The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (Bloomsbury Companions) 9781474278713, 9781350189843, 9781474278706, 9781474278720, 147427871X

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx

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Marx: An Introduction, Michel Henry Aesthetic Marx, edited by Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha Contemporary Marxist Theory, edited by Andrew Pendakis, Jeff Diamanti, Nicholas Brown, Josh Robinson, Imre Szeman The First Marx, Douglas Burnham and Peter Lamb How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy, Louis Althusser Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx Edited by Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis and Imre Szeman

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2021 Copyright © Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman and Contributors, 2019, 2021 Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis and Imre Szeman have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Eleanor Rose Cover image © Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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For Kevin Floyd

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Contents List of Contributors Preface Wolfgang Fritz Haug Acknowledgments Introduction Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman and Jeff Diamanti

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Part I Key Writings A. Key Texts 1

Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843–1844) Jerilyn Sambrooke Losch 2 The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844) Judith Grant 3 “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845–1846) Andrew Pendakis 4 The German Ideology Anna Kornbluh 5 The Communist Manifesto (1848) Peter Lamb 6 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Gavin Walker 7 The Grundrisse (1858) Nick Nesbitt 8 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Simon Choat 9 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1867) Harry Cleaver 10 The Civil War in France (1871) Franco “Bifo” Berardi 11 “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875) Andrew Pendakis

3 9 15 21 27 33 41 57 63 81 87

Part II Context B. Philosophical and Historical Context 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

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Materialism and the Natural Sciences Maurizia Boscagli The Christian State Roland Boer Liberalism and its Discontents Terrell Carver Philosophical Constellations Christian Thorne Nineteenth-Century Social Theory Corbin Hiday Industry, Technology, Energy Bob Johnson Engels Jordan Kinder

95 107 121 133 139 153 163

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C. Sources and Influences 19 20 21 22 23

Ancient Philosophy Aaron Jaffe and Cinzia Arruzza Hegelianism Andrew Cole Political Economy Radhika Desai French Socialism and Communism Jonathan Beecher Marx’s German and British Political Encounters William Clare Roberts

175 185 199 219 231

Part III Key Themes and Topics D. Key Themes and Topics 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Abstraction Leigh Claire La Berge Accumulation Sean O’Brien Alienation Timothy Bewes Base and Superstructure Edgar Illas Capital Elena Louisa Lange Circulation Atle Mikkola Kjøsen Crisis Joshua Clover Dialectics Carolyn Lesjak Exploitation Matt Cole Fetishism James Penney History and Class Struggle Peter Hitchcock Ideology Tanner Mirrlees Imperialism Tanner Mirrlees Mediation Ruth Jennison Mode of Production Jason Read Nature and Ecology Philip Campanile and Michael Watts Primitive Accumulation Jordy Rosenberg Profit Alan Freeman Property Christian Schmidt Religion Jan Rehmann Reproduction Amy De’Ath Revolutionary Communism Peter Hudis Revolutionary Strategy Peter Hallward Social Relations Kevin Floyd Utopia Gerry Canavan Value Mathias Nilges Work David Ravensbergen

243 251 259 267 273 281 289 297 303 311 319 327 335 341 347 353 363 371 379 387 395 405 411 419 425 431 437

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Part IV Reception and Influence E. Marx after Marx 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Soviet Union and Eastern Europe Joseph Grim Feinberg Latin America Emilio Sauri China Rebecca Karl Japan Gavin Walker Western Europe Jan Kandiyali The Arab World Jaafar Aksikas India Dhruv Jain Africa Priya Lal North America Tanner Mirrlees Indigenous Internationalisms Deena Rymhs

445 451 461 467 479 485 493 501 509 515

F. Contemporary Theory and Philosophy 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Literature and Culture Sarah Brouillette Cultural Studies Jaafar Aksikas Ecology and Environmentalism Danijela Dolenec Gender and Feminism Leopoldina Fortunati Geography Matthew Huber Materialisms David Chandler Philosophy Panagiotis Sotiris Political Economy Justin Paulson Political Theory Bruno Bosteels Psychoanalysis A. Kiarina Kordela Racism Barbara Foley Sociology Samir Gandesha Technology McKenzie Wark Uneven Development Harry Harootunian

Index

525 533 541 549 557 563 569 577 585 597 607 613 621 629 635

List of Contributors Jaafar Aksikas is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Humanities at Columbia College, Chicago. Cinzia Arruzza is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Jonathan Beecher is Professor Emeritus in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist of the Autonomia tradition, and teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan. Timothy Bewes is Professor of English at Brown University. Roland Boer is Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, Australia. Maurizia Boscagli is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Bruno Bosteels is Professor of Latin American and Iberian Culture at Columbia University. Sarah Brouillette is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University. Philip Campanile is a PhD student in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Gerry Canavan is Associate Professor of Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature at Marquette University. Terrell Foster Carver is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster. Simon Choat is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Kingston University London. ix

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Harry Cleaver is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas, Austin. Joshua Clover is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Andrew Cole is Professor of English and Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University. Matthew Cole is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change at the University of Leeds. Amy De’Ath is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King’s College London. Radhika Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba. Jeff Diamanti is Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analyzis at the University of Amsterdam. Danijela Dolenec is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb and President of the Board of the Institute for Political Ecology. Joseph Grim Feinberg is Research Fellow at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Sociology Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Kevin Floyd is Professor in the Department of English at Kent State University. Barbara Foley is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. Leopoldina Fortunati is a feminist theorist and author, and Director of the PhD program at the University of Udine. Alan Freeman is Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba. Samir Gandesha is Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Judith Grant is Chair and Professor in Political Science at Ohio University. Peter Hallward is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London.

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Harry Harootunian is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at New York University and Max Palevsky Professor of History and Civilizations Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Wolfgang Fritz Haug was from 1979 until his retirement in 2001 Professor of Philosophy at the Free University Berlin. Corbin Hiday is a PhD student and teaching assistant in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at the City University of New York, Baruch College. Matthew T. Huber is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Syracuse University. Peter Hudis is Professor in Humanities and Philosophy at Oakton Community College. Edgar Illas is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of Catalan and the Hispanic Literature Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. Aaron Jaffe is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Philosophy at The Juilliard School. Dhruv Jain is a graduate of the PhD programme in Social and Political Thought at York University. Ruth Jennison is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Robert Johnson is Chair of the Social Sciences Department and Professor of History at National University. Jan Kandiyali is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Istanbul Technical University. Rebecca Karl is Professor of History at New York University. Jordan Kinder is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Atle Mikkola Kjøsen is Lecturer in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario.

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A. Kiarina Kordela is Professor of German Studies and founding Director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College. Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor and Associate Head of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College. Priya Lal is Associate Professor in the History Department at Boston College. Peter Lamb is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Staffordshire University. Elena Louisa Lange is Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich. Carolyn Lesjak is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Jerilyn Sambrooke Losch is a graduate student and lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Tanner Mirrlees is Associate Professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Nick Nesbitt is Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University. Mathias Nilges is Associate Professor in the Department of English at St. Francis Xavier University. Sean O’Brien is a recent graduate of the PhD program in English at the University of Alberta. Justin Paulson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Andrew Pendakis is Associate Professor of Theory and Rhetoric at Brock University and a research fellow at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. James Penney is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University. David Ravensbergen is a PhD candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University. Jason Read is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine.

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Jan Rehmann is Visiting Professor for Critical Theory and Social Analyzis and Director of the PhD Program at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. William Clare Roberts is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. Jordy Rosenberg is Associate Professor of 18th-Century Literature and Queer/Trans + Critical Theory at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Deena Rymhs is Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Emilio Sauri is Associate Professor of English, College of Liberal Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Christian Schmidt is a Privatdozent at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Leipzig. Panagiotis Sotiris teaches European Philosophy at the Hellenic Open University. Imre Szeman is University Research Chair in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Christian Thorne is Professor of English at Williams College. Gavin Walker is Associate Professor in History and Classical Studies at McGill University. McKenzie Wark is Professor of Culture and Media at the New School for Social Research. Michael Watts is Emeritus Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Preface or A Message of Solidarity from the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM ) Wolfgang Fritz Haug (General Editor, Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism)

An unfinished project cannot die, as long as the existential problems that it had begun to address have neither been solved nor rendered meaningless. “Foreword,” HCDM 1 (1994)

I It is with great respect, mixed with a shade of envy, that an observer from the bridge of such an inflexible tanker as the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM ) gets sight of a flexible liner like the present Companion. While the former will have needed more than half a century to complete its journey, the latter has reached its goal within a mere three years. But suum cuique, both follow their respective necessities. To deepen research, and to do so with a specific regard to practical historical experience linked to theoretical concepts, establishes the fundaments of the Marxian universe. The importance of giving access to the Marxian universe, now and to the many, cannot be exaggerated. The touchstone, for Antonio Gramsci linked to his central concept of hegemony, consists in opening up for a mass of people the possibility “to think coherently and in a unitary way about the real present world”; to succeed in this endeavor represents for him “a ‘philosophical’ fact far more important and ‘original’ than the discovery by a philosophical ‘genius’ of a new truth which remains the entailed estate of small groups of intellectuals.”1 Just what are the conditions in which our respective projects are being carried out? And what are the perspectives that each project brings to the socio-political and historical conditions they face?

II In the year of Marx’s 200th birthday, no revolutionary movement seriously challenges the capitalist regime. The specter of communism has long ago stopped haunting xiv

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Europe, let alone the entire world. Never before has capitalism gripped humanity so globally, along with the earth, its habitat and the source of all material [stofflich] wealth. And never before have its irrevocably damaging effects on the eco-system set alarm bells ringing all over the globe like they do today. In this situation, the specter of Marx seems to be pervading the world like some harmless classical author. Quite a few of the powers of triumphant world capitalism have entered into a serene rivalry of paying tribute to this specter: Marx’s native city Trier, for example, but also (counter-intuitively) the Catholic church, as well as the culture industry. Long a staple of T-shirts and dorm-room posters, Marx has recently become (courtesy of Raoul Peck’s 2017 film and the 2018 documentary drama starring Mario Adorf) a cinematic hero. It’s difficult to say how the Chinese exception fits into this global panorama: Adam Smith in Beijing, watched over in the name of Karl Marx. This is a true and contradictory enigma, one that unleashes neoliberal capitalism while at the same time carefully translating and editing the complete works of Marx and Engels on the basis of the MEGA .2 Even the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism has made its first step on its way towards appearing in Chinese on the occasion of Marx’s bicentenary,3 and without any doubt, the present highly commendable Bloomsbury Companion to Marx will follow in that volume’s footsteps. We cannot know what will result from these appearances of Marx in a China that bears little resemblance to the one his specter first encountered. What we do know is that China, after a long process of economic experimentation with different approaches to socialism, has opted for a mixed economy, combined with what Lenin in his late years termed the retreat of the ruling Communist Party to the “commanding heights” of the State.4 The world witnesses China’s breathtaking ascent along this chosen path, still not exactly certain of what it is seeing.

III Why elaborate a Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism and why, on the other hand, develop a companion to Marx and not to Marxism? The reason for this can be seen in the tragic failures of Soviet-shaped European state socialism, whose memory is tainted by having met, to put it in Marx’s words, “with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.”5 One day, this last taint will be washed off by time and by a growing awareness that the USSR was the very first of the early socialist states,6 whose protagonists had to act without previous experiences to guide them, let alone any blueprints of how to build socialism. In the first years, these early state socialists expected their leading role in the revolutionary process to shift to the West. Later, realizing that their expectations had been disappointed, they over-generalized their model as the absolute paradigm and proclaimed their “Marxist-Leninist” ideology as (according to Stalin) the universal “Marxism of the epoch.” Since Stalin’s proclamation, being Marxist came after and secondary to being Communist. This order has held for most of the protagonists of an epoch of heroic struggles, an epoch characterized, under Stalin, by a regime of mass state terrorism and

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despotism, and later by a situation of life-or-death-struggle against German fascist imperialism. After the collapse of European State socialism, its “brother parties” everywhere faded away, and with them, the figure of the Party Communist. Finally, in a world shaped increasingly by transnational high-tech-capitalism—ever more so since the outbreak of the Great Crisis from 2007 onwards—the figure of the “intellectual” Marxist gained new currency as an important and relevant “historical form of individuality,”7 at least for the time being. This figure can be characterized as being Marxist without having to commit to Marxism in its full, historical sense. The kernel of truth in this paradox lies in the fact that the original (though always incomplete) fusion of Marx’s theory with the modern workers’ movement has dissolved, with the result being that Marxist theory has become unhinged from the organized class struggles and social movements that inspired it and were inspired by it. “Marxist Theory” as it exists today, is an abstraction compared with the richness of historically concrete Marxism, but a real abstraction in the precise Marxist sense of the term.

IV The first Marxist who explicitly reflected on the inevitable difference between Marx and Marxism was Antonio Labriola. Just a year after the death of Engels, Labriola writes: “Even the Marxist theories (I speak about the real ones8) are from now on partly inadequate for the new political-economic phenomena of the last 20 years.”9 In the last, unfinished essay he wrote on the materialist conception of history, Labriola refers to imperialism as the watchword of the day, the undisguised crusade. The inner economic revolution has changed all the terms of trade in foreign politics, and competition has become truly global [. . .] the axiom of the liberal society [. . .]. No wonder that the politics of conquering, of supremacy, of subduing, of intervention from country to country, and of war, be it actually waged or only threatened, is the powerful inner drive and the decisive instrument of the bourgeois-capitalist expansion.10

And since Labriola, generation after generation, Marxist theorists have continued to reckon with the same transformative energies and power of capitalism. In order to stay with Marx, one has always had to go beyond him. This was and is the general way in which Marxism arises under the specific new conditions of each era. As long as conflicts and crises demand a Marxism, its genesis inevitably meets the “dialectics of fidelity and treason.”11 Going back to Marx in order to stick as much as possible to the founding impulse, while at the same time constantly stepping beyond him: this is our tricky dialectical task. In today’s jargon, we can call these founding impulses the Marxian source code. In Marxist words, we may call it the philosophy of praxis, to use the concept with which Labriola at the end of the nineteenth century went beyond Marx, where he was later to be followed by Gramsci. We seem to have, over time, lost the key to what Labriola called “the practical reversal [Marx: Umstülpung; Labriola: capovolgimento] of the theory of cognition which is immanent to historical materialism.”12

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This is why we need a companion to Marx; and hence the necessity for traditional Marxism to undergo a historical-critical catharsis together with an effort of bringing things up to date (aggiornamento). Our task is to translate the questions related to and raised by Marx into the concrete language of our epoch.

V May this Companion reach many and stimulate their political-intellectual appetite for more! Because after having read about Marx, the proof of the pudding is to read Marx himself. Each one of us has to experience the luminosity and the wealth of food for thought that can be found in Marx. One has to give time to Marx himself, to encounter Marx not just to engage in political agitation, but to explore the way a body of thought makes possible meaningful human development. There is a similarity then, between Marx and Aristotle (a figure Marx himself revered); both created bodies of thought that, continuously updated, continue to remain fresh and necessary across the centuries. Even if there are no easy recipes for change offered by Marx today, what we find in his work is the outline of a coherently rational and global human project, a project that might, in the end, be the only one that is actually sustainable.

Notes 1

Gramsci, A. Quaderni del carcere, ed. V.Gerratana, Torino: Einaudi,1975, notebook 11, §12, note IV: 1377–8 (my translation). 2 Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (historical-critical complete edition of Marx and Engels’s publications, manuscripts and correspondence). Cf. the entry “MEGA” (including the Chinese equivalent) in HCDM 9/I, 2018: 388–404. 3 MAKESIZHUYI LISHI KAOZHENG DA CIDIAN 1, Bejing 2018 (Chinese edition of the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, Vol. 1, May 2018). 4 Cf. the entry for “Mischwirtschaft” (Mixed Economy), in HCDM (HKWM ) 9/I, Hamburg: Argument 2018, columns 1016–45 by Rösler, B. Röttger and T. Heberer, and W. Haug, B. Jessop, D. Weber and T. Heberer’s “Kommandohöhen” (Commanding Heights) in HCDM 7/II , 2010: 1218–43. 5 Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975: 34. 6 Cf. B. Kagarlitzky’s entry “Frühsozialistische Staaten” (Early Socialist States), in HCDM IV, 1999: 1069–78. 7 Cf. L. Sève’s entry “Historische Individualitätsformen” (Historical Forms of Individuality) in HCDM 6/I, 2004: 281–93. 8 “Marxist,” for Labriola, here still means the writings of Marx and Engels. 9 Labriola, Epistolario III, ed. Gerratana/Santucci, 1983, letter 878: 715 (my translation). 10 Labriola, Saggi sul materialismo storico, ed. V. Gerratana and A. Guerra, new edition, Rome, 1977: 346 (my translation). 11 Cf. W.F.Haug, “Marxistsein/Marxistinsein” (Being a Marxist), in: HCDM 8/II , 2015: 1898. 12 Labriola, Saggi, “III . Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia,” nr. IV, 206 (my translation).

Acknowledgments Though this is very obviously the case in a companion volume, every book is the result of the collective effort of a group of people. This extends from the work of those whose energies are put into transforming the book from idea (sketched out on a notepad) to bound tome (waiting to be cracked open), to those friends and colleagues whose daily presence and support replenish the desire to keep working (and concretize just why it is we’re doing any of this in the first place). The three of us feel privileged to work and think alongside a group of scholars and friends who are always up for whatever challenge might come their way, and who know, too, that they’re on the right side of history, despite the impediments and impasses they face each and every day. First things first: this project would not have existed but for the encouragement and support of Frankie Mace, our editor at Bloomsbury. We owe to her an enormous debt of gratitude, and thank her for pushing us onwards when the going got tough. As on other recent projects, we are fortunate to have been able to count on the energies and insights of Adam Carlson, David Janzen, Jordan Kinder, Sean O’Brien and Caleb Wellum. Put very simply: there would be no book without the contributions they made to its completion. To each of the contributors is owed a world of gratitude, not just for their time, thought, and professionalism, but more broadly, too, for the intellectual and political environments from which they are writing. No Marxist exists in a vacuum, which means that every contribution here represents a community of Marxists struggling daily to generate better conditions of life and labor. Thanks go to a huge range of people who contributed (even perhaps without knowing they did so!) to this Companion, including Darin Barney, Elspeth Brown, Marija Cetinic, Connie Chong, Arif Dirlik, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Fredric Jameson, Martijn Konings, Kinny and Marty Kreiswith, Li Feng, Kurt Pabst, Katherine Pendakis, Mary Pendakis, Alexei Penzin, Mark Simpson, Justin Sully, Joseph Szeman, Wang Fengzhen, Wang Min’An and Xie Shaobo, We wish to thank Tanner Mirrlees for being the very definition of a colleague for the help that he offered us. Thanks Tanner. Renowned Marxist theorist Moishe Postone died in 2018 before he could complete his entry to this Companion. The impact and influence of his work can nevertheless be seen across these pages. A huge thanks, too, to Wolfgang Fritz Haug for the preface that opens this Companion’s pages. Finally: a happy birthday to Karl Marx! This book appears in the 200th year since his birth in 1818. Much has been accomplished since then; much still remains to be done. Jeff Diamanti, University of Amsterdam Andrew Pendakis, Brock University Imre Szeman, University of Waterloo xviii

Introduction Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman and Jeff Diamanti

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia. His active life as a writer, thinker and political figure spanned four decades, from 1842, when he published his first articles for the Rheinische Zeitung, to 1875, when he wrote and circulated the “Critique of the Gotha Program”. These works, positioned at either end of his career, trace Marx’s trajectory from middle-class student of law and philosophy—someone encountering concrete economic realities for the first time—to world-historical thinker, perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated (and eventually influential) political theorist of his age. In the popular imagination, Marx has long been connected to direct radical action— to communism and the dramatic spectacle of revolution. As such, he has often been viewed as more akin to those later political figures who described themselves as Marxists, such as V. I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Amílcar Cabral, or Angela Davis, rather than the political philosophers who were his contemporaries, thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville or John Stuart Mill. Marx’s best-known and certainly most-read work remains The Communist Manifesto (1848), and many of the phrases indelibly connected to Marx are located in this text, from the challenge posed in its preamble—“A specter is haunting Europe; the specter of Communism”—to the clarion call to action at the very end of the Manifesto: “Workers of the world, unite!” Marx was committed to the radical restructuring and redefinition of society up to the very end of his life; it is in the “Gotha Program,” after all, that one can find one of the other phrases most closely associated with Marx (even if he wasn’t the first to say it): “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Marx was also a political and social theorist, a political economist fluent in German philosophy, who devoted himself to understanding as comprehensively as possible his primary object of study – capitalism. Marx remains our greatest thinker of the operations of capitalism, the concepts and theories that enable it, and the life-world that it creates. At the height of his career, his research—as represented iconically by his three-volume masterwork Capital (1867– 1883)—aimed to engage in the detailed “critique of political economy” that gave Capital its subtitle. Marx’s intensive and protracted interrogation of capital, which is at once philosophical, political and economic, has generated insights into and understandings of the operations of capitalism on which we continue to depend. Capitalism may have undergone a wide-range of transformations and transitions in the passage from the xix

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industrial capitalism that confronted both Marx and his colleague, Friedrich Engels, to today’s e-economies of immaterial labor. However, the writings of both theorists continue to offer us rich resources for understanding the enduring deep logic of capitalism, on-going practices of labor exploitation and value extraction, and the damage that these do to human communities and the planet’s environment. Importantly, the work of Marx also continues to offer us insights into the process and practice of theoretical inquiry—insights into just what it means to think and act in a world saturated by real historical suffering, ignorance and injustice. The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx aspires to offer a definitive reference guide to Marx’s life and work. Written by an international team of leading Marx scholars from across the disciplines, this book offers comprehensive coverage of Marx’s key writings; outlines his sources, influences and key political encounters; details the major themes and topics of Marx’s work; and explores the continuing impact of his writing across disciplines and around the world. This book is designed as a research resource for anyone working on or interested in Marx and his ideas today, though it is also intended to be accessible to students who may have little prior experience with his work. No single book—even a big one, like this Companion—can speak to every aspect of Marx’s work and life (sadly, for instance, by emphasizing Marx’s contributions to philosophy, history and political economy we haven’t been able to devote as much attention to his work as a journalist to the degree we would have liked). We take as one of the defining features of this Companion to be its focus on the deep connections between Marx’s critical theory and his critique of the political economy, and have asked contributors to pay attention to moments in Marx’s work where these two sides of Marxism are spelled out, modulated and put it to work. A full overview of the breadth and length of Marx’s thought is offered by the range of contributions contained in this book. As a way of introducing Marx to those who may not as yet have had an opportunity to encounter his work, we felt it essential to speak in this introduction to the two things history has indelibly connected to Marx: the critique of political economy and the politics of communism.

The Discovery of the Economic Where Freud places sex, Marx puts capital and class struggle: this common claim, usually made with the intention of discrediting both thinkers, offers us a useful point of departure for how not to understand Marx’s relationship to political economy. What is implied is that Marx’s interest in economics is of a piece with Freud’s ostensibly excessive (even perverse) interest in sex, and that both thinkers, in the end, reduce the rich diversity of the world to an explanatory model that is as abstract and elegant as it is empirically forced and impoverished. The suggestion is also that both thinkers are guilty of the sin of fetish, inflating their respective discoveries in such a way that one factor in the complex development of humanity becomes the (one and only) factor. Marx, we’re told, places so much emphasis on the economic that he forgets all of the other ways that humans express, determine or exploit themselves. In this sense, he is really no different from the bourgeois capitalist he never ceases to critique! Just as the

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latter reduces the body of the worker to an appendage of the machine, Marx makes humans into the automated playthings of large-scale economic forces. Both Freud and Marx, moreover, debase us: for them, the essence of the human is best sought not in its most elevated acts—its great treatises and constitutions, its high-flown art, music or science—but in the proddings of its most insistent and base desires. No longer an ethereal soul endowed with reason, culture and law, the human comes to appear as little more than a hungry animal with a cavernous appetite—a stomach attached to a revoltingly gaping mouth. When liberals or conservatives attempt to embarrass Marxists with such allegations, they’re surprised to find that, on some level, Marxists openly agree that the best place to look for “the human” is indeed in the obscure rumblings of the economic. Though Marx’s detractors are simply wrong to frame him as an apologist for vulgar economic determinism there is, as usual, a kernel of truth in their caricature. One cannot deny that there are deterministic moments in Marx. So, too, there are moments also when both he and Engels seem to be articulating a materialism that is little more than a hyperbolic inversion of idealism. When Marx wades into these undialectical moments it is often out of explanatory economy or to performatively differentiate his position from that of a rival. Sometimes the genre he’s working in—be it a manifesto, journalistic article, or an address to an association of workers—requires simplification as a matter of strategy. Marx’s ability to speak in different registers and to different kinds of audiences is testament to his sensitivity to the limits of traditional philosophical practice and to the importance of connecting thought to the specificities of the conjuncture in which it lives and breathes. There is no established consensus on the question of the status of the economic in Marx’s work, nor can we expect there to be. Marx’s position, however, can be usefully divided into three broad fields or domains. These domains can be separated in theory, but not in practice, where they enmesh and overlap. Marx’s interest in the economic should be understood, first, as anthropological in the sense that he is making an open argument for the centrality of material productive practices to the meaning, shape and repressed potentiality of human societies. Marx, of course, was not the first to suggest that human beings, as well as “reality” broadly conceived, should be understood as constitutively material. The empiricists in Britain (especially Locke) attempted to ground their understanding of human beings in the materiality of experience (rather than innate ideas), but they tended to de-emphasize the role played by history in the formation of the human, and often remained metaphysically and morally Christian. The French philosophes of the eighteenth century attempted to dispense with spiritual substances, though they sometimes leaned in the direction of a deterministic materialism in which the human became simply a cog in a huge natural-mechanistic machine. They, too, often articulated their positions within undialectical understandings of human psychology and morality (sometimes, for example, articulating the latter in a language of trans-historical natural law). The unique Marxist contribution to the history of materialism lies in the way Marx and Engels enmesh nature, social relations and praxis (or constructive, self-creating human activity). On some level, for Marx, human beings simply are their productive and reproductive activity. The human being for Marx is not a spiritual essence created by a providential God, nor a natural necessity coded in advance by our biology. Nor is it a

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static natural faculty or right thought to exist deep within the human mind or spirit, i.e., a transcendental condition shared necessarily by everyone. Rather, the human is nothing more or less than the history of all the things it has learned to make and do. The only limits that exist for human beings are those derived immanently from within the history of its practice. This is the meaning of Marx’s famous contention that humans make themselves, but not under conditions of their own making. Marx, then, wants to make a claim for the fact that the material, productive practices of human beings, long ignored by religious and philosophical accounts of humans, are in fact achingly central to what we are. In this, Marx’s work belongs alongside that of Nietzsche’s as a nineteenth-century anti-Platonism, a project that simultaneously rejects the institutionalized Christian tradition (one that Nietzsche referred to as “Platonism for the ‘people’” [2002: 4]). It is in this sense that Marx’s labor theory of value is not simply an economic equation, but an existential one. When Marx gazes upon a group of French communist workers and describes the radiant kind of fraternal pleasure he sees there, the material delight of their “association” as they share food and drink over passionate political debate, what he is describing is the “nobility” that touches things if they are no longer seen as mere preambles to an after-life and if humans are understood to be powerfully implicated in their own unfolding collective adventure (Marx 2007: 124). This anthropological axis of Marx’s work becomes particularly important in the light of what are sometimes called “consumer societies.” In the context of a Western consumerism in which sites of production have never been less visible—factories are now seen as much more a basic part of the landscape in places like China or Indonesia— Marx’s work allows us to make contact with the moving ensemble of natural/human processes and relations upon which our daily lives depend for their existence. This revelation is partly a simple question of truth, one that presumes that for human beings, knowledge of and contact with “what is” matters. It is also, of course, a question of utility, of survival, whether it be that of the immiserated worker or the species as a whole in a time characterized by omnipresent eco-emergency. Yet it is also the case that for Marx, as for Plato and Aristotle, being in touch with what “is,” in the deepest possible sense, is also simply the pre-condition of genuine happiness, that being happy or free requires not just insight into the economy, but its whole-scale transformation. One can work all day in the knowledge economy—say as a financier or a programmer—without ever encountering in any significant way the complex amalgam of natural abundance and human activity that lays down the conditions for one’s own very limited experience of life and labor. Marx’s orientation to the economy, then, is about escaping all of the various “heavens” that mystify and obscure our experience, from the alienated metaphysics of traditional religion to the much less austere, yet no less disempowering “heaven” of consumerism. That an individual’s every act is on some level directly productive of the future of the species, is a fact that today’s passive, routinized variety of individualism totally obscures. Though few people today believe in a fixed human essence or in a world-determining God, and though many insist that as individuals they are capable of changing the world through discriminate acts of consumption (e.g., organic meat, recyclable cups, dolphin-free tuna), almost nobody today believes that the human as a species is able to rationally, collectively and democratically determine its own future.

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We shouldn’t be afraid to suggest that Marx’s project then agrees in principle with the famous injunction of the phenomenologists: “back to the things themselves.” The proviso here is simply that “things themselves” for Marx include the obscure totality of the economy, the forgotten natural order on which the economy relies for life, as well as the naturalized workerly subjectivities—expectations, values, beliefs, etc.—that constantly produce and reproduce the system ideologically. Marx places us back into the moving, risky, existentially unmoored domain of things themselves, a space that is as mysterious and open as it is conceptually determinate and intelligible. The second broad domain in which Marx’s orientation to the economic is expressed has to do with the long-term structural dynamics at work in human history. This is Marx and Engels’s much discussed “materialist conception of history,” a position that is sometimes called “historical materialism” (significantly, though, Marx never used the term). Before Marx, Europeans conceived of history in one of five ways. History was either: (1) as for the Greeks, circular or cyclical, in that it had no clear telos or developmental structure, a great churning motion that could only ever arrive at places it had been before (this meant that no political system could be seen as in any way final or as historically more complete than another); (2) a chaotic narrative driven from the top down, in which great men battle over territories to enrich themselves and their peoples at the expense of competitors (the position of Machiavelli and Hobbes); (3) an arc culminating in justice, one born of and guided by the revealed providence of a divine God; (4) a bourgeois success story of the kind found in Condorcet in which human beings move from poverty, ignorance and war towards enlightened wealth, peace and happiness via the accumulated truths of natural science (Descartes was already articulating this position in 1637); or (5) a meaningless entanglement of empiricist events, a series of accidents or happenings without internal development or intrinsic connection that simply unfold mechanistically forever (with one event bumping into another in a merely external manner). Before we can understand how Marx breaks with these models, we need to understand the way he thinks about the connection between economics and history. Along with someone like Comte, Marx refuses to see societies as simply disaggregated sums of individuals, but rather as internally integrated, intelligible totalities. Just as atoms and individuals are organized sets of relatively stable parts, so, too, are societies (though the “whole” of a social order is never “natural” or “one” in quite the way an atom is). Societies on a structural level diverge from or resemble each other and change in ways that are comparable (and even partially predictable). This in some ways unproblematic claim is sometimes rejected today for the way it cancels out the differences between the things it endeavors to compare. This means that the principle of nominalist non-comparability, in which each society is posited as radically unique and un-generalizable (a principle common to postmodern relativists), is very foreign to the spirit of Marx’s work. Societies widely removed from each other in time or space might be extremely similar morphologically, just as two contemporary, neighboring nations may be radically different on a deep, structural level. Unlike Comte, Marx does not build the inner cohesiveness of a society around its level of “knowledge,” nor, as in Hegel, around the content of its religion or philosophy (its spiritual essence). Nor are societies interconnected—as they are for Aristotle, as well as later figures such as Locke

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and Rousseau—by the will of social contracts or constitutions. Rather, what makes up the stability and repetitiveness of a social order is the buzzing material dynamism of its economic relations. Societies are relatively stable economic wholes, meaning that changes in one part of the system affect relations in other parts, even though at a great distance from it, and that real change, real, transformative difference, is relatively rare. Economies are always moving and changing, but rarely do they enter into periods of transformation on the level of the whole itself. The name Marx reserves for such periods is, of course, revolution. For Marx, societies are best understood from the perspective of their economic structures because it is along the axis of their productive arrangements that we see laid out before us an historical period’s organizing everydayness—its historically specific substance. The notion that we could “know” a people or period through its art or culture alone is, from a Marxist perspective, naïve; one has to locate these forms within the broader context of the economic totality, laying out the myriad relationships of reciprocal determination that take place between the forces and relations of production. The skeletal structure of societies are their economic relations, in that everything that makes up the material life of a society—from the architecture of its houses, to the structure of its families, to the kinds of objects it uses, to the food it eats and clothes it wears—passes through the matrix of economic forces and relations that make them all possible. However, it is important to note that knowing that a society was “feudal” or “industrial” would not be enough a priori to know much of anything about it. Marx is clear that any time is at the same instant singular, and is made up of a complex network of regional, institutional and cultural specificities. Marx, then, breaks with prior understandings of history in a number of ways and at the same time. First, history is no longer circular but characterized by movement and difference, or, to frame it in the language of Hegelianism, a process marked by unity in difference. The human changes and evolves, but it does not do so in such a way that ancestors become totally alien to those who come after them. The human is not split up into sealed non-communicating essences called “cultures,” “sexes,” “races” or “periods”: we don’t, says Marx, live in radically untranslatable worlds. For Marx, it is possible to make a few broad statements about all the human beings that have ever lived: they relied on and entered into transformative activity with nature; they used tools; they had to labor to sustain themselves physically; and so on. At the same time, as change takes place within these broad coordinates of sameness there are radical differences between one moment and another. These differences are decisive in understanding the possibilities available to a given society at a particular stage of economic development. Marx is extremely attentive to the specificity of these differences and especially to the manner in which capitalism organizes human existence in ways that have never been experienced before it. What is it, in the end, that links even the most nomadic creative worker to the oldest form of serfdom? The simple fact that all hitherto societies have involved the oppression of one class by another. Though it is rarely framed as such, Marx’s claim about all hitherto existing societies being the history of class struggle is a broad contention about what links all humans in the end: the presence of suffering, the reality of historical oppression, and an enduring desire for something we might in English call “happiness” or “freedom,” but which have their own names in any

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language that has ever existed. It is important to note that as changes take place on an economic level, Marx is clear that everything changes, that the whole coordinates by which a people understand or articulate themselves change. Unity in difference—what, harkening back to Hegel, is called a “concrete universal”—means that beneath this radical, singular historical difference a single—sometimes difficult thread—weaves its way quietly; a thread that in the end might only exist once human beings collectively affirm it as such. It should be noted, too, that for Marx, on some level, there is no returning through history to an earlier age: this principle, one that he takes from Hegel, ensures that though disaster might await the human, the things we have learned—for example, about the invaluable rights of individuals, or in the fields of chemistry or industrial production—are, barring a cataclysm, unforgettable. The second way in which Marx’s interest in history has to be understood is in relation to typical narratives and figurations of the historical. After Marx, historical transformation is no longer the prerogative of the deeds of the great—a matter merely of arranged and re-arranged political conquests or aristocratic marriages of convenience—but primarily the outcome of changes at work in the deep tectonic economic and technological structures of societies. The shift from life on the land to life in the blank light of a nocturnal factory, or from hunting and gathering to the rhythms of agriculture, though never “instituted” by one person, have far greater consequences for humanity than the actions of any one person. Individuals do not make history alone, but do so in concert with others, with the core organizing tension moving things within and between eras being those huge aggregations of people we call classes. Third, it is clear that Marx’s materialism ensures that he breaks with any transcendental conception of the origins and future trajectory of human beings. Humans develop themselves, ceaselessly sustaining their world, but they do so under conditions not of their own making. History, then, is no more the free creation of a spontaneous God than it is that of a fully conscious Enlightenment subject. Marx sees in the declarations of freedom made by bourgeois politicians acts that are structurally analogous to the conception of God as effortlessly speaking humanity into existence. There is no free will, neither in heaven, nor on earth, which is not to say there is no such thing as freedom tout court. For Marx, the project of aspiring towards the self-determination of humanity by itself takes place within terms and limits inherited by the productive apparatus that any given age has inherited. Freedom as such would only exist for Marx—as it did for Aristotle—on the condition that human beings were free from meaningless work. Aristotle, of course, reserved this freedom for a minority of leisured beings who were reliant on slave labor, while Marx aspired to universalize it. This possibility (of free leisured life) only truly exists in the context of an industrial economy that can automate the process of production, while leaving humans the time they need to feely develop themselves as individuals and to participate in their own collective cultural and political life. In addition to the anthropological and historical scales mentioned earlier Marx’s orientation to the economic can also be characterized as almost scientifically empirical. This third domain discernible within Marx’s relationship to the economic takes the form of a series of precise, “local” hypotheses about the characteristics of nineteenthcentury capitalism. In the twentieth century this took the form of a fully articulated (though never homogeneous) Marxist political economy, one which was able to

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construct its own sophisticated, internally coherent viewpoint, but which was able at the same time to deal in a nuanced, economically literate manner with whatever mainstream, “bourgeois” economics it was forced to contend with (neoclassical, Keynesian, neoliberal, etc.). However, those who see Marx as primarily an economist— as someone who abandoned philosophy for a set of positive, falsifiable economic claims—ignore the nuanced meta-philosophical threads that constitute precisely the specialness of Marx. He was always, even during and after his most intense political engagements, a philosopher/sociologist operating in the body of a militant, a theorist who also happened to place his fingers on many of the most salient empirical details of his age (“facts” that often remained invisible to even the most empirically grounded of liberal economists). That Marx “discovered” the need within thought and politics for precise, economic maps of historical conjunctures—that he discovered, really conjunctural thinking itself—is alone a notable achievement; that he was able to simultaneously add so much to our empirical understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism is simply remarkable. Much today is made of all the ways Marx’s economic observations misfired. We’re told (unfairly) that the theory of labor no longer makes sense in the context of a world characterized by post-industrial work. We’re told too that Marx’s economics live or die on their capacity to predict the future. If the global communist revolution he anticipated failed to materialize, aren’t the rest of his observations equally tainted? Of course, if we were to base the relevance of a social science on its capacity to predict historical outcomes then mainstream economics would have been largely de-legitimated by its almost universal inability to foresee the 2008 financial crisis (or, for that matter, almost any other element of the ebb and flow of economic change and development). Though Marx’s predictions were often wrong—it is better to call them hypotheses rather than predictions to separate them from the associations of the latter with the practices of prophets—there exists a very interesting body of claims that have come to prove that Marx was one of the most prescient thinkers of his age. Marx saw clearly the coming of free-market globalization, rightly intuited the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall, clearly saw the transformations in the composition of capital that characterize the present (with variable capital replaced by constant capital, labor replaced by machines), and denounced the long-term tendency of capitalism to generate massive levels of inequality and world-wide (relative) immiseration. A world such as ours in which 1 percent of the population owns 27 percent of global wealth looks much closer to that described by Marx than anything anticipated in the works of Smith or Hayek (Alvaredo et al. 2017). There is a strong argument to be made that, despite the regression globally of organized Marxist resistance to capitalism, Marx’s observations about the way capitalism actually works (with grim consequences for human beings, animal life and the environment) have never been more relevant. Finally, it’s important to realize that for Marx the task of orienting ourselves to the economic, is, in the end, to free us from it. Marx complained to Engels about the boredom he endured while contending with what he called the “economic shit.” It is only after we have understood and rationally re-articulated production that we will free ourselves from an economy that subordinates life to the banality of money making. Marx pulls us back into the economic shit precisely to save us from it.

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On Being Communist A good idea in theory, but not in practice: this is the reflex response of the average student when asked to speak about the contemporary relevance of Marx’s politics. That Marx was a communist is seen by detractors as proof he should not be read and by those otherwise sympathetic to his critique of capitalism as a vice he would have learned to quit had he lived to see the cozy pleasures of mid-century Sweden. How could Marx have known that capitalism would be stabilized by Keynesian demand management and that workers would be able to leverage their unionized power into higher wages, pensions and important legal protections and rights? Doesn’t the worker asleep by his suburban pool today negate a posteriori a communism invented in the shadow of Victorian starvation? It is naïve, of course, to trivialize the gains made by workers under social democracy, but there are real ways in which this argument about capitalist abundance was already suspect in 1960. Many people post-war may have had more rights and freedoms (and certainly more stuff ) in the West than they did a century earlier, but economic inequality and political passivity never ceased to haunt the everyday experience of actually-existing Keynesianism. Whether workers able to consume more (meat, cigarettes, images, etc.) were ever really freer than their predecessors is a thoroughly open and interesting question (with freedom here, of course, understood not negatively, but in a robust Hegelian sense as collective, autonomous self-determination). If, however, Marx’s communism is framed as superannuated by social democracy, then surely it can only be re-vivified by the latter’s neoliberal negation, a time in which Victorian logics of all kinds—from the fetish of self-help to the entrepreneurial use–value of inequality—have returned in full force. Marx’s communism is not an overzealous glitch (what we today might call a bad early life choice), but the structurally necessary consequence of his research into the dynamics of capitalism. To really know capitalism is, on some level, to necessarily desire its destruction. Marx, then, proposes an extremely strange science, one that can only really be grasped from within a set of emphatic political commitments. Though we often style the latter as being opposed to the objectivity necessary for knowledge, in Marxism the situation is reversed. Knowledge of our moment cannot take root in a subject at home in capitalism because it is this at-home-ness that precisely preempts the estrangement necessary to see our own time in all its weird specificity. It is in the practice of communists, in their efforts to organize and to open up a space of resistance to capitalism that they begin to concretely sense its fragile contingency—its openness to being changed. It may even be the case that we can really only properly know capitalism retrospectively, in the wake of its having being replaced by something newer and better. We will only know it is possible in the wake of the event itself, and we will only be able to affirm that “yes,” objectively, capitalism was flawed and fated to fade, when indeed we have buried it once and for all. We should not spend too much time responding to the charge that Marx was the bad old grandpappy of Stalinism. Marx believed that in communism the state apparatus would eventually be abolished and that there would be no political power separate from the will of the majority, and he argued passionately for the erasure of the gap between the party as a political form and the organized activity of the working class as

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a whole. The party was to be the most theoretically informed and politically passionate segment of this class itself, a body within the broad movement of workers best able to grasp the overall patterns and tendencies at work in the present. Though many continue to understand the conflict between Marx and Bakunin as that between the former’s arch statism and the latter’s unfettered anarchism, the truth is much more complicated. Bakunin preferred a theoretically unified, hierarchical and clandestine party structure, a group of hardened revolutionaries that would simply mix with the workers, imparting to them a kind of revolutionary fervor. Marx consistently argued for a more open, public and democratically representative structure, one that would in turn work to systematically educate workers with a view to their own long-term political interests. There’s certainly a political hierarchy at work here, with the militant in Marx’s model still envisioned as closer to the truth of the present than the average, apolitical worker. But Marx is extremely clear: the working class cannot be freed from above, but only through their own, sustained revolutionary activity. Marx’s communism was not, then, an embarrassing error of the heart, nor a merely personal desire for power or control, but an expression of the preciseness of his thinking. However, there is more to the construction of a communist politics than simply a logical conclusion drawn about the nature of capitalism. Becoming the kind of person who can systematically map the present order and sympathize rationally with those it exploits and disempowers, while imagining beyond that order to a more just alternative is difficult. Add to this the incredible effort required to sustain a political process and the sheer stamina needed for a genuinely political life, and we get a better sense of how stacked the odds are against a human being deciding to radically reject an injustice embedded in the very molecules of the time in which it lives. Unlike scientologists, communists are not rare because they’re wrong. They’re rare because the series of conditions that need to be in place for the formation of a consistent, intelligent, active communist subject are improbable. Unlike conservatives, who often organically age into their politics, or centrist liberals, who in contemporary societies stand for little more than the open-minded reproduction of the status quo, the coming into being of a struggling, thinking communist is a question of reality moving in direct opposition to the path of least resistance. Those for whom being nice to one’s mother or holding doors open for the elderly warms the heart should think twice before they write off the intense moral trajectories of a Rosa Luxemburg or a Che Guevara. To become a communist in 1843 required empathy, clarity of vision and real courage. It meant being rejected by family members, chased out of countries, being persecuted and censored, and often even imprisonment or death. Nothing in the historical cruelty of the gulag cancels out the truth of the suffering imposed on the body of communists by one hundred and fifty years of capitalist repression. The violence of the communisms of the twentieth century, at least provisionally, has to be placed into the context of the brutality with which vested interests treated organized workers movements in the century that preceded them. Marx’s communism was unique. He did not attribute to equality a moral or spiritual dimension; it was not a feeling that returned to the human its God-given or natural essence. He had no interest either in an equality that took the form, as in Babeuf, of an enforced uniformity or sameness; instead, differences would proliferate, unfolding

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really for the first time, rather than undergo repression in communism. There is no trace in Marx of a desire for monkish simplicity, a Christian tone of virtuously frugal or self-limited life. Marx after all was an open sensualist, someone who liked to smoke, eat and drink: he wanted both for himself and others a materially rich creaturely existence. Communism was to be a system that equally distributed abundance, not penury. Marx wasn’t interested either in conspiratorial violence, a life lived in the shadows organized around militancy (this was part of the intervention he made into the nature of the League of the Just). He simply thought that capitalism, in the end, was irrational, that it damaged the bodies and minds of people and that it ultimately separated them from their collective human potential. It had to be overthrown if humans were to be able to push outwards into an era that made the promises of the Enlightenment actual: individuality, happiness, freedom, meaningful work and a sense of purpose on the level of the species. Every reader of the great works of modernist literature knows intuitively what Marx says explicitly: that capitalism is boring, that it bends the beauty and mystery of life into the dullness of needy money-making, and that almost all of the basic values shared by human beings are endangered, rather than nourished and expanded by capitalism. The goal for Marx was to combine the productivity and inventiveness of capitalism with a socialized form of industrial production that would no longer place economic and political power into the hands of unelected capitalists and the fate of the species as a whole into the historical unconsciousness of markets. Certainly, the nation-state based communisms of the twentieth century failed. Marx, however, though strategically committed to supporting nation-based socialist movements, was always, to the core, an internationalist: he wanted a communism as globalized, cosmopolitan and inventively integrated as the capitalism it sought to overthrow. Ecological emergency, unchecked capital mobility, the global nature of financial crises and all kinds of shared universal risk (ranging from epidemics to the potential dangers of AI or VR—even to interstellar meteorites!) have made the prospect of planetary government a question of ultimate concern to us all. Popular science fiction effortlessly explains to us what our politicians ceaselessly obscure: there is one planet, its interests in the end are shared and this one planet (which is not, to be sure, only one world) requires a politics alive on the scale of the globe itself if we are to survive and flourish. This is the terrain, frankly, on which the Marxist experiment is only just beginning. Nobody, of course, denies the sheer improbability of communism. Nobody better knows this than communists themselves: they feel it, painfully, every day of their lives. Communism may be difficult, it may be improbable, but no more so than the Promethean techno-fixes constantly promised to us by the likes of Elon Musk. Marx’s position asks that we dig in for the long haul of a global political adventure that we cannot anticipate, and in the name of an outcome we can’t yet foresee. It is grim, dangerous work, but it is also joyful and light, a truth one knows only by experiencing it. Musk, like many of the capitalist prophets that have come before him, asks of us only that we watch and wait. Earlier centuries asked of the ruled that they believe in the natural right of their masters to rule, a quality shared by those in power that made them naturally fit for command. The present asks that we believe not in aristocratic

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excellence, but in the limitless intelligence of the savant. The smart, we’re told, will save us through innovation. They will solve the riddle of a changing climate, provide us with unimaginable new toys and trinkets, end meaningless work, and perhaps even abolish death itself. Immortal life. Protean bodies. Unthinkable new pleasures and delights. Just watch and wait. It will all work out in the end.

Organization of this Companion “Part I: Key Writings” offers introductions and summaries of some of the central texts in Marx’s canon, chosen to emphasize his contributions to political philosophy and political economy, and to register important breaks and continuities in Marx’s thinking in order to capture the developmental process at work in his thought. Marx was a stunningly prolific writer—a thinker whose writing had impact and import across his life, from his 1842 articles in Rheinische Zeitung (that argued against the introduction of a law prohibiting the collection of fallen wood) through to The Civil War in France (a text that was translated into numerous languages and circulated widely in both newspapers and pamphlet form), and much, much more. The number of texts included in this section was limited by editorial necessity (to ensure that a large book did not become even larger). Those that were included, we feel, offer an overview of the shifts and transitions across the whole of Marx’s career. The contributions to “Part II : Context” locate Marx in relation to the philosophical and historical frameworks that inflected his development as a thinker and revolutionary. The unique profile of Marx, located as he is at the conjunction of politics, philosophy and economics, and with a legacy of intense political organization and activity, demands that a companion to his work address a dense thicket of events, texts and real world encounters. The first section of Part II , “Philosophical and Historical Context,” addresses significant conjunctures that shaped Marx’s ideas and worldview: ●

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the interpenetration of church, nation and state (as well as the status of religion in Europe more generally) in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna and the formation of the Holy Alliance; the spread of capitalism and liberal, republican, democratic and socialist movements after 1789 in Europe; nineteenth-century philosophy as well as the development of the social sciences; the radical shift in the epistemological and practical dimensions of the nineteenth century enacted by the incredible progress made by the natural sciences (a paradigm of knowing that would leave an indelible trace on Marx’s own method); the impact of industry and technology; and finally, the influence of Marx’s interlocutor, collaborator and micro-loan lender, Friedrich Engels, whose impact on Marx and Marxism cannot be understated.

The second section of Part II , “Sources and Influence,” attends to the intellectual archive on which Marx drew. In addition to the debts owed by Marx to the ancient Greeks (Epicurus and Aristotle especially) and to Hegel, it is important to think of

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Marx’s development in the context of the emergence of British political economy as well as via his encounter with French Communism after his move to Paris in 1843. The third part of the Companion explores close up the most significant themes and topics that animate Marx’s critical analyzis. Though Marx is closely associated with a handful of key concepts, nearly all of the organizing themes and topics of his work are encountered rather than invented: Marx repurposed and redeveloped concepts already in play in nineteenth-century thinking rather than laboring to animate neologisms. The concepts and themes brought together here highlight that Marx did not merely oppose the economic and political theory of capitalism with one of communism (a popular misperception). Instead, Marx spent the majority of his adult years engaging critically with both popular and dominant accounts of history, economics, politics and philosophy in order to unlock their key assumptions, oversights and commitments. This is a thinker who was alive to the debates and struggles animating the politics and philosophy of his era, and who understood it to be important to contend fully with the world in which he lived. In addition to establishing a core constellation of concepts fundamental to Marx’s writings and the main points of contention around which future Marxisms would oscillate, this section offers readers a broad overview of the topics and debates with which Marx engaged. What makes the theories of Marx distinct from all other nineteenth-century philosophies—predecessors such as Hegel or contemporaries such as Darwin and Mill—is the direct material impact his theories have had on real-world political practice. The critical analyzis of capitalist society and economics inaugurated by Marx has played an essential role in shaping socialist and communist politics around the world, up to and including the present day. (One might argue that liberal political theorists and economists have had a similar impact on the character of liberal capitalist states, but let’s be blunt—it’s not the same.) For this reason, when considering the reception and influence of Marx’s ideas, it is important to look not only at the enormous role it has played in shaping theory and philosophy, but also at its specific life in generating new ideas of—and desires for—political structures and subjectivity. The singular impact of Marx’s idea on the planet over the past 175 years can be gauged by the need to include this section in the Companion; volumes on Arendt or Sartre or de Beauvoir would not demand extended assessments of the specific effect of their ideas in China, Africa or North America. Marx’s ideas and the political possibilities they have engendered have had an impact around the world. Similarly, they have shaped the development of concepts across the disciplines. The final section of this book, “Contemporary Theory and Philosophy,” probes the influence of Marx’s ideas on contemporary philosophy and theory, including topics such as race, gender and feminism, uneven development, and ecology and environmentalism. Though it is at times difficult to separate Marx from the various Marxisms that have developed in relation to the provocation of his ideas, the contributors to this section have been invited to speak, as much as possible, about the ongoing influence and impact of the work of Marx himself. In a world that is still ferociously shaped by the politics and economics of capitalism, and by the sociocultural relations it has produced, the ideas of Marx continue to play a significant role in investigations of almost every topic and issue we face today.

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As we have just intimated, one of the challenges in putting this Companion together has been to keep the focus on Marx rather than on Marxism. There is an important and necessary distinction to be drawn between Marx and Marxism, as well as between Marx and the history of communism. The range of political, theoretical and conceptual positions that identify themselves as Marxist (or even “Marxian”) is enormous; these various Marxisms often disagree substantially about ideas and politics, as well as about how to interpret the texts and ideas of Marx. Our intent in insisting on this distinction between Marx and Marxism isn’t to challenge the import or impact of the latter (or some versions of them) through an appeal to the former. Almost a century-and-a-half after the death of Marx, it is difficult not to see Marx through the lens of the Marxisms and communisms that followed in his wake, transforming the world into the one we inhabit now. Nevertheless, the focus of this Companion is in unfolding the ideas and writing of Marx himself. “Marx-ism has, I think, an uncertain future,” writes Göran Therborn, “But Marx himself is bound for the long life of alternating winters, springs, summers and autumns undergone by so many of the great thinkers of humankind, from Confucius and Plato onward” (Therborn 2008: ix). While we might not position Marx within an indelible canon of great thinkers in quite this way (evoking another of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle), we agree that the contemporary challenges to many Marxisms do not impact on the continued importance, energy and necessity of Marx’s thought. The world we inhabit today has been shaped profoundly by the ideas, insight and imperatives outlined by Karl Marx; it is only through an encounter with his ideas that we can grasp fully where we find ourselves and where we might yet be able to move over the course of this century.

References Alvaredo, Facundo, et al. (2017), World Inequality Report 2018, Paris: The World Inequality Lab. Marx, Karl (2007), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, New York: Dover Publications Inc. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2002), Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Therborn, Göran (2008), From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, New York: Verso.

Part I

Key Writings A. Key Texts

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Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843–1844) Jerilyn Sambrooke Losch

Marx begins his “Introduction” to the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” with a scathing critique of religion that contains some of his most frequently cited prose. The “criticism of religion, ” he boldly claims, “is the premise of all criticism” (Marx 1972a: 11). A few paragraphs later, he famously declares religion is “the opium of the people” (12). In an essay meant to introduce his critique of Hegel’s most sustained work of political philosophy, it is not immediately apparent how these bold proclamations about religion relate to the political arguments that Marx aims to advance through his reading of Hegel. One might read Marx here as a staunch secularist, insisting that it is only once people relinquish their commitments to religion that they can achieve political and eventually human emancipation. Read in this way, the “criticism of religion” frees people from the shackles of religion so that they can pursue a purer form of emancipation. Such a secularist reading of Marx’s early writing overlooks, however, the sophisticated theoretical work the criticism of religion does for him. Marx does not simply dismiss religion as false or delusional: instead, the criticism of religion provides the conceptual tools Marx will employ to critique “merely political” emancipation. When Marx published the “Introduction” to “The Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” in 1844, he had not yet revised the full Critique for publication. This extensive critical analysis of Hegel’s political writing remained unfinished in Marx’s lifetime and was first published in 1927. The contrast between the introductory essay and the main text is striking. While the “Introduction” has a bold, polemical style, the Critique (such as it was, posthumously published) offers a careful, paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of Hegel’s lengthy Philosophy of Right. The differences between the two raise many questions, but central to understanding the gap between the Critique and its introduction is Ludwig Feuerbach’s criticism of religion, which Marx uses to generate new insights into Hegel’s political philosophy.1 The “Introduction” demonstrates Marx’s early thinking about how the criticism of religion is central not only to a critique of Hegel’s political philosophy but, more importantly, to Marx’s own goal of bringing about the revolution of the proletariat. Marx is indebted to Feuerbach for the main assertion that “man makes religion; religion does not make man” (Marx 1972a: 11).2 People attribute their human capacities 3

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to a being external to them, beyond the human world, and then construe themselves as having been made in the image of this magnificent Other. As they project their capacities onto a separate being whom they then grant power over them, they hinder their own freedom.3 Understood in this way, religion is a product of a world where people know neither themselves nor each other, unaware of what they could together become. The “criticism of religion” demonstrates that “the fantastic reality of heaven, ” where people seek a supernatural being, simply contains their own reflection (11). Having learned this in the realm of religion, Marx argues, “[man] will no longer be tempted to find only the semblance of himself—a non-human being—where he seeks and must seek his true reality” (11). Marx extends Feuerbach’s central insight by suggesting religion is not the only context in which people collectively and historically confuse a semblance of themselves for the reality of themselves. In other words, Marx brings Feuerbach’s criticism of religion to bear on social and political institutions like the representative liberal state. Marx is not always clear, however, about how this works. Early in the essay, he asserts that “man is the human world, the state, society” (11), without distinguishing between the three (distinctions he considers more fully in “On the Jewish Question, ” which I take up briefly below). “This state, this society, ” he goes on, “produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world” (11). Marx implies that absolutist and liberal political orders are, like religion, effects of alienation and thus ought to be subject to the same kind of criticism as religion. A few paragraphs later, he explicitly calls for this kind of political critique: It is the task of history, therefore, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus, the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. Marx 1972a: 12

Philosophy must enact this transformation, bringing the tools developed through religious criticism to bear on the liberal state and on political life. By formulating this project in the language of transformation, Marx sidesteps several conventional accounts of secular politics. He does not assume that secular political life is what remains once religion has been revealed as an effect of self-alienation (and hence disregarded). His critical project does not aim to reveal the truly religious nature of secular political life, demonstrating that what was thought to be secular is actually religious.4 Rather, Marx argues that both religion and the state are effects of alienated social conditions, and it is only through the kind of criticism that Feuerbach develops in relation to religion that people can take back their own capacities and abilities that they have separated from themselves and granted to the state. Only through the criticism of religion can people accurately understand the state for what it is and obtain freedom from it. As Marx develops his argument about the task of criticism, specifically in Germany, he adopts a rhetoric of war. This criticism, he says, is “in a hand-to-hand fight, ” and

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“[a]ll that matters is to strike [the adversary]” (14). The urgency of this language illustrates Marx’s effort to distinguish himself from intellectuals (namely, the Young Hegelians) who seem content to criticize but not act. How, though, does criticism enter this battle? It elicits fear. Each sphere of German society must be made to appear as the shameful part of society, and “these petrified social conditions must be made to dance by singing their own melody to them. The [German] nation must be taught to be terrified of itself, in order to give it courage” (14). Criticism brings to life that which is presumed to be inert, fixed and given.5 It terrifies by showing people that what they took to be foundational social divisions are historically produced and thus malleable. Through the work of criticism, these social conditions can be made to appear alive rather than fixed and eternal. This passage goes some way to explaining why Marx finds emancipatory politics that employ these social divisions to be inadequate. The modern (absolutist) German state, Marx claims, “leaves the real man out of account or only satisfies the whole man in an illusory way” (17). This illusory satisfaction is what Marx elsewhere in the essay terms “political emancipation. ” Marx contrasts Germany with other “modern nations, ” particularly France, explaining that Germany has not “passed through the intermediate stage of political emancipation” (19); he insists, however, that such emancipation is itself an insufficient goal. A “partial, merely political revolution, ” he explains, “leaves the pillars of the building standing” (20). In other words, political emancipation is unable to move beyond the self-alienation on which the modern state and its political order are predicated. Marx offers his most coherent explanation of this in an essay entitled, “On the Jewish Question, ” published in the same 1844 issue of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher with the “Introduction. ” One of the central arguments of this essay concerns the structure of the modern liberal state—the “pillars of the building” that projects of political emancipation leave standing. In “On the Jewish Question, ” Marx makes explicit how the liberal state, like religion, is a product of human alienation: “The state is the intermediary between man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-divinity and all his human freedom” (Marx 1972b: 30). In an effort to clarify how the operation of the state echoes that of religion, Marx argues that political emancipation from religion parallels political emancipation from private property. When the state no longer considers private property a relevant factor in determining a person’s relation to the state, the person can be said to be politically emancipated from private property. Once someone who does not own property can vote, for example, the state no longer recognizes private property in a political capacity. In a parallel fashion, if the state recognizes people as neither Jews nor Protestants but simply as citizens, people have arguably been politically emancipated from religion. The problem, Marx insists, is that by declaring property or religion—or “birth, social rank, education, occupation” (31)—to be non-political distinctions, the state does not abolish such distinctions but “actually presupposes [their] existence” (31). The state allows private property, education and occupation “to act after their own fashion . . . and to manifest their particular nature” (31). Furthermore, the state “constitutes itself as universality” in opposition to these distinctions, an insight that

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Marx credits to Hegel (31). The state declares itself independent from these distinctions so that it can legitimately rule over them. Their existence necessitates the existence of the state. In the “Introduction, ” therefore, when Marx notes that other modern nations have achieved a level of political emancipation, he asks whether Germany might move beyond this stage, which is insufficient and partial. “Can Germany, ” he asks, “attain a practical activity à la hauteur des principes; that is to say, a revolution which will raise it not only to the official level of the modern nations, but to the human level which will be the immediate future of those nations” (18)? In the final section of the essay, Marx entertains an answer to this question. What would it take to bring about a revolution that does not simply reinforce the existing distinctions between classes and groups of society? How, in other words, might a criticism of the state be affected if, in parallel with the criticism of religion, it returns to people their own capacities to freely imagine, create and rule themselves? Unfortunately, Marx concludes, every class in Germany “lacks the logic, insight, courage and clarity” to bring about such a revolution (21). What is needed is a class that has the “generosity of spirit” and the “revolutionary daring” to declare “I am nothing and I should be everything” (21). The middle class in Germany is not up to the task: it is more concerned with erecting new barriers between it and the lower classes than it is with “destroying the barrier which opposes it” (21). “Where is there, then, ” Marx asks, “a real possibility of emancipation in Germany?” (21). He argues that a class must emerge that claims “no traditional status but only a human status” (22). This sphere of society cannot base its coherence on existing social distinctions like class, education or property, which only reinforce the need for the state. This sphere of society has a “universal character” (22) and it does not claim a “particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general” (22). In other words, this class does not insist on better education or more property. It “is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system” (22) and, by emancipating itself from this political system more broadly, it emancipates other spheres of society as well. Marx then famously declares: “This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat” (22). The line of argument this chapter traces clarifies why Marx, at this juncture, resists conflating the proletariat with the poor. The “poor” is a category based on class distinctions; they own less than the property-owning class (or even no property at all). While the poor or those speaking on their behalf may seek to improve their living conditions, such campaigns only seek to adjust—not threaten—the imbalance between the two classes. The proletariat, however, “announce[s] the dissolution of the existing social order” (23); they do not seek simply to ameliorate it. When the proletariat denounces the existing social order, it is “declar[ing] the secret of its own existence, for it is the effective dissolution of this order” (23). When the king calls the people his private property, he is simply declaring that the owner of private property is king. This entire system of determining sovereignty through ownership, specifically sovereign ownership of the people, is what the proletariat are uniquely able to overthrow. Marx brings us to the moment at which people take back the attributes and capacities they have projected on to the state, to the sovereign, and to God. Marx has

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transformed the criticism of religion into the criticism of the political order. He concludes the essay by recalling his opening arguments about the criticism of religion: “The emancipation of Germany is only possible in practice if one adopts the point of view of that theory according to which man is the highest being for man” (23). It is no longer the case that the king or God are the “highest being. ” People are only fully emancipated, Marx insists, when they recognize themselves as rightfully occupying that place—a realization that is at once religious and political.

Notes 1 2 3

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See in particular Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841) and The Essence of Religion (1845). All emphases in citations are original, unless otherwise indicated. Wendy Brown helpfully reminds us that Marx’s conception of religion differs in its “source and its sustenance” from ideology, which is a “cloak for power generated by power itself ” (Brown 2014: 114–15). This reading of Marx brings him into conversation with a contemporary line of inquiry into secularism developed by anthropologist Talal Asad. Critics of secularism, Asad notes, often try to expose the religious underpinnings of what is ostensibly secular society. These critics work to show that what we take to be secular is not truly secular: the religious persists in ways to which we are blind (see Asad’s reading of Michael Taussig in Formations of the Secular [Taussig 2003: 22–3]). Marx reverses the flow of this critical stream. Rather than seeking out theological influences in ostensibly secular, political institutions, Marx argues that the criticism of religion is central to understanding political institutions and their operation. This idea that inert objects can assume (or in this case, be given) a surprisingly lively appearance returns in Marx’s later work, most famously in his discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital where the commodity of the table ceases to be wood and “changes into a living thing” that “stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will” (Marx 1976: 164). See Wendy Brown (2014) for a reading of this passage of Capital that demonstrates how Marx draws on the criticism of religion to explain this mysterious life commodities appear to have in capitalism. Brown argues the religious criticism that features so prominently in Marx’s early writing remains central to his later work, which are often read (in the wake of Louis Althusser) as the work of a scientifically-minded political economist.

References Asad, T. (2003), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford CA : Stanford University Press. Brown, W. (2014), “Is Marx (Capital) Secular?” Qui Parle 23(1): 109–24. Feuerbach, L. (1989), The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot, Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Feuerbach, L. (2004), The Essence of Religion, trans. A. Loos, Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

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Marx, K. (1972a), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, ” in R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: Norton, 11–23. Marx, K. (1972b), “On the Jewish Question, ” in R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: Norton, 24–51. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin.

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The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844) Judith Grant

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 was written by a very young Karl Marx, and not published until after his death in 1883. Even then, the work was published only in bits and pieces and in several different versions beginning in 1927 (Musto 2015: 234). In 1998 all the notebooks and extracts were finally published together in their entirety (239). The work begins with discussions of political economy that would seem familiar to anyone with even a passing understanding of Marx. It covers topics such as wages and the division of labor (Marx 1988: 19–34), profits, monopolies, rent, and the relations between big and small capitalists (43–5), as well as engagements with arguments related to the classical political economists Ricardo and Smith (59–68). However, the most unique and controversial sections are located later in the work, and have to do with the concepts of “human” and “nature. ” Debates about the manuscripts can be largely understood as related to two issue in this later section. First, issues pertaining to the philosophical orientation of this section and its seeming divergence from Marx’s later preoccupations with the critique of political economy and capitalism. Second, issues pertaining to his analysis of human beings as a species and the remarkably transformed conception of nature that emerges out of it. By some readings, The Manuscripts are said to embrace the very humanism that Marx is known to have railed against in his later works, most notably, in his critique of Feuerbach, and in the German Ideology. Those who read Marx this way claim that his analysis in the Manuscripts is not materialist because it describes a concept of “human” that is not materially grounded and does not acknowledge class difference. Marx is read as veering in the direction of an essentialist or transcendentalist understanding of “human, ” and as having given in to a crude humanism. This would be surprising, indeed, considering that in a few short years Marx would fiercely and elegantly denounce idealist versions of humanism in both the “Theses on Feuerbach” and the German Ideology. In these later works, Marx singles out Feuerbachian humanism precisely for its lack of materialist foundation, and consequently for its reliance on an idea of a trans-historical human “essence. ” Marx wrote in his “Theses on Feuerbach” that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual, ” but is “the ensemble of social relations” (Marx 1845: n.p.). How then, some Marxists have 9

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asked, can this 1844 work be made consistent with Marx’s own criticisms of humanism in both the “Theses on Feuerbach” and the German Ideology? This question of Marxian humanism was investigated definitively by French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser. Althusser famously argued that there is a radical rupture or “epistemological break” in Marx’s work that occurs in 1845, and is expressed most clearly in the posthumously published German Ideology. Therefore, one ought really to speak of two stages of Marx’s thinking. The first stage, Althusser argued, was dominated by idealist Hegelianism. In the second stage, Marx came to understand humanism as ideology, and turned his attention wholly to political economy. In Althusser’s conception, Marx’s early writing (including the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) can be dismissed as the work of an immature scholar who had yet to develop the truly innovative part of his corpus. The later Marx devoted himself to a critique of political economy (Althusser 1964: 219–47) that abandoned the category “human” in favor of class analysis, moving from an ideological to a scientific register. The debate about Marxian humanism and the status of the Manuscripts within the corpus of Marxism has been brewing since the 1930s. Soviet publications of the work downplayed what they saw as the democratic humanism of a young Marx because it stood in stark contrast to the economic determinism of Soviet Marxist orthodoxy. Lukacs’s attempt to reinvigorate Hegelian Marxism by arguing that it was the true orthodoxy is certainly a nod to this controversy. Likewise, certain later New Left ideas that posit a link between capitalism and alienation can be traced to this work, a connection that has been written about extensively by Bertell Ollman (1971) among others. Against Althusser’s reading of Marx as having radically broken with the humanism of the Manuscripts, stands the earlier work of Lukács as well as that of the Frankfurt School, with Herbert Marcuse perhaps the clearest advocate of the value of Marx’s early thought. In his 1932 review, Marcuse argues that the Manuscripts develop a critique of capitalism enacted through a distinctly philosophical lens. Far from something one ought to dismiss as youthful folly, this philosophical understanding provides a critical foundation for the later political economy (Marcuse 1972: 5). As Marcuse writes, “the revolutionary critique of political economy itself has a philosophical foundation, just as, conversely, the philosophy underlying it already contains revolutionary praxis” (4). The political economy of Marx, Marcuse argued, involves “the whole of man” (2). The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts does indeed present a kind of humanist argument, as Althusser and others have observed. However, Marxian humanism contains some key factors that distinguish it from other humanisms. While Althusser offered many transformative and highly illuminating readings of Marx, he misses the distinct and genuinely profound quality of Marx’s humanism. What Marx offers is an historicized humanism that is also an important critique of the idea of nature as well as human essence itself. Marx argues that it is man’s nature to create himself as a species, and in so doing, to change, not only his own nature as a species, but to change nature itself.1 In short, Marx rejects essentialist claims about human nature with the remarkable argument that even the foundation upon which human being supposedly stands is mutable and historical. In fact, he claims, nature and man are enmeshed in one another. As man changes, so

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does nature, and the idea of an “organic” nature that exists apart from mankind is an ontological error. One cannot speak either of a static, transhistorical “man” or of a static “nature” across time and culture. Thus, he points to the fallacy which undergirds much of western philosophy, including theories that treat reason or acquisitiveness as inherent human qualities. There is no nature that defines an a priori mythical man. Man is a part of nature, but man also drives, conditions and transforms nature. This is because man is a self-creating, infinitely changeable and mutable species. Neither man nor nature is stable, and one cannot properly speak of nature as foundational any more than one can speak of man as transcendent. This is what Marx means when he says that nature is man’s “inorganic body. ” This argument is framed by the observation that classical political economy understands man only as it has been created by political economy itself; i.e., solely as a worker, as abstract labor and capital. It is this framing observation that links Marx’s early work to the later political economy, which is that the capitalist political economy has no notion of man apart from the form it has taken under capitalism. However, if man-under-capitalism were the true mankind, there would be no way to conceptualize revolution because human beings would already live in a world that perfectly matches their nature (as state of nature theorists, such as Locke, argued). Marx counters this understanding of man by looking at the production of the human being as an object under conditions of capitalism (Marx 1988: 72)—i.e., as a being conditioned by a process which he terms “objectification. ” This human-produced-as-object is in a relationship of “estrangement” to the product he produces (72). Here, Marx expounds upon his important and often misunderstood discussion of nature, and also gives an explanation of one of the most central concepts of the Manuscripts: the discussion of “alienation” (74). Marx argues that labor under capitalism is external to the worker, i.e., it does not “belong to his essential being” (74). Human beings are only truly human (i.e., free to create themselves as they please) when they are not engaged in labor for another. Thus, the worker feels wholly itself only when it is not working. Whereas animals (when not enslaved to humans) work only to satisfy their needs, the human worker under capitalism is precisely “not working to satisfy its own need, ” but is being used as a means, a tool, and an instrument to satisfy the need of another, i.e., to satisfy a need external to itself. As such, the worker is alienated from the product of its labor; it experiences the product of its labor as an externality, and as an object that has power over her or him. Second, workers are also alienated from their own labor activity, which they experience as not belonging to themselves. This is significant because it is partly the human ability to connect thought and action in labor as life activity that enables it to transform itself as a species. In selling this power to another, man loses what is most fundamentally human about itself, and is reduced not to the status of an animal, who at least has control over the satisfaction of its own needs, but to that of a machine. A third aspect of estranged labor begins from the crucial, but complex, idea that “man is a species being. ” Understood as a species, Marx argues that species-man lives on “inorganic nature” (Marx 1988: 75); “inorganic” because it does not exist as an object on its own, but only in relation to man. Insofar as nature is man’s means of life and its life-activity (76), a dialectical linkage appears in which nature is part of man’s body, as

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much as man is a part of nature. At first, nature appears to man only as a means of sustaining his needs, just as it appears to any other animal. However in all other nonhuman animals, the means of life and “life activity” are one and the same thing. In contrast, human life activity is not synonymous with means of life insofar as it extends far beyond the acquisition of basic survival needs. In fact, man creates more fully and freely in the absence of such needs. Indeed, Marx argues that the only truly uniquely human trait is the creation that occurs when one is free from material need, and true freedom can only occur when basic needs have already been met. This is, of course, Aristotle’s argument, a problem Aristotle solves by arguing in favor of slaves who can provide necessities and thus create a state of freedom for owners in a polity. In contrast, Marx’s argument is that this ability to create freely with intentional direction and for the universal good as opposed to creating with a view to one’s basic needs, means that man is a species man. As such man has the potential to be universal, the socially produced version of itself as species. The universality of man is manifested in the “universality which makes all nature his inorganic body” (75). Man’s conscious life activity distinguishes himself from animals: “It is because of this that he is a species being, ” and it is because man is a species being that he is a conscious being. Man’s own life is an object for his creation, not in some individualistic way, but as a species that creates the objective world through its life activity (76). In so doing, man changes nature along with himself (77). Unlike other animals, man produces even when he is free of physical need, and it is only then that he is freely producing. This is what Marx means when he says that “An animal produces only itself, while man reproduces the whole of nature” (77). Further, man knows how to produce not just for itself, but for every species. Finally, man produces not only for need, but also for law and beauty. Man duplicates himself both in consciousness and in material life (77). The promise of a genuinely universal man is ravaged by capitalist social relations, wherein estranged labor turns man’s species being, “both nature and his spiritual species property into a being alien to him” (77); capital estranges from man both its own body as well as external nature. Man and nature become mere tools for the accumulation of wealth, and man’s “spiritual essence, his human being” is destroyed (78 Marx’s emphasis). In a grand example of immanent analysis, Marx concludes that, “We took our departure from a fact of political economy—the estrangement of the worker and his production” and analyzed estrangement and alienation as “facts” of political economy (79). He then looks at the standpoint of the non-worker (80). It remains a great irony that people have difficulty understanding Marxian humanism precisely because of the extraordinary success of his own critique of humanism, and his claims about social constructivism. This has made it almost impossible to conceptualize a notion of universality that takes particularity into account, as Marx does. The fragmentary nature of the Manuscripts is exemplified by sections that begin in the middle of a sentence, but are nonetheless effective: “(C)apital is man wholly lost to himself, ” Marx writes (85). “Production does not simply produce man as a commodity the commodity-man, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a spiritually and physically dehumanized being” (86 Marx’s emphasis). Marx’s analysis of the human

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stands in contrast to that of classical political economy which, Marx writes, does not care about humans except insofar as they are commodity-man, or workers. Thus, it misunderstands the concept of human, even thinking of the term as a matter of “indifference” or as “harmful” (87). We thus see the production of human activity reduced to capital and, along with it, nature (87). “Land as land” is resolved into “rent as land, ” and “the power of industry over its opposite is at once revealed in the emergence of agriculture as a real industry” (88). Marx writes, “under the semblance of recognizing man, the political economy whose principle is labor is really no more than consistent implementation of the denial of man . . . ” (94). Thus, its theory of man is anti-human, replacing man with wealth as the agent of history (95). Marx concludes by linking his humanism to revolutionary praxis and communism. “Communism, ” he writes is, “the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return become conscious . . . the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man . . . Communism is the riddle of history solved” (Marx: 102–3). Marx qualifies that what he at first terms a “return” is a teleology. “For socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labor, nothing but the coming-to-be of nature for man” (113). Thus, the species nature of man and man’s authentic relation to nature are in potential; a potential that can be actualized through revolutionary praxis and made concrete in communism.

Note 1

I am using the word “man” here because it is the word Marx uses, and there are important theoretical reasons to not make a feminist adjustment to this term and use “mankind” or “human” instead. Marx’s use of the word “man” is highly complex and purposeful. In one sense, it is true that he does use the word to be genderless so as to mean “mankind” or man as species. But he is also quite clear that he using the word in its gendered sense. In fact, he considers women to be part of nature. I do not take this to be derogatory, but rather to be Marx describing an empirical reality about women’s treatment and station at a given moment in history. This is why Marx writes in this very work that it is from man’s relationship to women that one can judge “man’s whole level of development” because it reveals the “extent to which man’s natural behavior has become human” (Marx 1988: 102). For a full discussion of the importance of Marx’s early work for an understanding of his views on gender, see Grant 2015.

References Althusser, L. (1964), “Marxism and Humanism, ” For Marx, New York: Verso, 219–47. Grant, J. (2005), “Gender in the Works of the Early Marx: The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ” Rethinking Marxism 7(1): 59–77. Marcuse, H. (1972) [1932], “The Foundation of Historical Materialism, ” Studies in Critical Philosophy, tr. Joris De Bres, London: NLB , 1–48. Marx, K. (1988) [1844], Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, New York: Prometheus, 13–141.

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Marx, K. (1845), “Theses on Feuerbach, ” available on line at https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm (accessed May 20, 2017). Musto, M. (2015), “The ‘Young Marx’ Myth in Interpretations of the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 43(2): 233–60. Ollman, B. (1971), Alienation: Marx’s Concept of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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“Theses on Feuerbach” (1845–1846) Andrew Pendakis

Like so much of Marx’s work, the notes that would come to comprise the text we know today as the “Theses on Feuerbach” were only published posthumously. They were written by Marx in Brussels in the spring of 1845. He had been forced to leave France by an order of expulsion signed by François Guizot and had just begun to conceive with Engels the project that would eventually become The German Ideology (1845– 1846, not published until 1932). Engels discovered the theses in an old notebook a few years after Marx’s death, after which he edited and published them as an appendix to his own 1888 book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy. The text’s quiet, early death contrasts dramatically with the eminence of its afterlife. Thesis eleven—“the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”—is surely among the best known of Marx’s proclamations (Marx 1992: 423). Not only have the “Theses” been widely read, many readers have seen in them the earliest stirrings of Marx’s mature theoretical position. Engels described it “as the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new [historical materialist] world outlook” (1949: 6). French Marxist Louis Althusser likened the theses to a series of “lightning flashes” that break through the long “night” of idealist history and momentarily illuminate a “new world” (Althusser 1970: 30). What Marx discovers, says Althusser, are the (residually ideological) seeds of an objectively true account of history, a discovery as critical to the formation of our understanding of society as Newton’s was to physics. Engels writes of the “Theses” that “they are notes hurriedly scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not intended for publication” (1949: 6). From the perspective of our moment, a time in which scholars are enjoined to “publish or perish, ” Marx’s lax relationship to the fate of his own writings can perhaps appear naïve or lazy. But it is essential to understand that Marx’s work is simultaneously driven by something we postmoderns no longer really understand: an active, concrete will to truth. This is not truth for its own sake (as in Aristotle) nor Truth capitalized as an eternally existing and fixed set of entities or principles (as in Plato). Rather, Marx desires truth—an account of the historical order of things—as a means to radically re-make that order. He wants to understand the world, because he thinks that it can only be effectively changed on the condition that it is first the object not of a vague emotional reaction, but of a rigorous (though never comprehensive or final) theoretical account. Only a subject 15

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convinced that writing is a means to truth and truth a means to historical justice would be as quick as Marx was to leave the things he’d written on the way to Capital unread in dusty notebooks. At work in Marx’s relationship to the texts he writes is a halfconscious, half-submerged materialist conception of writing: write to know, to selfclarify, and then to directly intervene in things themselves. Marx’s thought in 1845 was in the process of emerging from the shadow of Ludwig Feuerbach, a philosopher widely read in Germany in the early 1840s and a figure of central importance to Marx and his cohort at the time. For Feuerbach, the central task facing modern philosophy was the completion of the critique of religion. His position combined humanist, atheist and materialist elements, calling openly for the“humanization of God” and for the “dissolution of theology into anthropology” (1966: 5). Feuerbach’s core claim—one derived in part from his reading of Hegel—was that all of the properties traditionally associated with God—volition, rationality, goodness, infinitude, and so on—are projections of powers latently characteristic of human beings themselves: “in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature” (1855: 21). Rather than turning their attention to values located outside this world, Feuerbach enjoined a generation of German thinkers to ground their thought in the sensual, material reality there right before their eyes: “The new philosophy makes man—with the inclusion of nature as the foundation of man—the unique, universal and highest object of philosophy” (1966: 70). No longer would Man the worm be humiliated in the shadow of a God. “The human alone,” wrote Feuerbach, “is the true and the real” (67). Enlightenment humanism spoken with a thick Hegelian accent, Feuerbach’s materialism had about it an existential strain that separated his work from both British empiricism and French mechanism and which also anticipated the intoxicating sense of escaped limits that would later characterize the best works of Nietzsche. The “Theses” work to position Marx both within and against the kind of materialism avowed by Feuerbach. Marx is, to some extent, a traditional materialist in the sense that he takes as axiomatic a principle of monist immanence. Like Hobbes before him, he sees the notion of a “spiritual substance” as inherently oxymoronic: nothing denoted by theological conceptions of the spirit exists. There are no Gods, nor are there secret animating principles at the heart of things. Like Baron D’Holbach or Julien Offray de La Mettrie, both prominent eighteenth-century French materialists, Marx believes that what exists is instead just nature, a natural totality that is material through and through, comprised of laws and properties that are consistent and discoverable by science. Marx, however, rarely says any of this, showing little interest in epistemology (or even “method”) and next to none at all (at least after his dissertation on ancient atomism) in what is traditionally understood by the category of ontology. Philosophers sometimes take issue with this refusal on Marx’s part to fully ground his position metaphysically: why would he not take the time, perhaps beginning like Aristotle at indemonstrable first principles, to lay out logically his case for the existence of an objective material world? Why does Capital not begin, like Spinoza’s Ethics, with an account of what exists in the broadest possible sense? Where are the proofs we need to know for certain that God was never there? We can only properly address these philosophical reservations once we have understood the ways in which Marx is emphatically breaking with the philosophy of

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Feuerbach. To clearly distinguish Marx’s materialism from that of Feuerbach, scholars have traditionally distinguished between Marx’s “materialist conception of history” (or his “historical materialism”) and Feuerbach’s “humanist” or “essentialist” materialism. Though Marx himself never used the term “historical materialism, ” it remains an extremely useful way of thinking about the difference separating him from the myriad philosophical materialisms that preceded him. Marx writes in the first thesis: The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. 1992: 421

For Marx, though Feuerbach has escaped the mystifying heaven of Christianity, he errs in making sensuousness itself into its own kind of apolitical eternity. Feuerbach correctly asserts that the world is filled with sensuous material objects and that the task for humans is attending intently to this world of real material bodies and things. He’s right to orient our gaze away from holy books, prayers and priests and to re-focus it on actually existing material reality. For Marx, however, Feuerbach turns the material itself into a cloudy heaven, a category that is abstract and vague, and that doesn’t properly acknowledge the roles that politics and economics play in the life of humans. A certain Aristotelian residue continues to exist undiscerned at the heart of Feuerbachian materialism. For Marx, this remainder hypostasizes or fixes the human in the form of an essence, one primarily defined by a contemplative attitude to what exists. Aristotle— like Confucius or Plato before him—assumed that thought revealed the structure of what is and laid down the coordinates for human action on the basis of our knowledge of this structure. Thought unveiled reality and with it a map of humanity’s proper place in the order of things. The world takes the form of an object laid out before the gaze of a knower who discovers rather than invents (or changes) things. Marx sees this contemplative essentialism at work to varying degrees in ancient materialism, in modern English empiricism and political economy, as well as in French mechanist materialism. Whatever the distance separating Aristotle from Feuerbach both attribute to the human an energeia or actuality, a mode of being in which humanity becomes positively what it had only ever been virtually. In other words, this is a state in which humans are finally, actually themselves. What this residual Aristotelianism obscures, says Marx, is history, the ontologically decisive role played by politics in the construction and reproduction of humanity’s “essence”. This is what Marx calls in the first thesis “sensuous human activity” [menschliche sinnliche Thätigkeit] or “practice” [Praxis] (1992: 421). Humans collectively, in and through their social and economic activity, create themselves, but not under circumstances of their own choosing. Human beings are born into definite relations of production that circumscribe and define them even as the mode of production they’re born into is sustained in the last instance by nothing more than the will and activity of human beings themselves. What unites the various forms of contemplative materialism is their tendency to locate the decisive ontological entities or processes outside the human.

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In the sixth thesis, Marx famously asserts that the “essence” of the human is nothing more than the “ensemble of social relations” [das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse] that have defined it and that might yet, through politics, define it anew (1992: 423). Whether obscured by the stirring of ancient atoms, by the qualities of the objects encountered by the understanding or by the idea of an “essence” thought to be “inherent in each individual, ” these theories fail to see that what matters in the end is human productive activity, not atomic or psychological constitutions or essences thought to innately pre-form us (423). This insight does not deny that we are constructed out of atoms, but rather denies that it is on the terrain of the atomic (or chemical, or biological) that what is defined as human potential is determined. Marx does not deny we are objects among other objects, but he insists, against materialisms old and new (including today’s object oriented ontology), that we are in some real way special. Humans are objects without a proper place in the order of things, objects that change everything, comprehending and radically re-making the world of things in which we live. What historical materialism offers is an account of human reality which frees it from every Christian (but also every scientific) determinism. At the same time, Marx’s historical materialism functions as a knowledge of the specificity of historical conjunctures. Just as heaven obscured the sensuous, the abstractness of the sensuous obscures the decisive nature of human praxis as well as the specificity of the knowledge required to understand and transform reality. Human sensuous activity alters the natural world, transforming landscapes, dotting them with cities and radical new technologies, but it is “practical-critical activity” [praktisch-kritischen Thätigkeit] or “revolutionary” activity that Marx claims in the first thesis actually re-makes this world (1992: 422). Scientists can invent technologies that change our relationship to things, but they could never invent behind our backs (and without our participation) a technology of freedom. Revolutionary activity is for Marx a very special kind of action, one we might describe as ontological so as to emphasize the depth and breadth of the change it names. Such activity transforms its object—the natural and political world—as much as it does the political subject or agent enacting this change. Marx writes in the third thesis that “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice” (422). This action is purposive, rational and oriented towards an historically concrete conception of justice, but is also in-process, critical and subject to revision in the light of knowledge gleaned on the risky terrain of struggle. Marx later accents the nature of this process in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “proletarian revolutions [. . .] engage in perpetual self-criticism, always stopping in their own tracks; they return to what is apparently complete in order to begin it anew, and deride with savage brutality the inadequacies, weak points and pitiful aspects of their first attempts” (Marx 2002: 35). This conception of revolutionary activity combines an Enlightenment skepticism towards everything merely believed or inherited with a Machiavellian capacity for decisive, effective, context-specific action. Nothing could be further from the way Marx imagines the revolutionary, than contemporary clichés about the dogmatic and unimaginative personality of militants. In the third thesis, Marx takes aim at materialisms that fail to recognize the critical link between freedom and collective, active self-emancipation: “the materialist doctrine

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concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself ” (Marx 1992: 422). Socialist reformers like Robert Owen and empiricists like James Mill knew well that humans are the products of their own circumstances. In this, they admirably left behind an earlier conservative view of a reality that naturalizes human ignorance or suffering, and which idealizes class-based systems in which the naturally best rule and the congenitally worst obey. These liberal and socialist reformers, however, confine their understanding of “circumstances” to the field of individual education, leaving the human being circumscribed by the anthropological coordinates of bourgeois political economy. Marx challenges the aristocratic assumptions of a worldview that admits that people are changed by their circumstances (evoking calls for more and better education), but which then leaves the general structure of capitalism untouched. He also cheekily calls into question the power relationship implied in the gap between the bourgeois teacher and its squirming working-class pupil. For Marx, there remains in this disparity a troubling echo from the conservative aristocratisms of Plato or Aristotle. For Marx, the educators themselves need to be educated because their positions ignorantly reproduce the mystifying ideological parameters of capitalism. What Marx says here echoes what I said above about the nature of revolution: it is never a question of something imposed from above, the educated few liberating an ignorant many, but a process undertaken by the people themselves, a process of organized struggle and self-reflection that Marx makes clear can be catalyzed, but never completed, by a party. The many must free themselves in and through transformative revolutionary praxis. Paradoxically, it is through this revolutionary praxis that the possibility of an historical human “essence” actually appears. The latter, says Marx in thesis six, is not an “internal, dumb generality which naturally unites [. . .] individuals” (1992: 423). Rather, if the human is to have anything like an “essence, ” a genuine living unity, it would have to be politically invented and universalized through the concerted historical struggles of actually existing individuals. Our “essence, ” in other words, would have to be collectively invented (and politically sustained) to exist. Marx, in breaking with Feuerbach, is at the same time breaking with philosophy as an historically delimited human practice. This is the thrust of thesis eleven and the reason why we will never find in Marx a proof for the non-existence of God. By rejecting such proofs, as well as many of the conventions of traditional philosophy, Marx pushes the modern philosophical critique of theology into a political critique of philosophy itself. For Marx, a philosophy that spends its time attempting to prove the existence of the material world, or the non-existence of God, is fated by the kinds of problems it sets for itself to never actually encounter reality in any meaningful way. After Marx, there is no starry sky above us (to be explored by ontology), and no starry sky inside us (to be plumbed by psychology), only the infinitely complex cosmos of capitalism. Though philosophy can appear to us as a neutral forum for the distribution of positions, what Marx’s work shows is the way that a certain fundamental sameness exists beneath the seeming plurality at work on its surface. This sameness is the contemplative orientation to the world of a being that has been unconsciously disciplined by the very process of becoming a philosopher. Philosophers propose new ways of seeing or being in the world, and new interpretations of things, but often they

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propose these ideas away from a concrete (historical materialist) sense of the specificity of our moment and, from within a naïve conception, the relationship between theory and practice. Human beings are not, says Marx, the sum of their theories, but a complex amalgam of ideas, material interests and historically inherited social relations that are at once fixed and flexible. Seeing the world anew does nothing to change the world if the material interests which codify everyday behavior are left unchanged. Marx enjoins us to leave behind philosophy, not to escape thought or to exchange thinking for brute action, but in order to pursue the creation of a world in which philosophy is no longer a delimited human practice, but, rather, something woven into every molecule of social life. This free republic of philosophy, called by another name, is communism.

References Althusser, L. (1970), Reading Capital, London: New Left Books. Engels, F. (1888 [1949]), Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Foreign Languages Publishing House. Feuerbach, L. (1841 [1966]), Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Feuerbach, L. (1843 [1855]), The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans, New York: Calvin Blanchard. Marx, K. (1845 [1992]), Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Penguin Books/New Left Review. Marx, K. (1852 [2002]), Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Terrell Carver, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The German Ideology Anna Kornbluh

Reading The German Ideology isn’t easy. The difficulties are not only conceptual, but also formal, starting with the text’s decidedly mixed genre. Genres are conventions for writing and reading, but in 1845 there weren’t any conventions for writing a critique of ideology or a manifesto for materialist method—let alone a hybrid of the two—and thus there certainly weren’t conventions for reading all the many experimental fragments that Marx and Engels composed in that vacuum. The text we have received today, 500 pages in two volumes and eight uneven parts, was never published in its authors’ lifetimes, and indeed was constantly rejected for publication, such that the authors left it, as Engels said, “to the gnawing criticism of the mice. ” It was finally, although partially, published in Russian in 1924, in German in 1926, and fully published in 1932, though not appearing in an English translation until 1969. The publication difficulties surely reflect the text’s genrelessness, since it contains uneven multitudes; sections of it are as polished as the later works with which Marxist readers are better acquainted, while sections of it are basically unreadable. Within this unevenness, the project of the text is twofold: “to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience . . . in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy” (Marx 1998) and to formulate an alternative. However, while Marx and Engels succeed in laying out the materialist alternative, they struggle to succinctly prove that idealism is ubiquitous and wrong. The text’s genre-bending bears the strains of this struggle; the 500 pages incorporate essays, manifestos, declarations of philosophical tenets, logical equations, sustained jokes, lists of maxims, uninterrupted catalogues of uninterpreted quotations, shorthand notes for future elucidation, gnomic slogans unadorned and play-written scripts for the dramas that might take place among idealists after the crush of critique. All these different types of writing strive to illustrate the pervasiveness of ideology, and strive as well to implement the critique of ideology as a new genre. Conceptual questions formulated in this text continue to animate political and philosophical debate today: What is ideology? Can ideology be documented or evidenced in quantitative fashion? Is hegemony a necessary dimension of ideology or not? Is there an outside of ideology? How do science, philosophy and intellectual history each expose ideology differently, and each entail their own ideologies? The first point to make about The German Ideology, then, is that the very undigestibility of its 21

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form actually enhances its content, since Marx and Engels set out to improvise and model the practice and attitude of materialist critique, which is and should be a manifold, poliform, unfixed and roving activity. Critique on this account is an unfinishable business, a praxis merging caustic polemic and projective utopianism with the raw intensity of the picket line. On its face, the text is organized by grappling with three different figureheads of idealism: Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. These three sections are disparately constructed. The first assumes everybody knows Feuerbach’s corpus (perhaps because Marx had already drafted the Theses on Feuerbach just before sitting down with Engels to work on The German Ideology), so it goes straight to a rebuttal: presenting a fairly systematic articulation of materialism, including some principles of communism. But the second and third sections do not take Bauer and Stirner as being known, instead documenting their positions with multipage excerpts from their works, and interspersing rebuttals less systematically than in the first section, often in sarcastic comebacks. Even though the three sections are, therefore, inconsistent, the three thinkers together are used to demonstrate the widespread tendency in modern German thought to an overly religious, overly Christian approach to philosophy (Marx and Engels had already begun to oppose this tendency in The Holy Family). In The German Ideology, religiosity signifies the social and political clout of idealist thought, and its power to cement complacency for the status quo. More than being epistemically flawed, idealism is at the same time politically suspect, colluding with the powerful, and this is why it warrants critique. Showing how dominant frameworks for knowledge wield their own kind of power— how “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (Marx 1998: 67)—was not the kind of self-reflection in which philosophy had much engaged before Marx. The unprecedented quality of the enterprise would seem to explain much of the strangeness of this text. Compared to the earnestness of Kant or the seriousness of Hegel, the voice of Marx is satirical, iconoclastic and epithetic. He makes extreme pronouncements like: “Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves” and “Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away” (Marx 1998: 29). This ironic tone of Marx’s voice is compounded by his use of other voices: at times in the text, he talks in the voice of “Saint Max,” or of Hegel, or of bourgeois theologians, political-economists and bureaucrats. He stages confrontations in which he ventriloquizes both sides of a disagreement. He even pretends to be Don Quixote. The effect of all these voices is a performance of materialism as a different kind of language to idealism; if idealism is rigorous philosophical argument and common sense, materialism can mark its difference by taking on a shape at odds with both of these. It jostles among many voices many perspectives; it jousts with hegemony; it jumps with jokes, and it doesn’t always make common sense. All these things that leave The German Ideology hard to read, that define it as different from previous philosophy, motivate Louis Althusser’s reading of it as a beginning of the “end of philosophy.” The first section is the most widely read, most commonly cited, and the most compelling, clearly asserting “premises” and “methods” of materialism, and doing so in

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a way that overcomes the habitual opposition of idealist Hegelian spirit and materialist Epicurean sensuousness. Marx’s materialism carves out a space oblique to the philosophy it criticizes, inventing itself as a para- or anti-philosophy (as Balibar and others have called it), a kind of knowing that positions itself on different footing than hitherto existing philosophy, whether idealist or materialist. This footing leads philosophy away from speculative looking inward (how does the mind know what it knows?) and toward quasi-empirical looking backward (how have human beings produced their own lives, including the production of knowledge?). Moreover, this new materialism admits that its way of knowing is “conjunctural” (Balibar 2017: 6), situated at the nexus of existing political conditions and the utopian desire to transform them. Materialism differs from idealism not only because one is matter and the other mind, one historical and the other ontological, one vibrant action and the other “the realm of pure thought, ” but because one directly avows the material effects of its own knowledge project while the other represses them. “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality” (Marx 1998: 36). The ideology of the idealists, the German ideology, is the forgetting of their own conjuncture. It substitutes for the particular contingency of human history a motionless universality of humanity. Materialism differs from idealism stylistically, insofar as it requires a paraphilosophic genreless genre to produce its critical insights into how philosophy functions socially— it requires what we might call “the form” of ideology critique. However, it also differs substantively, insofar as it produces philosophical insights about different subjects other than idealism’s elaboration of spirit. The trick for any reader of The German Ideology is to keep both of these balls in the air: whenever it seems as though we can be sure that materialism is specifiable stuff that contradicts idealist generalities, this kind of surety has to be rejected, since materialism is also a procedure for moving beyond what appears as knowledge, a procedure for negating what everyone knows, a procedure for critique. So let us consider a few substantial formulations of materialism offered up in The German Ideology, but consider them as points of departure rather than destinations in themselves. Materialism emerges as distinct from idealism in its approach to constructing knowledge as the writing of human history from the vantage point of the collectively lived experience of social relations, rather than from the vantage point of the individual consciousness. It shares the idealist pursuit of writing the future progress of ideas (the Bildung of Geist), but starts out from ideas’ contingent history (the species-being of thinking animals). The opposition between the collective and the individual, the plural and the singular, is at least as important as those dividing sociality and consciousness, living and thinking, and practices and ideas. Where Young Hegelians take consciousness as the first premise of any judgment of the world, Marx offers a counter starting point, which he notably pluralizes—it is not a single fact nor a single strata of matter but a plural “First Premises of a Materialist Method, ” and the premises directly concern plurality: “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals” (Marx 1845: 37). Marx’s manifest materialism launches thought from actual living individuals that are plural in their definite social relations. The point

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is not just that embodiment precedes consciousness but that plurality too is prior; the field of relations always precedes individuals. Crucially, this plurality is on the move. Immediately after this first premise, the next sentence already completely confounds the very notion of a premise: “Thus the first fact of the case to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature” (Marx 1998: 37). A premise is not selfidentical, but is divisible into premise and fact, a premise is not a point of departure but a promontory to be “established, ” “stated ” and “verified”; the very registering of the material is already a representational process charged with mental and aesthetic qualities. The question of “organization” rests on this fulcrum of fact and representation. Plurality is social, the first fact is aggregation, a quantity to which corresponds the quality of organization. Material “organization” is the elementary, primal fact, the ratification of which distinguishes a materialist from an idealist. To focus on the organization of human relations, Marx proposes the major idea of “the mode of production”: “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself ” (Marx 1998: 47). Any mode of production combines “means of production”—materials like natural resources or technology—with “relations of production”—the social and political relationships among the people whose material lives are being produced. Crucially, for the materialist, “organization” is elementary, but any given organization is contingent, resulting from “the first historical act. ” There is no “natural” mode of production, but it is a natural activity of human beings to produce their collective “material life itself ” and, within this universal activity, Marx notes a common denominator: all modes of production involve some sort of “division of labor. ” The division of labor differentiates man from woman, town from country, private property from communal property, local economy from alternative economy, production from circulation and, vexingly, intellectual activity from physical activity. Ideas are “at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, ” but because those material activities tend towards division and specialization, ideas come to be disjoined from the mode of production of life. This disjoining, aka ideology, is inevitable, as Marx explains in analogizing the division of labor to the anatomy of the eye: Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real active men, as they are conditioned by the definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything other than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical lifeprocess. Marx 1998: 42

Humans naturally divide the herculean labors of producing their own existence, and this division precludes individuals from directly perceiving the whole of their

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existence, that is, its contingency owing to the historical particularity of its mode of production. Materialism is the study of ideology, that intellectual predicament of human physical life—but it cannot attain a place outside of ideology. There is no realm of pure matter to be dwelled in as against the realm of pure thought, for the matter of human life is already contingently—which is to say, ideologically—produced. In contrast to the German ideology, Marx identifies that kind of intellectual activity capable of understanding its own genesis within the division of labor as “the writing of history” (Marx 1998: 37). After establishing its premises in the relations of living individuals and the contingency thereof, this materialist writing of history turns toward building out a schema of concrete history, comprised of different epochs (ancient/tribal nomadism, middle ages/feudalism, early modern/mercantilism and modern/industrial capitalism) and motored by the division of labor itself. Communism comes into relief as both an implied future epoch and the historiographic attitude through which new futures become possible—as, in other words, a synonym for “materialism. ” Communism beholds the contingent material history of the division of labor (unlike idealism or ideology, which behold ideas in the abstract, or contingency as inevitability), and from that assessment of contingent division it “turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality which communism is creating is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals themselves, insofar as reality is only the product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves” (Marx 1998: 90). If idealism comprises ideas abstracted from social relations, there would also be a touch of idealism within any materialism that naturalized the division of labor and the trajectory toward capitalism and the world market. Against this idealist materialism, materialist materialism considers the unnaturalness of nature itself, the particular veins of nature that problematically stand in for universal nature. “The communists in practice treat the conditions created up to now by production and intercourse as inorganic conditions, without however . . . believing that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating them” (Marx 1998: 90). The division of labor is natural, yet it begets the divisions of exploitation and caste inequality and the division between the productive forces and existence, divisions which unjustly thwart the full production of human beings. The materialist revolution in philosophy, like the communist revolution in society, is not the fetishistic ecstasy of the concrete matter of nature, but on the contrary the restless “ridding itself of all the muck of the ages, ” and the projection of new ideals “fitted to found society anew. ” The German Ideology, in all its generic muck, remains an inventive gambit of which we cannot yet be rid.

References Althusser, L. (2007), Philosophy of the Encounter, London: Verso. Balibar, E. (2017), The Philosophy of Marx, London: Verso. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1998), The German Ideology, New York: Prometheus Books.

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5

The Communist Manifesto (1848) Peter Lamb

In 1846 several Brussels-based radicals, led by Marx and Engels, formed the Communist Correspondence Committee with the aims of producing propaganda and organizing like-minded European activists. Meanwhile, the interests of the Paris and Londonbased League of the Just, which had abandoned its Christian-based communism, came to resemble those of Marx’s committee. In the following year the two groups merged to form the small but international Communist League, which commissioned Marx and Engels to produce a campaigning pamphlet (Stedman Jones 2017: 212–22). Having written two drafts Engels wrote to Marx in November 1847 anticipating a discussion at their next meeting a few days later. “Give a little thought to the Confession of Faith, ” Engels asked with reference to the first draft, suggesting that “we would do best to abandon the catachetical form and call the thing Communist Manifesto!” (Engels 1982a: 149). Engels said he would bring the other draft with him. This second draft, entitled Principles of Communism, was, he conceded, presented “in simple narrative form, but wretchedly worded, in a tearing hurry” (149). Engels was being rather unfair to himself; the drafts were actually very focused and concise. It is, however, the case that his dry and unemotional prose was hardly attractive. Marx resolved this problem as he rewrote the manifesto quickly, readying it for publication in February 1848, a date that coincided with the beginning of the revolutionary uprisings in Paris and in a number of other European cities. Marx’s lively, rhetorical style gave the pamphlet a sense of urgency, transforming it into a very readable and quotable document (Martin 2015). The style which Marx employed indicates that he took very seriously Engels’s suggestion to call the pamphlet a manifesto. It was transformed from a set of questions and answers into a lively political document, written with the intention of rallying the proletariat at a time when revolutionary uprisings were brewing (Lamb 2015: 4). Before turning to a few examples of that style it should be noted that, although Marx’s prose was crucial to the Manifesto’s eventual reputation as one of the great political works of the modern era, some key points are clearly traceable to Engels’s drafts (Engels 1976a; 1976b). For example, the following sentence in Principles of Communism makes concisely a point that Marx’s far more stylistic prose presented at greater length. The proletariat was a class, Engels (1976b: 341) suggested, which, “procures its means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labor and not from the profit derived 27

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from any capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose whole existence depend on the demand for labor, hence, on the alternation of times of good and bad business, on the fluctuations resulting from unbridled competition. ” Engels thereby laid firm foundations for Marx’s skillful creativity. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels pulled together ideas they had together been formulating and articulating since they began to collaborate in 1844. One such idea posited history as primarily determined by class struggle—at each stage of history one or more social classes harnessed the productive forces and thereby benefited from an exploitative socio-economic system at the expense of other classes. Marx and Engels began to argue that the present, capitalist-dominated stage of history was the last to be characterized by class struggle. A revolutionary proletariat would harness the forces of production which had been fostered and developed by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie would thence be removed from the position of economic power that enabled it to exploit and oppress the proletariat. In countries such as Germany where capitalism was at a relatively early stage of development, Marx and Engels advised, the proletariat would first have to participate in revolutions to empower the bourgeoisie and thereby assist the development of productive forces (Blackburn 1977: 29–34). The progression, driven by those forces, through different historical periods characterized by relations of production would later be considered by Marx as a guiding thread in his studies and described by Engels as the materialist conception of history. The Manifesto begins with a reductio ad absurdum devised by Marx to attract the attention of readers who may have been familiar with folk tales such as those the Brothers Grimm had popularized over the past few decades. “A specter is haunting Europe, ” Marx declared on the first page, “the specter of communism” (Marx and Engels 1976: 481). He exposed the absurdity of the tendency, hugely successful at the time, to frighten ordinary people away from communism and socialism by making these movements appear to be driven by evil. Thereafter, several prominent themes can be found. First is the epoch of the bourgeoisie, in which the capitalist class dominated the economy, society and thereby politics. Marx predicted this epoch would be brought to a close when productive forces became so advanced that the exploitation on which capitalism relied would no longer be tolerated. This brings us to the next broad theme: class struggle and the proletarian revolution. Members of the proletariat would need to organize themselves to transform the exploitative society into one which would meet their needs. Differences in the composition of classes meant this process would vary among countries. Another theme of the Manifesto is the weaknesses and shortcomings of previous and existing variants of socialism. In the 1840s socialism was considered to be a movement for moderate reform. Marx and Engels used the term “socialist” pejoratively to describe various reformist literature including that of the anti-bourgeois aristocracy. Scathing of almost all the previous socialist and communist arguments, theories, schemes and plans, they divided them into three broad, progressively less backward looking categories. The first was reactionary socialism, which comprised feudal socialism, petty-bourgeois socialism and German or “true” socialism. “True socialism” adopted French revolutionary ideas and applied them universally in a philosophically and politically empty manner. Concerned with abstract “Man” and the universal love of

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mankind rather than real human beings, the “True” socialists lacked revolutionary enthusiasm and precision. The second category was conservative or bourgeois socialism, which sought to redress social grievances and thus to preserve the existing bourgeois society. The third category was critical-utopian socialism or communism, which opposed the present conditions of the working classes, but failed to see what needed to be done politically. In attempting to achieve social harmony, the “Utopians” such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Henri-de Saint-Simon, did not recognize that class struggle was unavoidable. Even the more radical, non-Utopian communists such as Gracchus Babeuf who did voice proletarian demands advocated crude leveling and austerity, failing to understand that productive forces needed to be sufficiently advanced for communism to work. These socialists and communists, Marx and Engels argued, neglected the realities of the class-dominated epoch and misunderstood the needs of ordinary people. Marx and Engels outlined the post-revolutionary measures that would be required to begin to meet those needs in a transitionary stage before a fully communist society could be built. These measures amounted to state control and planning of vital production and services, restriction on property ownership and substantial, graduated taxation. Anybody considering how to bring about this transitionary stage would first, however, need to be persuaded that capitalism should be replaced by means of revolution. Hence, before turning to the post-revolutionary measures, Marx and Engels stressed that the Communists, who possessed the necessary theoretical knowledge of class dominance, class struggle and the historical process, were also “practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others ” (Marx and Engels 1976: 497). For the purpose of illustrating class dominance one of the most well-known sentences in Samuel Moore’s widely published English translation of the Manifesto (approved by Engels) was created: “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels 1976: 486). This was obviously a rhetorical generalization designed to ensure the Manifesto served as a political intervention, a campaigning pamphlet, indeed a manifesto. As is the case with the best political rhetoric, the Manifesto was creative with what appeared to be the truth; it did not purposively project an untruth. Marx and Engels were not presenting the bourgeoisie simplistically as an undivided class. A close look at this alongside another English translation helps verify that, very carefully and effectively, they were presenting a quite sophisticated argument. Consider the word “committee” in Moore’s translation. A committee acts with a degree of autonomy from those it represents (Fraser and Wilde 2011: 194). The state might take the side of one segment or more of a class over others, but in a way that thereby manages the interests that all in the class share (Hoffman 1993: 174–6). Terrell Carver translates the sentence as: “The power of the state is merely a device for administrating the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels 1996: 3). Although a device does not necessarily have autonomy, the stress on common interests is in this translation still crucial to the sentence. Further verification of his understanding of the bourgeoisie as less than monolithic appears a few pages later. Moore’s translation stresses that, in its struggle, the proletariat “compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by

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taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself ” (Marx and Engels 1976: 493). Similarly, according to Carver’s translation, the proletariat “compels the recognition of workers’ individual interests in legal form by taking advantage of divisions within the bourgeoisie itself ” (Marx and Engels 1996: 10). Marx saw the bourgeoisie as a complex class with divisions but, nevertheless, one with a broader purpose. Having drawn attention to the positions of the competing classes in the existing society, Marx and Engels turned to a weakness in the bourgeois hold on power, intending thereby to show that the dominant class could be unseated. Hence, another widely-known phrase in the standard Moore translation of the Manifesto was the following: “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 1976: 487). It is questionable whether this made the most effective use of Marx’s point, or whether it actually detracted from its potential efficacy. Carver’s translation, which says in effect the same thing but in less vague terms, is as follows: “Everything feudal and fixed goes up in smoke” (Marx and Engels 1996: 4). Marx believed the bourgeoisie would soon undergo its own demise. It could continue to exist only by “constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society” (Marx and Engels 1976: 487). The process of revival could not go on indefinitely. Eventually the old, seemingly permanent relations would be swept away along with their prejudices and opinions. The words “All that is solid melts into air” thus generate a mental image of vaporization and a sense of the temporary nature of each situation as the rapid development of productive forces takes its course. As this process progressed, Marx and Engels argued metaphorically, the bourgeoisie forged the weapons which would be used against them. Generating an image of witchcraft they said the bourgeoisie was “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Marx and Engels 1976: 490). The bourgeoisie had “called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons . . . the proletarians” (Marx and Engels 1976: 490). The bourgeois had thus produced “its own gravediggers” (Marx and Engels 1976: 496). The Manifesto was, nevertheless, distinctly unsuccessful in its authors’ attempt to persuade the workers that the moment to turn those weapons against the bourgeoisie was rapidly approaching. After the uprisings of 1848 had been quelled, even Marx and Engels lost interest in the pamphlet. Indeed, although in April 1848 Marx received notice from Engels (1982b: 173) that he was hoping soon to finish an English edition, it would be two more years before Helen Macfarlane’s English translation was published in the Red Republican newspaper. Unfortunately for Marx and Engels, the first of three instalments in November 1850 began by stating that a “frightful hobgoblin” (Marx and Engels 1850: 161), rather than a “specter, ” was haunting Europe. The pamphlet, furthermore, had little impact in the two decades that followed (Herres 2015: 26–7; Carver 2015: 68–9). The Manifesto was revived in 1872 with a new edition (Carver 2015: 68–74). The German authorities had inadvertently rekindled interest by lifting censorship in order to claim that August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht drew on the pamphlet in what was portrayed in court as their subversive conspiracy (Lamb 2015: 134–5).

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As further new editions were published after Marx’s death in 1883, the Manifesto gradually gained notoriety as a Marxist classic—something of which its authors would never have dreamt in 1847–1848 (Carver 2015: 74–6). The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 triggered the most prolific circulation of the Manifesto as the Soviet Union and its international communist network made cheap editions and reasonably priced selected works available for purchase in much of the world (Lamb 2015: 137–9). The Soviet regime, however, replaced the call for self-emancipation of the proletariat with the authoritarian guidance of a centralized vanguard (Townshend 2015: 94–8). The Manifesto was published in many English language editions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, often with introductions by eminent scholars including Harold Laski, A. J. P. Taylor, Eric Hobsbawm, Frederic L. Bender, Jeffrey C. Isaac and Gareth Stedman Jones. One of the more imaginative editions, published in the USA with an introduction by the American Marxist William Schneiderman (1948), included large, cartoon illustrations on every other page of the abridged Manifesto, portraying particular points in twentieth-century pictorial terms. In such ways its value in terms of rhetoric and propaganda continued to be utilized. Perhaps the most interesting passage for many readers of the Manifesto today is that in which it identifies the early stages of what is today described as globalization. In the bourgeoisie’s search for new markets that would, unbeknown to the particular capitalists, enable it to thrive and indeed survive, the bourgeois system expanded around much of the world. In this process Marx identified both progressive tendencies and the maintenance of the old exploitative ones in an uneasy relationship. The bourgeoisie had “through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” (Marx and Engels 1976: 488). As it did so the old industries, organized within narrow geographical boundaries, went into decline. New wants were encouraged and satisfied by the importation of products from locations around the world. Although it criticized Western aggression the Manifesto in parts reflected the patronizing and Orientalist Western culture and attitudes of the day. The bourgeoisie had, one sentence declared, drawn “all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization” (Marx and Engels 1976: 488). As mentioned above, the Manifesto did, however, identify a progressive aspect of international capitalism. “National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness” had through improvements in production and communication “become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature” (Marx and Engels 1976: 488). More generally, its authors identified exploitation as a core feature of capitalism, the concealment of divisions between exploiting and exploited classes and the roots of the current processes of globalization very clearly and concisely. Some of the features of international capitalism which they discussed are still recognizable today: constant expansion and variation of exploitative processes without regard to human consequences; demonization of the left in response to challenges to class dominance; the stunting of productive forces which could benefit people in need; the treatment of human beings as commodities; but also the portents of capitalist demise. The Manifesto is thus still worth reading in the twenty-first century.

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References Blackburn, R. (1977), “Marxism: Theory of Proletarian Revolution, ” in. R. Blackburn (Ed.), Revolution and Class Struggle: A Reader in Marxist Politics, 25–68, Glasgow: Fontana. Carver, T. (2015), “The Manifesto in Marx’s and Engels’s Lifetimes, ” in T. Carver and J. Farr (Eds.). The Cambridge Guide to the Communist Manifesto, 67–83, New York: Cambridge University Press. Engels, F. (1976a), “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Volume 38, 96–104, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Engels, F. (1976b), “Principles of Communism, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Volume 6, 341–57, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Engels, F. (1982a), “To Marx, 23 November 1847, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Volume 38, 146–50, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Engels, F. (1982b), “To Marx, 25 April 1848, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Volume 38, 172–4, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Fraser, I. and Wilde, L. (2011), The Marx Dictionary, London: Continuum. Herres, J. (2015), “Rhineland Radicals and the ‘48ers’, ” in T. Carver and J. Farr (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to the Communist Manifesto, 15–31, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hoffman, J. (1993), “Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto, ” in M. Forsyth, M. Keens-Soper and J. Hoffman (Eds.), The Political Classics: Hamilton to Mill, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lamb, P. (2015), Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto: A Reader’s Guide, London: Bloomsbury Martin, J. (2015), “The Rhetoric of the Manifesto, ” in T. Carver and J. Farr (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Communist Manifesto, 50–66, New York: Cambridge University Press. Marx, C. [sic] and Engels, F. (1850), “Manifesto of the German Communist Party, ” in The Red Republican, 9 November, 16 November and 23 November: 161–2; 170–2; 189–90. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976), “Manifesto of the Communist Party, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Volume 6, 477–519, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2006), “Manifesto of the Communist Party, ” in T. Carver, (ed.), Marx: Later Political Writings, 1–30, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneiderman, W. (ed.) (1948), The Communist Manifesto in Pictures, San Francisco: International Book Store, Inc. Stedman Jones, G. (2017), Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, London: Penguin. Townshend, J. (2015), “Marxism and the Manifesto after Engels, ” in T. Carver and J. Farr (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Communist Manifesto, 87–104, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Gavin Walker

Perhaps the most widely influential text in the Marxian corpus, beyond Capital and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, which was first published in the New York based Die Revolution in 1852 (see also the exhaustive publication history of the text in Marx 1985a: 679–705). Grounded in a withering historical and political analyzis of the Napoleonic coup of 1851, the Eighteenth Brumaire (named hereafter, EB ) remains a decisive source for the development of Marxist theoretical analyzis. It offers a remarkably prescient analyzis of the development and structure of fascism as well as a rich theoretical understanding of the nature of historical time, and of the tendency of political cycles and forms to repeat. In addition, it offers us a different image of Marx’s thought, one not grounded in the kind of critique of political economy we find in Capital, but in the possibility of a specifically Marxist theory of politics as such. EB occupies a crucial place in the field of Marxian thought precisely because it is less a theoretical text laying the foundations of an entire continent of social critique as it is a conjunctural analyzis that showcases the remarkable force of Marx’s thought when applied to a specific political, historical situation. It is doubtful that any text of Marx’s besides Capital has had such a wide critical influence, perhaps even surpassing that of Capital itself, at least in the common-sensical circulation of its insights. And yet, EB is not a text that is easily understood, not least because it is in no way a general, universal theoretical work, but instead a highly specific intervention into the historical record. In a sense, then, part of the importance of EB is to show us Marx’s analytical grasp of the conjuncture and how such a grasp, formulated on the basis of his extensive theoretical work, can produce political positions and problematics—modes of conceptualizing problems themselves—from out of the historical breadth of a wellknown scenario, the Napoleonic coup of 1851. In historical terms, the first work of social-political history ever written on the 1851 coup d’état (see Marx 1985a: 680), EB has come to hold a much broader significance in contemporary social and political thought than a mere response to one narrow social scenario. Why should this be the case, and what is it about EB that has made it such a decisive text when its object is ostensibly so removed from the political scenario of our moment? 33

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In answer to these questions, and while there are innumerable readings and “protocols of reading” that have been applied to and have been inspired by EB , for our present purposes three broad categories of analyzis ought to be kept in mind. First, EB is a text that deals with the nature of historical time and the historical development of societies. It is an intervention into our received and dominant way of thinking the relationship between the past and the present, an intervention that emphasizes, above all else, the presence of the past, not as the past, but as social forms that we inherit in the present: characters, narratives, modes of creating oppositions and complementarities, linguistic forms for our social reality, and forms of thought through which ideology intersects with material interest. Second, EB is a text about the vicissitudes of class society and about the ways in which class, while being a determining force on the social forms in which people live, is also a hazardous, fluctuating category into which politics and ideology intervene, one frequently bisected by the national-popular. Third, EB is a text that performs its own politics, not only in its analyzes, but also in its mode of argumentation, its mode of identifying problems, and its mode of reading sociopolitical forms. These forms are always changing in concrete content, but often retain formal determinations initially difficult to detect.

I In the opening lines of EB , one of the most quoted phrases in the history of social thought, Marx writes: Men make history but not in circumstances of their choosing; they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Marx 1979: 103; 1985: 96–7

This phrase, which concentrates within it an entire theoretical concept that subtends the text as a whole, is exemplary of EB ’s influence. If, in fact, the Marxist position within political thought has always been to oppose two tendencies—broadly speaking, anarchism on the left and liberalism on the right—it is this basic point of Marx’s work that produces the most effective development. As much as Capital or Marx’s other mature economic writings, EB remains a crucial text for us today, insofar as it is one of the very few treatments in the entire Marxian corpus that gives us a clue as to what a Marxist theory of politics proper would look like. In some ways EB is the quintessential text in the Marxian corpus that outlines a theory of politics that would later be known as “dentro e contro” (“within and against”) in the trends of operaïsmo. “Within and against” would thus signify a specific type of position characteristic of the Marxian intervention: neither a refusal of the current conjuncture and its forms of technical and social development, in the style of the aristocratic anarchism of Bakunin or of the fascist solution, nor an uncritical immersion into the situation and its status quo,

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characteristic of liberalism’s hallucination of endless development and a normative end of systemic contestation. “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, ” Marx argues, “but only from the future. ” As David Harvey once pointed out, it must strip off all superstition in regard to the past, else “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” and converts the cathartic tragedy of revolution into the ritual of farce. In pitting himself so mercilessly against the power of myth and the aestheticization of politics, Marx, in effect, affirms their remarkable powers to stifle progressive working-class revolutions. Bonapartism was, for Marx, a form of “Caesarism” (with all its classical allusions) that could, in the person of Louis Bonaparte assuming the mantle of his uncle, block the revolutionary aspirations of the progressive bourgeoisie and the working class alike. Thus did Marx come to terms with the aestheticization of politics, that fascism later achieved in far more virulent form (Harvey 1990: 109). This aestheticization of politics, so characteristic of fascism in the twentieth century, has its logical antecedents in the scenario depicted in EB , which explains why the text has remained such a decisive piece of political commentary, even has laid the foundations of the Marxian theory of politics. The structure of EB , in fact, itself is an attempt to critically explode this tendency towards aestheticization in its own literary form, and therefore also an attempt to think the warped mimetic operations of the historical process, revealing something critical about what we might call Marx’s transcritical method, moving in the parallax between the material and the ideological, in the sense that the Napoleonic coup of 1851 essentially “dressed in the linguistic costume of the first French revolution” (Karatani 2003: 142). In this transcritical sense, pointing out the gap between the ideological appearance (a tragicomic repetition of the Revolution) and its material reality is insufficient; rather, Marx treats the gap itself as the object of analyzis, showing us how ideology comes to function at a material level, and in turn, how the “infrastructure” or “base” conceived of by historical materialism is not some scientistic or purely physical conception of matter, but a concept of matter as a total social process. From time to time figures in the Marxist tradition, such as Ernst Bloch in his Die Erbschaft dieser Zeit, have pointed out that EB can be taken as a political diagnosis and a “prescient delineation of pseudo-revolutionary, proto-fascist forces in modern society to which more orthodox forms of Marxism have often been blind” (LaCapra 1983: 289), echoing Harvey’s identification of the realm of the aesthetic intervention in politics with the development of fascism. The role of Bonaparte—“to repress, as long as possible, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist economy by way of state intervention”—furnishes the theoretical centerpiece of the text, for this reason, Louis Bonaparte, as a figure, “became the enduring prototype for all counterrevolutionaries, including twentieth century fascists” (Karatani 2003: 143). In a sense, it is no accident that Marx’s historical intervention speaks to a certain existential unevenness that characterizes the social formation under capitalist relations, an historical “alternation” of processes rendering the class balance at any given time a tense space in which even minor struggles for hegemony can spill over into periods of dramatic social change. “If people were mindful enough of class tensions, ” Harvey

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remarks,“they might invoke, as Marx did in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a sense of ‘alternating time, ’ in which the outcome of bitter struggles must always be seen as a precarious balance between class forces” (Harvey 1990: 261). Thus, the historiographical innovation of EB is both to critically demolish a personal, character-driven vision of the historical process centered on “historical personalities” (Tomba 2013: 35), but also to materially ground the politicality of history and the consequences of the appearance or representation of political determinations under a character mask (Charaktermaske)—the apparent forms through which a particular order expresses its dominant “types” in the socio-linguistic terms of the existing situation. Rather than being the harbinger of historical change, Louis Bonaparte, this “mediocre and grotesque character” (Marx 1985: 57), in fact functioned for political culture as a sort of heroic (but farcical) representation that crystallized an entire series of political-social determinations within it. This quality of EB , of always treating the social surface, neither as mere “false consciousness” nor in a simple, credulous manner before the appearance of the given or the status quo, remains one of the crucial theoretical-analytical innovations of the Marxist field. It is precisely why the textual analyzis of EB by later Marxist thinkers—who discerned its emphasis on ideology as a real material force, on the dream as the concretization of social drives, on peculiar reversals and inversions in narrative that sustain our social “character” masks, among other points—has been so closely linked to the development of psychoanalysis, particularly Freud and eventually Lacan.

II In Gregor McLennan’s terms, EB is the text that “best shows” Marx’s “ability to bring together” two distinct levels of analyzis in one form: that of “class interests” or “the longterm allegiances of individuals qua—members of classes to a system of economic production, ” and the specific “objectives that classes, qua political fractions or forces, work for in political conjunctures” (McLennan 1981: 163). It is this polyvalent nature of class—and of the struggles for hegemony that characterize its ideological manifestations—that provide us with Marx’s unique insights in EB. Let us now quote at some length from Marx’s text itself: While the parliamentary party of Order, by its clamor for tranquillity, as I have shown, committed itself to quiescence, while it declared the political rule of the bourgeoisie to be incompatible with the safety and existence of the bourgeoisie— by destroying with its own hands, in the struggle against the other classes of society, all the conditions for its own regime, the parliamentary regime—the extraparliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, by its servility toward the President, by its vilification of parliament, by its brutal maltreatment of its own press, invited Bonaparte to suppress and annihilate its speaking and writing section, its politicians and its literati, its platform and its press, so it would then be able to pursue its private affairs with full confidence in the protection of a

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strong and unrestricted government. It declared unequivocally that it longed to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling. Marx 1979: 172–3; 1985: 166

The bourgeoisie, trapped by its double role—both needing to provide the political anchor in the state for capitalist society and yet needing to carry the logic of capital to its developmental zenith—ends up eliminating itself as a block on capital’s development. If Bonaparte’s class “character-type” was the petty shopkeeper (strictly speaking, “Bonaparte represents a class, the ‘small-holding peasantry’” (Marx 1979: 187)), the logical conclusion of Bonaparte’s political action was to worsen, if anything, the coherence of the bourgeoisie as a class. Isolated, atomized and believing, above all, in the sanctity of the individual with his heroic, entrepreneurial spirit, the bourgeoisie is “incapable of enforcing its class interests in its own name. ” “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented, ” while this representative, “must at the same time appear as their master” (187). This “master” is needed to protect the bourgeoisie, to gift it providence when the development of capitalism turns against them, to “send them rain and sunshine from above” (188). In essence, the entire Bonapartist sequence reminds us that in the bulk of our political experience of the capitalist state we remain in the gap between the two levels of class analyzis pointed out by McLennan: class interests and class objectives. The bourgeoisie arrogates to itself the protection of the nation, the policing of the social sphere, and the worship of individual achievement, but these very categories rebel and undermine the bourgeoisie when the class interests, to which it is condemned by capitalism, come into contradiction with their political objectives. After all: Louis Bonaparte represents the peasants only in the electoral mode, and consequently their class interests are by no means represented by him. And if Bonapartism irupts within history as a “crude peasant joke, ” it must be admitted that the peasants, by supporting the nephew a half-century after the policies of the uncle have stopped conforming to their class interest, are as much the victims as the perpetrators of the joke. Mehlman 1977: 16

EB is a remarkable text insofar as it provides us a case-study of the classical question of politics, why does the entire spectrum of classes in the modern state routinely participate in electoral politics against their own “interests, ” at least inasmuch as those interests are ordained by the capitalist mode of production? This point leads us to the remarkable prescience of Marx’s analyzis of what has come to be called “populism” in the context of EB : And this extra-parliamentary bourgeoisie, which had already rebelled against the purely parliamentary and literary struggle for the rule of its own class, and had

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx betrayed the leaders of this struggle, now dares after the event to indict the proletariat for not having risen in a bloody struggle, a life-and-death struggle on its behalf! This bourgeoisie, which every moment sacrificed its general class interests, that is, its political interests, to the narrowest and most sordid private interests, and demanded a similar sacrifice from its representatives, now moans that the proletariat has sacrificed its ideal political interests to its material interests. [. . .] I refer, for example, to the already quoted Economist, which as late as November 29, 1851, that is, four days prior to the coup d’état, declared Bonaparte to be the “guardian of order, ” but Thiers and Berryer to be “anarchists, ” and, on December 27, 1851, after Bonaparte had quieted these “anarchists, ” is already vociferous about the treason to “the skill, knowledge, discipline, spiritual insight, intellectual resources, and moral weight of the middle and upper ranks” committed by the masses of “ignorant, untrained and stupid proletaires. ” The stupid, ignorant and vulgar mass was none other than the bourgeois mass itself. Marx 1979: 173; 1985: 166–7

It would be difficult to find a more prescient passage in EB for our time after the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and the concomitant rise of populism, or the “nationalpopular” as a category of political analyzis. The bourgeoisie, which has always utilized the state apparatus as a mechanism to enrich itself narrowly, even undermining its own social basis (innumerable examples of the neoliberal turn can be linked here), finds itself shocked in a rather dewy-eyed fashion to discover that the proletariat is not ready to sacrifice its own material interests (means of subsistence) to politically support the higher-minded projects of the bourgeoisie. As Marx incisively notes, there is only one political project that is axiomatically excluded from the modern capitalist state: proletarian material interests themselves. However, while EB uncannily resonates in our moment, some, for example Dominick LaCapra, read it as an anomalous text in the Marxian corpus. They oppose it to the mature Marx of Capital, by suggesting that the category of parasitism, central to EB as a text, causes problems for the later Marx’s supposed “productivism. ” Such a perspective takes the mistaken view that Marx’s mature critique of political economy remains wedded to a notion of social development, always dependent on the development of the productive forces, rather than one centered on the primacy of class struggle. But even beyond these erroneous criticisms, EB is, strictly speaking, a text that cannot be easily conflated with Capital, for the simple reason that it is a document above all of political strategy and conjunctural analyzis. Marxist documents on political strategy are few and far between, save for Marx’s writings on the First International, the Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy, the reports to the Delegates for the Provisional General Council, and others. What we have in EB is an extremely incisive, subtle attempt to think transversally between positions, to formalize (though never in a “normative” manner disconnected from the historical flux) positions as disparate as “first complete the parliamentary power, only to overthrow it, ” and “all revolutions to the present have done nothing but perfect the machine of the State.” (See Balibar 1997: 163 for an important commentary on the tension between these positions on the “political apparatuses” of the state, law and equality.)

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III Alain Badiou once reminded us not merely to repeat “the Marxism of drowsiness and the classroom” (Badiou 2009: 24), but instead to “do Marxism” (198). EB is one of very few texts in the work of Marx itself that shows us how to “do” Marxism in this sense— how to act politically. How to analyze a conjuncture; how to understand the function of ideology; how to see the sedimented history of the class struggle in the congealed and disguised representations that stalk the realm of the political; how to see the personalities that emerge in the social field, not as ahistorical individuals, but as personifications of class forces and social processes; how to take concrete positions in the current situation; and how to understand the possibility of pushing forward the social motion of the conjuncture into a potential instance of social revolution: the work is, in this sense, a kind of political user’s guide to conjunctures. EB is in many ways a text of a time of defeat, a reversal of fortune for the proletariat, and a reminder that history’s unfolding is never a linear model of progress, but full of relapses at every turn. It’s in this sense that EB remains for us an actual text, a text that is not limited to the circumstances of 1851, any more than those historical circumstances themselves were limited to the personage and character mask of the figure of Louis Napoleon. Rather, in EB, we find an attempt to “build a tradition from past attempts at liberation that is able to join in a fight in the present” (Tomba 2013: 41). Our present moment is no more free of tragicomic despots than the 1850s, despots whose character masks tend to obscure the mass of social contradictions that produced such personalization-effects of history in the first place. Rather, it is the protofascist call to race, blood and soil, and the appeal to the sphere of the national as a bulwark against capital’s undermining of its own social basis that becomes the object of analyzis in EB, and which basically remain our political horizon nearly two centuries later. Rather than see EB as a simple pamphlet, in contrast to the “great” works such as Capital and the broad project of the “critique of political economy,” represented by Marx’s mature theoretical work, EB “should be read as the critique of national politics” (Karatani 2003: 151), a critique more relevant than ever in our time of resurgent nationalisms after globalization. Engels in 1885 wrote of his friend’s remarkable work that “the fact that a new edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire has become necessary, 33 years after its first appearance, proves that even today this little book has lost none of its value” (Engels 1990: 302). We ought to say that in 2018, 166 years since the first publication of EB, it has still lost none of its value. Nor has it safely ossified into a mere “classic.” Instead it has been restored to its danger, its conjunctural power and political acumen at a moment when Bonapartism, at the political level, conjoined to a rapacious and immiserating development of capital at the economic level, stalks our world renewed. In thinking of the origin, maintenance and hopeful dissolution of the current status quo, and in formulating political projects to hasten its demise, we could do much worse than to read, re-read and re-write for ourselves the lessons of the Brumaire.

References Badiou, A. (2009), Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels, London: Continuum.

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Balibar, E. (1997), La crainte des masses: Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx, Paris: Galilée. Engels, F. (1990), “Preface to the Third German Edition, ” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26, Moscow : Progress Publishers, 302–304. Harvey, D. (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Karatani, K. (2003), Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Boston: MIT Press. LaCapra, D. (1983), “Reading Marx: The Case of The Eighteenth Brumaire, ” in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marx, K. (1979), “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11, Moscow : Progress Publishers, 99–197. Marx, K. (1985), “Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, ” in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe Abt. I, Bd. 11, Berlin: Dietz, 96–189. Marx, K. (1985a), “Werke, Article, Entwürfe Juli 1851 bis Dezember 1852”, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, Bd. 11 (Apparat), Berlin: Dietz. McLennan, G. (1981), Marxism and the Methodologies of History, London: Verso. Mehlman, J. (1977), Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Tomba, M. (2013), “Political Historiography: Re-reading The Eighteenth Brumaire, ” in Marx’s Temporalities, Leiden: Brill.

7

The Grundrisse (1858) Nick Nesbitt

The truth includes not only the result but also the path to it. Marx “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction”

Buried in the mountain of notes and manuscripts that Marx left behind upon his death in 1883 were seven untitled notebooks, composed between August 1857 and May 1858. Following Marx’s revision of a small portion of these notes for incorporation into his 1859 “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ” Marx never again drew from this massive work, his first substantial foray into the “critique of political economy, ” as the subtitle of Capital defines Marx’s magnum opus.1 Indeed, the notebooks appear never to have been read by Engels, and only two very brief extracts were published by Karl Kautsky in Die Neue Zeit in 1903–1904: the critique of Bastiat and Carey and the similarly concise, but far more influential “Introduction, ” written in 1857 (Hobsbawm 2008: xxi). After their discovery in 1923 by David Ryazanov, director of the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute, Paul Weller prepared an initial Soviet edition that finally appeared in 1939–41, but which passed unnoticed throughout the war. Thus, it was not until 1953 that a widely accessible East German edition made the contents of these notebooks available, nearly a century after their initial drafting. How then to define this mass of notes amounting to some 900 pages in its published version, which Marx made only for his own self-clarification? While these pages, since called the Grundrisse, are often claimed to be and, indeed, even superficially appear to be the “first draft” of Capital, such a definition says little about the singular nature of these texts, and in fact is fundamentally inaccurate.2 While it would be impossible to do justice here to both the labyrinthine complexity of these notes as well as the mass of commentary that has reflected upon them since 1953, the presentation below will seek to give the reader a sense of: (a) the singular nature of the Grundrisse in its relation to the subsequent drafts and published versions of Capital; (b) an overview of the structure and reception of the text; and (c) a sampling of its principal themes, focusing especially on those materials that found no subsequent development in Marx’s mature thought.3 Marx indicates, in his 1873 Postface to the second edition of Capital, the name most appropriate for the notes constituting the Grundrisse; they are a Forschungsweise or 41

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“inquiry” (literally, a method or “way” of research), to be distinguished from the Darstellungweise (method of presentation) of the results of that research.4 Unlike all the subsequent drafts and published versions of Capital (as well as the 1859 “Introduction”), the Grundrisse consists not in the systematic, deductive presentation of the hidden but real categories that structure capitalism, but rather in a seemingly arbitrary and empirically determined investigation that simply begins in media res with a critique of the writer Marx happened to be reading at the moment; specifically, a critique of the Proudhonist economic journalist Alfred Darimon’s theory of crises. Many commentators have recognized, however, beginning with Nicolaus and Rosdolsky, that this contingency is, in fact, among the principal virtues of the text. Among the Grundrisse’s many merits is the way it allowed readers to follow, as if in real-time, the deployment, development, mistakes and self-corrections of Marx’s intellectual investigations.5 “The Grundrisse, ” Nicolaus writes, “is the record of Marx’s mind at work, grappling with fundamental problems of theory. The Grundrisse and Capital have opposite virtues of form. The latter is the model of the method of presentation, the former the record of the method of working” (1973: 25, 61).6 Following Marx’s brief but crucial “Introduction, ” to be discussed below, the Grundrisse in its published form is divided into two principal chapters: one “On Money, ” the second “On Capital, ” followed by the brief extract on Bastiat and Carey. Reproducing Nicolaus’ analytical contents list alone would exceed the bounds of this article; that said, the remit of the Grundrisse can be summarized succinctly: it constitutes Marx’s initial theoretical, scientific inquiry into the fundamental category of his critique of political economy, the theory of value.7 The twists and turns, the false starts, ambiguities and shattering moments of insight across its 900 pages all share this aim, following which Marx could begin the unremitting but never-completed project of giving a scientific form of presentation, as he understood it, to his findings.8 The two chapters seek to describe the laws of money and capital, not as transhistorical essences, as in the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo, but rather via the analyzis of capitalism as a historical system of social relationships. The chapter on “Money” in particular is marked by digressions, repetitions and false-starts, seeking both to formulate the results of Marx’s economic research over the preceding decade, while also serving as the basis for an aborted pamphlet that Marx hoped to publish (quickly) in the context of the 1858 economic crisis (Nicolaus 1973: 13). It begins with an extended polemic against the Proudhonist labor-money system of chits, an analyzis that is of significant interest both historically and insofar as it constitutes Marx’s most extensive and systematic critique of Proudhonian socialist theory, the theoretical results of which would only be very briefly footnoted in Capital. Among the aspects of Marx’s monetary theory developed in this chapter, commentators disagree in particular whether his “symbolist” theory is a regrettably “imprecise, ” idealist remnant of Marx’s initial critique (Nicolaus 1973: 16), or an initial invocation of monetary theory within the totality of the reproduction process (Bellofiore 2013: 37). Marx’s primary accomplishment in this chapter is to investigate value and its necessary representation as money as a social relationship rather than trans-historical essence, in a critique that seeks to encompass the totality of its various functions and roles (Nicolaus 1973: 16).

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Among the many milestones the Grundrisse marks in the development of Marx’s thought, perhaps the most important is the first appearance of what Marx himself identified as his signal contribution to the critique of political economy: the distinction between labor and labor-power, and the two-fold nature of the commodity as both use-and-exchange value, each understood as historical features, specifically immanent only to capitalism. The commodity “labor, ” Marx argues, “is not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from [the laborer] at all, thus exists not really, but only in potentiality as his capacity, ” and thus Marx names this potentiality “labor power” (Marx 1973: 267, 282).9 The Grundrisse also witnesses the invocation of the categories of absolute and relative surplus value; of constant and variable capital; a coherent theoretical defense of collective wage bargaining and unions; and the critique of Ricardo’s theory of profit via an initial elaboration of the categorial distinction between profit and surplus value (Nicolaus 1973: 21, 49, 25; Dussel 2008). At the very end of this manifold investigation, in its final paragraph before breaking off, Marx begins to summarize and clarify the results of his investigation of the founding categories (commodity and value) with which he will henceforth begin all subsequent drafts and editions of Capital. In its single incomplete paragraph, entitled “Value, ” Marx recognizes that his inquiry is now complete, and so he reminds himself: “This section to be brought forward. The first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity” (1973: 881. Cf. Bischoff and Lieber 2010: 41). From this point on, the nature of his research changes, and though he will continue to develop the categories of his critique, all subsequent drafts and published versions of his critique of political economy, from the 1859 Introduction on, will sustain and rework this basic finding of the Grundrisse—to begin the exposition of his critique with the basic categories of the commodity and value.10 The global publication and reception of the Grundrisse after 1953 constituted a major event in the history of the reception of Marx’s thought, one that engendered astonishing degrees of enthusiasm from the global Left. Only in these notes does Marx address, with widely varying degrees of development, the entirety of his project for a critique of political economy. They constitute, Nicolaus writes in his 1973 “Introduction”: “the most significant new development [of Marx’s writings] to appear in the twentieth century . . . the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism” (7). In the context of the post–1956 critique of Stalinism in Marxist camps globally, the Grundrisse, along with the 1844 Manuscripts, offered, as Eric Hobsbawm points out, a text by Marx that could sustain positions critical of Soviet orthodoxy and official Marxism (Diamat) from within Marx’s thought itself (2008: xxii).11 It was this enthusiasm that led Penguin books to issue this 900-page heteroclite mountain of Marx’s theoretical investigations in its mass-market paperback edition (Arthur 2010: 250). The most remarkable and polemical deployment of this critical position was undoubtedly the argument put forward by Toni Negri in a series of seminars in Paris in 1977, at the invitation of Louis Althusser, that would ultimately be titled, appropriately, “Marx Against Marx.” There, Negri argues for the actual superiority of the Grundrisse over Capital itself, as a visionary invocation of the overcoming of the social predominance of valorization and the revolutionary potential of the contemporary proletariat, a theoretical and polemical defense of “workerist” subjectivity. Rosdolsky’s 1968 book, The

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Making of Marx’s Capital, itself widely translated, lacks Negri’s flashes of insight and polemical fire, but constitutes a more methodical investigation of Marx’s text, one that, indeed, spurred a general global recognition of the Grundrisse’s significance and remains in print globally today.12 Among its many virtues is the emphasis it places upon Marx’s basic theoretical distinction between the categories of “capital as a whole” and its subsequent division into multiple, competing capitals in plural.13 The Grundrisse has often been read as a revealing and explicit source for grasping the place of Hegel’s thought in Marx’s critique. It has also revealed the beginnings of a historicized ecological critique of capitalism, one based on Marx’s research into agricultural science and his development of the historico-critical category of “metabolism, ” research that Marx would continue to develop through the 1870s (investigation of which awaits the further publication of his post–1870 research notes in the MEGA ). While the above comments indicate a few of the many themes initiated in the Grundrisse that would be further developed and deployed in Capital, it is especially interesting to note that elements of Marx’s thought only find their exposition in these pages. While they are numerous, and undoubtedly others await discovery by attentive readers, here I will only indicate the three best-known cases: the section “Forms which Precede Capitalist Production”; the 1857 “Introduction”; and the so-called “Fragment on Machines. ” In 1964, Eric Hobsbawm published, along with his own influential introduction, “Forms which Precede Capitalist Production” under the title Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. There, Hobsbawm wrote: “looking at the historical record, Marx thought that he could discern a certain number of socio-economic formations and a certain succession, ” of pre-capitalist forms that Marx famously enumerated as the Oriental or Asiatic, the ancient or Classical (Greek and Roman), and the Feudal (Hobsbawm 1964: 20). Marx’s assertions have proven to be both influential and problematic. On the one hand, as analytical categories for historical investigation, their accuracy has not withstood subsequent historical and archeological investigation. As Ellen Meiksins Wood summarizes, Marx’s “account of all three major forms were, in varying ways and degrees, misleading, when not downright wrong” (2008: 80). At the same time, it is in these pages that Marx initiates a radically new and influential mode of critical historiographic thought and inquiry, one that would come to bear the name of Historical Materialism (a term Marx never used himself). As Marx delineates the parameters of each of these pre-capitalist modes of production—against the trans-historical notions of human essence characteristic of classical political economy (i.e., Smith’s famous “propensity [of all men] to truck, barter and exchange”)— he underscores the dynamic and temporal nature of various social relations and configurations. These serve more generally to relativize and historicize the social forms of capitalism, his object of investigation. Wood argues that “in ‘Forms which Precede Capitalist Production’ . . . each system of social property relations is driven by its own internal principles and not by some trans-historical law of technological improvement or commercial expansion” (2008: 88). Against common misunderstandings of Marx’s historical method, such an argument is precisely a refutation of trans-historical

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laws and technological determinism. Instead, it is human practice and, above all, transformations of property relations that drive historical mutations in the modes of production that characterize various social formations (Wood: 89). The so-called “1857 Introduction, ”— perhaps the best-known and most commented upon section of the Grundrisse thanks to its initial 1904 publication by Karl Kautsky and many subsequent translations and republications—stands as Marx’s single substantial exposition of his method for the exposition of his critique (Musto: 2010a).14 Karel Kosík’s 1963 book, The Dialectic of the Concrete [Dialektika Konkrétniho: Studie o problematice člověka a světa], while marking one of the first significant philosophical appropriations of the Grundrisse as a whole, also constitutes an incisive reflection on the “Introduction” in particular. Working from the text of the 1953 German edition, its first chapter systematically develops Marx’s notion of the reproduction of the concrete in thought.15 For Kosík, “it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the Grundrisse . . . Capital is incomprehensible [nepochopitelný] without the Grundrisse” (123 [131], translation modified). While Kosík’s text is articulated in the language of Marxist humanism, of Sartrean “praxis, ” and neo-Hegelian production-based subjectivity, his focus on the “concrete” as a conceptual structure implies an unexpected proximity with the thinker most closely associated with a concept-based structural reading of Capital and the 1857 “Introduction, ” Louis Althusser. Althusser’s introductory chapter to the 1965 collective volume, Reading Capital, offered a brilliant close reading of Marx’s “Introduction. ” In those famous pages, Althusser grounds his polemical distinction between “the object of knowledge” and the “real object” in a Spinozan epistemology strongly influenced by the thought of Jean Cavaillès.16 In the injudicious rush since 1980 to entomb Althusser’s protean and immensely influential reading of Capital, his many insights are most often abusively reduced to the single proposition of an “epistemological break” between an early “humanist” and a mature “scientific” Marx. On this count, the Grundrisse can be turned either for or against the accused, having been taken finally to reveal the underlying ground of a Hegelian logic that will persist, under erasure, into Capital, or, conversely, to show precisely Marx’s theoretical struggle gradually to overcome this youthful theoretical legacy.17 Althusser’s analyzis of Marx’s presentation of “the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete . . ., ” in which thought appropriates for the concrete and reproduces [reproduziert] it as the concrete in the mind [geistig Konkretes] remains far more complex and suggestive than the vast majority of commentaries admit. It is, nonetheless, no small irony that one need not look as far afield as Spinoza or Cavaillès, as Althusser did, to explicate Marx’s methodological procedure and his decision to begin his exposition with a systematic deduction of the commodity-and-value forms rather than an empirical procedure. In fact, Hegel, in The Science of Logic, indicated precisely the methodological procedure Marx would adopt for all his subsequent drafts of Capital: [One must begin a scientific exposition] with the subject matter in the form of a universal . . . The prius must be . . . something simple, something abstracted from the concrete, because in this form alone has the subject-matter the form of the

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx self-related universal . . . It is easier for the mind to grasp the abstract simple thought determination than the concrete subject matter, which is a manifold connection of such thought determinations and their relationships. Cited in Musto 2010a: 16

From the 1859 Introduction through every draft of Capital, however, Marx begins his exposition not with the category of “Being, ” as Hegel does, but with the “concrete” category of the commodity and the highly abstract notion of value.18 What makes interpretation of the “Introduction” particularly difficult, however, is Marx’s explicit denial that notions such as “commodity” or “value” are “concepts” in the commonly held sense of the abstract representation of an object. In Marx’s 1879 “Notes on Adolph Wagner, ” he writes that: I do not start out from “concepts, ” hence I do not start out from “the concept of value” . . . What I start out from is the simplest social form in which the laborproduct is presented in contemporary society, and this is “the commodity. ” Cited in Iñigo Carrera 2014: 44

In the 1857 “Introduction, ” Marx refuses the logic of conceptual representation for a novel form of intellectual production that Marx terms the “reproduction of the concrete” as a “thought-concrete” [Gedankenkonkretum] (1973: 101, translation modified). In this view, Marx rejects both Hegelian Idealism and the methodology of classical political economy as various modes of representation of the concrete, and instead develops this novel methodology he names the reproduction of the concrete. Marx contrasts this with the mere representation of the concrete, which entails taking phenomenal appearances at face-value and merely re-presenting them conceptually, whether as the various immediate forms of appearance in their general multiplicity, or even as the analytical abstraction of specific universal features of the concrete (Iñigo Carrera 2014: 46). A classic example of the latter analytic process of conceptual representation, abstracted from mere phenomenal repetition, is Adam Smith’s famous assertion, invoked above, of a universal “propensity in human nature to truck and barter. ” Whether via immediate observation or abstraction from lived experience, conceptual representation merely confirms superficial, phenomenal appearances and thus, in the case of political economy, is condemned to constitute an apologetics for capitalism, and, Marx concludes, to dig “the graveyard of this science” (cited at Iñigo Carrera 2014: 48).19 In contrast, the process Marx names the reproduction of the concrete—the most developed example of which is the final version of Chapter 1 of the 1872 second edition of Capital, Vol. I—refuses the empiricist search for recurrent attributes, to discover instead the hidden, but real, process that allows for two qualitatively distinct use-values (coat and linen, in Marx’s example) to be socially equated as identical exchange-values, and then to reveal the hidden common “substance” of value itself, abstract labor-power, the latter quantified in turn as what Marx names “socially necessary labor-time” (Marx 1976: 129).20 If such is the methodology, first articulated in the 1857 “Introduction” and subsequently developed and deployed across the various drafts of Capital and in

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the Grundrisse itself, the methodology remains analytical and empirically-determined, for all of its flashes of insight and invention. The extreme example of this ambiguity is undoubtedly the brief, enigmatically suggestive section of the book that has perhaps received the most attention of any since the 1960s, the so-called “Fragment on Machines. ” From nearly 700 pages into his notes, in Notebook VII , Marx penned one of the most rhetorically forceful and imaginative of all his writings, a twenty-page reflection on the impact of industrial machinery and automation on labor, the production process, and the destiny of capitalism itself, pages that have come to be known as the “Fragment on Machines” (Marx 1973: 690–712). While he would further develop similar considerations on the impact of machinery and automation on labor in Chapter 15 of Capital (“Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”), other treatments on the crisis and collapse of capitalism, on the concept of the “general intellect”, and the Fragment’s final, extensive, reflection on the necessary transformations of labor and production in a post-capitalist society are to a great extent unique to all of Marx’s writings.21 George Caffentzis points out that the extraordinary reception this abandoned fragment of Marx’s thought has received since the 1960s is in no small part a function of a contingent historical conjuncture, appearing as it did in a period when, on both the left and right, it was widely assumed that the postwar increase in “automation and reduction of the workday [was] an inevitable product of capitalist development” (Caffentzis: 275). In the context of this postwar expansion, capping a century of rising wages and reductions in the workweek (at least in the Global North), the reception of the “Fragment” “was accentuated by Marx’s apparent ability to foresee the arrival of a sort of twilight capitalism, ” one in which the problem of the free-time of the laboring class became, for these few years at least, either a threat (on the right) or a glorious impending future (on the left) (Caffentzis: 276).22 Theoretically, this tendency found its most developed and resonant expression in the reception of the “Fragment” in Italian Workerist and Post-Workerist circles.23 First published in 1964 in the journal Quaderni Rossi, this initial reception was capped by Toni Negri’s assertion that the growing predominance of the “general intellect, ” i.e., the socialized forms of knowledge that precede, encompass and overflow the direct production process undertaken by any individual worker, implies the automatic and actual irrelevance of Marx’s theory of value due to a growing impossibility of temporal measurement of labor. It must be said that this influential and polemical conclusion appears in hindsight naïve and simplistic, failing as it does to take into account the actual nature of Marx’s theory as it developed after 1858 (Tronti: 232; Negri: 1977. See also Musto 2010c: 185; Smith 2014). Penetrating readers of Marx, including Riccardo Bellofiore, Fred Moseley, Massimiliano Tomba and Michael Heinrich, largely concur with Tony Smith in concluding that “the purpose of Marx’s value-theory is not to measure wealth, ” as the “workerist” readers of the “Fragment” continue to claim.24 Instead, to avoid so-called “substantialist” (mis-)understandings of the concept of surplus-value that locate its production in the immanent labor time of any actual, given production process, rather than the aggregate social validation of each individual capital’s production activity,

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which Marx would come to term in Capital “socially necessary labor time, ” it must be recognized that “money [and not clock time] provides the only socially objective measure of value” (Smith 221; see also Heinrich 2009).25 Another influential aspect of the “Fragment on Machines” has been its identification of a central and predominant contradiction abiding within capitalism, what Marx calls a “moving contradiction, ” which ceaselessly eliminates living labor (the very source of surplus value) from capitalist production in the drive of any individual capital to realize perpetual gains in profitability.26 Marx’s affirmation of this dynamic, “moving” contradiction of capital has been taken up in its powerful formulation by a number of recent readers of Marx. Most notably, in his principal work, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Moishe Postone deploys an influential categorial reading of Marx’s critique of political economy. There, he grounds his critique of what he terms “traditional Marxism”— understood by Postone as post-Leninist theories of workers’ exploitation and the uneven distribution of the wealth of capitalist production articulated “from the perspective of labor”— upon a close reading of the “Fragment” (1996). More recently, the German school of thought referred to as Wertkritik (Value critique), has used the “Fragment” to initiate an argument that the post-Fordist general automation of production processes has engendered a collapse in the capacity of capital to produce surplus value (in aggregate). The result, they argue, is a tendency toward a collapse that is staved off only by the exponential expansion of fictive capital in the form of financialization (Larsen et al., 2014; Lohoff and Trenkle). Despite the extraordinary suggestiveness of the “Fragment on Machines, ” its powerful rhetorical argument is logically “extremely weak, ” as Michael Heinrich has argued. The passage is marked by a series of ungrounded logical deductions, moving from an observed tendency to reduce living labor in production to the general collapse of capital in a mere few sentences, an empiricism that immediately extrapolates a global tendency toward collapse from observed regularities (machines replacing workers), and a logically inadequate argument that stands in marked contrast to Marx’s mature scientific methodology of Capital (described above). Furthermore, the “Fragment” suffers from a general underdevelopment of the basic categories that Marx would develop and deploy in Capital: between labor and labor-power, between concrete and abstract labor, between wealth and surplus-value, between use-values and exchange-values, as well as the concepts of relative surplus-value and the organic composition of capital (Heinrich 2014: 215, 212–13. See also Bellofiore 2014a: 36).27 Despite these real and valid critiques, the question remains whether the flashes of insight, characteristic not only of the “Fragment on Machines, ” but of so much of the Grundrisse more generally, are invalidated by the preliminary and underdeveloped form of the categories Marx deploys therein, or whether categories such as the “moving contradiction” or the “general intellect, ” categories that Marx developed nowhere else, can be carried forward, translated and transformed in accordance with his subsequent, more fully developed critical vocabulary. The question remains open as an invocation to future readers of this labyrinthine, enigmatic and visionary bundle of notes, this preliminary inquiry into the foundations of political economy that has become a centerpiece of Marx’s critique of capitalism.

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Notes I would like to thank Andrew Pendakis and Elena Louisa Lange for their helpful critiques of earlier versions of this chapter. 1

2

3

4

5

Musto notes that Marx did draw briefly on these manuscripts in his 1861–1863 manuscript (2008: 179). Prior to the Grundrisse, Marx composed throughout the 1850s a number of briefer investigations of political economy, collected in volume IV of the now-definitive Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA 2). Karel Kosík, in his 1963 Dialectic of the Concrete, was the first to clearly recognize that the Grundrisse was not in fact a first draft, but rather “preparatory material” [přípravnými pracemi] for Capital (123 [131]). Anglophone readers inquiring into the nature of the Grundrisse and the debates that continue to surround it will be well served by three outstanding volumes that do ample justice to the text’s conceptual complexity and historical impact. In addition to Martin Nicolaus’ “Foreword” to the widely available Penguin edition, the single most influential and comprehensive analyzis of the Grundrisse remains Roman Rosdolsky’s classic 1968 study The Making of Marx’s “Capital” (London: Pluto 1992). Two outstanding edited volumes dedicated to Marx’s notes have appeared in the past decade. Musto (2008) has a series of authoritative articles on the history and major themes of the Grundrisse, offering a systematic overview of its global publication history and reception since 1923. Bellofiore and Starosta (2014) constitutes, if anything, an even more detailed and systematic investigation of the conceptual complexities of the Grundrisse, one informed by the findings of the team of distinguished researchers composing the “International Symposium on Marxian Economic Theory (ISMT ). ” This comprehensive volume thus benefits from a combined scholarly familiarity with the findings resulting from study of the nearly complete (as of this writing) publication of the critical edition of Marx’s works (MEGA 2). On the latter, see also the related volume Bellofiore and Fineschi (2009). “The method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development and track down their inner connection. Only after this work is done can the real movement be appropriately presented” (cited at Musto 2008a: 26). Marx pursued this process of inquiry prior to the systematic exposition of his findings till the end of his life, for example in his extraordinarily rich notes on world history from 1881–1882 (Krätke: 2018). Throughout this essay, following Marx’s practice across the three volumes of Capital, I differentiate between the real, but superficial, phenomenal forms of appearance of capitalism, such as profit, price, competition, the lived experience of proletarian labor and the underlying “categories” that Marx identified and formulated to conceptualize the true but hidden “fetishized” structures of capitalism as a total social form: i.e. surplus value, abstract labor power, fixed and variable capital and the like (see also Marx 1998: 117). As Elena Louisa Lange has argued, Marx’s methodology of so-called “Value-Form analyzis” “dissolves the fetishized objective dimension of a category like ‘exchange value’ or ‘the commodity’ as only appearing to be simple, ‘given’, and indeed ‘presuppositionless.’ The analyzis of their form shows that they can be fully grasped only as the result of a very specific social process, presupposing both the relations of (re)production and class. ” Here is Riccardo Bellofiore’s succinct definition of the value-form: “I see [Marx’s] labor theory of value as a theory of the extraction by total

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7

8

9

10 11

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx capital of labor and surplus labor (and thereby value and surplus-value) from the whole working class, thanks to the form-determination of the capitalist production process which empowers capital to overcome the potential resistance of workers to valorization” (Bellofiore 2002: 107). Chris Arthur argues persuasively that the 1986–1987 edition of the Grundrisse, comprising Vol. 28 in the Marx-Engels Collected Works, is the better translation, both for the superior scholarship of the MEGA 2 edition upon which it is based, and above all its correct and now standard rendering of the key concept of Verwertung as “valorization. ” This essay will nonetheless continue to cite Nicolaus’ widely-available 1973 Penguin edition, as it is the standard English-language reference (Arthur 2008: 254). “The determination of value is the major question to which the work as a whole addresses itself. It forms the spine in the skeleton of the argument through both chapters. The bulk of the content is the examination of this question in its various aspects, at various levels of abstraction and with different degrees of simplicity or complexity” (Nicolaus 1973: 16). Of course, the Grundrisse was far from a complete systematic investigation, and Marx continued to develop and refine his inquiry into the structure of capitalism in his notes and drafts till the end of his days. On the various conceptual ambiguities and issues of underdevelopment in the Grundrisse, see especially Bischoff and Leiber (2008), Dussel (2008), and Heinrich (2014). Michael Heinrich has shown that Marx continued to refine his theory of value and its mode of presentation beyond even the second 1872 edition of Vol. I of Capital, making marginal comments and clarifications to his argument that have yet to be published in the MEGA 2 edition (Heinrich in Bellofiore, and Fineschi 2009). Michael Heinrich points out a number of significant conceptual limitations in the Grundrisse: Marx had “still not clarified the essential distinction between abstract and concrete labor, ” nor did he, as yet, clearly distinguish between exchange-value and value itself, as he would in the second edition of the first chapter of Capital, Vol. I. Furthermore, “Marx still had problems with the concept of constant capital” (2008: 210). Heinrich concludes that these conceptual limitations have significant implications, above all for the arguments Marx puts forward in the “Fragment on Machines, ” to be discussed below. I will return to the problem of method and exposition in discussing the 1857 “Introduction” below. Mohl, in his overview of Germanophone publications of the Grundrisse and its secondary literature, writes that Rosdolsky’s book continues to “comprise a seamless general commentary on the Grundrisse that offers readers an enlightening entry into Marx’s hermetic text” (Mohl 2008: 193). See Arthur 2002 and 2013, and Dussel 1985. See Bellamy Foster 2008, and Saito 2017, Ch. 2. In Marx’s 1873 Postface to the second edition of Capital, Vol. I, he briefly returns to questions of methodology broached in the (then unpublished) 1857 “Introduction. ” While Kosík’s first chapter, on “The Dialectic of the Concrete Totality, ” was written in 1961, the book’s later chapters had, in fact, already been written in the late 1950s. Kosík’s 1958 article, “Classes and the Real Structure of Society, ” had already engaged with the Grundrisse in passing in its initial exposition of Kosík’s concept of concrete totality (a personal conversation with Ivan Landa [editor of the forthcoming re-edition of Dialectic of the Concrete], January 17, 2018). Other

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18

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27

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initial treatments of the Grundrisse include Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom (1958). Althusser et al. 2017: 40. Cf. Nesbitt 2017a. In addition to Chris Arthur’s systematic investigations of Marx’s Hegelian logic (2002) and the earlier work of Colletti (1969), for a recent example of the former, see Carver 2008: 52; for the latter, Bidet: 1985. Michael Krätke reminds us that Marx was deeply engaged in both his economic journalism for the New York Tribune and his descriptive and polemical “books of crisis” in exactly the same period in which he composed the notebooks of the Grundrisse. He was, moreover, immensely proud to have predicted the suspension of the 1844 British Bank Act correctly, against prevailing economic wisdom in his article of November 21, 1857, as well as having earlier correctly predicted in 1850 that the next crisis would begin in New York, as it did in fact, in August 1857 (Krätke 2008a and 2008b: 165, 169). Cf. Henryk Grossman, “The Value–Price Transformation in Marx and the Problem of Crisis, ” Historical Materialism 24(1), 2016 [1932]: 105–34; on Althusser, see Nesbitt 2017a. It is for this reason that the term “category” is generally to be preferred to that of the “concept” when referring to the elements of Marx’s systematic theoretical production. See Iñigo Carrera 56 See Fetscher 2008. For a detailed and insightful history and critique of the Italian Workerist (Operaismo) and post-workerist reception of the Grundrisse and the “Fragment on Machines” in particular, see Bellofiore and Tomba. Although to adopt this terminology overwrites the complicated intellectual lines of development between Operaisimo and post-workerism, in Italy and elsewhere, that Bellofiore (2014) and Tronti (2014) develop, it nonetheless underscores an identical assertion of a post-Fordist impossibility of measuring labor time and thus the irrelevancy of Marx’s value theory, a conclusion shared by Negri, Virno (2007) and Vercellone (2007), to mention only those three. Heinrich writes: “Immediate labor-time was at any rate never the measure of value. Immediate labor-time is that quantity of concrete labor that is expended by an individual producer. However, the individual expenditure of concrete labor-time does not form value; rather, value is formed by that quantity of abstract human labor that results only from the average social relations (Heinrich 2014: 208). This essential theoretical critique of the Italian ‘workerist’ readings of the ‘Fragment’, as indicating as supersession of the value-form, is seconded by a more general and obvious assertion against the conclusions of this school of thought—that the actual mode of production of the contemporary world in fact remains capitalist” (Smith: 222). “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labor time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form” (1973: 706, emphasis added). Without identifying its presence in the “Fragment, ” Postone pillories this theoretical muddle in Habermas specifically, but one might also mention its presence in the case of thinkers as distinct as Deleuze and Guattari, Raymond Aron, Radovan Richta and Adorno, to name only those (on the latter, see Nesbitt: 2017b).

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References Althusser, L. et al. (2017), Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, New York: Verso. Arthur, C.J. (2002), The New Dialectic and Marx’s “Capital, ” Leiden: Brill. Arthur, C.J. (2008), “USA , Britain, Australia, and Canada, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 249–56. Arthur, C.J. (2013), “The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour, ” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill. Bellamy Foster, J. (2008), “Marx’s Grundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 93–106. Bellofiore, R. (2002), “ ‘Transformation’ and the Monetary Circuit: Marx as monetary theorist of production, ” in M. Campbell and G. Reuten, The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume III of Marx’s Capital, New York: Palgrave, 102–27. Bellofiore, R. (2009), “A Ghost Turning into a Vampire. The Concept of Capital and Living Labor, ” in R. Bellofiore and R. Fineschi (Eds.), Rereading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, London: Palgrave. Bellofiore, R. (2013), “The Grundrisse after Capital, or How to Re-read Marx Backwards, ” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas. In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 17–42. Bellofiore, R. and R. Fineschi (Eds.) (2009), Rereading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, London: Palgrave. Bellofiore, R., G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas (Eds.) (2013), In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill. Bellofiore, R. and M. Tomba (2014), “The ‘Fragment on Machines’ and the Grundrisse: The Workerist Reading in Question, ” in M. van der Linden and K.H. Roth (Eds.), Beyond Marx: Theorising Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century, Boston, MA : Brill, 345–68. Bidet, J. (1985), Que faire du Capital? Paris: PUF. Bischoff, J. and C. Lieber (2008), “The Concept of Value in Modern Economy: on the Relationship between Money and Capital in Grundrisse, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 33–47. Caffentizis, G. (2013), “From the Grundrisse to Capital and Beyond: Then and Now, ” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 265–83. Carver, T. (1975), Karl Marx: Texts on Method. London: Blackwell. Carver, T. (2008), “Marx’s Conception of Alienation in the Grundrisse, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 48–66. Colleti, L. (1969), Il Marxismo e Hegel, Rome-Bari: Laterza. Dunayevskaya, Raya (2000 [1958]), Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today. New York: Humanity Books. Dussel, E. (1985), La producción teórica de Marx. Un commentario a los “Grudnrisse, ” Mexico City : Siglo XXI . Dussel, E. (2008), “The Discovery of the Category of Surplus Value, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 67–78.

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Fetscher, I. (2008), “Emancipated Individuals in an Emancipated Society: Marx’s Sketch of Post-capitalist Society in the Grundrisse, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 107–19. Fineschi, R. (2013), “The Four Levels of Abstraction of Marx’s Concept of ‘Capital’. Or, Can We Consider the Grundrisse the Most Advanced Version of Marx’s Theory of Capital?” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 71–100. Hegel, G.W.F. (2015), The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heinrich, M. (2013), “The ‘Fragment on Machines’: A Marxian Misconception in the Grundrisse and its Overcoming in Capital, ” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 97–212. Hobsbawm, E. (2008), “Foreword, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, xx–xxiv. Iñigo Carrera, J. (2003), El Capital: Razón Histórica, Sujeto Revolucionario y Conciencia, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Cooperitivas. Iñigo Carrera, J. (2013), “Method: From the Grundrisse to Capital, ” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 43–70. Kosík, K. (1963), Dialektika Konkréního: studie o problematice člověka a světa. Praha: Československe akademie věd, 1965 [1963]. Trans. R.S. Cohen, M.W. Wartofsky (eds), The Dialectics of the Concrete, Boston: D. Reidel, 1976. Kosík, K. (2017 [1958]), “Classes and the Real Structure of Society, ” Contradictions 1(2): 187–206. Krätke, M.R. (2008a), “The First World Economic Crisis: Marx as an Economic Journalist, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 162–7. Krätke, M.R. (2008b), “Marx’s ‘Books of Crisis’ of 1857–8, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 169–76. Krätke, M.R. (2018), “Marx and World History, ” IRSH Available at https://www.academia. edu/36000687/Marx_and_World_History [accessed April 1, 2018]. Lange, E.L. (Forthcoming), Value Without Fetish. Uno Kozo’s Theory of Pure Capitalism in Light of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, Leiden: Brill (Historical Materialism). Larsen, N, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown (Eds.) (2014), Marxism and the Critique of Value, Chicago, IL , and Alberta: MCMʹ . Marcuse, H. (1964), One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston, MA : Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1842), “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction. ” [1842]. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/02/10.htm (accessed April 1, 2018). Marx, K. (1953), Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Marx, K. (1957), “L’Introduction de 1857, ” trans. Maurice Husson and Gilbert Badia, Paris: Editions Sociales, 147–57. Marx, K. (1964), Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin 1973.

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Marx, K. (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1986–87), Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58 (First Version of Capital), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 28, trans. Ernst Wangermann, Vol. 29, trans. Victor Schnittke, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1988), “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29: Marx 1857–61, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 257–417. Marx, K. (1996), “Capital, Vol. I, ” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35: Capital, Vol. I, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1998), “Capital, Vol. III , ” in Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 37: Capital, Vol. III , New York: International Publishers. McLellan, D. (1971), Marx’s Grundrisse, London: Macmillan. Meiksins Wood, E. (2008), “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms which Precede Capitalist Production’, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 79–92. Mohl, E.T. (2008), “Germany, Austria, Switzerland, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 189–201. Moseley, F. (2013), “The Whole and the Parts: The Early Development of Marx’s Theory of the Distribution of Surplus-Value in the Grundrisse, ” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 285–302. Moseley, F. (2017), Money and Totality: A Marco-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital and the End of the “Transformation Problem, ” Leiden and Boston: Brill. Murray, P. (2013), “Unavoidable Crises: Reflections on Backhaus and the Development of Marx’s Value-Form Theory in the Grundrisse, ” R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 121–148. Musto, M. (2008a), “History, Production, and Method in the 1857 ‘Introduction’, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 3–32. Musto, M. (2008b), “Dissemination and Reception of the Grundrisse in the World: Introduction, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 179–88. Negri, T. (1991 [1979]), Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, New York: Autonomedia/Pluto Press. Nesbitt, N. (2017a), “Editor’s Introduction, ” in The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today. Nick Nesbitt (ed.), Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Nesbitt, N. (2017b), “Value as Symptom, ” in The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today. Nick Nesbitt (ed.). Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Nicolaus, M. (1968), “The Unknown Marx, ” New Left Review, 48: 41–61. Nicolaus, M. (1973), “Foreword, ” in Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin. Postone, M. (1996), Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Postone, M. (2008), “Rethinking Capital in light of the Grundrisse, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 120–46. Rosdolsky, R. (1992 [1968]), The Making of Marx’s “Capital, ” London: Pluto.

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Saito, K. (2017), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Smith, T. (2013), “The ‘General Intellect’ in the Grundrisse and Beyond, ” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 213–232. Starosta, G. (2013), “The System of Machinery and Determinations of Revolutionary Subjectivity in the Grundrisse and Capital, ” in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, and P.D. Thomas, In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Leiden: Brill, 233–64. Tronti, M. (2008), “Italy, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 229–35. Vasina, L. (2008), “Russia and the Soviet Union, ” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, New York: Routledge, 202–12. Vercellone, C. (2007), “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism, ” Historical Materialism 15(1): 13–36. Virno, P. (2007), “General Intellect, ” Historical Materialism 15(3): 3–8.

