Author: Marcello Musto

Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera on Marx and Indigenous Politics

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date November 9, 2019

Álvaro García Linera has been vice president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia since 2006.

He is one of the most original voices in the Latin American Left, whose works include Value Form and Community Form (1995) and Plebeian Power (2008). Born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1962, Linera was very young when he first drew close to Marxism and the struggles of the Aymara people, an Indigenous nation in the Andes. In the early 1980s, he moved to Mexico to study mathematics, and he was influenced by the Guatemalan guerrilla movements fighting for the cause of the Indigenous population. After his return to Bolivia, he became one of the founders of the Túpac Katari Guerrilla Army, a political organization that combined Marxist class struggle with Katarist principles (the idea that in Bolivia the Indigenous population suffered both from class and ethnic oppression), promoting Indigenous emancipation. Held in a maximum security prison between 1992 and 1997 for his political activity, he went on to teach sociology and to become an influential intellectual. Later, he joined Evo Morales’ Movement for Socialism, which is the biggest Bolivian political party since 2005. Our conversation with him centered on the situation of progressive forces in Bolivia and other parts of Latin America.

Marcello Musto: Your political commitment is marked by an awareness that most Latin American communist organizations were incapable of speaking to the popular classes as a whole and occupied little more than a function of observers. In Bolivia, for example, the communists’ reliance on the most schematic and economistic Marxism-Leninism prevented them from recognizing the specificity of the Indigenous question and placing it at the center of their political activity. They saw Native peoples as an indistinct “petty-bourgeois” peasant mass with no revolutionary potential. How did you come to realize that it was necessary to build something radically different from the left that existed at the time?

Álvaro García Linera: In Bolivia, food was produced by Indigenous farmers, buildings and houses were built by Indigenous workers, streets were cleaned by Indigenous people, and the elite and the middle classes entrusted the care of their children to them. Yet the traditional left seemed [oblivious] to this and occupied itself only with workers in large-scale industry, paying no attention to their ethnic identity. Though certainly important for work in the mines, they were a minority in comparison with Indigenous workers, who were discriminated against and even more harshly exploited. From the late 1970s on, the Aymara population organized large mobilizations against the dictatorship as well as the democratic governments that arose after its fall. It did so proudly with its own language and symbols, operating through federated communities of campesinos and furthering the birth of a nation under Indigenous leadership. It was a moment of social discovery.

How did you respond to this?

I was a school student at the time, and this Indian insurgency made a great impression on me. It seemed clear that the discourse of social struggle in the classical left, centered only on workers and bourgeois, was one-sided and unsustainable. It had to incorporate Indigenous themes and to reflect on the agrarian community, or collective ownership of the land, as the basis for social organization. Moreover, to understand the women and men who made up the majority of the country and were demanding a different history and place in the world, it was necessary to go more deeply into the ethnic-national aspect of the problem of oppressed peoples. And for this, the schematism of Marxist textbooks seemed to me completely inadequate. It sent me in search of other references, from the store of Indianist ideas to the Marx whose writings on anticolonial struggles and the agrarian commune in Russia had enriched his analysis of oppressed nations.

With the passing of time, the complexity of the subject of social transformation – which was so important in your political thinking and activity – has become an essential question for all progressive forces. As the vision of the proletariat as the only force capable of overthrowing capitalism has waned, and as the myth of the revolutionary vanguard has dissolved, what should be the new starting point for the left?

The problem for the traditional left is that it confused the concept of “the proletarian condition” with a specific historical form of wage labor. The former has spread everywhere and become a worldwide material condition. It is not true that the world of labor is disappearing – there have never been as many workers in the world, in every country. But this huge growth of the global workforce has happened at a time when all the existing trade union and political structures have been breaking up. More than at any time since the early nineteenth century, the working-class condition is once again a condition of and for capital. But now in such a way that the world of workers has become more complex, hybridized, nomadic and deterritorialized. Paradoxically, in an age when every aspect of human life has been commodified, everything seems to happen as if there were no longer any workers.

What is the character of social struggles today? Are the difficulties that political and trade-union organizations face in organizing migrant, insecure and unskilled workers very different from those that existed in the time of twentieth century Fordist production?

The new working class is not unified mainly around labor issues. It does not yet have the strength to do this, and perhaps it will not have it for a long time to come. Social mobilizations no longer take place through classical forms of centralized working-class action, but rather through mixes of different trades, cross-sector issues and flexible, fluid and changeable forms. We are talking of new forms of collective action thrown up by the workers, even if, in many cases, what emerges is less a labor identity than other, complementary features such as territorial conglomerates or groups demanding the right to healthcare, education or public transport.

Instead of reproving these struggles because their forms differ from those of the past, the left should pay attention to this social hybridity or heterogeneity – first of all, to understand the existing struggles and to articulate them with others at a local, national and international level. The subject of change is still “living labor”: workers who sell their labor power in multiple ways. But the organizational forms, discourses and identities are very different from the ones we knew in the twentieth century.

Amid the social complexity of our times, do you think it is necessary to think anew about the concept of class?

Classes, identities, mobilized collectives are not abstractions: They are forms of collective experience of the world that are constructed on a wide scale. Just as they took contingent forms a hundred years ago, they are doing so again through unforeseen and often surprising routes and causes that are very different from those of the past. We should not confuse the concept of social class – a way of statistically classifying people on the basis of their property, resources, access to wealth, etc. – with the actual ways in which they group together on the basis of elective affinities, places of residence, shared problems and cultural characteristics. This is the real movement of the mobilized construction of classes, which only exceptionally coincides with the convergences exhibited in statistical data.

You often quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned under Mussolini. How important has his thought been for your political choices?

Gramsci has been decisive for the development of my own thinking. I began to read him when I was very young, when his writings circulated in between one coup d’état and another. Since then, unlike so many texts containing economistic analyses or philosophical formulations centered more on the aesthetics of words than on reality, Gramsci has helped me to develop a different way of seeing. He spoke of questions such as language, literature, education or common sense which, though seemingly secondary, actually form the web of daily life for individuals and determine their perceptions and collective political inclinations.

Since those early days I have regularly returned to a reading of Gramsci, and he has always revealed new things to me particularly with regard to the molecular formation of the state. I am convinced that Gramsci is an indispensable thinker for the renewal of Marxism in today’s world.

From what you say, it is obvious that the way in which you relate to Marx – who you know very well and about whom you have written a great deal – is very different from that of Soviet Marxism. Do you think that a turn to the Marx of questions and doubts, found in the unfinished manuscripts of his later years, may today be more fruitful than the assertions contained in his published pamphlets and books?

Textbook Marxism always seemed inadequate to me. So, I took the initiative of also delving into authors inspired by Indigenist ideology, as well as a kind of Marxism that spoke to me of hybrid social identities. In this way, I discovered a Marx who taught me about colonial struggles, who spoke about agrarian communities, who kept trying to place the theme of oppressed nations on a solid foundation — a Marx on the margins, more plural and more abounding with questions than with answers. It was these questions that enabled me, over the years, to read differently the Grundrisse, the Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1863 and Capital and to find there elements of the genetic logic of capitalism that other authors, before and after Marx, failed to understand.

In the last four years, almost everywhere in Latin America, governments have come to power that take their cue from reactionary ideologies and seek to reimpose a neoliberal economic agenda. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is the most striking case in point. Is this sharp right turn likely to last a long time?

I think the big problem for the global right is that it has no narrative for the future. The states that preached a free-market liturgy are now building walls against immigrants and goods, as if their presidents were latter-day feudal lords. Those who called for privatizations are now appealing to the very state they used to vilify, in the hope that it will save them from the burden of debts. And those who once favored globalization and spoke of a world that would finally be one now clutch at the pretext of “continental security.”

We are living in a state of planetary chaos, where it is difficult to foresee what the new Latin American right-wing movements will look like in the future. Will they opt for globalization or protectionism? Will they follow policies of privatization or state intervention? They themselves do not know the answers to these questions, since they are sailing in a sea of confusion and can only express short-term views. These forces of the right do not represent a future to which Latin American society can entrust its long-term expectations. On the contrary: They are bringing about a rise in injustices and inequalities. The only tangible future they can offer to new generations is one of anxiety and uncertainty.

