A ‘ “message in the bottle” for a different future’, Fredric Jameson wrote 25 years ago, after the first four volumes of the (German-language) Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (HKWM) – Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) – had been published. Admittedly, the Preface to the first volume may have approached the matter somewhat less modestly, stating that it was the HKWM’s task, ‘as if on Noah’s Ark’, to carry ‘humankind’s treasure trove of enlightening knowledge and social imagination […] into a new era’, so as to salvage it from ‘an enormous mountain of historical debris, one which threatens to indiscriminately bury both that system’s rational elements and seeds for the future, along with those elements which are irrational and hostile’ to life (1994, III).1
The time in which these lines were written – and, indeed, understood as a historic mission – was shaped by the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In December of 1994, Heiner Müller captured the situation in the following verses: ‘From my cell before the blank page / In my head a drama for an empty auditorium / Deaf are the victors, and the vanquished mute’.
We announced the first volume under the title ‘Abbau des Staates bis Dummheit’ (Dismantling of the State to Stupidity). To the news magazine Der Spiegel this sounded so absurd that it printed our announcement in its Hohlspiegel column, which features involuntarily comical quotes. Of course, this brought us attention. However, the first volume had become considerably too long and had to be divided up. The new, rather sober title was Abbau des Staates bis Avantgarde (Dismantling of the State to Vanguard). The second volume, titled Bank bis Dummheit in der Musik (Bank to Stupidity in Music), was published the following year and earned an appreciative review from the centre-left daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, which we used for its cover blurb: ‘Considering its philologically precise form and its convincingly undogmatic approach, this dictionary won’t be one of the worst legacies of the intellectual culture of this century to be carried over into the next millennium’.
We, for our part, however, were obviously quite unaware of the magnitude of the endeavour we had embarked on. The HCDM would probably ‘not be completed before the year 2000’, concluded the Preface written that autumn in 1994 (VI). The fact that the first volume had to be limited to entries beginning with the letter ‘A’ should have made us aware of the absurdly overambitious understatement of ‘not […] before the year 2000’. In the meantime, the endeavour has turned into a veritable generational task. ‘Due to an irresistible intrinsic logic’, as we learn in volume 7/I from 2008, in which Frigga Haug and Peter Jehle acted as co-editors, ‘it has since transcended the originally intended boundaries and is exceeding the limits imposed on its founding editors’ stamina, and, indeed, lifetime’ (II). In 2012, some 30 years after its launch, the HCDM project had not even accomplished half of its task, when Oskar Negt, one of the most renowned of the German intellectuals who emerged from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, referred to the HCDM as ‘ein Jahrhundertwerk’, a formulation which in German ranks it as one of the great achievements of the century.
Another decade down the road, the term Jahrhundertwerk has acquired the ironic undertone of ‘the work of a century’, suggesting it may refer to the actual time required for its completion.
Anyway, this ‘ark’, or ‘message in a bottle’, is now being brought ashore in two world languages: first, in Chinese, in the form of a meticulous translation by Beijing University of the first three HCDM-volumes, conceived as the beginning of a complete edition; second, in Spanish, through theme-specific volumes compiled by Mariela Ferrari and Victor Strazzeri under the guidance of Miguel Vedda at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and beginning with a selection of feminist articles integrated into the HCDM under the supervision of Frigga Haug.
At long last, as this present volume proves, the ark is now releasing a first sample of specimens in English. Following up on the diachronic practice maintained by the journal Historical Materialism over several years, in which it published one English-language HCDM entry in each of its issues, this selected volume, compiled under the aegis of and edited by Victor Strazzeri alongside Konstantin Baehrens and Juha Koivisto, has the merit of, finally, bringing a synchronic body of such selected ‘work samples’ ashore.
For the HCDM, this marks a decisive step. Why?
Well, as Friedrich Engels loved to say, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. This collection accomplishes what ‘author guidelines’ never can: namely to convey to potential authors, in our epoch’s foremost global language and modus operandi, the criteria of this historical-critical or Dictionary of Concepts (Begriffswörterbuch) in the epistemological sense of a concrete theoretical reconstruction of its objects that afford the HCDM the character of a practical-theoretical encyclopaedia.