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A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Simon Choat

In the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848, Marx temporarily retreated from direct political organization and agitation and spent much of the next decade immersed in the study of political economy. A global economic crisis that began in the summer of 1857 reinvigorated his revolutionary hopes and inspired him to collate his findings and prepare an outline of his critique of political economy. The result was the manuscripts collectively known as the Grundrisse, in which Marx first developed the central concepts and claims of his mature economic theory. The Grundrisse, however, is a rough draft and was not published until the mid-twentieth century, long after Marx’s death. His first attempt to present his research of the 1850s to the public can be found in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in June 1859. The Contribution is best known today for its “Preface. ” Before we examine the “Preface, ” however, we will look at the wider content of the Contribution and its place within Marx’s oeuvre. Letters from early 1858 indicate that Marx was planning to write and publish a three-volume critique of political economy. Through a critique of classical political economy and its categories, Marx planned to offer a critical analyzis of the origins, development and nature of the capitalist mode of production. Against the claims of the classical political economists that capitalism is natural and universal, Marx would apply the insights of dialectical thought to show that capitalism is a historically specific form of production whose contradictions would eventually lead to its destruction. The first volume of this proposed work was to be a critique of economic categories, itself divided into six books. The first book, On Capital, was to be divided into four sections: capital in general, competition, credit and share capital (CW40: 270, 298). This explains why the Contribution has the subtitles “Book One. On Capital” and “Section One. Capital in General. ” Marx wanted this first section (“Capital in General”) to contain three chapters: on commodity, money and capital. The first two chapters were completed and they constitute the published version of the Contribution, however, a projected sequel containing the third chapter on capital never materialized. Instead, the first two chapters were eventually rewritten and incorporated into Capital Volume I (first published 1867). 57

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The Contribution thus anticipates the content and structure of Part One of Capital, Volume I. It begins by analyzing two aspects of the commodity: use value and exchange value; and the twofold character of the labor contained in commodities: concrete labor and abstract general labor. This latter distinction, which was thought by Marx to be fundamental to his entire critique (CW42: 407), was first established in the Contribution; this writing appears in the Grundrisse, but only in a very confused way. Based on this distinction, Marx developed an analyzis of the contradictory nature of the labor that takes place in a capitalist mode of production. In pre-capitalist or post-capitalist societies, production is under communal control, hence labor is directly and immediately social. Under capitalism, however, labor is privately organized and controlled by independent commodity producers, hence the necessarily social character of labor that only appears when the products of labor are exchanged as “equal amounts of universal labor time” (CW29: 274). Thus, Marx claims: “Labor which manifests itself in exchange value appears to be the labor of an isolated individual. It becomes social labor by assuming the form of its direct opposite, of abstract universal labor.” Because the labor of different commodity producers “is equated and treated as universal labor only by bringing one use value into relation with another in the guise of exchange value,” it appears that this exchange value is a property of things rather than a relation between people, “the social relations of individuals . . . appear in the perverted form of a social relation between things” (CW29: 275). This “mystification” (CW29: 276) is termed “the fetishism of commodities” in Capital, Volume I, where the analyzis is developed in greater detail and clarity. From the commodity, Marx moves to money. There is an embryonic version of Capital, Volume I’s analyzis of the four forms of value, after which, in the second chapter, Marx examines the contradictory functions of money: as a measure of value; as a medium of circulation; and money as money (hoarding, money as means of payment, and world money). In general, the chapters on the commodity and money in the Contribution are not quite as developed—and arguably not as accessible—as the equivalent chapters of Capital, Volume I. For example, the Contribution fails adequately to distinguish between exchange value and value. The book nonetheless provides a useful supplement to Capital, and contains themes and subjects missing from the latter; notably, both of its chapters end with critical engagements with classical political economy in which Marx provides histories of the theories of the commodity and of money. The Contribution also contains Marx’s clearest critique of the “labor money, ” schemes advocated by Proudhonist and Ricardian socialists (CW29: 320–3). Marx continued to affirm the significance of the Contribution, to the extent that Capital, Volume I was presented as a “continuation” of the earlier work (CW35: 7). There are repeated quotations from and references to the Contribution in Capital, and indeed its very first line reads: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’”—a quote from the Contribution (CW35: 45; cf. CW29: 269). Marx was, nonetheless, disappointed by the reception which his 1859 book received; in Germany, he suggested, it had been met with a “conspiration de silence,” “I expected to be attacked or criticised but not to be utterly ignored” (CW40: 502, 518). Marx’s wife, Jenny, reported to Engels

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that the conspiracy of silence was “only broken by a couple of wretched, belletristic feuilleton articles which confined themselves to the preface and ignored the contents of the book” (CW40: 574). Unfortunately for Marx, the vast majority of readers since 1859 have similarly confined themselves to the book’s “Preface.” This is unfortunate for us too; while the “Preface” has some pedagogical value as an introduction to Marx’s work, it provides a summary of the materialist conception of history that is so condensed as to be deeply misleading. The “Preface” begins and ends with some useful biographical information about Marx’s intellectual development, in which, amongst other things, he confirms his plans for a six-book work on “the system of bourgeois economy” (CW29: 261). It is, however, the central paragraph of no more than 500 words that has inspired so much discussion and elaboration of Marx’s work. Here, Marx summarizes the “guiding principle[s]” of his approach (CW29: 262). In an implicit critique of Hegel, Marx argues that,“[j]ust as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, ” so we should not judge social formations by their forms of self-consciousness. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. ” The “real foundation” of any society is its economic structure, constituted by relations of production “on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. ” As productive forces develop, the relations of production become obsolete and there “begins an era of social revolution” that ushers in a new mode of production (CW29: 263). The “Preface” is sometimes taken as the definitive statement of Marx’s methodology and, as such, the standard against which all his other writings should be measured and interpreted. Such an approach is profoundly unhelpful. The best way to understand Marx’s methodological approach is by seeing how it operates “in practice” in his political, historical and economic analyzes. If we want overt reflection on methodological questions, then there are other far more interesting and provocative texts to which we can turn, notably the 1857 “Introduction” to the Grundrisse. Several of the formulations in the “Preface” are misleadingly simplistic or ambiguous and so should only be used with caution and with reservation. This caveat must apply to each of its three main claims that concern the relationship between forces and relations of production, the relationship between base and superstructure, and the historical progression of modes of production. First, then, forces and relations of production. These terms are not defined in the “Preface” or elsewhere in the Contribution, though they can, perhaps, be attributed to the necessarily abbreviated nature of a preface. More problematic is the manner in which they are related by Marx. The suggestion is that it is the development of productive forces that act as the motor of history; the relations of production facilitate or encourage that development until they begin to act as fetters, which are then replaced by new relations (CW29: 263). Taken literally, Marx’s phrasing lends itself to what G.A. Cohen (2000: 29, x) termed, “a ‘technological’ interpretation of historical materialism, in which history is, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall . . . as they enable or impede that growth, ” but if we consider Marx’s work as a whole, such an interpretation is highly dubious. In

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the Grundrisse, for example, he does indeed argue that the introduction of machinery transforms the relations of production and pushes the capitalist mode of production towards its dissolution, but the introduction of machinery is itself motivated by the production and appropriation of surplus value that is demanded by capitalist relations of production (CW29: 80–98). In other words, there is a reciprocal determination between the forces and the relations of production. We cannot analyze technology or its development in itself, but only in relation to the social forms that it takes in specific modes of production. When primacy is given to technological change, then what is occluded is class struggle. As George Sorel (1969: xli) noted, it is striking that the Preface does not even mention the word “class. ” Instead, the development of productive forces and subsequent realignment of social relations appear inexorable, without any role for the working class as an agent of political struggle. In contrast in The German Ideology, which offers a similarly “technological” interpretation of history, discussion of the conflict between forces and relations of production is always accompanied by some reference to class struggle (e.g. CW5: 52). The absence of class also makes it difficult to understand what the Preface has to say about the base-superstructure relation; without class there can be no account of the superstructure defending or expressing the interests of the ruling class, so we are left wondering what its function is. Marx tells us that the economic base or “real foundation” gives rise to the legal and political superstructure—presumably, principally the state—to which “correspond” ideological forms of consciousness: including “legal, political, religious, artistic, [and] philosophic” (CW29: 263). This implies that the superstructure somehow simply reflects or expresses the base; there is little indication that the institutions and activities of the former may have their own (relative) autonomy, nor that they may able to influence or act upon the base. The conceptualization of society that emerges from the Preface, then, is something like what Louis Althusser calls an “expressive totality”; society is viewed as a totality with an economic essence, its superstructural levels reduced to mere expressions of that essence (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 17). In this conceptualization, any modifications of the superstructure merely reflect and follow transformations of the base: “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure” (CW29: 263). This simplistic and reductive interpretation of base-superstructure relations can be contrasted with the much richer and subtler propositions found elsewhere in Marx’s work—albeit that these propositions are often cryptically brief, or buried in concrete analyzes. We could, for example, point to: the “political” writings such as the Eighteenth Brumaire, the note in Capital, Volume I in which Marx argues that in some societies religion and politics can play the dominant (but not determining) role (CW35: 93), and the reference in the 1857 “Introduction” to the uneven development of material production relative to cultural, legal and intellectual forms (CW28: 46). The model found in the Preface, of society as an expressive totality, is mirrored by its conception of history as a linear progression of discrete stages—“the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production”—whose unfolding expresses a single principle; i.e. the conflict between forces and relations of production (CW29: 263). On the face of it, the modes of production listed in the Preface seem to echo the

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“forms preceding capitalist production, ” examined in the Grundrisse (CW28: 399– 439), but in the Preface the different modes of production are presented as “epochs marking progress in the economic development of society” (CW29: 263). In contrast, the Grundrisse’s Asiatic, ancient and Germanic economic forms are presented as coexistent social forms, not as progressive steps towards capitalism. When Marx explains why a community takes one of the three forms, he refers not to their level of historical development, but, rather, to factors like climate and geography (CW28: 410). Hence, we can contrast the Grundrisse’s “multilinear” theory of history, in which modes of production overlap and history unfolds in a varied and uneven manner (cf. Anderson 2010) with the unilinear theory offered by the Preface—though it is true that, later in the Contribution, Marx does make some comments on pre-capitalist societies that gesture towards the more complex model of the Grundrisse [CW29: 275]. The problem with the Preface is not simply that its arguments are crudely phrased; more importantly, it does not represent Marx’s work very well. This would not matter so much if it was treated as a minor work, but it has so often been taken as a distillation of Marx’s fundamental system. Cohen’s technological interpretation of historical materialism is an especially egregious case, but even as perceptive and significant a reader of Marx as Lenin praised the Preface for providing “an integral formulation of the fundamental principles of materialism as applied to human society and its history. ” What can explain the lack of sophistication in the Preface? It cannot be attributed to intellectual immaturity; as we have repeatedly seen, the Preface suffers by comparison with the Grundrisse, even though the latter was written before the former. It may be that Marx was anxious about potential censorship by the Prussian authorities and so deliberately left out all mention of “class” in the Preface (Prinz 1969). It may also be that the absence of a chapter on capital in the Contribution led Marx to simplify the claims of its preface (Stedman Jones 2016: 409). Whatever the reasons, we should remember that the Preface is just, that; i.e. a preliminary introduction, and hence we should not expect it to provide us with a master key for unlocking Marx’s theory.

References Althusser, L. and E. Balibar (1970), Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster, London: New Left Books. Anderson, K.B. (2010), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press. Cohen, G.A. (2000), Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lenin, V. I. (1964), Collected Works, Vol. 21, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1975–2005), Collected Works, 50 Vols, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Prinz, A.M. (1969), “Background and Ulterior Motive of Marx’s ‘Preface’ of 1859, ” Journal of the History of Ideas 30(3): 437–50. Sorel, G. (1969), The Illusions of Progress, trans. J. and C. Stanley, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Stedman Jones, Gareth, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, London: Allen Lane, 2016.

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Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1867) Harry Cleaver

Capital, Volume I (1867) was the most systematic and detailed theoretical analyzis of capitalism that Marx published during his lifetime. For over two decades, from the mid–1840s to the mid-1860s, as integral parts of his political efforts to support the overthrow and replacement of capitalism, he studied the changing world around him and participated in political movements organized to achieve that. Along the way, he analyzed and took notes on the writings of political economists, philosophers, social reformers and revolutionaries. He mulled over their ideas, picked them apart, and compared them with his own assessments. Those assessments were based on direct observation, ceaseless absorption of the mainstream press, of denunciations of the suffering imposed by capitalists, and careful reading of government studies, e.g., the reports of British factory inspectors. As he read, listened and watched, he filled a whole series of notebooks and published smaller works—several of which are analyzed in the early chapters of this Companion—and a wealth of articles in both mainstream and radical journals. Marx intended Capital to be the first in a series of volumes treating various aspects of capitalism. When he died in 1883, with those subsequent volumes partially drafted, but unprepared for publication, it was left to his friends and followers to pull together the material in his notebooks. The result was the publishing of Capital, Vols II and III , which contain more of his theoretical analyzis of capitalism, and Theories of Surplusvalue, which contains his evaluations and critiques of the reasoning of various political economists. The analyzes in these further volumes all utilize the same foundational theoretical concepts laid out in Capital, Vol. I, therefore, the content of those later volumes can only properly be understood in terms of one’s reading of Vol. I. That said, as with so many influential books, interpretations of those concepts have varied widely and are often contradictory. As a general rule, the way people have read Capital, Vol. I, has been shaped by their own preoccupations. Academics have read the book through the lens of their own fields; economists have read it as work of economics; sociologists as an analyzis of conflicting social forces; and historians have evaluated its sketches of actual history, sometimes adding new research to flesh-out the stories told therein.1 Pro-capitalist ideologues have searched the text for flaws sufficient to dismiss the book.2 Anti-capitalist 63

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militants have celebrated its revelations of the cruelties of exploitation and alienation and its vision of the possibilities of getting beyond capitalism. Those who have embraced the ideas and politics in the book often call themselves Marxists, although Marx himself denied being one; but among Marxists, their politics and preoccupations have varied so widely that, without further clarification, the term means little and reveals nothing about how they have understood Capital, Vol. I. For example, in a pattern repeated since the period of the Second International (1889–1916), some Marxists have embraced social democracy and sought the replacement of capitalism via elections and gradual legal reform;3 others have denounced such politics as a reformism that plays into the hands of capitalists. They have, instead, supported and organized for revolution— insurrectionary uprisings to replace capitalism entirely.4 That said, among Marxists of whatever stripes, it has almost always been incumbent to offer an interpretation of Capital that supports their own political position. Therefore, social democratic Marxists have emphasized those parts of Capital, such as Chapter 10 on struggles over labor time, which highlighted the author’s support for reforms. Revolutionary Marxists, on the other hand, have evoked the passage in Chapter 32 that envisions the “expropriation of the expropriators” in support of direct action to oust capitalists and replace their control of the means of production by that of workers. Beyond such differing rough and ready appropriations, Marxists have felt compelled, both by competition with other Marxists and by anti-Marx critics, to interpret and defend, albeit often with some concessions, the core theory of capitalism as laid out in the text. To take just one contentious issue, there has been a long-standing debate between Marxists and their critics over the validity of the labor theory of value that frames most of the analyzis in Capital. Critics, especially economists, have rejected the theory because they have judged it as being unable to explain variations in market prices, and replaced it with theories of supply and demand.5 Against this rejection, many Marxists have defended the theory, arguing that its elaboration in Vol. III of Capital counters this critique.6 Among Marxists, some, such those associated with the journal and printing press, Monthly Review, those known as analytical Marxists and more recently some of the post-workerist Marxists in Europe, have abandoned the labor theory of value, while offering analyzes elaborating other aspects of the ideas in Capital.7 Other Marxists, ranging from orthodox adherents to Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism to contemporary Autonomist Marxists and Marxist-Feminists, have defended Marx’s theory of value as still offering essential insights into the nature of capitalism and resistance to it.8 In what follows, I outline the theory in Capital, Vol. I, mostly in the order that Marx presented it, and offer one possible approach to interpreting the text.

How Capital is Organized and One Way to Read it Capital, Vol. I, has eight parts.9 The first seven parts are mainly theoretical and present his analyzis of the social relationships characteristic of capitalism, while the final eighth part offers an analyzis on how those relationships were imposed historically. In the first seven parts, Marx’s presentation of his analyzis consciously paralleled Hegel’s organization of his Science of Logic—a book familiar to him since his days at university.

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That is to say, the first chapter contains his most basic and abstract theoretical ideas— foundational elements of his labor theory of value—the subsequent chapters then add ever more complexity, gradually building up a more complete, and thus a more determined, or concrete, analyzis. Precisely because he lays out the core of his theory of value in a bare-bones, abstract manner, many have found the first chapters difficult, even opaque. One result has been the abandonment of any effort to read the whole book. Indeed, for long periods, Capital was effectively the most famous unread book in the world. Another result has been, for those who have struggled to read through the whole, to recommend reading the book in a different order.10 I belong to the second group, and proceed here in the same way I have long structured my courses on Capital, Vol. I, i.e., beginning with Part VIII on the historical rise of capitalism.11 Marx’s largely historical account of that rise is not only easier to read than his abstract treatment of the theory of value, but understanding what was involved in the creation of capitalism as a new dominant social form also makes his reasons for having a labor theory of value clearer. The abstractions of Part I, then, become more intelligible because they can be understood as theoretical expressions of key aspects of the social relationships of capitalism.

Part VIII: So-Called Primitive Accumulation Marx uses capitalism’s core social relationships to frame his organization of the chapters that make up Part VIII . A short introduction in Chapter  26 sketches his overall argument about the violent birth of capitalism. He then devotes two chapters (27, 28) to analyzing the forcible creation of a new class of workers. Chapter 27 details how, in England and Scotland, people were savagely “expropriated”, i.e., driven from their land and stripped of their tools. Chapter 28 recounts how those uprooted folks were then coerced through “bloody” legislation into selling themselves to those who have stolen their means of independent livelihood. Forcing uprooted people into the labor market and thence into waged labor not only provides capitalists with workers to exploit, but the imposition of waged work becomes, in his analyzis, the dominant new form of social control, reorganizing society in a fundamental way. He then devotes three chapters (29, 30, 31) to the rise of the capitalist class whose growing wealth, power and influence on government derives from their ill-gotten control over the means of production (land and tools) and the exploitation of those they have dispossessed. Chapter 29 analyzes this process in the countryside, where the rights of independent and tenant farmers are wiped out; and they are then subordinated to a new class of agrarian capitalists. Chapter  30 shows how wiping out the selfsufficient autonomy of farmers forces them to work for wages and also shows how those wages form the demand for consumer goods, which makes industrial capitalism possible. Chapter  31 then analyzes the rise of industrial capitalists, where workers’ wages constitute a growing part of consumer demand, and where capitalists’ investment of profits expands the demand for industrial goods and raw materials. Early English industrialization, from which Marx draws most of his illustrations, was centered on the textile industry, producing cloth out of raw materials produced in the countryside

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or imported from abroad. This chapter also points out how capitalist influence on government played a key role in guaranteeing their control by limiting workers struggles against both expropriation and exploitation. Chapter 32 presents what Marx clearly felt was the logical conclusion, both of Part VIII and the book as a whole, namely a sweeping portrayal of how the development of capitalism has created the possibility that expropriated workers may develop enough power to overthrow their expropriators and usher in a new historical epoch characterized by the “possession in common of the land and the means of production. ” The final chapter, 33, further illustrates his analyzis of the rise of capitalism by highlighting the policy proposals of an economist, Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796– 1862), to limit workers’ access to land in newly settled colonies such as Australia by putting a price on it, then forcing them to work years to earn the money to pay for it. In other words, reading Part VIII before Part I makes it obvious that, for Marx, the imposition of work (or labor) and the resistance to that imposition constitute the central social relationships of capitalism—an antagonistic relationship due to the very ugly way that alternative social relationships were destroyed and new ones violently created. This antagonism lies at the heart of the class struggle. So, when we turn from Part VIII at the end of the book to Part I at the beginning, we have seen some of the historical, social and political reasons for how labor became the most valuable social relationship to the capitalist control of society. In such a situation, a labor theory of value makes perfect sense as a theory of the value of labor to capital. Marx was not the first to recognize this. Adam Smith (1723–1790), David Ricardo (1772–1823) and other so-called “classical” political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the same centrality of labor and elaborated their own labor theories of value in response, but, whereas Smith was focused on maximizing the production of wealth and Ricardo was preoccupied with how the fruits of labor were distributed, Marx saw the subordination of workers’ lives to labor as an alienating, exploitative social relationship against which workers understandably rebelled, and beyond which they might craft new worlds where labor was only one among many forms of self-realization. As a result, Smith’s famous Wealth of Nations (1776) and Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) put forward analyzes supporting policies for solving capitalism’s problems and promulgating its development. Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, instead, set out an analyzis that both condemns capitalism for the ills it imposes on society, and highlights for workers how, organized collectively, their struggles have the potential to transcend it.

Elaborating the Theory Part I: Commodities but Money With these things in mind, Marx argues in Section 1 of Chapter 1 “On the Commodity” that the substance of the value (for capital) of a commodity is the labor employed in producing it. This is not the concrete labor expended, but labor abstracted from all the unique skills deployed. In other words, regardless of the kinds of labor capital succeeds

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in imposing to produce commodities, from those of field laborers to those of factory workers, their common, essential value to capital is their role in the maintenance of social order by soaking up peoples’ energy and occupying their time. Therefore, in Section 2 he argues that the measure of value, or the quantitative value of a commodity (for capital), is the socially average amount of labor time required for its production. A commodity that requires more time to produce is more valuable than one that requires less time because its production affords a greater opportunity to impose work and social order.12 That the meaning of value here is the value for capital becomes obvious if we juxtapose it to what is valuable to those whose lives are eaten up by work. For them, the less time required for work, the more time they have free to enjoy what they produce and engage in all kinds of other self-determined activities. Marx had made this point explicit ten years before Capital, Vol. I was published. In the Grundrisse notebooks, written in 1857 during a crisis that he hoped would be followed by widespread rebellion, just as the previous crisis of 1847 had been followed by Europewide rebellions in 1848, he imagined how, once liberated from capitalist control, growing productivity would increase “disposable time” and free everyone’s time for their own development. (708) So, when Marx points out that improved efficiency in the production of a commodity that raises productivity (output per unit of labor input) results in a fall in the value of each unit produced, we can see that this is certainly only true from a capitalist perspective. Having defined the value of commodities for capital, both qualitatively and quantitatively, he then turns, in Section 3 of Chapter 1, to the form of value as shaped and measured through capitalist markets, i.e. exchange value and money. In this longest, and often neglected, section, Marx presents his analyzis of how exchange expresses various aspects of value. He begins by assuming that when one commodity is exchanged for another, the other is accepted as an equivalent (the simple form). Indeed, the number of potential equivalents is as great as the number of commodities available for trade (the expanded form). So, in a world with lots of commodities, exchange becomes universal and at least potentially infinite, but only a common, universal equivalent can express the common characteristic of being valuable to capital (the general form). Finally, as some socially acceptable equivalent becomes universal, it becomes money (the money form). Effectively, Marx provides the basics of a theory of money as embodiment of value, a theory he elaborates in the next two chapters. He ends this first, most abstract Chapter, with Section 4, pointing out the fetishism of his presentation up to this point; because he has discussed all these issues only in terms of the relationships among commodities without situating them within the social context in which they are produced, exchanged and consumed, i.e., the antagonistic social relations of capitalism. What he means by fetishism, he explains by drawing a parallel with religions in which deities (like commodities) are understood as things-in-themselves rather than as projections (or embodiments) of human qualities. For those who have studied Part VIII prior to Chapter 1, the fetishism of the chapter is glaringly obvious because it leaves out how the labor being analyzed was imposed as a means of control (becoming value for capital), and how the market for labor was central to that imposition. Marx doesn’t discuss the labor market directly until

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Chapter 6, but in the light of Part VIII all the abstract determinations of Chapter 1 can be seen to be aspects of the class relationship. In Chapter  2, “Exchange, ” he takes a first step in “defetishizing” his analyzis by bringing in people, the owners of commodities who bring both themselves and money to market; then in Chapter 3, “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities, ” he analyzes how people use money in exchange as a store and measure of value, to facilitate exchange and as means of payment. While these are familiar functions for economists, reading Marx’s prior analyzis in Chapter  1 in the light of Part VIII reveals these functions as moments of the antagonistic social relations of capital, as moments of class struggle. He even reminds us of such struggle in Chapter 3’s discussion of money and debt, and the possibility that the debtor cannot come up with the means of payment, thus causing a crisis. “The class struggle in the ancient world, ” he wrote, “took the form mainly of a contest between debtors and creditors, and ended in Rome with the ruin of the plebeian debtors, who were replaced by slaves. ” Although this example is from pre-capitalist times, much of Marx’s journalism analyzed the role of financial crises and their relation to the class struggles of the capitalism of his day, and much of Part 5 of Vol. III of Capital is devoted to the subject.

Part II: The Transformation of Money into Capital With Part II , on “The Transformation of Money into Capital, ” Marx’s analyzis becomes explicitly focused on capitalism by looking at what capitalists do with money. Most immediately, they invest it to make more money, embodied in his famous sequence M-C-Mʹ (Chapters 4 and 5), where M-C represents the capitalist exchange of money for commodities, i.e. investment includes both the purchase of the means of production (tools, factories, raw materials) and the hiring of workers, and C-Mʹ represents the sale of C resulting in more money than was originally invested (Mʹ > M) and the realization of a profit. But, Marx asks, if we leave aside cheating (where the value of goods traded are not equivalent) how is it possible to realize an Mʹ greater than M? Marx answers this question in Chapters 6 and Chapter 7. In Chapter 6 on “The Sale and Purchase of Labor power, ” Marx makes a distinction he deems essential for understanding the origins of Mʹ, namely between labor (L) and labor power (LP ), understood as the ability and willingness to work. The difference was long unrecognized by economists who pretended that workers sell their labor and capitalists buy it as just one more input, the L in a typical production function Q = f(K, L), with K representing “capital, ” i.e. purchased means of production. Marx shows that workers sell their labor power and capitalists purchase it. What employers have always known, and what Marx’s distinction recognizes, is the need for management to turn the ability to work into actual labor.13

Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-value But what is work, or labor? Marx offers a definition in the first part of Chapter 7, “The Labor Process and the Valorization Process. ” The process of labor involves humans transforming nature, a process he suggests has three elements: purposeful work,

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the object on which work is performed and the tools employed.14 A man of the enlightenment, Marx thought only humans had the will necessary to do purposeful work, thus his famous statement that the worst of architects was better than the best of bees—who build lovely hives with uniform hexagonal cells—because human architects build first in their minds and only later with their tools. It is this ability, this power to labor, that workers sell and capitalists buy. The distinction between labor and labor power was essential for Marx because it lay the basis for his theory of exploitation, spelled out in the second part of Chapter  7. Applying to the labor market his assumption that commodities exchange at their value, Marx implies that workers are not cheated in exchange, but receive the value of their labor power. That value, he argues, is received first in the form of equivalent money wages (or salaries, etc.) and then in the form of the consumer goods purchased with those wages. Invested capital is valorized (its value increased) through M-C-Mʹ, but value can only be increased when workers work more than is required for their own reproduction. The imposition of such excess labor, or surplus labor, Marx calls exploitation and argues that this is how workers are cheated.15 As labor within capitalism has the quality of value for capital, so surplus labor has the quality of surplus-value. At the level of the individual capitalist firm, surplus-value appears as money profit, just as the value of labor power appears as wages. At the level of the whole social capital, the existence of surplus labor and surplus-value is glaringly obvious in the vast amounts of labor employed to produce the means of production rather than the means of consumption. In the first section of Vol. II of Capital, Marx provides an explicit representation of all this by reformulating M-C-Mʹ in a way that includes the sphere of production, i.e., M-C(MP, LP) . . . P . . . Cʹ-Mʹ. Here M-C(MP, LP) = investment in the means of production and labor power, while P = production, where workers are put to work using MP to produce new commodities Cʹ whose value has been increased by the new labor added to that of MP , and then sold to realize an increased value Mʹ. In Chapter  7, the first section of Part III , “The Production of Absolute SurplusValue, ” Marx analyzes one key strategy through which capitalists seek to increase surplus labor and surplus-value, namely getting workers to work longer. As opposed to the claims by both economists and capitalists that both capital (K) and labor (L) are sources of the value of production Q, Marx devotes Chapter 8, “Constant and Variable Capital, ” to distinguishing between the value contributed by the means of production, and that contributed by the exploitation of labor power. In his perspective, while an analyzis of the technology of production, reasonably represented by economists’ production functions, is necessary (and he analyzes this in Part IV ), the value contributed by the means of production is limited to the past labor socially necessary to produce them. Once produced, their value is constant and their contribution to the value of new products can never exceed their own value. He therefore calls the value invested in the means of production constant capital (c). Unlike the means of production, the degree to which workers can contribute value (new socially necessary labor time) is quite variable, with this amount depending on how much work capitalists are able to extract. He therefore calls the value invested in labor power variable capital (v).16 Successful exploitation of workers results in the amount of

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socially necessary labor time extracted exceeding the value invested in their wages, etc., hence surplus-value (s). Although, except for situations of imperfect competition, neither economists nor capitalists admit to the exploitation of workers, Marx points out in Chapter  9, “The Rate of Surplus-Value, ” that lurking behind one of the measures that are used by both economists and capitalists to measure the success of investment, namely the rate of profit, is a measure more meaningful to workers, namely the rate of surplus-value. In Marx’s value concepts, the rate of profit can be defined as s/(c + v), a ratio of the surplus-value earned to the total value invested in both constant and variable capital. The parallel to more common monetary measures of the rate of profit, e.g., (net revenue)/(costs), should be obvious. But while this ratio is a reasonable expression of the preoccupations of capitalists who want to maximize it, for workers, a far more significant measure is s/v, namely a ratio of the amount of time they spend working to produce what capital needs (surplus labor) versus the amount of time they spend working to produce what they need (necessary labor). This rate of surplus-value measures the rate of their exploitation by capital. Two different measures for two different (and opposed) class perspectives. Given that in the mid-nineteenth century, workers often worked every day of the week and every week of the year, and the most common measure of labor expended was the working day, it will come as no surprise to find Chapter 10, “The Working Day, ” one of the longest in Vol. I. Marx begins his analyzis of the working day by pointing out that there is nothing “natural” about it, but rather its length has been determined by the class struggle between capital’s efforts to impose work (especially surplus labor) and worker’s efforts to work less. Within this struggle, unlike the efforts of earlier ruling classes to impose surplus labor, the efforts of capitalists know no bounds. The former’s efforts were confined to their concrete needs, but the objectives of capitalists include both an unlimited accumulation of money and the endless imposition of work as the means of organizing society. Thus, Marx appropriates images from the gothic literature of his day and writes of capital’s “werewolf hunger for surplus labor” (353), and of how capital, “vampire-like, lives only sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (342). “Sucking living labor” is only achieved against resistance from those employed. Unlike Dracula’s usual passive victims, workers fight back. Capital, therefore, requires strategies to overcome their resistance. The strategy addressed in Part III —its character, successes and failures—Marx calls a strategy of absolute surplus-value because, to the degree that capitalists are successful, the length of the working day increases and surplus-value with it; any shortening of the working day would reduce absolute surplus-value. The length of Chapter  10 is consequential to the results extracted from detailed accounts of the various ways capital has sought to increase the length of the working day: using the law to extend the formal working day; using clocks to fool workers into working more; and imposing work at night as well as during the day, as well as reporting efforts to resist this process. In Sections 5 and 6, he traces the historical pattern of this class struggle, which changed as the ability of capital to extend work was reversed by workers becoming better organized and succeeding in getting laws passed limiting and then shortening the working day—a direct undermining of the strategy of absolute surplus-value. Although

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drawn out over time, this was a dramatic reversal that continued well into the twentieth century, eventually winning the eight-hour day, five-day work weeks, weekends free of work and even annual vacations.

Part IV: The Production of Relative Surplus-Value In Part IV, Marx argues that resistance by workers on the terrain of work time drove capital to invest more heavily in another strategy, namely the reorganization of work so as to be more efficient and raise productivity. In that Part’s first chapter (12), Marx, like a good economist, explains how increased productivity achieved via technological innovation lowers the costs of production. In money terms, lower costs raise profits, but when the increased productivity is in the production of the means of subsistence, or consumer goods, it also lowers the value of labor power (v) tending to raise the rate of surplus-value (s/v). Faced with workers’ success in hammering down the length of the working day, such that total v + s declines, this strategy can offset the decline in absolute surplus-value by increasing the relative share of surplus-value— thus, the name relative surplus-value. The size of this effect depends upon how widely technological improvement spreads—a process encouraged by competition among capitalist firms. Having explained how relative surplus-value can be achieved, Marx then goes on in the next three chapters to offer a detailed analyzis of the general social nature of technology and how it tends to be organized in capitalist society. He begins with a discussion in Chapter 13 of co-operation, showing how work and production are always social, which involves the interconnected skills of many people, both those in the present and those in the past who have informed and shaped the abilities, methods and tools of the present. He argues that capital seeks to harness and exploit this collective power. To do so requires dividing those it puts to work so that it can control them. Therefore, Chapter  13 is followed by Chapter 14, “The Division of Labor and Manufacture.” His emphasis on manufacturing (as opposed to, say, agriculture) responded to the increasingly dominant role of manufacturing in British industrialization and capitalist development more generally. In three sections, he analyzes the rise of manufacturing out of pre-existing handicrafts and how it is organized by combining many specialized workers to form a collective worker of vastly greater power than any simple sum of individual abilities.17 As an integral part of its use of the division of labor as a means of control, capital imposes hierarchy on this collective worker, giving some (e.g., managers) power over others and paying some more than others (e.g., differentiating wages by seniority). For Marx, the division of labor on-the-job is not merely technical, it is a function of efforts to control workers by pitting them against each other, undermining collective efforts to self-organize. Widening his view, Marx also points out the existence of broader divisions between industries, e.g., textiles and steel, and between sectors, e.g., between agriculture and manufacturing. Although the connections between these divisions are sometimes organized within the operations of what today are called conglomerate firms, e.g., a steel company that also operates iron and coal mines, Marx saw, mostly, connections through markets—thus his representation of investment as including the purchase of

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the means of production, tools and raw materials (M–MP ). As a result, he juxtaposed the “anarchy” of the market, where each participant operates separately in an uncoordinated manner, to the “despotism” of detailed capitalist planning of the division of labor on the shop floor. In Chapter 15,“Machinery and Modern Industry, ” Marx focuses on the introduction of new machines as the primary form of technological change in nineteenth century industry, and, increasingly, a key element of capital’s struggle to impose work and extract relative surplus-value. This necessarily involves the impact of the introduction of machines on the organization and the division of labor on workers. Machines are often portrayed as complex tools, enabling workers to be more productive; an example might be a back-hoe that allows a worker to dig a ditch faster than possible with a shovel. More concerned with the role of machines in the rapidly proliferating factories of his time, Marx sharply differentiates those machines from tools used by workers. The essential difference, he insists, is that while workers use tools, machines tend to use workers, in the sense that it is the machine, regulated by managers, that sets the pace of work, and factory work tends to be reduced to machine-tending. From the tool-using, active subject of labor, the workers are reduced to being “one more cog in the machine, ” where the control of the latter provides one means to exploit the former. A familiar image of this kind of labor from the nineteenth century is that of girls tending long rows of spinning machines or looms in textile factories. Stripped of their tools and forced to react machine-like to the rhythm of mechanical monsters, work becomes deadening, boring and even crippling. In Section  3 of this Chapter, Marx dwells at length on the negative effects of machines on the health of workers. In that section, he also takes up two important ironies resulting from the introduction of machines to extract more surplus-value: 1. Despite the possibility of taking some of the fruits of rising productivity in the form of less work—the dream of Aristotle to replace slaves with robots— capitalists instead do their best to use machines to extract more work from their employees. How? Desiring to minimize costs, capitalists try to keep their machines running continuously. This has created both longer working days and shift-labor, as one cohort of workers replaces another, twenty-four hours a day. Even if longer days have been rendered impossible by workers’ struggles, subordinating workers to the rhythm of machines and then speeding up those machines (or making individuals work on more than one machine) intensifies labor and by doing so imposes more work, and more negative effects on workers. Imposing more work by making workers work longer is replaced (or complemented) by making them work harder. Although this analyzis appears in Part IV on relative surplus-value, the parallel (more work) with absolute surplus-value is obvious. The analyzis of the capitalist use of the machine provides Marx with the perfect occasion to drop the previous assumption of constant intensity of labor. 2. With demand limited, despite the best efforts of capitalists to create new markets at home and others abroad through imperialist expansion, the increased productivity made possible by machines results in the laying-off of workers and a rise in unemployment. Where such constant capital (c) widely replaces variable

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capital (v), as it did in the British textile industry as power looms replaced hand looms, displaced workers made up a growing proportion of what Marx calls, in Chapter 25, the “reserve army of labor. ” This displacement and the resulting unemployment became a constant by-product of capitalist efforts to raise productivity and extract more work from fewer workers; true in the nineteenth century and true today with the creation and deployment of robotic machines in industry after industry. The repeated reduction in available jobs directly undermines capital’s use of waged labor for social control. After situating these dynamics within the characteristic nineteenth century factory in Section 4, in Section 5 Marx turns to the inevitable class “struggle between workers and the machine. ” Machinery, he writes, “is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital . . . It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt” (563). He then highlights workers’ inevitable negative responses, from the machine breaking of the Luddites to the increased self-organization of workers to fight any changes in technology that affect them negatively. As with the struggle over the length of the working day, such self-organization spread from factories to industries to society as a whole, from the movement for the Peoples’ Charter of 1838 (supported by Marx) to the demand for unemployment compensation and assistance during and after the New Deal (US ) of the 1930s and 1940s.

Part V: The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value Having explained the mechanisms for the extraction of absolute and relative surplusvalue in Parts III and IV, Marx emphasizes in Part V that, although workers’ success in shortening the working day encouraged capital to respond with increased investment in raising productivity and the intensity of labor, absolute and relative surplus-value generally exist alongside each other, sometimes the one expanding to make up for declines in the other, sometimes both changing in complementary ways. In three short chapters (16, 17, 18), Marx reviews how variations in work time, productivity and the intensity of labor may change in relationship to each other, and how those changes determine changes in surplus-value and the rate of exploitation. He does so by methodically holding two of the determinants constant, varying the third and examining the effects.

Part VI: Wages For the most part, up to this point Marx has laid out his analyzis in terms of value and surplus-value, eschewing all those money forms that embody value. Here, however, in four chapters (19–22) he does analyze one of those forms, money wages, and how that form facilitates the imposition of work. The value of labor power was discussed in Chapter 6 and is recalled in Chapter 19 as the amount of socially necessary labor time capital must allocate to the production of the consumer goods required for the

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reproduction of the working class. While the form of that value sometimes takes the form of actual items of consumption; e.g., when agricultural laborers are paid with part of the harvest or when the government provides services, e.g., public health measures or public schools, increasingly, with the development of capitalism, workers have been paid money wages or salaries, etc. Not surprisingly, the question of money wages and workers’ struggles to avoid reductions and gain increases were much debated within the workers’ movement of the mid-nineteenth century (as they are today). In a famous debate, Marx sided definitively with those who advocated resistance to wage reductions and battles to raise wages where possible.18 But in these chapters, he assumes the value of labor power to be constant and examines how capitalist employers structure wages and manipulate them in an effort to impose as much work as possible. In the process, he highlights two aspects of capitalist strategy. First, by pretending to pay workers for their labor rather than their labor power capitalists hide the existence of exploitation. Whereas in slavery, Marx points out, workers appear to work purely for their owner and the work they do for themselves is hidden, in capitalism waged workers appear to be paid for all their work, and the work they do for their employers is hidden. Second, by linking wages paid to measures of labor performed, capitalists create situations in which it is easier to get workers to do more work, e.g. time-wages, such as hourly wages, analyzed in Chapter 20, and piece-wages, or wages per unit produced, analyzed in Chapter 21. In the case of time-wages, higher pay for longer work makes it appear that the wage is paid per time unit of labor. In the case of piece-wages, because the production of each piece requires a given amount of work, it also appears that the amount of money wages is determined by amount of work performed. Both strategies make money wages look like the price of labor, and both obscure how workers receive only part of the value they provide. Exploitation is hidden. Both forms can be manipulated by employers to extract more work. When capitalists are unconstrained by minimum wage laws, and are able to reduce time wages, say, during a recession, workers will be willing to work more hours to maintain their standard of living, or the value of their labor power. When employers can lower piece rates, workers work harder to compensate. Independently of changes in piece rates, inevitably some workers will work harder and produce more pieces to earn more money than others. This not only creates a wage hierarchy that divides workers, but it is also an opportunity for employers to use the output-per-hour of those who work hardest to set lower piece rates for all workers. Because workers working for piece-rates tend to impose work on themselves and don’t require direct oversight, e.g. for workers harvesting in orchards or turning out parts with machine tools in factories, capital does require “quality control” to make sure crates are not filled with rocks or substandard parts. In response to both these manipulations, workers have often organized to fight the reduction of time-wages, to demand extra payment for any overtime, to collectively set upper limits on how hard piece-wage workers will work, and to sanction any worker who violates those limits.19 Marx finishes Part VI with Chapter 22 in which he looks at variations in the utilization of these methods, in resistance to them in different countries, and at the differences in wages that result.

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Part VII: The Process of Accumulation of Capital Up to this point, Capital, Vol. I. has presented elements of Marx’s analyzis of the social relationships of capitalism, bit by bit, adding more and more determinations, and thus more concreteness to the overall theoretical and political understanding being offered. Here, at the end of the mainly theoretical bulk of the book, Parts I–VII , we have additional analyzis and synthesis, an overview of capital’s organization of society. Both analyzis and synthesis begin in Chapter 23 on “Simple Reproduction,” which emphasizes how the successful imposition of work provides the wherewithal to begin the whole process all over again, to reproduce the same set of social relationships. Reproducing them requires that all their elements must be reproduced, from the monies invested, through the factories, tools and raw materials by which work is organized, to those upon whom work is imposed. In other words, reproduction is the reproduction of capitalist society, both on the job and off. On the job, used up tools and raw materials must be replaced; off the job, consumption must be sufficient to replace labor power, also often used up. In this chapter, this overall process is called simple reproduction because it sets aside, for the moment, Marx’s analyzis of how capital grows its social order, a subject he takes up in Chapters 24 and 25. While, as we have seen, Marx devoted Chapters  12–15 to detailing how capital organizes work and production on the job, here he argues that individual consumption is also an essential “aspect of the production and reproduction of capital, ” but analyzes that consumption in much less detail. Writing in a period in which capitalist efforts to shape and organize the family, a major preoccupation in the twentieth century, were limited, Marx felt it sufficient to note that “the capitalist may safely leave this [individual consumption] to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation. ” (718). Almost immediately, however, he gives a counter-example of South American mine-owners who forced their workers to eat beans as well as bread to increase their strength and productivity (718, n. 9). Moreover, he notes how the “transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another” (719) is also an essential part of the reproduction of the working class. These processes clearly occur both on the job and within families and schools, but of their dynamics within the latter, he says little.20 Despite being limited in scope as to how the reproduction of capital requires the reproduction of the working class, Marx’s analyzis follows capital’s influence out of the factory gates into society, especially into the homes and other spaces where people live and die, worry or love, study or play. By implication, these spaces, just like factories, are terrains of struggle between workers’ efforts to live both as individuals and collectively, and capital’s need for those efforts to contribute to the reproduction of their lives as labor power. However, from the point of view of capitalists, Marx argues that simple reproduction amounts to mere stagnation. Their efforts to generate and realize surplus-value, such that Mʹ > M, always aims at more investment and more workers to be put to work to produce more commodities, i.e. growth. The aim is to achieve an expanded reproduction of the capitalist organization of society. How that is accomplished, Marx takes up in Chapter 24; many of the consequences, he analyzes in Chapter 25.

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The “how” is given in the title of Chapter 24: “The Transformation of Surplus-value into Capital. ” It could as well have been titled “Investment” because that is how surplusvalue in the money form of profits is turned into more of everything. As Chapter 23 shows, capitalists must spend some money to replace means of production and labor power consumed in the process of production. But to expand their operations, to spread their way of organizing social life on an ever-wider scale, they must undertake what some economists call real investment—as opposed to the expenditure of money on financial assets or securities—by hiring more workers and by buying new tools and raw materials to increase the production of commodities, and, of course, they must find new customers for those commodities, whether for newly produced means of production or means of consumption. In other words, investment not only renews the existing set of relations, it expands them. In the second section of this chapter, Marx inveighs against apologists for capitalism, like Adam Smith who pretended “that the whole of that part of the net product which is transformed into capital is consumed by the working class” (738). Such formulations not only ignore the transformation of another part of net product into the means of production owned by the capitalists, but portrays investment as being in the interests of workers, thus hiding the existence of exploitation.21 In the third section, he also attacks those, like Nassau Senior (1790–1864), who justify profits by portraying investment by capitalists as a virtuous, self-denying process of abstinence from consumption. Whereas self-denial may be true for some shop owners, Marx argues that the rise of corporations, whose owners and directors derive their high incomes and conspicuous consumption from the exploitation of large numbers of much poorer workers, makes that portrayal laughable. Abstinence from consumption in modern capitalism is not a virtue, but an infliction imposed on workers by their low wages and paltry social welfare. In the fourth and final section of this chapter, Marx critiques an old argument against workers’ efforts to raise wages which claimed that the “fund” available for hiring labor is fixed, such that some workers success in raising their wages will undermine those of others. On the contrary, as his analyzis of investment and expanded reproduction has shown, the resources available for hiring labor power grow right along with every other element of accumulation. Chapter 25 on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” ends Part VII with three main themes. First, accumulation is above all the accumulation of the classes. Second, the dynamics of accumulation tend to undermine the process itself, causing crises for the system. Third, the accumulation of the classes inevitably includes, on the side of capital, a tendency toward an ever-greater centralization in the control of capital, and on the side of the working class the accumulation of both waged and unwaged workers. The first of these themes appears almost immediately on the second page of the chapter. “Accumulation”, Marx writes, “reproduces the capital-relation on an expanded scale, with more capitalists, or bigger capitalists, at one pole, and more wage-laborers at the other pole. Accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat” (763-764). The prior analyzis in Chapters  1–24 demonstrated how this includes an accumulation of all the antagonisms of the class relation; so, accumulation is, at the same time, accumulation of class struggle.

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The second of these themes, how capitalist strategies undermine the process of accumulation, focuses on the consequences of the relative surplus-value strategy of cutting costs and the value of labor power by introducing productivity-raising machines. In value terms, such efforts involve an increase in what Marx calls the organic composition of capital (c/v). This contributes to the emergence of crises in two ways. The first concerns its short-term impact. Because capitalists usually attempt to turn increased productivity into increased output, and because the size of available markets is hard to estimate, doing so creates a tendency to overproduction, falling prices and falling profits—a crisis for producers. Often a response to reduced working hours and rising wages, which also undermine surplus-value, this strategy makes it easier for capitalists to respond by laying off workers and cutting back wages. These changes all contribute to less waged work, lower wages and higher unemployment—in short, a crisis for workers.22 Whereas economists optimistically refer to such changes as downturns in the business cycle, and assume every downturn will be followed by a cyclical upturn, for Marx each “downturn” constitutes a crisis with the possibility of becoming so general as to provoke a revolutionary response by workers (as in 1848) and the overthrow of capitalism. The second way in which relative surplus value undermines accumulation concerns its long-term impact on the ability of capital to organize society through the imposition of work. As capitalist after capitalist, in industry after industry, responds to workers struggles by replacing them with machines, and as the rise in MP /LP and c/v means an ever-greater investment is required to put workers to work, this dynamic undermines capital’s most basic mechanism for imposing waged labor and hence control over the population. This theme is elaborated in Vol. III of Capital where Marx calls this tendency the most important contradiction of its development.23 The third theme in this chapter, the impact of capital’s relative surplus value strategy on the structure of class relationships, includes the genesis both of “bigger capitalists” and of a “reserve army of labor. ” Replacing troublesome workers with more easily controlled machines reduces costs and gives those capitalists who act first a competitive advantage over others, contributing to their ability to take-over or absorb their competitors’ operations. Marx called the expansion of fewer capitalists’ control over more elements of production the centralization of capital. Because the rise in the organic composition of capital occurs only as the result of a rise in what he calls the technical composition of capital (MP /LP ), and involves the displacement of waged workers, it increases the number of unwaged workers. Although, as he showed in Part VIII , the expropriation of people from their land and tools generated a pool of unwaged workers, Marx argues that, instead of disappearing with the accumulation of capital, this pool is repeatedly regenerated creating a permanent “reserve army. ” This argument makes clear that in his view “the working class” has, from the beginning, consisted of both waged workers (the industrial proletariat) and unwaged workers. Whereas throughout most of the earlier chapters of Capital, Vol. I, Marx focused on waged labor with only passing reference to the unwaged, here he offers the beginning of a more detailed analyzis of the unwaged. The reserve army of labor can be understood, he suggests, as composed of at least three different sectors: the floating reserve, the latent reserve and the stagnant reserve.

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The floating reserve consists of those who are looking for new jobs and offer to sell themselves in the labor market. This corresponds, roughly, to the contemporary definition of “unemployed. ” The latent reserve is made up of those not currently looking for work, but who may do so in the future—either by choice or necessity. Children, women escaping the home, or the return of those who had temporarily stopped looking for work, may voluntarily seek waged employment. Continuing enclosure (as described in Chapter  27 of Part VIII ) has made finding waged work a matter of survival for many. The stagnant reserve is populated by those who are unlikely to ever seek waged employment. For Marx, this included those engaged in “domestic industry” and everyone trapped in the “sphere of pauperism”, from the “lumpenproletariat” of vagabonds, criminals and sex workers, to orphans, pauper children, disabled victims of industry and the elderly. “Pauperism, ” Marx writes, “is the hospital of the active labor-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army” (797). This discussion, the Chapter and Part VII end with a whole series of concrete historical illustrations.

Notes 1

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Classic among those who have amplified Marx’s story telling is Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1992). An early critique of Marx was Eugen Bohm von Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1898). Among the early Marxists who eschewed revolution were Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) and Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), both members of the German Social Democratic Party that sought socialism through the ballot box. The Socialist International, formed in 1940, claims member parties in over eighty countries, as of 2015. The earliest such denunciations came from anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) and Bolsheviks such as Lenin (1870–1924). Both have been succeeded by generations of followers. Almost any text on the history of economic thought presents the usual argument, e.g., Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962, 1997). This decades-long debate has turned around differing interpretations of the so-called “transformation problem”—the “problem” being the transformation of values into prices. For a recent contribution, see Fred Moseley’s Money and Totality: A MacroMonetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital and the End of the “Transformation Problem” (2016). See, for example, Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1966), John Roemer, Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy (1988); Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons of the Grundrisse (1979) and Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude (2001). See George Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines and the Crisis of Capitalism (2013), Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money and Financialization (2017) and the forthcoming collection Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader (2018).

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The most recent translation by Ben Fowkes in the Penguin edition—the source of excerpts in this essay—also includes, as appendices, a text now titled “Results of the Immediate Process of Production”, sometimes called “the unpublished sixth chapter”, and two “Isolated Fragments”. These are not included in this overview of Vol. I. One example is Louis Althusser who advised readers to skip Part I, begin with Part II , read the whole book through and then return to Part I. This approach is embodied in a study guide prepared for those courses, which can be found online at: http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg.html (accessed August 11, 2018). In Chapter 1 and for many chapters thereafter, Marx holds the intensity of labor constant, an assumption he eventually relaxes in Chapter 15. Workers applying for a job inevitably promise—sometimes honestly—a willingness to work. But every employer knows that willingness, and the associated realization of ability, must be guaranteed by either close oversight (sticks) or by encouragement (carrots). Eventually, in the mid-twentieth century, economists came to recognize and incorporate into their theory how the payment of “efficiency wages”, above those indicated by existing state of supply and demand, could result in a greater willingness to work, less shirking, more work, less turnover and higher productivity. Because most of Marx’s examples of commodities and commodity producing work were lifted from agriculture or manufacturing industry, some Marxists have hesitated to recognize “services” as valid commodities and the work of providing services as commodity producing labor on a par with industrial labor that produces “objects”. Elsewhere in Capital, however, in both Volumes 1 and 2, Marx does recognize how services produced by waged labor and sold by capitalist bosses are, indeed, commodities and the labor that produces them is of the same order as that employed in fields and factories. Mainstream microeconomics only recognizes exploitation in the much narrower case of imperfect competition when wages are less than marginal value product of labor. Almost a hundred years after Capital, Vol. I, was published, economists in the 1950s gave this variable quality of labor power a new name, but one with echoes of Marx’s “variable capital”. They dubbed it “human capital”, and argued that the amount and quality of labor extractable from workers could be raised through investments in education. While economists seem to recognize this phenomenon, rarely seeking to calculate the productivity of individuals, managers often ignore it and seek measures (often called “metrics” nowadays) of individual work as a way of keeping pressure on employees to work hard. See Karl Marx, “Value, Price and Profit” (1865) in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20, Marx & Engels, 1864–1868, New York: International Publishers, 1985, 101–49. Read Jack London’s account of a worker who violated such informal rules in “South of the Slot” in Novels & Stories (New York: Library of America, 1982), or listen to Patti Smith’s song “Piss Factory” (1974) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6aUbrZYjYE (accessed August 11, 2018). The most important amplifications of this analyzis have been undertaken by women. See, for example, the Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader mentioned above. A modern version of such portrayal can be found in Irving Kristol’s book Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978) where jobs created through investment are treated as benevolent gifts to workers.

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22 Against Malthus who blames wage fluctuations on population dynamics, Marx points to changes in capitalists’ demands for labor. 23 The discussion in that volume can be found in Part Three on “The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit”, a law that results from the rising organic composition of capital.

Reference Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin Books.

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The Civil War in France (1871) Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Marx did not write very much about revolution. In many ways, revolution is not really even a concept for him, it is an event that can hardly be conceptualized in structural terms. He speaks of revolution in The Communist Manifesto and in The Civil War in France. Although the former has been more widely published and read, the second text is relevant as a mature reflection on the ongoing development of the political force of the working class. Even if his previous works were widely known and his name respected among the insurgents, Marx did not directly influence the events the Commune dealt with in The Civil War in France; the conspiratorial theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui and of the anarchist utopias of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon were far more relevant in the political vision of the Communards. But this is not so important for Marx; he knows that class struggle is more a spontaneous becoming than a consciously directed process, and he knows that the possible emancipation of human time from the chains of salaried work does not depend only on the structural dynamics of social conflict, but also on the unpredictable emergence of events. Despite the prominent role he played in the creation and leadership of the International Workingmen’s Association, the profile of Marx is not really that of a leader, of someone who presides over a movement and addresses speeches to rebellious crowds. It is much more the profile of an interpreter of signs, a person who links the development of the immanent structure with the evolution of social subjectivity. Marx’s biography, as well as his work, turns around two different and sometimes diverging tasks: the first is the construction of a theoretical edifice; the second is participation in the historical conflicts of his time, with a special interest in the social and political activity of an emergent working class. The major theoretical writings to which he dedicated his intellectual energy, particularly Das Kapital and the Grundrisse, not to mention the early philosophical texts, must be read as attempts to extrapolate historical trends destined to prevail in the long run, while the occasional, journalistic texts written in the context of ongoing occurrences should be read as real-time, inprocess assessments of the intellectual and political debates of his time. One scale attends to patterns detectable on the level of centuries, the other to the micro-rhythms of a present in the process of unfolding unexpectedly. Marx was not just a philosopher, in line with thesis eleven of his famous 1845 piece on Feuerbach, he was also a journalist, a political organizer and a polemist—a 81

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committed activist. Some of his books are collections of articles, Wage Labor and Capital were first published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1849, while some are speeches that were delivered for an audience of workers; Value Price and Profit is the transcription of a speech delivered to the First International Workingmen’s Association in June of 1865. The text titled The Civil War in France, published in London on June 13, 1871, consists of just 35 pages and is actually a collection of three addresses given by Marx to the General Council of the International at three different moments. Originally written in English, the texts are inspired by the events that occurred in Paris in 1870–1871, culminating in the experience of the Commune de Paris. The pamphlet contains comments on the Franco-Prussian war; on the insurrection of Paris; on the Thiers government’s betrayal; as well as on many more details of the period. The crucial pages, however, are dedicated to the Commune as an experience and express a clear appreciation for its historical novelty as the first autonomous manifestation of the working class as a political subject. In the following years, the pamphlet was translated into French, Russian, Polish, German and other European languages. It was also reprinted across the continent in newspapers and pamphlets. The absolute novelty of the Parisian experience, which lasted less than one hundred days, influenced the political imagination of the following century. This was clearly perceived by Marx. Although a large part of the text is focused on military and political occurrences, what was most interesting to Marx was the social content of the daily activity of the Communards, particularly the promulgation of measures for the improvement of everyday life. The daily chronicle of the Commune is marked by simple acts of law that lay down the base for a transformation of production and of social life at large. Marx is enchanted by this everyday political magic, this capacity of the many to actively participate in their own historical emancipation. In a page of the third Address, Marx outlines the first steps of the Commune: On April 1 it was decided that the highest salary received by any employee of the Commune, and therefore also by its members themselves, might not exceed 6,000 francs. On the following day the Commune decreed the separation of the Church from the State, and the abolition of all state payments for religious purposes as well as the transformation of all Church property into national property. As a result of this, on April 8, a decree was issued that forbade schools from holding all religious symbols, pictures, dogmas and prayers—in a word “all that belongs to the sphere of the individual’s conscience” was ordered to be excluded from the schools, and this decree was gradually applied. On the 5th, in response to the shooting of the Commune’s fighters captured by the Versailles troops, a decree was issued that authorized the imprisonment of hostages, but it was never put into effect. On the 6th, the guillotine was brought out by the 137th battalion of the National guard and publicly burnt, [amid great popular rejoicing]. On the 12th, the Commune decided that the Victory Column on the Place Vendôme, which had been cast from guns captured by Napoleon after the war of 1809, should be demolished; the Column was a symbol of chauvinism and incitement to national hatred. This decree was carried out on May 16. On April 16, the Commune ordered a statistical

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tabulation of factories which had been closed down by the manufacturers, and the working out of plans for the carrying on of these factories by workers formerly employed in them, who were then to be organized into co-operative societies, and also plans were made for the organization of these co-operatives in one great union. On the 20th, the Commune abolished night work for bakers and workers’ registration cards, which since the Second Empire had been run as a monopoly by police nominees—exploiters of the first rank; the issuing of these registration cards was transferred to the mayors of the twenty arrondissements of Paris. On April 30, the Commune ordered the closing of the pawnshops, on the ground that they were a private exploitation of labor and were in contradiction with the right of the workers to their instruments of labor and to credit. On May 5 it ordered the demolition of the Chapel of Atonement, which had been built in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI .

In many ways, these descriptions of the actual choices made by the Communards fill in a perceived gap in Marx’s work, namely his failure (or refusal) to closely detail the processes necessary to overturn capitalism. Marx seems to suggest that theoretical speculation about political strategy can only appear stale and belated when held up against the actually existing inventiveness of revolution. For the first time in history the problem of work, the reduction of work-time comes to the fore as the prominent point of progressive culture in the making. Simultaneously, however, for the first time in history the evolution of class struggle makes direct contact with the problem of the State. These two levels—the social transformation of the relation between labor and capital and the socialist transformation of the State—must be examined according to their differences. The first concerns the structural dimension that Marx explored in his main theoretical texts: the basic contradiction between labor and capital; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; and the possibility of the emancipation of social life from salaried work inscribed in the evolution of the general intellect. The second concerns the dimension of eventuality: individual will; social consensus; and the emergence of new political formations that cannot be reduced to structural dynamics. This dimension escapes the grasp of structural analyzis and opens the door to the unpredictable sphere of subjective autonomy. Twenty years after the Commune and nine years after the death of Karl Marx, in introducing a new edition of The Civil War in France, Friedrich Engels writes: From the outset of the Commune, (Marx) was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

Engels posits here the problem that Lenin will try to resolve, for better or for worse: the problem of the relation between structure and event, between the inscribed dynamics of the general process of production (which leads to the reduction of necessary work

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time and the ensuing emancipation of people from the constraints of salaried work) and the unpredictable occurrences of social subjectivity and of political will. Lenin, of course, would come to emphasize the free action of the political will; Gramsci—in an article published on November 24th, 1917 in the newspaper Avanti— openly saluted the Bolshevik Revolution as a revolution against Das Kapital. From this perspective, the event comes to break the structural chain as conceptualized by Marx. The event of the Russian Revolution, like the event of the Paris Commune was not predictable since it was not a necessary development of the structural dynamics inscribed in the process of production. Indeed, the Russian Revolution can be understood as a direct violation or refutation of Marx’s claim that socialist revolution would first begin in the most advanced industrial countries. Similarly, the Commune is not the manifestation of an implied tendency, but an unpredictable event. In this sense, we can compare the kind of position articulated by Marx in his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—where he seems to place greater emphasis on the necessary, structural development of the forces of production—with a later moment, taught by the spontaneity of events, in which Marx comes to see the subjectivity of the masses as itself historically decisive. According to Franz Mehring, in Spring 1871 the Paris police published a report in which Marx was said to disagree with the Communards, particularly on the point that they were more focused on political issues than on social issues. Promptly, Marx replied with an article, published in The Times, accusing the police article of obfuscation. Obviously, we trust Marx on this point. As an ethical person and as a political militant, he was heartily engaged in supporting the Paris Commune. Nevertheless, the police report is not totally meaningless. A smart Parisian flic having read the theoretical texts of Karl Marx could reasonably guess that the severe philosopher might disagree with the political symbology of the Communards, and might disclaim the event in the name of the structural predictions implied in his theory. Marx, however, was not a determinist nor a nitpicking doctrinaire. He did not expect the historical event to comply with his structural analyzis or with its implied predictions. He was not a dogmatic believer in historical necessity; this was already apparent in his dissertation, which championed Epicurean atomism over the strict necessitarian variation espoused by Democritus. In Communal Luxury, Kristin Ross notes that for Marx: What mattered most about the Paris Commune was not any ideals it sought to realize but, rather, its own “working existence, ” he underlined the extent to which the insurgents shared no blueprint of the society to come. The Commune, in this sense, was a working laboratory of political inventions, improvised on the spot or hobbled together out of past scenarios and phrases, reconfigured as need be, and fed by desires awakened in the popular [. . .] reunions at the end of the Empire. 2015: 11

In fact, Marx writes in the Third address of The Civil War in France that: The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They had no readymade utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They knew that in order to work

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out their own emancipation, and along with it a higher form to which present society is irresistibly trending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, other than to set free the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. 1871: n.p.

In La Commune, Histoires et souvenirs (first published in 1898), Louise Michel writes: One night, I don’t know how, it happened that we two were alone in the trench in front of the station: the former Zouave pontifical and me with two loaded rifles . . . we were incredibly lucky that the station was not attacked that night . . . As we were performing our duty, doing and going in the trench he said to me when we met up: We continued walking back and forth in the trench under the silence of the Versailles at Clamart (170). What effect does the life we are leading have on you? Well, I said, the effect of seeing before us a distant shore that we have to reach. For me, he replied, the effect is one of reading a book with dazzling pictures.

In this scene, in this short conversation, we may read an analogy of the future revolutionary movement that will shake the world in the twentieth century. A passionate intellectual woman walking together with a soldier of the Vatican who has deserted the ranks of the pro-French coalition and joined the guard of a never-beforeseen commune of workers. He asks: “What is the meaning of this experience that we are living?”, and she answers as an intellectual and political militant: “We are on a boat and we are trying to reach a shore, to discover and build a new land, a new world. ” The Zouave soldier nods, smiles, and frankly replies: “No, no, for me it is not to reach a shore to discover and build a new world, but a way of gazing at an unimaginable landscape, an opportunity for an exciting escape. ” In this nocturnal dialogue one may find the seeds of two different approaches to history that have traversed the twentieth century. Is history the effort to reach a shore, to fulfil a goal, or is it an enchanted journey, the discovery of something that we did not expect?

References Engels, F. (1891), “Introduction, ” Marxists.org. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm (accessed August 11, 2018) Marx, K. (1871), The Civil War in France, Marxists.org. Available online: https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm (accessed August 11, 2018) Michel, L. (2005 [1898]), La Commune, Histoires et souvenirs, Paris: La Decouverte. Ross, K. (2015), Communal Luxury, London: Verso.

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“Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875) Andrew Pendakis

When the revolt against Germany’s ancien regime broke out in March of 1848, those who participated did so on the basis of an extremely broad array of political commitments. The German bourgeoisie was struggling for the establishment of a Rechtsstaat, a state governed by law rather than by arbitrary princely rule. This entailed demands for constitutional rule, for the expansion of basic liberal rights and freedoms— rights to free expression, movement, etc.—and for a regularized national parliament to replace the weak, infrequently-convened federal Diet which was then in place. Many bourgeois reformers saw their program as theoretically compatible with monarchical rule, even with the continuing monopoly on military privilege of the aristocratic landlord class. A smaller group—which included liberal republicans, socialists, and radical democrats—wanted the complete overthrow of the aristocratic state. Overlapping the differences between these two broad groups was a desire for national unification and an end to the Deutscher Bund, a federated political arrangement that had been established at the Congress of Vienna and which was widely perceived as politically ineffective and out of touch with the times. Two years after the insurrections of 1848, however, Marx and Engels would lament that “the powers that were” before the revolution were again the “powers that be” (Marx and Engels 1912: 13). Conservative power had been re-asserted and the liberal and socialist oppositions repressed, censored and exiled. A decade of relative political quiet followed. In the 1860s a new kind of organized working class opposition began to appear. Liberals in the period before and after 1848 had called on the German working class to support them in their struggle; they saw themselves as advocating for “universal” values—things like rule of law, property rights and freedom of the press—from which everyone stood to gain. They also thought that both workers and liberals had more to lose if they were divided in the fight against absolutism—neither group had military power and each would be much easier to defeat separately. For many workers, however, questions about constitutions and parliamentary sovereignty were far less concrete and pressing than those pertaining to the everyday social conditions in which they worked, lived and died. High unemployment rates, badly remunerated work, exploitative child labor, and work days that, for adults, could last up to fourteen hours: these were the issues of ultimate concern to a whole generation of urban, industrial workers. The emphasis placed within the standard liberal program on free-trade only further 87

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alienated a large segment of the working class; the promise of trade freed from external tariffs had little traction among poor German Handwerker whose livelihoods were directly endangered by cheap English imports. Workers were beginning to envision the need for autonomous, self-governed political organizations that posited their own class-interests as ends in themselves. For those who could read the signs, it appeared as if the future belonged increasingly to the rapidly growing class of urban manual workers; if anybody had the right to speak in the name of the “universal” it would, no doubt, be them. In the 1860s and early 1870s, radical working class politics in Germany were dominated by two competing socialist parties. Founded in 1863, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (Universal German Workers’ Association, ADAV ) was built around the political philosophy and direct charismatic leadership of Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle’s politics were socialist and radically democratic, but he stopped well short of advocating for the revolutionary overthrow of German absolutism. In fact, he was not even unambiguously republican; he thought there was nothing intrinsically oxymoronic about the idea of a “socialist monarchy, ” an idea that would eventually be half-heartedly experimented with by Bismarck (with whom Lassalle corresponded and respected). Lassalle’s position drew from Marx, on whom he relied for his understanding of the structure and history of capitalism, and from Johann Rodbertus, a conservative socialist economist who proposed that capitalist immiseration could only be solved “scientifically” from the top down. For Rodbertus, state socialist intervention into the market was the only thing standing between order and bloody communist revolt. Lassalle’s strategy, one close in spirit to that of the English Chartists, was to expand the base of the party with the promise of universal manhood suffrage, and to then use the political power won by the majority through the vote to address the economic conditions that oppressed workers. Democratic political reform would be used as a means to a top-down economic restructuring, though not to radically alter the conservative political machine itself. Lassalle hoped to gradually introduce socialism into Germany by using the existing state to extend credit to voluntary producer cooperatives controlled entirely by the workers themselves; in this, his program partially resembled that of Louis Blanc in France—though the ateliers nationaux established in the latter’s name by his enemies during the Second Republic were heavily critiqued by both Lassalle and even by Blanc himself. Under both Lassalle and Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, the leader of the ADAV after Lassalle’s death (in a duel), the association was emphatically nationalist in tone; workers, in (temporary) alliance with the aristocratic landlord class, were to align against the interests of free-trade liberals to create a united, socialist Germany, one protected against foreign aggression by the Prussian military apparatus. The second main working-class party active in this period in Germany was the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany). It was formed at Eisenach in 1869 by August Bebel, an artisan/activist who had come to socialism through the works of Lassalle, and Wilhelm Liebknecht, a writer and associate of both Marx and Engels who had been active in the Communist League in London in the 1850s. Held up against its Lassallean counterpart, the politics of the SDAP were less ambiguously radical and more closely aligned in spirit to the position

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of Marx—though Marx himself often angrily distanced himself from the program of the party. Its 1869 manifesto called openly for “the abolition of class rule” and demonstrated much greater overall hostility to the aristocratic (and especially Prussian) military state. In contradistinction to Lassalle, whose contempt was mostly reserved for the liberal bourgeoisie, the Eisenachers were thoroughgoing republicans and recognized, along with Marx, the advantages of a tactical, if temporary, alliance with the middle classes. Their manifesto called for the people’s right to direct legislation through parliament; for the “abolition of all privileges attached to class, property, birth and religious faith”; the replacement of standing armies with militias; the separation of church and state; and for secularized, free and mandatory elementary education (Eisenach Program 1869). Liebknecht and Bebel, both of whom who had been elected to the Reichstag as socialists, refused to vote for the extension of war credits in the run up to the Franco-Prussian War; this burnished their internationalist credentials and placed them closer to Marx’s long-standing insistence on the need to construct proletarian solidarity across national and cultural boundaries. In addition to this, the SDAP was much more open to trade unionism and to organized strike action than was Lassalle’s party. After a great deal of surprisingly bitter conflict, the two parties eventually realized that they were effectively splitting the socialist vote in Germany and decided to merge their forces. Meeting at Gotha in 1875, the existing parties were dissolved and a new organization formed, the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Socialist Workers Party of Germany). Marx was sent an early version of the program that had been drafted ahead of the convention by key figures in both parties; his written response to this draft, the text we have come to call “Critique of the Gotha Program, ” played next to no role in the final version of the platform adopted by the party; it was not even published until 1891. Though Marx’s critiques went unheeded in 1875, his work became an essential part of the critical milieu of German social democracy in the years after the party was banned under the Anti-Socialist legislation of 1878. His influence would eventually be made official; at Erfurt, in 1891, the re-named Social Democratic Party would declare itself openly adherent to the theories of Marx. Marx opens the first section of the“Critique”by affirming (perhaps counterintuitively) that “Labor is not the source of all wealth” (2002: 208). His point here is simply to distinguish a common bourgeois/idealist conceit—that humans autonomously produce their prosperity, and by implication their own individual fates—from a more nuanced, materialist position, which sees human production as determinately enmeshed in and reliant upon nature. Labor, Marx emphasizes, does not take place in a vacuum, but unfolds within conditions that precede it; this is true both for the human animal as a species and for the individual worker who learns, day in and day out, that labor is in fact the opposite of wealth—an experience not of enrichment, but of open dispossession. Marx’s insistence on the dialectical interchange between labor and nature—and between labor and any conditions/relations—anticipates, though from an alternative conceptual framework, many of the critiques made by poststructuralists of a humanism ostensibly indistinguishable from a desire for sovereign control over all that exists. What Marx’s position has over these critiques, however, is a class-tinged twist; it is not the human desire for mastery per se that is the problem, so much as it

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is a very specific, middle-class inflection of this desire, a specifically bourgeois mastery that transforms nature into property and living labor into a fungible, docile commodity. Marx then turns his attention to the Gotha manifesto’s claim that “all members of society have an equal right to the undiminished return from labor” (2002: 209). What troubles Marx about this seemingly innocuous statement is its compatibility with the worst kinds of idealist holism; haven’t all societies, even those characterized by the most brutal forms of exploitation, justified the maldistribution of wealth by attributing to those in power a special, and indispensable, ability to rule? Haven’t all historical aristocracies worked on the premise that the good of the whole, enjoyed equally by all in times of peace and safeguarded by the strength of the ruling few, far outweighs the inconvenience and bloodiness of revolt? In what remains of Part 1 of his “Critique, ” Marx takes issue with the ways the Gotha program imagines the economics of socialism. It calls for the “fair distribution” of the product of labor within a framework in which the worker’s labor would no longer be characterized as it is under capitalism by the extraction of surplus value. Instead, this labor would return “undiminished” to the worker in the form of a right to individually consume its “true” value (2002: 209). What bothers Marx about this formulation is the way it entirely brackets the question of communist reproduction; that is, those questions pertaining to the public outlays required to reproduce the communist whole. Subtracted from the wealth produced by socialized labor would have to be the “capital” necessary to reproduce the means of production, to expand and technologically improve productive capacity, as well as the costs associated with the provision of insurance for those incapable of working. In addition to this, says Marx, and anterior to any discussion of how this “total social product” would be divided among specific individuals, any functional communist society would also have to deduct enough “capital” to cover the costs of public administration and for the sustenance of collective goods like schools, libraries and hospitals. Marx, as he does throughout the piece, points to the bourgeois individualist presuppositions still at work in this putatively socialist program and makes clear how radically novel any genuinely post-capitalist project would have to be if it is to escape the second nature of capitalism. Towards the end of this section, he accentuates this point by suggesting that the program remains mired in Lassallean patriotism and that it hasn’t properly arrived at the internationalist perspective necessary to any genuine emancipation of the working class. In the final part of the “Critique, ” Marx turns his attention away from the economics of communism and towards questions about the political form required by a legitimately communist society. He wants to think through the relationship between communist political strategy and the state, and to discuss the state-form’s role in the construction of any possible future communism. The early draft of the Gotha program read by Marx called for the establishment of a “free state” (2002: 221). Marx takes issue with this phrase, not only on the grounds that it is too vague, but because it seems to imply that the task of politics is freedom for or in the state. At work in the background of this formulation is a conservative liberal reading of Hegel, a point which is not surprising given the influence of Lassalle’s thoughts on the program as a whole. Lassalle

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was a close reader of Hegel and always envisioned the state as the highest expression of human rationality and freedom. Though Marx was himself richly indebted to Hegel, with this debt still very much apparent in his very last work, he had broken with the general outline of Hegel’s political philosophy as early as 1843. For Marx, the state was not a neutral form that could simply be filled in with new ideological content and made to work better; though its present content was the direct reflection of obfuscated class relations, it could not simply be taken up by the proletariat and re-made transparently in their own image. This is because the state itself, in both its absolutist and liberal forms, intercedes between the people and their own powers, paternalistically framing legislation and alienating the capacity of human beings to govern themselves. The state must be abolished, the oppositions it creates between sovereignty and society, between constitution and production, replaced by a form of immanent self-governance that makes life and its potentialities the object of collective consent and inventiveness. Marx insists that this can only be achieved on the basis of what he calls a “dictatorship of the proletariat, ” a process that is sometimes read by interpreters as a mere interregnum between capitalism and communism, but which is probably better understood as a mode of permanent revolution isomorphic with communism itself (2002: 222). Why does Marx insist on this seemingly antiquated concept, one so far away from the emphasis on rational discourse, consensus and the peaceful transfer of power avowed by the liberal tradition? There are two main reasons. First, the dictatorship of the proletariat makes clear the need for a revolutionary rupture with the present, a total break with the coordinates of the existing system, and it does so in an openly classinflected manner; it puts class and social struggle at the forefront of our imagining of just what it is that constitutes politics. The notion of a dictatorship, especially when read against the checks and balances of liberal governance, rightly indicate both the intensity and the scale of revolutionary change, though it is important to note that this is the dictatorship not of one strong man (a tyrant), nor of a separated set of official representatives (a party bureaucracy), but the dictatorship of an entire, self-conscious class. The second reason Marx insists on this concept is that it helps us to think of communism as something that has to be constructed temporally, a work in progress that is invented over a span of time—through labor, engaged investment and the activity of the many—and also something that, at the same instant, has to be characterized by a permanent sense of unfinishedness. Marx concludes his critique by suggesting that “the whole program . . . is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state, or by a democratic belief in miracles” (2002: 224). Communism, in other words, is the opposite of the belief in miracles. Marx’s point is extremely simple; the liberal-bourgeois state, even in its improved twentieth century Keynesian mutation, requires the dampening of its own citizens’ powers to exist. The happiness promised to the poor by industrialists and state bureaucrats is, for Marx, a new version of the oldest heavenly promises made by priests to peasants. To free ourselves, he insists, we must do so collectively and away from the dusty paternalism of the state. It is precisely this stateless, open-ended process, this permanent revolution, that Walter Benjamin described very beautifully as the “open air of history” (2007: 261).

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References Benjamin, W. (2007), Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books. Eisenach Program (1869), accessible online: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/ docpage.cfm?docpage_id=1093 (accessed August 11, 2018). Marx, K. (2002), Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Terrell Carver, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K and F. Engels (1912), Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Vienna: Charles Kerr and Company.

Part II

Context B. Philosophical and Historical Context

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Materialism and the Natural Sciences Maurizia Boscagli

The nineteenth century was a time of groundbreaking scientific and technological advances that brought to fruition what science had achieved since the seventeenth century. This new outlook, particularly revolutionary in the natural sciences, put in place an increasingly secularized view of nature and of the human being. Geology and biology, through the study of fossils and of the human body itself, recognized the possibility of a new vision of the past centered on an evolutionary logic that clashed with traditional religious views of nature. This is the scientific and cultural context in which Charles Darwin’s theory took shape; Darwin’s writings about evolution made both the idea of divine creation and human exceptionalism incompatible. Parallel to, and inspired by the evolutionary discourse of the period, Karl Marx formulated a new form of philosophical materialism. In the work of the young Left Hegelians, such as Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, Hegel’s dialectics was refashioned in materialist terms through a new understanding of the process of history; no longer viewed as an emanation of the Spirit, history now appeared as a complex process of interactions and events that reflected the evolutionary logic of natural processes. Nineteenth-century natural sciences thus became an important part of the epistemological context in which Marx’s dialectical materialism took shape. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 gave an enormous impetus to colonial conquest and exploitation, and with it industrial growth and a new phase of capitalist expansion. In turn, this rapid capitalist development sustained both the progress of the sciences and the technological advancements of the period. The first half of the century witnessed the study of energy and the discovery of the laws of conservation of energy. Key here was the work of the German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, as well as that of James Prescott Joule and Julius von Mayer, while Michael Faraday focused on electromagnetic induction. Friedrich Wohler’s and Justus von Liebig’s work represented important advances in the field of organic chemistry, together with the cell theory of Theodor Schwann. The discoveries of Louis Pasteur in bacteriology had an important impact on modern medicine, while Johannes Müller’s research had the same relevance in physiology. Charles Lyell’s work in geology was also crucial in advancing the concept of evolution. This scientific ferment found many forms of application in industry: the study of plant physiology and chemistry found its application in modern agriculture, and organic chemistry revolutionized the 95

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production of dyes, which in turn resulted in major changes in the textile industries. The most revolutionary shift in the natural sciences occurred in geology, where the evolutionary view of natural history was affirmed, with the recognition of a longer and slower geological time span. Lyell’s study was extremely influential for Charles Darwin, and was further spread and popularized in the second half of the nineteenth century by Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall in the English-speaking world, and by JeanBaptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier in France. The theory of evolution showed that the natural world had a natural origin and a natural history, and that human beings were part of this history. Rather than originating in the will of a creator, men and women had emerged out of a complex and extremely long evolutionary time. The affirmation and study of evolutionary theory in geology and biology represented a point of departure for Marx and Engels’s own thought. Science becomes crucial for Marx’s materialist interpretation of history and for his own view of materialism, so much so that we can talk of an osmotic relation between the discourse of nineteenthcentury natural sciences and Marx’s dialectical materialism. While Engels wrote specifically of this topic in The Dialectics of Nature (1872–1882) and Anti-Duhring (1878), Marx never produced any full-scale work on the philosophical implications of the natural sciences (Sheehan 1985, 48). Nonetheless, he dedicated much attention to the topic in his “scientific notebooks, ” as well as in The Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, and later in Capital (1867–1883). Marx’s correspondence with Engels, as well as their collaboration on texts deeply informed by the scientific knowledge of their times, such as The Holy Family (1845), demonstrate Marx’s extensive interest in the sciences. All his thinking was sustained by the belief that natural science was the foundation of all knowledge and that there was an essential unity between humans and nature and that, given this unity, parallel methodological approaches to understanding natural history and human history should be pursued (Sheehan 1985: 50). Marx had been interested in natural history since his time at the gymnasium at Trier, where one of his teachers was the famous geologist Johann Steininger. At Berlin University he attended the lectures of the anthropologist, natural philosopher and mineralogist Henrik Steffens. He also conducted independent research on astronomy and read Daniel Kirkwood and John Tyndall’s work on the quality of the sun’s rays. Being familiar with the work of August Schleicher, Theodor Schwann and Charles Darwin, Marx had a good knowledge of chemistry and biology, which he also pursued through his reading of Helmholtz and Huxley. In applied physics, he read Marcel Deprez, and knew of Deprez’s experiment at the Munich Electrical Exhibition. This wide knowledge of the natural sciences made it possible for Marx to focus on the status of nature, and to consider the special task of the natural sciences. In the Manuscripts of 1844, as well as in The Holy Family and in The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engels lay the foundations for their materialism and, in particular, for their materialist concept of history against Hegel’s idealism. After 1850, when at work on political economy and the problem of rent, Marx studied agronomic chemistry, focusing in particular on Liebig’s theory of the exhaustion of the soil and on the way science was applied to industry. At the same time he carefully read Darwin, whom Marx used to criticize Malthus. He also attended Huxley’s lectures in London.

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In any discussion of the relation of Marxian theory and nineteenth century natural science, it is significant to note that between 1840 and 1841 Marx wrote his dissertation on the Difference between the Democritan and the Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. This turn to the pre-Socratic philosophers anticipated Marx’s attempt to go beyond Hegel’s idealism and instead affirm an image of nature capable of existing prior to thought. Marx became interested in Epicurus through his early study of philosophical materialism, from Bacon to the Enlightenment. The Young Hegelians were against positive religion and worked to elaborate a notion of materialism against both idealism and Enlightenment mechanism. Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1888), points out how the entire tradition of modern European materialism, from Bacon and Hobbes to Locke and Hume in England and Scotland, and la Mettrie, Diderot and D’Holbach in France, share a common ground in the anti-teleological philosophy of Epicurus, which has no space for final causes or divine intervention, but rather looks at nature as an immanent, open-ended process. Hegel’s dialectic already provided the image of a totality in the process of becoming, albeit this “becoming” was a necessitarian movement of individual consciousness and of history toward the final telos of the unity of the individual and the universal, absolute. Instead, through Epicurus’s anti-teleological and aleatory philosophy and by placing it in a practical historical and socio-economic context, Marx made the dialectic materialist. With his dissertation Marx tried to come to terms with both Epicurus’s materialism and with the French and English materialist tradition. Marx read Bacon in 1837, the same year he encountered the Hegelian dialectic, and knew of Bacon’s influence on the philosophers of the Enlightenment (Foster 2000: 33). His interest in Epicurus is evident from the dissertation he wrote as well as in his seven “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” which he completed in 1839 while writing his thesis, and in The Holy Family (1845) and The German Ideology (1846), both co-written with Engels. Marx is interested in Epicurus because of how “his intellectual and sensual freedom from gods and doctrines, concedes to chance a greater role in human life than to necessity; individual will is asserted and an understanding of contingency in human life” (Rubel and Manale 1975: 16). Further, “He was the first to grasp appearance as appearance, that is, as alienation of the essence, and to acknowledge human self-consciousness . . . ” (Marx and Engels 1975: 64). These were the principles of Epicurus’s materialism that so interested Marx: the mortality of the world, the transience of all life, the idea that nothing comes from nothing, and that nothing destroyed can be reduced to nothing. Epicurean atomism, derived from the thought of Leucippus and Democritus, affirms that all material existence was interdependent and emerged from atoms, so that events cannot be explained by either determinism or essentialism. Epicurus’s philosophy is equally important for Marx and for the natural sciences of the nineteenth century, both for the impact it had on the theory of dialectical materialism and for its influence on modern materialism and evolutionary thought from the seventeenth century onwards. This is a tradition that Louis Althusser himself recognized and traced in what he calls “the materialism of the rain ” (Althusser 2006). Epicurus’s thought had a strong impact on the ancient world as well; in Roman times it was circulated by Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Lucretius’s manuscript, despite being widely copied, was lost in medieval times, to be

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rediscovered only in 1417 (Foster 2000: 41). In seventeenth-century France, the cleric and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) turned to Epicurus to attack the Aristotelian concept of nature. This presaged a return to Epicureanism in the Enlightenment and in the development of the modern scientific outlook. Epicureanism had an enormous influence on scientific discourse before the nineteenth century. In England it came to represent, from Bacon onwards, a materialism that excluded any type of divine causality, and as such it became associated with forms of anti-religious, political radicalism. The Baconian Robert Boyle, a leading scientist before Newton, developed a moderate version of Epicureanism, which considered nature through the lens of atomism, but did not let go of the figure of the creator. Giambattista Vico in La Scienza Nuova (1725) also adopted a vision of human nature influenced by Lucretius. David Hume dedicated a part of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) to an imaginary speech by Epicurus. The criticism of religion, and the view of animate nature that characterizes Epicureanism, and the belief that the knowledge of the laws of nature could dispel fear, deeply informed the philosophy of the French Enlightenment in the work of Helvetius, D’Holbach, de la Mettrie and Buffon. This view was however contested; Voltaire, a deist, did not fully accept Epicurus’s atomism. For Marx, Epicurus was “the greatest representative of the Greek Enlightenment, and he deserves the praise of Lucretius, ” but, above all, he was “the key to the European present ” (Marx and Engels 1975: 23). Marx agreed with Bacon’s argument in Of Dignity and Advancement of Learning (1605), that the philosophy of the ancient materialists, Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus was more important than that of Plato and Aristotle because of its refusal to accept final causes and the existence of God. For Epicurus, the gods live in “the intermundia. ” For Marx, Epicurus was also superior to Democritus, who only believed in necessity. By acknowledging contingency, Epicurus introduces the possibility of human freedom through the theory of the clinamen, the swerving away of the atoms from a straight line. This unpredictable deviation made possible chance and contingency, so that reality and nature are free from determinism. It is the swerve that makes the world, its bodies, its materiality and its sensuous objects possible. What fascinates Marx in Epicurus’s thought is, on the one hand the swerve, and on the other the primacy given to the sensuousness of human experience, the way human beings perceive reality through the senses and a reciprocal entanglement with nature. In this perspective, knowledge included intellectual activity and sensation. In its refusal of any religious view of nature, Epicurus represented for Marx the beginning of Enlightenment, and his philosophy brought forth a new understanding of human history. From the Middle Ages to the seventeenth and even into the eighteenth century, science accepted the religious view of the organization of the natural world into the Great Chain of Being or “The Scale of Nature, ” as read the title of the 1677 philosophical essay, “The Scale of Creatures” by Sir William Petty (Parsons 1977: 7). According to this view, everything in the world is the product of divine providence and of God’s creation of nature for man. All species had been separately created, the earth was at the center of the universe and time and space had a finite beginning and an end. Made in the image of God, man was conceived of as a microcosm that reflected the macrocosm of

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nature, and both were ruled by a supernatural God. Capitalism and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century brought a new conception of the relation between man and nature; both Bacon and Descartes affirm that knowledge is power and what is necessary is man’s mastery of nature rather than submission to it, whether in the name of religion or through a romantic idealization of its parts. When Epicureanism reappeared in the Renaissance, and later on the cultural scene of the Enlightenment, both theology and the idea of human exceptionalism, the idea of the privileged position of man in the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being, were challenged, and with them the Aristotelian-scholastic view that had defined both scientific and theological thought until the nineteenth century. With the arrival of the concept of evolution, both in geology and biology, the theological-inspired scenario was turned on its head: time and space soon came to be understood as infinite; human beings were shown to share a lineage with apes; and God soon faded out of the vision of the world in a rapid shift towards secularization. The natural sciences, by reason of evolution, and Marx and Engels with their dialectical view of materialism, outlined a new vision of nature and of the relation between nature and humans. Hegel had established the dialectic as a dispositif that would propel the movement of history as a manifestation of Spirit. For Hegel, nature was the alienation of an abstract idea, while Marx, in his attempt to “materialize” Hegel’s theory, was after a notion of matter and nature that existed independently from thought. Nonetheless, what mattered for Marx in the Hegelian concept of the dialectic was that it regarded the whole world, natural, intellectual and historical, as a process of interconnected events and energies. This dialectical view of nature is central both to evolutionary thought and to dialectical materialism. Nineteenth century scientific and philosophical materialism is dialectical in yet another way: it presents a vision of constant interchange between different natural systems and between natural “becoming” and human beings. Once God disappears, as happens in the Epicurean strand of materialism encoded both in the natural sciences and in Marxian theory, a new idea of nature emerges; this is no longer a static world of individual entities organized into a system but, rather, a field traversed by change, interaction and becoming—one which anticipates the contemporary ecological concept of nature. This interactive relation demonstrates how animals, plants and humans stand in mutual and transformative relations with their environment. The dialectical relation of humans to nature that sustains Marx’s concept of dialectical materialism goes beyond religion (Scholasticism), British natural scientific empiricism (Bacon), idealism (Hegel), as well as any form of rigid mechanical determinism, as in eighteenth century materialism. Evolution refused any causa prima and affirmed the autonomous existence of matter, as well as the fact that humans belong to the natural sphere themselves as sensate bodies. At the same time, Marx discerned and insisted upon a close connection between the natural world and society; as Roy Bhaskar writes, Marx knows that “there is, or can be, one essential unity of method between natural and social science ” (Bhaskar 1983: 324). Thus social history, we could say, “learns” to be dialectical from natural history. To further explain Marx’s view of nature and of its relation to human beings, we need to turn to evolutionary thought and consider its influence on dialectical materialism.

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In the midst of the exceptional panorama of scientific developments of the nineteenth century, whose key figures Marx knew of and read, Charles Darwin’s work occupies a particularly important position and resonates with that of Marx because of the way Epicureanism inflected their respective understanding of nature. Via this most heretical version of materialism, Darwin’s theory of evolution becomes de facto a blueprint for Marx’s theory, the scientific method that Marx will deploy to analyze the social. Both Marx and Engels read The Origin of Species (1859) and wrote to each other recognizing the significance of Darwin’s research, whose foundations belonged to a very ancient philosophical tradition. Evolutionary ideas were already at the core of the thought of the ancient materialist philosophers Empedocles, Epicurus and Lucretius. Lucretius died in 55 BC and atomistic materialism, whose history I outlined earlier, did not came to full fruition until the eighteenth century (Sears 1950: 124). Although slowly declining, the dominant view of nature in Darwin’s time was teleological and centered on the idea of divine providence. According to this view, the species had been created by God and remained immutable and unchanged since the time of creation. The idea of evolution, of change in nature, began to appear in the Enlightenment, e.g. in the work of scientists such as Linnaeus, the taxonomist of nature, who accepted the idea of the limited possibility that the species had improved through time. At the end of the eighteenth century, Lamarck in France and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ father, also dedicated themselves to the study of evolution. Materialism also appeared in the physiological psychology of David Hartley, Observations on Man, 1749, and the chemistry of John Priestly, whose A Free Discussion of the Doctrine of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (1778) inspired Erasmus Darwin. During the same period, the French anatomist, Georges Cuvier, pointed to the possibility of the extinction of certain species, and the new science of paleontology started to seriously undermine the century-old belief in the scale of nature and the Great Chain of Being. Darwin read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), the text that introduced the idea of geological time as a blueprint for evolutionary change, challenging the prevalent view of time as immutable. Lyell’s ideas, so important for Darwin, were contested by scientists who believed creation was the origin of the world and rejected the idea of phylogenetic descent. Another tradition that refused the logic of materialist evolution was natural theology, which accepted evolutionary change as part of a divine design. A line of British scientists, from Robert Boyle to Isaac Newton to John Ray, incorporated natural theology in their views. In their formulation, materialism could be made compatible with religion, as deism would propose in the eighteenth century. These compromises between religion and science were also attempts to mitigate the stigma of materialism as a tool of political radicalism and the connection between free thought and revolution; connections that would be amply on display in France as the eighteenth century drew to a close. Darwin was deeply aware of the radical qualities and implications of his ideas. As Adrian Desmond and James Moor note, “Materialism petrified him, and one can see why it was condemned by the forces of church-and-state, as a blasphemous derision of the Christian law of the land ” (Desmond and Moor 1992: 269). In 1837, while the young Marx was studying to write his dissertation, Darwin came back to England after his five-year voyage to Brazil and the Galapagos Islands on the

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HMS Beagle, taking back with him a series of notebooks on the “transmutation of the species. ” In The Origin of Species (1859), the book which emerged from these notebooks, Darwin makes clear that, in his view, all organisms will produce more offspring than are capable of survival (Foster 2000: 183). A struggle among them guarantees that only the ones most adapted to the variations of their environment, i.e. the fittest will outlast the others. As the biologist Stephen Jay Gould puts it, “A cumulation of such favorable variations over the very long space of geological time would result in the evolution of the species, a descent with modifications ” (Gould 1990: 138). While at work on his notebooks on the transmutation of the species, Darwin was reading Malthus’s An Essay on The Principle of Population (1798), which inspired the idea of “survival for existence. ” However, it was only in the 1869 edition of Origin of the Species that Darwin, reluctantly, used the phrase “the survival of the fittest, ” which had been introduced by Herbert Spencer in 1864 as a synonym for natural selection. From this point on, “Darwinism” assumes a more Spencerian and Malthusian tone, which is visible in the way Spencer connects evolution with bourgeois progress, which was not part of Darwin’s original intent (Foster 2000: 198). The Origin of Species hardly mentioned the evolution of human beings. This idea was introduced by Darwin much later in The Descent of Man (1871), and its implications were explored in Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals (1872). These texts proposed a more radical version of evolution, which denied anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism; for Darwin, all animals, man among them, are connected by evolutionary laws and a series of material relations. As John Durant affirms, “[This is] a naturalism that humanizes nature . . . and naturalizes man ”(Durant 2014: 301). Marx was thoroughly familiar with evolutionary science; he read Darwin extensively, but he was also familiar with the work of the scientists who inspired Darwin himself. In London, he attended the lectures of Thomas Huxley, who explained Darwin to English workers. He read John Tyndall, another important evolutionist, and Lyell’s Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man, (1863). The book Ancient Society, or Research in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1872), by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, provided a theory of social development that took into consideration the idea of a longer ethnological time. Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks (1880–82) are devoted mostly to Morgan, but also to other scientists interested in society and ethnology, such as John Budd Phear, Henry Sumner Maine and John Lubbock. After Marx’s death, the notebooks became the ground for Engels’s work in Origins of the Family: Private Property and State (1886). Marx was elaborating his theory of dialectical materialism as Darwin was writing the book that would provoke a scientific revolution in England and beyond. Both Marx and Engels understood that the theory of natural evolution could be a grounding for their theory of materialism. In a letter, dated December 19, 1860, to Engels, Marx writes about Darwin’s work; “Although developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view ” (Marx and Engels 1936: 126). In another letter to Lassalle in 1861, Marx affirms, “For the first time teleology in natural sciences is not only dealt a mortal blow, but its rational meaning is empirically explained” (Marx and Engels: 1936). Marx considered the materialist view of evolution compatible with his own, albeit applied to a different field, the social. In this perspective,

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the dialectical articulation of nature in Darwin becomes a blueprint for understanding society. Engels affirms this in a passage with a rather Lucretian tone, “[In Darwin’s view of nature] all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity dissipated, all particularity that had been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature was shown as moving in eternal flux and cyclical course ” (Engels 1940: 126) The same complex exchange and relationality among opposing elements came to define Marx’s understanding of society. According to Marx, human society had undergone the same evolutionary process as nature, and must continue to change until it reaches the stage of a classless society. As Darwin made visible the dialectical (relational, centered on a process of change and interconnectedness) quality of nature, so Marx demonstrated the dialectical nature of society and of human history. If scientific evolutionary theory is crucial for Marx’s theory, dialectical materialism hinges on an issue that neither Darwin nor Feuerbach, whose elaboration of a sensuous notion of materialism in Provisional Theses on the Reform of Philosophy (1842), foregrounded—human labor. The study of English political economy and of French socialist politics during his time in Paris in the 1840s helped Marx to elaborate his own version of materialism through and beyond both nineteenth-century Epicureanism and Feuerbachian anthropological naturalism. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx affirms on the one hand that man is part of nature in his animal and sensate state: “That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature, ” he wrote (Marx 1975: 424). On the other hand, he reclaims a co-dependence between nature and humans that privileges the human, “Nature taken abstractly, for itself, nature fixed in isolation from man, is nothing for man. ” The Manuscripts make clear that the human relation to nature is mediated by work, by production and by tools, themselves a product of the human transformation of nature. The dialectical and transformative relation between nature and human beings takes place through work and the human need to work for subsistence. Work is presented in the Manuscripts as “the individual’s self-realization”, insofar as it does not take place under the rule of capitalism. For Marx, work—the transformation of nature through purposive, expressive human activity—is the chief prerogative of human beings, and as such work is a means to freedom and happiness. He does, however, provide an important caveat: it must be social (communist) labor rather than the exploited labor of capitalism. Nature becomes part of human history through production, by being transformed by human labor. Human beings can establish their own historical relation to nature by producing their means of survival. Marx came to his interpretation of the relation between man and nature through his interest in human subsistence, the relationship of humans to the soil and the problem of capitalist agriculture. Thus, Marx affirms the creative role of humans in nature without giving up his Epicurean materialism; humanity is considered an evolutionary product of natural processes and at the same time it is a social being that works nature to change it according to its own purposes: “. . . man is able to understand his own history as a process, and to conceive of nature—involving also practical control over it—as his own real body. Man ‘annexes’ nature to his bodily organs. His work is the interaction of man and nature” (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Section XB ).

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The traffic of humanity with nature is no longer defined by the Hegelian alienation of nature from self-consciousness, but rather it is cast as an active, productive exchange. In a number of texts, including Grundrisse (1857–1858) and Capital, Marx defines this exchange with the term Stoffwechsel, which translates as metabolism, exchange, circulation and dynamic mutuality. The term “metabolism” was first introduced in 1815 and was used by German physiologists in the 1830s. Marx used this biological concept in the 1860s to refer to the material and dynamic exchanges between humans and nature through labor. In Capital, Marx writes, “Actual labor is the appropriation of nature for the satisfaction of human needs, the activity through which the metabolism between man and nature is mediated . . . The activity of labor is never independent of nature’s own wealth-creating potential, since material wealth, the world of use values, exclusively consists of natural materials modified by labor” (Marx 1976: 283). Capitalism introduces a rupture in this metabolic exchange between man and nature. Nature provides humans with natural wealth—means of subsistence, rich soil, fish and minerals—and with forms of labor instruments, e.g. natural routes and navigable rivers. Capital exploits nature and structures humanity’s relation to it in terms of alienation. With private property, industrial production, and the consequent exploitation of nature, there follows the estrangement of human beings from their active role in the transformation of nature. “The view of nature which is growing under the regime of property and money is an actual contempt for, and practical degradation of, nature,” writes Marx in On the Jewish Question (1843) (Marx 1975: 329). This alienated relationship to nature begins when labor power is reduced to a commodity and when, through primitive accumulation, the land is expropriated, repossessed and exploited, as happened from the time of the enclosures onwards, with the rise of the great estates and the dispersal of the peasantry. Marx’s critique of capitalist agriculture and of the exploitation of the soil, that opens his analysis of rent in Capital, Volume III , was spurred by his knowledge of the advancement of chemistry in his time. Justus von Liebig’s discussion of soil depletion in the countryside in Organic Chemistry and Its Applications in Agriculture (1840) and J.B. Lawes’ invention of new synthetic fertilizers deeply affected Marx in the 1860s. Modern agriculture demanded an increased fertility of the soil to support the capitalist law of supply and demand. In formulating his own systematic critique of exploitation, Marx saw that the exploitation of the laborer was an extension of the exploitation of the very soil; large-scale exploitative agriculture had the effect of enervating and impoverishing both. The exhaustion of the soil by industry and commerce goes hand in hand with the exhaustion of the worker. Only “the associated producers”, that is, communism, as he writes in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, will be able to re-establish the balance between human beings and nature through non-exploitative labor. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx asserts that with the abolition of private property, communism realized through “association” will rebalance the metabolism of man and nature: [This association] is the genuine resolution of the conflict of man and nature [created by capitalist exploitation] and between man and man, the resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species.

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Communism, therefore, will guarantee, “the perfect unity in essence, of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man, and the realized humanism of nature” beyond the universal exploitation of the worker and of nature (Marx 1975: 348–9). Marx had a vast knowledge of the scientific discourses of his time, as well as of the rapid and dramatic technological advances that changed both the relation between man and nature and the character of labor. His knowledge of, and deep interest in, Epicurus’s philosophy, which so decisively shaped Marx’s view of science and nature from the early stages of his research and throughout his career, provides a view of Marxian thought in open contrast to the deterministic readings that have often characterized Marxism after Marx. A case in point is Karl Kautsky’s and George Plekhanov’s “orthodox” interpretation of Marx’s writings at the time of the Second International. If we consider Marx’s work in the context of scientific discourses of his time, and in particular of Darwin’s theory of evolution, we soon recognize the importance of Marx’s engagement with the concept of alea, the contingency and chance that stands as the source of human freedom, both in atomism and in Marx’s own philosophy. His practical dialectical materialism, grounded in political economy, debunked the idea of a theoretical neutrality of science. It showed that science is not simply a matter of theory, but something that greatly impacts historical and economic conditions. Science, industry and colonialism in the nineteenth century already had enormous consequences on the way people lived and worked, and also on the way nature was understood and used for profit. Marx’s interest in the natural sciences and the way he politicizes nature are visible, like a connective thread, throughout his writings, and they have never been more relevant than today. As such, Marx’s interest in nature, the environment and ecology, his grasp of the relation between the exploitation of the workers and of the earth itself, and the potential for a better relation of humanity and nature embedded in the Marxian dialectic needs to be further studied. In the context of today’s global exploitation of the earth, the depletion of resources and the planetary climate crises, his writings on nature have much to teach.

References Althusser, L. (2006), Philosophy of the Encounter. Later Writings, 1978–1987, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. Bhaskar, R. (1983), “Materialism,” in Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford: Blackwell. Desmond, A. and J. Moor. (1992), Charles Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, New York: Warner Books. Durant, J.R. (2014), “The Ascent of Nature in Darwin’s Descent of Man,” in David Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Engels, F. (1940), The Dialectics of Nature, New York:, International Publishers. Foster, J.B. (2000), Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press. Gould, S.J. (1990), Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, New York: Three Rivers Press.

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Marx, K. (1975), Early Writings, New York: Vintage. Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K., and F. Engels. (1936), Selected Correspondence 1846–1859, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels. (1975), Collected Works, New York: International Publishers. Parsons, H.L. (1977), Marx and Engels on Ecology, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Rubel, M. and M. Manale, (1975), Marx without Myth: A Chronological Study of His Life and Work, Oxford: Blackwell. Sears, P. (1950), Charles Darwin: The Naturalist as Cultural Force, New York: Scribners’ Sons. Sheehan, H. (1985), Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History Vol. 1, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, and London: Humanities Press.

Bibliography On Marx and the Natural Sciences, see: John Bellamy Foster (2000), Marx’s Ecology, Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press Valentino Gerretana (1973), “Marx and Darwin, ” New Left Review 82 (November– December). Ernst Mayr (1991), One Long Argument: Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Margaret Osler (1991), Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes, New York: Cambridge University Press. Howard L. Parsons (1977), Marx and Engels on Ecology, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Helena Sheehan (1985), Marxism and The Philosophy of Science. A Critical History, Vol. 1, Atlantic Highlands, NJ : Humanities Press. Y.M. Uranovsky (1935), “Marxism and Natural Science, ” in Nikolai Bukharin et al., eds., Marxism and Modern Thought, New York: Harcourt: Brace.

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The Christian State Roland Boer

The politically perfected, modern state that knows no religious privileges is also the fully developed Christian state Marx and Engels 1845: 111 The secular state is the full realization of the Christian state—so argued Marx in response to intense debates at the time concerning “the state. ” To understand this argument more clearly, we need to ask, what was the “Christian state”? One may cast a wide net and examine the Christian state from Constantine to Samoa, or one may focus on the reality of post-Napoleonic Europe, especially the Prussian situation, where the Christian state was deployed as a bulwark against the ostensibly corrosive effects of liberal modernity. I focus on the latter, since it was the primary political context in which Marx and Engels began to develop their thought. In the following, I begin with some questions of definition, before dealing with the European Christian state as a terminal point within the longer history of absolute states. Only then can we return to Marx’s forceful argument concerning the “Christian state. ” Throughout, we need to keep in mind the sheer anomaly of the European situation in relation to global history, an anomaly that perpetually threatens to universalize from a specific context (Diakonoff 1999: 3).

On Definition I begin with some observations on definitions of “the state. ”1 The modern tradition2 is usually assumed to have begun with Weber’s influential definition, “the state is the form of human community [Gemeinschaft] that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence [Gewalt] within a particular territory” (Weber 2004: 33). The problem here is twofold. First, too many rush to assume that Weber’s (derived) definition is a universal one. By contrast, Weber stresses that it is “specific to the present”; that it applies to a “nowadays”, that concerns the Western “modern state. ” This particularity applies to the definitions that attempt to tweak Weber’s, despite their temptation to universalize (Poggi 1978: 86–116; Tilly 1985, 1990; Elias 2000; Bourdieu 2014: 4, 7; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Foucault 2014). 107

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Now we face the second problem. Weber is actually dependent on an even more influential definition by Friedrich Engels. In The Origin of the Family (Engels 1884: 268–72), Engels makes the following points: 1. The state arises from a society riven with “irreconcilable opposites, ” which are “classes with conflicting economic interests. ” 2. So that society does not tear itself to pieces, a power (Gewalt) is necessary to “alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’. ” 3. Power “alienates itself more and more” from society, so that the apparatus stands, as the organs of a society, “above society. ” 4. The state becomes a “means” or an “organization of the possessing class for its protection against the non-possessing class. ”3 5. The state divides its subjects “according to territory, ” not tribe or gens. 6. It “establishes a public power [Gewalt], ” separate from the population and comprised “not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds. ” 7. In order to “maintain this public power, contributions from the citizens are necessary—taxes. ” 8. With the advent of full communism, the state will “wither away. ” Clearly, here we find some of the terms of Weber’s definition, although he curiously neglects to mention Engels and dispenses with the obviously materialist parts. To recap, for Weber the key items are Gewalt (power, force and violence), territory and a self-justifying apparatus, which Weber interprets as “legitimacy, ” or the alienated and alienating bureaucratic apparatus with its rational-legal claims. For the purpose of analyzing the Christian state, I am interested in the way Engels’s multifaceted definition may be recast in light of subsequent Marxist debates concerning the state. These debates have worked with three distinctions, two of them obviously dialectical: dependency-agency; objective-subjective; power-apparatus. In terms of the first opposition (where we find points 1–3 of Engels’s definition), the argument turns on whether the state is dependent on and determined by the social dynamics of class struggle, or whether the state is in some way separated from society as an alien body. As soon as it becomes alienated, the state may become a collective agent in its own right, influencing society in distinct ways. Engels’s definition provides a narrative structure, with initial dependency leading to alienation and (implicit) agency by the state. The risk with such a narrative is that we lose the dialectical relationship between the two dimensions. Related, but distinct, is the second opposition, between objective and subjective factors. This tension appears in Engels’s ambivalence concerning the notion of the state as an “organization of the possessing class” or as an “instrument” (point 4). The reason for describing this opposition as one between objective and subjective factors is as follows. On the objective side, the state is stamped and shaped by the objective realities of class, so much so that one may speak of a feudal, absolutist, Christian, or indeed bourgeois state. The subjective side appears with the suggestion that the state is a neutral instrument, which may be wielded by the subjective intention of one or another class against its opponent. If so, it entails an implicit awareness of the

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crucial ideological role of the state, for the class in question must have a reasonably clear consciousness of what it wishes to achieve with this “instrument. ” Finally, the power-apparatus distinction appears in Engels’s deliberations over the crucial term Gewalt, with the meanings of power, force and violence. However, this abstract force requires an apparatus to work, so Engels speaks of the “material adjuncts” and “institutions of coercion, ” as well as the specification of a territory and the demand for taxes (points 2, 5–7). The question remains as to whether Gewalt is distinct or whether it is manifested only through the apparatus. These core features would define the terms for two lines of subsequent inquiry, the one running through Weber and the other through Lenin and into Marxist analyses.4 But I am interested here in the implications for understanding the Christian state. At this point, I propose that such a state may be defined in terms of the tensions I have outlined; it has both distinct class actors seeking their own agenda, and is determined by specific structures that have an objective logic; it is a distinct entity (a collective subject) in tension with its dependency on the dominant economic realities; and while one may distinguish power and apparatus, the power (Gewalt) is actually found in the apparatus (as Engels already saw).5 Whether it was a feudal leftover or a crucial form of the state in the transition to capitalism remains to be seen.

Holding Back the Tide? My specific focus is the Christian state in Europe, which should be understood in light of the longer history of the much-debated absolutist state.6 Indeed, the nineteenthcentury Christian state was in many respects seen as the absolutist state’s last stand as it sought to hold back the tide of liberalism, as well as more radical socialist movements. Let me set the scene briefly, beginning with what may be called an estatist–absolutist continuum. “Estatist” means an organization consisting of different and local “estates, ” whether family cliques, aristocratic (seigneurial) lineages, merchant concentrations, corporate elites and so on, while “absolutist” designates the effort to locate all, or at least as much power as possible, in the monarch. Rather than either/or, we find a continuum between both forms, with the various state formations in Europe tending to fall somewhere along the continuum. From the seventeenth century onwards, France, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia and Russia developed absolutist states to varying degrees, while England, and especially the Netherlands, moved to more estatist forms, albeit not without efforts at absolutism. Many factors lead to absolutism, including: socio-economic developments; political compromises among the ruling class (between the monarch, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie);7 inculturation of this through the court; the threat and prosecution of war; and theoretical struggles framed in terms of theology and the classical tradition. At this point, I stress a particular feature of absolutism before turning to its specific religious articulation. Far from hindering the growth of capitalist social and economic relations, absolutist states often actively fostered them in a mercantilist form. The Prussian state is perhaps the most signal example (Mulholland 2012: 51–2), with Friedrich II (1712–1786) and especially Friedrich Wilhelm II (1744–1797) encouraging migration, funding infrastructure for

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agriculture (drainage, land settlement and transport), and fostering manufacturing, shipping and mining. The strong state of absolutism was one path to capitalist modernity in Europe.8 The ideology, if not theo-political structures of the absolutist state, was in many respects modeled on the papacy, which was both a territorial and a spiritual state, run by God’s “representative” on earth. With the recovery of Roman law by the “lawyer popes” of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Berman 1983; see also, Poggi 1978: 73)9 and the claim—first made by Innocent III (pope from 1198 to 1216)—to be the “Vicar of Christ” rather than the lowly “Vicar of St Peter, ” the papal revolution set in train the later claims of absolute monarchs. As Jean Bodin had already put it in 1576, the monarch is the “image of God” and thereby “responsible before God [responsable devant Dieu], ” albeit with the caveat that he is always subject to the laws of nature, which are of God, and cannot dispossess others, that is, aristocrats, of property at will (Bodin 1576 [1993]: 87, 218, 219).10 Or as Friedrich Wilhelm I (1688–1740), the architect of the Prussian absolutist state, opined, “I must be served with life and limb, with house and wealth, with honour and conscience, everything must be committed except eternal salvation—that belongs to God, but all else is mine” (Anderson 1974: 226–7). Ultimately, deriving from Romans 13:1, it was assumed that the monarch would rule under the fear of God and his subjects in fear of him (Petterson 2014: 75–6).11 Different theological traditions found enough ammunition to support various absolutist rulers (Wilson 2000: 47–9). Thus, France and Austria may have been Roman Catholic; Russia, Orthodox; and Denmark and Sweden, Lutheran, but the German states were divided between the three main Western European forms, with the Hohenzollerns in Prussia mostly Calvinist.12 Absolute states may have adapted in many ways to changing circumstances over the centuries, but the last serious adaptation was to claim, explicitly, the status of “Christian state” in the nineteenth century—although the roots run deep in previous centuries. The response was commensurate with the scale of the threat embodied in the French Revolution of 1789. The Netherlands may have been a constant liberal irritation, and the bourgeois revolution in England was somewhat removed due to the English Channel, but the cataclysmic end to the ancien régime in France produced an existential threat to every other such regime in Europe. Soon enough, Napoleon’s armies rolled across the continent, reducing one country after another to vassal status, and instituting wide-scale reforms in many of the conquered territories. These were based on the Code Napoléon, instituted in France in 1804 and promulgated elsewhere. They included the clarity of written laws, modern property rights, a civil service based on merit, centralized government, financial reform, an effort to widen education, religious freedom and the state taking over many of the former roles of the church, which it now managed. With the defeat of la grande armée in Russia in 1812, sealed by the final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the challenge seemed to have been overcome. The Congress of Vienna (1814/1815) gave all the appearance of reasserting the old order, even though it took place before Napoleon’s final defeat. Actively opposed to republicanism and revolution, the negotiators at Vienna—apart from territorial readjustments—sought to roll back the various liberal and republican reforms that had been spurred by the Napoleonic threat. The “rights” of the old ruling class were high on

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the agenda and a consistent conservative order was promulgated. This included the importance of tradition, authority and religion for the preservation and reproduction of social order. All of this was cemented, many believed, by the signing of the Holy Alliance in September, 1815. Spearheaded by Alexander I, it included as its core Russia, Austria and Prussia, although at various times most other states in Europe signed. The text of the alliance claimed that the signatories took as their “sole guide” the precepts of “Holy Religion, ” that the monarchs in question were “merely designated by Providence” and that they were in turn subject to “no other Sovereign than Him to whom alone power really belongs, because in Him alone are found all the treasures of love, science and infinite wisdom, that is to say, God, our Divine Saviour, the Word of the Most High, the Word of Life. ” Humbly acknowledging the Bible’s command to consider “all men” as “brethren, ” they agreed to do so with each other, but clearly not with their subjects.13 With the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, brotherly love abruptly turned to antagonism. One of the signatories of the original alliance was Friedrich Wilhelm III , who took his seat on the Prussian throne in 1797 and reigned until 1840. Since Marx and Engels grew up under this Prussian king’s rule, with significant implications for their early writing and activism, I focus on developments in this particular Christian state. Like the other signatories, Friedrich Wilhelm III interpreted the alliance and the subsequent “congress system” (Jarrett 2013) as a counter-revolutionary mechanism seeking to prevent the corrosive forces of liberalism, secularism and revolution. Against this tide of modernity, he did his best to uphold and strengthen the monarch’s authority. In many respects, this was an effort to compensate for a moment of weakness; after defeat by Napoleon in 1806 and at the mercy of energetic ministers, Friedrich Wilhelm III had given in to a series of reforms for almost a decade. These had been driven mainly by Karl Freiherr vom Stein and then Karl August von Hardenberg, who were influenced by Enlightenment criteria and Napoleonic practice. They proposed: governance through a cabinet system; collegiality; decentralization in administration; separation of the judiciary and equality before the law; removal of much feudal privilege for the sake of meritocracy; economic and educational changes; as well as the promise of constitutional reform to recognize wider suffrage. However, as soon as the ink was dry on the agreements of the Vienna Congress and the Holy Alliance, Friedrich Wilhelm III set about to repair the damage and restore his former prestige, aided and abetted by the rise of more conservative forces in leadership positions. A key component was the union of Reformed (Calvinist) and Lutheran churches in his realm. Before I deal with the matter of church union, let me add a complicating factor, the pietistic revival of the 1810s and 1820s. This revival was the latest in a longer history of German pietism and revivalist waves, although now it was a response to the dislocations produced by the various industrial revolutions happening across Europe, as well as the “godless” revolutionary republicanism championed by the French. Pietism reemphasized a religious form of Enlightenment inwardness: the personal walk with God, the inner life of faith and the central place of the Bible (Petterson 2014: 76–7). Pietism could well present a threat to the established order, but, as in the seventeenth and eighteenth century revivals, the nobility and intellectuals also saw the value of certain aspects of the pietistic tradition. It suited the reactionary agenda of the times,

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with the despot himself given to similar bouts of fervor while simultaneously marking a profound transition to bourgeois forms of valorizing the private individual. Thus, the pietism of the early nineteenth century was not merely a revival from below, but also one fostered from above. Despite initial misgivings, Friedrich Wilhelm and his henchmen, influenced by the crown prince’s overt support, realized the immense conservative potential of pietism, for it was compatible with both allegiance to a state and to a pietistic monarch himself. The slogan of a “Christian-German” state unifying “throne and altar” turned out to be as much a program for conservative church and pietistic leaders as it was for the king (Breckman 1999, 46). To return to church union in Prussia, as a Reformed Christian of a conservative bent, Friedrich Wilhelm III felt that the primary path to restoring the traditional power of the monarchy lay in a unified Protestant Church with a distinctly orthodox nature. He had already marked his intention with a proposed new liturgy for both churches upon his ascent to the throne. But when the French were banished from Prussia, the process became urgent. The two main branches of Protestantism would be united under the summus episcopus, who happened to be the monarch himself. The process was ongoing and involved governance, state supervision and administration, vestments, liturgy, theological training and, last but by no means least, the naming of the new entity. It was initially called the Evangelische Kirche in den KöniglichPreußischen Landen, although this did not prevent struggles, schisms and congregational differences, with some deciding to unite and others remaining distinctly Reformed or Lutheran in different areas, albeit under the umbrella of the new arrangement. Friedrich Wilhelm III was closely involved throughout this process, seeing it as a central duty of the leader of a “Christian state. ” The core reason may be found in the question of singularity; if the monarch was Christ’s representative on earth within a particular state, it would be problematic to have a multiplicity of church traditions. For Protestants at least, it would not do to have more than one, especially if the king himself was the head of the church. A singular despot needed a singular church, although he had to resign himself to the fact that the Roman Catholics had their own institution. His son would later claim to lead the Roman Catholics as well. So seriously did Friedrich Wilhelm III see his task, he felt called upon to imprison ministers who dissented from these new arrangements. In 1840, Friedrich Wilhelm IV succeeded to the Christian state’s throne. Already at the Congress of Vienna while still crown prince, he had expressed the opinion that the Holy Roman Empire had been in abeyance while Napoleonic reforms were sweeping Europe. With a fondness for the European Middle Ages, a nostalgia that is sometimes called “political romanticism” (Kroll 1990), he felt that the only way forward was to look back. One should proceed only on the basis of traditional laws and practices, including noble privilege. To this end, the only viable form of collegial governance would be assemblies or diets of provincial estates. He also carried this view through to wider European practices of governance, holding the belief, and failing to see it reinstated, that any emperor would be appointed by a College of Electors, as had been the practice of the Holy Roman Empire. The revolutions of 1848 both challenged his assumptions and revealed him to be a deft politician; he initially gave some ground to appease the revolutionary and liberal forces, but as soon as he felt he had the upper

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hand he reneged on most of his promises. Thus, he spoke of German reunification, on which he was formerly less than enthusiastic, and recalled the Prussian National Assembly with a view to writing a constitution. All of this was put aside as soon as possible, except for governmental reform, of which he was the architect, meaning that he could bend the new constitution and the shape of the parliament to suit his deeply conservative bent. While the new Landtag had two houses, one by seigneurial descent and the other by severely restricted voting, it ensured that the monarch remained in the position of supreme power. As for those who had any involvement whatsoever in the 1848 revolutions, he saw to it that the courts and police hunted them all down. Among many others, Marx and Engels were forced to leave the German states as a result. In relation to the key feature of the church, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in a momentary show of tolerance early in his reign, overturned his father’s treatment of dissenting clergy and groups. Now recognized, these groups came together under the umbrella of the Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche, while the main union church became the Evangelische Landeskirche Preußens. Nonetheless, Friedrich Wilhelm IV was generally more reactionary than his father (see further, Kroll 1990; Berdahl 1988; Blasius 2000). He may have dangled the occasional promise of a reform to keep the liberals hopeful, but he was bent on blocking any moves made by the newly wealthy bourgeoisie for actual political power. We are beginning to gain a sense of what the “Christian state” actually meant. A conservative Christian theology was not merely the ideological bulwark of the state, it ran much deeper; influencing the very apparatus of the state and the perception of its source of power and sovereignty. To give but a few examples, apart from seeing himself as God’s representative on earth, Friedrich Wilhelm IV promulgated laws encouraging church attendance, strengthening the observance of Sunday rest, tightening conditions for divorce, purging the theological faculties, stressing firm belief for government appointments and the tightening of censorship—with restrictions on discussing, let alone organizing, republican, democratic and liberal—or more radical—ideologies. Forbidden too was philosophical materialism, whether it be the anti-clericalism of the French philosophers or the deism of the English empiricists. In short, theology was once again deployed to construct a “comprehensive system of sovereignty, borders and believers” (Petterson 2014: 76). The effect on young politicized intellectuals was immense. Marx found this out first-hand in his ill-fated editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung (1842–1843), while Engels had to publish his satirical pieces under pseudonyms (Engels 1839). Others, too, found conventional careers blocked, such as: Ludwig Feuerbach, the biblical critic; radical atheist Bruno Bauer (Marx’s erstwhile teacher and mentor in Berlin); and David Strauss of Das Leben Jesu fame (Strauss 1835).14 In effect, all one could do was debate theology, but not the Bible, for here one could argue, indirectly, over matters of politics, freedom of the press, the nature of the state, secularism and reason. As Engels observed, “the battle for dominion over German public opinion in politics and religion” is in fact a battle “over Germany itself ” (Engels 1841: 181). It should be no surprise that the early works of Marx and Engels dealt so extensively with theological matters. In light of this overview, I would like to return to the categories gleaned from Engels to define such a state, albeit with a twist: dependency-agency, objective-subjective and

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power-apparatus. The Christian state was a peculiarly European development, as a late permutation of the absolutist state. Thus it was dependent upon specific historical events, most recently the Napoleonic wars. It also gained a distinct agency in promoting its own agenda, which appeared above all in the efforts to counter the developments of liberalism and republicanism further to the west, in the name of a certain perception of Christianity. Such agency overlaps with the subjective dimension, in which the ruling class made use of the state apparatus to promote its own agenda (Poggi 1978: 71–3). Crucially, this involved both ideological (theology) and economic features. In terms of the latter, the absolutist Christian states were not so much hindrances as a means for the developments of capitalist agricultural and industrial practices. The specific mechanisms may have differed, for instance, with “re-enserfment” [Gutsherrschaft] in the east, which was predicated on a shortage of labor and enclosures in the west, where labor was more plentiful (contra Brenner 1985). But the bottom line was the need for strong states with mechanisms of enforcement, the police, the judiciary and the civil service, in order to ensure the needed “security” for the production and exchange of commodities within and especially between states. This brings me to the objective nature of the state, which was inescapably enmeshed with the transitions of capitalism alongside feudal leftovers. In this respect, the absolutist Christian state was one form that the state took in the framework of capitalism. Finally, the apparatus was itself “absolutist, ” strongly geared to maintaining an adapting ruling class and ensuring that its agenda and power were vested in the hands of a monarch who ruled “by the grace of God. ” In short, it was a relatively strong state that drove through the economic, social and ideological programs it deemed necessary (Wilson 2000). Rather than a feudal hangover superimposed over the spread of capitalist economics and social relations, it was a transitional form of the state that enabled capitalism, if not the “first mature embodiment of the modern state” (Poggi 1978: 62).

Aufhebung of the Christian State To all appearances, the Christian state may seem like a reactionary development in nineteenth-century Europe, especially in light of the 1848 revolutionary wave. Many at the time, and since, have seen it as a counterpoise to the liberal or bourgeois state that had appeared in France, the Netherlands and in North America. Accordingly, the Christian absolutist states could hold out no longer, falling in different ways into the patterns of the bourgeois state; but a different and more dialectical approach provides a better insight, and for this I turn to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question. ”15 Marx argues that the full realization of the Christian state is the secular state, so much so that the proclaimed “Christian state” of his time was really a non-state (Marx 1844: 155–8). The argument is obviously dialectical; the very effort to bring about a Christian state in Prussia, in opposition to a liberal, secular state, brings about the latter. The true Christian state is both the negation of Christianity and its realization in a rather different form. How so? The Christian state, as envisaged in Prussia, was riven with contradictions: this-worldly politics versus other-worldly religion; a political attitude to religion versus a religious attitude to politics; the effort by the state to control

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religion while avowing subservience to religious precepts; the inability to live out in civic life the high moral code of the Bible—turning the other cheek, giving your tunic as well as your coat, walking the extra mile. These contradictions could not be resolved in the current form of the Christian state. Indeed, they led to its undoing. The resolution is therefore “the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to a place among other elements of civil society [der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft]” (Marx 1844: 156). The immediate context was Marx’s response to Bruno Bauer’s argument for “an atheistic secular state as the only possibility for emancipation, not for religion but from religion. ” For Marx, this is wrong-headed. The politically perfected modern state without religious privileges is, in fact, the Christian state in the plenitude of its development (Marx and Engels 1845: 111).16 Thus, the Christian state in nineteenth-century Europe was not, as even its leaders assumed, the anathema of the modern secular state. As the text of the Holy Alliance indicates, they may have thought they were taking a firm stand against liberalism, republicanism and revolution in the name of a conservative form of Christianity. The bourgeois state, with its peculiar forms of democracy and notions of the sovereignty of the people was to be avoided at all costs. Marx’s argument, however, suggests otherwise; the modern secular state is the Aufhebung, the simultaneous negation and realization of the Christian state. The implications of Marx’s argument are many. The initial contradictions of the Christian state may lead to its undoing and transformation into a secular state, but new contradictions and problems would still abound. These include the thorough alienation of life between the private individual and the citizen (this he borrows from Hegel), and the pervasiveness of religion in public life in new and unexpected ways, precisely through the privatization of religion (Franken 2016). Further, the lynch-mob—the bellum onmia contra omnes—known as “bourgeois civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]” depends heavily on religion, especially Christianity, for its very construction and nature.17 Thus, it is not that bourgeois civil society somehow existed beforehand and religion had to find a place and voice in such a forum (Butler et  al. 2011; Habermas 2002, 2008, 2013), but that the very nature of this supposed realm outside the state was shaped in the very Aufhebung Marx identified (Petterson in press). Even more, Marx already espied a point made increasingly today (Asad 2003; Taylor 2007; De Vries and Sullivan 2006): if the secular state is an attempted resolution of the tensions within the Christian state, it follows that secularism cannot escape religion, since religion is the reason the secular state exists at all. A question remains: did Marx envisage that all secular, liberal states would be realizations of the Christian state? A minimalist position would suggest that some states may follow such a path. France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Austria are obvious examples, although Marx witnessed only the violent transformation of the French Revolution. Yet, I suspect that Marx’s argument is stronger than this. The signal of this maximalist position is his example of the United States, where he espies the sheer privatization, if not alienation, of religion as a personal and differential affair, so much so that religion flourishes in unexpected ways (Marx 1844: 155). The initial problem is that the United States did not pass through a period of absolutism nor, indeed, the Christian state, so it seems like an odd example. Would he not have been wiser to use France as an example? But this is precisely the point, even those states that

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have not been absolutist Christian states express the truth of the Christian state, which is nothing less than the secular bourgeois state. I close with an observation concerning Engels’s definition of the state, which I have deployed to understand the Christian state. He may have done so based on Marx’s notes on Lewis Henry Morgan, seeking to provide a definition that had a somewhat wider reference, but the reality is that his context also played a significant role. Engels witnessed the Christian state of Prussian absolutism, as well as the transformations enacted under Bismarck’s muscular tenure. Thus, his definition is more immediately applicable to this context, between the end of absolutism and its transformation into a form of the bourgeois state. It is in this light that we should understand his suggestion that the state would eventually wither away and be consigned to the museum of antiquities. This also means that his definition is not really applicable to the possibility of a socialist state, concerning which he or Marx had little, if anything, to say.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

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While studies of the modern state tend to be the province of sociologists and political scientists, studies of the origins of states in ancient Southwest Asia tend to be the concern of archaeologists and anthropologists. Elsewhere, I have offered an assessment and contribution to the origins of states in ancient Southwest Asia (Boer 2015: 132–9). By contrast, the pre-modern tradition saw the state in implicit (and at times explicit) theological terms as arising from a state of nature and entailing specific limits for the sake of the common good. Variations on this position may be found in Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Rousseau (Carnoy 1984: 12–23; Held 1984: 14–31). In more detail: such a state is not only the state of the “economically dominant class, ” but this class, “through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, ” which now “acquires a new means of keeping down and exploiting the oppressed class. ” I have dealt with these two lines in more detail elsewhere (Boer In press). I find this approach more useful than Ahdar’s threefold schema: 1. The combination of form and content to produce a “clerocracy”; 2. Formal or de jure, which is in substance empty; 3. Substantive or de facto (Ahdar 1998–1999: 453–4). Wilson offers a useful survey of the range of debates over absolutism, usefully distinguishing between the varied practices and the theories developed at the time (Wilson, 2000). I leave aside the longer tradition of the Christian state, beginning with the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century ce (although legend has it that Armenia was the first such state, when its ruler converted in 301 ce ) to Samoa, which decided in 2017 to amend its constitution to identify it as a “Christian nation founded on God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Sanerivi, 2017). Emphases vary, from subservience of the aristocracy, through enlistment of the bourgeoisie, to the continual struggles between different elements of the ruling class (Anderson 1974; Poggi 1978: 62–7; Wilson 2000: 29–34). In this respect, I disagree with Anderson, who argues that absolutism was a feudal form of the state superimposed on emerging capitalist economics. This leads him to the curious position that the Russian Revolution was an anomaly (Anderson 1974: 39–40, 359–60).

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Using the later Prussian example, Poggi reveals the origins of the fabled “rule of law” in this process (Poggi 1978: 74–7). “Image” has a long lineage, stemming from the “image and likeness” of God in Genesis 1:26–7, although there it applies to the first human being and thereby all. The claim by the absolute monarchs did not attribute such a status to their subjects. The claims—by monarchs and their ideologues—were of course greater than the reality, in which the monarch was actually constrained by all manner of forces (Henshall 1992; Collins 2009: xv; Wilson 2000). Given that there were at any one time a number of God’s agents on earth created some problems. As Reus-Smit drily observes, “Claiming that monarchs were God’s lieutenants on earth was one thing, but establishing a reliable means to determine which of God’s lieutenants was closer to the Divine was another” (Reus-Smit 1999: 102). A translated text of the Holy Alliance may be found at http://www.napoleon-series. org/research/government/diplomatic/c_alliance.html (accessed August 11, 2018). Strauss was sacked from the theology faculty at Tübingen, only to be given a lifelong pension after the abortive effort by liberals to gain him a position at Zürich. The crux of his argument, from which he retreated in subsequent editions (Strauss 1836, 1839, 1840), was that everyone was capable of being a “Christ”—a radically democratic idea that profoundly challenged the singular claim of the Prussian monarch (Massey 1983). This argument contrasts with Marx’s earlier criticism of the Christian state as a contradictory beast due to the exclusive particularity of different religions, so the only solution is a secular state that is indifferent to religion (Marx 1843: 116–18). Engels makes a comparable point, arguing that the internal dynamics of Christian theology—a primary allegiance to God rather than an earthly master—necessitate the separation of church and state, apart from the contradictions of a Christian state as such (Engels 1843). Poggi argues that bourgeois civil society first arose in the context of absolutist states (Poggi 1978: 77–85).

References Ahdar, R. (1998/1999), “A Christian State?” Journal of Law and Religion 13(2): 453–82. Anderson, P. (1974), Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: Verso, 1974. Asad, T. (2003), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Berdahl, R.M. (1988), The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Berman, H.J. (1983), Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Breckman, W. (1999), Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blasius, D. (2000), Friedrich Wilhelm IV. 1795–1861: Psychopathologie und Geschichte, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Bodin, J. (1576 [1993]), Les six livres de la république, Paris: Librairie générale française. Boer, R. (2015), The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel, Library of Ancient Israel. KY: Westminster John Knox.

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Marx, K. and F. Engels. (1845 [1975]), “The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, ” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 5–211. Massey, M. (1983), Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of The Life of Jesus in German Politics, Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press. Mulholland, M. (2012), Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear: From Absolutism to Neo-Conservatism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petterson, C. (2014), The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter: Foucault, Protestantism and Colonialism, Leiden: Brill. Petterson, C. In press. Community of Selves: Individualism and Alienation in EighteenthCentury Saxony, Leiden: Brill. Poggi, G. (1978), The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Reus-Smit, C. (1999), The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Sanerivi, S. (2017), “Parliament Backs Samoa Being Declared Christian State, ” Samoa Observer, 26 January. Available from http://www.samoaobserver.ws/en/26_01_2017/ local/16206/Parliament-backs-Samoa-being-declared-Christian-state.htm (accessed August 11, 2018). Strauss, D. F. (1835), Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, Tübingen: C.F. Osiander. Strauss, D. F. (1836), Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 2nd edn, Tübingen: C.F. Osiander. Strauss, D. F. (1839), Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 3rd edn, Tübingen: C.F. Osiander. Strauss, D. F. (1840), Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 4th edn, Tübingen: C.F. Osiander. Taylor, C. (2007), A Secular Age? Cambridge: Belknap. Tilly, C. (1985), “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, ” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 169–91. Tilly, C. (1990), Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Oxford: Blackwell. Weber, M. (2004), The Vocation Lectures, trans. R. Livingstone. Indianapolis: Hackett. Wilson, P. (2000), Absolutism in Central Europe, London: Routledge.

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Liberalism and its Discontents Terrell Carver

The German Context In Marx’s time liberalism was a movement of discontent, and from early youth Marx was highly discontented. In the post–1815 German Confederation of states, principalities and free cities of his early years, constitutionalism had not yet arrived. Indeed any whiff of such liberalism in politics was seditious at best and treasonous at worst. Established rulers were monarchs, or ruled as monarchs, and thus as authorities and authoritarians. They were anointed at coronations or at least legitimated by religious hierarchies, which had overwhelmingly similar ideas and practices. Sovereignty was thus a divinely sanctioned office and role, conferred on an individual, unchecked in principle and legislatively supreme. Free cities were free of monarchs, but governed through self-selecting elites that allowed rule by a very few of the wealthy, certainly not by “the many, ” and especially not by “the poor. ” While some monarchs and rulers granted a consultative role to diets and assemblies, appointed from suitable constituencies or estates of the realm, those bodies served at the sovereign’s pleasure and exercised no obligation on him to comply or even listen. All positions of power, under the Salic and religious laws and conventions of the time, were confined to males, and only to those qualified by law or tradition to rule, most often by birth-rank or religious vocation (Stedman Jones 2016, 7–30). Political liberals of the time took inspiration from the doctrines of popular sovereignty declared and institutionalized during the American (1776–1781) and French revolutions (1789–1799), albeit in different versions and in different degrees. These ranged from polite petitions for inclusion in ruling circles, to risky talk of major reform, to republican-minded abolition of monarchy itself and, thus, full-scale revolution. What was strikingly opposite to the authoritarian regimes that held sway prior to 1848 is the way that liberals located sovereignty—at least to some extent—in “the people. ” This re-definition meant that rulers had to be in some sense answerable to “the people” via the rule of law, not monarchical whim, and that the consequences of a ruler’s malfeasance could include removal from office. The American constitution (the world’s first written institutionalization of popular sovereignty), and then the successive French constitutions based on that model, were touchstones of this way of thinking, and of liberalism perforce as revolutionary politics. In the German states, any 121

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politics to these ends was necessarily clandestine. Marx’s father, and future father-inlaw, were both subject to police surveillance and social disapproval for what the Prussian authorities determined was their support for anti-monarchical, and therefore anti-state and anti-Christian ideas and values. From the official perspective liberals were not merely radicals, but actual rebels, at least potentially, and therefore a threat to state security and social order, as well as to good morals and basic decency (Gabriel 2011: 11–21).

Political Liberalism Political liberalism in Marx’s era was thus a doctrine and movement to overturn topdown authoritarianism, and to put some version of “people’s rule” in its place. On the liberal model, sovereignty would lie in legislative assemblies through which “the people” would be represented, choosing their representatives themselves from among the citizenry. The citizenry was therefore no longer differentiated (among males exclusively) by birth-rank and hereditary rulership, but—in the American and French constitutional arrangements of the time—in terms of political rights through qualifications of residency, property-ownership, education and the like. In other words, simply being a “common man” was never enough. Universal male suffrage did not arrive anywhere in practice until the (Second) Republic in France of 1848, and even then the experience was quite brief. The most liberal of the French revolutionary constitutions, that of 1793, had declared universal male suffrage, but this ultra-radical measure wasn’t implemented. The succeeding constitution of 1795 went ahead with a franchise excluding many men from political life. The youthful Marx was clearly influenced by the more radical versions of popular sovereignty, constitutional provisions, representative legislatures and state agencies serving “the people, ” under a system of public law.

Economic Liberalism However, at the time political liberalism was also deeply imbued with economic liberalism. In the neo-medieval context of the German Confederation, these ideas were nearly as unwelcome to authoritarian monarchs and aristocratic hierarchies as the political version. Economic liberalism arose from much the same anti-feudal rebelliousness as did political liberalism, developing doctrines of individualism, free trade, entrepreneurial career-making and low-tax easy access to market rewards. All these ideas ran counter to medieval landholder-rights, craftsmen’s guilds and highly localized regimes of taxation, tariffs, customs, currencies, weights and measures, and the like. In the German-speaking states a network of tediously negotiated and bizarrely inconsistent customs unions was being gradually adopted over a decades-long process of patchwork consolidation of regulatory institutions. This was bitterly resisted by myriad vested interests and adherents to the anti-modern tradition. French and English studies in political economy, the economic science of the time, long pre-dated any

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German works on the subject. In what would eventually become Germany, the economies of myriad neo-medieval state-lets worked against the clearer theorizing that arose in politically developed, and economically developing, nation-states to the west. Marx’s family background in his hometown, Trier, was in the professional, rather than commercial classes, where state-service, pensioned preferment and occasional inheritances kept up “middling” social pretensions. When possible, such families had occasional investments, generally in land rentals and secure forms of saving, such as silver service and gold coins. This was not the world of trade and commerce, and indeed the classical “gymnasium” education that Marx enjoyed was directed to prepare youthful males for genteel careers safely secured from “lower” pursuits in mere trade. Marx’s biographers have emphasized the Rhineland connections between the liberalizing values and institutional practices of the French revolutionary regime, which was instituted there by Napoleonic conquest. The ensuing abolition of monarchical feudalism in the region introduced an element of popular sovereignty (albeit a highly limited one) to the institutions of the new Confederation of the Rhine (1806–1813). Thus the declarations of equality enshrined in the Napoleonic Code, derived from the revolutionary Rights of Man and the Citizen (1791), were locally known (if not at all universally supported) in the Mosel Valley where Marx grew up. Just a few years before his birth, however, the Napoleonic Confederation was dissolved, and the region was absorbed into the Kingdom of Prussia, which, over time, withdrew as many of the foreign, revolutionary principles and practices as possible. For the Prussian monarchical state, the area was politically troublesome. The very youthful Marx focused himself on “trouble” in the form of ideas (Sperber 2013: 3–35), rather more than his tepidly liberal father really wanted.

Intellectual Critique Today Marx’s early musings and university writings seem imbued with Germanic romanticism, itself a questioning mode of thought and expression unsafely outside the rigid orthodoxies of confessional Christianity. Classical writers, though, were admissible in schools, if suitably interpreted as morally consistent with establishment views and the neo-medieval social order. Those ideas were modernized, but only when deemed necessary, to promote Prussian militarism and monarchical bureaucracy. Unfortunately for German rulers, however, liberalism was no longer purely foreign, and—since the late eighteenth century—it had become overtly nationalist. Unlike France, Germany lacked a nation-state. From the liberal point of view, the Austrian Empire was even worse as a model, since it was itself a patchwork not just of neomedieval jurisdictions but of “peoples” with vastly different cultures and languages. German culture was the battleground of choice for liberals, since politics—as open debate in a public sphere—was resisted by the authorities as being seditious and, perforce, rigorously censored in speech and print. This occurred through processes of intimidation, including physical force, as well as bureaucratic re-writes and redactions, particularly in relation to stage performances and other modes of artistic expression.

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Conversely, cultural approval was granted to artists and writers who evinced acceptable values and represented good taste and proper morals. These official regimes of cultural control extended, of course, to universities, where appointments were at the pleasure of the authorities. However onerous in form, cultural manipulation predictably generates critique and rebellion, and occasionally a double-reading. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770– 1831) was indubitably German and was celebrated in his lifetime and posthumously as such. However, his convoluted thinking and opaque discourse generated a legacy of interpretive debate. This was, in essence, an intellectualized political world contemporaneous with Marx’s youthful student-days at two universities, Bonn and Berlin. Within certain circles the “Old” and “Young” Hegelians and their recondite differences fused a conservative/liberal political debate into a nation-building (or at least nation-imagining) cultural conversation. These conversations, rather than being overtly political engagements, looked back to French revolutionary ideas and institutions with horror or admiration, and forward to the future of German-speaking states and peoples, whether conservatively managed in line with tradition or radically transformed by revolutionary popular forces (Leopold 2007: 17–99).

Journalism as Activism Marx’s career as a university-based liberal was cut short by state sanctions on his principal mentor, and ensuing further exclusions, mirrored by conservative preferments, within academic and cultural life. Moreover Marx positioned himself—a lot more controversially than most liberals—as an atheist, compounding his troublesomeness. Established Christian churches and authoritarian monarchical states were only formally separated as hierarchies (with some fully integrated exceptions), but in practice they interlocked as mutually legitimizing institutions. The overt and often violent anti-clericalism of the French Revolution, and its experiments with civic religion and anti-Christian cults of the Goddess Reason, terrified even German liberalizers. Otherwise they were in favor of incorporating (some) citizen participation and public opinion into constitutional monarchical or republican practice. Christian confession and faith-driven conformity were considered essential to being any kind of worthy human being at all. Philosophers and historians who were even suspected of atheism were subjected to dismissal and exile, and even Hegel’s works, and therefore his followers, were not above suspicion on this score. By the time Marx left the world of German universities, having submitted a doctoral dissertation to the University of Jena in 1841 (without attendance, as was then an accepted practice), he was clearly in sympathy not just with political liberalism but with philosophical atheism. This was refracted in his intellectual work through a study of classical materialists, whose universe was by definition not just non-Christian, but effectively a godless world of particles-in-motion (Breckman 2001: 90–130, 258–97). Marx’s thinking, as well as his career, took an unusual turn at this point in 1842, when he was twenty-four. He began to write for a liberal newspaper in Cologne and soon joined the editorial team. The journalism from this period was collected only in

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the twentieth century, and little noticed textually by Marx after 1843 or by anyone else at the time, other than in passing. While biographers into the twenty-first century have collected somewhat more information on the other journalists, editors and financial backers of the Rheinische Zeitung (“Rhenish Gazette”), they have concentrated on making Marx’s views consistent, albeit within a narrative of development. Their project was to track his presumed intellectual transition from a Young Hegelian liberal to a communist critic of political economy. Marx’s own autobiographical account, however, contains an enlightening suggestion of an important moment of enlightenment. This hint will help us to make sense of his discontented liberalism and turn to practical politicking, which occupied him for the rest of his life. In an autobiographical preface dating from 1859 (only widely circulated from the turn of the twentieth century) he comments that his first encounter with “what is known as material interests” came from his journalistic engagement with the practical businessmen and others associated with the newspaper (Marx 1987: 261–2). These interests were material in the sense that they were worldly rather than spiritual or intellectual in some higher-minded way. The reference here is to a social hierarchy of values, rather than to an ontological position on “being” or “existence. ” Additionally, a concern with this-worldly practices of manufacture, trade and finance was itself somewhat at odds with Christian preoccupations with the next world, as opposed to this one, and with Christian moral values of charitable giving, as opposed to self-interested trading. While Marx devotes only a sentence to this episode, he is clearly referring to a formative experience, and one not available (or in any sense wanted) in the universities or other “polite” circles that he had been used to. The Rhineland paper was liberal, concerning itself with debates both within the consultative Diet and outside it, where there were discussions on rights and freedoms, which were of interest to the propertied, literate classes. However, even more controversially, some correspondents on the paper and elsewhere raised the “social question” from a variety of perspectives. This latter set of issues—to do with landless labourers and a new class of rural poor—arose within a context of authoritarian reform of feudal rights formerly accorded to peasantproprietors. The purpose was to alter the land-tenure system, where feudal obligations had made onward sales and inward investment difficult for landlords. The goal was to make “private” property available on the open market. The business-minded backers of the Rheinische Zeitung were prepared to publish criticisms of the Prussian regime for invoking Christian charity alone as an answer to discontent and upset among the lower orders, and for presuming that the “social question” was in any case a consequence of degraded morals and individual turpitude. From the commercial perspective unrest on the land and in the streets would not be good for business.

Political Economy The role of political economy in this encounter, and the exposure to a this-worldly sort of critique about real people in the present, opened a brave new world for Marx, albeit one hinted at in Hegelian ruminations on history, progress and reason. Marx’s writing for the paper, however, necessarily shows considerable continuity in genre and style

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with the overly intellectualized and very sarcastic polemics of his university mentors and Young Hegelian confrères. This was a realm of code, shared by writers and readers, such that works of political critique, disguised as philosophical debates, could get past the censorship, which blew hot and cold on the extent to which such writings were acceptable at all. But beneath the elaborated abstractions of Marx’s writing it is possible to discern a growing political commitment to the underdog and a barely suppressed rage at the neo-medieval, determinedly authoritarian and inhumanly callous attitude of rulers and bureaucrats. In simple terms, Marx’s early journalism was liberal in arguing for a common human dignity that extended to all individuals in society, and for a politics of collective, social responsibility for all individuals, particularly for the care of those whose livelihood and welfare were dependent on others via precarious structures of employment and impoverished descent into unemployment. This position was a radical challenge, since it conflicted in principle and in practice with the thorough-going individualism of action and responsibility favored by some economic liberals, and was perhaps too starkly put in political terms for other liberalizers, who as gradualists were not inclined to press the authorities as strongly, or as persistently and as uncompromisingly as Marx (Lubasz 1976). After the Rheinische Zeitung was closed down by the censors, on the instructions of the King of Prussia, Marx turned to Hegel, but with something new in mind. His project was to read up on political economy, the study of production, distribution, exchange and consumption, both in abstraction from history (as propositions in natural philosophy) and in conjunction with history (as practical statecraft directed to national, or would-be national, rulerships). Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821), on which Marx took extensive notes, concerns itself with political economy and with the then-standard sources on the developing science; “science” was here understood as Wissenschaft, i.e. the rigorous study of any subject, including philosophical ones (note that this is different from the later Anglophone usage that defines the term primarily with reference to the physical sciences). Hegel’s philosophical account of society, understood as a progressive development of hierarchical rationalities in human experience, thus included his ruminations on material processes of production and social processes of exchange. He gave a nodding but qualified approval to developing productivity, suggesting a reconciling of the distributive hierarchies of wealth and privilege with rising commercial interests in manufacture and trade. To do this, he outlined socially-managed corporate responsibilities for the unfortunate poor with concomitant political exclusion of “the rabble.” Ever keen on logical clarity and fearless critique, Marx zeroed-in on what he saw as Hegel’s timid version of liberal reform and his regime-serving defence of a neo-feudal order. Marx’s then-unpublished critique of Hegel’s political philosophy was written in the aftermath of his all-too-brief hands-on engagement with activist journalism. But this was the prelude to his planned first-hand engagement with economic liberalism as a way into the “social question” that other radicals had not yet found. Marx’s studious retreat in 1843 was quite brief, and coincided with marriage, honeymoon and sorting out his plans to continue his journalistic activism, albeit in a context where it could actually take place, which was clearly not anywhere within the German states. With his new bride, he set up residence in Paris with other émigré Germans whose liberalism was, from the governmental perspective, a revolutionary

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threat. As foreigners they were allowed into France on sufferance of good behavior, but as German-speakers, who for the most part were writing for and consorting with other Germans, it took some time for the authorities to get very nervous about their politics. The victorious forces of the allied German states, Austrian and Russian empires, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, had dissolved the Napoleonic regimes and republics in 1814 and restored former monarchies to power. However, the settlements imposed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 did not restore the middleages, but preserved a somewhat rationalized neo-feudalism, except in France. Nonetheless, the restored monarchy there worked against the revolutionary principles proclaimed in the inflammatory Rights of Man and Citizen, barely tolerating the National Assembly and strenuously resisting any moves to widen the then very limited suffrage, or otherwise replace monarchical hierarchy with democratic equalities. When the Marx family arrived, French liberals were attempting—against police harassment— to discuss and demand a counter-imposition of the political and economic liberalism that the Revolution had achieved.

The “Social Question” Some of these debates bore down on the “social question” of poverty, rather more than in the German states, but, from the perspective of Marx and his German associates, French thinking was far more advanced. This was particularly so in publications that theorized an egalitarian communist resolution of economic inequalities in property, income and wealth. Such radical thinking was of course highly varied. These books and pamphlets ranged from fantasies on the model of Thomas More’s austerely egalitarian and overtly religious (if non-Christian) Utopia of 1516, to small-scale visions of cooperative agrarian communities, to high-flown fantasies celebrating artistic creativity and sensual pleasures. Marx’s previous take on such writings had been an annoyance with the amateurism, frivolity and woolly-mindedness of such works, which were admittedly quite far off from the historical and philosophical rigor that Hegel’s writings evinced, at least in terms of methodical seriousness. Working closely with Arnold Ruge (1802–1880) as lead editor, Marx planned and executed a volume of a political review modeled on the older man’s successful Hallische Jahrbücher för deutsche Kunst und Wissenschaft (Halle Annals of German Art and Science). The title neatly expresses the liberal conjunction of anti-feudal, promodernism that would help to constitute a new German politics and culture. The proposed Deutsch-Französisiche Jahrbücher, again in its title, neatly summarized these broader ambitions internationally, and the two editors were perfectly placed in Paris to find like minds among French intellectuals; and, in reverse, some of them could possibly become interested in an encounter with the quite different and quite novel idealist philosophies current among Young Hegelians, who were no longer welcome at home. In one sense the volume was not a success in that no French contributions were actually secured, and the work attracted little notice. Moreover Ruge and Marx fell out over various personal and financial issues, and the editorial partnership was wound up. Today the volume is quite rare, and has never been translated as a whole into English.

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In another sense, though, the volume was a big success for Marx, in that his thinking—conveyed this time in published rather than manuscript form—advanced very considerably on two fronts. In terms of the “social question, ” and his exposure to and critique of communist ideas, he announced in advance his own critical work on Hegel’s widely read Philosophy of Right, specifically highlighting the great man’s failure to engage properly with market-driven commercialism. In Marx’s view, this unstoppable development was already working against any neo-medieval society that could be ordered into regulated, guild-like corporations as Hegel had suggested. Moreover, Marx merged the “social question” with French revolutionary egalitarianism in a rigorously liberal (but sociologically rather suspect) vision of a working-class triumphthrough-numbers over the hierarchies of power, wealth and property that had produced—so he argued—their property-less conditions of misery in the first place. Using a French word (proletariat) for the oppressed “class of civil society that is not a class of civil society, ” Marx proclaimed the future of German politics to be unfolding in exactly this manner (Marx 1975a: 186). His other essay in the volume, “On the Jewish Question, ” was also little noticed until the twentieth century. Intervening in a longstanding debate on the political status of German Jewry, this work represents Marx’s synthetic reckoning-up of contemporary liberal thinking; political liberalism would remain a mere masquerade in acting out a kind of equality through the franchise of public participation and free debate in ideas, unless, and until, it took on board the consequences of economic liberalism in terms of material inequalities of wealth, poverty, opportunity and life-chances. In other words, political liberalism was insufficient and positively misleading, unless, and until, it formulated a genuinely egalitarian economics of everyday life that would benefit everyone (Marx 1975b).

Partnership with Engels Moreover, as editor, Marx received a manuscript submission “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” from Friedrich Engels (1975a), a young man whom he had previously met only briefly, and had dismissed as a yet another amateur liberalizing Young Hegelian from Berlin. Engels’s background was in manufacture, commerce and international trade, including spells in Manchester where he had familiarized himself, as a bilingual after-hours journalist, with the egalitarian liberalism of Chartist politics. Chartists pressed for democratic reforms, including a wider franchise, regular elections and salaries for MPs. Some Chartists were also engaged with the “social question, ” particularly as it related to the impoverishment of factory workers. Many of these people had migrated from Ireland to seek work and were resident in appalling urban slums, already noticed by the press and debated in Parliament. Chartists, however, were resisted by the British ruling classes. From that perspective, Chartists were dangerous radicals, inspired by foreign principles of equality that would upend the monarchical (and only semi-constitutional) social order of aristocratic landownership, accumulated wealth and Protestant morals. Engels’s submission was electrifying for Marx; here was someone, writing in German, who genuinely commanded the French and Englishlanguage sources on political economy.

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Moreover, Engels was drawing conclusions that some within the literature hadn’t drawn, or were characteristically avoiding. Engels not only outlined the modern, freetrading dynamic of capital investment and cost-cutting wages in neat theoretical terms, he also proposed a political dynamic arising economically from endemic instability and over-production. In his view, the system as a whole was doomed to fail. Marx (1975c) instantly took notes that effectively outlined his own life’s work. Engels’s short essay functioned as a German-language crash course in political economy for Marx, a direct stimulation to write his own even more rigorous critique. It also acted as a considerable inspiration to get on with his German-focused activism in straightening out ignorance, amateurism and foolishness among his remaining rivals and potential allies within the liberalizing radicals back home. He and Engels established a political partnership that awaited the publication of Engels’s very considerable socio-economic researches into The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels 1975b). After that, it took off in a co-residential arrangement in Brussels, since the French police had secured the expulsion of Marx and other foreign trouble-making radicals in early 1845.

Radical Liberalism No one, not even Marx himself, has had much of an interest in emphasizing the way his theory and practice overlapped with contemporary liberalizers. He positioned himself on the very radical “left of the left, ” in a qualified relation to both political liberalism and its economic counterpart. Indeed, from that perspective, it became possible to see just how closely they were entwined, since Marx had developed the view that the logical and practical separation between the two strands of thought was illusory. Establishing a distinctive and deliberately overdrawn position so as to make politics practical is hardly a new idea, and, indeed, Marx was particularly good at immanent critique and on-side criticism. He also aimed to push timid, compromising associates to much clearer conclusions. Thus, exactly when Marx became a communist, as opposed to a liberal, is something of a moot point, given that the evident object, liberalizing social transformation, would necessarily be a mass coalitional action, and so require a broad and united front. In this way he was very active in the Democratic Association of Brussels, and an eager participant in their middle-class debates on free trade. Marx’s “Speech” on this subject, written in French to fit in with local activism, is now little read, but was mentioned in his 1859 autobiographical note as an activist highlight. Declaring himself to be a supporter of free trade, and therefore of the globalized commercialism for which liberals were arguing, Marx—very characteristically—also drew a conclusion that would be uncomfortable for his audience: “In a word, the Free Trade system hastens the Social Revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I am in favor of Free Trade” (Marx 1976a: 465). Marx’s sole, single-authored book from this period, The Poverty of Philosophy, espoused just this kind of critique, written in French to speak to the Continent’s most literate audiences and also to impress the Germans, and remind them of their own backwardness. Boldly, Marx took on the then-famous radical Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) for his amateurish appropriation of Hegel, his evident weakness in

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political economy, as well as his celebrity-oriented political posturing (Marx 1976b). The subsequent “Manifesto of the Communist Party” of early 1848, written in conjunction with Engels, presented communists as leading elements within the activisms of liberalizing democrats, who were still by definition revolutionaries. The document made suggestions for political alignments in various national contexts. Few, if any, of the programmatic goals outlined in the document look particularly communist today, but at the time they constituted a revolutionary but liberal upending of the established political, social and—most importantly—economic orders. This was in the spirit of reform and redistribution, though with advice to prepare for violent opposition. Admittedly there were more than a few hints at what would make communists distinctive—communal property in some sense, abolition of monetary exchanges, distribution of goods and services according to need, obligation of all to labor for the collective good etc. (Marx and Engels 1976: 504–6). Whether or not the “Manifesto” was particularly helpful or hurtful to these causes we do not really know—most copies were seized by the Prussian police, and shortly after its anonymous publication, the liberalizing revolutions of 1848 swept across Europe, and Marx and Engels returned home to revive their Rhineland newspaper.

After the Revolution After 1848 European politics changed, moving from a determinedly anti-liberal reaction for a decade, to a very gradual and reluctant liberalization as time passed. Things also changed for Marx, including: family exile in England from 1849, international journalism for liberalizing newspapers in the USA and on the Continent, and financial dependence on Engels for the remainder of his life. His engagement with German politics continued, but was chiefly backward-looking political justification and self-defense. The opportunities for collective activism sharply diminished, given that his exile was in a sense double; he did not engage very much with English liberalizing reformers and radicals, fearing further expulsion and increased privation, and he opted out of any possible return to any German state. His masterwork Capital, Vol. 1 (published in 1867 and translated into French 1872–1875) represented the clarity and rigor that he had been promising in putting liberalizing politics into a properly critical relationship with modernizing commercialism. Once again he was intervening in the Franco-German context, and once again, in areas where Proudhonistes were particularly influential (Roberts 2017: 35–50). Marx was also involved with the International Working Men’s Association, founded in 1864 and headquartered in London. This was a loosely organized and highly international union of liberalizing radicals, which had a self-evident economic engagement with the “social question, ” and was again a forum where Marx’s “left” radicalism was put to use (Musto 2014). His overseas confrères in the forerunner to the later, unified German Socialist Party, settled in 1872 on a “grand old man” status for Marx and Engels, who were featured in a preface to a re-published “Communist Manifesto. ” By that time liberalizing democrats had achieved some degree of respectability, if not necessarily full legal sanction, and the spy-ridden clandestine

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activism of the 1840s, as well as the coded Young Hegelian intellectual agitation, had faded from view. Even Marx and Engels professed, in retrospect, to finding those writings merely amusing. Up till his death in 1883, Marx was becoming something of a socialist icon, more ferociously distinctive as the years passed by, though not without competition, even in those circles. He was always well to the left within the international movement, which was itself to the left of liberal reformers, who were still building constitutionalism, and in many cases avoiding the “social question. ”

Marx is Back! Today, Marx’s coincidence with, and participation within, these liberal processes of political and economic democratization have largely faded from view. From the historical record, we can see evidence of working coalitions, necessary compromises and joint declarations that he was involved in producing. He spent far more time espousing liberal causes and values from a radical perspective than he did outlining communist ideas or any such distinctive plans or practices. His relationship with familiar liberal ideas that overlapped with social democracy looks very much clearer now than it did in Cold War days. Politics after the financial crashes and crises of 2008 reflects, among other things, a discontented merger of political and economic liberalisms. Even if we disagree with Marx’s own diagnoses and resolutions, his discontents are still with us.

References Breckman, W. (2001), Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engels, F. (1975a), “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 418–43. Engels, F. (1975b), The Condition of the Working Class in England. From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 295–583, Gabriel, M. (2011), Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, New York: Norton. Leopold, D. (2007), The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lubasz, H. (1976), “Marx’s Initial Problematic: The Problem of Poverty, ” Political Studies 24: 24–42. Marx, K. (1975a), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 175–87. Marx, K. (1975b), “On the Jewish Question, ” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 146–74. Marx, K. (1975c), “Summary of Frederick Engels’ Article ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 375–6.

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Marx, K. (1976a), “Speech on the Question of Free Trade. Delivered to the Democratic Association of Brussels at Its Public Meeting of January 9, 1848, ” In K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 450–65. Marx, K. (1976b), The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 105–212. Marx, K. (1982), “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Preface, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 477–519. Marx, K, and Engels, F. (1976), “Manifesto of the Communist Party, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 261–6. Musto, M. (ed.) (2014), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later, London: Bloomsbury. Roberts, W. C. (2017), Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Sperber, J. (2013), Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, New York: Liveright. Stedman Jones, G. (2016), Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Cambridge, MA : Harvard.

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Philosophical Constellations Christian Thorne

There are four things that one needs to know about Marx’s relationship to his immediate philosophical context:

1. In Germany in the 1840s, many people thought of philosophy as an intrinsically revolutionary endeavor. It is, of course, easy to derive revolutionary stances from even the most conventional philosophical starting-points. Philosophy begins by asking the student to provisionally set aside all of their uninspected beliefs, everything they have taken on trust, everything she thinks she knows just because she heard it from her parents or the priest or the neighborhood. The young philosopher who prorogues their views in this fashion may not be promising never to believe anything again, but they are pledging to re-admit only those beliefs they can rigorously justify. And really, how many of their old and merely habitual opinions do they expect will survive such a strictness? Philosophy for them is likely to be a remaking, a putting-out-of-play, of all rival sources of belief— religious authority, the creedal bylaws of this or that institution, and culture. If generalized across a population, philosophy would amount to the destruction of the latter. This point would hold for most philosophies, but to that classically heterodox profile, philosophers in the two generations before Marx added what we might call the German Idea—the idea, namely, that the mind is active and creative (and not just a screen or empty box). Other positions follow on from there; if the mind is creative and likely to insist on its creativity, it can never stand put with what it has already created. The mind creates something, fashioning an argument or engineering an object for the building, but immediately turns against these achievements, against its own positions and designs, which it must henceforth regard as obstacles to further creation. The inherently active mind is always moving past what already exists. At any point in time many people will be beyond, experiencing available social forms mostly as constriction for which the mind, without prompting, will begin to devise alternatives, exercising its transformative freedom until such day as the mind’s freedom becomes the stuff of social life. The only institutions that the active mind would not feel compelled to move beyond would be ones that themselves affirmed and cultivated the mind’s activity— institutions, that is, that took the creative mind to be their very point. The “German 133

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Idea” thus issues, in a distinctive political goal, a demand for institutions that we have made, that we know we have made, and that we are capable of remaking in an ongoing fashion. The notion was widespread that the French Revolution had been a uniquely philosophical event, but that’s just the start of it. It is not enough to remark that Kant, Fichte and Hegel had all supported the revolution, though this is true. The point is, rather, that by the time Marx started writing in the early 1840s, the younger philosophers most associated with the German Idea, thinkers ten or fifteen years older than him, had fashioned the doctrine of the active and creative mind into an openly anti-clerical and neo-Jacobin position. Philosophy could convincingly pose as the revolution re-done in thought.

2. Marx, who held a Ph.D in philosophy, and who for a time foresaw a career for himself teaching philosophy in Bonn, arrived at many of his core positions by adapting arguments made by older philosophers in the radical cohort. The critique of political economy began as the philosophical critique of religion. Anyone can tell you that their job sucks or that most people are unhappy at work. When Marx first writes about the economy, he immediately makes claims that are quite a bit more extravagant than these. Chief among them is the idea that, in capitalist societies, people relate to capital in the same distorted way that church-goers relate to God. There are three related claims that a radical critic of monotheism might make in this regard:

(a) Humans invented God (and HaShem and the Almighty). God has always been a human creation.

(b) Having invented God, humans then assigned to Him their own powers of creation. Some devout people continue to act as though they lacked the powers to make and sustain the world, and yet when people worship God, they are actually worshiping their own capacities for thoughtful activity, referencing the thinking human aggregate—what the Germans call Geist, which translates as both Mind and Spirit (and sometimes as Ghost—Germans talk about the Father, Son and Holy Geist). There does, indeed, exist a supremely powerful force in the world, a force capable of marvels, a force both unseen and in a sense everywhere. It is not wrong to think that there exists an omnipresent spirit, but that force (spirit, Geist, mind) is just thought. Thought spans the world. When Christians go to church, then, they are worshipping thought as though it were something outside of them, a separate entity, and not their own innermost being and accomplishment. (c) Having projected thought onto a non-human and invented entity, humans then subordinate themselves to it. Endowing their own creation with a specious authority, they take themselves to be lesser than it. Such is the core of the Hegelian account of alienation. What we’ll want to see now is that all three of these points carry over to Marx’s critique of capitalism:

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(a) People make capital. Everything that counts as capital is a human creation. This is true in at least two different senses. The institutions of capitalism are not inevitable or permanent or a geologically enduring feature of the natural landscape. People built the institutions of capitalism: stock markets and commodity exchanges, the banking system and the factory system. They invented double-entry bookkeeping. Workers also construct everything that counts as capital in the present. For a start, they make what economists call capital goods—the tangible items that get used in the production of goods and services. They make the machines (that the capitalist owns); they build the buildings (that the capitalist owns); they gather and do the initial processing on the not-really raw materials (that the capitalist buys and temporarily owns), and they obviously make the commodities that the capitalist owns—the finished goods waiting for sale that represent his investment at a certain stage in the economic cycle—although at any given moment not all capital will be invested in capital goods or sitting un-liquidly in a warehouse. One of Marx’s more searching points is that the wealth that is housed in financial assets (stocks, bonds and interest-bearing bank accounts) can also be traced back to work that someone had to do somewhere at some point—mostly someone other than the owner of that asset. (b) Having created capital, people then assign to it the powers of creation. This is true in several senses, simultaneously. People think that capital is productive, or that capital sets the entire economy in motion: people think that the machines “are doing the work, ” or that capital is “money making money”—or “putting money to work. ” For Marx, these are all mystifications. Capital can’t produce anything. It certainly cannot “make money”—workers somewhere have to be creating something, they have to be taking the stuff of the world and making it better, more useful and more conducive to human need and desire. Nor does money work; only workers work. Yet, from a certain perspective, from a certain position within the social system, it can indeed look like my money is “making money, ” magically, without anyone having had to work—though I can think this only because I didn’t have to do the work. People in capitalist societies assign to capital the powers of creation that in fact belong to work alone. (c) Once the creative powers of work are incorrectly assigned to capital, actual workers are made subordinate to it. A created thing that lacks the power to create is taken to be the all-creative thing, and so allowed to lord it over the real creators. What stands out from the perspective of 1844 is that this last sentence could serve equally well for the radical critique of God and the Marxist critique of capitalism. At this point, it becomes possible to adapt to the spheres of production and distribution the politics of the German Idea: we demand an economy that we have made, that we know we have made, and that we are capable of remaking in an ongoing fashion.

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3. Even as Marx adapts the positions of his philosophical friends and mentors, he cautions against the perils of philosophy itself. Philosophy turns out to be one more thing, like capitalism and the state, which the self-organizing working class is going to have to overcome. In the later sections of The Holy Family, when Marx decides to show off his philosophical education, he takes it upon himself to correct the Left Idealist account of eighteenthcentury intellectual history, offering to counter the attacks mounted by some radical intellectuals on the “materialism” of the “French Enlightenment. ” It is a telling moment. Marx does not call himself a “materialist” nearly as often as the subsequent history of Marxism would lead one to think. The Holy Family thus yields some valuable references for anyone who wants to show not only that Marx was a materialist, but that he regarded himself as such. One of the great surprises of that book, then, is that it is in these very paragraphs that Marx most clearly aligns himself, not with materialism as conventionally understood, but with a classical, anti-philosophical skepticism. This has some farreaching consequences. He says first that the “materialism” he is promoting is not an ontology in its own right, though he recognizes that miscellaneous and rival ontologies do indeed get grouped under that rubric. That’s not the point, he says. The task, rather, is to stop caring about ontology, to stop getting bogged down in ontological argument. “Materialism, ” then, is but a name for our concerted attention to the present and the onrushing future—a pragmatism, in other words, that fundamentally brackets metaphysics. On the basis of this passage alone, it might seem advisable to substitute the word “pragmatism” every time Marx writes the word “materialism”; this silent amendment would head off one persistent misreading of Marx and return our attention to practice, which is where he wants it. Skepticism or even something rather like Pyrrhonism enters the argument when Marx writes that the person who taught eighteenth-century thinkers how to exit metaphysics was Pierre Bayle, the exiled French Huguenot who, from his perch in Rotterdam in the 1690s, systematically exposed the folly and error of one thinker after another, doggedly taking on the mainstays of the late seventeenth-century philosophical scene (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz), and then roasting each intellectual novelty as it achieved its moment of pan-European prominence (Newtonianism, Lockeanism). Marx’s way of praising Ludwig Feuerbach is to say that he is a second Bayle—a Bayle whose “weapon was skepticism. ” Another consequence was that Marx’s enrollment of himself among the antiphilosophers was a heavy blow to the Red Spinozists. He says more than once in The Holy Family, “Not Spinoza!” The monist is first of a list of thinkers from whom we should disassociate the “materialism” Marx is sticking up for. Marx then says that Bayle “refuted chiefly Spinoza and Leibniz”—the implication being that we should follow Bayle and not these others. Anyone rejecting philosophy in some comprehensive way would, at the same time, be rejecting Hegel, of course, although this latter is typically thought of as the rival candidate for Marx’s metaphysical allegiance. The point, then, would be that the entire Hegel vs. Spinoza debate, so recurrent a feature of Marxist philosophy, is misguided, because Marx openly points to a third candidate. This, then, is the Marx who argues that communism is not a philosophy; that does not trade in

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“ideas and principles”; that communism will not presume to “shape or mould” the thinking of the working classes; that communists will not be teachers; that philosophers always ask the wrong questions because they have inserted themselves into the world in the wrong way.

4. Marx borrowed the attack on philosophy from other thinkers in the radical philosophical scene, indeed, from the very thinkers against whom he wields his skepticism most bitingly. Skepticism, was not only an alternative to Hegelianism, but also one of its more distinctive products. Marx got into a race with other Hegelians to see who could exit philosophy the fastest. There is a small difficulty here. When Marx was in his 20s, Hegelian philosophy produced not one but two competing anti-philosophies, opposing programs for talking people out of making philosophical arguments. The German Idea holds that the mind is active and creative. What’s at issue is whether you think that philosophers, just by virtue of practicing philosophy, are liable to overstate or understate that creativity. We can consider each possibility in turn. In the 1840s, that first position—the one that holds that philosophers are likely to exaggerate the powers of thought—was associated with the name Feuerbach. Hegel had already demanded that we naturalize God—that we recognize all claims about God to be claims about Geist, itself to be understood in naturalized and this-worldly terms (which is one good reason to translate Geist as mind rather than as spirit). Hegel had also emphasized what he called realization; concepts are only worth the positing to the extent that they can also be made real. It is one thing to argue, in the spirit of philosophical anthropology or during the last week of an existentialism seminar, that human beings are necessarily and always free. It is another thing to build the institutions that will house that freedom—actualize it, extend it and make it practicable. Hegel, in other words, had already initiated the critique of mere thought, asking his readers to shift their attention from skull-trapped ideation to thought-in-practice. Feuerbach’s point is that Hegel’s emphasis on the Infinite or Unbounded is unlikely to survive this translation. Human beings are the bearers of mind, and to emphasize their mindedness is to call attention to their freedom, the fact that they can for reasons of their own, fashion the world in an infinitely extendable list of different ways. But, human beings are not only mind, and this means that the beings who incarnate unbounded mind are also limited and that our theory of creation-without-limit is going to have to be accompanied by an account of need and dependency. Hegelianism does, in fact, tend to produce theories of the God-man, in which a self-exalting humanity promotes itself to the position of the Creator. Feuerbach argues in response that this putatively divine and all-making humanity is in fact rather encumbered, that its members are often hungry or vulnerable or aroused, and that they can only think and create from amidst these constraints. The philosopher’s error is to underscore at every turn the achievements of thought while saying almost nothing about my need to eat every five or six hours. Philosophy, then, is best grasped as the specious transfiguration of thinking activity, as the abstraction of thought from out of its mundane and bodily circumstance. One exercise facing the student of philosophy

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would be, via acts of speculative reconstruction, to restore to abstract thought its origins in practice, to make any canonical philosophical doctrine legible as a way of being in the world. That done, the next assignment would be to go ahead and dispense with philosophy, to quit asking philosophical questions, to avoid framing the problems that arise in one’s life as philosophical puzzles, and to cultivate instead a militant orientation to the stuff of this world, a non-philosophical will to concretion. The second skepticism, meanwhile, is a forthright adaptation of the German Idea’s great political demand—the demand for institutions that we have made, that we know ourselves to have made, and that we are capable of remaking in an ongoing fashion. The Hegelian, of course, is determined to utter this formulation not only about institutions in general, but severally about each particular thing. We demand a state / a legal system / a language / an x that we have made, that we know etc. Repetition of that kind comes easy, but the slogan is at its most challenging when it turns reflexive, plugging thought into x’s open slot, and so subjecting Geist itself to the politics of Geist—we demand a philosophy that we have made, that we know etc. As soon as this demand is spoken it will generate a misgiving, since I am likely to regard the concepts at the center of my philosophy as true or right, as discovered not as made. The ideas that I take to be guiding my political conduct are, thus, rather like the Christian God and will need to be demystified in turn. We create the idea of equality (or freedom, or solidarity, or the commonwealth, or Geist), treat it as uncreated and not of us, and then subordinate ourselves to it. The doctrine of the active, creative mind, followed consequently to its conclusion, turns on itself as thought’s last uncreated term. Knowing about these conflicting anti-philosophies should make it possible to specify one of Marx’s more important innovations. His trick is to deploy the two positions against each other, identifying the moment of dogmatism in each and then countering it with arguments drawn from the other. To the ultra-idealist creed of the mind’s endless inventiveness, he counterposes a doctrine of need and material constraint, as chastened as any Catholic conservatism. I do not liberate myself by thinking myself liberated, but to any philosophical account of such constraints he responds by restating the precepts of geistliche creativity; our dependencies are themselves created, and so too is any account of human nature that claims to comprehend human constraint once and for all. There is no human endowment whose historical variations we can safely ignore or whose persistence we can confidently predict. Marxism comes into being not as a philosophical system and not as a new science, but as an ensemble of coordinated and mutually contemptuous skepticisms— as a philosophy abandoned . . . and then re-abandoned for good measure.

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Nineteenth-Century Social Theory Corbin Hiday

Marx is not a sociologist, but there is a sociology in Marx. Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx In many ways, Marx’s thought lies at the fulcrum of nineteenth-century intellectual debate and development, thus making any comprehensive genealogy or historiography of influence a difficult task. In his work The Sociology of Marx, Henri Lefebvre refers to this notion as the “broad thought” of Marx: without reducing this thought to interdisciplinarity, “Marxian investigation bears upon a differentiated totality and centers around a single theme—the dialectical interrelations between men active in society and their multifarious, contradictory accomplishments” (1982: 23). Relatedly, Lefebvre, as the epigraph suggests, approaches Marx’s relationship to a variety of disciplines without reducing his thought to one particular enclave: Marx “does not, however, carve out of reality (as one does today) an epistemological field bearing the name ‘sociology.’ On the contrary, Marx would repudiate any such delimitation that stands in the way of global apprehension and comprehension. The same is true for anthropology” (1982: viii–ix). My task here will be to articulate the stakes of Marx’s “broad thought” as it relates to the development of social theory in the nineteenth century. Part of the thrust of Lefebvre’s remarks about fields and disciplines rests on the fact that, for Marx and his peers, these institutionalized frameworks were not yet in place; social thought during this period coalesced around a series of interrelated practices and discourses that included journalism, interviews, ethnography, philosophy and political economy. Importantly, the foundations laid by Marx and others from the mid-to-late nineteenth century persist into our present, a moment of particular Marxist resurgence, not only in the return to fundamental Marxian economic lessons after 2007/8 (most notably illustrated by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century), but also in the ways in which we are forced to confront the re-organization and re-construction of our broken sociality, with the hope of remaking the social anew. When attempting to construct such an intellectual genealogy, most often we find Marx among philosophers and political economists. In part, this stems from an early twentieth century attempt at systemization by both Kautsky and Lenin. As Étienne Balibar notes, the development of Marxism as a “world-view” coalesced around the idea of “the ‘three sources of Marxism’: German philosophy, French socialism and British 139

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political economy” (2017: 7). This explication emerged out of Kautsky’s lecture, “The Three Sources of Marxism. The Historic Work of Marx” (1907), followed by Lenin’s own adaptation in his lecture, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (1913). Balibar, following the path of Constanzo Preve, suggests an alternative attempt at “totalization, ” one in which Marx has four masters rather than three broad sources: Epicurus, Rousseau, Adam Smith and Hegel. However, while this might crystalize a particular philosophical Marx, this perspective does not fully account for the various iterations and influences related to the nascent social theory that I attempt to highlight here. Thus, Marx sits firmly ensconced within a vibrant and emergent intellectual moment. His own work should be read as one part, albeit crucial, of the implantation of social theory and practice, explicitly grappling with notions of epistemology, rationality, positivism, metaphysics, empiricism, humanism and scientism—problems and conceptual concerns of many nineteenth-century social theorists as they attempted to codify sociology and its related branches as a science. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, a series of foundational texts of social theory were written and published, setting the stage for the institutionalization of the disciplines we know today as sociology, anthropology and psychology. Between the years 1830 and 1848, the year of widespread European revolutions, thinkers and theorists like Marx, Engels, John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte wrote and published a series of foundational texts in the development of social thought. These works include: Comte’s series of texts known as The Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842); Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (written in 1844, but not published during his lifetime); a collaborative effort between Marx and Engels entitled The Holy Family (1844); Engels’s foundational text, The Condition of the English Working Class (1844); Marx’s draft of the Theses on Feurbach (1845); more collaborations with Engels, The German Ideology (written in 1845) and The Communist Manifesto (written in 1847); Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848); and Comte’s Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (1848, first translated in English as A General View of Positivism in 1865). While I am unable to properly treat this explosion of mid-century intellectual production, I want to first focus my attention on the intersection between Henri de Saint-Simon, Comte and Marx, a series of fruitful junctures in the foundation of modern social thought.

