ABSTRACT
The work of Marx can be interpreted in different ways, including the early romantic critique of the ‘Paris Manuscripts’, Marx the philosopher, the historical anthropology of The Gennan Ideology, the critical history of the Eighteenth Brumaire or The Civil War in France, Marx the historian, the private brainstorming of Grundrisse, the later critical economy of Capital, Marx the economist, and so on. One way to argue the unity of Marx’s thought, rather than its fragmentation and subsequent proliferation into various Marxes, is to read his project as possessing a single over-arching theme: the critique of political economy. Like Weber’s thought, Marx’s theory lost much of its critical impact in the hands of stratification theorists. But the trajectory of Marx’s own theory was also one which became progressively less critical and more fully locked into the logic of industrialism. The fundamental question involved was whether Marx’s theory was continuous or whether there was some kind of qualitative shift in his work.