The reason can be summed up very succinctly – albeit not without summoning a Roll of Honour for those we have lost along the way: most of the international founding generation of the HCDM project, many of whom – coming from varying strands of Marxism and socialism and having played influential roles in the disputes over the ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’2 and the best way forward for the workers’ movement – have succumbed to the ‘fury of disappearance’ (Hegel)3 that is time. It was a generation of internationally active and influential Marxist intellectuals, many of whom still spoke (or at least read) German, as had been common in the first three Internationals, in the Second and Third International at least up to the period immediately following the First World War.
The loss of this generation turned the publication of selected texts for a global English-reading public of university-educated intellectuals from all over the world into a matter of survival for the HCDM project. The project relies on these authors and courts their collaboration. And while not originally intended, the historicity or, indeed, historicality of our project has firmly inscribed English-language publications into our repertoire. What exactly this may entail in the future remains to be seen.
In reality, this historicality was inscribed into the HCDM project from quite early on, seeing as it was launched on the 100th anniversary of Marx’s death (1983) as a translation project of Georges Labica’s Dictionnaire critique du marxisme realised by two dozen notable academic intellectuals associated with Das Argument. Without this journal and the various research projects that emerged from it, the new project could not have been tackled. Then in 1984 it was confronted with a concerted attack from the DKP’s staunchly ML-aligned intellectuals under the aegis of the DKP-affiliated Institut für marxistische Studien und Forschungen (IMSF, Institute for Marxist Studies and Research). The journal and the HCDM both adhered to a “leftist-ecumenical” line, an approach that generally included the DKP intellectuals as well. This was denounced as a usurping of co-responsibility for the political culture among all those parts of the left that operated within “shouting distance” of Marx, as Stuart Hall liked to say, a responsibility supposedly reserved exclusively for “the party”. Things became so heated that the author of these lines of text – who was responsible for launching and developing the journal from 1959 onward as well as initiating the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie (‘Project Ideology Theory’) in 1978, the Berliner Volksuniversität (‘Berlin People’s University’) in 1980, and the HCDM in 1983 – was barred from the IMSF after a formal hearing, albeit without ever having been affiliated to begin with. This author’s combative response was a two-volume collection of political-theoretical analyses with the programmatic title Pluraler Marxismus (Haug 1985 and 1987). The starting point of its Preface is the so-called ‘Yalta memorandum’ dictated by the chairman of the Italian CP, Palmiro Togliatti, shortly before his death in 1964. Faced with the effects of the Sino-Soviet split, Togliatti then formulated – in reference to the communist parties and socialist countries as a whole – the postulate of ‘unità nella diversità, unity in diversity […] in the diversity of our concrete political positions, conforming to the situation and degree of development in each country’.
In the projects mentioned here, we transferred Togliatti’s approach to the conditions within the left. For the internationally oriented HCDM such a procedure was a matter of course. Yet, wherever there was mention of plurality, those summoned from their fortresses to join a context of rational and free debate would mishear and instead deduce this only to be a prescriptive pluralism directed against coherent critical theory, which Margherita von Brentano (Das Argument 1971), then vice-president of Free University Berlin, had criticised on our West-Side of the Iron Curtain where pluralism was obligatory, as a ‘battle cry’ for institutional sanctioning, or, to put it rather bluntly, repression of any ‘theory that contradicts and threatens the dominant theory’ (2010, 331).4
No, plural Marxism does not entail arbitrariness, but rather research-based unity within diversity; not proceeding from dogmas, but from real problems and crises, which, according to Antonio Labriola – the “last orthodox Marxian” (Karl Korsch) – has to be analysed as a mute self-criticism of the specific social relations and their stages of development. At least with a view to the advancement of Marxism in the different world regions, respect for diversity and difference had to be recognised as imperative. At the same time, history’s open horizons, traversing all differences, made and always again make constant engagement with the question of “What is to be done?” inevitable. An inevitable form of this engagement is controversy, with the danger of division constantly looming in the background.
