Excerpt

Dialectical materialism, which became the standard designation of the “official theory” of state-based Marxism, has almost nothing to do with Karl Marx's materialist conception of history. It is contentious to suggest that there is an “authentic” or “good” Marx underneath all of the false readings and applications—that “the man” Marx wrote texts that were emancipatory, and that “bad readers,” beginning with Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky, transformed the theory into something totalitarian—but it should not be. There is a growing movement that sees the work of Engels as the true theoretical basis of “Marxism,”¹ and key Marxists themselves all but…