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Month: October 2021
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Marx e o colonialismo (Interview)
I. The Importance of the Development of Capitalism in Marx’s Early Political Works
The conviction that expansion of the capitalist mode of production was a basic prerequisite for the birth of communist society runs through the whole of Marx’s oeuvre. In one of his first public lectures, which he gave at the German Workers’ Association in Brussels and incorporated into a preparatory manuscript entitled “Wages,” Marx spoke of a “‘positive aspect of capital,’ of large-scale industry, of free competition, of the world market” (1976, 436). To the workers who had come to listen to him, he said:
I do not need to explain to you in detail how without these production relations neither the means of production—the material means for the emancipation of the proletariat and the foundation of a new society—would have been created, nor would the proletariat itself have taken to the unification and development through which it is really capable of revolutionizing the old society and itself (Marx 1976, 436).
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, he argued with Engels that revolutionary attempts by the working class during the final crisis of feudal society had been doomed to failure, “owing to the then-undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the material conditions for its emancipation, conditions [. . .] that could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone” (Marx and Engels 1976, 514). Nevertheless, he recognized more than one merit in that period: not only had it “put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations” (486); “for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it [had] substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” (487). Marx and Engels did not hesitate to declare that “the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part” (486). By making use of geographical discoveries and the nascent world market, it had “given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” (488).
Moreover, in the course of barely a century, “the bourgeoisie [had] created more colossal and more massive productive forces than all preceding generations together” (489). This had been possible once it had “subjected the country to the rule of the towns” and rescued “a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life” so widespread in European feudal society (488). More important still, the bourgeoisie had “forged the weapons that bring death to itself” and the human beings to use them: “the modern working class, the proletarians” (490); these were growing at the same pace at which the bourgeoisie was expanding. For Marx and Engels, “the advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association” (496).
Marx developed similar ideas in The Class Struggles in France, arguing that only the rule of the bourgeoisie “tears up the roots of feudal society and levels the ground on which a proletarian revolution is alone possible” (Marx 1978, 56). Also in the early 1850s, when commenting on the principal political events of the time, he further theorized the idea of capitalism as a necessary prerequisite for the birth of a new type of society. In one of the reviews, he wrote hand in hand with Engels for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, he argued that in China “in eight years the calico bales of the English bourgeoisie [had] brought the oldest and least perturbable kingdom on earth to the eve of a social upheaval, which, in any event, is bound to have the most significant results for civilization” (Marx and Engels 1978, 267).
Three years later, in “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” he asserted: “England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia” (Marx 1979a, 217–218). He had no illusions about the basic features of capitalism, being well aware that the bourgeoisie had never “effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation” (221). But he was also convinced that world trade and the development of the productive forces of human beings, through the transformation of material production into “scientific domination of natural agencies,” were creating the basis for a different society: “bourgeois industry and commerce [would] create these material conditions of a new world” (222).
Marx’s views on the British presence in India were amended a few years later, in an article for the New York Tribune on the Sepoy rebellion, when he resolutely sided with those “attempting to expel the foreign conquerors” (Marx 1986, 341). His judgment on capitalism, on the other hand, was reaffirmed, with a more political edge, in the brilliant “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper.”. Here, in recalling that historically unprecedented industrial and scientific forces had come into being with capitalism, he told the militants present at the event that “steam, electricity and the self-acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even the citizens Barbès, Raspail and Blanqui” (Marx 1980, 655).
II. The Conception of Capitalism in Marx’s Economic Writings
In the Grundrisse, Marx repeated several times the idea that certain “civilizing tendencies” of society manifested themselves with capitalism (Marx 1973, 414). He mentioned the “civilizing tendency of external trade” (256), as well as the “propagandistic (civilizing) tendency” of the “production of capital,” an “exclusive” property that had never manifested itself in “earlier conditions of production” (542). He even went so far as to quote appreciatively the historian John Wade (1788–1875), who, in reflecting on the creation of free time generated by the division of labour, had suggested that “capital is only another name for civilization” (585).
At the same time, however, Marx attacked the capitalist as “usurper” of the “free time created by the workers for society” (Marx 1973, 634). In a passage very close to the positions expressed in the Manifesto of the Communist Party or, in 1853, in the columns of the New York Tribune, Marx wrote:
production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side [. . . and] on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility [. . .]. Thus, capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself. [. . .] In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. (Marx 1973, 409–10)
At the time of the Grundrisse, therefore, the ecological question was still in the background of Marx’s preoccupations, subordinate to the question of the potential development of individuals.
One of Marx’s most analytic accounts of the positive effects of capitalist production may be found in volume one of Capital. Although much more conscious than in the past of the destructive character of capitalism, his magnum opus repeats the six conditions generated by capital—particularly its “centralization”—which are the fundamental prerequisites that lay the potential for the birth of communist society. These conditions are: 1) cooperative labour; 2) the application of science and technology to production; 3) the appropriation of the forces of nature by production; 4) the creation of large machinery that workers can only operate in common; 5) the economizing of the means of production; and 6) the tendency to create the world market. For Marx,
hand in hand with [. . .] this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. (Marx 1992a, 929)
Marx well knew that, with the concentration of production in the hands of fewer and fewer bosses, “the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation” (Marx 1992a, 929) was increasing for the working classes, but he was also aware that “the cooperation of wage-labourers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them” (Marx 1992a, 453). He had come to the conclusion that the extraordinary growth of productive forces under capitalism—a phenomenon greater than in all previous modes of production—had created the conditions to overcome the social-economic relations it had itself generated, and hence to advance to a socialist society. As in his considerations on the economic profile of non-European societies, the central point of Marx’s thinking here was the progression of capitalism towards its own overthrow. In volume three of Capital, he wrote that “usury” had a “revolutionary effect” in so far as it contributed to the destruction and dissolution of “forms of ownership which provide[d] a firm basis for the articulation of [medieval] political life and whose constant reproduction [was] a necessity for that life.” The ruin of the feudal lords and petty production meant “centralizating the conditions of labour” (Marx 1993, 732).
In volume one of Capital, Marx wrote that “the capitalist mode of production is a historically necessary condition for the transformation of the labour process into a social process” (Marx 1992a, 453). As he saw it, “the socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions” (Marx 1992a, 451). Marx maintained that the most favourable circumstances for communism could develop only with the expansion of capital:
He [the capitalist] is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society’s productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the free and full development of every individual form the ruling principle. (Marx 1992a, 739)
Subsequent reflections on the decisive role of the capitalist mode of production in making communism a real historical possibility appear all the way through Marx’s critique of political economy. To be sure, he had clearly understood—as he wrote in the Grundrisse—that, if one of the tendencies of capital is “to create disposable time,” it subsequently “converts it into surplus value” (Marx 1973, 708). Still, with this mode of production, labour is valorized to the maximum, while “the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is [. . .] reduced to a minimum.” For Marx this was a fundamental point. The change it involved would “redound to the benefit of emancipated labour” and was “the condition of its emancipation” (Marx 1973, 701). Capital was thus, “despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to replace labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development” (Marx 1973, 708).
Marx also noted that, to bring about a society in which the universal development of individuals was achievable, it was “necessary above all that the full development of the forces of production” should have become “the condition of production” (Marx 1973, 542). He therefore stated that the “great historical quality” of capital is:
to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations, has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. [. . .] This is why capital is productive; i.e., an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself. (Marx 1973, 325)
Marx reaffirmed these convictions in the text “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” Having recalled the structural limits of capitalism—above all, the fact that it is a mode of “production in contradiction, and indifference, to the producer”—he focuses on its “positive side” (Marx 1992b, 1037). In comparison with the past, capitalism presents itself as “a form of production not bound to a level of needs laid down in advance, and hence it does not predetermine the course of production itself” (1037). It is precisely the growth of “the social productive forces of labour” that explains “the historic significance of capitalist production in its specific form” (1024). Marx, then, in the social-economic conditions of his time, regarded as fundamental the process of the creation of “wealth as such, i.e., the relentless productive forces of social labour, which alone can form the material base of a free human society” (990). What was “necessary” was to “abolish the contradictory form of capitalism” (1065).
The same theme recurs in volume three of Capital, when Marx underlines that the raising of “the conditions of production into general, communal, social conditions [. . .] is brought about by the development of the productive forces under capitalist production and by the manner and form in which this development is accomplished” (Marx 1993, 373).
While holding that capitalism was the best system yet to have existed, in terms of the capacity to expand the productive forces to the maximum, Marx also recognized that—despite the ruthless exploitation of human beings—it had a number of potentially progressive elements that allowed individual capacities to be fulfilled much more than in past societies. Deeply averse to the productivist maxim of capitalism, to the primacy of exchange-value and the imperative of surplus-value production, Marx considered the question of increased productivity in relation to the growth of individual capacities. Thus, he pointed out in the Grundrisse:
Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction, e.g., the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field, etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language. (Marx 1973, 494)
This greatly more intense and complex development of the productive forces generated “the richest development of the individuals” (541) and “the universality of relations” (542). For Marx,
Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. (325)
In short, for Marx capitalist production certainly produced “the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities” (162). Marx emphasized this point a number of times.
In the Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, he noted that “a greater diversity of production [and] an extension of the sphere of social needs and the means for their satisfaction [. . .] also impels the development of human productive capacity and thereby the activation of human dispositions in fresh directions” (Marx 1988a, 199). In Theories of Surplus Value (1861–1863), he made it clear that the unprecedented growth of the productive forces generated by capitalism not only had economic effects but “revolutionises all political and social relationships” (Marx 1991, 344). And in volume one of Capital, he wrote that “the exchange of commodities breaks through all the individual and local limitations of the direct exchange of products, [but] there also develops a whole network of social connections of natural origin [gesellschaftlicher Naturzusammenhänge], entirely beyond the control of the human agents” (Marx 1992a, 207). It is a question of production that takes place “in a form adequate to the full development of the human race” (Marx 1992a, 638).
Finally, Marx took a positive view of certain tendencies in capitalism regarding women’s emancipation and the modernization of relations within the domestic sphere. In the important political document “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council: The Different Questions,” which he drafted for the first congress of the International Working Men’s Association in 1866, he wrote that “although under capital it was distorted into an abomination [. . .] to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes co-operate in the great work of social production [is] a progressive, sound and legitimate tendency” (Marx 1985a, 188).
Similar judgments may be found in volume one of Capital, where he wrote:
However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organized processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes. (Marx 1992a, 620–621)
Marx further noted that “the capitalist mode of production completes the disintegration of the primitive familial union which bound agriculture and manufacture together when they were both at an undeveloped and childlike stage.” One result of this was an “ever-growing preponderance [of] the urban population,” “the historical motive power of society” which “capitalist production collects together in great centres” (637). Using the dialectical method, to which he made frequent recourse in Capital and in its preparatory manuscripts, Marx argued that “the elements for forming a new society” were taking shape through the “maturing [of] material conditions and the social combination of the process of production” under capitalism (635). The material premises were thus being created for “a new and higher synthesis” (637). Although the revolution would never arise purely through economic dynamics but would always require the political factor as well, the advent of communism “requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product [naturwüchsige Produkt] of a long and tormented historical development” (173).
III. Capitalism in Marx’s Later Political Interventions
Similar theses are presented in a number of short but significant political texts, contemporaneous with or subsequent to the composition of Capital, which confirm the continuity of Marx’s thinking. In Value, Price and Profit, he urged workers to grasp that, “with all the miseries that [capitalism] imposes on them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society” (Marx 1985c, 149).
In the “Confidential Communication on Bakunin” (1985d) sent on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association to the Brunswick committee of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP), Marx maintained that “although revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic revolution.” He explained this as follows:
It is the only country where there are no more peasants and where landed property is concentrated in a few hands. It is the only country where the capitalist form—that is to say, combined labour on a large scale under capitalist masters—embraces virtually the whole of production. It is the only country where the great majority of the population consists of wage labourers. It is the only country where the class struggle and the organization of the working class by the trade unions have attained a certain degree of maturity and universality. It is the only country where, because of its domination on the world market, every revolution in economic matters must immediately affect the whole world. If landlordism and capitalism are classical features in England, on the other hand, the material conditions for their destruction are the most mature here. (Marx 1985d, 86)
In his “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” which contain important indications of his radical differences with the Russian revolutionary concerning the prerequisites for an alternative society to capitalism, Marx reaffirmed, also with respect to the social subject that would lead the struggle for socialism that “a social revolution is bound up with definite historical conditions of economic development; these are its premises. It is only possible, therefore, where alongside capitalist production the industrial proletariat accounts for at least a significant mass of the people” (Marx 1989e, 518).