How to accommodate all this within a conceptual dictionary? – We decided to attempt to defuse the danger of division through well-argued critiques and philologically precise reasoning. Criticism of other authors must always be presented in a way that allows for a response and clarifies the contradictions and unresolved issues of the problematic under scrutiny. The boundaries we established in this regard include the following guidelines: no name dropping, nor concept dropping, in short, no citation cartels. In positive terms, then, we urge that lines of reasoning be documented through accurately referenced source citations, so as to enable future readers to judge the reasoning contexts for themselves and to pursue further research. In this regard, the Preface to HKWM 4 (1999) reads:
If plurality is to imply more than mere disparity, it requires work. Parallel to the expansion of the scope and the growing diversity of the political-cultural heritage and style of the authors, our editorial tasks also increased considerably. The inclusion of theme areas that had been traditionally neglected by Marxists and in which the corresponding theoretical culture was therefore poorly developed did not make our task any easier. The translation work, language and content editing, research of quotes and text information details, not least the condensing and avoiding of redundancies, and, finally, multiple rounds of corrections and proofreading, were virtually never-ending. […] Interventions were skewed towards making an argument more historically and philologically precise, and at times towards making sprawling material more compact. The design principle of conceptual fragmentation came with the danger of overlapping, which had to be reduced as far as possible during final editing. This process demanded a great deal from all parties involved – authors, editors, the coordinator, and the editor-in-chief.
The fact that the path from French, and in particular from German to English (especially American English), encounters linguistic filters in which some of the language of dialectics may become snared, was already noted by Fredric Jameson in the Preface to his work Marxism and Form. Here, he mercilessly rails against the widespread ‘mixture of political liberalism, empiricism, and logical positivism’ (1971, x). We agree on his point that the dialectical method requires ‘a concrete working through of detail’ (xi). Any result is the outcome of a prior development that demands meticulous scrutiny. We refer to this as genetic reconstruction. Though it may not be the easier path, it is certainly the most rewarding one, as it extrapolates the experience and concept of the subject matter which is being investigated.
One basic contradiction that is present in our project is due to the original publication being in German, which during the first two or even three phases of Marxism had been the established language of the international Marxist workers’ movement. These days the German language has been reduced to a de facto ‘local dialect’, as the Croatian-born author Boris Buden recently asserted with both a subversive ironic tone and a sense of resignation, citing the example of a new (third) translation of Marx’s Capital into Slovenian (2013), ‘a language spoken by fewer than 2 million people’, while, at the same time, the works of the world-famous ‘Slovenian School’ of philosophy and cultural theory, and of Marxism, ‘are exclusively written in English. And, as far as they refer to Marx, they necessarily rely on English translations of his writings’ (Buden 2019, 151, fn. 27; on the error sources of such an anglophone enclosure of Marx see Haug 2017).
Wolfgang Fritz Haug
Esslingen am Neckar, 5 October 2022
Translated by Jan-Peter Herrmann
Appendix
Anyone who relates to the history of Marxism like someone who doesn’t remember anything cannot be a good Marxist.
Based on Lenin5
The following Honour Roll unmistakably shows that the volumes published so far – to say it in the words of Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach – are ‘in their reality’ not the work of a German group, but rather the collective international work and, indeed, achievement of contributors representing many autonomous facets of a global Marxism.
At the same time, however, the Honour Roll reveals the gaping hole that death has torn into the fabric of our group of collaborating authors over the years. The first and foremost aim of these invitational remarks and of the subsequent Honour Roll is to commemorate these contributions of the past. In doing so, then, we hope these lines are also understood as an invitation to readers to enter into dialogue with the HCDM and its ongoing reception and impact, while joining the efforts to pursue its actual task, namely to progressively compile an historical critical dictionary of Marxist concepts – i.e., to update these concepts and apply them to our challenges of today and, in the process, to continually test, renew, and refine them over and over, again and again. May these historical voices serve as an encouragement to build on and resume their work in one form or another in forthcoming volumes.
