The sudden downfall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc after 1989, an upheaval of cataclysmic proportions, left many of us in a state of shock, disbelief, grief, relief, doubt, and hope. It forced us to take stock of what was irretrievably lost, and what could and should be saved. The Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) is imbued with this traumatic moment. The project, begun in 1983, one hundred years after Karl Marx’s death, underwent a complete reset before the first volume of the Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (title of the original German edition) appeared in 1994. Edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug and later by an editorial team, it is an undertaking of epochal scope, ambition, and importance. Its entries adhere to the highest standards of philological accuracy, scholarly erudition, and painstaking historical reconstruction. Transcending its European origins, it is the work of more than eight hundred Marxists from every corner of the English-speaking world, as well as from Latin America, India, and China – where a translation of the first volume appeared in 2019 –, from Western and Eastern strands of Marxist thought. Beginning with volume 6, each new volume was subdivided into two volumes. With more than 1,500 entries, its projected fifteen large-format volumes may well end up as twenty. The halfway point of the project was reached in 2012 with volume 8/I; the latest volume to appear is 9/I (2018). At that pace it may well take another twenty years until the publication of the final volume.
A drawback, you say. It is a drawback only if you expect the HCDM to be a museum where Marx’s concepts and terminology, if not Marxism itself, are preserved in the form of fixed entities, explained once and for all. The fact that nearly thirty years have elapsed since the publication of volume 1 is a metaphor for the project itself: it is a work in progress, profoundly dialectical in nature. Each lemma describes a term or concept in motion, evolving, changing, shedding older shadings under the impact of history, and acquiring new ones. Marx’s concepts are shown in a state of evolution; the HCDM both captures and embodies that state. Earlier positions have shifted, our understanding of 1989 and its consequences have evolved. New concepts and sites of struggle emerge, from post-colonial to feminist, from gender to ecology. They are presented in statu nascendi as critical theories about them take shape.
Each entry is written from a present moment, and each new volume is an account of the status of Marxist theory at that moment, as well as an intervention in ongoing debates. The volumes of the HCDM have themselves become part of the history of Marxist theory – an unfinished record of an unfinished story.
The German origin of the HCDM offers a unique historical opportunity to combine Western and Eastern strands of Marxist thought. The HCDM reconstructs the internal divisions within Marxism, and provides analytical tools for interrogating its history. It preserves intellectual resources of Eastern Marxism from falling into oblivion. It does not neatly separate Marxist theory from the crimes committed in its name and associated with figures from Stalin to Pol Pot. As an essential part of the history of Marxism, the communist political systems remain an object of historical-critical investigation for the left. The HCDM opens up a safe space for mourning and critical renewal. The end of the system of “administrative socialism” (Fredric Jameson) was experienced by many Marxists as a liberation not from Marx, as some would have us believe, but from what in the Eastern bloc had become “Marxism-Leninism”, a static, self-contained theory construct from which all dialectics had been drained. Against this the HCDM posits and encourages direct access to Marx and the history of Marxist theory. When misinformation, distortions, and anti-enlightenment positions spread instantly to the farthest reaches of the globe, we need to revisit and verify our sources and ascertain the facticity of our arguments.
The HCDM insists on the plurality of Marxist thinking. Plurality, and pluralism are key concepts in Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s thinking about Marxism. Professor emeritus of philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin, Haug has published more than thirty books on Marxist theory, ranging from theories of fascism and high-tech capitalism to Commodity Aesthetics (original edn. 1971, new edn. 2009), and on the transition from the Soviet Union to post-communist Russia; he is a co-founder of the Marxist theory journal Das Argument (now in its 63rd year), co-editor of a ten-volume annotated German edition of Gramsci’s prison notebooks, and founder of the Berlin Institute of Critical Theory. A key component of the HCDM’s pluralism is its feminism, more precisely its Marxist feminism or feminist Marxism. It contains numerous entries on gender relations, on gender-related exploitation, on domestic labour, and the feminisation of poverty. Spiritus rector behind this component is Haug’s wife Frigga Haug, professor emerita of sociology and a leading figure of leftist German feminism who has written, edited, or co-edited numerous books on Marxism and feminism. Also on the editorial board are historian Wolfgang Küttler, former department head of the Central Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, with numerous publications on the theory and methodology of historiography and on Marx’s theory of history; and Peter Jehle, associate professor of Romance Studies at Potsdam University, chairman of the Berlin Institute of Critical Theory, and co-editor of Das Argument, whose publications have a focus on Gramsci.
From its inception, and commensurate with Marxism’s global presence both as a theory and as a political practice, the HCDM was intended for an international audience. German was the language of Marx and Engels, of Marxist theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Bertolt Brecht. The defeat of Nazi Germany also put an end to the international importance of the German language. English became the global lingua franca. The ascendance, after 1968, of Marxist theorists writing in many different languages, from Antonio Gramsci to Mao Zedong, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Louis Althusser, made the need for an English language edition of the HCDM ever more pressing. While specialists will still need to go back to the texts in their original languages, the English edition of the HCDM is meant for the many for whom this is not an option.
Is the HCDM only for Marxists? Are you a Marxist? You’re not sure you know enough to call yourself a Marxist? You don’t want to be pinned down? You want to know if being a Marxist includes – or excludes – being a Leninist, a Luxemburgist, a Trotskyist, a Lukácsian, a Blochian, a Gramscian, a Brechtian, an Althusserian (or a Stalinist)? Does being a Marxist define you as an intellectual disconnected from the real suffering of the vast majority of mankind? And what could it mean to be a Marxist in one’s everyday activities? How can you participate in working toward changing the world, toward organising society in such a way that it works for the many, rather than the few? If these questions haunt and trouble you, the HCDM is for you.
How to use the HCDM? You can start by looking up any lemma. This will likely lead you to another lemma, and another, and another. It will lead you through erudite reconstructions and heated debates, through contradictions, pitfalls, failures, and triumphs, through dead ends and new beginnings. Your curiosity, your desire for knowledge, and your empathy with those these volumes are about, can get you hooked. You can both lose and find yourself in these pages. The HCDM is a site for open-ended learning, and in this way it is a joyful experience.
As for the above reference to Marxism’s global presence, it would seem more appropriate to talk about the global presence of neoliberal capitalism: a system fuelled by a financial industry severed from the “real” economy, pushing through reactionary social policies that foster xenophobia and racism. Marxism, with its immense scope and splendour of human thinking in the service of mankind, while fully conscious of the horrors perpetrated in its own name, remains the utopian other of this system. As long as the vast majority of people on the planet and the planet itself are exploited while the few acquire unimaginable wealth, it cannot disappear. Walter Benjamin, in his Commentaries on Brecht’s Poems, wrote of the poem ‘Von der Freundlichkeit der Welt’ (On The World’s Kindness) that it contains a ‘minimum program of humanity’. That is as good a summary as any of the usefulness of the HCDM.
Robert Cohen