In many parts of the world, the sharp decline of traditional political parties has gone together with the rise of new political forces that, in their different ways, are challenging neoliberal globalization and the existing order. The “free market” is no longer seen as synonymous with development and democracy, as it mistakenly was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the debate about alternatives to capitalism is once again arousing considerable interest. What should the Latin American left be doing to turn things around and to open a new cycle of political involvement and emancipation?

The conditions exist for the development of a new progressive stage that will go beyond what was achieved in the last decade. In this context of great uncertainty, there is space for alternative proposals and a collective orientation to new horizons, based on the real involvement of people and the (ecologically sustainable) overcoming of social injustices.

The great task for the left, in overcoming the limits and errors of twentieth-century socialism, is to chart a new horizon that offers solutions to the actual questions that cause suffering to people. It would serve a new “principle of hope” – whatever name we give to it – which promulgates equality, social freedom, and universal rights and capacities as the basis for collective self-determination.

Tags English

Book chapter

Introduction

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date November 1, 2019

1. From the Grundrisse to the Critical Analysis of Theories of Surplus Value
Marx started to write Capital only many years after he had begun his rigorous studies of political economy. From 1843 onwards, he had already been working, with great intensity, towards what he would later define as his own ‘Economics’.1 It was the eruption of the financial crisis of 1857 that forced Marx to start his work. Marx was convinced that the crisis developing at international level had created the conditions for a new revolutionary period throughout Europe. He had been waiting for this moment ever since the popular insurrections of 1848, and now that it finally seemed to have come, he did not want events to catch him unprepared. He therefore decided to resume his economic studies and to give them a finished form.

This period was one of the most prolific in his life: he managed to write more in a few months than in the preceding years. In December 1857, he wrote to Engels: ‘I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies, so that I might at least get the outlines Grundrisse clear before the deluge’ (Marx to Engels, 8 December 1857, Marx and Engels 1983: 257).2

Marx’s work was now remarkable and wide-ranging. From August 1857 to May 1858, he filled the eight notebooks known as the Grundrisse, while as correspondent of the New-York Tribune (the paper with the largest circulation in the United States of America, with whom he had collaborated since 1851), he wrote dozens of articles on, among other things, the development of the crisis in Europe. Lastly, from October 1857 to February 1858, he compiled three books of extracts, called the Crisis Notebooks (Marx 2017). Thanks to these, it is possible to change the conventional image of a Marx studying Hegel’s Science of Logic to find inspiration for the manuscripts of 1857-58. For at that time he was much more preoccupied with events linked to the long-predicted major crisis. Unlike the extracts he had made before, these were not compendia from the works of economists but consisted of a large quantity of notes, gleaned from various daily newspapers, about major developments in the crisis, stock market trends, trade exchange fluctuations and important bankruptcies in Europe, the United States of America, and other parts of the world. A letter he wrote to Engels in December indicates the intensity of his activity:

I am working enormously, as a rule until 4 o’clock in the morning. I am engaged on a twofold task: 1. Elaborating the outlines of political economy (For the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential to go into the matter to the bottom, as it is for my own, individually, to get rid of this nightmare). 2. The present crisis. Apart from the articles for the [New-York] Tribune, all I do is keep records of it, which, however, takes up a considerable amount of time. I think that, somewhere about the spring, we ought to do a pamphlet together about the affair (Marx to Engels, 18 December 1857, Marx and Engels 1983: 224).3

The Grundrisse were divided in three parts: a methodological ‘Introduction’, a ‘Chapter on Money’, in which Marx dealt with money and value, and a ‘Chapter on Capital’, that was centered on the process of production and circulation of capital, and addressed such key themes as the concept of surplus-value, and the economic formations which preceded the capitalist mode of production. Marx immense effort did not, however, allow him to complete the work. In late February 1858 he wrote to Lassalle:

I have in fact been at work on the final stages for some months. But the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further. […] The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system. I have very little idea how many sheets the whole thing will amount to. […] Now that I am at last ready to set to work after 15 years of study, I have an uncomfortable feeling that turbulent movements from without will probably interfere after all (Marx to Lassalle, 22 February 1858, Marx and Engels 1983: 270-1).

There was no sign of the much-anticipated revolutionary movement, which was supposed to be born in conjunction with the crisis and Marx abandoned the project to write a volume on the current crisis. Nevertheless, he could not finish the work, on which he had been struggling for many years, because he was aware that he was still far away from a definitive conceptualization of the themes addressed in the manuscript. Therefore, the Grundrisse remained only a draft, from which – after he had carefully worked up the ‘Chapter on Money’ –, in 1859, he published a short book with no public resonance: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

In August 1861, Marx again devoted himself to the critique of political economy, working with such intensity that by June 1863 he had filled 23 sizeable notebooks on the transformation of money into capital, on commercial capital, and above all on the various theories with which economists had tried to explain surplus value.4 His aim was to complete A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was intended as the first instalment of his planned work. The book published in 1859 contained a brief first chapter, ‘The Commodity’, differentiated between use value and exchange value, and a longer second chapter, ‘Money, or Simple Circulation’, dealt with theories of money as unit of measure. In the preface, Marx stated: ‘I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the state, foreign trade, world market’ (Marx 1987a: 261).

Two years later, Marx’s plans had not changed: he was still intending to write six books, each devoted to one of the themes he had listed in 1859.5 However, from Summer 1861 to March 1862, he worked on a new chapter, ‘Capital in General’, which he intended to become the third chapter in his publication plan. In the preparatory manuscript contained in the first five of the 23 notebooks he compiled by the end of 1863, he focused on the process of production of capital and, more particularly, on: 1) the transformation of money into capital; 2) absolute surplus value; and 3) relative surplus value.6 Some of these themes, already addressed in the Grundrisse, were now set forth with greater analytic richness and precision.

A momentary alleviation of the huge economic problems that had beset him for years allowed Marx to spend more time on his studies and to make significant theoretical advances. In late October 1861 he wrote to Engels that ‘circumstances ha[d] finally cleared to the extent that [he had] at least got firm ground under [his] feet again’. His work for the New-York Tribune assured him of ‘two pounds a week’ (Marx to Engels, 30 October 1861, Marx and Engels 1985: 323). He had also concluded an agreement with Die Presse. Over the past year, he had ‘pawned everything that was not actually nailed down’, and their plight had made his wife seriously depressed. But now the ‘twofold engagement’ promised to ‘put an end to the harried existence led by [his] family’ and to allow him to ‘complete his book’. Nevertheless, by December, he told Engels that he had been forced to leave IOUs with the butcher and grocer, and that his debt to assorted creditors amounted to one hundred pounds (Marx to Engels, 9 December 1861, Marx and Engels 1985: 332). Because of these worries, his research was proceeding slowly: ‘Circumstances being what they were, there was, indeed, little possibility of bringing [the] theoretical matters to a rapid close’. But he gave notice to Engels that ‘the thing is assuming a much more popular form, and method is much less in evidence than in Part I’ (Marx to Engels, 9 December 1861, Marx and Engels 1985: 333).

