ABSTRACT
Until recently, the various Marxes who presided over twentieth-century European thought were constructed by inserting epistemic breaks somewhere in the thirty-nine volumes of the Collected Works and by discrediting or excluding the texts which come before. Althusserian scissors were inserted at 1845 in volume V, humanist scissors at 1844 in the middle of volume III. The Marx that David McLellan has significantly called ‘Marx before Marxism’, 1 the Marx obsessed with spiritual, mystical and metaphysical questions, was repressed by both camps. The Party also made its cuts. Marginalized – at least as far as editorially possible – in the bulging appendix to volume I, the mystical spiritual Marx of the late 1830s and early 1840s had no real place either in the official Marxist-Leninist Institute chronology of the development of Marx’s thinking. Engels still hovered over orthodox and revisionist excisions, with his profane, ‘scientific’ and merely materialist version of the Teaching, his ‘embarrassment’ over Marx’s mystical poetry and metaphysical speculations, and his desire to consign everything but the Theses on Feuerbach to oblivion. Officially, Marx was hostile to religion; if he was not hostile to religion, he was not officially Marx.
