ABSTRACT
Marxism in its mature form consists of three elements: a materialist interpretation of history and politics; a critique of capitalist political economy; and a commitment to socialist revolution. These elements are to be found in all Marx's own work from The Communist Manifesto of 1848, or even earlier, to the posthumous volumes of Capital. Like thousands before me, I use as a basic text for discussion the 1859 Preface to his first major mature economic work, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This is a programmatic statement which Marx published himself and endorsed again in the second edition of Capital; it has very high authority.
The Preface is taken as the source of Marx's general framework for historical, political and economic analysis, which later became known as historical materialism, and which is, in my view, his main contribution to human thought. I give a brief commentary on this to bring out what Marx meant, to defend his position as reductive economism and against charges of crude economic determinism, and to bring out its implications for the sphere of ideology and culture. The obvious meaning of his words is in my view often diametrically opposed to what modern sophisticated Marxists and post-Marxists, influenced by such different figures as Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, etc., have claimed. I consider some of their arguments later in this book.
Since Marxism stands or falls by its economic rather than its literary claims, I have also discussed some elementary problems of Marxist economics: they concern the labour theory of value and the concept of 84surplus value. But I conclude with an account of Capital as a influential work of European literature rather than economic science, which has had its effect by constructing a heroic legend of the proletariat.
