By: Kohei Saito*
Recent years
have seen the development of a fresh area of research into Marx’s critique of
political economy, based on his previously unpublished economic manuscripts and
notebooks, which have been made newly available in the updated edition of the
complete works of Marx and Engels, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA).1
Lucia Pradella published the first detailed analysis in English of Marx’s London
Notebooks, and Brill’s Historical Materialism book series recently celebrated
its hundredth volume with a translation of Marx’s original manuscript for
volume 3 of Capital, based on the new MEGA edition. The same series also
published Heather Brown’s Marx on Gender, which drew extensively on his
late notebooks.2 And earlier this year, the second, expanded edition
of Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and
Non-Western Societies appeared. The first edition of Anderson’s book,
published in 2010, inaugurated this new trend in Marxist studies, and it
remains among the most important achievements in the field.
The book’s
title can be read in two ways: it not only addresses Marx’s analysis of
marginalized (i.e., peripheral) societies under capitalism, but also the
marginalized texts of Marx’s own work, such as his newspaper articles, the
French edition of Capital, and, most importantly, his research
notebooks. Six years on, this latter sense of “marginality” is gradually but
surely changing, due in no small part to Anderson’s pioneering work. Due to his
careful study of Marx’s marginal writings and notebooks, the book has opened
both a new path for research and a strong tool to counter familiar criticisms
of Marx’s “productivism” and “economic determinism.” Anderson and other
scholars have persuasively shown that the depth and diversity of Marx’s
critique of capitalism extended to such supposedly neglected areas as race,
gender, and ecology.
In the second
edition, Anderson finds the original task of the book fulfilled: to “undercut
the fashionable argument that Marx was fundamentally a Eurocentric thinker
trapped in the narrow frameworks of his time, the mid-nineteenth century, and
thus largely impervious to contemporary issues like race, gender, and
colonialism” (vii). Critics have long claimed that Marx’s theory assumed, with
a mixture of optimism and condescension, that the development of productive
forces in Western European countries would be the driving factor in a
historical progress toward socialism, even if it produced misery and
destruction in peripheral, colonized societies. Marx was the target of repeated
criticism by postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said, who accused both Marx
and orthodox Marxism of a naïve, orientalist affirmation of the “great
civilizing influence of capital,” which effectively ignored the cruel reality
of the colonized countries.
Anderson
concedes that Marx, from the Communist Manifesto through his New York
Daily Tribune articles on India in the early 1850s, was still trapped by
the prevailing ethnocentrism of the time, and did believe uncritically in the
progressive character of capitalist domination in the colonies (237). Thus it
is not wrong to accuse Marx, in his earlier writings, of imposing a
Eurocentric, unilinear vision of history on non-Western countries, though even
these works include descriptions of British domination as “barbarism” (238).
However, as
Anderson demonstrates, Marx’s critique of capitalism grew far more subtle and
sophisticated as a result of his theoretical and practical engagement with the
Taiping Rebellion, the Second Opium War, the Indian Rebellion, and the American
abolitionist movement against slavery. The decisive change came in the late
1860s, when Marx voiced his unequivocal support for Irish independence. In an
1869 letter to Engels, he wrote: “The English working class will never
accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied
in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social
movement in general”.3 Marx not only argued that the English working
class could not entrust the eventual emancipation of their Irish counterparts
to the development and expansion of British capitalism; he maintained that
English workers could not liberate themselves as long as they remained
reluctant to take action against British colonialism. Instead of passively
waiting for emancipation, Marx argued, the working classes of both England and
Ireland had to take up the Irish cause as a central issue.
In the
following years, Marx went on to study non-Western and pre-capitalist
societies, efforts that are documented in his notebooks of 1879–82. In what is
probably the book’s most original and important chapter, Anderson carefully
examines these little-known notebooks, arguing for the later Marx’s nuanced,
multilateral understanding of history. He marshals impressive evidence in this
regard, uncovering the background to Marx’s famous admission—first in a letter
to Vera Zasulich and later in the preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto—that
his analysis in Capital was “explicitly restricted to the countries
of Western Europe.” Decades before the Bolshevik Revolution, Marx even
recognized the possibility of a unique Russian path to socialism.
Thanks to the
unique combination of circumstances in Russia, the rural commune, already
established on a national scale, may gradually shake off its primitive
characteristics and directly develop as an element of collective production on
a national scale. Precisely because it is contemporaneous with capitalist
production, the rural commune may appropriate for itself all the positive
achievements and this without undergoing its frightful vicissitudes.4
Since Marx
published little after the first volume of Capital appeared in 1867, it
is often difficult to understand fully the theoretical depth of these later
writings, which are often scattered and fragmentary. However, by tracing the
intellectual and political themes in the late notebooks, Anderson demonstrates
their vital importance for understanding Marx’s changing ideas toward non-Western
socialist revolutions. After intensively studying Russian village communes and
other non-Western and pre-capitalist societies, through works by Lewis Henry
Morgan, Maksim Kovalevsky, and Robert Sewell, Marx came to recognize the
“natural vitality” of existing pre-capitalist communes that could serve as a
social basis for future revolutions.5 The contradictions of
capitalism manifest themselves most clearly when the violent forces of economic
development confront the natural vitality of other social formations outside
capitalism. This is why the “margins” became so vital for the late Marx, as
David Norman Smith also points out: “Now he needed to know concretely, in exact
cultural detail, what capital could expect to confront in its global extension.
