by Sam Franz and Véronique Mickisch

Edward Baring is an intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe and the Associate Professor of History and Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2019). His new book, Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming December 2025), explores the history of twentieth-century Marxist thought through the lens of worker education. The first part of the book describes the educational infrastructure built by the German Social Democratic Party from 1880 to 1914. Baring then shows how prominent intellectuals of the interwar period—Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Hendrik de Man, Antonio Gramsci, and José Carlos Mariátegui—situated their work in relation to worker education and the failure of European revolutions in 1918. Baring discussed his forthcoming book with Sam Franz and Véronique Mickisch for the JHI Blog.

Sam Franz: We first wanted to ask about your intellectual background. What drew you to this project? How did you move from the previous two book projects to the set of debates that occupy this book? What drew you to the Marxist tradition?

Edward Baring: For the last decade or so, I have been interested in intellectual movements that cross borders—transnational intellectual history. How do we understand the way that ideas spread across large parts of the globe, despite huge variations between different countries and regions? What methods do we need in order to understand that process? My last book, for instance, showed how phenomenology was able to break out of a certain German parochialism and become a Europe spanning continental philosophy. The Catholic Church turned out to be enormously important for this development because it is an institution that is deeply interested in ideas and has massive global reach.

When you’re thinking about transnational ideas, for the twentieth century it’s very hard to beat Marxism. Marxism has appeared on every continent on earth, barring Antarctica. It hasn’t simply been a marginal interest; it has shaped the ways that societies have understood themselves and been run. It’s a remarkably successful transnational story. I was interested in how this happened. How did it work? What institutions held it together?

My particular way in came from the initial puzzle of the book: “vulgar Marxism.” Today, we use the term so often that it almost falls under the radar, but analyzing it seemed a productive way of approaching Marxism as an intellectual tradition. It’s an insult, and insults tend to be widely shared because they offer a photographic negative of your ideals and goals. Yet from this perspective “vulgar Marxism” seems a bit odd, because it’s taken to be a rejection of popular understandings of Marx in favor of a Marxism for the bourgeois elite, which seems very un-Marxist.

I wanted to grapple with the problem of what “vulgar Marxism” meant and how it was used. Investigating that led me to uncover this massive project of worker education, which turns out to have existed across multiple countries and was probably the largest and most expensive project undertaken by Marxist parties in this period. This, I thought, could be the institutional key to understanding Marxism as a transnational intellectual tradition.

SF: The designation of some thinkers as “Western Marxists” frequently serves to narrate the rise of an elite, academic form of Marxism. In Perry Anderson’s influential framing, this resulted from Marxism’s turn from revolutionary practice to methodology and Marxists’ entrance into the academy. How does your focus on worker education and vulgar Marxism complicate this received narrative about the rise of theoretical or Western Marxism after the failure of revolutions in Europe?

EB: I am trying to argue against this conception because I don’t think that “Western Marxism” is an enormously helpful category.

“Western Marxism” is used to describe a new turn to theory and method in the period after 1920 that supposedly produced a growing divide between workers and intellectuals leading to a depoliticization of Marxism. Anderson and others linked this to an overemphasis on ideology rather than economics, and a growing pessimism. Because of the overwhelming power of bourgeois ideas, the revolution was not going to come anytime soon.

I find that narrative wrong on all levels. This becomes clear when you appreciate the centrality of worker education for these so-called “Western Marxists.” First, in their view, they didn’t cut the bonds between theory and the revolutionary working class. That had been done by their predecessors. After 1917, most Marxists thought that the revolution should have swept from Russia through Europe. After all, Germany and France had a much larger and much more, in their view, mature working class. When the revolution failed to arrive, they thought that something had gone wrong. They argued that the older form of Marxism had allowed a division to develop between theory and the proletariat, and they turned to method to heal that division. Karl Korsch, for example, considered it obvious that the Marxism of Das Kapital would be unable to spur the workers to revolutionary action. It was over fifty years old! His solution was to use Marx’s method to work out what sort of Marxism was appropriate to the conditions of 1923 and teach it to the workers. In this way his work was meant to bridge the apparent schism between theory and the revolutionary workers’ movement.

