Thomas Marxhausen

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Thomas Marxhausen (born January 13, 1947 in Zeitz ; † September 6, 2010 in Halle ) was a German professor of political economy, author of numerous works on Marxist economic, historical and contemporary research, employee of the Marx-Engels Complete Edition (MEGA) and at the historical-critical dictionary of Marxism (HKWM) as well as long-time board member of the Berlin Institute for Critical Theory eV (InkriT)

Life

Thomas Marxhausen was born in 1947 in poor conditions in the industrial city of Zeitz in Central Germany as the son of a single domestic worker. The boy never got to know his father, a printer. He is given to foster parents from an early age. They recognized his talent and supported his obsession with reading. He attended school from 1953 to 1966, when he was fourteen he bought the Brecht Complete Edition and a subscription to the Zeitz Theater. The writer Edith Bergner supervised the first literary attempts in the circle of writing workers in the nearby brown coal mining town of Deuben .

He graduated from high school in Zeitz in 1968 and was recommended to the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg by his school director . In the teacher's course for civics and history, his extraordinary ability for scientific work caught the eye, so that he was taken directly to a research course without an examination , at the end of which in 1974 a dissertation on the topic of the origin and development of the theory of the objectification of social conditions and the personification of things with Karl Marx from 1843 to 1863 .

Karl Marx , Theories of Added Value , 1956

In 1982 a habilitation thesis with the title Marx's investigation into the dissolution of the Ricardo school followed . The topic was in the context of the MEGA editions of the theories about surplus value as part of Marx's economic manuscript from 1861 to 1863. His research on the history of theory contributed to the clarification of Marx's part in the work of Johann Georg Eccarius , A Worker's Refutation of national-economic doctrines of John Stuart Mill 's in which he / processed for MEGA² I 20th As early as 1972, his teachers and supporters Wolfgang Jahn and Heinz Abend brought him into the Halle group of authors to create a Marx-Engels Complete Edition (MEGA). Marxhausen is among other things co-editor of the Marx volumes Londoner Exzerpthefte (1850-53) and theories about surplus value (IV. Volume of the capital ). During these years he is considered the theoretical head of the group and the “ commodity fetishism Pope of the GDR”. His Marxism-Leninism lectures also found an attentive audience among traditionally skeptical students of medicine and German studies. In 1985 Marxhausen married his wife Gudrun for the second time.

In 1988, Thomas Marxhausen, who had just been appointed professor in Halle, and his wife saw a way out of the ever-narrowing conditions in Halle in helping to develop Marxist-Leninist teaching and research at the University of Aden in Yemen . He experienced the collapse of the GDR from afar. When he returned to Martin Luther University shortly after monetary union , he was appointed full professor of political economy. In 1991 daughter Josefa was born.

In 1992 Marxhausen's institute was wound up. Marxhausen experienced the “expatriation of Marxism from the Republic of Sciences” ( Wolfgang Fritz Haug ) as a personal disaster. After a brief interlude in a financial advisory service, which briefly appeared to him as a rescue from unemployment, Marxhausen gave courses and advanced training seminars in private adult education institutions in Halle, which offered retraining and qualification for the unemployed. Here he experienced the increasing hopelessness of his task of preparing for jobs that would never arise.

On September 6, 2010, Thomas Marxhausen put an end to his life.

Collaboration at the HKWM

In addition to his gainful employment, Marxhausen now mainly devoted himself to scientific research and publication. From 1996 to 2008 he was editor of the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HKWM). For the HKWM he writes a. a. the articles on the keywords "ivory tower", "development" (with Sven-Eric Liedman and Wolfgang Fritz Haug ), "extraprofit" (with Nail Satligan ), "factory legislation", "fetish character of goods", "functionary" (with Gunter Willing ), "Secret Diplomacy", "Secret", "Just Wages" (with Gilles Campagnolo ), "Glasnost" (with Boris Kagarlitsky ), "Historical Mission of the Working Class", "Historical School of Economics" (with Mario Candeias ); “ Jabobinism ”, “Capital Edition”, “Classical Political Economy”, “Kautskyanism I”, “ Communist Manifesto ”, “Consumption” and “Collectivization II” (with Simon Krysl). He also did a lot of work as an editor and reviewer. In the series Philosophical Talks of the Berlin Association for Political Education, he presented “Helle Panke” in 2008 on the 110th birthday of Brecht with the brochure “He made suggestions”. What has become of it? a summary of his tireless Brecht research and in 2009 under the title Stalin, Stalinism, Stalinisms a text on the socialism debate that summarized the work of many years. There are also countless other conference and magazine contributions.

Positions

Marxhausen's main research areas were alienation, commodity fetishism and ideology criticism ; Theory history: Classical economy, dissolution of the economic classics, vulgar economy in Marx's reception; Methodology: interaction of Marx's economic theory with the history of theory; Brecht's reception of Marxism.

“For him, it was always about the whole: to understand Marx's theory historically, to make use of Brecht's thinking and to criticize“ real ”socialism. He claimed for himself "criticism as a way of life", as he headed an essay in 1985 in relation to Brecht. "

- Rolf Hecker : from the obituary

Marxhausen committed himself to Brecht's “intervening thinking” early on, often argued with Heiner Müller , Bulgakow and Hašek , Benjamin and Lukács, and convinced with his problem-oriented approach. The fact that he was allowed to travel “only” to Moscow and not to capitalist foreign countries for his research while teaching in the GDR had to do with his independence, which was interpreted as “political unreliability”. So he sends article manuscripts without voting to the " Marxist papers " published in West Germany .

In 2008 Thomas Marxhausen ended his work in the HKWM editorial team. He no longer saw in her the form in which he felt at home with his way of looking at and discussing things.

In 2008, Marxhausen wrote in Neues Deutschland : “The 'good sides' of the GDR could not be had without its 'bad'. The safe work place included the cadre files accessible to security, the housing construction program left the old towns to decay, loving nativity aunts organized disciplinary 'potting'. (...) 'Transfiguration' of the GDR is causally the reaction to lost grounding. The demand for social security by referring to earlier 'achievements' does not go far. What was an organic component of another society cannot be removed and transplanted into what already exists. Civil society claims to be a haven of freedom, democracy, human rights and equal opportunities. Let's take them at their word. ”His intensive preoccupation with Stalin, Stalinism and Stalinists accumulated in 2009 in the script of the same name, which is a meticulous examination of the structural backgrounds of the Bolshevik disaster on a high scientific level.

Publications

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Habilitation thesis (PDF; 6.5 MB)
  2. ↑ Dissatisfied with the unchangeable. Obituary by Rolf Becker for Thomas Marxhausen (1947–2010)
  3. ↑ Neues Deutschland, November 1, 2008, p. 22
  4. ↑ Table of contents at Hellen Panke  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.helle-panke.de  
personal data
SURNAME Marxhausen, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Marxist philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Time
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 2010
Place of death Halle (Saale)