Against this dramatic background, Marx tried to borrow money from his mother, as well as from other relatives and the poet Carl Siebel [1836 – 1868]. In a letter to Engels later in December, he explained that these were attempts to avoid constantly ‘pestering’ him. At any event, they were all unproductive. Nor was the agreement with Die Presse working out, as they were only printing (and paying for) half the articles he submitted to them. To his friend’s best wishes for the new year, he confided that if it turned out to be ‘anything like the old one’ he would ‘sooner consign it to the devil’ (Marx to Engels, 27 December 1861, Marx and Engels 1985: 337-8). Things took a further turn for the worse when the New-York Tribune, faced with financial constraints associated with the American Civil War, had to cut down on the number of its foreign correspondents. Marx’s last article for the paper appeared on 10 March 1862. From then on, he had to do without what had been his main source of income since the summer of 1851. That same month, the landlord of his house threatened to take action to recover rent arrears, in which case – as he put it to Engels – he would be ‘sued by all and sundry’ (Marx to Engels, 3 March 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 344). And he added shortly after: ‘I’m not getting on very well with my book, since work is often checked, i.e. suspended, for weeks on end by domestic disturbances’ (Marx to Engels, 15 March 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 352). During this period, Marx launched into a new area of research: Theories of Surplus Value.7 This was planned to be the fifth8 and final part of the long third chapter on ‘Capital in General’. Over ten notebooks, Marx minutely dissected how the major economists had dealt with the question of surplus value; his basic idea was that ‘all economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent’ (Marx 1988: 348).9

In Notebook VI, Marx began with a critique of the Physiocrats. First of all, he recognized them as the ‘true fathers of modern political economy’(Marx 1988: 352), since it was they who ‘laid the foundation for the analysis of capitalist production’ (Marx 1988: 354) and sought the origin of surplus value not in ‘the sphere of circulation’ – in the productivity of money, as the mercantilists thought – but in ‘the sphere of production’. They understood the ‘fundamental principle that only that labour is productive which creates a surplus value’ (Marx 1988: 354). On the other hand, being wrongly convinced that ‘agricultural labour’ was ‘the only productive labour’, they conceived of ‘rent’ as ‘the only form of surplus value’ (Marx 1988: 355). They limited their analysis to the idea that the productivity of the land enabled man to produce ‘no more than sufficed to keep him alive’. According to this theory, then, surplus value appeared as ‘a gift of nature’ (Marx 1988: 357). In the second half of Notebook VI, and in most of Notebooks VII, VIII and IX, Marx concentrated on Adam Smith. He did not share the false idea of the Physiocrats that ‘only one definite kind of concrete labour – agricultural labour – creates surplus value’ (Marx 1988: 391). Indeed, in Marx’s eyes one of Smith’s greatest merits was to have understood that, in the distinctive labour process of bourgeois society, the capitalist ‘appropriates for nothing, appropriates without paying for it, a part of the living labour’ (Marx 1988: 388); or again, that ‘more labour is exchanged for less labour (from the labourer’s standpoint), less labour is exchanged for more labour (from the capitalist’s standpoint)’ (Marx 1988: 393). Smith’s limitation, however, was his failure to differentiate ‘surplus-value as such’ from ‘the specific forms it assumes in profit and rent’ (Marx 1988: 389). He calculated surplus-value not in relation to the part of capital from which it arises, but as ‘an overplus over the total value of the capital advanced’ (Marx 1988: 396), including the part that the capitalist expends to purchase raw materials.

Marx put many of these thoughts in writing during a three-week stay with Engels in Manchester in April 1862. On his return, he reported to Lassalle:

As for my book, it won’t be finished for another two months. During the past year, to keep myself from starving, I have had to do the most despicable hackwork and have often gone for months without being able to add a line to the ‘thing’. And there is also that quirk I have of finding fault with anything I have written and not looked at for a month, so that I have to revise it completely (Marx to Lassalle, 28 April 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 356).

Marx doggedly resumed work and until early June extended his research to other economists such as Germain Garnier [1754 – 1821] and Charles Ganilh [1758 – 1836]. Then he went more deeply into the question of productive and unproductive labour, again focusing particularly on Smith, who, despite a lack of clarity in some respects, had drawn the distinction between the two concepts. From the capitalist’s viewpoint, productive labour

is wage labour which, exchanged against the […] part of the capital that is spent on wages, reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labour capacity), but in addition produces surplus value for the capitalist. It is only thereby that commodity or money is transformed into capital, is produced as capital. Only that wage labour is productive which produces capital (Marx 1989a: 8).

Unproductive labour, on the other hand, is ‘labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue, that is, with wages or profit’ (Marx 1989a: 12). According to Smith, the activity of sovereigns – and of the legal and military officers surrounding them – produced no value and in this respect was comparable to the duties of domestic servants. This, Marx pointed out, was the language of a ‘still revolutionary bourgeoisie’, which had not yet ‘subjected to itself the whole of society, the state, etc.’ illustrious and time-honoured occupations – sovereign, judge, officer, priest, etc. – with all the old ideological castes to which they give rise, their men of letters, their teachers and priests, are from an economic standpoint put on the same level as the swarm of their own lackeys and jesters maintained by the bourgeoisie and by idle wealth – the landed nobility and idle capitalists (Marx 1989a: 197).

In Notebook X, Marx turned to a rigorous analysis of François Quesnay’s [1694 – 1774] Tableau économique (Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 381).10 He praised it to the skies, describing it as ‘an extremely brilliant conception, incontestably the most brilliant for which political economy had up to then been responsible’ (Marx 1989a: 240).

Meanwhile, Marx’s economic circumstances continued to be desperate. In mid-June, he wrote to Engels: ‘Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable’. Already in April, the family had had to re-pawn all the possessions it had only recently reclaimed from the loan office. The situation was so extreme that Jenny made up her mind to sell some books from her husband’s personal library – although she could not find anyone who wanted to buy them.

Nevertheless, Marx managed to ‘work hard’ and in mid-June expressed a note of satisfaction to Engels: ‘strange to say, my grey matter is functioning better in the midst of the surrounding poverty than it has done for years’ (Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 380). Continuing his research, he compiled Notebooks XI, XII and XIII in the course of the summer; they focused on the theory of rent, which he had decided to include as ‘an extra chapter’ (Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 394) in the text he was preparing for publication. Marx critically examined the ideas of Johann Rodbertus [1805 – 1875], then moved on to an extensive analysis of the doctrines of David Ricardo [1772 – 1823].11 Denying the existence of absolute rent, Ricardo had allowed a place only for differential rent related to the fertility and location of the land. In this theory, rent was an excess: it could not have been anything more, because that would have contradicted his ‘concept of value being equal to a certain quantity of labour time’ (Marx 1989a: 359); he would have had to admit that the agricultural product was constantly sold above its cost price, which he calculated as the sum of the capital advanced and the average profit (Cf. Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 396). Marx’s conception of absolute rent, by contrast, stipulated that ‘under certain historical circumstances […] landed property does indeed put up the prices of raw materials’ (Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 398).

In the same letter to Engels, Marx wrote that it was ‘a real miracle’ that he ‘had been able to get on with [his] theoretical writing to such an extent’ (Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 394). His landlord had again threatened to send in the bailiffs, while tradesmen to whom he was in debt spoke of withholding provisions and taking legal action against him. Once more he had to turn to Engels for help, confiding that had it not been for his wife and children he would ‘far rather move into a model lodging house than be constantly squeezing [his] purse’ (Marx to Engels, 7 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 399).

In September, Marx wrote to Engels that he might get a job ‘in a railroad office’ in the new year (Marx to Engels, 10 September 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 417). In December, he repeated to Ludwig Kugelmann [1828 – 1902] that things had become so desperate that he had ‘decided to become a “practical man”’; nothing came of the idea, however. Marx reported with his typical sarcasm: ‘Luckily – or perhaps I should say unluckily? – I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 436). Meanwhile, in early November, he had confided to Ferdinand Lassalle [1825 – 1864] that he had been forced to suspend work ‘for some six weeks’ but that it was ‘going ahead […] with interruptions’. ‘However,’ he added, ‘it will assuredly be brought to a conclusion by and by’ (Marx to Lassalle, 7 November 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 426).

During this span of time, Marx filled another two notebooks, XIV and XV, with extensive critical analysis of various economic theorists. He noted that Thomas Robert Malthus [1766 – 1834], for whom surplus value stemmed ‘from the fact that the seller sells the commodity above its value’, represented a return to the past in economic theory, since he derived profit from the exchange of commodities (Marx 1989b: 215). Marx accused James Mill [1773 -1836] of misunderstanding the categories of surplus value and profit; highlighted the confusion produced by Samuel Bailey [1791 – 1870] in failing to distinguish between the immanent measure of value and the value of the commodity; and argued that John Stuart Mill [1806 – 1873] did not realize that ‘the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit’ were two different quantities (Marx 1989b: 373), the latter being determined not only by the level of wages but also by other causes not directly attributable to it.

