From: Michael Hoover <hoov-AT-freenet.tlh.fl.us>
Subject: Re: Marx - not a Marxist? (fwd)
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 96 8:03:00 18000


> > too many 
> > "Marxists" have become "fundamentalists" -- which brings to mind Marx's 
> > statement that he was not a Marxist 
> Could anyone help me with the context of this quote. I have heard it so
> many times - and for *very* different purposes, and I really would like to
> know what he meant.

I'm a bit late here, but Hal Draper briefly discusses the comment
in the Forward to Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vol. II: The
Politics of Social Classes (pp. 5-8)...Draper indicates that
Engels mentioned it 4 times (3 of them in personal correspondence)..
.first time in an 1882 letter to Bernstein in: 

"...so-called" Marxism in France is an altogether peculiar product, 
so much so that Marx said to Lafarque: what is certain is that, for 
me, I am no Marxist"...Lafarque, of course, was Marx's son-in-law and 
Bernstein later used the quote in his autobiography...

According to Draper, a variation appears in an Engels letter to
Schmidt in 1890 -  critiquing a book review by Moritz Wirth:

"...little Moritz is a calamitous friend.  The materialist
conception of history has a lot of such friends today, to whom
it serves as a pretext for not studying history.  Just as Marx
said about the French "Marxists" of the late seventies: All I know 
is that I'm not a Marxist"...

A few weeks later in 1890, in a letter to Lafarque, Engels
criticizes a factions of intellectuals in the German party called
the "Jungen" by saying:

"These gentleman all go in for Marxism. but of the kind you were
familiar with in France ten years ago and of which Marx used to
say: All I know is that I'm no Marxist"

The 4th instance appears as an open letter in a party newspaper a 
few days after the letter to Lafarque in 1890...Engels is again 
critiquing the "Jungen' faction:

"Marx foresaw also these disciples when, towards the end of the
'70s, he said of the then prevailing "Marxism" of certain
Frenchmen: all I know is than I'm no Marxist"

Draper's forward, for those who are not familiar with it, is
entitled "How Not to Quote Marx"...of course, he may at times be 
quilty of that which he finds lamentable...Michael


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