Foundations: Positivism and Materialism To understand Marx’s position as a foundational thinker within the development of mid-nineteenth century social theory, I turn to important predecessors and contemporaries that constituted an important intellectual milieu, which included: Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte. Both Saint-Simon and Fourier are representative of the influence of the “French socialism” branch of the tripartite model put forth by Kautsky and Lenin, discussed above. Importantly, while Saint-Simon and Fourier provide early philosophical lessons and inspiration for Marx, they are also representative of a material movement to reimagine and remake the social world, thus in some sense anticipating the ways in which Marx will attempt to bridge

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the gap between idealism and materialism. Saint-Simon, a perhaps overlooked and elusive figure within the development of social theory and thought, experienced important moments in proximity to revolution, politically adjacent to the Jacobins during the French Revolution, while also taking part in the American Revolution. These events informed his conception of politics and its relation to economics, producing a notion of history in which Nature and Society exist within a set of governing laws. While these laws led to a mechanistic and deterministic outlook, Marx and Engels found productive his discussion of emergent industrial development in relation to science and technology, as well as his understanding of the economic impact on political activity.1 Many of these central tenants would be pursued by Marx and Engels, but also, importantly, by Saint-Simon’s pupil, Auguste Comte. Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon’s student and one-time secretary, stands as a notable interlocutor and contemporary of Marx, and figures as a crucial figure within the development of sociology. Often thought of as the founder of philosophical positivism, a scientific approach to empirical epistemology, Comte is also credited with coining the word (in its modern usage) sociologie in 1838, in his attempt to understand the social whole through science. At its core, the development of Comte’s philosophical positivism necessitated the introduction of philosophies of natural science into the realm of the social. This exists within an understanding of the scientific method as empirical and progressive, particularly in relation to the sciences themselves—moving across mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology—ultimately arriving at sociology. Thus, sociology for Comte, provides the possibility of a unified, and total science: “the science of Society, besides being more important than any other, supplies the only logical and scientific link by which all our varied observations of phenomena can be brought into one consistent whole” (1/2). Relatedly, his “Law of the Three Stages, ” developed across his multi-volume work, The Course in Positive Philosophy, presents a progressive vision of society, moving from the theological stage (associating phenomena with the supernatural, reflective of a “primitive mind”), to the metaphysical stage (a transitional stage in which the supernatural is merely replaced with another “abstract” conception), and finally, to the positive stage (the scientific realization that phenomena are governed by rational and empirical laws). Within this framework, Comte articulated a hierarchical construction of the sciences across this historical, stagist development. Comte’s formulation exists as an early version of the social evolutionism that will become more fully developed by the end of the nineteenth century. Within the interrelated web of mid-century social theorists, we are able to point to overlaps and parallels across social thought. In Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, he seems to echo Comte’s vision of the development of science, “History itself is a real part of natural history and of nature’s becoming man. Natural science will in time subsume the science of man just as the science of man will subsume natural science: there will be one science” (1992: 355). While Marx expresses a version of scientific unity (“one science”), an important difference exists within the understanding of human agency and material relations between individuals, producing a dialectical exchange between “natural science” and the “science of man. ” For Marx, humanity does not exist as a passive unit enlightened by the realization of externally imposed laws of governance. Instead, we are reminded of Marx’s famous dictum from The Eighteenth

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Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (1979 [1852]: 103). This history is a human one—not metaphysical, or scientifically static and unchanging. Despite particular theoretical and philosophical proximities, I want to continue to grapple with these various departures and incongruities that arise throughout nineteenth-century social theory. In a letter dated January 24, 1895, Engels responded to Ferdinand Tönnies, a reply that seems at least partially prompted by Tönnies’s article, “Neuere Philosophie der Geschichte: Hegel, Marx, Comte” (“Modern Philosophy of History: Hegel, Marx, Comte”). In Engels’s brief note to Tönnies, we are provided with a glimpse into the promise and tension present in the intersection between the thought of Marx and Comte. Both connections and divergences between the thoughts of Marx and Comte might be understood through their shared intellectual relationship with Henri de SaintSimon. Saint-Simon who, Engels claimed “suffered from repleteness of thought, ” a “genius” (Engels 1895), in his mysticism, inaugurated the modern conception of industrial society, and who became a significant influence not only on Comte, but also on Marx and Engels, John Stuart Mill, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Thorstein Veblen. Comte would serve as Saint-Simon’s secretary from 1817–1824, when Comte’s desire for a more coherent formalization of what would emerge as his philosophy of positivism, its major tenants remaining Saint-Simonian in nature: the progressive and determinate Law of the Three Stages, and its implication within a systemization of the sciences. Engels characterizes Comte and his system as a clash between “brilliant thoughts” and a “narrow, philistine way of thinking”—essentially Saint-Simonian without the mysticism. For Engels, this systemization has “a hierarchically organized religious constitution, whose source is definitely Saint-Simonian, but divested of all mysticism and turned into something extremely sober, with a regular pope at the head, so that Huxley could say of Comtism that it was Catholicism without Christianity” (Engels 1895). This version of Catholicism brings us to a fundamental difference between the social theories of Marx and Comte during this period; in his scientific structure of the philosophy of positivism, Comte constructs a secular humanism that ultimately reproduces an organizational hierarchy similar to Catholicism, with his Grand-Être (Great Being) at the center of his secular structure, a stand-in for humanity as aggregate of individuals, and thus a replacement of traditional religious notions of God. Related to this hierarchy is Comte’s understanding of an intellectual class as the gatekeepers of the final stage of science—sociology. Despite Marx’s borrowings from French articulations of “social relations, ” he refuses a straightforward totalization of these relations. However, through Comte’s theorization of concepts like “progress” and “fetishism, ” we are able to conceive a direct link between Comte and Marx within their shared mid-century moment. Interestingly, Comte understands fetishism as a subset of the first stage of his Law of the Three Stages (Theological, Metaphysical and Scientific). Related to religion and theology, fetishism emerges as the transformation of inanimate objects into divinities, thus leading to a proliferation of worship, or polytheism. Those familiar with Marx’s theorization of the commodity and its “secret” will find resonance between these conceptions of objectification.

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Within these similarities, the challenge, then, becomes tracing the differences between Marx and Comte; this distinction reveals not only an important intellectual historical point, but also one of theoretical import—related to the subsequent development of Marxian historical materialism, dialectics and class struggle as constitutive of capitalist social relations. In a forceful reading of Marx’s sixth thesis from Theses on Feurbach, Balibar spends considerable time with the following passage: “But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” In his engagement with the concept of “the transindividual,” Balibar positions Marx within a long philosophical tradition, one interested in thinking through relations between the individual and society in both ontological and political registers: “Marx will embrace neither the ‘monad’ of Hobbes and Bentham, nor the ‘grand être’ of Auguste Comte.” It is significant that Marx (who spoke French almost as fluently as he did German) should have resorted to the foreign word “ensemble” here, clearly in order to avoid using the German “das Ganze,” the “whole, or totality” (2017: 30). How then, do we understand the Marxian composition of the social realm? For Balibar, transinvidivuality allows for an alternative to the monad or Great Being (or the “social organism” of Durkheim and Spencer) to be found literally in the in-between spaces of individual interactions and relations. This intermingling is the fruitful space of dialectical encounter for Marx. Refusing both the “monad” and the “whole,” Marx avoids reproducing the capitalist logic of formulating the individual as “atomistic,”2 while also insisting that the whole does not appear as autonomous and external, a spirit disconnected from the material reality of human history. In a passage echoing his sixth thesis on Feurbach, Marx writes the following in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts: It is above all necessary to avoid once more establishing “society” as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being. His vital expression— even when it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression, conceived in association with other men—is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. 1992: 350

What appears as a tautology—the “individual is the social being ”—functions as Marx’s refusal to codify, autonomize and elevate the social realm above the individual “expression, ” always in relation to others, whether explicit or implicit. For Marx, this focus on the externalization of the social realm and its appearance as autonomous, first emerges in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and most forcefully in his writings on the emergence of the money form. I will more fully address this complex intersection between the individual and society and its persistence in the work of Durkheim, Spencer, and others, below.

Methodology: Ethnographic and Sociological Moving from the philosophical and social groundwork laid by Comte and SaintSimon, among others, I now shift registers to the methodological influence and practice

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emergent within mid-century work by Friedrich Engels and Henry Mayhew. In order to better understand the relation between, and, perhaps, the shift and transformation from positivist empiricism to historical materialism, we must be attuned to the way this developed on the ground, between individuals as the expression of “social being” (Marx 1992: 350). Perhaps, even more so than Marx, Engels’s work represents an early version of what would come to be known as sociology or anthropology. In his foundational work, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), Engels explores the darker underbelly of industrial life in Manchester, an illustration in opposition to his class position as the son of a cotton factory owner. While originally conceived with a German audience in mind, Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, exists within a changing English political landscape. On the heels of the 1832 Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws and the subsequent Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), Engels’s work should be read as a unique contribution to an emergent sociological discourse with an interest in the Victorian poor. An important figure in this moment is Edwin Chadwick, whose work, The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842), published two years before Engels’s text, played an important role in the implementation of the Public Health Act (1848). Engels’s work should also be understood in dialogue with something like John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843), an attempt to understand the emergence of industrial capitalist production through social science. It should be noted that the influence of Saint-Simon continues within this moment, and emergent industrial discourse, as his articulation of industrialism and the related needs of the working-class provides an economic foundation to later versions of socialism. Within the burgeoning moment of industrialization and attempts at its theorization, Engels produces a defining work containing elements of ethnography, sociology and social anthropology. His introduction of the concept of the “industrial reserve army, ” as a reconceptualization of Malthusian “surplus population, ” would become central to Marx’s sustained critique of political economy in Capital. The composition of Marx’s Capital (1867), in many ways the culmination of a series of engagements across methodologies and disciplines, presents a multitudinous volume, the product of thousands of pages of notes written during his time at the British Museum. Despite its subtitle, Capital exists as a work that extends beyond the economic realm, incorporating innumerable amounts of data, statistical tables, equations and formulas, while also reliant on the journalistic, ethnographic research that sustains scientific understandings of sociology. There is something to be said for the popularity of the historical image—a now codified origin story of sorts—of Marx sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, pouring over issues of The Economist and Victoria’s Blue Books.3 During these sessions, Marx consumed knowledge across disciplines, sectors, spheres, centuries and languages, making his position within nineteenth-century social theory indispensable and pivotal, but also complicated and often contradictory. Engels would continue to push disciplinary boundaries in his own work, while also cultivating, editing and preparing posthumous publications of Marx’s work after his death in 1883. In a later work, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Engels explores the contradictions at the heart of bourgeois society’s most central social institution: the family. This text takes as its central interlocutor, Lewis Henry Morgan

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and his work Ancient Society (1877), an exploration of the relation between private property and the familial unit. As many have noted, Engels composed Origin in large part on the foundation of Marx’s extensive annotations and notes related to Ancient Society, organized by Engels after Marx’s death. Extending upon Morgan’s insights and Marx’s notes, Engels focused on capitalist exploitation within the realm of the family, with a patriarchal enforced order as the explicit representation of this exploitation: “With the patriarchal family, and still more with the single monogamous family, a change came. Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production” (2010: 104). Shortly after this passage, and after the codification of these relations under the capitalist mode of production, Engels extends the consequences to the whole of society: “The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules” (2010: 105). Engels imagines “modern society” as a chemical compound comprised of molecules, in this case represented by the exploitative family unit. This figuration of a scientized social order, understood as a totality or organic whole, in some ways parallels the late-century language of thinkers like Spencer and Durkheim, but refuses the complete externalization of “Society” devoid of the very social relations (interrelated molecules) that compose “modern society. ” Before the social evolutionist moment, however, I turn briefly to the mid-nineteenth century and the foundations of modern social theory and thought. Shortly after Engels’s picture of the Manchester working-class, a form balancing both sociological statistics (the type of quantitative research Durkheim found lacking in Marxian historical materialism) and ethnographic study, Henry Mayhew conducted interviews and recorded his initial findings in his attempt to uncover the economic condition of Victorian London in his groundbreaking, London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew’s work exists within a broader moment of Victorian society in which the notion of surplus population becomes reimagined not only by journalistic and ethnographic means, but also through bureaucratic, administrative and bio-political efforts. Who counts to be counted in modern society? How does governmental administration balance the knowledge related to both individual and population? An important moment in this nineteenth-century project exists within the 1841 Census of England.4 The rise of statistical knowledge about the state population obscures individuality through the transformation from subject to number, while also illuminating the uncounted, precarious bodies excluded from the social whole (Hensley 2016: 90). In this context, Mayhew (along with Marx and Engels) attempts to capture “London’s underclasses” through “transcriptions of hundreds of interviews, vignettes and first-person anecdotes, hemmed in on all sides by towering heaps of statistical data” (Samalin 2017: 392). Ultimately published in 1851, ten years after the far-reaching 1841 Census project, Mayhew’s work remained haunted by an epistemological crossroads, seeking scientific rationality and empirical social “facts, ” while still being reliant on particular subjects as interviewees.5 This is yet another version of an animating tension between a desire for knowledge of the social whole, and the preservation of individual experiences and realities. A version of this problem persists

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into the latter part of the nineteenth century with the emergence of social evolutionary thinking, often producing an object of study—“Society” as externalized, abstract and autonomous sphere of analysis. For Marx, contra Durkheim, Spencer and Weber, the social realm cannot be excised and removed from the relations between individuals.

Society as Object: The Rise of Social Evolutionism After Comte’s reinvention of sociologie, Emile Durkheim emerged as a leading figure in the development of social theory in France, playing a formative role in the institutionalization of what we now understand to be modern sociology. Despite Durkheim’s many contributions and his significant influence over thinkers well into the twentieth century (including Pierre Bourdieu), Marx and Max Weber often overshadow Durkheim within discussions centered around the development and instantiation of sociological theory. Like Marx and Comte, Durkheim shares an intellectual influence found in the work of Saint-Simon. Despite this, the writings of Emile Durkheim (and Weber) are often viewed as oppositional to Marx. As Raymond Firth notes in his contribution to the collection, Marxist Analysis and Social Anthropology: One cannot help forming an impression that Durkheim, with his own brand of social programme and a set of theoretical ideas, which, as he saw it, he had arrived at independently, especially through their common ancestor Saint-Simon, was reluctant to discuss those of Marx. He may have tried to reconcile Comte and Marx, but certainly, the few pages he devoted to the class struggle in the Division of Labour (1932: 367–9), in which he attributed such conflict as he saw to maldistribution of natural talent and increasing aptitudes in the face of the activities assigned to them, make no mention of Marx’s views. Firth 2010: 33

Here Firth alludes to Durkheim’s first major work, De la division du travail social (The Division of Labour in Society) first published in 1893. Shortly after this, Durkheim would become the first professor of sociology in France, appointed in 1895. Durkheim’s title suggests obvious opportunities for sustained engagement with Marx’s work, but, instead, Durkheim departs from a Marxian perspective in relation to class struggle, without fully engaging with his late predecessor. In addition to Marx’s emphasis on class struggle, his historical materialism articulates the particular monstrosities of the division of labor within the capitalist mode of production, moving from the acknowledgement of industrialism as emergent phenomenon, to the “ruthless critique” of the formation of industrial manufacturing: Manufacture proper not only subjects the previously independent worker to the discipline and command of capital, but creates in addition a hierarchical structure amongst the workers themselves . . . It converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the

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suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations, just as in the states of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. 1992: 481

Marx continues, explaining that the “individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation” (1992: 481), thus further illustrating the mechanistic, stultifying effects of the division of labor within capitalist society, moving well beyond Durkheim’s understanding of a misallocation of “natural talent. ” Tom Bottomore also makes note of the missed connection between Durkheim and Marx: In 1895 Durkheim began a series of lectures on socialism which was intended to lead on to a comprehensive examination of Marxism (though it was abandoned before reaching that point), and in his last major work (1912) he took pains to distinguish his conception of the social functions of religion from the “total social explanation” proposed by historical materialism 1991: 506

While Durkheim, like Comte and Spencer, privileged “society” over the “individual, ” each contributing to a conception of the social whole as proper object of study, Marx shifts the terrain into the realm of social relations between individuals as the site of production of this social totality. As mentioned above, for Marx, humans construct history. Ultimately, through his articulation of “social facts, ” orienting societal mores and principles, Durkheim’s thought might look more like a science of morality than one invested in the intricacies of sociality proper. Within this shared intellectual milieu of Marx, Comte and Durkheim, stretching back to their ties to Saint-Simon, we find Durkheim specifically as an important part of the late-century institutionalization of sociology, in dialogue with both Comte’s scientific positivism and Spencer’s organic utilitarianism. While Durkheim pushes back on the particular scientized and functionalist positions of Comte and Spencer, his thought exists within a general shift to social evolutionism, inaugurated by Comte and popularized by Spencer. The infusion of evolutionary biological theory into social behavior often entailed an understanding of society as a “social organism”; an understanding of “Society” as autonomous, paralleling what Mary Poovey highlights as the effort to externalize society as an objective “body. ”6 Ultimately, despite Durkheim’s departures from Marx (a trend among certain sociologists, including Max Weber) his thought persists into the twentieth century among Marxists influenced by or practitioners of sociology. Among these thinkers, Theodor Adorno wrote an article entitled, “Sociology and Psychology” (1955), in addition to an introduction to Durkheim’s sociological philosophy.7 Lefebvre illustrates that, even within proximity of thought, Durkheim and Marx remained distant. Exploring the relation between Marxian ideology and Durkheim’s “collective representation, ” Lefebvre states, “In a way, every ideology is a collective representation, but whereas to Durkheim society is an abstract entity, to Marx it results from practical interactions among groups and individuals” (1982: 75). This helpful gloss reinforces the above notion that, for

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Durkheim, “Society” remained an autonomous sphere as an abstract, “social organism, ” and, for Marx, to understand the social realm, we must first consider the “ensemble of social relations. ” Much of Durkheim’s work also resonated with social theorists in the fields of psychology and emergent Freudian psychoanalysis. Durkheim posited the concept of “collective consciousness” as a way for social organization and “Society” to combat what he understood to be the individual’s natural egoism. Durkheim both naturalizes the alienation Marx locates between individuals, labor and nature—a product of the capitalist mode of production—while also, perhaps, providing the foundations for the Jungian conception of the collective unconscious, a similar externalization structured by instincts and archetypes. A direct engagement with psychology exists in Durkheim’s Suicide (1897), in which he attempts to distance himself from both psychology and political philosophy. Further, Durkheim’s examination of totemism in Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), along with Spencer’s animism, would be taken up by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913). While the importance of Durkheim’s thought as it relates to the development of sociology as a scientific discipline should be evident, his uneasy relationship with the work of Marx and Comte and Spencer has led to his work being overlooked in comparison. By the end of the nineteenth century, thinkers like Durkheim and Herbert Spencer illustrate the growing distance between Marxian historical materialism and sociology as science. In ways akin to Marx, Spencer’s position within the history of nineteenth-century social theory poses difficult challenges. A man of many interests, Spencer’s influence by the end of the century was wide-ranging, most notably within what would be thought of as social evolutionism. Spencer, while certainly the most notorious thinker of social evolutionism, exists within a matrix of thought outlined above. Like Comte’s attempt to extend the scientific method into the social realm, producing a contiguity between natural and social science, Spencer constructs a social theory based on Darwinian biological evolution, an attempt to further scientize and naturalize sociology and ethics. During this late-century moment, Thomas Malthus’s theory of surplus population and resource distribution becomes intimately linked to the development of “Social Darwinism. ”8 An anxiety related to population and resource scarcity exists alongside Spencer’s, perhaps, most dubious legacy, his coinage of the now oft-misused (or misattributed) phrase, “the survival of the fittest. ” In addition to the influence of Comtian scientific progressionism, one can also trace Spencer’s work back to SaintSimon and his legacy. In his Principles of Sociology (1879), Spencer articulates a distinction between two types of societies: militant and industrial, a notion of progression and social movement not entirely unlike Comte’s Law of the Three Stages. But, for Balibar in his essay “Marxism and War, ” he makes these connections explicit, suggesting that, for Saint-Simonian social theory, the historical shift from militarism to industrialism represents the replacement of “war by commerce and production. ” Alternatively, Balibar claims that Marx understood the rise of industrialization and proletarianization as “just another form of war” (2010: 10). Within industrial society, Marx locates inherent contradictions within the capitalist mode of production, understanding historical movement through changes and transformations. For other social theorists, like Comte, Durkheim and Spencer, social organization and relations

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are seen as static and naturalistic, ultimately reinforcing exploitation at the heart of emergent industrial life. While on the surface, there might not seem to be much difference between Malthusian, Hobbesian and Spencerian “competition” and Marx’s articulation of “class struggle, ” it’s important to note that Spencer’s (and others) attempt to naturalize inequality and rationalize “competition, ” while Marx theorizes class struggle as the fundamental and untenable antagonism within capitalist social relations. As Marx and Engels famously announce in The Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles ” (2002: 219). For Marx, the social order cannot be reduced to an external set of governing laws enforcing hierarchical stability, nor to a series of monistic, atomized and autonomous individuals. His insistence on the “ensemble of social relations, ” articulated in the Theses on Feuerbach, places Marx in relation to positivist empiricism, but his insistence on humans as social actors marks an important distinction between historical materialism and positivism. The larger context of this developing intellectual milieu includes the work of thinkers like Spencer and Malthus, alongside and within a tradition that includes French theorists of socialism and the social like Comte and Durkheim. Other British influences on Marx, beyond the oft-cited political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, include Thomas Carlyle, whose work Past and Present represents many of the sociological tendencies discussed in the context of Engels and Mayhew. Carlyle, coined the now familiar Marxist phrase “cash nexus, ” and it is within the revolutionary Manifesto that Marx and Engels evoke this concept through their critique of “Free Trade” and the callous “cash payment” (2002: 222). The English place in a story of nineteenth-century social theory continues through Harriet Martineau, translator of Comte, and her contemporaries George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, whose book, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (1853), further illustrates the global intersection of social theory mingling across a series of translations and encounters, and influence within British, French and German contexts. This complex web of texts and thinkers allows us to slightly revise the familiar contextualization of Marxian thought in relation to British political economy, German philosophy and French socialism; instead, an attentiveness to the production of emergent social theory spanning the nineteenth century, across national borders, illustrates the intimate intersections between modes of knowledge, hybrid and generative.

Notes 1

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See specifically, Engels’s work, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm (accessed August 11, 2018). In Capital, Vol. I, Marx remarks upon mineral resources and their relation to the “money-form” as “universal equivalent”: “This physical object, gold or silver in its crude state, becomes, immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the earth, the direct incarnation of all human labor. Hence, the magic of money. Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way” (1990: 187).

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx For a recent engagement with the tension between Marx’s historical presence within the Reading Room and the myth and conceit surrounding his visits, see C. Higgins (2017), “ ‘Seeing “Sights” that Don’t Exist’: Karl Marx in the British Museum Round Reading Room, ” Library & Information History 33(2): 81–96. As Nathan Hensley remarks, a tension exists within the rise of population management, perhaps most evident through the 1841 Census: “Because it was the first of such efforts to be nationalized and executed under a single authority, the 1841 Census of England and Wales was the first centralized, state-run project of human abstraction in British history” (2016: 89). Zachary Samalin highlights this intersection when he claims, “[a]long with contemporary texts by Marx and Friedrich Engels and, later, the Freudian case study, London Labour and the London Poor is animated by a tension between a methodological commitment to exposure and critique and a phenomenological impulse toward description and interview” (2017: 392). See Mary Poovey (1995), Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago. See, T.W. Adorno (1972b [1967]), “Einleitung zu Emile Durkheim Soziologie und Philosophie, ” in: G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann (eds), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 8. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 245–79. For a more elaborate discussion of Malthus’s influence, see Raymond Williams, “Social Darwinism” in Culture and Materialism: “But to me it is significant that a theory about the relation between population and resources—an explicit social theory which had great influence on nineteenth-century social thought—was at any rate one of the organizing elements in the emergence of the great generalization about natural selection” (1980: 87). With Malthus, Williams also cites Hobbes and his theorization of “life is the war of all against all” as a foundational explication of social life as competition (1980: 88).

References Balibar, E. (2010), “Marxism and War, ” Radical Philosophy 160: 9–17. Balibar, E. (2017), Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso. Bonneuil C. and J.B. Fressoz (2017), The Shock of the Anthropocene, trans. David Fernbach, London: Verso. Bottomore, T. (1991), “Sociology, ” in T. Bottomore, L. Harris, V.G. Kiernan, and R. Miliband (eds), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 505–9. Comte, A. (1908 [1848]), A General View of Positivism, trans. J.H. Bridges, London: Routledge. Engels, F. (1895), “Friedrich Engels to Ferdinand Tönnies in Kiel, ” Marx Engels Correspondence 1895, 24 January 1895. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_01_24.htm (accessed January 25, 2018). Engels, F. (2010 [1884]), Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Alick West, New York: Penguin. Firth, R. (2010), “The Sceptical Anthropologist? Social Anthropology and Marxist Views on Society, ” in M. Bloch (ed.), Marxist Analysis and Social Anthropology, New York: Routledge, 29–60. Hensley, N. (2016), Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nineteenth-Century Social Theory Higgins, C. (2017), “‘Seeing “Sights” that Don’t Exist’: Karl Marx in the British Museum Round Reading Room, ” Library & Information History 33(2): 81–96. Marx, K. (1990 [1867]), Capital, Vol. I, New York: Penguin Classics. Marx, K. (1992 [1844]), “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” from Early Writings, New York: Penguin Classics, 279–400. Marx, K. (2002 [1847]), The Communist Manifesto, New York: Penguin Classics. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1979 [1852]), Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 11: Marx and Engels:1851–1853, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed January 29, 2018). Samalin, Z. (2017), “Plumbing the Depths, Scouring the Surface: Henry Mayhew’s Scavenger Hermeneutics, ” New Literary History 48(2): 387–410. Williams, R. (2005 [1980]), Culture and Materialism, London: Verso.

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Industry, Technology, Energy Bob Johnson

Marx sought to know “the inner nature of capital, ” its internal soul, and, as he put it, its machinations, which were “not directly perceptible to the senses” (Marx 2011: 347). In locating the heartbeat of capital, Marx made his enduring contribution to modern thought as philosopher and economist, but equally important was his treatment, as historian, of what we might call the outer nature of capital—the material context in which capitalism found nourishment and self-fulfillment, that is, capital’s mattering, its embodiment. On this score, Marx’s comprehension was also prescient, if less complete. The materiality behind capital’s take off is, in one sense, well-known. Capitalism derived its fuel from two related revolutions, the Industrial Revolution and the Thermodynamic Revolution. Together, these created the resource paradigm for the fossil economy that propelled capitalism into the modern age by supplying it with a new bio-energetic basis for economic growth, population increase and social control—what turned out to be the requirements for a Prometheus unbound. The history of capital thus has a pre-modern and a modern form. On the one hand, capital’s formation originates in the pre-industrial era, before the shift to fossil fuels, but, by the time that Marx was writing, capitalism had broken sharply from that preindustrial paradigm. To wit, there was originally capital—and then there was what we ended up with, industrial capital, or, better yet, fossil capital, to borrow a term from historian Andreas Malm (2016). Marx used different phrases to describe the West’s transition into this modernized mode of capitalist production, terming it “modern capitalist production, ” “the modern mode of production, ” “the birth of machinism, ” “modern manufacture, ” “modern industry based on machinery” and “a revolution in the instruments of labor, ” etc. (2011: 5, 29, 304, 399, 417). Whatever the case, he saw the shift from capital’s preconditions to its modern industrial form as something new and disruptive. Here is how he depicted that cataclysm as it first occurred in England: [T]here followed on the birth of machinism and modern industry in the last third of the 18th century, a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity and extent. All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night, were broken down. Even the ideas of day and night . . . became so confused that an English judge . . . needed a quite Talmudic sagacity to explain “judicially” what was day and what was night. Marx 2011: 305

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Marx knew, in other words, that something unprecedented in the nature of capital had burst onto the historical stage, that quantitative changes, as he quotes Hegel in a different context, had become qualitative. Of course, no single moment marked this world-historical rupture into industrial capital. Epochs are semi-colons rather than hard stops; thus, Marx focused much of his attention in Capital on the ramp-up to industrial capital, on the preconditions that permitted its emergence. He wanted to establish the historical postulates to modernity— such as the birth of a capitalist class, the initial phase of primitive accumulation, the growth of state operations and the emergence of wage labor—those things that led to “the great slaughter of the innocents, ” once capitalism found its prime mover in coal, steam and industry (Marx 2011: 537). But, to be sure, if we clear away the brush, it is really the emergence of industrial capital, modern capital or fossil capital that we are looking at. Two centuries of compounded economic growth, a septupling of the world’s population and unabated increases in worker productivity by way of carbon technologies all trace back to the twin revolutions in technology and thermodynamics that foisted on us this Frankenstein. We know this—but, then again, maybe we don’t. Capital is a slippery signifier, called upon to do a lot of explanatory work, to fill in a lot of ellipses. As an analytical tool, its history is promiscuous. One way to feel ourselves around the edges of the problem is to ask what capital have would become without the thermodynamic and industrial revolutions, without fossil fuels and the steam engine. Of course, we can’t know for certain, but there are points of clarity. First, we can presume that capital without coal would have been as callous as it is today. Little historical evidence indicates it could be generous and leveling even under pre-industrial terms. There is no Arcadia to return to. Second, we can expect that capitalism without the thermodynamic revolution would have lacked fuel (quite literally) for the unhampered take-off, or acceleration, that we, and Marx, came to take for granted. To be crass: no thermodynamics; no discovery of fossil potential; no easy flow of energy; no modernity. Inequality and exploitation, of course, but modernity? Not really. Where would that have left capitalism as a project? Marx, for his part, did and did not understand the ecological revolution he was witnessing. On the one hand, he knew that the impact of coal and steam was so discombobulating that it required a hard line to be drawn between capital and industrial capital, a claim staked between the premodern and modern worlds, as Edmund Burke terms them (Burke 2009: 33–53). On the other hand, as his collaborator Friedrich Engels explained, Marx was set on establishing a theory of capitalism that “obliterated” all distinctions between the two.1 Knowing the difference, however, is critical to addressing the most pressing moral and existential problems we face today— climate change, population growth and global inequality—because each of these derive squarely from the shift to a fossilized version of capital, not simply to capital. To crack this nut, we might return to the context of Marx’s thinking on the three constituent features of the fossil economy that grounded capital’s take off: industry, technology and energy.

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Industry Marx is the great theorist of industrialization. What we know about the Industrial Revolution—a term much debated but coined back in 1799—has been with rare exception filtered through a Marxist lens. Today, only a handful of unreconstructed neoliberals are comfortable sidestepping Marx to speak of industrial capital, and the shift to a fossil economy, as if it were a forward-moving uncomplicated project. What is notable in Marx’s writing is that the term “industry” appears within a specific enunciative context, alongside the adjective “modern. ” To Marx, there was premodern industry, which did not differ so much from manufacture or handicraft, and then there was what he was really talking about, modern industry, this mutation with arguably a new DNA . Marx tells us that “capitalist production only . . . really begins” once a certain scale, yield and concentration has been achieved—that “the starting point of capitalist production” comes only once we have “a greater number of laborers working together, at the same time, in one place . . . to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist. ” Short of those conditions, the praxis of production “is hardly to be distinguished” from that of medieval master craft, only that it is enlarged to a degree. Industrialization is, for Marx, the key to that shift.2 However, in Marx’s argument there is a certain gap between theory and history. Marx left off or, more accurately, partitioned off the material context of capital’s thermodynamic and technological revolutions to later chapters in the first volume of Capital, while he pursued capital’s raison d’etre in its earlier chapters, often hypothetically and with only casual reference to the actual thermodynamic changes that permitted its liftoff. The questions Marx explores—e.g. why capital is expansionary, how it extracts surplus labor, where exchange value originates, how capital accumulates dead labor, why the wages of workers hover near subsistence—his mapping of the mind of the sausage factory and its consequences, are bracketed off from the historical context of capital’s mattering.3 So, while we get a detailed portrait of the factory’s ways of thinking, we get an incomplete accounting of the architecture and resource requirements that bring the sausage factory to life. In other words, capital’s energetic paradigm—including the new thermodynamic logic of labor that subsumed men and machines under the same discourse and praxis—was understood by Marx, but never rose in his theory to the level of significance that capital’s division of labor and other organizational considerations did in modeling the mode of production. The point to drive home, and it is a fine one, is that the organizational basis of capital’s take off, which Marx almost casually calls its mode of production, can be easily accounted for under a pre-industrial logic—e.g., its accumulation and investment, its reliance on the division of labor, its capital intensification and its extraction of surplus— but the material basis for its expansion, intensity and reach lay in the kinetic power of steam and the heat surplus of coal—these were the factors that allowed capital to break from the Malthusian budget of the past and shatter the ceiling on the somatic limitations to labor extraction that had contoured all pre-industrial societies. That breakthrough traces back to carbon technologies, although theoretically it could have occurred with some equally prodigious source of energy such as nuclear power or today’s renewable technologies. Each of Marx’s primary concerns in Capital, including

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the new pace, scale and scope of factory production, the drive to intensify and rationalize labor, the deskilling of the working class, the unabated rise in worker productivity—what he sums up as this confusion of day and night—did not hinge simply on capital’s logic but on the energetic and technological revolutions that afforded capital the physical leverage to achieve these ends. Industrial capitalism, in short, becomes naturalized in his theory, standing in for capitalism writ large. The history on this subject is blasé to the point of tedium. Early industrialists turned initially to waterpower to achieve the conditions for centralization, scale and control, and then committed, in a short period of time, to steam power, which was less bounded in time and place, almost infinite in supply, and less limited in the productive possibilities for mastership under one capitalist. Marx was, of course, aware that the thermodynamic and technological revolutions were the palpable and naturalized context of his thought process, but he did not give to these revolutions the proper classification and proportion in capital’s history. This is no fault of Marx’s. The reason for that error in categorization is understandable. Marx wrote when the modern world was still shy of its zenith. He was, unlike us, not staring down the threat of climate change, a globalized population crisis, or two hundred years of expansion that shot humanity beyond the organic energy regime it had evolved to operate in. So, if Marx was really focused on the question of industrial capital, rather than simply capital, then we might also have to entertain the fact that modern capital and its trajectory were as much an historical accident, an unexpected mutation in the DNA of capital, as they were a teleological consequence of capital’s logic. This, however, requires a discursion into two other factors—technology and energy.

Technology Technology was a cornerstone of the industrial revolution and, in Marx’s theory, it plays a Janus-faced role. Recent critics have dissected that fact with scalpel-like precision, and what we know from their work is two-fold.4 On the one hand, we know that Marx’s first instinct was to view technology—and here we are talking about the steam engine as an example—as capital’s prosthetic means for extracting added surplus from labor and degrading its overall standing. Marx valorized, early in his career, a Producerist ethos that aligned to labor movements occurring across the Western world, like the International Workmen’s Association which advocated for the dignity and primacy of manual labor as a form of self-creation. This line of thinking led Marx to contend that man was by nature a creator, homo faber, Man the Maker, and that he generated self-worth and created economic value through the act of working (Avineri 1968: 65–95; Rabinbach 1992: 72). In such a context, the advent of machinism, or modern capitalist production, was a threat to those values because it gave capital a new hammer for its toolbox, to pound labor into something less than it was or could be. Marx assessed technology’s impact under modern capital harshly; the “conditions of life sink, ” work accelerates to a “feverish haste” and laborers find themselves under “the control of a watchfulness that never

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tires. ” Industrial capital driven by machinery “exhausts the nervous system . . . [and] confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity” (Marx 2011: 253, 462, 705). So much for homo faber. Thus, in this first line of thought, technology sealed the power of the dead over the living, and gave to capital its chief instrument for displacing labor and intensifying its exploitation. On the other hand, Marx viewed technology, and again the steam engine was the ideal type, as the means to labor’s emancipation. Marx saw in the birth of the factory system revolutionary potential for shifting the burden off human, or sweated, labor to automated technologies which did not suffer and strain in the same way that sentient beings did. As historian Anson Rabinbach explains, “Technology, ” came to be for Marx, “merely ‘abstract labor’ operating with indifference. ” That surprising insight—that steam engines were equivalent to human labor—led Marx to argue that history’s ultimate achievement would be, as Rabinbach again paraphrases him, the “replacement of men with machines” (Rabinbach: 79). Of course, in order for technology to transition from its exploitative use to its liberating potential, Marx developed his theory of dialectical materialism. In that model, Marx proposed that capital’s feverish commitment to the principle of productivism, inherent in its application of the new labor-intensifying devices, would drive it to push labor to its breaking point while developing efficiencies that would one day, once capitalism cracked under its own weight, allow society to redeploy those same technologies to reduce the burden on workers while still elevating their standard of living. Industrial technologies—and in particular these new energy technologies—thus emerge in Marx’s advanced theory as the fulcrum for human liberation, as the means to get us beyond labor, beyond a lifetime of what he called work-time. The context of Marx’s thinking on this matter was the centralized mill town. Here, Marx and his compatriot, Friedrich Engels, witnessed the human costs of mechanization, which, he said, “mutilate[d] the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade[d] him to the level of an appendage of a machine, [and] destroy[ed] every remnant of charm in his work. ” But, Marx also saw here in its “cyclopean steam-engine” the material means for “reducing” work hours for men and women without decreasing productivity. In short, these “dark Satanic mills” could be, he thought, transformed under socialism into the stepping stone to a utopian society in which life was rebuilt around “a mightier moving power than man. ” In this respect, Marx escaped the dead-end of industrial capital by discovering that machinery offered a new pathway to self-realization with “the least expenditure of [human] energy. ”5 Of course, that revolution did not come. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies—in particular, the steam engine and its descendants—became, instead, capital’s chief means for intensifying work-time, displacing labor and degrading its value, all-the-while increasing its own surplus. For the next two centuries these technologies that, as Marx put it, had been “entirely emancipated from the restraints of human strength” (Marx 1993: 412) propelled capitalism forward, nourishing its body, and bulking up its now familiar muscularity. In transportation, it was the railroad, container ship, semi-truck and automobile. In industry: the die-press, the electric loom and the assembly line. In agriculture: the tractor, the harvester and the electric grain

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elevator. In construction: it was the backhoe and the boom crane, and in the extractive industries: the chainsaw, the drag-line and the dump truck. Throughout each economic sector, such power technologies (fueled by carbon) swept away the old somatic paradigm of productivity, making the methods of laboring almost unrecognizable within a generation or two. The net result was that workers in industrial nations saw their productivity (and capital’s surplus extraction) rise without pause for over 200 years. The facts are stunning; per capita productivity (or the output per individual) increased in an industrial powerhouse like the United States on average 2.1% annually for nearly 130 years, starting in the nineteenth century. This made each individual worker a staggering ten times more productive than their great, great (or great) grandparents.6 In short, thermodynamic technologies (i.e. coal and steam, gas and the ICE , electricity and the power plant) provided capital with the physical or literal power to achieve the gigantic-ism that it did. However, here we are getting into a much trickier type of materialism—one that insists on understanding the relationships between energy and capitalism’s operations.

Energy Energy (or fossil fuels in historical terms) is capital’s absent center. Ironically, energy appears both everywhere in both Marx’s theory and capital’s history—and yet somehow remains nearly invisible to the eye. Terrorist energy. Vital energy. The energy of wealth. For Marx, energy as a concept circulated in the messy world of metaphor. Energy, or Energie, was, for him, a plastic term that was just coming to make the materialist turn. To listen in on Marx, the term shows up in different contexts, referring to the depleted spirit of workers, to the moral corruption of capitalism and to the vigor of capitalism’s stockpiles. In other words, the core languages and logic of the thermodynamic revolution, centering on the concept of energy, were incomplete in Marx, with its key term still tied up in the figurative discourse of strength and vigor. We also know that Marx adopted the beginnings of an energeticist paradigm. He read prominent physicists of his day, such as Hermann Von Helmholtz, and came to rethink the concepts of labor and industry around findings in the new physics. The most important change this had on Marx’s thinking appeared, as Rabinbach tells us, in his redeployment of Helmholtz’s definition of Kraft, or force/energy/power, which came to be a core concept not only in the new physics, but in Marx’s own theory of capital. Marx embraced the new scientific worldview that what we call work, labor, or power is, in one sense, simply a product of the expenditure of energy and that it can be seen everywhere in nature and society—in the force of the wind, the rush of a river, the torque of a steam engine and, of course, the physical exertion of men, women and animals. This realization that the thermodynamics of the human body and the steam engine were part of the same puzzle permitted Marx to resituate labor, not as a uniquely human endeavor, but within the generic concept of labor, or labor-power, which referred to the physical power deployed in production, whether that force was generated by a human being or a machine. Marx’s concept of labor power, or

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Arbeitzkraft, never quite shriveled down to a simple economy of force, but it came to stand in for the human dimension of the otherwise quantifiable work output that went into capitalist production. Marx understood, in other words, that these twin developments—the new physics and the steam mill—demanded a different type of quantitative accounting that sidelined significant distinctions between humans and machines.7 These realizations placed Marx on the precipice of modernity, looking down into the open void of a thoroughly materialized universe in which rocks and bodies, mules and carrots, and gravity and steam all bore some intimate connection to Kraft, which might, under the right conditions, be turned to either human liberation or exploitation. However, Marx’s embrace of the new thermodynamics remained circumscribed. He was primarily interested in the issue of labor—and hence expounded on how the new physics related to work and machines. What he did not do—nor have most subsequent historians—was to unpack the role that energy (which in physics and physiology is decidedly different than work or power) had for the development of capital. While Kraft, or let us call it power, can denote the physical labor we see manifested in a working machine or a sweating person, it also carries the more expansive meaning of the term energy, which refers to how matter, heat and work are interchangeable in the material world. That is, Kraft denotes how a humble chunk of coal can exist in three distinguishable states: as the physical rock that you can pick up; as the intangible heat needed to produce steel, glass and cement; or as the labor-power needed to expand industry’s output and alter capital’s algorithms for production.8 It was this new ability to control the interchanges among matter, heat and work that transformed capital’s resource budget, permitting its primary industries, like steel, concrete and glass, to expand beyond hard-to-capture photosynthetic energy sources to fossil reserves below the surface, which were for all intents and purposes infinite in supply. As one eminent historian put it, that shift in the bioenergetics of business was truly “something new under the sun. ”9 Marx, for his part, knew that nature was, on some essential level, energy—swirling, recombining and expending itself—the glue that held the world together—and he knew that mattered to his theory of capital, but his narrower focus on how energy manifests as work left him ill-equipped to comprehend the multiplying effects of fossil energy flows on capital. What we know in retrospect is that capitalism’s nourishment came not simply from a revolution in the mode of production—enabled by capital’s new technological and organizational strategies—but from this deeper revolution in energy circuits that cast us into a new ecology of production that revised the upper limits on capital’s opportunities for growth, extraction and accumulation.10 This is not some form of sophistry, and we can see glimpses of its import in Marx’s writing. Marx’s theory is, on the one hand, saturated in the tropology of energy—of coal mines, of coal workers, of steam engines, of steam-powered looms, of waterpower, and other forms of fuel—but, like most of us, he treated energy as either metaphor, or simply another resource, as if it could be accounted for in the diminished notion of fuel. Energy in its physical form shows up in his writing at the shrunken level of metonym, appearing in scattered referents that stand in for a concept and history that is never fully explicated.

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Marx’s richest discussion of energy comes in parts of the Grundrisse and in Chapter 15 of Capital where he reflects on “Machinery and Modern Industry. ” Here, as Wendling shows, Marx’s main concerns were two-fold: first, he wanted to reconceive the human body in energeticist terms, as a human motor equivalent to machinery with its own natural limits and capacities; and, second, he wanted to understand how those thermodynamic engines had been used, and could be used, as a substitute for human labor. These complementary concerns pointed him towards, as we have seen, a new economy of force that released him from his earlier producerist ethos.11 While Marx did an admirable job analyzing the new equivalency between men and machines, he did not explore the much bigger question of how the thermodynamic revolution provided capital with the resource requirements needed to achieve what has felt like two centuries of perpetual expansion detached from material considerations. Historians, like Malm, have stepped in to rectify this lacuna in Marx’s Capital by unpacking the role that coal and steam played in his history and theory. Malm proposes two clear impacts on capital’s development. First, coal and steam empowered capital by giving it managerial advantages, namely, the capability of moving Britain’s factories from a limited number of river valleys, with their cultures of worker control, to fresh locales with a more pliant labor force. Second, he explains that coal and steam underwrote the entire process of commodity production and exchange that was central to Marx’s theory. For Marx, economic growth resulted from surplus accumulated when commodities were traded for money and then valorized through repetition of that process (represented in the sequence: C–M–C′–M′).12 For Marx, the trick turned on how capital extracted surplus from this process in the first place. Marx had explained that once labor power was divorced from the means of production, it came to depend on capital’s agency to perform work—by allocating surplus to build a factory, to set up a corporation, to hire labor power, to pay for tools or to fund the purchase of resources— but what Marx did not see was that nature played a role in setting limits to this process, and that the thermodynamic revolution had transformed capital’s capacity to crack open nature for industrial purposes. Marx understood that capital’s “soul” derived from labor—and he understood that capitalism required natural resources—but he never fully grasped the fact that nature was capital’s “body”; as Malm puts it, capitalist industry had a metabolism, a deep set of energy requirements that permitted its take off. To wit, Marx failed to see that commodity production and exchange had, at some point, come to carry in their assumptions, not merely embodied labor power and the dead weight of labor, but also a continuous flow of fossil energy that served as the ur-resource—the magic, for sustaining ecologically all of its operations across the sectors of production and circulation. For his part, Malm stresses the fact that fossil fuels revolutionized labor power and productivity—i.e. coal = billions of new laborers who don’t need feeding— but he also points us towards the larger recognition that capital required fossil energy for its other colossal task, heat production, which permitted all of the primary industrial sectors of the nineteenth century—including steel, cement, glass and railway manufacturing—to expand beyond pre-industrial limitations.13 What Malm makes clear is that the thermodynamic revolution gifted us an easy age of energy, and capital simply absorbed that excess energy, that subterranean windfall,

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into its mode of production while letting popular accounting of it recede into the background. That is why Malm and most energy historians have concluded that fossil energy became the “necessary substratum” of capital’s economic growth.14 There is no easy summary of this unsung ecological role that fossil fuels, and the corresponding thermodynamic revolution, played in enabling capitalism to become what it is; how fossil fuels took pressure off forests; how they expanded labor without food resources; how they freed up arable lands from animal draft power; and how they lifted the world out of the negative feedback loop that defined the photo-synthetic economy.15 Here, the humble conclusion we can take is that capital’s formula for accumulation, surplus extraction and growth was always, as Malm puts it, “a closely regulated Stoffwechsel, or metabolism, between humans and the rest of nature, ” with fossil fuels serving as its “lever of surplus-production. ”16 So, to bring matters to a close; once we understand that capitalism for Marx is really industrial capitalism, and once we understand that Marx made thermodynamic technologies the key fulcrum in his theory, we can begin to see the hidden ecological assumption that fossil fuels are not one of many resources needed by capital, but its absent center, the hard base of its triangle in the trifecta of energy, technology and industry that has allowed it to rejoice and redound into the future. Take fossil fuels out of that equation, capitalism wilts, modernity shrinks down to size and we all find ourselves living in a world different to this hot, flat and crowded one we have today—a world of severe inequality and scarcity, but one without human-induced climate change. Fossil fuels are capital’s real magic system, the outer nature of capital’s mattering. Not only did they leave a stamp on modern capitalism—they made it possible.

Notes 1

Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the English Edition (Engels 1886), ” in Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 29. 2 Marx, 353. 3 Malm, “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam and the British Cotton Industry, ” Historical Materialism 21(1) (2013): 49–53. 4 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 1992); Amy Wendling’s Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 5 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1993), 959. 6 US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1989). See also Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population. (Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley and Sons, 2001), 130. 7 Rabinbach, 57–81. 8 Ibid. 9 John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000). 10 Bob Johnson, “A Peculiarly Valuable Oil’: Energy and the Ecology of Production on an Early American Whale Ship,’ Industrial Archaeology 40.1–2 (2014): 33–50.

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11 12 13 14 15

Wendling, 61–88. Malm, “Origins, ” 49–53. Malm, “Origins, ” 50. Malm, “Origins, ” 51. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2001); Rolfe Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2010); E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance, Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 16 Malm, “Origins, ” 50.

References Avineri S. (1968), The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 65–95. Burke E. (2009), “The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment, ” in Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds, The Environment and World History, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Malm A. (2016), Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso. Marx K. (2011), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Mineola, New York: Dover. Marx K. (1993), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III , trans. David Fernbach, New York: Penguin. Rabinbach A. (1992), The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Wendling A. (2009), Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Engels Jordan Kinder

Friedrich Engels’s role in the development of Marxian thought is a complicated, multifaceted one. As close friends, both personally and professionally, there is certainly no doubt that Engels influenced and was influenced by Karl Marx’s thought and works. Their collaborations produced some of the key texts of Marxism, including The Holy Family (1845), The German Ideology (1845) and The Communist Manifesto (1848). After Marx’s passing, Engels spent a great deal of effort curating and compiling the notes that Marx left behind (most prominently, what would become the third volume of Capital), generally at the sacrifice of his own work. Throughout their lives, moreover, Engels financially supported Marx and his family through the earnings Engels made as a manager of his father’s Manchester cotton-spinning factories. Because of the intensity of their relationship and collaboration, it is common to approach Marx and Engels “as a single entity” (Roth 2002: 59). Engels remains a polarizing figure in Marxist thought. As compiler and editor of some of Marx’s major works, the degree to which Engels’s own concerns shaped texts, such as the later, more available editions of the first volume of Capital and the whole of the second and third volumes (Roth 2002: 62), is a point of contention among Marxist critics. Some assert that his influence in this process determined the content of volumes two and three, sidestepping, for example, Marx’s project of the critique of political economy in favor of providing the foundation of a “world-view Marxism” comprised of “crude economism” and an “historical determinism that viewed the end of capitalism and the proletarian revolution as inevitable occurrences” (Heinrich 2012: 24–25). Moreover, Engels’s thought played a central role in the development of rigid, determinist forms of historical dialectical materialism that shaped the Soviet Union through figures such as Karl Kautsky. Beyond these historical-ideological conflicts, a deep tension remains in terms of how to understand Engels in relation to Marx in general, prompting biographer Terrell Carver to frame his biography around the question, “which Engels?” (1990: xv) Because of this tension, Engels has been, at best, a misunderstood figure in the Marxist tradition, and, at worst, a figure who distorted Marx for his own ideological ends. More recently, however, Engels’s work has been re-evaluated in a more positive light, particularly in the growing field of Marxist ecology. To provide an account of Engels’s impact on Marxist thought, both then and now, I ask the following questions: How did Engels’s 163

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critical thought develop throughout his works? What did he contribute to Marxism? What does the future of his thought look like? To answer these questions, I worked through Engels’s major solo-authored works, then I examined core theoretical and methodological concepts found throughout his work, materialism and “scientific socialism. ” Finally, I explore the ways in which Engels’s thought is being engaged with and revitalized today in Marxist ecology.

Constructing Engels: From The Condition on the Working Class to The Dialectics of Nature When one examines the breadth of Engels’s oeuvre, a distinct trajectory of intellectual and political development becomes clear. Along with Marx, Engels was associated with the “Young Hegelians” in Germany, a group of politically active college students who brought Hegel’s thought to bear on the realm of the political. Both Engels and Marx defected from this group, ultimately developing their own materialist frameworks that challenged the idealistic bases of German political philosophy in general. The conflict between idealism and materialism is a consistent theme throughout Engels’s work. From the early days of his The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) to his posthumously published Dialectics of Nature (1927), Engels’s work articulates a growing understanding of the mechanisms of capitalism that shape the present that he was writing from within, including its social, economic and ecological effects. At the same time, his work expresses an increasing commitment to revolutionary socialism in the form of communism. One of Engels’s most foundational and well-known texts was published in 1845, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Equal parts ethnography, social geography and sharp polemic, The Condition of the Working Class in England maps the spatial, social and economic conditions of the British working class, or proletariat, at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Observing the effects of rapid industrialization at multiple levels of society, Engels narrates the material conditions from which the proletariat, as both a class and a revolutionary force, was brought into being. “[T]he proletariat,” Engels writes, “was called into existence by the introduction of machinery” (1968: 24). The text itself pioneers a mixed methods analyzis, heavily reliant on personal observation supplemented with figures and statistics, such as industry reports. It reveals Engels’s keen awareness of industry and its developments, leaving its mark on the ways that “sociologists, journalists and activists approach the built environment” (Hunt 2009: 111). The Condition, however, is as much a journey through the social and economic effects of industrial capitalism as it is a political tract that forms the foundation for the kinds of materialist socialism that Marx and Engels would later develop. The polemical aspects of The Condition cannot be overstated, and this mode was privileged by Engels throughout his work. Indeed, The Condition is, in the last instance, a scathing critique of both the effects of industrial capitalism (and the entire system of capitalism itself), as well as a prediction of the violent proletarian uprising whose echoes are to be found in The Communist Manifesto. “It is too late for the parties concerned to reach a peaceful solution, ” Engels writes:

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The workers are moving from minor guerrilla skirmishes to demonstrations and armed conflicts of a more serious nature. Soon it will only be necessary to dislodge a stone and the whole avalanche will be set in motion. When the cry echoes throughout the country: “War to the mansion, peace to the cottage, ” then it will be too late for the wealthy to save their skins. 1968: 336

Here we can see traces of the revolutionary program of communism in its early stages yet to be named and articulated as it was in 1848’s The Communist Manifesto. Engels identifies the protagonists of socialist revolution, the proletariat and the intensifications of class struggle that were structurally born out of the Industrial Revolution, while declaring war on the bourgeoisie—cottage against mansion. Several central themes and concerns that Engels returns to throughout his later works are thus introduced in The Condition, such as the division and antagonism between bourgeois and proletarian classes, expressed in the class warfare inherent in capitalism; a materialist politics that developed from the lived conditions and relations within the society that Engels was observing; and a faith in the revolutionary promise of a growing proletarian class consciousness. Glimpses of the early stages of Engels’s materialism are present throughout The Condition, but a more mature materialism is articulated in 1878’s Anti-Dühring, a text that exemplifies the more philosophically and theoretically sophisticated aspects of Engels’s later works. Written in response to the spread of idealist thought in Germany and elsewhere in Europe—primarily through the work of Eugen Dühring who was attempting to displace Marxism as the central socialist paradigm in Europe— Anti-Dühring systematically critiques the whole of Dühring’s socialist program. The distinction between scientific and utopian socialism plays a central role in Engels’s critique, which is manifested through Dühring’s lack of grounding in dialectics and materialism (1987: 125). The polemical aspect of Engels’s writing shines through here, “What did Herr Dühring promise us? Everything. And what promises has he kept? None” (1987: 133). Concluding his attack, Engels provides the following verdict of Dühring, “mental incompetence due to megalomania” (1987: 309). The intellectual reverence with which Engels held Marx is also clear, as much of the book counters Dühring’s claims of originality: “[T]he fact that everything in the Cursus about capital and labor which makes any sense at all, ” Engels argues, “is likewise an emasculated plagiarism of Marx” (1987: 243). Thus, Engels clarified and articulated important aspects of Marxism through a critique of Dühring, counterposing Dühring’s idealistic socialism—dressed up as an innovative, highly original philosophy—with the development of scientific socialism. While The Condition examined social and economic relations under industrial capitalism as they played out in the streets of Manchester, using the everyday conditions of the proletariat class as a site from which to critique the effects of industrial capitalism—and Anti-Dühring exhibits a more philosophically sophisticated materialism—The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State looks to the family form throughout history to leverage a critique of the patriarchal family unit particular to industrial capitalism—the nuclear family. Historicizing domestic relations

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as they understood them in the Victorian era, The Origin takes to task the patriarchal family form as it exists under capitalism by tracing the dynamics of the family throughout history, while critiquing the myths surrounding women’s natural subordination from a materialist standpoint. A synthesis of conversations with Marx’s notes on the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, left to Engels after Marx’s passing, as well as his own perspectives on Ancient Society and other contemporary American anthropological texts, The Origin traces dominant family forms throughout history while illustrating the relationship between material conditions and social organization. For instance, Engels argues that “[i]n the old communistic household . . . the task entrusted to the women of managing the household was as much a public, socially necessary industry as the procuring of food by the men, ” whereas within the patriarchal family form, domestic relations “became a private service” (2010: 104). Engels recognizes that within industrial capitalism, proletarian women could participate in social production, and that they are forced into a doublebind wherein they must choose between taking care of their family (private) or earning independently (public). “The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, ” Engels writes, “and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as molecules” (2010: 105). In examining the long history of the family form from this perspective, Engels denaturalizes the patriarchal, nuclear family form, revealing its historical contingencies upon which patriarchal order and other systems of domination were built, while also opening up the possibilities for other forms. The social constructivist, anti-essentialist threads found throughout the arguments made in The Origin have had a noteworthy impact on the development of contemporary feminism. As Tristram Hunt writes, “[w]hat many feminists admired about Engels’s approach was his treatment of gender differences as economically produced rather than biologically determined: patriarchy was another function of bourgeois class society and both needed to be undone” (2009: 314). Such arguments influenced generations of socialist and Marxist feminisms. Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, for instance, sees Engels as an early purveyor of what she calls the “sexual revolution, ” or a revolutionary politics built out of the recognition that “sex is a status category with political implications” (1969: 24). Engels’s The Origin, Millet argues, “provided the most comprehensive account of patriarchal history—and the most radical” when compared to other men, who Millet identifies as early theorists of the sexual revolution, including John Stuart Mill and Thorstein Veblen (1969: 108). Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, is very much indebted to both Marx and Engels as she extends their materialist accounts of the domain of gender relations from a feminist vantage point, developing “a materialist view of history based on sex itself ” (1970: 5). In 1987, celebrating the centenary of The Origin, Janet Sayers, Mary Evans and Nanneke Redclift edited a collection of essays, Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays, showing that “Engels is important to contemporary feminists because he offers the possibility of a materialistic explanation for women’s subordination and attempts to establish a relationship between the ownership of private property and the ideological subordination of women” (1987: 1). These treatments of Engels reveal a thinker who was not only ahead of his time in observing and building a politics out of economic

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disparities, but also accounted for the gendered characteristics of capitalist domination; these treatments, then, arguably challenge accounts of Engels that frame him as a forefather of an economistic, reductionist version of orthodox Marxism. Written between 1873 and 1882, The Dialectic of Nature was published posthumously in 1927 by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, after Albert Einstein’s verdict that it is “of such historical note as to be worthy of a broader readership, ” despite also finding “the science confused” (Hunt 2009: 289). Like The Condition, the Dialectic of Nature reveals the diverse characteristics of Engels’s interests. Inspired in part by Darwin’s Origin of Species, The Dialectic of Nature is concerned with showing that “the dialectical laws are real laws of development of nature, and therefore are valid also for theoretical natural science” (1987: 357). Engels claims in the Dialectic of Nature that “the laws of dialectics” (1987: 356) are not only at work in socio-historical processes, that is, in social relations, but in the relations of non-human nature as well. Naturalizing the dialectic in this way has led to considerable debate in the Marxist tradition, particularly in relation to its determinist characteristics that some see as the basis of a problematic orthodoxy. As Paul Thomas notes in his critique of scientific socialism: This impression, wrongheaded though it was, became rapidly, indeed eagerly, seized upon by others—either by those in Germany who were intent on developing Engels’s historical materialism into a Weltanschauung (or worldview), or by those in Russia to whom historical materialism so understood (and shorn of its “opportunistic” aspects, to be sure) needed assimilation within that Soviet monster, dialectical materialism. 2008: 40

However, such argumentation need not be read (as it often has been) deterministically, as John Bellamy Foster shows when he revises the famous statement, writing that “Engels’s thesis, reflecting his own deep dialectical and ecological analyzis, could be rendered in today’s parlance, Ecology is the proof of dialectics” (2017: 49, emphasis in original). Indeed, the book also reveals a nuanced understanding of the natural world and humanity’s place within it. In a significant chapter of the book, “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, ” Engels examines the Darwinian theory of human evolution in relation to labor and the development of tools; it is between labor as process—beginning “with the making of tools” (1987: 457)—and nature as materials that Engels locates the distinction between ape and man. “Labor is the source of all wealth, ” Engels writes: And it really is the source, next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man himself. 1987: 452

While naming labor as that which makes us human, The Dialectic of Nature also articulates an understanding of the reciprocal relationship between humans and

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nature, and the ever-accelerating ecological destruction of the Industrial Age. Like Engels’s critique of the family form under capitalism, his critique of the damaging ecological effects of capitalism in The Dialectic of Nature is a prescient one, forecasting significant tenets of the western environmentalist movement, including, especially, the complex interrelationship between all that is living and moving, understanding nature as a “system . . . an interconnected totality of bodies” (1987: 363).

Engels’s Materialism: Some Notes on Scientific Socialism Engels’s commitment to materialism was at the core of the distinction between scientific socialism and utopian socialisms. Whereas utopian socialism abstracts its political program and vision of the future from the realm of the idealistic, scientific socialism, as Engels understood it, is rooted in and develops out of the actually-existing, material conditions and relations of history and society. One can trace the emergence of scientific socialism to Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844), though it is only named as such in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; he later expands the concept in Anti-Duhring. Nevertheless, science in Engels’s sense—Marx never used the term directly and his relationship to the term is a hotly contested one—is an understandably elusive concept, especially when placed next to contemporary definitions of the term. Because of the contention over notions of science in the history of Marxism, especially as it relates to the founding of more dogmatic or orthodox Marxisms, the concepts of science and scientific socialism deserve commentary here. Science is, in popular discourse, understood as an objective, value-free practice associated with the “facts” of “hard sciences. ” Those of us familiar with critiques of science, found in disciplines such as Science and Technology Studies (STS ), know, however, that science as such is a charged concept that is neither neutral nor historically consistent. In the history of Marxian thought, science is less narrowly-defined— understood best through broader, traditional definitions that account for the roles of observation, analyzis and theory, rather than in its practice. In Marxian thought, that which is “scientific” is both empirical and dialectical. This method is precisely what Marx articulates in Capital, Vol. 1, when exploring how money transforms into capital; he tells the reader that we must “leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business’ ” (1990: 279–80). In moving into “the hidden abode of production, ” Marx examines how capital operates both above and beneath the surface, and through this dialectic generates a theory of capital. Science is a dubious concept in and of itself, especially when it deals in the totalizing gestures and grand narratives that poststructuralism and postmodernism challenged it for, and Marxism is no exception. Paul Thomas demonstrates the slipperiness of the concept of science in Marxism through his critique of scientific socialism in Marxism & Scientific Socialism, an account highly critical of Engels. He questions Engels’s assertion that he had read aloud the manuscript of Anti-Dühring to Marx before his death, the work that develops the concept of scientific socialism explicitly (1976: 9).

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Scientific socialism, Thomas writes, “is a phrase used by later Marxists in order to guarantee methodological certainty and doctrinal orthodoxy of a certain type” (1976: 10). In Thomas’s view, Marx is a victim of Engels and those who latched on to the allegedly determinist nature of the latter’s thought. Thomas’s perspective fits within the kinds of critiques of Engels that frame him as unthinkingly determinist; my aim is to problematize this conception by interrogating the ways in which “science” functions in the work of Engels, and within Marxism more generally. As Richard Schmitt points out, both Marx and Engels used the term relatively infrequently without “any sustained effort to clarify what they meant by science” (1997: 191). Because of this ambiguity, science simultaneously refers to a broader conception of the dialectical method briefly mentioned above and hard-line interpretations of Engels’s “scientific socialism. ” For many, like both Thomas and Schmitt, it becomes easier to dismiss the role of science and thus do away with the historical-ideological baggage it carries in one fell swoop, rather than complicate the concept of science as such. Schmitt, for instance, confidently asserts that that “Marx and Engels did not in fact possess the scientific knowledge to which they laid claim” and that “[t]here is no such thing as ‘scientific socialism’ ” (1997: 194). But if we expand our understanding of science and what constitutes scientific knowledge, addressing our anxieties surrounding its claims to objectivity, then the role of science in both Marx and Engels becomes less uncomfortable. For all its problems, the productive aspects of scientific socialism mostly lie in what it negates—utopian socialism. In utopian socialism, Engels saw a reproduction of a politics based on idealism qua moralism and ahistoricism. Utopian socialism falls into moralism when it bases its politics on claims of what we should do, whereas it reproduces an ahistoric outlook when it fails to recognize the historical and material conditions from which its politics emerge while incorporating that recognition into its vision. Instead, socialism, as Engels asserts throughout his work, must be rooted in and develop out of historical and material circumstances rather than the weightless realm of thought and idealism. This is precisely why Marx’s Capital is a work of socialism, despite the fact that politics in the text are virtually uncommented on. By mapping capital’s contradictions, one can begin to imagine alternatives that materially develop out of capitalism as the dominant mode of production—hence a materialist, “scientific” socialism. Even this explication, however, runs into issues and tensions, especially when one considers the historical and ideological baggage that scientific socialism carries in the tradition of Marxist thought; one can have materialism and one can have “science, ” without falling prey to the ideological blinders of determinism or positivism. Indeed, a historical materialist conception of society, the likes of which we have encountered above most clearly in The Origin and Anti-Duhring, need not be a vulgar, determinist, or economistic materialism. As Schmitt argues, in their critique of idealism, Marx and Engels “also deny that reality is exclusively material” (1997: 64). “Engels, ” he writes, “rejects that view explicitly as a ‘shallow and vulgarized form’ of materialism” (1997: 64). Indeed, Engels was keenly aware of the potential tendencies of his thought being used for hard-line deterministic, positivistic and economistic ends, admitting an overemphasis on the primacy of economic relations. “We [Marx and Engels] had to stress this leading principle in the face of opponents who denied it, ” Engels admits, “and we did not always have the time, space or opportunity to do justice

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to the other factors that interacted upon each other” (cit. Hunt 2009: 217). Critiques of Engels’s determinism that do not account for Engels’s awareness of these limits conduct less a critique of Engels than of a particular chapter in the history of Marxism, one that says more about that particular chapter than it does about Engels’s own work.

Engels in the Twenty-First Century: A Green Engels? Engels was endlessly fascinated with the natural world and the natural sciences. Like Marx, whose work on soil and the “metabolic rift” in Capital has become a mainstay of socialist and Marxist ecology, Engels’s The Dialectic of Nature is experiencing a secondlife in green Marxist or ecosocialist thought due to its treatment of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. But despite the rise in popularity of works related to ecology that brought the environmentalist movement in the West in the 1960s and 1970s into being (Rachel Carson’s pathbreaking Silent Spring was published in 1962), serious engagement with Marx and environmentalism has been sparse. One of the earliest accounts of the role of nature in Marx’s work is Alfred Schmidt’s 1962 book The Concept of Nature in Marx, first published in English in 1971. In it, Schmidt examines Marx’s treatment of nature vis-à-vis materialism. Schmidt’s work traverses the relationship between nature and culture as theorized by Marx and later Western Marxists. The Concept of Nature in Marx engages heavily with Engels and especially The Dialectic of Nature, due in large part to the fact that Engels clearly articulated a materialist understanding of nature as such while Marx’s treatment of these categories was more implicit. Schmidt is clear not to equate Engels’s own ideas of nature with Marx’s, accusing Engels of passing “beyond Marx’s conception of the relation between nature and social history” and relapsing “into a dogmatic metaphysic” (1971: 51). Schmidt sees within The Dialectic of Nature an application of Hegelian categories to the natural world that problematically separates the natural world from the social one, rather than seeing the spheres as interconnected as Schmidt argues Marx does. But the turn of the twentieth century would prove favorable towards Engels, with many challenging the view that Engels separated nature and society in this rigid way. In 1999, the publication of Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature: A Red Green Perspective ushered in an ecological turn in Marxist thought that, intentionally or not, placed Engels on equal footing with Marx once again. While Burkett aims to show that historical materialism “can provide an explanatory and normative framework for thinking about and developing political responses to the environmental problems that afflict and threaten contemporary societies” (1999:1), he underscores the unique ways in which the materialisms of Marx and Engels are founded on an attention to the role of the transformation of nature in human history (1999: 100). A fundamental aim of John Bellamy Foster’s work develops this trajectory further by underscoring the ways in which Marx was a deeply ecological thinker. Foster particularly emphasizes how Marx built an ecological vision of production through the work of the German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, which led to the development of his notion of the “metabolic rift” (2000: ix), a now central concept in Marxist ecology that describes the contradiction in the relation between humans and nature that “develops through the growth simultaneously of large-scale industry and

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large-scale agriculture under capitalism, with the former providing the latter with the means of intensive exploitation of the soil” (2000: 156). Jonathan Hughes’s Ecology and Historical Materialism confronts Marxism and environmentalism in an effort “to investigate what the existence of environmental problems means for Marxism and what, if anything, Marxism can contribute to the study and resolution of those problems” (2000: 2). More important for our focus on Engels though is that these works all demonstrate in their readings of the ecological in Marx that one simply cannot sever Engels from Marx when considering questions of nature and ecology. Perhaps what is most significant about The Dialectic of Nature, however, is the prescience with which it discusses the relationship between ecology and capitalism. The Condition expresses an awareness of environmental conditions in its analyzes of what Andreas Malm has called “the ecological ruins of the Industrial Revolution” (2015: 393), including the effects of air pollution on the atmosphere. However, The Dialectic of Nature pushes this ecological awareness even further, providing an account of the relationship between exploitation of labor and exploitation of nature under capitalism. “In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind, ” Engels writes. “[W]e have thereby infinitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred adults previously did. And what is the result? Increasing overwork and increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great collapse” (1987: 331). For Engels, the exploitation of labor power is both a political economic and political ecological process that in the first instance relies on a “subduing” of nature as such, to the detriment of both the natural environment and the working class, a perspective that seems only recently to be firmly theorized as, for instance, global anthropogenic climate change continues to disproportionately affect the world’s poorest peoples. The work that brought Engels a tarnished legacy is, in true dialectical fashion, also the work that has renewed interest in his thought. This is not to suggest that Engels is only primarily engaged with today as an ecological thinker, but rather that the sphere of the ecological is one site where Engels continues to have a lasting positive legacy, and for good reason. The laboring with and—under industrial capitalism—against nature is a process central to human existence in both past and present, and any productive socialism must account for this, as both Marx and Engels certainly do. Indeed, it is through socialism that this increasingly alienated relationship between humans and the environment can begin to be reconciled. “For Engels, as for Marx, ” Foster reminds us, “the key to socialism was the rational regulation of the metabolism of humanity and nature, in such a way as to promote the fullest possible human potential, while safeguarding the needs of future generations” (2017: 50).

Conclusion: An Engels for the Twenty-First Century The account offered of Engels here—beginning with several of his key works and ending with recent developments in his intellectual legacy—is far from exhaustive, and I have purposely avoided spending too much effort in engaging the many debates about Engels’s legitimacy. Much ink has, for better or worse, been spilled both defending

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and decrying Engels, and while he remains a controversial figure within Marxist thought, a renewed interest in Engels from ecosocialist perspectives has culminated in what John Bellamy Foster has dubbed the “return of Engels” (2017: 50). And while I doubt this return will result in the establishment of a “new Engelsian” branch of Marxism any time soon, this resurgence reveals at the very least that Engels has a key role to play in how Marxist thought will engage the complex political ecological moment we collectively face now and in the future.

References Burkett, P. (1999), Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Carver, T. (1990), Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Engels, F. (1968), The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. and ed. W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Engels, F. (1987), Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25, Engels, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Engels, F. (2010), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, New York: Penguin Classics. Firestone, S. (1970), The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: William Morrow and Co. Foster, J.B. (2000), Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J.B. (March 2017), “The Return of Engels, ” Monthly Review 68(10): 46–50. Heinrich, M. (2012), An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital, trans. A. Locascio, New York: Monthly Review Press. Hughes, J. (2000), Ecology and Historical Materialis, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Malm, A. (2015), Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, New York: Verso. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin Books. Millet, K. (2000[1969]), Sexual Politics, Chicago, IL : University of Illinois Press. Roth, R. (2002), “The Author Marx and His Editor Engels: Different Views on Volume 3 of Capital, ” Rethinking Marxism 14(4): 59–72. Sayers, J., M. Evans, and N. Redclift, eds. (1987), Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays, London: Routledge. Schmidt, A. (1973), The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. B. Fowkes. London: New Left Books. Schmitt, R. (1997), Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction, Boulder, CO : Westview Press. Thomas, P. (2008), Marxism and Scientific Socialism: From Engels to Althusser, London: Routledge.

C. Sources and Influences

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1. Marx and the Ancients Greco-Roman antiquity and its re-invention played a key role in nineteenth-century German humanism by providing it with a framework of concepts concerning the education of mankind, human freedom and human flourishing. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel interpreted the Greek classical period as exhibiting a fundamentally different kind of freedom than that of modernity. According to Hegel, in the political life of ancient city-states individual freedom is inconceivable in abstraction from the community, which has priority over the individual. However, in the modern world, individual, atomistic freedom has developed at the expense of the universality of the state; this is a necessary moment in the movement towards the realization of a new universality, which should not be conceived as a contradiction with individuality (Hegel 1955: 209). Marx inherited this set of concerns from the humanist and idealist intellectual milieu which was familiar to him from his formative years, but he also elaborated them in radically different directions, starting with his earliest works (Mewes 1992: 31–2). Moreover, while his Dissertation on the difference between Democritean and Epicurean atomism is the only instance of sustained scholarly engagement with ancient philosophy within his corpus, Marx never abandoned his early interest in Greek philosophy and the classical world. Citations and allusions to classical texts, from Thucydides and Xenophon to Cicero—which were read in the original languages—are disseminated throughout his work, and Aristotle remained an object of admiration throughout his life (De Golyer 1992: 115–18). References to Plato are, on the contrary, very limited and heavily influenced by Hegel’s reading of Plato’s Republic (Farinetti 2000). According to Hegel—who mistakenly read the abolition of private property and family articulated in Books III and V of the dialogue as applying to the whole city and not just to the class of the guardians—a key feature of the Republic is “the exclusion of the principle of subjective freedom” (Hegel 1955: 109). While the dialogue is an expression of the ethical life of the Greek city-state, it is also a reaction to the danger for the community represented by the rise of self-interest and individual subjectivity within the city-state. As such, it articulates an oppressive solution to this problem based on the suppression of 175

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individuality within the universality of an ideal state. Consequently, for Hegel and, likewise, Marx, Plato’s limitations consist both in seeing the individual as opposed to the universality of the state, and in advancing the solution to this opposition as a merely abstract idea of the state. In the scant references to Plato in Marx’s corpus, the influence of Hegel’s approach to Plato’s philosophy is rather apparent. In the 1839 Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, written in preparation for his Dissertation, Marx adopted Hegel’s approach writing, “[in Plato] the philosopher as such, that is, as the wise man, not as the motion of the real spirit in general, is therefore the truth-beyond of the substantial world facing him. Plato expresses this most precisely when he says that either the philosophers must become kings or the kings philosophers for the state to achieve its purpose” (MECW 1: 440). An Hegelian influence is at work also in Marx’s famous reference to Plato’s notion of the division of labor, in book II of the Republic, as “the Athenian idealization of the Egyptian system of castes” (Capital, Vol. I, MECW 35: 372). Along Hegelian lines, Marx interpreted the project of the Republic as a reaction to a historical transformation that would jeopardize the community of the city-state, and as an attempt to freeze the movement of history. But where Hegel expressed the problem Plato was trying to face as the emergence of individual subjectivity, Marx understood it as the increasing development of manufacture, commercial exchange and money circulation, and as the rise of a new form of wealth based upon them (Farinetti 2000: 535–55). Interpreted along these lines, Plato could hardly be a useful source for Marx’s reflections on the problem of freedom and on the relation between individual freedom and material and socio-political conditions of existence. It is rather in Epicureanism, and especially in Aristotle—whom, contrary to Hegel, he valued over Plato—that Marx found relevant elements for his own understanding of freedom as human flourishing.

2. Philosophical Materialisms and the Problem of Freedom Marx’s philosophical interest in the relation between freedom and the material conditions of existence can be traced all the way back to his Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession, 1835, written when he was just seventeen years old. While acknowledging the freedom to choose and fulfill a worthy vocation, Marx also recognized the limiting and conditioning effects of “our relations in society, ” as well as “our physical constitution itself ” (MECW 1: 4). This concern is constant for Marx. It reappeared, for instance, in Marx’s 1837 letter to his father, where he described his own problematic (Kantian and Fichtean) approaches to the study of law. Marx had pursued the philosophy of law in a way that idealistically separated theories of legal form from the content they were to describe, and he came to recognize this error as insuperable (MECW 1: 15). Marx’s solution was to accept Hegel’s absolute idealism by which he would seek “the idea in reality itself ” (MECW 1: 18). If the idea is incorporated into reality, then freedom and the matter comprising it would mutually determine each other rather than be absolutely distinct and incompatible. The acceptance of a Hegelian solution, in which self-consciousness realizes its material freedom, lies at the basis of Marx’s dissertation on the ancient philosophies of

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nature. In this hastily-written work, Marx reconstructed the problem of freedom in relation to the Epicurean and Democritean philosophies of the building blocks of material reality—atoms. In his Forward, Marx held that ancient philosophical systems were moments of self-consciousness, but he also expressed clear preference for the Epicurean version of atomism, as the notion of an atomic “swerve” allowed Epicureans to offer a non-deterministic notion of materialism. Marx, indeed, seemed to be searching for a philosophical materialism consistent with his Hegelian commitments, and went to the ancient sources to clarify the issue for himself (Schafer 2003). For Democritus, the gap between what we sense and the abstract principles guiding distinct and individual atoms motivates empirical investigation into the nature, constraints, relative necessity and real possibilities of the natural world. Yet, no matter how many discoveries a Democritean makes, a gap remains between the necessary principles governing atoms and the possibility and contingency that govern human sensitivity. For Democritus, such possibility is really just one way the essential truth of physical necessity appears. Within his materialism, then, appearance and essence are separated by an unbridgeable chasm. Marx’s Hegelian solution to the skepticism generated by such a position lies in his creative reconstruction of Epicurus. For Marx, Epicurus thought of the motion and qualities of atoms in mutual-relation and self-relation, not in isolation. He thus replaced Democritus’s materialism of individual isolated atoms with a dynamic materialism of atoms, and sought to integrate their relations in an account of their “essence. ” Crucially, this relational materialism could scale up from physical principles to social and political realities (MECW 1: 52–3). The Democritean concept of the atom reduced matter to only one of its moments, while Epicurus consciously pursued the productive tensions generated by a definition of the atom and their existence as a dynamic “alienation of th[is] essence” (MECW 1: 64). This ontology of matter—relational, temporal, dynamic and scalable from the atom all the way to the social and self-conscious human—would be Marx’s touchstone for a materialism capable of coherently grounding freedom. Marx’s turn to this kind of materialism made freedom thinkable by construing its essence as self-alienating. In this way, freedom and material determination could coexist in a problematic tension. Rather than denying nature its motion or reducing freedom to a mere semblance, such a position opened up a distinctly radical project (Browning 2000). Yet the philosophical account of matter that inscribed human freedom within nature was itself insufficient for Marx; he developed a higher bar for materialism in his Theses on Feuerbach. Here, the contrast is not between two natural ontologies, but between a kind of materialism that separates contemplation from its object, and another materialism, Marx’s own, that unifies the two in “practical-critical activity” (MECW 5: 3). Some of the same criticisms Marx had of Democritus are then leveled against Feuerbach; both Feuerbach’s and Democritus’s materialisms tend to think of single, isolated individuals whose motion does not contribute to conditioning the freedom afforded by their environments (MECW 5: 4). More significantly, Marx’s creative reconstruction of Epicurus’s tensions pointed beyond the philosophical possibility of freedom, and prepared the way for Marx’s bolder commitment to revolutionary practice (MECW 5: 4).

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3. Aristotle and Marx: Praxis and Critique Marx’s commitment to a materialism of practice has some important roots in Aristotle’s hylomorphism; the distinction of matter and form, and the unity of the two in a compound. Aristotle introduced the distinction between the material and formal aspects of an object in order to make sense of the change that is observable throughout nature, and to distinguish among different kinds of change. While Engels repeatedly described Aristotle as a great natural dialectician, second only to Hegel (for instance, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, MECW 24: 298), Marx also held him in high regard (Letter to F. Lassalle 21 Dec., 1857, MECW 40: 226) at least in part because Aristotle’s distinction between matter and form also applied to political environments; the constitution of a city is the form that provides unity and continuity (Politics: 3.2.1276b), while the mass of the citizen body and the natural resources are the material out of which the city is made (7.4.1326a). At times, Aristotle seems to view the city as analogous to a hylomorphic organic body, where the form is an immanent organizing principle analogous to the way the soul is the immanent form and life of a living body; for example, he defines the constitution as a certain life of the city (4.11.1295a 40–b1) and notes the correspondence between ways of life and constitutions (7.8.1328b 1–2). At other times, he depicts the activity of the lawgiver along the lines of a craftsman making artificial objects by manipulating the proper kind of material (7.4.1326a). Likewise, Marx recognized that constitutions are “actual expression(s) of the will of the people, ” while acknowledging that they can also be imposed (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, MECW 3: 57–8). Either way, like Marx’s political organizations, Aristotle’s polis and its virtues are generated out of the coordinated efforts of many, and the form of the city is not disjointed from the practical activity and virtue of the citizens (MacIntyre 1981). Marx was aware that, for Aristotle, the good life consisted of exercising excellence by being a participant in political activity (Nicomachean Ethics: I, 1102a). Aristotle’s account of the form, and thus the end of human life, valued the active, practical aspect of existence in a way that oriented each human towards actualizing the highest possibilities of each. Socially mediated practical activity, or “praxis, ” is thus central to both Aristotle’s naturalism and to Marx’s materialism. For Aristotle, “praxis” is a manner of being active distinct from theoretical thinking and from producing. It encompasses ethics, economics and politics. Both Marx and Aristotle value the activity that is necessary to physically produce and reproduce life less than free praxis (Nicomachean Ethics: 1177b 19–20; A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, MECW 30: 191–2). But, for Aristotle a certain amount of leisure is needed to engage in political activity such that only the free citizens who could live off the work of others are thoroughly justified in practicing politics; Marx, however, departs from Aristotle’s elitist intellectualism by calling us to struggle politically for the universalization of the leisure necessary for political activity and free thought. In addition to this, he breaks with the Aristotelian hierarchy of values, which locates craftsmanship and manual labor below philosophical and contemplative activity, by defining free creative production as being itself a kind of meaningful “praxis” (A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, MECW 32: 391).

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Both Aristotle and Marx acknowledged how praxis forms social and political conditions, but Marx’s notion of praxis includes theorizing and producing (Theses on Feuerbach, MECW 5: 3). As we saw, wrapping the activity of thinking into his materialism is as old as Marx’s preference for Epicurus in his dissertation. For Marx, therefore, the material efforts of each are co-implicating and contribute to the production and reproduction of a social form (Capital, Vol. III , MECW 37: 805–6). For Aristotle, however, laboring could never be a part of “praxis, ” and “free labor” would be a contradiction in terms. While for Aristotle praxis only refers to the rational form of activity that articulates the proper end or what is best for humans, Marx’s praxis describes the continuous theoretical-material creation of conditions through which human beings develop new powers and ends (German Ideology, MECW 5: 42–3). Marx’s practical materialism is thus tied to the ways that activity satisfies life’s needs simultaneously, and engenders both new needs and new social strategies for fulfilling them. The direction that new strategies take to satisfy needs, as well as access to these strategies, are conditioned by the enveloping forms of social organization which are, themselves, open to radical reconfiguation (Grundrisse, MECW 28: 336–7). Marx’s practical materialism valued the open-ended developments of human life as being rich in needs, especially the need for social organizations in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW 6: 506). This divergence regarding praxis can also be used to track the strategies of critique available to Aristotle and Marx. Based on his notion of the proper political and ethical ends of human life, Aristotle could criticize in Politics the “art of acquisition” when it aims at an endless accumulation of money (Politics: 1.9), or what Marx called the MoneyCommodity-Money and Money-Money cycles (Capital, Vol. I, MECW 35: 175). When money is used to purchase a good, not for its use but for the purpose of exchanging it for more money, or even worse, when money is lent out usuriously, such uses deny money’s specific end or purpose—namely, to provide the necessities for a good ethical life. Marx noted how, for Aristotle, denying money’s proper end blurred the line between the legitimate art of acquisition for the household and the unrestrained art of accumulation (Capital, Vol. I, MECW 35: 163). The latter was subject to criticism for Aristotle because it lacked a form that would constitute any aim or set any end. In other words, such uses of money replaced its proper end as enabling a life of good praxis, and replaced it with the misplaced value of unending accumulation. Marx’s criticism of the M-C-M and the M-M cycles, contrarily, relies less on their open-endedness and more on how they function as circuits by which capital valorizes. The growth of capital is a problem because it functions as a social power dominating and constraining the free scope of human praxis. Capitalists dictate what is possible for humans by orienting activity to maximize profit, yet this capital-determined direction of human activity is essentially inhuman (Capital, Vol. III , MECW 37: 89–90). The problem is not one of open-endedness, it is rather what is developed in an open-ended fashion. Capitalvalorization enriches capital instead of adding to the wealth of human freedom. Worse, it does so not in a neutral way, but by preventing human agency from realizing itself in the kinds of need-satisfying activities that have been made historically possible (McCarthy 1990: 157–8). Instead, activity is increasingly confined to the requirements

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of profit maximization, a process that is essentially dominating and exploitative (Capital, Vol. III , MECW 37: 89–90). Social relations, needs, even forms of individuality, are increasingly brought under this inhuman rule of capital (Capital, Vol. I, MECW 35: 749). A lot, then, hangs on what Marx thinks about, what has thus far been described as, the “human” in human praxis.

3. Aristotle and Marx on the Essence of the Human “Species” and the Possibility of Alienation For Aristotle the human is a rational, political animal, best oriented towards a narrowly conceived “praxis.” What is the human for Marx? This is a hard question to answer because, for Marx, the human species develops and changes such that no single form or definition would ever be entirely appropriate. Still, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), Marx offers a minimal account of the way the human develops, including the process by which it is self-alienated (EPM, MECW 3: 332–3). We know that the species changes when humans engage in praxis in different ways. So, while humans are natural, there is no deep or fundamental ontology; activity, i.e., what we can do and how this doing is organized, defines the life of the species (EPM, MECW 3: 277). When activity is dominated by capital, the human is alienated from its species-essence. In his “Comments on James Mill, ” as well as the EPM , Marx’s human is a natural being whose alienation is thought at the level of the individual (“Comments, ” MECW 3: 228); the social organization (“Comments, ” MECW 3: 216–17); the totality (EPM , MECW 3: 280); and the mutual conjunction of these three levels (EPM , MECW 3: 299). The human is composed of the relations obtaining in and conditioning of free, conscious social activity to satisfy needs—again understood individually, socially and as a totality. A few words need to be said, first about the notion of the “universal, ” and then about the concepts “free, ” and “conscious. ” The range of actions that can be chosen define the “universality” of the species-essence, such that the universal is, again, historically developing and can become wider or narrower depending on the powers developed through praxis and the freedom with which they can be selected (Márkus 2014). As before, the universality of the species-being can describe the scope of an individual’s possible freedom (EPM , MECW 3: 275). Since individuals are inscribed within capitalist social relations, which impose themselves on individuals and their social organizations, this “universality” exists only in an alienated form. Marx holds that “man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being” (EPM , MECW 3: 276). This use of “conscious” requires some further analyzis. Conscious production produces: a) objects; b) a producer engaged in just this activity of production; and c) consciousness of this fact. The first two it does necessarily, while the third, although equally emphasized in Marx, is itself only a possibility. This is, however, a very strong possibility because Marx’s materialism, as we saw, thinks of the conjuncture of external and internal worlds. The world of objects created by productive activity indeed includes the production of consciousness as well. Praxis can externalize consciousness, i.e., it can endow consciousness with an objective existence (EPM ,

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MECW 3: 277). By producing in accordance with conscious aims, humans concretize consciousness in, or better, as objects. In this way consciousness and material reality are not radically distinct. Now we can turn to “freedom. ” Freedom is always possible because the activity of consciousness is always under-determined. Humans are not given to having only one aim or only one manner of working towards achieving it. Here, Marx and Aristotle are close; Marx’s “freedom” is akin to Aristotle’s space of deliberation (Nicomachean Ethics: 1112a 13ff ), but extends to include the setting of ends as well. For Aristotle, deliberation is about the means to achieve given ends; while orientation towards the good and eudaimonia, understood as virtuous activity, is innate and universal, orientation toward concrete ends or projects depends on character disposition and hence on the habits that form a certain kind of character, whether virtuous or not. In this under-determined space, within which deliberation and choice are possible, Marx describes the possibility of “freedom. ” Freedom is actualized when humans can consciously choose among a set of aims and the diversity of strategies to achieve them. Even if we were to build dams exactly like beavers, we would do so not from some internal necessity, but from some (odd but free) determination of consciousness in that direction. We are free to do so even when we choose not to build dams in that way. Given a field of possibilities, consciousness is thus also consciousness of our species’ essential freedom (EPM , MECW 3: 276–7). In this way, the species is universal and mediated by every act of production; each moment of praxis, however minimal, contributes to the real, historical development of the essence of the species (Meikle 1985). Significantly, alienation now rests on an historically mutable set of possibilities within which choice is possible, and the fact that conscious self-reflection and concrete activity have changed over time determines, rather than negates, the universality of Marx’s species-essence (Petrović 1967). With this account of the species-essence in hand, alienation is best understood as, indeed, one way that the human can develop. It may be helpful to provide an illustration at each of the three levels described above. In the contemporary context, individuals may be constrained from exercising and fine-tuning socially developed culinary powers due to a paucity of disposable time and energy. After all, they need to sell their labor power on a market that tends to extend and intensify the length of a working day. Likewise, a society may be incapable of providing sufficient nutrition for all its members, precisely because the technical ability and freedom to do so is determined and limited by capital-valorization. Some go hungry, not out of an inability to produce and distribute sufficient caloric value, but out of the requirements that nutrition be produced and bought on capitalist markets, and that persistent unemployment produces downward pressure on wages. Finally, humans as a whole may be unable to quit or effectively modify harmful agricultural practices, the effects of which on the environment can constrain rather than promote the possibilities of continued nutrition, despite both the knowledge of this effect and the already developed ability to transform such practices. Each example shares three features. First, the logic of the capitalist mode of production prevents the actualization of real, historically developed possibilities. Second, these constrained possibilities also diminish individual, social and global capacities for further, free articulation of capacities in the future (EPM , MECW 3: 283).

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Third, this constraint and the historically developed greater possibility of freedom go hand-in-hand (Grundrisse, MECW 28: 99). It is not simply that an individual, or a society, or all are constrained and thereby alienated, but rather they are constrained in the sense that they are separated from real, historical possibilities. Alienation from the species is, in this light, alienation from historical possibility on an individual and social level; it is de-potentiation. For Marx communism resolves the division between historically developed and developmental possibilities on the one hand, and their constraint by capital on the other (EPM , MECW 3: 296). Yet, not all possibilities are to be valued. Marx’s position precludes valuing coercive or constraining capacities that would limit rather than broaden the universe of free action. So, even though they are powers of a certain kind, non-alienated species-beings would not develop new nuclear technologies, or the ability to more quickly destroy the ecological basis of human life. Reading Aristotle as an early forefather of Marx looks, at first blush, quite promising. However, while Marx’s notion of “species” makes alienation from its historically developed powers intelligible, Aristotle’s understanding of “species” cannot. For Aristotle, primary substances are forms or essences, which have definitions that provide an understanding of what a thing is in itself. A definition of a species, therefore, provides an understanding of the essence, which is not sensibly given in every individual, and this definition describes what that thing is in itself, but only under and with respect to its universal form (Metaphysics: Z 4, 1030a). However, within this framework it is not possible to think of alienation in the way that was so central to Marx’s definition. For Aristotle, only the forms of natural beings, not of artificial objects, are substances in a primary sense (Z 17, 1041b). As such, they are eternal in the sense that they do not undergo change, diminution or destruction. Aristotle only admits that the forms of natural being “can be at times”—whenever there is at least one existing individual of a natural species—while “not being at other times” (for example, because of the total extinction of an animal species) (Z 15, 1039b). Despite some similarities between Aristotle’s understanding of species-essence and Marx’s, there are two salient features that prevent Aristotle’s species-essence from bearing the burden of Marx’s alienation. First, for Aristotle, definitions are always fixed because the essence of each species is entirely static. Aristotle is insistent on this point; e.g., he argues that it is not the definition or the essence of a house that comes to be and ceases to be, but only the being of this particular house. (Metaphysics: Z 15, 1039b). In this way, Aristotle’s essence gains intelligibility at the cost of historical change. Only the essence of an immutable species is given in a definition. For this reason, Aristotle cannot think of the historical alienation of the species. Since the scope of free and conscious activity changes, the species and its self-alienation in Marx are inherently mutable, and this is quite impossible to think with Aristotle (Margolis 1992). Knowledge of the species’ historically self-produced alienation would require knowledge of a changing essence, which Aristotle explicitly rules out. Further, on Aristotle’s essence, an individual’s self-alienation is also impossible to think of. To be a human being, one must have a fixed and unchanging human essence. Since essences are general terms referring to primary substances, their definitions can apply to individuals, but no individual can have a definition. Individuals cannot be defined because of the matter of which they are constituted, which is capable of both

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being and of not being (Metaphysics: Z 15, 1039b 28–31). Given these epistemic commitments, individuals are knowable as human only if they are identified as members of the species. Insofar as the definition of the essence of the species obtains to the individual, it is simply impossible to know any individual’s alienation from their species; knowledge is unchanging, as there is no knowledge of an individual, but only of its universal form. An individual may be alternately self-generating and self-destroying, but this never impacts the species, the essence of which is always firmly present. This is quite far from Marx’s determination of the species as a free, conscious and universal set of historically developing powers for need-satisfying actions. The sharp divide between what is changeable and unknowable on the one hand, and, on the other, the intelligible reality of primary substances, prohibits Aristotle from seeing actually diminished or stultified capacities as instances of species alienation in the individual, their social organization or their totality. For Marx, in direct contrast to Aristotle, the species is in a process of becoming such that its essence is nothing other than this dynamic unfolding (Kain 1983: 262). It therefore follows that definitions of it must be understood, not statically, but provisionally, and in reference to its changing capacities. Aristotle was indeed interested in human capacities, as well as the way in which social organizations and education can foster them, yet this was never integrated, as it was for Marx, into an account of the essentially changing human species. For Marx, stressing the potentials lost in an alienated species-being required a reversal of Aristotle’s commitment to the priority of actuality over potentiality when defining species (Metaphysics: Θ 8, 1049b 11). Marx was keenly interested in something much like Aristotle’s understanding of potentiality, quoting a cognate of dunamis in Greek in his Grundrisse, and contrasting potentiality with actuality in Volumes 1 and 3 of Capital (MECW 28: 72; 35: 187 and 37: 379). For Aristotle, even when possibilities are embedded in or are part of actuality, these possibilities are intelligible, not in their own right, but only by way of their corresponding actuality (Metaphysics Θ 8, 1049 b13). Yet this poses a significant problem. When the entire basis for understanding the potential is the actual, it is hard to see how thinking fundamental change in what is actual could be possible. To make potentialities and capacities, rather than actualities, central to a definition of the species-essence, and thereby open up radical alternatives, potentiality needs to be given greater priority (Depew 1982: 174, Jaffe 2016). Marx did precisely this, in part by rejecting some ancient philosophical sources (Plato) and creatively drawing on others (Epicurus, Aristotle). Epicurean atomism provided the resources for a dynamic materialism, and an expanded notion of Aristotle’s praxis provided the normative bedrock of human life valued and defined by free, self-directing powers. By thinking the essence of the species in the development and alienation of these potencies, Marx moved beyond his ancient influences and offered a revolutionary alternative.

References Browning, G.K. (2000), “Marx’s Doctoral Dissertation: The Development of a Hegelian Thesis, ” in T. Burns and I. Fraser (eds), The Hegel-Marx Connection, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 131–45.

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De Golyer, M. (1992), “The Greek Accent of the Marxian Matrix, ” in G.E. McCarthy (ed.), Marx and Aristotle. Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, 107–53. Depew, D. (1982), “Aristotle’s De Anima and Marx’s Theory of Man, ” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 8(1–2): 133–97. Farinetti, G. (2000), “Il confronto di Marx con Platone (attraverso Hegel), ” in M. Vegetti (ed.), Platone. La Repubblica, Naples Bibliopolis 4: 497–559. Hegel, G.W.F. (1955), Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, trans. E.S. Haldane and F.H. Simson, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jaffe, A. (2016), “From Aristotle to Marx: A Critical Philosophical Anthropology, ” Science and Society 80(1): 56–77. Kain, P.J. (1983), “History, Knowledge, and Essence in the Early Marx, ” Studies in Soviet Thought 25(4): 261–83. MacIntyre, A. (1981), After Virtue, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Margolis, J. (1992), “Praxis and Meaning: Marx’s Species Being and Aristotle’s Political Animal, ” in G.E. McCarthy (ed.), Marx and Aristotle. Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity, Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, 329–55. Márkus, G. (2014), Marxism and Anthropology: The Concept of “Human Essence” in the Philosophy of Marx, Sydney: Modem-Verlag. McCarthy, G.E. (1990), Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy, Savage, MD : Rowman and Littlefield. Meikle, S. (1985), Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, LaSalle, IL : Open Court. Mewes, H. (1992),“Karl Marx and the Influence of Greek Antiquity on Eighteenth Century German Thought, ” in G.E. McCarthy (ed.), Marx and Aristotle. Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity, Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, 19–36. Petrović, G. (1967), Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century, trans. Gajo Petrović, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Schafer, P.M. (2003). “The Young Marx on Epicurus: Dialectical Atomism and Human Freedom, ” in D.R. Gordon and D.B. Suits (eds), Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance, Rochester, NY: RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, 127–38.

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Hegelianism Andrew Cole

Marx thought a lot about the dialectic and Hegel. Sometimes he tried to distinguish the two. To a certain extent, he can do this, because the dialectic (as we’ll see) involves strictly formal problems that are not reducible to any content, including the primary logical form of identity/difference, as well as contradiction and movement that are both functions of that form. Yet any discussion of the dialectic and its formal features has to be a discussion of Hegel. To be sure, we can think of Marx’s debts to Hegel in any number of ways, and discover, time and again, what Marx took from him and what made the mainstay of his thinking. Ideas about alienation, the theory of surplus value, fetishism, the problems of self-consciousness, the limits of phenomenology and the capacity of philosophy to think and critique the present: this is all to some extent taken from Hegel by Marx. But the truth is that what Marx said of Proudhon could be said of himself: “Proudhon is looking . . . for a dialectic method such as Hegel has indeed given us. A relationship with Hegel therefore exists here really and does not need to be constructed by means of some imaginative analogy” (MECW 5: 530). If you’re going to do anything dialectical, in other words, you have to deal with Hegel directly, and not make things up and concoct dialectics by other means (as basically most of the twentieth and twenty-first century theory and criticisms seek to do). And because the dialectic should always be our topic in a discussion of Marx, that great reader of Hegel, I think it would be useful to state in these pages exactly what the dialectic is; how it came to be dialectical; how it came to be Hegelian and, finally, how it came to be Marx’s own method of analyzis and presentation in Capital at a moment when Hegelianism was split between Right and Left-leaning versions in the 1840s and beyond, with virtually every philosopher clambering to “invert” Hegel’s system. Our touchstone for this discussion will be his 1873 “Afterword” to the second German edition of that great text, where Marx spells out his use of Hegel, but we’ll venture out to his other works too, including some authored by his collaborator, Engels.

The Dialectic Before there was Marx, before there was Hegel, there was the dialectic, which the ancients and medievals alike used to interpret the world. There are numerous examples 185

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of dialectic practice in pre-modernity, but Plotinus offered a version we need to understand, above all, because he invented a form of dialectic that can rightly be called “dialectical”—a dialectic that requires thinking of identities in their difference. Quite simply, the identity of any given thing is bound up with its difference from the identities of other things; likewise, every identity is already different to itself and already contains an otherness or contradiction within it. There is no pure identity. There is only identity in difference—a fact that runs all the way up the scale of being to the One, the gravity of whose pure, self-enclosed identity generates the difference known as the Intellectual Principle (Plotinus 1992). To be sure, the dialectic includes many logical forms, techniques, and, as we shall see, “laws, ” but its central mechanism, the way it works, is indisputably the categories of identity and difference, which Plotinus had prioritized in the name the discipline of dialectic, above and beyond all the formerly Platonic primals. While Plato had ordered the five forms of forms: that is, the five primals that comprise all intelligibles and existents as Being, Motion, Rest, Identity and Difference, Plotinus (and Proclus after him) made Identity and Difference the two logical forms by which all other forms, primary and secondary forms alike, are defined (Cole 2014: 28–9). To be sure, it is in Hegel’s name that one speaks of “the” dialectic and of what’s “dialectical, ” for the very reason that Hegel himself renewed the dialectic after the discipline itself experienced considerable neglect in early modernity: Erasmus called it “drivelectic”! (See book two of Erasmus 2000: 354). This derision went on all the way up to Kant, who used the term “dialectic” provisionally in his critical philosophy.1 Hegel, however, keenly understood the uniquely dialectical insights of Plotinus and other pre-moderns by accepting identity/difference as the chief logical form by which his own dialectic would function, and by which all other basic oppositions, like individual/universal, quantity/quality, form/content, subject/object, freedom/necessity and the various syllogisms near the end of the Science of Logic, interrelate. In short, everything is dialectical, an identity in difference, and that includes all the other logical forms, which is exactly the move made by Plotinus in his revision of Plato. Hegel’s novelty and importance in the history of dialectical philosophy comes, then, in his embrace of identity/difference and, specifically, in the way he uses these logical categories to make “contradiction” fashionable, in a philosophical climate that was entirely hostile to it. After all, the philosophical giant in Hegel’s age wasn’t Heraclitus, for whom contradiction was a given. It was Kant, for whom contradiction was anathema. Hegel’s gambit was to think creatively and dynamically about contradiction as a process, rather than as a synonym for “error” or non-being. It’s in the name of identity/difference and, indeed, in the name of dialectics, that Hegel speaks of “grasping opposites in their unity, or the positive in the negative. ” He declares this to be “the most important aspect of dialectic” (Hegel 2015: 5; also see 151, 166, 318). Difference lies at both the center and periphery of any identity, and any entity. This is why Hegel emphasizes that “identity is something different” (2015: 358). Identity/difference really is the only cliché about dialectics we can safely use. All others, like the supposed Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, are wrong. It’s a valid cliché because it’s the first description of the dialectic that isn’t reductive and, instead, gets you thinking about what is, and what is not. That’s no small order for an innocent cliché.

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No one with a straight face, in the Marxist tradition, can deny the importance of Hegel’s relentless and rigorous pursuit of contradiction and identity/difference across a range of narrative and historical examples in works encompassing so many disciplines and approaches: art, literature, history, natural science, religion, philosophy and logic. Marx certainly wouldn’t deny Hegel’s insight, writing that “Hegelian contradiction” is the “source of all dialectic” (MECW 35: 592n. 2). Others—unlike John Stuart Mill, the target of Marx’s words here—wisely followed suit. Friedrich Engels would be on board, of course, affirming that the principle of the dialectic is that there is “separation and opposition . . . only within . . . mutual connection and union” and vice versa (MECW 25: 365). Vladimir Lenin remarked, “In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics” (1961: 222; see 196–9, 177, 258, 357–8). And Nikolai Bukharin observed that “The specific feature of dialectics consists in the contradictory nature of movement, in the clash of opposed aspects and their unification. The splitting of the whole and the unity of opposites—coincidentia oppositorum—is the essence of dialectics” (2005: 308; see 86, 107, 127, 175, 205, 264, 273, 296–7, 318). This unity of opposites is only achieved through the thinking of identity in difference, and of understanding that contradiction is the way entities relate to other entities, as much as to themselves. There are, no doubt, other ways you could describe the dialectic, but it is impossible to speak of the dialectic without thinking about “identity in difference. ” I repeat; impossible. There are, needless to say, well-known (and so-called) dialectical laws, codified by Engels, Lenin and others. Chief among them is the law (I would prefer to call it a habit) whereby quantity transforms into quality (See Engels MECW 25: 356, 494; Lenin 1961: 221–3). Marx says in the first volume of Capital that, “Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his Logic), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes” (MECW 35: 313). He’s right. Hegel, for his part, uses the dialectical terms of quantity/quality to say that everything has a limit in terms of what it is and can be, spatially and temporally, beyond which point an entity becomes something else altogether. It’s a logic of transformation, of change—as he says in the Science of Logic: if by limit we understand one which is quantitative and, for instance, a field alters its limit in this sense, then the field remains a field just as before. If, on the contrary, it is the qualitative limit of the field which is altered, what is altered is the determinateness that makes the field a field, and the field then becomes a meadow, a forest, and so on. 2005: 53

These terms are projections, again. Limits are what we think, and they are a part of what it means to do phenomenology. We clearly see here Hegel’s meaning: a field is a field, by our terms, whether it’s one or three acres, but if the field becomes a forest over time, it is qualitatively something else. It is no longer a field. One can hear Eubulides of Miletus in the background: not his paradox of the heap or the bald man, but, rather, let’s call it the paradox of the forest. Precisely what is the minimum quantity of trees must there be to qualify, after qualificare, a field as a forest? (See Plekhanov 1929: 114.) How

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do you answer this? And what does thinking about the answer teach you? The thinking of quantity/quality shows you that a certain “limit constitutes the reality of being-there and, on the other hand, it is the negation of it” (Hegel 1991: 148). It shows that the “limit” itself is a kind of identity-in-difference, in the way every identity is different even to itself, it contains an otherness within it—a limit to what it is and what can be, and a capacity to alter that identity until it is passes over into absolute difference or total nothingness. This is, properly, the finitude of every entity, and it is also why identity is so complex in Hegel that it cannot be reduced to the syntax of A = A. Quantity/ quality, because it is a function of identity/difference, teaches you dialectics—a point Hegel made sure to underscore when he revisited this idea in his Encyclopaedia Logic, asserting that any limit “proves itself to be dialectical” (ibid.). Marx understood the dialectical utility of quantity/quality when he, again, acknowledges, “the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his Logic), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes. ” Marx makes this claim on the way to explaining what makes a capitalist a capitalist. His example is that of the guild master who would suddenly become a capitalist, something qualitatively different, once the “minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum” formerly advanced by the guild master. Increase the monetary outlay, up the quantity in other words, and suddenly a new quality appears—the capitalist. But let’s not beat around the bush; in the first volume of Capital, Marx’s entire theory of the commodity, his analyzis of use values and exchange values is grounded on the relation between quantity and quality: Every useful thing, as iron, paper, etc., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. MECW 35: 45–6

Marx says this on the very first page of the first chapter of Capital. Note that these terms, quality and quantity, are “points of view. ” Again, we’re doing phenomenology, using logical (Hegelian) categories that help us to see the operations of capital. These logical forms make visible the ways in which a mere change in quantity (up or down) produces a change in quality (down or up); for example, “an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. ” They enable us to understand the law of value, as well as the idea that quantities of commodities “have one common quality, viz., that of having value” (MECW 35: 84). They help us observe changes in labor practice, when the quantity of labor overtakes the quality, and vice versa. It’s not that quantity affects quality, in some push and pull sort of way, it’s that quantity produces quality. From the perspective of the laws of value; “the value of every commodity is determined by the labor time requisite to turn it out so as to be of normal quality” (MECW 35: 183); and it produces value because production, from means to modes, figures centrally in Marx’s analyzis of capital. “By the simple addition of a certain quantity of labor, new value is added, and by the quality of this added labor, the original

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values of the means of production are preserved in the product” (MECW 35: 211; see 327). Marx delineates the numerous ways in which quantity and quality, in dynamic relation, explain virtually every aspect of capital and production in capitalism, all the way up to the third volume of Capital, in which he finds, “The purely quantitative division of the profit between two persons, who have different legal titles to it, has turned into a qualitative division, which seems to spring from the very nature of capital and profit” (MECW 37: 376). All this, and more, in Marx, thanks to a dialectical law discovered by Hegel. So much criticism, so much “theory, ” over the decades has beaten into our heads that Hegel and Marx are from different planets. In fact, there is a clear trajectory from Hegel to Marx, a movement in which we pass from the logic of thought to the thought of the logic of capital.

Dialectical Hegelianism It may therefore begin to make sense why Marx is very, very sparing in his use of the term “dialectic” in his masterwork, Capital. For example, in the entire first volume of Capital; in over some 800 pages he discusses the dialectic only a half-a-dozen times, and never explicitly mentions it again in Vol. II or Vol. III . He’s about as sparing in his citations of Hegel. You see, if he had to name check the dialectic at every moment, or cite Hegel as the source for this or that idea, we’d think Capital was a book about Hegel. But the year 1873 changed all of that. This was the year Marx penned the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, and it’s here that he discusses Hegel and the dialectic as many times as in the entire first volume of Capital, but in the space of a very few pages. We will stick with this Afterword from here on because it contains a host of important issues about the dialectic and Hegel. It’s crucial to know, too, that the problem of the dialectic and Hegel had been on Marx’s mind since at least 1858 when Marx expressed to Engels that, “What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment was Hegel’s Logic . . . I should very much like to write two or three sheets making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method, which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified” (MECW 40: 249). He says, basically, the same thing in 1868 in a letter to Joseph Dietzgen, “When I have cast off the burden of political economy, I shall write a “Dialectic. ” The true laws of dialectics are already contained in Hegel, though in a mystical form. What is needed is to strip away this form”—though this is likely the promise for a larger, separate work (MECW 43: 31). What prompted Marx to finally compose those pages were the reviews. It’s funny, but, perhaps not for him, that early reviewers believed that he was Hegelian in the worst way possible, as he observes with high irritation in this Afterword: German reviews, of course, shriek out at “Hegelian sophistics. ” The European Messenger of St. Petersburg, in an article dealing exclusively with the method of Das Kapital (May number, 1872, pp. 427–36), finds my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, unfortunately, German-dialectical. MECW 35: 17

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Marx’s primary worry is his own writing, the ways in which his Darstellung or “presentation” in Capital seems to have been captured by appearances. He answers this critic, not by defending his prose so much as stating what informs it: his dialectical method that lays bare the logic of capital. Indeed, after a giant quote from the reviewer, Marx asks, “Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?” (MECW 35: 19) Marx explains this method thus: Of course the method of presentation [Darstellungsweise] must differ in form from that of inquiry [Forschungsweise]. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement [die wirkliche Bewegung] be adequately described [dargestellt]. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror [spiegelt], then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction. MECW 35: 19; German text from Marx 1988: 27

Marx is having a moment here, as if he is admitting that his own magnum opus reflects appearances so accurately as to blur the line between critique and ideology, a problem he famously depicts with Engels in the German Ideology, in reference to a camera obscura (MECW 5: 36).2 Here, however, the “subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, ” Marx says. While it may appear as if we had an a priori construction in what’s represented in Capital, such that Marx’s work reads like an attempt at realism, it’s not; it’s a description carefully made after an “analyzis” that was itself admittedly “work” to pull off. When we read Capital, we’re reading the real thing, but not as the thing wishes to be seen—for it wishes to be seen as a capitalist would see it, not as a Marxist would. As Marx says deep into volume one of Capital, the appearance only of the relations of production mirrors itself in the brain of the capitalist. The capitalist does not know that the normal price of labor also includes a definite quantity of unpaid labor, and that this very unpaid labor is the normal source of his gain. The category, surplus labor time, does not exist at all for him, since it is included in the normal working day, which he thinks he has paid for in the day’s wages. MECW 35: 549

Marx, however, mirrors in his mind and ours the category of surplus labor time. It’s in view of these methodological claims that Marx finds it necessary to go on record about what he owes to Hegel, addressing the question about Hegel and method, which we now may understand as the question “of ” Hegel and method: My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea, ” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external,

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phenomenal form of “the Idea. ” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. MECW 35: 19

Marx aims to pursue a dialectic that is “opposite” to Hegel’s. There’s so many other ways to say your dialectical method is distinct, yet Marx here chooses to use dialectical language itself, to boot, language invented by Hegel, to distinguish his dialectical method from his predecessor—and what is that difference, precisely? Yes, Marx says that for Hegel, thinking creates the world, whereas, for him, the world creates thinking. Great, but that’s not dialectic, because the dialectic isn’t fundamentally about positions like idealism, materialism, etc. In the same way, it can be said that Marx has a strong Hegelian side while Hegel, too, has a Marxian side—a point that isn’t meant to be stupidly clever, it’s just to say that the dialectic transcends the difference between the two. It’s a win for dialectics, in short, and not a score solely for either team, Hegel or Marx. So now that we’ve got that out of the way—as if either thinker really ever demonstrated with the rigor we require (and still never achieve) today on the topic of which created which, thinking the world, or the world thinking. Let’s instead behold Marx acknowledging some real dialectical contributions by Hegel, “The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of motion [ihre allgemeinen Bewegungsformen] in a comprehensive and conscious manner” (MECW 35: 19; translation modified, Das Kapital: 27). See how Marx’s tack has changed? In other words, while he says he wants the “direct opposite” of Hegel’s dialectic, he won’t say he wants the total “opposite” of Hegel’s ideas about motion, which just happens to be quite a significant component of the Hegelian dialectic. Marx simply wants no direct opposite of motion. For that would mean he thinks the world is “at rest, ” or that stasis is what explains the operation of capital on a scale one could rightly call “dialectical. ”3 When he says that Hegel is “the first to present [the dialectic’s] . . . general form of motion, ” he is making a strong claim, as strong as the one Hegel himself made when clarifying what makes the dialectic dialectical (Dialektische): “to properly understand and recognize the dialectical is of the highest importance. It is in general the principle of all movement [Bewegung], of all life, and of all activity in actuality [Wirklichkeit]” (1991: 128–9).4 So crucial is this dialectical (Hegelian) understanding of motion to Marx’s analyzis of capitalism that Marx returns to it in the final paragraph of his 1873 Afterword; “The contradictory movement [Bewegung] of capitalist society is most strikingly felt by the practical bourgeois in the vicissitudes of the periodic cycle” (my translation of 1988a: 28). Marx can see the dialectical movement of capitalism, whereas “the practical bourgeois” cannot. Analogies between Hegelianism and the bourgeoisie—and one hastens to recall that Marx and Engels are prepared to strike these analogies with reference to Hegelians, but not necessarily or always to Hegel—are sometimes fun but in the end they are facile, often times simply attempts to obscure or deny Marx’s Hegelianism, rather than understand it. Chief among the culprits here is Louis Athusser whose reading of Hegel

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and Marx in Reading Capital and elsewhere can be described as an exercise in bad faith, simply “playing at being” (Sartre, 101) the anti-Hegelian—this from a scholar who, in fact, wrote his masters thesis on Hegel and should know better than to make of Hegel what he’s not. Fact is, Marx and Engels had a special love for Hegel, stating that his ideas were always better than those of the Hegelians and admitting, left and right, what they learned from Hegel. For example, in the Holy Family, Marx avers that “it goes without saying that whereas Hegel’s Phänomenologie, in spite of its speculative original sin, gives in many instances the elements of a true description of human relations, Herr Bruno and Co., on the other hand, provide only an empty caricature” (MECW 4: 193). If both Marx and Engels could supposedly correct Hegel by inverting his dialectic, the same could not be said of Hegelians: as Engels puts it: “For, although Hegel’s speculative construction still made some sense, even if it is turned upside-down, that of the postHegelian system manufacturers no longer makes any sense at all” (MECW 4: 642).5 On this question of Hegelians—if we can digress for a moment—we may observe that the whole enterprise of Hegelianism, from the 1840s on, was to invert Hegel, so as to prioritize different parts of his philosophical system. Granted, it’s stupid to sort people into categories, but we can be forgiven for citing the common classification of Right or Old Hegelians, comprised of folks few scholars today remember, apart from Heinrich Hotho who edited Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, and their counterparts, the Left or Young Hegelians, who are more well-known, like Bruno and Edgar Bauer, August von Cieszkowski, Ludwig Feuerbach, Carl Nauwerck, Arnold Ruge, Karl Schmidt, Max Stirner, David Strauss and one other, Karl Marx himself. To a person—Old and Young or Right and Left—Hegel’s early reception among this crowd had almost everything to do with religion, and especially the place of religion in relation to philosophy, art and society writ large. You see, Hegel in the final sequence of the Phenomenology of Spirit had described the progression of consciousness from art, to religion, to philosophy, whereby the former two modes were philosophy by other means until philosophy itself entered the scene as a properly conceptual mode of thinking, whose intent is to supplant art and religion as ideations mired in sensuousness, symbolism or images (Vorstellung). This was a controversial view, and the so-called Right Hegelians sought to challenge it, or better, invert it by making religion, not philosophy, the ultimate mode by which humans actualize and govern themselves. The Left Hegelians obviously thought differently about religion. As noted, Marx was one of them. Recall his oft-cited view that religion is the “opium of the people. To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness” (MECW 3: 175–6). Yet Marx borrowed heavily from an important and influential Left Hegelian several years his senior, Feuerbach, who said that all we must do is “invert speculative philosophy and we have the unconcealed, pure, bright truth” (1983: 157).6 In other words, you can find the motif of demystification that would come to define Marxist analyzis—only in Feuerbach do we strip away the illusions to behold real, sensuous embodied human beings (1986: 51, 52, 67, 70) rather than, as in Marx, the material conditions in which all such beings are “free” to labor for a wage under capital. Yet Marx never totally broke from the Feuerbachian frame. We recall that in his 1873 Afterword to the second German edition, he speaks of Hegel’s dialectic as “mysticism”—he speaks of the “mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands”

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(MECW 35: 19). This is a view that Marx long held, and it’s more clearly expressed and practiced in his earlier critique (from 1843/44) of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:7 This is the enigma of mysticism. The same fantastic abstraction, which rediscovers state consciousness in the inadequate form of the bureaucracy, a hierarchy of knowledge, and which uncritically accepts this inadequate existent as the real existent and as fully valid, this same mystical abstraction just as candidly avows that the real, empirical state spirit, public consciousness, is a mere pot-pourri of “thoughts and opinions of the many. ” As it imputes to the bureaucracy an alien essence, so it leaves for the true essence the inadequate form of appearance. Hegel idealizes the bureaucracy, and empiricizes public consciousness. He can treat actual public consciousness as very special precisely because he has treated the special consciousness as the public consciousness. MECW 3: 60–1

This is a representative passage in terms of Marx’s criticism of Hegel, and it’s also a better, more helpful passage than the one we find in the 1873 Afterword. Here is Marx’s criticism of Hegel: Hegel starts with what’s before him—in this case the actually existing institutions of state—but then abstracts them in order to derive a more perfect version of these so-called “state consciousness, ” only then to re-materialize them once more to say that the real institutions are inadequate examples of the idealized versions, or “the inadequate form of the bureaucracy” that Hegel had abstracted. All the while, as Marx says, Hegel dismissed “the real, empirical state spirit, public consciousness, ” not as the stuff of spirit, but merely “thoughts and opinions. ” So we see that Hegel, according to Marx, starts in the right place with existing institutional and material conditions, but performs the wrong dialectical abstraction. Thus, the problem here is not about starting points after all. It’s not about the way, say, one dialectician begins with ideas and another with material realities. Rather, the problem goes to precisely how either Marx or Hegel abstracts from the same material reality, the same hard facticity, that both of them are beholding, though let’s always remember that Hegel, having never traveled to England, was looking upon feudalism and agrarian production, while Marx was looking at industrial capitalism at its birth place. It is in this sense that their objects of analyzis are decidedly different from the start, and so it’s ridiculous to criticize Hegel as if he were a bad Marxist.8 In short, then, from Marx’s perspective, Hegel uses the right dialectic method, starts in the right place with respect to existing institutional and material conditions, performs the right dialectical abstraction insofar as there must be a moment of abstraction, but presents his findings in prose in the wrong way. It’s a problem of writing, of presentation or Darstellung, and of criticism.9 We arrive now at the final conceit in Marx’s 1873 Afterword, and it is another wellknown remark about Hegel’s dialectic: “With him [the dialectic] is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. ” There are two things you can do with this passage. On the one hand, you could puzzle the image and ask what it means to turn a dialectic this way or that, when the dialectic itself does this anyway already. You could also wonder why Marx wants us to visualize a personification at all, giving the dialectic a head and legs as if it

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were becoming a commodity, imbued with “mystical character, ” like the table that “stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas” (MECW 35: 82). It’s supposed to be funny, this motif. It even recalls a quip Marx made about Georg von Vincke, who in agreement with the rightwing Prussian general Joseph Maria von Radowitz, “stood on his head and signaled his applause with his legs, to the delight of the whole gallery” (MECW 17: 253). On the other hand, reading the image in this way will get you only so far, primarily because the image, the metaphor, is not about Hegel in a straightforward way. Which is to say, it is about Hegel because Hegel himself authored the image! In the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel tells us what it means to learn a complex philosophical science too hastily: When natural consciousness entrusts itself straightway to Science, it makes an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk on its head, too, just this once; the compulsion to assume this unwonted posture and to go about in it is a violence it is expected to do to itself, all unprepared and seemingly without necessity. Let Science be in its own self what it may, relatively to immediate self-consciousness it presents itself in an inverted posture. 1977: 15

Hegel here muses about drawing together the disparate ends of natural, everyday consciousness, on the one hand, and the philosophical sciences on the other. This isn’t easy to do, as any reader of this companion knows. Hegel states, several sentences earlier, that “Science on its part requires that self-consciousness should have raised itself into this Aether [of ‘Pure self-recognition in absolute otherness’] in order to be able to live, and (actually) live, with Science and in Science. ” True enough; we should require a minimum amount of mental effort from those wishing to learn philosophy on the path to discovering how “Pure self-recognition . . . is the ground and soil of Science or knowledge in general” (1977: 14). Yet the student, here figured as selfconsciousness, “has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him the standpoint within himself. ” Fair enough, a ladder from the soil to the aether could come in handy, no doubt; but the problem begins when the learner assumes that an “inverted posture” (15) is all that’s needed to climb and do philosophy—that all that’s needed is to raise your feet to the aether and call it your ground because that’s where you find your feet. Hegel is so insistent on this point that he repeats it in his Philosophy of Nature, where he says that the “philosophical way of putting the facts is no mere whim, once in a way to walk on one’s head for a change, after having walked for a long while on one’s legs, or once in a way to see our everyday face bedaubed with paint” (1970: 10). This is the philosophical and, I’d add, dialectical mistake: taking the air for the ground, the real for the ideal, the bone for spirit, and so forth. It’s exactly the mistake Marx is trying to point out in Hegel, but Hegel has already pre-empted Marx in the criticism, cancelling it ahead of time. Engels, at least, understood Hegel’s gist with this image (see MECW 25: 16 and 591; cf. 16.474).

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Hegel already understands that a simple inversion, this “unwonted posture” to “walk on its head, ” will get consciousness nowhere. Because the “soil” is the metaphor for “sense-certainty, ” the name of the very first chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and is indeed the word for all that’s physically immediate, all that’s before us as things, persons, circumstances and what have you; and given that the aether is the metaphor for the philosophical point of view on them, we know we are talking about abstraction, which is the movement from spontaneous “everyday” consciousness to philosophy. This scene, this moment of sense-certainty, is, in other words, nothing but a lesson in how carefully one should perform abstraction when faced with immediacy, how delicately one should go about finding meaning in things. It’s a lesson that the world before us is not only a problem, in the sense that nothing is ever obvious or patently meaningful, but it is also a starting point that is difficult, precisely because it is immediate and obvious: what’s given, the object or gegenstand that stands-against it. We can have all sorts of theses about mind and matter, thought and world, which has priority, which is a reflection of the other, but we can never get around the difficulties already encoded there, in appearances themselves. This is, I suggest, where Marx’s real problem lies, and he instead transforms it into a problem with Hegel. On some level it is a problem about Hegel, in the sense that Hegel identified it as a problem that Marx learned he couldn’t solve so easily, which is one of the main purposes of his writing the 1873 Afterword in the first place: to clarify his method, to admit to his dialectical Hegelianism (with the requisite caviling) and to state his intentions in writing Capital and thinking about the logic of capital, in the way he did. We should therefore put great weight on a single sentence in the 1873 Afterword: “I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him” (MECW 35: 19). Here and there? More like everywhere. Marx isn’t flirting with Hegel so much as with his readers in making that very coy claim. The truth is there’d be no Marx without Hegel—and Marx knew it.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5

As Hegel says of Kant: “In modern times it has mainly been Kant who reminded people of the dialectic again and reinstated it in its place of honour” (1991: 129–30). For a great reading of this image, see Kofman 1998. Restricting his frame of reference, Marx can, however, say “That which in the laborer appeared as movement, now appears in the product as a fixed quality without motion”; “While the laborer is at work, his labor constantly undergoes a transformation: from being motion, it becomes an object without motion” (35: 191, 199). Trans. modified; “Das Dialektische gehörig aufzufassen und zu erkennen ist von der höchsten Wichtigkeit. Es ist dasselbe überhaupt das Prinzip aller Bewegung, alles Lebens und aller Betätigung in der Wirklichkeit” (Werke in zwanzig Bänden: TheorieWerkausgabe [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970], 8.173). Every now and then, you’ll find an exception, as when Marx says that Eugen Dühring “makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of ideas, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere before the world, from eternity—just like a Hegel” (MECW 25: 35).

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx “Spinoza is the originator of speculative philosophy, Schelling its restorer, Hegel its perfector” (Feuerbach 156). See Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right makes clear, “What ought to be the starting point becomes a mystical outcome, and what ought to be the rational outcome becomes a mystical starting point” (MECW 3: 40, my emphasis; see 3: 87, 427). Marx offers a compressed explanation, in this instance, “Hegel is not to be blamed for depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but for presenting that which is as the nature of the state. That the rational is actual is proved precisely in the contradiction of irrational actuality, which everywhere is the contrary of what it asserts, and asserts the contrary of what it is” (MECW 3: 63). I think Marx is digging a hole here. He too has an “idea” about what the “state” is, either naturally, or in relation to capital. The point is it’s not as if Marx’s criticism of Hegel here renders the problem of appearances any easier, or Marx’s dialectic any different at the moment it abstracts its chosen object, whatever the object is. See Marx’s salty passage on the purpose of criticism, which begins “War on the German conditions!” (MECW 3: 17).

References Althusser, L. et al. (2016), Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. B. Brewster and D. Fernbach, New York, Verso. Bukharin, N. (2005), Philosophical Arabesques, trans. R. Clarke, New York: Monthly Review Press. Cole, A. (2014), The Birth of Theory, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Engels, F. (1987), Dialectics of Nature, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25, New York: International Publishers. Erasmus (2000), Hyperaspites, in Collected Works of Erasmus: Controversies, Vol. 77, ed. C. Trinkhaus and trans. C. H. Miller, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Feuerbach, L. (1983), “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy, ” in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. L.S. Stepelevich, New York, Cambridge University Press, 156–71. Feuerbach, L. (1986), Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. M. Vogel, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Hegel, G.F.W. (1956), The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York: Dover Publications. Hegel, G.F.W. (1970), Philosophy of Nature, trans, A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G.F.W. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G.F.W. (1991), The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris, Indianapolis: Hackett. Hegel, G.W.F. (2015), The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. G. di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kofman, S. (1998), Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, trans. W. Straw, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lenin, V.I. (1961), Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works, Vol. 38, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

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Marx, K. (1975), Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1975), Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, (New York, NY: International Publisher. Marx, K. (1975), The German Ideology, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1981) Herr Vogt, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 17, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1983), “Marx to Engels. 16 January 1858, ” Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40, New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1987), Anti-Dühring, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1988), “Letter to Joseph Dietzgen, 9 May 1868, ” Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 43, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1996), Capital, Vol. I, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1998), Capital, Vol. III , Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 37, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1998a), Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Band 1, Berlin: Dietz. Marx, K. (1983), “Marx to Engels. 16 January 1858, ” Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40, New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1975), “The Holy Family, ” Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, New York, NY: International Publishers. Plekhanov, G. (1929), “Dialectic and Logic, ” in Fundamental Problems of Marxism, ed. D. Ryazanov and trans. E. Paul and C. Paul, London: Martin Lawrence. Plotinus (1992), The Enneads, trans. S. Mackenna, Burdett, New York: Larson Publications. Sartre, J.P. (1984), Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. H.E. Barnes, New York: Washington Square Press. Uchida, H. (1988), Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, ed. T. Carver, New York: Routledge.

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Political Economy1 Radhika Desai

Marx and Political Economy Marx first turned to political economy when, having obtained his doctorate in jurisprudence, he began to edit the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842 and “found [himself] in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests” (Marx 1859/1970: 19). However, the consuming engagement that produced his key works only began with the defeat of the revolutions of 1848. They impressed on Marx and Engels the staying power of capitalism and the need to understand it comprehensively and fundamentally (Williams 1987). This realization coincided propitiously with Marx’s arrival in London, after successive expulsions from Germany and France for his political activities. The metropolis was a “convenient vantage point for the observation of bourgeois society, ” then entering its mid-century burst of expansion. It was also home to the British Museum, which housed an “enormous amount of material relating to the history of political economy” (Marx 1959/1970: 22). Understanding the political economy of Marx’s time—the intellectual paths it had cleared towards understanding the “anatomy of civil society” (Marx 1859/1970: 20), the questions it resolved and those it still struggled with—is critical to understanding Marx’s unmatched analyzis of capitalism for at least two reasons. First, Marx analyzed capitalism, as the subtitle of Capital indicates, through a critique of political economy. Critique, as Marx practiced it, involved acknowledging political economy’s advances, noting its confusions and limitations, and explaining them against their historical context and intellectual resources. This effectively made Marx one of the greatest chroniclers of political economy. For example, the surfeit of footnotes to Capital, Vol. I, which are often lengthier than the page’s text, testify to his labyrinthine engagement. In them, Marx was not only scrupulous in attributing his ideas to major, minor and even anonymous writers, but also continued his spirited intellectual duels with them, often drawing blood with a tongue and wit sharper than any sabre. Contrary to the widespread impression that Marx disdained “bourgeois” political economy, he saw himself as carrying forward the work of “investigat[ing] the real internal framework [Zusammenhang] of bourgeois relations of production” (Marx 1867/1977: 174–5n) that earlier political economists had begun. That is why understanding Marx requires understanding, on the one hand, precisely how and why political economy came far 199

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closer to the analyzis Marx developed than most appreciate, but on the other hand, also failed to adequately address capitalism’s core questions of value, surplus value and money. Such an assessment would not have required the labor of recovery I am undertaking here had it not been for the intellectual counterrevolution that came to stand between Marx and political economy. The second reason for understanding the political economy of Marx’s time is to grasp the size of the obstacle to understanding that this counterrevolution produced. Within a few years of the publication of Capital, the marginalist revolution gave birth to neoclassical economics. It was directed at the emerging socialist challenges, both intellectual and political, and Marx’s ideas combined the two, having prevailed over various post-Ricardian socialist currents to become the theoretical banner under which the rising working classes of continental Europe began to organize. Though initially tangled in formative struggles with other prevailing traditions, such as the German historical school, and then overshadowed by Keynes, over recent decades neoclassical economics has held a sway over our understanding of capitalism that has been, if not undisputed, at least tenacious. But in the intervening century-and-a-half, it has estranged generations from accessing either political economy or Marx and the critical perspectives they offer on capitalism. For neoclassical economics is, and is designed to be, antithetical to both, distiling precisely the currents that, as we shall see below, Marx derided as “vulgar economics” (Desai 2010, 2016, 2017). Even though political economy failed to penetrate the nature and dynamics of value entirely, like Marx, it considered value to be capitalism’s chief regulator, rooted in labor, distinct from price and independent of—though not unaffected by—supply and demand. By contrast, neoclassical economics replaced value with subjective individual utility and price, whose magnitude was determined by the contingent fluctuations of supply and demand alone. In asking how value was distributed among the major classes, political economy connected the capitalist economy to its social and political setting. Marx went further to ask why and how the social product took the form of value at all—why and how could societies that once produced specific useful goods such as grain or clothing become societies that produced value in the forms of interchangeable goods, and what was its social meaning? In so doing, capitalism became rooted even more firmly in society. Neoclassical economics was, by contrast, founded on the premise of a separation of economy from society and state. This autonomous economy of markets was deemed to determine all prices, including those of labor, land, money and capital through its own dynamics, unconnected with society and politics. Most fundamentally, perhaps, neoclassical economics forsook the study of capitalism as a historically specific and crisis-prone form of social production and posited instead a perfectly self-regulating market order that could exist anywhere and at any time as a “system of provision of human needs” (Clarke 1991: 9). While this conception may have contributed to devising forms of socialism and welfarism (Meek 1972; Blackburn 1991), it could only fail to truly comprehend a form of social production that was the farthest thing in human history from a system of adequately providing for human needs. Inevitably, to generations inured to such theoretical and methodological frameworks, Marx’s political economy could appear alien, even incomprehensible; and when political

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economy is folded into a “Whig” history of economic thought (Freeman, Chick and Kayatekin 2014), in which political economy appears, against all evidence, as a mere anticipation of neoclassical economics, prospects of understanding Marx and his relation to political economy fade even further. The majority of Marxists did not react by defending the distinctive traditions of political economy and Marx against the neoclassical onslaught, but by founding a “Marxist economics, ” making matters worse. The work of neoclassical trained economists arrived late to Marxism, the mainstream of this discipline focuses on trying to fit Marx into a neoclassical theoretical and methodological framework that is antithetical to his ideas (Desai 2010, 2016, 2017). While the effort is bound to be in vain, it is not without its consequences. In the process, Marxist economists have alleged that Marx failed to solve the so-called “transformation problem” of transforming values into prices, when no one reading Marx would imagine they needed such transformation (Marx 1867/1977: 196; see also Freeman and Carchedi 1996 and Kliman 2007). They claim that Marx did not believe limited demand was a problem for capitalism, despite his prominent rejection of Say’s Law and insistence that “The ultimate reason for all real crises remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses” (Marx 1894/1981: 615). They contested his view that profits tended to fall, not mindful of his thorough discussion of it (Marx 1894/1981: 317ff ). Much contemporary Marxist economics is an endless brooding over problems of its own making—major exceptions include Mandel and Freeman 1984, Freeman, Kliman and Wells 2004, Kliman 2007. We must penetrate its occluding fog to place Marx in the political economy of his time.

Political Economy: Classical and Vulgar Historical materialist that he was, Marx could scarcely refrain from subjecting political economy to that method “[T]he development of the capitalist mode of production . . . and . . . the construction . . . of modern bourgeois society” formed the “living soil from which political economy springs” (Marx 1867/1977: 95). He coined the term “classical political economy” to refer to “all economists who, since the time of W. Petty, have investigated the real internal framework [Zusammenhang] of bourgeois relations of production. ” This included making, as Ricardo—classical political economy’s “last great representative”—did, “the antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting point of his investigations. ” However, Marx went on to clarify that “insofar as political economy is bourgeois, i.e. insofar as it views the capitalist order as the absolute and ultimate form of social production . . . it can only remain a science while the class struggle remains latent” (Marx 1867/1977: 96). Bourgeois political economy was scientific only so long as “large-scale industry itself was only just emerging from its childhood, ” and “the class struggle between capital and labor was forced into the background, politically, by the discord between governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance, assembled in one camp, and the mass of the people, led by the bourgeoisie, in the other camp, and economically by the quarrel between industrial capital and aristocratic landed property” (Marx 1867/1977: 174–5n).

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The mid-nineteenth century political victory of the capitalist classes, which marked the maturation of capitalism and the outbreak of class struggles between capitalists and workers, “sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economics. ” “In place of disinterested inquirers there stepped hired prizefighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics. ” This was “vulgar economy, ” and Marx reserved his most acerbic invective for it. Vulgar economists “only flounder”: within the apparent framework of [bourgeois] relations, ceaselessly ruminate on the materials long since provided by scientific political economy, and seek there plausible explanations of the crudest phenomena for the domestic purposes of the bourgeoisie. Apart from this, vulgar economists confine themselves to systematizing in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is to them the best possible one. Marx 1867/1977: 175n

The best bourgeois political economy was now a “shallow syncretism” of the sort carried out by John Stuart Mill, attempting to “reconcile the irreconcilable, ” as Marshall would also later attempt (all quotations in this paragraph are from Marx 1867/1977: 96–98 and 174–5n). Sharpening class struggle inevitably took intellectual forms, and new divisions rent political economy. Against bourgeois “vulgar economy, ” Ricardo’s frank assessment of class antagonisms became the theoretical weapons of the Ricardian socialists. This explains two other features that run through Marx’s critique of political economy: a careful recovery of the insights of the Ricardian socialists and an attack on the inanities of vulgar economy.

Capitalism as a Historical Mode of Production Marx’s two great discoveries, Engels declared in his graveside oration, were the historical materialist method and capitalism’s “special laws of motion. ” So we begin with the former. By the eighteenth century, Ronald Meek (1976) showed that the experience of accelerating material improvement combined with encounters with other, less developed, societies—particularly, native American—led many thinkers to develop theories of a succession of distinct stages of history, each with its own distinctive organization of social production. Adam Smith’s conception of the Hunting, Pastoral, Agricultural and Commercial stages was typical. Meek argues further that political economy “arose out of the four stages theory. ” Schemes of “socio-economic progression . . . started with an [native] American-type society and ended with the ‘commercial system’ of contemporary Europe. ” The progenitors of these schemes then “spent the rest of their lives making a sustained economic analyzis of the working of this commercial system” (Meek 1976: 219), and these analyzes would constitute political economy. So in moving—as recorded in the famous 1859 preface—from outlining a materialist conception of history—complete with distinct historical

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stages—to an analyzis of the “laws of motion” of the capitalist mode of production, Marx was treading a path also taken by many others, including Smith and the French pioneer of political economy, Turgot. Given that Marx’s conception of history is often reviled as “stagist” and “economically determinist, ” it may surprise many to learn that these labels described these early thinkers more aptly than Marx. They originally proposed universal historical stages and quite naturally defined them materially given that the progress they sought to explain was, above all, material progress. John Millar, the Scottish philosopher, believed, for instance, that economic progress “will be productive of suitable variations in [mankind’s] taste and sentiments” and that the various stages of this progress “are usually accompanied with peculiar laws and customs. ” Indeed, he considered this the “masterprinciple, ” enabling him to penetrate “beneath that common surface of events which occupies the details of the vulgar historian” (quoted in Meek 1976: 164). Marx’s contribution was to disrupt this universal stagism and to inject its still relatively crude materialism with Hegelian dialectical sophistication, and—as is clear from the fragment of the Grundrisse that was published as Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations—greater historical erudition. It included the burgeoning corpus of historical and ethnographic knowledge that a spreading imperialism was making available: his knowledge of the economy, society, culture and politics of antiquity, and his penetrating analyzis of capitalism. He linked the organization of material life more intricately with the legal and property structures of the social formations of the past than any other writer before him. He explored the tensions and contradictions in these structures that accounted for the historical dynamic that drove change. Finally, Marx’s understanding of capital as a relation between those who appropriated land and productive resources, and those relieved of them, transformed the problematic of his understanding of history. The resulting exploration of history and its stages defied any neat succession of historical stages. Instead of a single historical succession leading from the primitive social forms to commercial or capitalist society that might be applicable to all societies, Marx spoke of various routes—antiquity, feudalism, the Asiatic and Germanic—out of “the original unity of a specific form of (tribal) community and the property in nature connected with it” (Hobsbawm 1964: 36 quoting Marx). These routes constituted class societies of various degrees and forms of social oppression and exploitation in different parts of the world; it also opened up new possibilities for understanding the variety of social formations around the world, laying the historical materialist foundation for questioning Eurocentrism, contrary to many who, in recent decades, have taken to accusing Marx of it. Moreover, positing this original unity of humanity and nature brought out the historical specificity of capitalism more clearly than ever before; the objective conditions of existence of capitalism are created, Marx says, in the opening paragraphs of this section of the Grundrisse, by: the separation of free labor from the objective conditions of its realization . . . of the worker from the soil as his natural workshop . . . hence dissolution of small, free landed property as well as of communal landownership resting on the oriental commune [where] the worker relates to the objective conditions of his labor as to

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his property [and] individuals relate not as workers but as proprietors—and members of a community, who, at the same time, work. The aim of this work is not the creation of value . . . rather, its aim is sustenance of the individual proprietor and of his family, as well as of the total community. The positing of the individual as a worker, in this nakedness, is itself a product of history. Marx 1858/1973: 471–2

Consider what is happening here: Marx is turning the tables on the conventional Enlightenment narrative about capitalism, one in which it is as natural a social form as you could get, the polar opposite of the artifices of feudalism. In fact, Marx is saying, capitalism is the most unnatural of social forms. A long and tortuous history has to unfold before the member of a community who works is stripped of the ancient dignities and natural rights that come with communal labor and reduced to the “nakedness” of a mere worker. Artifice has to be heaped on artifice before humans are ripped from their original unity with the earth and thus with their sustenance—akin to a child taken from its mother’s breast. This historical process varies from region to region. A set of long, various and winding historical paths lead away from these natural and communal social forms, through various, more and less, oppressive social forms, to capitalism. In these transitional forms, workers “still belong among the objective conditions of production and are appropriated as such. ” Only under capitalism are they so radically separated from the means of their production and sustenance. What has to happen, Marx is essentially asking, before such an unnatural mode of production can establish itself? This is the question that governs Marx’s extensive investigations of pre-capitalist social formations, rather than any urge to codify. It was the radicalism of this question that led Marx to re-define Smith’s problematic on the origin of capitalism. Instead of Smith’s moralistic tale of an original accumulation based on thrift and saving of individuals, Marx outlined the “actual history” of expropriation; of “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force,” which is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (Marx 1867/1977: 874–5) in the justly famous Part 8 of Capital. It also established that capitalism did not amount to a hoard of money, but was instead a social relation. Just what manner of social relation and how utterly different it was from anything that preceded it, is what we turn to next.

Civil Society . . . Capitalist societies function by authorizing the appropriators of the means of production to employ those expropriated in production for profit. By giving this authorization, the capitalist state creates an apparently separate sphere of civil society, which (is allowed to) operate(s) (relatively) independently of it. The resulting social formation appeared to its earliest observers to have, unlike all previously known social forms, its own laws independent of human will and intention—laws that had to be discovered—and political economy set out to do precisely that. Civil society was clearly capable of expanding production and extracting surplus; it was also prone to crises and dislocations. How did these things happen?

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Among the first laws, already noted by that early pioneer, William Petty, was that privately organized production coordinated through the market led to growing division of labor, both within productive units and in society. For political economy’s first great systematizer, Adam Smith, the division of labor was the foundation of the growing wealth of nations. However, amid growing division of labor, what would ensure its unity? With self-interest governing private action, what would ensure that private interests and activities were coordinated meaningfully and beneficially at the social level? Was coordination by the market enough? Some supposed a spontaneous harmony of interests, typically in paradoxical form. Kant spoke of “unsocial sociability” (Kant 1991); Mandeville scandalously proposed that human vices turn out to work for the public good; while Adam Smith proposed, with more equanimity, that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (Smith 1776, 1976). However, spontaneous harmony was not much in evidence. With repeated gluts and crises practically manifesting the difficulty of harmonization, this line of thinking could only go into denial. Jean Baptiste Say proposed his “law, ” denying the possibility of gluts, and thus disharmony, by assuming a barter economy; since goods exchanged for goods, where was the glut? Those who did not assume any spontaneous harmonization included reformers and conservatives. Reformers proposed general ways of achieving harmonization through legislation and government action, as did—each in his own way—Hegel and Bentham, or, as Sismondi did, by recommending state action to increase wages to address the problem of gluts. Such social reform involved what Elie Halevy called the “artificial identification of interests” (Halevy 1955: 513–4). Conservative solutions, by contrast, entrenched the existing social order. Domestically, they included Malthus’s idea of avoiding gluts of commodities and capital by increasing the luxury consumption of the rich. However, by far the more historically weighty of these conservative solutions was internationalism, and this gave capitalism, which had originally developed in the northwest corner of Europe, its legendary planetary reach.

. . . and its Volatile Expansionism Many, including Malthus, called for colonization to create outlets for surplus commodities, capital and labor. It is widely believed that these calls represented a new departure in political economy, which had set its face against colonialism since Smith. Matters are, in fact, considerably more complicated. Smith certainly criticized colonial conquest and targeted the “mercantilists”—a wide variety of writers from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries who advocated policies for increasing national power and wealth through colonies, long distance trade and a “favorable balance of trade, ” and who allegedly considered wealth to consist in the inflows of bullion that resulted (but see Wiles 1987 and Keynes 1936). Like the Physiocrats—the French school of political economy known for its advocacy of landed interests—Smith privileged production over trade, although, unlike them, he did not consider agriculture the only productive activity. Smith believed that the general

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expansion of the domestic division of labor (including trade and manufacture), was the source of wealth. However, Smith was no doctrinaire advocate of free markets and free trade: he was deeply concerned about the effects of markets on individuals and society (Gocmen 2007), and focused on increasing in the wealth of nations, justifying protection, for instance, on several grounds: national defense, threats of unemployment and retaliation against protection elsewhere (1776/1976: 489–91). Since the Wealth of Nations, written amid the revolt of the American colonies, it had become fashionable to argue against colonies; they diverted capital to less profitable longdistance trade; they tied trade to themselves while cheaper goods could be had elsewhere; and they supported production elsewhere (Semmel 1993: 19–20). Such arguments did not, however, prevent Britain from presiding over a substantial and growing empire—as Gallagher and Robinson (1953) showed—settler and non-settler, formal and informal, even after the loss of the American colonies. So, such “anti-imperialist” opinion merely gave an air of insouciance to empire while an acceptance of and even thirst for it pervaded political economy circles, as well as those of practical politics and policy. Even Smith couldn’t deny that long-distance trade attracted many investors, and colonies provided necessary markets. His arguments against colonies assumed that “a mutually profitable and harmonious trade between the less developed former colonies and their previous imperial masters” would continue after independence (Semmel 1993: 20). Say’s Law reinforced this current; by denying gluts, it disguised the tendencies that made foreign trade capitalism’s “specific product” through “its need for an ever extended market” (Marx 1894/1981: 344), and colonies were a surefire way of securing that market. Ricardo accepted Say’s Law and added the ballast of his law of “comparative advantage” to better hold up its conceptually creaky structure. While the mercantilists had openly acknowledged that foreign trade advantaged the more developed mother country, Ricardo’s conception of comparative advantage denied precisely this, claiming that foreign trade was mutually beneficial. Political economy could now discount the reality of empire and of Britain’s superior competitive position. Many argued that trade, being mutually beneficial, would become even more extensive with decolonization. They even advocated forsaking colonies. All this entrenched the idea that the nineteenth century was one of free trade rather than imperialism, and so powerfully that it was not dislodged until Gallagher and Robinson’s classic 1953 article demonstrating the continued and vigorous expansion of the British Empire throughout the century. The effect of foreign trade on poor, less developed, weak or colonized societies could be devastating. In an important mid-eighteenth-century debate, Josiah Tucker clearly recognized this, while David Hume sought to argue, as Ricardo later would, that such integration would benefit rather than harm the less developed economy—though he was forced to acknowledge Tucker’s truths to a surprising extent. Tucker was clear that “operose, or complicated Manufactures are cheapest in rich countries;—and raw Materials in poor ones” because of the presence of greater skills, knowledge and capital in the more developed countries. Protection was the best course if “the rich are to be prevented from swallowing up the poor” and “the poor are stimulated and excited to emulate the rich” (quoted in Semmel 1993: 60–1). Inevitably, perhaps, in a Britain enjoying its moment of industrial supremacy, Tucker’s arguments became influential

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only to promote free trade as the policy best favoring Britain as the most competitive nation. It was up to those threatened by British productive power and its free trade policy to advocate protection and industrial policy, as Alexander Hamilton did in the United States in his 1790 Report on Manufactures and the German pioneer of industrial policy, and likewise Friedrich List in his 1841 National System of Political Economy. These policies, not free trade and free markets, account for the spread of productive power around the world (Desai 2013). Of course, formally or informally, colonized nations had no such recourse and their underdevelopment was the inevitable result. There would later be a third way of rejecting the idea of the spontaneous harmonization of interests; acknowledging that the harmonization of private interests at the social level was a problem endemic to capitalism and could not be solved within its horizons. This was the path taken by capitalism’s greatest nineteenth- and twentiethcentury critics, respectively Marx and Keynes. Keynes rested his case on his critique of neoclassical economics based on his observation of the “macro” dynamics of capitalism. He proposed a level of state action—the “socialization of investment” of the concluding chapter of the General Theory—that would leave capitalism unrecognizable as such (Desai 2009). Marx’s case was openly revolutionary, and it rested on the manner in which he developed classical political economy’s understanding of value, its increase and its distribution.

Value: The Unseen Regulator While political economy considered value—the ratio in which commodities exchanged for each other, what they were worth—to be objective, independent of individuals’ estimation of utility or desirability, it was also invisible and intangible. It regulated capitalist production, directing investment and apportioning profits and losses, much as gravity regulated the physical world. Value was not the price determined in markets, but rooted in something beyond them. It was not unvarying, but its variations were not the market gyrations of price. Value was also inversely related to wealth: the less valuable commodities became, the more plentiful they became, making societies wealthier. Within these parameters, however, many questions remained. How did commodities acquire value and what determined the magnitude of their value? The question of surplus was related; where did the addition clearly being made to social output each year come from? How was it distributed? How did parts of the social product come to maintain those, like the aristocrats, who produced little or nothing? The Physiocrats, who are remembered for having insisted on the centrality of production over trade in increasing wealth, believed that value was the bounty of the land. However, once manufacturing and industry became important and were clearly not “unproductive” or “sterile,” this belief could not be sustained. So, classical political economy returned to the older Scholastic idea that associated value with labor and production. The Scholastics’ conception of “just price”—a price mutually agreed or conventionally held to cover costs, effort and risk—was designed to be wielded against fraud, and recalled Aristotle’s distinction between legitimate “natural exchange”—to fulfill needs—and dubious exchange for gain—essentially “buying cheap and selling dear.”

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In the intervening mercantilist age, when the just price of goods coming from afar was hard to assess and prices were generally rising, the concept of value arising from labor briefly yielded to the idea of value arising from “intrinsic” value or utility whose magnitude was determined by supply and demand and was not distinguished from price. While this conception would re-appear in vulgar economy and neoclassical economics, at the time it failed to survive the transition to capitalism. Increasing competition between merchants and “the rise from the ranks for the producers themselves of a capitalist element, half-manufacturer, half-merchant” (Dobb 1963: 128–9) began to push the idea of value away from exchange and back towards production and labor. Goods certainly had to be useful to be desired and exchanged, but their value was different from and independent of any “intrinsic value” or utility they possessed. Thus it was that “the habit of thinking of ‘value’ in terms of producers’ cost . . . was later to prove itself one of the most influential legacies left by the Schoolmen [Scholastics]” (Meek 1973: 14). Labor was the source of value. This idea was certainly further underlined as capitalism developed. With the early development of capitalism needing an expanding labor force, and labor not being “freed”—driven off the land and separated from its means of its livelihood—fast enough, late-seventeenth-century literature “abound[ed] with suggestions for attracting foreigners to the country by encouraging immigration and permitting naturalization, for “setting the poor to work,” abolishing the death penalty for all but the most serious offences, and so on” (Meek 1973: 19–20). However, the general association of labor and the value of commodities—either because it increased their use value or because it was, according to Locke, for example, quantitatively more important than land as an input—was not yet a proper theory of value. For one thing, if individual labor was the measure it would have the absurd implication that the products of slower and incompetent workers were worth more. For another, it was clear that labor was already highly socialized. So a proper conception of value would have to relate the idea of labor as the source of value with the increasing socialization of production as the division of labor grew. Benjamin Franklin considered, “Trade in general [as] nothing else but the exchange of labor for labor, the value of all things is most justly measured by labor” (Franklin, Works, 1836 edition, Vol. II , p. 267, quoted in Meek 1973: 41); and more and more writers realized that “commodities produced for exchange consisted essentially of a mass of congealed or crystalized social effort” (Meek 1973: 41) and that “a commodity possessed exchange value simply because a part of the labor of society had been allocated to its production. It was not enough that labor should have been expended upon it; it was also necessary that this labour, as Marx was later to put it, should be ‘subordinate to the division of labour within society’ ” (Meek 1973: 41, quoting Marx 1865/1933: 30). Value was social; products of labour would only exchange for each other if they embodied labor considered well spent by the person who agreed to accept a commodity in exchange for their own. It was, in other words, socially-validated labor. Value was not, and could not be, a solipsistic idea. Those exchanging had to agree, tacitly at least, that what they were exchanging as equivalents contained (roughly) equal amounts of labor. This was a considerable advance toward Marx’s definition of value as socially necessary labor; “the labor time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and

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intensity of labor prevalent in that society” (Marx 1867/1977: 129). This keystone of Marx’s understanding of capitalism had, Marx scrupulously acknowledged, originated in “a remarkable anonymous pamphlet” which he dated to 1739 or 1740, “The value of [the necessaries of life] when they are exchanged the one for another, is regulated by the quantity of labor necessarily required and commonly taken in producing them” (Marx 1867/1977: 129n). It is debatable, however, whether this keen observer, later identified as William Pulteney, also understood the connection between exchange value and labor. When we read him saying that the price of commodities “is governed by the Labour imployed in producing them; and the Labour makes much the greatest part of such Price, for the Produce of Land in puris naturailus and uncultivated, is of small value” (Pulteney 1738/1882: 37), his conception does not appear to be vastly different from that of, say, Locke, in this respect. In any case, Pulteney’s step forward, occurring as it did in a pamphlet on interest, was sidelined from the main path of the development of political economy’s conception of value, which was connected, not to say tangled, with the question of distribution.

Distribution Before industry got into its stride, the Physiocrats and Petty equated the surplus—what was produced above cost—with rent. Only with the further development of capitalism were the various streams of income separated. Wages were separated from profits, initially as wages of “superintendence, ” when capitalists employed laborers, but also worked alongside them. With the emergence of England’s famous triadic system, in which landlords rented land to capitalist tenant farmers who, in turn, employed workers, the rent which accrued to the landlords could be distinguished from profits, which accrued to the capitalist tenant farmers. Eventually, the investment of money in production, which earned profits, came to be distinguished from its advance in the form of a loan (Meek 1973: 25–6), which earned interest. Moreover, it was observed that “profit at a reasonably regular rate would be earned on capital in whatever sphere it happened to be employed” (Meek 1973: 27), that is to say, a “normal rate of profit” was empirically discerned. So profit could no longer be considered a result of exchange, as Petty, Cantillon and Steuart had done. However, if value was rooted in labor, what accounted for its distribution to those other than laborers? Smith was unable to square this circle. His Wealth of Nations opened by affirming that value was rooted in labor, “The annual labour of each nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life” (Smith 1776/1976: 1) and “Labour . . . is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities” (Smith 1776/1976: 34). Smith even insisted that labor was a superior measure to money, its “never varying . . . ultimate and real standard” (Smith 1776/1976: 35). However, this idea soon petered out in the sands of a discussion on how money became the measure of value because “it is difficult to ascertain the proportion between two different kinds of labour. ” And when, in his very next chapter, it was time to reckon how value was measured, Smith now claimed that the idea that “quantities of labour” constitute the only determinant of exchange value—allowing for intensity, skill

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etc.—only applied to that “early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land. ” Once stock was accumulated, the laborer had to share his produce with its owner. And once land was appropriated, the laborer had to pay for the “licence” to use it (Smith 1776/1976: 56). In these circumstances, the value of commodities now became, for Smith, the sum of these “components, ” all of which had their “natural rates. ” Profits and wages were regulated partly by society’s “riches or poverty, their advancing stationary or declining condition; and partly by the particular nature of each employment” (Smith 1776/1976: 62). Rents depended on the society or neighborhood in which land was located and partly on the extent of its improvement. This move still left Smith short of either a convincing explanation or justification of the distribution of value to the various classes of society in the form of distinct streams of income—profits, wages, rent and interest. Why did profits, for instance, bear a “regular proportion to the capital” (Smith 1776/1976: 55)? A whiff of illegitimacy hung not only around rents—which Smith explicitly considered “reaping what was never sowed” (Smith 1776/1976: 56)—but also profits. While they were more than the “wages of inspection and direction, ” and a recompense to the capitalist for “hazarding” his stock, the capitalist set “to work industrious people . . . in order to make a profit by the sale of their work. ” Indeed, he “could have no interest to employ [laborers], unless he expected from the sale of their work, something more than what was sufficient to replace his stock to him; and he could have no interest to employ a great stock rather than a small one, unless his profits were to bear some proportion to the extent of his stock” (Smith 1776/1976: 54). Moreover, Smith then connected this new “components” conception of value with labor in an entirely novel fashion. Now value was the quantity of labor “which a commodity ought commonly to purchase, command, or exchange for” (Smith 1976: 55; emphasis added). Interestingly, the magnitude of this “commandable labor” exceeded the original conception of value, as labor was “employed” or “embodied” precisely by the amount of profit—including interest and rent—as surplus. The idea of value as commandable labor was tied to Smith’s claim that capitalists tended to invest the entirety of their proceeds, giving profits greater legitimacy than rents, which indulgent and wasteful landlords squandered in luxurious living. Smith also believed that such investment went entirely to purchase labor because all other outlays—on raw materials and instruments—were also products of labor. While this may have been true in some ultimate sense, and while it certainly provided good publicity for capitalism and capitalists as creators of jobs, it distracted Smith from considering the role of the means of production—what Marx called “constant capital” of varying degrees of durability— in increasing the “wealth of nations, ” despite his emphasis on the accumulation of stock (Marx 1867/1977: 736–8).

Biological Economy: The Real Dismal Science David Ricardo would return to the idea of value resting on the quantity of labor embodied in commodities, but under radically changed conditions that engendered a

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rather dismal outlook. Smith’s outlook had been fundamentally optimistic, looking forward to simultaneous increases in wealth, population and productivity (Smith 1776/1976: 97). However, as pointed out by the rather idiosyncratic but remarkably insightful twentieth-century radical (non-, but not anti-, Marxist) critic of capitalism, Karl Polanyi, by the early nineteenth century, the prospects for the mass of the people had darkened. For Malthus and Ricardo, rising wealth would go along with mass poverty, not mass prosperity. Polanyi attributed this change to the Speenhamland Law, in force from 1795 to 1834. It obliged English parishes to provide subsidies to all, employed or not, whose income fell below a locally determined minimum. While such measures prevented a free market in labor from emerging, along with the Combination Act 1799 that prevented unionization, they also depressed wages and morally enervated those on poor relief. While ongoing enclosures were pushing people off the land, Speenhamland was “depriving their labour of its market value” and “contemporaries were appalled at the seeming contradiction of an almost miraculous increase in production accompanied by a near starvation of the masses” (Polanyi 1944: 80). This was the context in which, Polanyi argued, Townsend’s fable of the dogs and the goats limiting each other’s populations introduced natural laws into the study of society. Malthus elaborated on Townsend, proposing not only that agriculture was subject to diminishing returns, but also that any increase in food production would simply lead to population growth eventually outstripping it. Now, “Malthus’ population law and the law of diminishing returns, as handled by Ricardo, made the fertility of man and soil constitutive elements of the new realm, the existence which has been uncovered. Economic society had emerged as distinct from the political state” (Polanyi 1944/1985: 115; emphasis added). It is possible that Polanyi exaggerated the pervasiveness and perverse effects of Speenhamland and discounted the role of poverty created by the agricultural downturn following the Napoleonic War (see Block and Somers 2014). However, he was not wrong about the shift in mood. It undergirded Ricardo’s much-admired intellectual candor.

Ricardo’s Antinomies Ricardo, the first great systematizer since Smith, had a distinct problematic. Smith had asked what accounted for the rise in the wealth of nations. His answer was accumulation and its policy implication was to remove obstacles to it. Ricardo, writing in the midst of the depression of the period following the Napoleonic war, asked what limited the pace of this accumulation. His answer was the rate of profit. For reasons described below, the policy implications of this answer centered not on distribution, but on production. Ricardo’s thinking developed in counterpoint to Malthus’s, with the two maintaining an extensive correspondence. With Malthus, Ricardo assumed that wages would not normally rise above subsistence. If they did, population would increase, pushing wages back down to their “natural price” (Ricardo 1951: 94) determined by the price of necessaries—at this time, chiefly food—Ricardo’s anticipation of Marx’s emphasis on the moral and cultural element in the determination of wage levels notwithstanding.

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What worried Ricardo was that this natural price was bound to rise in the prevailing circumstances. With the Corn Laws prohibiting grain imports, English agriculture had to resort to cultivating less and less fertile land to produce more food, raising its cost. The solution lay in the repeal of the Corn Laws so that the agriculture of the rest of the world could be mobilized to feed the English working class, lowering its wages and increasing profits. The repeal would also aid accumulation in another way. When less fertile land was cultivated, even slightly more fertile land would earn rent. Rising rents, being a deduction from profit most likely to be spent on unproductive consumption by an effectively idle class, would also curb accumulation. So the Corn Laws, in force since 1815, subjected profits to a pincer movement from rising rents as well as wages. In making this argument, Ricardo employed Malthus’s ideas about rent as well as wages. Where the two differed was that Malthus, a loyal defender of the privileges of the aristocracy, believed that the Corn Laws diminished the “quantity of accumulated capital compared with the demand for the products of capital, ” increasing profitability (Ricardo 1952: 111). In reply, Ricardo demonstrated his adherence to Say’s Law, arguing that demand “cannot augment, or long continue stationary with a diminishing capital” (Ricardo 1952: 133). The clear implication was that demand would rise and fall with investment, i.e. that supply would create its own demand. The impossibility of either demand or wages restricting profits set the parameters of Ricardo’s thinking on value and distribution. In his 1815 Essay on Profits, Ricardo had already rejected Smith’s “components” idea of value. For Ricardo and Malthus, values and prices—which they equated—rose with the greater difficulty of cultivation requiring the greater application of labor. This had several implications. First, rather than the cost of labor, as with Smith, it was the actual amount of labor time spent in production that became the arbiter of value. Ricardo had returned to the idea of quantities of labor in commodities determining their value. Secondly—and here lay the potentially revolutionary implication of Ricardo’s advance—contra Smith, neither the accumulation of capital nor the appropriation of land affected the determination of value on the basis of the amount of labor embodied. The distribution of value among social classes had no effect on its magnitude, no matter what time of history it was, whether “early and rude” or late and sophisticated. Value remained anchored to labor, profits were the surplus over cost, and rent and interest were deductions from profit. It was only a matter of time before Ricardian socialists would draw the conclusion that all incomes other than wages constituted unwarranted deductions from the value produced by labor. Ricardo is to be admired for tackling the politically charged question of distribution with intellectual courage, though summoning it was surely made easier by his assumption that the condition of the working classes could never rise much above subsistence, the moral and cultural element notwithstanding. This return to the idea of labor time as the basis of value was all the more salutary given that in the intervening years Bentham had re-introduced the idea of utility as the basis of value. Ricardo rejected it in terms very close to Marx, while accepting that utility was “absolutely essential” to value (Ricardo 1951:11) and that the theory of labor value applied only to those commodities the supply of which can be increased through labor (Ricardo 1951: 12).

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Ricardo was less successful, however, in demonstrating precisely how to sustain the idea that labor time determined the magnitude of value in societies where capital as well as labor was deployed in production, though “his deep-rooted feeling that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, embodied labor did, in some significant sense, constitute and regulate the “value” of a commodity” (Meek 1956: 119) made him persist in his attempts. He was gripped with confusion on a number of fronts, chiefly because he was unable to untangle the complex web of social relations that constituted value in analytically useful ways, and so proceed methodically (Marx 1968: 168–9). One of Ricardo’s best-known confusions was his inability to reconcile the observed prevalence of a general or uniform rate of profit and its implication that capital of equal size would produce commodities of equal value with the reality that they did not always seem to. The fact was that when equal two blocks of capital were divided between wages and means of production in unequal ratios—with one volume of capital spending more on labor than the other—they would necessarily yield either commodities of unequal values and (since Ricardo equated them) prices, or unequal rates of profit. Unraveling this knot required that, instead of assuming a general rate of profit as given, Ricardo should have asked “how far its existence is in any way consistent with the determination of value by labour time” (Marx 1951:212). Had he done so, “he would have found that instead of being consistent with it, prima facie, it contradicts it, and its existence has therefore to be explained through a number of intermediary stages” (Marx 1951: 212). It would have required understanding, first and foremost, that value and price are not always identical in magnitude—“The possibility . . . of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value . . . is inherent in the price-form itself ” (Marx 1867/1977: 196)—though they consist of the same substance, socially necessary labor. Second, Ricardo did not grasp that the general rate of profit is not a static fact but the result of a dynamic and often tumultuous process, one of “the leveling out of different rates of surplus value in different commodities produced by equal capitals” (Marx 1968: 198–99) as capital leaves sectors yielding low surplus value to those yielding higher surplus value, which, once capitalist development has reached a certain stage, are those with higher levels of investment in the means of production relative to labor. Such processes take time; over this time, the values of various commodities routinely diverge from their prices as the most competitive producers are able to produce at lower values, but are still able to charge the prevailing higher process rates. The resulting extra profit they make also makes rates of profit diverge from each other until enough capital enters the sector with higher profits to sharpen competition there and depress prices of products to their values and profits to their average rates. Marx would argue that Ricardo almost understood all this (Marx 1968: 197–8) but not well enough to proceed further in his analyzis. Moreover, to truly demonstrate that labor time determined value, Ricardo would have had to focus on the time—hours, days, weeks—spent on the production of a commodity, on the use of labor in production and on its independence from the amount labor cost, its value in the market. This was the distinction, first made in Wage Labour and Capital, which proved fundamental for all Marx’s later discoveries. It would be the use value of labor power in production—which lay in the fact that labor power was capable of producing more, often far more, than its own value—that would yield

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the additional value, the surplus value over the value of labor (and other inputs), that was the aim of all capitalist production. To see this, it was critical for political economy to distinguish clearly between use value and exchange value. That is why a chapter on commodities opens Capital, Vol. I. That is why Marx takes great pains to distinguish use value and exchange value in general and, because of its critical importance to tracing the source of surplus value in the use value of labour, concrete, use-value producing labor and abstract, value producing labor. It would also have required political economy to go beyond recognizing that the difficulty of production, the amount of labor expended, constituted the content of value, and then ask “the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product” (Marx 1867/1977: 173–4). Political economy left this to Marx, and it is Marx’s consciousness of carrying out this all-important task that is expressed in the famous section on the “Fetish character of commodities” that ends the opening chapter of Capital on commodities. This “secret” explained the antinomies of classical political economy and the illusions of vulgar economy that would presently become the illusions of the neoclassical economics, which has so dominated our (mis)understanding of the workings of capitalism. Ricardo left a conflicted legacy. By returning to the idea of value as embodied labor time, he shunted reflection on value back onto the main line that would lead to Marx (Marx 1951: 118). His unflinching honesty about distribution opened doors to socialist thinking. However, he also left two toxic legacies—Say’s Law and comparative advantage—which neoclassical economics would exploit to the hilt, even though both were rejected by Marx and Keynes. Marx rejected Say’s Law for spiriting away the role of money, which could be hoarded rather than spent, and held instead that the commodity—the basic building block of an economy in which private production was coordinated through the market—contained within it the germ of crisis precisely because it exchanged for money. Keynes followed Marx in this key respect, even using Marx’s distinction between the circuit of commodities (C-M-C) and the circuit of capital (M-C-Mʹ) as his starting point in early drafts of the General Theory (Sardoni 1997: 429–30). Ricardo could never see this because he considered money a commodity, or at least thought it should be. It was precisely because he held money to be a commodity ideal that he recommended returning to the gold standard after the Napoleonic Wars at a level of pre-war parity, the policy that led to the post-Napoleonic Depression. That ideal also led him to side with the Currency School in its controversy with the Banking School. Even when he was forced to concede that fiat money was necessary, he sought restrictions on its issue so as to make it function more like a commodity. Marx’s frontal critique on Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is as sketchy as his critique of Say’s Law is forceful. Early plans for Capital show that he planned to write about international trade and the world market (Nicolaus 1973: 53–54); these plans were never realized. However, Marx wrote extensively about poor countries, colonies and semi-colonies such as Ireland, India, China and Russia, and about nationalist economists such as List and Carey (Desai 2012), and made scattered remarks on Ricardo’s trade theory. From these writings we know that Marx understood

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the unequal exchange—more labor of poor countries being exchanged for less labor of the rich ones—that produced and maintained underdevelopment (Marx 1894/1981: 346), which had to be defied if a society’s productive powers were to develop (Desai 2013 and 2012). For his part, Keynes also came to promote “national self-sufficiency” as opposed to free trade (1933) as the implications of Britain’s declining competitive position became ever clearer to him (Desai forthcoming). Given how much neoclassical economics makes of them, it is all the more ironic that both Say’s Law and comparative advantage were actually tangential to Ricardo’s concerns. He accepted Say’s Law, largely because it permitted him to discount the issues of gluts and demand on which Malthus insisted and to focus instead on what he considered the chief obstacles to robust accumulation—landlords and rent. And, despite the widespread use of the law of comparative advantage to justify free trade down to our time, the importance of the concept for Ricardo was only “to support his theory of value or to demonstrate that his views on foreign trade are not foreign to it” (Marx 1972: 253). While Ricardo could not square the divergence of values and prices of products produced by different proportions of labor and the means of production, he understood clearly that they did diverge. At the international level, this translated into a frank recognition of unequal exchange. Just as with the introduction of capital into the equation, the same commodity produced with proportionately more and less labor would embody more and less value respectively, and sell at prices above the values of those embodying less labor, so at the international level commodities produced by more or less advanced forms of production, which were also less and more labor intensive forms of production, would also involve unequal amounts of labor, “The labour of 100 Englishmen cannot be given for that of 80 Englishmen, but the produce of the labour of 100 Englishmen may be given for the produce of the labour of 80 Portuguese, 60 Russians, or 120 East Indians” (Ricardo 1951: 135. See also Marx’s critique, Marx 1894/1981: 344–5). The clarity with which Ricardo could see the reality of unequal exchange counted for little to someone who was hardly concerned about the dynamics of foreign trade, or its effects on weaker and poorer societies, and focused only on solving the riddle of value. But the resulting advocacy of free trade continued to prevent countries from taking steps to increase their ability to produce more with less labor, which is the essence of economic advancement.

Conclusion This was where matters stood when Marx began his long and lasting engagement with political economy. By the mid-nineteenth century, political economy had laid the foundations of Marx’s system to a surprising extent. It already thought of capitalism as an historically distinct form of social production. It had set about trying to uncover its laws. Political economy accepted that value was an objective fact. It identified its characteristic problems of injustice and anarchy, exploitation and crises, and identified many of its volatile dynamics. It had wrestled with its expansive character. And political economy had explored questions of distribution and its justice. What it did not understand was the connection of value to socially necessary labor time. Political

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economy did not understand this because it did not distinguish use value and value of commodities with sufficient clarity to locate surplus value in the use value of labor. And it did not locate surplus value because political economy did not ask why qualitatively different forms of labor were abstracted to their duration alone and why production took the form of value production in capitalism.

Note 1

I would like to thank Fletcher Baragar and Alan Freeman for their careful reading of the first draft and their very effective suggestions for improvement, and Andrew Pendakis for his editing, which has enhanced the readability of this essay. Participating, when time permitted, in Fletcher’s seminar on the “History of Economic Thought” in the fall of 2017 helped put me in the frame of mind necessary to write this. I also benefited immensely from Fletcher’s exceptionally careful treatment of the subject and his students’ excellent questions and observations, whether they were naïve or penetrating.

References Blackburn, R. (1991), “Fin de Siecle: Socialism after the Crash, ” New Left Review I/191, 5–66. Block, F., and Somers M. (2014) “In the Shadow of Speenhamland, ” The Power of Market Fundamentalism, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Brewer, A. (1995), “A Minor Post-Ricardian? Marx as an Economist, ” History of Economic Thought 27(1): 111–45. Bukharin, N. (1972) The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Monthly Review Press. Clarke, S. (1991) Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Macmillan Academic and Professional. Desai, R. (2009), “Keynes Redux: World Money after the 2008 Crisis, ” in Bailouts and Bankruptcies, W. Anthony and J. Guard eds, Halifax: Fernwood Press. Desai, R. (2010), “Consumption Demand in Marx and in the Current Crisis, ” Research in Political Economy 26: 101–41. Desai, R. (2012), “Marx, List and the Materiality of Nations, ” Rethinking Marxism 24(1): 47–67. Desai, R. (2013) Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, London: Pluto Press. Desai, R. (2016) “The Value of History and the History of Value, ” in The Great Meltdown of 2008: Systemic, Conjunctural or Policy-created?, ed. T. Subasat, Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing. Desai, R. (2017), “Capital at 150: An Invitation to History, ” Red Pepper, September 30, 48–49. Dobb, M. (1963) Studies in the Development of Capitalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dobb, M. (1973) Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Freeman, A., and G. Carchedi, eds. (1996), Marx and non-Equilibrium Economics, Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Freeman, A., A. Kliman, and J. Wells, eds. (2004), The New Value Controversy and the Foundations of Economics, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Freeman, A., V. Chick and S. Kayatekin, eds. (2014), Whig History and the Interpretation of Economic Theory, Special Issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics 38(3): 519–699. Gallagher, J., and R. Robinson (1953), “The Imperialism of Free Trade, ” The Economic History Review 6(1): 1–15. Halevy, E. (1955), The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, Boston, MA : Beacon Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1964), “Introduction” to Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Kant, I. (1991), “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, ” in Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keynes, J. M. (1933), “National Self Sufficiency, ” New Statesman and Nation, July 8, 36–37. Keynes, J. M. (1967), General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan. Kliman, A. (2007), Reclaiming Marx’s Capital: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency, Lanham, MD : Lexington Books. List, F. (1856), National System of Political Economy, Philadelphia, PA : J.B. Lippincott and Co. Locke, J. (1953), Two Treatises of Civil Government, Boston, MA : Dutton. Mandel, E., and A. Freeman (1984), Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa: The Langston Memorial Volume, London: Verso. Marx, K. (1933), Value, Price and Profit, in Wage Labour and Capital and Value, Price and Profit, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1951), Theories of Surplus Value (Selections), London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. (1968), Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. II , London: Lawrence and Wishart Marx, K. (1970), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya, Moscow : Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1972), Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. III , London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1974), Political Writings II: Surveys from Exile, New York: Vintage. Marx, K. (1977), Capital, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1978), Capital, Vol. II , trans. D. Fernbach, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1981), Capital, Vol. III , trans. D. Fernbach, London: Penguin. Meek, R. (1956), Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Meek, R. (1972), “Marginalism and Marxism, ” History of Political Economy 4(2): 499–511. Meek, R. (1976), Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polanyi, K. (1985), The Great Transformation, Boston, MA : Beacon Press. Pulteney, W. (1738), Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in General, London: P. Groenewegen. Ricardo, D. (1951), The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. I, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ed. P. Sraffa and M.H. Dobb, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricardo, D. (1952), The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. VI , Letters 1810–1815, ed. P. Sraffa and M.H. Dobb, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sardoni, C. (1997), “Marx and Keynes on Effective Demand and Unemployment, ” in A “Second Edition” of The General Theory, G.C. Harcourt and P. Riach, London: Routledge.