Let us remember, from Egypt, Samir Amin (Anti-colonialism),6 one of the most enduringly influential voices from the Global South, who became head of the Third World Forum in 1980; Anouar Abdel-Malek (Non-alignment), author of Egypte, société militaire (Paris 1962, Ital. and Span. 1967, Engl. and Germ. 1971); from India Ajit Roy (Gandhism I), who was very influential in the South Indian autonomous Marxist scene, who represented a Marx-oriented anti-Stalinist Marxism with the Occasional Letters of The Marxist Review, and also did so internationally, for example through his participation in the Lelio-Basso Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal; the Marxist theologian Bastiaan Wielenga, working in Tamil Nadu, had put us in contact with Roy, and, moreover, wrote twelve essential articles for the HCDM (Atheism, Village community, Gandhism II, Justice I, Green Revolution, Gulag, Indian question, Church of the poor I, Smallholders/small peasants II, Colonial mode of production, Leviathan, Moloch); finally, let us think of Ramkrishna Bhattacharya (ancient Indian materialism), from Kolkata, famous for his extensive work on Indian materialism, especially the ancient Indian Carvaka/Lokayata system. From China, let us think of Su Shaozhi from the People’s Republic of China (Chinese cultural revolution), former Director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Academy of Social Sciences, and also of labour movement historian Yin Xuji of the Central Translation Institute, both of which are based in Beijing; from Latin America let us think of the philosophers Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (unfortunately, we did not retrieve his article in time), who, born in Spain, fought as a young communist poet in the civil war and then later, during his exile in Mexico, further elaborated Marx’s approaches to a philosophy of praxis and a corresponding aesthetics, as well as Bolívar Echeverría, who linked the world of mestizaje cultural in the midst of capitalist modernity with the ‘critique of this modernity at the top of the neoliberal and postmodern Index librorum prohibitorum: El Capital, de Marx’ (1994, 18), and who co-founded the intermittent Latin American editorial group of the HCDM under the aegis of Gabriel Vargas Lozano in Mexico City; from Japan, let us think of the internationalist Luxemburgist Narihiko Ito (Something); from the USA, let us think of Lawrence Krader (Asiatic mode of production, Ownership/property, Form and substance), editor of The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (1972); let us think of the co-founder of world-systems theory Immanuel Wallerstein (Bourgeoisie/middle classes II); of the feminist epistemologist and standpoint theorist Nancy Hartsock (Domination/rule II), active on many fronts including the foundation of social institutions, teaching and writing, who was President of the Western Political Science Association (1994–95) and founding director of the Center for Women & Democracy in Seattle; of Joseph Buttigieg (Prison Notebooks) from the University of Notre-Dame (Indiana), the translator and editor of the initial published volumes of the planned comprehensive multi-volume English edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, with whom we had been in close contact; of Norman Birnbaum (Struggle/fight), a professor at Georgetown University Law School who was also a classical intellectual in terms of his critical and political work, who contributed to many left-wing journals and whose activities included working as a consultant for Robert and Edward Kennedy, for United Auto Workers, and for the German Green Party; of William H. Shaw (Functional explanation) from San José State University; of the labour movement intellectual Stanley Aronowitz (Power elite of the USA) from the City University of New York; from Canada, of Frank Cunningham from the University of Toronto, former President of the Canadian Sociological Association, who welcomed the launch of the HCDM as ‘world historic’; of North American historian Ellen Meiksins Wood (Origin of capitalism), editorial board member of New Left Review, co-editor of Monthly Review, later inducted into the Royal Society of Canada; of Roger Simon (Collective memory II); from Australia, let us think of the epistemologist and science theorist Wal A. Suchting (Empiricism, Epistemology, Experiment, Falsificationism); from then-Yugoslavia, of Miloš Nikolić, the spiritus rector of the annual ‘Socialism in the World’ conferences in Cavtat, where the HCDM forged many of its initial contacts