Peter Harrison's review of Main Currents Of Marxism (original) (raw)

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Peter Harrison's Reviews > Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

Main Currents Of Marxism by Leszek Kołakowski

Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
by

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Peter Harrison's review
bookshelves: marx

Read 2 times. Last read October 26, 2020 to January 1, 2021.

I first came across this book when it was on the required reading list for my undergraduate political philosophy course 30 years ago. The single volume edition covers what were originally three separate volumes. The first ("The Founders") gives a an introduction to the philosophical background to Marx's thought from neo-Platonism through to Hegel and the new Hegelians. The second ("The Golden Age") covers the period of the Second International through to the development of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. The third ("The Breakdown") covers Soviet Marxism, including Stalinism and the aftermath of his death, with a brief chapter on subsequent developments in Marxism into the 1960s.

It is a monumental work of scholarship, giving a summary of the thought of a huge range of more or less significant figures in the Marxist movement. This makes it really valuable starting point for getting a sense of the key points for any given thinker from Marx through to Marcuse and (just) Althusser. The primary focus is on philosophy, and although Marx's economics is covered it is a secondary topic. Kolakowski's approach is generally critical. For Marx and Engels he gives the main lines of criticism. For subsequent thinkers a short and generally critical summary - although he gets noticeably more critical of later thinkers, and particularly the Frankfurt School.

Once he reaches the Russian Revolution and beyond, Kolakowski's narrative becomes intertwined with the history of the Soviet state and particularly Stalinism. He describes the ossification and subsequent ideological collapse of Marxism in the Soviet era, and therefore prefigures (bearing in mind the book was first published in 1976) and essentially predicts the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91.

And if history had stopped there it would perhaps all have made a perfectly coherent analysis of the development of a doctrine from beginning through to institutionalisation, ossification, and collapse while capitalism by the 1960s seemed to have worked out how to overcome the contradictions identified by Marx leaving the strand of thinking bearing his name irrelevant. As Kolakowski writes in the new epilogue to the 2005 combined edition:

"we may safely predict that Marx himself will become more and more what he already is: a chapter from a textbook of the history of ideas, a figure that no longer evokes any emotions, simply the author of one of the 'great books' of the nineteenth century. As for my three, newly combined volumes... they may perhaps be useful to the dwindling number of people still interested in the subject."

But by 2008, Marx was in fact looking increasingly relevant again. Not perhaps in the way it was understood by the old Soviet Union, but with the collapse of the post-war consensus and the implementation of neoliberalism the analysis suggested by Marx looks again like a fruitful way of helping us to understand how modern capitalism works. And Marx (and Marxism) remain a bogeyman for the political right - as recently demonstrated by Liz Truss - despite seemingly having neither read nor understood him.

Kolakowski's work can't help with these more recent developments, but remains a critical book for studying Marxism from inception through to the 1960s, particularly as a means of getting a short introduction to the basics of each significant figure in Marxism.

This review can also be found on my blog here: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...

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Reading Progress

March 21, 2014 – Shelved as:marx

October 26, 2020 –Started Reading

January 1, 2021 –Finished Reading

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