Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx

Abstract

The book that follows pulls together ideas and writings about Karl Marx that have developed over many years. My original work, with which I am still engaged, broadly addressed class struggles and historical political development, with a particular focus on the French Revolution. Like many others, I was initially attracted by the epochal character of the Revolution, and widespread acceptance that it constituted a “class revolution”. Aside from the broadly recognized account of its leadership embodying the interests of the French bourgeoisie as a class rising to ascendancy, there seemed much to learn from research focussed on the radical popular movement in the Revolution, with leading contributions by such Marxist historians as George Rudé and Albert Soboul.1 From the start, however, I found myself compelled to address the rela- tively recent but increasingly influential “revisionist” conception of the Revolution. During the 1970s, a growing wave of French revisionist his- torians followed the lead of the deeply anti-Marxist British historian Alfred Cobban. Their challenge to the classic account of a bourgeois class revolu- tion became more and more emphatically ideological, embracing Cobban’s characterization of the conception as a distortion of historical evidence driven by Marxist theory.2 Notwithstanding this ideological intent, how- ever, there did indeed appear to be a deeply problematic disjuncture between the terms of the classic account of “bourgeois revolution”—not only prominent in Marx’s own writings, and a touchstone of Marxist his- toriography, but long accepted by mainstream historians—and a growing body of evidence that in fact no capitalist class had been involved. xiii