Like most terms derived from proper nouns, « Marxism » was first used to stigmatize supporters of Karl Marx’s ideas, reducing them to worshippers of his person. The word was also widely used to open the way to a possible return to the author of Capital against Marxism (then defined as « a set of misunderstandings made about Marx »).
Unlike the many mobilizations that seek to oppose the vitality of Marx’s individual thought to a necessarily « dogmatic » discourse, this book places at the heart of the interrogation what makes Marxism as such interesting: the pursuit and concretization of a discourse inspired by Marx in contexts quite different from the one that presided over the genesis of his work.
The analysis focuses on three constituent moments: Germany at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Russia in the early years of the 20th century, and the Soviet Union in the 1920s. From Karl Kautsky to Isaak Roubine, via Rosa Luxemburg, Gueorgui Plekhanov, Rudolf Hilferding, Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov, as well as a number of Russian novels that set the stage for political questioning, this study remobilizes a whole body of literature that has been ignored until now. Each time reconstructing the contexts and issues at stake in the different readings of Marx, his thinking on history and his critique of political economy, the investigation takes as its common thread the question of the performativity of discourse, of the link between reflection and action, which is a crucial issue for any social science.
