The contributors to the Berlin-based project of the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) with the earliest and latest birth years are Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901) and Sauli Havu (b. 1998). The gap between the dates, encompassing nearly the entire twentieth century, means one of them was old enough to remember the Russian Revolution of 1917, while the other was born almost a decade after the fall of the European socialist states. While Lefebvre had passed away by the time the HCDM’s first volume appeared in 1994, he left some material that has since been edited into three short entries (‘Everydayness’ [Alltäglichkeit], ‘Metaphilosophy’ [Metaphilosophie] and ‘Surplus Product’ [Mehrprodukt]). Havu has authored – in tandem with Juha Koivisto (b. 1958) – the entry ‘Multicultural Question’, due out this year in the HCDM’s latest volume (9/II Mitleid – Nazismus [Compassion – Nazism]). Neither is German; Havu is part of a strong Finnish component in the lexicon, represented in this volume by J.O. Andersson’s ‘Imperialism’. Lefebvre’s contribution, in turn, evokes the HCDM’s significant debt to French Marxist thought; a connection best embodied in the fact that the lexicon started off as a supplement to the German translation of the Dictionnaire critique du marxisme (Critical Dictionary of Marxism – DCM), published in 1982 as a collaboration of editor Georges Labica with Gérard Bensussan and the journal Dialectiques.1
The key figure behind that translation initiative, and its eventual metamorphosis into a self-contained project that would eventually outstrip its French counterpart in length and scope, was the Marxist philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug (b. 1936), at the time a philosophy professor of the Free University of Berlin, now retired. Haug’s international trajectory and wide network in the global Marxist sphere has decidedly shaped the HCDM’s physiognomy; his brand of critical Marxism, in turn, provides its theoretical framework to this day. The key role of its initiator notwithstanding, the HCDM is a quintessentially collective enterprise, centred around the Berlin Institute of Critical Theory (Berliner Institut für kritische Theorie – InkriT); its active editorial board of around two dozen members coordinates a network of authors and collaborators spread across the disciplines (and latitudes) now numbering in the hundreds.
The entries gathered in the present volume aim to reflect both dimensions of the HCDM, i.e., its international imprint and concrete situatedness. The Berlin-based project began as a two-pronged effort of renewal – against the ossified Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy propped up by ruling communist parties and as a response to a supposed ‘crisis of [Western] Marxism’ in the 1980s. Against the backdrop of European state socialism’s utter collapse and the onset of neoliberal globalisation in the 1990s, it quickly metamorphised into a bulwark of resistance and revitalisation in the global Marxist landscape. Due to its ambitious scope, the challenging conjuncture it has faced, but also the success of its ‘formula’, the HCDM remains an ongoing, open-ended project. In what follows, I briefly delve into some of the key historical and theoretical strands that have converged to give the HCDM its peculiar physiognomy in the hopes of shedding light on a project that readers can profit from and, hopefully, actively contribute to. The goal of this translation volume and the (re)internationalisation project behind it is, hence, twofold: expand the HCDM’s global readership and, on this basis, win over a new cohort of authors and collaborators to propel what, as of 2023, will be its fourth decade of activities.2
1 An International Network as Impulse
Due to its direct links to the Dictionnaire Critique du Marxisme, any reconstruction of the HDCM’s international genealogy must make reference to Wolfgang F. Haug’s reception of French Marxist thought, from his critical dialogue with Althusser – approached in its further development in Jan Rehmann’s entry ‘Theory of Ideology’ – to his affinities with Georges Labica’s deconstruction of the Marxist-Leninist paradigm. The long list of French contributors to the HCDM – from Lefebvre to figures like Étienne Balibar, Isabelle Garo and Lucien Sève – is a testament to this cross-border exchange, represented in the present volume by André Tosel’s ‘Communism’.
