The periodical revivals of Marxism in our age reflect
moral and political interests in search of a respectable
revolutionary tradition. The discovery of the social
problem by phenomenologists, Neo-Thomists, positiv-
ists, and even linguistic analysts usually results in an
attempted synthesis between Marx and some out-
standing philosophical figure who has very little in
common with him (Hook, in Drachkovitch, 1966).
From the point of view of sociological and economic
theories claiming objective truth, Marxism has con-
tributed many insights that have been absorbed and
developed by scholars who either do not share or are
hostile to the perspective of social reform or revolution.
Scientifically there is no more warrant for speaking
of Marxism today in sociology than there is for speak-
ing of Newtonianism in physics or Darwinism in biol-
ogy. The fact that Marxism has become the state doc-
trine of industrially underdeveloped countries in Asia
and Africa is testimony to the fact that his system of
thought proved to be inapplicable to the Western
world whose development it sought to explain. There
is also a certain irony in the fact that the contemporary
movements of sensualism, immediatism, anarchism, and
romantic violence among the young in Western Europe
and America which invoke Marx's name are, allowing
only for slight changes in idiom, the very movements
he criticized and rejected during the forties of the
nineteenth century—the period in which Marx was
developing his distinctive ideas. Some modes of con-
sciousness and modes of being that are the concern
of New Left thought and activity today Marx scornfully
rejected as characteristic of the Lumpenproletariat.
At this stage in the development of Marxism it may
seem as fruitless a task to determine which, if any,
version of Marxism comes closest to Marx's own doc-
trinal intent as to ask which conception of Christianity,
if any, is closest to the vision and teachings of its
founder. Nonetheless, although difficult, it is not im-
possible in principle to reach reliable conclusions if
the inquiry is undertaken in a scientific spirit. Even
if he was in some respects self-deceived, Marx after
all did conceive himself as a scientific economist and
sociologist. Allowing for the ambiguities and impreci-
sion of Marx's published writings, there is greater war-
rant for believing that those who seek to provide
scientific grounds for his conclusions are closer to his
own intent and belief than are those who, whether on
the basis of Marx's unpublished juvenilia or Sartre's
metaphysical fantasies, would convert him to existen-
tialism. The scientific versions of Marxism have an
additional advantage: they permit of the possibility of
empirical refutation, and so facilitate the winning of
new and more reliable scientific truths which Marx as
a scientist presumably would have been willing to
accept. Existentialist versions of Marxism, where they
are not purely historical, are willful and arbitrary
interpretations of social and political phenomena.
“Marxism,” declares Sartre, “is the unsurpassable phi-
losophy of our time,” but only because he interprets
it in such a way as to make it immune to empirical
test. Holding to it, today, therefore, is not a test of
one's fidelity to truth in the service of a liberal and
humane civilization, but only a measure of tenacity
of one's faith.
