[...] Lenin would certainly have rejected the idea that Marxism was a critique of political economy: for him it was a critique of bourgeois political economy only, which finally transformed political economy itself into a real science. But the subtitle of Capital indicates something more than this—it suggests that political economy as such is bourgeois and must be criticized tout court. This second dimension of Marx’s work is precisely that which culminates in his theory of alienation and fetishism. The great problem for us is to know whether and how these two divergent directions of Marx’s work can be held together in a single system. Can a purely scientific theory contain within itself a discourse on alienation? The problem has not yet been resolved.

This caution remains especially salutary today, against the facile chorus of those on the Left who have suddenly discovered ‘capitalism’ or ‘fascism’ in the USSR.

We have discussed the Della Volpean school in Italy, in which I received my early formation. What I would finally like to emphasize is something much deeper than any of the criticisms I have made of it hitherto. The phenomenon of Della Volpeanism—like that of Althusserianism today—was always linked to problems of interpretation of Marxism: it was born and remained confined within a purely theoretical space. The type of contact which it established with Marxism was always marked by a basic dissociation and division of theory from political activity. This separation has characterized Marxism throughout the world ever since the early twenties. Set against this background, the Della Volpean school in Italy is necessarily reduced to very modest dimensions: we should not have any illusions about this, or exaggerate the political differences between the Della Volpeans and the historicists at the time. The real, fundamental fact was the separation between theoretical Marxism and the actual working class movement. If you look at works like Kautsky’s Agrarian Question, Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital, or Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia—three of the great works of the period which immediately succeeded that of Marx and Engels—you immediately register that their theoretical analysis contains at the same time the elements of a political strategy. They are works which both have a true cognitive value, and an operative strategic purpose. Such works, whatever their limits, maintained the essential of Marxism. For Marxism is not a phenomenon comparable to existentialism, phenomenology or neo-positivism. Once it becomes so, it is finished. But after the October Revolution, from the early 1920s onwards, what happened? In the West, where the revolution failed and the proletariat was defeated, Marxism lived on merely as an academic current in the universities, producing works of purely theoretical scope or cultural reflection. The career of Lukács is the clearest demonstration of this process. History and Class Consciousness, for all its defects, set out to be a book of political theory, geared to an actual practice. After it, Lukács came to write works of a totally different nature. The Young Hegel or The Destruction of Reason are typical products of a university professor. Culturally, they may have a very positive value: but they no longer have any connection with the life of the workers’ movement. They represent attempts to achieve a cognitive advance on the plane of theory, that at the same time are completely devoid of any strategic or political implications. This was the fate of the West. Meanwhile, what happened in the East? There revolutions did occur, but in countries whose level of capitalist development was so backward that there was no chance of them building a socialist society. In these lands, the classical categories of Marxism had no objective system of correspondences in reality. There was revolutionary political practice, which sometimes generated very important and creative mass experiences, but these occurred in a historical theatre which was alien to the central categories of Marx’s own theory. This practice thus never succeeded in achieving translation into a theoretical advance within Marxism itself: the most obvious case is the work of Mao. Thus, simplifying greatly, we can say that in the West, Marxism has become a purely cultural and academic phenomenon; while in the East, revolutionary processes developed in an ambience too retarded to permit a realization of socialism, and hence inevitably found expression in non-Marxist ideas and traditions.

[...] If Marxists continue to remain arrested in epistemology and gnoseology, Marxism has effectively perished. The only way in which Marxism can be revived is if no more books like Marxism and Hegel are published, and instead books like Hilferding’s Finance Capital and Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital—or even Lenin’s Imperialism, which was a popular brochure—are once again written. In short, either Marxism has the capacity—I certainly do not—to produce at that level, or it will survive merely as the foible of a few university professors. But in that case, it will be well and truly dead, and the professors might as well invent a new name for their clerisy.