In an indication of the global nature of the international network that propelled the HCDM’s emergence, Haug’s acquaintance with the Dictionnaire Critique and its initiators did not stem primarily from his time as a guest lecturer in Paris in 1983. His contact with Labica3 dates back, in fact, to the ‘Socialism in the World’ international conferences held in the then Yugoslavian coastal city of Cavtat. In a recent interview with Serbian researcher Aleksandar Matković, Haug emphasised the key role of these conferences – which constituted a rare ‘non-aligned’ space of convergence for global leftist thinkers from 1976 to 1989 – in terms of the genesis of the contributor network that would underpin the HCDM’s first decades of work.4 This includes, for instance, his acquaintance with figures like Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) and Samir Amin (1931–2018), whose single entry in the lexicon – this volume’s ‘Anticolonialism’ – should not belie his important bridge-building role between the Berlin-based project and Marxists from outside Europe.
Those extra-European connections are also represented by a few more Middle-Eastern authors and a small contingent of Asian contributors – the latter based mainly in Japan, followed by China and India – but, above all, by the HCDM’s significant Latin American cohort. If the forthcoming volume 9/II is included, Cubans, Brazilians, and Argentinians will have written about a dozen entries for the project so far. Multiple generations of Mexican contributors, amongst which are Pablo González Casanova (b. 1922) and Gabriel Vargas Lozano (b. 1947), will have been responsible, in turn, for almost twice that number; the editorial board even constituted a Mexico-based ‘consultive committee’ in 1996. The formalisation of this ‘bilateral’ collaboration harkens back to the project initiator’s strong ties to the country and its thinkers. The HCDM’s period of genesis in the 1980s coincided, in fact, with Haug and his Berlin-based collaborators’ heightened reception of Latin American Marxist thought. The publisher Argument, founded by Haug, was responsible for the German-language edition of José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality) in 1986 and, most recently, the first volume of essays from Ecuadorian thinker Bolívar Echeverría in German translation.5
The dynamic detailed by Eleonore von Oertzen in this volume’s ‘Mariáteguism’ with regards to the international genesis and diffusion of the Peruvian Marxist’s work is, hence, also at play in the HCDM’s ties to Latin America. In both cases, the reception (and re-elaboration) of Marxist thought beyond Europe ‘crosses back’ over the Atlantic to impact the West European intellectual landscape, just as a new round of appropriation in postcolonial contexts gets underway, in a continuous process of circulation (as characterised by William W. Hansen in the close of ‘Fanonism’). Along these lines, Wolfgang F. Haug and his collaborators’ drive to preserve and reclaim the living legacy of the Marxist tradition since its nineteenth-century inception has consistently overlapped with an urgent search for new modes and forms of Marxist thought, not least beyond Europe, in a combined process of recovery and reorientation that underlies the HCDM’s framework to this day.
Haug’s reception of the ideas of Mexico-based (Spanish-born) thinker Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, and especially the latter’s contribution to reconceptualising Marxism as a ‘philosophy of praxis’, is exemplary in this regard. In an essay from 1980, Sánchez Vázquez framed this work of praxeological ‘reorientation’ in the following terms: ‘Praxis is the axis upon which Marxism articulates itself in its triple dimensionality: as a project to radically transform the world, as an – equally radical – critique of existing reality, and as the necessary knowledge of the reality to be transformed’.6 Latching on to these impulses, Haug and his team turned to another purveyor of Marxism as ‘philosophy of praxis’, Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks they translated and published in a critical edition from 1991 to 2002 (an edition of the Prison Letters would follow around a decade after). These translation and ‘bridge-building’ efforts into global Marxism, enormous undertakings unto themselves, necessarily impacted HDCM production. The Gramsci connection facilitated, for one, the arrival of a significant number of Italian contributors as well as of Gramscian thinkers from the Anglophone space (including Peter Thomas, an HCDM contributor and instrumental figure in the publication of the first entries translated into English in the Historical Materialism journal). Gramsci’s thought is approached in several of this volume’s entries – notably in ‘Absolute Historicism’, ‘Hegemony’, ‘Luxemburg-Gramsci Line’ and ‘Intellectuals’ – in a testament to the meaning of this ‘rediscovery’ for those thinkers (in the German context and beyond) attempting to prevent the crisis conjuncture of the 1990s from unravelling the Marxist landscape altogether.
