Preface to the first edition¶
Core Argument¶
The preface to the first edition of What is Marxism? opens with a combative defence of Marxism’s continued relevance, pitched directly against its bourgeois critics. The core argument is that Marxism is not dead, but is instead gaining traction as capitalism enters an epoch of instability, crisis, war, and intensifying class polarisation. The author identifies the relentless stream of anti-Marxist publications as evidence that the ruling class is genuinely rattled by these ideas, not indifferent to them.
Two critics are singled out for polemical treatment. Niall Ferguson, Professor at Oxford, is quoted dismissing Marx as a “washout” and “class traitor”, and Capital as “long, verbose, abstruse” and one of the most “unreadable books of all time”. Ferguson also concedes, however, that Marx’s insights into capitalism “can still illuminate” and that “behind the bubbles and busts of the capitalist system there is a class struggle”. The author seizes on this as a revealing admission from a hostile source. Dominic Lawson is taken to task for peddling the caricature of Marxism as vulgar economic determinism, reducing individuals to “cogs in a class-war machine”. This is rebutted with extended quotations from Engels’s 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch, which insists that the economic is the determining factor only “in the final analysis”, and that the superstructure—politics, law, philosophy, religion—also bears on historical struggles and “largely determine[s] the form”. Trotsky is also cited to dismiss the “hoary caricature” that economics directly determines artistic creation or judicial verdicts.
The preface then defines Marxism as the synthesis of English classical economics, German Hegelian philosophy, and French socialism, whose component parts are dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and Marxist economics—the “three sources and three component parts” identified by Lenin. The book itself is presented as an introductory text, originally part of an ‘Education for Socialists’ series, designed for first-time readers and suitable for individual study or discussion groups. The author stresses that there is no substitute for tackling the classic works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Plekhanov, and warns that Marxism, as a science with its own terminology, demands perseverance. The preface closes with the assertion that Marxism is a “guide to action”, quoting Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
A brief preface to the third edition, dated August 2025, notes the book’s consistent popularity and announces the addition of a new article on dialectical materialism, further development of the historical materialism section, and updated questions and reading lists.