This issue tackles the question of “vulgar Marxism.” The term has pervaded Marxist discourse over the last century, especially since its simultaneous but seemingly independent use by Georg Lukács in his History and Class Consciousness and by Karl Korsch in Marxism and Philosophy, both published exactly a hundred years ago. Often tossed out as an insult, and rarely the subject of extended analysis, the term has played a surprisingly important role in structuring Marxist debate. It has shaped our histories, especially as concerns the place of Second International thinkers (for both Lukács and Korsch, the quintessential vulgar Marxists), and it has also guarded the borders of academic orthodoxy, keeping certain forms of Marxist economics and cultural theory at bay, especially those that have developed outside of the academy. We thus turn our attention to this critical concept, examining how it informs the way Marxist theorists talk about their past and thus opening new ways to think about the future. In this special issue’s title, we have placed a forward slash between the two words “Vulgar/Marxism” both to disrupt the easy flow of thought that has led prior commentators to pass over the concept and also to encourage analysis of the multiple and complex relationships between its component parts.
Most of the essays in this issue were presented in a workshop organized by Edward Baring, Yahya M. Madra, Maliha Safri, and David Sockol (also the coeditors of this issue) at Drew University, first planned for the Spring of 2020 but postponed and held virtually in 2021. The workshop was generously supported by the History and Culture Program, the Economics Department, and the College of Liberal Arts at Drew. The disruptions of the pandemic meant that the original conference composition changed. David Ruccio was invited, and had even written up his speech (mentioned in Madra’s essay), but was unable to join at the rescheduled time a year later, while Anna Kornbluh and Maliha Safri participated in the workshop but ultimately could not contribute finished pieces to the final issue. Finally, the editors received the essay from Peter Kulchyski while preparing the issue and decided both that it spoke to themes common to the other essays and that it opened up new and productive lines of analysis. These factors have led to a gender imbalance in the published issue that we regret, though it does not match the architecture of the original conversation.
Three of the essays address the continuity of Marxist ideas across the caesura of the Russian Revolution. The Second International has often been overshadowed by Lenin and the so-called Western Marxists, and certainly both took pains to distance themselves from it, and particularly from its most prominent representative, Karl Kautsky. In his essay “Airbrushing Out Revolutionary Social Democracy: Lenin, Stalin, and Potresov on the Second International,” Lars T. Lih builds on his 2008 Lenin Reconsidered to examine the subtleties of Lenin’s criticism. He argues that Lenin did not reject the Second International wholesale but rather identified a split within it, between its revolutionary and nonrevolutionary sides. Lenin presented himself as the inheritor of the former side. It was only Stalin who, recasting his own relationship to Lenin, came to harden the line and thus disavow all forms of continuity with prewar Marxism. Recovering this history, Lih asks us to think through the stakes of our periodization and encourages us to reconsider the value of Revolutionary Social Democracy as it had developed before the war.
In “Who Are You Calling Vulgar? Lukács, Kautsky, and the Beginnings of ‘Western Marxism,’” Edward Baring does something similar for Western Marxists, and particularly for Georg Lukács. Lukács, following Lenin, also rejected Kautsky’s work alongside that of the Second International more generally. But as Baring shows, Lukács did so by picking up a set of arguments that had developed by Second-International thinkers, including Kautsky, who was one of the first to challenge “vulgar” approaches to Marxism. The resulting argument about vulgarity set up a complex relationship between class consciousness, the party, and revolutionary action that dogged Lukács’s writing through the early 1920s, but here it offers new means of understanding his most important work, History and Class Consciousness.