International cooperation between the pockets of impenitent Marxists that remained active in that conjuncture was crucial for the preservation – continuing into the present – of a space of radical critique of the existing capitalist reality. The HCDM was (and remains) precisely one such node for the coming together of diverse strands of critical theory from around the world. Yet, while the lexicon can only be understood from the standpoint of its international genealogy – a trait it shares with other contemporary Marxist projects – it is the oblique connections that have constituted it that make the HCDM peculiar. In other words, the fact that the road of its German initiators to heterodox French Marxism and reappraisal of Gramsci’s legacy went, respectively, through Yugoslavia and Mexico.
2 The ‘Berlin School of Critical Theory’
If the HCDM’s trajectory cannot be understood without reference to its international roots and key role of its initiator, the project’s rootedness in a divided-then-united Germany and collaborative character are equally central to its makeup. In that regard, the lexicon’s role as a vehicle of ‘plural Marxism’ and lively controversy across borders coexists with and is propelled by its editors’ specific contribution to global Marxism, constituting what could be termed the ‘Berlin School of Critical Theory’. While mapping out the different components of this collective intellectual enterprise would exceed the scope of this afterword, the entries published in the present volume provide clues to a few of its central coordinates. Wolfgang F. Haug’s praxis-centred reconstruction of Marxian thought (see ‘Dialectics’ and ‘Theses on Feuerbach’) as both ‘non-metaphysical’ and ‘anti-naturalistic’, for instance, conjugates Antonio Labriola and Bertolt Brecht. In ‘Luxemburg-Gramsci Line’, Frigga Haug, a chief-editor of the HCDM, invites a ‘reciprocal’ study of Rosa Luxemburg and Gramsci to ‘reinforce political hope and, with it, the capacity for action [Handlungsfähigkeit]’. That concept, in turn, is approached by Rinse Reeling Brouwer and Morus Markard, respectively, in its Spinozan roots and appropriation in the framework of Klaus Holzkamp’s Critical Psychology in the entry ‘Action Potence, Agency’.
Holzkamp and the Haugs collaborated closely over several decades, struggling relentlessly as colleagues at the Free University of Berlin to safeguard institutional space for Marxist psychology and philosophy in a hostile Cold War conjuncture; a space that, with the eclipsing of the bipolar world in the 1990s, has paradoxically become even narrower in German academia (critical, left-wing professors constitute rare exceptions, such as ‘Land Seizure/Land Grab’ author Klaus Dörre (b. 1957), chair of labour and economic sociology at the University of Jena). The relevant presence of Marxists and other radical thinkers in West German universities from the 1960s through to the 1980s was due, fundamentally, to a spillover of the Federal Republic’s social-movement ferment into the academic landscape. The emergence of the movement for peace and against nuclear armament in that country in the 1950s, for instance, is directly tied to the HCDM’s history, considering it provided the framework for the formation of the journal Das Argument by Wolfgang F. Haug in 1959. The West Berlin-based platform emerged from the convergence of a broad spectrum of humanist intellectuals (e.g., Margherita von Brentano, Helmut Gollwitzer and Klaus Heinrich) and various progressive student and confessional organisations. The publication would closely engage with the labour, student and Third World movements in the run-up to and aftermath of the 1968 events, coalescing many of the critical Marxists (and core controversies) that would later culminate in the lexicon initiative; the journal remains in print today.
