What remains: of Marx and Marxism

As I have argued in my doctoral dissertation on 'The Marx-Machine' (Barbour, 2004), 'Karl Marx' is not an individual author possessed of animating intentions that the reader endeavors to see through his writing, as though the text itself were but a detour en route to an extra-textual 'truth'. Nor, however, is he merely a specter or a host of specters, all the more threatening because living beyond the grave, as Jacques Derrida has proposed. Marx, I would suggest, is better understood as a machine, or an assemblage of machines" a relay machine, a copying machine, a desiring machine, a war machine. The last is, perhaps, the most important. As much as it is the product of an individual's mind, the colossal textual factory that we retroactively label 'Marx' is a product of countless struggles (between Marx and his contemporaries, Marx and his coauthors, Marx and his editors, and even Marx and his interpreters), and together these struggles constitute the performative dimension of his work.