Marx without Teleology

Spinoza says that ignorance is no argument.If everyone was to delete the passages in the ancients which he does not understand, how quickly would we have a tabula rasa!Karl Marx, Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature Slowly recovering from the Cold War reception of Marx as a prophet of unflinching necessity, 1 new biographically inflected studies, such as scholarship on Marx's late work by Kevin Anderson and Michael Musto, 2 have highlighted the multidirectional dynamics of his thought, underscoring that a reappraisal of Marx as a theorist of the historical possibilities of freedom requires a fresh look at his intellectual itinerary.We can appreciate such corrective enlargements and complications of the record as critical responses to the fateful twin narratives of Marx's intellectual biography as an exemplary evolution from youthful idealism to mature materialism and of history as inevitably marching towards a socialist transcendence of the contradictions of capitalism. 1 In the anticommunist West, Hannah Arendt's absorption of Marx and Marxism into her theory of totalitarian rule can be cited as paradigmatic for this mode of reception.See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edn (San Diego, 1973), 464.In the Stalinist East, historical necessity was integral to the infallible "world outlook" of "dialectical materialism, " a phrase Marx never used.