Marx also paid special attention to various economists opposed to Ricardian theory, such as the socialist Thomas Hodgskin [1787 – 1869]. Finally, he dealt with the anonymous text Revenue and Its Sources – in his view, a perfect example of ‘vulgar economics’, which translated into ‘doctrinaire’ but ‘apologetic’ language the ‘standpoint of the ruling section, i.e. the capitalists’ (Marx 1989b: 450). With the study of this book, Marx concluded his analysis of the theories of surplus value put forward by the leading economists of the past and began to examine commercial capital, or the capital that did not create but distributed surplus value.12 Its polemic against ‘interest-bearing capital’ might ‘parade as socialism’, but Marx had no time for such ‘reforming zeal’ that did not ‘touch upon real capitalist production’ but ‘merely attacked one of its consequences’. For Marx, on the contrary:

The complete objectification, inversion and derangement of capital as interest-bearing capital – in which, however, the inner nature of capitalist production, [its] derangement, merely appears in its most palpable form – is capital which yields ‘compound interest’. It appears as a Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right, whose legitimate demands, arising from its very nature, are however never met and are always frustrated by a mysterious fate (Marx 1989b: 453).

Marx continued in the same vein:

Thus it is interest, not profit, which appears to be the creation of value arising from capital as such [… and] consequently it is regarded as the specific revenue created by capital. This is also the form in which it is conceived by the vulgar economists. […] All intermediate links are obliterated, and the fetishistic face of capital, as also the concept of the capital-fetish, is complete. This form arises necessarily, because the juridical aspect of property is separated from its economic aspect and one part of the profit under the name of interest accrues to capital in itself which is completely separated from the production process, or to the owner of this capital To the vulgar economist who desires to represent capital as an independent source of value, a source which creates value, this form is of course a godsend, a form in which the source of profit is no longer recognisable and the result of the capitalist process – separated from the process itself – acquires an independent existence. In M-C-M’ an intermediate link is still retained. In M-M’ we have the incomprehensible form of capital, the most extreme inversion and materialisation of production relations (Marx 1989b: 458).

Following the studies of commercial capital, Marx moved on to what may be thought of as a third phase of the economic manuscripts of 1861-1863. This began in December 1862, with the section on ‘capital and profit’ in Notebook XVI that Marx identified as the ‘third chapter’(Marx 1976a: 1598-675). Here Marx drew an outline of the distinction between surplus value and profit. In Notebook XVII, also compiled in December, he returned to the question of commercial capital (following the reflections in Notebook XV, Marx 1976a: 1682-773) and to the reflux of money in capitalist reproduction. At the end of the year, Marx gave a progress report to Kugelmann, informing him that ‘the second part’, or the ‘continuation of the first instalment’, a manuscript equivalent to ‘about 30 sheets of print’ was ‘now at last finished’. Four years after the first schema, in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx now reviewed the structure of his projected work. He told Kugelmann that he had decided on a new title, using Capital for the first time, and that the name he had operated with in 1859 would be ‘merely the subtitle’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 435). Otherwise he was continuing to work in accordance with the original plan. What he intended to write would be ‘the third chapter of the first part, namely Capital in General’.13 The volume in the last stages of preparation would contain ‘what Englishmen call “the principles of political economy”’. Together with what he had already written in the 1859 instalment, it would comprise the ‘quintessence’ of his economic theory. On the basis of the elements he was preparing to make public, he told Kugelmann, a further ‘sequel (with the exception, perhaps, of the relationship between the various forms of state and the various economic structures of society) could easily be pursued by others’.

Marx thought he would be able to produce a ‘fair copy’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 435) of the manuscript in the new year, after which he planned to take it to Germany in person. Then he intended ‘to conclude the presentation of capital, competition and credit’. In the same letter to Kugelmann, he compared the writing styles in the text published in 1859 and in the work he was then preparing: ‘In the first part, the method of presentation was certainly far from popular. This was due partly to the abstract nature of the subject […]. The present part is easier to understand because it deals with more concrete conditions’. To explain the difference, almost by way of justification, he added:
Scientific attempts to revolutionize a science can never be really popular. But, once the scientific foundations are laid, popularization is easy. Again, should times become more turbulent, one might be able to select the colours and nuances demanded by a popular presentation of these particular subjects (Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 436).

A few days later, at the start of the new year, Marx listed in greater detail the parts that would have comprised his work. In a schema in Notebook XVIII, he indicated that the ‘first section (Abschnitt)’, ‘The Production Process of Capital’, would be divided as follows:

1) Introduction. Commodity. Money. 2) Transformation of money into capital. 3) Absolute surplus value. […] 4) Relative surplus value. […] 5) Combination of absolute and relative surplus value. […] 6) Reconversion of surplus value into capital. Primitive accumulation. Wakefield’s theory of colonization. 7) Result of the production process. […] 8) Theories of surplus value. 9) Theories of productive and unproductive labour (Marx 1989b: 347).

Marx did not confine himself to the first volume but also drafted a schema of what was intended to be the ‘third section’ of his work: ‘Capital and Profit’. This part, already indicating themes that were to comprise Capital, Volume III, was divided as follows:

1) Conversion of surplus value into profit. Rate of profit as distinguished from rate of surplus value. 2) Conversion of profit into average profit. […] 3) Adam Smith’s and Ricardo’s theories on profit and prices of production. 4) Rent. […] 5) History of the so-called Ricardian law of rent. 6) Law of the fall of the rate of profit. 7) Theories of profit. […] 8) Division of profit into industrial profit and interest. […] 9) Revenue and its sources. […] 10) Reflux movements of money in the process of capitalist production as a whole. 11) Vulgar economy. 12) Conclusion. Capital and wage labour (Marx 1991: 346–7).14

In Notebook XVIII, which he composed in January 1863, Marx continued his analysis of mercantile capital. Surveying George Ramsay [1855 – 1935], Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez [1797 – 1869] and Richard Jones [1790 – 1855], he inserted some additions to the study of how various economists had explained surplus value.

Marx’s financial difficulties persisted during this period and actually grew worse in early 1863. He wrote to Engels that his ‘attempts to raise money in France and Germany [had] come to nought’, that no one would supply him with food on credit, and that ‘the children [had] no clothes or shoes in which to go out’ (Marx to Engels, 8 January 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 442). Two weeks later, he was on the edge of the abyss. In another letter to Engels, he confided that he had proposed to his life’s companion what now seemed an inevitability:

My two elder children will obtain employment as governesses through the Cunningham family. Lenchen is to enter service elsewhere, and I, along with my wife and little Tussy, shall go and live in the same City Model Lodging-House in which Red Wolff once resided with his family (Marx to Engels, 13 January 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 445).

At the same time, new health problems had appeared. In the first two weeks of February, Marx was ‘strictly forbidden [from] all reading, writing or smoking’. He suffered from ‘some kind of inflammation of the eye, combined with a most obnoxious affection of the nerves of the head’. He could return to his books only in the middle of the month, when he confessed to Engels that during the long idle days he had been so alarmed that he ‘indulged in all manner of psychological fantasies about what it would feel like to be blind or insane’ (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 453). Just over a week later, having recovered from the eye problems, he developed a new liver disorder that was destined to plague him for a long time to come. Since Dr. Allen, his regular doctor, would have imposed a ‘complete course of treatment’ that would have meant breaking off all work, he asked Engels to get Dr. Eduard Gumpert [?] to recommend a simpler ‘household remedy’ (Marx to Engels, 21 February 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 460).

