Even though this latter, far weaker claim is (presumably) one from which few readers would dissent, it does Martin very little good. Marx is not much of a “point of reference” in his own argument, which proceeds at a high level of abstraction and deals with Marx only in an incidental, perfunctory way. “Socialism,” or “the left,” always defined amorphously, is more likely as subjects of a Martin sentence than Marx turns out to be. All the same, Martin's argument is oddly insistent: “[I]t is not that Marx was, in some ahistorical way, ahead of his times, but that, in being so fully in and of his times, he helps situate us in ours” (p. 84). But Martin does not tell us how and why Marx should so help us. Instead he attributes to Frederic Jameson the view that “(M)arxism has suffered the conflation between [sic] its identification as a philosophy, a social movement, and a historical project,” and adds with a flourish the observation that his (Martin's) no less beloved postmodernism has “suffered” a similar “conflation” (p. 28): “Although the incessant attack on ‘all that is solid’ [Marx's Manifesto mistranslated] is unleashed by modernization itself, postmodernism embraces this condition as an affirmative value;” “we see in postmodernism the same circularity, fragmentation begetting fragmentation, that capital ‘sees’ in itself ” (pp. 31, 33).

Martin makes much of a similarity that may be formal and fortuitous, in order to back up his further points that socialism is “constitutive of,” not an “end point to” history (p. 116); that “socialism is not postcapitalist but anticapitalist” (p. 86); and that “socialism, far from being external to capitalism, is intrinsic to the material realization of the actual patterns of life that constitute capitalist society” (p. 83). Martin may here have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, and we do need to remind ourselves that today's anticapitalist protestors do not necessarily regard Marx as a progenitor (though they should). Be all this as it may, Martin does appear to be hanging on a hook of confected similarity more weight than it can reasonably be expected to bear. In any case, even if this similarity of socialism and postmodernism is a linkage joining them, so what? Who (apart from Martin) cares? We are not told. Wage labor is a far less dated concept than Martin's cherished alterity, aporias, optics, descensus, reinscriptions, and imaginaries bid fair to become.

For all these reasons, it is a pleasure as well as a relief to turn to Alan Megill's Karl Marx. Megill's conclusions could be put baldly: Marx rejected politics and the market, and was wrong to have done so. These immediately make Megill's Marx, unlike Martin's “socialism,” postcapitalist as well as anticapitalist. All the same, one could claim, and not without justice, that there is nothing surprising or (it would seem) original about them. Many roads have been traversed to reach these same conclusions, which may therefore seem to some readers to be rather ho-hum conclusions. But such a summary procedure would be peremptory and unfair. It would also do scant justice to the considerable originality of Megill's argument. As Marx himself said (a little awkwardly): “Truth includes not only the result but also the path to it” (quoted on p. 103). The question to ask is not whether the road leading to Megill's conclusions has been a much-traveled one, but whether it has ever been traveled so carefully and so well. And I don’t think it has been. Otherwise put, the question to ask is not whether Megill's gauntlet has been thrown down before, but whether Megill is the first to throw it down firmly and properly. And I think he is. While Randy Martin says things, Allan Megill shows things—this being the mark of the true scholar. Megill's argument is one that is going to have to be confronted, and met. It provokes and challenges the reader.

It also bristles with thought, or, more precisely, with thinking. Megill gets an almost alarming number of things right. He gets right Marx's debt to Hegel in general, and to Hegel's lesser logic in particular; he provides the best interpretation of Marx's doctoral dissertation this reviewer has yet encountered; he explains Marx's Prometheanism; he reinstates “Aus James Mill” to its rightful (and important) place; he gets right Marx's understanding of materielle Produktionskraefte in the 1859 “Preface” (as “forces of material production” that are both material and nonmaterial in character); and he even adds, as a kind of scholarly lagniappe, which puts us all in his debt, a topically organized list of Marx's journalistic writings of the 1842–43 period.

But what about Megill's conclusions? While a short review is not the place to engage him on these, a couple of points seem in order. First, the political. That Marx rejected the bourgeois state is not at issue. That in so doing he also rejected “politics” depends on what one's understanding of politics in general, and of revolutionary politics in particular, is to be. Marx as a revolutionary politician—and he was a revolutionary politician as well as a theorist—is insufficiently acknowledged. Second, the economic. Marx, says Megill, “was right in seeing that the market does not automatically conduce to the satisfaction of human needs. He was only wrong in his insistence on abolishing it” (p. 177). This insistence stems in turn from Marx's discovery, contra Ricardo, J.-B. Say, and James Mill, that “the market is not, and cannot be, subsumed under laws,” and that “the nonaccordance between the fluctuations of the market and the task of economic science is an indicator of the market's irrationality” (p. 173). Could it be that “laws,” “rationality,” and “science” are here pushed rather too closely together (or “conflated,” as Randy Martin would say)?

Let's approach this issue from a different angle. Three quotations from Megill follow, in what I take to be an ascending order: “by 1845 at the latest, [Marx] rejected philosophy for science” (p. 5); “when Marxian socialism put its political mask aside, what face is revealed? It is the face of science” (p. 120); “Marx rejected politics and the market because he found it impossible to understand politics and the market in a way that conformed to his idea of science” (p. xviii). The question that arises is whether the weight awarded to “science” in these different and far from interchangeable formulations—a weight that is on any reckoning considerable—is awarded to science by Marx or by Megill? In thinking that it is Megill, I am not suggesting that he privileges science carelessly or offhandedly. Nor am I suggesting that Megill attributes to Marx a positivist view of science, which he knows to be quite wrong (“Marx's method is precisely not positivist: indeed in some respects it is the direct reverse of positivism” [p. 239]). But while Megill distinguishes the Marxian from the positivist with some care, he does not distinguish Marx from Engels (who was much closer to positivism than Marx, and whose writings contain much more about natural science than Marx's) with anything like the same degree of care. Megill almost admits as much himself: “Marx portrays a natural science that had ‘intervened in and transformed human life through industry’ and envisaged an eventual unification of natural science and the science of man. None of this required much specific knowledge of natural science, and the early Marx certainly did not have such knowledge. The idea of natural science was sufficient” (p. 163). This suggests that Marx's interest was more in technology than in natural science per se (although one could not say this of Engels). And while this in turn does nothing to dispose of the three quotations, it does qualify them in important ways.