Jonathan Rée: The Invention of Marxism

The first of the LRB Winter Lectures for 2027; the other two lectures will be given by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Emily Wilson, and you can book a ticket for the whole series on this page.

Karl Marx spent almost twenty years working on his first substantial book, Das Kapital, which came out in 1867, when he was nearly fifty. But as far as he was concerned, it was only ‘a fragment’, and he promised to add further volumes over the following months and years. He worked hard but failed and failed again, piling up a vast derangement of rejected drafts, and eventually abandoning hope of leaving a viable intellectual legacy. When he died, however – in 1883, at the age of 64 – his friend Friedrich Engels commandeered his archive and devoted the remaining twelve years of his life to building the vast edifice which, though now known to the world as Marxism, is perhaps a massive obstacle to the understanding of Karl Marx.

Jonathan Rée was a professor of philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic until he gave up teaching, as he has put it, to have more time to think. His books include Proletarian Philosophers, Philosophical Tales, Heidegger and Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English. He has also edited his father’s memoirs of fighting in the French Resistance, published by Yale as A Schoolmaster’s War. He presented ‘Conversations in Philosophy’, an LRB Close Readings podcast series, with James Wood; it returns for a second series in 2027. Ten of his pieces for the LRB, on thinkers from Spinoza to Sartre, have been collected in an audiobook, Becoming a Philosopher.