with contributors; from England, Monty Johnstone, one of the most striking voices from the CPGB leadership and former co-editor of the English edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, who concerned himself with the controversial topic of Democratic centralism; let us think of the Jamaican-born pioneer of British cultural studies, who moved ‘within shouting distance of Marx’, Stuart Hall (Identification I); of the historian Gerald Aylmer (English Revolution), from St. Peter’s College, Oxford; and of the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who grew up in Vienna and Berlin; from France, of Paul Boccara (Informational revolution), Henri Lefebvre (Everydayness/dailyness, Surplus product, Metaphilosophy I), of Claude Meillassoux (Anthropology), of Georges Labica, the grandfather, as it were, of the HCDM project, whose article Dismantling of the state opens the first volume, later followed by that on Illegality; of Lucien Sève (Historical forms of individuality), who passed away after contracting Covid before he was able to complete his article on Nonlinearity; of Michel Vadée (Ensemble of the social relations I), of André Tosel (Communism), and Arnaud Spire (Ideal II, Collective action I), who participated in the management of Espaces Marx and maintained the link with the HCDM, all of whom were active in the PCF; of Larry Portis (Society), whose path led him from Bremerton (Washington) in the United States to the University of Montpellier in the 1970s and brought him into contact with the anarcho-syndicalist movement; from Sweden, let us think of Carl-Henrik Hermansson (Finance capital I), the leader of the Left Party there, who spurred the party’s emancipation from CPSU hegemony; from Finland, of Veikko Pietilä (Abstract/concrete, Analysis/synthesis, Apologetics, Concept, Formal abstraction/real abstraction, Research/presentation, Social law), who helped shape the HCDM project from the outset and enriched it with his scientific-theoretical articles; from Belgium, of Ernest Mandel (Classless society I), the leading intellect and theoretician of the Fourth International, from whom we still have a posthumous text waiting to be published; from Italy, of the Spinoza scholar Emilia Giancotti Boscherini (Determinism I), editor of the Lexicon Spinozanum; of Antonio A. Santucci (Gramscianism), whose works ‘include the complete Italian critical editions of Gramsci’s pre-prison and prison letters’; of Giorgio Baratta, the founding chair of the International Gramsci Society, and of his brother Alessandro Baratta (Critical criminology I); let us think of the unbending communist Marxist Domenico Losurdo (Fundamentalism), whose two-volume Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet on Nietzsche was published by InkriT in German translation; from Spain, let us think of Francisco ‘Paco’ Fernández Buey; from Greece, of Kosmas Psychopedis (Hegelianism, Idea) from the University of Athens; from the former GDR (‘East Germany’), let us think of Jürgen Kuczynski, the resistance fighter against Nazism and later doyen of social and workers’ history in the GDR (Misery/poverty); of Lothar Bisky (Informational society), the long-time chairman of the PDS, under whose leadership it merged with the West German WASG to form the party Die Linke (The Left); of Michael Schumann (Renewal, Mistake/error), one of the leading reformers as the SED evolved into the PDS, to whom the HCDM owes much of its early funding; of Hanna Behrend (Denazification), who emigrated from Nazi Germany to France, then to England, before returning to Germany, or rather the GDR, after the victory of the Allies, and under these changing conditions ceaselessly pursued the goal of a just society, including as a member of the Argument women’s editorial team; of the sociologist and class analyst Helmut Steiner (Class analysis, Expropriation of Marxism), who was the editor-in-chief of the journal Utopie kreativ, which appeared from 1990–2008 and was important for the discussion between Eastern and Western Marxist intellectuals, and who was a corresponding member of the Argument editorial board from 1998 to 2005 and then a member of the journal’s Scientific Advisory Board; of Dieter Wittich (Experience, Immaterial, Materialism and Empirio-criticism); of Helmut Seidel, whose death occurred before he could submit the article we had agreed that he would write, and of the long-time HCDM editorial board member and author Thomas Marxhausen, who had been engaged in the MEGA and who, from the end of the 1990s onwards, served as a mainstay of our