ABSTRACT
The historical study of Marxism has been oddly slow to spread beyond a small circle of cognoscenti. But Marxism, historically speaking, is an intellectual tradition or school; a body of thought whose exponents, no matter how diverse or mutually combative, have been aware of working within and developing (or correcting) a received tradition. The interconnections of Marx’s thought follow Hegelian logic; nothing can be isolated from its process of becoming, nothing can be considered apart from the relationships that make it what it is and at the same time are changing it into something different, while negation, transcendence, and other elements of the Hegelian dialectic shape the processes of change. Many writers have pointed up the scientistic and Darwinian elements in first-generation Marxism. Probably its best-known dimension is the attempted extension of Marx’s understanding of process – which focused explicitly on the human historical process.
