ABSTRACT
This book has surveyed and analysed the major ideas developed by Karl Marx over some sixty years of intellectual and political activity. Its conclusions on the validity of those ideas have been distinctly mixed. It has suggested that Marx’s theory of history, while enormously suggestive and stimulating in certain ways, was expressed in a manner which could easily lead to it being understood (wrongly in my view) as a deterministic stage theory of history. It has examined the core of Marx’s lifetime intellectual effort – his political economy – and found it seriously flawed, most notably with regard to the theory of class exploitation which Marx attempted to erect upon the Ricardian foundations of the ‘labour theory of value’. Marx’s writings on revolution and communism were found to be more varied and multidimensional than is commonly supposed, but his vision of communism was found to be distinctly question-begging in a number of ways and appears to have an unresolved contradiction (between democracy and planning) at its centre. Finally, what is, arguably, Marx’s most fundamental and influential legacy to the study of society – his superimposed picture of society and reality often referred to as ‘historical materialism’ – was found to rely on certain metaphors and analogies which, while deeply embedded in human language and probably unavoidable for human beings, are not the most appropriate ones for communicating the dynamic processes with which Marx and Engels were concerned, nor for elucidating at all clearly the logic of those processes.