In the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1989f), in which he took issue with aspects of the platform for unification of the General Association of German Workers (ADAV) and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, Marx proposed: “In proportion as labour develops socially, and becomes therefore a source of wealth and culture, poverty and destitution develop among the workers, and wealth and culture among the non-workers.” And he added: “What had to be done here [. . .] was to prove concretely how in present capitalist society the material, etc., conditions have at last been created which enable and compel the workers to lift this historical curse” (Marx 1989f, 82–83).
Finally, in the “Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party” (1989g), a short text which he wrote three years before his death, Marx emphasized that an essential condition for the workers to be able to appropriate the means of production was “the collective form, whose material and intellectual elements are shaped by the very development of capitalist society” (Marx 1989g, 340).
Thus, with a continuity stretching from his early formulations of the materialist conception of history, in the 1840s, to his final political interventions of the 1880s, Marx highlighted the fundamental relationship between the productive growth generated by the capitalist mode of production and the preconditions for the communist society for which the workers’ movement must struggle. The research he conducted in the last years of his life, however, helped him to review this conviction and to avoid falling into the economism that marked the analyses of so many of his followers.
IV. A Not Always Necessary Transition
Marx regarded capitalism as a “necessary point of transition” (Marx 1973, 515) for the conditions to unfold that would allow the proletariat to fight with some prospect of success to establish a socialist mode of production. In another passage in the Grundrisse, he repeated that capitalism was a “point of transition” (540) towards the further progress of society, which would permit “the highest development of the forces of production” and “the richest development of individuals” (541). Marx described “the contemporary conditions of production” as “suspending themselves and [. . .] positing the historic presuppositions for a new state of society” (461).
With an emphasis that sometimes heralds the idea of a capitalist predisposition to self-destruction, Marx declared that “as the system of bourgeois economy has developed for us only by degrees, so too its negation, which is its ultimate result” (Marx 1973, 712). He said he was convinced that “the last form of servitude” (with this “last” Marx was certainly going too far),
assumed by human activity, that of wage labour on one side, capital on the other, is thereby cast off like a skin, and this casting-off itself is the result of the mode of production corresponding to capital; the material and mental conditions of the negation of wage labour and of capital, themselves already the negation of earlier forms of unfree social production, are themselves results of its production process. The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation, is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production. (Marx 1973, 749–750)
Further confirmation that Marx considered capitalism a fundamental stage for the birth of a socialist economy may be found in Theories of Surplus Value. Here he expressed his agreement with the economist Richard Jones (1790–1855), for whom “capital and the capitalist mode of production” were to be “accepted” merely as “a transitional phase in the development of social production.” Through capitalism, Marx writes, “the prospect opens up of a new society, [a new] economic formation of society, to which the bourgeois mode of production is only a transition” (Marx 1991, 346).
Marx elaborated a similar idea in volume one of Capital and its preparatory manuscripts. In the famous unpublished “Appendix: Result of the Immediate Process of Production,” he wrote that capitalism came into being following a “complete economic revolution”:
On the one hand, it creates the real conditions for the domination of labour by capital, perfecting the process and providing it with the appropriate framework. On the other hand, by evolving conditions of production and communication and productive forces of labour antagonistic to the workers involved in them, this revolution creates the real premises of a new mode of production, one that abolishes the contradictory form of capitalism. It thereby creates the material basis of a newly shaped social process and hence of a new social formation. (Marx 1992b, 1065)
In one of the concluding chapters of Capital, volume one—“The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”—he stated:
The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reaches a point at which they become incompatible with the capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (Marx 1992a, 929)
Although Marx held that capitalism was an essential transition, in which the historical conditions were created for the workers’ movement to struggle for a communist transformation of society, he did not think that this idea could be applied in a rigid, dogmatic manner. On the contrary, he denied more than once—in both published and unpublished texts—that he had developed a unidirectional interpretation of history, in which human beings were everywhere destined to follow the same path and pass through the same stages.
V. The Possible Path of Russia
In the final years of his life, Marx repudiated the thesis wrongly attributed to him that the bourgeois mode of production was historically inevitable. His distance from this position was expressed when he found himself drawn into the debate on the possible development of capitalism in Russia. In an article entitled “Marx before the Tribunal of Yu Zhukovsky,” the Russian writer and sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842–1904) accused him of considering capitalism as an unavoidable stage for the emancipation of Russia too (Mikhailovsky 1877, 321–356). Marx replied, in a letter he drafted to the political-literary review Otechestvennye Zapiski (Fatherland Annals), that in volume one of Capital he had “claim[ed] no more than to trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic order emerged from the womb of the feudal economic order” (Marx 1983, 135). Marx referred to a passage in the French edition of volume one of Capital (1872–1875), which suggested that the basis of the separation of the rural masses from their means of production had been “the expropriation of the agricultural producers,” but that “only in England” had this process “so far been accomplished in a radical manner,” and that “all the countries of Western Europe [were] following the same course” (Marx 1983, 135). Accordingly, the object of his examination was only “the old continent,” not the whole world.
Marx referred to a passage in the French edition of Capital (Le Capital, Paris 1872–1875), where he asserted that the basis for the separation of the producers from their means of production was the “expropriation of the agricultural producers,” adding that “only in England [had this been] accomplished in a radical manner,” but that “all the other countries of Western Europe [were] following the same course” (Marx 1989h, 634).
This is the spatial horizon within which we should understand the famous statement in the preface of Capital, volume one: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” Writing for a German readership, Marx observed that, “just like the rest of Continental Western Europe, we suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development.” In his view, alongside “the modern evils,” the Germans were “oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations” (Marx 1992a, 91). It was for the German who might “in optimistic fashion comfort himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad,” that Marx asserted “De te fabula narratur!” (90).
Marx also displayed a flexible approach to other European countries, since he did not think of Europe as a homogeneous whole. In a speech he gave in 1867 to the German Workers’ Educational Society in London, later published in Der Vorbote (The Harbinger) in Geneva, he argued that German proletarians could successfully carry out a revolution because, “unlike the workers in other countries, they need not go through the lengthy period of bourgeois development” (Marx 1985b, 415).
Marx expressed the same convictions in 1881, when the revolutionary Vera Zasulich (1849–1919) solicited his views on the future of the rural commune (obshchina). She wanted to know whether it might develop in a socialist form, or whether it was doomed to perish because capitalism would necessarily impose itself in Russia, too. In his reply, Marx stressed that in volume one of Capital he had “expressly restricted [. . .] the historical inevitability” of the development of capitalism—which had effected “a complete separation of the producer from the means of production”—to the countries of Western Europe” (Marx 1989c, 360).
In the preliminary drafts of the letter, Marx dwells on the peculiarities deriving from the coexistence of the rural commune with more advanced economic forms. Russia, he observed, is
contemporary with a higher culture, it is linked to a world market dominated by capitalist production. By appropriating the positive results of this mode of production, it is thus in a position to develop and transform the still archaic form of its rural commune, instead of destroying it. (Marx 1989c, 362)
The peasantry could “thus incorporate the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks” (Marx 1989d, 368).
To those who argued that capitalism was an unavoidable stage for Russia too, on the grounds that it was impossible for history to advance in leaps, Marx asked ironically whether this meant that Russia, “like the West,” had had “to pass through a long incubation period in the engineering industry [. . .] in order to utilize machines, steam engines, railways, etc.” Similarly, had it not been possible “to introduce in the twinkling of an eye, the entire mechanism of exchange (banks, credit institutions, etc.), which it took the West centuries to devise?” (Marx 1989d, 349). It was evident that the history of Russia, or of any other country, did not inevitably have to retrace all the stages that the history of England or other European nations had experienced. Hence, the socialist transformation of the obshchina might also take place without necessarily having to pass through capitalism.
In the same period, Marx’s theoretical research on precapitalist community relations, compiled in his Ethnographic Notebooks, were leading him in the same direction as the one evident in his reply to Zasulich. Spurred on by his reading of the work of the US anthropologist Lewis Morgan (1818–1881), he wrote in propagandistic tones that “Europe and America,” the nations where capitalism was most developed, could “aspire only to break [their] chains by replacing capitalist production with cooperative production, and capitalist property with a higher form of the archaic type of property, i.e., communist property” (Marx 1989c, 362).
Marx’s model was not at all a “primitive type of cooperative or collective production” resulting from “the isolated individual,” but one deriving from “socialization of the means of production” (Marx 1989b, 351). He had not changed his (thoroughly critical) view of the rural communes in Russia, and in his analysis the development of the individual and social production preserved intact their irreplaceable centrality.
In Marx’s reflections on Russia, then, there is no dramatic break with his previous ideas. The new elements in comparison with the past involve a maturation of his theoretical-political position, which led him to consider other possible roads to communism that he had earlier considered unrealizable.
VI. Conclusions
The idea that the development of socialism might be plausible in Russia did not have as its sole foundation Marx’s study of the economic situation there. Contact with the Russian Populists, like his contact with the Paris Communards a decade earlier, helped to make him ever more open to the possibility that history would witness not only a succession of modes of production, but also the irruption of revolutionary events and of the subjectivities that produce them. He felt called upon to pay even more heed to historical specificities, and to the uneven development of political and economic conditions among different countries and social contexts.
Beyond his unwillingness to accept that a predefined historical development might appear in the same way in different economic and political contexts, Marx’s theoretical advances were due to the evolution of his thinking on the effects of capitalism in economically backward countries. He no longer maintained, as he had in 1853 in an article on India for the New-York Tribune, that “bourgeois industry and commerce create [the] conditions of a new world” (Marx 1979b, 222). Years of detailed study and close observation of changes in international politics had helped him to develop a vision of British colonialism quite unlike the one he had expressed as a journalist in his mid-thirties. The effects of capitalism in colonial countries now looked very different to him. Referring to the “East Indies,” in one of the drafts of his letter to Zasulich, he wrote that “everyone [. . .] realizes that the suppression of communal ownership there was nothing but an act of English vandalism, pushing the native people backwards not forwards” (Marx 1989d, 365). In his view, “all they [the British] managed to do was ruin native agriculture and double the number and severity of the famines” (Marx 1989d, 368). Capitalism did not, as its apologists boasted, bring progress and emancipation, but the pillage of natural resources, environmental devastation and new forms of servitude and human dependence.
Marx returned in 1882 to the possibility of a concomitance between capitalism and forms of community from the past. In January, in the preface to the new Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which he co-authored with Engels, the fate of the Russian rural commune is linked to that of proletarian struggles in Western Europe:
In Russia we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property, which is just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, a form of primeval common ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West? The only answer possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development. (Marx and Engels 1989a, 426)
In 1853, Marx had already analysed the effects produced by the economic presence of the English in China in the article “Revolution in China and in Europe” written for the New York Tribune. Marx thought it was possible that the revolution in this country could lead to “the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent.” He added that this would be a “curious spectacle, that of China sending disorder into the Western World while the Western powers, by English, French and American war-steamers, are conveying ‘order’ to Shanghai, Nanking and the mouths of the Great Canal” (Marx 1979b, 98).
Besides, Marx’s reflections on Russia were not the only reason for him to think that the destinies of different revolutionary movements, active in countries with dissimilar social-economic contexts, might become entwined with one another. Between 1869 and 1870, in various letters and a number of documents of the International Working Men’s Association—perhaps most clearly and concisely in a letter to his comrades Sigfrid Meyer (1840–1872) and August Vogt (1817–1895)—he associated the future of England (“the metropolis of capital”) with that of the more backward Ireland. The former was undoubtedly “the power that has hitherto ruled the world market,” and therefore “for the present the most important country for the workers’ revolution”; it was, “in addition, the only country where the material conditions for the revolution have developed to a certain state of maturity” (Marx and Engels 1988, 474–475).
However, “after studying the Irish question for years,” Marx had become convinced that “the decisive blow against the ruling classes in England”—and, deluding himself, “decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world”—“cannot be struck in England, but only in Ireland.” The most important objective remained “to hasten the social revolution in England,” but the “sole means of doing this” was “to make Ireland independent” (Marx and Engels 1988, 473–476). In any event, Marx considered industrial, capitalist England to be strategically central for the struggle of the workers’ movement; the revolution in Ireland, possible only if the “forced union between the two countries” was ended, would be a “social revolution” that would manifest itself “in outmoded forms” (Marx 1985d, 86). The subversion of bourgeois power in nations where the modern forms of production were still only developing would not be sufficient to bring about the disappearance of capitalism.
