There is a big lacuna in his treatment of Marx--but that's a hole opened by Marx's analysis. I don't believe for a second Marx abandoned the idea that history has a direction; a direction is not a destination. 1/

In fact, I think Marx became more rather than less certain of a trajectory; the late writings on Russia that Heinrich mentions are hardly a rejection of a direction to history, or tendency. Quite the contrary, they assume global tendencies, and reject national *stages* 2/

I think it's fair to say that Heinrich rejects the majority of Marx's tendential theory; it may be right to reject much of it. But that does not itself warrant rejection of all theory of tendency, by way of Marx or whoever. 3/

This ground-clearing operation has the effect of obscuring vast parts of Marx's oeuvre, not to mention questions that are of vital interest not just to Marxists but to communists. You can't answer the question of why Marx is important by jettisoning the tendential theory. 4/

In fact, I would argue that there has no been no truly important work of Marxism that wasn't a work of tendential theory. Quite often this theory of tendency is arrived at by way of an erroneous or flawed reading of Marx. 5/

This is because the primary sources for tendential theory are class struggle itself. Tendential analysis often draws upon some forgotten thread in Marx that has been otherwise ignored and is perhaps apocryphal. It it is tendentious. It doesn't actually permit Marxology. /fin