by Andreas Peglau

 

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Vulgar psychology

In his 1933 book Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, Wilhelm Reich dealt with „vulgar Marxism“ – which he understood as the opposite of the teachings of Marx and Engels. According to Reich, vulgar Marxists „schematically separated social, mostly economic existence from existence itself,“[1] claimed that ideology and consciousness were „determined solely and directly by economic existence,“[2] and dismissed the study of drives, needs and mental processes as idealistic.

However, these accusations could also have been levelled at Marx and Engels in a milder form. They contradicted the idea that ideological processes were solely and directly determined by economics, albeit rarely. Although they viewed social existence in the context of „existence in general,“ they gave undue priority to economic existence. They did not deny the existence of psychological processes, but rather their real significance and momentum.
Reich continued: The vulgar Marxist is forced to „constantly engage in practical psychology, to speak of the needs of the masses, of revolutionary consciousness, of the will to strike, etc. The more he denies psychology, the more he himself practises metaphysical psychologism“ or comforts „the masses […] that they should trust him, that despite everything, progress is being made, that the revolution cannot be defeated, and so on“.[3] Marx and Engels fell into this trap – which they themselves had set – on several occasions.

Even they could not consistently avoid referring to the mental state of those whom they otherwise portrayed primarily as mindless zombies. And suddenly these zombies awoke and did what Marx and Engels needed them to do to justify their predictions: resist, train for the revolution. The „character masks“ fall – and no one knows why.

Perhaps this approach could be called „vulgar psychology“: unsubstantiated or even unjustifiable assertions about psychological connections and states are used   as explanations.

Engels provided another example of this in The Origin of the Family. There he summarises the development of the last millennia as follows: „Civilisation“ has set „the basest instincts and passions of men in motion“ and developed them „at the expense“ of their other faculties. „Blunt greed“ has been „the driving force of civilisation from its first day to the present,“ „wealth and again wealth and for the third time wealth, wealth not of society, but of this single wretched individual, its only decisive goal.“[4]

Although Engels naturally had no knowledge of the psychological state of humanity on the „first day“ of civilisation, he believed he could judge its overall „soul“ and diagnose it in this millennia-long constant. In doing so, he presented a crude view of humanity: dirty instincts as part of basic human nature, greed as the most important motive of society as a whole since then, i.e. probably also across the class boundaries that he and Marx otherwise emphasised.[5] Suddenly, economic „laws“ no longer played the main role, but rather the goals of individual, lumpish individuals – an equally astonishing and disconcerting revaluation of the role of the individual.

The Origin of the Family became one of Engels‘ most widely read works. In 1892, he was able to publish a fourth, expanded and revised edition.[6] He did not change anything  in the sentences quoted above.

Marx’s best-known attempt to justify his historical optimism also suffers greatly from its exclusion of psychosocial reality.

 

Social upheaval without people

 In 1859, in the preface to his work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote:

„In the social production of their life, people enter into certain necessary relations, independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a certain stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production forms the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a legal and political superstructure arises and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.“[7]

He never went into this „superstructure“ in depth.[8] He continued:

„At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or, which is only a legal expression for this, with the property relations within which they had hitherto moved. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.“[9]

Material productive forces come into conflict with production relations: Once again, human beings do not appear here, or at most only indirectly, as a possible[10] Bestand- teil „material productive forces“. But even if human beings are meant to be included here, their role in this process is obviously not worth mentioning: Essentially, „the productive forces“ fight it out with „the production relations“ alone.
This would only be plausible insofar as semi-automatic machines, frozen into „character masks“, would have no scope to rise above their material circumstances. People, as Marx essentially describes them in Capital, would not be capable of revolution.
Psychological conditions – Marx speaks of „ideological“ or „forms of consciousness“ – are therefore, in his view, only incidentally „revolutionised“:

„With the change in the economic basis, the entire enormous superstructure undergoes a slower or faster transformation. When considering such upheavals, one must always distinguish between the material, scientifically verifiable upheaval in the economic conditions of production and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short, ideological forms in which people become aware of this conflict and fight it out.“[11]

Fighting it out and becoming aware of it is not a (contributing) cause here, but only a consequence, a symptom: at some point, people simply notice what is going on and are forced to get involved. Marx emphasised that „such an epoch of upheaval“ cannot be „judged“ from the „consciousness“ of those involved, but rather „this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between social productive forces and production relations“.[12]

This was no longer as simplistic as he had portrayed it in 1846/47: „The hand mill gives us a society with feudal lords, the steam mill a society with industrial capitalists.“[13] But once again, it was a case of obscuring the psychosocial processes and the actual actors.

