Marx in the Shadow of Marxism

The only way Marx is rendered digestible in academic discourse is by de-militarising him, by making him one amongst several philosophers of his time, or by retrospectively Hegelianising him. To declare a fidelity to Marx is all too often functionally entangled with an obfuscation or conceptual reframing of Marx’s basic project. From this obscure status of the Marxist legacy, Christoph Schuringa argues that we today have to actualise Marx, or rather see Marx himself as the actualisation of philosophy. Marx’s relation to philosophy was neither to merely extend its theoretical enterprise, nor to reject philosophy in favour of a more ‘practical’ outlook. Marx rather implemented a third alternative: to re-conceptualise philosophy as inherently practical, to reject the forced disparity between theoretical philosophy and practical anti-philosophy. Marx saw in philosophy, as a political force, what philosophy had failed to see in itself.

Yet there is an uncomfortable implication to this project of actualising philosophy by considering Marx beyond the confines of his complacent Hegelianising. If Marx is kept alive partially by being watered down, by being repeated through Hegel or framed as yet one more philosopher, then to be an actual Marxist is to risk the true death of Marx. The project of actualisation is also a form of marginalisation, to reject the taming of Marx in those philosophical practices which keeps him (dysfunctionally) active. Marx himself can in this sense be equated to Freud’s paradox of the symptom. The symptom actively impedes our subjective functioning, and yet it acts as a type of structural mediator. If you remove the symptom, you often invite a more acute disorientation where nothing is the problem, and a solution thereby becomes impossible. In other words, imperfect functioning becomes the only form of functioning, the alternative to which is not good functioning, but no functioning at all. To extract a purer Marx simultaneously implies marginalising him to the point of abjection, or (from the academic perspective) losing a Marxist project altogether.

With this state of affairs, nobody, it seems, is really a Marxist. Being a Marxist has so far in fact implied the obfuscation of Marx’s doctrine. And yet at the same time, a large non-academic consensus depicts the status of Marx in a very different light. In a local newspaper operating in my home town - the Isle of Wight - a recent article detailed this island’s frequent visits from Marx in the