Author: Enrico Campo

The literature on the Third, or Old, Marx, by which I mean the literature that deals with the last 16 years of his life (approximately from the publication of “Capital” in 1867 to his death in 1883) is becoming increasingly frequent and influential. I have already reviewed Kevin Anderson’s excellent “Marx at the Margins”. Marcello Musto’s “Les dernieres annees de Karl Marx” (I read the book in French) or “The last years of Karl Marx” is an important addition. Musto’s original was published in 2016 in Italian, and, as he writes in the preface, has already been translated into twenty languages.
Musto’s main thesis, like in other books on the Third Marx, is that Marx’s last years, far from being barren as the common view holds, have been filled with uninterrupted readings in all areas, from ethnography and anthropology to physics, increasing interest in mathematics (which Marx used mostly as a passe-temps) and, most importantly, political and economic discussions that led him further away from the Eurocentric stadial philosophy of history. It is this last part that is, for obvious reasons, most relevant for us today. It “creates” the third Marx: the first being the one of human condition, of “Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts” and “German Ideology”, the second, and best known, the one of “Capital” and other economic writings, and the third, the Marx of globalization.
Despite what Musto attempts to prove, namely that Marx was intellectually very active until almost the end of his life, the reader remains somewhat unconvinced by the argument. In fact, as the detailed chronological review of the last years (and especially of the last two years) shows Marx suffered a lot due to his bad health, deaths in the family (of his wife in 1881, and then just before his own death of his oldest daughter), continued to read and make copious notes across disciplines, but did not really produce much. His objective of finishing at least volume 2 of “Capital” was unfulfilled. Finishing volume 3 was not even on the horizon.
The last intellectually significant contribution was Marx’s discussion in the seventies, with several Russian authors, of Russia’s transition to socialism. That discussion is not only important because of what happened later but because Marx was, for the first time, faced with the question whether his stadial theory of history and ineluctability of socialism, meant also that very diverse societies had to go through the same stages as Western Europe or not. Marx became quite aware of the problem, and papered it over by writing that his schemata were based on West European experience only. This is the non-dogmatic Marx that Musto privileges in his interpretation.
However, the danger of being non-dogmatic is the following: if one admis a multitude of economic systems, or that similar conditions may lead to very different outcomes, one eventually remains without any distinct socio-economic theory, but with many individual case studies. They can be discussed in great detail one by one, and very reasonably so, but this “segmentation” also rules out the inevitability of the ultimate aim that Marx entertained throughout his life: the emancipation of labor, or in other words, socialization of the means of production. If anything can happen, why are we convinced that emancipation of labor is ineluctable?
Looking at the caution with which Marx approached the Russian question (can land held in common be the basis for communist development? does Russia need to develop capitalism first?), one can easily see how very conscient Marx was of the problem. Insisting on Western European stages of history meant irrelevance of his theory for the rest of the world (including India into which Marx was quite interested), but “diluting” his theory too much meant undermining the historical necessity of the ultimate objective. It is only thus that we can understand Marx’s hesitation on the Russian question, and numerous drafts of his famous reply to Vera Zasulich’s letter.
Musto comes to the conclusion that Marx accepted the Russian populists’ view that the commune can provide the basis for direct transition to communism, and against the view that Russian socialists need do nothing but cheer the advance of capitalism in the hope that, when capitalism is sufficiently advanced, it would lead the country automatically to socialism. In other words, Marx accepted the multiplicity of the paths to socialism, and even the political way of achieving this through insurrection and revolution. The multiplicity of the ways to socialism is therefore ideologically compatible with Blanquism or Leninism: audacious political action that may not be fully supported by the “objective” economic conditions, as a way to force history. Lenin’s and later Mao’s interpretations of Marxism are certainly consistent with this view.
A different interpretation is also possible, but its political implication is “attentisme”, that is reformism and pragmatism that eventually took over German Social-democracy and Eduard Bernstein, whom both Marx and Engels thought to be its most promising leader. The two aspects of Marx that are, in theory, indissoluble: a student of historical processes and a political activist, collide. One has to choose what to do: to be a Fabian or a Leninist.
Choosing the latter, that is, “forcing history” leads to some unpleasant conclusions. Not only can “reasonable” voluntarism be endorsed, but even much more “costly” measures too. If it makes sense to use common ownership of land as in the Russian obshchina to build upon it a much more developed, but collectively owned, system, it does make sense, as Stalin did, to proceed to collectivization. Collectivization can be seen not solely as a means to increase agricultural output through economies of scale but to solve the socio-economic puzzle. Stolypin’s reforms and then, after 1917, the seizure of land belonging to nobility had created a very numerous small-holding peasantry. The obshchina mode of production was spontaneously and naturally transformed into a small-scale and increasingly capitalist mode of production. But if a short-cut to socialism is possible, would not the argument that this multitude of small holdings should be combined into a more general collective ownership, supported by more advanced technology, be valid?
The statement on the feasibility of different ways of transition to socialism thus leads one to the acceptance of revolutionary practice as a “midwife” of new economic formations which in turn allows for ever more voluntaristic, or politically-motivated, moves.
Musto does not seem, in my opinion, to fully realize that what seems, from today’s perspective, open-mindedness and non-dogmatism of Marx, can lead to the outcomes like collectivization that he rightly deplores. This is the dilemma faced even today: if everything (or most) is a matter of political will, then, with skillful leaders, the underlying economic and social conditions become less important, and one enters the realm of arbitrariness. But if everything is decided by the social “fundamentals”, then there is no role for politics, or there is only a role for the politics of the possible which is timid, boring and self-limiting.