During this period, apart from brief moments when he studied machinery, he began to ‘attend a practical (purely experimental) course for working men given by Prof. Willis […] (at the Institute of Geology, where [Thomas] Huxley also lectured)’ (Marx to Engels, 28 January 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 449). Apart from that, however, Marx had to suspend his in-depth economic studies. In March, however, he resolved ‘to make up for lost time by some hard slogging’ (Marx to Engels, 24 March 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 461). He compiled two notebooks, XX and XXI, that dealt with accumulation, the real and formal subsumption of labour to capital, and the productivity of capital and labour. His arguments were correlated with the main theme of his research at the time: surplus value.

In late May, he wrote to Engels that in the previous weeks he had also been studying the Polish question15 at the British Museum: ‘What I did, on the one hand, was fill in the gaps in my knowledge (diplomatic, historical) of the Russian-Prussian-Polish affair and, on the other, read and make excerpts from all kinds of earlier literature relating to the part of the political economy I had elaborated’ (Marx to Engels, 29 May 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 474). These working notes, written in May and June, were collected in eight additional notebooks A to H, which contained hundreds of more pages summarizing economic studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and covering more than a hundred volumes.16

Marx also informed Engels that, feeling ‘more or less able to work again’, he was determined to ‘cast the weight off his shoulders’ and therefore intended to ‘make a fair copy of the political economy for the printers (and give it a final polish)’. He still suffered from a ‘badly swollen liver’, however (Marx to Engels, 29 May 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 474), and in mid-June, despite ‘wolfing sulphur’, he was still ‘not quite fit’ (Marx to Engels, 12 June 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 479). In any case, he returned to the British Museum and in mid-July reported to Engels that he had again been spending ‘ten hours a day working at economics’. These were precisely the days when, in analysing the reconversion of surplus value into capital, he prepared in Notebook XXII a recasting of Quesnay’s Tableau économique (Marx to Engels, 6 July 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 485). Then he compiled the last notebook in the series begun in 1861 – no. XXIII – which consisted mainly of notes and supplementary remarks.

At the end of these two years of hard work, and following a deeper critical re-examination of the main theorists of political economy, Marx was more determined than ever to complete the major work of his life. Although he had not yet definitively solved many of the conceptual and expository problems, his completion of the historical part now impelled him to return to theoretical questions.

2. The Writing of the Three Volumes of Capital
Marx gritted his teeth and embarked on a new phase of his labours. From Summer 1863, he began the actual composition of what would become his magnum opus.17 Until December 1865, he devoted himself to the most extensive versions of the various subdivisions, preparing drafts in turn of Volume I, the bulk of Volume III (his only account of the complete process of capitalist production) (Marx 2015), and the initial version of Volume II (the first general presentation of the circulation process of capital). In the manuscripts of 1863-65, Marx grappled with new themes after his work of previous years. None of these, however, was tackled in an exhaustive manner.18 As regards the six-volume plan indicated in 1859 in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx inserted a number of themes relating to rent and wages that were originally to have been treated in volumes II and III (See Rosdolsky 1977: 27).19 In mid-August 1863, Marx updated Engels on his steps forward:

In one respect, my work (preparing the manuscript for the press) is going well. In the final elaboration the stuff is, I think, assuming a tolerably popular form. […] On the other hand, despite the fact that I write all day long, it’s not getting on as fast as my own impatience, long subjected to a trial of patience, might demand. At all events, it will be 100% more comprehensible than No. l.20

Marx kept up the furious pace throughout the autumn, concentrating on the writing of Volume I. But his health rapidly worsened as a result, and November saw the appearance of what his wife called the ‘terrible disease’ against which he would fight for many years of his life. It was a case of carbuncles,21 a nasty infection that manifested itself in abscesses and serious, debilitating boils on various parts of the body.

Because of one deep ulcer following a major carbuncle, Marx had to have an operation and ‘for quite a time his life was in danger’. According to his wife’s later account, the critical condition lasted for ‘four weeks’ and caused Marx severe and constant pains, together with ‘tormenting worries and all kinds of mental suffering’. For the family’s financial situation kept it ‘on the brink of the abyss’ (Jenny Marx in Enzensberger 1973: 288).

In early December, when he was on the road to recovery, Marx told Engels that he ‘had had one foot in the grave’ (Marx to Engels, 2 December 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 495) – and two days later, that his physical condition struck him as ‘a good theme for a short story’. From the front, he looked like someone who ‘regale[d] his inner man with port, claret, stout and a truly massive mass of meat’. But ‘behind on his back, the outer man, a damned carbuncle’ (Marx to Engels, 4 December 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 497). In this context, the death of Marx’s mother obliged him to travel to Germany to sort out the legacy. His condition again deteriorated during the trip.

After he returned to London, all the infections and skin complaints continued to take their toll on Marx’s health into the early spring, and he was able to resume his planned work only towards the middle of April, after an interruption of more than five months. In that time, he continued to concentrate on Volume I, and it seems likely that it was precisely then that he drafted the so-called ‘Chapter Six. Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. In this text, Marx returned several times to a very important concept: ‘commodities appear as the purchasers of persons’. In capitalism, ‘means of production and […] means of subsistence confront labour-power, stripped of all material wealth, as autonomous powers, personified in their owners. The objective conditions essential to the realization of labour are alienated from the worker and become manifest as fetishes endowed with a will and a soul of their own’ (Marx 1976b: 1001).22

During this period, the early death of his friend Wilhelm Wolff, of whom both he and Engels were very fond, was a source of great pain for both. Wolff left a legacy of £800 to Marx, thanks to which he was able to move to a larger detached house at No. 1 Modena Villas.23 Despite this improvement in his finances, the arrival of summer did not change his precarious circumstances. Only after a family break in Ramsgate, in the last week of July and the first ten days of August, did it become possible to press on with his work. He began the new period of writing with Volume III: Part Two, ‘The Conversion of Profit into Average Profit’, then Part One, ‘The Conversion of Surplus Value into Profit’ (which was completed, most probably, between late October and early November 1864). During this period, he assiduously participated in meetings of the International Working Men’s Association (Cf. Musto 2014), for which he wrote the Inaugural Address and the Statutes in October. Also in that month, he wrote to Carl Klings [1828 – ?], a metallurgical worker in Solingen who had been a member of the League of Communists, and told him of his various mishaps and the reason for his unavoidable slowness:

I have been sick throughout the past year (being afflicted with carbuncles and furuncles). Had it not been for that, my work on political economy, Capital, would already have come out. I hope I may now complete it finally in a couple of months and deal the bourgeoisie a theoretical blow from which it will never recover. […] You may count on my remaining ever a loyal champion of the working class (Marx to Klings, 4 October 1864, Marx and Engels 1987: 4).

Having resumed work after a pause for duties to the International, Marx wrote Part Three of Volume III, entitled ‘The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’. But his work on this was accompanied with another flare-up of his disease. From January to May 1865, Marx devoted himself to Volume II. The manuscripts were divided into three chapters, which eventually became Parts in the version that Engels had printed in 1885: 1) The Metamorphoses of Capital; 2) The Turnover of Capital; and 3) Circulation and Reproduction. In these pages, Marx developed new concepts and connected up some of the theories in volumes I and III.

In the new year too, however, the carbuncle did not stop persecuting Marx, and around the middle of February, there was another flare-up of the disease. In addition to the ‘foruncles’, which persisted until the middle of the month, the International took up an ‘enormous amount of time’. Still, he did not stop work on the book, even if it meant that sometimes he ‘didn’t get to bed until four in the morning’ (Marx to Engels, 13 March 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 129-30).

A final spur for him to complete the missing parts soon was the publisher’s contract. Thanks to the intervention of Wilhelm Strohn [?], an old comrade from the days of the League of Communists, Otto Meisner [1819 – 1902] in Hamburg had sent him a letter on 21 March that included an agreement to publish ‘the work Capital: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. It was to be ‘approximately 50 signatures24 in length [and to] appear in two volumes’ (Marx 1985b: 361). By signing the agreement, Marx undertook ‘to deliver the complete manuscript […] on or before the last day of May of this year’ (Marx 1985b: 362).

