Marx in the West and in the East: Reading Capital in the Divided Germany

Description

The dissertation examines how scholars approached Marx’s Capital in the divided Germany during the Cold War. At the project’s core is a set of scholarly articles addressing the following constellation of specific questions: What kinds of problems did researchers from the East and the West tackle in their reading of this classic work? While the Berlin Wall separated East German researchers from West German ones, there was no language barrier between them, so did they communicate with each other? What types of conflicts, contradictions in approach, or tensions, if any, existed between these sets of scholars, who were working in very different social and institutional contexts? Did influences cross the wall? The focus is on the Neue Marx-Lektüre (NML), a tradition of reading Capital that began to take shape around 1968 among Theodor W. Adorno’s students, with the matter of how East German scholarship influenced its formation. Today, the NML is known for its resolute rejection of the GDR’s state ideology, Marxism-Leninism. As a negative example, concretising how not to read Marx, that ideology functioned as an identity-precipitating Other for the NML. Not simply another way of reading Marx; Marxism-Leninism was an ideology of legitimisation for the autocratic rule of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). As such, it was not based on critical reasoning; rather, its purity was maintained by the secret police. When drawing an analytical distinction between Marxism-Leninism and genuine Marx scholarship, one can, however, find serious East German scholarship also, work that influenced the NML ‘positively’. The dissertation explores these influences. A pillar of its argument is that scholarship on Marx in the GDR was a phenomenon replete with contradiction. The authoritarian rule of the SED simultaneously facilitated and hindered the work of those scholars who applied Marx’s ideas or prepared his original manuscripts for publication in an official complete edition (MEGA). The party intervened substantially in research, so genuine discussion in this field required application of cunning. Accordingly, the contributions that remain relevant today are usually spiced with Marxist-Leninist jargon. Deciphering the meaning and importance of those texts demands awareness of the limits within which the argumentation of East German scholars moved. The years leading up to 1968 proved pivotal for both Western and Eastern literature on Marx. The student movement brought Marx into West Germany’s academic establishment, and economic reforms that began in 1963 in the GDR ushered in greater intellectual freedom. The years 1967 and 1968 marked not only the peak of the student movement but the centenary of Capital and the 150th birthday of its author, respectively. Scholarship on Capital poured forth in both German states then. In both East and West, 1968 brought social upheavals to a climax and then an abrupt end. Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (marking the conservatives’ decisive victory over economic reformers who had found inspiration in the ideas of the Czechoslovak reform movement). Before this chill, especially vivid in the East, came an event with dramatic consequences for the discourse at the heart of the dissertation project: a conference held in 1967 for the centenary of Capital at Frankfurt. This also offered a rare opportunity for face-to-face discussion between East and West German scholars. The first two articles contributing to the dissertation concentrate on this occasion, which proved central to the emergence of the NML. These tease apart the nuances of why East and West Germans had decisively different perspectives on two profoundly important theoretical questions: Marx’s theories of value and the matter of commodity fetishism. The third article deepens the discussion via attention to the sticky issue of the ‘monetary theory of value’, one of the fundaments of the NML’s thinking. The piece demonstrates that, in contrast against what representatives of the NML argue, it cannot be set in opposition to East German positions. There are understandable reasons for the ignorance of scholars cohering around the NML in this respect: several of them related to adversarial stances. The final article fleshes out the picture by examining the reception of the ideas of Isaak Rubin, the most important early Soviet expert on Marx, in the divided Germany during the Cold War. It lays bare a discrepancy between word and deed in both German states, a nexus of contradictions that may stem from the fact that the reception of his ideas was extremely politicised in the Cold War setting. If scholars of any stripe are to be able to approach questions related to the interpretation of Capital in an unprejudiced manner today, it is imperative for them to grasp the history of the work’s reception in East and West alike. Only by doing this can we unearth the real Marx, a classic thinker whose ideas remain largely hidden beneath the weight of Marxism-Leninism, the Cold War, and twentieth-century history more generally.