Marx In The West And In The East Reading Capital In The Divided Germany Paula Rauhala by Paula Rauhala 9789520328016, 9520328017 instant download after payment.

The dissertation examines how scholars approached Marx’s Capital in the divided Germany during the Cold War. At the project’s core is a set of scholarly articles addressing the following constellation of specific questions: What kinds of problems did researchers from the East and the West tackle in their reading of this classic work? While the Berlin Wall separated East German researchers from West German ones, there was no language barrier between them, so did they communicate with each other? What types of conflicts, contradictions in approach, or tensions, if any, existed between these sets of scholars, who were working in very different social and institutional contexts?
The focus is on the Neue Marx-Lektüre (NML), a tradition of reading Capital that began to take shape around 1968 among Theodor W. Adorno’s students, with the matter of how East German scholarship influenced its formation. Today, the NML is known for its resolute rejection of the GDR’s state ideology, Marxism-Leninism. As a negative example, concretising how not to read Marx, that ideology functioned as an identity-precipitating Other for the NML. Not simply another way of reading Marx; Marxism-Leninism was an ideology of legitimisation for the autocratic rule of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). As such, it was not based on critical reasoning; rather, its purity was maintained by the secret police. When drawing an analytical distinction between Marxism-Leninism and genuine Marx scholarship, one can, however, find serious East German scholarship also, work that influenced the NML ‘positively’. The dissertation explores these influences.
A pillar of its argument is that scholarship on Marx in the GDR was a phenomenon replete with contradiction. The authoritarian rule of the SED simultaneously facilitated and hindered the work of those scholars who applied Marx’s ideas or prepared his original manuscripts for publication in an official complete edition (MEGA).