It is in the late-1970s, however, that many of the early members of the HCDM’s editorial board, both from West Germany and abroad, come together in the framework of the ‘Theory of Ideology Project’ (Projekt Ideologie-Theorie – PIT), directed by W.F. Haug at the FU Berlin from 1977 to 1985. As Haug recounts, the project raised the ‘question of socialisation [Vergesellschaftung] within the overlapping framework of the division of labour, antagonistic class-based relations of production, and ideological powers, primarily the state’. The PIT not only produced a range of publications on the theoretical dimensions of ideological phenomena and, in a considerable empirical effort, the ‘ideological powers in German fascism’,7 it would form many of the key contributors to the HCDM, such as Jan Rehmann (b. 1953), Peter Jehle (b. 1954) and Thomas Weber (b. 1954) and provide a further platform for exchange with researchers from outside Germany and Europe.
The dialogue between Marxist scholars and social movements in post-1968 West Germany equally extends to the feminist upsurge of the 1970s. As Frigga Haug, the main conduit of this debate within the HCDM, stresses: ‘Marxism-Feminism is characterised by its effort to fight and work for an integration of the feminist revolution into Marxism. The resistance it encounters means that feminism has been forced to take on an initially oppositional and polemical form’. This ever-current vector of renewal within Marxism has had a central role in the HCDM over the years; F. Haug’s ‘Cook (female)’ and ‘Gender Relations’ round up, alongside Lise Vogel’s account of the ‘Domestic-Labour Debate’, a small sample of a Marxist-Feminist output that now adds to several dozen entries in the lexicon.8
Finally, this volume also aims to reflect the lasting engagement of the HCDM’s founders and editors with the critique of political economy,9 harking back to W.F. Haug’s classic work Critique of Commodity Aesthetics10 and long-running course on Marx’s Capital at the FU Berlin,11 as well as their early concern with the contradictory – exploitation-increasing, but also potentially emancipatory – dimensions of technical development, dating back to the Frigga Haug-led ‘Project Automation and Qualification’ (Projekt Automation und Qualifikation – PAQ) based at the FU Berlin’s Institute of Psychology in the 1970s and 1980s. Christof Ohm (b. 1942), the author of ‘Hacker’, was a researcher at the PAQ and is a long-time member of the HCDM’s editorial board; the lexicon’s focus on the ever-evolving aspects of capitalism’s transformation into a high-tech mode of production has carried over into earlier cohorts of contributors – see Mario Candeias’s (b. 1969) ‘Cybertariat’ – and was recently the focus of a double-issue of Das Argument on ‘online capitalism’.12
The journal’s analogously forward-looking engagement with the ecological question – ‘ecology’ has figured as a rubric in its review section since 1978 and a constant stream of articles on the topic dots its issues throughout the 1980s and 1990s all the way into the present – is represented by Peter Schyga’s and Victor Wallis’s ‘Limits to Growth’. The lexicon’s three-decade journey to the letter ‘n’ and the current conjuncture of climate catastrophe and rise of new ecological movements has, in turn, rekindled debate on human-nature relations from the standpoint of the philosophy of praxis within the HDCM (resulting in the nature-related ‘article complex’ of the upcoming vol. 9/II).
3 A (Rare) Bridge between the Two Germanies
After Lefebvre, the HCDM’s oldest author is the historian Jürgen Kuczynski (1904–1997). Kuczyinski, whose lifelong political engagement dated back to his militancy in communist organisations in the 1920s before he joined the German Communist Party in 1930, was a leading intellectual in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Termed a ‘critical believer’ of the East German socialist system by historian Mario Kessler,13 his relationship to the GDR’s ruling party and authorities was marked by a form of alignment that never devolved into utter capitulation to dogmatism or the abandonment of his critical stance. He remained a committed Marxist after 1989 and wrote the entry ‘Misery, Poverty’ (Elend) for the HCDM, published on the year of his death.