The dialectical position that Marx arrived at in his final years allowed him to discard the idea that the socialist mode of production could be constructed only through certain fixed stages. The materialist conception of history that he developed is far from the mechanical sequence to which his thought has been reduced several times. It cannot be assimilated with the idea that human history is a progressive succession of modes of production, mere preparatory phases before the inevitable conclusion: the birth of a communist society.
Moreover, he explicitly denied the historical necessity of capitalism in every part of the world. In the famous “Preface” to the Critique of Political Economy, he tentatively listed the progression of “Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production,” as the end of the “prehistory of human society” (Marx 1987, 263–264) and similar phrases can be found in other writings. However, this idea represents only a small part of Marx’s larger oeuvre on the genesis and development of different forms of production. His method cannot be reduced to economic determinism.
Marx did not change his basic ideas about the profile of future communist society, as he sketched it from the Grundrisse on. Guided by hostility to the schematisms of the past, and to the new dogmatisms arising in his name, he thought it might be possible that the revolution would break out in forms and conditions that had never been considered before.
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O último Marx (1881-1883) (Interview)
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Joan Manuel Tresserras, NacióDigital
1. El 1881 F.D. Niewenhuis, un dels líders de la Lliga Socialdemòcrata dels Països Baixos, va preguntar a K. Marx quines mesures hauria de prendre un govern revolucionari per assegurar l’èxit del socialisme. Marx va considerar absurda una pregunta tan general, però va respondre que el que calgui fer en un moment qualsevol del futur “dependrà absolutament de les condicions històriques reals en què calgui actuar”. Els detalls de l’episodi i el seu context es poden trobar al llibre de Marcello Musto L’últim Marx.
Una biografia política, editada en català per Tigre de paper Edicions. La resposta de Marx sembla elemental. És l’abecedari de la política: partir de l’anàlisi concreta de cada situació concreta. Però, vistes les pretensions de la direcció de la CUP en el recent debat d’obertura del curs polític al Parlament, potser val la pena insistir-hi. La gesticulació i la lírica radical són una cosa; la denúncia, la canalització del malestar i la mobilització d’energies socials en són una altra; i la recerca responsable de propostes i d’accions que tradueixin aquella energia i les posicions de poder assolides en resultats polítics concrets i tangibles en són, encara, una altra.
2. Tanmateix, tot i les bufonades habituals de la triple dreta (costa saber si desbarren a consciència o sense voler), el premi a la bajanada durant el debat se’l va endur Salvador Illa. Les maneres volien ser esforçadament educades. Però el contingut de les seves afirmacions el mantenia a molts anys llum de la realitat. Aquesta mena de lletanies com ara que “la gent el que vol és passar pàgina” (del procés i de l’octubre del 2017) o que “el referèndum divideix” indiquen una actitud paternalista, conservadora i antidemocràtica. Aquestes sentències semblen fruit d’una temptativa maldestra de justificar la complicitat amb l’estratègia repressiva d’estat plantejada per la dreta extrema i l’extrema dreta espanyoles. Del PSC fundat el 1978, el 2017 en quedava més aviat poc.
Després de l’aval a la ferotge repressió contra els que van voler votar, ja no en queda res. Només la sucursal catalana del PSOE, amb l’aspiració de narcotitzar una part significativa de l’electorat català davant del permanent abús de poder que s’exerceix, des de l’estat, sobre la població i les institucions catalanes. Que Salvador Illa encara no hagi estat capaç de prendre distància respecte a la política repressiva engegada pel PP és un llast pesadíssim pel seu partit i per l’efectivitat de la taula de negociació. Es poden entendre el pànic i els moments de pusil·lanimitat de Pedro Sánchez a Madrid davant d’una dreta capaç d’imposar la seva concepció rància d’Espanya a l’interior del PSOE i a molts segments les seves bases electorals. Però que, amb la correlació de forces existent a Catalunya, Salvador Illa faci el mateix a Barcelona, resulta decebedor i clarificador alhora. Independentment dels efectes electorals que acabi tenint, suposa la renúncia a disposar d’una política pròpia capaç de vincular-se d’alguna manera al tronc històric del catalanisme.
3. Encara són fresques les commemoracions de l’1 i 3 d’octubre del 2017, les grans victòries polítiques del moviment popular català a favor de la independència. I mentre escric, de la mà del president Puigdemont i de l’exili, el sistema judicial espanyol ha tornat a fer el ridícul –una vegada més- davant la justícia europea. El jutge Pablo Llarena sintetitza amb precisió les característiques del conjunt d’un sistema judicial ancorat en el franquisme i pendent de ser reformat amb criteris democràtics: incompetència professional i obcecació política. La potineria reaccionària de tants jutges li hauria de fer veure a Pedro Sánchez que l’amnistia es l’instrument més immediat i inequívoc que té a l’abast per parar els peus a la dreta enquistada en els aparells de l’estat. Si no ho fa, si no els hi planta cara amb determinació des del compromís democràtic del seu govern, no només li continuaran boicotejant els tímids intents de regeneració política sinó que acabaran devorant-lo. I, si això últim passa, la causa no haurà estat la intransigència del republicanisme independentista català, sinó la seva transigència impassible amb la dreta franquista i la monarquia corrupta que l’empara.
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Marx’s Late Writings
[Marx’s late thought is the subject of Marcello Musto’s recently published The Last Years of Karl Marx. There, Musto masterfully weaves together rich biographical detail and a sophisticated engagement with Marx’s mature, oftentimes self-questioning writing.
Jacobin contributing editor Nicolas Allen spoke with Musto about the complexities of studying Marx’s final years of life, and about why some of Marx’s late doubts and misgivings are in fact more useful for people today than some of his more confident early assertions. Excerpts:]
Nicolas Allen: The “late Marx” that you write about, roughly covering the final three years of his life in the 1880s, is often treated as an afterthought for Marxists and Marx scholars. Apart from the fact that Marx didn’t publish any major works in his final years, why do you think the period has received considerably less attention?
Marcello Musto: All the intellectual biographies of Marx published to this day have paid very little attention to the last decade of his life, usually devoting no more than a few pages to his activity after the winding up of the International Working Men’s Association in 1872. Not by chance, these scholars nearly always use the generic title “the last decade” for these (very short) parts of their books. Two of Marx’s best-known writings—the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology (1845-46), both very far from being completed—were published in 1932 and started to circulate only in the second half of the 1940s. As World War II gave way to a sense of profound anguish resulting from the barbarities of Nazism, in a climate where philosophies like existentialism gained popularity, the theme of the condition of the individual in society acquired great prominence and created perfect conditions for a growing interest in Marx’s philosophical ideas, such as alienation and species-being. The biographies of Marx published in this period, just like most of the scholarly volumes that came out from academia, reflected this zeitgeist and gave undue weight to his youthful writings. Many of the books that claimed to introduce the readers to Marx’s thought as a whole, in the 1960s and in the 1970s, were mostly focused on the period 1843-48, when Marx, at the time of the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), was only thirty years old.
There is a growing body of research that suggests Marx’s final years might be a gold mine filled with new insights into his thought.
One can say that the myth of the “Young Marx”—fed also by Louis Althusser and by those who argued that Marx’s youth could not be considered part of Marxism—has been one of the main misunderstandings in the history of Marx studies. Marx did not publish any works that he would consider “major” in the first half of the 1840s. For example, one must read Marx’s addresses and resolutions for the International Working Men’s Association if one wants to understand his political thought, not the journal articles of 1844 that appeared in the German-French Yearbook. And even if one analyses his incomplete manu-scripts, the Grundrisse (1857-58) or the Theories of Surplus-Value (1862-63), these were much more significant for him than the critique of neo-Hegelianism in Germany, “abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice” in 1846. The trend of overemphasising his early writings has not changed much since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
One of the central chapters of The Last Years of Karl Marx deals with Marx’s relationship with Russia. As you show, Marx engaged in a very intense dialogue with different parts of the Russian left, specifically around their reception of the first volume of Capital. What were the main points of those debates?
MM : For many years, Marx had identified Russia as one of the main obstacles to working-class emanci-pation. He emphasised several times that its sluggish economic development and its despotic political regime helped to make the tsarist empire the advance post of counterrevolution. But in his final years, he began to look rather differently at Russia. He recognised some possible conditions for a major social transformation after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Russia seemed to Marx more likely to produce a revolution than Britain, where capitalism had created the proportionately largest number of factory workers in the world, but where the labour movement, enjoying better living conditions partly based on colonial exploitation, had grown weaker and undergone the negative influence of trade union reformism.
The dialogues engaged by Marx with Russian revolutionaries were both intellectual and political. In the first half of the 1870s, he acquired familiarity with the principal critical literature on Russian society and devoted special attention to the work of the socialist philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889). He believed that a given social phenomenon that had reached a high level of development in the most advanced nations could spread very swiftly among other peoples and rise from a lower level straight to a higher one, passing over the intermediate moments. This gave Marx much food for thought in reconsidering his materialistic conception of history. For a long time, he had been aware that the schema of linear progression through the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production, which he had drawn in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), was completely inadequate for an understanding of the movement of history, and that it was indeed advisable to steer clear of any philosophy of history. He could no longer conceive the succession of modes of production in the course of history as a fixed sequence of predefined stages.
Marx also took the opportunity to discuss with militants of various revolutionary tendencies in Russia. He highly regarded the down-to-earth character of the political activity of Russian populism—which at the time was a left-wing, anti-capitalist movement—particularly because it did not resort to senseless ultra-revolutionary flourishes or to counterproductive generalisations. Marx assessed the relevance of the socialist organisations existing in Russia by their pragmatic character, not by declaration of loyalty to his own theories. In fact, he observed that it was often those who claimed to be “Marxists” who were the most doctrinaire. His exposure to the theories and the political activity of Russian Populists—as with the Paris Communards a decade earlier—helped him to be more flexible in analysing the irruption of revolutionary events and the subjective forces that shaped them. It brought him closer to a true internationalism on a global scale.
Marx’s correspondence with Russian socialist Vera Zasulich is the subject of a lot of interest today. There, Marx suggested that the Russian rural commune could potentially appropriate the latest advances of capitalist society—technology, particularly—without having to undergo the social upheavals that were so destructive for the Western European peasantry. Can you explain in a little more detail the thinking that informed Marx’s conclusions?
By a fortuitous coincidence, Zasulich’s letter reached Marx just as his interest in archaic forms of community, already deepened in 1879 through the study of the work of the sociologist Maksim Kovalevsky, was leading him to pay closer attention to the most recent discoveries made by anthropologists of his time. Theory and practice led him to the same place. Drawing on ideas suggested by the anthropologist Morgan, he wrote that capitalism could be replaced by a higher form of the archaic collective production.
This ambiguous statement requires at least two clarifications. First, thanks to what he had learned from Chernyshevsky, Marx argued that Russia could not slavishly repeat all the historical stages of England and other West European countries. In principle, the socialist transformation of the obshchina could happen without a necessary passage through capitalism. But this does not mean that Marx changed his critical judgement of the rural commune in Russia, or that he believed that countries where capitalism was still underdeveloped were closer to revolution than others with a more advanced productive development. He did not suddenly become convinced that the archaic rural communes were a more advanced locus of emancipation for the individual than the social relations existing under capitalism.
At the end of his life, Marx revealed an ever-greater theoretical openness, which enabled him to consider other possible roads to socialism that he had never before taken seriously.
Second, his analysis of the possible progressive transformation of the obshchina was not meant to be elevated into a more general model. It was a specific analysis of a particular collective production at a precise historical moment. In other words, Marx revealed the theoretical flexibility and lack of schematism that many Marxists after him failed to demonstrate. At the end of his life, Marx revealed an ever-greater theoretical openness, which enabled him to consider other possible roads to socialism that he had never before taken seriously or had previously regarded as unattainable.
Marx’s doubting was replaced by a conviction that capitalism was an inescapable stage for economic development in every country and historical condition. The new interest that reemerges today for the considerations that Marx never sent to Zasulich, and for other similar ideas expressed more clearly in his final years, lies in a conception of postcapitalist society that is poles apart from the equation of socialism with the productive forces—a conception involving nationalist overtones and sympathy with colonialism, which asserted itself within the Second International and social democratic parties. Marx’s ideas also differ profoundly from the supposedly “scientific method” of social analysis preponderant in the Soviet Union and its satellites.
So much of Marx’s late thought is contained in letters and notebooks. Should one accord these writings the same status as his more accomplished writings? When you argue that Marx’s writing is “essentially incomplete,” do you have something like this in mind?