Between the last week of May and the end of June, Marx composed a short text Wages, Price and Profit.25 In it, he contested John Weston’s thesis that wage increases were not favourable to the working class, and that trade union demands for higher pay were actually harmful. Marx showed that, on the contrary, ‘a general rise of wages would result in a fall in the general rate of profit, but not affect the average prices of commodities, or their values’ (Marx 1985a: 144).

In the same period, Marx also wrote Part Four of Volume III, entitling it ‘Conversion of Commodity-Capital and Money-Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant’s Capital)’. At the end of July 1865, he gave Engels another progress report:

There are 3 more chapters to be written to complete the theoretical part (the first 3 books). Then there is still the 4th book, the historical-literary one, to be written, which will, comparatively speaking, be the easiest part for me, since all the problems have been resolved in the first 3 books, so that this last one is more by way of repetition in historical form. But I cannot bring myself to send anything off until I have the whole thing in front of me. Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole, and this can only be achieved through my practice of never having things printed until I have them in front of me in their entirety (Marx to Engels, 31 July 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 173).

Two years later, Marx’s fascination with art reasserted itself in Capital. He advised Engels to read The Unknown Masterpiece (1831) by Honoré de Balzac, which he described as a little ‘masterpiece’ in its own right, ‘full of the most delightful irony’ (Marx to Engels, 25 February 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 348). The hero of the short story is Master Frenhofer, who, obsessed with the wish to make a painting of his as realistic as possible, delays completing it in the search for perfection. To those who ask what is still lacking, he answers: ‘A trifle that’s nothing at all, yet a nothing that’s everything’ (Balzac 2001: 16). To those who ask him to display the canvas, he stubbornly refuses: ‘No, no, it must still be brought to perfection. Yesterday, toward evening, I thought I was done. Yet I’m still not satisfied – I have doubts’ (Balzac 2001: 22). Eventually Balzac’s masterly creation is driven to exclaim: ‘It’s ten years now … that I’ve been struggling with this problem. But what are ten short years when you’re contending with nature?’ (Balzac 2001: 24). And he adds: ‘For a time I believed my painting was done; but now I’m sure several details are wrong, and I won’t have a moment’s peace till I’ve dispelled my doubts’ (Balzac 2001: 32).

It is likely that Marx, with his usual sharpness of wit, identified with Frenhofer. Looking back, his son-in-law Paul Lafargue [1842-1911] said that a reading of Balzac’s story had ‘made a deep impression him because it partly described feelings that he had himself experienced’. Marx, too, was ‘always extremely conscientious about his work’, he ‘was never satisfied with his work – he was always making some improvements and he always found his rendering inferior to the idea he wished to convey’ (Lafargue in Enzensberger 1973: 307).

When unavoidable slowdowns and a series of negative events forced him to reconsider his working method, Marx asked himself whether it might be more useful first to produce a finished copy of Volume I, so that he could immediately publish it, or rather to finish writing all the volumes that would comprise the work. In another letter to Engels, he said that the ‘point in question’ was whether he should ‘do a fair copy of part of the manuscript and send it to the publisher, or finish writing the whole thing first’. He preferred the latter solution, but reassured his friend that his work on the other volumes would not have been wasted:

[Under the circumstances], progress with it has been as fast as anyone could have managed, even having no artistic considerations at all. Besides, as I have a maximum limit of 60 printed sheets,26 it is absolutely essential for me to have the whole thing in front of me, to know how much has to be condensed and crossed out, so that the individual sections shall be evenly balanced and in proportion within the prescribed limits (Marx to Engels, 5 August 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 175).

Marx confirmed that he would ‘spare no effort to complete as soon as possible’; the thing was a ‘nightmarish burden’ to him. It prevented him ‘from doing anything else’ and he was keen to get it out of the way before a new political upheaval: ‘I know that time will not stand still for ever just as it is now’ (Marx to Engels, 5 August 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 175).

Although he had decided to bring forward the completion of Volume I, Marx did not want to leave what he had done on Volume III up in the air. Between July and December1865, he composed, albeit in fragmentary form, Part Five (‘Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital’), Part Six (‘Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent’) and Part Seven (‘Revenues and Their Sources’).27 The structure that Marx gave to Volume III between Summer 1864 and the end of 1865 was therefore very similar to the 12-point schema of January 1863 contained in Notebook XVIII of the manuscripts on theories of surplus value.

In parallel with this work, in the second half of November 1865, Marx asked Engels to obtain from his acquaintance Alfred Knowles, a Manchester manufacturer, some information about the cotton industry, without which he would be unable ‘to write out the second chapter’ (Marx to Engels, 20 November 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 199) of Capital, Volume I.28

The financial relief that allowed him to concentrate fruitfully on his work did not last long, and within a year the economic problems were back. In late July 1865, Marx confessed to Engels that he felt extremely uncomfortable about his plight and that he ‘would rather have had [his] thumb cut off than’ to be writing to him about it. The situation was indeed dramatic: ‘For two months I have been living solely on the pawnshop, which means that a queue of creditors has been hammering on my door, becoming more and more unendurable every day’. Thinking back to what had led to this state, he recalled that he had ‘been unable to earn a farthing and that ‘merely paying off the debts and furnishing the house [had] cost [him] something like £500’ (Marx to Engels, 31 July 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 172).

On top of this, his duties for first conference of the International in London were particularly intense in September. To keep at least a modicum of time for the writing of Capital, Marx ending up telling a few white lies. To comrades in the International, he said he was about to leave on a trip, when in fact he was planning complete isolation so that he could work as much as possible without interruptions. However, he came down with a bad ‘flu that only allowed him to write intermittently’ (Marx to Engels, 19 August 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 172). When the ‘fellows and friends of the “International” discovered after all that [he was] not away’, they sent ‘a summons to attend a meeting of the Sub-committee’ of the General Council to which he belonged. Marx complained to Engels that all this had prevented him from writing, and in addition the ‘four weeks of [his]disappearance’ had been ‘spoiled by the doctor’s prescriptions’ (Marx to Engels, 22 August 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 188).

3. The Completion of Capital Volume I
At the beginning of 1866, Marx launched into the new draft of Capital, Volume I. In mid-January, he updated Wilhelm Liebknecht [1826 – 1900] on the situation: ‘Indisposition, […] all manner of unfortunate mischances, demands made on me by the International Association etc., have confiscated every free moment I have for writing out the fair copy of my manuscript’. Nevertheless, he thought he was near the end and that he would ‘be able to take Volume 1 of it to the publisher for printing in March’. He added that its ‘two volumes’ would ‘appear simultaneously’ (Marx to Liebknecht, 15 January 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 219). In another letter, sent the same day to Kugelmann, he spoke of being ‘busy 12 hours a day writing out the fair copy’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 15 January 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 221), but hoped to take it to the publisher in Hamburg within two months. Marx was referring here only to Volume I, on the process of production of capital.

Contrary to his predictions, however, the whole year would pass in a struggle with the carbuncles and his worsening state of health. Despite everything, Marx’s thoughts were still directed mainly at the task ahead of him:

What was most loathsome to me was the interruption in my work, which had been going splendidly since January 1st, when I got over my liver complaint. There was no question of ‘sitting’, of course, […]. I was able to forge ahead even if only for short periods of the day. I could make no progress with the really theoretical part. My brain was not up to that. I therefore elaborated the section on the ‘Working-Day’ from the historical point of view, which was not part of my original plan (Marx to Engels, 10 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 223-4).

Marx concluded the letter with a phrase that well summed up this period of his life: ‘My book requires all my writing time’ (Marx to Engels, 10 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 224). How much the more was this true in 1866.

The situation was now seriously alarming Engels. Fearing the worst, he intervened firmly to persuade Marx that he could no longer go on in the same way:

You really must at last do something sensible now to shake off this carbuncle nonsense, even if the book is delayed by another 3 months. The thing is really becoming far too serious, and if, as you say yourself, your brain is not up to the mark for the theoretical part, then do give it a bit of a rest from the more elevated theory. Give over working at night for a while and lead a rather more regular life (Engels to Marx, 10 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 225-6).