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Semmel, B. (1993), The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire, Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, A. (1976), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. E. Cannan, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Sraffa, P. (1951), “Introduction” to David Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, ed. P. Sraffa and M.H. Dobb, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiles, R. (1987), “The Development of Mercantilist Economic Thought, ” in Pre-Classical Economic Thought, ed. S.T. Lowry, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Williams, G. (1987), “Eighteenth Century Brumaire: Karl Marx and Defeat, ” in Marx: 100 Years On, ed. B. Matthews, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

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French Socialism and Communism Jonathan Beecher

The story of Marx’s engagement with French radical thought is best known in the version told by Friedrich Engels in the essay Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880). According to Engels, “scientific socialism” had two important roots in French thought. Firstly, in its “theoretical form” it was the “logical extension” of the principle of criticism that lay at the heart of the thought of the French Enlightenment. Secondly, and more directly, in working out his own ideas Marx owed much to a group of early nineteenthcentury social thinkers who criticized nascent industrial capitalism and contrasted to it visions of an ideal society of plenty and social harmony. The three principal “utopian socialists” were the Frenchmen Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, and the British factory owner Robert Owen. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific offers a shrewd and sympathetic interpretation of the work of the utopian socialists and their contribution to the development of Marxism. But this essay—originally a part of a polemic against the economist Eugen Dühring—was never intended to provide a comprehensive assessment of utopian socialism. Instead, Engels emphasized aspects of the thought of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen that anticipated the Marxist critique of capitalism and dismissed much of the rest as “fantasy” unavoidable at a time when capitalist production was “still very incompletely developed. ” Engels praised Fourier as a brilliant satirist of bourgeois society; Robert Owen as an articulate spokesman of the demands of the working class; and Saint-Simon as the inspired prophet of a post-capitalist social order. At the same time, however, Engels criticized the utopian socialists for ignoring the rise of the proletariat and the importance of class conflict, and for failing to think seriously about the problem of how the ideal society might be brought into being. What the utopian socialists had failed to grasp, in Engels’s view, was that the development of capitalism and the growth of the factory system were themselves creating the material conditions, both for proletarian revolution and for humanity’s ultimate regeneration (Marx and Engels 1962: 116–55) This was not Engels’s first assessment of the work of the French socialists. That came thirty-five years earlier in an article entitled “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent, ” published in the Owenite journal, The New Moral World, on 4 November 1843. Saint-Simonism had been important in its time, wrote Engels; “Like a brilliant meteor, ” it had excited the attention of thinking people. But the “singularities and 219

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eccentricities” of Saint-Simon’s followers had eventually caused the movement to “disappear from the social horizon. ” Engels was also critical of the egalitarian communists, the heirs of Gracchus Babeuf and followers of Théodore Dézamy, whose scorn for the refinements of civilization such as science and the arts he described as “a prejudice necessarily arising from their total ignorance of history and political economy” (Marx and Engels 1975b: 394, 397). The three French socialists to whom the young Engels gave the closest attention were Proudhon, Cabet and Fourier. Proudhon’s Qu’est-ce que la propriété? had been published just three years earlier and it won unstinting praise from Engels. If a single French book could be translated into English, he wrote, this was the one he would choose. “The right of private property and its consequences in competition, immorality and misery are here developed with a power of intellect and real scientific research, which I have never since found united in a single volume. ” As for Cabet, his writings were in some respects “superficial, ” but the arrangements for his utopian community, as described in his novel Voyage en Icarie, were “very little different” from those of Robert Owen and combined respect for individual liberty with progressive views on education, marriage and punishment. Engels was also impressed by Cabet’s ability to attract followers from the working class, but he could not understand how Cabet and other French socialists could describe their own doctrines as the realization of Christian teachings rightly understood. It was “curious, ” Engels wrote, that belonging to a nation well known for its infidelity, so many French socialists and communists were themselves Christians (Marx and Engels 1975b: 398–400). Engels’s comments on Fourier are particularly interesting. He speaks of the strangeness of Fourier’s language and suggests that he himself had to work hard to get past Fourier’s “mysticism” and “extravagance, ” but, he tells us with relief, once you understand Fourier you can “discard” the mysticism. Then you will get to “something not to be found among the Saint-Simonians—scientific research, cool, unbiased, systematic thought” (Marx and Engels 1975b: 394). Later, Engels was to come to a deeper understanding of Fourier, recognizing the levels of satire and irony that underlay his scientific pretentions; but, in 1843 Engels already recognized the radical originality of Fourier’s utopian vision of a society in which work would become a source of pleasure and fulfillment for all. Engels was always to remain an admirer of Fourier. In 1845, in publishing his own German translation of a text including Fourier’s mock-serious “hierarchy” of thirty-six different types of bankruptcy, he paid tribute to Fourier for demonstrating “the necessity of a social reconstruction. ” In his criticism of the bourgeoisie, Engels concluded, Fourier offered a “unique” indictment of “the hypocrisy of respectable society, the contradiction between its theory and its practice” (Marx and Engels 1975c: 613–44). Finally, Engels’s continuing sympathy for the communitarian proposals of Fourier is evident in the fact that in his October 1847 draft of The Communist Manifesto he included a proposal for “the erection of large palaces on national estates as common dwellings for communities of citizens engaged in industry as well as agriculture. ” No hint of an interest in experimental socialist communities appeared in Marx’s fi nal version of the Manifesto, or in any of Marx’s writings between 1844 and 1848 (Marx and Engels 1976b: 351; Stedman Jones 2002: 66–9).

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What about Marx’s relation to French radical thought? As a native of the Rhineland, which had been French from 1794 to 1814, and as the son of a man who was remembered in family lore as “a real eighteenth-century Frenchman who knew Voltaire and Rousseau by heart, ” Marx was at home in French culture in a way that Engels never was (McLellan 1981: 163). He was a reader of Corneille and Racine, Lesage and Rabelais, and the memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz and the Duke de Saint-Simon.1 Marx was also a lifelong reader of Balzac and a lover of Diderot whose “unique masterpiece, ” Rameau’s Nephew, he twice (!) sent to Engels with instructions to read it (Marx and Engels 1982b: 134; Marx and Engels 1988: 303–4), but he was no quicker than Engels to discover the French socialists. During his year on the staff of the Rheinische Zeitung, March 1842 to March 1843, Marx published articles arguing for a free press, religious freedom and the rights of poor peasants. His attitude toward socialism and communism at this time was guarded. Replying to accusations of communist sympathies, in October 1842 he wrote that he did not believe that communist ideas “in their present form possess even theoretical reality, ” but then added that recent books by Pierre Leroux and Victor Considerant and “above all the sharp-witted work by Proudhon” could not be dismissed without “long and profound study”(Marx and Engels 1975a: 220). Marx’s first extended article as editor did include what has been described as an “echo” of Proudhon’s claim that property is theft. Arguing that the gathering of downed wood from landowners’ forests should not be regarded as theft, Marx wrote, “If every violation of property without distinction, without a more exact definition, is termed theft, will not all private property be theft?” (Marx and Engels 1975a: 220–1; Gregory 1983: 162–3), but such gestures toward socialism appeared rarely in Marx’s journalism. In the spring of 1843, after the Prussian authorities had shut down the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx became convinced that there could be no political solution to Germany’s problems. Making plans to leave Prussia for good, he spent the summer at Kreuznach at the home of his new bride, Jenny von Westphalen, and then in October left with her for Paris. During that summer at Kreuznach, Marx focused on the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that he had embarked upon that spring. However, his criticism of Hegel had been radicalized by his study of Feuerbach, who had shown in The Essence of Christianity that religions were human creations, forms of alienated consciousness in which human beings projected their own powers onto an imaginary god. Now that human self-alienation had been “unmasked in its holy form, ” Marx wrote, the task was “to unmask [it] in its unholy forms” (Marx and Engels 1975b: 176). This meant turning from the criticism of theology to the criticism of politics and adopting a new language in which “emancipation” was understood not in Hegelian terms as the product of the progress of Spirit, but as the result of a “human” transformation of the “relations between man and man. ” In concluding the Introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ” Marx for the first time identified “the proletariat” as the instrument whereby political self-alienation could be overcome (Marx and Engels 1975b: 186–7). From Marx’s earliest days, his interest in French thought had been guided by German philosophy, and that was the case in the summer of 1843 when he turned his attention to French social thought and the history of the French Revolution. At Kreuznach he

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came to believe that the overcoming of alienation must take revolutionary form, and that French thought and French history would offer clues as to how this could happen. Thus during the summer of 1843, while trying to wrestle himself free of Hegel, Marx took careful notes on both Rousseau’s Contrat social and Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (Marx and Engels 1981: 91–101, 106–15). At the same time he began to study the history of the French Revolution. His plan, once in Paris, was to collaborate with Arnold Ruge on the publication of an annual journal, to be called the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which would bring German philosophy and French socialism to bear on the critical analysis of the contemporary world, and Germany’s place in it. His inspiration was, once again, Feuerbach, who had just proclaimed in his “Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy” that “the true philosopher . . . must be of Franco-German parentage,” uniting French materialism and German idealism (Stedman Jones 2016: 143). During his sixteen months in Paris, October 1843 to February 1845, Marx discovered socialism and the proletariat, inaugurated his life-long partnership with Engels, and became possessed by an image of the French Revolution as the prototype of a future German revolution, which would go beyond and complete the work of the bourgeoisie in France (Furet 1988: 3). He read and criticized Smith, Ricardo and Say in the light of French socialism and German historical theory. He studied the French materialist philosophers, Helvétius and d’Holbach, and found in their work weapons to turn on Hegelian idealism. At the same time, he used Hegelian categories (alienation, dialectics) to understand labor and material life. Marx spent most of his days in Paris reading and writing. He plunged into that “endless sea of books” which, as Arnold Ruge observed, was his real element (McLellan 1981: 8). In studying the French Revolution, he focused on the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of the monarchy on August 10, 1792, on the concentration of power in the hands of the Convention and its committees, and on the conflict between the Girondins and Montagnards. His sources included the massive Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, edited by Buchez and Roux, and memoirs by the Montagnard René Levasseur and others. This project obsessed Marx during much of his stay in Paris and, in May 1844, Ruge could write to Feuerbach, “Marx wants to write the history of the Convention; he has gathered the necessary documentation and has worked out new and fruitful views” (Cornu 1962: 1; Marx and Engels 1975b: 361–74; Bruhat 1966). Marx’s writing in Paris also grew out of his contact with the life of the city. He found Paris exciting, and for the first time he met real workers. Many of these workers were members of the large German community of journeyman artisans who had come to France in search of work, but some of his most memorable encounters were with French workers. This is at least the impression one gets from a famous passage in the 1844 manuscripts: When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of their association, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc. are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together.

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Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them. The brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. Marx and Engels 1975b: 313

The ordinarily unsentimental Marx must have been deeply moved by his visits to these “gatherings of French socialist workers. ” For he used identical language in describing them in a letter to Feuerbach of August 11, 1844, “You would have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers to appreciate the pure freshness, the nobility which burst forth from these toil-worn men” (Marx and Engels 1975b: 355), and in The Holy Family he returned once again to “the studiousness, the craving for knowledge, the moral energy, and the unceasing urge for development” of the French workers, which he saw as evidence of the “nobility” of their movement (Marx and Engels 1956: 113). These encounters surely stimulated Marx’s analytic efforts as much as his readings in economics and history. He had not attended socialist worker meetings in Germany and, up until 1844, he lacked the first-hand knowledge of the industrial working class that Engels had already begun to acquire at Manchester. In Paris, Marx made up for lost time, plunging into literature on the condition of the working class, and using the concept of alienation to explore the material and mental misery of the Paris poor and to seek a social theory that could explain how a degraded worker might become “at one” with himself. Convinced now that the dehumanization of modern man, which he had previously considered from moral and religious standpoints, could not be understood apart from by its economic roots, he read Buret, Villermé, VilleneuveBargemont and Sismondi (Marx and Engels 1998: 123–46). Marx was not much interested in salon life, or in making friends in Parisian literary circles. He was part of a large community of radical German expatriates living in Paris at the time, and he had particularly warm relations with the best known of them, Heinrich Heine. His relations with French socialists were less satisfactory and, apart from Proudhon and Louis Blanc, he had little contact with them. This was no doubt partly because the gregarious Ruge took responsibility for contacting the French about possible contributions to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Ruge got on very well personally with the French socialists (Ruge 1846: 103–7),2 but he failed to convince any of them to write for the Jahrbücher. The French were clearly alarmed at the atheism of the Germans and their fondness for the secular materialism of the Enlightenment philosophes. Thus, the project of Franco-German collaboration got nowhere; the first issue of the Jahrbücher was also its last. The 1840s in France were marked by the flowering of a wide variety of “schools” of socialism and communism, some of which were of little interest to Marx. He did not share Engels’s curiosity about Cabet’s communitarian ideas, and he had even less interest in the views of the self-described “communists” around Théodore Dézamy. They saw themselves as the heirs of Babeuf, and what distinguished them was their radical egalitarianism. For Marx they were hopelessly simple-minded and dogmatic (Marx and Engels 1975b: 142–3). One might have expected Marx to be intrigued by the views of the socialist feminist Flora Tristan, whose final and most influential work, L’Union ouvrière (1843), was an impassioned call for workers to organize themselves

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into self-governing unions. Marx’s colleagues Ruge, Moses Hess and German Mäurer all attended meetings organized by Tristan at her apartment on the rue du Bac, and Ruge left a moving account of her power and eloquence as a speaker (Ruge 1846: 1: 93–102), but it does not seem that Marx ever met Tristan, and the few references to her in his work are inconsequential (Marx and Engels 1956: 29, 30, 249, and Rubel 1946). Then there were the Saint-Simonians, a group of brilliant young people, many of them graduates of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique, who had created a movement loosely based on the ideas of the utopian prophet Henri Saint-Simon, (1760–1825). By 1830 the movement had become a “faith, ” a new religion that aimed simultaneously at harnessing the productive forces of the merging industrial society, at bettering the condition of “the poorest and most numerous class, ” and at filling what the SaintSimonians perceived as the moral and religious vacuum of the age. Although the movement was soon torn apart by a series of painful schisms, it attracted much interest in Germany, and Marx’s first contact with any form of socialism consisted of discussions about the Saint-Simonians with his future father-in-law, around 1835. Marx eventually read both Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians carefully; his criticism of Karl Grün’s “True Socialism” in The German Ideology shows a detailed knowledge of their work. He found food for thought in the Saint-Simonian critique of private property and in SaintSimon’s insistence on the subordination of politics to the “science” of production. But in 1845 he was already writing sarcastically about the Saint-Simonian “dithyrambs” concerning the productive power of industry, noting that “their glorification of industry” had become “a glorification of the bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels 1964: 541–61, and Marx and Engels 1975c: 282–3). Many of the leading French social thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century passed through the Saint-Simonian movement, and there are two such individuals whose works Marx read and particularly valued. One was Constantin Pecqueur, who was the only French socialist of the 1840s who was entirely at home in writing about questions of political economy, and one of the first to advocate collective ownership of the means of production. Marx apparently never met Pecqueur, but his works are cited approvingly in the 1844 manuscripts and in Capital (Marx and Engels 1975b: 243–4, 254–6; Marx 1961: 614, 762; Marx 1959: 594–5). The other former Saint-Simonian whom Marx read and respected was Pierre Leroux. An autodidact of working class origin who helped found two influential periodicals, Le Globe and La Revue Encyclopédique, Leroux is credited with having given currency to the term “socialisme. ” Unlike Marx, he was a philosophical idealist and a religious pantheist, but he was also a staunch democrat and the only French socialist to show any understanding of German philosophy. Marx owned copies of two of Leroux’s major works: De l’humanité (1840) and Réfutation de l’éclecticisme (1839), and also the first volume of Leroux’s important Revue sociale (1845–1846). Writing to Feuerbach from Kreuznach in October 1843, Marx could contrast “the weak, eclectic [Victor] Cousin” and “the gifted Leroux” (Marx and Engels 1975b: 350). Although Leroux and Marx were never close, their relationship endured into exile (Gregory 1983: 169, 177–80; Breckman 2005). Three French thinkers played a major role in the initial shaping of Marx’s socialist perspective, and in convincing the 25-year-old exile that the dehumanizing tendencies of modernity, which he had previously considered from moral and religious standpoints,

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could not be understood apart from their economic roots. These were Proudhon, Blanc and Considerant. Marx’s period of close personal contact with Proudhon was brief, but the relationship was intense on both sides. Marx was later to claim that he “taught” Hegel to Proudhon, but he also celebrated Proudhon as an authentic proletarian and, in The Holy Family, he paid tribute to Proudhon for having offered “the first resolute, pitiless, and at the same time scientific investigation of the foundation of political economy, private property. ” Proudhon had, wrote Marx, made “a real science of political economy possible” (Marx and Engels 1956: 46). So impressed was Marx by Proudhon that in May 1846 he invited the Frenchman to serve as the Paris representative of an International Correspondence Committee designed to coordinate communist theory and practice throughout Europe. Proudhon’s cautious response of May 17 shows that he already suspected that Marx would not share his libertarian and undogmatic views, “Let us work together, if you like, to discover the laws of society . . . but for God’s sake, when we have demolished all the à priori dogmas, let us not think of indoctrinating the people in our turn” (Proudhon 1875: 198–9). This was not what Marx wanted to hear, and after publication that same year of La Philosophie de la misère, Marx’s view of Proudhon changed radically. Accusing Proudhon of misunderstanding the dialectic and describing historically changing economic relationships as if they were “preexisting eternal ideas, ” Marx denounced his work as “petty bourgeois sophistry” (Marx 1847; McLellan 1973: 104, 159–66; Stedman Jones 2002: 163–7). Marx’s relations with Louis Blanc were variable. Blanc apparently received Marx warmly after his arrival in Paris, promised him an article for the Jahrbücher, and let Marx use his house as a forwarding address for foreign correspondence; but the article never appeared, and Marx later wrote that, in Paris, he and Blanc concluded “a sort of alliance, but an alliance that was not particularly cordial. ” In later years Marx often derided the uncommonly short Blanc as “Louise” and “dear little Louis Blanc, ” and as a “foppishly vain and importunate dwarf ” (Marx and Engels 1982d: 282, 292, 309, 502). He also regarded Blanc’s Jacobin socialism as symptomatic of the inability of the French to free themselves from revolutionary memories. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Marx read and profited from Blanc’s Organisation du travail (1840) and his Histoire de Dix Ans, 1830–1840 (1841–44). The picture of contemporary French society presented in both these works helped shape Marx’s thinking at a time when he was becoming aware, as he later put it, that “the anatomy of society is to be sought in political economy. ” According to Blanc, France was going through a period of crisis, which had a political dimension, but was rooted in economic change. The “bourgeois” revolution of 1789, which was itself the result of prior economic changes, had opened the way for the establishment of a “commercial society, ” in which all economic life was governed by egoistic individualism and by competition in a free market. A “system of extermination” had emerged which produced great wealth for capitalist entrepreneurs, but led to the impoverishment of workers and the ruin of large sections of the bourgeoisie. Louis Blanc went on to argue for a centrally planned economic system including governmentcontrolled social workshops, but what Marx found most powerful in Blanc’s thought was the criticism and analysis of bourgeois society (Gregory 1983: 169–73). It was the critical dimension that Marx also found most appealing in the work of the leader of the Fourierist movement, Victor Considerant. While still in Prussia, Marx had

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read appreciatively portions of Considerant’s major work, Destinée sociale, and not long after his arrival in Paris he apparently visited the Fourierists’ headquarters on the rue Tournon. Though he and Considerant seem to never have met, it is clear that Marx read Considerant’s widely circulated pamphlet, Manifeste politique et sociale de la démocratie pacifique, which appeared in August 1843. Indeed, Marx’s language in The Communist Manifesto is at times so close to Considerant’s that some writers (including Georges Sorel) have argued that Marx’s Manifesto is in part a “paraphrase” or “translation” of Considerant’s pamphlet. Considerant speaks of the economic anarchy produced by unregulated capitalism and “the development of a new feudalism, an industrial and financial feudalism,” which was replacing the old landed aristocracy “through the liquidation and impoverishment of the intermediary classes.” This is reinforced by an analysis of the role played by free competition and “an uncontrolled industrialism” in driving down workers’ salaries and creating a society divided into “the possessors of the materials and the instruments of labor” on the one hand, and a “class of proletarians stripped of all possessions on the other” (Considerant 1843; Beecher 2001: 162–4). The charges of plagiarism are absurd, but it does seem that Considerant’s work, like that of Proudhon and Louis Blanc, did help expedite Marx’s conversion to socialism. That said, it seems clear that after 1848 Marx ceased to draw on the ideas of Considerant, Blanc and Proudhon, or, for that matter, any of the French democratic socialists of the 1840s. For a while he felt a kinship with Auguste Blanqui whom he described in 1861 as “the head and the heart of the proletarian party in France” (Marx and Engels 1985: 326),3 and, in the immediate aftermath of the Paris Commune, Marx’s sense of what was politically possible became immensely wider. As Kristin Ross has written, the Paris Commune was, for Marx and many others, a “laboratory of political invention” (Ross 2016: 76–89), but through all of this the one French radical thinker whom Marx never ceased to admire was Charles Fourier. Like Engels, Marx appreciated Fourier’s ability to cut through the rhetoric of liberal political economy and to expose the contradiction between its promises and the reality of bourgeois civilization. Marx also regarded as “masterly” Fourier’s analysis of the humiliation of women within the institution of “civilized” marriage (Marx and Engels 1956: 259), but the most significant instance of Marx’s appreciation and appropriation of Fourier’s ideas comes with Marx’s discussion of the working day in a future communist society. In a famous passage in the German Ideology, Marx looked forward to a society that would “make it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I like, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic” (Marx and Engels 1976: 47). Here Marx was making his own Fourier’s vision of a future society in which workers would hold a variety of jobs and develop their talents in a variety of areas without ever becoming tied down to, or identified with, a single role. In a more general sense, one can say that there is an optimism in the early writings of Marx and Engels that links them to Fourier, an optimism about the possibility that all of the work undertaken within the context of a communist society could serve as a vehicle for self-realization and for the affirmation of the worker’s freedom. In his later works, however, Marx shifted his position with regard to work and its place in a communist society. Hints of this are to be found in the Grundrisse (1857–58)

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where, while arguing against Adam Smith’s “negative definition” of labor as sacrifice, Marx simultaneously criticizes Fourier for adopting a frivolous attitude toward the problem of work by claiming that “labor can become mere fun, mere amusement.” This, wrote Marx, was to treat a profound problem “with the naïveté of a young shop-girl” (Marx 1973: 611). In the Grundrisse, Marx still looked forward to a day when “labor would become attractive work, the individual’s self-realization” (Marx 1973: 611), but, in Capital, Marx’s rejection of Fourier’s view of work was emphatic. Stressing the distinction between free labor and labor determined by need and external purpose, Marx claimed in Capital that necessary work would one day become immensely less arduous and fatiguing. Yet, he argued, all the improvements that technology and socialization might bring would not alter the fact that much of the work to be done in a communist society would remain painful and unrewarding. Thus, he began to look forward to the day when “the development of machinery and automation would give workers so much free time” that they would be able to use their leisure hours in such a way as to develop their latent and unrealized capacities. “In fact,” Marx wrote in the third volume of Capital, “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases. Thus, in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production . . . [which] remains a realm of necessity” (Marx 1959: 820). In passages such as this, it is clear that the Fourierist vision of work as an affirmation of freedom and self-realization has been left far behind. Still, in his later years Marx continued to turn to Fourier’s writings for sustenance because, as he wrote Kugelmann in 1866, “In the utopias of a Fourier and an Owen” there is “the anticipation and the imaginative expression of a new world” (Marx and Engels 1962: 460).

Notes 1

2

3

On Marx’s reading, see Prawer 1976, a wonderful study of Marx’s lifelong engagement with world literature. See also the inventories of his personal library, “Ex Libris Marx 1850” in Rubel 1982: 1918 to1923, and Kaiser 1967: 211–28. During 1844 and 1845 Ruge was a regular visitor to the Fourierist headquarters on the rue de Seine; and in his memoirs he observed that the Fourierist leader, Victor Considerant, seemed to have “a weakness for Germans. Heine, Weitling, Moses Hess and Lorenz von Stein were all welcomed at the Fourierists” Wednesday evening gatherings, but there is no record of Marx’s presence. See also Marx to Engels, April 22, 1859 on “the turpitude of Blanqui’s deportation to Cayenne”, Marx and Engels 1983: 427. Although Blanqui was in London for five weeks (December 10, 1859 to January 10, 1860), the two apparently never met. See Dommanget 1960: 6–7.

References Beecher, J. (2001), Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Breckman, W. (2005), “Politics in a Symbolic Key: Pierre Leroux, Romantic Socialism, and the Schelling Affair, ” Modern Intellectual History 2(1) (April): 61–86

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Bruhat, J. (1966), “La Révolution française et la formation de la pensée de Marx, ” in La Pensée socialiste devant la Révolution française, Paris: Société des études Robespierristes, 125–70. Considerant, V. (1847), Principes du socialisme. Manifeste de la démocratie au XIXe siècle, Paris: Librairie Phalanstérienne. Reprint of Manifeste politique et sociale de la démocratie Pacifique (1843). Cornu, A. (1962), Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels. Leur vie et leurs oeuvres, Vol. 3, Marx à Paris, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Dommanget, M. (1960), Blanqui et l’opposition révolutionnaire à la fin du Second Empire, Paris: A. Colin. Furet, F. (1988), Marx and the French Revolution, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Gregory, D. (1983), “Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ Knowledge of French Socialism in 1842–43, ” Historical reflections/Réflections Historiques, 10(1): 162–3. Kaiser, B., ed. (1967), Ex Libris Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Schicksal und Verzeichnis einer Bibliotek, Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Marx, K. (1959), Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K. (1961), Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Vol. 1, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. by Martin Nicolaus, New York: Vintage Books. Marx, K. (2002), Misère de la philosophie, Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1956), The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1962), Selected Works, Vol. 2, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1975a), Collected Works, Vol. 1, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1975b), Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1975c), Collected Works, Vol. 4, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels. (1976a), Collected Works, Vol. 5, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1976b), Collected Works, Vol. 6, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1982a), Collected Works, Vol. 38, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1982b), Collected Works, Vol. 39, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1983), Collected Works, Vol. 40, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1985), Collected Works, Vol. 41, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1988), Collected Works, Vol. 43, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1998), Gesamtausgabe (MEGA ), IV, 3, Exzerpte und Notizen. Sommer 1844 bis Anfang 1847. McLellan, D. (1973), Karl Marx. His Life and Thought, New York: Harper and Row. McLellan, D. (1981), Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections, Totowa, NJ : Barnes and Noble. Prawer, S. (1976), Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Proudhon, P.J. (1875), Correspondance, 14 Vols. Paris: Lacroix. Ross, K. (2016), Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, London: Verso. Rubel, M. (1946), “Flora Tristan et Karl Marx, ” La Nef, 14: 68–76. Rubel, M. ed., (1982), Oeuvres de Karl Marx. Vol. 3, Oeuvres philosophiques, Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

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Ruge, A. (1846), Zwei Jahre in Paris. Etudien und Erinnerungen, 2 Vols. Leipzig: Wilhelm Jurany, Vol. 1. Stedman Jones, G. (2002), “Introduction” to Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin. Stedman Jones, G. (2016), Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion, MA : Belknap Press.

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Marx’s German and British Political Encounters William Clare Roberts

Introduction The history of Marx’s political encounters falls rather neatly into three episodes. After his prospects of an academic career evaporated, Marx entered into a period of journalistic and literary politics, which saw his evolution from an Enlightenment liberal to a communist. This is when he befriended Engels, who exercised the single greatest personal influence upon Marx’s political development henceforth. Following Engels into the world of Anglo-German communist groupuscules, Marx became a political analyst and agitator during the Revolutions of 1848. In this second engagement, Marx developed a distinctive form of social and political commentary, and set himself apart from the existing parties of communism, mutualism and social reform. Finally, after fifteen years of journalism and research, Marx entered into the newborn International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA ). This final involvement would spur the publication of Capital and provide the platform from which he would eulogize the Paris Commune, the political act that finally established Marx as a defender of revolutionary socialism and as a theorist in his own right. Each of these episodes of engagement contributed to the transformation of Marx’s politics. He started his editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish News) as an Enlightenment liberal, hoping to rationalize the state through the expansion of a sphere of rational public discourse. Two years later he went into exile in Paris, a convert to socialism, drawn to the neo-Jacobin notion that an uprising of the poor would drive the next revolution beyond purely political republicanism and on to the elimination of private wealth and dispiriting labor. In 1848, he expected the unification of Germany under constitutional government to be followed by a revolution of the workers, which would consolidate the central state, expropriate the gentry and the lords of the factories, and build a new industrial economy governed by mass democracy. By the end of the revolutionary cycle, he was disillusioned with both the revolutionary potential of the middle classes and the rational potential of the modern state, and he began to invest his hopes, instead, in the autonomous process of industrial development and the ability of the working classes to develop their power and international solidarity in opposition to both state and capital. These were the commitments he carried into his engagement with the IWMA . His encounter, there, with the burgeoning trade union movement, with fatalism about 231

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industrial development, and with division over the Irish national question, led him to encourage the possibility of constructing a working class political party on the basis of the economic struggles of wage workers for better pay and a shorter work-day. These transformations in Marx’s outlook are attributable to the way he responded to, and outflanked, his opponents, and also to his habit of criticizing his own earlier positions by criticizing former allies. This essay will trace these three moments of engagement and transformation in Marx’s political career.

1. First Encounter: “The Union of Thinking and Speaking” Marx’s first explicit engagement with politics began in the summer of 1841, in conjunction with Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge. Marx’s writing had been implicitly political for some time. It was common in Restoration Europe for discussions of political matters to be “masked . . . in theological and philosophical terms” (Gabriel 2012: 36). Theological and philosophical debates about the personality of God were, mutatis mutandis, debates about political authority (Breckman 1999), and were recognized as such. Nonetheless, the trajectory taken by Bauer, Ruge and Marx in the summer of 1841 represented a step beyond, and this was acknowledged by all involved. Thus, Jenny von Westphalen cautioned her fiancée in a letter on 10 August, “Now you get yourself involved in politics too. That is indeed the most risky thing of all” (Marx and Engels 1975: 1:707). The goal of Marx’s first “party” was to create a public sphere where ideas and political developments could be openly discussed. Ruge was the pathbreaker. His journal, the Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst (Halle Yearbook of German Science and Art), aimed to facilitate “the awakening to self-consciousness” of the German public. When it was suppressed by authorities in 1841, Ruge reopened it as the Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst (German Yearbook of Science and Art), and dedicated it to the development of public “intelligence” (Breckman 1999: 249). Ruge contrasted this with the “diplomatic” intelligence of Kant and Hegel, which kept silent about many matters of public concern out of deference to the power of the monarchy and the religious authorities. Their diplomacy was understandable in their time—which “was not very favorable for politics”—but, by 1842 Ruge argued it was time to demand the free constitution and the free public life that German Idealism had only promised (Stepelevitch 1999: 220, 215). Ruge was confident that the monarchy and the censor were, in fact, paper tigers. “It is easy to be free, ” he argued, for, “Who gives us censorship? Those who put up with it at as much as those who impose it” (Stepelevitch 1999: 237). Hence, the path forward seemed to be clear, put up with censorship no longer. The living embodiment of this new union “between theory and praxis, between thinking and saying, ” was Bruno Bauer. Bauer had been a star pupil of Hegel himself, and of the Right Hegelian Philipp Konrad Marheineke. However, Bauer abandoned Marheineke’s synthesis of Hegelianism and orthodox Protestantism and became, alongside his brother Edgar, a leading figure on the Hegelian Left. Marx grew close to the Bauer brothers at the Doctor’s Club, a coffee klatch for young radicals in Berlin. As

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Bauer’s own confrontations with conservative Protestantism escalated, he was compelled to move from Berlin, the headquarters of officialdom and reaction, to Bonn. Even there, however, his position was not secure, given his ongoing publication of rationalist criticisms of religious faith and Biblical text for being necessarily dogmatic, and for fostering autocratic government (Moggach 2003). When Bauer’s university post disappeared, so, too, did Marx’s hopes of academic employment. The Rheinische Zeitung, a new, liberal paper in Cologne, edited by Bauer’s brother-in-law, was the alternative that presented itself (Sperber 2013: 80–3). Bauer, Ruge, Marx and several other members of the Doctor’s Club, began to write for the paper. The masthead declared the paper to be, “For Politics, Commerce, and Industry” (Gabriel 2012: 39), and Marx’s journalism fitted well with this mission. His first articles opposed new censorship legislation and advocated freedom of the press and the rule of law. As Marx argued, “No one fights against freedom; at most one fights against the freedom of others . . . Laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion” (Marx and Engels 1976: 1:51, 57). Nonetheless, Marx couched his critical journalism in a terminology far removed from Bauer’s trumpets. When Marx rose to the editorial committee in October of 1842, it was because he was seen as someone who could keep the Young Hegelians in line (Sperber 2013: 91–2). He made the Rheinische Zeitung into “the liberal voice of Prussia” (Gabriel 2012: 41). He demanded “more attention to the actual state of affairs” and “more expert knowledge” from correspondents, straining relations with the academic radicals he had been involved with in Berlin (Marx and Engels 1975: 1:394). This did not mean that Marx was conciliatory to the Prussian authorities. He “made it a practice to bait the official Prussian censors” (Sperber 2013: 94), and Marx’s articles roundly criticized the Provincial Diet. Complaints about the paper from Tsar Nicholas I were insuperable, and the paper was shuttered in the spring of 1843. Marx and Ruge remained united in their original purpose of engaging in public criticism of German politics, but the relationship with Bauer had been strained irreconcilably by Marx’s unwillingness to publish the theoretical writings of Bauer’s protégés in Berlin. Marx and Ruge increasingly saw Bauer’s criticisms of theology as politically fruitless. Having begun to read socialist literature with Moses Hess in Cologne, Marx spent the summer of 1843—his honeymoon with Jenny—in Kreuznach, reading political history and theory (Hegel, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, etc.) (Marx and Engels 1981). He and Ruge moved to Paris in the fall, and tried to begin again with the DeutscheFranzösische Jahrbücher (German-French Yearbook). The Jahrbücher was to be the death-knell of Marx’s first partisan grouping, and the inauguration of his second. Bauer had already left the party, having doubled-down on his elitist rationalism. Marx bid him farewell by tearing apart his essay, Die Judenfrage— The Jewish Question—for arguing that the intellectual emancipation of the Jewish people—freedom from “superstition” and “particularism, ” i.e., conversion to atheism— must precede their political emancipation. Marx’s own position had evolved into the opposite; political emancipation was limited and partial, but it was a necessary prerequisite of the sort of ethical and intellectual autonomy valorized by Bauer (Leopold 2007).

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While this position on political emancipation accorded with Ruge’s ideas, Marx had been deeply affected by reading Proudhon, Fourier and other French socialists in Hess’s reading group. Marx had come to the opinion that “the so-called rights of man, as distinguished from the rights of the citizen, are only the rights of the member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man” (Marx 1997: 235). These “egoistic” rights “boiled down to the ‘practical application’ of liberté, namely the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s property without regard for other men” (Hunt 1974: 1:73). This abstract right to property was made substantial and durable, as Hegel had argued, in the institutions of the bourgeois family, the market, the legal system and the bureaucracy (Hegel 2002: 158–256). However, contra Hegel, for Marx, the political state did not transcend these spheres, but served them. Political reform was limited by the social base, and so only a transformation of society itself could make possible the real universalization of the rights of citizens. This turn towards social transformation split Marx from Ruge, who was repelled both by Karl and Jenny’s experiments with communal living in Paris and by the uprising of the Silesian weavers in 1844. Social revolts were sterile, according to Ruge, so long as they lacked “political understanding, ” a stance that Marx understood as Ruge wishing “to play schoolmaster” (Marx 1975: 416–17). At the same time, Marx had discovered in Engels’s “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie”—Outline of a Critique of National Economy—the idea that the science of political economy revealed the contradictions of bourgeois society, and that these contradictions pointed the way to their own overcoming. It was within Engels’s framework that Marx would attempt to bring together a new “communist” party during the Revolutions of 1848.

2. Second Encounter: The Communist Party of 1848 Marx and Engels began their collaboration in Paris in 1844, but relocated to Brussels in 1845. Their initial concern was backward-looking, to criticize the work of Bauer and his associates. By 1846, however, Marx and Engels were primarily engaged in establishing and developing connections among the various socialists and communists of Europe, trying to bring them together into one movement. This was never achieved, the differences—personal, political, and theoretical—were too many and too sharp to be surmounted. Nonetheless, the Communist Correspondence Committee they established did connect them to a growing circle of radical socialists, united by the sense that the new industrial economy was making communism both necessary and possible in a way that it never had been before. By the autumn of 1846, Engels had established an alliance with the Paris chapter of the League of the Just, one of the old conspiratorial communist groups associated with the far-Left Jacobinism of Louis August Blanqui and Philippe Buonarroti, made up almost wholly of German exiles. At a conference in London in June 1847, the two organizations merged into the Communist League. In many ways, this was an improbable alliance (Nicolaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen 1936; Hunt 1974; Lattek 2006; Marik 2008). The old League of the Just was conspiratorial and anti-theoretical by tradition, and acted as if the inauguration of communism would be swift. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, advocated public and democratic agitation, along the lines of Chartism, and were committed to critically appropriating

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the science of political economy, both positions which tended to the conclusion that the transition to communism would be a drawn-out process. These differences were minimized to the point that merger was possible by the groups’ mutual opposition to two other trends within socialism: the millenarian insurrectionism of Wilhelm Weitling and the modified Proudhonism of Karl Grün. Weitling had preached an apocalyptic Christian communism, very congenial to the old Paris clubs but, as the 1840s slipped by without any new insurrections, his bloodymindedness lost its appeal. Moreover, the leadership of the League moved to London in 1846, where it was influenced by the Chartism of George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones in the direction of public educational efforts and mass politics. When Weitling tried to shore up his support within the League, he “found only one vocal supporter, ” Hermann Kriege (Hunt 1974: 1:56). When he then tried to secure an alliance with the Brussels Correspondence Committee, Marx argued vehemently with him. Weitling thought communism was immediately realizable and that oral propaganda was sufficient to spread the word among workers. Marx insisted, according to Weitling’s own report, that unsentimental and critical debate among socialists was crucial, and that “the bourgeoisie must first take control” before there could be any question of a socialist revolution (quoted in Sperber 2013: 180; see also: Mühlestein 1948; Hunt 1974: 1:156; Lattek 2006: 28–31). The other common opponent was the True Socialism of Karl Grün. Grün was an old acquaintance of Marx, and a translator of French socialist ideas for a German audience. He was personally close to Proudhon, and his ideas had a distinctly Proudhonian cast. Marx himself had been heavily influenced by Proudhon, and had cultivated a relationship with him, but when Marx tried to denounce Grün to him, Proudhon responded angrily. Marx’s own socialism had moved away from Proudhon’s, and Proudhon was allergic to the Brussels Correspondence Committee’s conception of critical debate among socialists. That Grün mixed Proudhon’s ideas with a Young Hegelian vocabulary reminiscent of Bauer’s disciples, and that Marx saw him as unscrupulous and opportunistic as well, made hostility between the two Karls inevitable. Less predictably, the League of the Just sided with Marx and Engels against Grün. Grün’s Feuerbach-inflected Proudhonism was fundamentally “anti-political” (Stedman Jones 2016: 222), and this was just as unpalatable to the League of the Just as Weitling’s fantasies of violence. Moreover, as the case of Kriege indicates, Weitling and Grün appealed to the same constituency. The anti-political longing for mutuality and voluntary communion could, and frequently did, go hand in hand with the execration of “any man who does not support” such mutuality “as an enemy of mankind, ” against whom any violence might be justified (Kriege, quoted in Marx and Engels 1976: 6:47). The intolerance of “the new religion” was equally an excuse for forsaking all enquiry into any questions concerning “how” socialism might be brought about. On all of these points, Marx and Engels were able to establish some real accord with the League of the Just. The outcomes of this alliance were the Communist League, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung; the three-point pedestal upon which the twentieth century erected the legend of Marx, son of Robespierre, father of Lenin. Like most legends, this one took hold of actual facts and observations, but

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elaborated upon these with fanciful connections and extrapolations. Marx went into the Revolutions of 1848 expecting great things from the industrialists and merchants who had bankrolled the liberal press. He thought they would be driven to overthrow the Prussian monarchy, partly by the reactionary repression of the monarchy itself, and partly by their interest in keeping a rein on the revolutionary energy of the lower classes. He thought the workers could ally themselves with the progressive bourgeoisie, and thereby secure a democratic-republican and united Germany. And he thought that this result would be an ideal staging ground for the workers to carry out, after a more or less protracted period, a communist revolution. All of Marx’s tactical shifts during 1848–50 were in the service of holding together a broad democratic-republican front while simultaneously nurturing a nascent communist workers’ party (Hunt 1974: Vol. 1, Chs 6–7). Neither aspect of this political commitment ever went away. Nonetheless, Marx’s fealty to the French Revolution as a pattern for “the social revolution of the nineteenth century” died alongside the Revolutions of 1848, and his faith in the political capacity of the new middle classes dissipated just as quickly (Marx 2010). His encounter with Weitling, his break with Proudhon, and his running struggle—in Cologne in early 1849—against the “workerism” of Andreas Gottschalk also prepared Marx for an even more fundamental shift of perspective. When he was forced into exile in London in August 1849, Marx proceeded, over the course of a year, to break all ties with the radical artisans of the old League of the Just. Artisan communism was rooted in a valorization of hand-work, appealed to the principle that the producer had a right to their full product, and sought a right to guaranteed work. Its enemy was the idle class of consumers and rentiers. Marx’s attempt to sell free trade, and a long process of industrial development to a constituency of this persuasion, was, by the summer of 1850, a confirmed failure. The Communist League splintered, and Marx retreated into research in the British Museum reading room; his journalism for the New York Tribune; and a nasty cycle of debts, illnesses and tragedies at home.

3. Third Encounter: The International Workingmen’s Association Marx remained isolated from any substantial audience in the workers’ movement until 1864. Although he retained contacts and friendships among German socialists, his circle of admirers was scattered and harried by the anti-communist prosecutions in Germany. His correspondence with Ferdinand Lassalle never translated into significant influence over Lassalle’s political program, and visits between the two men only underscored their political and personal differences. Lassalle looked towards Prussian state intervention on behalf of workers, and denied that self-organization could improve wages and working conditions (Thomas 1980: 233–8). On the English side, the dissolution of the Chartist movement after 1848 deprived Marx of many of his allies. Ernest Jones had moved steadily out of Marx and Engels’s orbit, becoming allied with Gladstone’s Liberal Party. George Julian Harney had ceased to publish his own papers, and emigrated to the United States in 1863. However, the early 1860s also saw new kinds of international movements arising. The abolition of serfdom in Russia fed into a resurgent Polish independence movement.

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The “slaveholders’ rebellion” in the United States raised the hopes of emancipation there, and the Emancipation Proclamation galvanized support for the Union among workers across Europe. Lassalle’s Workers’ Program gathered steam in Germany, leading to the founding of the first workers’ party, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein [General German Workers’ Union]. And in England, the London Trades Council was formed in 1860, marking an upswing in trade union organization and worker-based politics. Solidarity with Poland ended up being the specific catalyst for continental and British workers to meet in London on 28 September 1864, where they founded the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA ). Marx had not been involved in any of the planning, but he soon immersed himself in the IWMA , drafting both an “Inaugural Address” and the “Provisional Rules” of the Association. In contrast to his earlier party groupings, the IWMA did not coalesce around a specific political strategy, but around a broad vision of international worker cooperation and, drawing upon anti-slavery language, “the emancipation of the working classes. ” In another contrast, German workers did not predominate; rather, French and British workers formed the largest sections, with Belgian, Italian and Swiss groups filling out the Association initially. Marx was excited about the IWMA , especially because of the involvement of London Trades Council leaders such as Randal Cremer, George Howell and George Odger. The debates of the General Council and their preparations for the Congresses of 1866 and 1867 went hand-in-hand with Marx’s final drafting and editing of the first edition of Capital, and it is straightforward to trace connections between Marx’s presentation of matters in Volume I and his interventions in the IWMA . His trade unionist interlocutors were quite distinct from the artisan communists he debated with around 1848. England was the heartland of industrial production, and its growth since 1850—in coal mining, in urban construction, and in railroads and steamships— had been prodigious. The increases in the scale and mechanization of production were obvious, and obvious sources of concern for trade unionists. They brought in their wake the deskilling of labor, an influx of women and children into trades formerly the province of skilled male workers, and a nationalization and internationalization of economic concerns. The trade unionists could be quite conservative about the social changes wrought by industrial growth, but they were also bent on winning political power for the growing mass of workers. Marx responded to trade unionist concerns by developing a new political strategy. Marx’s arguments regarding the machinery question before the General Council in July 1868 are indicative. “One of the great results of machinery, ” Marx argued, “is organized labour which must bear fruit sooner or later . . . machinery leads on one hand to associated organized labour, on the other to the disintegration of all formerly existing social and family relations” (IWMA 1964: 229–34). The General Council next debated the reduction of working hours, and Marx reiterated the same line, arguing that reducing the length of the working day “had the effect of introducing more machinery, and made production on a small scale more and more impossible, which, however, was necessary to arrive at social production” (IWMA 1964, 244). These arguments were supported by his analyzis in Capital. In Chs 14–16 of the first edition (16–18 in the French and English editions), Marx tried to establish that the

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development of the capitalist mode of production—based on cooperative, large scale and mechanized labor—only encourages the capitalist to extend and intensify the working day, heightening the exploitation of the workers. Furthermore, he argued that reductions in the working day are both a gain for workers and not detrimental to the capitalist class. On the other hand, a longer or more intense working day is always bad for the workers. Therefore, Marx suggested, the workers’ movement ought to focus its efforts on shortening the working day. The struggle to work less will both spur the further technical development of capitalist production and win free time for the political projects of the workers. This strategy will also sharpen the contradiction between workers and capitalists, since it will lead to the concentration of capitalist industry and swell the ranks of the workers. This will make small-scale production ever more impossible and encourage the self-organization of the laborers in the face of overwork and mechanization. These developments are the negative and positive material conditions for a transformation in the direction of socialism (Roberts 2017: Ch. 5). Marx’s new strategy was not adopted by the trade unionists, however. In the first place, Cremer, Howell and Odger devoted more and more of their energy to the new Reform League, which was seeking to realize the manhood suffrage plank of the Chartist platform. Marx was very supportive of the new Reform movement at first, but as it became not an adjunct of the IWMA but a competitor, he cooled on it. The Irish Question also divided Marx from many of the trade unionists; the solidarity of the English for the Polish independence fighters did not extend to those seeking independence from England itself. Both of these struggles revealed a tendency among the trade union leadership to prioritize recognition by, and inclusion within, the national community. Marx, by contrast, had moved away from his 1848 position of associating proletarian class organization with national consolidation. The distance between Marx and the trade union leaders he had hoped to sway is underscored by the fact that Marx’s 1872 pamphlet, The Civil War in France, published as an address of the IWMA General Council, provoked both Odger and Benjamin Lucraft, another prominent trade unionist, to resign from the General Council. The pamphlet also made Marx world famous. A second edition of Capital was now in demand. A Russian edition and a French edition followed shortly, as did re-publications of the Manifesto and other works from the 1848 era. These developments—conspiring with the struggle against Bakunin over the future of the IWMA , the growth of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Worker’s Party of Germany), and Marx’s declining health—ended Marx’s engagement with the IWMA and with the British trade unions. After 1875, Marx’s influence was felt almost exclusively through the activity of friends and allies: Engels, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, Paul Lafargue, and Eleanor Marx.

Conclusion Marx’s political encounters—a euphemism, perhaps, given the fragile alignments and polemical divorces that marked time in Marx’s political life—have traditionally been read in one of two modes. Those sympathetic to Marx have gone to the records of the

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past seeking guidance. They have seen in Marx’s partisan maneuvers, if not always a model to emulate, at least a set of experiences from which to learn. Others interrogate his relationship with Bruno Bauer, his fights with Andreas Gottschalk, his pamphlet against The Great Men of the Exile, his leadership in the International Workingmen’s Association, and so forth, in order to judge Marx’s shortcomings, or to show where he went wrong (Stedman Jones 2016). The danger of the first approach is obsequiousness. The danger of the second is self-satisfaction. These are not equivalent dangers, however, and, in historical scholarship, it is best to steer closer to the first than to the second, at least on one’s first approach. An over-identification with Marx may lead one into apologetics, but it preserves the awareness that one has something to learn. Nonetheless, sympathy with Marx as a political actor can be more or less wellgrounded, and is certainly insufficient for producing agreement about the meaning or significance of his various political engagements. Leninists, Trotskyists and antiBolshevik social democrats have all had cause to find authorization of their own politics in Marx’s practice. This essay has argued, however, that the lessons of Marx’s political encounters are indeterminate from the perspective of twentieth-century partisan alignments. This is not surprising. Marx did not face the political choices his followers did, and should not be expected to have articulated answers to dilemmas he could not have foreseen. Looking at the overall course of his encounters with German and British politics—from his early apprenticeship to Bruno Bauer through his engagement with British trade-unionists in the IWMA—this essay has identified a series of transformations in Marx’s political outlook, with regard to modernization, the role of the state, and the process of revolutionary class formation. In none of these areas did Marx simply, or completely, change his mind or arrive at any fixed conclusion. His political involvement always retained its mottled complexion; called forth by necessity and frequently improvisational; more responsive than directive; more memorial than strategic. Above all, Marx tried to draw lessons from failures, an endless task, if ever there was one.

References: Breckman, W. (1999), Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gabriel, M. (2012), Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, Boston, MA : Back Bay. Hegel, GWF. (2002), The Philosophy of Right, trans. A. White, Newburyport, MA : Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Company. Hunt, R.N. (1974), The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, Pittsburgh, PA : University of Pittsburgh Press. IWMA (International Working Men’s Association) (1964), The General Council of the First International, 1866–1868: Minutes, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lattek, C. (2006), Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860, Routledge Studies in Modern British History, London and New York: Routledge. Leopold, D. (2007), The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Marik, S. (2008), Reinterrogating the Classical Marxist Discourses of Revolutionary Democracy, Delhi: Aakar Books. Marx, K. (1975), Early Writings, ed. Quintin Hoare, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, New York: Vintage Books. Marx, K. (1997), Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. L.D. Easton and K.H Guddat, Indianapolis, IN : Hackett. Marx, K. (2010), Political Writings: Surveys from Exile, ed. D. Fernbach, Vol. 2, of 3 Vols. London: Verso. Marx, K., and F. Engels (1975), Collected Works, Vol. 1, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K., and F. Engels (1976), Collected Works, Vol. 6, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K., and F. Engels (1976), Werke, Vol. 1, Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Marx, K., and F. Engels (1981), Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Vol. IV. 2, Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Moggach, D. (2003), The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Mühlestein, H. (1948), “Marx and the Utopian Wilhelm Weitling, ” Science and Society 12: 113–30. Nicolaevsky, B.I., and O. Maenchen-Helfen (1936), Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, London and New York: Routledge. Roberts, W.C. (2017), Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Sperber, J. (2013), Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, New York: Liveright Publishing Corp. Stedman Jones, G. (2016), Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Stepelevitch, L.S., ed. (1999), The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Thomas, P. (1980), Karl Marx and the Anarchists, London and Boston, MA : Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Part III

Key Themes and Topics D. Key Themes and Topics

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Abstraction Leigh Claire La Berge

Overview Marx’s unique approach to philosophy, what is known as historical materialism, is guided by his development of a historically oriented understanding of abstraction. Marx’s philosophy is both historical in its understanding of how abstraction has been theorized in previous philosophical discourse, and it is historical in its understanding it its own position in creating a new theory of abstraction as it relates to cumulative stages of human social development. In basing his economic theories within a philosophy of history, Marx turns to a field that has, since its inception, offered those who study it a lesson in abstract thought. Marx both borrows from and changes what it means to understand an “abstraction” within philosophical and economic discourse. He does this by historicizing the function and origin of abstract thought in the history of philosophy, as well as by showing the inseparability of concrete and abstract moments of historical processes. After developing an appreciation for Marx’s abstraction, what constitutes abstraction, and what can be corralled under its sign, will appear to be both more nuanced and more capacious. Under Marx’s watch, abstraction ceases to be solely a conceptual form humans use to think through, and becomes, additionally, a social form generated by human actions. Marx will use it to think through labor, history and, most importantly, value. Marx’s goal, it might be said, is to use the economic theory he finds in political economists such as David Ricardo and Adam Smith and combine it with a Hegelian imperative that “the truth is the whole, ” wherein “the whole” signifies history itself (Hegel 1967). Ricardo and Smith, Marx’s immediate forbearers in economic thought, came close to answering Marx’s most fundamental question—what is the substance of value?—but their inability to produce a method that included the necessary levels of abstraction prevented them from understanding the historical truth needed to answer the question. It is only through realizing that the process of abstraction is both a philosophical and a historical problem that one can truly appreciate Marx’s contribution to the history of political economic thought, and also of thought itself. Before proceeding, it is worth noting that abstraction in our particular Marxian context bears little relationship to twenty-first-century idiomatic usage of the adjective, “abstract, ” which often equates to “complex” or “difficult to understand. ” It is also 243

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worth noting that other humanist traditions use the terminology of abstraction in a manner that needs to be differentiated from Marx’s use of it. In aesthetics, for example, abstraction denominates an aesthetic mode of non-figurative representation. Compared to a realistic landscape painting, we might say that a Mark Rothko colorfield painting is abstract. In philosophy, abstraction denotes something not realizable in time and space. Compared to a table, which one can see, touch and use, the idea of “freedom, ” for example, is abstract. Plato designated such concepts forms; Immanuel Kant called them regulative ideas. In today’s social theory, we call them abstractions. In social theory, abstraction indicates something not fully realizable by a particular. Timothy Mitchell (2012), for instance, argues that “the economy” itself is a recent historical abstraction used to designate a diversity of local and global actions and transactions. There is no one transaction which renders “the economy” visible. Subsequently, we use our own contemporary abstractions in order to understand Marx. For example, we use the term “capitalism, ” which Marx himself did not use. For Marx, abstraction is a method of thought rather than a description of meaning. To provide readers with an overview of the topic of abstraction in Marx’s oeuvre, this entry will begin with his critique of his predecessors and contemporaries, then move on to his fullest methodological explications of abstraction in Capital and Grundrisse, and, finally, conclude with the long journey that abstraction has made into twenty-firstcentury critical theory.

Who is a Political Economist? In order for Marx to begin his critique of political economy, he first had to determine who counted as a political economist. While this may sound like an easy proposition, Marx faced then, as scholars face now, a need to discriminate amongst serious thinkers, whose work he could build on and critique, and dilettantish thinkers, who, for him, had little to offer by way of explanation. The matter in how his predecessors and contemporaries dealt with “abstraction” was an important concern. Marx writes in Capital, Vol. I, “Let me point out once and for all that by classical political economy I mean all the economists who, since the time of W. Petty, have investigated the real internal framework of bourgeois relations of production, as opposed to the vulgar economists who only flounder around within the apparent framework of those relations . . . for the domestic purposes of the bourgeoisie” (1976: 174 n.34). Marx offers some quite famous, and often quite funny, examples of how vulgar economists miss the point. Remember the case of Nassau Senior who proffered a theory of Senior’s “Last Hour, ” which Marx highlights. Senior famously argued that the length of the working day of British workers could not be shortened because all of the profits were made in “the last hour” (Marx 1976: 333). For Marx, it is not the case that certain economic critics provide the wrong answer, i.e., “the last hour”; rather, they ask the wrong questions, i.e., “during what point in the day is profit made?” In order to ask the right question, one has to understand both at what level of abstraction is one’s own thought operating and at what level of abstraction is the social field, in which the thinker exists, operating. The stated goal of the field of

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political economy is to understand value and the subtitle of Marx’s great work, Capital, is “A Critique of Political Economy. ” To critique a society organized by value, one has to understand the parameters of value; but to understand what value is, one has to understand how its substance is formed through a bifurcation between Marx’s most basic, fundamental dichotomy: abstract and concrete labor. Of course, here we see an initial conceptual division which includes some dimension of how “abstraction” functions, but before we move onto to understanding this division, we should first appreciate the genealogy of political economic abstraction out of which Marx comes. Unlike his assessments of the vulgar economists, Marx is impressed with and synthesizes the work of David Ricardo. In doing so, Marx singles out the problem of abstraction in his critique of Ricardo’s legacy. Indeed, Marx’s critique of pre-existing political economy interrogates the ways in which Adam Smith and David Ricardo employed abstraction. Marx writes in Theories of Surplus Value: On the one hand, Ricardo must be reproached for not going far enough, for not carrying his abstraction to completion, for instance, when he analyzed the value of the commodity, he at once allowed himself to be influenced by consideration of all kinds of concrete conditions. On the other hand, one must reproach him for regarding the phenomenal form as immediate and direct proof of exposition of the general laws, and for failing to develop it (the phenomenal form). In regard to the first, his abstraction is too incomplete; in regard to the second, it is formal abstraction which is itself is wrong. 1968: 106

Again, the basic division between abstract and concrete is present. In this passage, we see Marx scold Ricardo, but we also see him explain the most important tenets of his own method. The crux of any genuine argument about the structure of capitalism must delicately balance what may be assumed and what must be explained. Gopal Balikrishnan argued that Capital might be said to resemble a philosophical proof. Only an understanding of abstraction can allow for one to produce the necessary components of an argument. Ricardo is both too concrete and too abstract at the same time.

What is Political Economy? For Marx, the key question for political economy is not, as his predecessors, including Ricardo and Smith, thought, what is the quantity of labor that produces value? Rather, Marx reveals the correct question is, why, in capitalist societies, does wealth take the form of abstract labor? Several contemporary critics, including Moishe Postone and Diane Elson, have insisted strongly and rightly on this reversal as crucial to understanding Marx’s project. As Elson neatly states, previous to Marx, political economy offered “a labor theory of value.” Marx reverses this preposition by offering “a value theory of labor” (Elson 1979). What is novel and important about capitalism, Marx argues, is not how much is labor worth, but why does social wealth itself take the form of abstract labor?

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How was Marx able to posit and substantiate this categorical reversal? For one, he was able to see that labor takes multiple forms, it is both concrete and abstract. This assertion also necessarily implies that social wealth could be organized through other forms. In showing what is new and different about capitalism through his theory of abstract labor, and in showing how the economy changes, Marx is also showing that the economy can be changed. We need not accept that capitalism is “the way that it is.” But to arrive at that point, where the economy may appear otherwise, Marx insists that we must understand how the economy is organized now, namely through a series of abstractions and concretizations, most fundamentally of labor. In tracing how labor occupies these twin dimensions Marx reveals how, with the development of capitalism, value comes to be defined in terms of labor and how labor itself is composed of usevalues and exchange values. Why, Marx asks, does a capitalist buy the right to someone else’s time in the form of labor and why does the worker sell that time? In Capital, Vol. I, Marx explains that: Our capitalist has two objectives: in the first place, he wants to produce a use-value which has exchange-value, i.e., an article destined to be sold, a commodity; and, secondly, he desires to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it, namely the means of production and the labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market. 1976: 293

Marx could only arrive at this conclusion through the development of a methodology of abstraction in his own thought and an analyzis of abstraction as a material, non concept-based historical process. A use-value is concrete, an exchange value is abstract. Labor as a commodity expresses both dimensions of value; in the space between the two, the sale of value generates surplus value and, in a radically different terminology, a profit is made. Because this distinction between abstract and concrete organizes the most foundational aspect of his critique of capitalism, Marx repeatedly sought to categorize what makes the concrete “concrete, ” the abstract “abstract, ” and on which of these levels should theoretical investigation begin. The stakes are beguiling in their simplicity. If one begins with too abstract a concept to orient her investigation, then she precludes access to the quotidian, material perceptible world, and if she begins with too concrete a term, then she may be unable to understand its organization within a larger social totality. It will seem non-intuitive to many readers, but Marx insists that one must start with the abstract. “The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects. It appears therefore in reasoning as a summing up, a result, and not as the starting point” (Marx 1973). For Marx, the concrete is a metabolized result and the abstract a social intuition capable of leading to the concrete. Conversely, “as a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all” (Marx 1973). Adherence to this methodology is why, even today, Marxists remain troubled by the work done in much social science as it is oriented around a concrete category “poverty, ” “innovation, ” “delinquency, ” without an

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articulation of how these categories themselves come to be meaningful in a larger, abstract whole.

Abstract and Concrete Labor This basic differentiation tells us about different kinds of labor, and also why, precisely, abstraction is such an important component of Marx’s analyzis of capitalism. When the human activity of work is reorganized under capitalism as valueproducing labor, it takes on both abstract and concrete dimensions. Marx will explain the concrete dimension to us in the most material of terms, namely those of tissues, hands, nerves, brains, blood and so on. Most of us will be able to relate to this concrete dimension easily. We know the moments of experience of our own exertion as we begin to conceptualize and move towards a goal. We may feel a sense of ourselves as heightened and engaged, or as alienated and controlled, and, certainly, we all know the moment when those elements of our energy begin to fade, and yet we still need to keep working. One could say humans have been laboring like this for millennia but Marx himself does not say that precisely, because concrete labor changes in conjunction with its abstract dimension in a manner that is only possible under capitalism. Yet, here is where we must remember what is unique about abstract labor is not that it is “abstract” in the contemporary sense of being difficult to understand or nonfigurative. What is unique about it is that its social, global qualities are daily generated by local, concrete actions, and that through such actions individuals become radically and unintentionally collective. As Alfred Sohn-Rethel explains, “the value abstraction exists nowhere but [humans’] minds but doesn’t spring from their minds” (1983: 20). We see a different explanation of the same fundamental claim from Postone, who says, “The category of abstract labor expresses a real social process of abstraction and is not simply based on a conceptual process of abstraction” (1996: 152). The result is that in a scheme of abstract labor, “individuals are now ruled by abstractions, ” Marx says in the Grundrisse. At the same time, as John Roberts has argued, such abstractions may also be liberatory, they may lead to social development. Roberts writes that: abstract labour is the thing that both destroys all-roundedness as an exemplar of socialised, collective production, but also stands to liberate all-roundedness from its chronic technical and conceptual inflexibility (in the medieval workshop) through splitting the producer away from the need to subordinate all of his creative labours to the performance of a multitude of routine tasks, perfectly reproducible by machines. Roberts 2010: 88

Because labor dwells abstractly within capitalism, it possesses certain unchanging features within that system. Labor, for example, cannot be deskilled; work, however, may be. The title of Harry Braverman’s magisterial study of twentieth-century capitalist transformation may be seen in this respect to make an argument: Labor and Monopoly

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Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. As the ratio between technology and labor changes with successive economic moments, as technology both makes new forms of work possible—we can now send office emails—it also makes certain forms of work obsolete—the office mail carrier will now lose his or her job— what is known as the “organic composition of capital. ” Braverman’s study shows us how daily work and abstract labor may be disarticulated. With the development of technology, changes will be registered in patterns and organizations of daily work. The work becomes “degraded, ” but the labor, the socially produced abstraction that organizes work, remains unchanged (Braverman 1975). No matter what work we are doing, we are always doing abstract labor. It is not only labor which takes on abstract and concrete forms. Rather, it is labor that is centrally expressed in both concrete and abstract dimensions, and that tension is replicated and externalized in other forms of value, such as money. In its concrete dimension, the daily activities of social reproduction are value producing, but this is possible only because they are necessarily both concrete and abstract, too. Richard Godden notes that “for labor power to become value, it must be subsumed within abstract labor, or else its qualitatively diverse forms could not be quantitatively compared” (2011: 419). Money exists as a representation of this relationship. Marx explains that “qualitatively or formally, money is independent of all limits . . . it is the universal representation of material wealth, ” and that “world money is a realization of human labor power in the abstract” (1976: 230, 241). As an expression or representation of abstract labor power, money may be said to be abstract, but as an expression or representation, a symbol, it is not abstract but material, and thus “thingly. ” This necessary vacillation between abstract and concrete is crucial because it is the polarity itself and not the exclusive contents of either pole that structures the form and social world of value. Nonetheless, certain forms overly represent certain dimensions; the commodity, made valuable by abstract labor, seems overly “thingly”; and money and its forms appear overly abstract. Indeed, Sohn-Rethel goes so far as to argue that the abstract categories of natural science—we could include social science here, too— are symptomatic of a society dominated by the commodity form and its familiar division between use value and exchange value (1983: 69). He insists that, “while the concepts of natural science are thought abstractions, the economic concept of value is a real one” (1983: 20, 22).

Abstraction in Critical Theory Today? Today it is finance, not money, that has assumed the mantel of abstraction. If we want to know how Marxist critics think about abstraction today, we must turn to their writings about finance. Several critics, including Fredric Jameson and, following him, Max Haiven, ignore money’s concrete dimension in order to posit its abstract character as a staging ground for what they describe as finance’s additional abstraction. Jameson is able to categorize finance as a “second-order abstraction” because he has categorized money as “first-order” one; he defines finance as a play of monetary entities (1998: 151). Haiven argues that “finance is the redoubling of the complexities and abstractions of

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money” (2011: 93). In this initial path from money to finance, in which abstraction somehow intensifies or increases, we may discern an implicit yet critical move; Haiven and Jameson posit an increase in abstraction as money’s abstract character is consolidated and heightened through finance. They suggest, then, that as capitalism progresses, one of its products is even more abstraction. This is a common conception in critical theory today, but one that Marx would likely be critical of. Conversely, one could argue that abstraction has been and remains an important concept through which to analyze the development of capitalism, but does not itself increase or intensify. Regarding the abstractions of money in particular, Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty provide one example of what such a critical move might look like. They argue that finance, which they specify in the form of the derivative, becomes money. Functioning now as money, this instantiation of finance “expresses a form of capital that we have hitherto thought of only as an abstraction” (2007: 142). That is, according to this argument, finance instantiates a new concreteness. Dick Bryan et  al. suggest that “financialization” produces a new concreteness. They claim that “ ‘financialization’ gives capital a concrete liquidity and ‘fungibility’ that is more commonly conceived only in abstraction. This is a starkly different perspective on financialization from that found in the pervasive focus on speculation, debt, and crisis” (2009: 464). To restate their point; finance concretizes what was heretofore abstract. Such a conclusion is in keeping with Enzo Paci, who argues that “the fundamental character of capitalism is revealed in the tendency to make abstract categories live as though they were concrete” (Toscano 2008: 273).

References Braverman, H. (1975), Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Press. Bryan, D., and M. Rafferty (2007) “Financial Derivatives and the Theory of Money, ” Economy and Society 36(1): 134–58. Bryan, D., R. Martin and M. Rafferty (2009), “Financialization and Marx: Giving Labor and Capital a Financial Makeover, ” Review of Radical Political Economics 41(4): 458–72. Godden, R. (2011), “Labor, Language, and Finance Capital, ” PMLA 126(2): 412–21. Elson, D. (1979), Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, London: CSE Books. Haiven, M. (2011), “Finance as Capital’s Imagination? Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis, ” Social Text 108 29(3): 93–124. Hegel, G.W.F. (1967), Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie, Moscow, ID : University of Idaho Press. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/phindex. htm (accessed August 11, 2018). Jameson, F. (1998), The Cultural Turn, London: Verso. Marx, K. (1968), Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, trans. R. Simpson, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1973), “Introduction (Notebook M), ” Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Penguin Books and New Left Review. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm (accessed August 11, 2018). Marx, K. (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin.

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Mitchell, T. (2012), Carbon Democracy, London: Verso. Postone, M. (1996), Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, J. (2010), “Art after Deskilling, ” Historical Materialism 18: 77–96. Sohn-Rethel, A. (1983), Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, London: Humanities Press. Toscano, A. (2008), “The Open Secret of Abstraction, ” Rethinking Marxism 20(2): 273–87.

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Accumulation Sean O’Brien

“The capitalist production process, ” Marx writes, “is essentially, and at the same time, a process of accumulation” (1991: 324). Capital accumulation refers to the logical process whereby profits are reinvested in order to increase the monetary value of the initial capital, thereby increasing the total sum of capital. This is what Marx calls “the general formula for capital” (1990: 257), which describes the movement of self-valorizing value that distinguishes the capitalist mode of production from simple commodity production. Yet Marx and many Marxists since have sought to tie the categorical logics of the critique of political economy to the unfolding of capital accumulation as a historical process. In what follows, I underscore the importance of the logical and historical processes of accumulation for Marx’s politicization of political economy. I then offer an account of accumulation as it figures in a series of theoretical interventions that deal in one way or another with periodic developments in the history of capitalism—from Giovanni Arrighi’s model of systemic cycles of accumulation, to the French Regulation School’s theory of regimes of accumulation and its influence on Italian post-Marxism—touching briefly on relevant work by economic historians Fernand Braudel and Robert Brenner. I conclude with a discussion of the consequences that follow from capital accumulation’s logical promise to undermine the historically specific reproductive circuitry of the capital-labor relation.

The Logic of Accumulation Marx famously opens the first volume of Capital with the claim that, “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’ ” (1965: 35).1 He distinguishes the function of the commodity in capitalist society with reference to “the general formula for capital, ” or M-C-Mʹ, whereby monetary value congeals in the commodity-form, only on the condition that it be realized at a profit (Marx 1990: 247–257). Thus M-C-Mʹ differentiates itself from simple commodity production, or C-M-C: The simple circulation of commodities—selling in order to buy—is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values,

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the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless. Marx 1990: 253

Further, Marx distinguishes between simple reproduction, by which he means a rate of accumulation necessary to sustain a society at a given standard of living—in which the production and consumption of capital goods is equal—and expanded reproduction, which refers to the reinvestment of capital to increase the scope and scale of production (1992: 144–66). It is in this manner that the synchronic logic of accumulation assumes a diachronic form of expansion. Capital accumulation therefore constitutes a historically distinct mode of social reproduction, which is the reproduction of capital as a social relation. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “the result of the process of production and realization is, above all, the reproduction and new production of the relation of capital and labour itself, of capitalist and worker” (1993: 458). And yet, the very movement by which capital accumulates compromises the conditions of its own reproduction. Marx writes, “capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth” (1993: 706). Marx calls this process the “general law of capital accumulation, ” which charts the general movement of constant over variable capital as it is coded into the most basic movement of capital over time: The greater social wealth, the functioning of capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labourpower at its disposal. The relative mass of industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. 1990: 798

Capital works, on the one hand, to create as much available labor power as possible, and, on the other, to steadily decrease the amount of socially necessary labor time. This is Marx’s theory of crisis, according to which rising productivity leads to diminishing rates of accumulation and ever-slacker labor markets; but note, here, how capital acts as an independent subject, how its action takes place before anyone even shows up for work. Capital recalibrates the conditions for accumulation before exploitation, as a technical feature of accumulation, begins. Through the real subsumption of labor, capital reduces the amount of labor time that is socially necessary for production. Decreasing socially necessary labor time entails what Marx calls a “rising organic

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composition” of capital, which indexes “the progressive decline in the variable capital in relation to the constant capital” (1991: 318). In other words, capital accumulation proceeds with more hardware and software relative to the number of workers on the job. The Marxian concept of subsumption has proven central to the larger problem of tracking accumulation logically and historically. Spatial readings of subsumption, in particular—as capitalist expansion from the factory into previously separate or semiautonomous spheres of social life—underwrite a series of contemporary Marxian periodizing models, as I will show below. But, subsumption is a contested term in Marxist theory. Marx inherits the concept of subsumption from the German Idealists, for whom it denotes the process of cognitive abstraction through which the particular is brought into subordinate relation with the universal.2 For Marx, however, the material act of exchange presupposes an abstract universal—value—to which particular concrete labor processes are subsumed. According to Marx (1994), already existing labor processes are first formally subsumed in their pre-capitalist forms through the introduction of the wage. To produce surplus value under such conditions, capital must lengthen the working day beyond what is necessary for the reproduction of labor power, producing what Marx calls absolute surplus value. Driven by competition and limits to the working day, capital increases the productivity of labor via technological ratcheting, reducing the amount of socially necessary labor relative to surplus labor, producing what Marx calls relative surplus value. Real subsumption for Marx thus describes the “form-determination” of the capital–labor relation in anticipation of value.3

The History of Accumulation M-C-Mʹ thus names the logical process of capital accumulation, understood generally as a circuit through which the total sum of capital increases with each profitable reinvestment. As Giovanni Arrighi argues, however: Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM ʹ) may be reinterpreted as depicting, not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of world capitalism. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC ʹ phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial expansion (CM ʹ phases). 2005: 86

In his structuralist account of late twentieth-century developments in the capitalist world system, Arrighi adopts Fernand Braudel’s model of the longue durée, with its seasonal logic of hegemonic transition whereby autumn for one declining global hegemon means spring for the next. Following Braudel, Arrighi identifies four systemic cycles of accumulation, each increasing in scope and intensity, but contracting in duration; “a Genoese cycle, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries; a Dutch cycle, from the late sixteenth century through most of the eighteenth century; a British cycle, from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century; and a US cycle, which began in the late nineteenth century and has continued

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into the current phase of financial expansion” (2010: 6–7). In Arrighi’s model, this financial bubble cannot rescue an ailing hegemon, which at the end of each cycle must inevitably give way to its successor.4 As Braudel so elegantly puts it, “it [is] a sign of autumn” (1984: 246). Like Arrighi, Michel Aglietta responded to the economic restructuring of the 1970s by attempting to construct a historical model of capital accumulation adequate for the emergence of new economic and social forms. Emphasizing the role institutions play in the regulation of the capitalist economy, Aglietta founds his theory of regulation on two interrelated formulations central to the Regulation School: the regime of accumulation and the mode of regulation. A regime of accumulation is a historically bounded and relatively stable system comprising production, circulation, consumption and distribution, while a mode of regulation refers to the institutional networks of governance that provide supportive environments for a given regime of accumulation. Together they form a mode of development. When tensions between the regime of accumulation and the mode of regulation reach a critical point, a structural crisis ensues, and from the chaos and conflict of crisis a new mode of development emerges. Marx’s categories of absolute and relative surplus value form the basis of the Regulation School’s periodizing model, which correspond in their theory to extensive and intensive regimes of accumulation understood, respectively, in terms of the domination of one over the other in a given phase of capitalist development. As Aglietta argues, “under the regime of extensive accumulation, where absolute surplus-value predominates, the length of the working day is the principal means of extracting surplus labour” (2015: 130). For the Regulation School, the extensive regime of accumulation leads for most of the nineteenth century until the rise of Taylorist scientific management around the First World War, under which investments in fixed capital increased productivity rates and cheapened consumer goods. Taylorism thus marks the advent of the intensive regime of accumulation, but, following the Great Depression of the 1930s, remains unstable until the shift from the competitive to the monopolistic mode of regulation. The combination of an intensive regime of accumulation and a monopolistic mode of regulation inaugurates a mode of development called Fordism. And yet, as Robert Brenner and Mark Glick argue, “where capitalist social-property relations are fully established, we can, all else being equal, expect to find: development on the basis of relative surplus-value” (1991: 54). Brenner and Glick reject the notion of an extensive regime of accumulation based on absolute surplus-value extraction, given that capitalist production tends to cheapen consumer goods through productivity increases from the outset. Nevertheless, the Regulation School’s theory of Fordism proved decisive for Antonio Negri, who draws on this work to narrate an historical shift from the mass worker of Fordist industrialism to the socialized worker of post-Fordism. This line of reasoning follows from the notion that the development of productive forces has entailed a shift from formal to real subsumption—a transition that many theorists argue constitutes a distinct period in the history of capital accumulation, roughly analogous to postmodernity—creating a kind of social factory in which the totality of human activity contributes to an aggregate profitability. For Negri and other thinkers associated with the Italian post-Marxist tradition, such as Carlo Vercellone (2007) and Franco

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“Bifo” Berardi (2009), real subsumption has little to do with relative surplus value extraction, and, instead, tracks a paradigmatic shift, beginning in the 1970s, from the regulated, often physical types of labor central to Fordism, to the flexible, dematerialized and precarious labor practices that characterize the post-Fordist economies of Western liberal democracies. In post-Marxist thought, the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism signals a period of capitalist expansion, since, from this point of view, all forms of social activity are now potentially productive for capital. Other Marxist critics, however, have characterized capital accumulation in the period following the Fordist “Golden Age” in terms of secular stagnation, or the persistence of negligible growth rates beyond normal business cycles. Brenner, for instance, provides an account of the “transition from long boom to long downturn” (2005: 267). For Brenner, inter-capitalist competition tends to produce global overproduction and overcapacity, exerting downward pressure on prices and lowering returns on capital investments. As a result, profitability declines, which in turn places downward pressure on wages and triggers rising unemployment rates. In Brenner’s account, inter-capitalist competition between the US , Germany and Japan reached a point of saturation in the early 1970s, ushering in a protracted period of economic stagnation and contraction in advanced capitalist countries. As a result, “average rates of growth of output, capital stock (investment), and real wages for the years 1973 to the present have been one-third to one-half of those for the years 1950 to 1973, while the average unemployment rate has been more than double” (Brenner 2005: 4). Brenner reminds us that capitalists are subject to competitive constraints that compel them to innovate, accumulate and move from line to line in search of the highest returns, but over time these same constraints tend to trap firms in stagnant lines, placing downward pressure on extant profit rates. Joshua Clover’s theory of riot (2016) offers a compelling interpretation of the contemporary state of accumulation, as capital’s self-undermining process of exploitation dissolves the social structures that previously reproduced, and were in turn reproduced by, the capital-labor relation. For Clover, this shift in the capital-labor relation is accompanied, even symptomatized, by new forms of struggle. Clover joins a number of theorists working within the communization current in emphasizing the constitutive role of a surplus population in the post industrial economy, and in tying changes in class composition to the political significance of the proliferation of riots since the end of the long boom.5 Cycles of struggle are here theorized in relation to the logical and historical trajectory of capital accumulation as it interlocks with class composition. Marx calls this dynamic the “double moulinet” (zwickmühle); the systematic reproduction of the capital-labor relation at the level of the social totality.6 The return of the riot signals the exhaustion of what Théorie Communiste call “programmatism” (2005), as the struggle of workers to affirm themselves as a class both within and against capital wanes with the breakdown of capitalist social reproduction in the postwar period. When capital accumulation crosses this threshold, the affirmation of labor—the traditional Marxist project of its liberation and socialization—becomes impossible. Labor cannot represent an opposition to capital, or be the agent of its overcoming in an era of de-industrialization, not simply because it is already an alienated form of human activity, but because it no longer occupies

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a structural position within the class relation from which to assert itself as an antagonist.7 “Accumulation of capital” has certainly meant “multiplication of the proletariat” (1990: 764), as Marx predicted. More of the world’s population must sell their labor to acquire the essentials of social reproduction than ever before in human history. And yet this has not entailed an expansion of the industrial working class or the arrival on the world stage of the collective worker whose destiny it was to usher in a new world on the back of the development of the productive forces.8 Instead of being integrated into industrial production and concentrated into a great mass of semi-skilled factory workers, the vast majority of the world’s proletarians find themselves in low-paid service work, if they are included in the formal economy at all. Expelled from the point of production, labor must seek the means of its reproduction in the sphere of circulation, greasing the wheels of capital as facilitators of exchange rather than producers of value.9 In its scramble to secure profitability, capital accumulation has returned to forms of absolute surplus value extraction, with the rise of zero-hours contracts and the monetization of care work. Meanwhile, relatively low unemployment figures increasingly mask a growing rate at which people drop out of the labor market altogether. Austerity, financial crises, rising precarity and mounting debt can all be understood as part and parcel of a slowdown in capital accumulation. Since the 2008 credit crash, productivity rates, output figures and real wages have all stagnated, and stagnant economies breed right wing populisms. A world free from the crushing weight of the value-form may seem impossibly far away, but the future for capital accumulation looks very bleak indeed.

Notes 1

2

3

Here, I am using Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling’s 1965 English translation of Capital, Vol. I. Ben Fowkes (1990) translates the German “ungeheure Warensammlung” as “immense collection of commodities, ” but note that the German word that Marx uses, “ansammlung” also means accumulation and is translated as such in S.W. Ryazanskaya’s 1970 edition of Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. While I use the Fowkes’ translation in all other instances, “accumulation” is arguably the more pertinent translation in this case. For Kant (2007), subsumption is a cognitive process that organizes conceptual experience according to categorical truths, whereas for Hegel (2008) the universal resides in and is mediated by the particular. For an extended critical appraisal of the category of subsumption as it figures as a periodizing model in various strands of Marxian thought, see Endnotes, “The History of Subsumption” (2010). The idea that value “form-determines” the labor process derives from Marx’s writings on the capitalist value-form. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx uses the German term Formbestimmtheit (“form-determination” or “determination of form”) to describe the process by which money or commodities become forms of value for capital (1910: 531). Diane Elson develops a cogent account of how value form-determines labor in her essay, “The Value Theory of Labour, ” where she writes, “The argument of Capital, Vol. I, goes on to show the dominance of the universal equivalent, the money form of value, over other commodities, and how this domination is expressed in the self-expansion of the money form of value, i.e., in the capital form of value. Further it

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5

6

7

8

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shows that the domination of the capital form of value is not confined to labor ‘fixed’ in products, it extends to the immediate process of production itself, and to the reproduction of that process. The real subsumption of labor as a form of capital . . . is a developed form of the real subsumption of other aspects of labor as expressions of abstract labor in the universal equivalent, the money form of value” (2015: 165–6). Arrighi notes, however, that capital accumulation must eventually “reach a stage at which the crisis of over-accumulation cannot bring into existence an agency powerful enough to reconstitute the system on larger and more comprehensive foundations,” and suggests that “there are indeed signs that we may have entered such a stage” (2010: 341). See, for example, Blaumachen, “The Transitional Phase of the Crisis: The Era of Riots” (2011), Endnotes, “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Crisis Era Struggles in Britain” (2013), and several pieces from the second issue of the international communization journal SIC (2014). This rendering derives from the French translation of Capital, Volume I. Marx uses the term Zwickmühle in the original German, taken from the thousand-year-old game of Mill, sometimes called Nine Men’s Norris. For some reason, the term is entirely absent from the English translation—appearing instead as “alternating rhythm”—and is more accurately translated as the “double mill, ” which refers to a grave dilemma, being caught in a trap or an iron grip. For a discussion of the term “double moulinet, ” as it figures in Marx and subsequent work in communization theory, see the Introduction to issue 8 of riff-raff (2006). That is not to say that the surplus proletariat has now become the revolutionary subject of our era. As the Surplus Club writes, “The proliferation of riots within the present moment as an addendum to the development of the surplus proletariat does not necessitate a romantic projection that distinguishes an identitarian agent closer to communism than those more fortunate” (2015). Nevertheless, the horizon of anticapitalist struggle in the present necessarily confronts the fact of a proletarian class in the throes of decomposition. This latter point forms the crux of the long-form essay “A History of Separation” by the Endnotes collective (2016), which situates the rise and fall of the workers’ movement against the backdrop of the development of the productive forces and the long transition to full proletarianization over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Aaron Benanav and John Clegg note, “This surplus population need not find itself completely “outside” capitalist social relations. Capital may not need these workers, but they still need to work. They are thus forced to offer themselves up for the most abject forms of wage slavery in the form of petty-production and services” (2014: 606 n.14).

References Aglietta, M. (2015), A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, trans. D. Fernbach, New York: Verso. Arrighi, G. (2005), “Hegemony Unraveling II , ” New Left Review 33: 83–116. Arrighi, G. (2010), The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times, New York: Verso. Benanav, A., and J. Clegg. (2014), “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital, ” in A. Pendakis, J. Diamanti, N. Brown, J. Robinson and I. Szeman (eds), 585–608, Contemporary Marxist Theory: A Reader, New York, Bloomsbury.

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Berardi, F. (2009), The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, Los Angeles, CA : Semiotext(e). Blaumachen. (2011), “The Transitional Phase of the Crisis: The Era of Riots, ” libcom.org, July 13. Available at: http://libcom.org/library/transitional-phase-crisis-era-riots (accessed August 11, 2018). Braudel, F. (1984), Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Vol. III: The Perspective of the World, New York: Harper and Row. Brenner, R., and M. Glick. (1991), “The Regulation Approach: Theory and History, ” New Left Review I(188): 45–119. Brenner, R. (2006), The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945 to 2005, New York: Verso. Clover, Joshua. (2016), Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, New York: Verso. Elson, D. (2015), “The Value Theory of Labour, ” in D. Elson, ed., Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, New York: Verso, 115–80. Endnotes (2010), “The History of Subsumption, ” Endnotes 2: 130–53. Endnotes (2013), “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Crisis Era Struggles in Britain, ” Endnotes 3: 92–171. Endnotes (2016), “A History of Separation, ” Endnotes 4: 70–193. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (2008), Lectures on Logic, Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press. Kant, I. (2007), Critique of Pure Reason, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1910), Theorien uber den Mehrwert, Vol. 3, Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf. Marx, K. (1965), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling, Moscow : Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1970), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1991), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, trans D. Fernbach, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1992), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 2, trans. D. Fernbach, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1993), Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1994), “Results of the Direct Production Process, ” in MECW Vol. 34, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Negri, A. (1991), Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. H. Cleaver, M. Ryan and M. Viano, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. riff-raff. (2006), “Introduction, ” riff-raff 8. Available online: http://riff-raff.se/wiki/en/ riff-raff/introduction_to_riff-raff8 (accessed August 11, 2018). Sic: International Journal for Communisation. (2015), no. 2, January : 200 pages. Surplus Club. (2015), “Trapped at a Party Where No One Likes You, ” SIC 3. Available online: http://sicjournal.org/trapped-at-a-party-where-no-one-likes-you/ (accessed August 11, 2018). Theorié Communiste. (2005), “Theorié Communiste responds, ” Aufheben 13. Available online: https://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-13-2005/theorie-communisteresponds (accessed August 11, 2018). Vercellone, C. (2007), “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,” Historical Materialism 15: 13–36.

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Alienation Timothy Bewes

In Marxist criticism, alienation usually refers to the term used in the notes and drafts of the young Karl Marx to characterize the effects of capitalism on labor and the laborer.1 In those early writings, produced before Marx met Engels, Marx understands alienation as a consequence of the emergence of private property, an “entire system of estrangement” (1992: 323). Against the tradition of political economy, which takes private property as a “fact” and the basis of its analysis—and therefore sides with capital from the outset—Marx understands private property as primarily a “separation”: between ownership of land, on one hand, and lack of ownership on the other, between property and propertylessness (1992: 322). The failure of political economy to think this separation as such is thus a failure to understand the interconnectedness of the various elements of the economy: of, say, capital and labor; wages and profit; or competition and monopoly. Political economy opposes these principles to each other without intuiting that their very “opposition” is part of the false unity of private property itself, which binds them together in an “essential connection” (323). The most immediate expression of the division between labor and capital is wages, which presuppose the separation of work from life, when labor becomes “external” to the worker. Under such conditions, says Marx: the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labour is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of labour for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to him but to another, and that in it he belongs not to himself but to another 1992: 326.

Besides alienated labor, Marx’s target here is the discipline of political economy, “which bases [its] explanations on some imaginary primordial condition” (private property) 259

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that it assumes as a “theolog[ical]” given (323). Here, as in much of his early writing, Marx has recourse to religious language. And yet, when Marx describes the alienation of labor, he too is ensnared in metaphors that posit primordial entities, such as man’s “essential being” (326), which have more than a whiff of theology about them. Such theoretical problems raised by Marx’s early writing are manifold, and have inspired plenty of commentary and debate since the discovery and publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1932. For what is this “himself ” (or herself) that, under conditions of capitalist exploitation, is experienced only during moments of non-worktime? What is this state of “homelessness” into which the laborer is shunted the moment he or she enters the workplace? And what is the contemporary fate of such simple diagnoses in a world that has seen working conditions undergo a pace and scale of transformation comparable to the industrial revolution? How, for example, should we understand the implications, for Marx’s concept, of the increasing appearance of labor undertaken “voluntarily, ” for no wages? Can such conditions guarantee that the labor in question is not alienated, or do they confirm something like the absoluteness of alienation? And what if I start to “identify” so strongly with my salaried work that I experience it as self-fulfillment? What if—as certain analysts of “neo-liberalism” have contended has happened in the contemporary period—the reconfiguration of people as “human capital” is applicable to “all that we do and every venue” of our activity—such that labor itself begins to disappear as an analytical category, along with “alienation, exploitation and association among laborers” (Brown 2015: 21, 38)? What do we do with “exceptional” working conditions—such as those that continue to exist in pockets of academia, in the activities of charitable institutions, and in the private studios of writers and artists, where markets, competition, wages and exchange may not have a determining influence on the nature of production (Beech 2016)? Such questions do not, of course, undermine the fact of exploitation, but they surely raise questions about the general appropriateness of the metaphor of alienation. It will not have been missed that Marx’s early discussions of alienation remain at a phenomenological level. Marx, in other words, preserves the subjective quality of alienation: “The realization of labor is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy this realization of labor appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement [Entfremdung], as alienation [Entäußerung]” (1992: 324). “Appears, ” but to whom? Reading Marx’s earliest writings, one has the sense of a figure struggling to negotiate the conceptual gap between “philosophy”—represented by Hegel and the Romantic tradition that provides him with the concept of alienation—and revolutionary politics; struggling, that is, to overcome philosophy. When Marx writes that to force a rise in wages—either by external pressure or through industrial action—is to fight for “nothing more than better pay for slaves” and does nothing for “human significance or dignity”, that to campaign for wage equality is merely to universalize the relation of the worker to work (332–3), the sense, radical as it is, is close to the “philosophical” tendencies that Lenin would one day condemn as “left-wing communism” (Lenin 1966). Louis Althusser was later to comment that the real work of the 1844 Manuscripts was not to expound the thesis of the alienation of the subject under capitalism but to

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“explode” it—that is, to uphold it as “untenable. ” Notions such as subject, human essence and alienation are simply “evaporated, ” “completely atomized” in order to make way for the “liberation of the concept of a process . . . without a subject, ” the basis of “all the analyses in Capital” (Althusser 2001: 80–1). In making such claims, Althusser is vacating the phenomenological domain by detaching the significance of Marx’s text entirely from the subjective sphere, i.e. from the question of Marx’s intentions. What is undeniable is that Marx’s systematic use of the concept of alienation is largely contained within writings, such as the 1844 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, that were never intended for publication. In The German Ideology, co-authored with Engels just a year or two after the composition of the Manuscripts, references to “alienation”—the state of things that must be abolished—are weighted with irony, as “a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers” (Marx and Engels 1974: 56). Indeed, even to talk of “states of affairs” is, for the Marx and Engels of The German Ideology, to perpetuate the language of alienation. Communism, they write—partly substantiating Althusser’s emphasis on “process”—is not a state of affairs to be established, but “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (1974: 56–7). In the Grundrisse—the notes that Marx made during the winter of 1857–58 while researching the first volume of Capital—the language of alienation returns but with a more “scientific” emphasis rooted not in the laborer’s consciousness, but in the concept of surplus value, “a product of labour itself ” (1973: 452). “Surplus value” is a synonym for “capital”, the entity into which labor is transformed “as value endowed with its own might and will, confronting [the worker] in his abstract, objectless, purely subjective poverty” (453). In other words, by the time of the Grundrisse the subjective dimension has been more or less expunged from the category of alienation. Marx objectivates the concept further with the figure of the machine. With the “transformation of the means of labour into machinery, ” living labor becomes “a mere living accessory of this machinery” (693). Workers themselves are cast as nothing but “conscious linkages, ” elements of the machine that enable the “absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital” (692, 693). In a substantial fragment intended for, but not included in, the first volume of Capital, Marx makes clear the degree to which the worker’s very idea of “free selfdetermination, of liberty, ” far from forming a buffer against alienation, may be simply another form of it, for those subjective qualities make him a “much better” (more productive) worker than, say, the slave, whose place in the process of production is maintained by “direct compulsion” (1990b: 1031). Alienation, for the mature Marx, is a process to which even a worker’s sense of autonomy and free will is a contributing factor. However, the same unpublished fragment provides us with an answer to the question of the artist, raised earlier, that complicates this story. Marx makes a distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” work, depending on whether the labor accrues surplus value or not when it is exchanged for money: Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as

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the activation of his own nature . . . A schoolmaster who instructs others is not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who works for wages in an institution along with others, using his own labour to increase the money of the entrepreneur who owns the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker. But for the most part, work of this sort has scarcely reached the state of being subsumed even formally under capital, and belongs essentially to a transitional stage 1990b: 1044

One possible implication of this reference to a “transitional stage” is that subsumption is an historical logic, “full subsumption” is a matter of time, and art and education—in the fully vocational sense that Marx imbues to those activities—are vestiges of a vanishing epoch. Some analysts have had no compunction in proposing that we arrived at such a stage long ago, and that Marx’s theoretical retention of “pockets of autonomy, ” such as this distinction between productive and unproductive labor, is nothing but a symptom of his failure to imagine the incursions of capital that we are observing in our own period.2 Marx himself concludes that these relatively autonomous formations are of “microscopic significance” when compared with the main currents of capitalist production (1044). But a second implication of the passage, in tension with the first, seems to be the survival of the phenomenological understanding of alienation in intervals, at least, of Marx’s mature thought—an understanding that underwrites the continuing prominence of the concept in the “Western Marxist” tradition, where, especially in the post-war years, it came to designate all the most grievous effects of capitalist production on, as one characteristic work puts it, “human beings . . . their physical and mental states, and . . . the social processes of which they are a part” (Ollman 1976: 131). Contemporary engagements with the concept of alienation tend to reactivate the “normative” or “humanist” terms of that tradition, albeit in a transformed sense. The most recent contribution to this literature comes from within the Frankfurt School, the tradition of Marxist social theory founded by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and closely associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.3 In 2014 the Institute published Entfremdung by Rahel Jaeggi, immediately translated into English (as Alienation).4 The distinctiveness of Jaeggi’s intervention is in the overturning of the place of “appropriation” in Marx’s earliest accounts of alienation, its attempt to reconfigure the concept of alienation without “the certainty of a final harmony or reconciliation” (2014: 32), and its desire to reinvent “normative” critique without its essentialist implications. For the young Marx, “appropriation, ” understood literally as making something one’s own, is a form of engagement with nature that ensures that human activity will appear as “estrangement” and as “activity for another and of another,” when nature turns from being simply man’s “inorganic body” into “a means for his individual life,” i.e., when “life itself appears only as a means of life” (1992: 328). In so doing, man is alienated from his “species-being”; he “makes his life activity, ” which for the animal is “immediately one with its being, ” into “an object of his will and consciousness. ” The “another, ” in the phrase “activity for another and of another,” is therefore himself. The figure of appropriation, like the distinction between “individual life” and “species-life, ” is thus a further mark of the “philosophical” quality of the 1844 manuscripts, since the

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moment of alienation is thereby situated in a mythical moment in the history of man— indeed, with the appearance of human consciousness itself. In order for Marx to resolve these problems, which persist even in the Grundrisse (1973: 196), it was necessary for him to acknowledge that appropriation is “common to all forms of society in which human beings live” and “independent of every form of [human] existence, ” including capitalism (1990a: 290). In Capital, Vol.  I, therefore, Marx vastly contains and qualifies the roles of both appropriation and alienation in the capitalist mode of production. Jaeggi’s project to “resurrect” the concept of alienation in the face of its “loss” for social critique (Neuhouser 2014: xi) involves dissociating the concept of appropriation from alienation, and reconceiving it in positive terms, as a relationality that remains to be produced.5 For Jaeggi, “appropriation” is not, as it is for the young Karl Marx, a mode of alienation, but the means of overcoming alienated existence. Appropriation, indeed, is the very basis and condition of “living one’s own life” (2014: xxi), while alienation interrupts or “inhibits” this appropriation (2). In Jaeggi’s most potted formulation, alienation is “a relation of relationlessness” (1). In this way, Jaeggi illustrates the degree to which the project of the Frankfurt School, under the direction of Axel Honneth, has taken on the qualities of an ethical philosophy, indeed, it might even be claimed to have repositioned itself as an inquiry into the contemporary constitution and viability of the “good life” (Aristotle’s eudaimonia) (Aristotle 2011). Marx’s late realization that ideas of “self-determination” and “liberty” can be further modes of alienation does not find any way into Jaeggi’s project. For, despite her emphasis on “will” and “futurity, ” her work announces the return to claims of “normativity” of one of the most consequential traditions of Marxist thought. In a 2009 conversation with Jacques Rancière, Honneth insisted that “we simply cannot do without the notion of an undistorted and complete self-relationship, even if there is only ever going to be a negative or indirect access to it” (Honneth and Rancière 2016: 110). Holding back from defining what one means by a “complete, ” “successful” or “undistorted” relation to the self, however, or the content of the “good life, ” far from avoiding the risks of essentialism, opens up such terms to the imperialist or theological conceptions of anyone who might lay claim to them. Do western military leaders feel less than “complete” when they order drone strikes on targets in Yemen or Afghanistan? Does anything suggest that a sense of the “good life” is absent from development deals that lead to the expropriation of communities or individuals in resource-rich parts of the planet? Do not Honneth’s and Jaeggi’s appeals to “self-relation” and “fulfillment” intersect comfortably with appeals to “mindfulness” and “connectivity” in contemporary work practices and consumer culture—the latest stage in the transformation of all dimensions of existence into storehouses of surplus value? In the 2009 conversation, Rancière replied to Honneth as follows, “I am far away from any conception in terms of the normal, normality and pathology, because what disturbs me is the idea that the telos is some kind of good relation to oneself ” (Honneth and Rancière 2016: 119). The continuing relevance of the concept of alienation may be primarily in marking a faultline in contemporary currents of Marxist theory, between those who see a return to concepts such as alienation, self-relation and integrity as the

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key to reviving “critique, ” along with normative conceptions of social and ethical being, and those for whom the best chance of emancipation is in practices of dis-identification from all such “philosophical” categories, practices that do not depend for their legitimacy on being noticed by philosophers and political thinkers. Practices that may even appear, to the eyes of political economists and social theorists, as symptoms of “alienation. ”

Notes 1

2 3

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5

The Marxist critic Raymond Williams calls alienation “one of the most difficult words in the [English] language” (1985: 33), a claim that might be extended to German and French, the languages in which much of the work of Marxist conceptualization has taken place. The “difficulty” is aggravated by the fact that Entfremdung, usually translated as “estrangement, ” and originally denoting a state of interrupted relations with God or with other persons, and Entäußerung, usually translated as “alienation, ” but including the sense of the transfer of rights or property to another, are used largely interchangeably in Marx’s early writing. See Williams (1985: 33–6). The best known of such analyses is Jameson (1991: esp. 45–9). For a more recent elaboration see Nicholas Brown (2014: esp. 457–8). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in 1944, Horkheimer and Adorno associate alienation unambiguously with “technical rationality, ” “the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself ” (2002: 95). The series in which Jaeggi’s work was published, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie (Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology and Social Philosophy), published by Campus Verlag, was initiated by Axel Honneth on becoming director of the Institute in 2001. In a foreword to Jaeggi’s book, Axel Honneth associates this loss for critique of the concept of alienation with charges of “musty essentialism” leveled by poststructuralist critics (Jaeggi 2014: x).

References Althusser, L. (2001 [1971]), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press. Aristotle. (2011), Nicomachean Ethics, trans. R.C. Bartlett and S.D. Collins, Chicago, IL : Chicago University Press. Beech, D. (2016 [2015]), “Art and Productive Capital, ” Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics, Chicago, IL : Haymarket, 241–66. Brown, N. (2014 [2012]), “The Work of Art in the Age of its Real Subsumption under Capital, ” Contemporary Marxist Theory: A Reader, in A. Pendakis, J. Diamanti, N. Brown, J. Robinson and I. Szeman (eds), 449–68, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Brown, W. (2015), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone. Honneth, A. and J. Rancière (2016), Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, eds. K. Genel and J.P. Deranty, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Horkheimer, M. and Theodor W. Adorno (2002 [1972]), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Jaeggi, R. (2014), Alienation, trans. F. Neuhouser and A.E. Smith, New York: Columbia University Press. Jameson, F. (1991), Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Lenin, V.I. (1966 [1920]), “ ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, ” The Lenin Reader: The Outstanding Works of V. I. Lenin, S.T. Possony (ed), 409–47, Chicago, IL : Henry Regnery. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. (1990a [1976]), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. (1990b [1976]), “Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production, ” trans. R. Livingstone, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, 941–1084, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. (1992), Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1974), The German Ideology: Student Edition, 2nd edn, trans. C. Dutt, C.P. Magill and W. Lough, (ed), C.J. Arthur, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Neuhouser, F. (2014), “Translator’s Introduction, ” Alienation, trans. F. Neuhouser and A.E. Smith, xi–xvii, New York: Columbia University Press. Ollman, B. (1976), Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. (1985), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Base and Superstructure Edgar Illas

The opposition between base and superstructure is both scientific and political, i.e. it functions as a methodological distinction and as a transformative device.1 The opposition is essential for the analysis of the mode of production, even if Marx only thematizes it once in his corpus. In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he writes: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. 1970: 20–1

The theory of the determinacy of the base over the superstructure relies on the previous “inversion” of idealism, and specifically on the Hegelian conception of history, carried out by Marx and Engels in 1846 in The German Ideology. Although Marx and Engels do not explicitly talk about base and superstructure yet, their materialist conception of history constitutes the conceptual premise for what will be the analysis of the mode of production. They write: This conception of history thus relies on expounding the real process of production, starting from the material production of life itself, and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production, i.e. civil society in its various stages, as the basis of all history; describing it in its action as the state, and also explaining how all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, morality, etc., arise from it, and tracing the process of their formation from that basis; thus the whole thing can, of course, be depicted in its totality, and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various

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sides on one another. It has not, like the idealist view of history, to look for a category in every period, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice. 1976: 61

Marx and Engels establish a dual opposition between, on the one hand, material production, life-processes, history, development and actual reality, and, on the other hand, ideological reflexes, phantom-like forms, mental products and human thought in general. Thus, each side of the opposition encompasses a complex diversity of components. The version of the base-superstructure division that commonly circulates, however, is more abridged. The base has come to describe the unity of the forces of production, which include the technological, geographical and physical means of production together with human labor power, and the relations of production, which refer to the social and property relations such as the one between wage laborers and the owners of the means of production. The superstructure, in turn, designates ideologies and institutions: the state, religion/churches and morality. In this respect, the initial reflections in the German Ideology remind us that the base-superstructure is not a mere Manichean dualism, but rather expresses an ontology of historical production, built on two spheres that are united by means of their very opposition. In other words, the mode of production constitutes a form of human “worlding,” to use a Heideggerian term, in which both things and ideas constitute the foundations of existing social formations. Marx and Engels’s attack on idealism has given rise to a subsequent simplification— the labeling of Marxism as a mere inversion of Hegelianism. The story goes like this: whereas Hegel conceives history as the teleological unfolding of the different stages of the Absolute Spirit in its effort to attain knowledge of what it is in itself, Marx reinterprets this teleology according to the base or infrastructure of production. Thus, if Hegel speaks of the stages of the Oriental world, the Greek world, the Roman world and the Christian-German world, Marx replaces these spiritual wholes with the succession of Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production. Finally, Hegel’s end-of-history stage of the realization of freedom would correspond to Marx’s project for a socialist mode of production. Given this clear-cut outline, Marxism has been accused over and over of being teleological, reductionist, dogmatic and mechanicist. Yet, as is often the case, things are more complicated. To begin with, while the opposition between base and superstructure aims to describe the reality of history from a scientific viewpoint, it also constitutes a wager, a political intervention at the theoretical level. The very conception or “enframing” of historical reality in terms of base and superstructure within modes of production is an attempt to compel us to think about the relationship between material production and all the political, cultural, legal, ideological and social manifestations of each human society. This invitation to think ideas in relation to the economy is not dogmatic, but exploratory. It is a genuine effort to understand the world and empower humans in their struggles to transform it. This materialist line of inquiry contains an inherent gesture of self-critique; if ideas are determined by material production, that means that any theoretical endeavor, including

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materialism, will also have to account for the ways in which it may be determined by the historical conditions that made it possible. Marx’s own corpus presents the empirical proof that the base/superstructure opposition does not intend to reduce human societies to a set of economic coordinates. Indeed, the large quantity of essays in which he analyzes various political situations of his time, from the Eighteenth Brumaire in France to British rule in India to social relations in Russia, demonstrate the need to consider the multiplicity of contingent factors that compose each historical situation. Yet it is Althusser who provides the definitive description of the complex and nonreductionist nature of base and superstructure. In Reading Capital, Althusser explains how the determinacy of the base over the superstructure cannot be understood either as a transitive causality, which would imply a direct, mechanicistic determination, or as an expressive causality, in which case the superstructure would represent the multiple forms of expression of the “inner essence” of the base (2006: 186). Instead, Marx’s theoretical revolution is to conceive a form of structural causality exerted by the base over the superstructure. Thus, structural causality does not consist in Cartesian transitive effectivity or in Leibnizian–Hegelian expressivity, but rather it involves Spinozist immanence, “it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects . . . that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects” (2006: 189). This rereading of base/superstructure has two interrelated implications. First, the base exerts its determining effectivity over the superstructure “in the last instance, ” that is, as an absent cause that never appears as such, since, as Althusser puts it, “the lonely hour of the “last instance” never comes” (2005: 113). Consequently, and second, the superstructure is composed of relatively autonomous levels that cannot be reduced to one spiritual principle, like Hegel’s civilizations. Instead, these levels organize themselves in social formations according to a “structure in dominance” (2005: 204). The economic last instance determines which levels play a dominant role in the articulation of social conjunctures as complex wholes. This does not mean that the economy univocally decides that a particular component dominates a situation. The point is, rather, that the base provides an orientation to understand the structuring of dominant and subordinate elements in each real situation. Marxist analysis focuses on “the relation of this situation in fact to this situation in principle, that is, the very relation which makes of this situation in fact a ‘variation’ of the ‘invariant’ structure, in dominance, of the totality” (2005: 209). Thus, Althusser’s fundamental intervention shows how the foundation of the base does not predetermine the content of political, social and cultural events, but rather the opposite; the infrastructure provides an absent, presupposed point of reference that enables us to explain the “overdetermined” singularity of each event without reducing it to an abstract principle or inner essence. After Althusser’s elucidation of the problem, a problem that Marx produced but “did not pose . . . as a problem” (2006:187), Marxism can never again be accused of economic determinism. In a further reflection on the base and superstructure, Fredric Jameson has continued to stress the anti-mechanicist vocation of this opposition and its usefulness as an interpretive tool of concrete situations:

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there can be no static structural or sociological theories or models of base and superstructure. Each analysis is ad hoc and punctual; it sets out from a specific event or text and constitutes an interpretive act rather than a theory of structure. 2009: 48

In this respect, Jameson proposes to study given phenomena as “base-andsuperstructural” units (2009: 48), that is, as particular manifestations of the convergence of the two levels. Indeed, this convergence has become a common premise of contemporary Marxist theorizations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for instance, write that “Post-modernization and the passage to Empire involve a real convergence of the realms that used to be designated as base and superstructure” (2000: 385). Specifically, Hardt and Negri observe that, in the global society of immaterial labor and finance capital, the ideological, cognitive and social superstructural elements have become themselves forces and relations of production, as the whole realm of social production has been subsumed under the logic of capital. The thinker who has probably extracted the most radical consequences from the convergence of base and superstructure is Kojin Karatani, in his reinterpretation of the modes of production in terms of modes of exchange. Karatani rewrites human history as a sequence of conjunctures in which four modes of exchange coexist in a relation of dominance, or “structure of dominance. ” The four modes: reciprocity, plunder/ redistribution, commodity exchange, and communism involve the total convergence of economic structure and political and social formations, which he gathers under the terms “state” and “nation.” This theorization even overcomes the Althusserian paradigm: Marxists regarded state and nation as parts of the ideological superstructure. But the autonomy of state and nation, an autonomy that cannot be explained in terms of the capitalist economic base, does not arise because of the so-called relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure. The autonomy of state and nation arises instead because each is rooted in its own distinct economic base, its own distinct mode of exchange. 2014: 10

Thus, Karatani pushes the convergence of the two levels toward a certain kind of implosion. In a way, he returns to economic determinism, as superstructural autonomy is “rooted in” an economic base, and, at the same time, he over-determines the very last instance, as each base becomes a singular combination of the four modes of exchange. Here, one is tempted to apply the same operation of “base-and-superstructural” historicization to the very history of this opposition. Indeed, two dominant articulations can be detected in the genealogy of base and superstructure: first, the form of economic determinism, whether mechanicist or expressive, that is dominant in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century; and, second, the post-1960s Althusserian form of immanent convergence. The event that marked the shift from one form to the other was Stalinism. Stalinism represented the most extreme version

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of economic determinism since, at least, the Second International of 1889 to 1916. For this reason, the shift from determinism to structural causality also responded to the urgent need to dissociate Marxism from totalitarianism. But perhaps another, more structural change also overdetermined this retheorization of the base and superstructure. This change is the shift from modernity to postmodernity and globalization. The shift is dialectical and paradoxical, as it entails both continuity and rupture, and it brings all the oppositions that articulated the modern period to a moment of culmination and collapse, of fulfillment and indistinction. Despite this equivocality, however, the two periods define clearly different temporalities; whereas modernity corresponds to the temporality of progress, of the new versus the old, and of the gradual subsumption of previous modes of labor under capitalism, globalization represents the temporality of a perpetual present in which capitalism has fully incorporated all external modes of labor, and in which all social production and historical events take place on the same simultaneous spatiality or plane of immanence. In this respect, economic determinism can be related to the temporality of modernity and the conception of history as a progressive sequence of different stages. Indeed, we may even say that determinism was a necessary, “mechanic” conception that made possible the very appearance of capitalist modernity. In other words, economic determinism functioned as a superstructural principle that expressed the base of a capitalism, which was in a stage of formation and development. By contrast, the reinterpretation of base and superstructure in terms of economic last instance, over-determination and singularity corresponds to a global world in which capitalism has reached its full development and has become the absent cause of the entire planet. At this stage, the convergence of base and superstructure occurs at all levels. The production of immaterial, superstructural goods, such as ideas, knowledge and communication fuses the technological forces of production and social life itself. Material production blends with social reproduction, and consequently the modes of production are reinterpreted as modes of exchange. The merging of levels results in infinite articulations and, for this reason, it becomes necessary to focus on the singular nature of each of them. If the levels of base and superstructure have folded onto each other, is it indispensable to retain this modern “metaphor of a topography” (Althusser 2014: 53)? The answer is definitely yes. Logically, without the distinction we would not be able to understand the convergence that globalization represents. We can propose that the two terms should be used under erasure, that is, with marks indicating that they do not express identifiable realities, and yet they continue to designate the ontological pillars of historical conjunctures and social formations. The final but essential question, what are the consequences of these two conceptions of base and superstructure for political practice? With the vanishing of economic determinism, we have lost the modern faith in the inevitability of communism and in the epochal proletarian road to socialism. But another energizing realm of possibilities has emerged, the task of recognizing multiple events and singular phenomena that, in a way, are already materializing other bases, other superstructures, from within the very confines and horizon of the eternal present of global capitalism.

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Notes 1

For a general overview of the base/superstructure “metaphor, ” see Stuart Hall (1977), “Rethinking the ‘Base-and-Superstructure’ Metaphor. ”

References Althusser, L. (2005), For Marx, trans. B. Brewster, London: Verso. Althusser, L. and E. Balibar (2006), Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster, London: Verso. Althusser, L. (2014), On the Reproduction of Capitalism, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. Hall, S. (1977), “Rethinking the ‘Base-and-Superstructure’ Metaphor, ” in J. Bloomfield (ed), The Communist University of London: Papers on Class, Hegemony and Party, 43–72, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Jameson, F. (2009), Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso. Karatani, K. (2014), The Structure of World History. From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, trans. M.K. Bourdaghs, Durham, MD : Duke University Press. Marx, K. (1970) A Contribution to the Critique Of The Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya, ed. M. Dobb, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1976), The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

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Capital Elena Louisa Lange

Introduction It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Marx’s entire project of the “Critique of Political Economy” culminates in the concept of capital. The reason is twofold: Marx’s concept of capital presents both the key to the “secret of profit-making” (Geheimnis der Plusmacherei), that is the sine qua non of the capitalist mode of production, as well as the solution to why, for classical and vulgar political economy, profit-making had to remain a “secret” or, rather, a mystery (Marx 1976: 280). What was crucial for answering both of these “mysteries” was Marx’s critical evaluation of the classics, notably Smith and Ricardo. Marx’s far-reaching discovery was that neither one, despite being the “best representatives” (1981: 969) of their science, had succeeded in answering the pertinent question, how, if commodities are exchanged for commodities of equal value,1 can the capitalist withdraw a greater sum of value from their circulation than he had initially cast into it? In other words, how is “self-valorizing value” (Marx 1976: 322), i.e. capital, possible on the basis of equivalent exchange? By successfully answering this question on the basis of the classics’ own condition of the problem, i.e. the laws of equivalent exchange, Marx’s concept of capital discloses the “blind spot” of bourgeois political economy to serve as the foundation for the work he conceived as “the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie, landowners included” (Marx and Engels: 1987: 358), Capital. This essay will focus on the general outline of how Marx introduces the concept of capital in Capital to account for Marx’s unique method of solving the riddle that had so perplexed his predecessors. The locus classicus are Chapters 4 to 6 of Volume I of Capital, Part Two of Book One. After the value forms of commodity and money, treated in Chapters 1 through 3, capital is introduced as the third form of value. Yet, even more than the commodity and money, capital appears as being increasingly unrelated to the expenditure and appropriation of human labor, and therefore came to “live a life of its own”, transforming “social relations . . . into properties of these things [money and capital] themselves” (Marx 1981: 965). This essay will follow Marx’s careful conceptual analysis to show how the “capital-fetish” comes to dominate the bourgeois selfunderstanding of the capitalist mode of production. It will do so along the lines of these structuring questions: 273

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1. How does Marx introduce the concept of capital in Capital? 2. How does Marx explain the creation of surplus value and capital on the basis of equivalent exchange? 3. How does capital come to appear as “fruit-bearing”, i.e. value creating, of its own accord? We shall see that Marx’s sarcastic view of the self-presentation of the capitalist mode of the production as the “very Eden of the innate rights of man” and the “exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” is the result of an analysis of capital that pierces through capital’s appearance towards its real essence (1976: 280).

1. How does Marx Introduce the Concept of Capital into Capital? While in the first part of Capital, Vol. I, the value forms of the commodity and money have been analyzed towards their obfuscated source in abstract human labor, the second part, Chapters  4 through 6 concern “The Transformation of Money into Capital”. Here is where Marx systematically introduces the concept of capital for the first time. He begins his analysis with “The General Formula for Capital”, Chapter 4, and then goes on to point to “The Contradictions in the General Formula”, Chapter 5, to finally arrive at the “secret” of capital, namely “The Sale and Purchase of Labour Power” in Chapter 6. The overarching theme is how money becomes capital, how money valorizes itself. As we shall see, according to Marx money only has this one function under the conditions of capitalist production. In “The General Formula for Capital”, Marx exclusively focuses on the economic forms as they appear to us, preliminarily abstracting from their material content. As one of the economic form determinations, he starts with the circulation of commodities. In it, he strictly differentiates two forms: the first, the “direct form of the circulation of commodities, ” or C-M-C (commodities—money—commodities), signifies the transformation of commodities into money and the re-conversion of money into commodities, “selling in order to buy” (1976: 247). The ultimate aim here is the consumption of the commodities’ use value. The other form of circulation, M-C-M (money—commodities—money), however is “quite distinct from the first” (Marx 1976: 248). It denotes the transformation of money into commodities and the re-conversion of commodities into money, “buying in order to sell” (Marx 1976: 248). Marx differentiates money, which through a particular process should transform itself into capital, from money that is intended for the purchase of use values. The criterion for their difference is shown in the forms of circulation themselves; C-M-C describes the purchase of commodities for a certain use, e.g. selling corn in order to buy wine. M-C-M, on the other hand, describes the seemingly meaningless exchange of exchange values. Why meaningless? Because, while the first commodity in C-M-C denotes a qualitatively different commodity than the second one—wine, not shoes—the exchange for money as such seems tautological: there is no qualitative difference between 100 Euros thrown into circulation and the 100 Euros withdrawn from it. The crucial point

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of course is that in M-C-M, the qualitative difference of C-M-C must be replaced by a quantitative one. It is the difference in their respective quantities that motivates the circulation or exchange of money for (more) money. Let us take a closer look at money alone. Both circulations consist of two contrary phases: C-M and M-C. In direct circulation, money is spent. It is definitely gone and will not come back to the seller of the initial commodity. In money circulation however, money is preserved. More precisely, money is only “advanced” in order to come back to the buyer. Both forms of circulation therefore serve different ends: in the first, direct consumption meets a person’s needs, in the second, money becomes and end in itself. Value therefore presupposes itself to serve as the motion’s own end. Here is where Marx first introduces the formula for capital: The complete form of this process is therefore M-C-M′, where M′ = M+Δ M, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call “surplus-value”. 1976: 251

More money is withdrawn from the circulation than is originally thrown into it. The corn bought for 100 Euro re-converts into 100 Euro plus an increment of, e.g. 10 Euros. And this is where we find the first definition of capital: The value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but increases its magnitude, adds to itself a surplus-value, or is valorized [verwertet sich]. And this movement converts it into capital. Marx 1976: 252

What is decisive here for Marx is that the movement of capital does not aim at the satisfaction of particular human needs, which must be represented in use values. Neither does the movement of capital aim at value, expressed in units of money, alone. Instead, the movement of capital aims at self-valorization, its own quantitative transformation into a larger sum of money than its own circulation began with. Hence, the valorization process of capital is a dynamic process; if capital’s exchange with commodities were the ultimate end, it would step out of line. If capital were withdrawn from circulation, it would petrify as treasure. Money, giving itself the form of capital, must, therefore, be able to infinitely expand its own magnitude. This mystery however could only be explained on the basis of equivalent exchange. In the following, we will see why.

2. How does Marx Explain the Creation of Surplus Value and Capital on the Basis of Equivalent Exchange? Marx’s fundamental claim was that the classics were never able to explain the creation of “added” or “surplus” value, i.e. capital, on the basis of equivalent exchange. It is obvious however, that when commodities of equal exchange value, i.e. equivalents are

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exchanged, “no one abstracts more value from circulation than he throws into it. The formation of surplus-value does not take place” (1976: 255). Therefore it seems logical that only the sale and purchase of commodities above or below their value, i.e. their exchange as non-equivalents, can explain the creation of surplus value or capital. This claim, called “profit upon alienation”, was put forward by the “vulgar economists” (Torrens, MacCulloch, Say, etc.) emerging after the demise of the Ricardian school. Dissatisfied with the conundrums in Ricardo’s theory of profit,2 their main contention was that “profit,” a derived form of capital, results from a markup to the original value of the product. In this section we will see how Marx shows that a markup on value in exchange cannot explain the origin of capital. More pertinently, neither can exchange or circulation itself explain it. For reasons of clarity, let us assume two commodity owners, named Andy and Boris. Andy deals in wine, Boris deals in corn. If we take the exchange of nonequivalents as hypothesis, we may then assume that “some inexplicable privilege” (Marx 1976: 263) allows Andy to sell his wine above its value. Let us assume that he sells his wine for 110 instead of 100 Euros. He will then receive a surplus of 10 Euros which corresponds to a nominal price increase of 10 per cent. In his function of commodity owner, however, he is also a buyer of commodities. Andy therefore buys another commodity, whether for personal use or for further sale, from Boris. Boris in turn also has the privilege to sell his corn above its value. This time, Andy has been cheated by Boris. It is clear that no surplus value is generated in this process. The magnitude of value on both sides is balanced out again. Everything remains as it was before: The formation of surplus-value, and therefore the transformation of money into capital, can consequently be explained neither by assuming that commodities are sold above their value, nor by assuming that they are bought at less than their value. Marx 1976: 263

Let us further assume that Andy had sold wine worth 40 Euros to Boris, in exchange for corn worth 50 Euros. Andy has consequently increased the value of his product by 10 Euro and turned it into capital. Boris however is left with products that are 10 Euros less in value. Before this transaction, 40 Euros were in Andy’s hand and 50 Euros were in Boris’s hand. After the transaction, 50 Euros are in Andy’s and 40 Euros in Boris’s hand. “The same change would have taken place, if A[ndy], without the disguise provided by exchange, had directly stolen the 10 Euros from B[oris]” (Marx 1976: 265). Only the owners of money have changed their positions, while, in the whole circulation, the total value of the transaction has not increased by an atom. The capitalist class of a given country, taken as a whole, cannot defraud itself . . . [In consequence] . . . Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, creates no value. Marx 1976: 266

Ultimately, as Marx has shown, the exchange of non-equivalents does not create value. And yet, how else can surplus value be generated? We have heard that the treasurer is

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not a capitalist, because he withdraws money from circulation. It also clear that a shoemaker, who expends her labor power cutting, sewing and painting shoes, cannot valorize a new pair of shoes without selling them at the market. We therefore do not seem to be able to get rid of circulation altogether. The general formula of capital, M-C-Mʹ seems to contradict all laws of the nature of the commodity and value. To this problem, Marx adds his famous paradox: Capital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation. 1976: 268

The conditions of the problem are hence twofold. First, the exchange of equivalents must be presupposed if the transformation of money into capital is to be explained on the immanent laws of commodity exchange. Second, at the end of the process more money must be withdrawn from circulation than has initially been thrown into it. In Chapter  6, “The Sale and Purchase of Labour Power”, Marx solves the riddle to the “self-valorization” of value based on these conditions of the problem. The transformation of value into surplus value, Marx concludes, must be initialized with the purchase of a particular commodity on the free market. This is the purchase of the commodity in the first act, M-C. Being a commodity like any other, it must have both an exchange and a use value. However, if its exchange value cannot create value in the process of circulation, then it must be the commodity’s use value. Marx’s revolutionary scientific discovery was the determination of labor power as this particular kind of commodity; the use value of labor power, of living labor in the production process, is the source from which surplus value is generated. It is the unique commodity of labor power that produces a surplus beyond the value for which it has been bought on the market, i.e. its wage. Here, the crucial point escaping Marx’s predecessors was the separation of the working day into necessary labor time, the labor time needed to reproduce the laborer’s means of subsistence in the form of her exchange value or wage, and surplus labor time, the living labor time creating surplus value which “costs the capitalist class nothing” (1978: 550). In this process, capital, against the living labor of the workers, is mere “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Marx 1976: 342). Marx had therefore solved the antinomy of capital that it must have its origin both “in and outside of circulation” on the basis of his own conditions of the problem: first, the precondition for surplus value is the buying and selling of labor power on the free market. Here, the condition of circulation is fulfilled. Second, the use of the labor power commodity in the production process takes place outside of circulation. The contingent fact that, during the whole working day, the worker produces a greater sum of value than he receives in exchange is not the concern of the capitalist, who merely abides by the rules of equivalent exchange. The capitalist is entitled to consume the full capacity of the use-value of the commodity he has bought. This also entails that the whole sum of the commodities produced during the working day now belong to the capitalist. Labor power, though the only commodity that creates value, is no exception

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where the law of equivalents applies. This also entails that he, the capitalist, strictly speaking, does by no means take any unlawful possession of the surplus product, and ultimately, capital. Capital, though produced by the expenditure of labor power, belongs to the capitalist under the laws of equivalent exchange. Marx has therefore solved the riddle to unequal exchange of capital and labor on the condition of the formal validity of equivalent exchange.

3. How does Capital Come to Appear as “Fruit-Bearing”? Notes on the “Capital-Fetish” The classics, starting with Smith, were ultimately unable to explain the creation of capital. Instead, they resorted to explaining it as an independent source of value, and more particularly, of price. In their attempts to explain the value (price) of a product, the independent sources of capital, land and labor, yielding profits, rents and wages respectively, were equal components of price and, ultimately, “wealth”. Smith termed these the “three original sources of all revenue as well as of all exchangeable value” (1846: 24). This “Trinity formula”, in Marx’s dictum, endowed capital and land the magical status of being a “component” or source of value of their own accord. Because Smith and his successors did not succeed in understanding living labor in the production process as the source of both capital (profit) and the rent drawn from land, they ultimately could not understand the outcome of a surplus up and above the initial investment (capital) which cannot be the original capital itself. Tautologically, they refer to capital as “fruit-bearing”, and, with it, made its detachment from the labor that produces it under definite social relations, i.e. the mystification of a social relation into a “thing”, complete: Capital thereby already becomes a very mystical being, since all the productive forces of social labour appear attributable to it, and not to labour as such, as a power springing forth from its own womb . . . In this sphere, the conditions of the original production of value fall completely into the background. Marx 1981: 966

This “capital-fetish” is finally perfected in the formula of interest-bearing capital (M-Mʹ) in which the intermediate steps, the production and the circulation process, are obliterated. This conception has been mainly embraced by the vulgar economists who explained interest as a “property of money to create value, to yield interest, as it is the property of a pear tree to bear pears” (Marx 1981: 517). Here, in the formula M-Mʹ, “this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-valorizing value, money breeding money, and in this form it no longer bears any birth marks of its origin” (Marx 1981: 516). Capital that no longer bears the birth marks of its origin in the appropriation of unpaid human labor thus becomes the dominant fetish of the capitalist mode of production and its “theoretical interpreters”, the political economists. Marx’s endeavor to pierce through the illusions of the circulation sphere, of interest, finance and “dead

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labour” as “independent” sources of value, gives us an unprecedented and unsurpassed account of the definite social relations that lie behind, ground and ultimately shatter these fetishisms—in Marx’s time and today.

Notes 1

2

This is a factual condition of the problem, because general fraud (selling commodities at higher, buying them at lower values) is not only contradictory to the laws of commodity exchange, but cannot explain the general increase in value, i.e. surplus value and capital, in a national economy. This will be explained in detail in 2. See also (Marx 1976: 269, footnote 24). For these, see Marx’s account in (Marx and Engels 1989: 258–298).

References Marx, K. (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1978), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 2, Trans. D. Fernbach, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1981), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, Trans. D. Fernbach, London: Penguin. Marx, K., and F. Engel (1987), Collected Works, Vol. 42 (1864 to1868, Letters), London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K., and F. Engel (1989), Collected Works, Vol. 32 (1861 to 1863, Economic Manuscripts), London: Lawrence and Wishart. Smith, A. (1846), The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, and William Tate.

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Circulation Atle Mikkola Kjøsen

Circulation is a concept and a category Marx uses to analyze capital as a process in addition to, or rather than, a relation. Marx’s analysis of the circulation process is challenging, which in part is due to the polysemy of circulation as a concept. While circulation refers primarily to the transformation or movement of forms that value or capital undergoes in the sphere of exchange, it can also refer to capital’s movement through its circuit, transportation and storage, and, generally, to exchange, buying and selling. In addition, circulation is one of the spheres of the economy, next to production and consumption. The value that is produced in the sphere of production is realized through exchange in the sphere of circulation. The sphere of circulation, therefore, refers to the market, but is also the domain of logistics, given that Marx includes transportation and storage in the concept of circulation. In relation to Marx’s critique of political economy, circulation must be understood as a phenomenon that is historically specific to the capitalist mode of production and an ideological sphere of appearances that hides the essence of capital and, hence, as something to be negated by a post-capitalist society. This chapter delineates Marx’s concept and category and how he employs it in his analysis of the capitalist mode of production and critique of political economy. It gives an overview of how Marx discusses circulation in the volumes of Capital and Grundrisse, identifies and defines some other important circulation-related categories, and ends by explaining why a rigorous account of circulation is related to Marx’s general critique of ideology. Marx’s discussion of the circulation process of capital is scattered throughout the three volumes of Capital, Grundrisse and his many other unpublished manuscripts. Although Marx devotes the second volume of Capital to the circulation process, he starts his analysis in the first volume. Despite Marx merely assuming the “formal and material changes undergone by capital in the circulation sphere” (1978: 428), for the majority of Capital, Vol. I, he nevertheless discusses the function and importance of circulation, both as a process and a sphere in the six first chapters of this volume, but only in order to introduce his analysis of the production process. Marx first introduces circulation via his discussion of value and value form (exchange-value), and the related, but circulation-specific, economic forms of the commodity and money. That Marx introduces his analysis of the value-form while narratively remaining in the sphere of circulation rather than in production, is neither a mistake in his logical 281

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presentation of capital, nor with what he is trying to discuss; namely, how value is the dominant and socially necessary form in which labor presents itself in the capitalist mode of production. Despite value arising from production that is oriented towards exchange, it is in circulation that value is constituted as value through the act of exchange, abstracting different concrete labors into abstract labor and individual spent labor time into socially necessary labor time. In this process, value sheds its commodity form for the form of money. The first time Marx explicitly discusses circulation in Capital, Vol.  I, it is as the circulation of commodities, which “differ from the direct exchange of products not only in form, but also in essence” (1976: 207). Circulation is thus the form-determination of pre-capitalist exchange. While exchange in any form of society requires that one product of labor changes hands for another, in the capitalist mode of production this act becomes the material support for the circulation process of commodities, i.e. whereby value goes through a metamorphosis from the form of the commodity into money or back again (C–M–C).1 Marx distinguishes this simple circulation of value with the complex movement of capital contained in the formula money– commodity–more money (M–C–Mʹ). The difference between the simple circulation of commodities—“selling in order to buy”—and the circulation of money as capital, the movement of capital—“buying in order to sell”—is that the former is finite and ends in the satisfaction of needs, whereas the latter is an end in itself and limitless, because the “valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement” (Marx 1976: 253). That is, in the circulation of capital, money no longer mediates the circulation of commodities, but has become the telos of circulation (Marx 1976: 255). It is on the basis of the circulation of commodities that Marx develops the category and concept of circulation as a primarily logical process in which value or capital goes through a change of economic forms. Marx compares this formal movement or metamorphosis to the real metamorphosis that matter goes through in the production process, whereby commodities purchased as the elements of production are materially transformed into qualitatively new commodities objectified with surplus-value. Circulation is, therefore, the antithesis of production; whereas value is created in the sphere and process of production, it is realized and posited in its form(s) in the circulation process. Although the goal of M–C–Mʹ is the valorization of value, i.e., surplus-value, Marx is categorical that no new value can be created during the process of circulation. Whereas an individual capitalist may make money by buying cheaply and selling dearly, all that can happen in circulation is a distribution of value and of the products of labor among members of society (Marx 1976: 265–6). This does not mean that capitalists cannot gain extra profit in the sphere of circulation. The circulation of capital, as opposed to commodities, describes a “characteristic and original path” (Marx 1976: 248) that takes value through the sphere of production, but only on the prior condition that labor-power has been purchased in order to be exploited as labor. In Capital, Vol. II, Marx carefully investigates how commodities are exchanged on the market, his object of inquiry being the fetish forms of capital, i.e., “the different forms which capital clothes itself in its different stages, alternately assuming them and casting them aside” (1978: 109). Based on the premises developed in the first volume,

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he extends his analysis of the circulation process by subsuming both the simple circulation of commodities (C–M–C) and the production process into the circuit of capital, which is expressed with the formula M–C(Lp+Mp). . .P. . .Cʹ–Mʹ.2 The circuit describes capital as a repeated iterative and circular process in which value both maintains itself and increases its magnitude by passing through a sequence of mutually connected metamorphoses of forms—M, P, and C—and the three stages of buying: (M–C(Lp+Mp)), producing (P), and selling (Cʹ–Mʹ) (Marx 1978: 132–3). The two stages of buying and selling belong to the sphere of circulation. The circuit of capital is either an “independent circuit of an individual capital, ” i.e., individual businesses, or refers to total social capital as the aggregate of all individual circuits (1978: 110, 177). The individual circuits are intertwined through the “general circulation of commodities, ” meaning that the stages of the circuit of capital are not merely consecutive in the same process, but are also always parallel in the sense that a purchase by one capitalist is a sale by another, such as a linen producer selling her commodities to a coat maker.3 This connection indicates that the circuit of capital may be taken to refer to a supply chain. Formally, the circulation process of capital is nothing but a movement of abstractions, but Marx stresses that “the movement of industrial capital is this movement of abstraction in action” (1978: 185).4 In other words, capital’s change of forms must be supported by the material movement of physical commodities and money. As Marx argues, circulation “may require a motion of the products in space, their real movement from one location to another” (1978: 226) and that the “ ‘circulating’ of commodities . . . resolves itself in transportation” (1978: 229). Therefore, circulation is a process that “proceeds in space and time” (1973: 533) and involves the activities of transportation and storage. Circulation can, however, “take place without their physical movement” (Marx 1978: 226). A house cannot physically move, but it can nevertheless formally circulate by being bought and sold, and commodities that can physically move can “remain in the same warehouse while they undergo dozens of circulation processes, and are bought and sold by speculators ” (Marx 1978: 226).5

Categories and Concepts for Analyzing Circulation I: Temporal Categories Marx operates with several categories of time as important measures and sub-categories of circulation. Turnover time refers to how long it takes for a given capital value to complete a circuit; it is the sum of the duration of capital’s stay in the spheres of production (production time) and circulation (circulation time) (Marx 1978: 200, 204). Circulation time is subdivided by the stages of selling (Cʹ–Mʹ) and buying (M–C) into selling-time and buying-time.6 The time it takes to transport or transmit and store commodities and money is included in circulation time; the time involved in the transportation and storage of commodities prior to their sale is included in sellingtime, while repatriation of money is included in buying-time (1978: 329).7 Marx argues that the sale “is the most difficult part of [capital’s] metamorphosis, and thus forms the

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greater part of the circulation time” because the commodity–as opposed to money–is not in the form of direct exchangeability (Marx 1978: 204; see also 1976: 159).8 Production time and circulation time are “mutually exclusive . . . circulation time generally restricts [capital’s] production time, and hence its valorization process . . . in proportion to its duration” (Marx 1978: 203–4). Circulation time is, therefore, a barrier that acts as a negative limit on production and restricts how many times the production process can be repeated and hence how much surplus-value can be created within a given period (Marx 1973: 519, 538–9, 621; 1978: 203–4).9 Circulation time is, therefore, a “deduction from surplus labour time” (Marx 1973: 539), i.e., effectively a subtraction from surplus-value. There is, therefore, an imperative for capitalists to reduce the circulation time of their capital as much as possible because the “more that . . . circulation time comes to zero, the more the capital functions, and the greater its productivity and self-valorization” (Marx 1978: 203).10 While it is important to reduce circulation time in general, there is an added pressure to abbreviate sellingtime because the sale realizes the surplus-value objectified in the commodity (Marx 1978: 205).11

II: Barriers, Speed, and the Means of Circulation Marx (1973: 516) argues that speed is a “moment” of the circulation process. Capital reduces circulation time by increasing its velocity, which is accomplished through a progressive development of the physical conditions of circulation—the means of communication and transport.12 These means not only make circulation possible, but they also accelerate capital by “annihilat[ing] . . . space by time” (Marx 1973: 524). Merchant’s capital also accelerates the circulation of commodities for many industrial capitals by taking on buying and selling as exclusive functions (1981: 381).13 More broadly, the continuity of capital and the reproduction of the production process is dependent on a circulation process that is as smooth, friction-free and fast as possible, which can only be achieved by capital overcoming its barriers in the sphere of circulation; next to circulation time are the barriers of space, need, availability of money, and the perishability of use-values (Marx 1973: 405, 524, 539; 1978: 206).14 In overcoming these barriers, the logistics processes of transportation and storage, and their means, are essential. While Marx argues that transportation is a branch of industry that is productive of value, it is “distinguished by its appearance as the continuation of a production process within the circulation process and for the circulation process” (1978: 229; see also 1981: 379). The production time of transportation can consequently be directly translated into a component of the circulation time of the capital whose commodities are transported; productivity increases in this branch of production, therefore, lead to reduced circulation times for other capitals that are dependent on transportation. As Marx explains in Grundrisse, the “duration of one capital’s production phase determines the velocity of the other’s circulation phase” (1973: 520). During the transportation, warehousing or display of the commodity, Marx argues that different “measures of precaution” that are dependent on the size, weight, perishability, fragility or explosiveness of the use-value, must be taken (1978: 228). The

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commodity must be protected from both theft and the elements, which require “buildings, stores, containers, warehouses” (Marx 1978: 215). Warehouses are necessary for the formation of stock (inventory) and, as such, are a condition for circulation because “without the commodity stock” there is “no commodity circulation” (Marx 1978: 223).15 A continuous replenishment of inventory ensures both the “permanence and continuity of the circulation process” (Marx 1978: 225). The stock can, however, represent a “stagnation of circulation” if commodities are not sold and “fail to make room for the incoming wave of production” (Marx 1978: 225).

III: The Costs of Circulation With reference to the costs of circulation, Marx argues that the “general law is that all circulation costs that arise simply from a change in form of the commodity cannot add any value. The capital expended in these costs, including the labor it commands, belong to the faux frais of capitalist production” (Marx 1978: 225–6). Marx distinguishes these “pure circulation” costs from those costs that arise from production processes occurring within the circulation processes of other capitals—in particular, transportation. Hence, any and all costs that arise from merely buying and selling commodities are deductions from surplus-value. The expenses associated with storage and packaging for protecting and preserving the use-value of commodities, are also costs of circulation, unless they are necessary for the production of the commodity itself (Marx 1978: 214–25; Fornäs 2013: 168). Transportation as a cost is different, however, because it is a branch of production that produces a use-value (change of location) and, therefore, is also a process of valorization that adds value to the commodities that are transported (Marx 1978: 134–5, 227). That transportation is productive, but circulation is not, also indicates that the latter ideally concerns economic transactions and not spatial dissemination (Fornäs 2013: 170). Any labor employed for strictly economic transactions, such as that of checkout workers and accountants, are unproductive of surplus-value, even if they perform surplus-labor and are as essential for the reproduction of capital as workers employed in the sphere of production (Marx 1978: 207–11).16 As such, they can be considered to be costs of circulation. The functioning of merchant’s capital, however, can lead to less deductions of surplus-value from the total social capital due to merchants and wholesalers buying commodities from many different industrial capitals (Marx 1981: 381).

Circulation and the Critique of Ideology Marx argues that circulation is a “noisy sphere” of appearances “where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone” and is, therefore, the sphere of “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (1976: 279). In other words, Marx argues that the circulation process gives rise to economic illusions—the fetish forms of capital—that inform bourgeois economic theories and common sense understandings of the economy.

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These illusions, and Marx’s critique of them, can be explained with reference to the crucial differentiation that Marx makes between fixed and fluid (or circulating) capital, on the basis of how these two components move through the circuit of capital and their natural forms as use-values. Whereas fluid capital passes on its entire value to the end product because it is invested in use-values that yield up their entire body to the new product, raw material like coal, or intermediate goods like linen and fertilizer (fixed constant capital), machinery, buildings and tools, yield their value piecemeal to the end product in proportion to their depreciation.17 To the bourgeois economist, variable capital can be mistaken for fluid capital in the sense that labor-power is completely consumed in the production process. This identification of labor-power and raw material finds its basis in circulation; it therefore reflects the trinity formula and hence is “an example of that kind of reifying fetish character that conceals capitalist exploitation” (Fornäs 2013: 172) and transforms the capitalist production process “into a complete mystery, [with] the origin of the surplus-value present in the product [being] completely withdrawn from view” (Marx 1978: 303). More fundamentally, the sphere of circulation is ideological because it is there that the unconscious abstraction of labor occurs, and where the fetishism attaches itself to the commodity. Because of this fetishism, the sphere of circulation is structured as a relation between things. In addition, it is in the sphere of circulation, in which capital enters into so-called “equal exchange” with labor, an equality that hides the exploitation occurring during production. In other words, the fetish forms of commodity and money, and the fiction that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent in the exchange of labor-power is an ideological cover for the inequality of the social relations between capital and labor (1976: 280).18

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

Marx refers to C–M–C as “simple circulation. ” C–M–C is also the developed form of the commodity’s internal contradiction consisting of the opposition between use-value and value, concrete and abstract labor, and private and social labor (1976: 198–200). Whereas Marx assumes that the circulation process proceeds as normal and is a moment of the production process in Capital, Vol. 1, he assumes the production process proceeds as normal and is a moment of the circulation process in the second volume. In the formula for capital, M signifies money, C commodity, Lp labor-power, Mp the means of production, and P production with the dots indicating that the circulation process is interrupted (Marx 1978: 109). General circulation refers to the circulation of all commodities. With industrial capital, Marx refers to a type of capital that is primarily concerned with production, and thus productive capital. Industrial capital is distinguished from merchant’s capital and finance capital. Whereas merchant’s capital deals in the commodity capital produced by industrial capital, finance capital is primarily concerned with money capital. The circuit of merchant’s capital is M–C–Mʹ and that of finance capital is M–Mʹ. In both cases, what moves, instead of the house or the stored commodities, are their property titles (Marx 1978: 226).

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11 12

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17

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Selling-time thus reflects the time needed to convert commodities into money and purchasing-time represents the time needed to convert money into the commodities, labor-power and means of production (Marx 1978: 204). Selling-time is the interval in which capital assumes the particular form of the commodity, while buying time is the interval in which capital is stuck in the money form. A permanent cause of differences in the circulation time between individual capitals is, therefore, the distance between the points of the commodity’s production and exchange (Marx 1978: 327). In other words, someone must have a need for the commodity, which is something that can never be guaranteed; even if there is a need for it, the potential buyer may not have enough money. Marx, therefore, refers to the commodity’s sale as a “salto mortale” (1976: 200). For example, if both production time and circulation time are three months, the production process would occur twice within a year. If circulation time is reduced to one month, which is to say that capital’s circulation process is accelerated, the production process could be repeated three times. There are also other reasons and benefits to accelerating capital through the sphere of circulation. The rate of profit and surplus-value is increased by speed through the reduction of costs of circulation (Marx 1973: 518; 1978: 124, 389), and, in a given period, a quantity of capital with a high velocity of circulation may create more surplus-value than a larger quantity of capital with a low velocity of circulation (Marx 1973: 518–519). Because the sale realizes surplus-value, it “is more important than the purchase” (Marx 1978: 205). These means include both transportation vehicles (trucks, trains and ships) and associated infrastructure (roads, railroads and canals, as well as ports, warehouses and distribution centers), as well as the infrastructure of communications proper, including the postal system and telecommunications (from the telegraph to telephony and the internet) and their supporting infrastructures. Merchant’s capital is a type of capital that “functions exclusively in the circulation process” and deals with the commodity capital that industrial capitalists produce (Marx 1981: 380). Barriers delay the movement of capital in its circuit from one form, stage and sphere to the next, and/or limit the quantity of surplus-value that is produced and realized within a given period (Marx 1973: 421, 524, 538–9; Negri 1984: 114–19). Today, warehouses are referred to as distribution centers. The wages of unproductive labor employed in the sphere of circulation do, however, comprise necessary labor, which the worker must reproduce. By increasing the productivity of this worker all that happens is that she reproduces her wage in less time than before with the effect of extending the time that she works for free for the capitalist (Marx 1978: 210). The labor of the pure economic transactions of circulation can best be understood as labor that does not add any use-value to the commodity as opposed to transportation, which adds the use-value of change of spatial location. The peculiar circulation of fixed constant capital, therefore, means that its value “acquires a dual existence. A part of it remains tied to its use form or natural form, which pertains to the production process, while another part separates off from this form as money” (Marx 1978: 243). The “sphere of simple circulation . . . provides the ‘free-trader vulgaris’ with his views, his concept and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wagelabour” (Marx 1976: 280).

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References Fornäs, J. (2013), Capitalism: A Companion to Marx’s Economy Critique, London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1973), Capital, Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1976), Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1978), Capital, Vol. 2, trans. D. Fernbach, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1981), Capital, Vol. 3, trans. D. Fernbach, New York: Penguin. Negri, A. (1984), Marx beyond Marx, South Hadley, MA : Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

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Crisis Joshua Clover

While the three volumes of Capital, as well as the Grundrisse, refer explicitly to crises on various occasions, these often promise a later systematic treatment which never arrives. Marx’s own 1857 plan, not simply unfinished, but abandoned, proposed six volumes for Capital, with the final installment being the Book on the World Market and Crises (Rosdolsky 1977: 12). Consequently, it is remarked regularly and ruefully that Marx left behind no completed theory of crisis. This is not the case. Marx left behind two theories of crisis, distinct in mode, compatible both theoretically and historically, but both require some reconstruction. One provides an account of cyclical crises within specific economies of the sort associated in bourgeois economics with business cycles, recessions, booms and busts, et cetera. The other is a thoroughgoing account of secular crisis for capitalism as a whole, concerning its inability to produce surplus value indefinitely at rates adequate to capital’s compulsion to expand—an economic crisis that is necessarily a political crisis for the social order as a whole. Indeed, beyond the great category of value, we might argue that crisis is, along with unemployment, the great theme of Capital, Vol.  I. These are dialectical expressions of a single phenomenon; the development of the value relation over time, which Marx describes as capitalism’s “laws of motion” (Marx 1991: 1:92). This entry will assess these in order, cyclical and then secular crisis, with necessarily brief reference to leading theories of economic crisis from classical traditions. Finally, it will attune the two modes into a unified theory of crisis.

Cyclical Crisis and Credit As an idealized abstraction, capitalism has often been said to be immune to crisis stemming from internal causes, a tradition which finds its implicit basis in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand. ”1 The most enduring formulation of a self-equilibrating market is given the name “Say’s Law, ” after French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. It is commonly and concisely rendered as supply creates its own demand. In Say’s words: It is worthwhile to remark that a product is no sooner created than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value.

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When the producer has put the finishing hand to his product, he is most anxious to sell it immediately, lest its value should diminish in his hands. Nor is he less anxious to dispose of the money he may get for it; for the value of money is also perishable. But the only way of getting rid of money is in the purchase of some product or other. Thus the mere circumstance of creation of one product immediately opens a vent for other products. 1834: 138–9

He notes, moreover, that, “As each of us can only purchase the productions of others with his own productions, as the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce, the more men can produce, the more they will purchase” (Say 1834: 3). Consequently, a “general glut” of unsold goods is impossible. Moreover, the economy will seek not only equilibrium, but both expansion and full employment. Under various names, this assumption of a growth equilibrium has persisted as an open or unexamined axiom of laissez-faire economics to the present day. Say’s Law was both named and challenged by John Maynard Keynes. His General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, written in the wake of the Great Depression—an event which cast strong empirical doubt on the impossibility of a general glut—offered a non-equilibrium model of the economy, requiring external stimulus to maintain adequate effective demand. However, Say’s Law and the concomitant impossibility of a general glut-style crisis had been directly challenged some time before by Marx himself. Reflecting on “the commercial crises of the nineteenth century, and in particular the great crises of 1825 and 1836, ” he identified them as “big storms on the world market, in which the antagonism of all elements in the bourgeois process of production explodes” (Marx 1991: 3: 681). Elsewhere, he refers to these storms more descriptively as “the real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy” (Marx 1968: 2: 510). Among these contradictions, we might follow one concrete instance in particular. Marx’s general formula of capitalist accumulation, M–C–Mʹ, features two moments, M–C and C–M. In the former, money is invested in production of commodities; in the latter, finished commodities are exchanged. Treating them as two faces of a necessarily single event, Say misses the differing exigencies of production and consumption, and thus the contradictory character of their unity. Once a given firm has completed a production cycle, it is compelled to await reflux of advanced capital plus profits before reinvesting in another cycle of production—for only in productive reinvestment is this wealth capital; capital is value in expansion. However, were the firm to cease production while its circulating capital navigated the world market, its fallow fixed capital (machines, factories, etc.) would be at risk of devaluation. Moreover, as said firm would be unable to purchase production goods during this phase, its suppliers would be limited in their capacity to circulate their own goods. In this sense, production and circulation have an internal antagonism exactly because each is the condition for the other but they do not proceed synchronously. The solution to this problem appears in the form of credit, allowing the firm to recommence production in advance of sales from the previous round. Credit, that is to say, intercedes between the moments M–C and C–M, such that the first can be repeated

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before the second is completed. Should commodities go unsold, a firm has little choice but to secure further credit, producing ever more commodities and driving ever further apart the moments M–C and C–M. In some sense all activity pursuant to this separation is speculation, starting with the firm’s speculation that it can repay its debt, and the bank’s that it will receive that repayment plus interest. Increasingly complex forms of speculation appear. In the most spectacular form, intermediate investors can make use of credit to purchase commodities they hope to resell at a higher value— often to yet another intermediate investor making use of credit—providing the appearance of exchange, while, in truth, leaving the production-exchange circuit incomplete. As this leads to temporary and nominal price increases as well as investor profits, it appears first as economic expansion. Again it is crucial to understand that this phenomenon, the classic “bubble” is possible only because of the independence of the two moments M–C and C–M. This independence is illusory, however; reality must come calling. The more commodity production outpaces consumption, and the greater the amount of credit interceding as speculative intermediation, the harder it becomes for all commodities in motion to complete their circuit. In turn firms are eventually faced with the incapacity to recoup and repay loans. Banks which hold these paper rights to future income, “fictitious capital, ” must eventually demand repayment before further credit can be extended, thus “freezing” the credit market; that some banks become insolvent only intensifies the situation. It is for this reason that such events appear to be financial crises. As Marx notes, “The credit system appears as the main lever of over-production and over-speculation” (Marx 1991: 3:56). Now the indebted firms must halt production as they desperately seek sales to meet their financial obligations, leading to declining prices and disemployment. Credit having been withdrawn, the underlying problem seems to be one of liquidity– an inadequate supply of money. Meanwhile, the market is flooded with devalued goods available below cost, but only for cash—the apex of the very general glut that Say believed impossible. What is most striking about this event is that the moment of crisis is not the separation of M–C and C–M, but their forcible realignment; crisis is the moment when they come crashing back together in a violent affirmation of their underlying and antagonistic unity. In this juncture—barring, e.g. state intervention—firms unable to survive without ready credit dissolve, clearing the market for profitable firms and restoring some degree of stability to the market as a whole. This account of cyclical crisis accords in various ways with bourgeois doctrines of the business cycle, particularly the Austrian variety of von Mises and Hayek. It differs most substantially in that those models understand recessions, or boom/bust cycles, as minor and self-correcting within equilibrium growth. Keynes contrarily understands such crises as deriving from an economy’s tendency toward excessive savings, an internal disequilibrium. It can be resolved via countercyclical fiscal measures, most significantly deficit spending designed to stimulate effective demand; new spending will lead to increased hiring to meet this demand, leading to more demand in a virtuous cycle of recovery, eventually recouping stimulus expenditures. Keynes insists this is not an intractable economic problem, likening it to “magneto trouble” (Keynes 2016: 129); a technical problem with a technical fix which, once instituted—and granted, it may

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face significant political barriers—should allow the engine of the economy to run as before. While lacking an equilibrium theory of capitalism, Keynes still holds that, in this regard, a well-managed economy has no secular tendency toward collapse. From the perspective of the marketplace, firms seem engaged in overproduction in the advent of financial crisis; from the factory, the market beyond its gates has failed to consume adequately; from the banker’s offices, overextended credit is to blame. Each of these expresses a real moment in cyclical crisis, depending on where one looks for a cause. A Marxist account, while recognizing all these, might begin with the fact that capitalism is organized to sell commodities for profit, evacuating in advance the premises of equilibrium handed down from Say, which presuppose that production and exchange are regulated by mutual need. Thus, supply without demand becomes a possibility, just as the continuity of production against possible loss of competitive advantage becomes compulsory. This is not to say that lack of effective demand is a non-problem, the same can be said for excessive savings, or lack of capital investment. Crises are indeed defined on the side of individuals by decreased purchasing, displaced by financial operations onto the servicing of debts; they are equally defined on the side of firms by declining capital investment, particularly once credit is withdrawn. But what are the bases of these failures? Is the underlying problem truly that of liquidity? It is here that Marx’s fundamental distance from Keynes becomes clear, and from classical and neoclassical economics more broadly, in the same motion through which his theory of secular crisis for capitalism emerges.

Secular Crisis and Unemployment The intercession of credit allows, in effect, for the circuit of capital to be temporarily reordered as M–Mʹ–[C]. Money investment by capitalists might be replaced by credit money from a bank, without the sale of commodities. From the bank’s perspective, this seeming exchange of money for more money is all the more dramatic; in the form of interest, seemingly requiring no labor to earn a profit, “the capital relationship reaches its most superficial and fetishized form” (Marx 1991: 3: 515). However, the seemingly immediate—in this case literally, in the sense of unmediated—realization of money as more money still contemplates the valorization of commodities by labor power, itself a commodity, even if deferred and obscured. While producers may purchase labor power without sale, they must eventually make productive use of that labor power, exchangeable for price. In Keynes’s vision, money stimulus will lead to investment in, among other things, waged employment, which will lead to purchase of commodities, in turn leading to more waged employment (see above), thus resolving this issue. For Marx, the problem of employment over the long term is less tractable. Marx’s extended account of secular crisis is found in Capital, Vol.  I.2 Henryk Grossman argues that “the object of Marx’s analysis is not crisis, but the capitalist process of reproduction in its totality” (Grossman 1992: 83). Capital’s crisis character is an integral aspect of this process and of its breakdown. The book’s first seven parts, summarized in Chapter  25, provide an exposition of how capital’s presuppositions toward its own reproduction drive simultaneously toward a crisis for that reproduction,

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ceaselessly transforming the political and economic structure of capitalism along the way. Thus the most compressed and significant among Marx’s maxims on his great subject: “capital itself is the moving contradiction” (Marx 1993: 706) and “the true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself ” (Marx 1991: 3: 358). The causal chain can be schematized thusly: capital, defined as value in expansion, becomes possible with the generalization of the wage and commodity forms wherein value’s form of appearance in exchange value comes to stand over use value (Part One). This is a fundamental precondition through which an individual capital can satisfy the compulsion to convert money into more money (Part Two). Absolute surplus value, obtained by internalizing work into waged commodity production, is limited by physical barriers, by class struggle over the length of the working day, and by the profitability of a sector, and thus its magnitude and capacity to employ labor (Part Three). Against these limits, individual capitals in search of profit shift toward pursuit of relative surplus value—achieved via increasing productivity (Part Four). Absolute and relative surplus value co-exist, but have different implications for rates of surplus value and, thus, for capital accumulation, hence the significance of their changing balance (Part Five). This compulsion toward rising levels of productivity ceaselessly increases the proportion of means of production in relation to labor expended in the production process (“technical composition of capital”), and, in turn, the ratio of constant to variable capital (“organic composition of capital”).3 This ongoing expulsion of living labor from the production process, as individual capitals seek profit, hollows out the very source of the surplus value on which the profitability of capital as a whole depends (Part Seven). As the capacity to extract surplus value wanes, profit eventually follows, productive reinvestment ceases no matter the money supply, and capitalism— bereft of its existential basis in real accumulation—enters into crisis. We might summarize this entire process as the production of non-production, i.e. the ongoing production of excess capacity, excess labor supply, and excess capital, none of which can eventually be employed productively. From this crisis, there is eventually no recovery. It can be deferred in time insofar as it can be displaced at a global level, as shown by Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey among others. The accumulation process can be restarted elsewhere, terminal crisis for one cycle commencing a new cycle for a next hegemonic capitalist power. In this regard, global cycles of accumulation resemble business cycles within a national economy, albeit at a larger spatial and temporal scale; crisis functions to clear the field of unprofitable firms, destroys fictitious value, and reattunes production and consumption. These displacements feature immense political volatility. The First World War can be understood as the rearrangement of the capitalist world-system within what would be the transfer of primacy from the UK to the US . Because the resolution to such systemic crises appears to lie beyond the developed capitalist world, this tends to lend support to underconsumptionist theories of crisis, most notably forwarded by Rosa Luxemburg in Accumulation of Capital (1913), which hold that the limit for capital is the proletariat’s inability to consume all that it produces, as it is by definition paid less than the value it produces, in price terms. This shortfall of consumption must be found elsewhere—an external limit to capital. However, as shown above, Marx’s account of crisis affirms an internal limit; the exigencies of

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productivity must result in unemployment within the capitalist system, appearing from the perspective of circulation as a lack of demand. The deferred moment of C recedes, which is a technical way of saying that growing unemployment is endemic to capital at a systemic level, no matter the size of the system, and that this unemployment is the underlying basis for crisis. While restructurings of the capitalist system may countervail crisis tendency temporarily, by seeking out new centers, featuring both greater labor intensity and a larger social basis, so as to provide both adequate profitability (which assures capital reinvestment) and adequate scale (to supply the world market), these cannot permanently resolve internal limits, particularly as they confront rising rates of productivity globally, and planetary limits, including resource limits, understood as ecological crisis.

Unity of Crisis If the logic of the cyclical crisis is the compulsion to produce for profit rather than use, coupled with the temporary autonomy of production from consumption afforded by credit, this fits clearly within the logic of secular crisis. Secular crisis rests, fundamentally, on the compulsion of the capitalist to pursue profit at the expense of surplus value, maximizing the former through increased productivity such that it eventually undermines the latter. Both modes of crisis therefore are precipitated by a money-price being returned as seeming profit; until even that unreal realization becomes impossible, in that the value born by commodities is never actually realized. At this point, reinvestment ceases and crisis bursts forth. This then is the primary contradiction of crisis—that between price and value. However, one can also formulate the situation thus; in both cases, the realization of the value of labor power is displaced. In the case of cyclical crisis we might call this formal displacement in the form M–Mʹ–[C]; in the case of secular crisis, real displacement in the form of unemployment or “stagnant surplus population. ” The former gives on to the latter, as both vitiate accumulation. Thus, we can say in conclusion that the contradiction of price and value takes the logical and historical form of labor displacement. This is the context for crisis at each temporal and spatial scale, until possibilities for deferral and displacement are exhausted. At this point, economic crisis and political crisis open onto a new mode of production. Debates over the specific outcome belong to further discussions regarding agency and determinism, conjuncture and teleology, political will and capital as automatic subject, and so on. There is no basis in Marx or elsewhere for the belief that this next mode, awaiting on the far side of crisis, will necessarily resemble communism.

Notes 1 2

For a more extended guide to Marx’s theory of cyclical crisis, see Kuruma 1936, passim. For a more extended guide to Marx’s theory of secular crisis and its companion theories, see Shaikh 1978, passim.

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This will be a crucial moment for those who argue that countervailing factors, e.g. a decrease in the value of constant capital, even as its relative mass rises within the composition of the production process, can defer a rising ratio of constant to variable capital indefinitely and thus invalidate the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. See for example (Heinrich 2012: 141–54). The counters to this objection are persuasive, generally posing the limited and punctual countervailing developments which might lower the value of production goods contra the ceaseless, compulsory increases in productivity in the underlying dynamic.

References Arrighi, G. (2010), The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origin of Our Times, 2nd edn, London: Verso. Brenner, R. (2006), The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945 to 2005, London: Verso. Clarke, S. (1994), Marx’s Theory of Crisis, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Grossman, H. (1992), The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, trans. J. Banaji, London: Pluto Press. Harvey, D. (2006), The Limits to Capital, London: Verso. Heinrich, M. (2012), An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press. Luxemburg, R. (2003), Accumulation of Capital, trans. A. Schwarzchild. New York: Routledge. Keynes, J. M. (1965), The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Keynes, J. M. (2016), Essays in Persuasion, New York: Springer. Kuruma, S. (1936), An Overview of Marx’s Theory of Crisis, trans. M. Schauerte. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kuruma/crisis-overview.htm (accessed August 5, 2017). Marx, K. (1968), Theories of Surplus-Value, Vol. IV of Capital, Part II , translated from the German [translator not listed], edited by S. Ryazanskaya, Moscow : Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1991), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes and D. Fernbach, 3 vols, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1993), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. M. Nicolaus, London: Penguin. Rosdolsky, R. (1989), The Making of Marx’s Capital, London: Pluto Press. Shaikh, A. (1978), “Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories, ” in US Capitalism in Crisis, New York: URPE Monthly Review Press.

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Dialectics Carolyn Lesjak

There is not much about the topic of Marx and dialectics that is not contentious, whether it be the ongoing debate about Marx’s indebtedness to Hegel’s dialectics, the role of science within Marxism, and, more recently, the place of the dialectic itself within contemporary Marxism. Rather than enter into any one of these individual debates, this entry details how dialectical thinking permitted Marx to develop a materialist method of critique, and what it continues to offer today as a revolutionary form of critique. Theodor Adorno has argued that dialectics, be it in Hegel or in Marx, is both method and anti-method (2017: 4–5, 31). That is, on the one hand there exists an imperative for thought to expose and work through the contradictions and tensions that underlie all conceptual coherence, but on the other hand thought must follow consequently and rigorously the immanent logic of its object—philosophical thinking or the logic of capitalism—to develop a critique from within, as it were. This critique proceeds by the route of negation, a path whereby the contradictions of capitalism are made apparent, and its capacity to sustain the “unity of opposites” can be grasped. Marx demonstrates how these contradictions, between exchange-value and use-value, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, productivity and the destitution of unemployment, etc. are almost miraculously sustained by capitalism and are central to its continued functioning, while simultaneously containing the seeds of its eventual downfall, a downfall perhaps most famously forecast by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s hands, dialectics is the only form of thinking able to capture the ceaselessly transformative processes of history in general and of capitalism in particular, because capitalism is inherently contradictory and, as Capital will demonstrate, consists of a series of false equivalences in which wage labor is labor, exchange value is value, and capitalist history is history. The scope of this critique is enormous, manifesting what Georg Lukács once called an “intention toward totality” (1971: 198) characteristic of dialectical thought in the Hegelian tradition—as Marx declared in a famous letter to Arnold Ruge in 1843, his goal was nothing less than “the ruthless critique of everything existing. ” For the young Marx, as evident in his early manuscripts, the element of surprise, of the incipient overcoming of the commonsensical and of the sensuous world as we empirically know it, comes into view as he, along with the cohort of Young Hegelians, 297

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grapples with Hegel’s dialectics. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx, following Ludwig Feuerbach’s “transformative” method, critiques Hegel’s idealist dialectics in order to further develop the inherent materialism of the dialectic. Feuerbach’s critique proceeded by way of an inversion of subject and predicate, as most famously demonstrated in his argument that God did not create man [sic] in his image, but that man created God. In a similar fashion, Marx shows that Hegel, in his analysis of the relationship between civil society and the state, not only unjustly separates these two realms of social life, but that he elevates the state to the level of the ideal against the crude reality of civil society. In so doing, Hegel inverts subject and predicate, misreading the state as an ideal form rather than the product of real human beings; the very producers of the state, and of society, more generally, are, in Hegel’s version of the dialectic, predicates of the state rather than the subjects they actually are in reality. In his early works, Marx perceives this fundamental inversion of subject and predicate at work in multiple realms of social existence. In On the Jewish Question (1843), political emancipation is shown to be an inversion of proper human emancipation. In The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), the (German) bureaucracy, so idealized by Hegel, turns “the human subject” into a “mere object of manipulation. ” But most significantly, the inversion of subject and predicate is characterized in the workings of alienated labor, a universalized condition of human production in capitalism that underpins all other realms of social life. As C. J. Arthur comments in Dialectics of Labour: “For Marx, from 1844, the problem of alienation in modern society is understood to gravitate around the estrangement of labour. All other spheres of estrangement are to be related to this ” (1986: 1). In its most immediate sense, alienation refers to the separation of workers from the objects of their labor, expropriated as they are by the owning classes. But as Arthur points out, this alienation characterizes the human relation to the life-world at all levels, and the overcoming of it is, characteristically, posited by Marx as a dialectical process, as a positive sublation (Aufhebung) of alienated labor in which the producers re-appropriate that which they produce. As noted above, Marx’s method is an immanent one, and his philosophy of history is immanent as well: it should be noted that the social agent that will overcome the “universal wrong” of alienation, is the proletariat, itself the product of the immanent logic of capitalist relations. Capitalism has produced, as Marx noted for the first time in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, the proletariat, a class with: radical chains [. . .] a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general. Tucker 1978: 64

Or, as Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto in a polemical language that nevertheless illustrates the immanent logic of Marx’s thought: “what the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers” (1998: 50). The Manifesto offers some of Marx and Engels’s most compelling demonstrations of dialectical method, capturing as it does the dynamism of capitalist contradictions and

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putting on display, most dramatically, capitalist society’s capacity to sustain the “unity of opposites, ” which for Fredric Jameson is the dialectic’s signal feature. The dialectical provocation here is two-fold: on the one hand, to see simultaneously the positive and negative aspects of capitalism and, following from this, to resist recourse to the easy (read: undialectical) moral judgement that capitalism is simply good or bad. The bourgeoisie, we learn from Marx, perhaps counterintuitively, has played “a most revolutionary part” in history, emerging from within and then destroying as it has all feudal relations. In turn, the developments brought on during the bourgeoisie’s reign shall spell its own doom: “Modern bourgeois society . . . is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Marx and Engels 1998: 41), producing both the “weapons” that might bring about its doom—renewed and increasingly severe economic crises— and the social agent who is “to wield those weapons” (Marx and Engels 1998: 42). Capitalist society has produced enormous wealth and extreme poverty; objective riches and subjective destitution; destroyed local communities, but established the “universal interdependence of nations” (Marx and Engels 1998: 39); “liberated” workers from their bondage to the land, but enslaved them to the necessity of earning a wage; and so on. As catastrophic as these developments appear, as chaotic as the conditions might be in which “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 1998: 38), so too are these the developments that pave the way for a future society that has surpassed not only the oppressions of the feudal era, but the exploitation and misery of the bourgeois era. Marx’s dialectic is emphatically historical, and the essentially historical nature of Marx and Engels’s analysis of capitalist society, and of the communism they propose to take its place, must not be overlooked. That the “inevitable” fall of the bourgeoisie, as foreseen by The Manifesto, has not come to pass takes little away from the text’s prescience. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, the profound changes the Manifesto details had not yet fully unfolded at the time of its writing; part of the force of the Manifesto’s vision lies precisely in its ability to recognize the “necessary long-term historical tendencies of capitalist development” (1998: 16). In other words, “Marx and Engels did not describe the world as it had already been transformed by capitalism in 1848; they predicted how it was logically destined to be transformed by it” (1998: 17)—itself a testament to the power of dialectical thinking given how much of what they describe has come to pass. Nevertheless, the historical fact of the bourgeoisie’s continued triumph does raise the ever thorny issue of the relationship between theory and practice, an issue central to dialectical thought in general and Marxist thought in particular. Though space precludes a full discussion of the topic, two important features of Marx’s thoughts on the matter are essential to keep in mind. Above all, is Marx’s (and Engels’s) insistence on the historical and materialist character of all theory; as they underscore in the Manifesto, their “theoretical conclusions . . . merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes ” (1998: 51). Theory cannot consist of a set of trans-historical ideas or some ideal plan to be implemented in the world, but, instead, itself emerges from within the movement of a real historical society and in the continued engagement

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with it. This is an important reminder that Marxism must remain resolutely historical, and constantly aware of the historicity of its own theoretical conclusions. Secondly, part and parcel of the materialist character of Marx’s thought is the insistence that theory must turn itself toward the material world, not only in the ongoing effort to assess its validity and correctness, but in order to transform that world. As Marx famously put it in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction: “it is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses” (1978: 60). It is difficult not to see how Marx’s basic dialectical and materialist impulses persist across the breadth of his work. In the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Vol. I, Marx himself describes his critique of “the mystificatory side of Hegelian dialectics” (1977: 102) in a manner that recalls the dialectical thematics of his early work: My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of “the Idea, ” is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man [sic], and translated into forms of thought. 1977: 102

He continues by noting that this mystification does not, however, prevent Hegel from providing the first full working out of dialectics; rather, as he comments: “with him [dialectics] is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell” (1977: 103). It is also not difficult to see how Marx’s early concerns with alienation resurface in his later works, particularly in Capital, in his analyses of the commodity form and of the labor theory of value, even if the specific vocabulary of alienation has given way to the language of a “scientific” analysis of the conditions of production under capitalism. This is evident from the first chapter of Volume I, where Marx lays out his critique of the commodity form. For our purposes here, the key discoveries of Marx’s dialectical approach involve the related oppositions between essence and appearance, and quality and quantity. In the opening sections of Chapter 1, Marx distinguishes between two notions of value that inhere in a commodity: use-value and exchange-value. The former is, essentially, a qualitative determination, defined as the use to which a particular commodity is put. The latter is quantitative and is the value form whereby commodities are judged upon the market, and the form of value that so matters within capitalism that Marx simply designates it “value” without any prefix. Clearly, in its transformation into an exchange-value, a use-value takes on a form of appearance that dispenses with its essence as a use-value. Use-values, as Marx puts it, are the “bearers” of exchangevalues. For subsequent commentators, above all thinkers associated with Western Marxism (Adorno, Lukács et al.), and arguably for Marx himself, the universalization of the commodity form and the transformation of all qualitative values into quantitative

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ones was a significant force in the transformation of social relations in society— analyzed by Lukács as a universalized “reification” of social relations. The commodity form, however, does not only transform and conceal the qualitative character of use-values, but also the system of social relations that underpin commodity production. This sort of obfuscation was a hallmark of what Marx called the “fetishism of commodities, ” which he described in terms that echo the dynamics of alienation from his earliest works. In capitalist society, where the exchange of commodities is the basis of social relations,“the products of men’s hands, ” he writes,“appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. [. . .] I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (1977: 165). In this “world of commodities” the “definite social relation between men” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (1977: 165). The critique of commodity fetishism lies at the heart of Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy, the theories of which “bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite” (1977: 174–5). The inversions of subject and predicate, familiar from Feuerbach’s “transformative critique, ” originally deployed as a critique of religion, resurface here in the critique of capitalist social relations, and the dialectical structure of the critique of alienation appears in different, but unmistakeable, guise. In a recent reading of Capital, Jameson characterizes Marx’s analysis of the commodity and money at the broadest level as a “polemic waged against conventional forms of thought and language, the equation which presupposes the possibility, indeed, the natural and inevitable existence of this form, and thereby the plausibility of all the ideologies that issue from it” (2011: 22)—namely all forms of equivalence, be they economic or epistemological, that dialectics reveals to be false. Jameson also argues that Marx’s analysis holds new discoveries for us within our current phase of globalization, specifically in relation to the general law of capitalist accumulation, which Marx develops in the later chapters of Volume I of Capital. Specifically, he suggests that we can now see Capital as a book about unemployment, in which the necessary “reserve army of labor, ” of which Marx speaks, has been transformed into the permanently unemployed masses, namely those “excluded” from capitalist work altogether. Once again, Marx’s dialectical thinking allows this discovery precisely because it identifies capital as a total, albeit contradictory, system. “The shock of the dialectical formulation, ” as Jameson phrases it, “was meant to underscore the fatal unity of capitalism as a mode of production whose expansion cannot be arrested at will by social-democratic reform, continuing to produce, along with its accumulation of new value, an ever enlarging reserve army of the unemployed, now on a global scale” (2011: 130). Even as many contemporary post-Marxists turn away from dialectics, Marx’s dialectical approach would seem to be more, rather than less, relevant in our current moment, at a time when not only the disparities between rich and poor are increasing, but we are also faced with the knowledge, and real possibility, that we now have the capacity, as a result of climate change, to destroy the world. These twin global crises

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bring to the fore, in newly potent ways, our collective fate; they also highlight the necessity of understanding these crises dialectically as interconnected, systemic, and open to historical change on our part. In this regard, Schlomo Avineri’s description of Marx’s dialectics as the “method of revolution” (1971: 32) is worth recalling. That fundamental lesson of the dialectic, to proceed immanently, is where its greatest use perhaps lies today; instead of opposing the current organization of economic and social life, with an idealized vision imported from the past or from without, we need to understand what new forms of existence will unfold from within the immanent logic of contemporary capitalism.

References Adorno, T. (2017), An Introduction to Dialectics, ed. Christoph Ziermann, trans. N. Walker, Malden, MA : Polity Press. Arthur, C.J. (1986), Dialectics of Labour: Marx and his Relation to Hegel, New York: Basil Blackwell. Avineri, S. (1971), The Social and Political Philosophy of Karl Marx, London: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1998), “Introduction, ” The Communist Manifesto, New York: Verso. Jameson, F. (2011), Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, New York: Verso. Lukács, G. (1971), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Marx, K. (1977), Capital, Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Vintage Books. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1998), The Communist Manifesto, New York: Verso. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, New York: Penguin Books. Tucker, H., ed. (1978), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn, New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

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Exploitation Matt Cole

Introduction The concept of exploitation has a rich history in Marxist as well as non-Marxist political, economic and social theory. These multiple, and sometimes conflicting definitions, often rely on different assumptions concerning power, labor and economics generally. Etymologically, the modern term for exploitation1 emerged in the earlynineteenth century and referred to the “productive working” of something. Generally, the word had a positive connotation among those who first used it; however, it later developed negative connotations during the 1830s to 1850s due to the influence of French socialists like Saint Simon and Charles Fourier. Marx was likely influenced by this negative conception of exploitation when he began his study of classical political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, etc.) while he lived in Paris from 1843 to 1845. Like Marx, I will focus primarily on the economic dimensions of exploitation because these form what he understood as the material foundation for social relations. The following will explain Marx’s conception of exploitation; contextualize its development within both historical debates and the development of Capital itself; and conclude with the political implications of the concept. The final point is the most important; as without a proper understanding of exploitation, there is no possibility of truly overcoming it. To understand Marx’s concept of exploitation, it is first necessary to understand his conception of the development of the capitalist mode of production. A mode a production is made up of forces and relations of production, which codetermine one another. Forces of production are the range of possible means, determined by knowledge, science and technology. Relations of production are determined by the prevailing patterns of property or class relations. The classical Marxian periodization of modes of production and exploitation of labor follows the pattern: slave, feudal and then capitalist (see Banaji 2010). The slave mode of production relies on private property in people and non-labor means of production; the feudal mode of production relies on private property in land and non-labor means of production; and the capitalist mode of production relies on private property in non-labor means of production and land. In pre-capitalist modes of production, exploitation was directly mediated through the appropriation of the immediate surplus product, and labor was formally coerced. 303

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In the capitalist mode of production, by contrast, exploitation is abstracted through economic relations and labor is, formally, free, which is to say that workers can sell their labor as they see fit. Over the course of the three volumes of Capital, Marx develops two aspects of exploitation: “primary exploitation, ” which takes place in the production process itself and “secondary exploitation, ” which takes places outside of the production process and requires the capitalist’s mastery and advantage, based on property ownership. The former can be productive of surplus value, which is translated into profits through the market and competition. The latter is essentially an antediluvian form of accumulation and operates through appropriation of the former’s surplus or “profit upon alienation. ” Understanding the relation between these two types of exploitation is essential in order to grasp Marx’s critique of political economy.

Primary Exploitation Primary exploitation is the human and social process of “exploitation of the workman” by the capitalist, which relies on a classed monopoly of power over the means of industrial production. It relies on the extraction of surplus value. Value is the representation of abstract homogenized labor, which emerges in the process of exchange and is measured by money. The rate of surplus value extracted in the labor process is “an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist” (Marx 1990: 326). However, this does not mean that rate of surplus value is an expression for “absolute magnitude” of exploitation, because not all exploited labor produces surplus value. For Marx, some labor is productive of value, while some is non-productive. In most Marxian economics, the distinction between productive and non-productive labor is central (see Foley 1986; Shaikh and Tonak 1994; Mohun 1996). Activities such as trade, financial services and advertising are not socially productive of value, yet firms who carry out these activities nonetheless exploit workers. The rate of primary exploitation for both productive and nonproductive workers is the ratio of necessary labor time (the average annual consumption per worker in the sector) to surplus labor time (the excess of working time over necessary labor time). It important to note that, for Marx, capitalists cannot be exploited. The work of the capitalist appears as a labor process in its own right, however it is the labor of exploitation rather than exploited labor. The wages of managers, just as the incomes of capitalists are, as Marx notes in Capital Vol.  III, “precisely the quantity of others’ labor that is appropriated, and depends directly upon the rate of exploitation of this labor” (Marx 1992: 511).

Secondary Exploitation At the most abstract level, aggregate profit is essentially the monetary expression of aggregate surplus value; however, companies can also generate profit through purely redistributive techniques, taking advantage of the dynamics of circulation between

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social spheres. These profits come from what Marx terms secondary exploitation, or profit upon alienation. Secondary exploitation is mediated through financial and property relations that ensure the collection of interest payments, rents or profits through unequal exchange (merchant’s capital). This aspect of exploitation extracts and redistributes a portion of the total surplus value of society. The existence of secondary exploitation allows for two things: first, it explains how capitalism can profit from non-capitalist spheres without the creation of new value; and, second, it allows Marxian economics to account for the difference between the sum of profits and the sum of surplus values that emerges as values are transformed into prices (see Shaikh and Tonak 1994). Marx defines secondary exploitation in volume three of Capital as an essentially archaic form of accumulation. This dynamic persists in those branches of industry that have not transitioned to the modern mode of production. In this mode of exploitation, money and means of production, such as tools, software, appliances, machinery, cars and business premises, are loaned in kind. These represent a specific sum of money and the borrower must not only pay interest, but also the price for wear and tear which arises from the use-value of the items. Usury, trade and finance exploit a given mode of production without reproducing it and thus relate to the mode of production from the outside. Usurer’s capital, for example, “has capital’s mode of exploitation without its mode of production” (Marx 1992: 732). The primary distinction that should be made in terms of the form of accumulation is whether these means of production are loaned to immediate producers, which presupposes a non-capitalist mode of production, or whether they are loaned to industrial capitalists, which presupposes a capitalist mode of production. Both are forms of secondary exploitation.