Capital remained unfinished because of the grinding poverty in which Marx lived for two decades and because of his constant ill health connected to daily worries. Needless to say, the task he had set himself—to understand the capitalist mode of production in its ideal average and to describe its general tendencies of development—was extraordinarily difficult to achieve. But Capital was not the only project that remained incomplete. Marx’s merciless self-criticism increased the difficulties of more than one of his undertakings, and the large amount of time that he spent on many projects he wanted to publish was due to the extreme rigor to which he subjected all his thinking.
The large amount of time Marx spent on many projects he wanted to publish was due to the extreme rigour to which he subjected all his thinking.
When Marx was young, he was known among his university friends for his meticulousness. There are stories that depict him as somebody who refused to write a sentence if he was unable to prove it in ten different ways. This is why the most prolific young scholar in the Hegelian Left still published less than many of the others. This does not mean that his incomplete texts can be given the same weight of those that were published. Some of Marx’s published texts should not be regarded as his final word on the issues at hand. For example, the Manifesto of the Communist Party was considered by Engels and Marx as a historical document from their youth and not as the definitive text in which their main political conceptions were stated. Or it must be kept in mind that political propaganda writings and scientific writings are often not combinable.
[About the author: Marcello Musto is the author of Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (2018) and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (2020). Among his edited books is The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (2020).
About the Interviewer: Nicolas Allen is a Jacobin contributing editor and the managing editor at Jacobin America Latina.]
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In Socialism’s Name
The road leading to Ayacucho, the city where started the political experience of Abimael Guzmán (the main Peruvian political prisoner who died a few days ago at the Maximum Safety Center of the Callao Naval Base), is very rough and as one travels along it one breathes an air of mystery. Located in the middle of the Peruvian Sierra, the city has long been marked by extreme poverty. It forms part of a landscape where, up until a few decades ago, agricultural production was still organized on a semi-feudal basis. It is a treasure that has never ceased to arouse the interest of anthropologists and scholars of popular traditions. And yet, it was precisely this remote place, until the mid-1970s lacking an asphalt connection with the coast and a real electrical system and television, that gave rise to the events that changed, irreversibly, the contemporary history of Peru and that returned to make this nation talked about throughout the world.
In 1962, a young twenty-eight-year-old university professor arrived in Ayacucho to teach philosophy. Introverted and shy, he came from the beautiful city of Arequipa, where he had studied at the Catholic high school, distinguishing himself for discipline and asceticism. Shortly after his arrival, Abimael Guzmán learned quechua, the most widespread language among the indigenous peoples of Latin America, and began an intense political militancy. A few years later, he would become famous throughout the world as the leader of Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla movement that in the 1980s waged a bloody conflict with the Peruvian state, causing the death of almost 70,000 people over the course of twenty years. In the 1960s, with the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet crisis, the communist world split into two blocs. Originally a loyal Stalinist, Guzmán sided with the Chinese and became a Maoist. The following years saw a succession of splits among the Peruvian left, and in 1970 Guzmán led a splinter group away from the main Maoist party, naming it the Peruvian Communist Party ~ Shining Path. The group declared itself heir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was “the main event in human history”, the one that had discovered “how to change souls”.
Despite its proclamations, the organization was born without any relation to the peasantry. At its inception, its adherents were only 51 and, for a long time, its political presence was limited to the university of Ayacucho, where the teachers and the new technical personnel of the whole interior-southern region of Peru were being trained.
During this period, Guzmán taught numerous courses on José Carlos Mariátegui, a prominent Marxist ~ considered by many to be the Latin American Gramsci ~ who, in the hands of Guzmán was transformed into a proto-Maoist thinker and the spiritual father of Shining Path, despite Mariátegui’s own distance from such dogmatism. Drawing on schematic Marxist manuals, Guzmán began to spread an extremely deterministic worldview among the Andean youth of the area. The aim was to create a monolithic group with an oppressive relationship between the political party and society that did not allow any room for autonomy in the struggles. Shining Path, in fact, systematically opposed strikes and land occupations, manifesting, on more than one occasion, intolerance towards the indigenous culture.
Nevertheless, in Latin America, it was this party, small but sustained by an iron discipline, strongly centralized (its main governing body was composed of Guzmán, his wife and his future companion), and protected by the absolute secrecy of its militants, that came closer than any other to the conquest of political power through arms, a feat achieved only by Fidel Castro in Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
Between 1968 and 1980, Peru, like almost all other Latin American countries, experienced military dictatorship. At the end of the 1970s, Guzmán left the university to go underground and formed the People’s Guerrilla Army, a parallel structure to Shining Path. Guzmán was convinced of the necessity of armed struggle; in his interpretation, violence was understood as a scientific category and death, consequently, into the price that humanity would have to pay for the achievement of socialism: “the triumph of the revolution will cost a million deaths.”
The conflict arose in a surreal atmosphere. May 1980 saw the first political elections in Peru since 1963. In the central square of Chuschi, a village not far from Ayacucho, militants of Shining Path burnt all the ballot papers. The episode was completely ignored by the government, just as no attention was paid to the macabre spectacle that the inhabitants of Lima were forced to witness a few months later, when they woke up to find dozens of dead dogs hanging from traffic lights and street lamps, with the inscription, incomprehensible to most, “Deng Xiaoping son of a bitch”.
Initially, the Peruvian state underestimated the strength of Shining Path. In the middle of the 1970s, seventy-four different Marxist-Leninist organizations were operating in Peru and when the government of Fernando Belaúnde decided to intervene against Shining Path they hadn’t any knowledge of the political and military strategy of the group that they were fighting. It was erroneously considered to be similar to other Latin American guerrilla groups (for example, those of Guevarist inspiration), from which, instead, Shining Path was completely distant. Notwithstanding the still insignificant number of its militants ~ in the meantime increased to 520 ~ and the rudimentary nature of its arsenal, mostly old rifles, the popular war of Shining Path advanced considerably in this period. Therefore, Belaúnde decided to use the armed forces and Ayacucho became the area of a political-military command for the entire region.
This second phase of the conflict was distinguished by the violent repression of local populations. The racism of the soldiers from the city, who identified every campesino as a potential danger and a target to be eliminated, contributed to the increase in the number of deaths. Once the political sphere had been suppressed, the civil authorities were replaced by the army, who abused and arbitrarily ran the Civil Defense Committees, halfway between military camps and torture centers. Shining Path responded to this strategy by trying to create “counter-power”: the Popular Committees. In other words, “liberated zones”, strictly governed by commissioners appointed by the party, which served as a support base for the guerrillas. Furthermore, Guzmán decided to expand the conflict on a national scale, starting from the capital Lima. As a result, by the end of the decade (also because in 1984 the guerrilla Revolutionary Movement Tupac Amaru had also emerged) half of Peruvian territory was under military control.
In this phase, the Manichaen extremism of Shining Path designated all those outside the party as enemies. All areas not controlled by the Shining Path became military targets ~ including representatives of the campesinos, trade unionists and leaders of women’s organizations. The followed a strategy of selective annihilation, with the aim of creating power vacuums and then installing Shining Path’s leaders and militants in key political roles. In fact, local authorities (including the police) and leaders of social organizations represented the second target of Shining Path, after the peasants who opposed its directives. In total over 1,500 people died, 23 per cent of those deliberately murdered by Shining Path’s militants, and not killed in large-scale attacks.
At a time when Mikhail Gorbachëv started Perestroika in the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping was ferrying China towards capitalism, in Peru Guzmán was an outlier, giving directions for an intensification of war. Attacked by the government in its strongholds that were located in the most rural Peru, his influence grew in Lima – a huge city that at the time had seven million inhabitants, with over 100,000 refugees from the most dramatic conflict zones. The growth of Shining Path was also possible because of the spirit of revolt that permeated the popular classes, struck by the social disasters provoked by the outbreak of a serious economic crisis (in 1989 hyperinflation reached 2.775%) and by the severity of neo-liberal policies imposed by the technocrats close to Alberto Fujimori, the dictator who came to power with the elections in 1990 and author, in 1992, of an autogolpe that led to the closure of parliament and the cancellation of all democratic freedoms.
Meanwhile, Guzmán inspired a combination of terror among many Peruvians, particularly those who had reason to fear reprisals from Shining Path. At the same time, the cult of Guzman’s personality reached psychopathic levels. With the disappearance of any reference to Mariátegui’s socialism, Guzmán was transformed into a semi-divine figure among party militants. (By 1988, members of Shining Path numbered 3,000, while the People’s Guerrilla Army counted 5,000 among its ranks.) In the propaganda materials circulated at the time, Guzmán was spoken of as the “fourth sword (after Marx, Lenin and Mao) of Marxism”, the “greatest living Marxist on earth”, and the “embodiment of the highest thought in the history of humanity”.
During most of the conflict, Guzmán never left Lima and kept away from the risks and hardships of war. He was captured, on 12 September 1992, when some agents of the National Police of Peru (responsible of several bloody massacres during the war with Shining Path) found in the garbage of an apartment located in an upper-class neighborhood in Lima some discarded tubes of cream for the treatment of psoriasis, a disease that Guzmán was known to have. Shortly after his imprisonment, Guzmán proposed the peace agreement that he had always categorically rejected before and, in exchange for prison privileges, even went so far as to praise the corrupted Fujimori’s regime. These events were followed by eight more years of low-intensity guerrilla warfare between the profoundly authoritarian and corrupt Peruvian state and a sector of Shining Path ~ Proseguir (Continue) ~ that had not accepted the turn of the so-called “President Gonzalo”. Abimael Guzmán spent the rest of his life in prison and died on 11 September 2021, just 29 years after his capture. He will be remembered for having given rise to the most abominable political experience committed in the name of socialism.
O ressurgimento de Marx
Há mais de uma década, jornais e periódicos prestigiosos que contam com um amplo público leitor têm descrito Karl Marx como um teórico previdente, cuja atualidade é constantemente confirmada. Muitos autores com visões progressistas sustentam que suas ideias continuam indispensáveis para qualquer um que acredita ser necessário construir uma alternativa ao capitalismo. Em quase todo lugar, ele é tema de cursos universitários e de conferências internacionais. Seus escritos, reimpressos ou publicados em novas edições, têm reaparecido nas prateleiras das livrarias, e o estudo de sua obra, após vinte anos ou mais de negligência, tem ganhado impulso crescente. Os anos de 2017 e 2018 trouxeram maior intensidade a esse “ressurgimento de Marx”[1], graças a muitas iniciativas ao redor do mundo ligadas ao 150° aniversário da publicação de O capital e o bicentenário do nascimento de Marx.
As ideias de Marx têm mudado o mundo. Apesar da ratificação de suas teorias, tornadas ideologias dominantes e doutrinas de Estado para uma parte considerável da humanidade no século XX, não existe edição completa de todas as suas obras e manuscritos. O principal motivo para isso está no caráter incompleto dos trabalhos de Marx: as obras que ele publicou somam consideravelmente menos que o número total de projetos deixados inacabados, para não falar do imenso Nachlass [espólio] de notas relativas a suas infinitas pesquisas. Marx deixou, então, muito mais manuscritos que aqueles enviados aos tipógrafos. A incompletude foi uma parte inseparável de sua vida: a pobreza por vezes opressiva na qual ele viveu, assim como seus constantes problemas de saúde, se somaram às suas aflições diárias; seu método rigoroso e sua autocrítica impiedosa aumentaram as dificuldades de muitos de seus empreendimentos. Além disso, sua paixão pelo conhecimento permaneceu inalterada ao longo do tempo e sempre o levou a novos estudos. No entanto, seus incessantes trabalhos teriam as consequências teóricas mais extraordinárias para o futuro.