So it should not be surprising that Marx chose to investigate non-Western
societies at precisely this point. Euro-American capital was speeding into a
world dense with cultural difference. To understand this difference, and the
difference it makes for capital, Marx needed to know as much as possible
about non-capitalist social structures”.6
Of course,
Anderson rightly emphasizes that natural vitality alone is not a sufficient
condition for revolution, which also requires “an outside subjective factor, a
revolution on the part of the Western working classes” (235). Still, it is
clear that Marx believed that “a Russian revolution could lead to a ‘communist
development.’ Russia would not need to go through an independent capitalist
development to reap the fruits of modern socialism, provided that its
revolution became the spark for a working class uprising in the more democratic
and technologically developed world.” This is a more radical and complicated
image of socialist revolution than the rather unilinear view of history that
Marx held in the 1850s. Anderson concludes that Marx would not restrict this
theory to Russian village communes, but would apply similar logic to other
colonized societies (236).
Anderson’s
book received global recognition, and has been translated into Persian,
Japanese, and French (Chinese and Indonesian translations are also in
preparation). The expanded edition includes a new preface, in which Anderson
offers a succinct summary of further excerpts from Marx’s late writings that
will be published for the first time in MEGA IV/27. According to Anderson, Marx
in the 1870s and ’80s was reading not only about the Russian and Indian
communes, but also ancient Rome, through the works of classicists such as Karl
Bücher, Ludwig Friedländer, Ludwig Lange, and Rudolf von Jhering, with
particular attention to issues such as class, social status, and gender, from
the city’s founding through the late empire. Even in these excerpts, Anderson
argues, Marx did not simply trace a general, universal history, but was
strongly interested in non-capitalist societies in the midst of “transition,”
both in his own time and earlier, especially with regard to “a possible
transition to capitalism” (xi). Marx studied various concrete historical cases
with the aim of understanding whether the transformation of these earlier
non-capitalist forms under the influence of the capitalist mode of production
had resulted in strong resistance or in obedience to the dominant classes. Thus
these late notebooks confirm and extend Anderson’s contention that the late
Marx never sought to establish a universal law of history: “Most importantly,
these late writings and notes on Russia, India, and ancient Rome show that Marx
was interested in a deep and specific analysis of each society in its own
right, rather than any general formulas applicable to all societies across the
globe, regardless of sociohistorical specificity” (xi).
In addition to
these archival discoveries, Anderson’s new preface also acknowledges his
intellectual debt to his mentor, Raya Dunayevskaya, who first recognized the
importance of Marx’s late notebooks in the 1980s.7 However,
despite the extensive discussion by earlier Marxists going back to the
1970s—including in the pages of Monthly Review—of Marx’s changing views
on imperialism and ecology from the 1860s on, Anderson still gives only limited
attention to these prior contributions in the new edition of his book. In
his later years, after moving away from an optimistic productivism, Marx’s
research expanded to include not only pre-capitalist and non-Western societies,
but also natural science.
Marx defined
labor as a mediation of metabolic interchange between human beings and nature,
and analyzed how different historical “forms” of labor have altered the entire
social and natural metabolism.8 Marx’s theory of metabolism deals
with the problem of “metabolic rift” in capitalism, inspired by Justus von
Liebig, leading him to spend more and more time studying natural sciences after
1868. Further, Marx’s concept of metabolism addressed different ways of
organizing the transhistorical metabolism between humanity and nature. He
recognized that various systems of labor and property in non-European and
pre-capitalist societies have employed distinct processes of metabolism between
human beings and nature. In addition to the metabolic rift in Liebig’s sense,
the disturbance of social and natural metabolism also occurred under the
radical “transition” of traditional village communes after their confrontation
with capitalism—the transition that is the focus of a significant section of
Anderson’s book. Thus, Marx’s theory of metabolism could contribute to a still
more comprehensive framework for understanding his late writings, but this
connection has still to be examined more thoroughly in the future.
Nevertheless, Anderson’s work will remain an invaluable point of reference in
the ongoing reconstruction of Marx’s unfinished project of the critique of
political economy.{Ђ}
Notes
- The MEGA project has now been extended until 2030.
It was also recently announced that the third and fourth sections of the
MEGA, comprising the letters and notebooks, will be primarily published in
a digital format. This free, online model seems likely to attract a wider
audience for these vital texts. The MEGAdigital website provides a
promising example: http://telota.bbaw.de/mega.
- Lucia Pradella,Globalization and the Critique
of Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2015); Kohei Saito,
“Marx’s Ecological Notebooks,”Monthly Review67, no. 9
(February 2016), 25–42. Heather Brown,Marx on Gender and the Family(Chicago:
Haymarket, 2013).
- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,Collected
Works, vol. 43 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 398.
- Teodor Shanin, ed.,Late Marx and the Russian
Road: Marx and the ‘Peripheries’ of Capitalism (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1983), 105.
- Shanin,Late Marx and the Russian Road,
119.
- David Norman Smith, “Accumulation and the Clash of
Cultures: Marx’s Ethnology in Context,”Rethinking Marxism 14,
no. 4 (2002), 73–83, 79.
- Raya Dunayevskaya,Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s
Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (Brighton:
Harvester, 1982), 176.
- Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 1 (London:
Penguin, 1976), 133.
*Kohei Saito is a visiting scholar at UC-Santa Barbara and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow.
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