Debates Defining the precise role of exploitation in production and capitalism has been the source of considerable debate in the history of economics and political economy. From the late-nineteenth to late-twentieth century, the debates were largely between two distinct paradigms: the Marxist and the neo-classicalist (influenced by the Austrian and Lausanne Schools). Marxist thinkers asserted the centrality of value and exploitation in capitalism as a mode of production. They viewed the labor processes of capitalism, from the satanic mills to the penthouses of haute finance, as a totalizing system. Neo-classicalist thinkers, by contrast, typically denied the existence of exploitation, largely through omission of the labor process as a social phenomenon. They tended to flatten social phenomena to fit mathematical models and relied on the anomalous assumptions of Walrasian marginal equilibrium conditions, such that all market exchanges are perfectly competitive, yet reciprocal and voluntary. In sum, Marxists denied the possibility of capitalism persisting without exploitation, while neo-classicalists deny the possibility of a persistently exploitative system During the early 1980s the stark divisions between Marxist and neo-classicalist approaches to economics and exploitation began to soften as Marxists were influenced by neo-Ricardian and Sraffian economics. Two overlapping tendencies of Marx-inspired

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thought emerged, which were called the neo-Ricardian Marxists and the analytical Marxists, respectively. Both tendencies shared a rejection of Marx’s labor theory of value as a foundation for the Marxian theory of exploitation. Neo-Ricardian Marxists were theoretically indebted to Cambridge economists Maurice Dobb, Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson, among others. Sraffa shared Ricardo’s so-called “corn theory of value” or the idea that one can measure the rate of profit as a share of any particular commodity. Ian Steedman used the Sraffian approach to argue that a neo-Ricardian framework is a superior system and method compared to Marx’s when analyzing a range of issues involving prices and production under capitalism. Steedman and other neo-Ricardians claimed that, since magnitudes in terms of values tend to differ from those in terms of price, Marx’s labor theory of value must be abandoned (Steedman 1977: 205–7). This position influenced other analytical Marxists (see Roemer 1982), but also elicited strong criticisms from those who retained value-informed approach (see Himmelweit and Mohun 1981; Shaikh 1981). The latter’s main criticisms were that they conceptually flattened all labor process relations into money relations. The ideological roots of the series of concepts that neo-Ricardians relied on—equilibrium, profit as cost, and perfect competition—limited their analytical capacity to understand exploitation. Marxists claimed that Steedman and the neo-Ricardians could not accommodate social dimensions of the labor process or the relative autonomy of value and prices relations. The analytical Marxists (or “rational choice” Marxists) included scholars such as John Roemer, John Elster and G.A. Cohen. Roemer in particular argued that Marxian economics, particularly the notion of exploitation, should be able to be derived from Walrasian axioms of market equilibrium, perfect competition, full employment, etc., and should use neoclassical methodological assumptions such as the rational individual and normative preferences. This was intended to make Marx more palatable to the mainstream. This “simpler Marxian Argument” claimed that, because labor is the singular human element in production that generates the commodity, and because people who own means of production and do not labor in production control some of the revenues from the sale of the commodity, people who labor are exploited by those who do not (Cohen 1979). This led them to conclude “the relationship between the labor theory of value and the concept of exploitation is one of mutual irrelevance” (Cohen 1979: 338; see also Steedman 1981). Marxian political economists responded with wide-ranging criticisms of the analytical approach. For example, they argued that Roemer’s approach fails as a result of ignoring the distinction between labor and labor power (Lebowitz 1988); that the logic of a non-dialectical approach necessarily fails to grasp Marx’s theory of exploitation (Smith 1989); that Roemer’s analysis must be rejected because it cannot account for the emergence of class consciousness (Anderson and Thompson 1988); and that its reliance on Walrasian foundations is idealistic and ahistorical (Dymski and Elliot 1989).

Development The main criticisms of Marx by neo-classical economists were primarily influenced by Böhm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1896). Böhm-Bawerk claims

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Marx’s fundamental error is that the labor theory of value set out in Capital, Vol. I contradicts the theory of the rate of profit and prices of production set out in volume three. Most subsequent critiques of Marx have made similar arguments. For example, Joan Robinson in An Essay on Marxian Economics, argued that there was a contradiction between Marx’s assumptions in volume one, namely that a rising labor productivity leads to a rising rate of exploitation, and those assumptions in volume three, i.e., if the rate of exploitation remains stable, rising labor productivity could lead to a rising rate of real wages and a declining rate of profit. However, a careful analysis shows that these critiques stem from the failure to recognize the fact that Capital, volume one and volume three, are at different levels of abstraction, make different assumptions and address different questions (see Hilferding 1949; Kay 1979; Mandel 1990). Marx does not begin Capital, Vol. I, with a “labor theory of value” prior to market relations, but, rather, with an analysis of the commodity. Marx suspends all other differences in terms of production conditions, competition, interest, prices, etc. in order to examine concrete heterogeneous labor in the production of commodified “useful” things. He does this to make the commodification of labor power (the capacity to labor) explicit. In volume one, only the “law of value” matters. Marx restricts his analysis based on the assumption that the total profit available for capitalists is purely limited to the amount of surplus value appropriated from workers, and that the average rate of profit for the entire economy is simply the ratio of total surplus value to total value. This serves to make exploitation in the labor process transparent, and designate it as the specifically capitalist type of exploitation. Unlike exploitation under feudalism, where exploitation is transparent, personal and direct, specifically capitalist (primary) exploitation is indirect and socially mediated through commodity relations in the market. Whether an individual exploits or is exploited depends on the nature and price of the commodified object and the actual activity performed by that person. In volume one, capitalists are deemed to exploit workers collectively through the impersonal domination of the market, yet Marx’s analysis is limited to the fact that capitalists are only able to accumulate as much surplus as they are individually able to extract from their workers. Throughout volumes two and three, Marx progressively removes the assumptions of the first volume, so that industrial capitalists no longer must trade and distribute on their own behalf, rely on their own financial means, or use their own land. Trading can be undertaken by commercial capitalists and banking by money or finance capitalists, allowing a variety of types of assets to be incorporated into commodity relations. Capitalists’ capacity to accumulate is no longer restrained by their assets. This effectively renders the means of production and the property to the capitalist class as a whole. Property-based class relations are thusly generalized to the entire social system. Marx also introduces additional variables such as cost price, fixed capital and circulating capital that effect the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit. As a consequence of Marx’s increasingly complex analysis, the dynamics of price and profit end up obscuring the primary exploitation of surplus value. However, these different levels of abstraction are necessary because, as Marx notes, if he simply started from the calculation of the rate of profit, he would have never been able to “establish any specific relationship between the excess and the part of capital laid out on wages” (1992: 138).

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Conclusion The political implications of using Marx’s concept of exploitation cannot be understated. Exploitation is the basis for the production of surplus value, which forms a link between labor process relations in production and money relations in the market. Labor process relations, which correspond to concrete labor and the organization of production, manifest themselves in the struggle over intensity, time and interpersonal dynamics. The politics of the labor process are what Elson calls a “politics of production, ” which concentrates on “trying to improve conditions of production; shorten the working day, organize worker resistance on the shop-floor; build up workers’ co-operatives, produce an alternative plan . . . ” such as co-operatives and socialist organization (1979: 172). Money relations, which can be defined as those relations directly mediated by the universal equivalent (money), correspond to abstract labor and become manifest in the struggle over the payment or non-payment of wages. The politics of money relations are what Elson calls a “politics of circulation, ” which concentrate on changing distribution in a way that is advantageous to workers. For example, raising money wages, controlling money prices, regulating the financial system, establishing a welfare state and so on. Marx’s theory of exploitation offers a framework that unifies labor process and money relations and, in doing so, contains within it a politics that aims to move beyond capitalism. As Ernest Mandel pointed out: “The growth of the proletariat, of its exploitation and of organized revolt against that exploitation, are the main levers for the overthrow of capitalism” (1990: 83).

Notes 1

The root word “exploit” comes from the late-fourteenth-century French espleiten or esploiten, “to accomplish, achieve, fulfill, ” from Old French esploitier, espleiter, “to carry out, perform, accomplish” (Harper 2017).

References Anderson, W.H.L. and F.W. Thompson (1988), “Neoclassical Marxism, ” Science & Society 52: 191–214. Banaji, J. (2010), Theory as History, London: Brill. Böhm-Bawerk, E. von. (1984), Karl Marx and the Close of His System, Philadelphia, PA : Orion Editions. Cohen, G.A. (1979), “The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation, ” Philosophy & Public Affairs 8: 338–60. Dymski, G.A. and J.E. Elliot (1989), “Roemer vs. Marx: Should ‘Anyone’ Be Interested in Exploitation?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Vol. 15: 333. Elson, D. (1979), Value: the Representation of Labor in Capitalism, London: CSE Books. Foley, D.K. (1986), Understanding Capital: Marx’s Economic Theory, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Harper, D. (2017), “Exploit. ” Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at: http://www. etymonline.com/index.php?term=exploit&allowed_in_frame=0 (accessed August 11, 2018).

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Hilferding, R. (1949), “Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, ” in P. Sweezy (ed.), Karl Marx and the Close of His System and Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, New York: August M. Kelley, 121–96. Himmelweit, S. and S. Mohun (1981), “Real Abstractions and Anomalous Assumptions, ” in I. Steedman (ed.), The Value Controversy, London: New Left Books, 224–65. Kay, G. (1979), “Why Labour is the Starting Point of Capital, ” in D. Elson (ed.), Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, London: CSE Books, 46–66. Lebowitz, M. (1988), “Is ‘Analytical Marxism’ Marxism?” Science and Society 52: 215–28. Mandel, E. (1990), “Karl Marx, ” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Books, 11–86. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review. Marx, K. (1992), Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production, Vol. 3 , Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review. Mohun, S. (1996), “Productive and Unproductive Labor in the Labor Theory of Value, ” Review of Radical Political Economics 28: 30–54. Robinson, J. (1969), The Economics of Imperfect Competition, 2nd edn, New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Roemer, J.E. (1982), A General Theory of Exploitation and Class, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Shaikh, A. (1981), “The Poverty of Algebra, ” in I. Steedman (ed.), The Value Controversy, London: New Left Books, 266–300. Shaikh, A. and E.A. Tonak (1994), Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, T. (1989), “Roemer on Marx’s Theory of Exploitation: Shortcomings of a NonDialectical Approach, ” Science & Society 53: 327–40. Steedman, I. (1981), The Value Controversy, London: New Left Books. Steedman, I. (1977), Marx After Sraffa, London: New Left Books.

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Fetishism James Penney

Marx develops the notion of fetishism in the context of his analysis of the commodity. The term describes the commodity’s apparent power to drape a veil of distraction over the products of human labor, dissimulating the social qualities inherent in their conditions of production. Marx’s famous description of the commodity as a “trivial” and “queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 1978: 319) is one of the pivots around which Marxism’s alleged scientism—the contention that materialist method allows for a clear-cut exit from ideology, from the logic of fetishism—has been hotly debated. In Capital, Marx’s discussion elaborates an alternative, non-metaphysical way of apprehending the product of work: material and historical rather than ideal and transcendental. The assertion of the possibility of a properly Marxist science beyond fetishism comes most famously from Louis Althusser.1 On the surface, Marx’s discourse in the first volume of Capital confirms the seemingly naïve Althusserian thesis2 about the possibility of non-fetishistic, and in this sense scientific, knowledge. As the materials of “Nature, ” transformed by human labor, take their place among the market’s monetized exchange relations, they become monstrously “transcendent” writes Marx, sprouting “grotesque ideas” (Marx 1978: 320) that dissimulate their origins in the nitty-gritty of economic exploitation. Here is Marx’s most instructive example: A simple wooden table, transmogrified into a dazzling commodity-appearance, is an occult object more “wonderful” than even the “spinning” (Marx 1978: 320) table of Victorian literature’s most outrageous séance fantasy. Capital’s pages on commodity fetishism bristle with Marx’s embarrassment at humanity’s gullibility. As readers, we share in the shame he feels for our enthrallment by the spectacle of so many fantastic distortions—of not only mundane physical labor and earthy, need-satisfying use value—but also, and especially, the grotesque social inequalities that condition the commodity’s production under capitalism. Marx’s labor theory of value finally posits that exchange value is the product of commodification, not so much that of the products of human labor as that of labor itself. “Socially necessary labor” is the crucial term Marx coins to name the abstract quantity of labor-time necessary to produce an exchangeable object at a given moment in the technological development of the means of production. With this concept, Marx builds into his theory the assumption that a production process, relying on outdated, 311

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less productive machinery, will produce only as much surplus value as would have been produced had the machinery been cutting-edge. This explains why the pace of innovation within the means of production is so frantic, the competition for increased productivity so savage; for Marx, the capitalist system takes as its standard for measuring value only the most productive machines available. In the midst of Europe’s industrial revolution, those other than Marx could only imagine the machine as the instrument of a distinctly embodied, sweaty kind of labor. Yes, work requires “expenditure” on the part of the “human brain, ” but not without the accompanying physical exertion Marx vaguely evokes with reference to “nerves, muscles, etc. ” (Marx 1978: 320). Of course, things are different today. Even on the economic periphery, the radical shift in the ratio between brain-work—to an increasing extent externalized and dehumanized in the machine itself—and old-fashioned manual labor is what is most game-changing for the political economy of the digital revolution and the artificial intelligences of so-called cognitive capitalism. This same shift also puts Marx’s view of commodity fetishism to a new, historically unprecedented test: What happens to surplus value, and therefore to capitalism’s very viability as an economic system (however intrinsically prone to crisis it has proven itself to be), when socially necessary labor tends towards zero? At a moment in the history of production, when the quasi-immaterial or virtual algorithmic software infrastructure of even the most massive and complex manufacturing processes—of aircraft carriers, let’s say— can be reproduced with next to zero labor and in next to zero time, how does the commodity survive? Alternatively, does the very real prospect of asymptotically laborless digital reproduction reveal a postcapitalist horizon beyond which the structural dialectic of use value and exchange value is finally resolved in some final and utopian pseudo-Hegelian Aufhebung? In his sensible work, economist Paul Mason dares to imagine this world, one which, in his view, has more or less already arrived. Despite the fact that the postindustrial digital information that drives so much of contemporary capitalism is neither immaterial nor energy-neutral in the absolute, this information has nonetheless, in Mason’s view, “eradicated the need for labor on an incalculable scale” (2016: 165). This eradication has caused the use value of the techno-commodity to skyrocket in unprecedented fashion in relation to the quantity of labor required to manufacture its component parts. Moreover, virtual networks of unpaid worker-users steadily improve the efficiency of software infrastructure through the mechanism of so-called social knowledge, further amassing use value in a way that has no reliably measurable relation to waged labor time. Perspicaciously referencing the Grundrisse, Mason reminds us that Marx had already shown the foresight to imagine a machine that “never wears out” and/or “costs nothing to replace” (2016: 166). This at-the-time purely hypothetical contraption held the godly and prescient power to increase surplus value with no corresponding expenditure of capital (including, in particular, its labor form), effectively eliminating the gap between the physical machine and its concept, indeed incarnating a perfect mode of production, one whose efficiency is quite literally without limit. Again, Marx’s insight is merely theoretical in the purest sense, since some amount of capital is always expended to manufacture and maintain the bridge of meaning that translates code into

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intuitively recognizable, properly symbolic, terms. Nonetheless, Marx anticipated today’s wildly accelerated pace of technological advancement and predicted the everincreasing and crisis-precipitating quantitative chasm separating capital investment from use value that the digital revolution has made so patent to us today. His technological clairvoyance notwithstanding, however, instructive complications emerge when we scrutinize the assumptions Marx brings to the discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital. As the market’s obfuscation eliminates the traces of relations between producers, the commodity acquires characteristics which, Marx claims, “are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible” (1978: 320). A conceptual relationary comparison is drawn: Labor is alienated in the commodity in the same way that light reflected from an object creates “the objective form of something outside the eye itself,” masking from our awareness the merely physical “excitation of the optic nerve” (1978: 321). Clearly, in this biological metaphor, use value is to exchange value as physiology is to perception; material social relations are to objective nature as commodity relations are to subjective illusion. “Fetishism” occurs to greatest consequence in this immediate context; like the ordinary fetish-objects “endowed with life” in this or that so-called primitive culture, commodities are “productions of the human brain” (1978: 321), mere appearances that dissimulate a more primary, physical or structural, reality. The logic rests on a double analogy: Marxian science takes as its model for method the biologist who uncovers the physiological substrates of human perception or the cultural anthropologist who demystifies the fetish by uncovering the effective social functionality absconded behind its occult, taboo-generating surface. Projected against the backdrop of Mason’s view of the information economy’s entropic decline, the underlying empiricism of Marx’s biological and functionalist assumptions implies that, in the final analysis, the current system will have no chance of surviving our age of tending-towards-laborless digital reproduction. A flourishing Marxist science capable of exorcizing the devilish illusion of exchange value, coupled with a techno-economy endowed with the power to reproduce its infrastructure with minimal capital expenditure, dooms today’s capitalism to an imminent demise. That is, surplus value cannot survive use value’s exponential increase; in any case, the system rests on a merely subjective, and therefore corrigible, fetishistic misperception. In summary, with neither a significant quantity of socially necessary labor in production, nor a non-empirical quality in the commodity-object that withstands the Marxist’s scientistic reduction, capital lacks a foundation, a substance with which to generate the surplus value required for its survival. Note, though, how this seemingly unavoidable implication fails to prevent Mason from providing an insightful enumeration of the ways in which capitalism, however woozy, is nevertheless not down for the count. Monopoly pricing, externality capturing (i.e., the minimization of unforeseen or indirect costs), the driving up of energy and material prices, as well as the creation of new forms of free labor and the proliferation of commodified “microservices” (e.g., dog-walking, house-sitting, etc.) are among the phenomena that arise to forestall the digital economy’s impending collapse. To this list we can add the ubiquity of marketing and branding in the internet age; the classical commodity fetishism that sees us lining up for the latest iPhone, which we know, even in the best scenario, will prove only negligibly better than the last one.

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This last example is merely the most recent manifestation of a dismayingly intractable phenomenon which, beginning early in the last century, motivated the enlistment of psychoanalysis in an attempt to wake the Marxian analysis up from its empiricist and historicist slumber. For as Freud’s work implies, the object of labor is also always a libidinal object, endowed with an insistent propensity to slip from the grasp of the categories of social or economic utility. Because this object, or rather its signifier, is subject to repression, it is forced to don a cloak of gauzy ideality to make its appearance in our capitalist world of commodity relations. Too rarely acknowledged in the Marxian discourse on fetishism is Freud’s deep contention that the libido’s object is not desirable; something must be done to it in order to make it so. And from the psychoanalytic perspective, this “something, ” though finally irreducible to the empiricist and functionalist terms of Marx’s labor theory of value, constitutes the essence of the commodity’s properly metaphysical, fetishistic quality. Freud’s insight provides a salutary opportunity to connect Mason’s rejuvenation of Marx’s theory for digital political economy to Lacan’s famous contention that “Marx discovered the symptom. ”3 For Lacan, our experience of the world’s coherence—more precisely, our capacity to experience ourselves as observers of, and participants in, a world imbued with order and meaning—is conditional on a minimal degree of idealization by means of which the libidinal object—objet petit a, in Lacan’s unique idiom—acquires its status as desirable. The collapse of the fetishistic fantasy-frame, within which our world takes shape, presents the prospect of the end of viable psychic life as such. Here is the consequence: materialists of a certain Marxian persuasion can analyze the life out of the commodity-fetish, discovering the unequal power relations that seethe into every pore of the production process and casting radical aspersions on its moral or ethical legitimacy as well as its political desirability. In no way does this guarantee, however, that these same critics will never be found waiting patiently in line at the Apple store. As the Althusserians convincingly argued, theoretical knowledge has neither a necessary nor a predictable relation to action, to practice. Viewed through psychoanalytic glasses, the purely structural-economic ground buttressing Mason’s conviction about the inevitability of capitalism’s forthcoming, unprecedented information-age crisis is not quite as solid as he thinks. Psychoanalysis provides a productive way to think through the motivation for capitalism’s awesomely creative capacity to rescue its variety of social relations from their endless cyclical crises, in so doing restoring the subjective dimension to Marx’s subjectless economism. The hypothetical removal through automation and artificial intelligence of any material limit to the increase in use value—the reduction of capital expenditure in production to absolute zero, that is—would not in itself guarantee capitalism’s collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The Freudian contention that a more or less functional psychic life requires that there be at least one object in our experience that presents itself to us as desirable ensures that we can never be satisfied with mere use value, and in this sense never completely fetish-free. This special object that gives shape to our life-world contains an ineffable surplus value of dissimulated jouissance that cannot be reduced to the quantitative difference between the value created in time by labor and the cost of reproducing that labor. The object of labor is also an object of properly sexual enjoyment, “sexual” understood here as

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inherently excessive and dysfunctional, hostile to reason and utility. In the broadest sense, the commodification inherent in fetishism is simply the name for what happens to the object in capitalism as it is subject to repression, in this way becoming amenable to the conditions of possible experience, in essence causing the desire that constructs our human world of signification. What do these deceptively non-materialist insights imply for political economy? As influential Marxists have argued for some time,4 purely economic forms of analysis must be supplemented by cultural and ideological approaches. These can help us to understand how capital opportunistically enlists the force of repression to buttress the festishistic lure of the commodity, as use value gains increasing autonomy vis-à-vis capital expenditure in the advanced techno-economy. German sociologist Wolfgang Streek offers an especially salient summary of the superstructural symptoms with which neoliberal capitalism attempts to pull itself up by the bootstraps in a doomed attempt to circumvent yet another crisis in the globalized, race-to-the-bottom, free trade economy. In today’s “post-social society” in which cooperative structures of collective action have been massively sold out to the market, the dominant ethos is one of “competitive self-improvement, of untiring cultivation of one’s marketable human capital, enthusiastic dedication to work, and cheerfully optimistic, playful acceptance of the risks inherent in a world that has outgrown government” (Streek 2016: 38). The best way to attack this ethos is the technique of psychoanalytic interpretation. Its aim is to make available to consciousness evidence of a senseless, excessive enjoyment dissimulated in the most highly valued objects and activities in the capitalist system. Jouissance is what remains at the end of both psychoanalysis and Marxism’s (or Althusser’s) self-described scientific method. The most ethical, authentically disruptive social groups today are the ones who premise their political claims on a simple reversal of neoliberalism’s most sacrosanct values, and who then proceed collectively to effect this reversal’s institutionalization—its translation into authentically universal propositions for political action. To begin: a “masochistic” passion for anti-competitive cooperation; a simple refusal to requalify or retrain; an inveterate dedication to (what appears to capital as) idleness; and a surly demand for a guaranteed living wage in exchange for zero (economically valuable) labor. At the twilight of the neoliberal phase of capitalism, a new, radically anti-fetishistic slogan to guide our actions can be heard: All power to the losers!

Notes 1 2

See in particular sections 12 and 16 of “Part I: From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy, ” in Reading Capital (Althusser 1983: 43–6, 54–6). I write “seemingly” because the thesis most certainly is not naive. Indeed, Althusser is at pains to distinguish his notion of science (as opposed to ideology) from both an empiricist scientism and a historicism purporting to reduce all knowledge to the productive agency of its synchronic conditions of possibility. Unlike his many vulgar readers, Althusser construes science not as a form of positive knowledge or an outgrowth of the scientific method, but rather as “a truthful distance and an internal dislocation (décalage)” (Althusser 1983: 15) within knowledge, in other words a real

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx structure (in the Lacanian sense) that generates effects on a level other than that on which the causal principle is located. It is no coincidence that his debt to psychoanalysis, and more specifically to Lacan, is at its weightiest on this issue. Nor is it coincidental that Althusser uses the term fetishism to refer to the notion that the effects of the causal principle are not amenable to an “immediate reading ” (17). In the same way that the tricks of censorship distort unconscious dream-thoughts, the commodity-fetish disguises its entanglement with the social relations of production. The non-empirical, logical knowledge that allows one to go from manifest to latent levels is what is not ideological, and in this sense scientific, for Althusser. Though I generally endorse Althusser’s conceptualization of science, the argument I go on to develop in this piece implies that his sense of Marx’s own scientificity is to some degree misplaced. That is, Althusser’s notion of a Marxist science is distinctly more Althusserian (logical) than it is Marxist (empirical-economic), at least with respect to the immediate context of Capital’s outline of commodity fetishism. In a provocative moment of Seminar XXII (1974 to 1975), Lacan links the Freudian concept of the symptom, defined here as “the way in which each person enjoys the unconscious” to Marx’s specification of “proletarian man” as “the essence of man, ” “stripped [dépouillé] of everything” (February 18). Samo Tomšič nicely develops the consequences: Not only does the proletariat occupy “the universal subjective position in capitalism, ” but it also entails “a rejection of the false universalism . . . of [the] commodity form” (Tomšič 2015: 6), in other words its necessarily failed attempt to circumvent the manifestation of enjoyment within the market system. Lacan bases his reading of Marx on an analogy between Marx’s outline of the differential system of value in capitalism and the post-Saussurean notion of linguistic structure as a system devoid of independent, positive terms. The bibliography is of course forbiddingly vast, but one can single out for special mention Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Castoriadis, Deleuze and Guattari, Mitchell and Debord.

References Adorno, T. (1967), “Sociology and Psychology (Part I), ” New Left Review 1(46): 67–80. Althusser, L. and E. Balibar (2009), Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster, New York and London: Verso. Castoriadis, C. (1987 [1975]), The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Debord, G. (2002 [1977]), Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, MI : Black and Red. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2003 [1980]), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Continuum. Gramsci, A. (1995 [1948–65]), Prison Notebooks, trans. Q. Hoare, New York: International Publishers. Horkheimer, M. and T. Adorno (1997 [1947]), Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso Classics. Lacan, J. (1975), Le Séminaire, livre XXII. R.S.I, unpublished. Marcuse, H. (1964), One-Dimensional Man, Boston, MA : Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1978 [1867]), Capital, Vol. 1, in R.C. Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, London: Norton, 294–438.

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Marx, K. (1993 [1858]), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. M. Nicolaus, London: Penguin Classics. Mason, P. (2016), Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London: Penguin. Mitchell, J. (2000 [1974]), Psychoanalysis and Feminism, New York: Basic Books. Streeck, W. (2016), How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, London and New York: Verso. Tomšič, S. (2015), The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, London: Verso.

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History and Class Struggle Peter Hitchcock

The rousing opening of The Communist Manifesto is well known, “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism” (Marx and Engels 1998: 33). The next section of this central text in Marx and Engels’s thinking (on Bourgeois and Proletarians) begins with an equally famous pronouncement: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (1998: 34). Without summarizing all of the critical commentary on either of these statements it might be useful to understand their significance in terms of each other. Why? The first declaration appears to offer the fear of a future that would cancel through the present; whereas the second idea seems to present a version of history that is its precondition. In fact, of course, the statements are also eerily interchangeable and make the Manifesto a much more complex document than its genre would seem to sanction. Communism might be what has not been in relation to capitalism, but it is not quite a future conditional, since the specter (as a ghost) is a trace of what pre-exists the present. Perhaps something that haunts from the future is more fearful than the after-image of the already dead, but it is one of the achievements of the Manifesto that it plays with this ambiguity while presenting the material grounds for social transformation. The history of class struggles maintains this tension because perception of it hinges on the interpretation of society and struggle, and not just on history and class. The point here is not to sink forthright declarations into a semantic stew of signifiers, for which a close attention to the German would also reward a logical analysis, or to offer abstraction for the resolutely concrete, but is merely to emphasize that the polemical attractiveness of the first statement is consonant with the meaning of the second. If history also includes specters then what haunts class does not confirm its historical truths, but challenges its constituency. Yet this is precisely what makes history and class struggle both a lament and a legacy in Marx and Marxism. History and class struggle are so central to the meaning of Marxism that it would seem hard to note them without conjuring the entire corpus of such thinking to the present, with all of the differences in their interpretation. If much of the Communist Manifesto is necessarily out of date—because it was written for a particular moment in the history it references—rousing phrases like those quoted above continue to impress themselves on the political imagination. Does the history to which it refers continue to demonstrate or reveal the constituents of class struggle, and if so how? This depends 319

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very much on how class and class division are theorized. Marx, in particular, understood capitalism of his time as rife with class polarization between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a formation and opposition honed by their respective positions in the production and reproduction of the social. Seeing this as a deeper foundation of human history, however, would mean tracing the relations of owners and direct producers across a much longer trajectory, something that Marxists have attempted to formulate beyond the realm of mere assertion. And what of social intermediaries: the middle class; the lumpenproletariat; the petty bourgeoisie; etc.? What of social rank? Are these merely epiphenomena of class conditions, or do they in fact weaken the declarative certitude of the Manifesto as well? The historical core of the Manifesto radiates from its understanding of class conditions in its present. It is not that it misrepresented the complexity of social formation and distinction, but that it wanted to advance the prospects of transformation by focusing on class opposition itself as determinate. The basic point about history and class struggle at this level is that, notwithstanding all of the other divisions and fractions that make up social existence, the struggle between classes, overdetermined by their relative and opposing position in an economic mode of production, will be paramount in either extending or transforming those conditions. Such struggle is clearly not the only history to be found, but is objectively discernible in how socio-economic change occurs. Furthermore, contradictions in class interests are neither mono-causal, nor are they consistent. The historical crucible that makes the Manifesto simultaneously simplifies the actual logic of struggle and social change. Critics, therefore, have often looked to other texts for clarification. In Theories of Surplus Value, for instance, Marx notes that “the real constitution of society” (2000: 903) does not comprise two classes in their opposition. In addition, Marxist theorists like Poulantzas have cast doubt on propositions about class interests and consciousness, indeed, on the whole narrative that sees struggle in the transition of workers as a class in itself to a class for itself. One could, however, resort to Marx’s negative definition of class identity from the Eighteenth Brumaire, where he offers that merely local interconnections—no community, no national bond, and no political organization—means that class formation is not taking place. We might conjecture that class struggle is both defined as oppositional practices and a concomitant effort to render class identity as practical and collective. Both might be said to carry revolutionary import, yet in their combination they connote a very different sense of struggle than the heroic event of revolution itself represents. Historicized from this perspective, class struggle is occurring more or less all of the time, but it does not mean that social transformation is nigh, only that its possibility remains. Politics, then, is also a struggle, the struggle to encourage consciousness of precisely this possibility. Politics is not just an ideological struggle over interests, practical coalitions, basic demands on behalf of class difference and the like, but a struggle over the realities of class in its socio-economic contradictions– which is to say it is the latter that gives form to the former, and not the other way around. But what of the Party? What of the State? Much Leninism (and particularly the Lenin of State and Revolution) has clearly been dedicated to carving out a role for the development of class consciousness and struggle from beyond relations of class

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self-identity. Historically, while this has led to accusations of elitism, vanguardism, and, sometimes, out-and-out authoritarianism, it would be naïve to think that class struggle combusts spontaneously in all of its attributes from within class composition sui generis. Even if such external structures of class consciousness are not in themselves decisive, history shows that their relative absence may actually contribute to the diminution of class opposition in much of its expression. Again, class experience continues, but may be less recognizable as such without formal structures, for instance, in concomitant modes of cultural mediation. Thus, while the roles of parties and states are never less than contentious in Marxist theory, the many lessons of history and class struggle to date accentuate that the influence of Marxist theory and practice as a politics of class and social transformation have often rested on the production and maintenance of party and state support systems. This, of course, does not explain all of the setbacks in the course of class struggle. Indeed, whereas the Manifesto boldly proclaimed that capitalism was producing its own gravediggers in the form of the proletariat, after one hundred and seventy years or so the inevitable victory of the proletariat over its oppressors has not in fact occurred, and the conditions of actually existing class struggle have been transmogrified. Much of Marx’s vision of capitalism continues to be incisive, but specific elements, like class struggle, have had to be rethought and recast in their precise relationship to capitalism’s obdurate persistence. Although, for instance, we witness much capitalist crisis in the present, and calls for various versions of post-capitalism, this has not reflected or corresponded to intensifications of class struggle per se, despite the fact that labor/ capital confrontations are most certainly in evidence. There are several explanations for such a situation. First, of course, the aforementioned question of class composition has never receded. Early key challenges to the logic of class in the Manifesto, like the very different critiques by Kautsky and Bernstein, have been borne out by the actual course of history in which class struggle occurs. The idea of the proletariat is not selfevident in the composition of class, and was not in Marx’s time, where domestic labor and women’s role in the production and reproduction of class composition exerted as much if not more influence on the actual shape of the proletariat than the industrial worker, whose image otherwise dominates the discourse. Today, it is common to say class composition is more diffuse and, of course, complicated, but the case could be made that such diffusion and complexity is immanent to class. This means that when it comes to struggle, class composition reveals myriad fraught relations between purportedly objective and subjective elements. The impress of the former rests on one’s position in productive and reproductive processes; the force of the latter connects to self-identity, consciousness and various levels of affective solidarity, irrespective of defined categories and determinate inevitabilities. Second, in the past half-century in particular, and whatever the demands of formal distinctions, class and class struggle have manifestly been redefined by the broader challenges of social movements where class either in or for itself does not necessarily constitute a primary vector of interpretation or change. The massive histories of decolonization, for instance, are materializations of class difference and struggle, but they cannot be read outside of race, ethnicity and nationalism; trajectories of politics and economics that reconfigure what struggle actually comes to mean—a process

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significantly prescient in the work of C.L.R. James. Seen in the light of feminist movements, anti-racism and civil rights, queer activism, anti-imperialism and environmentalism of various kinds, an adherence to the primacy of class and attendant struggles would seem closer to a metaphysic rather than to a material concreteness of the social. If we argue that social struggle is always structured and overdetermined by precise historical limits, radicals, including Marxists, have appropriately questioned whether the limits of class constrict the materiality of change itself, whose dynamism can be discerned in so much else other than socialization. The importance of this second point lies precisely in drawing attention to the lineaments of struggle in which class is enmeshed rather than a supposed irrelevance in class struggle itself. Work like Silvia Federici’s, in particular, has been dedicated to rethinking struggle beyond these strictures. True, this might mean that traditional forms of opposition via parties and unions carry less weight in particular spaces of struggle, but, again, that depends on context and scale, which leads to a third point. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s, class struggle was, in general, unpinned from “actually existing socialism” as a project. In fact, of course, this detachment (and realignment) was evident before then, politically in the rise of the New Left, and economically, as post-industrialism in the West fractured solidarity previously secured through the experience of factory labor. Likewise, liberal democracy had long taken up many of the social policies of socialism while shaping them, through reforms and compromises, to a rapprochement between labor and capital. A variety of political movements, including the Socialist International and the Progressive Alliance, continue to favor labor in this struggle, but a post-Soviet world of neoliberalism and globalization represent a specific set of challenges in this regard. The key to understanding class struggle under these conditions is a materialist conception of history rather than a position that sees its promise end with a particular state structure. The Manifesto acknowledges capitalism as a revolutionary historical force and that any struggle against it must be dynamic in its own way. Yet the metrics of struggle are not simply reactive, but are creative embodiments of change that may not obviously meet the agency and identity of class. This may help to explain why revolutions can fail, like those of 1848—which would demonstrably change Marx and Engels’s outlook on social transformation—and why they can surprise, like those of April and October 1917 in Russia—where, arguably, socialism initially took root from class struggle, not based on or led by an industrial proletariat. It can also throw light on key events of proletarian struggle, like the Paris Commune of 1871, that seem to fulfill classic components of class composition yet are thwarted in achieving their expressed aims. The history of class struggle necessitates attention to the contradictory dynamics of class in which even basic formulae—workers defined by the commodified selling and buying of their labor power under capitalism for instance—may not give to class solidity or solidarity. This is why the history of class struggle is simultaneously a history of class consciousness. To struggle as a class requires the activity of those both within it and those who struggle on behalf of it. For both, individuals may or may not be conscious of such activity, but consciousness of it is a significant part of how class is defined in the first

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place (Luxemburg). At this level, consciousness operates in the space between a subjective understanding of our practical social being and objective operations of socio-economic rules or laws. Because class consciousness is caught between subjective and objective conditions, it also includes the possibility of misrecognition of its identifications and desires, a false consciousness that can be manufactured according to class interests, thus class struggle is coterminous though not synonymous with ideological struggle. If Marxism is properly dialectical, it is only because such a thought process and theory is constantly attempting to grasp the shortfalls and contradictions class critique necessarily entails. This is the achievement of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, in many ways the key text of Marxism that explains why class struggle is both inevitable and elusive—and, of course, a work mercilessly attacked precisely for these reasons! Lukács grapples principally with the notion that class antagonism pivots on the ways in which self-knowledge is mediated. Objective and subjective concerns are less likely to be distinguished if knowledge itself does not propagate such distinctions. Initially criticized for failing to privilege a contemporary Leninist insistence on party leadership—that is, a consciousness brought to the proletariat—Lukács’s polemic has the advantage of distancing crude determinism while wresting experience from the idealist pretensions of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. Of course, because History and Class Consciousness is itself historical, its assessments might usefully be linked to what was not going to plan in the revolutionary ferment of the time. If it speaks to class struggle today, it is because political and social consciousness has become more, rather than less, problematic in the way we imagine socialization as such. A re-reading of Lukács’s text does not free it from a plethora of contaminants—including a kind of creeping authoritarianism—but it might spur reflection on how reification and false consciousness continue to displace, and otherwise fragment, class struggle in the present, albeit with the significant caveat that this, too, in its dialectical insistence, is not outside the propensity for fetishism. Class struggle is indeed part of contemporary political consciousness, but it does not glom to revolutionary change the way Marx and Engels imagined in the Manifesto. I have indicated some of the reasons for this above—the collapse of actually existing socialism, globalization, class intermediaries, new social movements, etc.—but part of the issue is that the world historical significance of class struggle necessitates solidarity, simultaneously, at different rates of scale. Again, this does not mean the opposition of labor and capital that Marx and Engels identified in the Manifesto was, therefore, an easier and emptier formula than now, but that acknowledging historical difference includes a consciousness of scale and profound unevenness in development across the globe. Even when it comes to industrialism, for instance, workers of the world do not bear a singular, post-industrial identity. Automation must be factored in, but it is still noticeable that China today can cover the world steel production of all of 1850 in about a double shift. It is important to stress how non-unionized service workers of the west engage in class struggle beyond consumption and precariousness; it is equally significant that the vast number of proletarians live their experience of capital outside this conjunction. But what is class struggle now if consciousness of class itself, and its historical role in changing human relations, seems about as impossible as imagining the end of

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capitalism? It is altogether too neat to suggest that this is the dialectical challenge of Marx and Engels’s exhortation, or that, like Marx’s sober reflections on the 1848 revolutions, we again accentuate that the time is not ripe, or that the contradictions and crises of global capitalism are insufficient to hone adequate numbers of class-conscious gravediggers to bury the labor/capital relation itself. A class is never an individual, and, yet, what would class be without individual class struggle? Even when individuals act on the basis of selfish personal interests they cannot adjudicate whether some class antagonism or struggle is being performed beyond that claim. Yet the problem of adjudication itself cannot be resolved by Marxist desire: that is, to take everything that is innocuous and everyday and add it to a glimpse of historical reckoning. Furthermore, what if the aims of class struggle are universally thwarted? Did not the Manifesto also suggest the end of capitalism might occur in the “common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx and Engels 1998: 35)? What is the meaning of class struggle before ecological catastrophe or nuclear annihilation? Does the privileging of some forms of class struggle, work place equity, job stability, health services, the right to strike, and state and party activism somehow work to occlude how all kinds of other human activity might render such struggle superfluous or a dangerous distraction? Class struggle is primarily political and politics as we know, is never less than problematic in defining its interests. So obtuse in its contemporary mediations, class struggle today lends itself as much to parody as it does to programmatic political change, although Marxism has no monopoly on the banalization of the political as an arena of contestation. Because the idea of class struggle is itself dialectical, one should not be surprised that its recognition is subject to historical fluctuation and ideological vacillations. New conjunctions facilitate new understandings of classes in struggle. For instance, the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and its aftermath sharpened resistance to globalization into innovative configurations; “occupy” now has a very different meaning than what it had before the crisis. As E.P. Thompson once put it, class is something that happens in human relationships, and struggle is a challenge to understand how this happening is taking place. Forms of struggle and class must be in contention as a whole and over-determine how individual classes might relate. Social reproduction, for instance, is vitally agonistic and organizes contention in ways that are often more effective than much of the sloganeering of yesteryear. Again, this does not mean that the Manifesto is today no more than an historical artifact, or that the proletariat is but a political tic of conditions long since overreached. Whenever one reads contemporary articulations of class struggle, say by Théorie Communiste, or iterations of Italian Autonomia, one is reminded again of the power of the Manifesto’s injunction on history and class struggle. It is not just a specter of the past that teaches, but a spirit from the future that beckons in the belief humans have the creative and practical means to overcome the material processes of exploitation that divide them.

References Bernstein, E. (2011), Evolutionary Socialism, New York: Prism. Federici, S. (2012), Revolution at Point Zero, Brooklyn, NY: PM Press.

History and Class Struggle James, C.L.R. (1989), The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage. Kautsky, K. (1971), The Class Struggle, New York: Norton. Lenin, V.I. (1993), State and Revolution, New York: Penguin. Lukács, G. (2000), History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Luxemburg, R. (2006), Reform or Revolution, New York: Dover. Marx, K. (1963), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (2000), Theories of Surplus Value, New York: Prometheus Books. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1998), The Communist Manifesto, London: Verso. Poulantzas, N. (1975), Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London: NLB . Thompson, E.P. (1966), The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage.

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Ideology Tanner Mirrlees

From the end of the Cold War up until the global slump of 2007/2008, capitalism was frequently presumed by many to be the only and best mode of production for the world. The Chicago School’s neoliberal blueprint for changing the world with deregulation, liberalization and privatization was dominant, and the Thatcher-Reagan slogan of “there is no alternative” to free-market capitalism was interwoven into the “common sense” way many people understood and acted in the world. The dwindling number of Marxist thinkers, who continued to assert the necessity of a way of life beyond capitalism, were frequently chastized as “ideological” pawns of an unrealistic or even dangerous “ideology” that, if taken seriously, would take us back to the Gulag, or forward to some kind of dystopic “Terror” regime. Despite their professed allegiance to the values of pluralism, diversity and inclusion, the trans-national cosmopolitan business class, the technocratic elite of post-Keynesian states, and legions of sympathetic pundits were not very tolerant of Marxist “ideology. ” For them, as for much of society, ideology, along with history, meta-narratives and utopian thinking, had ended. In that post-ideological condition, “there was no alternative to capitalism!” Over the past decade, though, that end-of-ideology ideology has ended, and the social antagonisms of a world characterized by extreme inequality, endless war and environmental crisis revivified the Marxian critique of capitalism and a search for different and better alternatives to it. From this, an incredulity toward the neoliberal meta-narrative that declared an end to all meta-narratives emerged, and, now, what once confidently set itself apart from ideology, can be studied as one. In the previous moment, claims like “free markets are the precondition for freedom and democracy, ” or “a rising tide lifts all boats, ” or “what’s good for global business is good for America, ” could be taken for granted as the truth of the world, but this is no longer the case. Now, those who assert such opinions might be seen as subjects of an “ideology” that is getting them to think about the world from the vantage point of the corporations that pay think-tanks to promulgate this propaganda for the wonder-working powers of laissezfaire capitalism, or suffering ignorance due to being repeatedly exposed to false ideas, or just terribly naïve. Not so long ago, the tenets of neoliberalism seemed natural, eternal and universal, but, as of late, they are regularly called out as components of a particular “ideology” that supports the capitalist mode of production and upholds the interests of its “ruling class” (Monbiot 2016). 327

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Ideology critique is back, and ideology is an important keyword in Marxist theory, but one that predates Karl Marx’s writings. In 1796, the Enlightenment philosophe, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, coined the term “ideology” when calling for a scientific investigation of ideas; to be an “ideologist” was to examine ideas (Williams 1988: 154). Years later, Napoleon Bonaparte used “ideologue” as a term of opprobrium for his opponents: the liberal revolutionaries Benjamin Constant, Pierre Jean George Cabanis and Madame de Staël, who challenged his political authority and the illusions its maintenance relied upon. In the mid-nineteenth century, Marx drew from and transformed these ideas about ideology into historical materialist starting points for the critique of ideology in capitalism. Marx denounced Tracy as a “fischblütige Bourgeoisdoktrinär” (a fishblooded bourgeois doctrinaire) because he supported the bourgeois ideology of liberty, property and free markets. Against the metaphysical idealism of his contemporaries, Marx’s premise is that ideas, conceptions and systems of belief are not autonomous, but produced by people in, and interwoven with, the reigning forces and relations of production in society. Marx’s historical materialist method is to relate and connect any “theoretical product” of the mind—a religious doctrine, a political treatise and philosophy itself—to the real material conditions of the individuals and social groups that produce, shape and are shaped by them, with an eye to the role that these products play in affirming or challenging the mode of production and the power relations between the ruling and subordinate classes. For Marx, ideology is made on earth by people through their material practices (not an alien force descending from space), made with the materials afforded by certain circumstances (not natural or universal), and definitely changeable (not indefinitely eternal). What Marx meant by “ideology, ” however, is far from obvious and the reasons for this key concept’s fogginess are many. Marx’s corpus offers no single comprehensive definition of ideology, just references to it. Marx’s usage of the term ideology is inconsistent and changes over time. Also, Marx mostly deploys “ideology” as a pejorative when criticizing schools of thought (“the Young Hegelians”), modes of thinking (“idealist”), crystallizations of thought (“expressions, ” “phrases” and “conceptions”), and thinkers (“bourgeois ideologues”) that do not share his historical materialist precepts. In Marx’s hands, ideology is a cudgel wielded to attack each and every idea that seems to affirm and perpetuate, as opposed to sufficiently interrogate and challenge, capitalism. A cursory glance at or a deep dive into the academic literature about what Marx meant by ideology does not bring one any closer to a definitive account. In place of scholarly consensus and certainty, one discovers disagreement surrounding and clashing readings of the meaning of ideology to Marx (Barret 1991; Hall 1986; Eagleton 1991; Larrain 1979, 1991; McCarney 1980; McLellan 1995; Pines 1993; Plamenatz 1970; Seliger 1979; Žižek 1994). Added to this are projections about what Marx intended to write or might have written about ideology’s roles and effects. Nonetheless, combining exegesis with creative interpretation of passages pertaining to ideology in key texts such as: Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843); The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844); The German Ideology (1846); The Communist Manifesto (1848); The Preface to the Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy

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(1859); Grundrisse (1858); and Capital, Vol. I (1867), Marxists have elucidated the relationships between ideology and the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, class division, class interests and class struggle. Spanning historical periods and places, Marxist theorists—Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Guy Debord, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Slavoj Zizek—produced many unique iterations of the concept, some relevant to the problems of their immediate conjuncture, and, others, generalizable. At present, ideology, in Marx and Marxism, is a contested concept. On the first page of a book that identifies and deconstructs at least sixteen Marxist ideas about ideology, Eagleton says “nobody has yet come up with a single adequate definition of ideology” (2007: 1). Given the many complex and sometimes contradictory meanings, interpretations and political uses of “ideology, ” this entry does not try to extract a singular or correct conceptualization of ideology from Marx’s corpus. Instead, it derives five ideas about ideology from Marx, for today. These include: (1) ruling class ideas of and for capitalism;(2) false ideas about capitalism, for it; (3) ideas that respond to yet distort the cause of real social contradictions, for capitalism; (4) idealized expressions of dominant material relationships in capitalism, for capitalism; and (5) a sphere of ideas where class struggles for and against capitalism take place. The first way to conceptualize ideology is as “ruling class ideas” or, ideas of and for society’s dominant class. In The German Ideology, Marx writes: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (1978: 172). By “ruling class,” Marx means the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production), as distinct from the proletariat (the workers who must sell their labor power in exchange for the wage they need to acquire their own means of subsistence). Marx says the “individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness and, therefore, think, ” and these individuals rule as “thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch ” (1978: 173). In Marx’s time, the “ruling ideas of the epoch” were produced by the Enlightenment philosophes, whose political-economic doctrines established the constitutional foundations for the liberal democratic State, alongside the shift from feudalism to capitalism. These bourgeois ideologues made “the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself ” the “chief source of [their] livelihood” (Marx 1978: 173). The “ruling ideas” were also produced by the “active members” of the bourgeoisie; these might encompass ideas about how firms could efficiently turn a profit in the market and deep convictions about the virtue of liberal capitalism as compared to alternative modes. Marx argues that “ruling class ideas” are circulated throughout society by “means of mental production, ” or by what political economists of communication refer to as the media and cultural industries. As Marx says, the ruling class that owns “the means of material production” also controls “the means of mental production” and, as result, those “who lack the means of mental production are subject to it, ” and, therefore, subject to the ruling class’s ideas about the world. In this rudimentary conceptualization, ideology refers to ideas by and for the ruling class. A second and epistemologically-loaded conceptualization of ideology is “false ideas” about capitalism. When describing ideas that do not correspond with the way things

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really are in capitalism, Marx frequently uses words like “incorrect, ” “distorted, ” “illusory, ” “twisted” and “untrue ” (Seliger 1979), but Marx never described ideology as “false consciousness” (McCarney 1980; McLellan 1986). Friedrich Engels’s brief July 14, 1898, letter to Franz Mehrings is the source of this phrase. Engels writes that “ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker, but with a false consciousness” and explains that a thinker’s thoughts are “false” when “the real motive forces” impelling their “process of thought” are “unknown” to them (cited in Pine 1993: 1). This notion of ideology as “false consciousness” implies that an agent—capitalism, the bourgeoisie, an ideologue—shapes a subject’s thoughts, but from behind their backs; in their mind, but out of sight. It also implies that a subject’s thoughts will not match up with reality, as it is. To be in ideology, then, is to not know that one’s thoughts have been shaped by forces beyond oneself, and to think thoughts about the world that give a false impression of the way the world really is (Seliger 1979; Plamenatz 1970; Pines 1997). To the extent that “class consciousness” is the opposite of “false consciousness,” the subordinate class’s shift from being a class in-itself to one for-itself would seem to depend upon someone else revealing what the “real motive force” ideology conceals, making the unknown knowable, and dispelling false ideas with scientific knowledge. But this whole framework rests upon a division between those who know—an intellectual with unique access to the truth—and those who do not know—a recipient of the other’s special insight. A third way to conceptualize ideology is as ideas that respond to and distort the cause of real social contradictions (Larraine 1991). Marx (2009) gestures at this idea of ideology while engaging with Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) in the introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843). Marx agrees with Feuerbach that “the state and this society produce” religion—people created God in their image, not the other way around—but disagrees that simply pointing this out will inspire the faithful to give up their religious falsity and embrace humanism’s truth. Feuerbach understood that religion was something that people devoted their lives to and ritually did each day, but failed to explain why this was so. For Marx, religion played a productive role in the lives of its followers and a reproductive role for capitalism. Religion had mass appeal because it responded to and provided people with a way to “protest” against and cope with “real suffering. ” As Marx (2009) writes, religion “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. ” Marx (2009) says religion provides people with an “inverted consciousness of the world, because they are in an inverted world. ” Calling upon the faithful to “give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. ” As ideology, religion does not abolish the working class’s suffering, but channels this suffering into non-revolutionary expressions of emotion to mitigate suffering’s intensities. Ideology, then, responds to and helps the oppressed endure really miserable conditions of life and labor while distorting the cause of those conditions, that being capitalism. Here, the solution to the problem of ideology is not a crusade for scientific knowledge, but a practical movement to go beyond capitalism. Absent that, the hellish condition and its heavenly bliss will persist. A fourth way to conceptualize ideology is as an ideal expression of dominant material relationships in capitalism. Marx claims that ruling class ideas are “nothing

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more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas” (1978: 172). In capitalism, the dominant material relationships between social classes are mediated by markets, where owners and workers buy and sell commodities—one of those is labor power. In the market, however, the dominant material relationships are idealized, as this “sphere of circulation or commodity exchange” is “a very Eden of the innate rights of man” where “alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Marx 1990: 280). When interacting in the market, the relationship between owners and workers appears to be “free” (because the owner and the worker freely buy and sell commodities and are “constrained only by their free will”) and “equal” (because owners and workers meet in the market as individualized “equal” sellers and buyers of commodities and “exchange equivalent for equivalent”) (Marx 1990: 280). Yet, individual freedom and equality in the sphere of commodity circulation masks the substantive social class relations of “unfreedom” and inequality in the sphere of commodity production (Larrain 1991). As Marx said in Grundrisse, “in present bourgeois society as a whole” the market “appears as the surface process, beneath which, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent equality and liberty disappear” (1993: 247). In capitalism, workers are compelled sell their labor power as a commodity to owners in exchange for the wage they require to buy their basic needs, but this market transaction gives the owner the power to determine what the worker produces, how they produce it, and for what ends in the abode of production. Therefore, workers are not free; they do not produce for themselves, their time, labor power and labor process are controlled. While owners and workers meet as equals in the market, in production, they are unequal; owners hire workers to produce the surplus they accumulate to enrich themselves, reproducing class inequality. So, the “free” and “equal” exchanges between individuals in the market are idealized expressions of dominant material relationships between social classes that mask “unfreedom” and inequality in production and, ultimately, perpetuate society’s class divisions. For Marx, substantive freedom frees one from the realm of necessity; true democracy democratizes the mode of production. But neither can be achieved in capitalism. A fifth conceptualization of ideology indebted to Marx is elaborated upon by as: The mental frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the system of representation—which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works. Stuart Hall 1986: 29

This notion of ideology stems from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), where Marx presents the (in)famous “base” and “superstructure” model of society: “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (1978: 4). While Marx (1978: 4) speaks of “the mode of production; of material life conditions; the social, political and intellectual life process in general, ” this

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is not a vulgar economic deterministic claim that the base unilaterally dictates changes to the superstructure. Marx says a “distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production [. . .] and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic—in short, ideological—forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” (1978: 5). Far from being an automatic expression of the base, ideological forms and the forms of consciousness they shape “must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. ” In this conception, ideology is not necessarily ruling class ideas, false ideas, distorting ideas, or idealized expressions of material relationships. Rather, it encompasses the totality of “forms” that enable people to “become conscious” of the world’s conflicted and contradictory class relations. Here, ideology is neutral; it can derive from and serve the interests of the bourgeois or the proletariat. Instead of upholding the dominant order, ideology is a sphere of class conflict in ideas and through ideas; social contradictions are not resolved by ideology, but are expressed by it. Pace the “dominant ideology thesis” (Abercrombie and Turner 1978), a ruling class’s ideas may be the most dominant (or prevalent) in an epoch, but so long as class conflict persists these ideas will not dominate the total superstructure of a society, nor will they rule the consciousness of all. In The German Ideology, Marx describes a contest of ideas that takes place in moments of social upheaval (1978: 173). A “practical collision” between bourgeois ideologists and the bourgeoisie itself is possible, and this conflict might develop into “a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts. ” Marx also notes that ideologists may go against an epoch’s ruling ideas and ruling class: “The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class ” (1978: 173). In The Manifesto, Marx and Engels (1978) say “when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, ” bourgeois ideologues may even “go over to the proletariat. ” Marx (1978: 174) says the ideologues representing the ideas and interests of each class will battle to universalize their particular class interests and generalize their specific ideas throughout all of society. Planting the kernel of hegemony, or, the struggle by one class to win the consent of others to its leadership, Marx writes: “each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it” will be compelled to “represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society” and will “represent” its ideas as “the only rational, universally valid ones ” (1978: 174). Also, “This class making revolution” represents itself “not as a class but as the representative of the whole society” and appears “as the whole mass of society confronting one ruling class” by connecting itself to “the common interest of all other non-ruling classes” (Marx 1978: 174). Moreover, “Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously ” (Marx 1978: 174). Of the five conceptualizations of ideology, this final class-neutral conceptualization of ideology is the most politically significant. Perhaps it even expresses Marx’s own formation as a ruthless critic of bourgeois ideology and development as an unapologetic proletarian ideologue. As Marx became conscious of the conflict between the forces and relations of production in his “epoch, ” he produced and circulated ideas in a plurality of ideological forms—letters, news articles, books—that aimed to understand

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and change the world, not for the ruling class of that era, but for the “new class” which he hoped would take the “place of the one ruling before it. ” Far from hegemonic, Marx’s ideological forms are useful starting points for the critique and creation of ideology in our time.

References Abercrombie, N. and B. Turner (1978), “The Dominant Ideology Thesis, ” The British Journal of Sociology 29(2): 149–70. Barret, M. (1991), The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Eagleton, T. (2007), Ideology, New York: Verso. Hall, S. (1986), “The Problem of Ideology : Marxism without Guarantees, ” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2): 28–44. Larrain, J. (1979), The Concept of Ideology, New York: Routledge. Larrain, J. (1991), “Stuart Hall and the Marxist Concept of Ideology, ” Theory, Culture & Society 8(1): 1–28. Marx, K. (1973), “ ‘Preface’ to A Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy, ” in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 3–6. Marx, K. (1978), Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 66–125. Marx, K. (1978), The German Ideology: Part I, in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 146–202. Marx, K. (1978), Theses on Feuerbach, in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 143–5. Marx, K. (1990), Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, New York: Vintage Books. Marx, K. (1993), Grundrisse, New York: Penguin Books. Marx, K. (2009), “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction. ” Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/ critique-hpr/intro.htm (accessed August 11, 2018). Marx, K. and F. Engels (1978), Manifesto of the Communist Party, in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 469–500. McCarney, J. (1980), The Real World of Ideolog, Brighton: Harvester Press. McLellan, D. (1995), Ideology, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Monbiot, G. (2016), “Neoliberalism: The Ideology at the Root of all our Problems, ” Guardian, April 15 Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/ neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot (accessed August 11, 2018). Pines, C. L. (1993), Ideology and False Consciousness: Marx and His Historical Progenitors, New York: State University of New York Press. Plamenatz, J. (1970). Ideology, London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Seliger, M. (1979), The Marxist Conception of Ideology: A Critical Essay, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. (1988), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London: Fontana Press. Žižek, S. ed. (1994), Mapping Ideology, New York: Verso.

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Empire and imperialism are significant concepts in current Marxist studies of the nexus of capitalism and international relations. Yet, they are infrequently traced back to Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century writings. In Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A History (Noonan 2017), the history of these concepts begins with Rudolf Hilferding (Finance Capital), Nikolai Bukharin (Imperialism and World Economy), Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital) and Vladimir Illych Lenin (Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism); not with Marx. The bypassing of Marx is not entirely surprising because Capital was Marx’s primary object of analyzis, not Empire. Furthermore, when Marx used the word imperialism, it was to connote a form of bourgeois state power over the working class, not the exceptional power of an Empire to rule over subordinate societies in the world system. Nonetheless, passages in The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, chapters in Capital, articles published by the New York Tribune (1850–1888), and letters between Marx and Engels (1853–1894) highlight the breadth and depth of Marx’s understanding of the significance of Empire to world history. This entry summarizes and elaborates upon Marx’s key claims about Empire and the dynamics of imperialism in its old territorial-colonial and newer liberal-capitalist forms. For Marx, capitalism did not originate with free and equal individuals, industrialists and workers, buying and selling labor power in markets, nor did it develop on a national island set apart from the wider world. Rather, the history of capitalism and rise of the bourgeoisie is intertwined with Empire: “The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels 2012: 35–6). While the shift from the feudalism to capitalism happened in England, this transition relied upon the global colonial conquests of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England. As Marx says in The German Ideology: “The voyages of adventure, colonization and, above all, the expansion of markets into a world market . . . all called forth a new stage of historical development” (O’Malley 1994: 161). Also, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels depict colonialism as spearheading the shift from one mode of production to another: “The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and 335

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thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development” (2012: 35–6). In a chapter in Capital entitled “The Modern Theory of Colonization, ” Marx explains why colonization was so essential to laying the groundwork for industrial capitalism. Marx shows “the genesis of the industrial capitalist to be the Euro-colonial conquests of the Americas, Asia and Africa, ” and frames these as the “chief momenta of primitive accumulation” (1990: 915). By expropriating “the mass of people from the soil” and separating the producers from the means of production, the Euro-colonial conquests established “the basis of the capitalist mode of production” (1990: 934). Marx describes how “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production ” (1990: 915). In sum, Empire was the precondition of capitalism, and “primitive accumulation” propelled this mode of production into the world, “dripping head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (1990: 926). Marx does not offer a substantive theory of the world system, but his writings on the history of capitalism and colonialism gesture at a polarized world system of shifting centers (the countries that possess the greatest power to drive global transformation) and peripheries (the countries in subordinate positions, as colonies or trading states). Until the seventeenth century, the mercantile Empires of Spain, Portugal and Holland dominated world trade, but by the mid-eighteenth century, England had become the most powerful center in the world: “The dominant nation in maritime commerce and in colonial power was naturally also assured of the largest quantitative and qualitative expansion of manufacturing” (O’Malley 1994: 162). In Capital, Marx hints at an unequal exchange relationship between the center and peripheries: “the colonial system ripened trade and navigation as in a hot house . . . the colonies provided a market for the budding manufacturers and a vast increase in accumulation, which was guaranteed by the mother country’s monopoly of the market” (1990: 918). In addition to providing the English bourgeoisie with a source of slave labor to exploit, resources to extract and a captive export market to dump commodities upon, the British “colonial system” furnished the English bourgeoisie with the concentrations of wealth required to accumulate more capital: “The treasures captured outside of Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital” (1990: 918). Marx saw the British Empire as a selfish enterprise, driven by the greed of the bourgeoisie and the glory of the political aristocracy. In “The Future Results of British Rule in India, ” Marx writes that “the ruling classes of Great Britain” acted selfishly and callously toward India: “The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the ‘moneyocracy’ to plunder it, and the ‘millocracy’ to undersell it” (Marx and Engels 1960: 85). When the bourgeoisie invested in the productive infrastructure of the colonies—building mines, establishing transport networks and interlinking communication systems—this was due to self-interest, not benevolence. As Marx writes: “The ruling classes of Great Britain” only upon deciding that the “transformation of India into a reproductive country” would be of “vital importance to them” did they “gift her with the means of

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irrigation and of internal communication” and begin “drawing a net of railways” (Marx and Engels 1960: 85). Although the power relationship between the British imperial center and the peripheral colonies was unequal and designed to favor the Empire’s ruling class at the expense of the colonized, Marx depicts the world system as dynamic and suggests that peripheral countries can become new centers. Marx notes how, by the mid-nineteenth century, the United States, once a periphery of the English center, was fast becoming a new center: “the centre of gravity of world commerce, Italy in the Middle Ages, England in modern times, is now the southern half of the North American peninsula . . . the Pacific Ocean will have the same role as the Atlantic has now and the Mediterranean had in antiquity and in the Middle Ages—that of the great water highway of world commerce” (cited in Nimtz 2002: 67). Marx suggests that underlying the expansion of the British Empire is a convergence of economic and geopolitical factors. Empire seemed to bring together the deterritorializing economics of capitalist accumulation (the production, trade and investment practices of English corporations as they seek to turn a profit in markets) and the geopolitics of a powerful territorial state (the diplomatic and military strategies of the British state as it struggles to assert its interests and achieve its goals vis-à-vis other states and peoples). In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe how, as English industrial capitalism developed, the “need for a constantly expanding outlet for their products pursues the bourgeoisie over the whole world, ” compelling the bourgeoisie to “get a foothold everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” as part of an integrative process that interlinked the English center to the colonial peripheries and, ultimately, made the world’s “underdeveloped and semi-developed nations dependent on the civilized ones, peasant societies dependent on bourgeois societies, the east on the west” (2012: 33–4). This worldwide integration of “civilized” and “underdeveloped” nations, “bourgeois” and “peasant” societies, “west” and “east” was driven by capitalist logics, no doubt, but Marx balances an economistic account of Empire with a geopolitical one by emphasizing the role played by the State. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels (2012: 34) declare that the English bourgeoisie “gained exclusive political control through the modern representative state, ” and conceptualize the modern State as “a device for administering the common affairs of the whole bourgeois class. ” In Capital, Marx claims that “force” is the “the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one” (1990: 916), and depicts the force of the State as hastening “the process of the transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode” (1990: 915–916), in England, and worldwide, in its peripheries. Marx elaborates upon this point in a discussion of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A View of the Art of Colonization, a book Marx deems important, not because it “discovered something new about the colonies, ” but, rather, because it discovered “in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country” (1990: 932). That “truth” is the violence of primitive accumulation undertaken by State force by conquest abroad, and at home by the privatization of common land. Marx represents the imperial State, serving the interests of capitalists nationally and on an internation scale, dispossessing all—peasants and indigenous peoples alike—from their means of subsistence to create “for the urban industries the necessary supply of free and rightless proletarians” (1990: 895).

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In addition to framing State coercion as expediting the shift from feudal to capitalist society in England, Marx depicts the power of the State as integral to the bourgeoisie’s international expansion, something that opens the world to capitalism by disrupting and destroying pre-capitalist societies: “Where the capitalist has at his back the power of the mother country, ” says Marx, “he tries to clear out of his way by force the modes of production and appropriation based on the independent labor of the producer ” (1990: 931). Furthermore, Marx represents war between states being waged alongside capitalist competitions for world markets. Many of Marx’s New York Tribune writings depict the English bourgeoisie pressing the British “foreign sector” into its service, and the State wars against other peoples, states and civilizations, to secure capitalist interests. Marx writes of the British State using violence to: conquer and rule over India; wage the Opium (trade) Wars against China (1839–1842, 1856–1858); brutalize Burma to buttress the East India Company (1852–1853); fight the Crimean War against Russia to prop up the Ottoman Empire (1853–1856); advance the Anglo-Persian War to stave off Russia’s expansion to India (1856–1857); decimate the Jamaican slave revolt and bring order to the plantation colony (1865); and suppress the Irish national liberation struggle and crush the Fenians (1867) (Marx and Engels 1960). Unfriendly to the militarism of the British State, Marx’s numerous news articles frame the Empire’s wars as “unwarranted,” “unrighteous,” and justified with “false” pretexts by a “Ministry and Press” that thrusts these “down the public throat” (Marx and Engels 1960: 117). Although Marx criticizes Empire’s violence, Marx has been read as a Eurocentric apologist for Empire. A supposedly European-diffusionist thinker, Marx is sometimes charged with conceptualizing the past, present and future of non-Western societies in western terms and depicting the path of world history as following developments in western European society, from feudalism to capitalism, and on to communism. “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” is often read as a case in point of Marx’s Eurocentrism. In this short news article, Marx declares that “England has a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society and the laying of the material foundations of western society in Asia ” (Marx and Engels 1960: 84). The British Empire, Marx assumes, will progressively transform India’s old feudal society into a new capitalist one, integrate this mode of production into the world market, and open a path for the Indian proletariat to make history. Newsy passages such as the above might also be read as Marx justifying Empire; in the absence of Empire’s “destructive” and “regenerative” influence, world history doesn’t happen, ergo, Empire is necessary to world-historic transformation. Moreover, Marx’s comments about the “Asiatic mode of production” and “Oriental despotism” are assumed to be complicit with the discourse of Orientalism (Said 1979). To define the west positively (as active, progressive, forward-moving and civilized), Marx represents the east negatively (as passive, regressive, backwards and uncivilized). In effect, Marx appears to be a “Romantic Orientalist, ” akin to nineteenth-century imperialist thinkers who “conceive of humanity either in large collective terms or in abstract generalities” (Said 1979: 154). Yet, the notion that Marx is a Eurocentric apologist for the British Empire and an Orientalist is unsophisticated. Marx was well aware of the contradictions of Empire and its human consequences. Writing of British rule in India, Marx says “the

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bourgeoisie” never “effected progress without dragging individuals and peoples through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation” (Marx and Engels 1960: 88). Marx also recognized that the Empire’s liberal capitalist version of freedom was contradicted by the absence of freedom in the peripheries. In “The Question of the Ionian Islands, ” Marx writes: “the Ionian islands, like India and Ireland, prove only that to be free at home, John Bull (a cartoon caricature of England) must enslave abroad” (Marx and Engels 1960: 202). Additionally, Marx’s later writings cast Empire as much more “destructive” than “regenerating. ” In the 1840s, Marx marvels at the Empire’s development of transportation systems in India; by 1879, Marx views the social changes brought about by the railway as “very useful for the great landed proprietor, the usurer, the merchant, the railways, the bankers and so forth, but very dismal for the real producer!” (cited in Larrain 1990: 177). In the 1840s, Marx champions the expansion of private property regimes to India as an advance beyond communal land; in 1881, Marx envisages it as “an act of English vandalism which pushed the indigenous people not forward but backward” (cited in Larrain 1990: 177). In the 1840s, Marx downplays the significance of national liberation struggles; in 1867, Marx seems to support them, especially in Ireland. Marx encourages Ireland to follow Canada and Australia’s move toward “selfgovernment” and raise “protective tariffs against England” (Marx and Engels 1960: 324). Having observed the British ruling class propping up pre-capitalist modes of production and buttressing backward colonial states worldwide, Marx, nearing the end of his life, views the British Empire as a fetter on world history. Far from privileging western Europe’s industrial working class as the only agent capable of making history, Marx was much more supportive of the national liberation struggles advanced by the colonized against Empire than is often understood (Nimtz 2002: 65). In 1848, Marx and Engels conceptualize the fate of revolution in Western countries as being linked to “a worldwide revolutionary process that combined national liberation, anti-feudal and anti-capitalist struggles waged in Canada as in Italy, in East Indies as in Prussia, in Africa as on the Danube” (Nimtz 2002: 67). In the 1853 news article, frequently cited as Orientalist, Marx claims that: “The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till great Britain itself and the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves . . . have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether” (Marx and Engels 1960: 88). Marx also championed the emancipation of the slaves in the US Civil War and approved of efforts by the colonized in Algeria, Ireland and elsewhere to “throw off the English yoke. ” Marx did not idealize anti-colonial national liberation struggles or see all of them as revolutionary, but, rather, was interested in the prospect of these anti-colonial struggles linking with class struggles in the center of imperial power. Contra the Eurocentric label, Marx researched many peoples, places and nations, and had a thoroughly internationalist outlook. Marx “created a multilinear and nonreductionist theory of history, ” “analyzed the complexities and differences of nonwestern societies” and “refused to bind himself to a single model of development or revolution” (Anderson 2002: 238). Against the idea that Marx saw the colonized as unfortunate casualties, or lucky beneficiaries, of Empire’s march, Marx saw in them,

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along with the industrial working class, the potential for worldwide revolution. Moreover, Marx did not promulgate negative stereotypes of the Orient to make a case for western cultural superiority, but attacked the regressive class structures of all societies, old and new. As Ahmad says, “Marx’s denunciation of pre-colonial society in India is no more strident than his denunciations of Europe’s own feudal past, or of the absolutist monarchies of the German burghers ” (1992: 224). In sum, Marx never developed a fully-fledged theory of Empire and imperialism, but Marx clearly understood the significance of Empire—and the anti-colonial struggles by those it enslaved and oppressed—to world history. Marx described the British Empire as the centre of the nineteenth-century world system, establishing and spreading the capitalist mode of production around the world through conquest, trade and war. Until the late 1840s, Marx depicted the British Empire’s colonial-capitalist expansion as a brutal yet progressive historic force; by forging links and connections between hitherto isolated self-sufficient societies, it was bringing about the “universal development of productive forces” and making possible interdependence or “universal intercourse. ” Marx’s later writings side with the colonized, and prefigure what they did in the mid-twentieth century to make history.

References Ahmad, A. (1992), In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, New York: Verso. Anderson, K. (2010), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago, IL , and London: The University of Chicago Press. Bartolovich, C. and N. Lazarus, eds. (2002), Marxism, Modernity and Postcoloniality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Larrain, J. (1999), “Classical Political Economists and Marx on Colonialism and ‘Backward’ Nations, ” in B. Jessop and R. Wheatley (eds.), Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought Volume VI: Modes of Production, the World System, Classes, and Class Struggle, New York: Routledge, 164–95. Marx, K. (1990), Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, New York: Vintage Books. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1960), On Colonialism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K. and F. Engels (2012), The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, New York: Verso. Nimtz, A. (2002), “The Eurocentric Marx and Engels and Other Related Myths, ” In C. Bartolovich and N. Lazarus (eds.), Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 65–80. Noonan, M (2017), Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A History, New York: I.B. Tauris. O’Malley, J. (1994), Marx: Early Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pradella, L. (2013), “Imperialism and Capitalist Development in Marx’s Capital,” Historical Materialism 21(2): 117–47. Said, E. (1979), Orientalism, New York: Vintage.

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Mediation Ruth Jennison

Mediation, in Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, designates the process by which a structure, thing or idea intercedes between two (often conflicting) other structures, things or ideas. As many readers arriving at Marxism in our period do so as part of investigation of the relationship between political possibility and dialectical, materialist approaches; here we examine the history of the concept of mediation, with a special emphasis on the relationship between mediation and political agency. To this end, we will chart three different relational arenas in which Marx and Marxists have elaborated theories of mediation: the relations between subjects and nature, mediated by labor, both alienated and potentially unalienated; the relations between subjects mediated by commodities and the money form; and the relations between mutually constitutive subjects and objects in culture. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, human labor mediates between the subject and nature. Under capitalism, “labor’s product” confronts man as a “power independent of the producer” and in so doing announces that humans have entered a historical period of “estranged labor” with its attendant “estrangement of man from man”; in this early Marx, the culprit for this estrangement is “private property” (Tucker 1978: 71–9). What is notable about this early formulation is the way in which labor, as a mediation, distends rather than reconciles the relation between the subject and nature. In later works, Marx complicates his theory of labor as a mediation specific to the capitalist mode of production, and in so doing formulates the concept of “abstract labor. ” “Labor, as abstract labor, ” Moshe Postone explains, “constitutes a mediation among all producers” and “each individual labor functions in the same socially mediating way that all the others do, ” and thus form “a general social mediation. ” Hence, the products of abstract labor “constitute a socially total mediation—value” (Postone 1993: 152). Marx’s discovery of the concept of abstract labor is bound up with his turn to the production of value, and, in that, profit and exploitation; for our purposes, however, the journey from concrete labor to abstract labor signals the shift in Marx, from mediation as a concept that bridges humans and nature to one that structures social relations between humans. We measure value by the amount of socially necessary abstract labor congealed in the commodity. The value form constitutes the mediation historically specific solely to the capitalist mode of production; the social relations required to produce value through the exploitation of labor to ensnare all subjects. 341

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Abstract labor is a real abstraction arising from the material conditions of capitalist society, namely the subordination of human labor and reproduction to the production of exchange value as opposed to its revolutionary, chiasmic reversal: the production of use values for social needs. Despite abstract labor’s rootedness in the concrete structures of capitalism, individual producers do not experience their activity as part of a social abstraction; they experience it in concrete time and intensity. This is an important further development in how Marxists understand mediation: 1) mediations are not always directly observable or available to experience, and 2) despite this, structure the ways in which humans interact with one another and make representations of the world to themselves. When Marx opens up the concept of mediation to understand the social relations reproduced under capital, he is also expanding the role of a Marxist analyzis: to discover and wonder which mediations arise when they do, why they take the form that they do, and what kind of ideological work they often perform. For Marx, “commodity fetishism” is one of the primary mediations that structure relations between both people and the objects they produce, and between people themselves. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx develops a conceptual basis in mediation for commodity fetishism, writing that, “in production persons acquire an objective aspect, and in consumption objects acquire a subjective aspect; in distribution it is society which by means of dominant general rules mediates between production and consumption; in exchange this mediation occurs as a result of random decisions of individuals” (Marx 1970: 194). Here we can see that mediations are beginning to multiply as Marx works up a tessellated totality of production, consumption, distribution and exchange. The character of each mediation derives from its positioning between various elements of the larger system. Following from this formulation, the commodity fetish finds its origins in this specific capitalist totality. As is often cited, in the commodity fetish “the commodityform, and the value-relation of the products of labor within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 1976: 165, emphasis added). Where exchange once took the form of appearance as “random decisions of individuals,” in the commodity fetish the seeming arbitrariness is transferred to the object of the commodities themselves, which appear to inter-mediate without social intervention. The social relations of labor and surplus extraction underwriting commodity exchange appear, then, as relations between the commodities themselves. The “fantastic form” of the commodity form is then, in fact, a mediation of relations between people, but its appearance does not reveal this work; it appears to the producers of the commodities that the commodities are related to one another through their fungible worth, and not through the human labor invested within them. We are beginning to notice now that mediations are sometimes direct windows onto material processes (think concrete labor that links humans to nature) and sometimes they are profoundly opaque, intervening between subjects, and between subjects and objects in ways that obscure to subjects both contradiction and totality. Some Marxists have offered alternatives to this way of thinking about mediation as an obfuscatory process. Raymond Williams critiques this manner of conceptualization

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insofar as it preserves the duality between subject and object. For Williams, this dualism is an unwitting symptom of reification and alienation. Williams insists on mediation as a constitutive, universal process. He writes: “all active relations between different kinds of being and consciousness are inevitably mediated, and this process is not a separable agency—a ‘medium’—but intrinsic to the properties of related kinds. ” As such, he finds Adorno’s formulation especially useful: “mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and that to which it is brought” (Williams 1977: 98). Williams seeks to provide a corrective to more mechanical formulations of mediation as something to be swept away by insightful, objective critics; in his work, mediations are rather an organic part of the process by which humans find and make meaning. Williams’s intervention signals an antagonism within Marxism between mediation as constitutive and agential, and mediation as something that arises in the process of opposition, with a tendency to render contradictions opaque to the subject. This has deep implications for how we read cultural forms and the social mediations of capitalist society: are they symptoms of the hidden regimes of value production and exploitation, or are they agential negotiations where subjects construct meaning but not in conditions of their choosing? Williams’s use of mediation as an active process is central to his development of a specifically cultural materialism, which emphasizes the latter. Critic Fredric Jameson ratifies at least one sense of Williams’s conception of mediation as a constitutive process; he shares the idea that the task of historical materialism is not to stitch or unstitch mediations between “seemingly disparate phenomenon of social life” because, like Williams, he insists on subjects and objects occupying a shared totality, and their appearance of separation from one another is an illusory effect of bourgeois society (Jameson 1981: 40). Jameson, broadly speaking, seeks a way to understand mediation as both a relation between the forces and relations of production and within distinct spheres of the social totality. The former he attributes to the Hegelian tradition, and its Marxist legacy in Georg Lukács’s concept of “expressive causality”; the latter he aligns with Louis Althusser’s notion of relative autonomy and “structural causality. ” For Jameson, narrative is the primary mediation between historical events/data and the subject’s experience of and access to that history. This critical turn to language, and in particular its structures and forms marks another important waypoint in the ever-expanding deployment of mediation. Using the important concept of “transcoding, ” Jameson describes how cultural texts mediate systems of social codes and narratives, often blending them in complex and contradictory ways that exceed the limitations of any single code. In contemporary Marxist discourse on mediation, language rather than labor tends to occupy the analytical framework. The turn to language inherits much of its concerns and contours from a longer history of identifying and analyzing ideology as the mediation structuring the subject’s consciousness of the larger world. As we reviewed above, Marxists have understood the commodity fetish as an ideological formation, rooted, like all ideologies, in the material structures of class society. In addition to this, however, is a lengthy tradition of ideological analyzis, beginning with Marx’s own writings, and finding, perhaps, its most classical and enduring expression in Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. To turn to hegemony is to turn to the ways in which capitalists’ control of dominant narratives mediate subjects’ access to history, events and

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even their experience of the immediate present. For Gramsci, bourgeois hegemony describes the ways in which rulers reproduce their ideological supremacy and in doing so, secure consensus from dominated groups within society. The dominated groups can achieve hegemony, although this is a difficult struggle; this battle over ideas and ideology is the necessary counterpart to militant political and economic actions. Here, mediation and ideology converge conceptually and operate as terrain on which capitalists and dominated groups vie for control over what is considered “common sense. ” The convergence of mediation and ideology implies that, while once conceived by Marx as ontological (labor as the mediation between humans and nature), contemporary understandings of mediation emphasize it as a historical category, whose contents and forms frequently shift and transform. To this end, for Gramsci mediations can be a site of struggle precisely because they are indices of the battle for ideological ascendency. Indeed, throughout the Marxist tradition, mediations, due to their historical variability, can adopt various relationships to the material bases of society (reflective, semiautonomous, expressive). Charting shifts in the content and structure of mediations can permit us to observe in the historical past what is never immediately observable in the present: the process of social and political transition itself. Fredric Jameson’s “vanishing mediator” proposes precisely this. Some mediations exist transitionally, mediating between ideas, objects or structures in conflict. When the conflict is resolved in the course of history—usually through the ascendance of one over the other, and, less commonly, through their synthesis, the mediation “vanishes” from history. The recovery of this vanished mediator can make legible the process by which one thing, idea or structure is replaced by another in the flow of historical time. We might wonder here about the relationship between Jameson’s “vanishing mediator” and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony: in a revolutionary succession of the dominant class by the dominated, would the ideological tools used by the victors, e.g. Leninism; Maoism; Fanonism; etc., eventually become vanishing mediators when new structures replaced the old? We will return to this question of the relationship between practices of revolutionary politics and theories of mediation shortly in conclusion. The vanishing mediator allows us a window on otherwise concealed dynamics of historical transition and transformation. This is not its only virtue; it also allows us to see history as a process composed of negotiations, oppositions and convergences between subjects and subjects, and between subjects and objects. By focusing on mediations that structure society both synchronically, like the commodity fetish, as well as diachronically, such as in the case of the vanishing mediator, we avoid accounts of history that are subjectivist (and therefore voluntarist) or determinist, where the movement of objects churn subjects forward inexorably. Synchronic mediations like the commodity form often insert material-ideational barriers to the transcendence of the capitalist horizon by consciousness; diachronic mediations like the vanishing mediator, as well as the hegemonic field in which the struggle for ideas-of-an-otherwise takes place, center agency and struggle. Readers will note the continued tension, which we first witness in the work of Raymond Williams, that surrounds mediation as an index of determination or agency. For Georg Lukács, whose work we encountered above briefly in our discussion of Jameson on relations within the social totality, it is precisely the account of mediation,

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as a theatre of agency, structure and totality that makes it a central aspect of any theory of revolutionary subjectivity. With Marx, Lukács links in his most seminal text, History and Class Consciousness, the “mistaken ideas of bourgeois economists concerning the economic processes of capitalism to the absence of mediation; to the systematic avoidance of the categories of mediation; to the immediate acceptance of secondary forms of objectivity; to the inability to progress beyond the stage of merely immediate cognition” (Lukács 1971:156). The opposing classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, share the same totality, of course, but their objective relationships to various social mediations differ. From this, Lukács makes the argument that the proletariat bears a special relationship to the mediations of the commodity fetishism: Above all the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity. As we have seen, his immediate existence integrates him as a pure, naked object into the production process. Once this immediacy turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations, once it becomes evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capital. Lukács 1971:168

If we hadn’t asked the question already, Lukács has answered it: what’s so wrong with immediacy? For Lukács, immediacy operates as a political barrier to revolutionary consciousness, which, as he understands it, involves the worker recognizing himself as a mediation. In a dialectical turn, the process of “raising himself above the role of the object” finds its necessary if not a sufficient condition in the recognition of himself and his labor as a commodified object. We note that Lukács’s account of the self-consciously mediated subject draws on Marx’s account of both the structural and ideologicalobfuscatory capacities of commodity fetish. Objections have been raised that Lukács’s model relies on a category often referred to derogatively as “false-consciousness” in which the subject, or even potentially more dangerously, critic, places herself outside of mediation entirely, with exclusive and impossible access to a totality at once established and discovered by her. As we can see in the above text, this is both true and untrue. It is true that Lukács understands the commodity fetish mediation as an obfuscatory barrier to emancipation, but it is untrue that his model is predicated upon the establishment of externalities. By some contrast, for Lukács, the objective structure of value production under capitalism has commodified the worker’s labor, and it is from within the consciousness of that commodification that consciousness can turn the inside out. Lukács’s account opens up political questions about how these transformations in consciousness can occur, and how these now revolutionary self-mediated subjects will be represented, or mediated, within the social field. If it is deemed desirable that they achieve collective expression, are political mediations necessary? In some sense the question of the form, or even desirability, of political mediations structure all questions of organization, but, perhaps, most acutely, revolutionary ones. Gayatri Spivak’s meditation on Marx’s concept of political representation and its application to “small

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peasant proprietors” in which she concludes famously that “they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” is an illustration of how political mediations function differently depending on the ability of the social subject of that mediation’s ability to form a collective re-representation of itself, for itself, to itself. But the history of Marxist theories of revolutionary praxis and organization reveals that the question of what or whom is to be mediated by what or whom is an unresolved and pressingly permanent question. The party-form, both reformist and revolutionary; spokescouncils; worker’s councils; trade and cross-trade unionism; cells; assemblies; and affinity groups—organizational mediations take an almost infinite number of forms. A clear thread runs through the history of the concept of mediation. From its beginning in the transformation of concrete labor into abstract labor, through its multifarious articulations in the field of political organization, history inscribes itself in the form of the mediation. It is for this reason that mediation bridges multiple fields, all of which are concerned with the relationship between form and history, politics, aesthetics (specifically art and literature) and even consciousness itself.

References Jameson, F. (1981), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lukács, G. (1971), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Marx, K. (1971), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin. Postone, M. (1996), Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tucker, R.C., ed. (1978), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: Norton and Company. Williams, R. (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Mode of Production Jason Read

The sense of the term “mode of production” is generally understood to be the lynchpin of Marx’s concept of society and history. Each society is understood to be a specific mode of production, defined by a base and a superstructure; an articulation of economic activity, law, politics and culture; and each period in history—communal, ancient, Asiatic, feudal and capitalist, which is defined by its particular mode of production. There is no concept of history that is not also a conceptualization of social relations. Understanding how things change means understanding how they connect. The very concept of the mode of production indicates to what extent society and history, social structure and social transformation, are necessarily two sides of the same basic problem; that of determination or causal conditions and effects. While such a summation makes clear the role that the mode of production plays in Marx’s thought, it does not clarify how it is articulated and developed across the multiple problems of history, critique of capital and the revolutionary politics that occupy Marx’s thought. Not only does the question of society and history intersect—two becomes one, as it were—but each of these conceptions, the social and the historical “divides into two, ” split between a restricted and expansive sense of the mode of production. With respect to the first point, society, Marx offers two different definitions of the mode of production: one limited and the second expansive (Negri 1991: 151). In the limited sense, Marx defines mode of production by the relation between the forces and relations of production. The forces of production are the technological and social conditions of production: the technology and division of labor that produce and reproduce the conditions of existence. These forces are governed by the relations of production: the legal and economic structures that dictate how and to whom the products of labor are divided. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx presents the relation between forces and relation as a dialectic in which the forces of production outgrow the relations that made them possible; relations are transformed from conditions to fetters. It is this dialectic between conditions and constraints that defines the process of history; the capitalist conditions of private property, once serving as necessary conditions for increased innovation and transformation, eventually become hinders on the development of society, just as the feudal conditions did so in the case of the French Revolution. The first conception is not only limited—forces and relations are primarily economic matters—but also dynamic, its sole purpose is to offer a dialectic 347

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of history in which forces exceed relations. It is the primacy of forces, and specifically the technical development of forces, that provides the basis for the interpretation of the mode of production as a variant of a technologically determinist view of history in which “The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist” (Marx 1963: 109). History then is nothing other than the transformation of relations of production by forces of production, as different technological forces outgrow their constitutive relations bursting them as fetters. This dialectic of forces and relations offers a vision of history that comes into conflict with the other slogan of history offered in that text, namely that all hitherto history is entirely the history of class struggle. Against the technological conflict of forces and relations there is the political conflict of classes, culminating in the conflict between proletarian and bourgeois. The conflict between these two emphasizes, and in some sense installs, a conflict at the heart of Marx’s politics; between those who look to the tendencies and trends of economic crisis and those who look to the politics of class struggle. As much as Marx conceives of a conflict between technology and politics, this does not mean that they are without mediations. The Manifesto offers its own assertion of the intersection of forces and class conflict, economy and politics. As Marx argues, one of the central effects of the conflicts of the working class are the increased communication and dissemination of ideas, an effect of the increased technical means of communication. Thus it is not so much a matter of deciding between the economic transformation of forces and political conflicts of classes, but of comprehending the point where one effects and transforms the other. Marx himself takes no credit for the discovery of class struggle, stressing that his contribution is recognizing that class struggle depends “upon the particular historical phases in the development of production” (Marx 1978: 220). It is precisely in terms of the intersection between conditions and struggle, causes and history, that we get a larger, more expansive, concept of the mode of production in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This definition moves beyond the economy of forces and relations and the politics of classes to encompass the entire social and cultural relations. As Marx writes: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. Marx 1970: 20

This more expansive definition explicitly includes not only the legal and political relations as part of the superstructure, but ultimately expands to include “social consciousness” and the awareness of struggle as part of it. Struggle, class struggle, is

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placed in relation to its conditions, conditions that simultaneously determine its place and are animated by it. The mode of production is not the economy, some conflict between forces and relations can be relegated to a sphere outside of politics or culture, but most include its effects on the latter as well. The mode of production displaces such abstract and incoherent concepts as “society, ” replacing a vague invocation of a totality with the specific problem of the relations of causality and determination of the different aspects. However, it does so only in a figure, a sketch of a kind of topography, placing a relative relation of hierarchy without a clear sense of their determination; the superstructure rests on the base, that much is clear, but how the superstructure acts on the base, how consciousness shapes action, is less clear (Althusser 2014: 19). It is only a preface after all. Turning our attention now to history, as a history of modes of production, we see a similar tension between an expansive and restrictive definition of the concept. Marx’s attempt to write of the history of different modes of production is divided between a history of epochs and a history of tendencies. There is the epochal division of the different modes of production: communal, ancient, Asiatic, feudal and capitalist, and the attempt to define the specifically capitalist mode of production (Banaji 2010: 350). The former endeavor makes up one of the notebooks collected in Marx’s Grundrisse, sometimes referred to as Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Marx 1965). Marx’s focus in these pages is to draw a major point of contrast between capital, which has as its defining characteristic the separation of the worker from the conditions of its production—or, as Marx puts it, “The positing of the individual as worker, in this nakedness, is itself a product of history”—and the pre capitalist modes within which, in different ways, there is no separation from production and its conditions, from the worker and the means of production (Marx 1973: 472). This non-separation, the unity of the worker with the means of production, is not a community, at least not in any normative sense in that it includes conditions in which the individual worker is property, as in the case of slavery, or, generally, subordinated to the will of the despot. While Marx’s interest in precapitalist modes of production can be argued to serve primarily a heuristic function, the reason that they are all called precapitalist is that their fundamental condition differs from the capitalist mode of production, but this does not keep them from generating questions they simply cannot answer. Some of these questions touch on the question of Marxism’s claim as a system of knowledge. The description of precapitalist economic formations raises the possibility that Marxism can be considered not just a critique of capitalism, but a general theory of social relations on par with sociology and anthropology. Two related questions follow from this. The first concerns the historicity of Marx’s own concepts: how does Marx’s concept of a mode of production, predicated on a division of different levels of base and superstructure, forces and relations, account for those societies in which such divisions do not exist (Sahlins 1978: 6)? The second question is pretty much a reversal of the first: how can the very concept of the mode of production, with its pre-inscribed base of economic activity, apply to societies in which the economy does not play a determining role (Terray 1972: 66)? These questions mirror each other, concerning in different ways the relation of concept to object. Marx offers something like an answer to the second, an answer that in some sense encompasses the first as well as Marx writes:

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One thing is clear: the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their livelihood [Die Art und Wiese, wie sie ihr Leben gewannen] which explains why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism, played the chief part [die Hauptrolle spielte]. For the rest, one needs no more than a slight acquaintance with, for example the history of the Roman Republic, to be aware that its secret history is the history of landed property. Marx 1976: 176

What Marx describes through a series of allusions was later conceptualized by Étienne Balibar as the fundamental difference between the economy, which is determinant in the last instance, and the economy which is dominant (Balibar 2016: 385). The economy, for lack of a better word, is always determinant, but not always dominant. Which is to say that causality, or determination, is not a simple transitive causality, but a relation between relations. This raises a subsequent question: given that a mode of production is defined in part by its relations, is it possible to grasp the intersection of more than one mode of production in a given historical moment? This is less a speculative question than one demanded by the vicissitudes of not only history, as capital emerged from slavery and feudalism, but also current conditions which would seem to exceed the rigorous definition of capitalism. This has led some to propose the term “social formation” as a higher order abstraction, the articulation of multiple modes of production (Hindess and Hirst 1975: 13). If, in general, the precapitalist mode of production functions as something of a placeholder, designating the blank space from which capital could be defined, then the contours of this space sketch the limits and lacunae of the concept of the mode of production. Within this blank space there is the “Asiatic mode of production, ” itself more of a marker of the limits of knowledge than an actual concept (Banaji 2010: 349). Since its articulation, however, this phrase has been caught in different debates about Marx’s theoretical legacy. The first concerns the applicability of Marxism beyond Europe. Given that the Asiatic mode details a form of despotism combined with central bureaucracy, the geographical blind spot has been expanded to designate not only a theoretical blind spot but a political one as well; the inability of Marxism to grasp the state, to comprehend forms of domination irreducible to economic exploitation. The Asiatic mode of production figures as something of a dark mirror to capital, it duplicates the latter’s totality, domination and even fetishization, but it does so as the figure of stasis and unchanging dynasty (Harootunian 2015: 156). The second version of the historical use of the mode of production marks a periodization internal to capital itself. Here it is no longer a matter of the expansive sense of the concept, a concept developed in notes and drafts, but of Marx’s specific object of inquiry. Marx makes a distinction between the formal adoption of the necessary characteristics of capital and what he calls the specifically capitalist mode of production, or real subsumption. Capital begins with formal subsumption, the imposition of the wage form and commodity production over existing labor relations; nothing changes but the form, the relations of production. These relations then give rise to their own specific technological and social conditions. Here, Marx refers to the

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rise of large scale industry, the factory division of labor and the increasing role of machinery and technology, all of which define the real subsumption of society by capital. As Marx writes: With the real subsumption of labor under capital a complete (and constantly repeated) revolution takes place in the mode of production, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists. Marx 1976: 1035

Despite the invocation of the temporality of the Manifesto, we see that the logic is in some sense the opposite of the dialectic of forces and relations of that text; it is not a matter of economic forces outgrowing legal relations, but of a legal form, a form of capitalist property ownership, giving rise to transformations of technology and social relations. In the former, content exceeds form, while in the latter, form would seem to determine content. Here we are confronted less with a reversal of position than the fundamental ambiguity of thinking of technology and law as instances that are both conditions and effects. The mode of production can be understood as a history of tensions and divisions, divisions between the mode of production as a historical and structural concept, of an economic notion and a more encompassing concept. These tensions, in some sense, are internal to the different projects and endeavors of Marx’s thought, from universal history to charting the course of the revolutionary strategy within capital. These tensions and divisions of its meaning and sense are less a matter of a fundamental incoherence than an attempt to think through a central question, that of determination, of causality, of a conception of social relations in which effects become causes and vice versa. The mode of production is less a total defined concept, a resolved problem, than a set of problems, problems in thinking the determination of society by the economy while simultaneously asserting the causal force and power of the instances that it determines.

References Althusser, L. (2014), On the Reproduction of Capitalism, trans. G. Goshgarian, New York: Verso. Balibar, E. (2015), “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” trans. B. Brewster and D. Fernbach, in L. Althusser et al., Reading Capital, New York: Verso. Originally published as “Sur les concepts fondamentaux du matérialisme historique, ” in L. Althusser et al., Lire le Capital, Paris: Editions la Découverte (1965). Banaji, J. (2010), Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, New York: Haymarket. Harootunian, H. (2015), Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism,” New York: Columbia. Hindess, B. and P. Hirst. (1975), Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, New York: Routledge. Marx, K. (1963), The Poverty of Philosophy, New York: International. Marx, K (1965), Precapitalist Economic Formations, trans. J. Cohen, in E. Hobsbawn (ed.), New York: International.

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Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. M. Nicolaus, New York: Penguin. Published as Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Werke Band 42, (1988), Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Marx, K. (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes. New York: Penguin. Published as Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Werke Band 23, (1988), Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Negri, A. (1996), “Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today, ” trans. M. Hardt, in Marxism Beyond Marxism, in S. Makdisi et al. (eds.), New York: Routledge. Sahlins, M. (1976), Culture and Practical Reason, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago. Terray, E. (1972), Marxism and “Primitive” Societies: Two studies, trans. M. Klopper, New York: Monthly Review Press.

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Nature and Ecology Philip Campanile and Michael Watts

Any discussion of Marx, Marxism and ecology is a fraught exercise for the very good reason that Marx himself did not systematically lay out in the three volumes of Capital a theory of the relations between nature and capital. In both his early and later works, and in some of his writing with Engels, Marx does of course address what we would now call ecological questions, and indeed he was fully aware, and in some sense immersed in, nineteenth-century natural science, Darwinian evolutionary theory and the emerging field of agricultural chemistry. Marx’s friend and comrade, the physician Roland Daniels, was one of a number of scientists (and physiologists in particular) exploring the biochemical processes linking cells and their surroundings with the energetic and material exchanges between organisms and the biophysical world. Central to Marx’s analyzis and to his dialectical and historical materialism was the notion that the earth was the “universal instrument” and that the “natural” process of production was “the material exchange [Stoffwechesel] between man and nature. ” In Capital, Vol. I, Marx does reflect upon the implications of large scale industrial agriculture, which, he says, “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth” (1982: 637–9); in Vol. III, he refers to the squandering of the vitality of the soil in relation to capitalist ground rent (1991: 949); and in the Grundrisse, he invokes capitalism’s “separation of the inorganic conditions of human existence and active existence” (1973: 489). In exegetical terms, such proto-ecological observations— scattered and often little more than glimpses—can certainly be found across his œuvre, but the fact remains that any effort to conjure up a Green Marx must bring to the surface what is latent and often underdeveloped, an act of interpretation which has proven to be quite contentious. Such latency led Perry Anderson, the great chronicler of Western Marxism, to conclude in the 1980s that “problems of the interaction of the human species with its terrestrial environment [were] essentially absent from classical Marxism” (1983: 83). Even if one believes that Anderson over-generalizes, it is striking that much of the writing on Marx and ecology has focused on core debates which turn on how Marx can be read ecologically. One characteristic thread of such writing is exegetical and mines Marx’s vast body of work to establish his eco-socialist credentials— often in opposition to what is widely held to be his Promethean view of technology and the forces of production. Another is philosophical and theoretical, examining whether and how historical materialism and Marx’s dialectical method offer productive ways of 353

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thinking about the ecological crisis; that is to say, even if Marx did not systematically address nature and capitalism, is his theoretical project consistent with a critical understanding of contemporary ecological crises and the challenges of living in the Anthropocene (and if not, what might Marx’s theory require)? Much of the debate over Marx and ecology turns on a number of recurrent questions. For example, to what degree did Marx’s ferocious critique of Thomas Malthus’s account of scarcity and population come at the expense of recognizing environmental limits? Is there an early Green Marx to be seen in his engagement with Hegelian ideas, which was subsequently sublimated or ignored in the work of the later Marx? Did Marx ever really break from the Cartesian dualisms of Nature versus Society, which plagued much of the history of environmental thinking, as Clarence Glacken revealed in his Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967), or did Marx fold nature into the dominant logic of capital (resulting in what is sometimes called monism)? Does the heart of an ecological Marx reside, or is a recuperation of some form of ecosocialism to be found, in the twin Marxist concepts of the labor process and social metabolism? Were the ecological-materialist foundations in Marx’s thought ultimately, as the Frankfurt School believed, rooted in a Promethean view of nature, which saw the domination of nature as an intrinsic characteristic of capitalist and socialist modernity, an instrumentalist and productivist plundering of nature, as Alfred Schmidt put it, “mastered with gigantic technological aids” (Schmidt 1970:154)? Since Marx’s time these questions have been pursued along three trajectories. One is the genealogy of so-called Western Marxism. After Marx’s death, Engels directly addressed ecology in ways which seemed to break from some of Marx’s own ideas; Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital (1913) explored the category of the natural economy and its dissolution under global capitalist and imperialist expansion; Karl Kautsky in The Agrarian Question (1899) took up the question of how agriculture, which depended directed upon biology (seasonality, biophysical inputs), differed from industrial manufacture and in so doing articulated the barriers and blockages to capital which gave the agrarian question its own specificities; Antonio Gramsci explored historically and geographically specific forms of nature under capitalism (see Ekers, Hart, Kipfer, and Loftus 2012); and the Frankfurt School, through the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and their students Alfred Schmidt and Herbert Marcuse, which explored the theme of the domination of nature through their examination of the dialectic of enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1970). In this last tradition, Marx is seen as operating with an externalized conception of nature which produced, as Adorno saw it, an “arch-bourgeois” program for the “absolute control of nature” (1973: 244). Another line of what has come to be called ecological Marxism emerged in the wake of the 1960s environmental movements in which Marxist scholars, such at Ted Benton, James O’Connor, Neil Smith, David Harvey, Peter Dicken, Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster and others, including European Marxist theorists such as Andre Gorz, Michael Lowy and Elmar Altvatar, returned explicitly to Marx’s work to more fully elaborate the contours of a Green Marxism (sometimes dubbed eco-socialism). Much of this work also referenced a relatively submerged line of Marxian scholarship in which ecological ideas and concepts had been developed in the first half of the

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twentieth century by scholars such as J.D. Bernal and Joseph Needham, and by Soviet ecological thinkers such as Nikolai Bukharin, Boris Hessen and Nikolai Vavilov (see Foster 2016). And finally, there is a third body of work, not necessarily Marxist in form or tone, but which, nevertheless, drew upon Marx’s ideas to examine ecological crises and the relations between nature and capitalism. In the field of environmental history, Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire (1985) and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991) are examples of work following this trajectory; in political ecology (a field of geography), Susanna Hecht’s and Alexander Coburn’s work likewise belong to this strand; in the biological sciences Marx’s work influenced the idea of a dialectical evolutionary and biological theory developed by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in The Dialectical Biologist and through the work of Harvard paleontologist and biologist Stephen Jay Gould. On this capacious historical landscape of Marxian ecological ideas, we are highlighting four key debates which mark what Foster calls first and second stage ecosocialism, that is to say contemporary theory which returns to Marx’s notion that nature co-produces with labor, that a “universal metabolism of nature” points to the necessary interdependency of biophysical and social systems. Considerable debate and contention surrounds each of these lines of theory, and the question of whether authors have broken from dualistic Cartesian thinking or suffer from a monist collapsing of nature into society or vice versa—issues raised in Jason Moore’s Capitalism and the Web of Life (2015) and in John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett’s Marx and the Earth (2016)—remains a point of division and acrimony. The first key debate surrounds the notion of the production of nature. Geographer Neil Smith (1984–2008) is most closely associated with this work, though he returns to Alfred Schmidt to show that there is no pristine (first) nature but—and here there is an echo of Henri Lefebvre’s work on the social production of space—only nature that has been captured and transformed by capital (a “second nature”). The constant reinvention and transformation of the earth and of living systems—think of the industrial chicken or of biomedical science—internalizes nature into capitalism; nature is nothing but social (sometimes called “socio-nature”), and to that degree constructed and fashioned through commodification and technoscience. Nature is, according to Smith and others like geographer Noel Castree (2000), capitalized all the way down. A second debate involves the question of natural or ecological limits. Benton (1989) points to the work of Kautsky in his study of German agriculture and the ways in which capital does or does not take hold of the point of production. The survival and expansion of forms of peasant or smallholder production—rather than the uniform industrialization of agriculture through large scale capitalist production—turned on biology and how environmental risks, seasonality and other eco-systemic forces shaped the patterns of accumulation. Such works interrogate the limits of mechanization (or the turnover time) for capital, which are rooted in nature and are constitutive (i.e. limits) of some capitalist forces (see Mann and Dickinson 1978). The third key idea is James O’Connor’s second contradiction of capitalism (O’Connor 1996). O’Connor starts from the first contradiction of capitalism, between capitalist productive forces and production relations, which he sees as “internal” to the

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capitalist system and which manifests itself in crisis tendencies toward overproduction, which call class struggle into existence. The second contradiction is rooted in the ecological crisis that represents a barrier to accumulation. This contradiction is both external and internal, reflecting a tendency toward underproduction and calling forth new social movements. The contradiction turns on what O’Connor calls “production conditions, ” a term he partly takes from the work of Karl Polanyi (1944); communal conditions (such as space and communications), labor (personal conditions), and “external nature” are all phenomena which are not produced as commodities, but are treated as such. Capitalism constantly impairs and destroys these production conditions (the second contradiction), which undercuts the social reproduction upon which it depends, typically demanding that the state mediate the crisis (often engaging with new social movements). And finally, there is the work on metabolism and metabolic rifts. Such work returns to the labor process following the insights of Georg Lukács (2003), that human life is based on the metabolism with nature, and of Herbert Marcuse, that “History is grounded in nature” (1978: 116). Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore have worked explicitly within this tradition, though there are tensions and differences between them: see Foster (2016); Foster, Clark and York (2010). Foster deploys a trio of concepts: the universal metabolism of nature (the broader biophysical world), social metabolism (human society operates within earthly metabolism through processes which constitute and regenerate ecology), and metabolic rift (in capitalism the relationship between the two takes on an alienated form in which there is a rift or disjuncture in the metabolism between society and nature). The social metabolic order of capital is expressed as “a unique historical system of socio-ecological relations developed within a capitalist mode of organization” (2016: 16). Moore refers to this process as a “world ecology” emerging from the long sixteenth century and marked by periodic metabolic “shifts, ” which reflect the frontier qualities, commodity frontiers, by which capital seeks out what he calls the “four cheaps” (food, energy, labor and raw materials). Moore proposes a sort of monism—not unlike Smith’s production of nature—to overcome what he calls the enduring Cartesian dualisms of Green Arithmetic; Foster in turn sees Moore as exemplifying a non-dialectical form of analyzis that does not pay fidelity to Marx’s dialectical historical materialism. Foster states that “Without denying Hegel’s significance, Marx’s formative phase is much more complex than is usually pictured” (2002: 76). While this is undoubtedly true, it remains the case that any analyzis of Marx’s thinking on nature that leaves Hegel aside is bound to be skewed, partial or both. While “metabolism” announces an interesting focus in Marx’s later work, it would appear that Alfred Schmidt—and Foster after him—overstate the matter when claiming: “With the concept of ‘metabolism’ Marx introduced a completely new understanding of man’s relation to nature, ” and that “Only in this way can we speak meaningfully of a ‘dialectic of nature’ ” (1972: 78–9; also quoted in Foster 2013). While we do not deny Foster’s significance in highlighting the proto-ecological aspects of Marx’s materialism, a fuller account would look beyond “metabolism”—and the anachronistic application of “ecology”1—to include Marx’s explicit engagement with the concept of Nature after Hegel. Marx does indeed introduce a new understanding of the relations between “man” and “nature”; it appears

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from very early on in his critique of Hegel, and develops throughout his lifetime, encompassing his work on metabolism. Its constancy should be of no surprise since his theory of nature is dialectically bound to his theory of history. This being the case, understanding the importance of nature in Marx is crucial for understanding his dialectical method and, as we shall see, its potential shortcomings. Like so many concepts in Marx’s work, the idea of nature develops along different and occasionally contradictory paths. Marx’s 1841 dissertation put forth a dialectical reading of Lucretian Epicureanism against Democritus’s materialism in order to uphold a materialism characterized by the self-determination of thought and reality. Nature, Marx argued, should not be conceived of as a result of external intervention, but as immanent, autotelic and atheistic (2006). At other moments, Marx appears to revert to a rather straightforward Baconian desire to dominate nature. In his famous historicizing of Kant’s moral philosophy, he imagines associated production in the realm of freedom as contingent on being able to: Govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power . . . The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond [the realm of necessity], though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. 1991: 959

Marx insists on the structural and historical dependency of the realm of freedom on nature, but here, history develops only with control over nature. Defying Schmidt and Foster’s celebration of his “completely new understanding, ” Marx’s interest in “rationally governing” human metabolism over nature appears scientistic and, in today’s idiom, technocratic. In fact, these are statements after Hegel, for whom nature mediates history externally, such that history grows as a special realm atop nature and for whom “Nature” is an alienated form of Absolute Spirit whose alienation can be overcome by knowing it. The basic, but dubious, logic is that if man can know and control his environment, he can thereafter manifest a certain form of society. This environmental determinism, in the end, characterizes the kind of thinking about nature that Marx’s dialectics compel us to overcome. Contrast this with what Marx says, albeit in a crossed-out passage, in The German Ideology (1845–1846): “We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist” (Marx and Engels 1976: 28). Here, in Marx’s refusal of the nature/culture dualism honed during the Enlightenment, nature and history reciprocally and internally mediate each other: “the history of nature” and “the history of men, ” in other words, co-constitute each other. They cannot be independently conceived. This is no offhand remark: much of Marx’s early work— most obviously on modes of production and pre-capitalist economic formations— explicitly aims to recast historical development according to this materialist dialectic. And this never actually goes away. Even at the end of his life, Marx is tackling these

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questions in ever-more empirical ways, studying anthropology and supporting Russian peasant communes, which he hoped might result—after Lewis Henry Morgan—in a return of the modern to the archaic in a higher form (1983: 107).2 The problem of nature finds increasingly concrete traction in Capital (1867) and founds some of Marx’s most important concepts, of which we’ll point to just three. The famous chapter on “The Labor-Process” emphasizes the dialectical confrontation of human labor and nature through the sensuous body: “Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature . . . Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature” (1982: 283, our emphasis). Human labor is a form of nature that mediates and transforms the environments, of which human beings are inextricable parts, in a constant process that defies the mechanistic materialism so prevalent in Marx’s epoch. Second, as man “confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature” (ibid.), what he produces are use-values. Nature proves foundational to the structure of the commodity; use-value emerges from the “sensuous, ” “intrinsic” and “natural” qualities of a thing. Even while exchange “is characterized precisely by its abstraction from [. . .] use-values” (127), commodities circulate as physical properties, ultimately derivative of nature, which is why Marx calls nature “the universal material for human labor” (284). Third, in the decisive chapter on “So-called Primitive Accumulation, ” Marx indicates something that later commenters will highlight: the fundamentally political aspect of nature. Marx’s explanation of the enclosures points to the inextricability of nature from the real political struggles inherent to an historical mode of production and any political territory. A deeper reading of Capital further reveals the problem of nature arising in Marx’s thinking on time, technology and beyond. In other words, Marx’s views on nature are not exactly systematic, but they are prevalent and point us toward a different thinking about nature. Moreover, Marx can be read as part of an imperfect transition in the history of western ideas about nature: away from a positive, mechanist, deterministic dualism toward an anti-positive, conjunctural, dialectical (even systems-based) and “teleonomic” monism (Wilden 1980: xx). But it would take later thinkers to definitively formulate that still-ongoing transition. In what follows, we focus on a mid-century European formulates a more rigorous dialectics of nature after Marx (and Hegel): Theodor Adorno. This is certainly not to say there were not others before him: from William Morris to V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci; from Karl Kautsky to Rosa Luxemburg and beyond, many have contributed to pushing Marxism well beyond Engels’s rather “un-Marxian account” in his 1883 study, The Dialectics of Nature. We highlight Adorno as we believe the literature underrepresents his unique insights3 Adorno harnesses the dialectic of nature as a means to open Marx’s dialectic, stripping it of lingering teleological, naturalistic and deterministic tendencies. While the Frankfurt School thinkers, including Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), tended to frame the problem as one of the domination of nature4—namely, the more we dominate nature, the more we become subservient to that domination—we focus here on Adorno’s more generative idea of “natural history, ”

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extrapolated from Marx, who in turn altered it from Hegel. First formulated in a 1932 lecture, “The Idea of Natural History, ” Adorno came back to the problem as he worked on his magnum opus, Negative Dialectics (1966). Natural history here is not meant to connote the prescientific ordering of nature from the time of the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, which characterized nature as static. Quite the contrary, Marx always emphasizes that nature has a history, which is what his invocation of “natural history” is meant to convey. While he will come to emphasize empirical discoveries made by the great Victorian-era scientists—Lyell in geology (1830), Darwin in biology (1859) and Morgan in ethnology (1871),which all scientifically demonstrate nature’s history—these texts only served to verify Marx’s already-formed materialism. His initial inspiration came from Hegel and, arguably, from Feuerbach’s anthropological reading of Hegel. This is evident as early as his 1844 Manuscripts, where Marx states: As everything natural has to have its beginning, man too has his act of coming-tobe, history, which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of coming-to-be it is a conscious self-transcending act of coming-to-be. History is the true natural history of man. 1988: 156, our emphasis in final sentence only

While we may question the apparent humanism, Marx undoubtedly seeks to treat the nature of human nature as historical. There exists a tension here, however, which Marx never entirely resolves, which remains at the core of ongoing disagreements about his thought. The tension is over the nature of nature. Does history follow nature’s predetermined, inviolable and progressive course through primitive, Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production toward communism? Indeed, this teleological and stagist emphasis on Natural Law could be the outcome of applying the aforementioned Victorian science to a Hegelian historiography. Or is nature itself an historical category that modern humans ideologically assign to the nonhuman as a justification for exploitation? Or, yet another possibility; might there be a way to talk about the “nature of nature” as particular to an historical epoch such that Marxism comes to define a method describing the conditions, dynamics, forces and qualities that see historical conjunctures tend toward certain outcomes? These questions are what Adorno’s extension of Marx’s “natural history” seeks to answer, not only as part of Adorno’s own philosophical project, but as a way to reject the vulgar Marxism of his day along with phenomenology’s tendency toward archaism. In his 1964–1965 lectures, History and Freedom, Adorno summarizes “the procedure of Marxist critique” thusly: “Marxist critique consists in showing that every conceivable social and economic factor that appears to be part of nature is in fact something that has evolved historically. Thus, there is always an element of reciprocity: what appears to be natural is discovered to be historical, while things that are historical turn out to be natural because of their transience” (136–7). Historicize what appears to be natural and recognize history as being in motion: this is, in part, how Adorno, reading Benjamin, distills “natural history” after Marx. The process of critique, according to this formulation, aims to dissolve the appearance of naturalness, destroying immediacy

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and fundamentally rejecting claims that phenomena that have evolved in time are simply what they appear to be in the present. Here, we find an historicized dialectic of subject and object, in which each is irreducible to its pure state. Adorno sees this method as crucial for understanding “the ethnologically untenable concept of race” (109) and naturalized social categories more broadly. Though Adorno himself does not develop it in depth, one could extend his insight to “the environment” even more carefully than he does with his own thesis on the “domination of nature, ” which tends to conceive nature as a universal and ahistorical concept. Moreover, Adorno reads Marx’s “natural history” against universal and scientific forms of “Natural Law. ” He cites the 1867 “Preface to the First German Edition” of Capital, where Marx states, “Even when a society has begun to track down the natural laws of its movement . . . it can neither leap over the natural phases of its development nor remove them by decree. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs” (Marx 1982: 92). Adorno highlights the fact that in Marx’s attempt “to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society” (ibid.), he declares his project to be one of discovering not universal laws as such, but the basic tendencies of an historical moment. Marx continues: “My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains” (1982: 92). Thus, for Adorno, “The objectivity of historic life is that of natural history” (1973: 354). In other words, natural history depicts that level of analyzis that shapes all social relations and exceeds the control and comprehension of any individual. In the Enlightenment, this concept would have been called Natural Law, but Marx’s method forces us to historicize precisely that which appears most natural in an era. Critique demonstrates that “law is natural because of its inevitable character under the prevailing mode of production” (1973: 354). This historical understanding of nature has important implications for how we think about ideology. If, as Marx states, “The law of capitalist accumulation [gets] mystified by economists into laws of nature” (1982: 771), we must treat ideology not as a superimposed and detachable layer that rests upon a true society waiting to be revealed, but as something inherent to society. Commodity fetishism proves a perfect illustration; we do not exist in a cave out of which we can rise to see the Sun, pace Plato; the social world of commodities in which labor is objectified presents itself as natural reality in capitalism. For Adorno, this implies the necessity in any society of a semblance whose core historical values appear to be natural. Thus, “natural history” attempts to capture the real and apparently legal force of objective social processes while also revealing them as historically contingent and, importantly, impermanent. If we employ Adorno’s idea of natural history to “the environment, ” we must conceive of nature as absolutely not universal, everlasting, concrete and given precisely at the moment that it most appears to be so. If we follow Adorno’s thesis, we have to treat “nature” in much the same way as the critical landscape tradition does, best exemplified in Denis Cosgrove’s classic, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, which demonstrates that “in landscape we are dealing with an ideologically-charged and very complex cultural product” (1998: 11). Modes of production, in other words, produce landscapes in their own image and take them to be nature. The appearances of such

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landscapes are, of course, crucial, and they are idealized in all manner of aesthetic representations. More profoundly, Cosgrove’s thesis forces us, much like René Magritte’s aptly-titled 1933 La Condition Humaine does, to view “nature” as a representational category, already mediated by historical modes of production, technologies and ways of seeing. And because it is historical, as W.G. Sebald’s Enlightenment-infused landscapes profoundly captured in Rings of Saturn, everlasting nature is revealed to be ever-transient. Importantly, this problem lies at the heart of geography, whose very name—geo-graphia, “earth-writing, or inscription”—implies the demand to treat “nature” and thus, history, as inextricably bound to the problems of semblance and representation.5

Notes 1

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While the famous German naturalist, Ernst Haeckel introduced the term “ecology” (Oecologie) in his 1866 General Morphology of Organisms—when Marx would have been almost 50—there is no evidence Marx used the term himself. The word doesn’t seem to have been used with reference to the social until 1908 (“ecology”). This question is obviously wrapped up with debates over Marx’s stagism, which undoubtedly plagued his thought, and which it will take later thinkers to definitively overcome. But on his lifelong struggle with this question, see Kevin Anderson (2010), Marx at the Margins, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. For engagements with Adorno’s “natural history, ” see: Susan Buck-Morss (1977), The Origin of Negative Dialectics, New York: Free Press; Robert Hullot-Kentor (2006), “Introduction to T.W. Adorno’s ‘The Idea of Natural-History’, ” in Things Beyond Resemblance, New York: Columbia University Press. See in particular: Horkheimer (1974), “The Revolt of Nature, ” in Eclipse of Reason, London & New York: Continuum, 92–127. See especially: Gunnar Olsson (1991), Lines of Power / Limits of Language, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Franco Farinelli (2017), Blinding Polyphemus, trans. C. Chalmers, London: Seagull; Sharad Chari (forthcoming), Apartheid Remains.

References Adorno, T. (1973), Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London and New York: Continuum. Adorno, T. (1984 [1932]), “The Idea of Natural History, ” trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, Telos 20 (June): 111–24. Adorno, T. (2006), History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–65, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge and Boston, MA : Polity. Anderson, P. (1983), In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, London: Verso. Benton, T. (1989), “Marxism and Natural Limits, ” New Left Review I(178): 51–86. Burkett, P. (2006), Marxism and Ecological Economics, Boston, MA : Brill. Castree, N. (2000), “Marxism and the Production of Nature, ” Capital and Class 24(3): 5–36.

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Cosgrove, D. (1998), Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, Madison, WI : University of Wisconsin Press. “ecology, n.1” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2008. Available at: http://www. oed.com/view/Entry/59380 (accessed April 27, 2018). Ekers, M. et al., eds. (2012), Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics, London: John Wiley & Sons. Foster, J.B. (2002), “Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective, ” International Socialism 2(96): 71–86. Foster, J.B. (2013), “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature, ” Monthly Review 65(7). Foster, J.B. (2016), “Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical Rifts on the Left, ” International Critical Thought 6(3): 393–421. Foster, J.B., and P. Burkett (2016), Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique, Boston, MA : Brill. Foster, J.B., B. Clark, and R. York (2010), The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, New York: Monthly Review Press. Kautsky, K. (1988 [1899]), The Agrarian Question, 2 Vols, Winchester, MA : Zwan. Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, Oxford and Cambridge, MA : Blackwell. Leiss, W. (1974), The Domination of Nature., Boston, MA : Beacon Press. Lukács, G. (1971), History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin Press. Luxemburg, R. (2003 [1913]), The Accumulation of Capital, London: Routledge. Mann, S.A., and J.M. Dickinson (1978), “Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture, ” The Journal of Peasant Studies 5(4): 466–81. Marcuse, H. (1978), The Aesthetic Dimension, Boston, MA : Beacon. Marx, K. (1982), Capital, Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, London and New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1983), “Marx-Zasulich Correspondence, ” in T. Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press, 97–126. Marx, K. (1991), Capital, Vol. 3, trans. D. Fernbach, London and New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (2006), The First Writings of Karl Marx, in P. Shafe (ed.), New York: Ig. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1976), Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1845–47, Vol. 5, trans. C. Dutt, New York: International Publishers. Moore, J.W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso. O’Connor, J. (1998), Natural Causes, New York: Guilford. Polanyi, K. (1944), The Great Transformation, Boston, MA : Beacon. Rosdolsky, R. (1977), The Making of Marx’s Capital, trans. P. Burgess, London: Pluto Press. Schmidt, A. (1971), The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. B. Fowkes. London: New Left Books. Smith, N. (2008), Uneven Production of Nature, Athens, GA : University of Georgia Press. Wilden, A. (1980), System and Structure, 2nd edn, New York: Tavistock.

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Primitive Accumulation Jordy Rosenberg

Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation” has received a great deal of interest of late as a key dynamic of the current conjuncture.1 Although classically associated largely with the creation and exploitation of a modern proletariat, contemporary views on primitive accumulation have significantly broadened our understanding of the purview of this term. My approach in this entry will be to review the classical definition in order to better grasp its current permutations and various applicabilities. The bulk of Marx’s writing on primitive accumulation is found in Part 8 of Capital, Vol. I, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” particularly Chapter  26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.” In Chapter 26, we learn that “primitive accumulation” is Marx’s answer to a question with which both he and the classical political economists are concerned: what are the authorizing preconditions that set the capitalist mode of production in motion? For Marx, this question is complex because the system, as he understands it, “presupposes” itself: “the accumulation of capital presupposes surplusvalue; surplus-value presupposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labor power in the hands of producers of commodities” (1992: 873). The self-perpetuating nature of capital accumulation thus requires a speculative effort on the theorist’s part: the postulation of a set of conditions that pre-existed and inaugurated this cycle of presuppositions: The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point Marx 1992: 873

Smith’s “previous accumulation, ” however, does nothing to illuminate these starting points. Rather, it serves to veil the violence of this history in order to construct a mythology of capitalism’s origins. Smith’s “previous accumulation, ” Marx argues: Plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long,

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long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. Marx 1992: 873

Against Smith’s assertions that the “originary” accumulation of capital was the benign result of a group of especially thrifty proto-capitalists, Marx clarifies the conditions for capital accumulation: colonial conquest; the birth of public debt and the credit system; and the “freeing” (or separation) of the laborer from the land and into the selling of wage labor as the only means for survival.2 The role of the State is fundamental here. It not only orchestrates with direct force the enclosures of common lands and the prohibitions on vagrancy that sweep the landless poor towards the urban centers and into the wage-form; it also—financed by credit—enacts colonial resource extraction, enslavement and the forcing of new commodity markets. Indeed, riffing on and overturning Smith’s “idylls, ” Marx makes clear that colonialism constitutes capitalism’s fundamental original sin: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Marx 1992: 915

Building off these insights, David Harvey has reintroduced primitive accumulation as a framework for understanding how capitalism produces profit against the tendency toward over-accumulation and crisis in the present. Harvey writes, in the ambit of Rosa Luxemburg’s oeuvre,—which itself follows from Marx’s argument, above—that capitalism requires violently-produced differentials in the price of labor and in the availability of commodity markets in order to generate profit, both at the onset of capitalism and in an ongoing manner. In a chapter of The Accumulation of Capital, titled “Militarism as a Province of Accumulation, ” Luxemburg emphasizes the role of state violence and militarism, not only “in the first stages of European capitalism” but ever after, where “it is employed to subject the modern colonies, to destroy the social organizations of primitive [sic] societies so that their means of production may be appropriated, forcibly, to introduce commodity trade in countries where the social structure had been unfavorable to it, and to turn natives [sic] into a proletariat by compelling them to work for wages in the colonies” (2015: 511). Following Luxemburg’s logic, Harvey describes primitive accumulation as “accumulation-by-dispossession, ” not simply the opening strains of capitalism, but its eternal logic. Through violent dispossessive practices that created the unevenness necessary to produce profit for the imperialist core, capitalism generates “spatiotemporal fixes” (2003: 115), or the forcing of new territories into a capitalist mode of production, market and labor pools as a way of managing crises of over-accumulation and profit-stagnation.

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The role of the public debt in this process is critical, and Marx’s comments on this are found not in Chapter 26 of Vol. I of Capital, but in Chapter 31, “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist. ” There, we learn that finance and the state, together, are key to primitive accumulation, even at its outset: The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. Marx 1992: 919

In separating or “freeing” profiteering from ordinary methods of production, such as “industry or even usury, ” the state causes money to “breed. ” There are profound political implications to this claim. As William Clare Roberts has shown, Marx’s emphasis on the relationship between the state and finance capital is crucial, not only as a way of understanding how the capitalist nation-state functions, but also (for Marx) as a political intervention against the Proudhonian socialists, who imagined that “workers can build a new world by escaping from capital, either by establishing their own colonies and workshops, or by homesteading in the colonies of the mother country” (2016: 19). Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, in some contrast, shows that because the state—dependent upon capital accumulation and the “bankocracy”— is the “primary agent of primitive accumulation, ” one cannot simply fantasize a Proudhonian withdrawal from capitalism as an effective means of escape. Only the destruction of the nation-state can create the conditions for emancipation from capitalism more broadly. It bears noting the gendered tropes, implicit in this description of how the bankocracy and the state, together, turn “barren money” into a breeding body. Indeed, as Silvia Federici has shown, modern forms of gendered embodiment are a key prong of primitive accumulation. For Federici, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific discourses produced their own set of separations (or “vivisections” as below): that of the body. This aspect of primitive accumulation, Federici argues, is “a true vivisection of the body whereby it was decided which of its properties could live and which, instead, had to die. It was a social alchemy that did not turn base metals into gold, but bodily powers into work-powers” (2004: 140). According to Federici, it is the subsumption of the body to the demands of capitalist production that truly marks the onset of the capitalist mode of production: [T]he development of the “human machine” was the main technological leap, the main step in the development of the productive forces that took place in the period of primitive accumulation. We can see, if, other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism. Federici 2004: 145

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With the separation of the body into productive and unproductive—exploitable, nonexploitable or differently-exploitable—capacities, comes the gendering of that body as well. For Federici, gendered embodiment is thus, itself, a form of primitive accumulation, and a necessary precondition for the onset of capitalism. Massimo De Angelis also regards separation as foundational to primitive accumulation, and indeed as a continual process in capitalist production. For de Angelis, primitive accumulation “describes a forced separation between people and social means of production and . . . this separation can take many forms” (2001: 2). In this sense, an extension of the working day—because it intensifies this alienation/ separation between producers and the means of production—would constitute a kind of primitive accumulation: “The idea of separation applies to both accumulation and primitive accumulation” de Angelis argues. “[A]ccumulation reproduces the separation and the independent existence of material wealth as against labor on an ever increasing scale, ” and therefore, “merely presents as a continuous process what in primitive accumulation appears as a distinct historical process” (2001).3 The conceptualization of primitive accumulation as separation extends also to Marxist theories of globalization and neo-imperialism; as Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielsen have recently argued, borders themselves can be considered a technique of primitive accumulation. Building from Gavin Walker’s astute comment that borders are the “ideational mapping of primitive accumulation on a global scale, ” insofar as they “reproduce the naturalizing and grounding of difference in a phenomenalmaterial form, thereby legitimating and sustaining it ”, Mezzadra and Nielsen argue that there is a “simultaneous emergence of geographic and cognitive borders in the scene of primitive accumulation” (2013: 34), or, as Walker puts it, “primitive accumulation is also the accumulation and construction of difference itself—not difference as raw flux, but specific difference as bordering-effect, the creation, installation and utilization of commensurable systematic expressions of hierarchy as the fundamental building blocks of the inter-national world” (2016: 8). If Federici has shown that primitive accumulation is bound inextricably with the subjectification of the modern subject, Walker, Mezzadra and Nielson demonstrate that primitive accumulation is simultaneously an ideological and topographical process. Glen Coulthard’s intervention into contemporary understandings of primitive accumulation also refocuses our attention onto topologies and the land: “[F]ollowing the waves of colonial settlement that marked the transition between mercantile and industrial capitalism, ” Coulthard argues, “Native labor became increasingly (although by no means entirely) superfluous to the political and economic development of the Canadian state. Increased European settlement combined with an imported, hyperexploited, non-European workforce meant that, in the post-fur trade period, Canadian state-formation and colonial-capitalist development required, first and foremost, land, and only secondarily the surplus value afforded by cheap, indigenous labor” (2014: 12). Coulthard’s intervention against the classical tendency to associate primitive accumulation largely with the creation of a modern proletariat is critical, as he shows that the direct violence of primitive accumulation as land-expropriation remains one of the primary fronts of capital accumulation into the present. Moreover, Coulthard also shows that primitive accumulation both generates the conditions for the emergence

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of a labor force, and the means of keeping certain populations outside of that new category. Nikhil Pal Singh has recently broadened this multi-faceted approach to primitive accumulation, as well as Luxemburg’s analyzis of militarism and primitive accumulation, to consider the role of the police as a modality of primitive accumulation. For Singh, primitive accumulation must be understood within a larger matrix from which it is inextricable: that of racialization and racial oppression. “Luxemburg points to the institutionalization of coercion within capitalism, specifically militarization, ” Singh argues, “not only in the retention of the option of primitive accumulation, but also as the guarantor of capitalist discipline and disposability at the shifting borders of its circulatory movement” (2016: 39). Shifting our focus away from the single issue of the creation of a productive workforce, Singh stretches the discourse around primitive accumulation to address questions of surplus labor and its racialization. This point is worth citing at some length in order to see how Singh moves from questions of productivity and production to a more totalizing view of a primitive accumulation that extends into the present in specific forms: imperialism and border-enforcement, the sphere of reproductive labor, and the racialization of surplus. In this sense, Singh brings many of the concerns addressed by Coulthard, Federici, Mezzadra and Nielsen into a capacious and powerful matrix of analyzis: A narrow sphere of productive relations . . . depends upon a more expansive sphere of appropriation in which cheap human and extrahuman nature are taken up by commodity production. Embodied in the figures of the slave, the migrant worker, the household worker, the chronically unemployed, and the like, appropriation encompasses zones of both privatized and publicly sanctioned coercion and ethico-political devaluation that are inseparable from capitalist processes of valorization. Thus, rather than opposing notions of absolute sovereignty and its power of life over death with a bio-politically, productive materialist history, we might instead recognize how the two have been perdurably braided together (at least in part) through the conquest/commodification of black bodies (as well as in the conquest/commodification of indigenous lands) that for Marx comprises the moment of so-called primitive accumulation, extending this to the ongoing unpaid work of women the world over, accumulated unpaid work represented by labor migration, and war capitalism’s differentiation between the internally ordered, rule-bound spaces of production and market exchange and exceptional zones of armed appropriation. Singh 2016: 40–41

Taken all together, recent updates to the concept of primitive accumulation demonstrate that Marx’s theory, while appearing to apply solely to the pre-historical past, is in fact an apposite methodology for the present operations of neoliberal capital as well. In closing, I would like to note that, in returning to this area of Marx’s thought, scholars have opened the possibility of thinking of primitive accumulation not only as a modality of the past and the present, but—beyond this—also as a speculative theory of the future. One might even argue that this futural orientation is present in seed-form

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within the classical conception. Consider that Marx does not articulate the theory of primitive accumulation in order to examine the actual historical contours of feudalism. Rather, he does so in order to ask a critical political question: how did capitalism come into being? Marx asks this question in order to radicalize the question of capitalism itself: to push into the foreground the possibility that this particular mode of production, because it is a historical contingency, did not always exist, and, for this reason, might well come to an end. Here I have to remark, again, that this point is reinforced by the reading process itself, as we encounter the chapter on primitive accumulation, not at the beginning, but rather at Capital’s end. In this sense, primitive accumulation—in its most speculative iteration, and also at its heart—is a way of grasping the unforeseeable capacity for radical contingency that exists within even the most seemingly entrenched structures. Deleuze and Guattari, we recall, placed primitive accumulation at the center of their conception of de/reterritorialization and of the logic of the capitalist socius at large: “At the heart of Capital, Marx points to the encounter of two principal elements: on the one side, the de-territorialized worker who has become free and naked, having to sell his labor capacity; and, on the other, decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying it” (1983: 225). Deleuze and Guattari’s axiomatics of de- and re-territorialization are a theory of vital branchings whereby change develops in an unpredictable, molecular manner, strewn throughout the social and natural worlds. This theory of de/re-territorialization, moreover, has primitive accumulation at its foundation, not only as the ongoing logic of capitalism, but as an axiom of transformation more broadly. Along these lines, Jason Read has discovered resonances between the DeleuzoGuattarian commitment to contingency and Althusser’s own conception of the aleatory as, itself, crystallized through a conception of primitive accumulation: “[W]hile it is possible to think of each mode of production as entailing certain dimensions of necessity (for example in capital it is necessary to valorize existing capital, to reproduce a docile and competent labor force, and so on), ” Read argues, “the contingent encounter that formed the mode of production haunts it as the threat of its dissolution. ” As Althusser writes: “[Primitive accumulation] continues today, not just in the visible example of the third world, but as a constant process that inscribes the aleatory at the heart of the capitalist mode of production” (2003). Following Read, we can see that, primitive accumulation is not only a set of methodological presuppositions about the conditions that set and keep capital accumulation in motion, but it also represents—and quite dialectically—an opening at the core of the historical present. That is to say, primitive accumulation reaches back to the preconditions of capitalist production in order to reach forward—blindly, but inexorably—toward the possibility of transformation.

Acknowledgements My thanks to the editors and to Jeff Diamanti especially for their thoughtful notes on this entry.

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Notes 1

2

3

The bibliography here would be too long to reproduce in full. See, for example, Paula Chakravartty and Denise da Silva, eds. (2012), Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime; Glen Coulthard (2014), Red Skin, White Masks; Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielsen (2013), Border as Method. Moreover, it is worth noting that Marx himself saw the process of primitive accumulation as continual: “The original sin is at work everywhere” (589). “The immediate producer, the laborer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another” (Marx 1992: 714–15). Again, in the Grundrisse he states: “Once this separation is given, the production process can only produce it anew, reproduce it, and reproduce it on an expanded scale” (De Angelis 2001).

References Chakravartty, P. and D. da Silva (eds) (2012), Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime, Special issue of American Quarterly, 64 (3). Coulthard, G. (2014), Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Angelis, M. (2001), “Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s ‘Enclosures’, ” The Commoner 2. Available online: http://www.commoner.org. uk/02deangelis.pdf (accessed August 11, 2018). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota, MN . Federici, S. (2004), Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Harvey, D. (2003), The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luxemburg, R. (2015), The Accumulation of Capital, trans. A. Schwarzschild, Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books. Marx, K. (1992), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin. Mezzadra, S. and B. Nielsen (2013), Border as Method, or, The Multiplication of Labor, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Read, J. (2003), “A Universal History of Contingency: Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism, ” borderlands e-journal 2(3). Available online: http://www.borderlands. net.au/vol2no3_2003/read_contingency.htm (accessed August 11, 2018). Roberts, W.C. (2016), Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Singh, N. P. (2016), “Race, Violence and So-Called Primitive Accumulation, ” Social Text 128 34(3): 27–50. Walker, G. (2016), The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan, Durham, NC : Duke University Press.

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Profit Alan Freeman

Introduction Marx’s theory of profit marks the highest point so far attained in understanding capitalism’s most emblematic concept. He explains it in the most general and unrestricted terms to be found in economic theory; the results therefore apply to all societies and conditions in which capitalist production is to be found, and to all forms of capital. No previous or subsequent theory matches this achievement. The theory synthesizes the ideas of his predecessors, rendering them coherent by overcoming the contradictory assumptions they depend on. It is, in consequence, extremely simple. All subsequent developments re-impose these assumptions or, worse, attribute them to Marx, generating an aura of obscurity which is undeserved. In common with Keynes, but 60 years earlier, Marx grounds his theory in a rootand-branch renunciation of Say’s Law, which supposes that demand perfectly matches supply. This law is the ancestor of neoclassical “market perfection, ” which defines economic magnitudes by requiring them to reproduce society identically. In such theories money is absent; price is indistinguishable from value; capital is spirited away when technology changes; and crisis is impossible. Such economies are purely hypothetical and cannot exist. Marx begins from what is seen in the world. He unreservedly recognizes profit as a residual: that which remains after society has replaced what was consumed in production, including the capacities of its laborers. Since neither their past labor, nor past costs, can be modified once this result exists, its magnitude cannot then change; it can only be re-allocated to property-owning classes: entrepreneurs, merchants, landowners, bankers and so on, in the form of revenues defined by their corresponding property rights, such as commercial profit, rent or interest. Crisis is a failure to maintain the material conditions for exercising these rights. Their shares are the outcome of a struggle, both on the terrain of exchange through the establishment of money prices, and politics through battles over their respective rights, which is necessarily competitive because it creates no new value: capitalists form a “band of robbers” who join forces to increase their total profit to the detriment of labor, but fight with each other for a share of it. Wherever there are winners, there are losers, a fundamental identity which Marx sets out in Chapter 5 of Vol. I of Capital 371

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where he proves that value cannot be created in distribution: “the capitalist class of a given country, taken as a whole, cannot defraud itself ” (Marx 1976: 266). However, the commodity form obscures this basic identity because in exchange, values are expressed in money: The question why money does not itself directly represent labour-time, so that a piece of paper may represent, for instance, x hours labour, comes down simply to the question why, on the basis of commodity production, the products of labour must take the form of commodities. Marx 1976: 189

Marx makes the qualitative leap of recognizing that, because of the money form, the monetary expression of value, unlike its “immanent” labor-time expression, rises and falls independent of production. Price therefore cannot equal value. The possibility, therefore, of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, i.e., the possibility that price may diverge from the magnitude of value, is inherent in the price form itself. Marx 1976: 196

This leads to the advanced conception that value has a double expression: it can be measured by the labor that creates it, or by the money for which it sells. The two are related by a well-defined ratio, which Ramos and Rodriguez (1996) term the Monetary Expression of Labour Time (MELT ). Every money sum represents a quantity of labor-time, and any quantity of labor is expressible as a sum of money. Marx thus connects money and labor in a single, integrated theory of profit, which holds for all price magnitudes, whether the market works or fails, and to all forms of capital including money capital. This makes it the only theory so far known which is competent to understand the connections between profit, which is called on to maintain social reproduction, and crisis, in which reproduction breaks down.

Why is Profit Controversial? The tortuous evolution of the subject arises from the emblematic status of profit. Close to the surface of every theory of it lurks an esoteric question: does society need the people who receive it? Since theories are acted on politically, they affect revenue; the property-owning classes therefore naturally favor those that present their private advantage as socially virtuous. The imperative to reconcile society’s concept of profit with the material interests of property-owners displaces the requirement of explaining the observed facts. Historically the idea most congenial to capital, originating with Adam Smith, though contradicting his findings, is that profit comprises the value added by the “factor of production” of capital, proving that the capitalist class is needed.

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This was not always believed. Until the mid-eighteenth century, profit was widely viewed as a parasitic charge levied by merchants and usurers on the landed producers of wealth. Early political economy overcame this prejudice by demonstrating that wealth did not originate in landed property alone, fueling the revolutionary onslaught of capital on aristocratic privilege. Smith confronted the aristocrats’ claim to be the “natural” custodians of the land by recognizing rent as the outcome of a social act, the appropriation of the land: As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. 1976: 56

He could then place capitalists on an equal footing with landlords, noting that they too have acquired something needed for production, their “stock, ” or what Marx terms “constant capital. ” David Ricardo (1817:10) then opens a revolutionary Pandora’s box, bluntly asking: “Where did the stock come from?” Since labor produces stock itself, all value may be traced back to it. He then coherently identifies rent as a deduction from the produce of labor alone. Sauce for the gander: the Ricardian socialists concluded that the revenue of the capitalist likewise expresses not a fictitious productive power, but a legal right to appropriate it. Marx was not the progenitor of this idea; however, he overcame its contradictions. He liberated it from the preconception, transmitted to Ricardo from Say via Malthus, that prices were the outcome of a balance between supply and demand. This error is compounded by Smith’s idea, shared by Ricardo (and many Marxists to this day), that value explains the magnitude of price. For Marx, value explains what price consists of. Ricardo’s devotion to Say’s Law is incompatible with the requirement that price must equal value. If capital is rewarded with a rate of interest proportional to its size—a condition for the capitalist to supply it—price must, in general, differ from value. Marx’s famous “transformation of values into prices of production” inverts the problem; since the differences cannot be ignored, they must be accounted for. Capitalists who sell their produce above its value will gain, while those who sell below will lose, the divergences adding up to zero. In parts 3–8 of Vol. III , the great bulk of the work, Marx shows how each class obtains its revenue from this profit, impelled by the movement of capital. His theory of profit is thus first and foremost a theory of distribution, a sorely misunderstood point. Merchants produce no value, but they do own capital. Hence, if greater returns are forthcoming elsewhere, capital migrates out of commerce, decreasing the supply of retail goods, raising their prices and restoring the return on the merchants’ capital—and vice versa.

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Similarly, landlords do not accept, as Ricardo supposed, a rent of zero on marginal land, but strive to match returns elsewhere, yielding “absolute rent.” Crucially for Marx’s understanding of crisis, money-dealing or “fictitious” capital also attracts a return, the rate of interest. However, because it does not enter production, this return is regulated by fluctuations in the magnitude of the capital itself, not the revenue it receives. The price of a financial asset is thus determined by the revenue it attracts, whereas that of produced capital is determined by its cost. This accounts for the spectacular character of financial crashes in which the price of fictitious capital suddenly adjusts to its revenues. It has escaped the attention of many Marxists that in consequence, prices diverge not merely from values, but also from prices of production. First, they are governed by the return on all capital, including landed, merchant and money capital, not just productive assets. This modifies the general rule established in Parts 1 and 2 of Vol. III : On our first consideration of the general or average rate of profit (Part Two of this volume) we did not yet have this rate before us in its finished form, since the equalization that produced it still appeared simply as an equalization of the industrial capitals applied in different spheres. This was supplemented in Part Four, where we discussed the participation of commercial capital in this equalization, and commercial profit . . . In the further course of our analyzis it should be borne in mind that when we speak of the general rate of profit or the average profit from now on, this is in the latter sense, i.e. always with respect to the finished form of the average rate. Marx 1981: 459

Moreover the price of any product on which rent is levied, notably minerals, food, housing and, indeed, anything done on land, includes this rent. But rent is a profit on a marginal scarce resource—a further reason that price cannot in general equal price of production. Since Marx’s theory encompasses all price-value deviations, this presents no problems, which is why the theory is completely general. The first two parts of Vol. III address the special case in which the return on industrial capital is equalized; the remaining six address the general case in which the revenue of each property-owning class is fixed in struggle. The approach of accounting for price-value deviations, instead of wishing them away, further applies to all deviations from any other cause. It therefore applies directly to observed prices, not on average or approximately, as Shaikh (1998) and many others argue. This is what renders Marx’s theory a high point in theoretical understanding.

The Austro-Hungarian Revenge: The Retreat from Reality and the Assault on Marx This basic simplicity of Marx’s formulation cannot be grasped independent of the general regression in economic theory which followed it. How can a once-scientific

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theory go backwards? When it becomes a threat to the social order. The scientific motive of explaining facts is displaced by the religious motive of preserving social stability. The retreat from Marx is therefore coterminous with a retreat from reality. Economic reality imposes itself on thought when crisis becomes so deep as to spur millions to action. Marx’s ideas, known only to a few until the first Great Depression of 1870–1893, surged to popularity within the working-class movements that rose up in response to it. Economic theory, already in retreat from Ricardo, reacted (Freeman 2010b) to this new threat with Neoclassical theory—an aspect of a broader Weberian reorganization of the social sciences (Desai 2016), which separated “pure” economics from political economy and sundered the residue into disparate disciplines such as sociology, politics and history. Neoclassical theory depicts itself as a new discovery, the outcome of a putative “Marginalist Revolution. ” Yet it is better understood as the “General Equilibrium Counter-Revolution, ” since it epitomizes the return to Say’s Law principles. Ricardo and Marx alike used marginal analyzis; indeed, it is the foundation of his theory of super-profit (Mandel 1974), key to his economic dynamics. The real intention of Austrian-Jevonian marginalism was to abolish the category of production by explaining production decisions as responses to concealed consumer preferences. This posed a logical problem; how could production in the past be a response to demand in the future? The arch-ideologue Marshall (1872: 818) saw that this fiction could be preserved only by the further fiction that society reproduces perfectly (Dobb 1973: 184–5), so that demand remains fixed in time. “General Equilibrium” was born. The imposition elevated market perfection to a Platonic, religious principle: “true” prices, profits and employment levels were those that guaranteed unchanging social reproduction; what was actually observed constituted “imperfections” arising from external interference. Economic behavior was naturalized. Just as gravity drove planets through the heavens, whilst Darwinian savagery compelled species and “races” to evolve blindly towards perfection, economic magnitudes became the outcome of uncontrollable primal urges. Unsurprisingly, positivism moved to stage center, sanctifying market outcomes as reactions to forces inaccessible to human influence. As a new generation is discovering (Earle et al. 2017), the result bears almost no relation to reality. Experiments have refuted its behavioral assumptions and its logic yields paradox after paradox. The second Great Depression brought its predictive pretentions to an ignominious end, ushering in an age dominated by Say’s second greatest critic, John Maynard Keynes. Smith and Ricardo were reincarnated on the astral plane of “macroeconomics,” along with a jumble of unreconstructed ancient prejudices freed of the irksome requirement to be reconciled with each other. In this pragmatic play-space, the pre-Marxian concept of value-added could be rehabilitated, rendering it safe for capital. The assault on Marx’s theory of profit has to be understood in this context. Neoclassical theory, being unrealistic in its pure form and incoherent when diluted, was vulnerable to any alternative that was both rigorous and accurately described the real world. The response was an unrelenting drive to prove Marx inconsistent; his theory could then be ruled out as illegitimate without the inconvenience of recognizing its factual accuracy.

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The assault was launched in 1884 by Austrian Minister of Finance, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1984), who then encouraged Ladislaw von Bortkiewicz (1984) to recast Marx’s transformation as a general equilibrium system, restoring the contradictions Marx had painstakingly eliminated. The enterprise would have languished in obscurity but for Western academic Marxists, who, beset with the need for respectability, welcomed it with open arms. In 1942 Paul Sweezy translated von Bortkiewicz into English and set the scene for a halfcentury of regression within Marxism itself: The competitive supply-and-demand theory of price determination is hence not only not inconsistent with the labour theory; rather it forms an integral, if sometimes unrecognized, part of the labour theory [. . .] To use a modern expression, the law of value is essentially a theory of general equilibrium developed in the first instance with reference to simple commodity production and later on adapted to capitalism. Sweezy 1970: 47–53

Sweezy added a further confusion. Though Bortkiewicz said Marx was “mistaken, ” he did not attribute his system to Marx. However, Sweezy did. He thus offered a reinterpretation of Marx as a substitution for Marx’s own ideas, but, as Andrew Kliman (2007) explains, the interpretation does not yield Marx’s own conclusions. Bortkiewicz’s now-famous “two equalities” established that, in his system, either total value or total profit were not preserved in exchange. This flaw is fatal. If the first equality does not hold, labor cannot be the sole source of value; if the second does not hold, it cannot be the sole source of profit. A further, ideologically convenient contradiction soon emerged, mathematically proven in Okishio’s (1961) celebrated theorem, Marx’s “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, ” which could not hold in a Sweezy– Bortkiewicz system, disconnecting profit from his theory of crisis. Marxism (Steedman 1981) took 40 years to recognize that it was in a blind alley. The initial response, “Marxism without Marx, ” (Freeman 2010a), launched new theories which, it was claimed, could validate Marx’s conclusions without using his theory. Little today is seen of these failed projects. Marx scholars, beginning with Kliman (2007), however, launched a second, and more theoretically successful response, by asking what, actually, was Marx’s own theory. Foley (1982; see also Duménil 1980) had already shown that both equalities held if money and labor-time were connected by the “value of money”—the inverse of the MELT. Intriguingly, he referred to this as a “New Interpretation” of Marx. Scholars from the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI ) school (Freeman and Carchedi 1996; Kliman 2007) embarked on a root-and-branch critique of the Bortkiewicz-Sweezy system, demonstrating that once equilibrium is extirpated, Marx’s theory thus interpreted emerges as wholly consistent. Provoked by the depth of capitalism’s third great historical crisis, awareness is growing that Marx’s theory offers, and always offered, an understanding of profit, class and crisis which is not only superior to Neoclassical theory, but of direct practical relevance to the generations living in the shadow of its failure.

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References Böhm-Bawerk, E. von. (1984 [1896]), “Karl Marx and the Close of His System, ” trans. P.M. Sweezy, in P.M. Sweezy (ed.), Karl Marx and the Close of His System, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 3–120. Bortkiewicz, L. von. (1984 [1907]), “On the Correction of Marx’s Fundamental Theoretical Construction, ” in P.M. Sweezy (ed.), Karl Marx and the Close of His System, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 199–222. Desai, R. (2016), “The Value of History and the History of Value, ” in T. Subasat (ed.), The Great Meltdown of 2008: Systemic, Conjunctural or Policy-created? Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA : Edward Elgar, 136–58. Dobb, M. (1973), Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duménil, G. (1980), De la valeur aux prix de production, Paris: Economica. Earle, J., C. Moran, and Z. Ward-Perkins (2017), The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Foley, D.K. (1982), “The Value of Money, the Value of Labor Power and the Marxian Transformation Problem, ” Review of Radical Political Economics 14(2): 37–47. Freeman, A. (2010a), “Marxism Without Marx: Notes towards a Critique, ” Capital and Class 34(1): 84–97. Freeman, A. (2010b), “Trends in Value Theory since 1881, ” World Review of Political Economy 1(4): 567–605. Freeman, A. and D. Carchedi, eds. (1996), Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics, Cheltenham, UK , and Northampton, MA : Edward Elgar. Kliman, A. (2007), Reclaiming Marx’s Capital: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency, Lanham, MD, and Plymouth, UK : Lexington Books. Mandel, E. (1974), Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Marshall, A. (1890), Principles of Economics, London: Macmillan and Co. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Vol. 1, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1981), Capital, Vol. 3 , London: Penguin. Ramos-Martínez, A. and A. Rodríguez-Herrera (1996), “The Transformation of Values into Prices of Production: A Different Reading of Marx’s Text, ” in A. Freeman and D. Carchedi (eds.), Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics, Cheltenham, UK , and Northampton, MA , USA : Edward Elgar, xx. Ricardo, D. (1817), The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, London: John Murray. Available at: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/ lookup?num=33310 (accessed August 11, 2018). Shaikh, A.M. (1998), “The Empirical Strength of the Labour Theory of Value, ” in R. Bellofiore (ed.), Marxian Economics: A Reappraisal, London: Macmillan, 225–51. Smith, A. (1976 [1776]), An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in E. Cannan (ed.). Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Steedman, I. (1981), Marx After Sraffa, London: Verso. Sweezy, P.M. (1970 [1942]), The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy, New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks. Sweezy, P.M., ed. (1984 [1949]), Karl Marx and the Close of His System, New York: Augustus M. Kelley.

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Property Christian Schmidt

For any reader of The Communist Manifesto, by which the communist movement intended to enter the stage of world history, there is no doubt that property is at the heart of the propagated revolutionary class struggles. The authors of the Manifesto, anonymous at the time of the first printings, explicitly state in the final section: “[T]he Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time” (Marx and Engels 1976 [1848]: 519).

1. Conceptual Development From 1847 to 1848, when Marx1 wrote The Communist Manifesto, he had not yet fully developed the theory of a private property based economy, but he had already radicalized his views. In an early series of articles in 1842 on the discussions in the Rhine Province Assembly on the new “Law on Thefts of Woods,” Marx had simply argued against the ongoing transformation of property relations that turned the indeterminate and hybrid forms of property, predominant in the Middle Ages, into rigid monopolies which allowed for no customary rights, such as the gathering of fallen wood or berries. His critique focuses on the disregard of those rights that the old order of indeterminate forms of properties granted to the class of the very poor, “which, precisely because of these occupation rights, is excluded from all other property” (Marx 1975a [1842]: 233). Marx was not critical of the determination of informal rights by law as such, or generally in favor of customs. Yet, for him, the question of fallen wood touched the natural limits of private property. Marx claimed that “there exist objects of property which, by their very nature, can never acquire the character of predetermined private property; objects which, by their elemental nature and their accidental mode of existence, belong to the sphere of occupation rights” (Marx 1975a [1842]: 233). Therefore, the customary rights of the poor should reach a legal form rather than being excluded from it. In the case of the estates which were privileged by the feudal order on the other hand, the “law recognizes not only their rational right, but often even their irrational pretensions” (Marx 1975a [1842]: 231). 379

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Afterwards, Marx quickly radicalized his views on property. In the famous review, On the Jewish Question, it is hard to determine any further rationality in property rights at all. Property is, here, one key element that characterizes civil society as depoliticized and distinct from the state, i.e. the state is the only sphere of politics. “The right of man to private property is [. . .] the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion (à son gré) without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest [. . .] It makes every man see in other men, not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it” (Marx 1975b [1844]: 163). According to Marx, this is dangerous in two ways: it opens a private sphere where all inequalities and even violent relations are seen as a matter of arbitrary individual choice,2 and it destroys the common bond that is essential for the political determination of shared life in society.3 Even the state has the primary function to protect the private spheres of its citizens. The rights of man, and especially their conceptual core, private property, terminate politics at the very moment that the French Revolution made politics possible. “Man as a member of civil society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears [. . .] as the natural man” (Marx 1975b [1844]: 167). In the following years up to the publication of the first volume of Capital, Marx’s critique of property centers on the first of these two concerns. He spells out in more detail the subordination and exploitation that property enables. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, he describes the two economically most important forms of property: landed property and capital. The former is “the root of private property” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 267), but the latter had already become the dominant form because the rule of capital is “the undisguised rule of private property, ” and it controls the property in land which, for its part, has “become a commodity” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 267). This means landed property is no longer the consequence of a social status that includes dominium over the people living on it. It is solely a form of material wealth. The rule of private property does away with all differences based on estates, and so “the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes—the property owners and the propertyless workers” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 270). With regard to these two classes, property is not a relation of a person to an object. It is the expression and the basis of a social relation. That property is an expression of a social relation becomes obvious when Marx states that it is “the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself ” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 279). Such relations are the result of what Marx in Capital in the chapter on “The so-called Primitive Accumulation” describes as the separation of the producers from the means of production. By this separation, the act of production, the product, the co-workers, and the productive abilities are no longer expressions of the essential forces which a human subject possesses but turn into alien powers that materially dominate the workers and the working process. The actual producers not only work for the cause to enlarge capital which is alien property to them. The product of their work—by becoming capital—is the materialized condition of their further production. It remains in the hands of others and under the command of economic imperatives. Alienated labor produces the privatized means of production.

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As the historical presentation of “primitive accumulation” in Capital shows, the production of property by alienated labor is the result of a history of robbery, torture and murder. Yet besides being an expression of social domination, property is also the basis for it. In the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explains this reversal: “The conditions and presuppositions of the becoming, the emergence, of capital imply precisely that it is not yet in being but is only becoming. Hence they disappear with the development of real capital, the capital which, setting out from its own reality, itself posits the conditions for its realisation” (Marx 1986b [1857/58]: 387f). In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the same is said about property: “Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 280). The originally violent separation of the producers from the means of production is replaced by the economic reproduction of capital on the one hand and of being devoid of property on the other. The three volumes of Capital will then demonstrate in detail how the monopolies over the means of production, i.e., capital and land, allow their proprietors to appropriate the surplus value which the wagelaborers produce, leaving the latter with nothing else but the means to reproduce their labor power. In Capital, Marx lays also bare why the exploitation of wage-labor is in accordance with the rules of property exchange in commodity markets and why capitalized property, as a consequence, seemingly becomes the source of the productive forces. Being devoid of property does not mean that one has no access to objects in the world at all, even though the world consists of more and more enclosed pieces of private property. The access to the individual means of life is possible through wages which are earned by selling labor power. “We also understand, therefore, ” writes Marx already in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, “that wages and private property are identical [. . .] the wage is but a necessary consequence of labour’s estrangement” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 280). Political economy—as Marx critically remarks—not only acknowledges the integration of the poor in property relations by wages. With labor as the subjective source of property, those theories are “locating private property in man’s own being” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 291). In other words, they mingle personal individuality and private property. But in Marx’s view, political economy has an even greater flaw. It “sophistically conceals [. . .] the poverty bred by the movement of private property” (Marx and Engels 1975a [1845]: 34), as he explains in The Holy Family, written at the end of 1844. To him, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s treatise Qu’est-ce que la propriete? (What is property) was eye-opening because it “proved in detail how the movement of capital produces poverty” (Marx and Engels 1975a [1845]: 35). He also showed how private property negates itself: “Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things” (Marx and Engels 1975a [1845]: 36). The almost conceptual opposition of the proletariat and property culminates later on in The Communist Manifesto in the crucial determination: “The proletarian is without

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property” (Marx and Engels 1976 [1848]: 494) and is therefore excluded from bourgeois society. While Marx was writing his part of The Holy Family, Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own, literally: The Individual and His Property) appeared in Germany. In 1845, meanwhile in Brussels, Marx and Engels wrote a lengthy refutation of Stirner’s idea to radicalize the concepts of individuality and property in order to establish a new and truly liberated society. This refutation wasn’t published at the time and became known as the main part of The German Ideology. Here, Marx came to the conclusion that property relations are fundamental for the economic order, since they have an indissoluble connection with the division of labor: “The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of property, i.e., the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument and product of labour” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 32). He considers division of labor and private property as “identical expressions” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 46). And in 1859, when Marx summarized the way of his thinking in the preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, the property relations are presented as an expression of “the same thing in legal terms” as “the existing relations of production” (Marx 1987 [1859]: 263). Hence, the Marxian diagnosis of a contradiction between the forces and relations of production in capitalism recognizes a friction between the forces of production and property. Already in The German Ideology, Marx describes private property as a fetter to the development of the productive forces: “These productive forces receive under the system of private property a one-sided development only, and for the majority they become destructive forces; moreover, a great many of these forces can find no application at all within the system of private property” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 73). In the controversy with Stirner, this is important because Marx is convinced that the radicalization of the concept of private property is no revolutionary path. He argues for its dissolution instead. But, since the division of labor and private property are expressions of a society’s mode of production and of the relations of its members they remain “quite independently of the will of individuals” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 329). In the The Communist Manifesto, Marx therefore stresses the historical impulse from the contradiction between the forces of production and the form of private property in the bourgeois society. The signs of this tension are the economic crises (Marx and Engels 1976 [1848]: 489f). He believes that the objective movement of property’s decline and the subjective motivation of the proletariat to overcome private property relations coincide. For, the wage-labor doesn’t “create any property for the labourer [. . .]. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wagelabour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation” (Marx and Engels 1976 [1848]: 498). Marx neglects the objections by Proudhon and Stirner that property is also a source of personal freedom against the interference of state and society. The aim of the communists is “to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class” (Marx and Engels 1976 [1848]: 504).

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2. Historical Varieties of Property The identification of private property and property as such is common in the Marxian critique of the capitalist economy. But as the close relation of property relations and the modes of production suggests, Marx has also a historical view on property. In the first draft of The Civil War in France, he explicitly contests that the “present class form of property—a transitory historical form—is property itself, and the abolition of that form would therefore be the abolition of property” (Marx 1986a [1871]: 504). Regarding the past, Marx describes historical developments and alternative forms of property. Prospectively, he speculates about “true personal” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 268) or “truly human and social property” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 281) in a communist society. Both lines of thinking seek to embed the capitalist economy in history. The discussion of “true property” as a concept is restricted to the early works. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx equates true property to the restoration of the social character of the human being. While private property alienates and estranges the human being from his or her social essence, “positively sublated private property” makes evident that “man produces man—himself and the other man” and that “just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 297f., transl. altered). In The German Ideology, the end of private property is depicted in conformity with this line of thought as “the appropriation of the total productive forces by the united individuals” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 88). Already in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx stresses that human sociality is not in opposition to human individuality—“it is precisely his particularity which makes [the human being] an individual, and a real individual social being” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 299). Consequentially, not all activity and all enjoyment has to be communal. This distinguishes the elaborated version of communism from a “completely crude and thoughtless” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 294) version of the positive sublation of property which is the universalization of property to communal property and the destruction of “everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property [. . .] talent, etc. ” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 294). Marx concludes: “The first positive sublation of private property—crude communism—is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community system” (1975c [1844]: 296, transl. altered). Truly human property in contrast requires the subject as point of departure and result. In this fact lies for Marx “the historical necessity of private property” (Marx 1975c [1844]: 298). Marx comes back to this point in the controversy with Stirner. Accusing Stirner’s account of a “genuine and free development of individuals” to be nothing else than mere phrases, he argues that “this development is determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and, finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals on the basis of the existing productive forces” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 439). Yet instead of giving a full account of truly communist property, Marx indicates in these texts rather his philosophical view of the human condition in general.

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His thoughts became less abstract when his studies in the historical forms of property progressed. In The German Ideology, there is only a short sketch of the development from tribal forms of property via ancient and especially Roman ones to feudal landed property and finally bourgeois private property. The main insight of this little tour d’horizon is that while all the earlier forms of property are “based on a community” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 34) and “the right of the individual to it [appears] as mere ‘possession’” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 89), only “modern capital, determined by large-scale industry and universal competition, i.e., pure private property [. . .] has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the state from any influence on the development of property” (Marx and Engels 1975b [1845/46]: 89f). In the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy the different forms of property are not just depicted in more detail. Marx notes here the multiple varieties of each form of property. He adds remarks to oriental, Slavonic and German types and gives a systematic discussion of the relation of communal and private property in each case. The property relations in all these societies predetermine the relation of the respective community and the individual: “Property [. . .] means belonging to a tribe (community) (having one’s subjective/objective existence within it), and, mediated by the relation of this community to the land, to the earth as its inorganic body” (Marx 1986b [1857/58]: 416). Solely “the relation of labour to capital or to the objective conditions of labour as capital, presupposes an historical process that dissolves the different forms in which the labourer is a proprietor or the proprietor works” (Marx 1986b [1857/58]: 421). The idea that there is a rigid line of progressive development that leads from one type of property relations to another is—at least immanently—incompatible with the variety of such forms, some of which obviously coexist in time.4 This opens the space for a last twist in the discussion of private property. In the late Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx explores the idea that the old rural communities that existed in India and Germany and had survived in Russia could provide an initial model for rightly balancing the communal and the individual in a communist society: “Freed from the strong but tight bonds of natural kinship, communal ownership of the land and the social relations stemming from it guarantee [the agricultural commune] a solid foundation, at the same time as the house and the courtyard, the exclusive domain of the individual family, parcel farming and the private appropriation of its fruits give a scope to individuality incompatible with the organism of more primitive communities” (Marx 1989 [1881]: 367). This last twist in Marx’s discussion of private property is not a sudden intuition. Marx read and excerpted many volumes on constitutional history and historical property relations. Of special interest are his late readings on the topic especially the excerpt of Maurer (1854) written in 1868 which has not yet been published, and the excerpt of Kovalevskij (1879) published in Harstick (1977) as well as the excerpts which were collected and edited by Krader as The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx.

Notes 1 2

Engels had not but a marginal role in writing the manuscript (cf. Kuczynski 1995: 35–9). For a feminist version of this interpretation, see Brown 1995: 96–134.

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Lefort (1986) provides a critical reading of this part of the argument. According to Lefort, the private sphere is indispensable for the creation of free political bonds among individuals. Politics without a private sphere is hence a contradiction in terms. Marx seems to argue accordingly in the late Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich from 1881 (see below). See for a detailed discussion Hobsbawm 1964.

References Brown, W. (1995), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Harstick, H.P., ed. (1977), Karl Marx über Formen vorkapitalistischer Produktion: Vergleichende Studien zur Geschichte des Grundeigentums, Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1964), “Introduction, ” in K. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, New York: International Publishers, 9–65, Kovalevsky, M.M. (1879), Obščinnoe zemlevladenie, Moscow: Tipografiya F.B. Millera. Krader, L., ed. (1974), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, 2nd ed., Assen: van Gorcum & Co. Kuczynski, T. (1995), “Editionsbericht, ” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Das Kommunistische Manifest (Manifest der kommunistischen Partei) (= Schriften aus dem Karl-Marx-Haus Trier, 49), 25–230. Lefort, C. (1986), “Politics and Human Rights, ” in C. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. J.B. Thompson, Cambridge, MA : Polity Press, 239–72. Marx, K. (1975a [1842]), “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood, ” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 224–63. Marx, K. (1975b [1844]), On the Jewish Question, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 146–74. Marx, K. (1975c [1844]), Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 229–346. Marx, K. (1986a [1871]), Drafts of The Civil War in France, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 22, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 435–551. Marx, K. (1986b [1857/58]), Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 28, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 49–537. Marx, K. (1987 [1859]), A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 257–421. Marx, K. (1989 [1881]), Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 24, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 346–69. Marx, K. and F. Engels. (1975a [1845]), The Holy Family, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 5–211. Marx, K. and F. Engels. (1975b [1845/46]), The German Ideology, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 19–539. Marx, K., and F. Engels. (1976 [1848]), The Communist Manifesto, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 477–519. Maurer, G. L. v. (1854), Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf- und StadtVerfassung und der öffentlichen Gewalt, Munich: Christian Kaiser.

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Religion Jan Rehmann

It is a widespread belief that Marx was against religion because it represented for him a false consciousness and an instrument of manipulation in the hands of the ruling classes. There are many statements in Marx’s and Engels’s writings about religion that could corroborate such an interpretation, and it is no wonder that they were used by both conservative churches and official Marxism-Leninism to demonstrate that a cooperation between believers and Marxist atheists had no sustainable foundation. I am going to show that Marx’s approach to religion is much more complex; Marx provides a set of analytical tools that might help to decipher the inner contradictions and social struggles within the field of religion.

Marx’s Dialectical Understanding of Religion To describe religion as an “inverted world-consciousness” (MECW 3: 175) was by no means new, nor a specifically Marxian idea. The young Marx of the Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1843–1844) had taken it from Ludwig Feuerbach’s concept of projection, according to which the limited individuals project the “essence” of their potentially unlimited species-being onto religion, where it is presented as an omnipotent God; grace without limits and endless love (Feuerbach 1989: 2–3, 14–15, 29–30). Both Feuerbach and Marx shared the theoretical perspective of returning to the wishes and yearnings that had been “alienated” by religion and to strive for their fulfillment on earth. But, as Marx explains in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, the “human essence” is not to be considered as an unhistorical “abstraction inherent in each single individual, ” but as “the ensemble of the social relations” (MECW 5: 4). Instead of resolving “the essence of religion into the essence of man, ” Marx proposes to study the processes by which “the secular basis lifts off from itself ” and to explain this lifting off “by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis” (ibid.). Religious “alienation” is no more to be criticized from the point of view of a general philosophical humanism, but rather in consideration of an inverted world, i.e. from the structures of domination in class-societies. It is in the context of Marx’s shift from “man” to class-based society, as the historically specific “world of man” (MECW 3: 175), that he encounters religion as an ambiguous 387

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phenomenon: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (ibid.). Many interpreters have decided to stick to the last sentence without realizing that, as Roland Boer has demonstrated, opium was at the time “an ambiguous, multidimensional and contradictory metaphor” (Boer 2013: 225), and above all without looking at the “sigh of the oppressed creature” that immediately precedes the opium sentence. If one considers this context, the picture changes considerably. In the framework of a Marxist theory of class struggle and revolution, the “sighing” of the exploited and oppressed is, of course, a crucial precondition and the foundation of the resistance of subaltern classes. If religion provides a main form in which the protest against real misery and suffering is articulated, a Marxist critique, which wants to do away with religion, cuts itself off from popular protest movements. Marx’s critique of religion is obviously very different from a mere criticism of “false consciousness.” Its main interest lays in the deciphering and setting free of the impulses of yearning and protest that are contained in religious form. Taking a closer look at Marx’s twofold definition, there are two possible interpretations: did he mean that religion is, on the one hand, a “sigh of the oppressed creature” and, on the other hand, an imaginary and paralyzing “opium of the people”? Following this interpretation, one would get a dialectical understanding of religion as a field of contradictions that contains potentially activating and paralyzing dynamics. The task of the organic intellectuals of subaltern classes would then be to take the sigh of the oppressed seriously and enlighten it in a way so that it overcomes the illusionary forms in which it is expressed. But the meaning could also be that religion is a “sigh of the oppressed creature” and, as such, an “opium of the people” because it is only an inarticulate sigh without any analysis of the existing societal conditions. There is in fact no marker in the text that indicates a linguistic opposition between the “sigh” and the “opium.” The opposition between a “scientific” analysis and a “utopian” and illusory protest was indeed a recurring theme in Marx’s polemics with competing socialist and communist circles at the time. In the history of Marxist theory, it was primarily Ernst Bloch who overcame this dichotomy by developing a concept of “concrete utopia,” which combined what he called the “cold stream” of sober-minded analysis and the “warm stream” of human dreams, hopes and longings (Bloch 1986: 208–9). Marx’s twofold definition implicitly contains the conclusion of the “sigh of the oppressed creature,” because of its immediacy and distance from a “determinate negation,” which needs to be connected with a critical analysis of exploitation and oppression, together with a rational strategy to overcome them. Such a connection could also enable social movements with a religious background to overcome the illusory and paralyzing aspects of the religious “opium. ”

Marx’s “Meta-critique” of Religion: From the Criticism of Heaven to the Criticism of Earth Another aspect that has often been overlooked: the “Introduction” to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law is, strictly speaking, not a critique of religion,

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but rather an appeal to the Young-Hegelian philosophers to give up their fixation on religion and to widen their criticism beyond the religious domain. The first sentence already makes this clear: “For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (MECW 3: 175), which indicates that Feuerbach had accomplished the job of explaining religion as a human projection so that the critics could now move on to the real task, the criticism of alienation and domination on earth. “Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower” (176). In this vein, Marx called upon the critical philosophers to stop their obsession with pulling apart the “holy form of human self-estrangement” and to proceed to a critique of the “vale of tears, the halo of which is religion” to unmask human self-alienation, no more in its sacred forms, but in its secular forms. The “criticism of heaven” was to be turned into the “criticism of earth”; the criticism of religion into the “criticism of law”; and the criticism of theology into the “criticism of politics” (176). The paradox is that Marx, at the very moment he provided his twofold definition of religion as opium and sigh of the oppressed, declared to leave the whole matter behind. When he criticized Hegel’s statist fixation, which starts out from the state and “makes man the subjectified state, ” he did so by applying the pattern of religious inversion: “Just as it is not religion which creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution which creates the people but the people which creates the constitution” (MECW 3: 29). The constitution itself becomes a “religious sphere, the religion of national life, the heaven of its generality over against the earthly existence of its actuality” (31). Marx developed his criticism of modern politics most notably in On the Jewish Question (1844), which was directed against Bruno Bauer’s anti-Judaistic insinuation that the Jews had to give up their “narrow” religion in order to gain political emancipation. Marx started out from the separation of church and state in the US , which he described as a “displacement of religion from the state into civil society” (MECW 5: 155). Religion has been “banished” from the sphere of public law to that of private law and thus has been “thrust among the multitude of private interests” (155). This political emancipation was, however, not connected to the disappearance of religion, but instead to modern freedom of worship, in which religion “not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality” (151). This also changed the inner characteristic of religion, which thrives in the US no longer as “the essence of community, ” but rather as the “essence of difference, ” as “the expression of man’s separation from his community”; in short, as the spirit of bourgeois-civil society, “the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes” (155). At the same time as religion is being “privatized, ” modern politics takes on a “religious” character: when modern man frees himself from the domination of religion, he does so only “politically, ” i.e., “through the medium of the state” and, therefore, “in a roundabout way, ” which means for Marx, in a “religious” way (152). He thereby employs a very general definition of religion, which is “the recognition of man in a roundabout way, through an intermediary, ” and it is now the modern state that has become “the intermediary between man and man’s freedom” (152). Religious inversion has thus

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slipped into politics, where it compels people to live “a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life” (154). It splits the human being into an egoistic private individual of bourgeois civil society, “withdrawn [. . .] into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community” on the one hand, and in the moral person of the citizen of the political state on the other hand, who is “only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person” and “deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality” (154, 164, 167). Instead of a merely “political” emancipation, Marx envisions a comprehensive “human emancipation” that overcomes the split between bourgeois and citizen; the “real, individual man” no longer “separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, ” but rather organises his “ ‘forces propres’ [own powers] as social forces”; he “re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, ” and becomes “a species-being in his everyday life” (168). The real god of bourgeois society is money. It rules over the human beings that bow to it and degrades traditional gods by turning them into commodities (172). It is primarily in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that Marx applies the concept of religion to the alienation of workers. When, in bourgeois society, labor’s product confronts the producer as “something alien, as a power independent of the producer, ” with the effect that “the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and [. . .] the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, ” it is “the same in religion. ” “The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself ” (MECW 3: 272). Since alienation also manifests itself in relation to the workers’ productive activity, he “feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home” (274). That the worker’s activity belongs to someone else is again compared to religion, where “the spontaneous activity of the human imagination [. . .] operates on the individual [. . .] as an alien, divine or diabolic activity” (274). Looking back at Marx’s appeal to the Young-Hegelian critics of religion to move on to a critique of secular forms of alienation, we can now see the project of a “metacritique of religion”; the traditional critique of religion is turned against the capitalist principle of bourgeois society and thus dialectically “sublated. ” By locating the “untruth” in social relations, “truth” is returning to religion, although in an “untrue” displaced form (Haug 2016: 861–2).

Fetishism and “Religion of Everyday Life” The religious analogies of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are then taken up in the chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital. In order to explain the phenomenon in the capitalistic market, that the producers are ruled by the things they produce, Marx uses the analogy of the “misty realm of religion”: “There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities” (Marx 1976: 165). With the category of fetishism, Marx has now found a concept by

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which the critique of religion “arrived” at the core of capitalist economy, which helped him to concretize his demonstration of a fundamental “inversion” in bourgeois society. The religious genealogy of the terms “fetish” and “fetishism” is obvious. Marx encountered it first in 1842 when he studied Charles De Brosses’s investigation on fetish-gods (Du Culte des dieux Fétiches, 1760). Similar to other scholars of religion at the time, De Brosses had used the term to describe the most “primitive” level of religious evolution (cf. Pietz 1993: 131). In 1842, Marx took up the term and turned it against the “fetish-servants” of modern private property (MECW 1: 262f). The religious meaning of the term was moreover part of a colonialist paradigm characterized by an “orientalist” construction of the “other” (Said 2003: 331–2). “Fetish” was derived from the Portuguese feitiço, which was first developed by Portuguese missionaries in Africa in order to portray what they considered to be the “primitive” African religion. The Latin root of facticium (facere) designated something that has been “made” or is “man-made. ” From there, the meaning shifted to sorcery and witchery; man-made products gain power over their makers (cf. Haug 2005: 161). The supremacist white, European attitude (Christian or secularised) is obvious; the so-called primitive believers are portrayed as the ones who carve objects, who then bow to their own artifacts and worship them. By taking up this concept, Marx develops a subversive ideology-critique. He turns the tables on the contemporary ideologies of European supremacy by demonstrating that it is their modern bourgeois order that harbors the most anachronistic fetishism: an irrational reversal by which exchange-value rules over use-value; money over labor; accumulated capital over life. Since the producers have no democratic control over what is being produced, or how it is being produced, or how the surplus is being distributed, the products of their labor pile up on the other side of the divide and constitute the wealth of the capitalist owners. Thus, they turn into an alien-power that is used against the workers by impoverishing them and replacing them with new technologies. This irrational system that periodically destroys its own wealth by disastrous crises is finally to be overcome by an “association of free people” (Marx 1976: 171). As Marx’s critique of political economy ascends from the commodity-form to money; then to labor-power; to the wage-form; to capital and rent; the fetish-concept remains a constitutive part of the analysis. As a “socially valid, and therefore [. . .] objective thought form” (Marx 1976: 169), fetishism is both a form of social life in bourgeois society and a corresponding form of practice and consciousness. Towards the end of Capital, Vol. III , Marx summarizes the different stages of reification and mystification of the capitalist mode of production in the “trinity formula, ” according to which capital creates profit (plus interest), land creates ground-rent, and labor creates wages. In this context, he coins the concept of a “religion of everyday life” characterized by a “bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre who are at the same time social characters and mere things” (1981: 969). This everyday religion is deeply anchored in the socio-economic reality of capitalism; “the actual agents of production themselves feel completely at home in these estranged and irrational forms of capital-interest, land-rent, labor-wages, for these are precisely the configurations of appearance in which they move, and with which they are daily involved” (1981: 969).