A retomada da publicação da Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), a edição histórico-crítica das obras completas de Marx e Friedrich Engels, em 1998, foi de particular relevância para a reavaliação das realizações de Marx. Já vieram a lume mais vinte e oito volumes (quarenta[2] foram publicados entre 1975 e 1989) e outros estão em preparação. A MEGA2 está organizada em quatro seções: (1) todas as obras, artigos e esboços escritos por Marx e Engels (com exceção de O capital); (2) O capital e todos seus materiais preparatórios; (3) a correspondência, que consiste em 4.000 cartas escritas por Marx e Engels e 10.000 escritas a eles por outros, um grande número das quais publicado pela primeira vez na MEGA2; e (4) os excertos, anotações e notas marginais. Essa quarta seção atesta os trabalhos verdadeiramente enciclopédicos de Marx: desde seu tempo na universidade, era seu hábito compilar estratos dos livros que lia[3], entremeando-os frequentemente com reflexões que esses estratos lhe sugeriam. O legado literário de Marx contém cerca de duzentos cadernos de notas. Eles são essenciais para a compreensão da gênese de sua teoria e daqueles elementos que fora incapaz de desenvolver do modo que gostaria. Os excertos preservados, que cobrem o longo intervalo de tempo entre 1838 e 1882, estão escritos em oito idiomas (alemão, grego antigo, latim, francês, inglês, italiano, espanhol e russo) e se referem às mais variadas disciplinas. Eles foram tomados de obras de filosofia, história da arte, religião, política, direito, literatura, história, economia política, relações internacionais, tecnologia, matemática, fisiologia, geologia, mineralogia, agronomia, antropologia, química e física – incluindo não apenas livros, jornais e artigos de periódicos, mas também atas parlamentares, bem como estatísticas governamentais e relatórios. Essa imensa reserva de conhecimento, da qual muito foi publicado em anos recentes ou ainda aguarda ser impresso, foi o canteiro de obras para a teoria crítica de Marx e a MEGA2 deu acesso inédito a ele[4].
Esses materiais inestimáveis – muitos disponíveis apenas em alemão e, portanto, confinados em pequenos círculos de pesquisadores – nos mostram um autor muito diferente daquele que vários críticos, ou autodenominados discípulos, apresentaram por tanto tempo. De fato, as novas aquisições textuais presentes na MEGA2 possibilitam dizer que, dos clássicos do pensamento político, econômico e filosófico, Marx é o autor cujo perfil mais mudou nas décadas iniciais do século XXI. A nova configuração política decorrente da implosão da União Soviética também contribuiu para essa nova percepção, pois o fim do marxismo-leninismo finalmente libertou a obra de Marx dos grilhões de uma ideologia que dista anos-luz de sua concepção de sociedade.
Pesquisas recentes têm refutado as várias abordagens que reduzem a concepção marxiana de sociedade comunista ao desenvolvimento superior das forças produtivas. Por exemplo, tem sido mostrada a importância que Marx atribuiu à questão ecológica: ele denunciou repetidas vezes o fato de que a expansão do modo capitalista de produção aumenta não apenas o roubo do trabalho dos trabalhadores, mas também a pilhagem dos recursos naturais. Marx se aprofundou em várias outras questões que, embora frequentemente subestimadas, ou até mesmo ignoradas, por estudiosos de sua obra, estão ganhando importância crucial para a agenda política de nosso tempo. Entre essas questões estão a liberdade individual nas esferas econômica e política, emancipação de gênero, a crítica do nacionalismo, o potencial emancipatório da tecnologia, e formas de propriedade coletiva não controladas pelo Estado. Assim, trinta anos após a queda do muro de Berlim, tornou-se possível ler um Marx muito diferente do teórico dogmático, economicista e eurocêntrico que circulou por tanto tempo entre nós.
Novas descobertas sobre a gênese da concepção materialista da história
Em fevereiro de 1845, após intensos 15 meses em Paris que foram cruciais para sua formação política, Marx foi obrigado a mudar para Bruxelas, onde foi autorizado a residir sob a condição de que ele “não publique nada sobre a política atual”[5]. Durante os três anos que passou na capital belga, ele prosseguiu de modo profícuo com seus estudos de economia política e concebeu a ideia de escrever, junto com Engels, Joseph Weydemeyer e Moses Hess, uma “crítica da moderna filosofia alemã, tal como exposta pelos seus representantes Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer e Max Stirner, e do socialismo alemão, tal como exposto por seus vários profetas”[6]. O texto resultante, postumamente publicado sob o título A ideologia alemã, tinha um duplo objetivo: combater as últimas formas do neo-hegelianismo na Alemanha, e então, como escreveu Marx ao editor Carl Wilhelm Julius Leske, “preparar o público para o ponto de vista adotado em minha Economia, que é diametralmente oposto à ciência alemã, passada e presente”[7]. Esse manuscrito, sobre o qual ele trabalhou até junho de 1846, nunca foi terminado, mas o auxiliou a elaborar de modo mais nítido, ainda que não em uma forma definitiva, aquilo que, quarenta anos depois, Engels definiu para o público mais amplo como “a concepção materialista da história”[8].
A primeira edição de A ideologia alemã, publicada em 1932, bem como todas as versões posteriores que apenas incorporaram pequenas modificações, foram enviadas às gráficas com a aparência de um livro completo. Em particular, os editores desse manuscrito de fato inacabado criaram a falsa impressão de que A ideologia alemã incluía um capítulo inicial essencial sobre Feuerbach, no qual Marx e Engels expunham exaustivamente as leis do “materialismo histórico” (um termo nunca usado por Marx). De acordo com Althusser, esse foi o lugar onde eles conceituaram “uma inequívoca ruptura epistemológica” com seus escritos anteriores (Althusser, s/d, p. 33). A ideologia alemã logo se tornou um dos mais importantes textos filosóficos do século XX. De acordo com Henri Lefebvre, ele expôs as “teses fundamentais do materialismo histórico” (Lefebvre, 1968, p. 71). Maximilien Rubel defendia que esse “manuscrito contém a demonstração mais elaborada do conceito crítico e materialista de história” (Rubel, 1980, p. 13). David McLellan foi igualmente incisivo em sustentar que ele “continha a mais detalhada consideração de Marx acerca de sua concepção materialista da história” (McLellan, 1975, p. 37).
Graças ao volume I/5 da MEGA2, “Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Deutsche Ideologie. Manuskripte und Drucke (1845-1847)”[9], muitas dessas reivindicações podem agora ser suavizadas e A ideologia alemã, restituída à sua incompletude original. Essa edição – que compreende 17 manuscritos com um total de 700 páginas mais o aparato crítico de 1200 páginas, fornecendo variações e correções autorais e indicando a paternidade de cada seção – estabelece de uma vez por todas o caráter fragmentário do texto[10]. A falácia do “comunismo científico” característica do século XX e todas as instrumentalizações de A ideologia alemã recordam um trecho a ser encontrado no próprio texto, pois que a sua crítica convincente da filosofia alemã dos tempos de Marx ressoa, também, uma advertência amarga contra futuras tendências exegéticas: “Havia uma mistificação não apenas em suas respostas, mas também em suas perguntas”[11].
No mesmo período, o jovem revolucionário nascido em Trier expandiu os estudos que havia iniciado em Paris. Ele passou os meses de julho e agosto de 1845 em Manchester a mergulhar na vasta literatura econômica de língua inglesa e a compilar nove cadernos de estratos (os assim chamados Cadernos de Manchester), majoritariamente a partir de manuais de economia política e livros sobre história econômica. O volume IV/4 da MEGA2, publicado em 1988, contém os cinco primeiros desses cadernos, junto com três cadernos de anotações de Engels do mesmo período em Manchester[12]. O volume IV/5, “Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Exzerpte und Notizen. Juli 1845 bis Dezember 1850”[13], completa essa série de textos e disponibiliza aos pesquisadores suas partes antes não publicadas. Ele inclui os cadernos 6, 7, 8 e 9, que contém os excertos marxianos de 16 obras de economia política. O mais considerável desse grupo adveio de Labour’s wrong and Labour’s Remedy [Os males do trabalho e seu remédio] (1839), de John Francis Bray, e de quatro textos de Robert Owen, em particular de seu Book of the New Moral World [Livro do novo mundo moral] (1840-1844), todos os quais evidenciam o grande interesse de Marx à época pelo socialismo inglês e seu profundo respeito por Owen, um autor que muitos marxistas têm precipitadamente descartado como “utópico”. O volume termina com cerca de vinte páginas escritas por Marx entre 1846 e 1850, além de algumas notas de estudo de Engels do mesmo período.
Esses estudos sobre teoria socialista e economia política não eram um entrave para o habitual engajamento político de Marx e Engels. As mais de 800 páginas do recentemente publicado volume I/7, “Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe. Februar bis Oktober 1848”[14], permite-nos estimar a escala disso em 1848, um dos anos mais desgastantes em termos de atividade política e jornalística das vidas dos autores do Manifesto do partido comunista. Após um movimento revolucionário de extensão e intensidade inéditas mergulhar a ordem política e social da Europa continental em uma crise, os governos vigentes tomaram todas as contramedidas possíveis para pôr um fim às insurreições. O próprio Marx sofreu as consequências e foi expulso da Bélgica em março daquele ano. Contudo, uma república acabara de ser proclamada na França, e Ferdinand Flocon, um ministro do governo provisório, convidou Marx a retornar a Paris: “Caro e bravo Marx, (…) a tirania o baniu, mas a França livre reabrirá suas portas para ti”. Naturalmente, Marx colocou de lado seus estudos sobre economia política e assumiu a atividade jornalística em apoio à revolução, ajudando, assim, no traçado de um rumo político apropriado. Depois de um breve período em Paris, ele mudou, em abril, para a Renânia e, dois meses mais tarde, começou a editar a Neue Rheinische Zeitung [Nova Gazeta Renana], que, nesse meio tempo, havia sido fundada em Colônia. Uma campanha intensa em suas colunas deu suporte à causa dos insurgentes e incitou o proletariado a promover “a revolução social e republicana”[15].
Quase todos os artigos presentes na Neue Rheinische Zeitung foram publicados de modo anônimo. Um dos méritos desse volume é ter atribuído corretamente a autoria de 36 textos a Marx ou a Engels, enquanto coletâneas anteriores haviam nos deixado em dúvida quanto a quem escreveu qual peça. De um total de 275 artigos, 125 são integralmente impressos aqui pela primeira vez em uma edição das obras de Marx e Engels. Um apêndice apresenta, ainda, 16 documentos interessantes, contendo relatos de algumas de suas intervenções nas conferências da Liga dos Comunistas, nas assembleias da Sociedade Democrática de Colônia e na Associação de Viena. Quem tiver interesse pela atividade política e jornalística de Marx durante 1848, o “ano da revolução”, encontrará aqui um material muito valioso para aprofundar seu conhecimento.
O capital: a crítica inacabada
O movimento revolucionário que se ergueu por toda a Europa em 1848 foi derrotado dentro de um curto espaço de tempo e, em 1849, após duas ordens de expulsão da Prússia e da França, Marx não teve outra opção além de atravessar o Canal da Mancha. Ele permaneceria na Inglaterra como uma pessoa exilada e apátrida pelo resto de sua vida, mas a reação europeia não poderia tê-lo confinado em um lugar melhor para escrever sua crítica da economia política. Àquela época, Londres era o principal centro econômico e financeiro do mundo, o “demiurgo do cosmo burguês”[16], e, portanto, o lugar mais favorável a partir do qual se podia observar os últimos desenvolvimentos econômicos da sociedade capitalista. Ele também se tornou correspondente do New-York Tribune, o jornal com maior circulação nos Estados Unidos da América.
Marx esperou por muitos anos a eclosão de uma nova crise e, quando ela se materializou em 1857, dedicou muito do seu tempo à análise de suas características principais. O volume I/16, “Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Artikel Oktober 1857 bis Dezember 1858”[17], inclui 84 artigos que ele publicou entre o outono de 1857 e o fim de 1858 no New-York Tribune, dentre os quais aqueles em que expressa suas primeiras reações ao público financeiro de 1857. Não obstante o fato de que o diário americano publicava frequentemente editoriais não assinados, a pesquisa para esse novo volume da MEGA2 possibilitou atribuir mais dois artigos a Marx, bem como incluir quatro artigos que foram substancialmente modificados pelos editores e outros três cuja origem permanece incerta.
Movido por uma desesperada necessidade de melhorar sua situação econômica, Marx também ingressou no comitê editorial do The New American Cyclopædia e concordou em redigir uma certa quantidade de verbetes para esse projeto (o volume I/16 contém 39 deles). Mesmo que o pagamento de dois dólares por página fosse muito baixo, ainda assim era uma receita que ingressava em suas desastrosas finanças. Além disso, ele confiou a maioria do trabalho a Engels, de modo que pudesse dedicar mais tempo aos seus escritos econômicos.