Kuczynski’s participation in the lexicon is indicative of another of its defining traits, namely, the significant contribution of intellectuals active in East Germany (or who grew up in the now extinct country). The HCDM’s integration of critical Marxists from the former GDR is arguably one of the project’s greatest feats of ‘internationalisation’; while scientific research in unified Germany without a doubt boasts a broad international character, projects gathering academics from both ‘Germanies’ on equal footing have been a rare phenomenon over the last three decades. Indeed, the longest distance from (former-West) Germany to any other country seems to be the one separating it from the other (former-East) Germany. In this regard, the HCDM provided a rare lifeline to a collective of researchers whose work would be otherwise inaccessible beyond German libraries and archives.
This applies to Kuczynski and intellectuals like Heinrich Taut (1907–1995), who were born early enough to be politicised in the Weimar Republic, join the communist resistance in Nazi Germany, and eventually choose to resettle in the GDR after their return from exile. The lexicon’s value as an outlet was greater, however, for a cohort of HCDM contributors born ‘into’ the German socialist state. This is true of several of its authors who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, such as legal scholar Hermann Klenner (b. 1926) and musicologist Günter Mayer (1930–2010), both of whom had mature careers by the time the GDR collapsed;14 even more so, however, for those whose trajectory as Marxist intellectuals in East German institutions was interrupted at a relatively early point by the events of 1989, such as Thomas Marxhausen (1947–2010) and Wolfram Adolphi (b. 1951). Much like the viable East German enterprises that were either acquired by West German competitors or purposefully ran out of business to benefit them, unification represented a massive destruction of ‘intellectual’ productive forces, with a large segment of the GDR’s scientific establishment labelled too ‘compromised’ to continue scientific work by their West German peers.15
In this volume, the contribution of researchers trained in East Germany is represented by Lutz-Dieter Behrendt (b. 1941) and Wolfgang Küttler (b. 1936), one of the HCDM’s chief-editors. The entries in question, ‘Kronstadt Rebellion’ and ‘Lenin’s Marxism’, symptomatically demand a serious effort of self-criticism by the authors; not only due to their GDR roots, but in their defiant adherence to Marxism ‘after the deluge’ and into a present still hostile to emancipatory articulations of alternatives to capitalism. In that respect, if the responsibility of ‘settling accounts’ with the legacy of the Soviet experience and the contradictions of the thought and trajectory of major Marxist thinkers such as Vladimir Lenin cuts through the ensemble of HCDM authors, East Germans have understandably experienced the complexities and lacerations of that process more intensely. In that regard, as a platform for coming to terms with a catastrophic historical defeat and coalescing no longer bridgeable East-West divides, the HCDM has also witnessed the flaring up of psychic and personal trauma amongst its contributors, at times with cathartic, at times with quite painful consequences.
Conversely, the lexicon project’s stress on ‘unresolved’ and ‘undisposed of’ aspects of emancipatory struggle and thought mean it is fundamentally oriented towards a possible better future; it is ‘historical-critical’, therefore, also in the sense that its entries are produced from the standpoint of a clear-eyed outlook on the present and as a hope-bearing intervention into it. As J. Rehmann writes in ‘Hope’, referencing Ernst Bloch, the HCDM is rooted in the active search for a ‘future embedded in the past which is still to be realised’.
4 An Unfinished Project with a History
The publications of the HCDM’s first three volumes – in 1994, 1995, and 1997, respectively – predate its soon-to-be youngest author, Sauli Havu. The project, in other words, has by now its ‘own’, decades-long history. After nine volumes – adding up to thirteen tomes published between 1994 and 2022 – it is, nevertheless, not close to being finished. In terms of the (German) alphabetical list, we are barely into letter ‘n’, with work on vol. 10/I (Nebenwiderspruch – Ökofeminismus [Secondary Contradiction – Ecofeminism]) set to begin in earnest only in 2023. Yet, the perspective driving the HDCM makes all thought of ‘being finished’ relative; the lexicon is itself a living project with each tome representing both a link in an accumulated corpus of work and a new beginning. As such, the HCDM’s volumes form their own microcosm, due to the specific conjuncture under which they are produced – each tome takes around three years of work – and the peculiar collective of authors and collaborators they gather. While a full list of entries from A to Z was established at the outset of the project in the early-1990s through a dialogue between the editors and a broad panel of international experts, it is complemented and updated with the start of work on each new volume. The process usually reveals entry topics that have since been transcended or lost their urgency; absences, on the other hand, underline issues which were not on the horizon – or had not received proper attention – until recently. Novel issues or concepts might, of course, also have emerged.