Second, these “Western Marxists” weren’t focused on ideology at the expense of economics. Instead, they were interested in the ideological project of updating and teaching Marxist theory, especially Marxist economics. Third, they were not pessimists. They thought that if you got the theory right and taught it to the workers, then the working class in Western Europe could catch up to their Russian brothers and overthrow capitalism.

I also resist the term “Western Marxism” because it sets them apart. When you understand that their key concern was mass political education, you can see what links them to Second International Marxists, Eastern Marxism, and also global Marxisms. My book isn’t about “Western Marxism.” It is about revolutionary Marxism more broadly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I think that Anderson is right to identify a growing divide between academic Marxists and workers in the period. But this divide is not an effect of the way that the former think about Marxist theory. Instead, it is mostly about the institutions that enable that theory. Up until the mid-1920s, Marxist theorists could reasonably expect that their debates over worker education could shape what teachers were doing, how textbooks were written, and maybe even how institutions were organized. After Stalinization that was no longer possible. Moscow controlled worker education more and more. I emphasize the conditions of possibility for certain types of theorizing, not a growing detachment of Marxist theory itself.

Véronique Mickisch: I would like to challenge that to some extent. Your set of actors is quite heterogeneous, but you show that Hendrik de Man, at least, was definitely turning away from the working class. In 1926, he developed a theory that had a distinct continuity with his later pro-fascist conceptions, centered on his elitism and anti-materialism. You write, “In analyzing the psychology of the working masses, de Man had come to consider that their psychological and emotional predispositions made them fundamentally resistant to rational and ethical arguments. Thus, in his attempt to find an experiential ground for socialist slogans, de Man sidelined the educative part of the Marxist project” (173). So there was a turn away from the working class as the principal revolutionary force and also from the project of educating it.

Moreover, the relationship of these intellectuals towards Stalinism was more complex. They were not all simply disappointed or disillusioned with Stalinism. For instance, Lukács was very pro-Stalin. In the inner-party struggle of the 1920s when the Left Opposition under Trotsky opposed the Stalinization of the Communist International, he clearly and openly sided with Stalin rather than defending inner-party democracy. As for Korsch, he was a more complicated figure, but if you look at some of his writings in 1923 and 1924 in the KPD press on Trotsky, they were pretty vicious.

EB: You’re right. Lukács and especially de Man did lose faith in the working class, but I want to suggest that this followed not from their intellectual project, but from its failure.

De Man is an interesting case. He is not normally considered alongside the others, because he collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium. But he is clearly part of the story. First, because at the time of the publication of his book The Psychology of Socialism in 1926, de Man was perhaps one of the most influential writers to discuss vulgar Marxism. When Gramsci describes “vulgar materialism,” or when José Carlos Mariátegui, a Peruvian Marxist on whom one of my later chapters focuses, refers to vulgar Marxism, they clearly are referring to de Man’s work. And second, because de Man was deeply involved in worker education. Before the war, he was trained under the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in worker education. He then ran a worker education school in Belgium. The Psychology of Socialism draws from this experience.

His rightward turn didn’t follow from his educational work, but from a growing sense that it was futile. The problem was encapsulated by the concept of “vulgar Marxism.” According to de Man, because of the way in which capitalist conditions have taught the working class to think, when you transmit Marxist ideas to them, they’ll pick up the worst bits—mechanism, acquisitiveness, sometimes violence—and reject the best bits, like the goal of broader emancipation.

If that’s the case, then educating the workers won’t bring about social change. He decided that the best thing that the Socialist party could do was to mobilize the workers’ “worst side”—the dumb pleasures that he thought dominated their lives—in order to produce the desired result. He thought that Hitler was very good at that kind of mass mobilization and wanted to follow his example. That is obviously an extremely dangerous development, but it arose when de Man gave up on the educational project that had guided him earlier.

