The joke is obvious – if Marxism hadn’t existed, it would be necessary to invent it. Christina Morina has not invented it, but she has achieved a great intellectual feat. In this book she offers the freshest encounter with these Marxist rascals since Kolakowski’s Main Currents in Marxism, three volumes of which appeared in 1978. The comparison is inelegant, as these are seriously different projects – conventional and encyclopedic, in Kolakowski’s case, generational and lateral in Morina’s. The difference between the two projects is itself generational. They are worlds apart, even though Morina also grew up in the GDR.

Morina limits her cast to nine of the leading figures of the Golden Age – Kautsky, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Victor Adler, Jaures, Guesde, Plekhanov, Lenin and Struve. Her own intellectual companions are Weber and Koselleck, occasionally Foucault or Elias among others – these along with Mannheim, himself generations back, but our contemporary in his own insistence on using generations as a unit idea.

The pattern of thinking is emergent. Molina is interested in formation – childhood, family, disposition, education, demographics, personalities, sociology of intellectuals – in short, in the culture of classical Marxism. ‘Invention’, here, rings strange; it echoes the suggestion that Engels invented Marxism. This is an old hunch – Marx as the explorer, until 1883, then after his death Engels as the systematizer. The workers read Anti Duhring, not Capital, if they read anything at all. Oral culture ruled. Maybe they rather read the press, the socialist comics, and got the dope about surplus value in situ, in meetings,pubs or on the shop floor. Engels may have presided over the longer process of constructing marxism, but it was a long process of culture and institution building, the work of many hands, or heads, resulting in a kind of family (or at least in family resemblances). The idea that Marxism was an idea that changed everything, that is another thing, suggestive of too much idealism when the Bolsheviks came to power rather with the sensible, materialist but not particularly Marxist slogan: Bread, Peace and Land.

Morina draws the line well clear of 1917. Her curtain is drawn at 1905, the so called Dress Rehearsal. That itself is an interestingly teleological image, as though 1917 was inevitable.

Morina’s substantive interest is in the revolutionary ferment of the Second International – where revolution evidently meant very different things, from Kautsky to Lenin and Luxemburg. Even the young Bernstein was a revolutionary. But these were not, with the obvious singular exception here, Bolsheviks. They were bookworms rather than streetfighters.

They were all, if in different senses, redemptive personalities – Kautsky and Bernstein closer to evolution, in their own ways, Rosa the spontaneist, Lenin with the will to power and strategic nous to know that push come to shove the Bolsheviks might interrupt the play. Together they were what Lutz Niethammer called a Voluntary Elite. Morina does not pursue the obvious alternative left anxiety, that they were a New Class waiting in the wings.

They were, differently as Kolakowski claimed, romantics, prometheans, or rationalists. Maybe, as in Marx pere, they were all three. They were all, again differently, in love with literature and the idea of revolution. They held serious ambitions, for the world and maybe for themslves. Why, then, Marxism? The doxa worked up by Engels and Kautsky, both autodidacts in effect, was coherent, analytically persuasive, and it claimed to have both History and Science on its side. It offered the Package. After all, there was an apparent Problem – the Social Question, poverty, grinding inequality, decadence and corruption all around, crises abundant; and here was the Solution, salvation, redemption: Marxism. As Stephen Yeo famously showed decades ago, socialism and religion not least in Britain were powerfully entangled. Socialism was the riddle of history solved, but it also delivered on the articles of faith. For Marx, this stuff, the necessary line from science to revolution, forces and relations of production would all sort itself out; he was wrong, and the genius of Lenin was to add the combat party as the missing link. Lenin’s solution, in turn, would itself become one of the most monumental problems of the twentieth century.

This is a wonderful study, rich in detail and insight. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

It leaves us wondering, asking for more. For the chosen cast, we may wonder also about others who fit the moment. The two most brilliant intellectuals, associated more with the ex post facto category of Western Marxism, would be Gramsci and Lukács. How do they fit, where do they belong? But a third absence is perhaps even more striking. It is the figure of Comrade Trotsky, who more than Gramsci or Lukács was formed by the culture of the Second International which serves to hold together the individuals in this study. This absence is striking not least as Trotsky both was a crucial actor in, and historian of, the events of 1905, Morina’s closing act. 1905 may well have been curtain call for a series of later struggles leading for example to the workers councils and the bienno rosso. The Second International died in 1914, or more completely in 1917. The October Revolution, read in this light, was not the beginning but the end of Marxism, or the beginning of its end.

Christina Morina’s book is the English version of a text that goes back seven years in German. In the meantime, she and her colleagues have generated a raft of materials on contemporary history, Nazism and the bystander, memory and populism etc. This represents an intellectual force to be reckoned with. Perhaps others in turn might pick up on these threads in the history of Marxism. Maybe even Marxism itself is open, now, to reinvention, in the hands of an emerging generation. Its presenting problems persist, however differing solutions may now be open to reimagination. Those actors emerging need to know the weight of this history, even as they seek out their own.