Proceeding in this manner, Marx and Engels were unable to conclusively justify the maturation of what they declared to be the „lawful“ socialist revolution or to plausibly anticipate its course.

Furthermore, if the relations of production were bound to undergo radical change anyway, why should the workers still organise themselves? Why did Marx and Engels spend so much time promoting this process and acting as advisors to workers‘ organisations[14] – would it not have been enough to sit back and watch the objective conditions undergo their lawful radical change?[15]

 

Half-hearted mitigations

In 1863, Marx conceded:

„Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of every other production he performs.  All circumstances that affect man, the subject of production, modify [more or less] all his functions and activities, including his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect, it can indeed be proven that all human relationships and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have a more or less decisive effect on it.“[16]

Marx did not make the nature of this influence, or even whether it was compatible with economic „laws of nature“, the subject of his research. In Capital, we find the following sentence: „The manner in which the immanent laws of capitalist production […] come to the consciousness of the individual capitalist as driving motives is not to be considered here […].“[17] But this consideration did not take place later either.[18]

In 1884, in The Origin of the Family, Engels accorded greater importance to family structures and gender relations than he had previously done. However, he once again economised both. The „ultimately decisive factor in history“ was „the production and reproduction of immediate life“, i.e.

„the production of food, of objects of nourishment, clothing, housing and the tools necessary for this; on the other hand, the production of human beings themselves, the reproduction of the species. The social institutions under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live are determined by both types of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand, and of the family on the other.“[19]

„Both types of production“ – with this phrase, Engels lumped together the manufacture of objects and the birth and growth of human children. This probably made it easier for him to maintain his belief that his and Marx’s teachings covered all the essential areas of life.

Not in publications, but only in a few private letters, did Engels attempt to make a slight distinction in his later years. In 1890, he wrote that the „ultimately decisive factor in history“ was „the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I ever claimed more than that. If someone now twists the to mean that the economic factor is the only determining factor, they are turning that sentence into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase.“[20]

It seems not to have occurred to Engels that an „economic moment“ could only have arisen after thousands of years of „producing“ human-like, then human beings – and not, conversely, that humans had been produced for thousands of years before they decided to reproduce, that this „reproduction“ encompassed entirely uneconomic, emotional, sexual, partnership and family relationships, thereby also shaping the psyche and social being before any „production,“ does not seem to have occurred to Engels.[21] This allowed him to remain loyal to his friend Karl, leave the primacy of economics untouched, and continue to dismiss processes „in people’s minds“ as secondary at best:

„The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of class struggle and its results – constitutions established by the victorious class after winning the battle, etc. – legal forms, and now even the reflexes [!] of all these real struggles in the minds of those involved, political, legal, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into dogmatic systems, also exert their influence on the course of historical struggles and in many cases predominantly determine their form. It is an interaction of all these moments in which, through all the infinite number of coincidences […], the economic movement ultimately prevails as a necessity. […]
We make our own history, but […] under very specific circumstances and conditions. Among these, economic factors are ultimately decisive. But political factors, etc., and even the traditions that haunt people’s minds, also play a role, albeit not a decisive one.“[22]

The following assessment comes from another of his 1890s correspondences:[23]

„The whole of history must be studied anew […] before attempting to derive from it the corresponding political, private law, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, etc. views. Little has been done in this regard so far, because only a few have seriously set about doing so. […] Instead, however, the phrase ‚historical materialism‘ (anything can be turned into a phrase) serves only to enable many younger Germans to quickly and systematically construct their own relatively meagre historical knowledge – economic history is still in its infancy! – and then to feel very powerful.“

A sobering summary of the contemporary state of research. As mentioned above, two years earlier Engels had greatly narrowed the scope of his thesis that history is shaped by class struggles.[24] Notwithstanding all this, in 1892, in the introduction to the English translation of his work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, he stated that „historical materialism“ was the

„view of the course of world history which sees the ultimate cause and decisive driving force of all important historical events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the mode of production and exchange, in the resulting division of society into different classes and in the struggles of these classes among themselves“.[25]

In 1894, the year before his death, he reiterated: „Political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc. development is based on economic development“; it is a matter of „interaction based on economic necessity, which ultimately always prevails“.[26]
Not in himself, and certainly not in Karl Marx, but in general, he still seems to have considered what „people say, imagine, picture“ to be „fog formations in the brain“[27] .