editorial board for a decade and contributed a substantial body of articles within our collective work of a dictionary (Ivory tower, Development, Extra profit, Factory legislation, Commodity fetishism, Functionary, Secret diplomacy, Secret, Just wages, Glasnost, Historic mission of the working class, Historical School of Economics, Jacobinism, Capital-editions, Kautskyism I, Classical political economy, Collectivisation II, Communist Manifesto, Consumption); of the musicologist Günter Mayer, to whom we are grateful not only for a complex of foundational politico-aesthetic entries (Aesthetics, Basis aesthetics, Campaign against formalism, Formalism [Russian], Kitsch, Internet II [its utopian aesthetic-political beginnings], Barracks communism [together with Alexander Buzgalin]), but also for the unforgettable musical programmes at InkriT’s annual international HCDM conferences; let us also remember Heinrich Taut, who remained youthfully impetuous in his old age, and contributed not only as an author (Need, Awareness), but also as an editorial board member; from the Federal Republic of Germany (‘West Germany’), let us think of Margherita von Brentano, who, like Helmut Fleischer, Heiner Ganßmann, and Hella Tiedemann-Bartels, contributed to the German translation of Labica’s Dictionnaire critique du marxisme; of the theologian Helmut Gollwitzer (Christianity and Marxism), a leftist-ecumenical spirit with the confidence inherent in world-changing praxis from whom we have learned how to resist; of the philosopher and social historian Leo Kofler (Elite), who was influenced by Austro-Marxism, especially Max Adler; of Klaus Holzkamp, the founder of Marxist Critical Psychology, who is quoted in many HCDM entries but died before he could write his planned article; of the democratic communist Theodor Bergmann, tireless co-creator and author from the very beginning (Agrarian question, Agrarian reform/land reform, Workers control, Workers’ self-management, Insurrection/uprising, Peasant war, and a further 15 entries, including on Chinese reform policy); of Christian Sigrist, a researcher of acephalous societies (Commune); of the art historian Jutta Held (Architecture), founder of the Guernica-Gesellschaft, and of her colleague and husband Norbert Schneider (Fine arts, Art market, Melancholy I), with her teaching at the University of Oldenburg, and him at Münster University; of Hansgeorg Conert (Command economy, Decentralisation) from the University of Bremen; of the theologian Dorothee Sölle (Feminist theology), who was involved in bringing the ecumenical Political Night Prayer into being; of Erich Wulff (Anti-psychiatry, Satisfaction, Democratic Psychiatry, Mental illness, Instance II), who – while participating in the foundation of a modern Psychiatry department at the university of Hué in Vietnam – not only opened a new chapter in the field of Transcultural Psychiatry but also witnessed atrocities committed by the US army in Vietnam and made them public internationally under the pseudonym Georg W. Alsheimer (back in West Germany he taught Social Psychiatry at the Hanover Medical School and acted as the long-time Chairman of the West German Solidarity Committee with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America); let us also think of the Marxist-Keynesian economist Herbert Schui (Keynesianism II) from the Hamburg University of Economics and Politics; of the political scientists Elmar Altvater (Disembedding), Werner Goldschmidt (Separation of powers, Domination/rule I, Class domination II, Class struggle II, Power I), and the powerfully eloquent radical democrat Wolf-Dieter Narr (Inner-party democracy, Clientelism, Control); of Volker Schurig, a biologist who was also involved in the development of Critical Psychology (Ape, Anatomy I, Darwinism, Evolution, Struggle for existence, Lamarckism, Lysenkoism II); from Switzerland, let us think of Claudie Weill, who taught at EHESS Paris (Emigration, Factory councils/workers’ councils); from Austria, of the Austro-Marxist Eduard März (Keynesianism I), of the opera enthusiast Derek Weber (Commanding heights II, Luxury II) who, like März, was based at the Vienna University of Economics and Business; from the Netherlands, let us think of the revolutionary theologian Ton Veerkamp (God, Heaven/hell, Messianism I, Moloch), whose HCDM articles, together with his Political History of the Grand Narrative, have linked the inquiry of the HCDM to the history and content of the monotheistic religions and the social movements that have emerged from them. And so many others.