One can say the same for Lukács. Much of his theory arises out of a concern with education—the production of “class consciousness”—and in this way he spoke in terms similar to Marxists before the war. The early Lukács represents what I call an “educational vanguardism”: the party has Marxist theory and passes it to the workers, who will do the rest. This is the viewpoint that he adopted when he first embraced Communism in the winter of 1918, joining the Party and becoming the Deputy Minister for Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

When those aspirations failed, however, he began to think about the ways in which education might need to change. It is a complicated story, but he came to place increasing faith in the party—a party that would sometimes have to make decisions with which the working class were not on board and push them in a direction contrary to their inclinations. That is why he invested huge authority in the institutions of international communism. He came to think that, whatever his doubts about the Soviet Communist Party, they were the only hope for this emancipatory project. For the most part, he still thought that this authority was valuable for its pedagogical effects—the focus was still on the education of the workers—but in the moments in which he lost faith in even that, he aligned himself most closely with Stalin.

VM: I would argue that there was also a political affinity with the conceptions of Stalinism. Friedrich Pollock, for instance, did not appreciate Stalin as an individual, but he did share conceptions of national-statist development and autarky that formed the basis of the Stalinist program of building “socialism in one country.” There was a conception, more broadly, among socialist intellectuals at the time that a force other than the working class ultimately would have to do the job of building socialism. This aspect appears somewhat lost in your section on Lukács, and it contrasts with your discussion of Lenin’s theories which, as you note, had a very democratic core.

In general, your book barely touches upon developments in the Soviet Union. Your chapter on Lenin is relatively brief. Could you explain why that is the case? It seems to me that the mass literacy campaign in the Soviet Union, which did lift generations out of illiteracy, and the mass efforts to politically educate workers are very relevant to your topic. Much of this history has been buried, not least because so many Marxist intellectuals who fought to educate the working class were murdered during the Stalinist terror.

EB: I only discuss these things briefly. Mostly, that’s because mass worker education in the Soviet Union differed from that in Western Europe or indeed in Russia before 1917. The big questions of the figures on which I focus are: how do you, equipped with limited resources, engage the working class to encourage them to overthrow a bourgeois capitalist state in the name of Socialism? That is why worker education was so important, why it was so central to Lenin’s project, and why it could also be so dangerous. And that explains why Stalin might direct his purges against people involved in that project.

But everything changes when you take state power. Firstly, you have the power of the state to support education. It’s happening on a much larger scale. Secondly, the focus shifts from the encouragement of mass participation in a revolutionary movement against a regime to the manufacture of consent for a regime. This has led us to regard worker education in Stalinist Russia, Communist China, and so on with suspicion. But it’s a very different educational project to the one I’m interested in.

SF: I’d like to step back and ask about the fit between the methodology of intellectual history and the central problem of the book. Though you are conducting an intellectual history, you emphasize the centrality of educational institutions as a background for intellectual work. The figures you follow presumed such institutions’ existence, but you use the phrase “hard work” a number of times to describe what such education involved. My basic question concerns this level of practice: how would educators and organizers integrate an average German worker into this apparatus? What would education of this kind look like?

There also seems to be a movement from, in the book’s first half, worker education as institutional infrastructure and then, in the book’s second half, worker education as a problem for intellectuals. How does this historical shift occur?

EB: The book’s first part addresses the infrastructure of class consciousness by focusing in particular on the German Social Democrats in the period before World War I. Then, in the second part, I discuss how this infrastructure enters into a period of crisis. I do want to show how all of the figures in the second part were practically involved in this infrastructure: Korsch wrote textbooks, Lukács organized institutions, Gramsci taught a correspondence course, and so on. But I’m interested less in what say Korsch was doing in the classroom than in how he thought about the institutions and practices that he inherited from the Second International and how he participated in debates about how they should change. That is why the institutional and practical analysis is concentrated in the first part. It’s the groundwork necessary for understanding the debates in the second part.

So what did this educational project look like? Around 1891 or 1892, a worker might be handed pamphlets at work or political meetings, listening to speeches, reading newspapers, singing the “Worker’s Marseillaise” or having discussions at workers’ clubs, borrowing cheap editions of Marxist texts from a lending library to gain a deeper understanding, or even taking literacy courses in the evening. It’s mostly about ideas transmitted orally and textually. Remember, at this time, Germany had just repealed its Anti-Socialist Laws. Suddenly the party could agitate openly and produce texts more easily. Marxist intellectuals felt that workers urgently needed to understand Marxist theory and that workers would be interested in and understand Marxist theory because it aimed for their liberation and described their real life and struggles. By that logic, you just needed a worker to read a pamphlet, listen to a speech, or perhaps only absorb a few slogans, and they would get it. This was a period of enormous, almost absurd optimism: build it and they will come; write these pamphlets, and in only a few years you will have won over the working class to your project.