 

Conclusion

Early on, Marx and Engels‘ views focused on seemingly independent, living things and processes, as well as helpless, zombie-like humans who were their appendages, puppets, slaves. Above all this sat „immanent“ socio-economic laws, which concealed the enormous gaps in explanation: what happened according to the law required no further justification. In capitalism, the blood-soaked monster of capital acted as the enforcer of these laws.

„To be radical is to grasp things at their root. But for humans, the root is humans themselves.“[28] Marx could not have used this thesis, formulated in 1843/44, as the title for his later work. A more fitting title would have been: „The root for humans is economic laws.“ The place of God, driven out by the Enlightenment, had been taken by other, similarly powerful entities. Marx, who criticised bourgeois economists for „mystifying“ economic relationships,[29] created a new mystification. Exploring and proving the primacy of economics seems to have become a priority, almost an obsession, to which he egocentrically subordinated even marriage and family.[30]

I believe the question of whether Marx and Engels‘ teachings should be described as „economism“ rather than „materialism“ is a valid one.[31] „If you only have a hammer as a tool, you see every problem as a nail“ – this saying applies to some of their views. They reduced human beings to their premises and were therefore able to portray them in a simplified way: as a marginal phenomenon of what is really important. The „real individuals“ they promised to consider in 1845, at the beginning of The German Ideology,[32] had already lost sight of them a few lines later; even then, they imagined the „establishment“ of communism as „essentially economic“.[33]

In 1857/58, Marx went so far as to say that „society does not consist of individuals“; it merely expresses „the sum of the relationships, the relations“ „in which these individuals stand to one another“[34] – interpersonal relationships without people, in other words: an irresolvable contradiction.[35] When Marx then dealt explicitly with capitalist or bourgeois „society“ in Capital, he limited himself almost exclusively to economic issues;[36] his portrayal of people focused on the faceless duo of wage labourers and capitalists.

But 19th-century capitalist society included large, heterogeneous groups that did not participate in industrial production, whether because of their age (infants, the elderly), their social position (bourgeois children and wives), their living environment (the rural population), illness or unemployment, or because they were a minority of powerful politicians asserting their individual interests,[37] Marx and Engels devoted themselves to them only in passing, and so they did not understand capitalism as a social order.

As early as the 1970s, Marxist historian Edward Thompson pointed out that Marx was never able to fulfil his claim to represent capitalist society through his analysis of capital, partly because society consists of „numerous activities and relationships (of power, consciousness, sexual, cultural, of a normative nature)“ that „are not the subject of political economy, but are excluded from it and for which it has no concepts“.[38]

On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Marx and Engels – even in the passages I criticise in my text – had grasped more of this social reality than they themselves were aware of. Mass psychological effects, personality structures and disorders socialised in the interests of the ruling classes through education, religious and other indoctrination, and adapted to the social system, mutated in their portrayal into inevitable, economically enforced patterns of behaviour. The insight they thereby obstructed was that these patterns of behaviour, the effects of this indoctrination, and the underlying psychosocial reality could be understood and meaningfully changed.

Apart from the fact that Marx and Engels occasionally attributed to the proletariat what they hoped for from them in a „vulgar psychological“ manner, the tenor of their teaching is: we are neither responsible for our essential living conditions nor do we have the opportunity to radically transform these conditions on our own.

They themselves, of course, fulfilled Marx’s 1845 claim that what matters is to „change“ the world.[39] They were committed throughout their lives to the changes they felt were necessary. And here, I believe, lies the decisive reason for the impact and lasting effect of their work. They recognised and proved in the economic sphere that exploitative systems – including capitalism – are degrading to human beings and must therefore be „overthrown“. But they did not stop there. Through journalism and by initiating and inspiring socialist organisations, they helped to anchor these insights and reach those who were most affected.