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Updating and Fine-tuning Marx’s Critique of Religion The concept of religion is closely connected with the theory of ideology, which has developed considerably in Marxism and critical theory. Both Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser have argued that a concept of ideology that is fixated on ideas and consciousness is missing the main point, namely the specific material existence of ideologies, their institutional anchorage in the hegemonic apparatuses of civil society or, in Althusser’s terminology, in Ideological State Apparatuses (cf. Rehmann 2013: 117f., 147f.). Elements of this paradigm shift are already to be found in Marx and Engels. The late Engels defines the state as the “first ideological power over man” (MECW 26: 392), a power having “arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it” (287). Since the first states were theocracies, the definition is relevant for religion as well. According to Marx and Engels, idealistic ideologies arose together with the emergence of antagonistic classes, the state and, in particular, on the base of the social division of material and mental labor. Only then can consciousness “flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real” (MECW 5: 45). Drawing on this analysis, Pierre Bourdieu has concluded that the “field of religion” is the result of a process by which religious specialists have monopolized the magico-mythical “goods of salvation” (1991: 9). Religion emerges as a component of state hegemony based on the ideological monopoly of the priests. It is to be analyzed as an ensemble of hegemonic apparatuses with its own officials, intellectuals, ideological competences, practices and rituals, which in turn work primarily unconsciously, or as Bourdieu formulated, engrained in a habitus that is inscribed in the body (1990: 68–72). A critique of religion should therefore not waste its energies on an overall attack on religious beliefs, but is to be targeted on the way ecclesiastic apparatuses, be they mainline churches or sects or evangelist corporations, contribute to the hegemony of the ruling order by dissimulating the reality of social injustice or diverting the sufferings of the oppressed. However, religious apparatuses (like ideological apparatuses in general) are not simply the instruments of a ruling ideology, they are also the “sites” in which the ideological struggles about hegemony take place (cf. Althusser 2001: 99). Religions are not to be defined by a fixed and homogenous “essence. ” They are fields of social contradictions and struggles. Therefore, a Marxist approach to religion has the primary task to decipher its social antagonisms and struggles (cf. Rehmann 2011: 151). For that, a Marxist theory of religion needs to rid itself of the rationalist baggage it inherited from the Enlightenment tradition. What is missing in Marx’s and Engels’s approach is an analytical distinction between religion and faith. The latter designates a complex of relations and attitudes that can be found both inside and outside religions. According to its ancient usages (Hebr. “mn, Gr. pistis, Lat. fides), faith covers the semantic field of trust, faithfulness, truthfulness and mutual reliability, both as part of religious and of secular discourses that designate relationships of reciprocity and friendship. In the framework of religious history, faith was often an anchorage point for the critique of hegemonic religion e.g. St. Paul, the early Luther, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (cf. Rehmann 2001).

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Later critical theorists tried to correct this weakness. For Gramsci, faith/belief (fede) designates a world view that transcends the small circles of intellectuals and becomes a popular ethico-political force and part of an “intellectual and moral reform” (cf. Gramsci 1975: 1217, 2185–6). Ernst Bloch distinguished between (transcendental) religion and faith and defined the latter as a belief in “what is germinating, [. . .] still unfinished in the world, ” but not yet “spilled out before our eyes. ” “It is the attitude by which knowledge of future things is not only grasped but also willed and carried out in the face of faint-hearted and short-sighted doubtings” (1986: 1280; transl. altered). Referring to Walter Benjamin, Derrida distinguishes between religion as a set of beliefs, dogmas and institutions that is to be deconstructed, and faith as a universal relation anchored in communication, a “weak messianic force” conceptualized as a (nonreligious) dimension of “messianicity without messianism” (1994: 55, 166–9). As soon as one differentiates between the religious form and dimensions of faith or messianicity, one has a hermeneutic key that allows one to mutually “translate” the different discourses—not without untranslatable rest, of course, since there is never a one-to-one relation in translation. It might help us to see that there is a common ethical core that the young Marx described as the “categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being” (MECW 3: 182).

References Althusser, L. (2001), “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation), ” (1970), in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 85–131. Bloch, E. (1986), The Principle of Hope (1938–1947), 3 vols, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Boer, R. (2013), Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology, Chicago, IL : Haymarket. Bourdieu, P. (1990), The Logic of Praxis, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991), “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field, ” Comparative Social Research, 13: 1–44. Derrida, J. (1994), Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, New York, London: Routledge. Feuerbach, L. (1989), The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Gramsci, A. (1975), Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols, V. Gerratana (ed.), Torino: Einaudi. Haug, W.F. (2005), Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins “Kapital, ” Neufassung von 2005, Hamburg: Argument-Verlag. Haug, W.F. (2016), “Karl Marx’ Metakritik der Religion, ” Das Argument 320: 861–79. Marx, K. (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1981), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1975–2005), Marx Engels Collected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart (quoted as MECW ). Pietz, W. (1993), “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx, ” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, E. Apter and W. Pietz (eds), 119–51, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press.

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Rehmann, J. (2001), Article “Glaube” (Faith/Belief), in Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (HKWM ), Vol. 5, in W.F. Haug (ed.), Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 787–808. Rehmann, J. (2011), “Can Marx’s Critique of Religion Be Freed from its Fetters?” Rethinking Marxism 23(1): 144–53. Rehmann, J. (2013), Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection, Chicago, IL : Haymarket. Said, E. (2003), Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition, New York: Vintage Books.

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Reproduction Amy De’Ath With the revival of Marxist-feminist critique, the concept of “reproduction” has acquired a new sense of urgency in Marxist theory. Marx viewed reproduction expansively, as the process through which capitalist society reproduces itself both materially and socially. But he also missed a key stage in his theory of capitalist reproduction when he wrote that the worker reproduces himself, requiring only “a certain quantity of the means of subsistence, ” as if by magic the commodities “he” consumed turned themselves into hot meals, ironed shirts or bathed babies. I will highlight some of the central aspects of Marx’s theory of capitalist reproduction, including his models of simple and expanded reproduction and his reproduction schemas from Capital, Vol. II , where he explains how capitalism requires expanded reproduction in order for accumulation to take place. Following this, I will briefly gesture to some of the other ways in which Marx’s writings have informed theories of capitalist reproduction that focus on periodic developments in the capital–labor relation; systemic crises in capital’s ability to reproduce itself; and the expulsion of labor from cycles of accumulation. Finally, I will address Marxist-feminism’s substantial and recently sharpened critique, which demonstrates how the gendered labor of social reproduction—the reproduction of the commodity labor power, but also of capitalist social relations writ large—constitutes the very ground upon which capitalist reproduction is built, as well as a key site of resistance to capitalist forces.

Simple and Expanded Reproduction In Part Three of Capital, Vol. II , Marx explains how the production of individual capitals must presuppose an encounter with the products of other capitals in the market. Indeed, his concern across Vol. II is to explain, on a broad scale and at a necessary degree of abstraction, why capitalist reproduction cannot be understood by the example of an individual capitalist production process, but only through considering the reproduction of the total social capital in a society. As Ernest Mandel puts it: “how can an anarchic social system, based upon private determination of investment, ‘factor-combination’ and output, assure the presence of the objective, material elements necessary for further production and growth? What are the absolute preconditions of such growth?” (1978: 16). To this end, Marx’s reproduction schemas are useful in at least two respects. First, they help to explain why expanded (rather than 395

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merely simple) reproduction is necessary for capital accumulation, and, second, they provide a general overview of capitalist production and circulation that, as Michael Heinrich has succinctly explained, demonstrates the unity of these processes as they constitute the foundation on which many other concrete relations, such as profit, interest and capital stock, are based.1 For Marx, simple reproduction describes a hypothetical system in which the scale of production remains unchanged. Under simple reproduction, the total social product of a society includes both the means of production required to repeat the production process, and the means of subsistence—what Marx calls “articles of consumption”— that are consumed by both workers and capitalists. In order to understand the internal dynamics of capitalist reproduction, Marx divides these two spheres of production into “department I, ” the production of the means of production, for example, the manufacture of plant and machinery and raw materials; and “department II , ” the production of articles of consumption, for example, clothing or spectacles. The value of the total product of each department is equivalent to the total magnitude of constant capital (c) and variable capital (v) employed there, as well as the surplus value (s) produced. Thus, the total product of each department is expressed as: Department I = cI + vI + sI Department II = cII + vII + sII

Important here are the relations of exchange between department I and department II . Under simple reproduction, the product of department I, the means of production, is bought by capitalists to replace the means of production (the constant capital) expended in both departments I and II . Therefore: cI + vI + sI = cII + cI

The products produced in department II , the articles of consumption, are bought and, under simple reproduction, entirely consumed by workers and capitalists in both departments I and II . Therefore: cII + vII + sII = vI + sI + vII + sII

Note that the buyer in each case is different, and requires different types of product: in department I, it is the capitalist, and in department II , it is a mixture of workers and capitalists. The relevance of this fact becomes apparent when we reduce the second equation to its simplified form (subtracting terms common to both sides of the equation) to find that: cII = vI + sI

From this equation it follows that the value of the constant capital of department II must be equivalent to the value of the variable capital and surplus value of department I. In other words, simple reproduction must maintain a specific ratio of production

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between departments I and II in order to produce the means of production and the means of subsistence required by each group of buyers, and thus for the reproduction of the total social capital. Heinrich has noted that, in practice, this specific ratio will only ever come about coincidentally and that “normally, a certain disproportion between the individual departments will always occur” (2012: 139).2 Crucially, simple reproduction describes a situation in which all surplus value produced in both departments is “used up” or personally consumed by the capitalists. In Marx’s words, “the money is not advanced, but spent” (1978: 146). In his chapter on accumulation and reproduction on an expanded scale, Marx demonstrates how expanded reproduction is necessary for capital accumulation. The main principles of the division and exchange relations between department I and department II are much the same as in simple reproduction, except this time a portion of the surplus value is reinvested by capitalists, both as constant capital in the means of production, and as variable capital in the additional labor-power required for expansion. In the expanded reproduction schemas, Marx assumes that half of the surplus value is personally consumed by capitalists and half is reinvested and transformed into new capital (1978: 582–3). As a result of this reinvestment, department I produces more means of production, and department II produces more means of subsistence. It is through this process of reproduction that the accumulation of capital takes place. As with simple reproduction, expanded reproduction requires that a specific ratio, or proportionality, is maintained between the outputs of department I and department II in order for further production and growth to take place. What can we learn from Marx’s exhaustively detailed explication of reproduction and the relations between economic departments? These sections of Capital are crucial to Marx’s critique of political economy because, for one, they contribute to his (much larger) theory of crisis. The disproportionality between departments that Heinrich observes became the basis of a distinct variant of crisis theory centered on underconsumption and the notion that the demand for consumer goods regulates overall production (proponents of this theory have ranged from Rosa Luxemburg to Paul Sweezy, and, more recently, Simon Clarke).3 Secondly, the reproduction schemas form an important part of his correction to what he calls Adam Smith’s “dogma”: the idea, perpetuated by David Ricardo and others, that the total price of the total social product can be resolved into revenue, i.e. profit and wages. If this were the case, argues Marx, there would be no reproduction, whether simple or expanded (Marx 1963: 344). Instead, Marx argues that the total price of the total social product must contain a component of constant capital that is reinvested into the means of production. And for this reason among others, as Fred Moseley has shown, it is important to understand the distinction Marx draws between money as capital—money advanced to purchase the means of production and labor power that will eventually recover a greater sum of money—and money as revenue—money used to purchase products for individual consumption.4 By the same logic, we must also understand the inputs and outputs represented in the reproduction schemas, not as physical quantities of cotton or machinery—which are common to all economies—but as abstract quantities of money-that-becomes-moremoney, the form of value specific to capitalist economies. Only by understanding capital as money which becomes more money through the circuits of production and circulation is it possible to analyze the economic relations historically specific to capitalism.

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Reproduction of the Capital–Labor Relation In Marxian thought, the concept of reproduction has been central to accounts of capitalism’s capacity to recover from systemic crisis; of its ability to persist in the face of resistance; and of periodic developments in the relationship between capital and labor. Louis Althusser famously sought to explain the “reproduction of the relations of production” through an account of the role the state and ideology play in that process (Althusser 1971). Perhaps a less well-known but increasingly useful line of Marxian inquiry, however, comes from the French editorial collective Théorie Communiste (TC ), who sought to tie cycles of struggle to periodic developments in the reproduction of the capital–labor relations—i.e. the class relation between capitalist and proletarian. TC underscore the ways in which the form of antagonism that proletarian struggle assumes in a given historical moment will be shaped by the nature of the relation between labor and capital, especially in terms of the degree to which the reproduction of the laborer has become internal to the reproduction of capital; e.g., the degree to which the worker has access to common land and can grow their own food, on the one hand, or the degree to which they are de-skilled and dependent on the wage for their reproduction, on the other. Thus, for TC , the integration of proletarian reproduction into the cycle of capital accumulation in the early twentieth century marked the end of a cycle of struggle in which labor confronted capital as an external antagonist, or, in other words, a subject whose reproduction was to some extent independent of capital. A second seismic shift occurred in the late twentieth century in the aftermath of the political struggles and economic turmoil of 1968–1973, as the various institutions that mediated the capital–labor relation in the post-war era—such as unions and the welfare state—fell into rapid decline. The capitalist restructuring during the late 1960s and early 1970s brought to a close a long cycle of struggle that TC call programmatism, by which they mean the traditional Marxist project of the liberation of labor, and opened onto a new cycle of struggle they call communization. While TC focus on a long process of labor’s integration into the cycles of capital accumulation, recent analyses by the Endnotes and SIC collectives have turned to examine the re-externalization or expulsion of labor. While those in employment confront capital more directly (with less of the protection of unions or the 35-hour work week, for example), an increasing number of people find themselves locked out of the wage and the formal economy. Drawing on Marx’s theory of surplus populations, or a reserve army of labor, these theorists show how the tendency to boost productivity through automation expels a growing mass of people from the cycle of accumulation. Marx called this tendency the “general law of capital accumulation. ”5 While TC ’s periodization scheme has proved productive for charting the historical relationship between cycles of struggle and cycles of accumulation, Endnotes stress that the reproduction of the capital–labor relation has itself entered into crisis. We see the results of the disintegration of the capital– labor relation and its circuits of reproduction in rising unemployment and/or underemployment, and in the proliferation of precarious work in the service sector (Benanav and Clegg 2014: 585–608).

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The Marxist-Feminist Critique Marxist-feminism’s most fundamental intervention is the basic argument that, across the various threads of his otherwise scrupulous theory of capitalist reproduction, Marx missed a key stage in this process. When Marx comments on the reproduction of labor-power, he notes that: Labour power exists only as a capacity of the living individual. Its production consequently presupposes his existence. Given the existence of the individual, the production of labor-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. Marx 1990: 274

This slippage, where the existence of the individual laborer is, in Marx’s own words, a “given, ” is one of a number of similar oversights in Capital. Thus, “for his maintenance, ” Marx notes only that the worker “requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence” (1990: 274). Marx never considers the work of childbearing and child-rearing, washing, cooking, cleaning, sex and emotional care, among many other things, has typically fallen to—and, as some Marxist-feminists persuasively argue, actually produced—the category “women. ”6 Why does Marx fail to mention the “hidden abode of reproduction”—the feminized and feminizing reproductive work that undergirds capitalist accumulation? Marxistfeminists have suggested a variety of answers to this question. For Silvia Federici, it is because Marx remained wedded to a technologistic concept of revolution, where an increase in productive forces and technological advances would eventually lay the ground for communism. In this vision, Federici argues, Marx “accepted the capitalist criteria for what constitutes work, ” believing that “waged industrial work was the stage on which the battle for humanity’s emancipation would be played. ” Troublingly, he viewed the capitalist organization of production as the “highest model of historical rationality, ” and applied this model to the process of the reproduction of the workforce (Federici 2012: 95). This is an interpretation shared by Lise Vogel, who points out how Marx, as well as Friedrich Engels, seemed to uncritically view the sexual division of labor within the family unit as a representative miniature of the division of the capitalist and working classes within society.7 The international Wages for Housework movement emerged from the theory and activism of a number of feminist groups, including Lotta Femminista and Rivolta Femminile in Italy, Midnight Notes in the US , and the Power of Women Collective in the UK . Marxist-feminist theory by Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati and others was central to these struggles, and Dalla Costa’s “Women and the Subversion of the Community” became a theoretical foundation and polemic for the movement as a whole. But the demand for wages for housework was a tactical demand, not to be understood too literally. Indeed, Federici famously answers her own question—“what difference could some more money make to our lives?”—by insisting that the demand for wages is in fact a demand against housework, since to fulfill such a demand would require the revolutionizing of “all our family and social

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relations” and not merely the recognition of housework as necessary to valueproduction in the waged sphere (Federici 1975: 3). Thus, where Marx notes the perfunctory role of the wage-worker who is transformed by industrialization “from his very childhood, into part of a specialized machine” (1975: 3),8 Federici is equally forthright about the training of girls who must transform into women—“it is almost impossible to enjoy any freedom if from the earliest days of life you are trained to be docile, subservient, dependent and most important to sacrifice yourself and even to get pleasure from it. If you don’t like it, it is your problem, your failure, your guilt, your abnormality” (1975: 3). The precise structural role of reproductive work has been the subject of much debate in Marxist-feminism. Most famously, the “systems debates” of the 1970s revolved around the question of the extent to which patriarchy is a system autonomous from capitalism. Dual systems theorists held that patriarchy and capitalism are autonomous but interconnected systems (Delphy 1970; Hartmann 1979). Another position, which Cinzia Arruzza has recently termed a thesis of “indifferent capitalism, ” argues that the laws of capital accumulation have a contingent and opportunistic relation to gender oppression (Wood 1988). Most widely advanced among Marxist-feminists and social reproduction theorists today, however, are various developments of a unitary theory of gender in capitalism. Unitary theories of gender generally argue that capital internalizes gendered social relations, latching onto and torquing existing patriarchal structures— of feudal or agrarian societies, for example—to its own advantage (Vogel 1983). In this way, unitary theories reject the notion that pure economic laws exist, reminding us that this was never the point of Marx’s historical materialism either; rather, capitalist reproduction is the result of social relations between individuals. Recent developments in unitary theories have emphasized how the reproduction of both gender and capital proceed dialectically, through the inventive and constantly reconstituting movement of an integrated totality (Arruzza 2014; Bhattacharya 2017). The other major point of contention in Marxist-feminist theory since the 1970s, often known as the domestic labor debate, centered on the question of whether reproductive work is productive of value. On the one hand, Mariarosa Dalla Costa (1972) famously argued that “housework as work is productive in the Marxian sense, that is, is producing surplus value. ” More recent Marxist-feminist theory has tended not to advance this argument, demonstrating instead that unwaged reproductive work is not directly productive of value, but rather has an indirect relation to valueproduction in the waged sphere—not least because unwaged reproductive work cannot be rationalized towards the production of relative surplus value and thus resists productivity increases (Gonzalez and Neton 2014; De’Ath 2018). As Maya Gonzalez has underlined, the Marxist reflex to locate proletarian subjectivation within the sphere of productive labor, in a “privileging of value as that which defines class exploitation, ” has resulted in Marxist-feminist interventions being dismissed. Debates around whether reproductive work is value-productive, furthermore, still tend to miss the point in attempts to develop a theory of gender as a social and political relation internal to capitalism. The point is, rather, that “the wagerelation—not biologically, but structurally—must also involve that half of the working class relegated to the hidden abode of labor-power’s reproduction. ”9

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A renewed interest in the writings of Marx in the wake of the 2007–2008 financial crisis has been accompanied by a resurgence in Marxist-feminist analyses. Not only have recent critiques sought to show how many previously unwaged reproductive activities, from healthcare to ready-meals to sex work, have become commodified and made profitable in themselves, they also seek—following Federici’s and Dalla Costa’s insistence that the question of “reproduction” must be rethought from a planetary perspective—to understand these changes in direct relation to the global restructuring of the labor-market and especially the relocation of women from the Global South and former Soviet countries to become, as Marina Vishmidt and Zoe Sutherland (2015) observe, the “social reproducers of the North. ” As Vishmidt and Sutherland point out, Marxist-feminist theory is expanding to more adequately “consider sexuality and race, bringing into visibility the technologies of racialization and illegalization that prop up accumulation through the economic and social de-valorization of the labor of many, if not most, of the global population. ” Because reproduction is inherently an affirmative process—it is the reproduction of the subject to be exploited or cast off by capital, the reproduction of gender, indeed, of the capital–labor relation and capitalism in its totality—Marxist-feminist analysis of this process is also a reminder of its potentiality as a site of resistance.10 In an effort to consolidate “social reproduction theory” as a defined area of Marxian inquiry, Tithi Bhattacharya underlines how social reproduction theory “exposes to critical scrutiny the superficiality of what we commonly understand to be ‘economic’ processes, ” and, in doing so, “restores to the economic process its messy, sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly component: living human beings, capable of following orders as well as flouting them” (Bhattacharya 2017: 19). We might place this crucial intervention next to valuetheoretical accounts of the relationship between gender and capitalism: Marina Vishmidt has suggested, for example, that reproduction can be theorized in terms of the negativity of the value-form. Christopher Arthur points out that we might speak of waged labor not as “productive labor” but as “counterproductive labor, ” given that workers are “actually or potentially recalcitrant to capital’s efforts to compel their labor” (Arthur 2001: 30). “But what happens, ” asks Vishmidt, “if we think reproduction with or inside the social character of production which renders value contradictory, put reproduction into the term ‘counterproductive labour’?” (Vishmidt 2012). In other words, what happens when we conceive of reproductive labor not as an outside or excess to the sphere of value-production (as Federici and Peter Linebaugh have optimistically proposed in terms of the commons, and as Roswitha Scholz’s theory of gendered value-dissociation would hold),11 but as a negative dialectic internal to capital and labor?

Notes 1 2

See Heinrich 2012: 139–40. As Heinrich notes, this disproportion between departments inspired many debates in the early twentieth century about the possibility of a form of capitalism free from systemic crisis (2012: 140).

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3

For an overview of Marxian crisis theory that includes a series of approaches that develop their arguments through a reading of Marx’s distinction between simple and expanded reproduction and the importance of a necessary equilibrium between departments I and II , see Shaikh 1978. 4 Fred Moseley 1998: 163. In an earlier passage, Moseley emphasizes that “the primary purpose of Marx’s reproduction tables is not to analyse balanced growth in terms of physical quantities of inputs and outputs, but is instead to analyse the reproduction of quantities of money capital, that is to explain how the money which is invested as capital is later recovered, so that means of production and labor power can be purchased again and capitalist production can continue on the same scale (at least)” (160). 5 See Ch. 25 of Capital, Vol. I. 6 See F.T.C. Manning 2015. 7 Vogel 1983: 130. As Vogel also notes, in The Origin of the Family, Engels “regards the sex division of labor as biologically based and historically inflexible, whereas all other major phenomena in the Origin have a social foundation. ” 8 As many feminists before me have noted, this worker is nearly always gendered male in Capital. This seems even more of an oversight given Marx’s own observation, in his chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry, ” that “in so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means for employing workers of slight muscular strength [. . .] the labor of women and children was therefore the first result of the capitalist application of machinery!” (1990: 547). 9 Gonzalez 2013; see also Research & Destroy 2012: “whether or not something produces value does not, in the end, determine its usefulness for the reproduction of capital.” 10 While I note recent examples of this argument here, in 1971 Dalla Costa and James put it this way: “the ‘unreliability’ of women in the home and out of it [. . .] runs directly against the factory as regimentation organized in time and space, and against the social factory as organization of the reproduction of labor power” (Dalla Costa and James 1972). 11 See Federici 2012; Linebaugh 2009; and Scholz 2013.

References Althusser, L. (2014), On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. B. Brewster, London: Verso. Arruzza, C. (2014), “Remarks on Gender, ” Viewpoint Magazine, September 2, 2014. Available at: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2014/09/02/remarks-on-gender/ (accessed August 14, 2018). Arthur, C.J. (2001), “Value, Labour and Negativity, ” Capital & Class 73: 15–39. Benanav, A. and J. Clegg. (2014), “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital, ” in Contemporary Marxist Theory: A Reader, in A. Pendakis, J. Diamanti, N. Brown, J. Robinson and I. Szeman (eds), New York: Bloomsbury, 585–608. Bhattacharya, T. (ed.) (2017), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, London: Pluto Press. Dalla Costa, M. (1972), “Women and the Subversion of the Community, ” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 23–69. Dalla Costa, M. and S. James (1972), The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

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De’Ath, A. (2018), “Value, Gender and Social Reproduction, ” in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, London: SAGE , 1534–50. Delphy, C. (1984), “The Main Enemy, ” in Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, trans. D. Leonard, Amherst, MA : University of Massachusetts Press. Federici, S. (1975), “Wages against Housework, ” Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Federici, S. (2012), “The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution, ” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland, CA : PM Press, 91–114. Fortunati, L. (1995), The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital, trans. Hillary Creek, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Gonzalez, M. (2013), “The Gendered Circuit: Reading the Arcane of Reproduction, ” Viewpoint Magazine, September 28, 2013. Available at: https://www.viewpointmag. com/2013/09/28/the-gendered-circuit-reading-the-arcane-of-reproduction/ (accessed August 14, 2018). Gonzalez, M. and J. Neton. (2014), “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection, ” in A. Pendakis, J. Diamanti, N. Brown, J. Robinson and I. Szeman (eds), Contemporary Marxist Theory: A Reader, New York: Bloomsbury, 149–74. Hartmann, H. (1979), “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union, ” Capital & Class 3(2): 1–33. Heinrich, M. (2012), An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, trans. A. Locascio, New York: Monthly Review Press. Linebaugh, P. (2009), The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons For All. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Mandel, E. (1992), “Introduction” to K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 2, London: Penguin, 11–79. Manning, F.T.C. (2015), “Closing the Conceptual Gap: A Response to Cinzia Arruzza’s ‘Remarks on Gender’, ” Viewpoint Magazine, May 4, 2015. Available at: https://www. viewpointmag.com/2015/05/04/closing-the-conceptual-gap-a-response-to-cinziaarruzzas-remarks-on-gender/ (accessed August 14, 2018). Marx, K. (1963), Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 1, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya and R. Dixon, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin. Moseley, F. (1998), “Marx’s Reproduction Schemes and Smith’s Dogma, ” in C.J. Arthur and G. Reuten (eds.), The Circulation of Capital: Essays on Volume Two of Marx’s Capital, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 159–85. Research & Destroy (2012), “On the Oakland Commune: Limit Analysis and Its Limits, ” SIC December. Available at: http://sicjournal.org/limits-analysis-and-its-limits/ (accessed August 14, 2018). Scholz, R. (2014), “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body, ” in N. Larsen, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown (eds.), Marxism and the Critique of Value, Chicago, IL , and Edmonton, AB : MCM ʹ Publishing, 123–42. Shaikh, A. (1978), “An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories, ” US Capitalism in Crisis, New York: URPE , 219–41. Vishmidt, M. (2012), “Counter(Re-)Productive Labour, ” Auto Italia South East, April 4. Available at: http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/news/counter-re-productive-labour/ (accessed August 14, 2018).

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Vishmidt, M. and Z. Sutherland. (2015), “The Soft Disappointment of Prefiguration, ” Centre for Social and Political Thought. University of Sussex, June. Vogel, L. (1983), Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press. Wood, E.M. (1988), “Capitalism and Human Emancipation, ” New Left Review I(167): 3–20.

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Revolutionary Communism Peter Hudis

Although Karl Marx is primarily viewed as a critic of capitalism who had little or nothing to say about post-capitalist society, his body of work, taken in its entirety, contains a distinctive and coherent concept of communism. This concept is neither grounded in utopian speculation abstracted from the analysis of material conditions nor in a priori assumptions about the nature of the good life. Instead, it is developed through a decades-long critical engagement with existing social realities, mass movements and other socialist and communist tendencies. Like Hegel, Marx held that the object generates its own categories of knowledge (Hegel 2010: 29–30). He envisions an alternative to existing society by critiquing his object of investigation, capitalism, based upon the intimations of the future found in struggles against it, not by speculating about what ought to be. For Marx, capital is a form of domination that shackles human expression and creativity while at the same time containing immanent possibilities for its transcendence. That he spent most of his life delineating the logic of capital should not be seen as a substitute for elucidating a concept of communism, but, rather, as the necessary prolegomena for doing so. Marx used many phrases to refer to a post-capitalist society: “communism, ” “socialism,” “positive humanism,” “communal production,” “realm of free individuality, ” “freely associated labor, ” “free association, ” etc. These terms are all interchangeable in his work. It was only after Marx’s death that it became commonplace to refer to “socialism” and “communism” as distinct phases of history or social organization. Such a notion is alien to Marx’s work, in which these terms possess the same meaning and content. Like other revolutionaries of the time, Marx opposed the private ownership of the means of production, an unfettered market and capitalism’s anarchic pricedetermination. However, his critique cuts much deeper than mere opposition to property forms and market relations. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 sharply attacks “crude, and thoughtless communism” (Marx 1975: 294) for opposing private property and economic inequality while overlooking the alienation in the very activity of laboring. By robbing work of all dignity and creativity, capitalism not only denies us the fruit of our labor, but, most of all, it alienates us from our human nature, from the capacity for conscious, purposeful creation. Labor becomes a mere means to an end instead of an end-in-itself in taking the form of a purely instrumental 405

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activity augmenting industrial output and profit. According to Marx, there is no exit from capitalism unless this form of self-estrangement is overcome. Marx’s concept of communism, therefore, proceeds from a recognition that the abolition of private property and the “free” market do not suffice to end the domination of capital. Unless a new kind of democratic, freely associated and non-alienated labor arises, in which workers have actual and not just nominal control of the social process of production and reproduction, the replacement of private by collective ownership of the means of production amounts to little more than positing “society as an abstract capitalist” (Marx 1975: 280). In developing his distinctive concept of communism, Marx builds upon Hegel’s insight that, since all negation is dependent on the object of critique, the transcendence of alienation proceeds through “the negation of the negation. ” Marx calls the “vulgar communist” insistence on equating the new society to the absence of private property a merely initial “abstract” negation that shares with capitalism an infatuation with having instead of being; it promotes “the community as the universal capitalist” (Marx 1975: 295). The vulgar communist standpoint does not lead to “positive humanism, beginning from itself ” (Marx 1975: 342). To reach a truly free society, the negation of private property must itself be negated through a revolution that transforms the social relations of production. On these grounds, he writes, genuine “communism is the position as the negation of the negation” (Marx 1975: 306). Marx further develops this in the Communist Manifesto, in which defines the immediate goal of communists—the abolition of private property. He does not, however, mean by this the abolition of individual in favor of state ownership. As the Manifesto clearly states, communists aim to abolish the class property of the bourgeoisie, which is based on the separation of the laborer from the objective conditions of production (Marx and Engels 1976: 498). Collective property that fails to end the separation between workers and the conditions of production, which includes their connection to the natural environment, represents just another variant of class-dominated property. Marx’s concept of communism is, therefore, derived not only from a criticism of existing social relations, but also of leftwing tendencies that upheld views of “socialism” and “communism” at odds with his own. This is seen in his critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s notion that a post-capitalist society is defined by an equitable distribution of products through equal wages. Marx holds that this not only fails to address the problem of alienated labor, it also defines the new society by universalizing the principle of wage labor that characterizes capitalism. Proudhon fails to see that calling for labor to be accorded equal monetary value does not break from capitalism’s drive to reduce laboring activity to an undifferentiated equivalent—“abstract labor. ” Marx also took issue with fellow socialists, such as Ferdinand Lassalle and Johann-Karl Rodbertus, who viewed the state as the vehicle of communist emancipation. For Marx, communism is incompatible with statism, since the state, which he defines as an organized body that lays claim to the monopolization of physical violence within a given territory, is a product and expression of underlying class relations. As he wrote in his Ethnological Notebooks: “The State is in all its forms an excrescence of society; just as its appearance only arises at a certain stage of social development, it disappears again as soon as society has reached a stage not yet attained” (Marx 1972: 329).

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While primarily devoted to a critique of existing society, Marx’s Capital greatly illuminates his concept of communism. It shows that capitalism is defined by value production—the drive to subject human activity to augmenting wealth in monetary form. According to Marx, the value of a commodity is determined not by the actual amount of time in which it is produced, but by the socially necessary labor time required to do so by the world market. Since “constant technological revolutions change how much labor time is socially necessary” (Dunayevskaya 2000: 105), workers are constantly forced to produce in accordance with a social average that operates behind their backs. As a result, concrete labor—the varied kinds of labor employed in making discrete products—becomes dominated by labor that conforms to an abstract average, termed by Marx as “abstract labor. ” The ever-growing dominance of abstract over concrete labor transforms the meaning of time itself, since both workers and capitalists become governed by an abstract, quantitative and invariable time-determination over which they have no control. The more abstract labor becomes, the greater the amount of value produced. And the more value produced, the more that capitalism is driven to augment value and profit. Capital is self-expanding value; it is an endless quest for an infinite magnitude. Natural contingency and human creativity count only insofar as they augment value; if they do not, they are cast aside. By identifying the central contradiction of capitalism, Marx further concretizes his distinctive conception of communism—one that is radically different from the “socialist” and “communist” alternatives existing in his time, and by those who later claimed to govern in his name. Value production, which for Marx is specific to capitalism and capitalism alone, mandates that human relations are indirectly social, since they are shaped and dominated by abstract forms such as money. In contrast, in communism, labor takes on a general character prior to the exchange of products on the basis of the communal character of production itself. Exchange value, which is the phenomenal expression of value production based on abstract labor, is eliminated as soon as freely associated and non-alienated conditions of labor come into existence. Self-determined individuals distribute the elements of production according to their needs instead of being governed by social forms that operate independently of them, such as by the state or the market. This does not refer to small, isolated communities that operate in a world dominated by value production, but to a communal network of associations in which value production is superseded on a global level. Marx never adhered to the illusion that socialism or communism could be created in one country or region. While he held that it was possible for a communist revolution to first occur in a developing country, such as Russia, he insisted that without a social transformation in the industrially developed world such efforts would prove quixotic (Marx 1983: 138–9). The most explicit expression of Marx’s concept of communism is found in the section of Volume One of Capital on “The Fetishism of Commodities and its Secret. ” The fetishism of commodities is dispelled neither by the discovery of labor as the source of value, nor the proletariat as the revolutionary class. This is because “the social relations between private labors appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but as material relations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx 1977: 165–6). Since fetishism is

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adequate to the concept of capital, it can be dissolved only by examining the present from the vantage point of “other forms of production. ” Marx therefore writes: “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common. ” In this post-capitalist society, products are “directly objects of utility” and do not assume a value form. Exchange value and universalized commodity production come to an end. Producers decide how to make, distribute and consume the total social product. One part is used to renew the means of production, the other “is consumed by members of the association as means of subsistence” (Marx 1977: 171–2). Marx invokes neither the market nor the state as the instrument through which this distribution of the elements of production is achieved. It is purely the act of self-deliberation by the producers. It is a planned distribution of labor time by those who are no longer subjected to socially necessary labor time. This form of organizing time is the cardinal principle of Marx’s concept of communism. Marx speaks of a “parallel” with commodity production in that “the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labor time” (Marx 1977: 172). However, he is not suggesting that socialism or communism is governed by socially necessary labor time. Socially necessary labor time imposes itself as an external determinant irrespective of the sensuous needs of individuals, whereas actual labor time is the sensuous activity of individuals mediating their relations with nature. There is a parallel with commodity production only in that there is an exchange of equivalents, since one contributes a given hour of labor to the community and receives from it goods produced in that same amount of time, a given hour of labor. But since there is no social average that governs the exchange, generalized commodity production comes to an end. Marx’s fullest discussion of a post-capitalist society is found in his 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program”. It distinguishes between a lower and higher phase of communism; unlike later Marxists, he does not refer to the initial phase as “socialism” and the later one as “communism, ” these terms being indistinguishable for him. In the lower phase, where “we are dealing with a communist society . . . just as it emerges from capitalist society, ” the producers “do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the product appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labor” (Marx 1989: 86). Generalized commodity exchange is only possible if there is a commensurate social substance, abstract labor, that makes it possible for the diverse array of products of labor to be universally exchanged. But with democratic, freely associated common ownership of the means of production, abstract labor comes to an end. And since abstract labor is the substance of value, value production also comes to an end—not only in the higher, but in the “lower” initial phase of communism. This initial phase is still defective, however, since an exchange of equivalents continues to prevail, though in a radically changed form: “The individual producer receives back from society, after the deductions have been made, exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. ” Individuals receive from society a voucher or token that they have “furnished such and such an amount of labor, after deducing his labor for the common funds” and from it obtains “the social

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stock of means of consumption as much as the amount of labor costs” (Marx 1989: 86). As in Capital, Marx is not suggesting that the worker’s labor is computed on the basis of a social average of labor time. Here, labor time simply refers to the amount of actual hours of work performed by the individual in a given cooperative or community. Nevertheless, the lower phase is defective, since it is based on a quid pro quo. The individual receives from the community what he puts into it, in the form of actual hours of labor time. Exchange value is abolished, but exchange based on an “equal standard”—actual amounts of labor time—persists. Inequities will exist, since some may work longer than others and receive greater remuneration. The application of an equal standard, remuneration according to actual labor time, produces unequal results. Classes are abolished, but not inequality based on levels of remuneration. This is unfortunate, but inevitable, since: “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines. ” In contrast, in a higher phase of communism, a new principle prevails: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” (Marx 1989: 87). No longer is remuneration based on labor time. Actual labor time ceases to be a measure of social relations. No equal standard of any sort applies to a higher phase. The producers withdraw from the common storehouse what they need, and they give to society what they can, based on their natural and acquired abilities. The historical horizon of the quid pro quo is surpassed. But this can only occur once we have fully rid ourselves of the residue of class society. It is widely assumed that Marx held that labor is abolished in a post-capitalist society. However, the “Critique of the Gotha Program” states that, in a higher phase of communism, “labor has become not only a means of life but the prime necessity of life” (Marx 1989: 87). Labor as a means toward an end, as an instrumental activity that defines industrial capitalism, is surely abolished in communism; not only in its higher phase, but in the lower one as well. However, Marx’s discussion of distribution according to actual labor time, in Capital and the “Critique of the Gotha Program”, does not refer to instrumental labor that serves as a means of augmenting value, since the value-form is long abolished by the time of the lower phase of communism. Marx does not conflate all forms of labor with instrumental, industrial labor. The latter is a particular and peculiar kind of labor that is specific to class society. But “labor” has a broader meaning than activity that functions as a mere means to an end; labor also includes affective activities, such as caring, nurturing and sharing, as ends-inthemselves. As he writes in Capital, “labor is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore . . . common to all forms of society in which humans live” (Marx 1976: 290). Marx earlier argued in the Grundrisse (Marx 1986: 91–6) that the logic of capital progressively reduces the need for productive labor, or labor that augments surplus value. Value is accumulated by reducing the amount of living labor relative to capital, thereby positing the material conditions for a future society in which industrial labor is left behind. But that does not mean that technological innovations abolish the need for affective labor based on care, concern and love—a form of labor that is so devalued in capitalism as to be virtually ignored. With the abolition of value production, the very

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distinction between necessary and surplus labor, as well as between productive and reproductive labor, is annulled. The reduction and ultimate elimination of “productive” labor allows for greater labor time to be devoted to art, culture, caring for children and the elderly, and healing the environment. To be sure, capital has little regard for such labor. But breaking from the logic of capital by creating a totally new kind of labor is the pivot upon which Marx’s concept of communism turns. Marx’s conception of the phases of communism should not be confused with “the dictatorship of the proletariat, ” which he sees as a political transitional stage between capitalism and communism (Marx 1989: 95). For Marx a “communist state” is a contradiction in terms insofar as the conditions that make possible the existence of a state are annulled, like the proletariat itself, with the abolition of class society (Hudis 2013: 183–7).

References Dunayevskaya, R. (2000), Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 until Today, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Hegel, G.W.F. (2010), Science of Logic, trans. G. Di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudis, P. (2013), Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Chicago, IL : Haymarket. Marx, K. (1972) The Ethnological Notebooks, in L. Krader (ed.), Assen: Van Gorcum. Marx, K. (1975), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx-Engels Collected Works [MECW], Vol. 2, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1986), Grundrisse, in MECW, Vol. 28, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1975), Capital, Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1989), Critique of the Gotha Program, in MECW, Vol. 24, New York: International Publishers. Marx K. and F. Engels (1976), Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW, Vol. 6, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1983), “Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, ” in T. Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press.

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Revolutionary Strategy Peter Hallward

Although Marx uses the term “revolution” in a wide variety of contexts, its most important meaning involves a change in the dominant mode of production. A “bourgeois revolution” consolidates the transition from feudalism to capitalism; a “proletarian revolution” will initiate a shift from capitalism to socialism, and then, in some formulations, from socialism to communism. Contemporary revolutionary strategy, for Marx and Engels, and subsequently for figures like Kautsky, Luxemburg or Lenin, is thus concerned above all with how best to wage the proletariat’s political struggle to overthrow capitalism, i.e. to wrest control of the means of production from the hands of the bourgeoisie. A change in the mode of production is revolutionary in two quite distinct senses. First, and most obviously, it entails a sweeping transformation in the way people live, work and think. By promising an end to exploitation and class rule, what is at stake in communist or “radical revolution” is nothing less than “general human emancipation” (Marx 1975a: 184).1 Second, and just as importantly, Marx argues that such a transformation can only be carried through by an equally radical shift in actual political power, i.e. by the victory of one struggling class over another. To insist that a change in the mode of production is revolutionary in this second sense is to emphazise its difference from reformist or evolutionary conceptions of social and economic development. Already in 1844, Marx recognized that “socialism cannot be realized without revolution. It needs this political act in so far as it needs destruction and dissolution” (1975b: 206). Political “revolution is necessary, ” he added a couple of years later, “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fit to found society anew” (Marx and Engels 1975a: 53). Truly fundamental social change must be abrupt, rather than gradual. The slow-burning “civil war” that characterizes the normal routine of capitalist society bursts into “open revolution” at the point when “the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat” (Marx 2000b: 254). This is the central meaning of Marx and Engels’s recurring “battle cry: the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself ” (1991: 408).2 From this perspective, people never more emphatically “make their own history” (Marx 1979: 103), figuring as the “actors and authors of their own drama” (Marx 1976: 170), than 411

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when they act during periods of revolutionary instability, periods when the established means of class domination are stretched to the breaking point. The assumption that these two senses mutually reinforce each other, and express one and the same historical movement, orients Marx’s whole conception of revolutionary politics. It is both the source of his remarkable optimism and the root of what proves to be a dogmatic and eventually fatal simplification—the conflation of political freedom and historical necessity—whose consequences would become all too apparent in the wake of Bolshevik victory in Russia’s own civil war. Understood in its primary sense as a shift in the mode of production, revolutionary change tends to operate, according to Marx, with the force of an underlying necessity. The materialist conception of history aims to show how, for reasons that apply quite “independently of the will” of the people involved, the collapse of one mode and the emergence of another must in the end proceed, in spite of the local variations that Marx began to emphazise in the 1870s, “with the inexorability of a natural process” (1979: 929). Marx never retreated from his conviction that, as the Manifesto puts it, “the development of modern industry cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products”; the more the bourgeoisie exploits the workers whose labor generates the profits on which it depends, the more people it recruits and organizes to dig its own grave (2000b: 255). If, unlike some of his more impatient contemporaries, Marx realizes that “there can be no talk of a real revolution” so long as “the productive forces of bourgeois society” can sustain a degree of “general prosperity”, he remains no less convinced that the longer-term prospect of a “new revolution [. . .] is just as certain” as the economic crisis that will eventually overwhelm these forces (2000b: 324). Insofar as “the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (Marx and Engels 2000: 255), this primary meaning of revolution might seem to preclude any significant reference to strategy, or to those elements of consciousness, deliberation, volition, and so on, that must condition any taking of strategic decisions. Rather than consider the choices that might confront proletarian political organizations, the science of history seems to be more concerned with the nature or “secret” of the proletariat’s material existence, with the way it embodies the imminent “dissolution” of the capitalist order of the things—in short, with “what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do” (Marx and Engels 1975b: 37).3 From this perspective, it makes perfect sense for Marx and Engels, in ways that invite comparison with Kant’s otherwise antithetical approach to the issue, to stress the ways that revolution is more a necessary sequence that one undergoes rather than a deliberate process that one leads or makes; more a fact of nature than an exercise of distinctively political will. To the extent that Marx believes “the principle of politics is the will”, he consistently denounces the delusions of those who over-estimate the role of politics, those who, like Robespierre or Blanqui, appear to believe in “the omnipotence of the will”, and who thereby remain “incapable of discovering the sources of social evils” (1975b: 199).4 Right from his earliest investigations of the “objective character” of social configurations, Marx tends to stress those “relationships [. . .] which are as independent of the will as breathing”, whose determinations can be ascertained “with

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almost the same certainty as a chemist determines under which external conditions given substances will form a compound” (2000a: 30).5 As Engels liked to emphazise, both before and after the tumult of 1848, “revolutions are not made deliberately and arbitrarily, but everywhere and at all times are the necessary consequence of circumstances which are not in any way whatever dependent either on the will or on the leadership of individual parties or of whole classes” (1847: 102). Understood in this way, as Engels would soon conclude, “a revolution is a purely natural phenomenon” which is less the result of “ordinary social rules of development” than the expression of “physical laws”; or, rather, a sequence in which the social tendencies “assume a much more physical character, and the material force of necessity makes itself more strongly felt”—and the more one is prepared to operate as “the representative of a party, ” Engels adds, the more “one is dragged into this whirlpool of irresistible natural necessity” (1851: 289). A similar emphasis will persist with Kautsky’s influential conception of Germany’s Social Democrats as “a revolutionary party, not one that makes revolutions” (2007: 41). So long as Marx and his followers remain confident about their own ability to anticipate longer-term historical trends, nothing can shake their conviction that communism no longer needs to be understood as an “ideal” whose realization depends on its capacity to persuade and engage—and thus on its confrontation with other ideals that might solicit mass commitment—but simply grasped as “the real movement [die wirkliche Bewegung] which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx and Engels 1975a: 45), a movement whose development can be traced, in broad outlines at least, with a certainty resembling that of a natural science.6 From our second perspective, however, Marx stresses what appears to be a very different dimension of political practice. If the terminal crisis of capitalism is inevitable, what is equally inevitable, he assumes, against all those who might hope for a “smooth” or peaceful transition towards socialism, is capital’s determination to fight for its survival by all available means. No mode of production dies without using all of the weapons at its disposal, and there is no avoiding the fact that the road to socialism must first overcome the obstacles raised by a last-ditch “slave-owners’ revolt” or “pro-slavery rebellion” (Engels 1977: 113). If “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the working class to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy” (Marx and Engels 2000: 261), the only way the proletariat might ultimately prevail in a climactic civil war with the bourgeoisie is by assuming temporary but thorough-going dictatorial power, the sort of power that the Paris Commune of 1871 began to wield as it devised a political “lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule” (Marx 1986: 334). Marx consistently describes the unique class actor capable of exercising such dictatorship, “the only resolutely revolutionary class”, in terms that stress its clarity and determination (Marx and Engels 1978: 277). Whereas the petty bourgeoisie tends to “vacillate”, torn between its desires to escape precarity and to protect what it owns, the political psychology of the proletariat is characterized by the sort of “courage, determination and self-sacrifice” that allow it, and it alone, to prevail in a drawn-out political struggle with its enemies (Marx and Engels 1978: 282). From this perspective, the question of political strategy becomes altogether vital, a matter of political life and

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death, whenever there’s an actual prospect of revolutionary change in the primary or historical sense. Marx is most emphatic about this during the revolutionary sequence that he himself lived most intensely, in 1848–50. Although texts like Class Struggles in France and the infamous “Address to the Communist League” of March 1850 are often derided as youthful adventurism, there is no reason to think that the principles they rely on would not apply again in any genuinely revolutionary conjuncture, and a good case can be made for interpreting Bolshevik political strategy as inspired, in large part, by the Marxian-Blanquist logic of the March address.7 The revolutionary strategy Marx defends in 1850 relies in every sense on the proletariat’s capacity to take and implement forceful strategic decisions. A revolutionary proletarian organization must retain its independence at all costs; it must create and reinforce its own institutions; it must ensure that its supporters remain armed and organized; it must only engage in alliances that it can itself control; it must consolidate and concentrate its power “through the strictest centralization”; it must be able both to incite and restrain “direct revolutionary excitement” as the circumstances require; it must balance mass “enthusiasm” with a “calm and dispassionate estimate of the situation”; and so on (Marx and Engels 1978: 283). The proletariat can only prevail if it acts on its own initiative and on its own terms, relying on its own strength—the fact, for instance, that “the Paris proletariat was forced into the June [1848] insurrection by the bourgeoisie” all by itself “sufficed to mark its doom” (Marx 1978a: 69). Only suitably independent and decisive leadership, Engels insists in a much-quoted passage, can initiate an insurrection and then carry it through, maintaining the “moral ascendant” that can rally all “vacillating elements” by acting “with the greatest determination, and on the offensive”; following the inspiration of “Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known: de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace!” (1979: 86). Just as importantly, only such a leadership can persevere over the difficult course of a revolutionary struggle and carry it through to its end. Unlike the “swift” and “sparkling” results of the eighteenth-century bourgeois revolutions, until they succeed in pushing class struggle to the point of its decisive resolution our contemporary “proletarian revolutions” must “criticize themselves constantly”; must “deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts”; and “recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” (Marx 1979: 107). The only “end” of revolution must remain the still-distant final victory over a ruthless and desperate enemy, a victory that can itself only be achieved by revolutionary, rather than reformist or evolutionary means—hence the slogan that ends the March address, that will be revived by Trotsky and then effectively adopted as Lenin’s guiding strategy in 1917: “die Revolution in Permanenz” (Marx and Engels 1978b: 287). What endures over the course of a revolution is thus an ever more radical and uncompromising resolve; what succumbs or fades away are all those “pre-revolutionary traditional appendages”: “illusions” and “projects from which the revolutionary party was not free” and could not be freed, before it was tempered by the actual experience of mortal struggle, defeat and victory (Marx 1978a: 47).8 Whenever revolutionary change is at stake, what the situation demands is not stolid passivity in the face of inevitability,

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but, on the contrary, “the greatest possible efforts” and the most intense activity (Marx and Engels 1978a: 377). In other words, if in one sense the “expropriation of the expropriators” can be anticipated in theory as the historical equivalent of a logical deduction, in practice it can only be achieved by the disciplined unification of the proletariat as a universal class, i.e. “through a revolution in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organization is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished” (Marx and Engels 1975a: 88). From the perspective of the revolutionary actor, what is at stake is, indeed, nothing less than a transition from the realm of the necessity to the realm of freedom. Once we properly understand the social forces “which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them, ” so then, “it depends only upon ourselves, ” as Engels puts it in his most widely read text, “to subject them more and more to our own will, and, by means of them, to reach our own ends” (1987: 266, 270). Considered after the fact, and in the wake of those revolutionary contortions that marked the twentieth century, what is perhaps most remarkable about Marx and Engels’s approach is that they appear to see no significant tension between these two perspectives. The more convinced we might be of the eventual certainty of victory, they assume, the more vigorously we will fight to secure it. Similar convictions help to account for Lenin’s self-assured handling of what Lukács called “the actuality of the revolution,” and for Trotsky’s suggestive interest in the Calvinist world view of an earlier generation of revolutionaries—members of an “ascendant bourgeoisie [which] felt that the laws of history were behind it.” Together, they developed the doctrine of predestination with its denial of free will, which, Trotsky argues, was an expression of their “revolutionary energy” and their readiness “to accomplish a great historical act,” rather than as a quasi-Stoic acknowledgement of their insignificance (1925).9 Both Marx and Engels died before the apparently self-evident alignment of historical necessity and proletarian initiative came unstuck, and by the time Lenin saw it coming it was too late for him and his party to address the problem directly. Each in their own way—Trotsky, Benjamin and Gramsci—suffered the consequences of their uncoupling, but even Gramsci’s attempt to devise a way forward is compromised by his reluctance or inability to dissociate the “collective political will” he affirms from the “historical necessity” he still assumes. As Bernstein and then Kautsky had already demonstrated, the resulting compromise will always risk making too many concessions to the prevailing way of the world. Any attempt at a lasting renewal of revolutionary strategy must avoid repeating a similar mistake.

Notes 1 2 3

See also “On the Jewish Question” (1975c: 150–52). See also “Provisional Rules for the International Working Men’s Association” (1985: 14). See also The German Ideology (1975: 52).

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx Kant falls prey to a similar illusion, insofar as he “made the materially motivated determinations of the will of the French bourgeois into pure self-determinations of ‘free will’ of the will in and for itself, of the human will, and so converted it into purely ideological conceptual determinations and moral postulates” (Marx and Engels 1975a: 195). See also “Speech to the Central Committee of the Communist League” (1978b: 626). See also Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels 1975c: 337), The German Ideology (Marx 1975a: 48), and Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (Marx 2000b: 425). See also The Communist Manifesto (2000: 256). See, for instance, August Nimtz, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917 (2014: 154–55). “In a word: the revolution [of 1848 in France] made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragi-comic achievements, but on the contrary by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, by the creation of an opponent in combat with whom alone the party of insurrection ripened into a really revolutionary party” (Marx 1978a: 47). “An analogy can with some truth be drawn between the doctrine of predestination in the Puritans’ revolution and the role of Marxism in the revolution of the proletariat. In both cases the highest level of political activity rests not upon subjective impulse but on an iron conformity with a law, only in the one case mystically distorted and in the other scientifically known” (Trotsky 1925).

References Engels, F. (1976), “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Engels, F. (1977), 1886 Preface to K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Vintage. Engels, F. (1979), Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Engels, F. (1982), “Letter to Marx, 13 February 1851,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works Vol. 38. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Engels, F. (1987), Anti-Dühring, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Kautsky, K. (2007), The Road to Power, John H. Kautsky (Ed.), trans. Raymond Meyer, Centre for Socialist History. Marx, K. (1975a), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1975b), “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform,’ ” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1975c), “On the Jewish Question,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1976), The Poverty of Philosophy, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1977), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Vintage.

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Marx, K. (1978a), The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1978b), “Speech to the Central Committee of the Communist League,” in Marx/ Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1979), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1985), “Provisional Rules for the International Working Men’s Association,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 20. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1986), “The Civil War in France,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 22, 307–359. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (2000a), “The Attitude of the Mosel Region to the Cabinet Order of 24 December 1841,” in Selected Writings, David McLellan (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (2000b), The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, in Selected Writings, David McLellan (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (2000c), Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, in Selected Writings, David McLellan (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K., and F. Engels. (1975a), The German Ideology, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K., and F. Engels. (1975b), The Holy Family, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K, and F. Engels. (1975c), Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 1. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K, and F. Engels. (1978), “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10, 277–287. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K, and F. Engels. (1991), “Circular letter to August Bebel, William Liebknecht et al. ,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 45. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K., and F. Engels. (2000), The Communist Manifesto, in Selected Writings, David McLellan (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nimtz, A. (2014), Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917. New York: AIAA . Trotsky, L. (1925), Where is Britain Going?, in Leon Trotsky’s Writings on Britain, Vol. 2. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/index.htm.

47

Social Relations Kevin Floyd

Marx’s most detailed account, by far, of social relations is his elaboration, over many years and many volumes, of specifically capitalist social relations. His most familiar categories—labor, value and capital—can hardly be dissociated from social relations as he understands them. But this very term—capitalist social relations—already implies a paradox, the implications of which this essay will sketch. If we begin with the proposition that what social relations do is organize social life, then it would appear to go without saying that the notion of social relations suggests relations between living human beings, between people. But one of the basic insights of Marx’s analysis of capitalist social relations is that these relations are, in a crucial sense, not relations between people at all. We may begin with one of Capital’s most famous claims: “The commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things . . . [T]he definite social relation between men themselves . . . assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 1976: 164–5). Understanding Marx’s account of capitalist social relations requires an understanding of this peculiar inversion of relationality as such, the way in which relations between people somehow become, more saliently, relations between objects. It also requires that we consider the extent to which this inversion does or does not facilitate something that can reasonably be called social life, a question to which we will return. Capitalist social relations are often specified as relations of production. Complex relations of production imply a complex social division of labor, in which distinct, specialized forms of labor are carried out privately by individual producers, or in distinct industrial branches. But we only experience the inherently social nature of our labor in the exchange of our products. Capital represents the varied, qualitatively distinct use values produced across the division of labor as quantitatively commensurate exchange values. And Marx emphasizes that this representation is no mere subjective illusion: “the social relations between their private labors appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx 1976: 165–6, my emphasis). So you inhabit an objective, undeniable social relation; for example, with the super-exploited fifteen-year-old, working at a table somewhere thousands of miles away, whom you will never meet and whose name you will never 419

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know, who made your shoes. The fact that this relation is unlikely ever to become manifest in your daily experience does not make it less real, or less social, or less characteristic of the range of global production and exchange processes in which you participate. Capitalist social relations systemically bind us together, then. But they cannot do this without also dispersing us, without confining us within our own specialized, isolated corner of the division of labor. Social cohesion is in this way the inseparable, contradictory “other side” of social atomization. Capitalist social relations are at once hyper-socialized and radically de-socialized. This contradiction is sometimes suggestively glossed as capital’s “asocial sociality” (e.g., Lohoff 2014). Capital’s most consequential relation is, of course, the antagonism between capitalists and workers, between a minority who own and control the means of production and who purchase labor power, and the vast majority who sell labor power because they have nothing else to sell. On the one hand, this is a voluntary relation of exchange; one party buys labor power, the other sells it. On the other hand, it is compulsory; generally speaking, these two parties must buy and sell. Those who possess only labor power are compelled to sell it because they need to buy commodities in order to maintain their own conditions of existence. But the capitalist is also dominated by capital. Because commodified labor power is the sole source of value, the capitalist must buy this commodity if she is to secure surplus-value, and thereby accumulate capital. And capital’s defining objective is, precisely, to accumulate and to expand; its valorization is its reason for existence. Marx defines capital as value in motion, value in the process of self-valorization. Capital is an “automatic subject, ” while the capitalist, by contrast, is only “capital personified” (Marx 1976: 255, 254). And if capital is, in this respect, a subject with agency that dominates mere human capitalists, then here again we can see the coercive nature of capitalist social relations. Indeed, among the many contradictions that, for Marx, centrally define these relations, the most vertiginous is perhaps the way in which we are somehow forcefully subjected to processes that we ourselves produce. The fact that capital must expand if it is to remain capital implies, moreover, that capitalist social relations must be understood both systemically and temporally, or, to invoke an older structuralist vocabulary, both synchronically and diachronically. Any historical sense of these relations must confront the question of their maintenance over time, their reproduction. Because capital’s sole objective is self-valorization, first of all, its relations of production produce much more than commodified use-values; they must necessarily produce surplus-value, the value form that motivates the production of use-values in the first place. It is therefore imperative that these relations of production also produce, and reproduce, the capital/labor relation itself; this relation must be sustained if capital’s self-valorization is to be sustained. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this point, because here we can begin to discern the ways in which capital’s systemic contradictions—its asocial sociality—tend to play out over time. The long term historical tendency of these relations is, in fact, to fail to reproduce themselves. There are any number of countertendencies that can, and have, mitigated and delayed this tendency toward failure, and, of course, capitalist social relations have been forcefully enveloping the world for a long time. But this is precisely why it is

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crucial to understand this self-undermining tendency, which turns on the very source of value; capital tends over the long term to make labor superfluous to production, to diminish value’s very lifeblood. By increasing labor productivity—the basic imperative driving technological innovation, an increase ultimately driven across the system by the forces of competition—capital increases the labor time that produces surplusvalue, the source of profit. But it thereby also decreases the labor time that goes back to the laboring population in the form of wages. This pressure to decrease labor time tends, ultimately, to mean that fewer workers across the system are employed, while machinery becomes more elaborate and more expensive. But to expel labor from the production process is, again, to expel the very source of capital. Technological innovation which, over the short term, tends to facilitate the accumulation of capital, will tend over the long term to hinder it. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, capital “presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth” (Marx 1973: 706). Or, in the terms of Harry Braverman’s classic account of labor and monopoly capital, “the purpose of machinery is not to increase but to decrease the number of workers attached to it” (1974: 384). In other words, the same social relations that bind capital and labor together, just as persistently and powerfully, drive them apart. Thus, the long-term functionality of capitalist social relations can hardly be safely left in the hands of capital itself. The always partial, temporary mitigation of this self-undermining tendency has, therefore, generally required forms of labor and wealth that are excluded from the value form, from the circuit of capital, altogether. Domestic, traditionally gendered household labor, for example, is typically understood as the site of labor power’s generational reproduction. The value of the commodity labor power, for Marx, is determined by the value of the means of subsistence it requires; but this implies that domestic household labor, the labor that transforms those means of subsistence into labor-power in the first place, adds no new value to that commodity. In order for labor-power to have a value, the domestic labor that reproduces labor-power has to be dissociated from the circuit of value (Endnotes 2013: 61–2). The other readily available example is the capitalist state. The twentieth-century welfare state in the North, for instance, famously administered the living conditions of its laboring population with unprecedented vigilance, encouraging monetary and political strategies, e.g., Keynesianism and unionization, to facilitate consumption, subsidizing education, health care and pensions, and generally investing in the long-term vitality of its laboring population. The class relation has also clearly been maintained by the infrastructural forms of wealth provided by the state: electrical utilities, water supplies and transportation networks, all of which help to secure the profitable articulation of capital and labor. The contemporary significance of these extra-capitalist means of securing capital’s social cohesion can be discerned if we consider what has happened to them in recent decades. Put simply, these means have become pervasively commodified, a development that can hardly be seen as promising the social stability they have served to ensure, however unevenly. I will conclude by briefly considering the potentially grave social implications of this set of developments. Consider, for instance, the contemporary expropriation of gendered, reproductive labor from some regions of the globe to others. This includes, in the global North, an uneven shift away from unpaid domestic labor, its

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outsourcing to precarious forms of service labor, especially migrant labor, and, indeed, a voluminous relocation from South to North of laboring women, especially nannies and maids (Chang 2000; Sassen 2000; Ferguson and McNally 2014). This neocolonial internationalization of reproductive labor is also a symptom of a contemporary crisis of capitalist relations more generally. Lise Vogel makes the crucial dialectical point that the gendering of reproductive labor can be understood in terms of capital’s most basic social contradictions, that capital is always, either potentially or actually, caught between two incompatible tendencies: to naturalize womanhood as that which reproduces labor power, and thereby dissociate womanhood from the circuit of value; or to draw women into the circuit of value in the form of relatively inexpensive labor power (Vogel 2013). The international “feminization of labor” we have witnessed in recent decades is in this respect a powerful indication that the cheapening of labor, its disposability, has become a higher priority for capital than labor’s reproduction (Endnotes 2013). The now depressingly familiar sell-off of education, health care, pensions, water and electrical utilities, and transportation systems, meanwhile, threatens to erase the distinction so critical to capitalist social cohesion: between commodity production and circulation on the one hand, and its infrastructural preconditions on the other. And it can hardly be surprising that subjecting these reproductive functions to the logic of profitability threatens their functionality, to which any number of contemporary crises—the education crisis, the water crisis, the health care crisis—attest. And these crises necessarily return us to the question of social life. Ernst Lohoff starkly formulates the implications of these developments: [W]hen the state’s contribution to wealth production is converted into commodities, they lose the safeguard provided by the state. Here the advance of the commodity pushes society rapidly toward its own dissolution. The exclusion of those whose labor power can no longer be valorized, the dismantling of the social safety net so as gradually to turn over all responsibility for provision of care to the market—all this proves itself upon closer examination to consist of partial moments in a much more sweeping and generalized process of desocialization. 2014: 162–3

To this we need to add the forceful contemporary disarticulation of capital and labor. Global value production appears to be contracting, with surplus populations expanding. Numerous analyzes, divergent though they may be in emphasis or in levels of abstraction, have maintained that new value production is currently hamstrung by persistent overcapacity, by unprecedentedly high productivity worldwide and the accompanying difficulty of absorbing significant additional surplus labor (e.g., Kliman 2012; Endnotes 2010; Kurz 2014; Clover and Benavav 2014). A revealing 2011 analysis of the global proletariat estimated the total global surplus population as high as 2.4 billion—roughly one-third of the planet’s current population—an estimate that includes the “vulnerably employed, ” the officially unemployed, and the additional “globally inactive” population (Foster, McChesney and Jonna 2011: 20–1).

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The question of capitalist social relations, then, arrives inevitably at a question already implicit in the notion of asocial sociality: How are we to understand the relation between capitalist social relations on the one hand, and social life—by which I mean social relations in which people are not dominated by things—on the other? It should be obvious that, for huge portions of the global population, a relatively harmonious relation between social life and capitalist social relations has hardly ever obtained. But such harmony is also increasingly in question in places like Europe and the US, for populations that have tended to have better luck, normally as an effect of disharmony elsewhere. When entire governments, in increasing numbers, face financial bankruptcy; when employment is anemic even in wealthy countries; when large, impoverished swaths of the planet increasingly appear consigned to what Silvia Federici has called “zero degree reproduction” (2012: 103); when there is no sign that capital can re-absorb significant portions of the global surplus population into the value production process; when capital’s social cohesion, such as it is, seems to require much more in the way of police, prisons and border patrols than, say, schools or health care; in such a situation, the social relations that sustain capital may appear less compatible than ever with anything that might be expected to sustain social life. And this is not even to mention capital’s unmissable role in ongoing environmental devastation. It may or may not be overstating the case to claim, with Lohoff, that we are witnessing a “sweeping and generalized process of desocialization. ” But the question of capitalist social relations necessitates, at a minimum, reckoning with the problem of their historical unfolding and their long-term consequences. And today, this may mean asking whether those relations have created a situation in which Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, “there is no such thing as society, ”—begins to look less like the description of a world that could never exist, and more like self-fulfilling prophecy.

References Braverman, H. (1974), Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press. Chang, G. (2000), Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy, Boston, MA : South End. Clover, J. and A. Benanav (2014), “Can Dialectics Break BRICS ?” South Atlantic Quarterly 113(4): 743–59. Endnotes. (2010), “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital, ” in Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form, London: Endnotes. Endnotes. (2013), “The Logic of Gender, ” in Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes, London: Endnotes. Federici, S. (2012), Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland, CA : PM Press. Ferguson, S. and D. McNally. (2014), “Precarious Migrants: Gender, Race and the Social Reproduction of the Global Working Class, ” in L. Panitch and G. Albo (eds), Socialist Register 2015: Transforming Classes, London: Merlin, 1–23. Foster, J., R. McChesney, and R. Jonna. (2011), “The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism, ” Monthly Review 63(6): 1–31. Kliman, A. (2012), The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, London: Pluto.

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Kurz, R. (2014), “The Crisis of Exchange Value: Science as Productivity, Productive Labor, and Capitalist Reproduction, ” in N. Larsen, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown (eds), Marxism and the Critique of Value, Chicago: MCMʹ , 17–75. Lohoff, E. (2014), “Off Limits, Out of Control: Commodity Society and Resistance in the Age of ‘Deregulation and Denationalization’, ” in N. Larsen, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown (eds), Marxism and the Critique of Value, Chicago, IL : MCMʹ , 151–86. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sassen, S. (2000), “Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival, ” Journal of International Affairs 53(2): 503–24. Vogel, L. (2013), Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, Leiden: Brill.

48

Utopia Gerry Canavan

First coined by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 philosophic treatise and pseudotravelogue, the word utopia may well be the most enduring pun in the history of English literature. Simultaneously connoting eu-topos, the good place, and ou-topos, nowhere or no place, utopia is the paradise that doesn’t exist—the perfect location for any number of fantastic speculations, brutal satires, pie-in-the-sky political programs and desperate dreams of other ways of life. In another era these utopian speculations were (like More’s own) literally hidden lands or lost islands on the other side of the world, but, as the world has become more and more completely mapped, the site for utopia has typically shifted to an alternative (usually future) time (uchronia). Likewise, as the term has gained currency it has developed a number of useful counter-terms: 1. dystopia (dys-topos, the bad place): the opposite of a utopia, which typically serves as a warning to the present; a paradigmatic dystopian narrative would focus on a wicked state that one must overthrow or seek to flee. 2. anti-utopia: the negation of a utopia, which serves as the disproof of utopian possibility; rather than keeping open the possibility of historical mutability, as in the possibility of overthrowing or fleeing the dystopia, the anti-utopia argues instead that meaningful historical difference is impossible and all human social structures will necessarily exhibit hierarchy and exploitation. 3. anti-dystopia: a less-used fourth category to suggest the negation of dystopian possibility, i.e., that despite what appears to be a world of avoidable misery and needless pain we are actually living out a divine plan in which all things happen for the best (as in most Christian theology). Other key terms in contemporary utopian thinking include the idea of the break, the super-historical rupture that separates the utopian society from the ordinary outcomes of history, and the enclave, the tendency of utopias to eliminate internal barriers while bulwarking external ones. In some cases the break and the enclave become the same thing; the foundational gesture of More’s original Utopia, for instance, was King Utopus’s digging of an immense trench that turned Utopia from a peninsula into an island.1 In Marx’s own time, it was the tension between perfectability and plausibility in utopian political transformation that motivated him to speak so negatively of the 425

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thinkers on the left that he called, derisively, the “Utopian Socialists. ” In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels’s critique of the utopian socialists is relentless; they devote an entire section to demolishing utopian idealism and an implied refusal to link a critique of society to class antagonism: The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society? Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel. Marx 1969: n.p.

The “fantastic pictures of future society” promulgated by the utopian socialists correspond to the “first instinctive yearnings” of the proletariat “for a general reconstruction of society, ” but at the same time interrupt the development of class consciousness by redirecting that critique in unhelpful directions. Thus they are “purely, ” or merely, “Utopian”; “these fantastic attacks on [capitalism], lose all practical value and all theoretical justification . . . They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms” (Marx 1969: n.p.). In ignoring the practical questions of how the utopian future society might be brought about through revolution, and how it might be organized and sustained afterwards, the Utopian Socialists propose only “castles in the air” that ultimately speak to the sentimentality of the bourgeoisie rather than any practical or collective effort to transform society. And yet, despite this failing, the Utopian Socialists are “fanatical and superstitious” in their commitment to “the miraculous effects of their social science” (Marx 1969: n.p.)—perhaps most infamously registered in Charles Fourier’s claim that under his utopian system the North Pole would turn tropical and the seas would turn to lemonade.2 This sort of negative utopianism was contrasted in Marx and Engels’s writings with their own “scientific socialism, ” a term used primarily by Engels but reflecting the thinking of both. In contrast to the idealism of the Utopian Socialists that would hold that “socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power” (Engels 1970: n.p.), the scientific socialists commit themselves to the material analysis of power relations in the class antagonism and the need for revolutionary thinking grounded in class struggle. Without this materialist grounding, socialism becomes reactionary and doomed, running counter to its stated purpose by reinforcing the ungrounded dreams and self-protective wishful thinking of the bourgeoisie. And yet, despite this key theoretical distinction, it cannot be denied that Marx is certainly something of a utopian thinker after all; both in the positive sense of positing

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a future state in which the toxic class antagonism of actually existing history has been resolved and also in the more negative sense of not providing sufficient details about either the emergence of that state or its general organization. Even in Engels’s famous “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, ” which elaborates on the distinction between the two varieties of socialism in the Manifesto at length, the end state of “Proletarian Revolution, ” ostensibly the fulcrum of the entire discussion, is reduced to a single paragraph at the end: III. Proletarian Revolution. Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion, as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master—free. Engels 1970: n.p.

Marx and Engels’s futurological imagination fares little better in the Manifesto itself, which similarly names communism primarily through a sort of negative theology; communism will not possess this and that feature of contemporary capitalism but “can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” (Marx 1969: n.p., emphasis mine). Beyond that sense of communism as a radical opposite, the Manifesto, like most of Marx and Engels’s writings, is itself notoriously light on specifics. Perhaps because of this internal tension, many thinkers working in the Marxist tradition have been attracted to the study of utopia and its central place, as the theoretical classless end-state of history called communism, within socialist thought. Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) saw this dialectic between idealism and materialism as the feature that distinguished Marxism from all other systems of thought, nearly all of which (he argued) are constituted by what he called “the principle of hope” (Bloch 1995: q.v.); Marxism is unique only insofar as it provides a concrete blueprint for how that hope might be actualized. The highly influential work of Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940), while not organized around utopia per se, nonetheless replicates the concept in the messianism that runs throughout Benjamin’s thought and provides the antidote to his otherwise deeply grim diagnosis of society: the promise that each terrible moment of class domination and exploitation also contains within itself the possibility of its own supersession, just as “every second of time, ” however miserable, is yet “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Benjamin 1969: 264). In the contemporary moment, the literary critic and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (1934–) is likely the thinker best associated with this strain of utopian Marxism. Jameson’s work has elevated Bloch’s “principle of hope” and Benjamin’s

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messianism to the kernel of optimism that undergirds all artistic, philosophical and futurological cultural production. “[A]ll contemporary works of art, ” Jameson declares provocatively in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, ” “whether those of high culture and modernism or of mass culture and commercial culture—have as their underlying impulse . . . our deeper fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived” (Jameson 1979: 147). In his Archaeologies of the Future Jameson replicates Marx and Engels’s attack on the Utopian socialists with the distinction he draws between the utopian program and the utopian impulse (Jameson 2005: 3–5ff.). Utopian programs are imagined blueprints for Utopia, always hopelessly compromised and corrupted by the limitations of their origins in the pre-Utopian mind, which are in practice frequently ludicrous, despite the seriousness with which they are proposed and discussed. But the preposterous nature of most utopian scheming does not detract from the importance of the utopian impulse—the utopian form—the Blochian dream of a better world in the abstract that animates and motivates all human creativity, perhaps especially the genre of science fiction (sf). Jameson’s former student, Carl Freedman, likewise extends this notion to see it as the constitutive tension at the heart of Marxism. Freedman juxtaposes the deflationary, demystifying tendencies of film noir, which shows us the dirt and grit of the fallen world in which we live, with the inflationary, inspirational ambitions of sf, which shows us other, better possible worlds we might yet create. He further argues that this dialectical push and pull between deflation and inflation is what animates Marxist thought. “The deflationary dimension, ” Freedman writes, “is represented by the attempt to destroy all illusions necessary or useful to the preservation of class society in general and of capitalism in particular” (Freedman 2009: 72); it is, in Engels’s terms, the “science” of “scientific socialism. ” But deflation by itself risks bitterness and despair, even a sort of philosophical-theoretical suicide; it requires an inflationary countermove to prevent hopelessness. “For Marxism, visionary transcendence, ” the Blochian principle of hope, Jameson’s utopian impulse, “is the necessary completion of astringent demystification” (Freedman 2009: 73). The synthetic union of these two tendencies produces a Marxism that can be optimistic without succumbing to idealism, and materially grounded without succumbing to despair—the dialectic engine necessary to change the world, and not just interpret it, as Marx once famously proclaimed (Marx 1969–72: n.p.). In his two-part preface to the 500th anniversary edition of More’s Utopia in 2016, China Miéville notes the urgency of this spirit of change in an era that is already filled with too much. In a time of climate change, desertification, ocean acidification and mass extinction, our dreamers find themselves producing not visions of utopia but apocatopia, utopalypse: “a culture of ruination, dreams of falling cities, a peopleless world where animals explore . . . It’s as if we still hanker to see something better and beyond the rubble, but lack the strength” (Miéville 2016: 21). Miéville’s Anthropocene utopianism reproduces Marx’s original divide between the Utopian socialists and the scientific socialists; he concedes that the longing for utopia comes from good intentions, but that it needs to be disciplined by material conditions to be anything more than just the fantasy of the “exoneration of entrenched power” (Miéville 2016: 23). Thus “We

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should utopia as hard as we can. Along with a fulfilled humanity we should imagine flying islands, self-constituting coralline neighborhoods, photosynthesizing cars bred from bio-spliced bone-marrow. Big Rock Candy Mountains. ” But for this hope to be “tempered into a weapon, ” as it needs to be, it must be animated by the spirit of class antagonism, by total revolution, even perhaps by revenge: “We need utopia, but to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can’t afford. In the face of what it has done, we cannot think utopia without hate . . . To believe otherwise would be quaint if it were not so dangerous” (Miéville 2016: 26–7). Here again is utopia, as Marx and Engels had it: not wishful thinking, not the emergency exit, not some last-minute miracle escape, but, rather, “the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat . . . support [of] every revolutionary movement against the existent social and political order of things . . . the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” (Marx 1969: n.p.). Especially in our bad times, a properly Marxist utopia can have political value only insofar as it is also utterly ruthless, in the sense Marx once conveyed to Arnold Ruge; utopia for us can only be the “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be” (Marx 1843).

Notes 1

2

This summary of contemporary utopian theory has been distilled largely from the work of Fredric Jameson, discussed below, especially his 2005 Archaeologies of the Future. For anti-dystopia, see Rob McAlear, “The Value of Fear: Toward a Rhetorical Model of Dystopia. ” Of course, in our moment of ecological crisis, Fourier’s proposed climate changes sound fiendishly apocalyptic, rather than utopian, a problem I return to in the closing discussion of Miéville.

References Benjamin, W. (1969), “Theses on the Philosophy of History, ” in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York: Shocken Books, 253–64. Bloch, E. (1995), The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight, Boston, MA : MIT Press. Engels, F. (1970), “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, ” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow : Progress Publishers, 95–151. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed August 14, 2018). Freedman, C. (2009), “Marxism, Cinema, and Some Dialetics of Science Fiction and Film Noir, ” in M. Bould and C. Miéville (eds), Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 66–82. Jameson, F. (1979), “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, ” Social Text 1: 130–48. Jameson, F. (2005), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Durham, NC : Duke University Press.

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Marx, K. (1843), “Letter to Ruge. ” Available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm (accessed August 15, 2018). Marx, K. and F. Engels. (1969), “Manifesto of the Communist Party, ” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow : Progress Publishers, 98–137. Reprinted at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ (accessed August 14, 2018). Marx, K. (1969–72), Theses on Feuerbarch, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 13–15. Available online: https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm (accessed August 14, 2018). McAlear, R. (2010), “The Value of Fear: Toward a Rhetorical Model of Dystopia, ” Interdisciplinary Humanities 27(2): 24–42. Miéville, C. (2016), “Introduction: The Limits of Utopia, ” in T. More, Utopia, London: Verso Books, 11–27.

49

Value Mathias Nilges

Marx’s theory of value emerges out of his critique of the work of David Ricardo (especially Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817) and Adam Smith (especially The Wealth of Nations, 1776), who forward the predominant account of value in the nineteenth century: the “labor theory of value. ” The labor theory of value suggests that the price of a commodity can be objectively measured by the amount of labor that the production process requires, usually quantified in average labor hours. As long as we understand the value of a commodity in this way, however, and as long as we accept that labor time expresses itself directly in the value of a commodity, Marx argues, we reproduce the foreshortened and simplified account of value and of the basal relations and mechanisms of capitalism that capitalism itself seeks to establish. Marx’s critique of the labor theory of value thus proposes that we must, instead, examine the category of value itself, not solely in order to better understand how labor relates to the value of an object, but, rather, to determine why the category of value exists in the first place. In other words, Marx seeks to understand the centrality of the category of value itself in capitalist society. Marx understands the relation between value and capitalist society dialectically: the concept of value is defined by and assumes a specific function under capitalism, but this specific form of value also constitutes the foundations of the capitalist system itself. Capitalism creates a value form that is specific to it, as much as capitalism in turn depends upon the structures, operations, social relations and forms of ideology that are made possible by the capitalist value form. Marx’s theory of value, therefore, traces more than an economic relation. It is the basis for the entirety of Marx’s system of thought and of Marxian social critique. As a result, the logic of value must be understood as one of the cornerstones of Marxian thought tout court and it informs most of the major works of his mature period, in particular his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1853), the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1861) and all three volumes of Capital (1867, 1885 and 1894). Our understanding of Marx’s theory of value, of the category of value, and of Marxian thought as a whole remains incomplete if we consider the problem of value in Marx only as a matter of the valorization of objects in the context of production. Marx’s theory of value is one of the building blocks of his critique of political economy and of his analysis of the particular social and ideological forms that correspond to and make 431

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possible the rise of capitalism. In Marx’s system of thought, the analysis of value allows us to understand the valorization of commodities and the relation between commodities and labor. Value, in other words, is more than a category that serves the purpose of economic analysis. It constitutes the conceptual and analytical basis for Marx’s examination of the relation between economy, society and ideology under capitalism. The logic of value under capitalism is the guiding principle of bourgeois society, and it is, therefore, the totality of bourgeois society that Marx’s theory of value seeks to analyze and critique. The category of value also establishes the logical basis for a range of key concepts of Marxian thought, such as reification, ideology and alienation. Marx proposes that understanding value under capitalism allows us not only to understand value as a formative principle of the capitalist economy, but also of bourgeois society, as the formal logic of social life, social relations and the ideology of capitalism. It is for this reason that it is difficult to pinpoint individual, isolated passages that allow us to isolate Marx’s basic theory of value. Since value is one of the pillars of Marx’s analytical and epistemological framework, it permeates Marxian thought from beginning to end. What is possible, however, is to indicate the main points of entry, starting points that allow us to trace the complex ways in which Marx develops his theory of value as a way of developing his overall analytical framework. The commodity serves as one such point of entry into Marx’s theory of value. Marx’s basic writings on the commodity that form one point of origin for this theory of value can be found in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in the Grundrisse and in Capital, Vol. I (in particular, in Parts 1 and 2). A commodity has two kinds of value: use value and exchange value. Use value describes the commodity’s valorization with regard to the object’s utility and ability to satisfy human needs or wants. Exchange value, on the other hand, describes the value that the commodity acquires through its exchange. Exchange value is therefore an equivalent value, one external to the commodity, created through the process of exchange and without concrete relation to the commodity’s material properties. While a commodity must first acquire its value through exchange value, which proves the commodity’s utility for others as well as the utility of the expended labor time that was required to produce it, the final value of the commodity is only determined via its exchange value. In the latter lies the key operation of the capitalist process of valorization. This is, Marx suggests, one of the most fascinating aspects of the commodity: it initially appears as a simple thing that is valorized depending upon its utility. Upon closer inspection, however, the commodity reveals itself as a complex and indeed often mysterious object that acquires value through a complex, social process of exchange. The commodity is a use value, Marx argues, but, precisely since it is a commodity, it is also simultaneously and seemingly tautologically not a use value. If it were a use-value for its owner, then it would not be a commodity insofar as its value would be solely determined by its utility. While necessarily useful, the commodity acquires its value only via the process of valorization that emerges out of the process of exchange, and via the equivalency that this process establishes between the system of commodities. For our understanding of use-value under capitalism, this means, in turn, that this value itself depends upon and is specific to the logic of valorization of the commodity form, and becomes subject to the logic of value as defined in the context of capitalism; the commodity only has use value for its

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owner insofar as it has exchange value. Marx proposes that the commodity loses its independence as an object since it only has value inasmuch as it stands in relation with all other commodities. The complexities of capitalist valorization and the function of exchange value for the valorization of commodities emerge particularly clearly when we examine the ways in which labor power functions as a commodity under capitalism. In the context of capitalism, labor power itself becomes a commodity that is sold and purchased on the market. Labor power in pre-capitalist societies has use value insofar as it is directly and concretely useful to its owner; it has independent value. But just as the commodity loses its independent value, labor power as commodity under capitalism only has value insofar as it can be exchanged and sold. The sudden and complete devaluation of entire sectors of labor that can result from market changes or the decline of industries is one example of this, which reveals the absence of independent valorization of capitalist labor power. This means, in turn, that one central aspect of alienation in the context of capitalism can be understood as a consequence of the relation between labor and the logic of value under capitalism. Since labor functions as commodity, and since commodities acquire value only via a process of exchange and have no independent value—the value of labor only realizes itself through its exchange—the worker is alienated from the value of her labor and therefore from labor itself. Marx lays out this complex relation between value and labor in Parts 5, 6, and 7 of Capital, Vol. I. This example further illustrates the ways in which key concepts of Marxian thought, such as alienation, cannot be fully understood without tracing their relation to the theory of value that stabilizes Marx’s system of thought, and that binds Marx’s analysis of capitalist economics to his critique of bourgeois society. The commodification of labor power under capitalism is the foundation upon which Marx’s understanding of the relation between labor and value rests, with regard to the general process of capitalist valorization. The value of a commodity, Marx suggests, is not, as the labor theory of value suggests, determined by the labor expended in the process of its production. Instead, its value is determined by what Marx calls “abstract labor, ” as opposed to concrete labor, such as farming or carpentry. Marx understands abstract labor as human labor power as such, as a form of labor that, like the commodity, is a matter of universal equivalency under capitalism. Much like exchange value, abstract labor is a purely theoretical category; we are not able to see or touch exchange value, just as no human being actually engages in abstract labor. After all, Marx suggests, the relation between labor and value is not, in fact, a concrete relation or a concrete measure of the expenditure of time or of material properties. Rather, the term abstract labor expresses a relation that allows us to understand the creation of value itself. This means that the category of value itself, as defined under capitalism, only has value in the context of a society and as bound up with a social form that is structured around commodity exchange. As is the case with contemporary floating currencies, the value of an individual currency is determined only via its relation to other currencies, i.e. through its exchange. Neither labor nor the commodity have independent or concrete value. Their only value is the one that emerges from the process of exchange, and the value of a commodity is therefore neither a matter of its material properties nor of the amount of labor that was necessary for its production.

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Marx first lays out the basic conceptual definitions and logical relations involved in this aspect of his theory of value in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and further refines this account in Part 1 of Capital, Vol. I. Marx thus replaces the labor theory of value’s understanding of a concrete and measurable relation between labor and commodity which determines value with a system of thought that understands the creation of value as a complex set of social relations. Value, Marx argues, does not carry a label that explains what it is. Instead, it converts every commodity into a “social hieroglyphic, ” which is to say that the value of commodities is a result of, but also expresses and establishes, a social system. Neither side of the relation can be thought or examined independently under capitalism. What we examine when we try to determine the value of a commodity, therefore, Marx proposes, is our own social product. Value, in other words, is a quasi-fictional form that is created and stabilized socially, and that is not inherent in the object itself. The value of a commodity, therefore, is what Marx describes as fetishistic, for the first time in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and in greater detail in Part 1 of Capital, Vol. I; it is created socially but it also establishes the material relations of the social structure out of which it emerges. In fact, it is precisely due to this characteristic of the logic of value that Marx suggests that, under capitalism, the relation between commodities assumes a social nature while the relation between people also assumes the form of the relation between objects of exchange and trade. This is what Marx has in mind when he repeatedly describes value in Part 1 of Capital, Vol. I as a “phantasmagoric form” or as “ghostly materiality. ” Understanding value as a social relationship illustrates the importance of the logic of value and valorization as a building block for Marxian social critique. All aspects of society, its economic relations as well as its socio-political and ideological forms and relations, are re-made according to the logic of value and valorization that is specific to capitalism. It is in this sense, then, that we can understand Marx’s desire to examine not simply how value is created or how it might relate to labor. Marx asks a more fundamental question that grounds his larger project of social critique: why and how does value exist in a capitalist society? Value is the basal form of capitalism’s structure that binds together economic and social form and that is, in turn, dialectically connected to a metaphysical account of relations such as that between self and world, or between individuals, that is specific to capitalism. This is why the frequentlyencountered charge that Marx’s critique of capitalism is more a matter of metaphysics than of economics misses the mark. Marx shows us that both dimensions must be thought of together and in relation to the function their interrelation assumes under capitalism. The central concepts of Marx’s theory of value indicate that metaphysical analysis, economic inquiry and social critique must, at every point, operate together in order to trace the complex logic of capitalism. The concept of “surplus value, ” for example, which Marx establishes at the beginning of Part 3, Capital, Vol. I, describes the production of a particular kind of value that is related to the process of buying and selling labor power. Surplus value emerges as the difference between what Marx calls “variable capital, ” the labor power necessary to produce a commodity, and “constant capital, ” the resources and infrastructural costs of the production of a commodity.

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Marx suggests that the labor process is aimed at the generation of a surplus of value above and beyond the value that is equivalent to the production costs of the commodity. A surplus of labor is extracted from alienated labor, a form of exploitation based upon the worker’s separation from the means of production and by the alienation from her own labor, which makes possible the creation of surplus value. Surplus value, in turn, is utilized as profit and as the basis for future investments. Like value itself, surplus value only has meaning under capitalism. Previous forms of production were largely aimed at the creation of use value, of goods whose value was defined by concrete utility. In such modes of production it was possible to over-produce goods. However, overproduction of goods, whether forced or voluntary, differs from the production of surplus value insofar as capitalism is characterized by the production of exchange value, not use value. Surplus value, therefore, emerges only as the result of the relation between labor and value that is specific to capitalism. This relation maintains the conditions for the exploitation of labor, which in turn ensures the continued functioning of labor as an abstract exchange value, a commodity. In Parts 4 and 5 of Capital, Vol. I, Marx distinguishes between two forms of surplus value: “absolute surplus value” and “relative surplus value. ” Absolute surplus value results from what Marx calls the “formal subsumption of labor under capital. ” The worker is alienated from her own labor power and labors not for herself, but for capitalism. The owner of labor power, no longer the worker but, instead, the capitalist, employs it to produce value above and beyond the equivalent of production costs: absolute surplus value. Relative surplus value, on the other hand, describes the increase of the ratio of surplus value by way of the “real subsumption of labor under capital. ” Real subsumption can be understood as the completion of formal subsumption insofar as it describes the ways in which the entirety of the labor process is re-made in capitalism’s image. While formal subsumption describes the formal transformation of labor into a commodity that, by way of alienation and exploitation, produces value under capitalism, real subsumption describes changes to working and production conditions, and the process of assigning established forms of labor a productive role in capitalism. One crucial aspect of the real subsumption of labor is the expansion of the work day, which makes possible the extraction of surplus labor time and, therefore, of surplus value. As becomes evident through the logical constitution of the operative concepts of his theory of value, Marx seeks to lay bare not only the logic of value itself, but the ways in which the logic of value and its exploitative and alienating structures underwrite the entirety of capitalist society.

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Work David Ravensbergen

The question of the individual and social significance of work runs like a red thread through Marx’s corpus, connecting the philosophical writings of his youth with the political economy of his later life. More than any other figure in the canon of western philosophy and political thought, Marx elevated work from the mundane realm of daily life to the status of a central political category. He wrote as both a critic of capitalism and prophet of revolution, showing how the exploitation of workers is central to the process of capital accumulation, arguing that the organized working class will be the key social agent of a post-capitalist transition. Throughout his lifelong investigation into the function of work as an organizing institution of modern life, Marx was attuned to a constitutive tension that continues to animate debates around the status of work today. Within the context of capitalist society, Marx saw work as a source of drudgery and misery, an exploitative necessity imposed by economic imperatives. But, at the same time, he exalted work as the creative and practical activity we undertake in order to find fulfillment, to shape the world and to make ourselves at home in it. The move from work as toil to work as freedom is not only a question of philosophical attitude, but is ultimately a question of collective praxis. In Marx’s view, the liberation of work is the task of communism, a political formation he describes as the “real movement that abolishes the present state of things” (1998: 57). In order for work to become a freely chosen means of building a common world, the historically unfree organization of work must be overturned and a new form of collective organization created in its place. The translation of the German word Arbeit into both “work” and “labor” presents some difficulty in a discussion of Marx’s treatment of work in English. Rather than ascribe a fixed Marxian meaning to the distinction between the two English terms, the specificity of Marx’s thought is best maintained through the use of modifiers: concrete labor and abstract labor, for example. When speaking in general terms about productive activity as a facet of human existence, the two English words can be used interchangeably (Frayssé 2014: 468). Turning to the basis for the two different philosophical attitudes to work in Marx, we find the important distinction lies between work as a general, transhistorical activity and the historically specific form of work in capitalist society. Regarding the former, Marx points out in his Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy that “Labor is quite a simple category. The idea of labor in that sense, as labor 437

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in general, is also very old. Yet, labor thus simply defined by political economy is as much a modern category, as the conditions which have given rise to this simple abstraction” (1998: 18). For the ancient Greeks, work was understood to be a distraction from the higher aims of human existence, and a burden best shouldered by slaves and the low-born. While many of the pre-Socratic philosophers rejected the lowly status accorded to work, and instead saw practical technique and craftsmanship as central to the effort of understanding and shaping the material world, it was the tradition of Plato and Aristotle that came to define the Greek standpoint (Foster 2017). In their view, work is a time-consuming activity devoted to the satisfaction of mere bodily needs, and, as such, precludes the peaceful contemplation necessary for membership in the community of the polis. This sense of work as a brute fact of life is well captured in the etymology of labor: “All the European words for labor: the Latin and English labor, the Greek ponos, the French travail and the German Arbeit, signify pain and effort, and are also used for the pangs of birth. Labor has the same etymological root as labore (‘to stumble under a burden’); ponos and Arbeit have the same etymological roots as ‘poverty’ (penia in Greek and Armut in German)” (Arendt 1958: 48). The notion of work as a burden finds its clearest expression in the book of Genesis, when Jehovah places a curse on Adam and declares that work will henceforth be a source of pain and frustration. But if the depiction of work as divine punishment captures one of the main historical articulations of the idea of labor in general, it also describes the status of the modern category of labor in the eyes of the classical theorists of political economy. In the Grundrisse, Marx mocks Adam Smith for sharing the biblical view of labor, since he conceives of it only as a form of suffering and sacrifice. Although Smith argues that labor is the source of all wealth, he sees the concrete act of work as an activity with no intrinsic worth for the individual, as something undertaken only as a form of self-denial necessary to sustain life. We recognize a variant of this view today in neoclassical economics, which holds that work is a “disutility, ” a distasteful activity that entails the sacrifice of leisure. Marx concedes that this view offers a correct description of the historically unfree forms of work, from slavery to wage-labor, but sees Smith’s position as representative of a more general, cretinous preference for leisure over meaningful activity. For Marx, work is the expression of an innate human capacity to act with purpose, “a liberating activity” that unites the head and the hand in “regulating all the forces of nature” (1973). We can trace Marx’s positive appraisal of work to the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant theologians, Luther and Calvin, mark a significant shift away from the ancient attitude to work, with Luther describing work as a calling bestowed by God, and Calvin advocating work as the proper earthly activity of those predestined to salvation. But it is in Hegel’s interpretation of Protestant thought that we find the most direct antecedent of Marx’s own position. In the “Lordship and Bondage” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel uses an encounter between master and slave to illustrate the emancipatory potential of work. Although the master formally possesses the power of command, they remain isolated; it is the slave who is able to overcome their own atomized individuality, recognizing in their work the ability to

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shape the material world and their ability to act and assume membership in the larger earthly community. In this description, Hegel inverts the Greek hierarchy of freedom, arguing that leisure borne of command over others produces a stunted, hermetic individuality, while labor reveals to the one who labors their capacity to change the world, and in doing so to change themselves (Livingston 2016: 33). As Marcuse puts it, “Through his labor, man overcomes the estrangement between the objective world and the subjective world; he transforms nature into an appropriate medium for his selfdevelopment” (1955: 77). In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx notes approvingly that Hegel “grasps labor as the essence of man” (1978: 112). At his most lyrical, Marx describes the capacity to labor, conceived in the broadest possible terms, as “free, conscious activity” (1978: 76). But as we move from labor as a general category to a properly historical analysis of the particular forms assumed by labor in different societies, the emancipatory promise of work is obscured by relations of domination and hierarchy. Marx’s argument is reminiscent of Rousseau’s description of a liberated humanity in the state of nature, free of the corrupting influence of coercive institutions. While Marx posits an ideal vision of labor as a free activity that expresses a fundamentally human creative power, when he looks back across the arc of history he sees workers in chains everywhere, their freedom constrained by external forces. In societies where work is done by slaves and serfs, the coercion of labor is overt, with slaveholders and feudal lords directly responsible for the domination of those who work. But in capitalist society, alienation appears as a new form of impersonal, abstract domination. While modern workers enjoy the formal freedom of the labor contract, they surrender control over the actual process of work to the capitalist, who in turn merely embodies the abstract imperatives of competition and profit maximization. Furthermore, the institution of private property means that the worker is separated from the products of their labor. The more they work, the more they produce commodities that confront them as an “alien power, ” and are thus employed in the business of building a world in which they do not feel at home (Marx 1978: 77). Moving from the analytical register of philosophy into the critique of political economy, Marx shows how the generalized condition of alienation unfolds through the peculiar use that capitalism makes of the category of labor. By organizing the purchase and sale of individual productive activity as a commodity on the market, labor is reduced to an abstraction, considered only in terms of its capacity to produce value. As Marx argues, it is not labor that is purchased as an input into production, but rather labor-power, or the abstract capacity to perform work. According to Marx’s labor theory of value, labor-power stands unique among the mass of commodities in that it produces more value than the cost required to purchase it. While capital must pay a wage sufficient for the worker to feed and clothe themselves, and thus regenerate their capacity to sell their labor-power, that wage consists of a small portion of the overall value generated by labor-power in the production process. Simply put, workers are paid far less than the value of what they produce. It is this clear definition of exploitation that has made Marx’s critique of capitalism such a potent source of inspiration for working-class movements around the world.

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But the Marxian critique of work under capitalism goes beyond an argument over the level of wages, or the unjust distribution of the products of labor. What the abstract logic of economic calculation conceals is the fact that labor-power cannot be considered separately from the lives of those who labor. When a worker enters into a contract to sell a portion of their labor-power, they are in fact selling their own life activity in hourly increments (Marx 1978: 205). Since one of the basic conditions of capitalism is the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a class of owners, the working majority lack the ability to survive without selling their labor-power in exchange for a wage. In contemporary usage, the term wage slavery carries a hint of irony, but for Marx it held true in a very literal sense. Given the fact that workers have no choice but to sell the bulk of their lives to the owners of capital, they are fundamentally unfree and unable to exert autonomous control over how their lives are spent. The form of servitude inherent in the capitalist organization of work is revealed in more detail in Marx’s examination of the labor process. Since the market coordinates economic activity on the basis of commodified labor-power, individual capitalists are engaged in ceaseless competition to extract ever-increasing amounts of value from a single unit of labor-power. Increasing the level of surplus value generated by workers can be done by simply lengthening the working day, which Marx describes as absolute surplus value, or maximizing efficiency through the implementation of labor-saving machinery and techniques of scientific management, known as relative surplus value. Both strategies should be familiar to workers today. Despite long-standing legislation regulating the length of the working day, the shift to freelance work and the expectation of overtime mark the continuation of absolute surplus value. We need only look to a company like Amazon, where warehouse workers’s movements are tracked electronically and managers send warnings to hand-held devices when a worker moves slower than the time allotted for any given task, to recognize but one example of the ongoing drive to maximize relative surplus value. Despite his relentless cataloguing of the capitalist degradation of labor and its effects on the overall organization of society, it is the idea that work could finally become both the source of individual fulfillment and a rationally organized means of building a shared world that constitutes the truly utopian kernel of Marx’s thought. Just as Hegel argued for the paradoxical freedom of the slave in the face of the master’s domination, Marx insisted that the unfreedom of the capitalist organization of labor provided the foundation for labor’s emancipation. For the European workers’s movement of the mid-nineteenth century, Marx’s claim was based on more than philosophical speculation: it offered a convincing descriptive account of the new world being created by the extension of capitalist production across Europe. The factory system appeared to harbor “the kernel of a new society in formation” in which waged workers would constitute the majority of the population, labor would be organized along rational lines, atomized individuality would be transcended in the figure of the collective worker, and the human relationship with the living world could be consciously and rationally determined (Endnotes 2015: 75). If workers could translate their shared experience of exploitation into militant political organization, the superfluous class of capitalist owners could be done away with, and the basic

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human power of free, conscious activity placed under democratic control. But, looking back at the numerous historical attempts to build a socialist society, and considering the waning fortunes of the organized Left and the labor movement today, these basic parameters of the Marxist understanding of the revolutionary potential of work warrant re-examination. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, a primary line of contention in Marxist theory has been the question of what constitutes work and who counts as a worker. Both the Marxian definition of productive labor and the industrial base of the labor movement at its peak created an image of the male factory worker as the proper subject of workingclass politics. But the changing race and gender composition of the global working class, alongside theoretical interventions from feminist scholars on the importance of social reproduction, have made that focus untenable for contemporary labor politics. The work of feminist scholars like Maria Mies and Silvia Federici have dispelled the notion that the capitalist organization of work only applies to the factory or the office; they have shown how capitalist social relations structure the way that domestic labor and care labor are performed in the service of capital accumulation, both inside and outside the formal workplace. For Italian Autonomists like Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, the addition of domestic work does not sufficiently widen the scope; under the conditions of post-Fordism, workers now produce value through every aspect of creativity and communication in their daily lives, and all society has become a factory. But the biggest question facing the Marxist project remains under-theorized: the future of work in the face of climate change and the broader ecological crisis. By characterizing humans as homo faber, creatures defined by their capacity to work, Marx put a productivist stamp on the politics of the workers’ movement. As the earth’s temperature warms and the sixth mass extinction unfolds, the modern project of industrial expansion is encountering planetary limits. If Marx’s promised collective reorganization of labor is to rise to the challenge of the ecological crisis, the task of reordering human productive activity in line with the needs of the biosphere is an urgent one.

References Arendt, H. (1958), The Human Condition, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Endnotes. (2015), Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation. Oakland, MI : Endnotes USA . Foster, J. (2017), “The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society, ” Monthly Review, 64(4). Available online: https://monthlyreview.org/archives/2017/volume-69-issue-04september/ (accessed September 38, 2017). Fraysée, O. (2014), “Work and Labour as Metonymy and Metaphor, ” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism and Critique, 12(2): 468–85. Livingston, J. (2016), No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea, Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press. Marcuse, H. (1955), Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1857/grundrisse/ (accessed August 20, 2017)

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Marx, K. (1978 [1932]), “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ” in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Marx, K. (1978 [1849]), Wage Labor and Capital. Available online: https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ (accessed August 20, 2017). Marx, K. (1998 [1932]), The German Ideology, New York: Prometheus Books.

Part IV

Reception and Influence E. Marx after Marx

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Soviet Union and Eastern Europe Joseph Grim Feinberg

Hitherto, Marxian thought enjoyed prestige in Eastern Europe and the former territory of the Soviet Union, but now finds itself in disrepute. The region itself is typically defined by its history of rule by “Marxist” regimes that have done greater discredit to Marxism than they ever achieved in promoting it. The history of Marxism reveals a continual series of intellectual debates whose emancipatory insight was never exhausted in service to state or party policy. It was, at the same time, marked by the need to repeatedly rethink itself in the face of limiting conditions, and of its own role in the genesis of those conditions. Eastern European Marxism developed in close contact with Marxism in those parts of Germany and Austria that would later be considered “Western Europe. ” Nevertheless, Marxism developed in new directions as it spread to the east, where it responded to the problems raised by different social conditions, and where it reacted to the intellectual and social movements that preceded and competed with it, most notably the romantic revolutionary movements that defended the peasantry and the common people, as well as the region’s movements for westernizing modernization and national liberation. After the October Revolution of 1917, the establishment of the Soviet Union spurred the region’s Marxists to distinguish themselves, still further, from their comrades and rivals elsewhere, reflecting on the emerging problems of building a socialist society and, eventually, on how those constructive efforts may have gone wrong. Marx’s thought simultaneously traveled through Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire in many directions. Nevertheless, special attention is due to developments in the Russian-language milieu, not least because Russian radicalism held the attention of radicals throughout Europe, especially in those parts of Europe that bordered on the Russian Empire and whose intellectuals maintained contact with, or studied in, Russia. Although the first major socialist tendency in Russia, known loosely as “populism” (narodnichestvo), did not consider itself Marxist, it provided fertile ground for the reception of Marxist ideas. Even while so-called populists (narodniki) rejected the orthodox Marxist idea that socialist revolution in backward Russia had to wait until after the rise of capitalism, they eagerly adopted Marx’s criticisms of the ravages of capitalist development. Russian populism would also influence Eastern European Marxism indirectly through its influence on populists in other national traditions. One of the first people to introduce Marxism to the Balkans was Serbian philosopher and 445

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activist Svetozar Marković, who amended Marx’s writing on the proletariat by arguing that, in local conditions, it was the peasantry that played the proletariat’s historical role (McClellan 2015). Among Eastern European intellectual movements, populism also holds the distinction of having influenced the thought of Marx himself who, after corresponding in the 1880s with populist-turned-Marxist Vera Zasulich, revised some of his positions to make it clear that his historical analyses of capitalist development in the West do not claim universal validity, and that developments elsewhere might follow different paths (Kołakowski 2008: 615; Anderson 2016). Marx’s flexibility on the question of historical development was not generally shared, however, by the first generation of those who defended the cause of Marxism in Russia. When Georgi Plekhanov became the leading philosopher of orthodox Russian Marxism, it was thanks, above all, to his talent for presenting history as the unfolding of a unified and unilinear dialectical process determined by the development of productive forces. Since this process could not be altered by premature acts by small groups of activists, Plekhanov insisted that Marxists should place their hopes in the growing working class and prepare it for the time when it would, eventually, be capable of replacing capitalism. Although Plekhanov shared all the major positions of the leading German Marxists of his day, he went further than they did in situating these positions within an Hegelian framework, becoming the first to present “dialectical materialism” as an all-encompassing worldview that provided answers to fundamental questions of science, philosophy and aesthetics, which explained all phenomena according to basic laws that revealed the determination of the ideal by the material through a process of contradictions working themselves out in the material world. As Social Democracy spread throughout the region, it brought with it this kind of radical materialist determinism. Yet some of the most innovative Marxist thinking developed in opposition to this approach. Some, like Ervin Szabó in Hungary and Stanisław Brzozowski in Poland, turned for inspiration to anarcho-syndicalism as an expression of workers’ capacity for self-organization and revolutionary action, which they posed as a counterweight to the growing bureaucracy and quietism of the socialist movement’s leadership. Brzozowski developed a highly original “philosophy of labor, ” according to which creative human activity—rather than iron laws of history—is responsible for social change as well as the production and categorization of knowledge (Walicki 1989). In Russia, Alexander Bogdanov criticized Plekhanov’s version of materialism by drawing on the philosophy of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. Marxism should not posit “matter” as a substance existing prior to human experience, Bogdanov argued, because such a conception would be just as metaphysical as the positing of an a priori spirit or God. Rather, matter can only be known through experience, and a scientific materialism must understand matter, like all else, by understanding how all experience is socially organized. Bogdanov is best known today as the chief target of Lenin’s 1909 polemic Materialism and Empiriocriticism, in which Lenin upheld Plekhanovian philosophical orthodoxy against his unorthodox rivals. But Lenin too was dissatisfied with the determinism of mainstream social democracy, and he conceptualized the disciplined revolutionary party as a sort of mediating structure between the gradually developing working class—which might not, after all, lead a socialist revolution without the intervention of conscious and educated

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socialists—and revolutionary activists, who would be ineffectual if divorced from the masses. Equally important for the development of Marxism in the region was the challenge of providing an internationalist response to the question of national subjugation. While Rosa Luxemburg was among the most steadfast and consistent opponents of all kinds of national organization, figures like Macedonian-Bulgarian Social Democrat Dimitar Blagoev, Czech Social Democrat Bohumír Šmeral and Avraam Benaroya (Bulgarian Jewish founder of the multiethnic Socialist Workers’ Federation in Ottoman Thessaloniki), would draw on Austro-Marxism in calling on multiple nationalities to work together while at the same time developing their own ethnic culture. Meanwhile, other Marxist and Marxism-inspired movements like the Georgian Menshevik Party, the Armenian Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, the Polish Socialist Party, the General Jewish Workers’ Union (Bund) and the Zionist Paole Zion, would become key carriers of national aspirations. Some of these movements’ theorists, like Polish socialist Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, argued that the working class could only achieve its social aims within the frame of independent nation-states (Kołakowski 2008: 528). And even in cases where territorial dispersion did not make a given nation’s political independence realistic in the short run, left Zionists like Ber Borochov called for the concentration of their nation in Palestine as a precondition for the eventual rise of class struggle and socialist revolution. Bund theorist Vladimir Medem, by contrast, opposed this kind of territorialist nationalism, calling on socialists to defend “the people” wherever they are, with their concrete cultural traditions and economic needs, rather than sacrificing them to the abstract concept of “the nation” (Medem 2012). The October Revolution would mark a turning point in the development of Marxism, but rather than resolving the key questions facing socialists before 1917, it added to their urgency. History may have proven that a revolution could take place in economically “backward” Russia, but Marxists were divided over whether the revolution could result in authentic socialism, or whether it might lead to something entirely different. The most remarkable theoretical responses to the revolution, however, came neither from those who saw it as a confirmation of Lenin’s insistence on disciplined party leadership, nor from those who saw in it proof of the Plekhanovian idea that a socialist revolution in undeveloped Russia was premature, but rather from those who saw the “soviets” workers’ councils as evidence of the autonomous revolutionary activity of the working class, which appeared capable—in spite of their society’s alleged unpreparedness—to radically transform all aspects of social life. In this context Alexandra Kollontai saw the revolution as a moment to end the subordination of women and to liberate love and sexuality from bourgeois moralism. Throughout the region and beyond, large parts of the artistic and literary avant-garde, likewise, took up the banner of revolution in their efforts to liberate the imagination, while joining the proletariat in transforming the very bases of culture and society. But the farthestreaching philosophical expression of the revolution was, no doub, György Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, written in the shadow of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. The role of the Leninist party, in Lukács’s conception, is not so much to lead and educate workers, but to express the inherent consciousness of the proletariat as it embarks on its historical mission. And that mission, in Lukács’s hands, was not

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only to end economic exploitation, but also to overcome “reification, ” which made objects appear to subjects as immutable things rather than products of workers’ own creative activity. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, debates erupted over the appropriate philosophical and scientific approaches for an emerging socialist society. In the field of philosophy, a controversy between so-called “mechanists” and “dialecticians” pitted followers of Plekhanov against one another. Although party authorities would eventually suppress both sides of the debate, both the dialecticians’ codification of Hegelian “laws” and the mechanists’ faith in the all-explanatory power of science would be incorporated into officially sanctioned Marxism (Bakhurst 1991). Another strand of early Marxist philosophy, largely excluded from official Soviet Marxism, was represented by the work of I.I. Rubin, whose pioneering work on the commodity as a “value-form” would become internationally influential after its publication in English in 1972. But, as Marxism emerged from its position of illegality and exile, theorists began to investigate the significance of Marxism in a wide range of social and cultural fields previously left unexplored by Marxists. In this period, Valentin Voloshinov would develop a Marxist philosophy of language that saw meaning as the product of social reaction and class struggle. In psychology, Lev Vygotsky would also point to the centrality of language in his attempt to overcome mind-body dualism, showing that the mind develops through interaction with the social world. In legal studies, Yevgeny Pashukanis would analyze law as a form analogous to the commodity, serving as a point of interaction between isolated subjects with opposed interests. During this time the national question also re-emerged as a matter of foremost tactical importance. During the revolution and subsequent civil war, the Bolsheviks appealed to the national sentiment of oppressed minorities in their shared struggle against the restoration of the Russian Empire and, in the course of this struggle, activists of varying backgrounds joined the communist cause and gave it new shape. Among the most remarkable “national communisms” to emerge was that developed by leaders of Muslim nationalities, who synthesized communist ideas with Islamic notions of community and social justice, and tried—especially in the case of Tatar socialist Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev (or Soltanğäliev)—to present the communist revolution as part of a worldwide struggle against colonialism (see Rodinson 1979). Another form of national communism, meanwhile, developed an inward rather than an outward focus, after Nikolai Bukharin conceived of a self-contained “socialism in one country” as a response to the failure of global revolution. Leon Trotsky would famously point to this retreat into a national isolation as a chief cause of the revolution’s degeneration into a bureaucratic dictatorship charged with realizing this socialism without the impulse of a global revolutionary movement. One of the impulses to develop nationally specific forms of communism was the weakness, in conditions of underdeveloped capitalism, of an internationalist proletariat. Although, for many years, leading Soviet communists saw this as a tactical question that did not demand a reformulation of basic theoretical outlook, by the 1930s the old agrarian question would return in new form. The notion of “the people” took an increasingly central place in communist discourse, not only as an expression of crossclass alliance, but also as a representative of the classless society that was supposed to

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form. The communist turn to “the people” coincided historically with the consolidation of Stalin’s rule, and there is merit to the widely held view that it provided ideological justification for dampening social conflict and stabilizing a no-longer-revolutionary social system. Nevertheless, the new approach provoked creative work in a variety of fields. Art and literature saw the rise of socialist realism, conceptualized as a synthesis between revolutionary modernist aesthetics and older traditions of realism, which, in comparison with the work of the avant-garde, offered an allegedly closer connection between aesthetics and social reality. But socialist realism also offered a connection between high art and popular expression, and its rise corresponded to a rise in communist interest in folklore. When class difference disappeared after the revolution, Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp reflected that “the people” as a whole would become the carrier of folklore, taking the position once occupied by the oppressed and excluded classes (Propp 1984: 5). Although the Communist Party’s leading role in wartime resistance generally strengthened established currents of communist thought, the victory over fascism also yielded a new generation of enthusiastic communists who, in time, would alter the face of Marxism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. When the death of Stalin and the Yugoslav-Soviet split opened new possibilities for critique, the loudest critical voices came from those who had believed in the democratic socialist promise of the postwar political transformations. Most of them began as party members and sought to reform the system from within, bringing its practice into line with its ideals. In the course of this immanent critique, however, new ideas emerged. A leading role was played by the humanist vision of the young Marx, whose writings on alienation were just beginning to be known. The category of alienation made it possible to characterize, within a single theoretical apparatus, the experience of those exploited and atomized by market capitalism in the West, and of those politically and culturally repressed in the allegedly socialist East. Another focus of critical intervention was the scientistic positivism and vulgar materialism that, in the humanists’ view, discounted human creativity. Major philosophical contributions were made by Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov and Czech philosopher Karel Kosík, both of whom—apparently independently of one another—examined the dialectical relationship between the abstract and the concrete. Both drew on Marx’s notion of “concrete totality, ” arguing that Marx’s materialism does not derive ideal abstractions from “concrete” material causes, but seeks the total structure within which both material and ideal phenomena take shape. When the period of internal reform within the region’s ruling parties came to an end over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist humanists found it increasingly difficult to publish and, perhaps more importantly, to maintain their faith in the possibility of criticizing the system in its own terms. A new wave of systemic critique became more radical, calling into question the system’s very foundations. One important strand of Marxist criticism pointed to the persistence of class domination, even if the ruling class was no longer the bourgeoisie but a “new class” of state bureaucrats, as was argued by Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas already in 1957, which was repeated, in various forms, by numerous others. In Czechoslovakia, Egon Bondy would draw on the Maoist notion of revolution against party elites. He grounded this political call in a philosophical plea to reexamine the ontological attitude of orthodox

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Marxism, which, he argued, was based on the treatment of matter as an a priori underlying substance analogous to the Christian God, which demanded quasi-theistic allegiance, whereas a consistent materialism would assert no substance beneath selfcreating and ever-changing existence itself. This was also a time of intense philosophical development in a variety of unorthodox schools of thought, including the so-called Budapest School of György Lukács’s students—including Ágnes Heller, Ferenc Féher and György Markús, who devised an intricate analysis of Soviet-type society as a “dictatorship over needs, ” and the Ljubljana School, best known through the work of Slavoj Žižek, that integrated Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, producing an indepth critique of ideology, both bourgeois and communist. The end of Communist-Party rule after 1989–1991 brought a sharp decline in the position of Marxism, which was remembered as the ideology of the old regime, and largely forgotten as a creative force that had criticized the old regime and might have criticized the new regime that replaced it. In the peculiar condition of “postcommunism, ” communism came to appear publicly, not as a political horizon of the future, but as a relic banished to the past. Yet critics of the present still face Marxism’s historical challenges: of articulating internationalism against national division; of understanding class at a moment when the proletariat is declared, once again, to be too weak to foment social change; and of redefining political agency against a new historical determinism, a sort of inverted Plekhanovism that presents market capitalism as the inevitable outcome of all political struggle and economic development. As Eastern European Marxism reemerges, its past still bears lessons for its future.

References Anderson, K. (2016), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press. Bakhurst, D. (1991), Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kołakowski, L. (2008), Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P.S. Falla, New York: Norton. McClellan, W. (2015), Svetozar Marković and the Origins of Balkan Socialism, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Medem, V. D. (2012), “The Worldwide Jewish Nation, ” in S. Rabinovitch (ed.), Jews and Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States, Waltham, MA : Brandeis University Pres, 105–24. Propp, V. (1984), Theory and History of Folklore, trans. A.Y. Martin and R.P. Martin, in A. Liberman (ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rodinson, M. (1979), Marxism and the Muslim World, trans. M. Pallis, London: Zed Press. Walicki, A. (1989). Stanisław Brzozowski and the Polish Beginnings of “Western Marxism, ” Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Any effort to write a comprehensive history of either Marxism or Latin America would be impossible without reference of one to the other. Marx’s ideas have provided a powerful lens through which to understand Latin American societies, while inspiring political and social movements throughout the region that have transformed it in decisive ways. And yet, the encounter between Marxism and Latin America has also had a significant impact on Marx’s ideas themselves, as intellectuals from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century have made, and continue to make, far-reaching contributions to the development of the Marxist tradition, challenging and deepening its most fundamental insights over time. Although difficult to summarize, Marxism’s analyses of Latin America, to a first approximation, have been defined largely by their emphasis on the role capitalism, as a mode of production and as a global economic system, has played in the formation of the region’s social, economic and political realities. Rather than reduce these complex realities to the same abstract universal, however, that emphasis has yielded profound insights by means of an attentiveness to the historical specificity of individual nations like Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Peru. In this way, Latin American Marxism can be said to dramatize what Kevin Anderson sees as animating Marx’s concept of capitalism: “a rich and concrete social vision in which universality and particularity [interact] within a dialectical totality ” (2010: 7). Marx and Engels’s early writings on Latin America thus appear as one of the ironies of history. Neither man showed much interest in the region, and, as the historian Luis Aguilar puts it in Marxism and Latin America (1968), “Not even the fact that his sonin-law, Paul Lafargue, was born in Cuba seems to have aroused in Marx any great curiosity about the new American nations ” (1968: 3). The little attention they paid to Latin America in their published works offer opinions about key figures and events that are problematic at best. In his entry on Simón Bolívar for The New American Cyclopedia, for example, Marx paints an unfavorable picture of the venerated hero of Latin America’s wars of independence, and his compatriots, writing at one point: “like most of his countrymen, he was adverse to any prolonged exertion, and his dictatorship soon proved a military anarchy”(2010: 221). In a letter to Engels, Marx would later defend the “partisan style” of his contribution to the Cyclopedia, claiming that: “to see the most cowardly, ordinary, wretched rascal decried as though he were Napoleon I 451

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was really too absurd ” (qtd. in Aguilar 1968: 66). Engels’s article “The Movements of 1847” is no less disparaging in its outlook on the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Mindful that “the bourgeoisie alone” would benefit from the war, Engels nonetheless insists that “it is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will in future be placed under the tutelage of the United States, ” and that the “evolution of the whole of America will profit by the fact that the United States, by the possession of California, obtains command of the Pacific. ” Here, Engels gives voice to the conviction that drawing feudal societies into capitalist relations would provide them with the necessary preconditions for socialist revolution, a conviction that many Latin American Marxists would critique and break with later. Perhaps for this reason, while Marx and Engels’s political writings, particularly The Communist Manifesto (1848), were familiar to many of their Latin American contemporaries, Marxism would remain a minor current of thought until the second decade of the twentieth century. The critic, poet and hero of the Cuban wars of independence, José Martí, offers one of the earliest assessments of Marx’s legacy from Latin America in his “Tributes to Karl Marx, Who Has Died” (1883). Observing that “Karl Marx studied the means of establishing the world on new bases,” Martí nonetheless reproaches him because “he did not see that without a natural and laborious gestation, children are not born viable, from a nation in history or from a woman in the home” (2002: 131). Like many of his counterparts throughout the region, Martí recognizes Marx as an admirable thinker, but one whose work remained largely irrelevant, if not altogether alien, to Latin America’s “natural” history. Even among the burgeoning workers’ movements of the same period, anarchism— introduced by European immigrants—wielded a greater ideological influence than Marxism or the First International. No doubt the fact that the majority of Marx’s later writings simply were not available in Spanish or Portuguese greatly limited his readership. Indeed, it was not until 1898 that Juan B. Justo, co-founder of the Argentine Socialist Party, published the first Spanish translation of the first volume of Das Kapital, while the first complete Portuguese edition of volumes one, two and three, translated by Reginaldo Sant’Anna from the German original, did not appear in Brazil until the 1960s—though sections had been previously translated. That these should appear in Argentina and Brazil before other Latin American countries is, perhaps, not surprising, considering that socialist organizations in both countries formed part of the Second International early on.1 Still, Capital, as is well known, has much more to say explicitly about capitalism’s development in “advanced” countries than about peripheral regions like Latin America, which appears only in passing references to the “primitive community of natural origin” of the Inca state, the Spanish conquest, English slave trade in Spanish America and silver mining in relation to primitive accumulation (Marx 1976: 182). Rather than gloss over the relative paucity of Marx’s references to the region, Marxists have tended to treat the desencuentro, or missed encounter, between Latin America and Marxism as an occasion for rethinking both.2 Indeed, the continuous effort to stage an encounter between the two terms can, in many ways, be said to form the very foundations of anything we might call Latin American Marxism. Writing in the 1970s, for example, José Aricó saw Latin America as “a neglected reality” in Marx’s writings, one

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that suggested “Latin American Marxism is nothing more than a grammatical expression of a real historical difficulty” (2009: 81).3 For Aricó, then, the origins of that “difficulty” lie in Marx’s Hegelianism, from whose perspective “America appeared to be a vast empty territory” that Marx could consequently “exclude from his field of interests,” since he did not see in the region the “conditions for its transformation” (2009: 139–40).4 We might see something like this perspective in Engels’s comments on the Mexican-American War, which espouse the stagist conception of a universal history. Marx’s critics would later see this as central to his critique of capitalism. But, as Aricó also makes clear, “From the end of the decade of the 1870s onward, Marx never abandoned his thesis that the uneven development of capitalist accumulation displaces the center of the revolution from the countries of Western Europe to dependent and colonial countries ” (2009: 108).5 This shift in Marx’s own thinking not only poses a serious challenge to the view that Marxism sneaks a universal philosophy of history in “through the backdoor. ” It also led Marx to conceive of the pre-capitalist forms of communal production that persisted in so-called “backward” countries like Russia as furnishing the conditions for socialism. Indeed, Kevin Anderson has argued more recently that this shift may have been animated, in part, by Marx’s interest in the semi-feudal systems of coerced labor that developed in Latin America under Spanish colonial rule (2010: 196–235). Whether or not this is the case, Latin American Marxism can be said to emerge in the early twentieth century from an exhaustive attention to these same concerns. No doubt the eruption of the Mexican Revolution in 1910—like the Russian Revolution seven years later, whose impact in Latin America cannot be understated—would appear to confirm Marx’s conviction that capitalism’s peripheries had become the centers of revolution. For many Latin American Marxists, however, these events also raised the question of how Marxian theory and praxis might be adapted to specific national situations characterized, for example, by the presence of a sizeable peasantry. What would eventually be dubbed “the national question” would later become central to an entire generation of Marxists in the colonial world at the forefront of national liberation struggles, though its significance had already been noted in the 1920s by José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian writer, who remains a foundational figure within Latin American Marxism. Given the enduring legacy of his works in Latin American Marxism, it is worth elaborating on Mariátuegui’s position. Considered to be one of the first materialist analyses of Latin America, Mariátegui’s seminal Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad Peruana (1928) aims to demonstrate how Peruvian reality—in contradistinction not just to Europe, but also to other South American countries like Argentina and Brazil—was defined by the persistence of both a feudal economy and an indigenous communal economy in the sierra that coexisted alongside a nascent bourgeois economy on the coast. For Mariátegui, the presence of such “backwardness” was both a product of and impediment to capitalism’s development within Peru, where the latifundia system, gamonalismo, contributed to the immiseration of millions of indigenous peoples tied to working on the large estates owned by hacendados, the landowning class of compradors allied with foreign capital. Responding to “the problem of the Indian” required a socialist perspective, which “defines the problem because he looks for its causes in the country’s

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economy and not in its administrative, legal, or ecclesiastical machinery, its racial dualism or pluralism, or its cultural or moral conditions ” (1971). From this perspective, “the problem of the Indian” was inescapably tied to “the problem of land, ” which could only be resolved by means of a massive reorganization of society; hence Mariátegui’s claim, “the servitude oppressing the indigenous race cannot be abolished unless the latifundium is abolished ” (1971). Yet, Mariátegui also insisted that adopting this perspective had far-reaching consequences for any kind of Marxian praxis aimed at bringing about such large-scale transformations. The near absence of an industrial proletariat, even after the appearance of modern industry on the coast, meant that mass of workers that European Marxisms conceived as the lever of social revolution was largely missing from the Peruvian scene. For Mariátegui, then, the peasantry and indigenous masses, allied with urban workers, could function as such a lever in Peru, and, much like Marx looking to the Russian mir in his late writings, he saw a model for communism in the pre-capitalist forms of communal property, what he called “Incan communism ” (1971). At the same time, Mariátegui was among the strongest advocates of internationalism, using the journal he founded and directed, Amauta (the Quechua word reserved for teachers in the Incan empire), to champion the cause of revolutionary movements in Cuba and Nicaragua. The Communist International (1919–1943) cast a long shadow over the reception of Mariátegui’s works in the decades that followed, as the Comintern in Latin America denounced “Mariáteguismo” as a “populist” deviation from “official” Marxism, even as the problem he identified, the problem of organizing the masses in countries where the population was on the whole rural, remained central (Munck 2007: 154–73). But this kind of censure was itself symptomatic of the battles waged, not just between the Third International and the various Latin American Communist parties that arrived on the scene following the Russian Revolution, but also within the parties themselves. These conflicts would eventually be resolved, if only momentarily, in the mid–1930s, when Communist parties across the region embraced the Comintern’s call for the formation of a Popular Front in response to the rising threat of fascism, which not only demanded a compromise with their socialist rivals and bourgeois counterparts, but also a defense of Pan-Americanism. Whether the Popular Front also had the effect of popularizing Marx’s ideas is difficult to say, though the social and revolutionary insurgencies during the period immediately following the end of the Second World War drew inspiration from Marxism. Throughout the region, the Marxian Left faced unprecedented challenges during this same period as the Cold War intensified across the globe, transforming Latin America into one of the more important fronts in the ideological battle between liberal capitalism and worldwide communism. Having emerged from the Second World War as the new hegemon of global capitalism, the United States employed a broad range of means—military, political and cultural—to curtail the spread of communism throughout Central America, South America and the Caribbean. To be sure, Latin America, as Greg Grandin demonstrates, had long played a central role in the formation of US global ambitions throughout the twentieth century as “empire’s workshop ” (2010: no page number cited). As was the case during the interwar period, the US continued to apply political pressure on regimes that now sought loans for massive modernization

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projects, stoking the fires of anti-communist sentiment that prompted the outlawing of communist parties in countries like Brazil and Chile, and military coups in Peru and Venezuela. Further, as Patrick Iber has shown, the US and the Soviet Union increasingly viewed “cultural diplomacy” as an indispensible tool during the Cold War: “each superpower sponsored organizations whose goals were simultaneously cultural and political, most prominently the World Peace Council (WPC ) in the case of the Soviet Union, and the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF ) in that of the United States ” (2015: 10). This contributed to the fragmentation of the Marxian Left. And yet, it is just as true that the influence of Marxian ideas in Latin America expanded prodigiously during the Cold War, prompting a variety of interpretations that often pitted Marx’s Latin American readers against the Soviet Union’s “official” Marxism. Indeed, the forms of attention Mariátegui’s “socialist perspective” advocated were not just extended, radicalized and even vindicated by a more militant and internationalist Marxist-Leninism that swept through Latin America during this same period. They also found fertile ground in one of the region’s most significant contributions to Marxist dependency theory. Here, Mariátegui’s emphasis on the degree to which capitalism’s development on a global scale determined concrete national situations, its “backward” and more “advanced” aspects alike, finds a ready equivalent in the works of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Faletto, Theotônio dos Santos and Andre Gunder Frank. Challenging the development model championed by Cold War modernization theorists like William Rostow, a dependency theorist like Frank argues, “contemporary underdevelopment [in Latin America] is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations between the satellite underdeveloped and the now-developed metropolitan countries. ” Importantly, he continues, “these relations are an essential part of the structure and development of the capitalist system on a world scale as a whole ” (1970: 5). But even an influential thesis like Frank’s “development of underdevelopment” drew a great deal of criticism— indicative both of the multiplicity of positions dependency theory comprised, and longstanding debates within Latin American Marxism.6 At the same time, such criticisms animated incisive discussions about the nature of capitalist development, which became central to world-systems theory, including the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and Samir Amin. Perhaps no other event would redefine the encounter between Marxism and Latin America more than the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, whose combination of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric appeared to stage a re-encounter between Marx and Martí. With the First Declaration of Havana in 1960, the revolution proclaimed that it “condemns both the exploitation of man by man and the exploitation of underdeveloped countries by imperialist finance capital. ” As exponents of voluntarism, armed struggle and the exportation of the revolution to other countries in Latin America and the Third World, however, Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara broke with communist parties across the continent, which had largely advocated for non-violent means. This broad departure from the more “orthodox” Marxisms of the period was just as apparent in the First Declaration, which, in addition to denouncing the “latifundium, a source of poverty for the peasants and a backward and inhuman agricultural system, ” also decried the “inequality and exploitation of

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women” and the “discrimination against the Negro and the Indian ” (Castro 2008: 84). Drawing such concerns into the orbit of socialist praxis also had the effect of redefining Marxism for an entire generation of intellectuals inside and outside of Latin America, while offering a guiding light to the New Left of the late 1960s. Further, the Cuban government’s own investment in state cultural institutions, such as the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC ) and Casa de las Américas, signaled a similar dovetailing of political praxis and art, a dovetailing that achieved its fullest expression in Roberto Fernández Retamar’s polemical essay, “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” (1971). Whereas many Marxists viewed Cuban socialism as a continental symbol of the marriage of theory and praxis throughout the 1960s, the decade that followed dealt a serious blow to the political hegemony of Marxism throughout the region. By the 1970s, many believed the revolution had taken on a more dogmatic turn, while the brutal repression carried out by military dictatorships throughout the region forced leftist intellectuals, artists and militants either into hiding or exile. At the same time, this same period witnessed a flourishing of Marxian-inflected cultural studies. Critics like Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, for example, drew on Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approaches as a way of approximating Argentine artistic and literary production.7 Meanwhile in Brazil, Roberto Schwarz not only grasped the legacy of the tradition inaugurated by Lukács, Benjamin, Brecht and Adorno as an optic by which to arrive at a richer understanding of culture and politics in his own country, but also made profound contributions to that tradition that utterly transformed it.8 But the inroads made into literary and cultural studies failed to find any kind of equivalent within society more broadly, and while the 1970s closed with the triumph of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979, Sandismo was, as Ronaldo Munck puts it,“the swansong of a national-popular type of Marxism in Latin America and not the start of a new wave,” and its collapse “signaled . . . the end of the “armed road” as a viable strategy for the left” (2007: 160). What followed was the década perdida or “lost decade” of the 1980s, marked by the Latin American debt crisis of 1982. Structural adjustment programs, in line with IMF and World Bank prescriptions, introduced a new era of neoliberal reforms, which were already the centerpiece of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile since 1973. What would eventually be called the Washington Consensus comprised reform packages that pushed for the privatization of state enterprises, fiscal consolidation or austerity, and the elimination of restrictions on the movement of capital across borders. Such policy prescriptions proved devastating for the left in Latin America, as did the shift in US foreign policy from containment to rollback, as US -backed paramilitary forces in Central America waged a brutal campaign against communists in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. This decisively altered the political landscape in which the Marxian left operated, and while insurgencies like the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) took up arms against the Peruvian state in the 1980s, and although the Ejercito Zapatista Liberador Nacional, or Zapatistas, waged a protracted war against the Mexican government in response to NAFTA in the 1990s, by the end of the Cold War in 1989 Marxism sought new pathways in a rethinking of the relationship between socialism and democracy.

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Since the 1960s, post-Marxists like Ernesto Laclau had drawn on Antonio Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and the subaltern as a means of theorizing the rise of populism in countries like Argentina.9 Abandoning what they perceived as Marxism’s class reductionism, Gramsci’s readers in Latin America emphasized, instead, the “nationalpopular” dimension of the subaltern with an eye to creating articulations that Laclau, working with Chantal Mouffe, described as “chains-of-equivalence” not just between classes, but across racial, gender and ethnic lines as well.10 Marxism now dialogued with new social movements that had come into view in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s, while attempting to rethink the role that the state might play in socialist strategy. Álvaro García Linera, for example, observed in Bolivia the twin crises of the neoliberal model and of the republican state. Those crises, nonetheless, offered a new opening for an indigenous-popular transformation of the state, which, according to García Linera, faced two alternatives: “a path of gradual, institutional change by electoral means led by [the president] Evo Morales, and an insurrectional path for the revolutionary transformation of the state, ” alternatives that “are not necessarily antagonistic” and “could turn out to be complementary ” (2006: 84–5). With his electoral victory in 2006, Morales joined a number of left and center-left governments that had come into power at the beginning of the twenty-first century, including those of: Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (2002); Néstor Kirchner in Argentina (2003); Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil (2003); Tabaré Vazquez in Uruguay; and Michelle Bachelette in Chile (2006). Yet, the broad electoral victories for the region’s left, called la marera rosada or pink tide, represented an eclectic array of strategies. García Linera’s articulation of institutional and insurrectional paths proved central to Bolivia and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, while governments in Brazil, Argentina and Chile sought compromises with various sectors, including finance. These strategies translated into greater social inclusion of traditionally marginalized sectors and an overall diminution of economic inequality across the board. Yet, as the Mexican philosopher and cultural critic Bolívar Echeverría remarked in his reflections on Latin America’s Bicentenary, it remains to be seen whether these governments had, in fact, overcome the crisis of the republican state: “amidst all the displays of self-satisfaction, the celebrations of 2010 could not conceal a certain pathetic quality; these were ceremonies that betrayed themselves, displaying at bottom the character of spells against a death foretold” (2011: 58). Indeed, the recent reversal of the left’s political fortunes throughout the region would appear to confirm Echeverría’s impression. Whatever the recent retrenchment of la marea rosada has meant for the Latin American left in general and Marxism in particular, electoral defeat in Argentina, an uncertain fate in Venezuela and a coup in Brazil would all appear to raise the question of the region’s future with a renewed sense of urgency. But while this retrenchment was no doubt engineered by a newly resurgent right, it also highlights the degree to which the future was already a problem for la marea rosada. As the anthropologist Fernando Coronil explains, Latin America’s “turn to the left” has been marked by a “puzzling paradox”. “On the one hand, ” Coronil explains, “there is a proliferation of political activities inspired by socialist or communitarian ideals aiming at fundamentally changing society. On the other hand, ” he adds, “there is a pervasive uncertainty with respect to the specific form of the ideal

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future. ” “While there is an intense desire to change the nation, ” Coronil observes, “it is not clear what to desire ” (2010: 234). Whether Marxism will provide the solution to this contemporary crisis of futurity is still to be seen, though, as the history of its encounters with Latin America suggests, it is a question well worth asking.

Notes 1 2

See Arico (2009). The logic of this desencuentro has recently been elaborated by Bruno Bosteels (2012 in Marx and Freud in Latin America, in which he argues that the “history of the relation of Marx and Freud to Latin America is the history of a triple desencuentro, or a three-fold missed encounter”: the “missed encounter already within the writings of Marx” (5); the “missed encounter between Freud and Latin America” (9); and “the obstacles that stand in the way of a proper articulation of between Marx and Freud themselves” (12). 3 In the original Spanish: “una realidad soslayada”; “el marxismo de America Latina no es otra cosa que una expresion gramatical de una dificultad historica real. ” Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 4 “America aparecia como un inmenso territorio vacio”; “con mayor razon aun, podia excluirla de su campo de interes si no visualizaba claramente en ella las condiciones para su transformacion, y las posibilidades concretas de acceder al campo de la historia en virtud precisamente de esa transformacion. ” 5 Desde fines de la decada del sesenta en adelante, Marx ya no abandono su tesis del desarrollo desigual de la acumulacion capitalista desplazaba el centro de la revolucion de los paises de Europa occidental hacia los paises dependientes y coloniales. ” 6 See, for example, Cardoso (1972), and Laclau (1977). 7 See Altamirano and Sarlo (2001). 8 See, for example, Schwarz (1992). 9 See Laclau (1997). 10 See Laclau and Mouffe (2001).

References Anderson, Kevin (2010a), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and NonWestern Societies, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 7. Anderson, Kevin (2010b), Marx at the Margins, especially Ch. 6, “Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies” (196–235). Aguilar, Luis E. (ed.) (1968a), Marxism in Latin America, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 3. Aguilar, Luis E. (ed.) (1968b), A Letter of Marx to Engels’ Marxism in Latin America, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 66. Altamirano, Carlos and Beatriz Sarlo (2001), Literatura/Sociedad, Buenos Aires: Libreria Edicial. Arico, Jose (2009), Marx y América Latina, Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica de Argentina. Bosteels, Bruno (2012), Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror, London: Verso.

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Cardoso, Fernando Henrique (1972), “Dependency and Development in Latin America,” New Left Review 1(7)4 (July–Aug.): 83–95. Castro, Fidel (2008), “First Declaration of Havana” (1960), in The Declarations of Havana. London: Verso, 84. Coronil, Fernando (2010), “The Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America” (1989–), in C. Calhoun G. Derluguian (eds) (2011), Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, New York: SUNY Press, 234. Echeverria, Bolivar (2011), “Potemkin Republics,” New Left Review 70 (July–Aug.): 58. Engels, Frederick (1975 [2004]), “The Movements of 1847,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol: 6, New York: Lawrence and Wishart. Frank, Andre Gunder (1966), “The Development of Underdevelopment”, in R.I. Rhodes (ed.) (1970), Imperialism and Underdevelopment, New York: Monthly Review Press, 5. Grandin, Greg (2010), Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, New York: Holt Paperbacks. Iber, Patrick (2015), Neither Peace Nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2. Laclau, Ernesto (1977), “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America” Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism, London: New Left Books, 15–50. Laclau, Ernesto (1977), Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism, London: New Left Books. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (2001), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Linera, Alvaro Garcia (2006), “State Crisis and Popular Power,” New Left Review 37 (Jan.–Feb.): 84–5. Mariategui, Jose Carlos, Seven Essays of Interpretation of Peruvian Reality. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/works/7-interpretive-essays/essay02.htm (accessed August 14, 2018). Marti, Jose (2002), “Tributes to Karl Marx, Who Has Died,” Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen, New York: Penguin, 131. Marx, Karl, (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin, 182. Marx, Karl (2010), “Bolivar y Ponte,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 18, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 221. Munck, Ronaldo (2007), “Marxism in Latin America/Latin America in Marxism?” in D. Glaser and D.M. Walker (eds.), Twentieth-Century Marxism, Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 154–73. Retamar, Roberto Fernandez (1989), “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” Caliban and Other Essays, trans. E. Baker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 3–45. Schwarz, Roberto (1992), in John Gledson (ed.), Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, London: Verso and Beatriz Sarlo.

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China Rebecca Karl

A beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. Marx 1967: 15–16 It is little known that Marx was first introduced into Chinese through anarchofeminism in 1907 when a section of The Communist Manifesto was published in a translation from Japanese in the journal Tianyi bao (Natural Justice) (Liu, Karl, Ko 2013). As it turns out, while there was interest at that time in China in the Second International as well as in global socialisms (Benton 2007: 7), Marx fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, radical feminism and anarchism stuck around as autonomous streams of social theorizing and political activism for only a short time, before getting absorbed into or neutralized by other systems of thought. Marx was re-introduced in the early 1920s, often via Bolshevism, more successfully and more durably than before (Dirlik 1989). It was in this later era that Marx and Marxism began to produce historical, revolutionary and philosophical meaning in the Chinese socio-political, cultural and economic contexts, and it was in this world of resonance that Marxism came to be assimilated as a social language into Chinese. This productive resonance is a complex story, not of unidirectional influences nor merely of vocabulary change; rather, it is a story of how the very concepts and meaning of socio-political life and futurity came to be transformed in China’s twentieth century. One could write the tale of Marx and Marxism in China by focusing exclusively on the logic of organizational modes. Such a narrative would trace how the BolshevistLeninist Party revolutionary imperatives of the 1920s and 1930s overshadowed any genuine understanding of Marx or Marxism, and how this Party-centeredness, despite ensuing challenges and difficulties, became the guiding principle of the Chinese state from 1949, ultimately producing Xi Jinping and his particular brand of “thought” enshrined in the “China Dream, ” informed by Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics, ” as promoted in the 19th Party Congress which concluded in October 2017. While such a Party-centered teleological narrative is not entirely wrong and has been written many times, often as the orthodoxy legitimizing the Communist Party of 461

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China’s (CPC) grip on state power, such a perspective is nevertheless very partial. It turns an instrumentalized Marxism-qua-Bolshevism into a self-affirming handmaiden, to the rise and endurance of the CPC and its exclusive contemporary claim to represent China. Meanwhile, an adjacent form of narrative, also written many times over, is the story of how a European philosophy such as Marxism was “Sinified”— turned Chinese. This cultural story tells of how Chinese intellectuals, steeped in various types of particular Chinese learning, came to square the foreignness of a Eurocentric universalist-claiming doctrine with their native systems of thought and pre-existing modes of emotive life. The dichotomous division between China and the foreign serves in this story to underscore the essential nature of both Chinese tradition and Eurocentric Marxism, purporting to demonstrate thereby the ill-fit between these two cultural streams and the consequent necessary distortions of each in their historical encounter. The purpose of this brief contribution is to present a more nuanced account of the ways in which Marxism, as a politics and social language of history and the future, informed not just the hegemony of the Chinese Communist state, but, more elementally, the very modes of much Chinese thinking in the twentieth century. Marxism was encountered by Chinese intellectuals, both textually and through revolutionary organizing, in China and elsewhere; e.g., France or Russia, where Communist Party cells grew after the end of the First World War. Increasing numbers of fragments of Marx’s and Marxist texts were translated into Chinese and promoted through journalistic interpretive writing, starting in the early 1920s. Such CPC founders as Li Dazhao (1888–1927), Li Da (1890–1966), Ai Siqi (1910–1966) and Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), among others, are generally credited with doing this work. Among a segment of quasi-radicalized urban readers and political activists, the analytic content of these texts—which included class analysis, rudiments of historical materialism, theories of revolutionary necessity, analyses of capitalism as a structure of uneven domestic and global relations and imperialist-colonial global domination, and interpretations of patriarchal social structures, among others—came to resonate widely with observable and experiential aspects of Chinese life in the world at that time. The evident subordination of China in the Versailles Treaty ending the First World War; the onrush of factory manufacture associated with coastal industrialization and urbanization; the immiseration of the peasantry, along with pervasive imperialist and state violence; not to mention feminist upsurges against patriarchal oppression, among others; comprised some of the material conditions in which the seeds of Marx and Marxism could, and did, grow; indeed, these very social experiences of life came to be articulated, by the 1930s, in a vernacularized Marxist social scientific analytic (Barlow 2008). The Communist Party of China, formed under Comintern guidance in 1921, increasingly took up these and other questions through the 1920s and 1930s as a legitimizing mode of revolutionary organizing. From 1930 onwards, there was a veritable boom in translations and interpretive readings of Marxist texts in China. In addition to various texts by Engels—such as Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State—some by Lenin and Stalin, as well as more by Marx, there were translations of literary theory and cultural criticism coming from the Soviet Union and other sites of cultural radicalism. Often products of

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the Chinese Left Wing Writers’ Union, many of these texts were published, starting in 1934 in the journal Translation Texts [Yiwen]. By 1949, over 500 titles had been translated, primarily from Japanese, German, Russian and English (Chan & Pollard 2001: 383–4); an exponentially huge number of interpretive texts were also produced by Chinese Marxists, anarchists, Trotskyists, anti-Marxists and others. The 1930s debates on social history (Dirlik 1978), on agrarian economics (Cole 2018) and on social scientific concepts (Karl 2017)—all conducted to one extent or another through and in Marxist categories of thought—along with the 1938 translation from Japanese and German by Wang Yanan and Guo Da Li of the three volumes of Capital, helped standardize an enduring social language derived from Marxist theory in China. After 1953, when the Communist Party established its Translation and Edition Bureau, this conceptual language came to be assimilated fully into Chinese while displacing, until the 1990s, older or alternative social analytic languages. As Cai Xiang states, most of the best literary experiments from the 1940s to 1966 endeavored to make this new Marxist language into the pervasive expression of mass political participation, mass cultural articulation and mass productive activity (Cai 2016). Marx in China, as with all appropriations, was made to speak to a set of historical conditions that did not quite fit the original theory. By the early twentieth century, while China was already enmeshed, albeit quite unevenly, in capitalist logics of global primitive accumulation and commodity production, domestic relations of production in rural areas appeared to remain firmly traditional. Despite the superficial historical similarities that seemed to bespeak socio-economic stasis, Chinese Marxists— including Mao Zedong and many others—began to read Chinese history and the global present through a Marxist lens. They became attentive, not merely to the succession of dynasties and emperors, or to the doings and sayings of sages, or to ritual practices that purportedly never changed; they were now intent on revealing a people’s history that, they discovered, could provide a revolutionary idiom through which to bring into one temporal frame a reconceived past, a present now filled with radical potential, and a possible egalitarian future. This new Marxist-inspired history foretold and authorized the rise of overt domestic class antagonisms, the global struggle between imperialist capitalism and socialism, and the revolutionary rise of the world’s subordinated peoples in pursuit of the total transformation of their structures of life. In these consequential re-narrations, Mao Zedong and other theorists of Marx in China did not take developed industrial structures as the sole given grounds upon which socialist revolution could be made, but, rather, re-articulated and then embedded the Marxist concept of unequal social relations of production so as to interpret China’s uneven domestic and global social order through a Marxist lens. By elevating the problem of social relations of production above the problem of the forces of production—embedding Marxism into the Chinese social order rather than allowing abstract Marxist categories to dominate analysis of the social order—Mao and other Chinese Marxists were able to discern and mobilize, for socially transformative purposes, the inextricable historical link between the cultural and the economic, in ways that western and Soviet Marxists, still stuck in their base-superstructure dualities and disputes, could not, or did not, achieve. This proposition about the dialectical

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co-evalness of culture and the economic—about the simultaneous scalar intertwining of the cultural materiality of quotidian life-worlds with the abstractions of universalizing processes of production and extraction—has remained a hallmark of Marx in China from the mid–1930s onward. This is what is usually called Maoism, or “Mao Zedong Thought. ” When this interpretive proposition was hitched to mass movements for revolutionary transformation, mass enthusiasms were often both more easily summoned and yet harder to control from the center, as during the early–1950s land reforms, the mid–1960s onset of the Cultural Revolution, and, perhaps, at other less nationally-marked but nevertheless important locally-inflected points in the period of high socialism (1949–1976). Many orthodox Marxist historians have called these moments of mass mobilization “voluntarism” in deference to the idea that China’s material base and political superstructure were unaligned, and that Maoism thus heedlessly sought to overcome this misalignment by whipping up mass movements out of thin air. However, if one takes seriously the idea that Maoism was the social embedding of Marxism through an emphasis on social relations of production in the contemporary life-worlds of Chinese society, mass movements no longer appear voluntarist, but, rather, appear as manifestations of how social inequality was lived, and was to be transformed, at the level of the everyday. That is, if we see the everyday as a unity of conflicting temporalities (Harootunian 2000)—past, present and futurity jostling within the same unevenly lived historical frame—the mobilization of the everyday against the abstractions of economic, cultural and social domination can be seen as the hallmark of Marx in China, or in Maoism: its defining feature, as well as its ultimate downfall. Conversely, when the bureaucratic imperatives of the Communist Party were reinstituted in response to uncontrollable mass activity, the essential contradictions at the heart of the attempt for total historical transformation of Chinese and global life were bared. As the abstractions of accumulation, extraction and unequal exchange reappeared as the defining criteria of the cultural values and the economic value of socialism, thus overwhelming the embeddedness of inequality in social life itself, the road was prepared for what has accurately been called a “thermidorian reaction” (Meisner 1986). The first of these reactions took place in the early 1960s, in response to the utopian and ultimately disastrous Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, during which time an embryonic form of socialist economics was tried as an antidote to, what appeared to be, a re-emergence in rural everyday life of capitalist land and social relations—a mere 10 years after the initial revolutionary transformation of the villages. In 1950s China, the attempt at socialist economics famously revolved around a rearticulation of Marx’s law of value, whose law-like propositions derive from, and are more clearly apparent, in relation to capitalist societies where the surplus value of labor power is extracted as private profit, but whose socialist properties were not well understood or theorized. The opportunity, and the impossibility, of such theorization was encapsulated by the Maoist attempt, from 1957–1961, to abolish the relations of unequal exchange between rural and urban economies that had led to the absolute social, cultural and economic subordination of the agrarian to the urban industrial

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spheres of production. In theoretical-philosophical terms, as well as in materialist historical terms, unequal exchange and the social relations of production that underpinned it were said to lie at the foundation of the production and reproduction of structural social inequality; the remedy, it was proposed, would be to distribute social factors of production in ways that permitted production and reproduction to be locally self-sufficient and autonomous. Initially leading to the wholesale transformation of rural social relations into rural-industrial combinatories, called people’s communes, in an attempt to abolish rural-urban inequalities, the Great Leap Forward ultimately led to famine, economic disaster and widespread disillusionment among Party cadres and ordinary people with socialist experimentation in the economic realm (Lin 2006). The thermidorian reaction was led by Deng Xiaoping, who helped reinstate certain aspects of a private economy and an unfettered market. The second such reaction was launched in the early 1980s, again under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, in response to the destruction, during the Cultural Revolution, of the structures and authority of Party rule. This reaction is still ongoing today, in the ever-mutating and strengthening fortification of the Party-as-nation against all possible global or domestic challenges. The contemporary reaction, which has methodically undone and superseded all previous socialist transformations of the Chinese socio-economic and cultural order, can be seen as a thorough discrediting of Marx in China, as well as an attempt to root out any of the substantive analytic claims made by Marxism or Maoism in favor of a nominalist legitimization of Communist Party domination over society and Chinese nationalism in the world. The contemporary moment spells the end of the century of Marx in China. Recent “left-ish” intellectual attempts to revive Confucian concepts via a quasi-Marxist spin (B. Wang 2017) merely prove the observation; without elemental violence to basic Marxist analytics, and thus in merely a nominalist mode, classless Confucian datong [great unity] cannot be equated with Marxist class-based socialism, nor can Sinocentric tianxia [all under heaven] be equated with nationless Marxist internationalism. Marx in China must be seen as an extended event of great import. In broad analytical and historical terms, it inscribed the ineluctable insertion of China into a twentieth-century radical global horizon of anti-capitalist revolutionary activity, where the success of the Marxist-inflected Chinese Revolution of 1949 represented a major disruption of the developmental channels of global capital. In more intimate terms, Marx in China made clear that a “People’s War” on global and domestic social inequality could be fought and won (H. Wang 2017), thereby demonstrating that a non-European/ American people and movement could, with an embedded interpretation of revolutionary social analytics, mobilize to utterly transform the conditions of life. The ultimate failure of Marx in China must, on the one hand, be viewed against the challenge it posed to normative capitalist histories—orthodox Marxist ones, included— and, on the other hand, it must be seen in conjunction with the re-assertions of abstract domination over the conditions of social life generally in this era of neoliberal global capitalist consolidation and cultural reaction. That is, Marx in China is no longer the assimilated language of social and cultural transformational analysis; it has been devernacularized, dis-embedded and, for the most part, discarded.

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References Barlow, T. (2008), “Buying In: Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, ” in Modern Girl Around the World Group (ed.), The Modern Girl Around the World, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Benton, G. (2007), Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945, London and New York: Routledge. Cai, X. (2016), Revolution and its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966, trans. R. Karl and X. Zhong, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Chan, S. and D.E. Pollard (eds.). (2001), An Encyclopedia of Translation: Chinese–English, English–Chinese, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Cole, R. (2018), “To Save the Village: Agrarian Crisis and Conceptual Formation in China” PhD diss., New York University, New York. Dirlik, A. (1978), Revolution and History, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Dirlik, A. (1989), The Origins of Chinese Communism, New York: Oxford University Press. Harootunian, H.D. (2000), History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life, New York: Columbia University Press. Karl, R.E. (2017), The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Knight, N. (2005), Marxist Philosophy in China: From Qu Qiubai to Mao Zedong, 1923– 1945, Amsterdam: Springer. Lin, C. (2006), The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Liu, L., R.E. Karl and D. Ko (eds). (2013), The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Marx, K. (1967), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York: International Publishers. Meisner, M. (1986), Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 2nd edn, New York: Free Press. Wang, B. (2017) (ed.), Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Wang, H. (2017), “The Prophecy and Crisis of October: How to Think About the Revolution after the Revolution, ” trans. B. Kindler and H. Chambers, October: The Soviet Centenary. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 116(4): 669–706.

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Japan Gavin Walker

I To summarize the reception history of Marx in Japan is no small task. In fact, it is essentially impossible to give an adequate overview of one of the deepest, most prolific and most variegated linguistic repositories of the Marxist tradition. Although the fact remains remarkably little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual circles, Marxism was the dominant strand of theoretical inquiry in Japan for most of the twentieth century; more pointedly, we might say, Japanese has remained perhaps the most important language for Marxist-theoretical scholarship beyond English, German and French, yet the theoretical history of this tradition remains relatively isolated within its own linguistic boundaries. From its initial entry into the Japanese intellectual world in the late 1800s, Marxist analysis quickly came to constitute a vast and osmotic field that permeated all aspects of academic life, historical thought, forms of political organization, and ways of analyzing the social condition. Numerous examples testify to this, including the striking fact that the first Collected Works of Marx and Engels in the world was not published in German, Russian, French or English, but in Japanese, by Kaizōsha publishing house in 1932 in thirty-five volumes, overseen by Sakisaka Itsurō. There are few other places in the world where the distinction between the history of Marx’s reception and the history of Marxism is as important as in the case of Japan. Why? In the first place, while the Japanese context constitutes one of the earliest and most influential receptions of Marx—especially for the “non-Western” world—and in the twentieth century, Japan was one of the most advanced capitalist countries intellectually and socially marked by Marxist thought, the path of development of this reception is quite different from those of comparable societies in Europe and North America. While the English, French, German, Italian, American and other local developments of Marx saw his work as immediately linked to, and embedded in, the history of the workers’s movement, it would be hard to say that this relationship holds true in the case of Japan. Although a strong and powerful labor movement had existed since the intense industrialization of the 1870s to the1890s, this movement was principally conditioned in intellectual terms by a certain socialist-nativist orientation that provided the political ground for numerous social movements of the nineteenth century, stretching back to 467

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the late years of the Tokugawa feudal system, with its millenarian peasant contestations and formations of mass social consciousness. In this sense, Marx’s work entered Japan, not simply as the political vanguard of the labor and socialist movements, but also, or even principally, as the theoretical cutting-edge of social-scientific inquiry into the character of modern society, with its two central poles: the social relation of capital and the formation of the modern national state. Marx’s Capital was first published in German one year before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which would place Japan on its path towards rapid capitalist development, industrialization, and its imperialist turn towards the Asian continent. The first known Japanese introduction to Marx, published well before Capital had been translated, was a text titled simply “Karl Marx, ” written by Kusaka Chōjirō, who had studied in Germany in 1889–90, in the Kokka gakkai zasshi (Vol. 6, no. 72–4) in 1893, the twentysixth year of the Meiji Era (Suzuki 1956: 1); although as Suzuki points out, it is perhaps doubtful that Kusaka’s text was based on a real reading of Capital. For that, we ought to point to one of the most dominant and important thinkers of the early reception of Marx in Japan, Yamakawa Hitoshi, whose text “Marx’s Capital” was serialized in his radical newspaper, the Osaka heimin shinbun, in four issues in 1908 (Suzuki 1956: 6). Yamakawa would later go on to be one of the key figures in the early historiographical battles that would deeply mark the later reception of Marx in Japan, which we will touch on shortly. The pre-Marxist tradition of Japanese socialism was linked to the workers’s and peasants’s movements, whose prominent intellectuals included Kōtoku Shusui and Katayama Sen. Kōtoku’s Shakaishugi shinzui (The Essence of Socialism) and Katayama’s Waga shakaishugi (My Socialism) both emerged in print in 1903, a pivotal turning point in the development of Marxist thought in Japan (Sugihara 1998: 47). Kōtoku, who would soon be executed in the “High Treason Incident” of 1911 on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate the emperor, was the translator of The Communist Manifesto and a committed early socialist. Despite moving towards an anarcho-syndicalist position in his last years, Kōtoku’s early linking of what is called the “emperor system” to the development of capitalism in Japan would remain a key point of contention in later debates in Marxist thought. While the Meiji state, with its intense industrialization, was often considered a success story of global modernity, the Meiji Consitution enshrined, alongside the sanctity of private property, the divinity and absolute authority of the Emperor. This seemingly archaic political entity, according to Kōtoku—and for many later Marxists—was the key lever through which Japanese capitalist development occurred, with its high rate of exploitation and oppression in the countryside. As an ideological element of politics, what Marxists came to refer to as “the emperor-system” (tennōsei) functioned as a key element of the Meiji centralization. In the following year, on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, it would be Katayama’s handshake with his Russian counterpart Georgy Plekhanov, at the 6th Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam, that introduced the socialist world to the existence and prominence of the Japanese socialist movement. Katayama would, in the subsequent decades, go on to an extraordinary internationalist life. As a member of the executive committee of the Comintern, he was a founding member of three communist parties: the Japan Communist Party; the US Communist Party; and

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the Mexican Communist Party, which he helped found alongside his internationalist Indian comrade, M.N. Roy, in their unlikely years of struggle in Mexico City. His story is all the more remarkable considering Katayama was born a destitute peasant in rural Okayama in the last days of the feudal system (Katayama 1918).1 But aside from these early developments of Japanese Marxist thought at the turn of the century, the specificity of Marx’s theoretical work—and its essence in Capital— remained to be developed. In a sense, it is impossible to dissociate Marx’s reception in Japan from its centrality to the university system. From the 1910s into the 1920s, during the Taisho era, Marx’s Capital came more and more to the fore, to the extent that it became even a common figure of speech to refer to the young men obsessed with Capital by the name “Marx boy” [Marukusu bōi]. This new culture of the study of Marx produced an extraordinary generation of thinkers, many of whom would go on to become important theorists of Marx, and of Marxism in a broad sense: Yamakawa Hitoshi, Fukumoto Kazuo, Inomata Tsunao, Noro Eitarō, Yamada Moritarō, Hani Gorō, Uno Kōzō, Kuruma Samezō and many others, alongside those in the realm of philosophy proper, such as Tosaka Jun or Kakehashi Akihide, who had emerged from the Kyoto School of philosophy, a development more or less contemporary with the intellectual culture of Marxism at this time. Perhaps the catalyst or turning point of the entire period was the appearance of Kawakami Hajime’s Binbō monogatari (A Tale of Poverty), essentially a kind of popular introduction of socialist thought, which was serialized over three months in 1916 in the Osaka Asahi newspaper. The articles were shortly after compiled in book form, and proved so powerful in the intellectual climate of the time that it was reprinted thirty times by 1919 (Bernstein 1976: 87). This text, in turn, led Kawakami towards Marx’s own work and, in 1919, he published the influential Introduction to Marx’s Capital (Shihonron nyūmon). Many later Marxist thinkers cited this text and its appearance as the main catalyst for the popularization of Marxist theoretical work. Uno Kōzō, for instance, referred to the importance of Kawakami’s work as some of the first value-theoretical writing in Japanese (Uno 1970).2 By the late 1910s, especially in the two years following the success of the October Revolution, the theoretical vitality of Marx in Japan had been firmly established, and a new era of polemics opened.3

II One distinguishing and central element that deeply conditioned the Marxist tradition in Japan, as is the case almost everywhere outside Europe and North America, is the necessarily-central status of the so-called “national question. ” Historically speaking, the national question has been largely associated with Marxist theoretical investigations of the “non-West. ” Typically, it has been something that Western Marxism considered settled, although Gramsci’s analysis of the “southern” and colonial questions remained a notable exception. Unlike the instances of late imperial Russia or of the various Third World movements in the 1950s and 1960s, the national question has been often treated merely as a sign of an incomplete bourgeois revolution. In Japanese Marxist theory and historiography, however, this has certainly not been the case. Compressed into a period

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of one hundred years, from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the 1968 explosion of the New Left, Japan’s history encompassed the emergence of a modern, rapidly industrializing nation-state, the formation of a multi-ethnic, multi-national empire, the defeat of the nation and its empire, the occupation of the former “center” of the empire by the United States, and subsequent stratospheric economic development, under American hegemony, into the second largest capitalist power by the end of the 1960s. That is to say, the Japanese case effectively combines the trajectories of empire, colony, dependent power and dominant power into one complex whole. Still, from the introduction of the modern social sciences in their primarily German and French inflections in the early Meiji period (1868–1912), some form of the national question has always remained a dominant concern. From Fukuzawa Yukichi’s attempt to translate Mill’s work on national sentiment into the discourse of the “national body” to the Hegelian focus on “world history” and national destinies in Kyoto School philosophy, the figure of the nation—historically new in its modern political sense at this time—constituted a genuine site of potential and anxiety. No wonder then that this multi-dimensional crystallization of the national question was, for a long time, the foundational problem confronting Japanese Marxists: how to account for Japan’s historical position within the world?4 Another distinguishing feature of the Japanese Marxist tradition of historiography has been its relative insularity, at least in the postwar period, from Marxisms developing elsewhere, or more specifically its unidirectional insularity. One still frequently meets incredulity in Europe and North America: “Japanese Marxism? It exists?” I do not mean here that Japanese Marxists were unaware of the developments in Marxist theory, both of so-called Western Marxism and Marxism of other sorts. Rather, I mean precisely the opposite. While the Japanese Marxist tradition encapsulated and developed an exceptionally high level of theoretical development—in many ways more advanced than the contemporary discussions occurring in Europe—North America and elsewhere, especially in the prewar period—Japanese Marxist theory was and continues to be virtually unknown on a world scale save for a few figures. Even for those few figures who entered directly into global Marxist debates, their context and the intellectual history that formed the background to their positions has largely been ignored. It is my view that the long, dense and extremely comprehensive discussions of the national question in Japan, in addition to a series of other considerations, require rethinking the conventional division of Western Marxism, Soviet Marxism and “other” Marxisms that underpins so many attempts to consider this space of thought in modern intellectual history. The dominance of Marxism in Japanese academic fields such as political economy, sociology, history and so forth, is only part of the story. There is also a decisive political history that underpins the massive influence of Marxist theoretical inquiry in the Japanese situation. After the formation of the Japan Communist Party (Nihon kyōsantō) in 1922, internal debate in Marxist theory at first centered around questions of Marxist philosophy—in the work of major Marxist theorists of the 1910s and 1920s, such as Kawakami Hajime, Yamakawa Hitoshi, and Fukumoto Kazuo, among others—and the theoretical grasp of subjectivity, the problem of alienation, and the historical necessity of the revolutionary mission of the proletariat. After enjoying a level of support in the

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early 1920s, Fukumoto’s austere obsession with the correct line—what would later be understood as the theory of the “primacy of correct ideas, ” the standpoint of so-called “bunri ketsugō, ” or the unification of the party by removing ideologically incorrect elements (literally “unity” in separation)—became the target of denunciation during the time of the publication of the 1927 Comintern Theses, largely authored under the influence of N.I. Bukharin. Henceforth and to this day in Marxist theoretical work in Japan, the term “Fukumotoism” is used to dismiss a perceived hysterical insistence on purity of line, perhaps echoing the figure of Amadeo Bordiga in the European situation. The Comintern-JCP Thesis of 1927 began to lay out a theoretical line which emphasized the “two-stage” theory of revolution—in this view, Japan was not a fully realized modern state, rather it was still overwhelmed with “feudal remnants” in forms like parasitic landlordism—and it was this analysis of the stage of development of Japanese capitalism that initiated the beginnings of the split, which would come to a head with the 1932 Thesis (Comintern 1961). As the major “developed” country relative to its neighboring states and the primary imperialist power in East Asia, the Comintern considered Japan to be the most important and pivotal target for the revolutionary project, but in the wake of the 1927 Thesis, which emphasized that the 1868 Meiji Restoration had not yet been fully realized as the necessary bourgeois-democratic revolution in the transition to modern world capitalism, the questions emerged: was Japanese capitalism in the 1930s ready for socialist revolution and was it possible to discover the revolutionary subject of this process in the conditions on the ground? From the attempts to answer this question, the famous and influential “debate on Japanese capitalism” emerged (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō), which centered on clarifying the essential questions regarding modes of production and the historical processes of the articulation of social formations. What stage of development was Japan actually in and how, and by what means, had Japanese capitalist development proceeded, and did there exist a concomitant total development of the social formation as a whole which could produce the political consciousness necessary for the revolutionary transition? Was the basic economic category of social life in the villages—the form of land-tenancy rent (kosakuryō)—a “holdover” of feudalism, something partially feudal, or was it a product of the development of modern capitalism? The debate on Japanese capitalism, in its encyclopedic sense, took place between the mid-1920s and the mid-to-late-1930s. This debate, while central to Marxist theory, had an exceptionally broad influence on the formation of Japanese social thought on modern Japanese social sciences in general. In addition, it must be emphasized that, although there was certainly extensive and direct exegetical work on Marx in the 1920s and 1930s, exceedingly complex receptions of Marx—not only of Volume I of Capital, but of Volume II (the reproduction schemas) and Volume III (the category of ground rent and its theoretical explication)— principally took place in fields of the historiography and theoretical analysis of Japanese capitalism. In the debate on these questions, there emerged two basic positions: the first, which became that of the Rōnō (“Labor-Farmer”) faction, argued that the land reforms instituted in the 1868 Meiji Restoration—which they squarely considered to be a bourgeois-democratic revolution—had begun to solve the “backwardness” of the countryside, planting the initial seeds that would lead to full capitalist development;

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the second, which became that of the Kōza (“Lectures”) faction (representing the mainstream line of the JCP and the Comintern), argued that the Restoration had not been a full bourgeois-democratic revolution, but rather an incomplete transition to modernity, and that Japanese capitalism was only partially developed on a primarily feudal basis. The Comintern’s 1927 Thesis, in splitting from earlier emphases on the immediate socialist revolutionary process, initiated the conditions for the split between the JCP and the Rōnō faction, represented at this time by Yamakawa Hitoshi and Inomata Tsunao particulary. But in its 1932 Thesis, the Comintern position reinforced the thesis of the primacy of feudal remants even further, in parallel to the world situation, by calling for a mass-based bourgeois democratic revolution against absolutism and feudalism concretized in the form of the Emperor-system (tennōsei).5 The most influential author during this period of Comintern policy on the “national question” was Otto Kuusinen, who, in the 12th Plenum of the Comintern in 1932, called for mass-based actions which subordinated communist demands to the immediate needs of the broad mass front. By arguing that a directly communist political platform would alienate the party from the rural poor and the “non-advanced” strata of the working class, this call essentially began the transition in the Comintern to the line of the popular front adopted in 1935. In Japan, the Kōza faction’s position and dominance in this debate was comprehensively established with the 1932 publication of their eight-volume Lectures on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism (Nihon shihonshugi hattatsushi kōza). These works were in preparation well before the publication of the 1932 Thesis, and, therefore, they should be seen not as an expansion of the position of this Thesis, but rather as preparing the ground for the hegemony of its position in the wake of the 1927 Thesis. Noro Eitarō, a leader of the JCP, who was arrested and died in prison two years later in 1934, oversaw the compilation of the Lectures. Noro can be seen as the one who most concretely laid the groundwork for the overall conceptions of the Kōza faction. For him, the only way to effectively articulate the political consequence of theory, the proletarian strategy, was to focus on the “particularity” (tokushusei) of Japanese capitalist development. The reason for this, Noro claimed, was that, without understanding the “dominated” (hishihaiteki) mode of production, i.e. the agrarian semi-feudal structure of the countryside, one could not understand the particular way in which the development of the productive forces had necessitated a return to imperialism. This basic logic was echoed by Otto Kuusinen, then the leader of the Comintern’s Eastern Bureau, who was charged with preparing analyses of revolutionary conditions in East Asia. Kuusinen famously argued: “We observe the uninterrupted and limitless oppression of the peasantry, conditioned by the exceptionally powerful remnants of feudalism (hōkensei no zansonbutsu). The Japanese village is for Japanese capitalism a colony contained within its own domestic limits (Nihon shihonshugi ni totte jikoku naichi ni okeru shokuminchi de aru). ” He continues: “Japan’s bourgeois transformation remains remarkably incomplete (ichijirushiku mikansei de ari), remarkably inconclusive or non-determinate (ichijirushiku hiketteiteki de ari), and is in essence partial and unfinished (chūtohanpa). ” Precisely because of these features, he argues, Japanese capitalism is crippled or deformed (Walker 2016: 28–58). In an obvious sense, the transition debates in the Japanese context functioned allegorically to

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refract struggles over the correct line of political action—the “semi-feudal” thesis led to a two-stage theory of revolution; the thesis of an accomplished capitalism led to a onestage theory—but they also served as laboratories of theoretical experimentation on the status of Marx’s Capital, and how to apply its insights to the local conjuncture. In the immediate postwar period, the Japan Communist Party, reinvigorated after decades of governmental repression, bloomed and flourished as a source of resistance politics and as an intellectual organizational force. In the early 1950s, the political logic around which the JCP had theorized its position began to change towards the form of a “national liberation” struggle, an armed struggle for liberation from “subordination” inspired by the Chinese revolutionary line. This shift was largely touted by certain JCP leaders, in particular Tokuda Kyūichi (1894–1953), who had spent 18 years imprisoned under the prewar Peace Preservation Law, and Nosaka Sanzō (1892–1993), who had spent the war years in a variety of locations, and who had established linkages to the Chinese party, eventually fleeing to Beijing from the Red Purges undertaken by the American occupation forces throughout Japan in 1950. They emphasized in particular the continuance, rather than rupture, of earlier land relations that had obtained in the Japanese countryside, what they described as a “parasitic landlord system” (kisei jinushisei). With this as the decisive backbone of the subjugation of the “nation, ” the JCP began an ill-fated movement of returning to the villages. The strategy took the form of the quasi-clandestine Village Operations Corps (Sanson kōsakutai), groups of cadre and students who would enter the villages, agitate among the peasants, and attempt to ignite a revolutionary spark in the countryside— Mao’s “a single spark can start a prairie fire” in order to sow the seeds for an “encircling of the cities. ” The movement was doomed from the start, not only because the peasants were by and large completely uninterested in the movement, but also because their conditions, although still mired in appalling poverty, had been shifted by the postwar land reforms, enough at least to diminish the direct “parasitism” they faced, and thus enough to render ineffective the Operations Corps’ call for revolutionary action (Koschmann 1996). This moment, however, was certainly more than a failed political strategy; although the JCP soon disowned the return to the village as “ultra-left adventurism” (kyokusa bōkenshugi) and officially rejected the line of armed struggle in 1955 at its Sixth Congress, the material and affective memory of the village operations remained a critical site of literary politics, of political inspiration and of imagination and experimentation throughout the decade of the 1950s and well into the subsequent years. After the end of the Second World War, the JCP returned to the forefront of Japanese society, bolstered by the sacrifice and legitimacy of its main leaders, Nosaka and Tokuda. Hailed as uncorrupted by the war years, the JCP and the Japan Socialist Party undertook a concerted electoral effort in 1946 and 1947. Alarmed at the wide favor these parties enjoyed, General Douglas McArthur and the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP ) took a pivotal decision in what came to be known amongst historians as the “reverse course, ” changing strategy to prevent the spread of socialism rather than principally attempt to rid the Japanese state of fascism. Thus, the so-called “red purges” of the late 1940s and early 1950s attempted to destroy the sudden resurgence of the prewar Japanese communist tradition, once the strongest in Asia,

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and the source of major theoretical work in Marxist thought. This drove the JCP underground and led to a short period (from the late 1940s to 1955) of emphasis on armed struggle, underground clandestine work and a renewed proximity to the Chinese line.6 In 1955, at the Sixth Congress of the postwar JCP, this line of armed struggle in the countryside was repudiated, its supporters expelled and a new “historic compromise” (along the lines of that made by the Italian Communist Party) was installed, paving the way for the JCP ’s full transition to reformism and participation in government. Seen by the young activists and theorists as a betrayal of the struggle, this moment can be seen as the turning point for the emergence of a Marxian “New Left, ” one year before the events of 1956 in Hungary would generate a similar process for the Western European and North American communist parties. As the 1950s drew to a close, a new social mass of students, intellectuals, workers, peasants and the popular classes were once again rising, in particular around the 1960 renewal of the US -Japan Joint Security Treaty (Anpo, in its Japanese abbreviation). The inaugural mass demonstration of the 1960s around the Anpo protest mobilized immense numbers: just one of the three major general strikes called by the unions brought 6.2 million onto the streets in June 1960. With this intense level of mobilization, a new combative Left had formed, heralding a new social arrangement. No longer beholden to the JCP, who were by now regarded by many on the Left to have betrayed their politics, this New Left in Japan came to produce one of the most intense decades of political organization, political thought and political aesthetics in the global twentieth century (Haniya 1963).