Given this high degree of mutability, the alphabetical ordering emerges as an accidental but useful baseline limiting each volume’s scope and ambition. Previous omissions or new additions must be addressed within the range set by the first and last entries (though compound nouns and the creative use of adjectives and word order provide some leeway). Each letter brings, furthermore, interrelated entries that are produced, as much as possible, in dialogue with each other (e.g., the entries on ‘materialism’ in vol. 9/I or on ‘nation’ in 9/II) and which give volumes their overarching themes.
Ongoing internationalisation and translation initiatives further complicate the HCDM’s alphabetical timeline. The project that started as a translation of a lexicon in 1983, before turning into a self-contained original endeavour, is now being translated into several languages, with particular intensity into Chinese, English, and Spanish.16 Translation necessarily shuffles the alphabetic ordering of entry production, alongside its chronology, as is the case of this volume. It also provides further insight into omissions, silences, and biases that a concretely situated project, with its specific conjuncture, theoretical-editorial line, and set of bearers, will inevitably produce. In this sense, much like Marx’s efforts in Capital, the HCDM is always ‘finished’ and ever incomplete.
Most revealing in this regard is the Peking University-led ‘complete translation’ of the HCDM, given that entry order becomes entirely contingent once converted to Chinese characters. The choice to translate each volume as such has, however, the key advantage of faithfully preserving and immediately displaying their historicity; with the contingent alphabetical ordering out of view, the interval of production re-emerges as the fundamental link between a given set of entries.
As of late 2022, Chinese readers will have access to three integral HCDM volumes published in the 1990s. These volumes’ almost three-decade old publication dates does not necessarily mean, however, that they are per se ‘dated’. Such an interval might well vindicate (or dispel) aspects of lexicon projects like the DCM and the HCDM; the Chinese – and otherwise international – reception will be the judge in that regard. But marks of historicity are never ‘blemishes’ in a Marxist-oriented project. As Labica and Bensussan reflected in the preface to the third edition of the DCM in 1999, which – despite all intervening transformations – they left unaltered from the 1985 version:
At the end of the day, in its three editions and their respective dates – which are as indicative as the successive positions of a slider on a ruler – the Dictionnaire critique du marxisme constitutes the testimony of a life, the life of Marxism in the determined conditions of a space and a time.17
The same is true, of course, of the HCDM’s entries and volumes. Yet, because it is an ongoing endeavour and far from finished, if the exhaustive Chinese translation project continues over the next decade or so, it will eventually catch up with the production of the ‘original’ lexicon. Hopefully, by the time there is nothing left to translate, the cohort of Chinese authors will also have increased, fostering the project’s ‘completion’ (at least according to the ‘provincial’ German alphabetical entry list). The same goes, naturally, for the translation projects into other languages. As a key part of them, this volume is an invitation for participation in an open-ended project, whose ‘identity’ is also in permanent mutation. As Stuart Hall (1932–2014), another HCDM interlocutor whose lone entry in the lexicon (‘Identification’) is both highly symbolic and barely indicative of his significance to the project, underscored, ‘the process of identification’ behind ‘identity’ is neither univocal nor static. It is, rather, ‘the product of taking a position, of staking a place in a certain discourse or practice’. As such, it is ‘always, as they say, in process. It is in the making. It is moving from a determined past toward the horizon of a possible future, which is not yet fully known’.18
The same applies to the ongoing production of this lexicon project. For more information on how to contribute, see the InkriT’s homepage (
5 Conclusion – a Space of Confluency
