A review of Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx by Tom Rockmore

By David North
WSWS

Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx, by Tom Rockmore. 224 pages, Blackwell Publishers, 2002. US$29.95

Tom Rockmore, who teaches Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, begins his book Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx, with the following statement:

A review of Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx by Tom Rockmore

By David North
WSWS

Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx, by Tom Rockmore. 224 pages, Blackwell Publishers, 2002. US$29.95

The purpose of Rockmore’s assault on Engels becomes transparent as soon as he turns his attention to Marx. By claiming that it was the philosophically-ignorant Engels who created what is known as “Marxism” by falsifying and distorting the conceptions of his lifelong comrade and friend, Rockmore feels free to unveil a “new” Marx—that is, one without the materialistic narrative that supposedly was composed by Engels after the former’s death. And so, contrary to the claims of Engels and several generations of “Marxists,” the real Marx had no substantial differences with the philosophical outlook of Hegel. Rockmore claims that “it is crucial to go beyond politically motivated claims for distinctions in kind between Marx and Hegel, or again between Marx and philosophy, or even between philosophy and science; for it is only in this way that one can see that in the final analysis Marx is not only a philosopher, or a German philosopher, but a German Hegelian, hence a German idealist philosopher” (161).

Nancy Russell reviews Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel C. Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained, published in 1991, has been at the center of a large body of debate. Aimed at both the lay person and the scientist, the book became a bestseller and was described by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of that year.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, (London: Macmillan, 2005)

One of history’s greatest mysteries, Peter Heather tells us in his new book, is “the strange death of the Roman Empire.” An up-to-date general study of the fall of the Roman Empire has long been needed. Heather is attempting to fill the gap. He draws on material previously only available in specialist publications to produce a synthesis that takes into account the last 40 years of research into late antiquity.

In addition to a certain living standard, another condition must be met: if man is to be successfully propagandized, he needs at least a minimum of culture. Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture. We are not speaking here of intelligence; some primitive tribes are surely intelligent, but have an intelligence foreign to our concepts and customs. A base is needed — for example, education; a man who cannot read will escape most propaganda, as will a man who is not interested in reading. People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation).

A review of The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, by Richard Dawkins

In this survey of life on earth and its evolution, Richard Dawkins adopts a rather innovative approach. Rather than beginning with the origin and proceeding forward through historical time, the author starts with modern humans and works backwards. He does so in order to dispense with the anthropocentric and essentially religious notion that evolution was somehow fated to result in human beings.

But Then It Was Too Late

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.