This erudite yet highly readable study covers the period from January 1881 to Marx’s death on 14 March 1883. As Musto notes, previous biographers have ‘devoted . . . few pages to his activity after the winding up of the International Working Men’s Association, in 1872’ (p. 5). This tendency to neglect his final years includes authors of classic biographies sympathetic to Marx, such as Franz Mehring (1918), Boris Nicolaevsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen (1936), and David McLellan (1973), and also more recent and less sympathetic biographies by the likes of Gareth Stedman-Jones (2016). Musto’s aim is thus to fill a gap in the literature, making use of the new materials that have become available since the resumed publication in 1998 of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtaugabe (MEGA2). Musto notes that the demise of Marxism-Leninism makes it possible ‘to read a Marx very unlike the dogmatic, economistic, and Eurocentric theorist who was paraded around for so long’ (p. 4), and he argues that a study of Marx’s last writings can contribute to the emergence of such readings. Far from dimming, Marx’s relentlessly probing and questioning intellect burns all the more brightly as his health – ruined by decades of poverty and overwork – starts to give out. It is a great virtue of Musto’s book that the story of Marx’s theoretical work in his last years is intertwined with a vivid and intimate account of his struggle against bodily frailty and impending death. There are four modestly proportioned but substantive chapters. Chapter 1, ‘New Research Horizons’, provides an atmospheric portait of Marx in his study in Maitland Park Road in North London, toiling ‘at a modest desk no larger than three feet by two’ with his ‘painstakingly rigorous and intransigiently critical [method]’ (p. 11). Musto isn’t exaggerating when he writes that ‘The whole world was contained in his room as he sat there at his desk’ (p. 48): having taught himself Russian, a considerable section of his library consists of texts in the Cyrillic alphabet, such as Maksim Kovalevsky’s 1879 Communal Landownership: The Causes, Course and Consequences of its Decline, a study of which allows Marx to reflect on landownership in countries under foreign rule and how possession rights were regulated in Latin America by the Spanish, in India by the British, and in Algeria by the French. Anthroplogy, ancient societies, organic chemistry, physics, physiology, geology, and differential calculus are only some of the subjects studied, as well as Australia, the United States, and the British colonial occupation of Ireland, all in addition to his ongoing work in political economy and socialist politics. Chapter 2, ‘Controversy Over the Development of Capitalism in Russia’, displays just how far Marx was from being a dogmatist who attempted to shoehorn historical events into a pre-ordained a priori schema. In 1881, Marx received a letter from Vera Zasulich, a Russian activist (who had flown to Geneva, having attempted to assassinate the chief of police in St. Petersburg), asking whether Marx believed it possible that the rural commune (obshchina) was capable of developing in a socialist direction without first perishing and being usurped by capitalism. Based on the schema feudalism-capitalism-socialism, many ‘Marxists’ of the day would answer ‘No’. Musto outlines how Marx himself wrestled with the question for almost 3 weeks, producing 4 drafts of an answer to Zasulich, emphasizing that claims of the historical inevitability of the passage from feudalism to capitalism were ‘expressly restricted . . . to the countries of Western Europe’ (p. 65). In the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism in England, capitalist relations of production were not in existence anywhere else in Europe. This is not the situation of the Russian obshchina in the late 19th century. Marx thus reaches the answer he gave in the 1882 Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto: ‘If the Russian Revolution becomes a signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development’ (quoted on p. 71). More important than the answer reached was the fact that Marx at this late stage worked it out afresh based on the empirical research and historical analysis at his disposal: he was a social scientist with a remarkably open theoretical cast of mind, not a quasi-religious prophet dispensing ‘teachings’. Chapter 3, `The Travails of “Old Nick”’, details how the theories developed in Capital Volume I began to spread throughout Europe in the 1870s and early 1880s, together with the various obstacles (personal and otherwise) that prevented him completing Volumes II and III. Despite the death of his wife, Jenny, in December 1881 – he was so frail from pleurisy and bronchitis himself that his doctor ordered him not to attend the funeral – Marx resumed his historical studies, constructing `an annotated year-by-year timeline of world events from the first century BC on’ (p.99), and hoping to correct what he now took to be the `completely inadequate . . . schema of linear progression’ through the various modes of production outlined in his (now famous) “Preface” to the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. His timeline reached 1648 before ill-health again intervened. Unwilling to burden his youngest daughter Eleanor with the task of accompanying him, on his doctor’s advice he set out alone in February 1882 for Algiers, crossing France by train to Marseilles to take a steamship that reached the North African port after a 34 hour crossing through stormy weather. The final chapter, ‘The Moor’s Last Journey’, is the highlight of the book. Other biographies devote at most a few sentences to Marx’s only trip outside Europe, whereas Musto reconstructs from Marx’s correspondence the 72days he spent unsuccessfully seeking relief from ill-health in Algiers. The death of Marx’s eldest daughter Jenny in January 1883 (at the age of 39) is the cruellest blow, followed shortly afterwards by Marx’s own demise. Despite the heartbreaking tale, Musto ends the chapter on an inspirational note of which Marx himself would surely have approved, speaking of the message ‘that radiates incessantly from the whole of his work: organize the struggle to end the bourgeois mode of production and to achieve the emancipation of the workers of the world from the domination of capital’ (p. 125). Making very good use of Marx’s extensive late notebooks, Musto’s important volume constitutes an excellent addition to the literature: it will provide insight and inspiration to all students of Marx and his work.