Engels immediately consulted Dr. Gumpert, who advised another course of arsenic, but he also made some suggestions about the completion of his book. He wanted to be sure that Marx had given up the far from realistic idea of writing the whole of Capital before any part of it was published. ‘Can you not so arrange things,’ he asked, ‘that the first volume at least is sent for printing first and the second one a few months later?’ (Engels to Marx, 10 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 226). Taking everything into account, he ended with a wise observation: ‘What would be gained in these circumstances by having perhaps a few chapters at the end of your book completed, and not even the first volume can be printed, if events take us by surprise?’ (Engels to Marx, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227).

Marx replied to each of Engels’s points, alternating between serious and facetious tones. With regard to arsenic, he wrote: ‘Tell or write to Gumpert to send me the prescription with instructions for use. As I have confidence in him, he owes it to the best of “Political Economy” if nothing else to ignore professional etiquette and treat me from Manchester’ (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227). As for his work plans, he wrote:

As far as this ‘damned’ book is concerned, the position now is: it was ready at the end of December.29 The treatise on ground rent alone, the penultimate chapter, is in its present form almost long enough to be a book in itself.30 I have been going to the Museum in the day-time and writing at night. I had to plough through the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, in particular Liebig and Schönbein, which is more important for this matter than all the economists put together, as well as the enormous amount of material that the French have produced since I last dealt with this point. I concluded my theoretical investigation of ground rent 2 years ago. And a great deal had been achieved, especially in the period since then, fully confirming my theory incidentally. And the opening up of Japan (by and large I normally never read travel-books if I am not professionally obliged to). So here was the ‘shifting system’ as it was applied by those curs of English manufacturers to one and the same persons in 1848-50, being applied by me to myself (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227).31

Daytime study at the library, to keep abreast of the latest discoveries, and night-time work on his manuscript: this was the punishing routine to which Marx subjected himself in an effort to use all his energies for the completion of the book. On the main task, he wrote to Engels: ‘Although ready, the manuscript, which in its present form is gigantic, is not fit for publishing for anyone but myself, not even for you’ (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227). He then gave some idea of the preceding weeks:

I began the business of copying out and polishing the style on the dot of January first, and it all went ahead swimmingly, as I naturally enjoy licking the infant clean after long birth-pangs. But then the carbuncle intervened again, so that I have since been unable to make any more progress but only to fill out with more facts those sections which were, according to the plan, already finished (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227).

In the end, he accepted Engels’s advice to spread out the publication schedule: ‘I agree with you and shall get the first volume to Meissner as soon as it is ready’. ‘But,’ he added, ‘in order to complete it, I must first be able to sit’ (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227).

In fact, Marx’s health was continuing to deteriorate. Finally, Marx let himself be persuaded to take a break from work. On 15 March he travelled to Margate, a seaside resort in Kent, and on the tenth day sent back a report about himself: ‘I am reading nothing, am writing nothing. The mere fact of having to take the arsenic three times a day obliges one to arrange one’s time for meals and for strolling. […] As regards company here, it does not exist, of course. I can sing with the Miller of the Dee:32 ‘I care for nobody and nobody cares for me’ (Marx to Engels, 24 March 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 249).

Early in April, Marx told his friend Kugelmann that he was ‘much recovered’. But he complained that, because of the interruption, ‘another two months and more’ had been entirely lost, and the completion of his book ‘put back once more’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 6 April 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 262). After his return to London, he remained at a standstill for another few weeks because of an attack of rheumatism and other troubles; his body was still exhausted and vulnerable. Although he reported to Engels in early June that ‘there has fortunately been no recurrence of anything carbuncular’ (Marx to Engels, 7 June 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 281), he was unhappy that his work had ‘been progressing poorly owing to purely physical factors’ (Marx to Engels, 9 June 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 282).

In July, Marx had to confront what had become his three habitual enemies: Livy’s periculum in mora (danger in delay) in the shape of rent arrears; the carbuncles, with a new one ready to flare up; and an ailing liver. In August, he reassured Engels that, although his health ‘fluctuate[d] from one day to the next’, he felt generally better: after all, ‘the feeling of being fit to work again does much for a man’ (Marx to Engels, 7 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 303). He was ‘threatened with new carbuncles here and there’, and although they ‘kept disappearing’ without the need for urgent intervention they had obliged him to keep his ‘hours of work very much within limits’ (Marx to Engels, 23 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 311). On the same day, he wrote to Kugelmann: ‘I do not think I shall be able to deliver the manuscript of the first volume (it has now grown to 3 volumes) to Hamburg before October. I can only work productively for a very few hours per day without immediately feeling the effects physically’.

This time too, Marx was being excessively optimistic. The steady stream of negative phenomena to which he was daily exposed in the struggle to survive once more proved an obstacle to the completion of his text. Furthermore, he had to spend precious time looking for ways to extract small sums of money from the pawnshop and to escape the tortuous circle of promissory notes in which he had landed. He also said that ‘for [his] family’s sake’ he ‘must, however unwillingly, […] observe the hygienic’ limitations (linked to the prevention of new carbuncles) until he was ‘fully recovered’ Marx to Kugelmann, 23 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 312).

Marx’s old friend and former member of the League of Communists, Friedrich Lessner, recalled that he ‘often used to speak of the length of the working day’. At the end of the General Council meetings (which ‘he never missed’), Marx more than once said: ‘We are striving for an eight-hour day, but we ourselves often work twice as long in the space of twenty-four hours’. According to Lessner, Marx did ‘much too much’; ‘an outsider has no idea how much energy and time his work for the International cost him’. Besides ‘Marx had to slave away to keep his family and to spend hours in the British Museum collecting material for his historical and economic studies’ (Lessner in Enzensberger 1973: 293).

Very often, Marx’s permanent intellectual curiosity led him to widen his range of studies. For example, despite the pressure to finish his book as well as his political responsibilities, he wrote to Engels in the summer of 1865 that he was ‘studying Comte on the side just now, as the English and French are making such a fuss of the fellow’. He remained firm in what he thought of Comte’s limitations: what attracted him was ‘his encyclopaedic quality, la synthèse’, although ‘Hegel [was] infinitely superior as a whole’. ‘And this shitty positivism came out in 1832!’ he ended (Marx to Engels, 7 July 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 292).

His prediction to Kugelmann that he might be able to take the manuscript to Hamburg in October also proved to be overoptimistic. In August, Marx wrote to Kugelmann that ‘accumulated debts’ had become ‘a crushing mental burden’ and that he had even been thinking of moving to the United States. He was soldiering on, though, convinced that he had ‘a duty to […] remain in Europe and complete the work on which [he had] been engaged for so many years’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 23 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 312). With regard to Capital, he assured his friend that, although he was spending much time writing documents in preparation for the Geneva congress of the International, he would not be attending it himself. ‘For the working class,’ he wrote, ‘what [he was] doing through this work [was] far more important […] than anything [he] might be able to do personally at any congress’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 23 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 312).

Writing to Kugelmann in mid-October, Marx expressed a fear that as a result of his long illness, and all the expenses it had entailed, he could no longer ‘keep the creditors at bay’ and the house was ‘about to come crashing down about [his] ears’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 328). Not even in October, therefore, was it possible for him to put the finishing touches to the manuscript. In describing the state of things to his friend in Hannover, and explaining the reasons for the delay, Marx set out the plan he now had in mind:

My circumstances (endless interruptions, both physical and social) oblige me to publish Volume I first, not both volumes together, as I had originally intended. And there will now probably be 3 volumes. The whole work is thus divided into the following parts:

Book I. The Process of Production of Capital.
Book II. The Process of Circulation of Capital.
Book III. Structure of the Process as a Whole.
Book IV. On the History of the Theory.

The first volume will include the first 2 books. The 3rd book will, I believe, fill the second volume, the 4th the 3rd (Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 328).

Reviewing the work, he had done since the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was published in 1859, Marx continued:

It was, in my opinion, necessary to begin again from the beginning in the first book, i.e., to summarize the book of mine published by Duncker in one chapter on commodities and money. I judged this to be necessary, not merely for the sake of completeness, but because even intelligent people did not properly understand the question, in other words, there must have been defects in the first presentation, especially in the analysis of commodities (Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 328-9).