Nesse período, o trabalho de Marx foi notável e abrangente. Paralelamente a seu compromisso jornalístico, ele preencheu, entre agosto de 1857 e maio de 1858, os oito cadernos celebremente conhecidos como Grundrisse. Mas ele também colocou a si mesmo a extenuante tarefa de um estudo analítico da primeira crise econômica mundial. O volume IV/4, “Karl Marx, Exzerpte, Zeitungsausschnitte und Notizen zur Weltwirtschaftskrise (Krisenhefte). November 1857 bis Februar 1858”[18], contribui de modo decisivo para nosso conhecimento acerca de um dos intervalos mais profícuos da produção teórica de Marx. Ele descreveu seu surto febril de atividade em uma carta a Engels de dezembro de 1857:
Tenho trabalhado demais, geralmente até às 4 da manhã. O trabalho é duplo: 1. A elaboração das linhas fundamentais [Grundrisse] da economia política. (Em favor do público, é absolutamente essencial adentrar a matéria até o fundo, assim como para mim, individualmente, é absolutamente essencial se livrar desse pesadelo.) 2. A presente crise. Além dos artigos para a [New-York] Tribune, o que faço é apenas registrá-la, o que, entretanto, toma um tempo considerável. Penso que em algum momento da primavera devemos escrever juntos um panfleto sobre o caso, como um lembrete ao público alemão de que continuamos lá como sempre, e sempre os mesmos[19].
Portanto, o plano de Marx era trabalhar simultaneamente em dois projetos: um trabalho teórico sobre a crítica do modo de produção capitalista, e um livro mais estritamente atual sobre as vicissitudes da crise em curso. Essa é a razão pela qual Marx, diferentemente do que ocorre em volumes anteriores similares, não compila, nos assim chamados Cadernos sobre a Crise, estratos de obras de outros economistas; antes, coletou uma grande quantidade de boletins de notícias sobre os maiores colapsos bancários, sobre as variações nos preços do mercado acionário, mudanças nos padrões dos fluxos comerciais, taxas de desemprego e produção industrial. A atenção particular dispensada a essa última distinguiu sua análise em relação àquela de muitos outros que atribuíam às crises a concessão deficiente de crédito e o aumento nos fenômenos especulativos. Marx dividiu suas notas em três cadernos distintos. No primeiro e mais curto caderno, intitulado “1857 France”, ele coletou dados sobre a situação do comércio francês e as principais medidas tomadas pelo Banco da França. O segundo, o “Livro sobre a Crise de 1857”, tinha quase o dobro do tamanho do primeiro e lidava principalmente com o Reino Unido e o mercado monetário. Temas similares foram tratados no terceiro caderno, o “Livro sobre a Crise Comercial”. Pouco maior que o segundo, Marx anotara nesse caderno dados e notícias sobre relações industriais, a produção de matérias-primas e o mercado de trabalho.
O trabalho de Marx foi, como sempre, rigoroso: ele copiou de mais de uma dúzia de periódicos e jornais, em ordem cronológica, as partes mais interessantes de vários artigos e qualquer outra informação que ele pudesse usar para condensar aquilo que estava acontecendo. Sua principal fonte foi o semanário The Economist, de onde extraiu cerca de metade de suas notas, embora também consultasse frequentemente a Morning Star, The Manchester Guardian e The Times. Todos os estratos foram compilados em inglês. Nesses cadernos, Marx não se deteve na transcrição dos principais boletins de notícias a respeito dos Estados Unidos e do Reino Unido. Ele também rastreou os eventos mais significantes em outros países europeus – em particular França, Alemanha, Áustria, Itália e Espanha – e interessou-se vigorosamente por outras partes do mundo, em especial Índia e China, o Extremo Oriente, Egito e, até mesmo, Brasil e Austrália.
Com o passar das semanas, Marx desistiu da ideia de publicar um livro sobre a crise e concentrou todas as suas energias em seu trabalho teórico, a crítica da economia política, que, do seu ponto de vista, não poderia admitir mais nenhum atraso. Ainda assim, os Cadernos sobre a crise permanecem particularmente úteis para a refutação de uma falsa ideia sobre os principais interesses de Marx nesse período. Em uma carta a Engels do começo de 1858, ele escreveu que, “quanto ao método”, lançar mão da “Lógica de Hegel foi de grande utilidade” para seu trabalho, e que, além disso, queria destacar seu “aspecto racional”[20]. Com base nisso, alguns intérpretes da obra de Marx têm concluído que, ao escrever os Grundrisse, ele gastou um tempo considerável estudando a filosofia hegeliana. Mas a publicação do volume IV/14 deixa muito claro que sua principal preocupação à época era com a análise empírica dos eventos ligados à grande crise econômica que há tanto tempo estava prevendo.
Os esforços infatigáveis de Marx para completar sua “crítica da economia política” são, ainda, o tema principal do volume III/12, “Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Briefwechsel. Januar 1862 bis September 1864”[21], que contém sua correspondência do começo de 1862 até a fundação da Associação Internacional dos Trabalhadores. Das 425 cartas preservadas, 112 são correspondências entre Marx e Engels, enquanto 35 foram escritas por eles para terceiros, e 278 remetidas a eles por terceiros (sendo 227 cartas desse grupo publicadas aqui pela primeira vez). A inclusão das últimas – a diferença mais significante em relação a todas as edições anteriores – constitui um verdadeiro tesouro para o leitor interessado, dado que fornece uma gama de novas informações sobre eventos e teorias que Marx e Engels aprenderam com mulheres e homens com quem compartilhavam um compromisso político.
Como todos os outros volumes de correspondência da MEGA2, esse também termina com um registro de cartas escritas por － ou endereçadas a － Marx e Engels que não deixaram mais do que vestígios atestando sua existência. Elas chegam a um total de 125 cartas, quase um quarto do número que sobreviveu, e incluem 57 escritas por Marx. Nesses casos, mesmo o pesquisador mais exigente nada pode fazer além de especular sobre várias hipóteses conjecturais.
Entre os principais pontos de discussão presentes na correspondência de Marx no começo dos anos 1860 estavam a guerra civil norte-americana, a revolta polonesa contra a ocupação russa, e o nascimento do Partido Social-Democrata da Alemanha inspirado pelos princípios de Ferdinand Lassalle. No entanto, um tema constantemente recorrente era sua luta para progredir na escrita de O capital.
Nesse período, Marx se lançou em uma nova área de pesquisa: as Teorias sobre o mais-valor. Em mais de dez cadernos, ele dissecou minuciosamente a abordagem dos maiores economistas que lhe precederam, sendo sua ideia básica a de que “todos os economistas compartilham o erro de examinar o mais-valor não como tal, não em sua forma pura, mas nas formas particulares do lucro e da renda”[22]. Entrementes, a situação econômica de Marx continuava desesperadora. Em junho de 1862 escreveu a Engels: “Todo dia minha esposa diz desejar que ela e as crianças estivessem seguras em seus túmulos, e realmente não posso culpá-la, pois as humilhações, tormentos e inquietações que se passa em tal situação são, de fato, indescritíveis”. A situação era tão extrema que Jenny decidiu vender alguns livros da biblioteca pessoal de seu marido – ainda que ela não tenha conseguido encontrar ninguém que quisesse comprá-los. Contudo, Marx conseguiu “trabalhar duro” e expressou uma nota de satisfação a Engels: “estranho dizer, mas minha massa cinzenta está funcionando melhor em meio à pobreza circundante do que funcionava há anos”[23]. Em setembro, Marx escreveu a Engels que poderia conseguir um emprego “em um escritório ferroviário” no ano novo[24]. Em dezembro, repetiu a seu amigo Ludwig Kugelmann que as coisas haviam se tornado tão desesperadoras que ele tinha “decidido se tornar um ‘homem prático’”; nada deu certo, no entanto. Marx relatou com seu típico sarcasmo: “Felizmente – ou talvez teria que dizer infelizmente? – não consegui o cargo por conta da minha caligrafia ruim”[25].
Paralelamente às tensões financeiras, Marx sofreu por demais com problemas de saúde. Não obstante, do verão de 1863 a dezembro de 1865, ele embarcou na continuidade da edição das várias partes nas quais ele havia decidido subdividir O capital. Ao fim e ao cabo, ele conseguiu elaborar o primeiro esboço do Livro I; o único manuscrito do Livro III, no qual redigira sua única consideração acerca do processo completo da produção capitalista; e uma versão inicial do Livro II, contendo a primeira apresentação geral do processo de circulação do capital.
O volume II/11 da MEGA2, “Karl Marx, Manuskripte zum zweiten Buch des ‘Kapitals’ 1868 bis 1881”[26], contém todos os manuscritos finais relativos ao Livro II de O capital que Marx esboçou entre 1868 e 1881. Nove desses dez manuscritos não haviam sido publicados até então. Em outubro de 1867, Marx retomou o Livro II de O capital, mas vários problemas de saúde forçaram-no a outra súbita interrupção. Alguns meses depois, quando foi capaz de prosseguir com o trabalho, já haviam se passado cerca de três anos desde a última versão que ele escrevera. Marx finalizou os primeiros dois capítulos durante a primavera de 1868, além de um grupo de manuscritos preparatórios – sobre a relação entre mais-valor e taxa de lucro, a lei da taxa de lucro, e as metamorfoses do capital – que o ocuparam até o fim do ano. A nova versão do terceiro capítulo foi terminada no decurso dos dois anos seguintes. O volume II/11 se encerra com uma série de textos curtos que o já envelhecido Marx escreveu entre fevereiro de 1877 e a primavera de 1881.
Os esboços do Livro II de O capital, que foram deixados inconclusivos, apresentam uma série de problemas teóricos. No entanto, a versão final do Livro II foi publicada por Engels em 1885 e aparece, agora, no volume II/13 da MEGA2 intitulado “Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Zweiter Band. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Engels. Hamburg 1885”[27].
Por fim, o volume II/4.3, “Karl Marx, Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863-1868. Teil 3”[28], completa a segunda seção da MEGA². Esse volume, que dá sequência aos prévios II/4.1 e II/4.2[29], contém 15 manuscritos concebidos entre o outono de 1867 e o fim de 1868, os quais permaneceram inéditos até então. Sete desses manuscritos são fragmentos de esboços do Livro III de O capital; apresentam um caráter altamente fragmentário e Marx nunca conseguiu atualizá-los de modo a refletir o progresso de sua pesquisa. Outros três manuscritos correspondem ao Livro II, enquanto os cinco remanescentes lidam com questões concernentes à interdependência entre os Livros II e III e incluem excertos comentados retirados das obras de Adam Smith e Thomas Malthus. Os últimos são particularmente instigantes para aqueles economistas interessados na teoria marxiana da taxa de lucro e em suas ideias sobre a teoria do preço. Estudos filológicos ligados à preparação desse volume também mostraram que o manuscrito original do Livro I de O capital (do qual o “Capítulo seis. Resultados do processo imediato de produção” era considerado a única parte preservada) data, na verdade, do período de 1863-1864, e que Marx o cortou e colou na cópia que ele preparava para publicação[30].
Com a publicação do volume II/4.3 da MEGA2 todos os textos complementares relacionados a O capital se tornaram disponíveis: da famosa “Introdução”, escrita em julho de 1857 durante uma das maiores quebras na história do capitalismo, até os últimos fragmentos redigidos na primavera de 1881. Estamos falando de 15 volumes, mais outros tantos tomos vultosos que constituem um formidável aparato crítico para o texto principal. Eles incluem todos os manuscritos do fim dos anos 1850 e início dos 1860, a primeira versão de O capital publicada em 1867 (partes das quais seriam modificadas em edições subsequentes), a tradução francesa revisada por Marx que apareceu entre 1872 e 1875, e todas as alterações feitas por Engels nos manuscritos dos Livros II e III. Junto a isso, a coleção clássica dos três livros de O capital aparece positivamente diminuta. Não é exagero dizer que só agora podemos compreender completamente os méritos, limites e incompletudes da magnum opus de Marx.
O trabalho editorial que Engels levou a cabo após a morte de seu amigo, isto é, o de preparar as partes não terminadas de O capital para publicação, foi extremamente complexo. Os vários manuscritos, esboços e fragmentos dos Livros II e III, escritos entre 1864 e 1881, correspondem a aproximadamente 2.350 páginas da MEGA2. Engels publicou com êxito o Livro II em 1885 e o III, em 1894. Contudo, é preciso ter em mente que esses dois livros surgiram da reconstrução de textos incompletos, frequentemente formados por material heterogêneo. Eles foram escritos em momentos distintos e, assim, incluem versões diferentes, e por vezes contraditórias, das ideias de Marx.
