'Reading Marx, or the uses and abuses of Marx'

It is difficult to imagine a writer whose work produces more of an ideological response than that of Marx. There are of course many reasons for this – perhaps the most significant being the way in which Marx’s work has come to be incorporated into the complexities of socialist and specifically communist politics – that is, its ideological function. The location of theoretical labour in these contexts is complex, as are the theoretical objects produced. David McLellan is an academic. His engagement with Marx is in an academic – and at face value – less than political – form. But, academic labour (as with all forms of intellectual labour) as a mode of praxis is simultaneously ideological. McLellan may not approach Marx as a Marxist. Nevertheless, his radical moral, ethical and theological concerns are never entirely absent in his work on Marx. From the emphasis McLellan places on the early Marx’s belief in the liberatory potential of a world free of alienation, through to the continuity McLellan finds in the work of the young and ‘mature’ Marx (the Marx of the Grundrisse), we have a Marx read through the internal lens of a specific view of politics.