LITMIR.BIZ

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      DIALECTICS AND METAPHYSICS

      The announced subject of these lectures is “Marxism Today,” and I want at the outset to explain what it means to me as well as what it does not mean.

      I am not going to attempt a survey, still less a critique, of the various schools and tendencies that consider themselves to be intellectual and/or political descendants of the founding fathers of Marxism, Karl Marx himself and Friedrich Engels. (I ought perhaps to add that in my view the differences between Marx and Engels were mostly matters of emphasis and formulation and as such are irrelevant to a discussion of Marxism of the kind I am proposing: to the limited extent that I feel the need for textual quotation, I shall draw on the writings of either one depending on which seems more appropriate to the point at issue.)

      What I want to accomplish can perhaps be best clarified if I begin with a few autobiographical observations. I came to economics in particular and social science in general as a college student in the late 1920s. Harvard in those days had one of the more distinguished North American economics departments. It included, reading from left to right, institutionalists like William Z. Ripley, Marshallians like Frank W. Taussig, and dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Thomas Nixon Carver and Charles J. Bullock. There were of course no Marxists on the Harvard faculty, and if there were any in the student body they were unknown to me. I do not recall Marx’s name, let alone his ideas, ever being mentioned in any of the courses I took as an undergraduate. When I left Cambridge in 1932 for a year of graduate study at the London School of Economics, I had never been exposed to anything more radical than Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, his most famous but far from his most radical book.

      The year 1932–1933 proved to be a turning point in the history of the twentieth century. The prelude to World War II, if not the first act itself, was under way in the Japanese invasion of what was then called Manchuria. The Great Depression hit bottom in Western Europe and North America, giving rise to two simultaneous experiments in capitalist reform: the liberal New Deal in the United States, and the fascist, war-oriented Hitler dictatorship in Germany. The First Soviet Five-Year Plan, launched a few years earlier, suddenly began to appear to a crisis-ridden world as a beacon of hope, a possible way out for humanity afflicted with the peculiarly modern plague of poverty in the midst of plenty.

      Nothing I had learned in the course of what was presumably the best education available in the United States had prepared me to expect, and still less to understand, any of these momentous developments. My state of mind as I arrived in London in the fall of 1932 was one of bewilderment and confusion edged with resentment at the irrelevance of what I had spent the last four years trying to learn. Whether I knew it or not I was a perfect candidate for conversion to new ways of thinking. And fortunately

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