A Internacional, as pesquisas de Marx após O capital, e os trabalhos finais de Engels
Imediatamente após a publicação de O capital, Marx retomou a atividade militante e assumiu um compromisso permanente com o trabalho da Associação Internacional dos Trabalhadores. Essa fase de sua biografia política está documentada no volume I/21, “Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe. September 1867 bis März 1871”[31], que contém mais de 150 textos e documentos do período de 1867-1871, bem como as atas de 169 reuniões do Conselho Geral em Londres nas quais Marx interveio, atas essas que foram omitidas por todas as edições anteriores dos trabalhos de Marx e Engels[32]. Enquanto tal, esse volume provê material de pesquisa para anos cruciais da vida da Internacional.
Desde os primeiros dias de 1864 as ideias de Proudhon eram hegemônicas na França, na Suíça francófona e na Bélgica e os mutualistas – nome pelo qual seus seguidores eram conhecidos – eram a ala mais moderada da Internacional. Resolutamente hostis à intervenção estatal em qualquer campo, eles se opunham à socialização da terra e dos meios de produção, bem como a qualquer uso do instrumento de greve. Os textos publicados nesse volume mostram como Marx teve um papel central na longa luta para reduzir a influência de Proudhon na Internacional. Eles incluem documentos relacionados à preparação dos congressos de Bruxelas (1868) e da Basileia (1869), onde a Internacional fez seu primeiro pronunciamento explícito sobre a socialização dos meios de produção por autoridades estatais e a favor do direito de abolir a propriedade individual sobre a terra. Isso marcou uma vitória importante para Marx e a primeira aparição de princípios socialistas no programa político de uma importante organização de trabalhadores.
Além do programa político da Associação Internacional dos Trabalhadores, o fim dos anos 1860 e início dos 1870 foram ricos em conflitos sociais. Muitos trabalhadores que participavam de ações de protesto decidiram contactar a Internacional, cuja reputação se espalhava cada vez mais, a fim de pedir apoio a suas lutas. Nesse período surgiram, ainda, algumas seções de trabalhadores irlandeses na Inglaterra. Marx estava preocupado com a divisão que o nacionalismo brutal havia produzido nas fileiras do proletariado e, em um documento que veio a ser conhecido como “Confidential Communication”, ele enfatizou que “a burguesia inglesa não apenas explorou a miséria irlandesa para deteriorar a situação da classe trabalhadora na Inglaterra por meio da imigração forçada de irlandeses pobres”; ela também se provou capaz de dividir os trabalhadores “em dois campos hostis”[33]. No seu modo de entender, “uma nação que escraviza outra forja suas próprias correntes”[34] e a luta de classes não poderia ignorar um assunto tão decisivo. Outro tema importante no volume, tratado com particular atenção nos escritos de Engels para The Pall Mall Gazette, foi a oposição à Guerra Franco-Prussiana de 1870-1871.
O trabalho de Marx na Associação Internacional dos Trabalhadores perdurou entre 1864 e 1872, e o novíssimo volume IV/18, “Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Exzerpte und Notizen. Februar 1864 bis Oktober 1868, November 1869, März, April, Juni 1870, Dezember 1872”[35], fornece a parte até então desconhecida dos estudos que ele realizara durante esses anos. A pesquisa de Marx ocorreu tanto próximo à impressão do Livro I de O capital quanto após 1867, enquanto preparava os livros II e III para publicação. Esse volume da MEGA² consiste em cinco livros de excertos e quatro cadernos com resumos de mais de uma centena de obras publicadas, relatórios de debates parlamentares e artigos jornalísticos. A parte mais considerável e teoricamente importante desses materiais envolve a pesquisa de Marx sobre agricultura, sendo, aqui, seus principais interesses a renda da terra, as ciências naturais, as condições agrárias em vários países europeus e nos Estados Unidos, Rússia, Japão e Índia, e os sistemas de posse da terra em sociedades pré-capitalistas.
Marx leu atentamente Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie (1843) [A química em sua aplicação na agricultura e fisiologia], um livro escrito pelo cientista alemão Justus von Liebig e que ele considerava essencial, uma vez que permitiu-lhe modificar sua crença de que as descobertas científicas da agricultura moderna haviam resolvido o problema da regeneração do solo. Desde então, ele apresentou um interesse cada vez mais vivo naquilo que hoje chamaríamos de “ecologia”, em particular na erosão do solo e no desmatamento. Dentre os outros livros que impressionaram Marx fortemente nesse período, também deveria ser atribuído um lugar especial à Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf-, und Stadt-Verfassung und der öffentlichen Gewalt (1854) [Introdução à história da constituição da marca, sítio, povoado e cidade e da autoridade pública], escrito pelo teórico político e historiador jurídico Georg Ludwig von Maurer. Em uma carta a Engels, ele disse que achou os livros de Maurer “extremamente relevantes”, uma vez que eles abordaram de um jeito completamente diferente “não apenas a era primitiva, mas também todo o desenvolvimento posterior das cidades imperiais livres, do privilégio da posse dos proprietários rurais, da autoridade pública, e a luta entre o campesinato livre e a servidão”[36]. Ademais, Marx endossou a demonstração de Maurer de que a propriedade privada da terra pertencia a um período histórico preciso e não poderia ser considerada como uma característica natural da civilização humana. Por fim, Marx estudou em profundidade três obras alemãs escritas por Karl Fraas: Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte beider (1847) [Clima e reino vegetal no tempo. Uma contribuição para a história de ambas], Geschichte der Landwirtschaft (1852) [História da agricultura] e Die Natur der Landwirtschaft (1857) [A natureza da agricultura]. Ele achou a primeira dessas obras “muito interessante”, especialmente ao se referir à parte em que Fraas demonstra que o “clima e a flora mudam historicamente”. Marx o descreveu como um “darwinista antes de Darwin”, que admitiu que “mesmo as espécies têm se desenvolvido historicamente”. Ele foi surpreendido, ainda, pelas considerações ecológicas de Fraas e sua preocupação correlata de que “o cultivo – quando prossegue em crescimento natural e não é controlado conscientemente (como um burguês, naturalmente ele não alcança esse ponto) – deixa desertos atrás de si”. Marx poderia detectar nisso tudo “uma tendência socialista inconsciente”[37].
Após a publicação dos assim chamados Cadernos sobre agricultura, pode-se argumentar com maior grau de certeza que, se Marx tivesse tido forças para finalizar os últimos dois livros de O capital, a ecologia teria tido um papel muito mais importante em seu pensamento[38]. Evidentemente, a crítica ecológica de Marx era anticapitalista em seu enfoque e, para além das esperanças que ele colocava no progresso científico, envolvia o questionamento do modo de produção como um todo.
A magnitude dos estudos marxianos sobre as ciências naturais se tornou completamente visível desde a publicação do volume IV/26, “Karl Marx, Exzerpte und Notizen zur Geologie, Mineralogie und Agrikulturchemie. März bis September 1878”[39]. Na primavera e no verão de 1878, a geologia, mineralogia e agroquímica eram mais centrais para os estudos de Marx do que a economia política. Ele compilou estratos de uma série de livros, incluindo The natural history of the raw materials of commerce (1872) [A história natural das matérias-primas do comércio], de John Yeats; Das Buch der Natur (1848) [O livro da natureza], do químico Friedrich Schoedler; e Elements of agricultural chemistry and geology (1858) [Elementos de química agrária e geologia], do químico e mineralogista James Johnston. Entre junho e início de setembro, atracou-se com The student’s manual of geology (1857) [Manual do estudante de geologia] de Joseph Jukes[40], do qual copiou o maior número de estratos. O foco principal desses estratos são questões de metodologia científica, os estágios do desenvolvimento da geologia como disciplina, e sua utilidade para a produção industrial e agrária.
A assimilação de tais questões despertou em Marx a necessidade de desenvolver suas ideias a respeito do lucro, algo com o qual havia se ocupado contínua e intensivamente em meados dos anos 1860, quando escreveu o esboço da parte sobre “A transformação do excedente do lucro em renda da terra”, constituinte do Livro III de O capital. Alguns dos resumos de textos sobre ciências naturais tinham o objetivo de lançar uma luz mais intensa sobre o material em estudo. Mas outros excertos, mais voltados a aspectos teóricos, eram destinados à conclusão do Livro III. Engels recordou mais tarde que Marx “vasculhou (…) a pré-história, agronomia, propriedade russa e americana da terra, geologia etc., para desenvolver a seção sobre a renda da terra no Livro III de O capital em uma profundidade (…) nunca tentada”[41]. Esses volumes da MEGA2 são ainda mais importantes porque servem para desacreditar o mito, repetido em uma série de biografias e estudos sobre Marx, de que após O capital ele havia satisfeito sua curiosidade intelectual e desistido completamente de novos estudos e pesquisas[42].
Por fim, três livros da MEGA2 publicados na última década dizem respeito ao último Engels. O volume I/30, “Friedrich Engels, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe. Mai 1883 bis September 1886”[43], contém 43 textos escritos por ele nos três anos que se passaram após a morte de Marx. Dos 29 textos mais importantes dentre esses, 17 consistem em peças jornalísticas que apareceram em alguns dos principais jornais da imprensa proletária europeia. Embora nesse período estivesse especialmente absorvido pela edição dos manuscritos incompletos de O capital deixados por Marx, Engels não se furtou de intervir em uma série de questões políticas e teóricas candentes. Lançou, ainda, uma obra polêmica que mirava o reaparecimento do idealismo nos círculos acadêmicos alemães, a saber, Ludwig Feuerbach e o fim da filosofia clássica alemã (1886). Os outros 14 textos, publicados nesse volume como um apêndice, são algumas das traduções do próprio Engels e uma série de artigos assinados por outros autores em colaboração com ele.
A MEGA2 também publicou um novo conjunto de correspondências de Engels. O volume III/30, “Friedrich Engels, Briefwechsel. Oktober 1889 bis November 1890”[44], apresenta 406 cartas preservadas do total de 500 ou mais que ele escreveu entre outubro de 1889 e novembro de 1890. Além do mais, a inclusão inédita de cartas de outros correspondentes possibilita apreciar de modo mais profundo a contribuição de Engels para o crescimento dos partidos proletários na Alemanha, na França e no Reino Unido, no que diz respeito a toda uma gama de questões teóricas e organizacionais. Alguns dos itens em questão se referem ao nascimento da Segunda Internacional, cujo congresso de fundação ocorreu em 14 de julho de 1889, e aos muitos debates nela em curso.
Finalmente, o volume I/32, “Friedrich Engels, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe. März 1891 bis August 1895”[45], reúne escritos dos últimos quatro anos e meio da vida de Engels. Há uma série de peças jornalísticas escritas para os maiores jornais socialistas da época, incluindo Die Neue Zeit, Le Socialiste e Critica Sociale, bem como prefácios e posfácios a várias reimpressões das obras de Marx e Engels, transcrições de discursos, entrevistas e saudações a congressos partidários, relatos de conversas, documentos esboçados por Engels em colaboração com outros, e uma série de traduções.
Portanto, esses três volumes se revelarão extremamente úteis para um estudo aprofundado das contribuições teóricas e políticas tardias de Engels. As numerosas publicações e conferências internacionais programadas para o bicentenário de seu nascimento (1820-2020) certamente não falharão em sondar esses vinte anos que se passaram após a morte de Marx, período em que dedicou suas energias para a difusão do marxismo.
Outro Marx?
Que Marx emerge da nova edição histórico-crítica de seus trabalhos? Em certos aspectos, ele difere do pensador que muitos discípulos e oponentes apresentaram ao longo dos anos – sem falar das estátuas de pedra encontradas em praças públicas sob regimes não-livres da Europa Oriental, estátuas essas que o representavam apontando para o futuro com imperiosa certeza. Por outro lado, poderia ser enganoso trazer à baila a ideia – como fazem aqueles que, de modo muito entusiástico, saúdam um “Marx desconhecido” após cada novo texto que pela primeira vez surge – de que a pesquisa recente virou do avesso tudo aquilo que já se conhecia sobre ele. O que a MEGA2 fornece é, antes, a base textual para repensar um Marx diferente: diferente não porque a luta de classes abandona seu pensamento (como alguns acadêmicos desejariam, em uma variação do antigo bordão do “Marx economista” contra o “Marx político” que busca, em vão, apresentá-lo como um clássico inócuo); mas radicalmente diferente do autor que foi dogmaticamente convertido em fons et origo [fonte e origem] do “socialismo realmente existente” e supostamente fixado apenas no conflito classista.
