ABSTRACT
One of the stranger things that happened to classical Marxism in the century and a half of its intellectual life was its transformation into an ideology of industrial development and economic modernization. Originally scripted as a postindustrial revolutionary doctrine, after the Bolshevik Revolution it was pressed into service as a strategy for rapidly increasing industrial yield and modernizing retrograde economies. Whatever was done was justified in the name of the inherited doctrine—irrespective of any evident lack of coherence. There was little serious effort to provide a convincing rationale for the transformation. The “creative developments” of Marxism were almost always ad hoc, frequently sharing little affinity with the original doctrine, and sometimes entirely devoid of plausibility.
