MAY, 2018 – Frustrated at what his friend Frederick Engels called the “peculiar product … known as ‘Marxism’ in France,” Karl Marx at one point declared “One thing for sure — me, I’m not a Marxist.”[1] If there were many reasons for Marx to be “not a Marxist” in the 19th century, the decades since have given us many more.
The above is the first paragraph of “‘Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists’”. [2] The complete text can be found here.
[1] Quoted in Frederick Engels, “Engels to Eduard Bernstein in Zurich [Letter],” in Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW), Volume 46, 1880-1883, trans. Peter Ross and Betty Ross (1882; repr., London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), 356.
[2] Paul Kellogg, “Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists,” Against the Current 194, no. May-June (2018): 19–20.