Os novos avanços alcançados no âmbito dos estudos marxianos sugerem que a exegese da obra de Marx está novamente se tornando, assim como muitas outras vezes no passado, cada vez mais refinada. Por muito tempo, vários marxistas colocaram os escritos do jovem Marx em primeiro plano, principalmente os Manuscritos econômico-filosóficos de 1844 e A ideologia alemã, enquanto o Manifesto do partido comunista permanecia seu texto mais amplamente lido e citado. Naqueles primeiros escritos, no entanto, são encontradas muitas ideias que foram suplantadas em sua obra tardia. Por muito tempo, a dificuldade em examinar a pesquisa de Marx realizada nas duas últimas décadas de sua vida obstruiu nosso conhecimento acerca de importantes ganhos que ele obteve. Mas é sobretudo em O capital e seus esboços preliminares, bem como nas pesquisas de seus últimos anos, que encontramos as reflexões mais preciosas sobre a crítica da sociedade burguesa. Elas representam as últimas conclusões a que Marx chegou, embora não as definitivas. Se examinadas criticamente à luz das mudanças que o mundo sofreu desde a sua morte, elas ainda podem se mostrar úteis à tarefa de teorizar, após os fracassos do século XX, um modelo socioeconômico alternativo ao capitalismo.
A edição MEGA2 tem desmentido todas as alegações de que Marx seja um pensador sobre quem tudo já foi escrito e dito. Ainda há muito para se aprender com Marx. Hoje, é possível fazer isso estudando não apenas aquilo que ele escreveu em seus trabalhos publicados, mas estudando também as questões e dúvidas contidas em seus manuscritos inacabados.
Referências bibliográficas
ALTHUSSER, L. For Marx. London: Verso, [sem data no original].
LEFEBVRE, H. Dialectical Materialism, London: Cape Editions, 1968.
MARX, K. “Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1867-68 (Excerpt)”, Historical Materialism, vol. 27, n. 4, 2019, p. 162-192.
MCLELLAN, D. Karl Marx, London: Fontana, 1975.
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MUSTO, M. (ed.). The Marx Revival: Essential Concepts and New Interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
MUSTO, M. The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020a.
MUSTO, M. O velho Marx: uma biografia de seus últimos anos (1881-1883). Trad. Rubens Enderle. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2018.
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SMITH, D. Marx’s World: Global Society and Capital Accumulation in Marx’s Late Manuscripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, no prelo.
Resumo
O artigo apresenta as novas descobertas e possibilidades de interpretações da obra de Marx a partir da retomada da publicação da MEGA2. Argumenta que a nova edição histórico-crítica não revela um Marx desconhecido, mas indica a existência de facetas diferentes em sua obra. O exame das notas e do material não publicado por Marx permite chamar a atenção para seu interesse naquilo que hoje denominamos ecologia e para aspectos de sua crítica à sociedade burguesa que podem nos auxiliar no desenvolvimento de uma perspectiva anticapitalista própria ao século XXI.
Palavras-chave: MEGA2, Marx, materialismo histórico, Internacional
Abstract
The article presents the new discoveries and possibilities of interpretations of Marx’s work from the resumption of the publication of MEGA2. He argues that the new historical-critical edition does not reveal an unknown Marx, but indicates the existence of different facets in his work. The examination of notes and material not published by Marx himself allows to draw attention to his interest in what we now call ecology and to aspects of his criticism of bourgeois society that can assist us in the development of an anti-capitalist perspective proper to the 21st century.
Keywords: MEGA2, Marx, historical materialism, International
[1] Os tomos II/4.1 e II/4.2 foram publicados antes da interrupção da MEGA2, enquanto o II/4.3 saiu em 2012. Esse livro em três partes leva a 67 o número total de volumes da MEGA2 publicados desde 1975. No futuro, alguns dos demais volumes serão publicados apenas na forma digital. NT: Os tomos II/4.1 e II/4.2 da MEGA2 se referem aos Manuscritos Econômicos de 1863-1867; o II/4.3, por sua vez, aumenta o recorte temporal anterior em um ano e apresenta os Manuscritos Econômicos de 1863-1868.
[2] A publicação do volume IV/32 da MEGA2, Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Die Bibliotheken von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, editado por Hans-Peter Harstick, Richard Sperl e Hanno Strauß, Akademie, Berlin, 1999, foi de particular relevância para o conhecimento do conteúdo da biblioteca de Marx. Ela consiste em um index de 1.450 livros (em 2.100 tomos) – dois terços dos quais pertencentes a Marx e Engels. Essa compilação indica todas as páginas de cada volume nas quais Marx e Engels deixaram anotações e marginálias.
[3] Para uma resenha de todos os 13 volumes da MEGA2 publicados de 1998 – o ano da retomada dessa edição – até 2007, cf. Musto (2007). Essa resenha crítica cobre os 15 volumes – que somam o total de 20.508 páginas – publicados entre 2008 e 2019.
[4] Karl Marx, “Marx’s Undertaking Not to Publish Anything in Belgium on Current Politics”, Marx-Engels Collected Works [doravante MECW], vol. 4, p. 677. N.T. Para facilitar a leitura, todas as referências a publicações extraídas da MECW e da MEGA2 serão feitas em nota de rodapé.
[5] Karl Marx, “Declaration against Karl Grün”, MECW, vol. 6, p. 72.
[6] Karl Marx para Carl Wilhelm Julius Leske, 1 de agosto de 1846, MECW, vol. 38, p. 50.
[7] Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, MECW, vol. 26, p. 519. Na verdade, Engels já usara essa expressão em 1859 em sua resenha de Para a crítica da economia política de Marx, mas o artigo não teve ressonância e o termo só começou a circular após a publicação de seu Ludwig Feuerbach.
[8] MEGA2, vol. I/5, editado por Ulrich Pagel, Gerald Hubmann e Christine Weckwerth, Berlim: De Gruyter, 2017, p. 1.893.
[9] Alguns anos antes da publicação do volume I/5 da MEGA2 e com base na edição alemã de Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Joseph Weydemeyer, Die Deutsche Ideologie. Artikel, Druckvorlagen, Entwürfe, Reinschriftenfragmente und Notizen zu ”I. Feuerbach” und “II Sankt Bruno”, que apareceu como uma edição especial do periódico Marx-Engels Jahrbuch em 2003, Terrell Carver e Daniel Blank forneceram uma nova edição no idioma inglês do assim chamado “Capítulo sobre Feuerbach”: Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter”, New York: Palgrave, 2014. Os dois autores defenderam a fidelidade máxima aos originais, criticando, além disso, a edição do Marx-Engels Jahrbuch (agora incorporada ao volume I/5) pelo fato de que ela, alinhada com antigos editores do século XX, organizara os distintos manuscritos como se eles formassem o esboço de uma obra totalmente coesa, ainda que nunca completada.
[10] Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, vol. 5, p. 28.
[11] Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Exzerpte und Notizen Juli bis August 1845, MEGA2, vol. IV/4, editado pelo Instituto de Marxismo-Leninismo, Berlim: Dietz, 1988.
[12] MEGA2, vol. IV/5, editado por Georgij Bagaturija, Timm Graßmann, Aleksandr Syrov and Ljudmila Vasina, Berlim: De Gruyter, 2015, p. 650.
[13] MEGA2, vol. I/7, editado por Jürgen Herren and François Melis, Berlim: De Gruyter, 2016, p. 1.774.
[14] Karl Marx, “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution”, MECW, vol. 8, p. 178.
[15] Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, MECW, vol. 10, p. 134.
[16] MEGA2, I/16, editado por Claudia Rechel e Hanno Strauß, Berlim: De Gruyter, 2018, p. 1.181.
[17] MEGA2, vol. IV/14, editado por Kenji Mori, Rolf Hecker, Izumi Omura e Atsushi Tamaoka, Berlim: De Gruyter, 2017, p. 680.
[18] Karl Marx a Friedrich Engels, 18 de dezembro de 1857, MECW, vol. 40, p. 224.
[19] Karl Marx a Friedrich Engels, 16 de janeiro de 1858, MECW, vol. 40, p. 249.
[20] MEGA2, vol. III/12, editado por Galina Golovina, Tat’jana Gioeva e Rolf Dlubek, Berlim: Akademie, 2013, p. 1.529.
[21] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, vol. I, MECW, vol. 30, p. 348.
[22] Karl Marx a Friedrich Engels, 18 de junho de 1862, MECW, vol. 41, p. 380.
[23] Karl Marx a Friedrich Engels, 10 de setembro de 1862, MECW, vol. 41, p. 417.
[24] Karl Marx a Ludwig Kugelmann, 28 de dezembro de 1862, MECW, vol. 41, p. 436.
[25] MEGA2, vol. II/11, editado por Teinosuke Otani, Ljudmila Vasina e Carl-Erich Vollgraf, Berlim: Akademie, 2008, p. 1.850.
[26] MEGA22, vol. II/13, Berlim: Akademie, 2008, p. 800.
[27] MEGA2, vol. II/4.3, editado por Carl-Erich Vollgraf, Berlim: Akademie, 2012, p. 1.065. Uma pequena parte desse texto foi traduzida recentemente para o inglês: Marx (2019).
[28] O volume II/4.2 foi traduzido recentemente para o inglês em Moseley (2015).
[29] Veja Carl-Erich Vollgraf, “Einführung”, em MEGA2, vol. II/4.3, cit., p. 421-74.
[30] MEGA2, vol. I/21, editado por Jürgen Herres, Berlim: Akademie, 2009, p. 2.432.
[31] Algumas delas – como os discursos e resoluções apresentados nos congressos da Internacional – foram, em vez disso, incluídas em uma antologia publicada por ocasião do 150° aniversário dessa organização: cf. Musto (2014).
[32] Karl Marx, “Confidential Communication”, MECW, vol. 21, p. 120.
[33] Ibid.
[34] MEGA2, vol. IV/18, editado por Teinosuke Otani, Kohei Saito e Timm Graßmann, Berlim: De Gruyter, 2019, p. 1.294.
[35] Karl Marx a Friedrich Engels, 25 de março de 1868, MECW, vol. 42, p. 557.
[36] Ibid., p. 558-559.
[37] Sobre essas questões, veja também o trabalho de um dos editores do volume IV/8 da MEGA2: Saito (2017).
[38] MEGA2, vol. IV/26, editado por Anneliese Griese, Peter Krüger e Richard Sperl, Berlim: Akademie, 2011, p. 1.104.
[39] Ibid., p. 139-679.
[40] Friedrich Engels, “Marx, Heinrich Karl”, MECW, vol. 27, p. 341. O grande interesse de Marx nas ciências naturais, interesse esse que ficou praticamente desconhecido por muito tempo, é evidente também no volume IV/31 da MEGA2, a saber, Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels. Naturwissenschaftliche Exzerpte und Notizen. Mitte 1877 bis Anfang 1883, editado por Annalise Griese, Friederun Fessen, Peter Jäckel e Gerd Pawelzig, Berlim: Akademie, 1999, que apresenta as notas sobre química orgânica e inorgânica tomadas por Marx após 1877.
[41] Veja Musto (2020). Um marco importante para esse tema será a publicação do livro editado por David Smith, pela Yale University Press em 2021, “Marx’s World: Global Society and Capital Accumulation in Marx’s Late Manuscripts”.
[42] MEGA2, vol. I/30, editado por Renate Merkel-Melis, Berlim: Akademie, 2011, p. 1.154.
[43] MEGA2, vol. III/30, editado por Gerd Callesen e Svetlana Gavril’čenko, Berlim: Akademie, 2013, p. 1.512.
[44] MEGA2, vol. I/32, editado por Peer Kösling, Berlim: Akademie, 2010, p. 1.590.
[45] MEGA2, vol. I/32, editado por Peer Kösling, Berlim: Akademie, 2010, p. 1.590.
Categories
M. J. Wert, Choice Reviews
Readers are lucky to finally have this English translation of Musto’s intellectual biography of Karl Marx’s later years. First published in Italian in 2016, this concise book offers both a biographical look into Marx’s last years and the changes that occurred in his theoretical views. Musto (sociology, York Univ., Canada) lists the many works that were published in disciplines not typically associated with Marx, for example, anthropology and ethnography, or in fields that he is often accused of misrepresenting, like the economic history of India. Readers learn much about Marx’s intellectual curiosity and interactions with activists and scholars in Russia, which occupied much of his later life study. Along the way, Musto clears up the many misunderstandings of Marx, conveying, for example, that Marx did not believe that interpretive frameworks based on Western European history should be slavishly applied to other contexts, and that he was not an economic determinist. Accusations of Orientalism also miss the mark when looking at Marx’s later writings. To read the Communist Manifesto in college and then readily dismiss Marx is a mistake, and Musto’s book explains why this is true.