Article,
Lokomotive Zwei Neun Drei - Marxismus, Historiographie und Fortschrittsparadigma
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 20 (1): 13--41 (2009)
Abstract
Marxism and the idea of 'progress' have been closely interrelated in the course of the last 150 years. I argue that this relation was, however, less clear-cut and one-dimensional than those refl ected in critical appraisals hitherto of the notion of 'progress' in Marx and the many sorts of Marxism. After some refl ections on the possibility of historicizing Marxism in the aftermath of '1989', the paper goes on to present some elements of the multifaceted approach to 'progress' in the thought of Karl Marx himself, including some remarks on related topics (e. g. his interpretation of non-European regions). The genesis of Marxism - defi ned as any intellectual and political practice with reference to Marx - and the different attitudes of Marxist intellectuals towards 'progress' are then discussed. In contrast with the standard vision, in which 'Marxism' is depicted as being irremediably interlaced with a teleological concept of history, the narratives of 'progress' and Eurocentric distortions, this article de monstrates how different conjunctures of Marxist thought led to diverse ways of using the concept of 'progress'.
