It was James Lindsay’s tweet on the origin of Lenin’s interest in Marx that drove me to the bookpile, with all of it coming from Phil Magness and Michael Makovi’s contention that Lenin and his 1917 Revolution are responsible for Marx’s constantly rising flourishing in the universities. I have my troubles with the general idea, but it’s fairly interesting. You can read one of their articles about it at the American Institute for Economic Research — “Das Karl Marx Problem”.
James had asked —
Two Lenin biographies virtually at arm’s-reach seemed to help settle the question of who hipped Lenin to Marx, if not why it happened. 1) Victor Sebestyen (2017, p. 64) and 2) Dmitri Volkogonov (1994, p. 23) —
Lenin was eighteen years old when he “got hold of” his first Marx, with “Capital”. This was the year after his brother was hanged as an assassination plotter against Tsar Alexander III.
It set-off a flurry of books around here. Because of the economics angle on the Lenin/Marx paper, I was looking into Marxist action in various universities around the turn of the 20th century. Reviewing Vol. 10 of “The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek” (“Socialism And War” edited by Bruce Caldwell, 1977, University of Chicago), I noted:
In 1910, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk returned to teaching at the University of Vienna, and conducted something of a seminar class, including Otto Bauer, Emil Lederer, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Hilferding, all of whom were arguing Marxist economics. That year, Hilferding produced his “Finance Capital” and only about thirty years ago people were saying that it was “the most influential text in the entire history of Marxian political economy, excepting only [Marx’s] ‘Capital’ itself.” (Caldwell’s “Introduction”, p. 4, note 9.) This was seven years before the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin was still getting his feet under him that long after the failure of 1905.
It’s certainly not a conclusive or even probative point of history, but I do consider how “relatively” (to pick a word) Marx was dismissed (and by whom) until Lenin.
On the principle that “evil never goes away” I conclude that Marx propounded evil ideas that will always have to be fought. That’s why I don’t think that the degree of those ideas in the universities matters very much over the long-term on which communists fight their ideological fights. It’s essentially the same reason why Lenin so often invoked 1789: the basic ideas that run from Marx to Lenin were born in the French Revolution, and that current of evil has been constant since the day it sprung.
Without benefit of a coded “Synthetic Control,” but merely concepts and logic, I might run my own little counterfactual to arrive at a question:
I might suppose that Lenin had found the nerve to lead the assault on the Winter Palace that October night, and a horse had kicked his head clean off. I might imagine that Trotsky or even Zinoviev had inherited the Revolution and carried it through. My question, then:
Would Marx would somehow have been relegated to third-rate footnotes in a few obscure economics texts?
I would have a hard time imagining that.
Of course; the Bolshevik “victory” (if we should call it that) would burnish Marx’s reputation. To begin with, every politician knows that a high-rolling bandwagon is a spectacle beyond price for its ability to attract crowds, and everybody knew who built the chassis under this one. Lenin certainly wasn’t going to lie about his ideological inspirations — but none of them would have. Their True Belief of this moral scheme wasn’t entirely cynical (not like claiming they were the majority, when they weren’t). To a great deal of their hearts and minds, they really thought that they had “scientific” answers to ideological plagues of human existence, and all of their theoretical nurturing was the afterbirth of Karl Marx.
Even if Lenin had failed (as the German Revolution did, later), it would still make sense if some floaty professor were touting “alienation” in North Carolina today, on the way to “queer theory” tomorrow; all along the course-litany of failed but bold revolutions in the century-long interim.
That’s because evil never goes away, and this is a good one. It’s too good for the certain human archetype to which it appeals to give it up.
But what did you say that got you suspended?