Baring applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931, with the following results:
Page 99 of Vulgar Marxism takes us to the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács and more particularly to my reading of his famous argument that “orthodox Marxism” can be found not in any of Marx’s “conclusions” but rather in his “method,” an argument he directs against the “vulgar Marxists.”Learn more about Vulgar Marxism at the University of Chicago Press website.
The page offers a pretty good example of my central claim. In the book I argue that, though many of the most prominent Marxist theorists of the twentieth century—like Antonio Gramsci, José Carlos Mariátegui, Karl Korsch, as well as Lukács—are normally read as esoteric intellectuals hawking a sophisticated theory accessible only to the university-educated, they were actually deeply involved in the institutions and practices of mass worker education, and their work takes on new meanings if we take this into account. In the first two chapters, I detail the most prominent model of worker education at the time, which was articulated by the German Marxist Karl Kautsky. He argued that under the conditions of capitalism, the party’s educational apparatus (schools, textbooks, lecture series, reading circles etc.) could only hope to transmit Marx’s “conclusions” to the workers and not his “method.” In redefining “orthodox Marxism” as method first and foremost, Lukács was suggesting that Kautsky had got it back to front. If the workers learnt Marx’s conclusions (especially about the impending collapse of capitalism) without the method, they might think that the revolution would happen all by itself, and then they would fail to do their part. Only by understanding Marx’s method would they realize that the power to change the course of history lay in their hands. Of course, this raised the question of how exactly the Communist Party should go about teaching Marx’s method (which is notoriously difficult) to millions of workers, especially given its limited resources. Over the rest of the chapter, I follow Lukács’s attempt to answer this question and show how it shaped his developing politics.
--Marshal Zeringue
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