Marx versus Engels?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Unknown Marx

Takahisa Oishi, The Unknown Marx: Reconstructing a Unified Perspective. 
 Foreword by Terrell Carver.  (London: Pluto Press, 2001, £40 hardback)

Reviewed by Victor Wallis, spectrezine.org

The global Left has shown its mass potential in the demonstrations that 
tried to head off the US invasion of Iraq.  In the Social Forums that 
began three years ago, as well as in all the anti-WTO, anti-IMF, and 
anti-G8 demonstrations, it has also shown its aspiration to focus on the 
underlying structural issues of global power.  But what it still lacks 
is a full understanding of how all these issues are rooted in 
capitalism, and in what sense an authentic alternative must be a 
socialist one.

Marx's work remains a vital key to such understanding—not because of any 
iconic status Marx may at times have been accorded, but rather, on the 
contrary, because of the persistently critical and subversive character 
of his writings, which in effect challenge all measures that fail to 
view problems in terms of their underlying causes.  We need to learn not 
just what Marx said, but how he arrived at it and, most importantly, how 
to subject present-day structures to an equally penetrating critique. 
Beyond this, we need to make sure that the essentials of this critique 
become common currency for millions of people.

Oishi's study extends a long line of works (going back to the 1920s) 
that have sought to recover the method and insights that can be 
attributed purely to Marx, unencumbered not only by the "official 
Marxism" of the Soviet Union but also by the expository and even the 
editorial interventions of Engels.  Oishi posits a direct line between 
some of Engels's simplifications—from the use of labels like "historical 
materialism" to the treatment of productive forces more as fixed goods 
than as a complex of social relations—and the formulaic distortions of 
Marxism propounded by the Soviet State.

full: http://www.spectrezine.org/reviews/Oishi.htm

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