Citing Marx

“Citing Marx” aims to track published citations of the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei and Das Kapital (vol. 1) within articles of Die Neue Zeit, a socialist periodical, focusing on volumes published between 1891 and 1918. Encompassing a period which saw some of the most important debates and developments within Marxism before the Russian Revolution, the data generated through this phase of “Citing Marx” will support an exploration of whether and how these events impacted the way socialist thinkers engaged with and used Marx’s writings through their changing patterns of citation.

One provisional hypothesis of the research team concerns the impact of the “Revisionism Controversy,” a debate starting around 1897 that is often taken to foreshadow the break between socialism and communism. We expect that the beginning of “Revisionism Controversy” will coincide with a changing pattern of citation in Die Neue Zeit, and we expect to discover different citation strategies for the two sides — orthodox and revisionist — in the post-partnership analysis of the data.