III If the prewar debates regarding Japanese capitalism—its character, its development, its mode of relation to the narrative of capital’s emergence in Capital—were centered on the relations between the historical and the logical, the postwar boom of Marxist theoretical writing tended to be split between the methodological analysis of capital itself and the search for a philosophy of subjectivity located around the theory of alienation, characterized by an interest in the early Marx. Figures such as Kakehashi Akihide, Kuroda Kan’ichi and Umemoto Katsumi tended towards a reading of Marx centered, to an extent, around the category of the subject, or what Kakehashi called the “subjective grasp” (shutaiteki ha’aku) of capital, with a concomitant centrality given to the figure of “human labor. ” In contrast, Uno Kōzō and his primary colleagues like Suzuki Kōichirō, Iwata Hiroshi and others posited a relatively structural, Capitalcentered reading, concerned with three major points: 1) the methodological clarification of Capital in terms of levels of analysis (logic or “principle”; stage or mode of capitalist development; conjunctural analysis); 2) the centrality of the peculiar quasi-commodity of labor power; 3) the importance of a theory of imperialism internal to a re-reading of Capital. While many of those around Uno took up “world capitalism ” (Iwata Hiroshi), returned to the agrarian question (Ōuchi Tsutomu), or developed logical readings of Capital in their own right (Suzuki Kōichirō), Uno’s work, while studiously separated from politics proper and from the increasingly intense partisan

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struggles internal to the Marxist left, nevertheless became widely influential amongst the New Left (Suga 2005; Walker 2018). In the wake of 1968, and the eclipse of the armed movements such as the United Red Army and the East Asian Anti-Japanese Armed Front [Higashi ajia han-nichi busō sensen]), a new turn emerged in the early 1970s. Characterized by Kojin Karatani’s book, Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin [Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility] and the work of Hiromatsu Wataru, this moment saw a return to the textual center of Marx’s work, once again at a certain degree of separation from existing Marxist politics. Hiromatsu’s extraordinarily dense philosophical prose, with its focus on the philosophical category of reification in relation to the theory of the value-form, was highly influential in the generation of the 1960s, not least because of Hiromatsu’s involvement in the student movement. His work, not only in the realm of philosophy, but also in the active correcting of the manuscript of The German Ideology to create a more Marxologically-accurate text, produced numerous examples of lasting philosophical importance, perhaps best symbolized in his 1974 book The Philosophy of Marx’s Capital (Hiromatsu 1974). Of course, Hiromatsu represented much more of a link to the prewar high point of Marxist philosophy, represented by Tosaka Jun or Miki Kiyoshi, while, at precisely the same time, Karatani’s work brought the reading of Marx into a specific moment that coincided with the development of critical theory—in its broad, rather than narrow Frankfurt School, sense—particularly in the United States, where Karatani had spent time at Yale in the 1970s, later teaching at Columbia University. Since the famed 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on the “Sciences of Man” the so-called “French theory” had been in intense development, particularly in North America. In a way, the generality provided by the language of theory was not an entirely new development in Japan, where a certain type of crossover between literary criticism and social theory had long been part of public discourse, even at times wholly outside the university system. Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possiblity, serialized in the literary magazine Gunzō in 1974, represented a break—or rather is situated within a break—with the prevailing reading of Marx, dominant since 1968, that of the early Marx, a Lukácsian reading of the figure of the self-alienated laboring human. This new reading focused on the textuality of Capital; it was a transversal reading intersected by structural linguistics (Saussure), psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) and deconstruction (Heidegger and Derrida). In a sense, Karatani’s text can now be seen in the long intellectual-historical light as a key point from which the tradition of Japanese Marxist theory produced a new point of departure for itself in the global terms of critical theory (Karatani 1990). This shift would condition heavily the development of what was called “new academism” in the 1980s, when Karatani himself came to be a dominant critical figure alongside Asada Akira, whose influential works on Marx integrated the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as questions of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Today, there is no question that the reading of Marx remains a decisive part of the Japanese intellectual landscape, although one would be hard-pressed to name any truly dominant or hegemonic intellectuals in the style of Uno, Hiromatsu or even Karatani— who is himself still writing, albeit with less influence than he had in the 1990s. Recent Japanese readings of Marx have paralleled the post–1990s globalization years in

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interesting ways: on the one hand, there has been a significant “internationalization” of Japanese Marxist theorists, historians and philosophers, in the sense that the dominant modes of reading are now less centered on key figures and positions within the development of Japanese Marxist thought—the Rono/Koza positions, Uno’s work, Hiromatsu’s work, the work of more explicitly Kyoto School inflected theorists, like the postwar figures Kuroda Kan’ichi, Kakehashi Akihide, and so on. But on the other hand, the rest of the world remains deeply ignorant of the Japanese tradition, a peculiarity that can only be explained by linguistic distance, since at every other level, as much theoretically powerful Marxist analysis exists in Japanese as has been written in French, Spanish, Italian or other major world languages. Certainly the hyper-methodological character of midtwentieth-century Japanese-language Marxist thought has not helped its dissemination, nor have the rather obscure polemics in which much of it was embedded. While the internationalism of the prewar period, upheld by both the existence of the Soviet Union and, specifically, the pre-Popular Front (1935) Comintern, provided a globality to the early decades of Marxist theory in Japan, the postwar period saw a retreat of this international scope, with only a few notable exceptions in the field of history, wherein a number of important Marxists, such as Toyama Shigeki and Takahashi Kōhachirō, were certainly known globally. The revolutions of 1968 and the formation of the New Left in the wake of 1955 provided another form of globality, often more at the level of the contemporaneity of events and processes of the global 1960s (the similarities of the armed-struggle left in Japan, Italy, Germany and the US ; the aesthetic and political parallels at the formal level) rather than through intimate relation of direct exchange between national situations, with a few notable exceptions. The early Trotskyism of the 1950s, with links to French organizations like Socialisme ou barbarie, was one such avenue; the armed-struggle organizations, with their direct actions and descent into terrorism in Lebanon, Western Europe and South-East Asia was another. In the years after 1968, a new generation emerged, who were no longer necessarily beholden to the experience of the Japanese Marxist tradition as such. After the 1990s, a new change has taken place within the sphere of Marxist theory and Marxian analysis in Japan, bringing forward powerful voices that ought to be more widely disseminated in other languages.7 The Marxian tradition of scholarship remains extraordinarily widespread, with new links to the growing body of work on value-form theory, although the many possible links between the Neue Marx-Lektüre and its antecedents in the various Japanese value-form debates remain to be developed, as well as new work linked to the reception of French and Italian post-68 philosophical-political figures. The above highly schematic overview is a nothing more than a kind of impossible placeholder for a vast bibliographic and conceptual tradition. It remains a crucial task for Marxists today to bring this immense theoretical history in the Japanese language into connection with its counterparts around the world.

Notes 1 2

See Katayama’s early English text in Katayama 1918. See Uno 1970, Vol. 1: 214, 305.

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On this period in general, see Wakabayashi 1998: 147–206. On the Marxist historiography of the pre-war period, see Harootunian and Isomae 2008, especially the Preface. On the history of the debate on Japanese capitalism, see Nagaoka 1985 and Hoston 1987. On the question of the nation in this period of Marxist thought, see Gayle 2003. For two recent and important examples, see Ichida 2015 and Nagahara 2017.

References Actuel Marx, no. 2: Le marxisme au Japon (1985, in J. Bidet (ed.), Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Comintern (1961), Kominterun: Nihon ni kan suru teze-shū, Tokyo: Aoki Shoten. Bernstein, G.L. (1976), Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Fukuzawa, H. (1981), Aspekte der Marx-Rezeption in Japan: Spätkapitalisierung und ihre sozioökonomischen Folgen, dargestellt am Beispiel der japanischen Gesellschaft, Bochum: Studienverlag, Dr. N. Brockmeyer. Gayle, C.A. (2003), Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism, London: Routledge. Gendai Nihon shisō taikei, Vol. 21 (1965), in Y. Takeuchi (ed.), Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Gorō, H. (1956), Meiji ishinshi kenkyū, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Haniya, Y. (1963), Kakumei no shisō (Sengo Nihon shisō taikei, Vol. 6, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Harootunian, H.D. and Isomae, J. (2008), Marukusushugi to iu keiken: 1930–40 nendai Nihon no rekishigaku, Tokyo: Aoki Shoten. Hiromatsu W. (1974), Shihonron no tetsugaku, Tokyo: Gendai Hyōronsha. Hoston, G.A. (1986), Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Ichida, Y. (2015), Althusser: aru renketsu no tetsugaku, Tokyo: Ibunsha. Karatani, K. (1990), Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin, Tokyo: Kōdansha. Katayama Sen (1918), The Labour Movement in Japan, Chicago, IL : Charles Kerr. Kawashima, K. et al. (2013), Tosaka Jun: A Reader, Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series. Koschmann, J.V. (1996), Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Nagahara, Y. (2017), Yasagure tachi no gaitō: Kashi sonzai no seijikeizaigaku hihan josetsu, Tokyo: Kōshisha. Nagaoka, S. (1985), Nihon shihonshugi ronsō no gunzō, Tokyo: Minerva Shobō. Norō, E. (1930), Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi, 2 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suga, H. (2005), 1968 nen, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Suzuki, K. (1959), Shihonron to Nihon, Tokyo: Kōbundō. Uno, K. (1970), Shihonron gojūnen, Vol. 1, Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku. Wakabayashi, B.T. (1998), Modern Japanese Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, G. (2016), The Sublime Perversion of Capital, Durham, NC , and London: Duke University Press.

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Western Europe Jan Kandiyali

Marx spent his entire life in Western Europe. He was born in Trier, south-western Germany, in 1818, and lived most of his life in exile in Paris, Brussels and London, where he died in 1883. His influence in the region has been enormous. On the political level, Marx’s ideas have inspired Western European movements and political parties. While none of these movements or parties achieved the dominance that their counterparts did in Eastern Europe, many of them have enjoyed mass followings and significant electoral successes. On the theoretical level, Marx’s ideas have also been influential, inspiring supporters and critics in equal measure. Indeed, many of the important thinkers in Western Europe after Marx have either been Marxists or felt the need to respond to him.1 In this entry I shall primarily focus on Marx’s reception in four countries: Germany, France, Italy and Britain. Marx has been influential in all of these countries, but in different ways. I conclude with some remarks about Marx in contemporary Western Europe, which after years of decline appears to be showing signs of an unexpected revival. Marx spent most of his adult life in exile from his native Germany. However, this did not prevent him from a sustained attempt to build socialism in his country of birth. This effort primarily bore fruit after Marx’s death. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD ) was founded in 1875, but it was initially influenced by rival socialist factions, especially the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, whose views Marx subjected to trenchant criticism in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme. ” In the 1880s, however, Marx’s followers began to exercise greater power within the SPD. This crystallized at the Party Congress in Erfurt in 1891 when Marxism was adopted as the Party’s offi cial ideology. The rise of the SPD was rapid: from commanding less than ten per cent of the vote in the elections of the 1870s and early 1880s, it then went on to win the largest number of votes in every election from 1890 to 1932, when it was eclipsed by the rise of Hitler. From the outset, however, its commitment to Marxism in practice was questionable. This situation came to a head when the Reichstag SPD delegates voted for German involvement in the First World War, leading to both the dissolution of the Second International and a split in the German workers’ movement, with the formation of the German Communist Party (KPD ) in 1919. The KPD never achieved the same level of support as the SPD, but it was a serious force in the Weimar republic, regularly gaining 479

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more than ten per cent of the popular vote. However, its support dwindled after the Second World War, and it was banned in 1956. The last vestiges of Marxism were removed from the SPD in 1958. Marx’s influence on German theory has been similarly momentous. Once again, the SPD was, at least initially, the epicenter. The SPD’s early years were marked by a debate over Marx’s theory that became known as the “revisionism controversy. ” Its central figures were Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, both of whom had known Marx personally and who were seen, after Engels’s death, as Marx’s successors. The debate touched on a number of different aspects of Marx’s theory, but the central issue concerned the transition to socialism. Simply put, Bernstein argued that socialism could be brought about by a gradual transformation of capitalist society. Thus, revolution was both unnecessary and undesirable. By contrast, Kautsky defended the orthodox Marxist position that communism could only be brought about by economic breakdown, class conflict and, ultimately, revolution. Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas were also forged in this controversy. Born in Poland in 1871, Luxemburg became a German citizen and joined the SPD at the age of 28. A radical critic of Bernstein’s revisionism, Luxemburg’s writings emphasized the importance of proletarian “spontaneity, ” an emphasis that would also lead her to criticisms of the vanguardism of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. A more important figure in the development of Marxist theory was Georg Lukács. Born in Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1885, Lukács culturally and linguistically identified himself as German. Unlike Kautsky, Bernstein and Luxemburg, who had all imbibed Marxism in their youth, Lukács only became a Marxist in his early thirties—prior to that, he had found success as a romantic literary scholar. In 1918 he joined the newly-formed Communist Party of Hungary and enjoyed a brief stint as the People’s Commissar for Education and Culture. His central theoretical work was History and Class Consciousness. Published in 1923, it provided an extended discussion of the themes of consciousness, alienation and reification. In doing so, it did much to rehabilitate the Hegelian side of Marx’s thought, a side that had been lost in the discussions of Kautsky and Bernstein.2 It was a major influence on—indeed, it largely inaugurated—the movement that came to be known as Western Marxism. Marx was also the major influence on the Frankfurt School, though their reading of Marx was mediated through Hegel, Lukács and the German philosophical tradition more generally. Founded by an endowment from a wealthy grain merchant in 1923, its core members included the philosophers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. A major preoccupation of their work was the question of why a working class revolution had not taken place in the way that Marx had anticipated. Their basic answer was that capitalist ideology prevented workers from developing a clear view of their real interests. Their work was distinctive from the way they generally focused on art, rather than politics, as the key instance of bourgeois ideology. It was also distinctive for its quite un-Marxist pessimism about the working class and the prospects for socialism. Marx’s influence on subsequent generations of Frankfurt School theorists—most notably Jürgen Habermas and, more recently, Axel Honneth— has been somewhat weaker; here the major influences have been Kant and Hegel, respectively.

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Marx spent his first period of exile in France, arriving in Paris in 1843. His stay in the French capital was short, but undoubtedly important: it was there that he became a communist, mixed with workers for the first time, got to know a number of famous figures in the international socialist movement, and wrote the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, a text that was never intended for publication but which, nonetheless, has become famous for its humanist critique of capitalism. Marx was forced to leave France in 1845, but he continued to engage with French politics for the rest of life, most notably around the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, when he was in direct contact with its leaders and organized a number of events in its support. Owing to its many indigenous socialist traditions, however, Marx’s place in French politics was slow to materialize. The French Communist Party (PCF ) was founded in 1920, unifying a number of small Marxist parties, but it was only after the Second World War that Marxism, buoyed by the role that the communists had played in the resistance to Nazism, began to exercise a significant influence on the French political landscape. After that, however, Marxism’s presence was considerable. The PCF was a serious force in the post-war period, gaining a high of 28.2 per cent of the vote in November 1946 and entering national government on three separate occasions: in 1944–1947; in 1981–1984; and in 1997–2002. Marx’s thought was similarly influential on the development of post-war French theory. Broadly speaking, the French reception of Marx’s work might be described as undergoing two phases. The first is primarily associated with the work of the philosopher, playwright and novelist, Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was an existentialist before his conversion to Marxism, and his subsequent work might be seen as an attempt to fuse the two traditions. The second phase is primarily associated with Louis Althusser. Althusser’s work can be described as a repudiation of the humanist and Hegelian strand within Western Marxism, epitomized by Lukács and the Frankfurt School. Althusser did not deny the Hegelian and humanist aspects of Marx’s thought. Rather, he argued that these aspects were confined to Marx’s early writings and that they came to be replaced by the development of a scientific theory that constituted Marxism proper. Althusser’s work won considerable supporters in the following years, among the most important being that of Greek philosopher Nicos Poulantzas, who did important work (in French) developing the political side of Althusserian Marxism. Not surprisingly, however, Althusser’s interpretation of Marx also attracted a number of critics. As in France, Marx’s main political influence in Italy was felt after the Second World War, with the development of Marxism initially being checked by the strength of the anarchists and, later, the rise of Mussolini. The Italian Communist Party (PCI ) became a significant post-war political force; as well as having the largest mass membership of any communist party in Western Europe, it was also the second largest party in Italy in every election from 1948 to 1987. Marx’s thought made its mark on Italian theory earlier than it did on Italian politics. The key figure in the early years of Italian Marxism was the philosopher Antonio Labriola. Labriola moved towards Marxism from Hegelianism in the 1890s and went on to be a major presence in the Second International. Antonio Gramsci is an even more important figure. Born in Sardinia in 1891, Gramsci co-founded the PCI in 1921.

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He was then imprisoned by the Fascist authorities in 1928. In jail, with only a handful of books, and in increasingly poor health, he produced what some have seen as the most original work in Marxist theory after Marx, the Prison Notebooks.3 Rejecting crude forms of economic determinism, the Prison Notebooks provided an analysis of how the bourgeoisie in Western Europe had consolidated their grip on power and averted revolution. Gramsci’s central claim was that the Western European bourgeoisie possessed what he called “hegemony”—control over the moral, intellectual and cultural life of their society. As a result, they had come to rule primarily through consent rather than coercion. In Gramsci’s view, this change in the nature of bourgeois power necessitated a change in revolutionary strategy: in Western Europe it would not be enough to simply seize power, as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia, for example; rather, the revolutionary forces must forge a protracted “war of position” to subvert the bourgeoisie’s cultural domination and create their own hegemony. More recent important figures in Italian Marxism include Galvano Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti. Their work on Marx was more scholarly. Against the Hegelian strand within Western Marxism, represented by Lukács and the Frankfurt School (and repudiated by Althusser), Della Volpe and Colletti argued that Marx’s most important precursors were Kant (in philosophy) and Rousseau (in political theory). It is a familiar cliché that, despite living in London for well over thirty years, Marx had little influence in Britain in comparison to continental Europe. According to the former Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, for instance, British socialism “owed more to Methodism than to Marx” (1964: 1). However, Marx’s purported lack of influence in Britain can be overstated. It is true that the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB ) was small when compared with the communist parties of Germany, France and Italy. It is also true that the major party of the British left, the Labour Party, has generally been anti-Marxist. Nevertheless, Marx has exerted a significant influence on British society. This influence is not limited to the twentieth century. During his lifetime Marx was more active in British political and intellectual life than is commonly assumed (Leopold 2014). Not least, he was a major intellectual and organizing force in the International Workingmens’ Association. Founded in London in 1864, Marx wrote the Provisional Rules and Inaugural Address of the society and was elected to its General Council. Marx’s writings were also enthusiastically read (though not always well understood) by nineteenth-century British socialists such as Henry Hyman, Ernest Belfort Bax and William Morris. Through these figures, Marx influenced Britain’s first socialist political party, the Social Democratic Federation, and, later, its splinter group, the Socialist League—though both organizations also contained non-Marxist socialists and anarchists. Founded in 1920, the CPGB never achieved either the mass membership or level of electoral support that its counterparts in Germany, France or Italy did, though it did gain two members of parliament at the 1945 general election and exercised some leadership within the British labor movement. Marx’s influence in Britain has been primarily intellectual. In the 1940s and 1950s, Marxism was especially influential in the fields of history, where the writings of Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson are important, and economics, where Joan Robinson’s Accumulation of Capital is the standout work. Later, in the early 1960s, the group that came to be known

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as the “New Left” became the center for Marxist theory in Britain. Disillusioned by the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, the New Left looked to develop Marxism in a different direction from Soviet orthodoxy. In this task they were influenced by the humanism of Marx’s early writings, which were translated into English in the late 1950s, and by the work of other Western Marxists, especially Lukács, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. The key figures were the author and literary critic, Raymond Williams, the sociologist, Stuart Hall and the historian, Perry Anderson. It is fair to say that Marx has had less influence on British philosophy. Philosophers in Britain have written on Marx, but they have generally been critical of his work. Examples of this critical tendency include Isaiah Berlin, H.B. Acton, Karl Popper, Leszek Kolakowski and John Plamenatz. One notable exception to this reception were the analytical Marxists, a group of like-minded thinkers who came to prominence in Britain and North America in the 1980s. The central figure of the group was the philosopher G.A. Cohen.4 Born into a communist family in Montreal, Cohen wrote his thesis in Oxford and then worked at University College London, before returning to Oxford to take up the prestigious Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory. Cohen’s major work, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: An Interpretation and Defence, utilized the methods of analytic philosophy to offer a sophisticated defense of historical materialism. For a brief time in the 1980s, analytical Marxism constituted a major field of research in mainstream analytic philosophy. But in the 1990s, the focus of the major figures of the group turned away from Marx. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, many thought that Marx’s influence on Western Europe would also come to an end. For some time, this prediction looked eminently plausible. Communist parties that had enjoyed significant electoral success in the preceding years were hemorrhaging support. Debates about Marx’s theory also dried up. Marx was perceived as having been discredited, and his influence appeared to be fading away. However, this verdict proved premature. Far from burying Marx, the collapse of Soviet communism has liberated Marx from his association with its failed brand of communism. In addition, the global financial crisis of 2007, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has also put Marx back on the agenda. In this relatively favorable climate, there has been a revival of interest in Marx in Western Europe. This is most clearly seen in Greece, where the anti-austerity party, Syriza, won two general elections in 2015, with a government that included Yannis Varafakis, a self-proclaimed Marxist economist, as its finance minister. Yet similar stories may also be told elsewhere. For instance, in Britain the socialist Jeremy Corbyn confounded expectations to resoundingly win two Labour leadership contests (in 2015 and 2016) and to gain forty four per cent of the popular vote in the 2017 general election. He has been open about Marx’s influence on his thought, and his shadow chancellor John McDonnell has been even more so. Marx himself has, once again, become an enormous cultural presence, making the headlines of a number of mainstream newspapers and magazines, and being the subject of both a theatre production, “Young Marx” and a feature film, “Der Junge Karl Marx. ” There also seems to be a moderate revival of interest of Marxism in Western European academia. These developments suggest that the story of Marx’s influence in Western Europe may not yet be complete.5

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Notes 1

2

3 4 5

In this entry I shall primarily focus on Marx’s influence on Marxists. A fuller account would also focus on Marx’s influence on non-Marxists, where this might include discussion of such figures as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze among others. Another important figure in the early attempt to rehabilitate the Hegelian side of Marx’s thought was Karl Korsch. For discussion of Korsch’s thought, see McLellan 1998, Ch.12, and Kolakowski 1978, Ch. VIII . Gramsci is the only figure to emerge with praise in the otherwise negative assessment of Western Marxism produced by Anderson 1976 and Kolakowski 1978. Other important analytical Marxists include Jon Elster, Adam Przeworkski, John Roemer, Philippe van Parijs and Erik Olin Wright. For helpful comments and discussion on the contents of this chapter, I would like to thank Meade McCloughan, Barry Stocker, Imre Szeman and an anonymous referee.

References Anderson, P. (1976), Considerations on Western Marxism, London: New Left Books Leopold, D. (2014), “Karl Marx and British Socialism, ” in W.J. Mander (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLellan, D. (1998), Marxism after Marx, 3rd edn, Basingstoke and London: Palgrave. New Left Review, Western Marxism—A Critical Reader, London: New Left Review. Kolakowski, L. (1978), Main Currents of Marxism, 3 Vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, H. (1964), The Relevance of British Socialism, London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson.

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The Arab World Jaafar Aksikas

This chapter provides a schematic critical account of the major trajectories and formations of Marxism in the modern Arab world in the last two centuries. Such an account is both necessary and timely, especially in a historical moment characterized by a deep crisis in the Arab world—and in global capitalism more generally—that has prompted a return to Marx and Marxism. Furthermore, this is a special moment in the history of the contemporary Arab world, the moment of what appears to be the defeat of the so-called “Arab Spring, ” the wave of protests and political upheavals across the region which began in 2010–2011. It is in this context that I intend this essay to be a small contribution to the renewal of and return to Marxism in the Arab world: an attempt to account for and to help transform what is currently unfolding in the region. As a general critical and theoretical disposition, Marxism more or less spans and pervades the history of modern Arab thought since Marxist ideas were first imported into the Arab world from Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one can see the influence of Marx and Marxism even among those traditional and religious intellectuals who rejected the orthodox Marxist paradigm, but who were nevertheless interested in social and political change and in anti-colonial struggle. For example, there are clear socialist tendencies in the works of early Muslim and Arab modernizers such as Jamal-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897), Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855–1902), Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) and Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949). While these thinkers did not embrace Marxism in any systematic way, and while all of them distanced themselves from and some even rejected the Marxist paradigm altogether, much of their work was informed by Marxist language and Marxist concepts. This is especially clear in the letters of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in the work of Sayyid Qutb (see, for example, Qutb’s Al-Adala Al-Ijtima’iyya Fi Al-Islam [Social Justice in Islam] (1949), Ma’araqat Al-Islam Wa AlRa’asmaliyya [Battle between Islam and Capitalism] (1950), Al-Islam Wa Salam Al-Alami [World Peace and Islam] (1950)). But while this early work did draw on some ideas of Marx and Marxism, it was hardly a systematic, sustained or even explicit engagement. The absence of a serious encounter with Marxism was due largely to a general rejection of the Marxist paradigm as a secularist and anti-religious ideology that did not have much of use to say about the specific context and situation of 485

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the Arab world.1 But it can also be attributed secondarily to the fact that the major works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and other major European and Soviet Marxists were not readily available in Arabic translation at the time. In the Arab world, orthodox Marxist orientations did not appear until several decades later, when major works of Marxism became widely available as part of the intellectual and political life of the region. The history and place of Marxism in the modern Arab world is very complex. In quick summary and for the purposes of this brief survey, I would like to provide a few preliminary remarks and distinguish between two major formations of Marxism: Early Arab Marxism, or Old Left Marxism (spanning roughly from the early 1900s to the 1960s), and Arab New Left Marxism (roughly from the 1960s to the present). This periodization is not meant to obliterate the common problematic and common concerns that animate these formations, nor is it meant to erase the differences and project some massive homogeneity or uniformity within these historical moments. Instead, it is meant to help us describe some general trends, tendencies, and directions of what one might call the “selective formations” or traditions of Marxism in the Arab world.

Early Arab Marxism, or Arab Old Left Marxism: From the Early 1900s to the Late 1960s Arab Old Left Marxism first appeared in the era of pre-war capitalism, an era of intensifying colonial and imperial control of the region. The Arab Old Left refers to a varied group of Arab intellectuals (and also politicians) who accepted and engaged the works of Marx and other Marxists and offered multiple interpretations of these works. One can generally distinguish between Marxists who approached Marxism rather uncritically and ahistorically, seeking contextual evidence to confirm its universal validity and applicability, and those who sought to draw on the tools of Marxism to develop a distinct form of Arab Marxism, one capable of accounting for the prevalent state of affairs. As a consequence of the colonial encounter between Arabs and the West and of the challenges posed by the reality of that encounter Arab intellectuals and politicians developed a deep consciousness of the necessity of modernization and national nahda [renaissance]. Many Arab leftist intellectuals, including Shibli Shumail (1850–1917) and Farah Antun (1874–1922), largely accepted Marxism as an essential framework for the critique and analysis of capitalism and imperialism in the region and were attracted to the ideas and ideals of socialism, secularism, democracy and modernity. Others, such as Salama Musa (1887–1958) and Louis Awad (1915–1990), took Marxism even more seriously and saw it as the only way to establish the political project of Arab socialism in Egypt and in the Arab world more generally. They saw Marxism both as a political project of radical social change and a methodological framework for the analysis of the different levels of the Egyptian and Arab social formation—economic, political, cultural and ideological.

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Arab New Left Marxism: From the 1960s to the Present Arab New Left Marxism emerged in the context of the defeat of the political project of Arab socialism, also known as Nasserism, which became clear with the 1967 Arab defeat in the war between Egypt and other Arab states, on the one hand, and Israel, on the other. During the era of Arab socialism (1952–1967), Arab countries, following the lead of Egypt, evolved within the framework of a distinct economic model, which can be described as state capitalism, in which the state takes responsibility for the development of an indigenous capitalism in close relationship to the system of global capitalism, and whereby the state supplies the conditions for the emergence of national capital within the narrow framework prescribed by the international division of labor.2 By the late 1960s, it became clear that Arab socialism had failed and was unable to break with imperialism and eliminate dependency on the world capitalist system. Many contradictions, which set limits on its functioning, became apparent in the deepening of the social crisis at all levels, economic, political and cultural. As newer Islamist social and political forces were emerging, a new cohort of Marxist intellectuals began to appear. This cohort largely abandoned the political project of Marxist socialism and saw in Marxism a theoretical and methodological base indispensable for understanding Islamic tradition and Arab culture. Given the sustained focus on the analysis of religion, tradition, and culture, it would not be inaccurate to call this the era of cultural Marxism. Here, Arab cultural Marxists insisted that culture, religion, and tradition must be studied within the social relations and system through which they are produced, both historically and in the present. This focus is clear in works of Husayn Muruwwa (1910–1987), Hassan Hanafi (1935-present), Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943–2010), Tayeb Tizini (1934-present), Abdallah Laroui (1933-present), Mohammed Abed Al Jabri (1935–2010), and Adunis (1930-present). During this era, some of the most classic historical materialist studies on Arab and Islamic turath [tradition] and history were produced, including: Muruwwa’s Al Nazaat Al Madiyya Fi Al Falsafa Al Arabiyya Al Islamiyya [Materialist Trends in Arabic-Islamic Philosophy] (1979); Laroui’s l’idéologie arabe contemporaine [Contemporary Arab Ideology] (1967); La crise des intellectuelles arabes: traditionalisme ou historicisme [The Crisis of Arab Intellectuals: Traditionalism or Historicism] (1974); Al Jabri’s Naqd Al Aql Al Arabi [Critique of Arab Reason] (4 volumes, 1984–2001); Adunis’s Al Tabith Wa Al Mutahawil [The Static and the Changing]; and Abu Zayd’s Al Imam Al Shafyi Wa Taasis Al Idyolojiyya Al Wasatiyya [Imam Shafyi and the Foundation of the Ideology of Moderation] (2007). While it is true that many of these Arab cultural Marxists grounded their work in a Marxist problematic and Marxian jargon, their engagement with Marxist political economy remained largely scattered and residual in this period. And among some Islamist and liberal Arab intellectuals, the engagement with Marxism was becoming increasingly and explicitly opportunistic, libertarian and elitist. Despite the large volume of intellectual and scholarly production during this period, this work has tended to reveal what one might call an “implicit pragmatic Marxism. ” The work of Laroui exemplifies this tendency with his distinction between “objective Marxism” and “real Marxism, ” between Marxism as a guide for political action and practice and Marxism as means of understanding Arab social and material life. Laroui, along with

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many other Arab New Left Marxists, rejects Marxism as political ideology and practice, but embraces it as a method of analysis and as a strategy for justifying and defending liberal modernization in the Arab world.

The Recent Arab Revolts and the Future of Marxism in the Arab World Perhaps one of the most striking features of the Arab world today is the great contrast and massive contradiction between the reactionary and progressive elements in the culture. On the one hand, there are the rigid social forms and archaic beliefs, fundamentalism of all kinds, illiteracy, complex ignorance, unemployment, corruption, oppression and poverty—in short, the reactionary. On the other, there are the progressive and dynamic aspects of a society fascinated by and committed to growth, urbanization, productivity, wealth and change, marked by mobility, invention, new technologies, and media cities, shopping malls, in short, a highly energized modernity. I see the dialectic between reactionary and progressive elements in Arab culture as a constitutive condition. That is, this dialectic can be located throughout the modern, post-colonial history of the region and seen at play in the material life and being of the Arab subject. This constitutive dialectic is crucial to understanding not just the rise of Islamism or political Islam beginning in the 1980s, but also the recent waves of protests and conflicts in the region. What the Arab world is experiencing is the organic crisis of the struggle for ascendancy between these two constitutive forces. My larger claim, however, is that this dialectic is fundamentally enabled by two other central facts. While there are deep continuities between the Arab world and much of the postcolonial global South, two central facts distinguish the former in the contemporary political landscape. The first is the unique longevity and intensity of the Western imperial hold on the region over the last century. From Morocco to Oman, colonial control of the region, with the exception of Italian-controlled Libya, was divided between France and Britain. Unlike other areas of the world, formal colonization arrived rather late in much of the Arab world, and formal decolonization has been accompanied by a virtually uninterrupted wave of imperial wars and interventions in the post-colonial period and well into the present. Among these, recent historical memory recalls the first Gulf War in the 1990s; the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003; and the NATO bombardment of Libya in 2011. But one must also add to these external interventions the armed conflicts of largely local origin and count among these the Yemeni civil war of the 1960s; the Moroccan seizure of Western Sahara in the 1970s; the Iraqi attack on Iran in the 1980s; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s; and the ongoing Syrian, Yemeni and Libyan civil wars. This degree of close imperial attention, uninterrupted intervention, and intraregional conflicts should not come as a surprise to anyone. After all, the region boasts the largest concentration of oil reserves on the planet, which remain key for the energy-dependent economies of the global North. The second distinguishing feature of the Arab world has been the longevity and intensity of the varied royal tyrannies and military authoritarian regimes that have

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preyed on their nations since formal decolonization. The longevity of rulers in this region has been quite unique: In Libya, Gaddafi was in power for 41 years; in Yemen, Saleh ruled for 32 years; in Egypt, Mubarak ruled 29 years; in Tunisia, Ben Ali ruled for 23 years; and in Syria, Assad (father and son) have ruled for 48 years and counting.3 To be sure, these two historical facts of the region, its continuing domination by the EuroAmerican imperial system, further complicated by the Arab-Israeli conflict, and its continuing lack of democratic institutions, have been and continue to be connected and mutually enabling. This is the larger context in which the recent protests finally erupted across the whole region, aided by three other great common cultural markers of the region: language, religion and history. Starting in Tunisia in late 2010, from one country to another, we saw a wave of mass demonstrations by unarmed citizens demanding democracy and freedom from political repression and dictatorship. It would be naïve to attribute these mass protests—as is rather commonplace these days—to the emergence of new media and technologies. To be sure, new social media and technologies, marked by the wide reach of Al-Jazeera and the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, facilitated and mediated but could not have determined a new spirit of revolt and resistance. What drove this insurgency were deep, permanent social contradictions and economic pressures, including rising income inequality and wealth disparity, rising food prices, lack of decent housing and healthcare, organic poverty, high illiteracy, massive unemployment of educated—and uneducated—youth (61 percent in Jordan), amid a demographic pyramid without parallel in the world (more than 60 percent of the population is under the age of 30, more than twice the number in North America). The organic crisis of society is so deep, and the failure of the neoliberal model of development and modernization is so evident, and the fact that there does not seem to be any real credible path to modernization capable of integrating new generations of youth is plain.4 Throughout the past three decades, neoliberal policies, associated with the World Bank and the IMF, were forced on the region as the only path to development and modernization. These economic reforms, marked largely by increasing waves of privatization and liberalization of markets, as well as by the retreat of the state from vital sectors, especially education and healthcare, have largely failed in the attainment of an equitable distribution of income, in improving the material life of the working class and peasants, in decreasing unemployment, and in alleviating poverty. Instead, the economic transformations further embedded authoritarianism within the region, leading to a happy union between political and economic power, both of which remained conveniently manipulated by and in the hands of a few elites. With the notable exception of Samir Amin and very few others, Arab Marxists have largely failed to catch up and account for the above social and political developments. I would like to join a few emergent leftist voices, such as those of Gilbert Achcar, Samir Amin, and Salama Kila, to argue that any radical political project in the Arab world today has to take Marxism seriously. Marxism continues to be relevant and indispensable for understanding the complicities and interactions of capitalism, imperialism, and authoritarianism, and for the development of any serious emancipatory project of radical democracy and true modernity in the post-colonial

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Arab world. Marxism provides us with a set of conceptual, analytical and methodological tools that help us better understand Arab societies at this particular conjuncture, one characterized by deep economic and political crisis that has brought to the surface once more and more than ever before not only the contradictions of global capitalism and the ugly realities and consequences of material inequality in people’s lives, but also new forms and possibilities of collective resistance and struggle in the political and cultural realms. Arab Marxists now have a central role to play in understanding, studying, explaining, and helping change this state of affairs.

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The common-sense representation of Marxism in the region is that its political concepts, theoretical ideas, and historical methodologies are not useful because they are based on an atheistic, immoral philosophy. Nasserism is named after Jamal Abdel Nasser, one of the two leaders of the Egyptian military coup of 1952 and Egypt’s second President, in recognition of his role in the development of this brand of socialism. See Perry Anderson 2011. Ibid.

References Abduh, M. (1993), Al-A’amal Al-Kamila [Complete Works], Cairo: Dar Al-Shuruq. Abu Zayd, N.H. (2014), Al-Imam Al-Shafyi Wa Taasis Al-Idyolojiyya Al-Wasatiyya [Imam Shafyi and the Foundation of the Ideology of The Middle Ground], Cairo: Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi Al-Arabi. Achcar, G. (2016), Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Adunis (1983), Al-Thabit Wa Al-Moutahawil [The Fixed and the Changing], Beirut: Dar Al-Awda. Aksikas, J. (2009), Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the PostColonial Arab World, New York: Peter Lang. Al-Afghani, J-D. (1971), Al-A’amal Al-Kamila [Complete Works], Cairo: Dar Al-Katib Al-Arabi. Al-Banna, H. (1999), Majmou’at Rasail Al-Imam Al-Shahid Hassan Al Banna [The Complete Letters of The Martyr Imam Hassan Al Banna], Cairo, Dar Al-Da’wa. Al Jabri, M.A. (1984), Naqd Al-Aql Al-Arabi (Vol. 1) [Critique of Arab Reason], Beirut: Markaz Al-Wahda Al-Arabiyya. Al Jabri, M.A. (1986), Naqd Al-Aql Al-Arabi (Vol. 2) [Critique of Arab Reason], Beirut: Markaz Al-Wahda Al-Arabiyya. Al Jabri, M.A. (1990), Naqd Al-Aql Al-Arabi (Vol. 3) [Critique of Arab Reason], Beirut: Markaz Al-Wahda Al-Arabiyya. Al Jabri, M.A. (2001), Naqd Al-Aql Al-Arabi (Vol. 4) [Critique of Arab Reason], Beirut: Markaz Al-Wahda Al-Arabiyya. Al-Kawakibi, Abd al-Rahman (2011), Tabai Al-Istibdad wa-Masari Al-Isti’bad [The Habits of Oppression and the Struggles of Subjugation], Cairo: Kalimat Arabia

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Amin, S. (1983), The Arab Nation, London: Zed Books. Anderson, P. (2011), “On the Concatenation in the Arab World, ” New Left Review 68 (March–April). Antun, F. (1981), Ibn Rushd Wa Falsafatuhu [Ibn Rush and His Philosophy], Beirut: Dar Al-Talai’i. Awad, L. (1966), “Kan Ragel Shoogae” [“He Was a Fearless Man”], Al-Ahram, December 30, 1966. Hanafi, H. (1981), Al-Turath Wa Al-Tajdid [Tradition and Renewal], Beirut: Dar Al-Tanwir. Kila, S. (2011), Min Ajl Shiyy’iya Mounadila [For a Struggle-Based Communism], Cairo: Dar Altanweer. Laroui, A. (1967), L’idéologie arabe contemporaine [Contemporary Arab Ideology], Paris: Francois Maspero. Laroui, A. (1974), La crise des intellectuelles arabes: traditionalisme ou historicisme [The Crisis of Arab Intellectuals: Traditionalism or Historicism], Paris: Francois Maspero. Muruwwa, H. (1979), Al-Nazaat Al-Madiyya Fi Al-Falsafa Al-Arabiyya Al-Islamiyya [Materialist Trends in Arabic-Islamic Philosophy], Beirut: Dar Al Farabi. Musa, S. (n.d.), Mahiya Al-Nahda? [What is the Renaissance?], Cairo: Muassasat Salama Musa. Qutb, S. (1993), Ma’araqat Al-Islam Wa Al-Ra’asmaliyya [Battle between Islam and Capitalism], Cairo: Dar Al-Shuruq. Qutb, S. (1995), Al-Adala Al-Ijtima’iyya Fi Al-Islam [Social Justice in Islam], Cairo: Dar Al-Shuruq. Qutb, S. (1995), Al-Islam Wa Salam Al-Alami [World Peace and Islam], Cairo: Dar Al- Shuruq. Shumail, S. (1910), Falsfat Al-Nush Wa Al-Irtiqa’a [The Philosophy of Wisdom and Development], Cairo: Dar Al-Muqtatif. Tizini, T. (1989), Tariq Al-Wuduh Al-Minhaji [The Path to Methodological Clarity], Beirut: Dar Al Farabi.

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India Dhruv Jain

From 1853 to 1858 Karl Marx wrote 33 articles for the New York Tribune on India. Since then, his ideas have inspired the formation of communist parties and mass movements that enjoy support and membership from millions of working people, peasants, women, students, and low-caste communities across India. These movements have also seen electoral success in several states. Furthermore, Marx continues to cast a long shadow in Indian academia, especially in historical studies.

Historical Antecedents to Marxism in India The historical roots of Marxism in India go back to the First International, although Indian connections to utopian socialism date to 1833 (Josh and Damodaran 1975: 2). In 1871, radical elements from Calcutta contacted and tried to affiliate with the International Working Man’s Association. The Secretary of the General Council, John Hales, was instructed to respond and encourage them to establish a branch, while simultaneously noting that they would need to be self-sufficient and urged them to recruit native Indians (Joshi and Damodaran 1975: 2). The first mention of Marx was published in a Bengali journal, Amrita Bazar Patrika, in 1903. It was a reprint from an English publication about the growing European socialist movement. In March 1912 the first biography of Marx, “Karl Marx: A Modern Rishi, ” was published in the influential journal Modern Review. Its author, Lala Hardayal, founded the first émigré Marxist-inspired party, the Ghadar party (Joshi and Damodaran 1975: 6). Hardyal tried to find new sources for the Indian revolution, while using traditional Hindu idiomatics. However, he did not agree with Marx’s emphasis on the need for a critique of political economy or the theory of value, and was more interested in Marx’s personal struggles than his ideas (Joshi and Damodaran 1975: 35, 38, 41). In August 1912, Ramkrishna Pillai, a freedom fighter in the princely state of Travancore, published the first biography of Marx in an Indian language (Malayalam). Pillai had previously written a series of articles for the Malayalam journal, Atmaposhini, about the origins and development of socialism and socialist ideas. Pillai wanted to understand and propagate Marx’s ideas, but was forced to rely on secondary sources 493

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(Joshi and Damodaran 1975: 96–7, 98). This encounter with Marx demonstrates an early interest in his work by important nationalist figures, but it would be another decade before it would start to take root in India.

Marxism and the Nationalist Movement (1913–1947) Marx’s ideas gained an ideological foothold in India through three primary sources: the activities of the Ghadar party, the influence of M.N. Roy and the Comintern, and a new generation of domestic socialists involved in publishing and organizing in India. However, Marx’s work was overshadowed by the influence of V.I. Lenin and the Comintern, especially as Indian Marxists turned to Marxism as a doctrine of action to replace the failed strategy of revolutionary terrorism. The influence of the Comintern was vital in shaping the Communist Party of India’s strategy in the struggle against British colonialism and its relationship to the Indian National Congress. The Ghadar party was founded in 1913 by Indian émigrés living in North America, including Lala Hardyal. Some had been radicalized due to racism that they experienced or the new ideas that they had been exposed to in North America or Europe, while others had been anticolonial activists in India and had fled to Paris, London, Geneva, or New York, where more liberal laws were practiced. The Ghadar party itself was ideologically eclectic and its program was anti-colonialist, patriotic, internationalist, secularist, modernist, radically democratic, republican, anti-capitalist, “militantly revolutionist, ” and aesthetically romantic, “such as declaiming a bold slogan, witticism, or verse of farewell poetry at the foot of the gallows” (Ramnath 2011: 7). The Ghadar party encouraged young men to return to India to fight for Indian independence. In the first two years of World War I approximately 8,000 Ghadarites from around the globe returned to fight (Ramnath 2011: 51). However, arrests, poor communications, espionage, and the failure of German-promised arms to arrive, resulted in widespread confusion and organizational weaknesses. An attempt to stage a rebellion with the aid of disaffected military regiments in February 1915 in Punjab was stopped by the British authorities. The British authorities crushed the movement and party, both abroad and in India by 1917 (Ramnath 2011: 51). However, roving groups of Ghadarites going village to village handing out revolutionary propaganda, building contacts, and finding easy targets for revolutionary expropriations radicalized local people. Indeed, the majority of people arrested for involvement with the 1915 mutiny were not returnees, but local people. Remnants of these failed attempts that were residing in Punjab, inspired by the Russian revolution, organized a new organization, the Kirti party, around the newspaper, Kirti. Both later merged with the Communist Party of India. M.N. Roy, a particularly influential figure in early Indian Marxism, served as a channel between Indian communists with the Comintern and was a prominent theorist. Initially involved in the Anushilan secret society, which advocated revolutionary terrorism, Roy traveled to Indonesia, Japan, and China, before leaving for the USA , in pursuit of German weapons. During his stay in New York in 1916, he would become acquainted with Marx’s work, which would put him at odds with other nationalist émigré figures who were not keen to emphasize class (Roy 1964: 28–9). At

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the 1920 2nd Congress of the Comintern, Lenin invited him to produce his own resolutions regarding the national and colonial questions. Lenin argues that communist forces should work with bourgeois nationalist movements because, despite their political limitations, a successful nationalist revolution could function as the first stage towards socialist revolution. Roy, on the other hand, insists that no alliance should be forged with the nationalist forces because the bourgeoisie’s interests were inextricably at odds with the working class, and that the working class was already growing into potent force and thus capable of winning independence alone. Both Lenin and Roy’s theses were adopted by the Comintern. The Comintern also deployed Roy to Tashkent to establish the Central Asiatic Bureau of the Comintern which was to help organize anti-colonial movements in the colonies. In Tashkent, Roy, Abani Mukherji, and a group of former pan-Islamist activists formed the émigré Communist Party of India (CPI ) in 1920. Roy also intervened in debates within the Indian nationalist movement through the publication of numerous pamphlets and the newspaper, Vanguard of Indian Independence (Chattopadhyay 2011: 96–97). These international developments paralleled the formation of the All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC ) in 1920. By 1921, revolutionary literature was illegally available to nascent socialists, like Muzaffar Ahmed, who purchased an abridged version of Marx’s Capital titled People’s Marx, and pamphlets by Lenin (Chattopadhyay 2011: 76). S.A. Dange also wrote the first Indian Marxist pamphlet, Gandhi vs. Lenin, in 1921. By 1922, Abdul Halim, another CPI founding member, purchased Marx’s Capital, A Critique of Political Economy and The Poverty of Philosophy (Chattopadhyay 2011: 95). Ahmed, Dange, and others, inspired by the Russian revolution and receiving guidance by Roy, formed the first domestic socialist circles. These circles merged to form the Communist Party of India in 1925. However, the CPI did not have a program or constitution until 1927, and its strategy and tactics were largely guided by debates within the Comintern, often resulting in it being isolated from the nationalist movement. The CPI initially were most successful in their trade union work. However, this work took a step backwards because of the CPI ’s adherence to the decisions of the 6th Congress of the Comintern, which resulted in their isolation. The 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928, given the recent experience in China where the Kuomintang massacred its communist allies, abandoned its advocacy for a strategy that emphasized an alliance between communists and the nationalist bourgeoisie. The INC thus captured the leadership of the AITUC as the CPI formed a parallel trade union federation. Furthermore, in 1930, the INC launched the Civil Disobedience Movement, which electrified India. The CPI refused to participate, and attacked Gandhi and the INC in the press, thus isolating itself from the popular upsurge. By 1934, the 7th Congress of the Comintern repudiated this strategy. The communist-led trade union federation would also begin to collaborate with the AITUC , and in 1935 the two trade unions federations were reunified. Furthermore, the CPI resumed co-operating with the INC , especially left-wing INC members organized as the Congress Socialist Party (CSP ) led by Jayaprakash Narayan. Jayaprakash Narayan inaugurated another socialist tradition in India. Narayan read Marx’s Das Capital and other works in the USA in 1924. He also read Roy there. While

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sympathetic, he never joined the communist movement (Scarfe and Scarfe 1975: 55, 72). Instead, he worked with other likeminded left-wing members inside the INC . He helped form the CSP in 1934, which acted as a left-wing pressure group inside the INC (Scarfe and Scarfe 1975: 95–96). The Second World War again caused rifts between the INC and the CPI because the latter’s strategy kept oscillating according to Soviet foreign policy (Talwar 1985: 262). It would only be in the post-war period that the CPI would try to adapt itself more closely to national conditions by identifying with the nationalist movement, participating in the 1946 elections, condemning the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state, and attacking the Indian princes (Talwar 1985: 263). However, this led to two different and competing strategies developing inside the CPI . One section argued for greater cooperation with the INC and the use of parliamentary methods, while the other argued for pursuing armed struggle. The ideological and political dependence on the Comintern meant that while the CPI played a positive role in “advancing the theory of socialism in India, in integrating the class demands of the working class with the fight for national freedom” and influencing the CSP, it was unable to make significant headway (Talwar 1985: 267– 268). Furthermore, the party was divided between those who wanted to serve as a “loyal opposition” to the INC and advocated for electoral participation, while others advocated and adopted armed struggle especially in Telengana and Tebhaga (Talwar 1985: 269).

Marxism in Post-Colonial India (1947–Present) Indian communists in the post-independence period continued to be divided. This factionalism was not grounded in differing conceptions of Marxism, but in debates about how to implement strategies modeled on either Soviet or Chinese examples. P.C. Joshi, former General Secretary of the CPI , writes, “the Marxists as a broad collectivity neither fully imbibed nor transmitted the entire philosophical and cultural legacy of Marx, Engels or even Lenin. For most Marxists, the introduction of Marxism began and often ended with the writings of J.V. Stalin” (Joshi 1986: 3–4). In the postindependence period, the communists would thus be divided between two strategies: parliamentary politics or armed struggle. Proponents for armed struggle point to the struggle against the princes and feudal landlords in the princely states, specifically the Telangana rebellion, as evidence of the correctness of their strategy. In 1946, in the princely state of Hyderabad, the CPI would resist the Nizam of Hyderabad and his landlord allies by capturing and redistributing the land to the peasants in the region of Telangana. This escalated into an armed conflict between the CPI and the Nizam and his allies. However, in 1948, the Indian Army marched into Hyderabad to formally annex it into India and simultaneously crush the communist movement. The relative success of the Telangana rebellion inspired a section of the CPI that would advocate Maoist positions in subsequent years. The CPI would finally split in 1964 and again in 1967. The causes for these splits included disputes about Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech, ” differing characterizations

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of the national bourgeoisie and the INC , the Sino-Indian war, and the appropriate path for Indian revolution. Three factions emerged: the CPI remained pro-Soviet, called for an alliance with the INC and advocated a parliamentary path; the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which adopted a pro-Stalin, pro-China position that distanced itself from the INC but also advocated a parliamentary path and had electoral successes in several states; and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which adopted Maoism, distanced itself from the INC and adopted immediate armed struggle. The ideological debates between the different factions selectively deployed quotations from Marx and Engels, but were more indebted to the works of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong, and the polemics of the Sino-Soviet split. These debates were acompanied by the publication of compilations of selected writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, like the pro-Maoist 1964 collection, Under the Banner of Marx and Lenin, and textbooks written by ideologues. Student radicals were inspired by Mao’s The Orientation of the Youth Movement, but also by Régis Debray, Frantz Fanon and Herbert Marcuse (Basu 2000: 49,78–79). In 1956, a unique critique of Marxism was developed by the Dalit leader, B.R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar, inspired by Fabian socialism, and especially by John Dewey, outlined an original body of thought. In his essay, “Buddha or Karl Marx, ” published after his conversion to Buddhism, he argued that aspects of Marx’s doctrine had been falsified by history, including the inevitability of socialism and the economic determinist interpretation of history (Ambedkar 2002: 176–177). Ambedkar argues that four of Marx’s ideas remain salient: (1) the task is to change the world, not simply interpret it; (2) there exists a class conflict; (3) the ownership of private property by one class means the exploitation of another; and (4) it is necessary to abolish private property. However, he concludes that these principles are also found in Buddhism, and that the experience of the Russian revolution demonstrates that they can be more rigorously applied through Buddhism (Ambedkar 2002: 179). In recent years, there have been numerous efforts to reconcile Marxism and Ambedkarism.

Indian Historiography and Philosophy Outside of the sphere of formal politics, Marx’s influence greatest influence can be felt in academia, particularly in the field of history. The Marxist historiographical school includes amongst its numbers many of India’s most important historians, such as D.D. Kosambi, Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, Irfan Habib and Bipan Chandra. These authors present a Marxist historiographical account of ancient, medieval, colonial and post-colonial India that challenges Hindu and secular nationalist interpretations. The Marxist account stood in opposition to “the supposition that India was constituted preeminently through membership in religious communities, ” which “[introduced] manifold distortions in the understanding of Indian history: not only were HinduMuslim relations being cast as drenched in blood, but conflicts among the ruling elite were being construed as conflicts at the broader social level” (Lal 2003: 194). The Marxist historians were more interested in social and economic history, and thus argued for new forms of historical periodization predicated on different notions of

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social change (Thapar 2002: 22). Furthermore, Marxist historians challenged and abandoned Marx’s analysis of the mode of production in India, the Asiatic Mode of Production, which provoked them in turn to develop new analyses of the Indian precolonial and colonial political economy and social change (Thapar 2003: 22). A central figure in Indian Marxist historiography was D.D. Kosambi. Kosambi sharply criticized Dange’s From Primitive Communism to Slavery (1949), which used Frederich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State as a model to analyze social changes in ancient India. Arguing that Dange uses Marxism as a substitute for thinking, Kosambi in Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) “moved away from dynastic history to describing what he perceived as the dynamics of economy and society in various phases of Indian history” (Thapar 2003: 22). Thus, Kosambi, while articulating a critique of the Asiatic mode of production, does not reject Marxism but instead analyzes whether other modes of production could be identified. Kosambi thus modifies Marx’s feudal mode of production and introduces two kinds of feudalism, feudalism from below and above. Feudalism from above “was where feudatories were directly subordinate to a ruler without the intervention of other intermediaries; and from below created a hierarchy of landowning intermediaries between the king and the peasant” (Thapar 2003: 23). While Kosambi’s own model has not generally been accepted, it has spurred on a series of debates within Indian Marxist historiography about feudalism, including R.S. Sharma’s seminal work, Indian Feudalism (1965) and Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556–1707 (1963). Debiprasad Chattopadhyay similarly made an important intervention into the history of philosophy with Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (1959). Using a materialist standpoint which he draws from Marx, Chattopadhyay studies the Lokayata materialist tradition in ancient Indian philosophy, but notes that “as a Marxist student of the Lokayata I had also to survey the material conditions of ancient India of which I was a product” (Chattopadhyay 2006: xvi). Lokayata has a “this-worldly outlook, ” shared by the majority of people, which is characterized by the “view that the material human body . . . is the microcosm of the universe, along with a cosmogony attributing the origin of the universe to the ‘union of the male and the female’ ” (Chattopadhyay 2006: xvii).

Subaltern Studies Within Marxist historiography however, there has been significant debate with respect to analyzing the colonial and post-colonial periods as well. While Bipan Chandra argues that the nationalist movement could not simply be regarded as a bourgeois movement alone, other Marxist historians emphasized the INC ’s refusal to adopt and advocate for more radical economic and land reform, and its marginalization of large sections of the Indian population from political power (Lal 2003: 194). In particular, Subaltern Studies, published the works of a younger generation of historians who were influenced by Marx, especially between 1982 and 1988, but developed a distinct Marxist methodology.

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The Subalternists, influenced by the continued religious and caste-based strife, the 1962 Indo-China war, and the Maoist movement, rejected nationalist historiography (Chakrabarty 2002: 6–7). They also draw inspiration from two Marxist traditions: English history-from-below historiography and Antonio Gramsci’s writings (Chakrabarty 2002: 6–7). However, the Subalternists differ from their English counterparts in three areas: an emphasis on the “relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital, a critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation between power and knowledge” (Chakrabarty 2002: 8). Subaltern Studies reoriented itself away from Marxism in 1988 towards more postcolonialist and deconstructivist approaches, especially in response to criticisms made by Gayatri Spivak and Rosalind O’Hanlon about their failure to sufficiently take into consideration gender, the very idea of the subject itself, and of their attempts to use the historical archives to let the Subaltern speak (Chakrabarty 2002: 17).

Conclusion One hundred and fifty years after Marx wrote for the New York Tribune, it is unlikely that he could have ever imagined the myriad of ways in which the subjects of those articles adopted and made his ideas their own, both in action and in thought. The adoption of Marx’s ideas in politics, while leading to some accomplishments— including electoral successes, and the organization and improvement in the quality of life for millions—has unfortunately been marred by an over-reliance on foreign models that has blunted its efficacy in achieving structural changes. Marx would also be amazed at how academics, especially in historical studies, would reject his understanding of Indian history, especially the infamous Asiatic mode of production, while retaining his method, thus developing a uniquely Indian Marxist historiography.

References Ambedkar, B.R. (2002), “Buddha or Karl Marx, ” in V. Rodrigues (ed.), The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 173–90. Basu, P. (2000), Towards Naxalbari (1953–1967), Kolkata: Progressive Publishers. Chakrabarty, D. (2002), Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, New Delhi: Permanent Black. Chattopadhyay, D. (2006), Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, 8th edn, Calcutta: People’s Publishing House. Chattopadhyay, S. (2011), An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913–1929, New Delhi: Tulika Books. Joshi, P.C. and K. Damodaran (eds) (1975), Marx Comes to India: Earliest Indian Biographies of Karl Marx, Delhi: Manohar Book Service. Joshi, P.C. (1986), Marxism and Social Revolution in India and Other Essays, New Delhi: Patriot Publishers. Lal, V. (2003), The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Ramnath, M. (2011), Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Scarfe, A. and W. Scarfe (1975), J.P.: His Biography, New Delhi: Orient Longman. Talwar, S.N. (1985), Under the Banyan Tree: the Communist movement in India, 1920–1964, New Delhi: Allied Publishers. Thapar, R. (2003), The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, New Delhi: Penguin Books.

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Africa Priya Lal

Marxism has had a vibrant and varied life on the African continent. Starting in the early twentieth century, socialist thought and praxis assumed many different forms among African intellectuals, activists, political parties, and regimes, ranging from the formation of traditional communist parties affiliated with the Comintern to the development of hybrid versions of African Socialism only loosely inspired by and connected to orthodox Marxism. Several key thematic considerations can help make sense of these diverse forms. In the realm of ideology, we can distinguish between projects that embraced standard Marxist conceptions of class formation and stages of historical progress, on the one hand, and interpretations that rejected these notions in favor of an African exceptionalism and explicit heterodoxy, on the other. We can also differentiate between adoptions of Marxism that remained superficial, representing a rhetorical nod or symbolic posture, and those that were more substantively committed to interpreting and concretely acting on historical realities with socialist theoretical tools. In the realm of policy and governance, we can contrast initiatives undertaken by traditional political actors with those implemented by military groups or regimes. Finally, we can further discriminate between socialist organizations or states that established strong geopolitical ties to the Soviet Union or Maoist China and those that remained nonaligned. In reflecting on these types, it is critical to establish an analytical balance between viewing Marxism in Africa as part of a broader global story and understanding it as a specifically regional or local one. It is also important to remember that Africa is an extremely heterogeneous space even while noting a number of shared tendencies among various examples of Marxism on the continent. What follows is a brief, selective chronological overview of these unique stories and common trends over time. One of the earliest manifestations of Marxism’s influence in Africa in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution can be seen in the 1921 formation of South Africa’s communist party—the continent’s first. Whereas Leninist communist parties have not been the locus of Marxist organizing in much of Africa, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA ) remained active throughout the twentieth century. Labor organizing among South African miners gained momentum around the turn of the century, but this activism was fractured along racial lines, with white workers and workers of color pursuing different organizational affiliations and undertaking racially-segregated 501

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protest. The CPSA , by contrast, was the first colony-wide, explicitly non-racialist communist party, and it presided over a vibrant non-racial socialist movement throughout the mid-to-late 1920s. Although this embrace of pan-racial class-based internationalism would run aground by the following decade, it set an important precedent and provided inspiration to others. In some ways, the early evolution of the CPSA is representative of Marxist organizing elsewhere on the continent, while in other ways it is exceptional. Both aspects of this case prove illustrative. First, the CPSA’s story highlights the broad significance of issues of race and nationalism to local adoptions and adaptations of Marxist ideas and tactics throughout Africa. 1920s communist activism in South Africa coincided with an important series of debates within the Comintern about the organization’s official stance toward nationalism, framed as a debate over self-determination or the “national question. ” Upon deciding to support anti-colonial nationalism as a means of striking at the intertwined forces of imperialism and capitalism, the Comintern established an affinity between socialism and anti-colonial resistance that helps account for the syncretism between these two projects on African soil in ensuing years. However, in the wake of World War II and during the intensification of global Cold War bipolarities in the 1950s and 1960s, some African actors began to perceive Soviet influence as representative of a new form of imperialism rather than anti-colonial solidarity, in the spirit of what came to be the Non-Aligned Movement. This suspicion, along with intertwined concerns about issues of race implicit in discussions about nationalism and internationalism, produced a widespread ambivalence toward Soviet-style socialism during decolonization and the early postcolonial era, and instead fostered an embrace of explicitly selective and hybridized interpretations of Marxism. In time, these mixed models came to exhibit a privileging of racial over class identities and a challenging of Marx’s understanding of political economic stages of historical progress, among other things. These issues point to the second notable feature of the early CPSA story: its involvement of a substantial waged labor force in traditional working-class activism such as strikes. The existence of a large sector of the population that fit the qualifications of traditional definitions of the proletariat was in many ways unique to South Africa rather than typical of broader continental trends. Just as the Comintern came to define South Africa’s white minority rule as a “special type of colonialism, ” many considered colonial conditions as expressive of a special type of capitalism. Colonial regimes tended to consciously discourage the reproduction of working-class identities through policies enforcing temporary rather than long-term or regularized waged labor, limiting African industrialization and urban settlement, and thus creating cycles of labor migration that depended on rural areas that were delegated substantial productive and reproductive responsibilities. These distinctive political and economic conditions combined with and reinforced unique social and cultural dynamics in many African sites, including the persistence of precolonial modes of political economy that privileged material redistribution in service of the accumulation of dependents (reflective of a “wealth in people” model of political economy). Such complex elements of the colonial African landscape brought into question the suitability of conventional conceptions of proletariat revolution in this setting. The result was the splintering of

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Marxist projects into those that embraced class-based internationalism or “scientific socialism” and those that rejected it in favor of an “African Socialism” that blended socialist theory with elements of pan-Africanist thought and other philosophies. Despite these complicating factors, traditional organized labor activism during the mid–1930s to early 1940s provided a significant catalyst for anticolonial movements and fed into the spread of socialist ideas in many territories. Strikes by workers on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia, the docks of Kenya and Tanganyika, and the railways of French West Africa and the Gold Coast impacted various colonial economies in the World War II era, prompting a surge of anticolonial resistance that was increasingly directed by formal political parties. Some of these parties, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA ) founded in French West Africa in 1946, initially enjoyed close ties with foreign communist parties. In this case, the RDA’s relations with the French Communist party involved ideological training as well as material support. Although the RDA and French Communist party split in 1950, due in part to pressures exerted by the French regime on both organizations, this affiliation shaped the future of anticolonial and eventually postcolonial leaders such as Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea. Sékou Touré, a trade unionist, went on to become a pioneer of African Socialism after his country’s independence in 1958. Other types of international networks indirectly or directly involved in mobilizing anticolonial resistance brought Marxist concepts and institutions to the continent. These help account for the wide prevalence of socialist rhetoric in one form or another during the early years of the African decolonization and independence era. PanAfricanist networks that traversed the Atlantic world in the first half of the twentieth century often overlapped with internationalist socialist circuits, with people and resources and ideas circulating between the two movements. Kwame Nkrumah, leader of the Gold Coast’s Convention People’s Party (CPP ), that territory’s major anticolonial party, was influenced by both movements. He, too, went on to become a prominent proponent of African Socialism after Ghana’s independence in 1957. Nkrumah and another advocate of African Socialism, Tanganyika’s (later, Tanzania’s) Julius Nyerere, promoted a vision of pan-Africanist unity that sought to transcend narrow nationalism in favor of a continent-wide federation. This ambivalence toward nationalism reflected African Socialism’s uneasy relationship to basic Marxist precepts, for it was founded not in a rejection of nationalism as a force ultimately opposed to class-based internationalism but rather in a desire for transnational or internationalist unity grounded in racial, identitarian, or regional loyalties. Socialist-inflected identitarian alternatives to territorial nationalism similarly surfaced in parts of North Africa; for instance, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt led a popular Pan-Arab movement that even culminated in the formation of the United Arab Republic (UAR ) with Syria in 1958 (which lasted until 1961). Marxism’s association with anti-colonialism faced a test when it came time for the first generation of postcolonial leaders after the early wave of independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s to translate their socialist gestures into concrete political, economic and social policies. On the one hand, many heads of state took up the language of socialism in superficial terms while governing in ways that preserved the capitalist orientation of postcolonial economies. (This phenomenon was especially

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evident in countries such as Senegal and Kenya.) On the other hand, leaders such as Sékou Touré, Nkrumah, Nyerere and Modibo Keita (in Mali) undertook more substantive measures to restructure their countries in line with their particular vision of African Socialism. While different iterations of African Socialism exhibited considerable variations in the realms of discourse and policy, they shared a similar set of dialectical tendencies. One the one hand, African Socialist projects often celebrated a common idealized vision of precolonial African community as a foundation for postcolonial development, but on the other hand, they embraced theories and tools of modernization. Such initiatives frequently grounded themselves in idioms of familyhood and kinship, drawing on putatively indigenous traditions of “primitive communism” rooted in extended families and village communities. Simultaneously, they aimed to cultivate and consolidate national identities and loyalties through the selective reconfiguration or elimination of “traditional” institutions and practices (such as chiefship). Paradoxically, socialism was claimed as a unifying national ethos while conventional Marxist notions of class conflict were rejected as dangerously divisive. Also apparent in most cases was a tension between promoting the emancipation of women through the legal reform of marriage and socialization of reproductive and domestic labor, on the one hand, and the effective retention of patriarchal political and social norms, on the other hand. In the realm of economic policy, there was a similar friction between radical or revolutionary measures and a persistent inclination toward more reformist or even conservative norms. In many cases, the former were designed to eliminate private property and nationalize production, while the latter entailed the preservation of unequal wealth distribution and capitalist relations of production. The cases of Ghana, Guinea, and Tanzania illustrate the range of trajectories followed by African Socialist regimes in the 1960s. These three countries pursued substantive domestic transformations in line with their respective socialist visions but ultimately came to abandon these projects by the mid–1970s. In Ghana, Nkrumah’s CPP was known for its relatively technocratic take on African Socialism, emphasizing themes of modernization and technology. Starting in the early 1960s, the CPP-led state adopted centralized planning centering on large infrastructural projects meant to promote industrialization, the most significant of which was the construction of a Volta River Dam that would generate electricity to enable the conversion of bauxite into aluminum. The regime presided over a mixed economy that featured nationalizations of property and firms along with continued engagement with private capital, particularly in the form of foreign investment from multinational corporations. This type of mixed economy was also apparent in Guinea, Tanzania, and elsewhere on the continent at the time. Socialist-era Ghana’s other generalizable features include the implementation of a single-party state structure, the outlawing of independent labor unions, and constant attempts to repress activism by domestic groups (often student organizations) that demanded more rigorous application of socialist ideology. Likewise, under Nkrumah Ghana established important ties with socialist powers such as the Soviet Union but maintained a non-aligned stance in the area of foreign relations, a phenomenon also seen in other African Socialist states during this era. The diversification of foreign ties and adoption of domestic hybridized socialist programs in these African countries was connected to the proliferation of socialist

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models on the global stage by the early 1960s. At this moment, African states had new options for international affiliation and identification available to them, including the Chinese and Cuban alternatives to the heretofore normative, doctrinaire Soviet path to socialism. Socialism in Guinea and Tanzania reflected the symbolic influence of Maoism, for instance, with Sékou Touré’s regime implementing a Socialist Cultural Revolution and Tanzania’s Nyerere inaugurating a Maoist-inflected drive for rural socialist villagization, both in 1967. Guinea’s Cultural Revolution involved the radical restructuring of schooling, the widespread creation of folkloric socialist theater troupes, attacks on established religious practice through a Demystification Program, and the imposition of agricultural quotas, among other things. Tanzanian socialism, known as ujamaa (Swahili for “familyhood”), was characterized by its focus on consolidating socialist village communities. Ujamaa called for the relocation of Tanzanian citizens into such villages as a means of bypassing industrialization and avoiding the supposed ills of urbanization in favor of a more organic, indigenously tailored approach to socialist transformation. These policies contrasted with other African Socialist efforts—for instance, Zambia’s Humanism project explicitly braided together Christianity with Marxism. Amidst such differences, further commonalities among various African Socialist cases are discernible. The trajectories of the first wave of African states to take up Marxist programs ran aground on similar, ultimately fatal obstacles. Each country’s persistent dependence on primary commodity exports motivated and hampered its pursuit of the elusive goal of self-reliance. By the mid–1970s, the accumulation of debt to foreign bodies was exacerbated by the rise in rates of foreign aid, even for staples such as food. Without a radically restructured economy, no African Socialist state was able to provide social services to its citizenry in the face of limited institutional, infrastructural, and manpower capacities. Finally, many 1960s experiments with socialism on the continent fell apart due to internal political dynamics including the rise of autonomous militaries that threatened coups d’états and the strength of regional and ethnic divisions that fractured burgeoning national units. Such challenges, along with the global economic crisis linked to the 1973 oil shocks, resulted in the decline of the first wave of state-led socialist projects in Africa by the middle of the 1970s. Meanwhile, a second wave of Marxist-inspired endeavors was gaining momentum. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of African states or anti-colonial movements took up a militarized version of Marxist practice. These projects usually understood themselves to be more rigorously or scientifically socialist than prior African Socialist initiatives. This position was informed in part by stronger, more exclusive ties of patronage to external socialist regimes, often via entanglement in domestic or regional armed struggle. Among this second wave of more militant socialism are the examples of liberation movements in Portuguese African colonies (subsequently Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique) as well as the Derg regime in Ethiopia. Elements of earlier models of socialism in Africa are evident in this “second wave, ” as the periodization proposed here is schematic rather than absolute; there was not a definitive chronological break between these two chapters of socialism. For example, the People’s Republic of Congo (the contemporary Republic of the Congo) declared itself a Marxist-Leninist one-party state from 1969 onwards, under a military

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regime led by the under the Parti congolais du travail (Congolese Workers Party or PCT ). As with earlier socialist projects, various ideological and organizational models were evident in the 1970s and 1980s wave of Marxism in Africa. In particular, we can distinguish between military-led Marxism rooted in anti-colonial guerilla insurgencies and those associated with militaries aiming to displace civilian governments through coups in established postcolonial states. The examples of Portuguese African colonies are illustrative of the former, while the Ethiopian case embodies the latter. In the case of Guinea-Bissau, the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, or PAIGC ), led by Amilcar Cabral, was formed in 1956 and took up a campaign of armed anti-colonial resistance several years later. Mozambique’s parallel party, Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambican Liberation Front, or FRELIMO ), led by Eduardo Mondlane and later Samora Machel, was established in 1962, while in Angola’s complicated political landscape, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA ) was founded in 1956. The latter two of these parties were openly Marxist; the MPLA , for instance, had ties to the Portuguese Communist party (like the Guinean RDA ) and received substantial support from the Soviet Union and Cuba. Cuba eventually sent soldiers to fight on Angolan soil, while the USSR sent money and weapons. By contrast, in Guinea-Bissau, the PAIGC took a more selectively and strategically Marxist position, drawing on Marxist theory when Cabral saw it appropriate. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the PAIGC sought to actively win public support by establishing liberated zones in the countryside of Guinea-Bissau, where the party operated its own schools and health stations. Likewise, in Mozambique, FRELIMO was committed to mobilizing and radicalizing rural populations by establishing liberation zones in which the party operated its own parallel state structures and services. These liberated zones allowed for Marxist-influenced political conscientization programs, partly modeled after the Cuban example in the case of Guinea-Bissau. Mozambique, like Angola, slipped into protracted civil war after the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974–5. Naturally, continued conflict hampered the ability of these political groups to govern according to their Marxist ideologies. Such conflict, however, simultaneously secured continued patronage by external foreign powers and wedded each party’s socialist ideology to its position within the Cold War global paradigm. At the same moment of decolonization in these Lusophone sites, a group of Ethiopian military officers seized control of that state (1974) and proclaimed itself Marxist-Leninist (1975). The Derg, as the regime came to be known, undertook dramatic revolutionary measures, possibly sourcing its radical ideology from a leftist student movement that had been advocating socialism for years. (Very quickly, however, the Derg came to repress these same activists.) As in other cases mentioned above, the Derg immediately undertook nationalizations of many sectors of the economy, but it distinguished itself by implementing a far-reaching land reform policy. In addition to attempting to reallocate land to working farmers and eliminating landlordism in cities, the Derg actively eliminated domestic political opposition and

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quickly dismantled structures of power associated with the prior empire and Orthodox Church. These measures suggested that Ethiopian socialism was in many ways more revolutionary than others, although in its aggressive pursuit of policies such as villagization in the 1980s, the regime came to be known for its violence and recklessness. Like Mozambique and Angola, Ethiopia eventually came to be embroiled in conflict (in this case with internal secessionists and external irridentists) that took on larger Cold War implications, which helped to finally bring an end to the regime in 1987. Across the world more broadly, the 1980s brought the new paradigm of neoliberalism to the center of political, economic, and social life. The eclipse of the Soviet Union by the end of that decade extinguished many lingering Marxist projects in Africa as elsewhere. Similarly, China’s embrace of capitalism encouraged its former socialist allies in Africa to discard their radical precepts. Structural adjustment policies imposed on African countries by international financial institutions dismantled state structures and generated a culture of non-governmental organizations seeking to accomplish “development” work through small-scale, local measures meant to achieve economic progress without radical disruption. These changes have not left Marxism in a prominent place in mainstream African politics. In recent years, however, widespread protests against regimes felt to be unrepresentative of popular interests have erupted in countries such as Nigeria and South Africa that are notable for their intense social and economic inequality. Such conditions may lend themselves to a revival of Marxist thinking and acting on African soil, although such future engagements with socialism will likely be as flexible, selective, and heterogeneous as their predecessors. Revisiting the complex, uneven, and creative story of Marxism in twentieth-century Africa casts new light on Marxism and its still plentiful possibilities for appropriation and reworking in the years to come.

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North America Tanner Mirrlees

Since the late 1970s, North America’s neoliberal defenders of capitalism have pronounced Marx’s obsolescence, caricaturized his critique of political economy and declaimed his ideas as the basis for totalitarianism. But in the years following the 2008 global economic slump, the idea that Marx was again relevant to understanding—and even confronting—capitalism, started making headlines, such as: “Is There a Marxist revival?” (The Globe and Mail); “Marx and His Ideas Rise From the Dustbin of History” (The Toronto Star); “Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle is Shaping the World” (Time Magazine); “Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today” (The New Yorker); and “Thoroughly Modern Marx” (Foreign Policy). While the press reflected upon Marx’s insights, he became a publishing darling. In 2015, Penguin Books printed one million copies of its “Little Black Classic” edition of The Communist Manifesto, selling almost 80,000 copies in one week. The Jacobin, a popular socialist magazine, begun in a Brooklyn millennial’s apartment in 2011, now has over 30,000 subscribers and a website that draws hundreds of thousands of readers each month. Public interest in Marx is being renewed, but Marx’s social influence in North America across three interrelated spheres—the political, the economic and the cultural—is significant yet inestimable. In this entry, the continental sign of “North America” denotes the United States (US ) and Canada (the two largest countries in the United Nations’ geo-scheme for the North American region) but not Mexico (a country that the United Nations places in the “Central America” region). The US and Canada’s histories as white settler capitalist states formed in relation to the British Empire, these two countries’ current economic, military and cultural-ideological integration, and their power positions in the world system (with the former being an imperial hegemon and the latter, a sub-imperial ally), makes it possible to conceptualize these two different countries as a continental bloc. Marx perceived the US to be an exceptional bourgeois society significant to world history, but viewed Canada, perhaps following Engels’s travelogue, as an insignificant country in the process of being annexed to the US (and with little fuss from the British). Marx never stepped foot into these North American countries. By the midnineteenth century, Marx was best known to North Americans not as a philosopher or a revolutionary, but as a freelance journalist for The New York Tribune. A proponent of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, Marx wrote almost 400 op-ed stories 509

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about many topics between 1852 and 1861, including European politics, free trade, and the American Civil War. Earning $5 to $10 per article, Marx’s journalism was workaday to be sure—he had a family to support. But he also wrote to inform and persuade the Tribune’s readership of his developing philosophical and political positions on history. Marx’s nearly 10-year run as a journalist ended abruptly in 1864, when the Tribune fired him for refusing to cow to its editors’ calls for peace between the Union and the Confederacy sans slavery’s abolition. Unemployed and impoverished, Marx and others established the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA )—the First International—in 1864, and later moved the IWA’s headquarters from London to New York City in 1871. From across the Atlantic, Marx used letters and wires to promote the IWA . Inspired by Marx’s call for working class self-emancipation, German-American radicals were on the frontlines the IWA’s expansion, the trade union movement and urban social struggles to abolish slavery, racism and sexist discrimination against black people and women. Marx even engaged in some guileful citizen-to-politician public diplomacy, writing a letter in 1864 to congratulate US President Abraham Lincoln on being re-elected and championing the rapidly industrializing North’s war against the backwards slave economy of South. Marx did not see the North’s drive to abolish slavery as in any way bringing an end to capitalism, but rather viewed it as the precondition for multi-racial class solidarity and future struggles against capitalism. His letter to Lincoln put a radical twist on the abolitionist’s notion of free labor. While Marx’s ideas quickly ascended from the American working class up to the White House, Marxism entered post-Confederation Canada, in contrast, slowly. Marx never corresponded with Canadians, but some of the first Canadians to drum up support for his ideas were radicals, landed from Britain. By the late nineteenth century, North Americans were reading Marx’s published works. In 1872, the first English language version of the Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared in North America as a serial in the popular magazine, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. In 1888, 5 years after Marx’s death, the first full English translation of Capital was published. By the turn of the twentieth century, intellectuals, politicians and workers were reading Marx, and reading the national conditions of the US and Canada through a Marxian lens. Marx’s posthumous influence in North America has since manifested in myriad ways that people have taken up and refined Marx’s ideas to develop an understanding of the social world and how they’ve acted to change it, for the better. Every significant member of the North American Left has read Marx, combined Marx’s classic works with new ideas and in relation to new situations, refashioned Marx for the specificities of time, place and struggle, and generated hybrid Marxisms aimed at interrogating and breaking out of a seemingly unchangeable present. Marx was the catalyst for the formation of many North American political parties. The Socialist Labor Party (SLP ) was the first socialist party in the US . Its leader, a strident intellectual, newspaper editor and trade unionist named Daniel De Leon, read Marx and was moved to socialism. The Socialist Party of America (SPA ), a rival party that operated in the US and Canada, captured almost 6 percent of the federal presidential vote in 1912, with Eugene Debs on its ticket. Debs found his cause in

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socialism after reading Das Kapital while in prison for his role in the Pullman Strike of 1894. The SPA’s membership remained small until its dissolution in 1972. The MarxistLeninist Communist Parties, formed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, were influential in the first half of the twentieth century. They played a crucial role in exposing North Americans to a version of Marx and winning consent to Marxist ideas. These parties were all severely weakened by the onset of the Cold War, and were dealt a crushing blow after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. In 1919, the year of its founding, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA ) had nearly 60,000 members; today, it has 5,000. In the early 1930s, the Communist Party of Canada (CPC ) could fill Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens for a Tim Buck rally and win over 20,000 votes in a Federal election; in the 2015 election, it garnered about 4,000. Nearly 100 years after these parties tried to combine “democratic centralism” within and “the united front” without in an effort to spark the proletariat’s revolutionary awakening and bring about the overthrow of capitalism, their influence is minuscule. In the absence of attractive and effective anti-capitalist parties leading Marx’s revolutionary charge, a solid chunk of the North American Left has been captivated by social democratic parties and modest proposals to reform capitalism. The US has never been able to muster a mass social democratic party, but the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA ) have made some headway in promoting the need for one. Formed in 1982 by Michael Harrington, the DSA’s membership base recently grew to 50,000 alongside Bernie Sanders’s popularization of the term “socialism. ” The DSA “fights for reforms” through the Democratic Party and aims to “weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people. ” The DSA has had some political success: in 2017, Lee Carter, a thirty-year-old ex-marine, won a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a victory in New York Democratic congressional primaries. The DSA’s grassroots chapters, campaigns and reading clubs have been effective at placing Marx before the public in a positive light. Canada has been more welcoming to social democracy than the US , but not always welcoming of Marx. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s (CCF ) founders, radical planners and members held Marx in high regard but strove to build a democratic socialist state to manage capitalism. In 1961, the CCF became the New Democratic Party (NDP ) and has moved rightwards ever since, removing the word “socialist” from its constitution and embracing the neoliberal “Third Way. ” In the late 1960s, the wing of the party known as the Waffle tried to strengthen the NDP ’s socialist mandate, but was swiftly purged. Although the NDP repeatedly fails to win federal power, at the provincial level of governance, it has had some modest though important political victories. Those who have split from the NDP to forge democratic socialist parties have been less successful. Formed in 2011, the Socialist Party of Ontario ran in the 2011 and 2014 provincial elections and garnered no more than 0.01 percent of the popular vote. It seems to have collapsed in 2016. Formed in 2006, Québec Solidaire is one of the only existing provincially-based democratic socialist parties in Canada. Marx’s influence on it—and Quebec more generally—is complicated and inflected by the national question. In the late 1960s, Quebec sovereigntists, schooled in classical Marxism and the postcolonial Marxisms of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, framed the struggles of Quebec’s working class for

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emancipation from Anglophone hegemony as contiguous with the anti-colonial struggles for national liberation that were sweeping the “Third World. ” The Francophone Marxist Left’s aspiration for economic, political and cultural independence from Angloimperialism, however, sometimes sat uncomfortably with the Anglophone Marxist Left’s dream of de-linking Canada, the world’s most developed yet dependent country, from the chains of the US Empire. The struggles of indigenous peoples across “Canada” to liberate themselves from the edifice of historic Anglophone and Francophone colonization and bourgeois state formation meanwhile highlight how Canada has never been a unified national community: it continues to be a space where contending communities battle for sovereignty. Since 9/11, there has been an uptick of American Marxist conceptualizations of the US as a postcolonial Empire, but in Canada, Marxist dependency theory is no longer as significant as it once was. A new generation of Canadian Marxists powerfully argue that Canada is itself a sub-imperial power. In North America, Marx’s ideas have influenced the formation of parties and political ideologies, but none of these have been hegemonic, neither at the level of State power nor at the level of widespread “common sense. ” The vanguardist parties have never come close to seizing or winning power and all have shrunk or collapsed. The reformist “parties of socialists” have rarely been elected to govern, nor did they make the general rules that govern capitalism. Even though the multitudinous Marxian party Lefts have always been a relatively minor force in parliamentary politics and repeatedly failed to bring about the effects they wished to achieve, their many revolutionary and reformist challenges to liberal capitalist order sometimes have small but significant impacts, if only to remind the world that another world is possible. While Marxists have never won a “war of maneuver” at the level of State, Marx’s ideas have been the common denominator (for, or at the very least, a significant influence within), all of North America’s extra-parliamentary social movements and their “wars of position” in civil society. Struggles for decolonization, national liberation, world peace, environmental sustainability, as well as those set against racial, sexual and cultural oppressions and inequities, have grappled with Marx. From the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS ) and the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA ) of the New Left circa 1968 to the new cross-border movements of this age—Idle No More, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, No One is Illegal, Fight for $15 and Antifa—Marx’s ideas have played an influential role, and are revisited and revised by each new generation. Marx’s ideas also continue to be crucial to the political goals and educational work of socialist groups: the DSA , Socialist Alternative (SA ), International Socialist Organization (ISO ), New Socialist (NS ) and the Socialist Project (SP ). With regard to the economic sphere, Marx’s ideas instigated the formation of trade unions and galvanized the working class to recognize its power and dignity, and to challenge the owning class. From supporting the development of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) to being a social force in many mighty labor movements and strikes, Marxist ideas have mattered to the thousands upon thousands of working people who have struggled to make history, and have in fact done so: the 1919 general strike in Winnipeg; the 1931 garment workers strike in Toronto; the 1945 strike at Windsor’s Ford plant; the 2007 nationwide strike against General Motors; the 2012 strike against AT &T across California; and the ongoing cross-border Fair Wages

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campaign against precarity. Yet union membership and the strength of the organized working class have been in decline for four decades: today, 28 percent of the Canadian workforce is unionized while a mere 10 perecent of the American workforce is. Marx at once describes and prescribes a history of class struggle, and his ideas nevertheless haunt the organized and disorganized clashes between workers and owners over the time and pace of work, wages, the control of surplus value, the management of the workplace, and new technologies, in factories, malls and the digital media platforms. Marx’s ideas also intersect with and shape the ways of life of many of the North Americans who have individually and collectively challenged the reigning liberal capitalist order. Calling oneself a “Marxist” can be at once a privately satisfying means of differentiating one’s sense of self in society from bourgeois others, and is a public way of refusing the prefabricated lifestyle personas offered up by the cultural industries. Importantly, asserting that one is a Marxist can express a feeling of belonging to a community larger than oneself. The members of these Marxian communities may never know, meet, see or hear their fellow members. Yet in the minds of each lives the ideal of communion; in the practices of each is the pursuit of a realm of freedom from necessity, a utopia of living otherwise. Joining together with other self-identified Marxists on list-serves, in reading groups, in organizations and in street-level protests enables atomized strangers to form comradely subcultures and counter-hegemonic collectives distinct from dominant national communities. For those who read, write about and share Marxist ideas, commit their time, energy and money to supporting the development and continuity of Marxian-inflected groups, associations and causes, and put their comforts, reputations, jobs and bodies at risk when ruthlessly criticizing the status quo to the face of its most devoted proponents and defenders, passing over more lucrative opportunities as a matter of principle, and participating in protest actions with no guarantee of making a major difference, Marxists believe that there is or must be an alternative way of living. Additionally, Marx’s ideas have inspired and influenced much intellectual and cultural production in North America. Since the fall of the New Left, academia has been the primary institutional source of much Marxist intellectual production. Many Marxisms have been written, read, interpreted and applied to the world by professors and students across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Marxism is the philosophical backbone of conferences such as Left Forum and Historical Materialism. It is part of a publishing industry, where firms such as Verso, Haymarket Books, AK Press, Between the Lines and Fernwood Press publish and sell Marxist books. It is especially prominent in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Rethinking Marxism, New Politics, Science & Society, Studies in Political Economy, Labour/Le Travail and Alternate Routes. Marx’s ideas also live culturally in popular magazines such as The Jacobin, Monthly Review, N+1 and Canadian Dimension. The history of Marxist intellectual production is complemented by Marxist-inflected cultural output. James T. Farrell, Robert Cantwell, Josephine Herbst and Henry Roth crafted “proletarian literature. ” Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a realist novel about workers in the meatpacking industry, renders Marx’s Das Kapital in fictional form. Hollywood was once home to many Marxist filmmakers, and Boots Riley’s recent Sorry to Bother You is an anticapitalist film. Theatrical unions produced Marxist agitprop, and Howard Zinn’s play,

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Marx in Soho, has been staged across North American cities. The anti-capitalist lyrics of Zack de La Rocha, the lead singer of the band Rage Against the Machine, can easily be read as Marxist. And although the corporate news media tends to filter out Marxist thinking, Marx’s ideas are a major presence across the Internet’s websites, blogs and social media platforms. In sum, Marx’s legacy is deeply embedded in the North American political economy and culture, yet Marx’s ideas have never achieved structural power, nor been the source of the dominant ideology in mainstream culture. One reason for this is the existence of powerful countervailing forces to Marxism and deterrents in North America to opening oneself to Marx’s influence. For over 100 years, governments, corporations and liberals and conservatives have made sure that Marx’s ideas could not become hegemonic by coordinating persuasive and coercive campaigns against Marxists. From the Pinkerton detective agencies and mobs hired by capital to crush worker selfemancipation in the late nineteenth century, to the “Red Scares” of the First World War and the early Cold War, to the FBI ’s COINTELPRO program against the New Left in the 1960s, those who took Marx as their guide to making history risked criminalization, infiltration, sabotage, disruption, stigmatization, discrimination, censure and even violence. Even today, the fascist alt-right is fighting to purge “cultural Marxism” from North America. Nonetheless, we are living in a time of renewed public interest in Marx, especially among millennials and an increasingly disaffected working class that longs for change. If history is any guide to the present (and the future), Marx’s ideas will continue to endure in the thoughts and actions of movements pushing beyond capitalism. As long as capitalism exists in North America, so will Marx’s ideas, impact and influence.

References Blackburn, R. (2011), An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln, New York: Verso. Buhle, P. (2013), Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left, New York: Verso. Ceplair, L. (2011), Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History, Santa Barbara, CA : Praeger. Klassen, J. (2014), Joining Empire: The Political Economy of the New Canadian Foreign Policy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Marx, K. (2008), Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, New York: Penguin. McKay, I. (2005), Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History, Toronto: Between the Lines.

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Indigenous Internationalisms Deena Rymhs

The utility of Marx’s theories for understanding Indigenous political struggles and anticolonial resistance has been strenuously debated. In North America, and in the liberal settler state of Canada specifically, this debate centers on three interrelated concerns. Proponents of Marx insist, first of all, that Indigenous people have been absorbed into capitalism through colonial dispossession and most profoundly through land expropriation. Countering this assumption are those who maintain that Indigenous ontologies, ecologies, spiritual practices, social relations and modes of production have not been swept into the current of industrialism. This opposition extends to Marx’s teleology of historical progress, which is the second consistent centerpiece of the debate. Critiqued for its rigid developmentalism, Marx’s economic stages of production originally betrayed a social evolutionary bias that Marx revised in his later writings (Hardt and Negri 2009: 87–8). The third issue of debate stems from what some call Marx’s “anti-ecological” vision of economic progress. The shifting relations of production that Marx envisaged as an outcome of revolution and as a condition of human freedom arguably relied on the continued instrumentalization and industrialization of nature characteristic of capitalism. It is in relation to this third point that some of the more recent and compelling engagements with Marx have emerged in an effort to re-center ecological concerns and the viability of land-based cultural sovereignty as essential to decolonial and anti-capitalist struggle. Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation provides a coherent structure to the historical and economic processes by which Indigenous people in Canada were dispossessed of their landbases for the development of industrial economies. Comparable histories of land expropriation occurred in places like the United States and Australia, and more recently in the territories of the Truku people in Taiwan1 and Indigenous minorities in Laos.2 In Canada, this (ongoing) process of dispossession relied on the extinguishment of native title for farming, lumber industries and mineral extraction.3 Settler colonialism is at its core a capitalist enterprise in which territory acquisition figures as the “specific, irreducible element” (Wolfe 2006: 388). Rather than representing a primitive stage of modernity, settler colonialism was, as Patrick Wolfe argues, “foundational to modernity” (2006: 394). Wolfe explains: “The Industrial Revolution, misleadingly figuring in popular consciousness as an autochthonous metropolitan phenomenon, required colonial land and labour to produce its raw 515

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materials just as centrally as it required metropolitan factories and an industrial proletariat to process them, whereupon the colonies were again required as a market” (2006: 394). The economic expansion indexed by primitive accumulation was, from its origins, keyed to global economic forces that challenge any spatial and temporal spectrum placing the European metropole at one end and the colony at the other. This mutual embeddedness makes it difficult to pull apart colonialism from the capitalist forces driving it.4 Despite their coeval processes, an end to capitalism would not in itself guarantee an end to colonialism. Marx’s teleology, in which liberation would occur through the revolution of the proletariat, presents a proletarian-centered system as the only alternative to capitalist hegemony. This constitutive feature of traditional Marxism offers Indigenous people a narrow band of possibilities and little more than a promissory assurance of good faith that the social relations and ecological practices normalized under settler-colonial rule would wither away without capitalism. Marx’s earlier writings do little to inspire such good faith. His views on British colonialism in India are well known for his Eurocentric observation that “these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear [. . .] restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules” (Marx 1853). Marx corrected this progressivist ideology in the later years of his life as he became interested in pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies, including those of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people. This interest led him to “break with his earlier assumptions of modern ‘progress’ and the rigid theory of ‘precapitalist forms’ that he developed in the 1850s” (Hardt and Negri 2009: 88). Rejecting the developmental thesis of his earlier views on liberation, Marx’s later writings demonstrate what Étienne Balibar calls an “anti-evolutionist” turn (2007: 108). Given Marx’s own evolution in thinking, his later writings merit more careful consideration than many rejections of Marx’s political usefulness for Indigenous struggles have granted.5 While Marx might have admired the social relations and systems of governance of the Haudenosaunee, contemporary Marxist movements fall short of addressing colonial power structures and forms of domination (discursive, psychic, legal) that exceed class relations and render Indigenous people more than an oppressed proletariat. In Canada, First Nations’ struggles for self-determination have often been overlooked if not dismissed by Leftist movements who see Indigenous people “as already incorporated into capitalism or by its replacement, socialism” (Bedford 1994: 104). “Even if both Aboriginal persons and workers are oppressed by a similar economic formation, ” David Bedford points out, “it does not follow that they are necessarily allies” (1994: 110). For Left-based movements to form meaningful alliances with Indigenous people, Bedford adds, they must “treat [Indigenous people’s] demand for cultural survival seriously” (1994: 113). Glen Coulthard similarly reads this economic reductionism in Marx, arguing that “there is much more at play in the contemporary reproduction of settler-colonial relations than capitalist economics” (2014: 14). He elaborates: [T]he theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and orientated around the question of land—a struggle not only for land, in the material sense, but

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also deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms. 2014: 13; Coulthard’s emphasis

Implicit in Coulthard’s statements is the survival of Indigenous modalities and land-based practices that are the foundation of cultural identities and the futurity of Indigenous people. Marx’s instrumentalization of nature, Coulthard argues, “placed no intrinsic value on the land or nature itself, and [. . .] this subsequently led him to uncritically champion an ideology of productivism and unsustainable economic progress” (2014: 14). Re-centering land not as a material resource but as a source of teachings and cultural vitality, Coulthard urges “a more ecologically attentive critique of colonial-capitalist accumulation” (2014: 14). This recognition of ecology as a vibrant system of cultural meaning and model of social relations redresses the vertical relationship between humans and nature left largely untroubled in Marxist ideology. Coulthard summarizes Marx thus: “land is not exploitable, people are” (2014: 14; Coulthard’s emphasis). However, recent reappraisals of Marx’s contributions to ecological thinking challenge criticisms of Marx’s utilitarian views of nature. One must hasten to point out the tendentiousness of subjecting a historical body of writings to the concerns of an environmental movement that emerged a century later—and a field of critical inquiry that emerged decades after that. The terms “ecology” and “nature” have shifted meaning in the last twenty years alone. Even though Marx preceded modern environmentalism, his writings provide, in Brett Clark’s and John Bellamy Foster’s view, a critical method for “relat[ing] the ‘problem of nature’ back to the problem of society” (Clark and Foster 2010: 143). Marx’s analysis of dead labor, his critique of accumulation and his advocacy for sustainable economic development offer “an invaluable methodological foundation to critique contemporary environmental degradation and to envision social and ecological transformation” (143). While ecological thinking as we imagine it today did not originate with Marx, his writings laid the groundwork for seeing human and environmental exploitation as often conjoined. Nevertheless, the reluctance of some Indigenous thinkers to embrace a Marxist vision of liberation is warranted given historical examples of Marxist-oriented movements in which neither the environment nor the autonomy of Indigenous people figured as prominent political considerations. The revolutionary government of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN ) is an instructive example. After taking power in 1979, the Sandinistas attempted to revolutionize Nicaragua’s main Indigenous groups, the Miskito, the Sumu and the Rama. These non-Spanish speaking Indigenous people lived in a culturally distinct eastern region of Nicaragua that had endured centuries of British and Spanish imperialism followed by US dominance. Throughout the colonial wars between the British and Spanish, and under the Somoza dictatorship from 1937 to 1979, their lands were exploited for gold mining, lumber and agriculture. Upon seizing power, the FSLN revolutionary government sought the support of the Miskito, Sumu, and Rama (known as MISURASTA ) to fight foreign exploitation and a CIA-backed counter-revolution mounting along the Honduras border. The FSLN

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initially appeared to take MISURASTA’s conditions for alliance seriously, agreeing to a mass literacy campaign in Indigenous languages as well as English (Ortiz 1987: 43). When MISURASTA demanded self-government and autonomy over their land and resources, the FSLN government balked. MISURASTA’s leadership was arrested, which in turn motivated its Indigenous members to join the Contras insurgency.6 In the midst of the civil war that ensued, the Sandinistas drafted a constitution that recognized the self-determination of Indigenous people of the eastern region. The principles for autonomy, passed into law 1986, recognized language, cultural and land rights of the region’s Indigenous groups (Ortiz 1987: 55). This historical example illustrates how revolutionary movements, even when advancing a project of social equality (the Sandinistas supported universal health care and education along with promoting gender equality), can revert to another form of centralized power that annexes the cultural and economic self-determination of Indigenous people into its own vision of progress. While their respective goals may not always be continuous with each other’s, Marx’s insights can offer Indigenous people, who have long ago joined the wage economy, a critique of capital and its exploitative social relations. The role that Indigenous workers played in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike and Trotskyite socialist workers movements in the United States demonstrates the viability of Marxist praxis for mobilizing against oppressive relationships of labor and capital.7 Though it would be mistaken to see this oppression exclusively in terms of class struggle, it would also be disingenuous to ignore the broader frame of labor and capitalist relations that are ineluctably part of twenty-first-century life. The Mohawk ironworkers who built the New York City skyline are a compelling example of the instructiveness of seeing Indigenous people’s political lives within the labor relationship. Throughout the twentieth century, Mohawk men from Kahnawà:ke and Six Nations reserves in Canada contributed some of the most impressive feats of labor to industrial and urban infrastructure projects. This history points not just to the invisibility of Indigenous labor (few people who look at New York’s towering skyline know it was built by Mohawk ironworkers) but to the ways in which the lives of workers can be invested with political meaning. Generations of Mohawk men established a tradition of work that involved continual movement across the Canada-US border. These crossings exercise a political right established in the Jay Treaty of 1794, which ensured Mohawk people passage over the border that cut through their historical territory (Simpson 2014: 115). Audra Simpson explains that for Mohawk peoples, “the border acts as a site [. . .] for the activation and articulation of their rights as members of reserve nations, or Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy peoples” (2014: 116). In crossing this border, Mohawk ironworkers exercise a political sovereignty that refuses the settler regimes of both Canada and the United States. It is crucial, therefore, to imagine Indigenous people not as somehow standing outside labor but as capable of staging political interventions through their labor. Even while economic forces have indelibly transformed Indigenous communities, class cannot be treated as a substitute for often nationally-focused struggles of Indigenous people. Coulthard sees land-based resistance as having greater revolutionary potential in Canada than the socialist left has recognized. With a recent decline in

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Canadian and US manufacturing, land becomes even more vulnerable to exploitation. Indigenous people have been on the frontlines of blocking such exploitation. This mantle of resistance has not been universally taken up by a united working class, however. Those who continue to see their livelihoods as dependent on oil, forestry and mining industries are often the least sympathetic to Indigenous opposition to corporate and state-supported resource extraction projects.8 Coulthard’s attention to land as a continued site of dispossession and resistance offers a bridge between anti-capitalist and decolonial struggle. One must correspondingly ask, however, what framework for radical social change exists for Indigenous people, including a majority urban Indigenous population, who have no landbase to which to return. Although this question mistakes the effect for the cause, it pushes at class stratifications that exist among Indigenous communities, cleavages generated by capitalism and colonialism together.

Notes 1 2

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See Simon. Despite its constitution as a socialist country, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic government has granted large-scale access for foreign investors to rubber plantations. Ian Baird treats this development as a process of primitive accumulation that has profoundly disrupted Indigenous people’s subsistence economies and livelihoods. “[T]urning people into labour” and “land into capital” (Baird 2011: 12), these concessions have altered the environment and dispossessed many of the Indigenous groups who have been forced into wage labor and poor working conditions. In emphasizing ongoing forms of dispossession that characterize Indigenous people’s material and political struggles under settler colonialism, I am aware that my temporal reframing of primitive accumulation differs from the thinking of orthodox Marxists who see primitive accumulation as a finished process of transfer from noncapitalist to capitalist relations. I join Coulthard who similarly insists on “the persistent role that unconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts” (2014: 9). Coulthard adds that “the history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state” (2014: 9). Indeed, the operation of Indian Residential Schools in Canada from the 1880s to the late-twentieth century reveals the mutually constitutive relationship of colonialism and industrializing economies. Inaccurately referred to as “schools, ” these institutions focused less on literacy and academic education and more on sex-segregated “practical” skills like carpentry, agriculture, baking, cleaning and sewing—notoriously executed by a pedagogy of cultural shaming, violent discipline and abuse. Residential schools were, in reality, industrial training institutions for Indigenous children whose ties to their lands were severed by their long periods of removal from their parents and communities. Ward Churchill’s characterization of Marxism is typical of such rejections. “Marxism, ” Churchill writes, “for all its possible good intentions and grandiloquent pronouncements on behalf of humanity, remains as it has always been: an

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx ethnocentric dogma expressing eternal variations on a given theme and possessing little conceptual utility beyond its original European cultural paradigm” (1983: 14). This thinking was echoed by Russell Means during the rise of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Marx, however, was cautious of using his observations as “an all-purpose formula of a general historico-philosophical theory, ” and chastened the impulse to “metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself ” (Marx 1877: 200–1). The interventions of foreign interests, specifically the United States Central Intelligence Agency, in destabilizing the region after the Sandinistas gained government power, should not be understated here. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz writes: “Although intense political and cultural conflicts would undoubtedly have developed between the peoples of the Atlantic Coast region and the central government even without foreign intervention, it is clear to most observers that the war that raged on the Atlantic Coast between 1982–1984, with sporadic recurrence since, would probably not have occurred without US intervention” (Ortiz 1987: 49–50). See Palmer. A case in point is Elsipogtog First Nation’s blocking of shale-gas industry traffic in New Brunswick, Canada. In the summer and fall of 2013, anti-fracking protesters from the Mi’kmaq First Nation set up a blockade to prevent continued seismic testing near their reserve. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued an injunction against the road blockage, violence broke out. Even though the majority of New Brunswick residents oppose fracking, the clash drew backlash from non-Indigenous communities who condemned Indigenous protestors’ burning of cars as terrorist acts.

References Baird, I. (2011), “Turning Land into Capital, Turning People into Labour: Primitive Accumulation and the Arrival of Large-Scale Economic Land Concessions in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, ” New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 5(1): 10–26. Balibar, E. (2007), The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso. Bedford, D. (1994), “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress, ” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 14(1): 101–17. Churchill, W. (1983), “Introduction: Journeying Toward a Debate, ” Marxism and Native Americans, Boston, MA : South End Press. Clark, B. and J. Bellamy Foster (2010), “Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century, ” World Review of Political Economy 1(1): 142–56. Coulthard, G. (2014), Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (1987), “Indigenous Rights and Regional Autonomy in Revolutionary Nicaragua, ” Latin American Perspectives 14(1): 43–66. Hardt, M. and A. Negri. (2009), Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Marx, K. (1877), “Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski, ” Collected Works, Vol. 24, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 196–201.

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Marx, K. (1853), “The British Rule in India, ” Marxists Internet Archive. Available at: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm (accessed December 6, 2017). Palmer, B. (2013), Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, Boston, MA : Brill. Simon, S. (2001), “Indigenous Peoples Marxism and Late Capitalism, ” New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 5(1): 6–9. Simpson, A. (2014), Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Wolfe, P. (2006), “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, ” Journal of Genocide Research 8(4): 387–409.

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Literature and Culture Sarah Brouillette

This chapter outlines two ways Marxist thought clarifies the production of literature and other kinds of relatively elite culture. Given limited space, I can only emphasize what I take to be the determining forces of production of culture which inform what is available to our imaginations and techniques of representation. I first focus on recent attention to those aspects of culture’s making that retain an apparently non-capitalist or non-economic element. I then consider some of what is resolutely capitalist in culture’s making: the division of labor and shifts in labor’s composition are key forces delimiting who makes relatively elite culture such as literature, fine art, avant-garde film, “quality television” and so on. This divided focus—culture’s exceptionality versus culture’s exemplarity—is only heuristic; what I ultimately emphasize is how culture’s apparently non-economic elements and capital’s constraints on culture’s production are cut from the same cloth.

I In Art and Value, Dave Beech claims that there is an integrally non-economic quality of the artwork’s making that—regardless of its formal or thematic concerns—excludes it from total identity with the commodity. Beech maintains that art’s unusual relation to capitalism has been obscured by the focus of Western Marxism since the 1920s on art’s increasing commodification and absorption into the culture industry, such that art’s modicum of autonomy from capital is cancelled by the reduction of every intention to the maximization of advantage and sales, and by the turning of any critical purpose into nothing but a marketable spectacle. Theorists have exhaustively charted the influence of capitalist social relations on art’s themes and forms. They have considered artists’s reactions to their works being turned into reproducible commodities, marketed, stored as relatively safe investments, and so on. They have studied the extent of the determination of the cultural superstructure by the material base of capitalist social relations. In Beech’s take, this tradition has distracted scholars from the fundamentally economic question of whether art’s production conforms to the capitalist mode. Beech points out that the artist does not accept a wage in compensation for her role in the production of a commodity, but rather sells the product itself (to a gallery or a 525

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collector for instance). He indicates also that the artist does not act as a capitalist engaging in the exploitation of labor to accumulate surplus, and that external limitations on replication or iteration in production make the artwork irreproducible, setting it apart even from petty production. In essence, for Beech, because artists work on making unique objects that cannot be reproduced in their original form, the price of those works is not indexed to the average socially necessary labor time constitutive of value under capitalism. A coffee table book featuring paintings by Vincent Van Gogh is a capitalist commodity to which such measures are relevant; an original painting by Van Gogh is not, no matter how its price rises with the sale of postcards and books and tea towels and refrigerator magnets. Thus Beech describes artworks as in important ways “non-economic. ” What I would suggest instead is slightly different: artworks are not non-economic so much as defined fundamentally by their unusual relation to the economic sphere. Instead of anchoring analysis, as Beech does, only in the conditions of production exclusive to unique fine art, we could also claim that, well beyond such works, much of what aesthetic production is—from what we can for simplicity’s sake call its content or message, to claims for its ontological distinction from other kinds of expression— emerges in some way from the shifting but ultimately stable position of many aesthetic practices vis-à-vis the capitalist dominant. In other words, there is a whole world of aesthetic practice and experience that stems from and relates closely to the ideals of irreducibility that are only materialized in the (relatively unique) cases Beech considers. What is more, the fact of art’s association with uniqueness and irreproducibility is one that emerged historically in relation to capitalism’s dominant tendencies. The emergence of the category of art, and the privileged place held for aesthetic autonomy within that category, cannot be separated from the emergence of capitalism, in that it only becomes possible to conceive of art as an autonomous and “self-consistent” set of practices vis-àvis what Daniel Spaulding describes as “a different logic” (2015), namely, the logic of capitalist value production. Far from representing a pure non-capitalist other, the production of art exists in an uneasy and conflicted relationship with the capitalist value form, and that unease will remain in force so long as capitalism itself does. So to reiterate: whereas Beech emphasizes fine art as non-economic, I would follow Spaulding in suggesting we broaden that inquiry to conceive aesthetic activity of various kinds as trapped in a definitively problematic relation to the production of capitalist value. Turning to Marx’s admittedly scant writings on literature and culture is useful here. Marx argued that capitalist production “is inimical to certain kinds of intellectual production—to art and poetry, for instance, ” and he positioned the unproductive nature of the making of art against bourgeois economists’ tendency to overemphasize and overvalue productivity and to assume that everything is ultimately useful to the economy. He wrote that these economists “are so dominated by their fixed bourgeois ideas that they would think they were insulting Aristotle or Julius Caesar if they called them ‘unproductive labourers’ ” (Marx 1968: n.p.). He famously claimed that John Milton, who was paid £5 for Paradise Lost, was an unproductive laborer, while “the writer who turns out stuff for his publisher in factory style” is, in contrast, a productive one. He elaborates that, like a silkworm producing silk, “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason, ” that is, “as an activity of his nature” (Marx 1976a: 1044).

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When Marx describes Milton as engaged in an activity of his nature, he does not mean that the work articulates the pristine, original, self-grounding individual interiority imagined by bourgeois aesthetic theory. Consider his remark that Raphael, for example, “was conditioned by the technical advances made in art before his time, by the organization of society, by the division of labour in the locality in which he lived, and—finally—by the division of labour in all the countries with which that locality stood in communication” (quoted in Prawer 1976: 114). The artist’s nature is thus an expression of his existence as a zoon politicon, meaning a creature “which can individuate itself only in society” (Marx 1996: 129). The human consciousness which art exhibits is always everywhere conditioned by material relations. It is thoroughly embedded and social, even in its apparent indivisibility and uniqueness, which are, as we have seen, determined by a particular history of social and aesthetic forms. It is simply that the material relations that define art’s production differ in important ways from those that tie the laborer to the capitalist so characteristically. This difference, and not any special qualities of the artist, is what makes art practice a foil to the alienating abstractions of labor for a wage. Art and culture are in this light precisely not the singular achievements of given expressive individuals, but rather the products of practices that are materially— concretely—importantly distinct from capitalist norms. In other words, art is not a realm of free-floating ideas but a form of praxis thoroughly shaped by the artist’s relatively unusual material existence and by the social relations that define her experience. Cultural practices are in turn some of the many means, all only potentially and contextually effective, by which people can become conscious of the nature of their social existence and “fight it out”—that is, engage the defining struggle to realize or manifest something other than capitalism (Marx 1976b: xx). When Marx describes capitalism as inimical to art, it matters that labor under capitalism is understood as a threat to whatever artistic features our work might exhibit. He writes that the “economic relation” between capitalist and worker develops in proportionate relation to labor itself losing “its character as art” (quoted in Prawer 1976: 291). What he means here specifically is that the ends of labor, or the nature of the task and product to which the labor is applied, become irrelevant. Marx considered the loss within the wage-commodity nexus of work’s artistic character—its concrete specificity, its lack of generalizability—as definitive of modern wage labor. Capitalism depends upon the worker’s insecurity and desperation. She is dependent on wages for survival, and at work uses techniques and tools that appear entirely alien to her so as to produce commodities to which she similarly bears no obvious relation. It is easy to see why the making of art—performed with tools one has invested in oneself, toward creating a product apparently embodying one’s own ends—throws into such sharp relief the productive labor which rarely entails the “play of [one’s] own mental and physical power” (quoted in Prawer 1976: 313). Art is one thing—not the only thing— that entails an elevated or enhanced relation to one’s effort and to the products of one’s effort. This point has been hugely influential for subsequent Marxist approaches to art and aesthetics, though they have perhaps, like Beech, focused too exclusively on highartistic manifestations of this superior relation. For Georg Lukács, in György Markus’s terms, the best art was “the living example of the possibility of a non-reified relation to

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reality” (Markus 2001: 5); and for Adorno, similarly, genuine works of art were “plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity” (Adorno 2013: 310). In this light, aesthetic praxis, or intentional sensuous expression in art works and art-like objects, emerges as a form of the kind of activity that is not afforded to people forced to depend on wages to reproduce themselves and their social worlds. What is more, the implication of Marx’s observation about labor losing all of its artistic character, and about art remaining distinct from the law of value, is that the making of art is an activity that should be available to all people rather than just to that special singular Milton. Indeed, Marx writes explicitly that this making is something denied them, given that “concentration of artistic talent in single, unique individuals and . . . suppression of such talent among the masses is a consequence of the division of labour” (quoted in Prawer 1976: 113). Thus the ongoing realities of art making may help in some way to galvanize the transformation of general social conditions such that doing work that is not productive of value for capitalism would be the general condition.

II Class power and uneven relations define the history of cultural production under capitalism. To focus on my own field, Anglophone literary studies, we see clearly that literature’s development has involved industries located in the dominant economies, focused in London and New York, with support from the broader British and American milieu of education in literary writing and related literary professions such as editing, journalism and marketing. The metropolitan location of the dominant industries is not mere context for the invention of literary worlds; it is the grounds for the elaboration of concerns and techniques, topics and styles. There is a concentration of media industries in these metropoles and an attendant thickening of cultural capital that exerts a powerful pull on literary writers all over the world. Writers may engage with, dismantle and rework forms that are in some sense “imported”—Franco Moretti has studied the novel form in these terms—and there has of course been an influx of writers from peripheries into the center, whether they simply arrange that their works be published there or move there themselves. Still, the fact of writers’ awareness of a basic unevenness is the engine of these processes: writers look toward the core literary economies because that is where the greatest possibility for adequate income and access to the limelight is to be found, and these tendencies persist due to the limited extent elsewhere of development of local industries of literary production, circulation and acclaim. There is a close link between being at the center of literary production and being one of the advanced economies, and especially being an advanced economy that passed through an industrial age, featuring the dominance of waged labor, public schooling and mass literacy, and most especially being one of the Anglophone capitalist hegemons (Britain or the US ). Many smaller economies simply do not have the capacity to produce and circulate books, and the people working within them do not have the disposable income or leisure to buy books. In this context, literary books—which are

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more expensive and more time-consuming than other kinds—are at a particular disadvantage; hence, even where there are communities of readers vibrant enough to support authorship as a profession, the reading material is often genre or middlebrow rather than literary. Of course, smaller literary avant-gardes exist for consumption by local communities, but they rarely come to the attention of foreign audiences in (for instance) press coverage or university syllabi. It is hard to be galvanized or moved by a literary work if you do not have time to read; plus, your scope to respond to what you have read—to find related work or people to talk to about what you are reading, even— is determined by the nature of your working life and daily pressures. It is constitutive of the literary that it has been shaped and instantiated in this precise way, as one site of exploration and expression of relatively elite cultural power, which variously attends, props up, justifies and responds to hegemonic formations of capital as they emerge and are subject to question and displacement. The field of production and evaluation of the literary—where prominent fights are over what counts as literary and who is sanctioned to confer prestige—is shaped by the respective extensiveness of development of the cultural elite in those advanced economies. Nor is this pressing and characteristic pull between literary communities in the less advanced economies and the dominant metropolitan locations the end of the story. Also constitutive are the histories of uneven relations of race, class and caste that structure the literary field in the areas of advanced industry. The Anglo-American publishing field has been shown to be exceptionally white and peopled by those who come from elite backgrounds (Kean 2015; Spahr and Young 2015). None of this is about exclusion only, of course. It is about the terms of inclusion, and about the way in which the nature of the determination of inclusion and exclusion is perforce always close to the surface of practice within the field. No matter its subject matter, the expression of the literary involves those who have been trained in elite modes of reading and apprehension, and who have available to them a certain quantum of leisure and education. As Renée Balibar and Dominique Lecourte wrote about France, with Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey amplifying their claims: by definition, literature is a form of non-popular expression, and the ability to make and understand literary works is socially distinguishing. Literature as a category of expression has the unevenness and inequity of social relations built into it. These scholars understood the development of the literary as a superstructural transformation or “bourgeois ‘cultural revolution’ ” meant to justify the hegemony of the new bourgeoisie (Macherey and Balibar 1996: 280). Even if we nuance this claim to say that the literary’s relation to bourgeois dominance is historically a matter of exploration as well as expression, critique as well as adherence, we must concede that fighting to establish the legitimacy of class dominance is entirely consonant with openness to critique, refashioning and worried interiority. So literature has historically been expression and articulation of a classed position; the definition of the literary has entailed a certain focus on a heightened and disinterested mode of articulation and disavowed politics that floats above the messy world of struggles and renders judgment on it. There are always exceptions; the point is simply that the unevenness of social relations is an absolutely integral structuring force within literary relations. Unevenness

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is not simply a reality that writers are interested in or attempt to render in their work. It is there all the way down in every literary work, as soil from which the urge to literary expression springs. Whatever more evidently “radical” themes we may highlight and prefer, the problems within the field are not surmounted by content. There are powerful structures in place to prefer articulation of elite literary expression that embodies and ensconces bourgeois cultural values, including structured embrace of the “new” and apparently scandalizing. For Walter Benjamin, the literary effect involves a plethora of individualizing and interiorizing realities: copyright rewards individuals as the expressive source of literary writing; literary work is widely read as occasioned by a singular point of view and genius; you read silently to yourself; you need space and privacy to do so; and so on. A foundational unevenness is a structuring horizon to expression and hugely informing truth there beneath the shifting fortunes of a given literary field or the cultural economy writ large. The effects of this unevenness are heterogeneous and dynamic; it produces constraints but also occasions resistance. Only totally new and genuinely radically communal modes of production will offer anything substantively different.

III Note that I have not suggested that all culture has been reduced to the status of a commodity or prop to economic ends; that there is no longer any authentic culture “outside” the market; that art is debased by capital, and so on. Even in the case of the most market-based, commodified mass culture, people do not necessarily get involved in its production because they want success or wealth, and people who consume culture do not necessarily appreciate it or use it in ways that are tainted by commerce. Our economy is capitalist; we have to enter into the marketplace to have many of our needs met, and these include our real cultural needs of meaning, synthesis, storytelling, delight, absorption and so much else. Culture that has the potential and capacity to produce these effects continues to be made and accessed. However, it matters that time and inclination to engage in cultural activity are so unevenly distributed, and the potential uses and effects of culture so delimited by the situations we find ourselves in. It matters also that while culture performs crucially healing, sustaining functions for some of us, in doing so it can also help to sustain elite cultural values and shape us as workers into communities that are more peaceable or pliable. This contradictory situation is absolutely definitive of culture in a capitalist world. For all of these reasons, the Marxist question for study of literature and culture is not how to support or fund artists in their separate work, or how to preserve art’s critical capacities—which will exist so long as there is something worth opposing—but how to make creative self-articulation and leisure part of life for everyone. Right now basic survival is such a pressing concern for most people that any kind of artistic practice becomes impossible. Only when this reality is overcome, and working to survive is no longer the common lot, will the situation for culture and its producers, and the relationship between cultural pursuits and our everyday lives, meaningfully change.

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References Adorno, T. (2013), Aesthetic Theory, London: Bloomsbury. Balibar, R. and D. Lecourt. (1974), Le français national: politique et practique de la langue nationale sous la Révolution, Paris: Hachette. Beech, D. (2015), Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics, London: Brill. Benjamin, W. (1970), “The Author as Producer, ” New Left Review 1(62). Kean, D. (2015), Writing the Future: Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market Place, London: Spread the Word. Macherey, P. and E. Balibar. (1996), “On Literature as an Ideological Form, ” in T. Eagleton and D. Milne (eds), Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader, London: Blackwell. Markus, G. (2001), “Walter Benjamin or: The Commodity as Phantasmagoria, ” New German Critique 83: 3–42. Marx, K. (1968), Theories of Surplus Value, Moscow : Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1976a), Capital, Vol. I, trans. B, Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1976b), Critique of Political Economy, Peking: Foreign Language Press. Marx, K. (1996), “ ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse, ” in T. Carver (ed.), Later Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moretti, F. (2000), “Conjectures on World Literature, ” New Left Review 1. Prawer, S. (1976), Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spahr, J. and S. Young (2015), “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room, ” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 20. Spaulding, D. (2015), “A Clarification on Art and Value, ” Mute 28.

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Cultural Studies Jaafar Aksikas

This chapter provides a schematic critical account of the relationship between Marxism and cultural studies since the emergence of the latter field in post-war Britain in the 1950s. This exercise is probably more necessary and timelier than ever before, especially in a historical moment characterized by a deep crisis in global capitalism that has prompted a return to Marx and to the economic more generally. Furthermore, this account occurs at a special moment in the history of contemporary cultural studies; more than 50 years have now passed since the academic institutionalization of the field in the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964, and there is no doubt that cultural studies is now a more established and more “global” critical intellectual practice in the academy. So, unlike accounts and debates on the topic from earlier decades, this one has the advantage of looking at a much longer conjuncture and from a much broader perspective; but it also has the burden of abstracting from a wide range of actually existing work in cultural studies in Britain, North America and elsewhere. So, what can we say about the relationship between Marxism and cultural studies? In quick summary and for the purposes of this brief survey, I would like to distinguish between four major formations of cultural studies: early British cultural studies (roughly from the early 1950s to the late 1960s); classical Birmingham cultural studies (roughly from the late 1960s to the mid–1980); post-modern cultural studies (roughly from the late 1980s to the early 2000s); and, finally, emergent cultural studies (roughly from the early 2000s to the present). This periodizing hypothesis is not meant to obliterate the common problematic and larger formation from which cultural studies emerged or the common political-intellectual project and desire that has animated and continues to animate the field, nor is it meant to erase the differences and project some massive homogeneity or uniformity within these historical moments. Instead, it is meant to help us describe some general trends, tendencies and directions of what one might call the “selective formations” of cultural studies or what Larry Grossberg (2010) has recently called the changing “centers” of cultural studies. Cultural studies, especially since its importation into the American academy in the 1980s, has been growing increasingly skeptical of the uses of Marxist and political economic approaches to culture, including those more robust, nonreductive approaches and models in which cultural phenomena and cultural forms and formations are understood within the context of their social totality. 533

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Early British Cultural Studies: From the 1950s to the 1960s Early British cultural studies first appeared in an era of post-war capitalism, an era characterized by general economic stability on the one hand and deep cultural tensions and struggles on the other.1 Culture, not the economy, was now seen as the primary realm of struggle and contestation. The forms of culture described by early British cultural studies in the 1950s and early 1960s highlighted actually existing tensions between an earlier, more organic working class culture and an emergent mass-produced culture largely dominated by American cultural forms and industries. This fundamental tension animates the early work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, which can be read broadly as a defense of a disappearing working class culture against the threat of an “Americanized” mass culture. It is important to point out that this early work was also part of a New Left socialist and working class project that assumed, like much orthodox Marxism, that the working class was a subject of anti-capitalist social change and that its cultural and everyday life practices were, to use a phrase from Thompson, a “way of struggle” against the inequalities and contradictions of post-war capitalism. Early British cultural studies first emerged from what one might broadly describe as a Marxist, or at least materialist, problematic and epistemology, namely the insistence on the historical, materialist and relational analysis of cultural and ideological phenomena within the context of their social totality. Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and Richard Hoggart all maintained a deep commitment to the British working class and to an anti-capitalist, socialist analysis and politics. This is clear not only in their published works but also, and more importantly, in their political practice, affiliations and sympathies. It might be worth remembering here that Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s saw the emergence of the British New Left and British working class movements, especially the early adult education movement. Williams and Hoggart were also adult educators, who in their pedagogical and intellectual work took very seriously the actual life experience of their adult working class students. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (1957) is a self-reflexive account of the pre-war traditional working class and its rich cultural practices; E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is a wide-ranging historical account of British working class institutions and struggles; and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) are animated by the desire for a more democratic, more inclusive common culture that includes the rich traditions and practices of the working class. However, this account of the relationship between early cultural studies and Marxism would be incomplete if it did not also acknowledge a specific dissatisfaction with certain Marxist categories, positions and modes of analysis. As the late Stuart Hall puts in a recently published 1983 lecture, There is a complex relationship between the Marxist tradition and other traditions available to Cultural Studies in the period of its formation. I have already mentioned the overlap between the early stages of Cultural Studies and what I called the birth of the New Left. The New Left really arose in 1956 as a political movement, and

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many of the people involved in it were engaged in a debate with Marxism about the inadequacies of certain Marxist positions. While this dialogue used Marxist language and Marxist concepts, the people in the New Left were distancing themselves from the Stalinist positions which have led, for example, to the invasion of Hungary in 1956, which is really the formative moment for the New left. So there was an alternative kind of Marxism around in the early stages of Cultural Studies. . . . [Cultural Studies] was trying to wrestle against an extremely mechanical kind of Marxism in order to deal with and explain these complex problems, and not only in the sphere of culture. Cultural Studies 1983, 222

So, it is inaccurate and hasty to claim, as do some recent accounts, that early cultural studies was anti-Marxist and dismissed Marx and Marxism altogether.3 In fact, E.P. Thompson was a committed Marxist humanist, and Raymond Williams moved closer and closer to Marxism in the 1970s and the 1980s.4 But while this early work did engage with Marx and Marxism, there was hardly anything systematic or sustained about this engagement. This was due to a general dissatisfaction with some of the traditional Marxist accounts and concepts that were circulating in British intellectual life at the time and that did not have much of use to say about the emergent complex issues and questions of culture.

Birmingham Cultural Studies: From the 1970s to the 1980s The foundation of the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham occurred in the context of the social movements of the 1960s and the 1970s. And while the early work of the Centre continued the “culture and society” tradition of Williams, Hoggart and Thompson, it also expanded in focus to include the politics of identity and representation. Issues of race, gender, ethnicity and nationality in cultural and media texts took center stage. The leading role of Stuart Hall in this formation is undeniable, so undeniable that it would not be exaggerating by much to call this the Hallian formation of cultural studies. This new focus was accompanied by a search for newer theoretical models and conceptual categories, including in the newer Western Marxist work. The two key Marxist influences on the Centre were without doubt Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, and in that order of importance. In addition to studies on the important ideological roles of the media and mass culture in the integration of the working class into capitalist societies and in the reproduction of dominant social relations, the Centre also produced important studies on culture as a way of struggle and resistance against capitalism. The latter mode of analysis, which tended to highlight newer forms of subjectivity, agency and resistance, became privileged. It was during this era that classic studies on audiences, race, gender and youth subcultures were produced, including the collectively written Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1976); Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination (1978); and the classic Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978). If capitalism had succeeded in integrating the working class

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and weakening their potential as revolutionary subjects, it had also produced newer subjectivities and newer forms of resistance. And it was the latter issues that cultural studies in this era tended to highlight. In particular, it turned to youth cultures and contextualized them as counter-hegemonic resistance to dominant capitalist culture and also as domains where alternative and oppositional subjectivities, identities, styles and meanings were negotiated, contested and produced. In the 1970s and the 1980s, Birmingham cultural studies continued to insist that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which it is produced and consumed, while also increasingly distancing itself from Marxist political economic and ideological analyses on the grounds of their assumed reductionism and economism. The charge of reductionism might have applied to some Marxist work, but anyone who is familiar with actually existing Marxist scholarship during this time would recognize the problematic nature of such claims. Drawing on Althusser and deploying categories from Gramsci (and as I have argued elsewhere, in a way that departs from Gramsci and reads him through Althusser), cultural studies redefined itself as conjunctural analysis and insisted that it was at the level of a conjuncture that cultural studies could and should intervene to produce the best “useful political knowledge” to help transform the whole social formation. Stuart Hall’s work, especially his work on Thatcherism, was key to this new turn.5 Hall and his colleagues at the Centre saw in Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony and counter-hegemony a better alternative to the older Marxist ideology analysis. The conceptual framework of hegemony and counter-hegemony allowed them to explore and highlight how mass culture was itself part of a larger hegemonic capitalist project that sought not to impose but to win the consent of the majority to dominant cultural practices and political ideologies and to ensure the reproduction of dominant capitalist social and economic relations. But this framework also allowed them to highlight counter-hegemonic, resistant values, cultural and political practices. The latter were seen as central to anticapitalist political struggle and to any attempt to imagine and help bring about a better social world.

Post-Modern Cultural Studies: From the 1980s to the 2000s Ironically, if early British cultural studies was an attempt to defend and preserve organic working class cultural forms and practices against the onslaught of an American cultural imperialism, cultural studies itself was now invading the American university and had in the process been Americanized. It is as if the American context, which was intellectually largely anti-Marxist and heavily informed by post-modern French theory and the post-modern turn more generally, largely dominated by literature and literary studies departments, was now determining and shaping what the center of cultural studies should be. Most contemporary cultural studies, roughly from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, seems to be consumed by a post-modern concern with pleasure, consumption, empowerment, agency and identity politics.6 Very little attention was being paid to issues of class, the structural analysis of capitalism, or socialist politics, and a general evasion of critique and celebration of popular culture

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could be detected in most work produced under the banner of cultural studies. Even in the works that continued to insist on the need for cultural studies to be politically relevant and efficacious, which were largely produced within the field of communication studies, the engagement of Marx and Marxism remained sporadic and superficial at best. This new work in cultural studies appeared at, and was in a sense enabled by, a very specific conjuncture of the development of capitalism, the era of a triumphant global, neoliberal capitalism. The cold war was over and actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was dead. This was an era marked by intensifying flows of commodities, cultures, people and identities, by new relations of the global and local, and by new forms of struggle and resistance. Thus, focus on political economy and the hidden, mysterious world of the production of culture almost disappeared, and was replaced with a focus on the façade-world of consumption and reception. Issues of class, labor and political economy were either ignored or dismissed in favor of “hotter, ” “sexier” topics, such as empowering consumption, active audiences, new pleasures, popular feminism, and new subjectivities and hybrid identities. While it is true that Birmingham cultural studies practitioners, especially Hall, grounded cultural studies in a Marxist problematic and even Marxian jargon, their engagement with Marxist political economy remained largely scattered and residual. But if Hall’s relationship to Marxism was complex and contradictory, most practitioners of British and North American cultural studies, from the 1980s to the 2000s, seemed to avoid Marxism and political economy altogether. Post-modern cultural studies was too much concerned with the appearances of contemporary global capitalism. Capitalism in the era of globalization appeared to bring about a new social and cultural world, a world marked by the free flow of information and culture, a world open to more multiplicity, more pluralism, and more difference. But while these appearances may reflect some truth, what most cultural studies missed was what that very world of empowering consumption, active audiences, the free flow of information, newer pleasures, hybrid identities, and newer technologies was actually hiding, namely that this new social order was controlled and limited by an increasingly smaller number of transnational corporations. The larger developments and trends in the culture and media industries, especially in the last few decades, marked as they are by mergers and consolidations, all point in the same direction: to a world of increased private ownership, control and monopoly over information, knowledge and entertainment by increasingly fewer mega-conglomerates. Indeed, the defining characteristics of global capitalism are the contradictory forces of the global and the local, the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the modern and the post-modern, as well as the forces of identity and difference, homogeneity and heterogeneity, standardization and diversity, sometimes penetrating and clashing with each other, sometimes peacefully occupying the same space, and sometimes producing new hybridities and combinations. Globalization by and large means the hegemony of transnational, largely American, cultural and media industries. Throughout the world, especially in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, the increasing penetration of American cultural industries, commodities, fast-food, and even holidays all point to the increasing standardization of world culture. One dimensional celebrations of global post-modern diversity and difference should

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take a materialist dialectical approach and begin to pay attention to opposing trends and tendencies toward global homogenization and standardization.

Emergent Cultural Studies: From the 2000s to the Present In this final section, I would like to argue that we are beginning to see, and actually need, the emergence of a new cultural studies. Emergent forms of cultural studies, developed from the early 2000s to the present, theorize a shift from the stage of a triumphant neoliberal capitalism to a global capitalism in deep, organic crisis.7 Here, we are beginning to see a serious engagement with forms of cultural studies that highlight the connections between the production of meanings and subjectivities and the production of commodities, as well as examine the processes of determination and overdetermination amongst and between different levels of production. In general, this work returns to an earlier tradition of cultural studies, rejecting the notion of autonomy and recognizing that cultural phenomena, far from being autonomous, are caught in the logic of a contradictory social whole. According to this logic, the significance of a cultural event or phenomenon—be it ideological, political, economic or cultural— cannot be properly assessed outside a dialectical understanding of its place in society as a whole. With this emergent work in the field, which should be encouraged, we are in a better position to understand how social, economic and political forces act on cultural production, distribution and reception, and how cultural forces, in turn, act on the social, economic and political. This brief account has largely bracketed the trajectories and formations of cultural studies in other national contexts, especially in Canada, Australia, Asian and Latin American countries, and in the global south more generally. To focus on British and American cultural studies is not meant to dismiss some of the important and quite distinct forms of cultural studies practiced elsewhere. These newer trajectories and formations call for a complementary account, one that not only places them in their specific political-economic and historical contexts, but that also pays attention to their complex, contradictory relationships to the formations of cultural studies in Britain and the United States described here. Whether we like it or not, these remain the dominant and most influential trajectories in the development of cultural studies worldwide. In the end, let me conclude with a few prescriptive observations. I would like to argue here that any meaningful new version of cultural studies, and any radical political project, has to do two interrelated things: first, take Marxism and Marxist political economy more seriously, and second, simultaneously develop a more structural, systematic analysis and sustained conjunctural critique of neoliberal capitalism. And of course one must always add to these the following task, one that seems to me to be largely absent from most current cultural studies: the need to connect with (and also connect) actually existing social and political movements and formations outside the academy. These moves become especially urgent at a historical conjuncture characterized by a deep economic crisis that has brought to the surface once more and more than ever before (at least in our lifetimes) not only the contradictions of global

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capitalism and the ugly realities and consequences of material inequality in people’s lives, but also (re)new(ed) discourses, forms and possibilities of collective resistance and struggle in the political and cultural realms. The job of a cultural studies that matters is to understand, study, explain and help change this state of affairs.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

See Stuart Hall’s newly published lecture, “The Formation of Cultural Studies” (2016). Ibid. See Paul Smith 2017. See for example his Marxism and Literature (1977) and Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (1980). See the “Introduction” to my co-edited Cultural Studies and the “Juridical Turn” (2016). See, for example, the work of John Fiske. See the most recent work of Larry Grossberg, Toby Miller, Angela McRobbie, Doug Kellner, Paul Smith, Gargi Bhattacharyya, and the present author, among others.

References Aksikas, J. (2009), Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the PostColonial Arab World, New York: Peter Lang. Aksikas, J. and S.J. Andrews (eds). (2016), Cultural Studies and the “Juridical Turn”: Culture, Law, and Legitimacy in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism, London: Routledge, 2016. Bennett, T. and D. Watson, (eds). (2001), Understanding Everyday Life, Oxford: Blackwell. Bhattacharyya, G. (2018), Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival, London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Fiske, J. (1989), Reading the Popular, London: Unwin Hyman Ltd. Grossberg, L. (2010), Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Hall, S. (2016), “The Formation of Cultural Studies, ” in J.D. Slack and L. Grossberg (eds), Cultural Studies 1983, Durham, NC , and London: Duke University Press, 5–24. Hall, S. (1988), The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, London: Verso. Hall, S. and T. Jefferson (eds), (1976), Resistance Through Rituals, Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Hutchinson. Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, and B. Roberts (1978), Policing the Crisis: “Mugging, ” the State and Law and Order, London: Macmillan. Hebdige, D. (1979), Subculture. The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge. Hoggart, R. (1957), The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life, London: Chatto and Windus. McRobbie, A. (2008), “Young Women and Consumer Culture, ” Cultural Studies 22(1): 531–50. Miller, T. (ed.). (2001), A Companion to Cultural Studies, Oxford: Balckwell Publishers. Radway, J. (1984), Reading the Romance. Chapel Hill, NC : The University of North Carolina Press.

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Smith, P. (ed.), (2011), The Renewal of Cultural Studies, Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press. Smith, P. (2017), “Birmingham—Urbana-Champaign 1964–1990; or, Cultural Studies, ” in I. Szeman, S. Blacker, and J. Sully (eds), A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 59–72. Thompson, E.P. (1963), The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Random House. Williams, R. (1958), Culture and Society: 1780–1950, London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1961), The Long Revolution, London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1980), Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, New York: Verso.

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Ecology and Environmentalism Danijela Dolenec From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. Marx 1959: 567 Just as everyone got tired of proclaiming the “end of history” and resigned to the global dominance of neoliberal capitalism, ecological crisis started accelerating to a pace where this phrase is acquiring an ironic and ominous re-semantization. Fossil-fueled neoliberal capitalism is fast-forwarding us towards an end of humanity “due to the increasingly barbaric socio-economic and environmental conditions the system creates” (Burkett 2017). While during the last 50 years an enormous amount of scientific evidence of the human impact on the planet has been accumulating, it is only during the last decade that climate change and various forms of ecological degradation have begun to penetrate immediate experience. Since 2008 scientists have marshaled conclusive evidence that we have entered the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch. The hallmark of Anthropocene is that humans “largely determine the make-up of the biosphere as well as the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, and this episode of the species’ dominion will one day be as legible in the fossil record as the advancing ice sheets, asteroid impacts or proliferation of new life-forms that distinguished other epochs” (Kunkel 2017). While some take the gravity of the current situation to be a rallying cry for action because “it changes everything” (Klein 2014), others are resigned to the fact that it is already too late, and the last challenge remaining is to grasp that our civilization is already dead (Scranton 2013). However, irrespective of whether one is on the fighting-political or resigned-philosophical side of this issue, Marx’s writing is important in understanding the political economy of the ecological crisis. The environmental movement was born in the 1960s, from various New Left and Green groups in the US and Europe, and, due to a considerable mix and match between Green political and economic thinking, its ideological boundaries blurred (Eckersley 1992). The social ecology approach drew substantially from postmodernist writing, and it relied on Ronald Inglehart’s “post-materialist thesis, ” which emphasizes individual value orientations (Foster 1998). The more radical formulation within the 541

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environmental movement of limits to growth1 importantly accentuated the irreconcilable conflict between economic growth and the environment, but the principal focus was on cultural factors, such as the question of anthropocentric versus eco-centric culture (Foster 1998). In more recent times, various strands of green and left thinking in Europe are converging within the degrowth movement, encompassing strands from social ecology, across ecological economics, to Marxian analysis (see D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2014). The first Earth Summit, which was held in Stockholm in 1972, is considered the primary defining event of international environmentalism. At the time, the focus was on the negative environmental consequences of unregulated industrial development and the planetary interdependence of all life; the event called for the adoption of global responses to environmental problems and massive changes in the consumption-heavy lifestyles of the wealthy (Bernstein 2002). Between the 1972 Earth Summit in Stockholm and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, international debate on environmental issues changed dramatically, adopting a neoliberal framing according to which solutions to environmental challenges lie in market forces, free trade and unfettered corporate freedom (Bernstein 2002). Today, the mainstream approach to ecological challenges, embodied in the policies of international organizations like the UN , the World Bank and the WTO, is embedded in neoliberal economic thinking. Along these lines, public debates are dominated by a three-pronged neoliberal recipe: climate change denialism aimed at the immediate political effect of postponing solutions; instituting markets in carbon permits as the mid-range strategy for creating new profit opportunities; and geoengineering as the futuristic science fiction policy that inspires billionaires (Mirowski, Walker and Abboud 2013). Historically, therefore, the environmental movement co-evolved with the rise of neoliberalism—starting with the 1970s, continuing through Thatcher and Reagan, and culminating in the end of history atmosphere of the 1990s (West and Brockington 2012). Against the dominant liberal environmentalism, left-oriented theory has over the same period made considerable gains, initially incorporating (and more recently rewriting) a materialist political economy of the ecological crisis. The first important inroads into merging Left and Green thinking happened within the social ecology approach. Already in the 1950s Murray Bookchin had argued that environmental problems constituted the issue where the fundamental contradictions of capitalism played out (White 2016). Bookchin’s influence evolved, however, primarily into libertarian thinking (O’Connor 1988), which is currently experiencing a revival within the municipalist movement.2 Ecological Marxism3 started developing in the 1980s. In 1988 James O’Connor initiated the academic journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and the Guildford Press publishing house, both of which became primary outlets for the development of ecosocialism.4 O’Connor (1988) proposed that the “capital-nature relation” was no less fundamental than the capital-labor relation in analyzing how capitalism reproduces and, ultimately, undermines itself. A few years later, in 1994, Martin O’Connor edited a volume entitled Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology, featuring articles previously published in the journal. Other volumes followed, including Ted Benson’s edited volume The Greening of Marxism (1996), Paul Burkett’s

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Marx and Nature: a Red and Green Perspective (1999) and John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (2000). These volumes testified to the growing recognition that Marx’s political economy represented a valuable framework for dealing with the present ecological crisis.5 Since then, two decades of scholarship have accumulated, arguing that Marx and Engels embedded ecological thinking deep within their critique of capitalism (Williams 2017). After the first stage of ecosocialist writing in the 1970s, which was critical of and distant towards Marxism, the second stage from the 1990s onwards fleshed out a more comprehensive Marxist analysis of nature and sought a synthesis of red and green ideas (Williams 2017). The overriding motivation driving this scholarship was articulated by Foster, who asks whether Marx’s critique of political economy plays “an essential part in the reconstruction of social theory in an age of planetary crisis” (Foster 1998: 169). Foster (1998) initially saw the debate on Marx and ecology as forming three camps. In the first camp were those, like Clark (1989), who argued that although Marx occasionally points the way toward a truly ecological dialectic, he does not follow through, remaining instead within a paradigm of mastery over nature. Similarly, Routley (1981) argued that in order to pursue “an environmentally sound non-capitalist society” it was necessary to move beyond Marx. In the second camp were those who contended that Marx provided important insights on ecology, but that he was dominantly “Promethean, ” i.e., committed to industrial progress irrespective of natural limits. Foster places Anthony Giddens, Ted Benton, Kate Soper, Robyn Eckersley, Murray Bookchin and David Goldblatt in this camp. Finally, those who insist that Marx approached ecological issues systematically, to the point that they entered into his basic conceptions of both capitalism and communism, fall in the third camp. Here Foster mentions Elmar Altvater, Paul Burkett, Michael Perelman, Michael Lebowitz, David Harvey and himself. In a recent preface to Burkett’s book (2014), Foster reiterated this distinction between the first and second generation of ecosocialist scholars, the first being those that consider Marx valuable but incomplete and dated, the second, those who emphasize the contemporary methodological significance of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism. Overall, however, the differences Foster draws seem ones of degree rather than kind, the primary distinction being whether an author emphasizes Marx’s contributions to or his limitations in the development of a political economy of ecological crisis. Characterizing Marx’s thinking as Promethean originated from Giddens’ Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, where he argued that in Marx, “nature appears above all as the medium of the realisation of human social development” (1981: 59). Though Marx emphasizes that social development must be examined in terms of an active interplay between human beings and their material environment, according to Giddens the “Promethean attitude is always pre-eminent in Marx’s writings” (1981: 60). Within ecosocialist scholarship, Kate Soper is the one who, in 1996, first writes about Marxism and ecology by applying the concept of “greening Prometheus. ” After her, Foster discusses The Communist Manifesto as Promethean, agreeing that Marx, “in line with the Enlightenment tradition, placed considerable faith in rationality, science, technology, and human progress, and [that] he often celebrated

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the growing human mastery over natural forces” (1998: 181). In Foster’s interpretation, The Communist Manifesto on its own indeed was inadequate, given that in this text ecological contradictions played no role in the anticipated revolution against capitalism. Marx and Engels erroneously thought that capitalism’s lifespan would be short, while today it is clear that the ecological contradictions of capitalism “will inevitably play a large role in the demise of the system—with ecology now constituting a major source of anti-systemic resistance to capitalism” (Foster 1998: 186). Since the 1990s, careful research into Marx’s opus has been undertaken, analyzing various aspects of his ecological thinking. Kohei Saito researched Marx’s naturalscientific notebooks (Saito 2016, 2017), providing new insight into Marx’s preoccupations before and after the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867, when Marx intensively read into disciplines such as biology, chemistry, geology and mineralogy. Though Marx did not integrate much of this into Capital, his naturalscientific research was extensive. According to Saito (2016), Marx’s critique of political economy, had he completed it, “would have put a much stronger emphasis on the disturbance of the ‘metabolic interaction’ (Stoffwechsel) between humanity and nature as the fundamental contradiction within capitalism. ” At the same time, there remains a tension in Marx and Marxist writing regarding the uncritical view of productive forces, as if revolutionaries only needed to replace private with collective ownership in order to make them work in the interest of the working class (Löwy 2017). Just as workers cannot take over the capitalist state apparatus, but must break it, the same applies to the productive apparatus, which “carries in its structure the imprint of its development at the service of capital accumulation and the unlimited expansion of the market” (Löwy 2017: 19). Instead, capitalism must be radically transformed—including the rapid abandonment of fossilfuels, the ending of destructive agricultural practices, and the reshaping of transport systems and consumption. In other words, ecosocialism implies a revolutionary break with the whole of capitalist civilization (Löwy 2017). Marx’s critique of political economy fell short of elaborating the ecological challenge as capitalism’s fundamental contradiction, but it undoubtedly carries relevance and methodological significance today (Löwy 2017). Building on Marx’s writings, Foster has developed the theory of metabolic rift between human societies and nature as a consequence of the destructive logic of capital (2000: 155–67). In Capital, Vol. I, Marx argued that while in pre-capitalist societies the metabolism between human communities and nature was assured “spontaneously, ” in the future socialist society it will be re-established rationally (Löwy 2017). Prompted by Marx’s critique of the “unsustainable metabolism” by which capitalist agriculture extracts from the soil more nutrients than it replaces, Foster concludes that the metabolic rift between capitalist humanity and nature as “the compulsion to accumulate ever more capital rules out the metabolic equilibrium that would allow a society to maintain indefinitely the environment from which it indefinitely takes its livelihood” (Kunkel 2017). Furthermore, Burkett (2006) has elaborated links between a Marxian account of political economy and elements of ecological economics such as natural capital (natural resources considered as a capital asset, alternatively depleted or preserved), entropy (the depletion

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of energy-dense raw materials as an ultimate check on economic growth) and the possibility of a zero-growth economy. More recently, Ian Angus (2016) provides an ecological Marxist interpretation of the Anthropocene, arguing that the ecological crisis must be analyzed using the tools of historical materialism. He sees “the Anthropocene project as an opportunity to unite an ecological Marxist analysis with the latest scientific research in a new synthesis” (2016: 23). On the other hand, Jason Moore (2015, 2017) is critical of the term Anthropocene for its assumption of a “homogenous” humanity, and he proposes that we replace it with Capitalocene, since the rise of capitalism after 1450 “marked a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, . . . greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities” (Moore 2017: 596). Andreas Malm (2016) is likewise critical of the term Anthropocene, again for the reason that it obscures class dynamics. While for Moore (2015) the problematic assumption behind the term is that it “makes us all equal” and hence equally to blame, for Malm (2016) the problem is in the assumption that the Anthropocene is the outcome of ingrained human traits, implying resigned pessimism. Instead he proposes a materialist analysis of its genesis, and in his book Fossil Capital he details the close connections between the burning of fossil fuels and capitalism’s development of industrial production. According to him, fossil fueling of the economy was not driven by considerations such as scarcity or technical efficiency, but, in Burkett’s (2017) apt summary, by “requirements of exploiting wage-labour, class-monopolization of the benefits of production, and the system’s preference for private competition over social cooperation in the realm of energy use. ” How the Anthropocene unfolds over the coming generations will be decided primarily by whether it remains the Capitalocene; that is, humanity’s ecological future must necessarily be posed as a question about capitalism (Kunkel 2016). If that is so, then it is not possible to confront the contemporary ecological crisis without a Marxist critique of political economy. Taking this on board, ecosocialists need to further develop Marx and Engels’s arguments to provide a materialist understanding of the dynamics of the ecological crisis and envisage a socialist society that will respect the “inalienable conditions” of life on Earth (Löwy 2017).

Notes 1

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The debate was initiated with the enormously influential book Limits to Growth (1972), authored by D.H. Meadows, D.L. Meadows, J. Randers and W.W. Behrens III , which published computer simulations that explored how exponential growth interacted with finite resources. In recent years progressive political platforms across Europe have started establishing collaboration under the terms Rebel Cities and Fearless Cities. Prominent among them is the Barcelona en Comu platform, currently governing Barcelona. According to O’Connor (1988) the term ecological Marxism was coined by Ben Agger (see Western Marxism, 1979). Other important outlets are the Monthly Review and The Socialist Register.

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Bloomsbury Companion to Marx An important book that predates these was written by German philosopher Alfred Smith (1962) The Concept of Nature in Marx [German: Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx]. It was first published in English in 1971, and reprinted in 2014 by Verso.

References Agger, B. (1979), Western Marxism: An Introduction: Classical and Contemporary Sources, Santa Monica, CA : Goodyear Publishing. Angus, I. (2016), Facing the Anthropocene, New York: Monthly Review Press. Benson, T. (ed.) (1996), The Greening of Marxism, New York and London: Guilford Press. Bernstein, S. (2002), “Liberal Environmentalism and Global Environmental Governance, ” Global Environmental Politics, 2(3): 1–16. Burkett, P. (1999), Marx and Nature: a Red and Green Perspective, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Burkett, P. (2006), Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Burkett, P. (2017), “An Ecorevolutionary Tipping Point, ” Monthly Review. Available at: https://monthlyreview.org/2017/05/01/an-eco-revolutionary-tipping-point/ (accessed August 15, 2018). Clark, J. (1989), “Marx’s Inorganic Body, ” Environmental Ethics 11: 243–58. D’Alisa, G., F. Demaria, and G. Kallis (2014), Degrowth. A Vocabulary for A New Era, London: Routledge. Eckersley, R. (1992) “Green versus Ecosocialist Economic Programmes: the Market Rules OK ?” Political Studies XL : 315–33. Foster, J.B. (1998) “The Communist Manifesto and the Environment, ” The Socialist Register 167–89. Foster, J.B. (2000), Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J.B. (2014), “Preface, ” in P. Burkett, Marx and Nature, Chicago, IL : Haymarket. Giddens, A. (1981), Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Klein, N. (2014), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, New York: Simon & Schuster. Kunkel, B. (2017), “The Capitalocene, ” London Review of Books Available at: https://www. lrb.co.uk/v39/n05/benjamin-kunkel/the-capitalocene (accessed August 15, 2018). Löwy, M. (2017), “Marx, Engels and Ecology, ” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 28(2): 10–21. Malm, A. (2016), Fossil Capital. The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso. Marx, K. (1959), Capital, The Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Vol. III , New York: International Publishers. Mirowski, P., J. Walker, and A. Abboud (2013), “Beyond Denial, ” Overland, Vol. 210. Available at: https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-210/feature-philipmirowski-jeremy-walker-antoinette-abboud/ (accessed August 15, 2018). Moore, J.W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London and New York: Verso. O’Connor, J. (1988), “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction, ” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 1(1): 11–38.

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O’Connor, M. (ed.) (1994), Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology, New York and London: Guilford Press. Routley, V. (1981), “On Karl Marx as Environmental Hero, ” Environmental Ethics, 3(3): 237–44. Saito, K. (2016), “Marx’s Ecological Notebooks, ” Monthly Review. Available at: https://monthlyreview.org/2016/02/01/marxs-ecological-notebooks/ (accessed August 15, 2018). Saito, K. (2017), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, New York: Monthly Review Press. Scranton, R. (2013), “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, ” The New York Times, November 10. Available at: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/ learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/ (accessed August 15, 2018). Soper, K. (1996), “Greening Prometheus, ” in: The Greening of Marxism, ed. T. Benson, New York and London: Guilford Press. West, P. and D. Brockington (2012), “Capitalism and the Environment, ” Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 3: 1–3. White, D. (2016), “Murray Bookchin’s New Life, ” The Jacobin. Available at: https://www. jacobinmag.com/2016/07/murray-bookchin-ecology-kurdistan-pkk-rojavatechnology-environmentalism-anarchy/ (accessed August 15, 2018). Williams, C. (2017), “Marx and Engels on Ecology: A Reply to Radical Critics, ” Climate & Capitalism. Available at: http://climateandcapitalism.com/2017/07/31/marx-engels-onecology-reply-to-radical-critics/ (accessed August 15, 2018).

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Gender and Feminism Leopoldina Fortunati

Feminism has been the most relevant political force in twentieth-century political and social movements, thoughts and theories. Its resurgence in the last century has represented a challenge and a potential enrichment of Marxist movements and parties. Feminism and Marxism have fertilized each other by becoming reciprocally beneficial. Although feminism can take many different forms, its common thesis is that the relationship between men and women needs to be radically changed because it is based on inequality, oppression and exploitation. However, the identification of the causes that have determined women’s conditions of life over time and the strategies for addressing them are the source of many different perspectives among feminists. The term feminism was coined by Charles Fourier (1772–1817), the utopian socialist for whom the degree of women’s emancipation was the measure of the civilization of a society as a whole. In the twentieth century, the first phase of the feminist movement was the suffragette movement, which sought to extend women’s civic rights, including the right to vote. However, the relationship between the socialist movement and the feminist movement was not an easy one. Apparently, there was a convergence in most countries between the aspiration of utopian socialists to create a world of equality, social justice and liberation of workers from exploitation and, on the other, the aspiration of early feminists (Taylor 1983) to create such a world for women as well. In reality, women’s objective of “equal pay for equal work” was often not included in the program of male trade-unionists, especially in Germany and Russia. The second phase of the feminist movement was the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, which developed the idea of sisterhood, as specific form of solidarity among women, based on the theory that the unity of women is rooted on having some common interests to defend. In this decade, the encounter between feminism and Marxism produced a specific political movement, which spread all around the world: namely, Marxist feminism (see James 1953; Dalla Costa and James 1972; Fortunati 1981; Dalla Costa 2008; Federici and Fortunati 1984). The following decade (the 1980s) was, on the one hand, the period in which women’s studies or gender studies emerged as a major academic discipline. The birth of gender studies brought about a kind of institutionalization to feminism but, at the same time, made feminism a recognized part of the management of academic knowledge production and sharing. On the other hand, the 1980s was the period in which a true, 549

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undeclared war against feminism was fought largely in the media. The counterattack against the feminist moment claimed that feminists had gone too far with their political program and had created a lot of discontent among women. However, the debate opened in the 1970s continued to be nurtured and developed while a younger generation of women began to present themselves as potent social subjects, capable of expressing a relevant political agency. Whereas recognizing themselves as victims of social systems was a potent point of departure for women struggling in the 1970s and 1980s, in the 1990s this metaphor became a dissonant image that ended up disempowering young women. The new generation of feminists needed to apply for accreditation and public recognition as a political subject who, thanks to the social power that had been gained by women through the struggles of the previous decade, had earned considerable political importance. A significant theme, which was an outcome of Women’s Liberation and Feminism movements and has conveyed many theoretical efforts by feminists, is that of gender. The term gender began to be used in English as distinct from sex in the 1970s. It was defined in terms of socially constructed notions of femininity and masculinity, in contrast to sex defined as biological differences. The purpose of this distinction was to argue that what in Western culture was considered “biological” could perhaps be the result of beliefs, cultural conventions, education, social pressures and prejudice. The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to contest biological determinism or the idea that biology, as a careful guardian of nature, was an inevitable destiny, since this was often invoked as justification for women’s oppression. Ann Oakley (1972) proposed the distinction between sex, considered a biological term, and gender, considered a social and psychological term. She added the adjective social, because, although people are male or female at the biological level, they are pressured by culture to be and become masculine or feminine through processes of socialization (1974, 1996). In conclusion, sex was considered a fixed or immutable element, whereas gender was conceived as changeable, historically determined and influenced by political and social factors (Rubin 1975). Over time, this idea turned out to be not completely true in the sense that sex is also subject to changes over history determined by the force of culture, although not as fast and impressive as those of gender (Fausto-Sterling 1993, 2005). Judith Butler (1999) expressed concerns about the difficulty to distinguish biological sex from social gender, although Alison Stone (2007) argued that recognizing both sex and gender as being socially constructed does not make sex identical to gender. In the same vein, Linda Nicholson (1994) wrote that society, starting from sexed bodies, fixes the amount of femininity and masculinity of humans as being either male or female. However, as Mari Mikkola (2016: 4) argued, there is no consensus about which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what it means to have a certain degree of femininity or masculinity. This lack of consensus signals the fact that this analysis is far from precise. Society is used in generic terms, without specifying “the who” in society, except for a generic male-masculine ruling power. According to Katherine Millet (1971), the problem of gender is socialization, whereby by unlearning social roles and social practices women should be able to create more equal societies. Gender as social construction is based on a process of socialization (Millet 1971) in which a female becomes a woman by acquiring feminine traits and

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learning feminine behavior. The mechanism of construction of masculinity and femininity concerns social learning, and Sue Sharpe (1976) showed how the different socialization of boys and girls at home and at school influences the process of how girls become women. Two important contributions to the gender debate were introduced by Sue Lees (1993) and Butler (1999). Lees argued that the construction of masculinity and femininity is based on the relations of power that shape domestic roles to the disadvantage of girls and women. Butler considered the ascription of gender as the result of a process of “girling” and “boying” beginning before birth and continuously reinforced by the use of performativity. From many feminist analyses, it seems first that socialization, education (Kimmel 2000), social learning (Renzetti and Curran 1992), social roles and practices are the outcome of behavior that shapes women’s subordination with an unspecified power as one possible reason. There are of course some relevant exceptions: one of these is the interesting attempt made by Nancy Chodorow (1978, 1995) to find concrete reasons for the social practices that produce stereotyped men and women. She argued that starting from birth men and women develop different personalities in early infancy as responses to the fact that mothers tend to identify more with daughters than with sons. She also proposes a solution: both fathers and mothers should be equally involved in parenting. Another thesis (although less fully elaborated), is advanced by Catherine MacKinnon (1989), for whom the notion of gender should be rooted in a theory of sexuality, which identifies the power relation between men and women as a crucial factor from which the sexual dominance of masculinity and the sexual submissiveness of femininity derives. Second, it is not clear what should be appropriate for each gender. These approaches show how current socialization, social learning, social roles and social practices produce stereotyped and “wrong” women (and men). However, they fail to indicate what good socialization, social learning, social roles and social practices should be. In the same way, they do not indicate what a “non-stereotypical” woman and a man should be. The intellectual and scientific starting point of the gender debate was Simone de Beauvoir (1949) who anticipated many arguments that would later be found in the sexgender debate when she wrote “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, ” adding that femininity is not an eternal essence but is the product of contingent forces. Then, in 1953, Selma James wrote the essay “A Woman’s Place, ” in which she depicted the daily conditions of women in post-war Los Angeles. In this essay, for the first time, domestic labor emerged as the main reason for women’s weakness and the first ring of the chain in the exploitation of women. Robert Stoller (1968) shed new light on the sex/gender question with his research on the psychological effects of having lived with an erroneous gender assignment at birth. In the mid–1980s, gender began to be replaced by “sexual difference, ” a less dualistic and broader expression. In this debate on gender, one of the most important themes has been the definition of women as a social group, collective or category. Here the debate has become thorny. Instead of stimulating a reflection on women’s social stratification, the recognition of differences of nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and social position has ended up sowing doubts about whether it was possible to build a truly inclusive feminist movement. Very often in these analyses and their given theoretical approaches, women are seen as passive social subjects, completely devoid of any agency.

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After its initial articulation, the debate about gender has further developed a range of analytics and arguments: gendered social series (Young 1997), resemblance nominalism (Stoljar 1995), gender realism and particularity (Spelman 1988), normativity (Butler 1999), gender uniessentialism (Witt 2011), and gender as positionality (Alcoff 2006). It is not surprising that this on-going theoretical development has turned on itself: when the feminist movement has begun to ebb, the political analysis and theory have of course suffered. Feminism was born revealing and exposing gender as a politically, economically and sociologically substantive variable. To overcome centuries of division among women, in the first period it was necessary to forge the unity of women—the unity of women as women. This step had the purpose of avoiding the potential inhibition of women by the presence of men in meetings and assemblies. For this reason, there was in feminism a kind of interdiction to men, even if all women were accepted without any distinction related to the sex/gender question. Women activists were simply read as political subjects, available to struggle. This organizational foresight to close ranks within the world of women has proven to be a very effective political strategy and allowed women to talk in political meetings, a practice to which they were not accustomed. Men who were available to support women’s struggles were considered sympathizers but were only greeted as such at public demonstrations. The first phase of feminism saw women such as workers, teachers and intellectuals, but also women who belonged to the bourgeoisie, struggle together. Distinguishing low class women from middle-upper class women then was out of place, because at this early stage, women struggled to change their living conditions everywhere in society, especially on issues that were transversal to the various classes: the right to abortion, to have or not to have children (and eventually, the number of children to have), to obtain recognition of the absolute mastery of their body, and finally, the right to social and economic recognition for the work that all women did, including domestic and care work. But after this first step, women needed to organize themselves with women not only to change their living conditions but also to change the model of society in order to impose a redistribution of wealth. To oppression and subordination, they began to add the word exploitation. The feminist movement grew at this point, stretching to include numerous different and distinct constituencies. One of these souls was represented by Marxist Feminists. For them, it was no longer enough to be a woman in order to be a feminist. Belonging to the female gender was perceived as a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a feminist and to act as a feminist. The progress that women as such were achieving in various fields (from journalism to research and academic work) by increasing their presence and visibility did not imply an automatic improvement in the “quality” of their work. Even if, for example, the world of academia had become somewhat more open to women over time, it had not become any less class-driven. The same holds true for other forms of work in which women began to have more opportunities to participate. Although in his early works Marx shared the belief that the quality of the manwoman relationship is the measure of the degree of civilization achieved by that society, neither Capital nor the Grundrisse pose the problem of gender. There are many passages

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that describe the condition of women as workers; however, women’s problems are seen as problems of the working class. In the transition from the description of women’s problems to the elaborations of their analytical and political frame, women remained in the background. Their specific liberation was subordinated to that of the proletariat. The working class was seen as theoretically indistinguishable with respect to gender. In practice, the working class was predominately constituted by men. It is not surprising that women thus had to develop a specific story of struggle: the suffragette movement. Nevertheless, Marxism has had a large role to play with respect to gender, both negative and positive. Marxism has had a negative role because it has created in the history of workers’ struggles a sense of alienation and anomie in women. In fact, women were understood by orthodox Marxists as unproductive and therefore marginal with respect to class struggle. Their presence was appreciated only with respect to the aid and solidarity that women could give to the real protagonists of the working class: the male workers. Furthermore, since Marx had described religion as the opium of people, another contradiction opened up for women, who often had greater attachment to religion, as they had historically used it to hold off male power. Although the church was an institution heavily reliant on misogynistic and reactionary positions against women, women used religion and the religious rituals that governed everyday life to defend themselves from social practices and institutions that were even more disadvantageous for them. Male workers were much more likely than women to take up atheism, because they had more to gain, such as, for example, sexual freedom, and freedom from any marital bond and responsibility. Marxism has also had a positive role, since it has provided the basis for some aspects of feminism to avoid, from the beginning, the error of essentialism. This had been a mistake of feminism in general, which was in part inevitable because in its first stage, women had to move all together. The unconventional use of Marxian categories allowed Marxist feminists to root their analysis of women’s condition of life in a solid critique of political economy. Marx had unwittingly procured the tools that—if used from a feminist perspective—would have enabled women to demonstrate how the positions of orthodox Marxists were wrong. In fact, a new analysis soon emerged showing that, on the contrary, domestic work and prostitution were productive and that women were fully part of the revolutionary militancy. With this analysis, Marxist feminists put an end to the sense of alienation and anomie in women’s politics, finally opening up the real possibility for women to have a truly autonomous and proactive political agency.

References Alcoff, L. (2006), Visible Identities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, J. (1999), Gender Trouble, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Chodorow, N. (1978), Reproducing Mothering, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Chodorow, N. (1995), “Family Structure and Feminine Personality, ” in N. Tuana and R. Tong (eds), Feminism and Philosophy, Boulder, CO : Westview Press, 43–66.

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Dalla Costa, G. (2008), The Work of Love: Unpaid Housework, Poverty & Sexual Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Dalla Costa, M. and S. James (1972), The Power of Women & the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Dalla Costa, M. and G. Dalla Costa, eds., (1999), Women, Development, and Labor of Reproduction: Struggles and Movements, Trenton, NJ : Africa World Press. De Beauvoir, S. (1972), The Second Sex, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993), Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, 2nd edn, New York: Basic Books. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2005), “The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1—Sex and Gender, ” Signs 30: 1491–527. Federici, S. and L. Fortunati (1984), Il grande Calibano. Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale, Milan: Angeli. Fortunati, L. (1981), L’arcano della riproduzione. Casalinghe, prostitute, operaie e capitale, Venice: Marsilio. Fortunati, L. (2007), “Immaterial Labor and its Machinization, ” Ephemera, Theory & Politics in Organization 7(1): 139–57. James, S. (1953), “A Woman’s Place, ” in M. Dalla Costa and S. James (1972) The Power of Women & the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Kimmel, M. (2000), The Gendered Society, New York: Oxford University Press. Lees, S. (1993), Sugar and Spice, Sexuality and Adolescent Girls, Harmondsworth: Penguin. MacKinnon, C. (1989), Toward a Feminist Theory of State, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Marx, K. (1964), Il Capitale, Rome: Editori Riuniti. Marx, K. (1968), Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell’economia politica, Vol. 1, Florence: La nuova Italia. Mikkola, M. (2008), “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender, ” in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016 Edition). Millett, K. (1971), Sexual Politics, London: Granada Publishing Ltd. Nicholson, L. (1994), “Interpreting Gender, ” Signs 20: 79–105. Oakley, A. (1972), Sex, Gender and Society, London: Temple Smith. Oakley, A. (1974), Housewife, London: Allen Lane. Oakley, A. (1996), “A Brief History of Gender, ” in A. Oakley and J. Mitchell, Who’s Afraid of Feminism? Seeing through the Backlash, London: Hamish Hamilton. Renzetti, C. and D. Curran (1992), “Sex-Role Socialization, ” in J. Kourany, J. Sterba, and R. Tong (eds), Feminist Philosophies, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Rubin, G. (1975), “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex, ” in R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York: Monthly Review Press, 157–210. Sharpe, S. (1976), Just like a Girl: How Girls Learn to be Women, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spelman, E. (1988), Inessential Woman, Boston, MA : Beacon Press. Stoljar, N. (1995), “Essence, Identity and the Concept of Woman, ” Philosophical Topics 23: 261–93. Stoller, R.J. (1968), Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, New York: Science House. Stone, A. (2007), An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Taylor, B. (1983), Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, London: Virago. Witt, C. (2011), “What is Gender Essentialism?” in C. Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, Dordrecht: Springer. Young, I.M. (1997), “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective, ” I.M. Young (ed), Intersecting Voices, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press.

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Geography Matthew Huber

As David Harvey once said, “Marx is infuriatingly unsystematic and vague in dealing with” geographical questions. Harvey concludes that it is thus our task to “build a framework” to understand a geographical theory of capitalism (1981: 7). Although Marxism invokes “historical materialism, ” capitalism is not just a temporal but also a spatial process, and Harvey (1996: 9) therefore proposes the corrective of “historicalgeographical materialism. ” The project of developing a geographical theory of capitalism is an ongoing one, and many contributions have built upon Marx’s theory of capital accumulation in order to understand fundamentally geographical processes such as imperialism, uneven development, urbanization and resource extraction. We do have to go beyond Marx to deeply understand the geography of capitalism, but Marx, as usual, has some fundamental theoretical ideas. His most quoted spatial insight is in reference to capital circulation: The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange . . . become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus, the creation of the physical conditions of exchange—of the means of communication and transport—the annihilation of space by time—becomes an extraordinary necessity for it. 1973: 524

The nineteenth century witnessed exactly this: revolutions in the means of transport (railways, steamships, canals, etc.) and communication (telegraph, global mail, etc.). Marx would also point out that this “extraordinary necessity” of circulation must be rooted in the relations of production. As Marx details in Capital, capital extracts surplus value from living labor within the “hidden abode” of production (1976: 279). In relation to steam power, ultimately the drive for relative surplus value—or improvements in labor productivity—explains capital’s constant tendency toward labor saving innovations like automatic machinery. As Marx said, steam—and automation generally—was also a weapon used against the working class. “It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt” (1976: 563). 557

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As Malm (2016) shows, what we call the industrial revolution—and with it, the shift to steam power—was a fundamentally spatial process. Water power was too scattered throughout the country, and capitalists sought a more flexible, controllable fuel that—even if more expensive—could be concentrated in towns, “where labor is easily procured” (Malm 2016: 121). Fundamentally, the dramatic gains in productivity wrapped up in mechanization created a necessity for a global expansion in markets. Yet, this is about where Marx’s insights on geography end. After all, his work in Capital focused exclusively on Britain, which he said offered capitalism’s “classic form” (Marx 1976: 876). We need to seek out other theoreticians for further inspiration. Marxists after Marx were forced to elucidate the relationship between industrial capitalism—and classic labor-capital relations on the factory floor—and the rest of the non-industrialized planet. Lenin (1917) aimed to theorize early twentieth-century capitalism as a new stage of capitalism, “imperialism, ” characterized by monopolistic global corporations headquartered in the industrial countries. The states of those countries formed “inter-imperialist” rivalries struggling to control the rest of the world’s territory and resources. The classic case was the continent of Africa: in a few short years in the late nineteenth century, Britain, Germany, France and Belgium and others divided the entire continent among themselves. While Lenin is sharp for updating Marxist theory for his own historical moment, Rosa Luxemburg (1913) is notable for applying the insights of Capital—particularly Vol. II and the reproduction schemas—to an analysis of imperialism. She argued the accumulation of capital required its spatial expansion into underdeveloped countries in search of new markets. Postcolonial Marxism, which seeks to understand anti-colonial struggles for national self-determination, offered a dialectical—and spatial—analysis of the relationship between colonizer and colonized (e.g. James 1938; Fanon 1961). While they might not feature the classic battles between bourgeoisie and proletariat, anti-colonial struggles over land and livelihood are fundamentally about resisting capitalism as a specific “mode of production” (Coulthard 2014: 65). The first great Marxist geographer of the post-Second World War era was Henri Lefebvre. Immediately after the war, he began his critique of everyday life, starting with an examination of rural life in the countryside (1947). He later developed a Marxist account of urbanization and its political potentialities for revolution (Lefebvre 1970). All of this culminated with his masterpiece, The Production of Space (1974). In this work, Lefebvre insists that space is not only an empty flat plane, but also a social, political and relational field in which urban planners, political struggle and capital accumulation reproduce particular spatial configurations. The next major breakthroughs in a geographical understanding of capitalism were the developments of world systems theory (Wallerstein 1974), dependency theory (Rodney 1972) and theories of unequal exchange (Emmanuel 1972). All of these perspectives maintain a central analytical focus on the drain of wealth and value from the “peripheral” countries (e.g., Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia) to those of the “core” (e.g., the USA , Europe, Japan, etc.). In other words, as Andre Gunder Frank (1966) put it, the development of the industrialized world depends upon the “underdevelopment” of the periphery.

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A world systems approach was useful for theorizing capitalism on a world scale, but, overall, it lacked clarity on the specific property relations, market forces and accumulation imperatives that constituted capitalism as a mode of production (see R. Brenner 1977). It took the actual discipline of geography to construct a theory that was able to grasp spatial processes as part of the internal logic of the circulation and accumulation of value. David Harvey began this project by focusing on a basic spatial contradiction of capital “between fixity and motion” (N. Brenner 1998). Through a combination of Marx’s value theory, rent theory and the conceptual distinction between fixed and circulating capital, Harvey recognized capital accumulation will only thrive through forms of investments fixed in space. Investments in machinery, the built environment and other infrastructures represent profitable outlets for surplus capital, particularly in times of crisis where capital is looking for such outlets. However, the problem is that the fixity in space of these investments eventually becomes “fetters” (Harvey 2014: 155) on profitable accumulation in a given region, as other regions develop more profitable or technologically advanced value regimes (e.g., the fixed capital in Detroit now rusts, as massive factories and infrastructure are raised in China). This framework—particularly relevant to the processes of urbanization and investment in the built environment—led to Harvey’s (1981) theory of “the spatial fix. ” In times of crisis, when accumulation slows in a given region, capital can “fix” the crisis by “fixing” new investments in different regions/spaces. This is not simply illustrated by a single capitalist moving production offshore, but instead involves a more dynamic process of regional and global shifts in whole regimes of accumulation (e.g. automobile production shifting from Detroit to Japan). Other Marxist geographers have contributed to deepening our understanding of the geography of capitalism. Neil Smith (1984) built upon Leon Trotsky’s famous analysis of “uneven and combined development” to examine the role of capitalism in the production of space and nature. Smith’s most important contribution involves capital’s tendency toward a contradictory process of “equalization” (competition forces capitalists to keep up and equalize production methods with their competitors) and “differentiation” (capitalists outcompete others with new production methods creating new places of accumulation). Smith (1996) also became a leading analyst of the capitalist production of and political resistance to “gentrification. ” Doreen Massey (1984) proposed a framework for understanding “spatial divisions of labor”—relations between manufacturers, parts suppliers and corporate headquarters. She later went on to develop a feminist Marxist analytic for understanding local places as both products and shapers of global capitalism (Massey 1994). Much scholarship in Marxist geography focuses on space as produced by capital. Andrew Herod (2001) developed the framework of “labor geography” to take into account the ways in which space is also fundamentally a product of labor struggles and agency. For example, the case of a strike at a strategic parts supplier in Michigan can throw an entire global supply chain into crisis. In the 1990s, Marxist geography took a more “poststructural” turn focused on culture, identity and discourse (e.g., Peet and Watts 1996). In this vein, J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996: 41) developed a feminist critique of “capitalocentrism” in Marxist geography. In this critique, our theories and ways of

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talking about capitalism (as structurally all-encompassing and dominating) serve to reproduce those very same domineering structures. Gibson-Graham (1996: x) sought out actually existing examples of non-capitalist social relations to demonstrate a world shaped by “diverse economies” like cooperatives, care work and other economies not dominated by commodification and profit-logics. Although many conflate it with the study of space, geography has a longstanding tradition of studying nature-society relations as well (Huber 2010). Indeed, these relationships are fundamentally spatial, and the uneven geographical development of capitalism thrives upon displacing the ecologically destructive consequences of capitalism to marginalized people and places. Political ecology emerged as a subfield that both analyzed rural resource-based geographies (particularly peasant or indigenous subsistence oriented economies) in the larger context of global capital flows and state policies (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Peet and Watts 1996). Bunker and Ciccantell (2005) offer an ecological world systems approach that not only traces the flow of raw materials from the periphery to the core, but also the reverse flow of displaced “entropy dissipation” and ecological degradation from core to periphery. Today, a geographical approach to global capitalism cannot shy away from the planetary crisis of climate change and the new so-called era of the Anthropocene (Castree 2014). Marxists refuse to lay blame for the crisis on “humanity, ” and prefer the term “Capitalocene” (Surprise 2013; Moore 2016). Wainwright and Mann (2013) provocatively argue that the planetary emergencies of climate change will require a fundamental reconceptualization of “the political, ” particularly our taken for granted geographical imaginaries of the nation-state and territorial sovereignty. Marxist geography has developed sophisticated ways of theorizing capitalism as a geographical system. Yet, less clear in this analysis is what the geography of class struggle looks like. Marxist geography flowered in deindustrialized spaces, while capital globalized and the global proletariat expanded in China, post-Soviet spaces and other newly industrial countries. What does the geography of working class struggle look like under globalization? More to the point, what does the geography of socialism, or, at least, revolution look like? Under decades of neoliberal class rule, Marxist geographers were great at understanding how and why capital ruled us. In the context of crisis and the rise of authoritarian populist movements, it is time for a geographical theory of how we might overcome capitalism itself.