David Sockol, in “Verso of the ‘Vulgar’ Portrait: Georgi Plekhanov’s Anti-Kantianism and Activist Aesthetic,” turns to one of the other major figures of the Second International: Georgi Plekhanov. Examining Plekhanov’s interventions in the revisionism debate, Sockol thinks through his forays into philosophy and aesthetics, two realms often associated with later Marxists. Sockol shows how, in his challenge to Bernstein’s Kantian Marxism, Plekhanov reconsidered his stance on aesthetics, not least on “disinterestedness” as the quintessential aesthetic attribute. For Sockol, seemingly vulgar arguments about the economic determination of artistic production are transformed through this analysis into an argument for the activist nature of art, and particularly its ability to promote (or hinder) social and economic transformation. Such an appreciation of Plekhanov, while not effacing the differences between his work and that of later Marxists, requires us to rethink our Marxist genealogies as well as the role of intellectuals in social transformations.
In his contribution “The Vulgar (in) Marxism: Vacillating between Exchange and Production,” Yahya M. Madra examines a debate from the 1940s, between Abba Lerner and Maurice Dobb, to show how the term vulgar flips back and forth between the affirmative and the denigrative precisely because it is the frontier of class struggle within Marxism. In the exchange between Lerner and Dobb (wherein Lerner published a review of Dobb’s Political Economy and Capitalism, and Dobb published his own response to that review in 1939), Lerner’s focus of criticism was Dobb’s commitment to the labor theory of value—not surprising, given Lerner’s own commitment to the rival theoretical apparatus of marginal analysis. In his response, titled “‘Vulgar Economics’ and ‘Vulgar Marxism,’” Dobb insisted that the labor theory of value is what makes visible the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus and that the latter is what differentiates Marxism from subjectivist bourgeois economics. This background established, Madra goes on to trace the problem of value in socialism through the work of George Henderson, Charles Bettleheim, J. K. Gibson-Graham, and Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine to work out how a postcapitalist politics of multiplying the modes of valuation might be the way out of the vulgar impasse.
In McKenzie Wark’s and Neil Levi’s contributions we have different perspectives on the value of vulgarity. In “Toward a Vulgar Transgender Marxism” Wark uses a review of Leslie Feinberg’s classic Stone Butch Blues (1993) to argue that the attributes often regarded as “vulgar”—connection to working-class experience and sexuality—are important for contemporary uses of Marxism, especially those that want to be attentive to the demands of gay liberation and trans rights. She argues that Feinberg’s account of queer working-class life in 1970s–80s Buffalo, New York, showcases the personal and the sexual without isolating these concerns from “vulgar” economic analysis. In this way, Wark argues, Feinberg has offered lessons for the building of working-class solidarity across differences, through the “artful” narration of the self, or “autofiction.”
Neil Levi, in his contribution “Vulgar, Crude, Foolish: Brecht, Teaching, Fascism,” urges us to distinguish “vulgar” from “crude” thinking. He takes as his focus the work of Bertolt Brecht, who enthusiastically embraced a “vulgar” understanding of Marxism in his thinking through the best ways to educate workers for their self-emancipation. Yet Levi shows that Brecht’s discussion of plumpes Denken, or “crude thinking,” cannot be assimilated to this project, no matter the use made of it in Walter Benjamin’s writings. By examining how it is deployed in Brecht’s Threepenny Novel (1934), Levi shows how Brecht wanted to warn his audience away from the economic reductionism such “crude thinking” implied. It did not promise liberation but rather opened the door to fascistic and racist ways of thinking, as seen in Brecht’s reflections in his work on the contemporary history in South Africa.
Finally, we turn to a related topic. In his essay “Marx for Primitives,” Peter Kulchyski examines Marx’s early essays on “wood theft” in order to creatively reappropriate that work for indigenous projects today. Recognizing the derogatory meanings associated with the “primitive,” Kulchyski wants to draw out the subversive potential of this concept. He shows how the early Marx, in defending the rights of rural peasants who had gathered fallen twigs and branches from privately owned forests and were subsequently accused of “wood theft,” set himself on the path to materialism. He also opened ways of thinking about societal groups who had resisted the commodity form. That is, Marx developed a Marxism not for the proletariat but for “primitives.” Kulchyski argues that, for these marginalized groups, the most effective form of resistance involved “critical reversal”: the turning of arguments and laws used to oppress them back on the oppressor, particularly with the language of “rights.”
—The Editors