Bookworms and Fieldworkers

Before there was Marxism, there was just Marx and Engels and a scattering of activists, conspiracists, revolutionaries, and intellectuals committed to a shared cause. How did a set of ideas transform into a global movement and political tradition? How did, in other words, Marxism become Marxism? A new history by Christina Morina, reviewed this week by Peter Gordon, examines some of the figures who made Marxism what it became and both the personal and political reasons why they sought to do so. By doing so, Gordon argues, Morina not only offers a set of portraits of Lenin, Eduard Bernstein, Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg, and other early Marxist luminaries but also “paints a portrait of Marxism as less than a specific theory than as a shared language and a set of informal dispositions that spawned a variety of competing interpretations.” Read “How Did Marxism Become Marxism?”