conceptual strategies emerge for Marx not in terms of completed, finished conceptual structures, but precisely the opposite – in terms of opportunities that carry with them perhaps toxic assumptions

Most readings of Marx that emphasise vocabulary of stages and development, though, miss the… immanence that you’ve drawn attention to above – miss that he is talking about something that is “sunk in” to the phenomenon he wants to grasp. They also often miss the… matter-of-factness with which he applies these sorts of concepts – the way that he takes for granted that, of course, you build history from history – so whatever you end up with comes out of what came before it, because the way you make things, for Marx, is by transforming what lies to hand.

So you can tell a story about how the past led to the present – but that story is a non-necessary one – or becomes necessary only from our perspective, only given that it’s us, looking back narcissistically, as it were, and myopically, caught up in our present concerns, and looking for the raw materials and precedents that led to ourselves. By the same token, what follows us will be built out of us, by us – and in that sense be our heir. But it’s a political game, what form those later historical periods take.

Marx will rally the troops from time to time with reassurances about the “inevitability” of their victory, but his theory tells another story – as does his consistent reluctance to speculate about the details of a socialist society: something that would be built by other creatures, preoccupied by the concerns of their own moment, which we can’t foresee…