In 1844, Marx wrote, „Theory becomes a material force as soon as it grasps the masses.“[40] He probably hoped the same would happen to his own ideas. It was primarily Engels‘ writings that made this come true. In 1886, Engels announced that Capital was now „often called ‚the Bible of the working class‘.“[41]But even with the best will in the world, it is impossible to certify the mass appeal of the Capital volumes, which, even after multiple revisions, are still often highly complicated, verbose and obsessed with detail, with their countless nested sentences and repetitions.[42]

The one-sidedness and absolutism of Marx and Engels had consequences for the various forms of „Marxism“ developed after Engels‘ death. Those of their followers who refrained from critical questioning – i.e. most of them – were able to lull themselves into deceptive „certainties“ about the course of history, which in turn led to unrealistic political orientations: Our victory is inevitable. Or, in the version of SED General Secretary Erich Honecker from August 1989, three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall: „Neither ox nor donkey can stop socialism in its course.“[43]

Furthermore, it was possible to convince oneself that in-depth research into the actual state of consciousness of the working class or even into the overall psychosocial constitution of the population was unnecessary: the „classics“ had already settled this conclusively.

But contrary to all statements, there was never a serious social science basis for the structure of the GDR state, for the establishment of „socialism“ – now, having almost reached the end of my text, I am certain of this bitter realisation. The positive news is that what did not exist did not fail. It is worth making a new, different attempt.

Neither Marx nor Engels are to blame for the distorted reuse of their work, nor are they responsible for the authoritarian character structures among their followers. Anyone who ventures as courageously into new scientific and political territory as these two did is bound to make mistakes. It is just as inevitable that extensive intellectual output reflects the personality structure of its creators, including unconscious psychological problems. I outlined my view of the latter in relation to Marx and Engels at the beginning under the heading „repression“.

Subsequent generations should have identified and corrected these shortcomings instead of codifying and exacerbating them. But, as shown, Marx and Engels provided a number of opportunities for the misuse of their ideas.

Of course, they also left behind much that could have served as a basis for closing gaps and integrating new ideas. I have mentioned some of this, such as the relativisation of the concept of „law“ in Capital or passages from Engels‘ letters written in his old age.

In 1845, they noted that „circumstances make people just as much as people make circumstances.“[44] In 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, they shared their expectation that „bourgeois society“ would be replaced by „an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.“[45]

In 1875, Marx predicted that in a „higher phase of communist society“ the motto would be: „From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!“[46]
But Max Stirner, who attempted to identify the obstacles and goals of free development, was defamed by Marx and Engels. Those who, like Wilhelm Reich later on, set themselves the task of researching the interactions between people and circumstances more holistically, of finding out what exactly characterises a free individual, what conditions they need in order to be free, what – healthy! – needs motivate people, soon found themselves marginalised or persecuted by Marxists.[47]
And so what is still mostly referred to today as „Marxism“ continues to drift along as a doctrine that is supposed to liberate „human beings“ – but whose proponents for the most part do not even want to know what human beings are.

 

*

 

Continue reading in Part 10: Alternative ways of thinking

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Sources of the entire text (mostly in German).

German version of part 9.

 

Notes

[1] Reich 2020, p. 24.

[2] Ibid., p. 32.

[3] Ibid., pp. 24f.

[4] Engels 1975b, p. 171.

[5] Perhaps he was referring to Marx (1983b, p. 151), who wrote in 1857/58: „The pre-epoch of the development of modern industrial society is opened by the general greed for money, both of individuals and of states.“ The comparison with Engels‘ statement in 1844 that „the human heart“ is „from the outset, immediately, in its egoism, unselfish and sacrificial“ shows how much progress in understanding economics was accompanied by increasing deficits in understanding human beings.

[6] Krader 1973, pp. 136, 148.

[7] Marx 1971a, p. 8f.

[8] This concept remained correspondingly unclear.  See Heinrich 2021, pp. 202f.; Tomberg 1974, pp. 9–92; Labica/ Bensussan/ Haug 1989, pp. 1325–1330; Lotter/ Meiners/ Treptow 2016, pp. 60–63.

[9] Marx 1971a, p. 9.

[10] In the Capital volumes, „productive force“ is never directly attributed to humans, but mostly to „labour“: „The productive force of labour is determined by manifold circumstances, among others by the average degree of skill of the workers“ (Marx 2021, p. 54). „The term ‚productive forces‘ is rather obscure,“ criticises Lange (1955, p. 46). Nor does anything become clearer when one looks up all the places where the word appears in Capital or reads the corresponding collection of quotations in the Marx-Engels Lexicon (Lotter/Meiners/Treptow 2016, pp. 299–304). The expression „material productive forces“ – which would probably only make sense as a counterpart to ideal productive forces – does not appear at all    in Capital.

