Just Couldn’t Finish Reading: Marx and Marxism by Gregory Claeys (FP: 2018) [462pp]

I read this, or at least went into reading this, as part of the exploration of how far down my Socialism goes. I guess growing up in the North in the 60’s and 70’s I didn’t give my political beliefs much thought – not unlike growing up in an overtly religious family/environment – but too for granted that the Left was where it was ‘at’. Oddly my family are, mostly, either apolitical or Right leaning rather than a Leftie like me. I do think my Dad was a grass-root Socialist though. He never said as much but, the more I think about it, the more I think he was.

Anyway, I managed to get in around 100 pages before I gave up on this one. It wasn’t that it was bad per se or that I found it particularly difficult or in any way politically problematic. It was just that the whole section I was wadding through at that time was heavily down in the ‘weeds’ of the history of Marxist ideas and was going into great detail of how his ideas changed over time as he interacted with and reacted to other thinkers of the time and how Marx came to embrace the idea of Communism. Unfortunately for me I kept losing the thread of the argument so was in a constant state of confusion and increasing irritation. Any idea, especially powerful ones, are rarely born whole and complete and must therefore originate in quite different guise then change and mature over time. The problem I had, which others may not have, is that the author dug into this process and then kept on digging and then dug some more. If I was writing a paper on the development of early Marxist ideas this would have been gold but I, as someone with a more general interest in the topic, just found it too heavy, too detailed and too exhaustive (and exhausting) to carry on into what I hoped to be the more interesting (to me anyway) bit of how these ideas spread across the world and the consequences they had on world history going forward. I’m fairly confident that if the author had glossed over the birth of Marxist thought with references, footnotes and an annex or two I would have finished the book and probably enjoyed it. However, this was not to be and so we have the first DNF of the year!