References Blaikie, P. and H. Brookfield, eds. (1987), Land Degradation and Society, London: Routledge. Brenner, N. (1998), “Between Fixity and Motion: Accumulation, Territorial Organization and the Historical Geography of Spatial Scales, ” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16(4): 459–81. Brenner, R. (1977), “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism, ” New Left Review 104 (July-August): 25–92. Bunker, S. and P.S. Ciccantell (2005), Globalization and the Race for Resources, Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Castree, N. (2014), “The Anthropocene and Geography I: The Back Story, ” Geography Compass 8(7): 436–49. Coulthard, G. (2014), Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Emmanuel, A. (1972), Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade, trans. B. Pearce, New York: Monthly Review Press. Fanon, F. (1961), The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As we Knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Gunder Frank, A. (1966), The Development of Underdevelopment, New York: Monthly Review Press. Harvey, D. (1981), “The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thunen, and Marx, ” Antipode 13(3): 1–12. Harvey, D. (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2014), Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herod, A. (2001), Labor Geographies: Workers and Landscapes of Capitalism, New York: Guilford Press. Huber, M.T. (2010), “Hyphenated Geographies: The Deindustrialization of Nature-society Geography, ” Geographical Review 100(1): 74–89. James, C.L.R. (1938), The Black Jacobins, New York: The Dial Press. Lefebvre, H. (1947), The Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, trans. J. Moore, London: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (1970), The Urban Revolution, trans. R. Bononno, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, H. (1974), The Production of Space, trans. D.N. Smith, Oxford: Blackwell. Lenin, V. (1933), Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Luxembourg, R. (1913), The Accumulation of Capital, London: Routledge. Malm, A. (2016), Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, London: Penguin. Massey, D. (1984), Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, London: Palgrave. Massey, D. (1994), Space, Place, and Gender, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Moore, J., ed. (2016), Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, CA : PM Press. Peet, R. and M. Watts, eds. (1996), Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, London: Routledge. Rodney, W. (1972), How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications. Smith, N. (1996), The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London: Routledge. Smith, N. (2009), Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Athens, GA : University of Georgia. Surprise, K. (2013), “Welcome to the Capitalocene: Post-politics, the Production of Nature and the Subsumption of the Biosphere, ” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles, CA . Wainwright, J. and G. Mann (2013), “Climate Leviathan, ” Antipode 45(1): 1–22. Wallerstein, I. (1974), The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press.

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Materialisms David Chandler

Mattering Mind vs. Minding Matter It would be difficult to discuss the influence of Marx’s thought on materialism without a discussion of its legacy in the continuities and discontinuities with what is often called “new materialism” today. Since the mid–1990s, new materialist approaches have emerged as central to philosophically-informed critique, across the social sciences and the humanities, in response to the perceived limits of poststructuralist approaches that were focused on linguistic deconstruction. New materialism seeks to highlight the materiality of complex interactive life, the contingent power of emergent causality and the networks or assemblages that interactively give meaningful form to the world of appearances (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). If Marx was alive today, I imagine him reworking his famous aphorism on history, from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (2009), as “Materialist critique always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. ” The first modern political use of materialist critique— historical materialism—ended in tragedy, while the second, current, wave of materialist critique—new materialism—is farce, but with effects nevertheless.

Historical Materialism The modern, Cartesian, Newtonian binaries of subject/object, culture/nature and mind/ matter were critiqued from a particular angle through the Marxist cannon: the mattering of mind. The revolutionary position was that the human as subject was still a potential to come: that mind did not passively reflect upon the world as if it was external to matter, but was a product of matter and of circumstances. Mind was a product of history and environment; thoughts and concepts depended on the level of both material and social development (see, for example, the work of famous Bolshevik psychologists Luria 1969 and Vygotsky 1997) and needed to be free from the constraints of capitalist social relations. Capitalism constrained the development of mind not only by holding back the development of science and productive forces, but also through the mystifications of commodity fetishism described in Capital, Vol.  I (Marx 1983), which create the appearance that markets and prices “naturally” control labor/employment rather than 563

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understanding these as products of social relations. Similarly, Marxists critiqued the appearance of bourgeois freedoms and equality to argue that profits were a product of structural exploitation in the hidden sphere of production (Mattick 1980). For Marx and for classical Marxists, it was therefore necessary to change matter to liberate mind. Revolution was necessary to bring the human into being: as Marx famously writes, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx 1975: 423). The problem, of course, was that a paradox emerged: minds had to be changed in order to change matter in order to change minds. The separation of mind and matter, sublated in Hegel, was in Marxist theory reproduced and brought to the forefront of the struggle to build a revolutionary political movement. The tragedy of this first materialist critique was to end with Lenin’s vanguard politics (a failed attempt to force revolution in order to change minds) and the reaction to this failure in the shift away from materialist critique, which can be seen in Antonio Gramsci’s retreat into discourse in the Prison Notebooks (1978), as well as in the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on the post-Marxist Left, which breaks with the idea of any fixed material foundations or grounds (Strathausen 2009).

New Materialism The new materialists’ return to materialism can be understood as a response to the post-Marxist Left’s retreat to linguistics and psychoanalysis. However, this response is also shaped by the end of the Cold War and the perceived failure of Marxist or socialist projects internationally. This response takes shape without a desire to return to a “classical” Marxist understanding of materialism. It is therefore not surprising that new materialist theorists rarely engage with the experience and failure of historical materialism. They generally tend to position themselves directly counter to the binary assumptions of mechanical materialism: the world seen as a set of fixed, lifeless or linear causal relations, set in motion like a mechanical mechanism, where there is little contingency or agency. This refusal to take on historical materialism as a historical and complex body of work flags the almost complete neglect of the Marxist tradition of materialist critique, which is unfortunate; for attention to the lessons of this tradition could alert new materialist theorists to the problems, so paradoxical for the first wave of materialists, of a critique which reproduces the division of mind and matter. Instead of “mattering mind,” new materialists attack the binaries of mechanical materialism from the opposite direction: the minding of matter. Rather than the Marxist position of the human to come, for new materialists, “We Have Never Been Human” (to paraphrase the title of Bruno Latour’s famous work (1993)). Here—inverting the centrality of the human subject in Marxist materialism—modernity is criticized because it is too human-centered not because human potential has not been fulfilled. Because the angle of critique is the mirror-opposite, I think it is a mistake to overemphasize the link between new materialism and Marxism, via the detour of post-Marxism and Deleuze (as Manuel DeLanda does (2006; 2010)) or to read new materialism as an extension of the Marx-informed materialist analysis of critical realism (as Levi Bryant does 2011: 34–66).

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It would be more fruitful to trace the genealogy of new materialism through approaches to politics that seek to bypass mind, rather than through those seeking to develop mind. New materialist approaches, with their diminished view of the human subject, focus on adapting to matter, through recognizing its liveliness, its patterns and interplays. Matter can be “minded” in a number of ways, which can be heuristically derived from a study of the development of cybernetics. N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman (1999) is still the stand-out work in this area. In such work at least three positions can be heuristically isolated and presented historico-logically (see Rubin 1973) as developing away from subject-oriented and towards object-oriented positions: Firstly, that of the homeostatic subject, usually associated with post-Second World War first order cybernetics, focused on feedback and the maintenance of equilibrium. The subject’s interactive relationship with the environment is privileged over the subject’s acting on the object. In this “flat ontology, ” there is no assumption of causal regularities, merely the registration of effects as products of contextual relations of interaction. This framing can be seen in Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT ) (Latour 2005). While Latour’s work is sometimes classed as new materialist, for theorists like Graham Harman, ANT falls down for its lack of distinction between objects and their relations, which he argues acts by “flattening everything out too much, so that everything is just on the level of its manifestation, ” and, therefore, the approach “can’t explain the change of the things” or the hidden potential of alternative outcomes (in Latour et al. 2011: 95). Secondly, the development of this interactive framing to construct the autopoietic subject, which develops through its interaction with the environment, where external stimulus or perturbations are the triggers for internal relational processes of change. This autopoietic understanding, influenced by second order cybernetics, forms the basis of approaches of assemblage theory and is central to some object-oriented ontology (OOO ) approaches and to some speculative realists. Key works in this area include Manuel DeLanda’s New Philosophy of Society (2006), Levi Bryant’s Democracy of Objects (2011) and Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (2015). Thirdly, what could perhaps be seen as a third order of cybernetics, neither homeostatic nor containing autopoietic subjects, but a theory of life itself as an ongoing process of sympoiesis, or of symbiotic interconnection. Here, the process or life itself is autopoietic, growing in intensity in its unfolding. This framing is sometimes associated with theories of complexity or with virtual computer analytics, where all life can be seen to be interacting in emergent ways (order emerging at the edge of chaos through simple interactions). This framing develops and moves beyond the still subject-centered framing of autopoiesis (see, for example, Barad 2007; or approaches drawing more closely upon a Deleuzian framing of a plane of pure immanence, Deleuze and Guattari 2014). New materialist theorists (particularly in the fields of social science and the humanities) are often not concerned with drawing any distinctions between these framings but rather with the critical openings achieved on the basis of “minding matter”; these framings are perceived as in themselves adequate to challenge modernist or Enlightenment perspectives, held to assume the subject to be autonomous from the world. This focus explains why such discussions often revolve around a host

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of “new materialisms” (Coole and Frost 2010) and appear less interested in the conceptual clarity associated with the “polemics” of traditional materialist critique. New materialism seeks to challenge and disrupt accepted approaches rather than articulate programs of change. Whereas historical materialism sought to paradoxically change mind (through political engagement) to change matter (through revolution) to change mind (to free human potential), new materialism reproduces this mind/matter duality in a mirrorpositioning. New materialism seeks to use matter (appearances, ecological crisis) to change mind (approach to science, politics, economics, ecology) to change matter (to avert global warming, ecological disruption). While, for Marxists, the problem was not interpreting the world but changing it, for new materialists the problem is the need to interpret the world differently, to be more respectful of it and less “hubristic” and to carry out a duty of care, rather than focus on appropriation, extraction, ownership, direction and control. This is where the “ontological turn” is often seen as important, less as a materialist framing than as an epistemological move to “defamiliarize” or “provincialize” a Western or modernist episteme (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). Through “minding matter” new materialists seek to provide means and techniques for new, more iterative and experimental forms of governance. Here critique runs into the paradox that rather than a revolutionary vanguard party it is life itself that should dictate new forms of governing. Repeating, via inversion, the problem of traditional historical materialism, new materialism replays tragedy as farce. “Minding matter” does not easily translate into a politics of critique without a subject. Matter does not and cannot directly “speak” to us, although that is what we are told to imagine, when we see heavy rain, melting icecaps, dancing penguins, global warming, technological disasters or computer network cascades of failure (or dead rats and litter, see Bennett 2010). Historical Materialism

New Materialism

Tragedy “Mattering” mind Human to come Point is to change world Revolution

Farce “Minding” matter Never been human Point is to reinterpret world Resilience

Beyond Materialism as Critique “Minding matter” to change mind does not work well as political critique because of the problems of access to “the world, ” and inevitable drift into either mysticism “hearing the voices of nature” or of paranoia “we caused global warming, floods, earthquakes, etc. ” The logic of new materialism is to increasingly disengage from the world as a mediated object of understanding (Chandler 2013), highlighted in the speculative realist critique of some new materialist positions as still seeking to problem-solve and as too human-centered, too “correlationist, ” as if the external world was somehow there “for us” rather than revealing the necessary inadequacy of human understanding

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(see Meillassoux 2008). Political critique necessarily implies a set of modernist cuts between subject/object, mind/matter and culture/nature, which are always coconstitutive. Speculative realism puts matter out of reach of the subject, stressing the necessity of contingency, taking further the logic of the new materialist approach to go beyond the mind/matter problematic and materialism as political critique. While the first iteration of materialist critique ended in the tragedy of revolutionary defeat and its legacies, the second wave of materialist critique could be seen as a coming to terms with this defeat. Critique as “critique of critique” (see Latour 2004) in a period of demoralization and of a coming to terms with the world as it is. Critique as a call for acceptance: “resilience” rather than “revolution. ” New materialism, the “minding of matter, ” works well as a reflection of contemporary sensibilities and of the scaling-back of aspirations of transformation. But it lacks intellectual coherence when it is posed as a form of political critique, which is necessarily “subject-centered. ” Nevertheless, the legacy of new materialism in object oriented philosophy seems assured as it increasingly forms the backdrop to the development of everyday micro-politics or life-politics: as a new creative form of interactive pragmatic problem-solving—of “life-hacking”—working with life processes in their unfolding, rather than against them (Invisible Committee 2014; Wark 2004). In a world of complex interaction and flatter causal processes all that can be done is to work with things, repurposing relations or re-envisioning contexts. New materialism is understandably appealing in the face of today’s climate, in which epistemic uncertainty is absolute, because it proposes that reinterpreting the world— minding the matter of reality—forms the process of changing it. Farce is only farce when it presents itself as a dramatic struggle against current circumstances; as a welcoming of the world as it is, new materialism instead becomes the anodyne and everyday process of coping and survival.

References Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, London: Duke University Press. Bratton, B. (2015), The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Bryant, L. (2011), The Democracy of Objects, Michigan: Open Humanities Press. Chandler, D. (2013), “The Onto-Politics of Assemblages, ” in M. Acuto and S. Curtis (eds), Reassembling International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and International Relations, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Coole, D. and S. Frost (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, London: Duke University Press. DeLanda, M. (2006), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, London: Continuum. DeLanda, M. (2010), Deleuze: History and Science, New York: Atropos Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2014), A Thousand Plateaus, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Dolphijn, R. and I. van der Tuin (2012), New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI : Open Humanities Press.

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Gramsci, A. (1978), Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, M. and M.A. Pedersen (2017), The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Invisible Committee (2014), To Our Friends. Available at: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/ library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends.pdf (accessed August 15, 2018). Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2004), “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, ” Critical Inquiry 30(2): 225–48. Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B., G. Harman, and P. Erdélyi (2011), The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE , Winchester: Zero Books. Luria, A. R. (1969), The Mind of a Mnemonist, London: Jonathan Cape. Marx, K. (1975), “These on Feuerbach, ” in L. Colletti (ed.), Marx: Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 421–3. Marx, K. (1983), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (2009), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Gloucester, UK : Dodo Press. Mattick, P. (1969), Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy, London: Merlin Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2008), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, London: Continuum. Rubin, I. I. (1973), Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Montreal: Black Rose Books. Strathausen, C. (2009), A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Vygotsky, L. (1997), Thought and Language, Massachusetts, MA : The MIT Press. Wark, M. (2004), A Hacker Manifesto. Available at: http://monoskop.org/images/8/85/ Wark_McKenzie_A_Hacker_Manifesto.pdf (accessed August 15, 2018).

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Karl Marx began his theoretical and political trajectory in an environment in which philosophy was considered the revolutionary political terrain par excellence, i.e., revolution was envisaged as a combination of proletarian action and philosophical thinking. “The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat, ” Marx and Friedrich Engels write. “Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality” (MECW 3: 18). However, in the evolution of his thinking, Marx abandoned philosophy, opting for communist politics, the elaboration of a materialist conception of history, and the theoretical adventure of the critique of political economy. In fact, after The German Ideology where both Marx and Engels attempted to settle accounts with their “former philosophical conscience” (Marx and Engels: Vol. 29, 264), Marx never again returned to philosophy in the strong sense. With the exception of philosophical references in the prefaces to Capital, “a long philosophical silence during which only the new science speaks” (Althusser 1971: 40) followed. In this sense, Marx’s philosophy was something to be found, extracted or constructed. Consequently, the questions facing contemporary Marxist philosophy, or the confrontation of contemporary Marxism with philosophy, continue to deal with the same challenge of extracting or constructing a philosophy for Marxism. They also face the weight of all the attempts in the twentieth century to provide answers to these questions: from the recurring thematic of a positivistic or scientistic approach, to the establishment of the “Diamat” orthodoxy in the Soviet Union (a process coinciding with the consolidation of Stalinism), to the various detours through other philosophies (either Hegelian or Kantian), and—last but not least—the recurring varieties of what we could define broadly as “historicism” (from Lukács and Korsch to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School). The very heterogeneity and pluralism of the answers given to the question “What is Marxist Philosophy?” attest to the openness of the question, but also to the openness of the question of the specific theoretical status of philosophy in general. From the attempts to treat philosophy as epistemology or language analysis to varieties of a poetics of presence and finitude, the twentieth century was the period when philosophy was simultaneously challenged regarding its authority and expanded in terms of its scope. 569

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It is exactly here that we can see the importance of Louis Althusser’s constant confrontation with the question of philosophy. It is not so much about the answers he offered but about the questions he posed. Althusser attempted to “extract” a philosophy of Marxism from the work of Marx himself (Althusser et  al. 2016). Since it was Althusser that had insisted upon the epistemological break between the mature work of Marx and his earlier philosophical elaborations (Althusser 1969), this philosophy could be neither the Hegelianism nor the radical theoretical humanism of Marx’s youth. This could only be a highly original, strongly anti-empiricist, scientific philosophy of the sciences, with an emphasis on the centrality of theoretical problematics. The quest for this scientific philosophy had strong political overtones, since for Althusser a return to the scientific nucleus of Marx’s work would also induce a correction of the political direction and a left-wing turn of the communist movement out of the impasses of the post–1956 period. According to this schema, this scientific philosophy existed in practical form in the “mature” work of Marx, in particular in Capital, as the locus of a scientific revolution, and could provide the protocols for a “theory of theoretical practice” that could indeed be a theory of scientificity. However, in the introduction to Reading Capital, the very text that set the definite version of this reading of Capital and of this conception of a theory of theoretical practice, Althusser refrained from offering these protocols of scientificity, stopping “before a threshold we shall still have to cross” (Althusser et al. 2016: 72). At the same time, Althusser in other texts of this period, such as “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (Althusser 1969), also attempted to treat dialectics not as a general philosophical law, but rather as the theoretical confrontation with the uneven, contradictory, decentered character of social reality, expressed in the notion of overdetermination, which was his attempt to move beyond any mechanist conception of the articulation of the various instances of the social whole, while also maintaining the possibility of political intervention. Althusser’s self-criticism after 1966 included a rethinking of the status of philosophy. Beginning with Lenin and Philosophy and then in texts such as Spontaneous Philosophy and Philosophy of the Scientists and Elements of Self-Criticism, Althusser developed a conception of philosophy as the terrain where the ideological contradictions associated with the articulation between the sciences, ideology and class struggle take their particular theoretical form. This was expressed in two subsequent definitions of philosophy: philosophy as political intervention in theory and philosophy as class struggle in theory. For Althusser, philosophy was both unavoidable—since all these contradictions always take a philosophical form, either spontaneous or philosophical— and necessary, because it is a terrain of struggle against dominant ideologies. Althusser presented a complex conception of philosophy as a Kantian Kampfplatz—a field of struggle—in which there are never clear dividing lines between the different philosophical lines, but always situations where each philosophical tendency invades the terrain of the adversary only to find itself surrounded by the opposite tendency. He also insisted on the inevitability of various detours through other philosophies, as part of the complex and uneven character of philosophical battles. So Althusser could maintain the insistence that the history of philosophy is in the last instance the battle

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between idealism and materialism and at the same time avoid any simplification of the terms of the conflict. At the same time, Althusser begun to redefine materialism. He expanded the initial conception of the overdetermined character of the conjuncture, the “necessity of its contingency” (Althusser et  al. 2016: 45) into a broader conception of an antiteleological materialism of the encounter that he opposed to any traditional conception of dialectics (Althusser 2006). The new definition of philosophy and the new definition of materialism were also combined in the insistence that there can be no Marxist philosophy as a philosophical system. The very notion of systematicity of philosophy was a characteristic trait of idealism. In this sense, a materialist practice of philosophy, aiming at deconstructing recurring idealist tendencies and at liberating social practices of emancipation, would also be a “non-philosophy” in analogy to the “non-state” of the new political forms and the new practice of politics of the transition to communism. To support our argument by comparison with the revolutionary State, which ought to be a State that is a “non-State” . . . one might equally say that the philosophy which obsessed Marx, Lenin and Gramsci ought to be a “non-philosophy” . . . This new practice of philosophy serves the proletarian class struggle without imposing upon it an oppressive ideological unity (we know where that oppression has its roots), but rather creating for it the ideological conditions for the liberation and free development of social practices. Althusser 1990: 264–5

I chose to stress the importance of Althusser because of the role his work has played in the evolution of contemporary Marxist philosophy, since all subsequent interventions one way or the other entered into a dialogue with it. It is important to note that moving away from any consideration of a philosophy already existing, albeit in practical form, in Marx’s work, Althusser also helped to move away from simply trying to reconstruct “Marx’s philosophy” or to find his philosophical references. In this conception of a materialist line running through any antimetaphysical and anti-teleological theoretical gesture and any really emancipatory social practice, there is more space for dialogue with other philosophical currents and interventions of materialist orientation. This is evident in the renewed interest in Spinoza, partly originating in the Spinozan interests of the Althusserian circle, with the important contributions by theorists such as Pierre Macherey, Étienne Balibar, Warren Montag and others (see Balibar 1998; Montag 1999; Macherey 2011). Even tendencies that followed a different path, attempting to reclaim the reference to Hegel and in general the linkage between Marxism and post-Kantian philosophical debates on history, values and politics (a theoretical move that found its expression in the Open Marxism volumes [see Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis 1992a; 1992b; Bonefeld et al. 1995], began with a rejection of Althusserianism). There has also been a certain return of philosophical systematicity. Alain Badiou’s confrontation with the (im)possibility of the event is such an attempt towards reviving the very notion of philosophical ontology, including the reference to mathematics

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(Badiou 2005; 2009). At the same time, it is interesting to see in interventions such as Badiou’s the continuous relevance of the last attempt towards a systematic social philosophy around the notion of praxis, an attempt that was also present in a certain way in one of Althusser’s targets, namely Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. This same return to systematicity is also evident in the later work of Slavoj Žižek. Žižek began with a highly original attempt to bring back the relevance of both Hegel and German Idealism, by means of his reading of Lacan (Žižek 2014), and continued with an interesting dialogue with questions of politics beyond simple ideology critique, a dialogue always based upon the radical perspectivism of his initial reading of Hegel along with elements of decisionism, and ended up in an attempt to offer a more systematic exposition (Žižek 2012). However, even in such attempts towards philosophical systematicity it is obvious that there is a certain reservation regarding ontological claims or teleological schemas. Such a reservation is not so evident in recent attempts to reinvigorate a more “speculative” approach to philosophical materialism (Brassier 2007; Meillassoux 2008). The danger of relapse into metaphysics by means of a classical conception of the philosophical system was made more evident in the case of the evolution of Roy Bashkar’s thinking, which moved from epistemological realism to a classical “all encompassing” dialectic and finally to pure spirituality (Bhaskar 1975; 2008). The terrain of philosophical investigation regarding the relation of Marxism to philosophy was also expanded by more open dialogue with other theoretical currents. The very fact that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari chose the dialogue with Marxism in their texts on schizoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari 1983; 1987), and despite the polemics by Marxists against them when they first appeared, in the end opened up a way to rethink elements of a materialism of singularity and potentiality, despite the vitalism of certain varieties of “new materialisms” (Coole and Frost 2010). However, the problem with of the “new materialisms” and also some of the more speculative approaches to materialist philosophy is not only that they risk the fall back into some form of metaphysics. The problem has to do with their basic tenet that strategic political questions, especially those that have to do with the potential for emancipated postcapitalist social forms—in sum what in the Marxist tradition is defined as “communism”—are questions of ontology. This tendency is evident also in other theorists, for example in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s insistence on a positive social ontology of potentiality and creativity (Hardt and Negri 2000). The problem with such ontological references is that they tend to underestimate the very effectivity of class antagonism in favor of some immanently positive potentiality. This cannot account for the persistence of exploitative social conditions and does not help elaborate of a politics for emancipation. This runs contrary to Spinoza’s insight that the very notion of the potentia multitudinis refers not only to the potential for a rational and free society but equally to the perseverance of oppressive and alienating conditions. The entrance of Marxism into new terrains, from theory of literature to gender and queer studies, also meant new encounters with other philosophical currents. In contrast to the polemics of the 1970s and 1980s, when philosophies of radical difference and deconstruction were treated as either inherently anti-Marxist or under the general polemic against “postmodernism, ” in contemporary theoretical and philosophical

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thinking associated with Marxism, in the broadest possible sense, one can see more fruitful dialogues and the potential for new syntheses. However, there has been another attempt to rethink philosophy in relation to Marxism, an attempt whose theoretical and political implications we are only starting to realize now: Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis. Although initially considered by many, including Althusser himself in his infamous polemic in Reading Capital, as a simple synonym for some variety of humanist-historicist Marxism, it was in fact a very original attempt to actually theorize historical materialism. Moreover, Gramsci’s absolute historicism, along with his absolute humanism and his emphasis on the absolute earthliness of thought (Thomas 2009) have nothing to do with historical teleology and metaphysics; instead, Gramsci always stressed that historical sequences, such as the emergence of the hegemony of class, are the result of singularities and molecular processes. In contrast to Althusser’s sharp distinction between (scientific) theory and philosophy, Gramsci treated philosophy as part of a broader conception of intellectuality in politics and social antagonism. In such a perspective, the philosophy of praxis becomes a conceptual laboratory for the elaboration of new concepts that could enable the thinking of the politics of a socialist revolution and transition. Moreover, Gramsci links this conception of philosophy and the question of organization to the questions of new mass forms of critical political intellectuality (Gramsci 1975: 1387; 1971: 335), a necessary aspect of the cultural revolution associated with the establishment of working class hegemony (Frosini 2003: 95–7; Thomas 2009: 232–4). This conception of mass intellectuality is also expressed in Gramsci’s conceptualization of the need for new organic intellectuals and also of the figure of the “democratic philosopher” (Gramsci 1975: 1331; 1971: 350), linking the new practice of a politics for communism with new forms of collective thinking and the elaboration of alternatives. The road suggested by Gramsci, which offers a less limited role for philosophy, enabling broader dialogues as part of the elaboration of new concepts both for theory and politics, along with Althusser’s warnings against the dangers associated with the traditional forms of systematic philosophy, provide a way to rethink philosophy for Marxism. Such a philosophy is not about a simple defense of historical materialism or of materialism in general, nor is it limited to philosophical justifications and support for communism. A philosophy for Marxism refers to an antagonistic intellectual practice, a form of mass intellectuality associated with the struggle for communism and the political and organizational forms that this entails with the aim of not simply contributing to the elaboration of theories but also of changing the “common sense, ” that is, the mass ideological and intellectual forms that traverse social life and are important stakes of the class struggle itself, especially if we view the revolutionary process as a process of “restoring the masses their voice” (Althusser 1977: 11). What is at stake is the liberation of the collective potential, as a process of mass scale experimentation based not on abstract plans, but upon the collective ingenuity of the subaltern classes in their struggle for emancipation. Thus, philosophy becomes an important site of the struggle for hegemony and of the collective effort towards a new historical bloc, that is the articulation of a broad social alliance of the subaltern classes with a transition program that is not just a set of demands, but also an alternative

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narrative for our societies and the political and organizational forms that can enable such a collective effort and liberate new practices of politics and social organization. In this sense, Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach acquires a new meaning. It is no longer about “philosophers” defined as a separate category of intellectuals, but about the full implication of Gramsci’s insistence that “everyone is a philosopher”: not only in the sense that there is an intellectual element in all human practice, but also in the sense of a Modern Prince, a political front or party comprised by “democratic philosophers” of a new type who constitute the collective “organic intellectual” of a politics for communism.

References Althusser, L. (1969), For Marx, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press. Althusser, L. (1971), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press. Althusser, L. (1976), Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Locke, London: New Left Books. Althusser, L. (1977), “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party, ” New Left Review I: 104. Althusser, L. (1990), Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, London: Verso. Althusser, L. (2006), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–86, London: Verso. Althusser, L., E. Balibar, R. Establet, P. Macherey, and J. Rancière (2016), Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. B. Brewster and D. Fernbach, London: Verso. Badiou, A. (2005), Being and Event, London: Continuum. Badiou, A. (2009), Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II , London: Continuum. Balibar, E. (1998), Spinoza and Politics, London: Verso. Bhaskar, R. (1975), A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds: Leeds Books. Bhaskar, R. (2008), Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London: Routledge. Bonefeld W., R. Gunn, and K. Psychopedis, eds. (1992a), Open Marxism I, Dialectics and History, London: Pluto Bonefeld W., R. Gunn, and K. Psychopedis, eds. (1992b), Open Marxism II , Theory and Practice, London: Pluto. Bonefeld W., R. Gunn, J. Holloway, and K. Psychopedis, eds. (1995), Open Marxism III , Emancipating Marx, London: Pluto Brassier, R. (2007), Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Coole, D. and S. Frost, eds. (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Deleuze G. and F. Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Gramsci, A. (1971), Selections from Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1975), Quaderni di Carcere, Rome: Einaudi. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge MA .: Harvard University Press. Macherey, P. (2011), Hegel or Spinoza, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press.

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Marx, K. and F. Engels (1975–2005), Collected Works, London, Lawrence and Wishart. Meillassoux, Q. (2008), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, London: Continuum. Montag, W. (1999), Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries, London: Verso. Sartre, J-P. (2004), Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One, London: Verso. Thomas P. (2009), The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, Leiden: Brill. Žižek, S. (2012), Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2014), The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, London: Polity.

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Political Economy Justin Paulson

Political economy today—as distinguished from both “classical” political economy (of which so much of Marx’s work was an immanent critique (see II .B.3)) and contemporary economics—survives as an interdisciplinary field of study premised on the historical specificity of economic relationships and the political, historically contingent character of most arrangements of social life. Although it carries the name of the discipline pioneered by Adam Smith and championed by David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, even much non-Marxist political economy today has incorporated the most fundamental points of Marx’s critique: that capitalism is historical, not natural; that the “laws” governing accumulation are of human origin, and are sustained by political choices; and that the relations of production and accumulation of surplus do not exist independently of relations of reproduction. While the study of economics is, in many universities and think tanks, reducible to model-driven econometrics, political economy retains the holistic approach that preceded the disciplinary split between economics, sociology, and political science. For political economists today, there is no sphere of the economy that can be separated out—even heuristically—from the social (and, increasingly, the geographical). Political economy thus denotes a field of enquiry in which power and agency are as much the objects of study as are economic “laws of motion. ” Within such an orientation, contemporary political economy may be categorized by a range of tendencies. Clement (1997: 5), for instance, differentiated between liberal, neo-conservative, socialdemocratic, socialist and feminist variants of political economy, each distinguished by a unique determinism and the primacy accorded a specific social agent. Such distinctions are useful in broad strokes, though the first two tendencies have more in common with each other than with the latter three, and each of the social-democratic, socialist and feminist variants is likely to draw explicitly or implicitly from the Marxist tradition.

Characteristics of Marxian Political Economy Marxian approaches to political economy today are distinguished by a number of characteristics, including: 577

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1. Treating social life—including its economic and cultural dimensions—as a totality Following Marx’s Introduction to the Grundrisse (see I.7) and the three volumes of Capital, Marxist political economists do not recognize economic, cultural, or political variables to be independent of each other. It is not possible to single out any such particular variable and produce a model that tells us much about the operations of production or reproduction in the real world. Structure and agency are understood to be similarly entangled, as historically specific and contingent; Marx’s insistence, in the 18th Brumaire (see I.6), that people make their own histories, but not under conditions of their own choosing, is operative here. For Marxian political economy, the question of determination is thus a complex and historical one. Single causal agents are eschewed as mere appearances: all political economic events are presumed embedded in complex social processes. Although the charge of “economism” was often speciously leveled at twentiethcentury Marxism—in fact, Marxist theorists such as Georg Lukács (1923) and Antonio Gramsci (1930–32) used the term to deride the blind spots and oversimplifications of liberalism, a critique which still rings true today—it is nevertheless also true that productivist reductionism, a crude base-superstructure model, and forms of Eurocentrism could be found in popular, if less rigorous, variants of Marxist and Communist theory through the twentieth century. These hampered Marxism’s efforts toward thinking holistically. However, the popularity of such naïve renderings has waned, and Marxist political economy today is less deterministic and reductionist than it ever was. Indeed, in Marx’s own work there is little justification for understanding the economy as an entity independent of other social relations, and no justification at all for any analytical primacy accorded production over other parts of the circuit of value, nor for considering the point of production as a primary source of social contradiction. The neglect of (for example) circulation, distribution, and reproduction in some “Marxist” analyses is a legacy of the first volume of Capital, which deals principally with simple models of commodity production, something Marx never intended to stand in for a more complete analysis of capitalist value creation and its contradictions (as more clearly understood through Vols 2 and 3, and the notebooks making up the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value). It was the multidimensionality of capitalist processes that led Capital to be an unfinished project, and rigorous Marxist political economy takes this as a starting point. Marxist political economists may be unique in their concern for understanding class relations as integral to an understanding of power and agency in capitalist society, but today they also recognize that no account of the production and allocation of social surplus is possible without an adequate understanding of relations of gender, race, and colonialism. These are understood not as add-ons to class, but as always already bound up with class (cf. Camfield 2002; Acker 2006; Coulthard 2014).

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2. Maintaining the analytical distinction between relations of exploitation and oppression Marxism has long been unique in radical social theory for differentiating between exploitation and oppression. Such a distinction is often poorly understood outside the field. It does not render what is often mislabeled “class oppression” as experientially more significant than any other social and structural oppressions, but rather highlights that class power is uniquely predicated on class exploitation. Any group may exercise power through social movement activity, but class power is structural; the working class alone has power that derives from the necessity of its own exploitation (cf. Wood 1988). This is true regardless of whether the labor in question is, strictly speaking, “productive” labor; all that matters for the exercise of power is whether or not the labor is necessary for the realization of surplus. The analytical separation of relations of exploitation from those of oppression carries pitfalls for any political economist who assumes such relations to be wholly independent of each other. To speak of the “working class” should not be to presumptively speak of white, male workers; indeed, the “white, male working class” is but a small fraction of the global working class. Racism, patriarchy, and colonialism have long been factors in exploitation, such that the converse is more likely to be true: white men are disproportionately represented among the bourgeoisie, and Marxism helps us to understand that this has nothing to do with their purported talents. Marxist political economy thus does not consider class, race, and gender to be categorically analogous to each other, but rather it considers them to be mutually (if variably and contingently) constitutive. The contradictions they produce call for explanation and analysis, never simplistic reduction.

3. Emphasizing the structural, rather than individual, causes of poverty and inequality Marxist political economy rejects any methodological individualism that assumes wealth, poverty, and access to or lack of access to resources must be the results of individual choices. Following Marx, both wealth and poverty are understood to have specific meanings within capitalism and are indeed products of it, with inequality being a necessary consequence of a particular mode of production, rather than a preexisting, natural condition. Where liberalism (and liberal economics) presumes a “level playing field” prior to the entrance of individuals into economic and social activity, historical materialism recognizes that all such entrances take place in already-existing social worlds, within structures of inequality forged by centuries of exploitation, colonialism, and unequal accumulation. These different “starting points” are sometimes recognized in other theoretical traditions as relative levels of “privilege. ” Marxism emphasizes the ways such privilege is a product of (capitalist, colonial) social relations and histories, and contingent upon them, rather than their cause. Individuals can, of course, act in ways that shape their own fates or those of others, but they do not have unlimited agency to do so. Indeed, Marxist political economy

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often highlights how constrained individual (or group) economic choices may be. An individual may have the luxury to choose a particular employer or type of employment, but not whether or not to be employed and the range of employment choices available is a typical marker of class. Race, gender, geographical location, and generational class position(s) are among the many factors that impact one’s economic prospects beyond any individual’s control. Responsibility for poverty and inequality thus lies with those reproducing these structures as they profit from the labor of others—not with individuals in poverty, nor with any purported cultural propensities. Structural constraints are difficult to overcome in piecemeal form. While not discounting the possibilities of reform to improve the lives of some, Marxism understands revolutionary social movement activity to be the principal mechanism by which inequality can be lessened and poverty can cease to be produced.

Contemporary Domains of Political Economic Research While Capital is a starting point for Marxist political economy, the study of capital— what it is, how it moves, how it accumulates—did not end with Marx. We continue theorizing capital not because Marx’s study was wrong or too much a product of its time, but because it was incomplete. The contradictions inherent to production for profit rather than for use, and for accumulation rather than to meet collective needs, produce an endless array of social consequences that continue to develop in new and old ways. In studying these, both theoretically and empirically, Marxist political economy draws from and contributes to many social science- and humanities-based disciplines, academic journals, and policy-oriented think tanks. Four of the most vibrant currents of contemporary study are briefly described here. Other common areas of research for Marxist political economists include micro- and macro-level studies of inequality and taxation, the financing and distribution of public services, social movements and the political economy of space and scale.

Social Reproduction Theory Social reproduction theory epitomizes Marxist political economy’s interest in the complexity of determinations. Rooted in the debates and significant advances made by late twentieth-century Marxist feminism, early and late twentieth-century communists, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist political economy regarding the gendered nature of waged labor, unwaged labor, and reproductive labor (see IV.B.4), social reproduction feminism aims for a “holistic analysis of capitalist social relations” that takes account of the ways social relations—including class and gender, but also race, sexuality, and colonialism—are mutually constitutive (Ferguson et al. 2016: 30–2). Building on many of the same concerns and insights leading to intersectional feminism, social reproduction theory focuses on the intersections always already present in the concepts and categories themselves as they operate in the social world, rather than seeing them as independent axes intersecting in individual experience (Bhattacharya 2015; Ferguson 2016).

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States and Finance Capital The movement of capital looks very different in the twenty-first century than it did up until the Second World War, and requires a fresh understanding of its relationship to states and markets. Against the mainstream understanding of “globalization, ” there is a near-consensus among Marxist political economists that the process of globalized expansion of capitalist social relations (from the real subsumption of labor to the increased reach of finance capital) has been one in which states continue to play key roles and in which the material world is not replaced by the virtual (cf. Arrighi 1994; Huws 1999). The question of the role of different states in this process—which ones are in ascendancy, and whether the US faces hegemonic decline—continues to be theorized and studied empirically. The most rigorous work in this area, building on postwar Marxist debates on the nature of the capitalist state (notably the debate between Poulantzas and Miliband), takes one of the lessons of the 2008 crisis to be that the special role of the American state continues largely undiminished, and that challenging the power of capital will require taking power and using the state to bring finance capital under democratic, public control (Panitch and Gindin 2012).

Colonialism and the Political Economy of Settler-States Renewed interest in critiques of capitalism as a colonial project have been promoted in large part by David Harvey’s (1982) work, building on Luxemburg’s, on accumulation by dispossession (“primitive accumulation” in the classical political economy literature, including Marx’s critique—see III .16, Glen Coulthard’s (2014) Red Skin, White Masks, and Kevin Anderson’s (2010) Marx at the Margins; see also IV.A.9). This work builds on the insight that dispossession is an ongoing—and necessary—process within capitalism, not merely a matter of original enclosures long ago making the subsumption of labor possible and necessary. The interconnectedness of settler colonialism and capitalism has long been one of the foundations of Indigenous resistance to and analyses of the imposition of capital; while this has sometimes taken an explicitlyMarxist form (especially in Latin America), other Marxist political economists have been playing catch-up, spurred in part by the Indigenous resurgence throughout the Americas and changing attitudes toward resource extraction (see below).

Resource Extraction and Climate Change There has been a significant shift in Marxist perspectives on resource extraction over the twentieth century. As early productivist tendencies were displaced by a greater ecological awareness—especially once the basic problem of scarcity had been overcome—Marxist political economists came to be more concerned with questions of environmental sustainability and environmental justice. (Whether Marx himself had an environmental consciousness is a matter of some debate; he was very interested in productivity growth to meet needs and wants, and not opposed to the production of surplus per se. However, as Foster (2000) points out, he was also concerned about the metabolic rift between people and nature; cf. Biro (2005).)

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While liberal political economists often support any extractivist project on the grounds that these create jobs, Marxists are concerned instead with the corporate, capitalist ownership of the resource extraction process, and the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples so frequently a part of capitalist forestry, mining, and oil and gas projects. Marxist political economists in this field also draw from and contribute to the environmental justice movement, including its focus on which communities—nearly always working-class or nonworking, people of color, and/or overseas—are forced to live with the toxic detritus of capital. Marxist political economy has also diverged sharply from both liberal and neoliberal political economy in its understanding of the climate crisis. Where those tendencies see a technical problem with a market-based fix, Marxist political economy understands capitalism to be the source of both the technical and ideological sides of the problem, i.e., the carbon emissions themselves and the refusal to reduce emissions if doing so would reduce rates of economic growth. Thus, neither markets—whether through pricing carbon or a cap-and-trade scheme—nor visionary entrepreneurialism are adequate to the task of addressing this crisis; recent work has drawn attention both to the inadequacies of liberal environmentalism and to the possibilities of ecosocialist alternatives (Albo 2007; Rogers 2013; Löwy 2015).

References Acker, J. (2006), Class Questions, Feminist Answers, Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield. Albo, G. (2007), “The Limits of Eco-Localism: Scale, Strategy, Socialism, ” Socialist Register (43): 337–63. Anderson, K.B. (2010), Marx at the Margins. On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Arrighi, G. (1994), The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, New York: Verso. Bhattacharya, T. (2015), “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labour and the Global Working Class, ” Viewpoint (5): n.p. Available online: https://www. viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/how-not-to-skip-class-social-reproduction-of-laborand-the-global-working-class/ (accessed August 16, 2018). Biro, A. (2005), Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Camfield, D. (2002), “Beyond Adding on Gender and Class: Revisiting Feminism and Marxism, ” Studies in Political Economy 68: 37–54. Clement, W. (1997), “Introduction: Whither the New Canadian Political Economy?” in W. Clement (ed.), Understanding Canada: Building on the New Canadian Political Economy, Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Coulthard, G.S. (2014), Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ferguson, S. (2016), “Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms: Toward an Integrative Ontology, ” Historical Materialism 24(2): 38–60. Ferguson, S., G. LeBaron, A. Dimitrikaki, and Sara R. Ferris. (2016), “Introduction: Special Issue on Social Reproduction, ” Historical Materialism 24(2): 25–37. Foster, J. B. (2000), Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press.

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Gramsci, A. (1996 [1930–32]), “Relations between Structure and Superstructures, ” in Prison Notebooks, Vol. II, trans. J.A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 177–88. Harvey, D. (1982), The Limits to Capital, London: Basil Blackwell. Huws, U. (1999), “Material World: The Myth of the ‘Weightless Economy’, ” Socialist Register (35): 29–55. Löwy, M. (2015), Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Climate Catastrophe, Chicago, IL : Haymarket. Lukács, G. (1971 [1923]), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Miliband, R. (1969), The State in Capitalist Society, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Panitch, L. and S. Gindin (2012), The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, London: Verso. Poulantzas, N. (1972), “The Problem of the Capitalist State, ” New Left Review I(58): 67–78. Rogers, H. (2013), Green Gone Wrong: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Eco-Capitalism, New York: Verso. Wood, E.M. (1988), “Capitalism and Human Emancipation, ” New Left Review I(167): 3–20

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Political Theory Bruno Bosteels

Political Marx or Marxian Critique of Politics? To speak of a “political Marx” may seem redundant. Thus, the editors of a recent collection of essays devoted to the topic in French under the title Marx politique call the expression “a self-evidence, even a pleonasm” (Ducange and Garo 2015: 7; see also Dardot and Laval 2014: 13). Indeed, what is Marx, if not political? What else does his name stand for, if not the belief in revolutionary communism, that is, the political capacity of the workers of the world to unite and emancipate themselves by collectively throwing off their chains? “Marx fought above all else for the principles of proletarian internationalism and socialist revolution, ” we can read in a slightly older account in English, titled Marx’s Politics. Concretely, this meant two things for Marx: “As he envisioned it, his general theory, underpinning these principles, would perform a dual role in the working-class movement. It would provide a deeper understanding of the overall process of revolution, of the national as well as international contradictions in capitalism that would instigate class struggle. In addition, in “gripping” the workers, the theory would contribute directly to their political emancipation” (Gilbert 1981: 256). At the same time, numerous interpreters have long complained about the absence of a unified political theory in this author’s multifarious work, most of which was not published or even finished during his lifetime. In other words, the paradox would be that Marx was never anything but political, and yet at the same time we have no consistent picture of Marx’s politics—either in his theoretical work or in his actual practice as an organizer: “Marx’s omnipresent uncertainty can be located at the theoretical level, but it is to be found principally at the level of the political action which he tried to conduct. Marx was never able to stabilize his discourse with respect to the concept of ‘politics’ ” (Balibar 1994: 131). Despite the fact that Marx’s Political Writings in the most widely available English edition take up three volumes and despite the fact that the most complete overview of the topic, Hal Draper’s richly documented Marx’s Theory of Revolution, fills no less than five hefty tomes, the nagging impression remains—not just among those critical of, or disillusioned by, Marxism—that the theory of the political in its regional specificity constitutes somewhat of a lacuna in Marx (Poulantzas 1978: 19; Lefort 1986: 139–236). After his initial Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, not only would Marx never write 585

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a systematic treatise of his own on the role of the state and its supposed “withering away” under the dictatorship of the proletariat, but even the notion of the revolutionary party, which was supposed to emerge from The Communist Manifesto, can be faulted for being surprisingly curt, as though the political organization of the proletariat was going to flow ever more spontaneously from its position in the labor process under capitalism. On such crucial topics as the revolutionary party or the state, Marx left us with more questions than answers. In fact, in his famous declaration about the crisis of Marxism at the conference organized in 1977 by Il Manifesto in Italy, Louis Althusser pointed out that these gaps or lacunae are constitutive of what remains unthought not only in Marx’s political theory but also in the work of later Marxist thinkers such as Lenin. “There exist in Marx and Lenin two theoretical gaps of great importance: on the one hand on the State, on the other hand on the organizations of class struggle, ” Althusser claimed, before explaining why this is far from a purely theoretical question today: But these two “gaps” in Marxist theory are bound up with questions which are decisive for us. What is the nature of the State, and in particular of the type of State found in present-day imperialist societies? What is the nature, what is the mode of functioning of the parties and trade unions? How can we escape the risk of an eventual fusion of the State and Party? How can we grasp now, in order to spur on the process, the need for the “destruction” of the bourgeois State, and prepare the “withering away” of the revolutionary State? Althusser 1978: 219–20

Finally, other than the vexed relation between party and State, few topics have invited more polemical treatments than Marx’s theory of the nature, number, extent, and specific political role of classes over the course of all hitherto existing history, understood as the history of class struggles—whether in the still-Hegelian terms of a dialectic of the class in-itself and the class for-itself, in the closely related dialectic of formless masses and classes organized in and as parties, or in terms of an antiessentialist logic for which there are no classes that precede the struggle of which they are to be the subjects. While the first two conceptual pairs can be found in Marx’s own texts, including The Poverty of Philosophy or The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the last is an argument shared by Italian autonomous Marxists such as Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri that we can also hear often from Althusser’s students such as Nicos Poulantzas and Jacques Rancière, for whom the argument acquires the status of a full-blown ontological thesis about the primacy of the struggle over the classes themselves (Ichida 2005; Balibar 1999). Or, less pedantically: “Following Marx’s clue, one would say that the different classes in society occupy the various situations in terms of the relations of production that are apt to give rise to conflicts” (Miller 1991: 99). But this should not make us forget how it is the conflicts that give rise to the classes in the first place. State, party, and class: if on such central topics of modern politics Marx was less than univocal, how could his followers expect to achieve a complete picture of what

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might be understood as Marx’s revolutionary thought-practice? This insufficiency, moreover, cannot be attributed only to empirical or circumstantial factors, such as the author’s chronic lack of time or the dramatic changes in his position with regard to the role of the state as a result of his assessment of the Paris Commune (Balibar 1974: 65–104). There are also more substantial theoretical reasons for questioning the unity and consistency of the political in Marx. For one thing, after the critique of religion, which already in 1843 he considered for the most part complete thanks to the work of Ludwig Feuerbach and other Young Hegelians, but before the critique of political economy for which he was to become best known and which would culminate in 1867 in the first volume of Capital, the young Marx embarked on his lifelong path as a revolutionary communist thinker by making politics itself—from the declaration of the “rights of man” in the French Revolution to Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie or “philosophy of right”—into the object of his critique (Balibar, Luporini, and Tosel 1979; Teeple 1984; Abensour 2011; Kouvelakis 2007). The young Marx’s discovery of the communist and socialist struggles of the working class in Paris, in other words, coincides in the realm of theory and philosophy not with political criticism so much as with a criticism of politics. What is more, this tendency toward the critique or criticism of politics, which we could go so far as to call “anti-political, ” is not limited to the early writings but remains a crucial, if also implicit, factor throughout Marx’s subsequent work. Marx’s critique of politics indeed takes a number of recurrent forms. Most famously, in “On the Jewish Question, ” which dates from the same period as his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he plays down the significance of mere “political emancipation” with a fervent argument in favor of total “human emancipation, ” on the supposition that the former remains shackled to the representative apparatuses of the modern state. But in his so-called mature works, too, the conviction persists that a communist revolution will entail, so to speak, the end or dissolution of politics. Thus, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx concludes: “The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly socalled, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society” (Marx 1955: 197); and in his Third Address to the General Council of the International, delivered immediately after the defeat of the Paris Commune, he suggests the idea that a new kind of non-state state would come to restore political power to the working people themselves:“While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society” (Marx 1992: 210). Marx may be thinking analytically about the power of the state in one case, as he does in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, whereas he is likely speaking strategically in the other, as in The Civil War in France. But in both cases, whether at the origin or in the end, politics as a separate and preeminent sphere soaring high above society disappears, vanishes, or withers away and is reabsorbed back into society. Thus, we could say that Marx’s critique of politics oscillates between an infrapolitics and a metapolitics while in every case remaining adamantly antipolitical, at least if by politics we understand the separated power of the representative and repressive state.

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Underneath or on this side of politics, he reduces political power to being nothing more than the expression or condensation of economic contradictions at the level of civil society; and, beyond or on the far side of politics, he, like Engels after him, envisions a withering away of the state in the future society of free association and the administration of things. To the falsity of all hitherto existing politics, reduced to the truth of class struggles, Marx would oppose the promise of a true politics, a politics beyond politics, for which the concept of “class” would be the paradoxical or catachrestic name. “In a word, Marx turns a political category into the concept of the untruth of politics, ” Rancière explains. “From then on, the concept of class begins to oscillate indefinitely and the meaning of metapolitics with it between a radicalism of “true” politics, symmetrical to that of Platonic archipolitics, and a nihilism of the falseness of all politics that is also the political nihilism of the falseness of all things” (Rancière 1999: 84). At the heart of the Marxian theorization of politics, in other words, we find an equivocal use of the concept of class as both the social truth of the ideological lie of all hitherto existing political power and the empty operator for the overthrow of the current state of affairs in favor of communist association as the true beyond of politics. Increasingly, however, the historical necessity and efficacy of this articulation will be thrown into doubt, as the building blocks or instances of the economic, the political, and the critical or philosophical discourse of Marxism itself will begin falling apart.

The Three Sources and Three Component Parts Revisited To the question, What else is Marx if not political?, at least two answers can be given: if not a political thinker and organizer, Marx has to be seen as have been a scientist and/or a philosopher. Taken together, these answers lead us back to the official depiction of the unity of Marx’s thought, based on what Lenin famously called the “three sources and three component parts of Marxism”: “It is the legitimate successor of the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism” (Lenin 1977: 21). Marx’s genius, obviously conditioned by the historical tendencies and struggles of his time, consists in locating a series of antagonisms in the midst of what otherwise appears as the naturalized, seemingly eternal and nonpolitical order of the organization of the labor process, an articulation for which a materialist use of the categories of the Hegelian dialectic is the most useful. If the key to understanding the political Marx lies in the proposal, inextricably both descriptive and prescriptive, of a proletarian political capacity in the relationship between labor and capital mediated by the state, then we must start from the insight that the very notion of political economy hides a kind of short circuit between the economy and politics. In Balibar’s account, this is “the strong point in the Marxian theoreticization of politics, namely, the radical short circuit that it operates between politics and what is at least apparently politics’ ‘other’: the economy” (2015: 7). As Balibar explains elsewhere, we must start from the notion that “Marx’s short circuit is the discovery of an immediate relationship, a correlation which develops historically through economic and political mediations between the form of the labor process and

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the state. Then the implications of the concepts of the proletariat, of “proletarian politics” and “proletarian revolution” can appear more clearly” (Balibar 1994: 141). The history of the Marxist left in the twentieth century, however, can be described as the process of the gradual breaking apart of the immediacy of this short circuit: whence, too, paradoxically, the breaking-up of proletarian politics. This can be perceived already in the worldwide dissemination of Stalin’s rather than Lenin’s version of the unity of Marxism based not on its three sources but on the simultaneous invention of a science (historical materialism) and a philosophy (dialectical materialism). But even Althusser, in his reluctant embrace of the argument about the three sources of Marxism in a talk given just months before the events of May 1968 in France, paradoxically shifts the focus away from the political meaning of this equation in favor of a question of the new unity between science and philosophy that is found in a practical state in Marx’s mature work: “To simplify and for expositional clarity, I shall partially set aside French Socialism and consider only Ricardo and Hegel, as symbolic representatives of English political economy and German philosophy respectively” (Althusser 1972: 169). Having thus removed one of the three pillars, even as Althusser’s professed goal was to contribute to the politics of communism by reforming the Party from within, canonical Althusserianism would spend most of its theoretical energy on fine-tuning the articulation between the new science of historical materialism and the new philosophy of dialectical materialism, or the materialist dialectic. Not only do we witness a numerical impoverishment, as if from now on there were not three but just two sources and component parts of Marxism; but, furthermore, even the unity of the parts—no matter how they are defined—begins to fall apart. This process finds expression in different formulations among Althusser’s students and elsewhere. Some interpretations thus will explain the crisis of Marxism by pointing to the gap between the analytical (or descriptive) and the militant (or prescriptive) sides whose unity made up the strength of the original doctrine of Marxism. This is Badiou’s thesis, best expressed in Can Politics Be Thought?, which constitutes a transitional text between the still heavily Marxist and more specifically Maoist Theory of the Subject and the fiercely mathematical and anti-dialectical turn inaugurated in Being and Event: That which in some way certified Marxism as a universal thinking of revolutionary activity was not fundamentally its investigative or analytical capacity, or the mastery, which it meant to guarantee, of a grand narrative of History. It was not even what it prescribed, or authorized, in matters of political commitment. No: among all the revolutionary doctrines issued in the nineteenth century, that which designated the singularity of Marxism was the historically attested right to lay claims on History. Badiou 1985: 26

The crisis of political Marxism, then, can be explained as its growing incapacity to lay claims on History. This means that after the historical experiences of the working class movement, the foundation of socialist states, and the wars of national liberation— three referents which for more than a century attested to Marxism’s historical credibility—there no longer appears to be any clear or immediate transitivity between

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the analysis of capitalism and the question of political tactics and strategies. “The part of Marxism that consists of the scientific analysis of capital remains an absolutely valid background, ” Badiou says in an interview with Peter Hallward. But from this valid analysis no immediate political lessons can be drawn: “The position of politics relative to the economy must be rethought, in a dimension that isn’t really transitive. We don’t simply fall, by successive representations, from the economy into politics. What kind of politics is really heterogeneous to what capital demands?—that is today’s question” (Badiou, 2001: 105–6; see also Toscano 2006 and Bosteels 2011). Others go a step further by positing that communism, the Idea of which Badiou continues to propose to this day as a militant hypothesis and the key to understanding the political Marx, is only a kind of imaginary glue, which cannot really keep together the two heterogeneous logics at work in Marx’s thought: the “objective” logic of the system (the laws that govern the rise, development, and eventual death of capitalism) and the “practical” logic of the struggle (the tactics and strategies of the proletariat in its antagonistic relationship to capital). Between these two logics or perspectives, the point would not be to choose but rather to understand in what way communism serves as their glue or suture: “Communism is that which serves as “glue” to keep together two lines of thought with very different histories: the “objective” logic of capitalism and the “practical” logic of the civil war between classes [. . .] converge toward a superior form of social and economic organization. In other words, only an imaginary projection of the future can suture this disparate nature of the two perspectives” (Dardot and Laval 2012: 11). What this last interpretation suggests is that there is a gap or disparity that keeps the discourse of Marxism from fully coming into its own. For it is the original wager of this discourse that the two parts or perspectives actually constitute a single movement, albeit a dialectical one, based precisely on the point of view of class Marx in a single conceptual movement distinguishes two aspects: the aspect of critique and the aspect of systematicity, or scientificity; one pinpoints something (external) that serves as the foundation for the critique, the other is its scientific exposition. But this must not be understood as two separate moments but rather as forms of one and the same movement in which what is fundamental, what founds the critical and systematic movement, is the point of view of class. Del Barco 1977: 44

Such is precisely the specificity of Marx’s understanding of his own discourse as critique: critique of religion, critique of politics, critique of political economy, but also, in the end, critique of the traditional unity and autonomy of the theoretical or philosophical discourse that was to become known as Marxism: Marxism, then, would be the determinate critical theory that has as its base or point of departure the historic perspective of the oppressed classes, an interested (political) knowledge that does not point in the direction of a presumed objective (neutral) knowledge but finds itself strategically inserted in the concrete struggles that tend to transform society in a revolutionary way: it is a knowledge that instead

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of remaining at the concrete-in-thought (bourgeois science) returns to the first concrete, to “society, ” incarnated in political action and with the aim of transforming it. Keeping in mind, finally, that this class position and this class goal is not something external to knowledge but constitutive of it, giving way to a new status of the theoretical, as the form of the oppressed classes, which Marx names critique (critique of philosophy, critique of economy, critique of politics). Del Barco 1983: 33

Marx, then, is political precisely to the extent that he simultaneously offers a critique of political economy; he is practical and never purely scientific or philosophical, to the extent that his concepts, even when borrowed from philosophy or aiming to be scientific, are always only forms of the real movement of history. To lament the falling apart of Marx’s unified critique back into its component parts, which would be fundamentally the political and the economic precariously held together by the imaginary and perhaps dangerously idealist philosophical “Idea” of communism, also means to ignore what actually constitutes one of the guiding principles behind this critique, which is the insight that the changing relationships between the political and the economic are themselves part and parcel of what Marx seeks to describe. The constitution of the “spheres” or “instances” of the economical, the political, the juridical, the ideological, and so on, cannot be separated from the historical process of the constitution of the capitalist mode of production. This is the principal insight, already present in the early work of Nicos Poulantzas, which thinkers such as Ellen Meiksins Wood want to restore as key to the proposal for a return to the political Marx, or to political Marxism: It can, however, be argued that Marxism since Marx has often lost sight of his theoretical project and its quintessentially political character. In particular, this is so to the extent that Marxists have, in various forms, perpetuated the rigid conceptual separation of the “economic” and the “political” which has served bourgeois ideology so well ever since the classical economists discovered the “economy” in the abstract and began emptying capitalism of its social and political content. Wood 1981: 66

To take seriously the political Marx thus requires that we historicize the shifting relationships between the economic and the political, from the violent beginnings of capitalism when extra-economic power relationships were reframed in the seemingly neutral and nonpolitical language of contracts, salaries, and exchanges, to the point where this economization of every domain of human life can no longer hide the heavily racialized and sexualized antagonisms that run through it. In this sense, there is something incongruent in Wendy Brown’s argument in Undoing the Demos that neoliberalism’s stealth revolution has made Marxism irrelevant by recoding every aspect of contemporary life in the strictly economic key of a market-based model of governmentality, as though this would make the old Marxist analytical categories inadequate. “But in fact, of course, it has long been precisely those “spheres of existence”

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seen as separate from the capitalist mode of production—the household, the school, spaces of economic underdevelopment—that are the most fundamentally necessary to capitalism, ” in the words of one astute reviewer of Brown’s book. “This is why an insistence on the real productivity of spaces seemingly autonomous from capitalism has long been a key part of the political claims of politically excluded subjects” (McClanahan 2017: 511–12). While the becoming-economic of every endeavor of human life may seem to render inoperative the Marxist categories of capital, labor, and class, together with the processes of alienation, exploitation and association linked to them, Marx’s inseparably analytical and militant project in fact always consisted in showing the material and historical conditions that overdetermined such a differentiation of spheres in the first place. This, then, would describe the central contribution of the political Marx. Still in the words of Wood: “Karl Marx presented the world in its political aspect, not only in his explicitly political works but even in his most technical economic writings. His critique of political economy was, among other things, intended to reveal the political face of the economy which had been obscured by bourgeois political economists” (Wood 1981: 67–8). And such, finally, is the basis for a revitalization of a “political Marxism” that is ignorant neither of the political failures and defeats suffered by the socialist and communist left of the twentieth century nor of the changing historical conditions in which the old tactics and strategies for militant intervention may no longer be the same: “ ‘Political Marxism,’ as understood here, is no less convinced of the primacy of production than are the ‘economistic tendencies’ of Marxism. It does not define production out of existence or extend its boundaries to embrace indiscriminately all social activities or even class ‘experiences.’ It simply takes seriously the principle that a mode of production is a social phenomenon” (Wood 1981: 77; see also Blackledge 2008). Badiou’s argument about the lack of transitivity between the economy and politics, from this point of view, would thus have to be historicized, without losing sight of the fact that this history is a matter of strategies and struggles before becoming a question that could be settled in terms of doctrinal exactitude. In this regard, in fact, Badiou often adopts his friend Sylvain Lazarus’s arguments, which refer precisely to the historically changing relations between the so-called objective and subjective factors, from Marx to Lenin to Mao. For the author of Capital, there thus exists a close union or fusion between history and politics, enabling a certain transitivity between the working class or masses as a social category and the proletariat as an organizational operator of class politics; for the author of What is to be Done?, the need for a party already hints at a symptomatic gap between social being and consciousness, or between the class in-itself and the class for-itself; and for the author of “On Contradiction” and “On Practice” who is also not coincidentally responsible for a “Critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR , ” politics is put in the command post as a relatively autonomous practice or instance whereas history, instead of serving as an external referent at the level of social being, becomes absorbed into politics as the name for the latter’s entirely contingent unfolding according to a periodization of its own (Lazarus 1996 and 2013; Badiou 2005: 26–57).

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Politics and the Political Aside from revisiting this debate in the classical terms of the sources and component parts of Marxism that are English science, German philosophy, and French politics, the crisis of Marxism can also be addressed by considering a split that seems to have occurred within the latter—French politics—between politics and the political. Long associated with the thinking of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, who for a while engaged in a polemic on the topic of the value of das Politische as opposed to die Politik, this distinction has more recently become popularized among French thinkers influenced not only by Heidegger but also by Claude Lefort. Thus, for a period of four years in the early 1980s, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy would invite a veritable Who’s Who list of (all-male) French philosophers to discuss the “retreat” and possible “return” or “putting back at stake” of the political at the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political, which they founded at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. What is often forgotten in this context, however, is how it was Poulantzas, in the same early texts in which he defined the nature of state power as an ensemble of social relations, who seems to have been the first to establish this distinction between le politique and la politique in French: “We shall introduce at this stage the distinction between the juridico-political superstructure of the state, which can be designated as the political, and political class practices (political class struggle) which can be designated as politics” (Poulantzas 1978: 37). What this distinction should tell us is that the debate over politics and the political is actually a way in which in the 1980s a new generation of thinkers engages in the “fruitful dialogue” between Marx and Heidegger that the latter announced but for obvious reasons was unable to finish in his “Letter on Humanism” (Heidegger 1993: 243) and that even Althusser and Derrida, in spite of their having been colleagues for twenty years at the same elite institution of the ENS on the rue d’Ulm, were unable to take up in their lifetime (Derrida 1993 and 2017). While, starting with his book on Machiavelli, Lefort had already mobilized the notion of the institution of the political in an attempt to fill what he perceived to be a void or lacuna in Marx’s writings, in the hands of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe the distinction between politics and the political acquires a peculiar valence, which seeks to be non-Marxist without ever becoming vulgarly anti-Marxist: In speaking of the political we fully intend not to designate politics. The questioning about the political or about the essence of the political is, on the contrary, what for us must ultimately take stock of the political presuppositions itself of philosophy (or, if one prefers, of metaphysics), that is to say, of a political determination of essence. But this determination does not itself produce a political position; it is the very position of the political, from the Greek polis to what is deployed in the modern age as the qualification of the political by the subject (and of the subject by the political). What remains to be thought by us, in other words, is not a new institution (or instruction) of politics by thought, but the political institution of so-called Western thought. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997: 110

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At a time when supposedly everything is political, a step back is needed, or a retreat, which at the same time would be a way of giving a new treatment to the political as opposed to the business of politics as usual. The secret behind the appeal of the philosophical quest to define the essence of the political thus lies in the fact that through this quest readers of Heidegger and Derrida hoped to be able to understand Marxism’s role as the last stage in the history of the metaphysical definition of politics in the West: “In our translation: socialism (in the sense of ‘real or actually existing socialism’) is the complete and completing figure of philosophy’s imposition—up to and including what, for one of us at least, could have represented the hope of a critique and a revolutionary radicalization of established Marxism” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997: 110–11). When Badiou presented his work at the Center with two interventions that would form the basis for his short book Can Politics Be Thought?, he completely and somewhat perversely turned the argument of the organizers upside down again. On the one hand, Badiou agrees with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in their diagnostic that something like a retreat of the political has in fact occurred. But, on the other hand, he believes that this ought to open up the mobility of politics as a militant thought-practice: “It is totally exact that the political finds itself in retreat and becomes absent, whence the interrogation as to its essence. But this frees up politics the mobility of which, inscribed in thought from Machiavelli to Lenin, has been made philosophically subservient to the reconstitution of the essence of the political” (Badiou 1985: 11). Marx and Engels’s original gesture in The Communist Manifesto still constitutes one of the most powerful examples of what such an active understanding of politics as a militant thoughtpractice would entail. Marxism, or the Marxification of the critique of political economy, on the other hand, from this point of view would represent the fiction or fixation of what was supposed to have been a doctrine of the intervening doctrine, inextricably practical or militant and theoretical or analytical: “What was supposed to be a strategy of the event, a hypothesis regarding the hysterias of the social, an organ of interpretation-interruption, a courage of fortune, finally has been presented by way of the economy as giving us a convenient measure of social relationships. In this way Marxism was destroyed by its own history, which is that of its fixion, with an x, the history of its fixation into the philosopheme of the political” (Badiou 1985: 14). But in a double gesture of destruction and recomposition, which we might read as his version of deconstruction, Badiou proposes that we (re)turn today, in an updated version of The Communist Manifesto, to what was always supposed to have been the singularity of the political Marx.

References Althusser, L. (1972), Politics and History, London, NLB . Althusser, L. (1978), “The Crisis of Marxism, ” Marxism Today 22(7): 215–27. Badiou, A. (1985), Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Seuil. Badiou, A. (2001), “Appendix: Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou, ” Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso, 95–143. Badiou, A. (2005), Metapolitics, London: Verso.

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Balibar, E. (1974), Cinq études du matérialisme historique, Paris: Maspero. Balibar, E., C. Luporini and A. Tosel (1979), Marx et sa critique de la politique, Paris: Maspero. Balibar, E. (1994), Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, London: Routledge. Balibar, E. (1999), “Classes, ” Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, ed. G. Bensussan and G. Labica, Paris: PUF. 170–9. Balibar, E. (2015), Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press. Blackledge, P. (2008), “Political Marxism, ” Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, ed. J. Bidet and S. Kouvelakis, Leiden: Brill. 267–84. Bosteels, B. (2011), Badiou and Politics, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Brown, W. (2015), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Dardot, P. and C. Laval (2012), Marx, prénom: Karl, Paris: Gallimard. Dardot, P. and C. Laval (2014), “Présentation du dossier ‘Marx politique’, ” Cités 59: 11–18. Del Barco, O. (1977), Esencia y apariencia en El capital, Puebla: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Del Barco, O. (1983), El otro Marx, Sinaloa: Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa. Derrida, J. (1993), “Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida, ” The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, London: Verso. Derrida, J. (2017), Théorie et pratique, Cours de l’ENS-Ulm 1975–1976, Paris: Galilée. Draper, H. (1977), Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 1: State and Bureaucracy, London: Monthly Review Press. Draper, H. (1978), Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2: The Politics of Social Classes, London: Monthly Review Press. Draper, H. (1986), Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 3: The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat, ” London: Monthly Review Press. Draper, H. (1990), Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 4: Critique of Other Socialisms, London:, Monthly Review Press. Draper, H. and E. Haberkern (2005), Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 5: War and Revolution, London: Monthly Review Press. Ducange, J.-N. and I. Garo (eds) (2015), Marx politique, Paris: Syllepses. Gilbert, A. (1981), Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens, New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press. Heidegger, M. (1993), “Letter on Humanism, ” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, New York: HarperCollins. Ichida, Y. (2005), “Les aventures de la Verkehrung. À propos de l’ontologie politique de Jacques Rancière, ” Multitudes 22: 91–101. Kouvelakis, S. (2007), “Marx’s Critique of the Political: From the 1848 Revolutions to the Paris Commune, ” Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination 2(2): 81–93. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and J.L. Nancy (1997), “Opening Address to the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political, ” Re-treating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks, London: Routledge. Lazarus, S. (1996), L’Anthropologie du nom, Paris: Seuil. Lazarus, S. (2013), L’intelligence de la politique, ed. Natacha Michel, Marseille: Al Dante. Lefort, C. (1986), The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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Lenin, V. I. (1977), “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, ” Collected Works, Vol. 19, Moscow : Progress Publishers, 21–8. Marx, K. (1955), The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow: Foreign Languages. Marx, K. (1992), The First International and After, Political Writings, Vol. 3, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (2010), Political Writings, 3 vols, London: Verso. McClanahan, A.J. (2017), “Becoming Non-Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, ” Theory & Event, 20(2): 510–19. Miller, R.W. (1991), “Social and Political Theory: Class, State, Revolution, ” The Cambridge Companion to Marx, ed. T. Carver, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 55–105. Poulantzas, N. (1978), Political Power and Social Classes, London: Verso. Rancière, J. (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Toscano, A. (2006), “Marxism Expatriated: Alain Badiou’s Turn, ” Critical Companion to Contemporary MarxismI ed. J. Bidet and S. Kouvelakis, Leiden: Brill. 529–48. Wood, E.M. (1981), “The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism, ” New Left Review 127: 66–95.

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The interconnection between Marx’s theory and psychoanalysis owes to fundamental conceptual, methodological, epistemological, and ontological affinities. Nevertheless, it was after moments of Marxism’s own crisis (the failure of the 1918–1919 German revolution and, later, the totalitarianism of Stalinism) that sensitivity toward its relation to psychoanalysis emerged—and, even more paradoxically, it initially emerged as a perceived need to “reconcile” two (ostensibly) incompatible theories. Society and the unconscious seemed irreconcilable under the dominant (and occasionally still lingering) assumption that the latter is a “subjective” category that makes psychoanalysis oblivious to historical processes, affirming a transhistorical standard of rationality and morality (e.g., Kovel 1976). The society-unconscious split reiterated within the history of psychoanalytic Marxism the early Freudian and Marxian dualisms between interiority and exteriority. Among the pioneers, Wilhelm Reich attributed neurotic symptoms to the socioeconomic conditions of capitalism, but failed to see the homology between these conditions and psychological processes. For Reich’s student (initially a member of the Frankfurt School), the social psychologist Erich Fromm, both the individual and society are controlled by “subconscious” driving forces, in Rosa Luxembourg’s sense as “blindly acting historical forces” (Fromm 1966: 5). For Fromm, Marx and Freud converge in the Spinozan insight that humans cannot be free if unknown forces control their fate. Therefore, liberation presupposes understanding these forces. Nevertheless, Fromm also saw a need for reconciliation between Freud’s “mechanistic materialism, ” which reduces humans to psychological processes, and Marx’s humanistic philosophy of history. The Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory (the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse et al.) accomplished a decisive step in analyzing culture and socio-political power through the bilateral prism of German Idealism and Freud. In Adorno’s negative dialectic, “art is the social antithesis of society” (1984: 11). Accordingly, “to the extent to which psychoanalysis decodes the social character of a work and its author, ” it could reveal how in “artists of the highest caliber. . .the keenest awareness of reality was joined to an equally acute sense of alienation from reality” (12–13). Yet Freud’s theory lacks this potential, for it analyzes art “in terms of a purely subjective language of the unconscious” (14). Closer to understanding the intrinsic 597

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relation between society and the unconscious are Alfred Sohn-Rethel, to whom we shall return below, and Walter Benjamin (both of whom were associated with the School, but not members) who grasped that “Freud’s theory is capitalist through and through. ” That is, like Marx’s Capital, psychoanalysis both reveals and undermines the logic of capital, for “capitalism” is a “religion” whose “God must be hidden from it, ” which is why “what has been repressed . . . is capital itself, which pays interest on the hell of the unconscious” (Benjamin 1996: 289). We see here Benjamin’s anticipation of one of the most well-known theses of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, namely, that “the true formula of atheism is not [Nietzsche’s] God is dead” but: “God is unconscious” (Lacan 1981: 59). It is indeed through Lacan’s structuralism-inflected reading of Freudian psychoanalysis since the 1930s that the objectivity of the unconscious is systematically revealed, thereby offering a new impetus in the development of psychoanalytic Marxism, notably with Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar since the late 1960s. Freud’s conceptual repertory draws largely on economic and mechanical models: the “economic model” of the mind; cathexis (investment, occupation) of the libido: a form of energy with its own economy, gains and losses; overcompensation; withdrawal; pleasure principle: a homeostatic economy that maintains the value of the libido at an equilibrium, not unlike precapitalist economies for Marx; and the death drive: an entropic economy of disequilibrium that produces excesses that can become lost or be reappropriated as surplus, as in capitalism. Lacan’s structuralist reading added linguistic value to Freud’s homology between economic and sexual value (libido) (see Kordela 2007). Methodologically, for both Marx and Freud the logic of the norm is revealed in the exception or “pathological symptom” (e.g., economic crisis, slip of the tongue, respectively) (Žižek 1989: 21, 128; Lacan 1975). Epistemologically, an affinity between the two thinkers consists in the “theoretical, non-empirical character of the constitution” of the “object” of their theories, which is what makes each theory a new science (Balibar 2009: 277). The insight that the object of a science is constituted through and in the emergent science itself reflects Lacan’s thesis that the object of desire is not pregiven but rather constituted through and in desire, as Lacan’s phrase—“the object in desire” (Lacan 1977: 28)—indicates. And the same insight underlies two of the most famous concepts developed by Althusser: the “problematic” and the “symptomatic reading.” A problematic is the “horizon” of a given scientific “theoretical structure” that determines what questions and answers are possible within that scientific theory (2009: 25). The unthinkable questions constitute the theory’s silences and contradictions—its symptoms, in the psychoanalytic sense: codes in need of interpretation. For the “symptom” does not simply repress but “acts as a language that enables repression to be expressed” (Lacan 1997: 60). This is why for Althusser, the text’s “silence is its own words” (2009: 23). Marx’s analysis performs symptomatic reading by introducing the concept of “labour-power,” which names the silence and interprets the “confusions and contradictions” of classical political economy (Marx 1990: 679). While labor-power is the new object in Marx’s emergent science, in Freud’s it is sexuality, not as the (pregiven) procreative sexuality but redefined as the “search for pleasure”—which is why any part of the body becomes “invested with a sexual ‘value’ ” (Balibar 2009: 273). These new objects break with

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traditional ontological dualisms, since in Marx commodification posits being as pertaining both to the natural and the social, and Freud defines the instincts as “psychical,” “that is,” “as a frontier between the biological and the psychological” (275). For this reason “the libido, qua pure . . . immortal . . . irrepressible . . . indestructible life” and “the locus of the Other,” where “the first signifier emerges,” overlap (Lacan 1981: 197–198). This undifferentiated totality of indestructible life and the signifier is one of the meanings of Lacan’s real. Similarly, in Marx’s ontology, a sole substance—value—is presupposed as the undifferentiated totality of physical objects or bodies and abstract exchange-values: “money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself. . . . [C]apital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the dominant” and “automatic” “subject . . . of this process” (Marx 1990: 255). Marx’s value is the economic equivalent of the aforementioned real. The Marx-psychoanalysis interconnection is intensified in the late Marx (starting with Grundrisse (1857)) through his conceptualization of value, labor-power, and commodity fetishism as a phenomenon “inseparable from the production of commodities” (Marx 1990: 165). Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to grasp the significance of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, which postulates that “the formal analysis of the commodity”—i.e., the form of a posteriori empirical reality— “holds the key . . . to the historical explanation” of the a priori preconditions of “abstract thinking” (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 33). Marx’s materialist revision of the Kantian transcendental categories does not mean—as in naïve materialism—that there is no a priori, but that the a priori is an effect of the a posteriori as the latter’s own unconscious precondition/cause (see Kordela 2016a). From the perspective of capital, human activity consists in exchanging products as quantities of abstract homogenous labor (exchange-values); however, humans “do this without being aware of it, ” unconsciously, since we consciously assume (imagine) that we exchange concrete objects of utility (Marx 1990: 166–7). Since we are “not aware” that we actually exchange abstract values, “in commodity exchange the action and the consciousness of people go separate ways. Only the action is abstract[ed], ” while consciousness clings onto the material concreteness of the object (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 30). There is a split between the (unconscious) action of hands and the (conscious) intentions of the mind. Beyond the division of labor within production, commodity fetishism involves a division between manual (unconscious) and intellectual labor (consciousness) within the realm of exchange. By locating abstraction within social objectivity, Marx pointed to the socioobjective formation of the unconscious as the materialist transcendental precondition of abstract thought (Kordela 2016a). That “the unconscious is structured like language” (Lacan 1981: 149) also means that it is structured like the network of exchange-values. This interlacing of the ostensibly internal (thought) and external (objective network) is expressed in the neologism “extimacy” (“intimate exteriority”) (Lacan 1992: 139). This intimate exteriority introduced by commodity fetishism in capitalism relates to the experience of the “uncanny” (Unheimliche)—not recognizing one’s own most intimate core—and the fascination with the human-machine (automata, robots, golems), particularly since industrial capitalism (Freud 1974b). To grasp the importance of the unconscious in Marx’s late theory we must take heed of the fact that the abstraction of commodities as values—“not an atom of matter enters

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into the objectivity of commodities as values” (Marx 1990: 138)—is not “thought abstraction” but “real” (reale Abstraktion) because it “does not originate in men’s minds but in their actions” (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 20). This does not simply mean that “during the act of exchange, individuals proceed as if the commodity” were an exchange-value “although on the level of their ‘consciousness’ they “know very well” that “commodities [are] material objects . . . of particular . . . ‘use-value’” (Žižek 1989: 18). The objective dimension of value abstraction indicates the inverse: “the consciousness of [the] agents is taken up . . . with the empirical appearance of things which pertain to their use”; “we must be careful not to apply [abstraction] to the consciousness of the exchange agents,” which is “occupied with the use of the commodity they see, but occupied in their imagination only” (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 26–27). In the agents’ imagination commodities appear as if they were use-values, when they really (objectively) are abstract values. It is around this lack of positively given materiality that the network of exchanges is organized. Therefore, the mirage of commodity fetishism is double, with the as if on the side of either use or of value, depending on the perspective: human consciousness or capital (unconscious). Therefore, Žižek’s distinction between the Marxian and the Freudian conceptions of the fetish does not hold. Rather, the true function of the fetish in both thinkers is revealed by bringing together both insights, namely: “in Marxism a fetish conceals [both] the positive network of social relations”—which is the labor of conscious thought—and (what Žižek sees only “in Freud”) “the lack . . . around which the symbolic network is articulated” (which is the labor of the unconscious) (Žižek 1989: 49). Marx’s own development from his early period of The German Ideology (1846, together with Engels) to the first volume of Capital (1867) and its theory of commodity fetishism reflects a historical shift in the form of political power—a shift theorized by Lacan and Foucault. Marx’s earlier work is concerned with the dualist State-type ideology, where power employs a transcendent “idol” of the “ethereal realm of ideas (Freedom, Justice, Humanity, Law)” to dominate civil society (Balibar 2007: 76). By contrast, the commodity fetishism is a theory of “the mode of subjection or constitution of . . . subjects and objects inherent in the organization of society as market” (78). In commodity fetishism “subjection” is not only subjugation but also constitution of subjects and—due to commodity fetishism’s extimacy—objects. This conception of power as constituting subjectivity and objectivity differs from Marx’s conception of ideology in his early work. There, ideology is an imaginary (distorted) representation of the proletariat (manual labor qua external reality) produced by bourgeois thought (interiority). Consequently, although this “inverted consciousness of the world” owes to the fact that people live in “an inverted world, ” ideology constitutes the bourgeois means of domination (Marx 1970: 1), while the proletarians “are fundamentally external to the world of ideology, whose abstractions and ideal representations . . . ‘do not exist’ for them” (Balibar 2007: 54). Through commodity fetishism, by contrast, the imaginary becomes constitutive of subjectivity and objectivity because thought (interiority) reveals itself as a formation of objective reality—language: “for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language” (Marx 1990: 167). This shift, in which the imaginary is no longer power’s means of oppression but constitutive of objectivity and human thought reflects the transformation in the forms

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of power that Lacan indicates through the shift from the discourse of the Master to that of the University (see below), the latter inspiring Michel Foucault’s biopower. However, commodity fetishism and biopower do not announce a post-ideological era, since ideology is constitutive of subjectivity (Althusser 1971). Rather, commodity fetishism reconceptualizes ideology so as to grasp its logic when transcendence (qua idol and locus of power) is folded within the plane of immanence (market). This logic includes the following three aspects: ideological interpellation or “calling” emanates from an Other that is imagined by the subject; effective interpellation presupposes a kernel of non-sense within ideology and the subject’s distance from its own ideology; and the idol is increasingly replaced by affect (Althusser 1971; Žižek 1989; Pfaller 1998; Kordela 2016b). We find the same shift from a dualism between internal (mind) and external (reality) to extimacy in the development of Freud’s thought. Theories of “seduction” (1893–1897) and “Oedipus complex” (1897–1917) are trapped in “theoretical alternatives” such as “internal-external, imaginary-real,” according to which it makes a difference whether, say, the primal scene had actually happened (Laplanche and Pontalis 2003: 118–19). Around 1915, Freud finally formulates the unconscious as “a pre-subjective structure, beyond both the strict happening and the internal imagery” (Laplanche and Pontalis 2003: 118), in which there is “no negation” or “contradiction” (Freud 1974a: 179). Freud’s means to this discovery is auto-eroticism or human sexuality—sexuality predicated on desire, as opposed to the “sexual instinct” that aims at satisfying needs through objects “outside the infant’s own body” (e.g., breast) (Laplanche and Pontalis 2003: 132). Human sexuality gives up the external object of need and operates on the level of desire. Like the auto-erotic subject, capital aims not at an object but only at itself. Just as the “ideal . . . of auto-erotism is ‘lips that kiss themselves’” (Laplanche and Pontalis 2003: 132–3), “the circulation M–C–Mʹ presents itself . . . without any intermediate stage . . . as M–Mʹ,” a “self-moving substance” which instead of “representing the relations of commodities . . . enters into a private relationship with itself” and becomes “an end in itself” (Marx 1990: 256–7 and 253). Freud converges with Marx on the Hegelian distinction between initial (“animal”) need and human (auto-erotic) desire and, hence, drive. In Marx, the initial situation is precapitalist economy, in which the “renewal of the act of selling in order to buy”—“C–M– C”—“finds its . . . final purpose . . . outside it, namely . . . [in] the satisfaction of definite needs” (1990: 252 and 220). In the capitalist act of “buying in order to sell [M–C–Mʹ], on the contrary, the end and the beginning are the same, money or exchangevalue and this very fact makes the movement an endless one” (252)—what is known as the drive of capital, the compulsion to repeat the exchange (Freud 1974c: 287). A further central affinity between the late Marx and Lacan is that their respective objects are self-referential structures which, as such, involve the paradoxes of set theory (central in Lacan’s topologies). Commodification—Marx’s subjection of everything (including humans) to the universality of exchange-value (signifier)—parallels Lacan’s subject as “the subject of the signifier” (1981: 67). Examining value or the subject amounts to examining the signifier (language). Because there is no meta-language, language is “language about language,” hence, it is “a self-referential. . .structure . . . wherein ‘class’ [meta-language] itself becomes its own member” (Karatani 1995: 62 and 52). Similarly, because “capital [is] . . . bought and sold as stock,” Marx “treat[s] capital . . . as a commodity”

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and reveals the “paradox in which a class of the meta-level [capital] descends to the object level . . . to become a member of itself [commodity]” (70). This self-referentiality is one precondition of surplus-value, the other being the commodification of labor-power. Take out the self-referentiality (through a meta-language, e.g., God) and the commodification of labor-power (through serfdom or slavery) and you then realize that before capitalism labor-power was surplus—not in the sense of contributing to the accumulation of more economic value but in the sense of economic waste. Marx’s “surplus value . . . has the same ambiguous place as . . . surplus work” (Lacan 2007: 20)—“ambiguous, ” as work may either have an exchange-value that is in excess to its wage (as in capitalism) or it may not compute at all within the sphere of values, that is, it may be surplus in the sense of pure waste (pre-capitalism). Labor-power points to a surplus beyond surplus-value; a transhistorical surplus that historically can be either waste (as in antiquity or feudalism) or surplus-value (as in capitalism) (Lacan 2007). Surplus-value is only one, historically specific, modulation of surplus. Surplus as such is transhistorical, yet capable of enabling the formation of societies as diverse as archaic societies, the slave economy of pagan antiquity, theocratic feudalism, capitalism, and beyond (see Kordela 2007 and 2013a). And, as commodity fetishism indicates, this surplus must be conceived in terms pertaining as much to economy and power as to the subject’s thought and body (Kordela 2007, 2017). Whence Lacan’s “surplus-enjoyment” (plus-de-jouir), with the connotations of jouir (“to come” or “reach orgasm”) expanding the referential field of Marx’s economic counterpart, while the ambiguity of “plus-de-jouir” (meaning both “surplus-enjoyment” and “no more enjoyment”) alludes both to surplus-value (plusvalue) and to the loss of enjoyment (Lacan 2007; 1998). Note that jouissance (enjoyment) and plus-de-jouir (surplus-enjoyment) are the same, insofar as enjoyment is always a surplus to what is necessarily needed—as is always the case also with labor-power: either waste or surplus-value. The “equivalence between work and enjoyment” (Zupančič, in Clemens and Grigg 2006: 162) in Lacan’s Seminar XVII owes also to their both being sheer potentialities. On the register of the real, jouissance is Freud’s libido (indestructible life) (Lacan 1981), and due to Lacan’s “link between libido and . . . the death drive, ” enjoyment is “drive” (Miller 1995: 14). Since “the activity of the drive is concentrated in making oneself (se faire), ” jouissance is the potentiality of life to actualize itself, and as such, its “characteristic is not to exist” within the actualized world (Lacan 1981: 197 and 195). Similarly, labor-power is the potentiality of labor to actualize itself (se faire): “labour-power exists only as a capacity of the living individual” (Marx 1990: 274), it “is his vitality itself ” that “is not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him, thus exists not really, but in potentiality, as his capacity” (1993: 267; Kordela 2013a,b,c). For both Marx and for psychoanalysis, the body is the potentiality of self-actualization. The identification of surplus as labor-power and jouissance gave yet a new impetus toward a psychoanalytic Marxism. To understand the ramifications of the shift in forms of power indicated by both Marx and Lacan, let us turn to Seminar XVII (1969), where Lacan introduces the “discourses” as varying relations between enjoyment and the rotating concatenations of four mathemes that stand for the effects of the signifier: knowledge, truth, subject, and master (power). Of the twenty-four possible combinations of the mathemes, Lacan

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focused on four, of which two—the discourses of the Master and the University—he linked to pre- (or earlier) capitalism and capitalism, respectively. The transition from the Master to the University involves a shift in which, beyond the fact that the waste (labor-power and enjoyment) begins to be reappropriated as surplus-value, “surplus enjoyment [plus-de-jouir]” begins to be conjoined “with the master’s truth” (1991: 207; 2007: 177–178; translation modified). This means that the modern, capitalist master appears as “nothing other than knowledge, ” not mastery or power, but pure knowledge, which, as such, is said to be “objective knowledge . . . science . . . bureaucracy” (2007: 31). This radical transformation in the relation between power and knowledge marks the era of biopower with the so-called “(objective) laws of the market, ” in which power bases itself on the illusion that knowledge reveals objective, scientific or purely procedural truths, rather than sustaining its authority. This is to say that today’s dominant ideology is that we live in a post-ideological era. But the lesson of both Marx and psychoanalysis is that ideology is not just a subjective but also an objective illusion. Therefore, the task of a psychoanalytic Marxism becomes the examination of the imaginary as an objective category. The shift from the dualist State-type ideology to commodity fetishism, with the unconscious and the imaginary as constitutive of abstract thought and subjectivity, results in much more permeative forms of power, as subjectivity and power are intrinsically intertwined. This is why today it is impossible to grasp and intervene effectively in the political situation without knowledge of psychoanalysis.

Note My gratitude to Nick Chun for editing the bibliographical references.

References Adorno, T. (1984), Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. G. Adorno and R. Triedemann, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Althusser, L. (1971), “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation), ” in B. Brewster (trans.), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 127–242. Althusser, L. (1997), “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza, ” trans. T. Stolze, in W. Montag and T. Stolze (eds.), The New Spinoza, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 3–19. Althusser, L. and E. Balibar (2009), Reading Capital, London: Verso. Balibar, E. (2007), The Philosophy of Marx, trans. C. Turner, London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (1996), “Capitalism as Religion, ” in R. Livingstone (trans.), Selected Writings: Vol. 1, Cambridge, MA : Belknap Harvard Press, 288–91 Clemens, J. and R. Grigg (eds) (2006), Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII , Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Fromm, E. (1966), “Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Reality, ” first published in Tagebuch: Monatshefte für Kultur, Politik, Wirtschaft 21(9): 5–6, trans. Florian Nagde, CreativeCommons: https://www.marxists.org/ 2011 (accessed August 16, 2018).

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Freud, S. (1974a), “The Unconscious, ” in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14: 161–215), London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1974b), “The Uncanny, ” in J. Strachey (ed. ans trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 17: 219–56), London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1974c), “Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ” in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18: 3–64), London: Hogarth Press. Karatani, K. (1995), Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, ed. Michael Speaks, trans. Sabu Kohso, Cambridge: MIT Press. Kordela, A.K. (2007), $urplus (Spinoza—Lacan), Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Kordela, A.K. (2013a), Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Kordela, A.K. (2013b), “Biopolitics, from Tribes to Commodity Fetishism, ” in Differences 24(1): 1–29. Kordela, A.K. (2013c), “(Marxian-Psychoanalytic) Biopolitics & Bioracism, ” in Penumbra, ed. S. Jöttkandt and J. Copjec, Melbourne: Re.Press, 279–91; first published in Umbr(a) (2011): 10–25, http://re-press.org/book-files/9780987268242-Penumbra-OA.pdf (accessed August 16, 2018). Kordela, A.K. (2016a), “Materialist Epistemontology: Sohn-Rethel with Marx and Spinoza, ” History of Human Sciences 29(2): 113–29. Kordela, A.K. (2016b), “Monsters of Biopower: Terror(ism) and Horror in the Era of Affect, ” Philosophy Today 60(1): 193–205. Kordela, A.K. (2017 forthcoming), Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: (Bio) Power of Structure, London: Routledge. Kovel, J. (1976), “The Marxist View of Man and Psychoanalysis, ” Social Research 43(2): 220–45. Lacan, J. (1975), Livre XXII: R.S.I. 1974–1975, Ornicar? 4, Paris. Lacan, J. (1977), “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet, ” ed. J-A. Miller, trans. J. Hulbert, Yale French Studies 55/56: 11–52. Lacan, J. (1981), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1991), Le Séminaire. Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969–1970, ed. J-A. Miller, Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (1992), Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. J-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter, New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1997), Book III: The Psychoses, ed. J-A. Miller, trans. R. Grigg, New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1998), Book XX. Encore, 1972–1973: On Feminine Sexuality; The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. J-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2007), Book XVII. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A. Miller, trans. R. Grigg, New York: W.W. Norton. Laplanche, J. and J.B. Pontalis (2003), “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality. ” in Unconscious Phantasy, ed. R. Steiner, London: Karnac, 107–43. Marx, K. (1970), Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right, ” trans. A. Jolin and J. O’Malley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin Books. Marx, K. (1993), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus, London: Penguin Books.

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Miller, J-A. (1995), “Transference, Repetition and the Sexual Real: Reading the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ” trans. R. Grigg (2011), Psychoanalytical Notebooks 22: 7–18. Pfaller, R. (1998), “Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?” Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Durham, NC : Duke University Press: 215–18. Sohn-Rethel, A. (1977), Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology, ed. J. Young and P. Walton, trans. M. Sohn-Rethel, London: Macmillan. Žižek, S. (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

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Racism Barbara Foley

Can Marxism explain racism? What is at stake in the answer? My reasons for focusing on racism, rather than race, will quickly become clear below. Some theorists have dismissed Marxism as irretrievably Eurocentric and Marx and Engels themselves as hopelessly enmeshed within the notions of racial difference and hierarchy dominant in their time and place. These critics argue that Marx’s and Engels’s accounts of the origins and development of capitalism were irretrievably “white, ” failing to transcend the limitations of Hegel’s heavily racialized distinction between “historic” and “non-historic” peoples (Mills 2003; Robinson 1983). Defenders of Marx’s and Engels’s thinking about capital and class struggle stress their admiration for slave rebels; their distance from prevalent racial doctrines; and, especially, the global reach of their analysis of capital, from The Communist Manifesto onward (Nimtz 2002). Recent scholarship has stressed Marx’s increased appreciation of the brutality accompanying capital’s “civilizing” function, especially after the 1859 Sepoy Mutiny, as well as his growing interest, manifested in the late Ethnological Notebooks, in nonWestern societies that might pursue paths to communism different from those taken in the industrialized world (Anderson 2010). Nonetheless, the categories of economic analysis in Capital remain essentially color-blind; Marx’s relatively few observations about slavery, and still fewer comments about race, do not supply an adequate account of the role played by racism in the origins and development of capital (Singh 2017). The oft-cited quotation from Capital about the “rosy dawn” of primitive accumulation, entailing the “extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population [of America]” and the “conversion of Africa into a preserve for the hunting of black-skins” (Marx 1976: 937) reveals Marx’s full awareness of capitalism’s violent origins. His statement that the “veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal” (925) suggests that the exploitation of white wage-labor— that is, wage slavery—was contingent upon chattel slavery. The use of the present tense in the assertion that “labor in the white skin cannot be free while in the black skin it is branded, ” suggests, moreover, an ongoing process (414); while Marx’s statement that labor discipline in the colonies requires “police methods” different from the “silent compulsion of economic relations” that ordinarily keeps the Western industrial proletariat in line implies the necessity for differential levels of coercion in the 607

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extraction of surplus value (940, 937). Finally, Marx’s observation that “the ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life” draws directly an analogy with the United States. “[The English worker’s] attitude, ” he writes, is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. . . . This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this. Marx and Engels 1942: 289–90

These are all perspicacious observations; their relative paucity in Capital may suggest Marx’s determination to analyze capital at a certain level of abstraction rather than a lack of concern about the human dynamics and consequences of exploitation (Ollman 1993). When set alongside the representation of capital accumulation as fundamentally derived from the appropriation of surplus value from waged labor, however, such statements suggest that the racialized violence of primitive accumulation, as well as the continuing brutality of US chattel slavery, are for the most part temporally prior or geographically external to the principal sites of capital accumulation. Marx was aware that, within a given industrial setting—e.g., Manchester in the 1850s—capital not only drew upon, but created, a “surplus population” differentiated into the “floating, the latent, and the stagnant” (Marx 1976: 784, 794). But he seems not to have extended this insight to an appreciation of uneven development in the parts of the world supplying Manchester with its raw materials. Marx’s largely color-blind portrayal of capital has led some Marxist theorists to propose a key distinction between capitalism and capital: capitalism may make opportunistic use of all kinds of mechanisms of social control, ideological and political, to secure its hegemony; but capital itself is not intrinsically racist in its structures of accumulation (Wood 2002; Harvey 2003). This description does not, however, adequately explain how particular modes of identification and oppression, especially racism, came into being in the first place. The first Marxist scholar investigating how capital—not just capitalism, but capital—at once produces and requires race-based inequality was W.E.B. Du Bois, who, in Black Reconstruction, showed how the end to chattel slavery laid the basis not for a regime of free wage labor, as Marx had supposed, but instead for new methods of legal and economic coercion. Stressing the increasing entrapment of “black and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia” in the snares of capital, Du Bois also pointed out the deleterious effect of racism on white labor, which was paid a paltry “public and psychological wage” in compensation for its dire conditions of existence and political subordination to the ruling class (Du Bois 1935). Subsequent historians of US slavery and Jim Crow examined the “peonization” of black labor (Cox 1948) and the use of race as a mechanism of ruling-class social control (Bennett 1975, Fields 1990), holding out the “baited hook” of whiteness to the disenfranchised white proletariat (Allen 2012).

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Alexander Saxton investigated the ways in which violent anti-Chinese racism facilitated both the near-enslavement of Chinese immigrant workers and the weakening of nineteenth-century labor movements in the United States (Saxton 1971). Victor Perlo documented the downward pull of racist pay differentials on the wages of white workers, especially in the US South (Perlo 1996). Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has analyzed the role of racialized municipal laws and police practices in enacting a contemporary version of the coercive domination of racially subordinated sectors of the US proletariat (Taylor 2016). Tom Brass has examined the conjunction of paid and unpaid labor in global capital’s amassing of surplus value (Brass 1999); Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin have traced the uneven development of past and present global capital accumulation (Anievas and Matin 2016). These and other sociologists and historians have definitively demonstrated that capital requires and produces racialized difference and hierarchy: racism is central, not peripheral, to capital accumulation. Despite their different emphases, all the above scholars work in the Marxist tradition (Roediger 2017); while they expand upon concepts that are present only in nuce in Marx’s writings, they do not resort to an explanatory framework outside of historical materialism, ideology critique, and Marxist political economy. Marxist approaches to the relationship between race and class are thus to be qualitatively distinguished from recent theorizations that feature multiple systems of oppression, intersectionality, and white skin privilege as necessary tools for understanding, and remedying, racialized inequalities. Routinely mischaracterizing Marxism as a mode of economic determinism—and, often, political domination—needing to be subordinated to other explanatory paradigms (Meyerson 2000), these analytical models stress the limitations of class analysis (Collins 2000) and the need to focus upon white complicity in black, brown, and yellow oppression (McIntosh 1989; Wise 2011). Proponents of the multiple systems of oppression thesis acknowledge capitalism (class) to be one component, or axis, but it is one among several. Gender (patriarchy), race (white supremacy), and, more recently, sexuality (heteronormativity) constitute the other legs of the stool of oppression, each of which is “irreducible” to any of the others (Aguilar 2015; Gimenez 2001). Intersectionality, an alternative spatial model, describes the ways in which multiple identities converge in the experience both of individuals and of groups; often coupled with standpoint theory, intersectionality posits that those subjected to multiple oppressions are far more likely to understand the meaning and consequences of social inequality than those not forced to face degradation on a daily basis (Hancock 2011). The implication drawn from these modes of analysis is that people designated as “white, ” even if subjected to capitalist exploitation, inhabit a position of “white skin privilege”; the demographic sector least likely to “get it” are cisgendered straight white men. If white people involve themselves in movements for “social justice” (a somewhat slippery term), they do so as “allies” motivated by moral concerns; as dwellers in capitalist society, however, they have no skin in the game, so to speak (Taylor 2016). While on the surface addressing the same matrix of gender-sexuality-race-class as do the models based upon interlocked systems of oppression, Marxist class analysis proceeds from very different premises and comes to very different conclusions, two of which are of particular importance here. First, Marxism envisions the categories of

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race (and in somewhat similar ways, gender) as not causes, but consequences, of the ways in which surplus is extracted through exploitation. Categories of experience that are presumably self-evident are in fact reifications of group identities that have been produced by a racialized division of labor (Smith 2013–2014). It is an irony worth noting that while the category of “race” has for several decades now been routinely understood to be socially constructed—hence the quotation marks—the widespread replacement of “racism” by “race” in present-day discourse has the effect of resurrecting for presumably progressive political ends an ideologically saturated category that emerged in the nineteenth century as a pseudo-scientific rationalization for the very forces driving capital accumulation which generated “race” in the first place. Second, the doctrine of “white skin privilege, ” which has gone virtually unquestioned in the early decades of the twenty-first century, undermines the strategic insight that was central to the Marxist tradition’s theorization of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” or a “baited hook”—namely, that racism hurts all members of the working class, whether they are aware of this or not. While neo- and post-Marxist theory has posited a crucial distinction between a class “in” itself and a class “for” itself—a distinction that in fact does not appear in the writings of Marx—a bedrock principle of Marxist economics is that exploitation, the extraction of surplus value from unpaid labor, is an objective phenomenon. The working class is the working class by virtue of this fact; even if the category of the proletariat is extended (as it should be) to include the unemployed, the wageless nurturers and caregivers, and the billions participating in informal and “sharing” economies, the reality is that the vast majority of the world’s dispossessed proletarians have an interest in abolishing the conditions of capitalist exploitation, no matter what the color of their skins. To propose that white workers objectively benefit from their differential positioning within capital’s racialized and hierarchical division of labor is to posit, effectively, that they are not members of the working class. The fact that the knife of exploitation is thrust on average three inches into their backs, rather than into the six inches routinely experienced by workers of color, does not mean that the act of stabbing is serving their interests. The political consequences of the above distinction between Marxism and the paradigm of interlocked systems of oppressions should be clear. From the standpoint of Marxism, the liberation of the great majority of the world’s inhabitants can be effected only by a multiracial class-conscious praxis that places antiracism at its very center. It is not a matter of waiting for the revolution to do away with racism; that day will never arrive unless such a movement occurs. Since racism has its past and present roots in the capitalist division of labor, however, it can be eradicated only if capitalism is, through revolution, negated and replaced by a system, communism, in which all kinds of divisions of labor have been superseded (Gomberg 2007); the Marxist approach thus entails both the challenges and the advantages of being a unified field theory of causality (Wallis 2015). By contrast, the interlocked systems of oppression model would appear to allow for a less apocalyptic and more pluralistic and incremental strategy for social change. To the extent that it relies upon reified categories of identity as the basis of group affiliation, however—and race figures more prominently here than any other—this model locates political will largely in attitudes and affects rather than in analyses of objective structures of domination. Moreover, it both precludes

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analytical clarity (race causes racism, gender causes sexism) and discourages political unity among the different social sectors that are antagonistically positioned against capital. Indeed, in its more forthrightly anti-Marxist (that is, anti-“class reductionist”) manifestations, the interlocked systems of oppression paradigm ends up readily enough conforming to the needs of capital—and capitalism. Given the urgency of the spiraling inequality faced by the world’s population in the twenty-first century, it should be clear which model possesses greater utility for the workers of the world.

References Aguilar, D. (2015), “Intersectionality, ” Marxism and Feminism, ed. Shahrzad Mojab, London: ZED Books. Allen, T. (2012), The Invention of the White Race, New York: Verso. Anievas, A. and K. Matin (2016), Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Anderson, K. (2010), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Bennett, L. (1975), The Shaping of Black America, Chicago, IL : Johnson Publishing. Brass, T. (1999), Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labor: Case Studies and Debates, London: Frank Cass. Collins, P.H. (2000), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, New York: Routledge. Cox, O. (1948), Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, New York: Doubleday. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935), Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, New York: Harcourt Brace. Fields, B. (1990), “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America, ” New Left Review 181: 95–118. Gimenez, M. (2001), “Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy, ” Race, Gender & Class 8(2): 22–33. Gomberg, P. (2007), How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice, Oxford: Basil-Blackwell. Hancock, A-M. (2011), Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics, New York: Palgrave McMillan. Harvey, D. (2003), The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1942), Selected Correspondence, New York: International Publishers. McIntosh, P. (1989), “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of Privilege, ” Peace and Freedom: 10–12. Meyerson G. (2000), “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others, ” Cultural Logic 3(2). Mills, C.W. (2003), From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism, Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield. Nimtz, A. (2002), “The Eurocentric Marx and Engels and other Related Myths, ” Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. C. Bartolovich and N. Lazarus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ollman, B. (1993), Dialectical Investigations, New York: Routledge. Perlo, V. (1983), The Economics of Racism II: The Roots of Inequality, USA, New York: International. Robinson C. (1983), Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press. Roediger, D.R. (2017), Class, Race, and Marxism, London: Verso. Saxton, A. (1971), The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Singh, N.P. (2017), “On Race, Violence and So-Called ‘Primitive Accumulation’, ” Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. G.T. Johnson and A. Lubin, London: Verso, 39–58. Smith, S. (2013–2014), “Black Feminism and Intersectionality, ” International Socialist Review #91, http://isreview.org/issue/91/black-feminism-and-intersectionality (accessed August 16, 2018). Taylor, K-Y. (2016), From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, Chicago, IL : Haymarket Books. Wallis, V. (2015), “Intersectionality’s Binding Agent: The Political Primacy of Class, ” New Political Science 37(4): 604–19. Wise, T. (2011), White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, Berkeley, CA : Soft Skull Press. Wood, E.M. (2002), The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso.

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Sociology Samir Gandesha

Is it possible to regard Karl Marx as a sociologist? At first glance, the answer seems patently obvious. Despite Marx’s excoriating comment about the “father of sociology, ” Auguste Comte, it is simply a matter of fact that Marx has been installed within the discipline as no less than one of its founding figures.1 As one introduction to “classical sociological theory” states, it is to the “trinity” of Durkheim, Weber and Marx “that we owe much of the contemporary character of sociology with its attention to society as a whole, to social change, its epochal sweep, and its moral and political sensitivities” (Hughes, Martin, and Sharrock 1995: 16). Indeed, there can be little doubt that the impact of Marx’s writings has been felt throughout the discipline, for example, in the study of class and class structure, analyses of the labor process, problems of deskilling, political sociology, in particular, the state and party. Marx’s influence has been felt, moreover, in the sociology of development, sociology of technology and culture, theories of the family, social reproduction, race and nationality, and so on. More recently, his work has had a profound impact on thinking about the sociology of nature. There are historical and thematic reasons for Marx’s inclusion within the discipline of sociology. Marx (1818–1883) is roughly the contemporary of the other members of the sociological trinity, Durkheim (1858–1917) and Weber (1864–1920), and shared their concern with producing a thorough-going and systematic understanding of the origin and consolidation of modern European society between what Eric Hobsbawm has called the Age of Revolution (1774–1848) and the Age of Capital (1848–1875).2 As Robert Nisbet states in his classic study of the origins of sociology: “The fundamental ideas of European sociology are best understood as responses to the problem of order created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the collapse of the old regime under the blows of ‘industrialism’ and ‘revolutionary democracy’ ” (1993: 21). The “unitideas” of sociology—namely: community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation— therefore seek to address this problem of order generated by these “two revolutions” (1993: 21). Thematically there are at least three main areas that unify the discipline of sociology:

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1. An abiding dissatisfaction with the prevailing individualist assumptions of social contract theory as well as those of the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo. 2. The attempt, following Auguste Comte, to take society as an object of scientific inquiry—a science that focused on “facts” or empirical research. In other words, sociology was to be understood as a “positive” science of society. 3. Following from the previous point, sociology was the study of “modern” societies, as opposed to “primitive” societies, which were the preserve of anthropology, and was therefore a theory of social evolution or progress, whether understood in terms of the division of labor and logic of specialization (Durkheim), the rationalization and disenchantment of the world and increasing dominance of legal-rational authority (Weber), or in terms of the development of the productive forces and the succession of modes of production (Marx) (Hughes, Martin, and Sharrock 1995: 7–15). While Marx sought to provide an account of class societies (as he panoramically sketches in the Communist Manifesto) stretching from antiquity to feudalism to capitalism, there can be little doubt that his over-arching concern was with providing a systematic account of capitalist society (Marx and Engels 1998). It was indeed his point of departure for understanding previous modes of production in the same way that “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape” (Marx 1973: 108). In taking capitalism as his “scientific” object, Marx sought to provide a historical account of the emergence of the individualism that British political economy and contract theory simply took as an ahistorical given. One way of attending to and clarifying Marx’s status as a founding sociologist is by way of an examination of Lenin’s famous 1913 characterization of Marx’s work in Prosveshcheniye as “the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism” (Lenin 1977: 23–4). The sociological reading of Marx would suggest that the key term is the middle one: “English political economy. ”3 Here it may be maintained that Marx’s encounter with political economy from the Paris Manuscripts onwards was a way of, as he puts it with Engels in reference to the so-called German Ideology, “settling accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience” and hence moving beyond the narrow ambit of the mere criticism of German philosophy and theology, quintessentially expressed in Hegel’s philosophy of history, to an encounter with “real” history understood via a concept of sinnliche Arbeit (sensuous labor) (Marx and Engels 1976). Or, as Marx puts it in the Theses on Feuerbach, the intended “Introduction” to the German Ideology, the individual could not be understood abstractly as a member of the human species as such but, rather, was to be understood in terms of determinate social relationships or, what Marx calls, an “ensemble of social relations (ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse)” (Marx and Engels 1976: 3–10). In other words, true to the method of transformative criticism whereby the subject and the predicate were reversed, Marx argued in opposition to Hegel that the “truth” of the state was located in “civil society” rather than the reverse as Hegel had held (Marx 1987: 261). And, to understand civil society,

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it was necessary to study and critique political economy, which Marx considered its “anatomy. ” In other words, according to this reading of Lenin’s characterization of Marx’s work, the latter enlisted British political economy and French politics to de-mystify German idealism. After all, echoing sociology’s persistent dismissal of theory, Marx and Engels write “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love” (Marx and Engels 1975: 236). If one takes Marx to be enlisting British political economy and French socialism in his battle against German philosophy, then he fits rather well within the sociological canon and can be read as a sociologist of the labor process and above all, exploitation. We can read Marx as a sociologist insofar as we take him to be offering an account of social causality as articulated in the German Ideology, in which he and Engels famously argue in opposition to German idealism that “social being” determines “social consciousness” (Marx and Engels 1975: 35–7). Marx elaborates on this thesis in the oft-quoted 1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life (Marx 1987: MECW 29: 261). On second glance, however, Marx is not so easily incorporated within the discipline of sociology if we take the philosophical idea of “critique” (Kritik) as key to understanding his work. Critique is the central term in the mature philosophy of Immanuel Kant for whom it was the means by which the limits of human reason were to be ascertained. The idea of critique stretches from Marx’s two critiques of Hegel in 1842–1843, to the Grundrisse, and to Das Kapital itself, which is subtitled the Critique of Political Economy. For Marx, “critique” was the means by which the limits of bourgeois thought were to be both historically ascertained and overcome. Such a notion of critique was indebted to Hegel’s insight that the identification of a limit was also, at the same time, its transcendence. Arguably, it is the idea of critique that constitutes the red thread running throughout Marx’s writings from the youthful so-called “humanist” writings through the mature “scientific” writings of his later years (Louis Althusser’s reading to the contrary notwithstanding) (Althusser 2006). If, for Marx, the “criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism, ” then the criticism of religion by other means is now directed at the fetishism of the commodity form, as well as the other basic categories of classical political economy and remains constant in his mature work (Marx 1975: 175). Central to both early and late work is the idea of a constitutive misrecognition of the nature of human activity. Such a misrecognition initially takes the form of theological concepts and subsequently the categories of political economy. The sociological reading of Marx in the work of, for example, Karl Kautsky’s concept of “world-view Marxism, ” consists of a mechanical elaboration of Marx’s 1859 “Preface” that presupposed an economic base (basis) underlying and “determining” a political,

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ideological, and cultural superstructure (Überbau) (Marx 1987: 261; Heinrich 2004: 20–7). Such a reading, which posited a conception of society governed by supposedly “objective laws of motion” that were seemingly independent of social agents, itself participated in such a constitutive misrecognition of the nature of human activity. Georg Lukács would later characterize this conception of society as a form of “second nature” part and parcel of a reified “contemplative attitude” in History and Class Consciousness (Lukács 1986: 121–31; Jappe 1999). In Michael Heinrich’s view, such “world-view” Marxism can also be located in Lenin, though obviously determinism does not apply to him. Heinrich quotes Lenin suggesting that “The Teaching of Marx is all-powerful because it is true. It is complete and harmonious, providing men with a consistent view of the universe, which cannot be reconciled with any superstition, any reaction, any defense of bourgeois oppression” (25). An alternative reading of Lenin’s formulation that emphasizes the idea of critique is possible. According to such a reading, Marx’s encounter with the best of bourgeois thought of the nineteenth century wasn’t simply a synthesis of each moment into the theory of “historical materialism” based on the so-called “objective laws of motion of capitalism” but rather a constellation consisting of a series of determinate negations— negations that simultaneously annulled while maintaining aspects of each of these elements. In Hegelian terms, determinate negation is to be distinguished from abstract negation insofar as each moment is seen as contradictory, comprised of certain elements that would be preserved and others that would be relinquished in a dialectical Aufhebung or “sublation. ” If one emphasizes the dialectical conception of critique understood as determinate negation, then it is far from clear that Marx fits, unequivocally, within the sociological tradition. At best Marx’s work can be considered a species of “critical sociology, ” a form of social critique that resists being straightforwardly “disciplined. ” In other words, Marx’s distinct form of social critique would be a form of sociology that doesn’t simply take capitalist society as its scientific (wissenscahfliche) object but also the categories that form the necessary though not sufficient conditions for the reproduction, over time, of that very object. Another way of understanding these two different ways of reading Lenin’s formulation is in terms of what has been called traditional or world-view Marxism, on the one hand, and the so-called neue Lektüre (new readings) of Marx in the writings of Hans-Georg Backhaus, Moishe Postone, Heinrich, and Werner Bonefeld, on the other.4 In the first, the emphasis is on the role of productivity of concrete labor, studies of class, class structure and so on. In such a perspective, what Marx offers is simply an alternative form of political economy. If British political economy is the ideological justification of bourgeois property relations, then Marx is read as offering a type of political economy that entails the analysis of the manner in which profit, interest, and rent conceal forms of surplus value and the process of exploitation. By contrast, instead of taking labor as a trans-historical category, the second approach analyzes the specific form of labor in capitalist society—abstract labor, which expresses itself as value and, as such, is the means by which the structures of capitalist society are produced and reproduced. Rather than articulating a critique of capitalism

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from the standpoint of concrete labor and emphasizing labor processes and exploitation, the new reading of Marx emphasizes the standpoint of the totality of the moments or elements of capitalist society mediated by abstract labor or value as such. And rather than emphasizing a materialist political economy against the Idealism of classical German philosophy, this second reading emphasizes the importance and irreducibility of the idea of “critique” understood as the de-fetishization of the categories through which capitalist society understands itself, including the one-sided understanding of concrete labor. It entails a critique of forms of subjectivity as well as of objectivity. However much, on the surface, Marx can be said to share in common with the sociological tradition, his theory—which really is a “critical theory” or a theory based on a series of determinate negations, simultaneously cancelling and retaining aspects of its object of critique—must be differentiated from the sociological tradition precisely because of its dialectical and negative nature. Unlike the “positive” knowledge produced by sociology, the knowledge produced by historical materialism is a negative in two senses. The latter proceeds, as already previously suggested, by way of a negation of existing, limited categories of bourgeois thought. In the realm of political philosophy, it criticizes the one-sidedness of Hegelian political philosophy that pits the particularistic “economic man” against the “political man, ” homo economicus against citoyen. It proceeds, moreover, by way of a negation of the categories of a bourgeois classical political economy that is unable to distinguish between “labor” that is sold on the basis of a “free and equal exchange” for money and “labor time” or the worker’s sale of his capacity to labor which is the condition for the possibility of the difference between socially necessary labor time and surplus labor—which, taken together with nature, is the true source of wealth. In the realm of politics, it criticizes those forms of socialism unable to distinguish between merely utopian forms from those based in the real movement of historical struggles. It is a negative form of knowledge in the second sense that such knowledge is not produced in the interest of greater control and, therefore, domination of human beings and nature in its own productive processes but, rather, contributes to the negation of negativity of the capitalist order itself—that is, it conceives of this order as based on self-valorizing value (capital) that exploits human beings and the natural ecosystem alike. As such, unlike sociology as a discipline, Marx allows for the Aufhebung or the simultaneous realization and abolition of his own theory. This is made clearest by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory: The social facts that Marx analyzed (for example, the alienation of labour, the fetishism of the commodity world, surplus value, and exploitation) are not akin to sociological facts, such as divorces, crimes, shifts in population or business cycles. The fundamental relations of the Marxian categories are not occupied with describing and organizing the objective phenomena of society. They will appear as facts only to a theory that takes them in the preview of their negation. According to Marx, the correct theory is the consciousness of a practice that aims at changing the world. Marcuse 1968: 321

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Notes 1

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3

4

“I’m now studying Comte on the side, since the English and French make so much fuss about the fellow. What fascinates them is the encyclopaedic scope, la synthese. But that’s pitiful beside Hegel (although Comte is superior as a mathematician and physicist by profession, i.e. superior in detail; even there Hegel is infinitely great in total). And this damned positivism appeared in 1832!” (Marx and Engels cited in Adorno 2000: 186). It was in fact British political economy insofar as its most important representative was Adam Smith, who was, of course, along with his friend David Hume, a key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Lukács (1986) develops this logic in the section of the most important chapter of History and Class Consciousness “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” entitled “Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought. ” In addition to Heinrich’s An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, also see, for example, Backhaus (1989); Postone (1996); Bonefeld (2016). Anselm Jappe (1999) makes the case for Guy Debord as a forerunner of Marxian value theory.

References Adorno, T.W. (2000), Introduction to Sociology, ed. C. Gödde, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Althusser, Louis (2006), For Marx, London: Verso. Heinrich, Michael (2004), An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, trans. A. Locascio, New York: Monthly Review Press. Backhaus, Hans-Georg (1989), Marx und die Marxistische Orthodoxe: Studien zur Wertheorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Bonefeld, Werner (2016), Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hobsbawm, Eric (1985), The Age of Revolution: 1798–1848, London: Sphere Books Ltd. Hobsbawm, Eric (1996), The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, London: Vintage. Hughes, J.A, P. Martin, and W.W. Sharrock (1995), Understanding Classical Sociology: Marx, Weber, Durkheim, London: Sage. Jappe, Anselm (1999), Guy Debord, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lenin, V.I. (1977), “The Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism, ” in Prosveshcheniye, V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19, Moscow: Progress Press. Lukács, Georg (1986), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marx, K (1973), Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Marx, K. (1975), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, ” in MarxEngels Collected Works: Volume 3, New York: International Publishers, 3-129. Marx, K. (1987), “1859 Preface to Critique of Political Economy, ” in Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 29, New York: International Publishers, 261. Marx, K. (1996), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 35, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

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Marx, K. and F. Engels (1976), “Theses on Feuerbach, ” in Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 5, New York: International Publishers, 3–10. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1976), “The German Ideology, ” in Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 5, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1998), Communist Manifesto, London: Verso. Nisbet, R. (1993), The Sociological Tradition, New York: Routledge. Postone, M. (1996), Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Technology McKenzie Wark

Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. Karl Marx Capital, Vol. I (493)

The first and last question that usually comes up about technology is whether it is a good or a bad thing. This can apply to both particular technologies and to technology in general. Marx can readily be recruited to either side of this argument, either through selective quotation, picking the Marx of a particular period, or extracting a particular perspective out of his work at the expense of the dialectical and rhetorical play at work in his texts. Marx can be put to a lot of uses on the technology question. He is an all-purpose tool. Marx might also offer “tools” for thinking a bit more critically about technology. Do we have to subject technology to a moral decision, as good or bad? Why does technology appear as something separate, as a thing apart that one could contemplate? From whose point of view are we saying that technology as a thing apart can be contemplated as good or bad? What kinds of things are we thinking of as technical anyway? Starting from the last of those questions, it is important to situate Marx in his own times. What we now think of as technology was for Marx more a question of the machine. His was an era of steam, which powered factories, railways, shipping, and the printing presses of the newspapers for which he wrote. It was an era of telegraphy, but before the wide distribution of electric power, or the rise of modern chemistry, particle physics, genetics, climate science or information science. Marx did his best to keep up with the scientific and technical developments of his time, but his knowledge of how the physical world works, and hence his materialism, stops short at a certain historical threshold (Rabinbach 1992). Nevertheless, Marx makes important steps towards thinking technology not just as a collection of particular things but as a kind of thing. He is a key thinker of technology as a concept. Particularly in the Grundrisse, he starts to think of technology beyond the moral decision of whether it is good or bad. He starts to think it as a category of thing 621

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that has a range of possibilities (as something that has, as one might say in a more modern idiom) affordances. Consistent with the rest of his thinking, Marx comes to understand technology not as having an essence, but as something emerging out of particular historical circumstances. This gives him—and gives us still—a way into thinking past the curious way that technology appears as something separate. Technology is actually intimately connected to the human, on the one hand, and to the non-human, on the other. To take up just the first of these connections for now, technology is connected to the human in a double way. To put it simply: the content of technology is labor; the form of technology is capital. It is living labor that makes technology; technology then returns to confront the worker congealed into dead labor. The form of technology is capital, in that it is shaped by the objective of extracting value from labor (and from nature) as efficiently as possible. As particular capitalist firms compete with each other, they reach for labor-saving devices to increase output and drive down costs, replacing living labor with dead labor, but in the long run putting a squeeze on profits, as surplus value is extracted from exploiting human labor alone. The form of technology is capital in a second sense, too. Not all decisions that capital makes about technical change in the workplace are, strictly speaking, economic. Capital may also implement technical change that takes power away from the worker at the point of production (Noble 1986). Technology is not a separate thing, then. It is connected to the human, in a bifurcated way: its form is capital, but its content is labor. There is a parallel connection, on the other side, to nature. Technology is made of, and remakes, nature itself. Its content is sensuous materiality, iron and coal and so forth, mixed with labor; its form is once again the form of capital. One can thus connect Marx’s thinking on technology to the ecological question in Marx (Foster 2000). One could enter here into the vigorous debates on what Marx’s position on technology really was, not to mention what his position on nature really was. What might be more useful is to examine how later Marxists took him as a starting point for often quite different and incompatible ways of thinking about technology, both at the point of production and beyond (Benjamin 2008). It is a question on which he has proven endlessly productive. Besides the tension between the points of view of technology as labor in content but capital in form, there is a second distinction running through Marx’s work. This has to do with his practice of forming concepts negatively, through the critique of bourgeois concepts. At different times, Marx worked on the critique of different kinds of bourgeois thinkers. The ideas he worked to negate leave an imprint on the affirmative concepts that result. In the Grundrisse, Marx works on a critique of a Hegelian conception of labor as spirit, as that which engages and shapes the world, humanizing the world, while making the human more “worldly. ” In Capital, Marx also works in and against the less wellknown scientific materialism in vogue in Germany after the failure of the 1848 revolutions (Beiser 2014). From this, Marx took a thermodynamic concept of labor as an expenditure of energy, and an image of capitalism as a gigantic steam engine that would either break down or run down (Wendling 2011).

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Even before the Grundrisse notebooks were widely known, this tension in Marx produced two distinct approaches to thinking about technology. One approach thinks it possible to produce an adequate concept of technology with the critical tools of philosophy alone; the other thinks it is necessary to know something about the scientific and technical knowledge upon which technology actually works. This then gives us a grid with two axes and four kinds of Marxist theorists of technology: those who view it negatively, as capitalist in form; those who view it positively, as labor in content. Then there are those who view it philosophically, whether for or against it; those who view it more scientifically, whether for or against it. While this does not account for all of the vast literature on technology after Marx, it does provide a basic orientation. Those with a more affirmative and scientific view of technology often take Friedrich Engels as their point of departure. In the intellectual division of labor between them, Engels more than Marx took on research into scientific topics, polemics with the scientific ideologies of his time, and the question of whether there could even be a dialectics of nature. Engels lived long enough to see the sciences becoming systematically organized as a source of competitive advantage in fields such as the chemical industry, so the question of science and its impact on the development of the forces of production was no mere intellectual question. The rise of modern physics provoked a profound crisis among Marxists (Sheehan 2017). If materialism is at base a doctrine of the sole reality of the material world, then it matters what matter is actually made of, and it matters how this is known. Do quantum mechanics and relativity confirm or refute the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism? Or does it refute modern science? While that latter position had its proponents, the development of Marxism turned more on how modern science was to be accommodated, particularly in the Soviet Union (Graham 1987). One approach, agreed by both official and even New Left Marxism to be heretical, was to retreat from the claim that Marxism is a comprehensive philosophy and to see it more as a way of organizing science and labor (Bogdanov 1984). The other, more acceptably orthodox approach, was to see Marxism more as a method than a first philosophy (Haldane 2015). Thus reformulated, Marxism could be quite compatible with scientific work, and could provide a method for thinking about the place of science within capitalism. This was the basic orientation of the Social Relations of Science movement, strongest in Britain between the thirties and the fifties (Werskey 1979). This maintained a positive outlook on the potentials of technology, as science applied to the rationalization of social production. Yet it was at the same time highly critical of the subordination of science and technology to the capitalist monopoly firm and the imperialist and militarist state (Bernal 2010). In Science in History, J.D. Bernal shows how science—broadly conceived—played a critical role in the economic and social organization of all societies. V. Gordon Childe shows how the mode of production of even ancient societies set limits on how knowledge and technology developed. Joseph Needham systematically refutes the assumption that science was somehow part of some western rational essence. Up until the modern period, science and technology developed more fully in China than in the West.

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In the Social Relations of Science movement’s analysis of modern capitalism, there is a slippage in this work between the agency of labor and the agency of science, held together by one of their preferred terms for their own agency, that of the scientific worker. What this left unclear is whether the scientist is part of the working class, or is external but potentially allied to organized labor. Implicit in the formulation is the possibility to conceive of a third agent, perhaps even a class agent, who is neither labor nor capital. Here theorists and activists from the sciences connect to those from the arts who, like Asger Jorn, tries to think the agency of form-making as distinct from capital, but also from labor, which works to fill pre-given forms with content. The producers of both form and content might both might then be allied in their struggle against subordination to the regime of the commodity (Wark 2004). It is an alliance that, while rare, has in certain situations been realized (Wainwright 1981). This affirmative and scientific approach to technology has a parallel in a more philosophical but also affirmative school of thought. An influential version of this arises out of the Autonomist Marxism of postwar Italy (Negri 1984). Its starting point is a reading of Marx’s Grundrisse rather than Capital or Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which it would not recognize as canonical. The key concept extracted from Grundrisse is based on something Marx says, almost in passing, about the general intellect. The rising complexity of capitalist organization comes increasingly to depend not just on the exploitation of particular labors, but on the socialization of knowledge, embedded into the form of technology as general intellect. Thus the socialization of labor is already partly achieved, and it remains only to throw off the last vestiges of an obsolete private property form.) It is more common for philosophically based Marxist theories of technology to be critical of it. Georg Lukács extends the Marxist theory of alienation into the technical form itself. In different ways, Kostas Axelos and Herbert Marcuse combine Marx with Heidegger, resulting in a critique not of the form of technology under capitalism but the form of technology itself. This critical theory of technology is further refined by Andrew Feenberg. Guy Debord extended Lukács critique of the alienating form of technology in the sphere of production to the sphere of consumption and its reigning images, which he calls the spectacle. Both Lukács and Debord view Marxist philosophy as a theory of the totality, as opposed to bourgeois science or the spectacle which is alienated and separated. Here the question of technology touches on the problem of the technics of knowledge itself. Is Marxism a superior technique of knowing and acting in the world? If it is, Marxism is a theory that makes strong claims to know the world. Or, on the other hand, is Marxism a practice of organizing knowledge other than in the form of capitalist exchange, as a form of comradely cooperation? This latter approach is what Bogdanov advocated, but Lenin declared it a heresy. And yet in practice it was how the Social Relations of Science movement worked, even if in the name of a more orthodox Marxism in the spirit of Engels. The more scientifically trained have often been connected to the more affirmative view of technology as product of labor and means of achieving the expansion of social production that might satisfy social needs without exploitation. But there have also

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been critical voices. Barry Commoner studied biology and took J.D. Bernal as his inspiration, but became a proponent of a form of ecological socialism (Egan 2007). Donna Haraway also trained as a biologist. Starting in part from Needham, she made a series of useful interventions to thinking about technology. She complicates the concept of technology as capital in form and labor on content. Her use of the figure of the cyborg as a “political myth” helps us think of hybrid forms of agency, with no neat separation of human and inhuman actors. She includes other species besides humans in the organization of production and control. In related work, the physicist Karen Barad has revived an approach to science studies that could justifiably be considered Marxist. Based on a reading of Neils Bohr, she offers a theory of agential realism, which considers more things to be actors in the production of knowledge besides labor or even scientific labor. She pays close attention to the role of the apparatus in science. Also partly under the influence of Haraway, Paul B. Préciado questions the emphasis on the general intellect in Autonomist Marxism and its descendants, from the point of view of the kinds of technologized bodies produced by contemporary pharmaceuticals. The critical agents in this scenario are sex workers and transgender artists and activists rather than the traditional industrial proletariat or the scientific worker. Recent work attempts to synthesize the technical and philosophical approaches, and takes the good-or-bad decision in a more situated way. The postwar period saw an extensive commodification of information science (Terranova 2004). This may even amount to new kinds of forces of production (Fuchs 2014). What appears on the surface to be a financialization of everyday life may depend on new forces of production, or—if one can conceive of such a thing—forces of circulation (Martin 2015). That technology takes the form of capital is celebrated by Silicon Valley ideologists (Barbrook 2015). While they promise “freedom, ” the tech industry delivers new forms of control (Galloway 2004). These may owe more to state-financed military contracting than market-based innovation (Golumbia 2009). The current form of computational technology was shaped by struggles over control and the gendered division of labor (Chun 2013). Its deployment was a response by capital to a global cycle of struggles from below (Dyer-Witheford 2015). Control of the value chain may be derived from ownership of intellectual property as much as the means of production, and involve extracting information from the under-developed world (Shiva 2016). However, states in the under-developed world take an ambivalent approach to intellectual property (Pang 2012). Cheap information may be as vital as cheap labor or cheap nature to global commodification (Moore 2015). Value is now extracted from nonlabor as well as labor, but antagonism over the extraction of value and control of both production and everyday life may give rise to new coalitions among those who make the content with those who design the form of technology (Scholz 2016).

References Axelos, K. (1978), Alienation, Praxis and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx, trans. R. Bruzina, Austin, TX : University of Texas Press.

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Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Barbrook, R. (2015), The Internet Revolution: From Dotcom Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Beiser, F. (2014), After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Benjamin, W. (2008), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Bernal, J. (1971), Science in History, in 4 vols, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Bernal, J. (2010), The Social Function of Science, London: Faber & Faber. Bogdanov, A. (1984), Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization, trans. by G. Gorelik, Seaside, CA : Intersystems Publications. Childe, V. (2003), Man Makes Himself, Philadelphia, PA : Coronet Books. Chun, W. (2013), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Cambridge MA : MIT Press. Debord, G. (1995), Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books. Dyer-Witheford, N. (2015), Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labor in the Digital Vortex, London: Pluto Press. Egan, M. (2007), Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Feenberg, A. (2002), Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited, New York: Oxford University Press. Foster, J. (2000), Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press. Fuchs, C. (2014), Digital Labor and Karl Marx, London: Routledge. Galloway, A. (2004), Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Golumbia, D. (2009), The Cultural Logic of Computation, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Graham, L. (1987), Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union, New York: Columbia University Press. Haldane, J. (2015), The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences, London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1996), Simians, Cyborgs and Women, London: Free Associations Books. Jorn, A. (2016), The Natural Order and Other Texts, London: Routledge. Lukács, G. (1972), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Marcuse, H. (1991), One Dimensional Man, Boston, MA : Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Vol. I, Moscow: International Publishers. Martin, R. (2015), Knowledge Ltd: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative, Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press. Moore, J. (2015), Capitalism and the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, New York: Verso. Needham, J. (1979), The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Negri, A. (1984), Marx Beyond Marx, Lessons from the Grundrisse, trans. J Bell, Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Noble, D. (1986) The Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, New York: Oxford University Press. Pang, L. (2012), Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property, Durham, NC : Duke University Press.

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Préciado, P. (2013), Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY. Rabinbach, A. (1992), The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Scholz, T. (2016), Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Sheehan, H. (2017), Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, London: Verso Books. Shiva, V. (2016), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Berkeley, CA : North Atlantic Books. Terranova, T. (2004), Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press. Wainwright, H. (1981), The Lucas Plan: A New Trades Unionism in the Making?, New York: Shocken Books. Wark, M. (2004) A Hacker Manifesto, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Wendling, A. (2011), Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Werskey, G. (1979), The Visible College: The Collective Biography of British Scientific Socialists of the 1930s, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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Uneven Development Harry Harootunian

It is important to recognize that in the conceptual career of the theorization of combined and uneven development, its associations have been (until recently) linked to the world beyond Euro-America, regions once called “backward” and “underdeveloped. ” These terms usually referred to those parts of the world colonized by Western powers but not always, as in the case of Japan. This narrow definition stemmed in part from a traditional Marxist view that capital originated in Western Europe (principally England), and in part because the formulators of the theory of combined and uneven development like V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky equated it with countries like Russia, which had been late in adopting capitalism. What this theoretical identification of uneven development with underdeveloped societies meant was that capitalism, through the promotion of imperial policy and territorial colonization of large regions of Asia and Africa, was understood as being forcibly imposed on indigenous and pre-capitalist social and political systems and social relations of production to radically alter and often undermine received ways of life. At the same time, the superimposition of capital on traditional cultural matrices resulted in combining what might be useful in this reservoir of older and archaic ways of doing things with new techniques and procedures from contemporary capitalism to create the permanent figure of uneven development. While this interpretative strategy grew out of the Russian experience before the October Revolution of 1917, it was actually Karl Marx who first noticed the occurrence of uneven economic development wherever capitalism appeared, beginning in Western Europe itself. He observed that capital principally appropriated what it considered useful from pre-capitalist forms of production, calling the process by which those elements could be incorporated into capitalism’s production agenda formal subsumption. Formal subsumption refers to capitalism’s capacity to redeploy appropriated forms of production within its own context towards the goal of accumulating surplus value. What this formal, repetitious appropriating from the past suggests is that the origin of combined and uneven development, far from being limited to imperial colonies or latecomer nations like Russia, Germany and Japan, is structurally built into capitalism itself and appears everywhere capitalist production is established. Marx’s capacious vision, condensed in the logic of formal subsumption he described as the “rule of all capitalist development, ” saw beyond the Euro-American 629

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world to speak to all peoples. This wide perspective was necessary to account for the historical importance of the emergence of the world market in the nineteenth century and the extension of capital beyond enclosed national and cultural borders. If the predominant association of the theory of combined and uneven development was first identified with regions outside Euro-America, this suggested the theory opened the pathway for economic development of capitalism where it did not yet exist, providing the possibility of “catch-up” but at the price of disfigurement of received social and cultural endowments. By the same measure, the theorization of unevenness contributed not only to the idea that capitalism originated in the West but also explained how such societies had avoided the defect of unevenness, which became a classification reserved for “backward” countries of the Third World. Hence, the experience of combined and uneven development was not solely limited to capital’s latecomers but imbricated all countries committed to the capitalist mode of production. Since there is no “pure development” and final completion of capital, as supposed by earlier versions of Marxian discourse, or even a modular pattern capable of prescribing for all capitalizing societies a unitary linear and developmental trajectory divided into successive historical stages, it is important to revisit Marx’s concept of appropriative subsumption and what it means for the formation of combined and uneven development. As already suggested, Marx explained the procedure of formal subsumption as capital’s general rule of development everywhere. At the same time he proposed that formal subsumption, which means taking over prior practices and conjoining them with capitalist operations, “can be found as a particular form alongside the specifically capitalist mode of production in its developed form” (Marx 1991: 1019). This means that formally subsumed practices could co-exist alongside the most advanced forms of capitalist production, as they still do, eliminating the earlier belief of the successive movement of stages from an earlier mode of subsumption (formal) to a later advanced one (“real” subsumption). The act of subsumption first referred to the ways capitalism could take over labor practices belonging to prior modes of production, as well as forms of exploitation that capital could use and put to work. Formal subsumption meant that no real change took place in such operations; the worker would perform as in the past, and the only observable difference now was that labor worked for wages. In Grundrisse, Marx provides the formula with economical clarity: “Capital proper does nothing but bring together the mass of hands and instruments which it finds on hand. It agglomerates them under its command” (Marx 1993: 508). At the core of the relationship of capital and history lay the bonding supplied by the enactment of formally subsuming an external world to capital’s inner logic, and its inexhaustible capacity to make history by bringing the outside into its inside, in the form of conjoining elements from the past with the new. It was capital’s logic that made history when it encountered through subsumptive appropriation old and archaic practices that it took over and resituated in the environment of a new mode of production prevailing in the present. “In the course of its evolution, ” Marx wrote, “industrial capital must . . . subjugate these (older) forms and transform them into derived or specific functions of itself. It encounters these older forms in the epoch of its formation and development . . . as antecedents, but not as forms of its life process” (Marx 2000: 468). In the process of incorporating older

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practices and institutions into capital, it was not always the case that it was free from tensions generated by attempts to efface or reconfigure their original historical identity. There was always the probability that practices taken over from past forms of production would be able to retain their original historical identity in a new present and even be mobilized politically for opposition, despite having been retrofitted to capital’s demands or synchronized according to a new system of time accountancy based on labor’s time in producing a commodity. While Marx and Engels discussed the presence of uneven development in Germany in The German Ideology, in Capital Marx generalized it when he wrote “we suffer not only from the living but from the dead. ” But it was in Grundrisse where he offered the earliest expression of the conceptualization of unevenness: “If the simplest category may have existed historically before the more concrete, ” he reasoned, it can still “achieve its full . . . development precisely in a combined form of society while the more concrete category was more fully developed in less developed society” (Marx 1993: 103, my italics). Marx disclosed the silhouette of combined and uneven development whose content consisted of linking incommensurables in his late, draft letters to Russian progressive Vera Zasulich when he advised it was possible to join the still existing Russian commune and capitalism to promote national economic development because they were contemporary with each other. In Capital he made clear that the dire conditions currently experienced in England and Germany exemplified a general development since “the tale told is of you, ” namely all peoples who would encounter capitalism (Marx 1990: 90). Later, in the concluding sections on so-called primitive accumulation, Marx grounded his conception of combined and uneven development in capital’s genesis and the worldly consequences of the history of European commercial wars, staged in the “globe as its battlefield”: The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, in more or less chronological order. These different moments are systematically combined together at the end of seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system and the system of protection. . .They all employ the power of the state. . .to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode. Marx 1990: 915–16

Unevenness combined thus pointed to the reconfiguration of plural societies, to relationality and to a multiplicity of pathways of capital’s historical development that made each manifestation intrinsically worldly. The coming together also brought with it “inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations” (91). What conjoining and combining managed to produce was contemporary non-contemporaneities or non simultaneous non simultaneities indexing different histories and multiplicity of pathways of development. Marx’s vision of unevenness resulted in a new methodological perspective in Grundrisse as it explained the logic of subsumption and its aptitude for expansion into realms of the social formation beyond

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the economic, especially in latecomer societies in Asia and Africa where the spectacle of unevenness appeared visibly more explicit (Jameson 1998: 42). If Marx advised Zasulich not to fear the archaic, it was Lenin and particularly Trotsky who transmuted the conceptual possibilities inherent in the exercise of subsumptive appropriation into a powerful interpretative strategy for analyzing history to authorize a new political strategy. Lenin, according to Michael Löwy, was instrumental in making the idea of “permanent revolution” the “action programme of the Bolsheviks” (Löwy 1981: 59). After experiencing the failed revolution of 1905, Trotsky recognized that Russia’s contemporary historical circumstance undermined the idea of waiting for proper bourgeois revolutionary conditions, and he concluded that expecting the proletarian revolution was no longer a feasible political strategy. Trotsky turned to precisely the current conditions prevailing in Russia that had worked against a successful revolution as the means by which to imagine a “permanent revolution” founded on the conjoining of advanced and backward components of Russian society into the figure of unevenness. He was convinced, as Marx must have been when formulating the rule of formal subsumption, that “a backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquest of advanced countries” (Trotsky 2008: 4). The political strategy of permanent revolution sponsored by Lenin would likewise be based on and mediated by a historicizing strategy of combined and uneven development. While Trotsky cannot take credit for originating the idea or even for naming it, he was able to establish the relationship between the historical analysis premised on unevenness and its political purpose in permanent revolution. Trotsky visualized Russia as standing between “Europe and Asia. ” The East, supplying the “Tartar yoke, ” shaped the state’s structure, while the West was “more threatening” but remained its “teacher. ” At the same time, he saw in Russia’s underdevelopment “the historical privilege of backwardness” in that it could select from advanced society, “skipping” over intermediate stages. Convinced that unevenness was a “general law” of the historic process, Trotsky argued that it is accompanied by another “universal law, ” which might be called “combined development, ” leading to “an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms” (Trotsky 2008: 5). Just as Marx’s logic of formal subsumption constituted a repetitive gesture that implied specific temporal and spatial difference, so Trotsky’s theory said the repetition of forms of development followed by different societies would produce a diversity of results, each reflecting specific local circumstances. For Trotsky, the law of combined and uneven development of “backward countries, ” a mixing of the old and most modern, was expressed in its most finished form in the Russian Revolution (39). In this connection, it should be noted that Lenin and Trotsky also widened the adaptability of the advanced and contemporary to include not only economic innovation but also discoveries from other domains of the capitalist social formation, like politics, law, material culture, arts and literature. The non-economic objects which fell within Lenin’s broadened scope were particularly apparent in those societies which came late to capitalism and in nations like Japan that had escaped colonization but whose modernizing achievements were stamped by combined unevenness. Yet, it should also be added that progressives in these latecomer societies embraced combined and uneven development in order to realize the prospect of permanent

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revolution, not simply to acquire a new method disclosing an historical analysis of their current situation. Hence, Antonio Gramsci’s conception of “passive revolution” combined political legacies of the past with newer classes and forms of practice, and his The Southern Question shadowed the heritage of permanent revolution in his program calling for a coalition of northern industrial workers and southern peasants, yoking capitalism with semi-feudalism. In 1920s Peru, José Carlos Mariátegui constructed the coordinates of a Latin American transformation in his palimpsest composed of Inca communitarianism and modern capitalism as the basis of a national revolution. Mariátegui realized this program by envisioning a spatio-temporal imaginary comprised of the simultaneity of the non simultaneous that would become the lasting figure of combined unevenness everywhere. Japanese thinkers like Yamada Moritaro and Uno Kozo in the 1930s and 40s conceived of a social scenario that joined remnants from Japan’s feudal past to a capitalist modern present, as did Chinese theorists like Wang Yanan and political leaders Mao Ze Dong (Harootunian 2015). In more recent times, the primary emphasis on the political struggle for realizing a permanent revolution, drawing its authority from an historical analysis, has faded and been replaced by the authorizing historical analytic that had informed political action. It is possible to discern a hint of this move in Louis Althusser’s philosophic reflections on the uneven temporal and spatial relationship between the several spheres of the social formation, Michael Löwy’s admirable accounting of the force of combined and uneven development and its contemporary relevance, Nicos Poulantzas’s penetrating political analyses of fascism and the structure of the modern nation state, and in Anievas’s and Nisancioglu’s cogent historical sociology charting the international geopolitical origins of capitalism aimed at explaining “how the West came to rule. ” In the cultural realm there is Fredric Jameson’s brilliantly conceived account of how the mode of cultural revolution in the Chinese Revolution illustrated a heterogeneous composition of elements from prior modes of production. And with the Warwick Research Collective’s book, Combined and Uneven Development, Towards a New Theory of World Literature, there appears an original and persuasive attempt to resituate the production of literature in the context of an uneven world system to demonstrate in both form and content the sign of world literature itself and the recommendation of a pathway leading to a genuine comparative perspective.

References Harootunian, H. (2015), Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Jameson, F. (1998), The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998, London: Verso. Löwy, M. (1981), The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution, London: Verso. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol I, trans. B. Fowkes, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1991), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 3, trans. D. Fernbach, London: Penguin.

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Marx, K. (1993), Grundrisse, trans. with a “Foreword” by M. Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1993. Marx, K. (2000), Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 3, Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Trotsky, L. (2008), History of the Russian Revolution, Vol 3, trans. M. Eastman, Chicago, IL : Haymarket.

Index Abduh, Muhammad, 485 Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamid, 487 Achcar, Gilbert, 489 Acton, H.B., 483 Adorno, Theodor, 51 n.27, 147, 262, 264 n.3, 297, 300, 343, 354, 358–60, 456, 480, 528, 597 Adunis, 487 Aglietta, Michel, 254 Aguilar, Luis, 451 Ahmad, Aijaz, 340 Ahmed, Muzaffar, 495 Ai Siqi, 462 Akihide, Kakehashi, 469, 474, 476 Al-Afghani, Jamal-Din, 485 Al-Banna, Hassan, 485 Al Jabri, Mohammed Abed, 487 Al-Kawakibi, Abd al-Rahman, 485 Altamirano, Carlos, 456 Althusser, Louis, 7 n.5, 10, 15, 22, 43, 45, 60, 79 n.10, 97, 260–1, 269–71, 311, 314, 315, 315 n.1–2, 329, 343, 349, 368, 392, 398, 481–2, 535–6, 569–73, 586, 589, 593, 598, 601, 615, 633 Amazon, Inc., 440 Ambedkar, B.R., 497 Amin, Samir, 455, 489 Anderson, Kevin, 361 n.2, 451, 453 Anderson, Perry, 116 n. 8, 353, 483, 484 n.3 Angola, 505, 506, 507 Angus, Ian, 545 Anievas, Alexander, 609, 633 Antun, Farah, 486 Argentina, 451, 452, 453, 456, 457 Aricó, José, 452–3, 458 n.10 Aristotle, xi, xv, xvi, xviii, xxiii, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 72, 98, 99, 175, 176, 178–9, 180–3, 207, 263, 438, 526 Arrighi, Giovanni, 251, 253–4, 257 n.4, 293, 455

Arruzza, Cinzia, 400 Arthur, Christopher, 43, 50 n.6, 51 n.17, 298, 401 Asad, Talal, 7 n.4, 115 Assad Dynasty (Syria), 489 Australia, 66, 339, 515, 538 Austria, 111, 115, 123, 127, 376, 445, 447, 480 Austrian School, 291, 305, 374–6 Avineri, Schlomo, 302 Awad, Louis, 486 Axelos, Kostas, 624 Bachelette, Michelle, 457 Badiou, Alain, 39, 571–2, 589–90, 592, 594 Baird, Ian, 519 n.2 Bakunin, Mikhail, xxi, 34, 38, 78 n.4, 238 Balibar, Étienne, 23, 139–40, 143, 148, 350, 516, 529, 571, 585, 587, 588–9, 598 Balibar, Renée, 529 Balikrishnan, Gopal, 245 Barad, Karen, 565, 625 Bashkar, Roy, 572 Bauer, Bruno, 22, 113, 115, 192, 232–3, 234–5, 239, 389 Bax, Ernest Belfort, 482 Bayle, Pierre, 136 Bebel, August, 30, 88–9, 238 Bedford, David, 516 Beech, Dave, 260, 525–6, 527 Bellofiore, Riccardo, 42, 47, 49 n.3, 49–50 n.5, 51 n.24 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 489 Benanav, Aaron, 257 n.9, 398, 422 Benaroya, Avraam, 447 Benjamin, Walter, 91, 359–60, 393, 415, 427–8, 456, 530, 598, 622 Benson, Ted, 542 Bentham, Jeremy, 116 n.2, 143, 205, 212, 274, 285, 331 Berlin, Isaiah, 483

635

636 Bernal, J.D., 355, 623, 625 Bernstein, Eduard, 78 n.3, 321, 415, 480 Bhattacharya, Tithi, 401, 580 Blagoev, Dimitar, 447 Blanc, Louis, 88, 223, 225, 226 Blanqui, Auguste, 81, 226, 227 n.3, 234, 412, 414 Bloch, Ernst, 35, 388, 393, 427–8 Bodin, Jean, 110 Boer, Roland, 388 Bogdanov, Alexander, 446, 623, 624 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 78 n.2, 306–7, 376 Bohr, Neils, 625 Bolívar, Simón, 451 Bolivia, 457 Bonapartism/Louis Bonaparte, 33–9 Bondy, Egon, 449 Bookchin, Murray, 542, 543 Bordiga, Amadeo, 471 Borochov, Ber, 447 Bortkiewicz, Ladislaw von, 376 Bosteels, Bruno, 458 n.9 Bottomore, Tom, 147 Bourdieu, Pierre, 392, 456 Brass, Tom, 609 Bratton, Benjamin, 565 Braudel, Fernand, 251, 253–4 Braverman, Harry, 247–8, 421 Brazil, 100, 451, 452, 453, 454, 456, 457 Brecht, Bertolt, 456 Brenner, Robert, 114, 251, 254, 255, 559 Brown, Wendy, 7 n.3, 7 n.5, 260, 384 n.2, 591–2 Bryan, Dick, 249 Bryant, Levi, 564, 565 Brzozowski, Stanisław, 446 Bukharin, Nikolai, 187, 335, 355, 448, 471 Bunker, Stephen, 560 Burke, Edmund, 154 Burkett, Paul, 170, 354, 355, 356, 541, 542–3, 544, 545 Butler, Judith, 115, 550, 551, 552 Cabanis, Pierre Jean George, 328 Cabet, Étienne, 220, 223 Cabral, Amílcar, xxi, 506 Caffentzis, George, 47 Cai Xiang, 463

Index Calvin, John, 110, 111, 415, 438 Canada, 339, 366, 509, 510, 511–13, 515–17, 518–19, 519 n.3, 519 n.4, 520 n.8, 538 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 455, 459 n.21 Carlyle, Thomas, xxv, 149 Carver, Terrell, 29, 30–1, 51 n.17, 163 Castree, Noel, 355, 560 Castro, Fidel, 455 Chadwick, Edwin, 144 Chandra, Bipan, 497, 498 Chattopadhyay, Debiprasad, 498 Chávez, Hugo, 457 Childe, V. Gordon, 623 Chile, 454, 456, 457 China, ix, xv, xxiv, 214, 323, 335, 338, 461–5, 473, 474, 494, 495, 496–7, 499, 501, 505, 507, 559, 560, 623, 633 Chodorow, Nancy, 551 Chōjirō, Kusaka, 468 Churchill, Ward, 519 n.5 CIA/Central Intelligence Agency, 455, 517, 520 n.6 Ciccantell, Paul, 560 Clark, Brett, 356, 517 Clark, John, 543 Clarke, Simon, 200, 397 Clegg, John, 257 n.9, 398 Clement, Wallace, 577 Clover, Joshua, 255, 422 Coburn, Alexander, 355 Cohen, G.A., 59, 61, 306, 483 Colletti, Lucio, 51 n.17, 482 Comintern, 454, 462, 468, 471–2, 476, 494–5, 496, 501, 502 Commoner, Barry, 625 Communards, see Paris Commune Comte, August, xvi, 140–3, 146–9, 613–14, 618 n.1 Congo, Republic of the, 505–6 Considerant, Victor, 221, 225, 226, 227 n.2 Constant, Benjamin, 328 Corbyn, Jeremy, 483 Coronil, Fernando, 457 Cosgrove, Denis, 360–1 Coulthard, Glen, 366–7, 369 n.1, 516–17, 518–19, 519 n.3, 558, 578, 581

Index Cronon, William, 355 Cuba, 451, 452, 454, 455, 456, 505, 506 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, 78 n.8, 79 n.20, 399, 400, 401, 402 n.10, 549 Dange, S.A., 495, 498 Daniels, Roland, 353 Darwin, Charles/Darwinism, xxiv, 95, 96, 99–102, 104, 148, 150 n.8, 167, 353, 359, 375 Darwin, Erasmus, 100 De Angelis, Massimo, 366, 369 n.3 De Beauvoir, Simone, xxiv, 551 De Brosses, Charles, 391 De La Rocha, Zack, 514 De Leon, Daniel, 510 De Staël, Madame, 328 Debord, Guy, 316 n.4, 329, 618 n.4, 624 Debs, Eugene, 510–11 DeLanda, Manuel, 564, 565 Deleuze, Gilles, 51 n.27, 316 n.4, 368, 475, 484 n.1, 564, 565, 572 Della Volpe, Galvano, 482 Democritus, 84, 97, 98, 177, 357 Deng Xiaoping, 461, 465 Derrida, Jacques, 393, 475, 484 n.1, 593, 594 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 328 Diderot, Denis, 97, 221 Dietzgen, Joseph, 189 Djilas, Milovan, 449 Dos Santos, Theotônio, 455 Draper, Hal, 585 Du Bois, W.E.B., 608 Dühring, Eugen, 165, 195 n.5, 219 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 520 n.6 Durkheim, Émile, 143, 145, 146–9, 613, 614 Echeverría, Bolívar, 457 Egypt, 176, 486–7, 489, 490 n.2, 503 Einstein, Albert, 167 Eitarō, Noro, 469, 472 Eliot, George, 149 Elsipogtog First Nation, 520 n.8 Elson, Diane, 245, 256–7 n.3, 308 Engels, Friedrich, x, xiii, xiv, xix, xxiii, 15, 21–2, 27–31, 39, 41, 58–9, 83–4, 87–8, 95–102, 108–9, 111, 113–14, 116,

637 117 n.16, 128–9, 130–1, 140–2, 144–5, 149, 149 n.1, 150 n.5, 154, 157, 163–72, 178, 185, 187, 189, 190–2, 194, 199, 202, 219–26, 227 n.3, 231, 234–6, 238, 259, 261, 267–8, 299, 319, 322–4, 330, 335, 339, 353, 354, 358, 382, 384 n.1, 387, 392, 399, 402 n.7, 411–15, 426–9, 451–3, 462, 480, 486, 496, 509, 543–5, 569, 588, 600, 607, 614, 615, 623–4 England, 65–6, 97, 98, 100, 101, 109, 110, 130, 144–5, 150 n.4, 153, 164, 209, 211–12, 236, 237, 238, 335–9, 452, 608, 629, 631 Epicurus/Epicureanism, xxiii, 23, 84, 97–104, 140, 175–9, 183, 357 Erasmus, 186 Ethiopia, 505, 506–7 Eubulides, 187 Faletto, Enzo, 455 Federici, Silvia, 322, 365–7, 399–401, 423, 441 Feenberg, Andrew, 624 Féher, Ferenc, 450 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 456 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 3–4, 7 n.1, 9–10, 15, 16–17, 18, 22, 95, 102, 113, 136, 137–8, 177, 192–3, 221–4, 235, 298, 301, 330, 359, 387, 389, 587 Firestone, Shulamith, 166 Firth, Raymond, 146 Foster, John Bellamy, 167, 170–2, 354–5, 356–7, 517, 541–4, 581, 622 Fourier, Charles, 29, 140, 219–21, 225–7, 234, 303, 426, 429 n.2, 549 France, 5, 15, 82, 88, 96, 97–8, 100, 109, 110, 114, 115–16, 122, 126–7, 146, 199, 222, 223–4, 225–6, 416 n.8, 462, 481, 529, 589 Frank, Andre Gunder, 455, 558 Frankfurt School, 10, 262, 263, 264 n.4, 354, 358–9, 475, 480–3, 569, 597 Franklin, Benjamin, 208 Freedman, Carl, 428 Freud, Sigmund/Freudian, xiii–xiv, 36, 148, 150 n.5, 314, 316 n.3, 458 n.9, 475, 597–9, 601–2 Fromm, Erich, 597

638 Gaddafi, Muammar, 489 Gallagher, John, 206 García Linera, Álvaro, 457 Germany, x, 4–7, 16, 23, 28, 30–1, 48, 58–9, 61, 78 n.3, 87–9, 110–13, 115, 121–31, 133–5, 137–40, 144, 149, 164, 165, 167, 175, 189, 196 n.9, 199, 200, 201, 221–3, 224, 227 n.4, 231–9, 255, 268, 298, 340, 355, 382, 384, 389, 413, 445, 486, 479–80, 482, 494, 549, 597, 614, 622, 631 Ghana, 503, 504 Gibson-Graham, J.K., 560–1 Giddens, Anthony, 543–4 Glacken, Clarence, 354 Glick, Mark, 254 Godden, Richard, 248 Gold Coast, 503 Gonzalez, Maya, 400, 402 n.9 Gorō, Hani, 469 Gould, Stephen Jay, 101, 355 Gramsci, Antonio, viii, x, 84, 316 n.4, 329, 343–4, 354, 358, 392–3, 415, 456–7, 469, 481–2, 483, 484 n.3, 499, 535–6, 564, 571, 573–4 Grandin, Greg, 454 Grossberg, Larry, 533, 538 Grossman, Henryk, 51 n.19, 292 Grün, Karl, 224, 225, 235 Guattari, Felix, 51 n.27, 316 n.4, 368, 475, 565, 572 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” xxi, 455 Guinea, 503, 504, 505, 506 Guinea-Bissau 505, 506 Guo Da Li, 463 Haeckel, Ernst, 361 n.1 Habermas, Jürgen, 51 n.27, 115, 480 Habib, Irfan, 497, 498 Haiven, Max, 248–9 Hajime, Kawakami, 469, 471 Hales, John, 493 Halevy, Elie, 205 Halim, Abdul, 495 Hall, Stuart, 272 n.1, 328, 329, 331, 483, 534–7, 539 n.1 Hamilton, Alexander, 207 Hanafi, Hassan, 487 Haraway, Donna, 625

Index Hardayal, Lala, 493 Hardt, Michael, 270, 515, 516, 572 Harman, Graham, 565 Harney, George Julian, 235, 236 Harrington, Michael, 511 Harvey, David, 35–6, 293, 354, 364, 543, 557, 559, 581, 608 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people, 516, 518 Hayek, Friedrich, xix, 291 Hayles, N. Katherine, 565 Hecht, Susanna, 355 Hegel, G.W.F./Hegelianism, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxiii, xxiv, 3–7, 10, 16, 21–3, 44–6, 51 n.17, 59, 65–6, 90–1, 95–7, 99, 102, 115, 124–8, 129, 131, 134–8, 140, 154, 164, 170, 175–8, 185–96, 203, 205, 221–2, 225, 232–5, 243, 256 n.2, 260, 267–9, 297–8, 300, 312, 323, 328, 341, 343, 354, 356–9, 389, 390, 405–6, 438–40, 446, 448, 453, 470, 480–2, 484 n.2, 564, 570–2, 586–9, 601, 607, 614–8, 622 Heidegger, Martin, 268, 475, 484 n.1, 593, 594, 624 Heinrich, Michael, 47–8, 50 n.8, 50 n.9, 51 n.25, 163, 295 n.3, 396–7, 401 n.2, 616, 618 n.4 Heller, Ágnes, 450 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 95, 96, 158 Hensley, Nathan, 145, 150 n.4 Heraclitus, 186 Herod, Andrew, 559 Hess, Moses, 224, 227 n.2, 233, 234 Hilferding, Rudolf, 307, 335 Hill, Christopher, 482 Hiroshi, Iwata, 474–5 Hitoshi, Yamakawa, 468, 469, 471, 472 Hobsbawm, Eric, 31, 43, 44, 299, 385 n.4, 482, 613 Hoggart, Richard, 534, 535 Honduras, 517 Honneth, Axel, 263, 264 n.4 Horkheimer, Max, 262, 264 n.3, 316 n.4, 354, 358–9, 480, 597 Hotho, Heinrich, 192 Hughes, Jonathan, 171 Hume, David, 97, 98, 206, 618 n.2 Hunt, Tristram, 164, 166–7 Hyman, Henry, 482

Index Iber, Patrick, 455 Ilyenkov, Evald, 449 Inca, 452, 633 Inglehart, Ronald, 541 International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), 81, 82, 130, 231, 236–9, 482, 493, 510 Iran, 488 Iraq, 488 Ireland, 127, 128, 214, 232, 238, 338, 339, 608 Iroquois Confederacy peoples, 516, 518 Itsurō, Sakisaka, 467 Jaeggi, Rahel, 262, 263, 264 n.4–5 James, C.L.R., 322, 558 James, Selma, 399, 402 n.10, 551 Jameson, Fredric, 248–9, 264 n.2, 269–70, 299, 301, 343–5, 427–8, 429 n.1, 631–2, 633 Japan, 255, 461, 467–77, 494, 558, 629, 632, 633 Jones, Ernest, 235, 236 Jordan, 489 Jorn, Asger, 624 Joshi, P.C., 493–4, 496, Jun, Tosaka, 469, 475 Justo, Juan B., 452 Kan’ichi, Kuroda, 474, 476 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 134, 176, 186, 195 n.1, 205, 232, 244, 256 n.2, 357, 412, 416 n.4, 480, 482, 569, 570, 599, 615 Karatani, Kojin, 35, 39, 270, 475–6, 601–2 Katsumi, Umemoto, 474 Kautsky, Karl, 41, 45, 78 n.3, 104, 139–40, 163, 321, 354, 355, 358, 411, 413, 415, 480, 615–16 Kazuo, Fukumoto, 469, 471 Keita, Modibo, 504 Kelles-Krauz, Kazimierz, 447 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesian, xix, xx, 91, 200, 205, 207, 214–15, 290–2, 371, 375, 421 Khrushchev, Nikita, 496–7 Kila, Salama, 489 Kirchner, Néstor, 457 Kliman, Andrew, 201, 376, 422

639 Kōhachirō, Takahashi, 476 Kōichirō, Suzuki, 474, 475 Kołakowski, Leszek, 446, 447, 483 Kolslontai, Alexandra, 447 Korsch, Karl, 484 n.2, 569 Kosambi, D.D., 497, 498 Kosík, Karel, 45, 49 n.2, 50 n.15, 449 Kōzō, Uno, 469, 474 Kristol, Irving, 79 n.21 Kuusinen, Otto, 472 Kuwait, 488 Kyūichi, Tokuda, 473 Labriola, Antonio, x-xi, xi n.8, 481 Lacan, Jacques/Lacanian, 36, 314, 315 n.2, 316 n.3, 450, 475, 564, 572, 598–9, 600–3 LaCapra, Dominick, 35, 38 Laclau, Ernesto, 456–7 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 593–4 Lafargue, Paul, 238, 451 Lange, Elena Louisa, 49 n.5 Lao, People’s Democratic Republic, 515, 519 n.2 Laroui, Abdallah, 487–8 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 88–91, 101, 178, 236–7, 406, 479 Latour, Bruno, 564, 565, 567 Lazarus, Sylvain, 592 Lecourte, Dominique, 529 Lefebvre, Henri, 139, 147, 355, 358, 558 Lefort, Claude, 385 n.3, 585, 593 Lenin, V.I./Leninism, ix, xii, 48, 61, 64, 78 n.4, 83–4, 109, 139–40, 187, 235, 239, 260, 264, 320–1, 323, 329, 335, 344, 358, 387, 411, 414, 415, 446–7, 455, 461, 462, 480, 486, 494–5, 496–7, 501, 505, 506, 511, 558, 564, 571, 586, 588–9, 592, 594, 614–16, 624, 629, 632 Leroux, Pierre, 221, 224 Levins, Richard, 355 Lewes, George Henry, 149 Lewontin, Richard, 355 Li Da, 462 Li Dazhao, 462 Liebig, Justus von, 95, 96, 103, 170–1 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 30, 88, 89, 238 Lincoln, Abraham, 510 Linebaugh, Peter, 401

640 List, Friedrich, 207, 214 Lohoff, Ernst, 48, 420, 422, 423 London, Jack, 79 n.19 Lotta Femminista, 399 Löwy, Michael, 544–5, 582, 632, 633 Lucraft, Benjamin, 238 Lucretius, 97, 98, 100, 101–2, 357 Lukács, Georg/György, 10, 323, 329, 343, 344–5, 356, 415, 447–8, 450, 456, 475, 480, 481, 482, 483, 527–8, 569, 578, 616, 618 n.3, 624 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 457 Luxemburg, Rosa, xxi, 293, 323, 335, 354, 358, 364, 367, 397, 411, 447, 480, 558, 581 Lyell, Benton, 95–6, 100, 101, 359 Machel, Samora, 506 Macherey, Pierre, 529, 571 Mackinnon, Catherine, 551 Malm, Andreas, 153, 160–1, 171, 545, 558 Malthus, Thomas/Malthusianism, 80 n.22, 96, 101, 144, 148, 149, 150 n.8, 155, 205, 211–12, 215, 354, 373 Mandel, Ernest, 201, 307–8, 375, 395 Mandeville, Bernard, 205 Mann, Geoff, 560 Mao, Zedong/Maoism, 449–50, 456, 463–5, 473, 496, 497, 499, 501, 505, 589, 592, 633 Marcuse, Herbert, 10, 51 n.15, 316 n.4, 354, 356, 439, 480, 497, 597, 617, 624 Marheineke, Philipp Konrad, 232 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 453–4, 455, 633 Marković, Svetozar, 446 Markús, György, 450 Marshall, Alfred, 202, 375 Martí, José, 452, 455 Martineau, Harriet, 149 Marx, Jenny (Jenny von Westphalen), 58–9, 126–7, 221, 232, 233, 234 Mason, Paul, 312, 313, 314 Massey, Doreen, 559 Matin, Kamran, 609 Mayhew, Henry, 144, 145, 149 McArthur, General Douglas, 473 McDonnell, John, 483 McLennan, Gregor, 36, 37 Means, Russell, 520

Index Medem, Vladimir, 447 Meek, Ronald, 200, 202, 208, 209, 213 Mehring, Franz, 84, 330 Mexico, 452, 453, 456, 469 Mezzadra , Sandro, 366, 367 Michel, Louise, 85 Midnight Notes, 399 Mies, Maria, 441 Miéville, China, 428–9 Mikkola, Mari, 550 Mi’kmaq First Nation, 520 n.8 Mill, James, 19, 116 n.2, 303 Mill, John Stuart, xii, xxiv, 116 n.2, 140, 142, 144, 166, 180, 187, 202, 470, 577 Millar, John, 203 Millet, Kate, 166, 550 Milton, John, 261–2, 526–7, 528 Mises, Ludwig von, 291 Miskito people, 517 Mitchell, Timothy, 244 Mohawk people, 518 Mondlane, Eduardo, 506 Montag, Warren, 571 Moore, Jason, 355, 356, 545, 560, 625 Moore, Samuel, 29–30, 256 n.1 Morales, Evo, 457 More, Sir Thomas, 127, 425 Moretti, Franco, 528 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 101, 116, 144–5, 166, 358, 359 Moritarō, Yamada, 469 Morris, William, 358, 482 Moseley, Fred, 47, 397, 402 n.4 Mouffe, Chantal, 457 Mozambique, 505, 506 Mubarak, Hosni, 489 Mukherji, Abani, 495 Munck, Ronaldo, 456, 458 n.17 Muruwwa, Husayn, 487 Musa, Salama, 486 Musto, Marcello, 49 n.1, 49 n.3, 130 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 593, 594 Napoleon, 82, 110–12, 114, 123, 127, 211, 214, 328, 451 Narayan, Jayaprakash, 495–6 Nasser, Jamal Abdel, 487, 490 n.2, 503 Needham, Joseph, 355, 623, 625

Index Negri, Antonio, 43–4, 51 n.24, 254–5, 270, 347, 441, 515, 516, 572, 586, 624 Nicaragua, 454, 456, 517 Nicholas I, 233 Nicholson, Linda, 550 Nicolaus, Martin, 42–3, 49 n.3, 50 n.6–7, 214 Nielsen, Brett, 366, 367 Nisancioglu, Kerem, 633 Nisbet, Robert, 613 Nkrumah, Kwame, 503–4 Nyerere, Julius, 503–5 Oakley, Ann, 550 O’Connor, James, 354, 355–6, 542, 545 n.3 O’Connor, Martin, 542 Odger, George, 237, 238 O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 499 Owen, Robert, 19, 29, 219–20, 227 Paci, Enzo, 249 Paris Commune/Communards, 81, 82–3, 84–5, 226, 231, 322, 413, 481, 587 Pashukanis, Yevgeny, 448 Pecqueur, Constantin, 224 Penguin Books, 43, 49 n.3, 50 n.6, 79 n.9 Perlo, Victor, 609 Peru, 451, 453, 454, 633 Piketty, Thomas, 139 Pillai, Ramkrishna, 493–4 Pinochet, Augusto, 456 Plamenatz, John, 328, 330, 483 Plato/Platonism, xv, xxv, 15, 17, 19, 98, 175–6, 183, 186, 244, 360, 375, 438, 588 Plekhanov, Georgy, 104, 187, 446–7, 448, 450, 468 Plotinus, 186 Polanyi, Karl, 211, 356 Poovey, Mary, 147, 150 n.6 Popper, Karl, 483 Postone, Moishe, xxvi, 48, 51 n.27, 245, 247, 341, 616 Poulantzas, Nicos, 320, 481, 581, 585, 586, 591, 593, 633 Power of Women Collective, 399 Préciado, Paul B., 625 Preve, Constanzo, 140 Propp, Vladimir, 449

641 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 42, 58, 81, 129, 130, 142, 185, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 234, 235, 236, 365, 381, 382, 406 Prussia, xii, 41, 61, 82, 88, 89, 107, 109–16, 117 n.9, 117 n.14, 122–6, 130, 194, 221, 225, 233, 236, 339 Pulteney, William, 209 Qu Qiubai, 462 Quebec, 511–12 Qutb, Sayyid, 485 Rabinbach, Anson, 157, 158–9 Rafferty, Michael, 249 Rama people, 517–18 Ramos-Martínez, Alejandro, 372 Rancière, Jacques, 263, 586, 588 Raphael, 527 Read, Jason, 368 Reich, Wilhelm, 597 Reus-Smit, Christian, 117 n.12 Ricardo, David/Ricardian economics, 9, 42, 43, 58, 66, 149, 200, 201–2, 206, 210–15, 222, 243, 245, 273, 276, 303, 305–6, 373–5, 397, 431, 577, 589, 614 n.1 Rivolta Femminile, 399 Roberts, John, 247 Roberts, William Clare, 130, 230, 365 Robinson, Joan, 306–7, 482 Robinson, Ronald, 206 Rodbertus, Johann, 88, 406 Roemer, John, 78 n.7, 306, 484 n.4 Rosdolsky, Roman, 42, 43–4, 49 n.3, 50 n.11, 289 Ross, Kristin, 84, 226 Rostow, William, 455 Routley, Val, 543 Roy, M.N., 469, 494–6 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 520 n.8 Rubin, I.I., 448, 565 Ruge, Arnold, 127, 192, 222, 223–4, 227 n.2, 232–4, 297, 429 Russia/Soviet Union, ix, 10, 31, 43, 64, 84, 109, 110, 111, 116 n.8, 127, 163, 167, 214–15, 236, 269, 322, 338, 355, 358, 384, 401, 407, 412, 445–50, 453, 454–5, 462–3, 468, 469, 470, 476, 482–3, 486, 494, 495–7, 497, 501–2, 504–7, 511, 537, 549, 560, 569, 623, 629, 631–2

642 Saint-Simon, Henri/Saint-Simonian, 29, 140–4, 146–8, 219–21, 224, 303 Saito, Kohei, 50 n.13, 544 Saleh, Ali Abdullah, 489 Samalin, Zachary, 145, 150 n.5 Samezō, Kuruma, 469 Sanders, Bernie, 511 Sandinistas, 456, 517–18, 520 n.6 Sanzō, Nosaka, 473 Sarlo, Beatriz, 456, 459 n.24 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxiv, 45, 192, 481, 572 Saxton, Alexander, 609 Say, Jean-Baptiste/Say’s Law, 201, 205, 206, 212, 214–15, 222, 276, 289–92, 371, 373, 375 Schmidt, Alfred, 170, 354–7 Schmitt, Carl, 593 Schmitt, Richard, 169 Schneiderman, William, 31 Scholz, Roswitha, 401 Schwarz, Roberto, 456, 459 n.25 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 168 Sékou Touré, Ahmed, 503–5 Sen, Katayama, 468 Senior, Nassau William, 76, 244 Shaikh, Anwar, 294, 304–6, 374, 402 n.3 Sharma, R.S., 497, 498 Sharpe, Sue, 551 Shigeki, Toyama, 476 Shumail, Shibli, 486 Shusui, Kōtoku, 486 Simpson, Audra, 518 Sinclair, Upton, 513 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 367, 607 Šmeral, Bohumír, 447 Smith, Adam, ix, xix, 9, 42, 44, 46, 66, 76, 140, 149, 202–4, 205–6, 209–16, 222, 227, 243, 245, 273, 278, 289, 303, 363–4, 372–3, 375, 397, 431, 438, 577, 614, 618 n.2 Smith, Neil, 354, 355, 356, 559 Smith, Patty, 79 n.19 Smith, Tony, 47–8, 51 n.25, 309 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 247–8, 598, 599–600 Somoza DeBayle, Anastasio “Tachito,” 517 Soper, Kate, 543 Sorel, George, 60, 226 South Africa, 501–2, 507

Index Soviet Union, see Russia Spaulding, Daniel, 526 Spencer, Herbert, 101 143, 145–9 Spinoza, B., 16, 45, 136, 196 n.6, 269, 571–2, 597 Spivak, Gayatri, 345–5, 499 Sraffa, Piero, 305–6 Stalin, Joseph/Stalinism, ix, xx, 43, 270–1, 449, 462, 486, 496–7, 535, 569, 589, 597 Starosta, Guido, 49 Stirner, Max, 22, 192, 382–3 Stoller, Robert, 551 Stone, Alison, 550 Streek, Wolfgang, 315 Subaltern Studies, 498–9 Sumu people, 517–18 Surplus Club, 257 n.7 Sutherland, Zoe, 401 Sweezy, Paul, 78 n.7, 376, 397 Syria, 488–9, 503 Szabó, Ervin, 446 Taiwan, 515 Taussig, Michael, 7 n.4 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 609 Thapar, Romila, 497–8 Thatcher, Margaret/Thatcherism, 327, 423, 536, 542 Théorie Communiste (TC), 255, 324, 398 Therborn, Göran, xxv Thomas, Paul, 167, 168–9, 236, 573 Thompson, E.P., 78 n.1, 324, 482, 534–5 Tizini, Tayeb, 487 Tomšič, Samo, 316 n.3 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 142 Tristan, Flora, 223–4 Tronti, Mario, 47, 51 n.24, 441, 586 Trotsky, Leon/Trotskyism, 239, 414–15, 416 n.9, 448, 463, 476, 518, 559, 629, 632 Truku people, 515 Tsunao, Inomata, 469, 472 Tsutomu, Ōuchi, 475 Tucker, Josiah, 206–7 Tunisia, 489 USSR, see Russia Varafakis, Yannis, 483 Vazquez, Tabaré, 457

Index Venezuela, 457 Vincke, Georg von, 194 Vishmidt, Marina, 401 Vogel, Lise, 399–400, 402 n.7, 422 Voloshinov, Valentin, 448 Vygotsky, Lev, 448, 563 Wages for Housework, 339–400 Wainwright, Joel, 560 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 66, 337 Walker, Gavin, 366, 473, 475 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 455, 558 Wang Yanan, 463, 633 Warwick Research Collective (WReC), 633 Wataru, Hiromatsu, 475 Weber, Max, 107–9, 146, 147, 375, 613–14 Weitling, Wilhelm, 227 n.2, 235–6 Wendling, Amy, 160, 622 Wertkritik, 48

643 Westphalen, Jenny von, (Jenny Marx), 58–9, 126–7, 221, 232, 233, 234 Williams, Raymond, 150 n.8, 264 n.1, 328–9, 342–4, 456, 483, 534–5 Wilson, Harold, 482 Wilson, Peter, 110, 114, 116 n.6–7, 117 n.11 Wolfe, Patrick, 515–16 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 44–5, 400, 579, 591–2, 608 Worster, Donald, 355 Xi Jinping, 461 Yemen, 263, 488–9 Yukichi, Fukuzawa, 470 Zambia, 505 Zapatistas, 456 Zasulich, Vera, 384, 385 n.3, 446, 631–2 Žižek, Slavoj, 450, 572, 598, 600–1

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