[11] Marx 1971a, p. 9.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Marx 1972, p. 130. If one were to remain within the logic that new machines that massively change production cause revolutions, then the car or, at the latest, the computer should have brought about socialism.

[14] See Schieder 2018; Krätke 2020, p. 23.

[15] Similarly: Steinfeld 2017, p. 48. The fact that Marx (2021, p. 16) believed that the „birth pangs“ of the new society could possibly be „shortened and alleviated“ is not sufficient for me as an explanation of this massive commitment. Harman (1986) reports that the „New Left“ that emerged around 1950 referred, among other things, to the fact that Marx’s three „historical writings“ (The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War in France) „contained no reference to a passive, fatalistic approach to historical change“. But it is precisely this distinction that suggests that such references can indeed be found in Marx’s other works. In The Civil War, Marx (1962b, p. 343) also wrote that the working class still had „a whole series of historical processes to go through, […] through which both people and circumstances will be completely transformed“.

[16] Marx 1956, p. 251.

[17] Marx 2021, p. 335.

[18] I therefore consider the following interpretation of Marx by Lawrence Krader (1973, p. 181) to be incorrect: „The capitalist is the subjectification of capital, or capital is the externalisation of the subjectivity of the capitalist.“ In any case, the second aspect is not to be found in Capital. The passage in which Marx (2021, p. 620) attempts to look deepest into the soul of „the capitalist“ in Volume 1 of Capital reads: „With the development of the capitalist mode of production, of accumulation and of wealth, the capitalist ceases to be the mere incarnation of capital. He feels a ‚human emotion‘ […]. In the historical beginnings of the capitalist mode of production, and every capitalist parvenu goes through this historical stage individually, the drive for enrichment and avarice prevail as absolute passions.“ Here, then, capitalists seem to be only original personifications of capital. It remains unclear what causes the initial stage of avarice to arise and disappear, both socially and individually. Nor is it clear what an „absolute“ passion is supposed to be.

[19] Engels 1975b, p. 27.

[20] Marx/Engels 1967b, p. 463.

[21] Reich (1932, pp. 120–122), among others, pointed out that the pleasure aspect of sexuality is excluded from „reproduction“ and thus demonstrated how much Engels‘ argument misses the mark in terms of „real life.“

[22] Marx/Engels 1967b, p. 463. The lawful coincidences were also at play here: „Secondly, however, history is such that the final result always emerges from the conflicts of many individual wills, each of which is shaped into what it is by a multitude of specific living conditions; there are therefore countless intersecting forces, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which a resultant – the historical result – emerges, which itself can be regarded as the product of a power that, as a whole, acts unconsciously and without will. For what each individual wants is prevented by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one wanted. Thus, history to date has proceeded in the manner of a natural process, and is also essentially subject to the same laws of motion (ibid., p. 464). On the „laws of motion“ referred to here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialektische_Grundgesetze.

[23] Marx/Engels 1967b, p. 436f.

[24] Marx/Engels 1959, p. 462.

[25] Engels 1972, p. 298. Italics added by me.

[26] Marx/Engels 1968, p. 206.

[27] Marx/Engels 2017, p. 136.

[28] Marx 1976, p. 385.

[29] E.g. Marx 2021, p. 649.

[30] Neffe (2017, p. 283) describes the „old pattern“: Marx „makes himself scarce, […] goes about his work“, his wife Jenny „fights with the butcher and baker who want to collect their debts“. Jörn Schütrumpf (2008, p. 43f.) attests that Marx was „self-obsessed throughout his life“: thus, „emancipation remained theory“.

[31] Marx also used the pejorative term „economistic“ to describe other authors (Marx/Engels 2021, p. 128; Haug 1985, p. 130). Haug (ibid., p. 129) admits that Marx’s writings contain „formulations“ that are „simply ‚economistic‘ or can be read as such,“ but argues that Marx did not know any better and also expressed contrary views. He refers to a short passage from a letter written by Marx in 1877 (Marx/Engels 1987, pp. 108, 111f.) and to Engels‘ letters written in his old age. The „new left“ (Harman 1986) also referred to the latter. However, views consistently expressed in major works cannot be offset against a few sentences in later private correspondence.