WFH
Abbreviations
| DKP |
Deutsche Kommunistische Partei |
| IMSF |
Institut für marxistische Studien und Forschungen, linked to the DKP |
| InkriT |
Berliner Institut für kritische Theorie, institutional editor of the HCDM |
| ML |
Marxism-Leninism |
| PDS |
Partei des demokratischen Sozialismus, resulting from the antistalinist reform of the SED in the wake of 1989 |
| SED |
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, ruling party of the GDR up until 1989 |
| WASG |
Arbeit & soziale Gerechtigkeit – Die Wahlalternative, German political party founded 2004 by leftist members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and trade union actors, merged with the PDS in 2007 to form the democratic-socialist party DIE LINKE. |
Works Cited or Mentioned
G.W. Alsheimer, ‘Amerikaner in Vietnam’, in: Das Argument, vol. 8 (1966), no. 1, 2–43 (Immediately translated in Sartre’s Temps modernes)
G.W. Alsheimer, Vietnamesische Lehrjahre: Sechs Jahre als deutscher Arzt in Vietnam 1961–1967, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp 1968
H. Behrend, Die Überleberin: Jahrzehnte in Atlantis – Biographie, Vienna-Mühlheim/Ruhr 2008
M.v. Brentano, ‘Wissenschaftspluralismus: Zur Funktion, Genese und Kritik eines Kampfbegriffs’ (1971), ead., Akademische Schriften, ed. P. McLaughlin, Göttingen 2018, 312–41
B. Buden, ‘It is getting darker around the central sun of freedom’, Capitalism: concept, idea, image: Aspects of Marx’s Capital today, ed. P. Osborne, É. Alliez, E.-J. Russell, London 2019, 135–63 (online with permission of the author at
B. Echeverría, ‘El Ethos barroco’, id. (ed.), Modernidad, mestizaje cultural, Ethos barroco, Mexico City 1994, 13–36
W.F. Haug, Pluraler Marxismus: Beiträge zur politischen Kultur, vol. 1, Berlin/W 1985
W.F. Haug, Das Perestrojka-Journal: Versuch beim täglichen Verlieren des Bodens unter den Füßen neuen Grund zu gewinnen, Hamburg 1990 (accessible via
W.F. Haug, ‘On the Need for a New English Translation of Marx’s Capital’, in: Socialism and Democracy, vol. 31 (March 2017), no. 1, 60–86 (accessible via
D. Losurdo, Nietzsche: Der aristokratische Rebell, 2 vols., Berliner Beiträge zur kritischen Theorie, vols. 9 and 10, Hamburg 2009
H. Müller, ‘Fremder Blick: Farewell to Berlin’, transl. I. Bamforth, Grand Street, no. 69 (Summer 1999), 235
P. Togliatti, ‘Memorandum über Fragen der internationalen Arbeiterbewegung und ihrer Einheit’, id., Reden und Schriften: Eine Auswahl, ed. C. Pozzoli, introd. F. Feri, Frankfurt/M 1967, 210–25
T. Veerkamp, Die Welt Anders: Politische Geschichte der Großen Erzählung, Berliner Beiträge zur kritischen Theorie, vol. 13, Hamburg 2012
E. Wulff, ‘Grundfragen transkultureller Psychiatrie’, in: Das Argument No. 50, vol. 10 (1969), Special Issue, 227–47
On this, see the Preface to HKWM 1 (1994), in this volume, pp. XXV-XXXI.
This is how Lenin addressed the basic tenet also expressed in part 2 of Antonio Labriola’s Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, describing it as ‘the very gist, the living soul of Marxism’ (CW 31/166); priority should be given ‘not [to] logical reasoning, but [to] actual developments, the actual experience’ (CW 25/414), which, of course, subsequently require theoretical analysis.
See Appendix below.
Only a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the night of 9/10 November 1989, the IMSF ‘formally “rehabilitated” me (and Das Argument)’ (Haug 1990, 134). The names ‘from the GDR’ on the Roll of Honour that concludes this Invitation indicate the extent of the contribution to the HKWM’s core content from critical Marxists, particularly from the erstwhile ML context among them, not least our co-editor the historian Wolfgang Küttler. It was, so to speak, a fortunate ‘eastward expansion’ of the ‘ark’, albeit not without setbacks and disappointments.
Cf. Lenin, The Ideological Struggle in the Working-Class-Movement (May 4, 1914; CW 20/278–80).
The keywords which have been worked on by the respective authors are listed in parentheses.