Around 1900, worker education started to change. Marxist intellectuals began to think that that it was unable to achieve the results they wanted. They questioned, first, whether workers were learning the right stuff and, second, whether their efforts were even reaching enough people.

In 1906, the Germans set up a party school which became a model for others, not only later in the Soviet Union but also around the world. In this model, the party brought in a few workers for intense study. They would work with figures like Rosa Luxemburg to study Marxism in depth. Then these freshly educated workers would bring that message back to their local party by giving lectures, organizing reading groups, and so on. This new form of educational practice was much more intentional and explicitly institutional.

Then there’s that second question: are you reaching enough people? Most workers lacked the time or inclination to read long and dense books, and the party school itself could educate tens, maybe hundreds, over a number of years. As one commentator put it, this was a drop of water on a hot stove in Germany, a nation of millions. You would have to think about other ways of bringing people in. Some leaned on the unions’ educational organizations. Others started to think beyond education narrowly defined: maybe the best way to educate people was for the party to participate in the Reichstag, since people vote in elections and can perhaps follow what’s going on, eventually learning that the bourgeois parties aren’t on their side. Alternatively, the party might reach far more people—millions rather than hundreds of thousands—by working through mass strikes; in such strikes, workers would recognize their agency and their solidarity with other workers. Perhaps then the theses of Marxism will finally hit home.

These experiments inform debates over worker education after World War I. Then the idea that printing a few books and knowing a few slogans would suffice seemed laughable. They were working through alternatives. But the thesis of my book is that, although this looks quite different, it was structurally the same, oriented by the quite narrow project of transmitting the major insights of Marx to the working class.

SF: In addition to pamphlets, strikes, and so on, there is a concrete historical development that overlays this history, as general education became newly important for modern states. For example, in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci begins to talk about raising the level of education of workers in general. In what ways does the argument of the book link up with the histories of educational practice, pedagogy, and educational theory?

EB: The history of education is crucial. For Marx, to think that education could cause revolution in the 1850s or 1860s was just not plausible. The level of literacy necessary, the institutions and parties who could carry it out, were not there yet. Only in the 1890s does this strategy start to make some sense.

The figures I discuss also participated in contemporaneous debates about schooling. There was great interest in the “unique” or “common” school, where, instead of two tracks—an academic one for the few and rudimentary schooling for the rest—everyone would have the same education. What’s remarkable, however, is how extremely self-enclosed the theoretical discussions about Marxist worker education were. They centered on a very particular question: how do we get people to rise up in revolution? There does not seem to be any sort of cross-fertilization with other theories of education: liberal, religious, or what have you. I found few references to other major contemporary theorists, such as John Dewey, despite looking for them.

SF: Towards the very end of the book, you reference the thematization of education in the work of Althusser. It seems like one of the book’s insights is that education is important to Marxism even when it’s not the explicit subject of a text. Education continues to be a force in the history of Marxism even after the educational infrastructure of the SPD comes apart.

EB: Absolutely. You can see that in Britain’s New Left, in a range of different thinkers in the French-speaking world, and in the development of educational theory as well.

Althusser is an interesting case, because, as I read him, his turn to education is part of his auto-critique, the realization that he had been missing something crucial earlier. In 1965, he published For Marx and Reading Capital, and he very quickly afterwards came to criticize both of these books for their “theoreticism.” That’s when he turned to education with “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), one of his most famous essays. This is also when he starts to use the language of class instinct, class consciousness, and so on, which were so central to the educational tradition that I discuss. He, too, had moved far beyond worker education as the SPD practiced it at the turn of the century, but, Althusser still thought that his ideas would only have political import insofar as they could affect the consciousness of the working class. To that end, he produced a worker’s edition of Capital (1969), with which my book closes.