In a 1999 interview to the French publication Regards titled ‘Marxism as a globalisation project’, Wolfgang F. Haug described the conjuncture that produced the HCDM and presented its fundamental, two-pronged task in the following terms:
The historical rupture of the years 1989–91, the end of the bipolar East-West world have put in danger an entire universe of critical ideas and practices rooted in the social struggles of that century. It is necessary to, simultaneously, save the treasures buried under the ruins and to subject to self-critique the enormous errors committed along this history, so we are prepared for the future.19
In its attempt to both ‘safeguard’ a century-and-a-half of critical Marxist thought from permanent loss under the rubble of state socialism, at the same time attending to its permanent renewal and multiple (at times conflicting) strands, the HCDM is above all a future-oriented space of ‘confluency’. Mariátegui used the term to describe the virtuous ‘blending together [aleación] of “indigenism” and socialism’ in 1927. He writes:
I confess to have arrived at an appreciation, an understanding of the value and the meaning of the indigenous in our time neither through erudition, aesthetic intuition, or even theoretical speculation, but rather through the – at once intellectual, emotional, and practical – pathway of socialism.20
As with other conduits of emancipatory convergence in both the spheres of social struggle and theoretical production, the HCDM provides both the possibility to meet along that path, and calls for the active participation in shaping its trajectory. The ‘confluency’ of streams towards emancipation, despite the rubble in its way, is wide, and has not yet come to a stop.
Victor Strazzeri
Carouge GE, Switzerland – Summer 2022
A second, revised edition, with Bensussan as co-editor, was published in 1985. A third edition followed in 1999, conserving the 1985 text. See Bensussan and Labica’s October 1998 ‘Préface à la troisième édition’, Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, Paris: PUF, XV–XVI.
Since mid-2019, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation has supported the project ‘Internationalisation of the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism’ with funds from the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of the Federal Republic of Germany. The project’s main goals are the diffusion of the HCDM internationally (and especially in the Global South) through translations, workshops, and collaborations. Alongside this volume and other English-language selections, the project oversees the publication of Spanish-language selections and supports the full translation of the HCDM into Chinese.
See Haug’s 2010 account of his friendship with Georges Labica, ‘ “Une passion partagée”: Georges Labica et le Dictionnaire (historique et) critique du marxisme’, available at:
The proceedings of these conferences were published yearly in the journal Socialism in the World (Belgrade, 1977–1989). As Matković detailed in a recent e-mail, the events were organised by Belgrade’s Center for Social Research (Centar za društvena istraživanja or CDI), namely, the main hub of a wide network of fairly autonomous Marxist centers in Yugoslavia. The CDI constituted a ‘vehicle for the “self-research of the party” ’, i.e., the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and was tasked with ‘carrying out both surveys and scientific inquiry related to [the LCY’s] political decisions’. Miloš Nikolić was the key figure behind both the CDI and Cavtat conferences; Haug also stressed his importance to the genesis of the HCDM during the interview (held online on March 30, 2022).
See, respectively, José Carlos Mariátegui ([1928] 1986), Sieben Versuche die peruanische Wirklichkeit zu verstehen, Berlin (West): Argument / Fribourg: Exodus; and Bolívar Echeverría (2021), Für eine alternative Moderne: Studien zu Krise, Kultur und Mestizaje, ed. David Graaff, Javier Sigüenza, Lukas Böckmann, Hamburg: Argument. Latin American resistance to the neoliberal offensive – and experiments towards ‘alternatives’ to it – in the region since the 1980s no doubt helped dynamise these intellectual exchanges.
Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez ([1980] 1997), ‘¿Por qué y para qué enseñar filosofía?’, Filosofía y circunstancias, Barcelona: Anthropos / México, D.F.: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (UNAM), 43.
