An academic current that defines Marxism as a "method of analysis" that can be developed outside of the class struggle.

Under the label "academic Marxism" a multitude of approaches and schools are actually grouped together, united by the idea that "Marxism is a method" and that as such it can be "applied" or "developed" in different contexts regardless of its aims and of the social context in which the theory is developed. Starting with the university itself.

Marxist critique of "academic Marxism"

Marxism is not a method

Nothing could be further from Marxism than to propose a set of steps or a recipe, let alone a "procedural machine", an automaton, as an "infallible formula" for the analysis of reality. Not even historical materialism can be understood as a method in that sense; in any case, it would rather be a framework, a set of premises for the analysis of social reality in order to understand historical change as the transformation of modes of production, as a totality.

Among these premises there are, by the way, two that are extremely rare in these schools:

  • materialism: it is not the history of "ideas" or of "ideologies" that explains historical change, but the transformations in the productive, material base of society;
  • and the old dialectical principle that in any system the whole determines the parts, while the parts, or the aggregation of the parts, do not allow us to explain the whole.

Marxism is a critique (=demolition) of the very foundations of the academy

A good part of Marx's works are titled or subtitled with the word "critique": critique of the Philosophy of the State (Philosophy of History, we would say today), critique of Political Economy (economic theory), etc. All his work is in reality a "critique". And the fact is that Marx does not propose a "critical thought", but the critique of thought. And when he says critique, we must in reality read "demolition".

Because his critique of thought begins by placing it as a historical product, as an expression of material social reality and of the class struggle that it generates. That is, Marx turns the critique of thought into a critique of ideology, and that is how he treats the different sciences. That is why the denial of the autonomy of the sciences as defined by the academy, not to mention their particular "methods", lies at the very essence of the Marxist critique of thought.

There is no methodology that can be separated from Marxism; there is no application, no procedure, no method to be distilled from the work of Marx and of the revolutionaries who followed him that can live apart from the class struggle. Once again, the part cannot exist apart from the whole. Marxism is a continuous effort that implies a revolutionary demolition of ideology, a continuous iconoclasm,

Marx and Engels -it is worth remembering- were irrepressible iconoclasts, even in relation to themselves, because there is no other way to escape the compartmentalization of the closed system. The former answered those who spoke to him of the Marxists of continental Europe: "I am not a Marxist". In this way he tacitly established an a-dogmatic definition of revolutionary thought, which is very poorly understood today.

Engels, for his part, expressed how he and Marx had set to work on site on a large amount of materials that needed to be developed. Now it is necessary to add the materials that the world class struggle has generated since then. We are therefore deliberately committing a desecration. Only one thing matters: whether or not it is in line with the long continuity of all the desecrations that revolutionary thought has committed, and which it cannot avoid committing if it is not to suffocate.

Preface to the Italian edition of "For a Second Communist Manifesto", 1967

There is no Marxism outside or apart from the class struggle

Communism is a process of negation of capitalism that has been underway from the very moment the proletariat appears as a universal class.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1846

Marxism is the theoretical expression of the maximum possibilities, immediately and historically, of that ongoing negation. Like every expression of a movement, it cannot exist apart from it. That is, it can neither exist as a dogmatic body, as a doctrine fixed once and for all, nor can it exist outside the organized struggle of the working class.

In reality what is called Marxism is the theoretical expression of the struggle of the working class, of its ultimate possibilities and its means. In other words: the most advanced theoretical form, the one most free of ideological illusions, of class consciousness. And once again: as such it cannot exist apart from the class that gives rise to it; to believe so would be to fall back into the separation between body and soul proper to religious idealism... which is not very Marxist.

It is true that this error existed within the workers' movement itself in the form of Kautsky's "consciousness implanted in the class from outside". And it is true that revolutionaries such as Lenin made it their own at certain moments of isolation. But even though it was still an error, they at least attributed that "injecting" role to the political organization, a body that arose from and brought together the most advanced sectors, however small, of the working class. But the error becomes an evident aberration when "the party" is replaced by "the academy", that is, by an organ of the state -or its officials- whose function is none other than to indoctrinate and manufacture ideology.

The University is an organ of the class state

"Marxism" cannot come out of the university, because the university is an organ of a different and hostile class whose function is precisely to create ideology, that which Marxism seeks to demolish. Nor can it come out of individuals, whether professors or plumbers, because class consciousness is the product of the movement and struggle of a class and can therefore only have a collective existence and expression, however small in numerical terms.

The figure of the "Marxist professor", an individual capable of replacing an entire class and of working out alone the understanding of its historical situation and of the steps it must take, is simply absurd from a Marxist perspective. It is the position that the famous Doctor Eugen Dühring claimed for himself, whose theory Engels devastatingly dissects.

Does that mean the class movement will not be able to win over university professors? No, of course not. But has anyone thought about what tremendous virulence and strength the current class movement would have to be showing in order to have "won over" the thousands of "Marxist professors" who "teach" in universities all over the world?

And in any case... what does it mean for the workers' movement to "win over" an intellectual? What did "winning over", for example... Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin or Trotsky consist of? Of integrating them as militants into its organizations, not of "integrating their contributions" without their having to commit themselves to the material movement, something only the "Dührings" of each epoch ever sought.