In my book, I show how numerous people tried to make Capital accessible to the workers. For instance, there was a German translation that changed the measurement of temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius because no self-respecting European could understand Fahrenheit. They worried about Marx’s German, and so they rewrote it to make it more readable. What is interesting about Althusser’s version of Capital is that it was clearly not up to the task. He knew that achieving his political goals required reaching a broad working class audience, but the only thing he could think to do was to publish this accessible version of Capital with a glossary at the back.

I take that as a sign of the fact that after Stalinization there were very few opportunities to actually affect worker education on a mass scale. What’s left instead are these Hail Mary passes: publish a text and hope it is going to convince some people. Worker education involves hard work, institutions, and people. In the absence of those institutions or people, you’re just sending books out into the void.

VM: I read your book as motivated by the sense that something has been lost in the lack of an orientation or conscious orientation toward educating the working class among intellectuals today, which is part of what struck me in your passages de Man. You mention the influence of de Man on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whose 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was particularly important in what André Gorz called the Farewell to the Working Class (1982). We still live in the shadow of this shift. When reading some of the quotes from de Man about “dumb pleasures of a philistine existence” on the part of workers, I felt like this could have just as well been printed in the New York Times or various leftist magazines today. How do you see the influence of de Man’s conceptions today? How do you place your book in our contemporary context? What do you hope will be its impact? How do you see the attitude of contemporary intellectuals toward the working class?

EB: I would like to separate two things here: an orientation beyond the working class and a dismissive attitude towards them. Laclau and Mouffe argue that we need to build coalitions that include the working class but also extend beyond it. That is probably a necessity for modern politics. But the dismissive view of the working class as beyond redemption is very dangerous, especially when, like de Man, it leads to a neglect of worker education. We might be suspicious of mass political education as a form of indoctrination because of the Stalinist history that Véronique brought up earlier, but we can also look at it as a project of persuasion. It is an attempt to convince large coalitions to work together to achieve positive change. And in this way political education is not a problem that we can neglect.

However, it is a really hard problem because education at the scale that we are talking about involves millions of people. One has to work out what type of education is appropriate. This isn’t a graduate seminar. Is some sort of simplification necessary or possible and, if so, what kind? Aiming for real change, education has to appeal to emotions, but that can easily devolve into a form of demagoguery. Working out how to balance intellectual and emotional appeal is really difficult.

I want us to think about these questions, but I don’t want to endorse the answers given by the people in my book. After all, this is not a story of success. These people did not achieve what they wanted, nor did they achieve what we might want. Some of these failures arose from a dismissive view of the working class. But the book shows that an overly optimistic view of the workers can be just as dangerous. Many of the people I’m talking about here were remarkably upbeat about the workers. They thought that just giving a worker a copy of the Communist Manifesto would convince them immediately. But what happens when a worker disagrees with you? If you are sufficiently optimistic, it is very easy to cast that as a temporary aberration, a detour on the way to the truth. So this kind of optimism, just like the dismissive attitude toward workers, could be a reason to ignore the working class—what workers actually think and want.

And that can be a problem for many reasons. It might mean that you are less successful in your political aims, because people don’t like to be ignored, but it also means that you are more likely to be wrong. Like all forms of education, mass political engagement requires a tricky balance between holding to what you believe to be true and being open to other arguments that might lead you to see the world in a new way.

Sam Franz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Calculating Knowledge: Computing, Capitalism, and the Modern University, 1945–1990” explores the rise of computing education and concomitant transformations in US universities and capitalism in the twentieth century. He is currently a predoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Véronique Mickisch is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She received her PhD in History from New York University in 2025 for her dissertation “Party Economists, the Left Opposition, and the Rise of Stalinist Economics, 1917–1938.” Her publications include the article, “Jewish Historiography between Socialism and Nationalism: A Portrait of Historian Isaiah Trunk” and an interview with Alexander Dmitriev on Lukács and the early history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

Edited by Zac Endter, Sam Franz, and Véronique Mickisch

Featured image: Crop of panels from “Theorie und Praxis,” Der Wahre Jakob, September 13, 1910, via Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.