See Wolfgang F. Haug (1986), ‘Das “Projekt Ideologie-Theorie” (1977–1985): Ein Nachruf’, available at
Entries (and entry segments) with a feminist scope form a corpus sizeable enough to have been spun off into a lexicon of its own, the ‘Historical-Critical Dictionary of Feminism’ (Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Feminismus), published in three volumes (2003, 2011, 2014) by Argument. A collaboration with Latin American Marxist and feminist intellectuals over 2020–21 led, in turn, to the publication of a Marxist-Feminist entry selection in Spanish in early 2022 in the framework of the HCDM’s ‘Internationalisation’ project. The Diccionario Histórico-Crítico del Marxismo-Feminismo (edited by Mariela Ferrari, Victor Strazzeri, and Miguel Vedda, Buenos Aires: Herramienta), gathers 34 entries from Bruja (witch) to Trabajo femenino (female labour/women’s labour).
See W.F. Haug’s ‘Capitalist Mode of Production’, Michael Vester’s ‘Class in Itself/for Itself’, Thomas Sablowski’s ‘Crisis Theories’ and Mario Candeias’s ‘International Division of Labour’.
Published in English by Polity in 1986. The German original dates back to 1971; its latest revised edition was published in 2009: Kritik der Warenästhetik: überarbeitete Neuausgabe gefolgt von Warenästhetik im High-Tech-Kapitalismus, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.
The course was another key entry-point for subsequent lexicon contributors. Conceived as an introduction to Marxist theory work and critical research practice with Capital as its reference point – rather than a conventional reading course – it started while Haug was still a postgraduate assistant at the FU in 1970–1 and ran until 2000–1. Thousands of students from a wide disciplinary background would attend both the lectures and the smaller, tutor-led work-sessions during the period. The lessons are gathered in two volumes: Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins ‘Kapital’ and Neue Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins ‘Kapital’, published in their latest editions by Argument in 2005 and 2006; they were followed by the volume Das Kapital lesen – aber wie? from 2013. The first tome of the Vorlesungen was translated into Spanish (in 1974, revised in 1978), Slovenian (1980) and French (1983). The Spanish translation has recently been re-edited based on the updated German third edition (Lecciones de introducción a la lectura de ‘El Capital’, Barcelona: Laertes/Trebol Negro, 2016). I thank Dr. Hansjörg Tuguntke, former course tutor and current InkriT chair, for the information on the Capital courses.
See ‘Online-Kapitalismus: Umwälzungen in Produktions- und Lebensweise’, Das Argument 335, 2021.
For a portrayal of Kuczynski’s trajectory as a ‘critical believer’ and ambivalent status as a ‘faithful dissident’ in the GDR and beyond, see Kessler’s essay, ‘Jürgen Kuczynski – ein linientreuer Dissident?’, UTOPIE kreativ 171, 2005, 42–49.
Other members of this generation of East German intellectuals, such as philosophers Helmut Seidel (1929–2007) and Wolfgang Heise (1925–1987), contributed to the HCDM’s approach to the ‘philosophy of praxis’ and the ecological question, respectively, even if they ultimately never authored entries for the lexicon.
Werner Röhr has reconstructed the ‘winding down’ or Abwicklung of the GDR’s historical research establishment by their West German counterparts through highly questionable procedures in Abwicklung: das Ende der Geschichtswissenschaft der DDR, Berlin: Edition Organon, 2011–2012, 2 vols.
About twenty articles have also been translated into Turkish (see the Journal Felsefelogos at
‘Préface à la troisième édition’, Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, Paris: PUF, XVI.
Stuart Hall, ([2007] 2019), ‘Through the prism of an intellectual life’, David Morley (ed.), Essential essays, vol. 2: identity and diaspora, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 315.
Olivier Gebuhrer, ‘Du marxisme comme projet de mondialisation: entretien avec Wolfgang Fritz Haug’, Regards: les idées en mouvement, Vol. 50 (1 October, 1999), No. 6, 15–16. (The emphasis is mine.)
José Carlos Mariátegui ([1927] 1976), ‘Intermezzo polemico’, Manuel Aquézolo Castro (ed.), La polémica del indigenismo, La Paz: Mosca Azul, 76.