[32] Marx/Engels 2017, p. 8.

[33] Ibid., p. 101.

[34] Marx 1983b, p. 189.

[35] Perhaps this should correspond to the „law“ of the transformation of quantity into a new quality, which Engels also referred to: for example, water transforms into a new quality, steam, at 100 degrees Celsius. But this analogy does not work with human beings. Individuals in the „mass“ are subject to various influences, including those that tend to make them more alike, and may conceal or suppress parts of their individuality. However, they can never truly lose it, never merge into a „collective soul“ or a „large individual“ (cf. Peglau 2022).

[36] See Marx 2021, e.g. pp. 12, 16, 28, 57ff., 104, 132, 156, 178, 206, 285, 325, 372, 431, 552, 672, 743. Incidentally, Marx (1963, p. 123) uses the word „capitalism“ only once in the Capital volumes. „Capitalism“ had been used to refer negatively to bourgeois class society since at least 1839, i.e. before Marx (Sandkühler 2021, p. 1194).

[37] Marx (2021, p. 502, pp. 660–674) described the unemployed as a „disposable industrial reserve army,“ distinguishing them from the „actual lumpenproletariat“: „vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes“ (ibid., p. 673). In 1852, his description of the „lumpenproletariat“ was both more comprehensive and even more unsympathetic (Marx 1960a, pp. 160f.). Reading this, one sometimes gets the impression that he believed these people were themselves to blame for their misery – a very different view from that of Owen.

[38] Thompson 1980, p. 109, see also Solty 2024. Historian Paolo Tedesco (2023) states: „We cannot write the history of capitalism without […] taking into account the intersection of various mechanisms of racist, sexist and nationalist oppression.“

[39] Marx/Engels 1978, p. 7.

[40] Marx 1976a, p. 385.

[41] Marx 2021, p. 39. Despite his rejection of religion, Engels stated this entirely without irony. Interest in Capital developed rather slowly at first. Barbara Sichtermann (1995, p. 10f.) estimates that Marx’s „works served until the end to ’self-understanding‘ among a narrow stratum of intellectual commentators and programmatists of the labour movement,“ that his work „neither served as a maxim for action for the labour leaders of Europe in its originally complex and demanding form […], nor ever captured the masses.“ However, between 1946 and 1990, Dietz Verlag sold more than a million copies of the edited Volume 1. The fact that this high sales figure was closely linked to the existence of „real socialism“ is supported by the fact that between 1990 and 2007 only „between 500 and 750“ copies (presumably per year) were sold (Meisner 2013): „After reunification, Marx’s works were practically unsellable on the shelves“ (Supp 2009). After that, sales picked up again, reaching up to 2,000 copies per year (Meisner 2013). Nevertheless, what Thomas Steinfeld (2017, p. 10) writes is probably true: „There is no reason to assume that there are many people, especially younger ones, who have actually read Capital.“ For those who want to learn about the most important contents, a good introduction such as that by Michael Heinrich (2021) is recommended.

[42] Sichtermann (1995, p. 15f.) assesses the comprehensibility of Capital in a positive way that I find only partially contradictory to my own assessment. He argues that it is „foolproof because of its meticulous, step-by-step development of the argument in the style of a successful mathematics textbook“ and must be read „word for word“. Conversely, it would be a „feat not to understand Marx, this fetishist of precision, who says everything three times – in varying formulations, of course – and then illustrates it with an epic miniature“.  On Marx’s working methods: Kuckenburg 2023, pp. 12–17. On Engels‘ contribution to the difficult creation of the Capital volumes: Plumpe 2017. Engels wrote to Marx about the first edition: „How could you leave the external structure of the book as it is!“ Some sections are „horribly tedious and […] confusing,“ others apparently „written in a terrible hurry and with far too little processing of the material“ (Marx/Engels 1965, pp. 324, 334).

[43] https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ddr/deutsche-einheit/mauerfall/erich-honecker-sozialismus-ochs-esel-100.html

[44] Marx/Engels 2017, p. 46.

[45] Marx/Engels 1972b, p. 482.

[46] Marx 1973a, p. 21.

[47] In 1933, Reich was expelled from communist organisations for allegedly holding counter-revolutionary views and was declared a non-person. Later, as a supposed Trotskyist, he found himself on one of the Stalinist lists, which often led to the murder of those named on them (Peglau 2017a, pp. 311–322).