Extreme poverty marked the month of November, too. But Marx was keen to point out that ‘this summer and autumn it was really not the theory which caused the delay, but [his] physical and civil condition’. If he had been in good health, he would have been able to complete the work. He reminded Engels that it was three years since ‘the first carbuncle had been lanced’ – years in which he had had ‘only short periods’ of relief from it (Marx to Engels, 10 November 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 332). Moreover, having been forced to expend so much time and energy on the daily struggle with poverty, he remarked in December: ‘I only regret that private persons cannot file their bills for the bankruptcy court with the same propriety as men of business’ (Marx to Engels, 8 December 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 336).

At the end of February 1867, Marx was finally able to give Engels the long-awaited news that the book was finished. Now he had to take it to Germany, and once again he was forced to turn to his friend so that he could redeem his ‘clothes and timepiece from their abode at the pawnbroker’s’ (Marx to Engels, 2 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 351);33 otherwise he would not have been able to leave.

Having arrived in Hamburg, Marx discussed with Engels the new plan proposed by Meissner:

He now wants that the book should appear in 3 volumes. In particular he is opposed to my compressing the final book (the historico-literary part) as I had intended. He said that from the publishing point of view […] this was the part by which he was setting most store. I told him that as far as that was concerned, I was his to command (Marx to Engels, 13 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 357).

Despite Marx’s optimism, it should be noted that between 1862 and 1863 he had written only the history of the category of surplus-value – and that he had done this before making significant theoretical progress. A few days later, he gave a similar report to Becker:

The whole work will appear in 3 volumes. The title is Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. The first volume comprises the First Book: ‘The Process of Production of Capital’. It is without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included)’ (Marx to Becker, 17 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 358).

After a few days in Hamburg, Marx travelled on to Hannover. He stayed there as the guest of Kugelmann, who finally got to know him after years of purely epistolary relations. Marx remained available there in case Meissner wanted him to help out with the proof-reading.

Marx stayed in Hanover until the middle of May. Happy with the results of the trip, he described his weeks with the Kugelmann family as ‘an oasis in the desert of his life’ (Kugelmann, in Enzensberger 1973: 323).34 The most particularized accounts of Marx during this period have come down to us through the later recollections of Kugelmann’s daughter, Franziska. She described her fears before the arrival of the unknown guest, of her mother’s concern that he would be a man lost in ‘his political ideas’, with the manner of a ‘gloomy revolutionary’. But both she and her mother had to think again as soon as they met Marx in person; he turned out to be a ‘lively gentleman’ and displayed a ‘youthful freshness in his movements and conversation’ (Kugelmann in Enzensberger 1973: 314). In fact, he was ‘a thoroughly likeable and unpretentious presence, not only in get-togethers at home but also in the circle of my parents’ acquaintances’. Franziska also recalled that Marx ‘showed a lively interest in everything, and when someone pleased him in particular, or made an original remark, he would insert his monocle and look at the person with a cheerful and attentive expression’. The hospitality he received was returned with numerous anecdotes. On Hegel, he recounted how he had once said that ‘none of his students had understood him, except [Karl] Rosenkranz – and that he had understood him badly’ (Kugelmann in Enzensberger 1973: 315). Marx also often quoted Friedrich Schiller and once jokingly adapted a famous quotation of his from Wallenstein’s Camp: ‘He who has seen the best of his time has enough for all times!’ (Kugelmann in Enzensberger 1973: 320).

In discussions on the struggle against capitalism, however, Marx spoke in authoritative tones and did not avoid polemic. To one man’s question about who would polish boots in the future society, he replied: ‘You should do it!’ And someone who asked when communism would begin was told ‘the time will come, but we’ll have to be gone by then’ (Kugelmann in Enzensberger 1973: 319).

From Hanover, Marx wrote to other comrades about the forthcoming publication of his work. To Sigfrid Meyer [1840 – 1872], a German socialist member of the International active in organizing the workers’ movement in New York, he wrote: ‘Volume I comprises the Process of Production of Capital. […] Volume II contains the continuation and conclusion of the theory, Volume III the history of political economy from the middle of the 17th century’ (Marx to Meyer, 30 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 367). His schema was unchanged, however, and the idea was still that the second and third volumes would appear together.

Buoyed up with enthusiasm, Marx wrote to Engels in early May that the publisher Meissner was ‘demanding the 2nd volume by the end of the autumn at the latest’. That should have included both Volume II and Volume III, so Marx thought he would have to ‘get his nose to the grindstone’ again, especially as – in the time since he had composed Volume III – ‘a lot of new material relating to the chapters on credit and landed property ha[d] become available’. In the end, he expected to finish the third volume ‘during the winter, so that [he would] have shaken off the whole opus by next spring’. Marx’s overoptimistic predictions were based on the hope that ‘the business of writing’ would be ‘quite different once the proofs for what ha[d] already been done’ started to come in and he felt ‘under pressure from the publisher’ (Engels to Marx, 16 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 382).

In mid-June, Engels became involved in the correction of the text for publication. He thought that, compared with the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘the dialectic of the argument ha[d] been greatly sharpened’ (Engels to Marx, 16 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 381). Marx was heartened by this approval: ‘That you have been satisfied with it so far is more important to me than anything the rest of the world may say of it’ (Marx to Engels, 22 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 383). However, Engels noted that his exposition of the form of value was excessively abstract and insufficiently clear for the average reader; he also regretted that precisely this important section had ‘the marks of the carbuncles rather firmly stamped upon it’ (Engels to Marx, 16 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 380). A further problem was Marx’s rather dysfunctional subdivision of the volume. Its eight hundred pages were structured in just six long chapters, each with very few paragraph breaks. Engels therefore wrote: ‘It was a serious mistake not to have made the development of these rather abstract arguments clearer by means of a larger number of short sections with their own headings. You ought to have treated this part in the manner of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, with short paragraphs, each dialectical transition emphasized by means of a special heading’. Then, ‘a very large class of readers would have found it considerably easier to understand’ (Engels to Marx, 16 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 382). In reply, Marx fulminated against the cause of his physical torments – ‘I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day’ (Marx to Engels, 22 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 383) – and convinced himself of the need for an appendix presenting his conception of the form of value in a more popular form. This twenty-page addition was completed by the end of June.

The proof corrections were finished on 16 August 1867, at two in the morning. A few minutes later, he wrote to his friend in Manchester: ‘Dear Fred: Have just finished correcting the last sheet […]. So, this volume is finished. I owe it to you alone that it was possible! […] I embrace you, full of thanks’ (Marx to Engels, 24 August 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 405). A few days later, in another letter to Engels, he summarized what he regarded as the two main pillars of the book: ‘1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the twofold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use value or exchange value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc.’ (Marx to Engels, 24 August 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 407).

Capital was put on sale on 14 September 1867.35 The high price of the book – three thalers – was equivalent to a worker’s weekly wage. Jenny von Westphalen wrote to Kugelmann: ‘There can be few books that have been written in more difficult circumstances, and I am sure I could write a secret history of it which would tell of many, extremely many unspoken troubles and anxieties and torments’(Jenny Marx to Kugelmann, 24 December 1867, Marx 1983: 578). Following the final modifications, the table of contents was as follows:

Preface
1. Commodity and money
2. The transformation of money into capital
3. The production of absolute surplus value
4. The production of relative surplus value
5. Further research on the production of absolute and relative surplus value
6. The process of accumulation of capital
Appendix to Part 1, 1: The form of value (Marx 1983: 9-10).

Despite the long correction process and the final addition, the structure of the work would be considerably expanded over the coming years, and various further modifications would be made to the text. Capital, Volume I, therefore continued to absorb significant energies on Marx’s part even after its publication.

4. In Search of the Definitive Version
In October 1867, Marx returned to Capital, Volume II. But this brought a recurrence of his medical complaints: liver pains, insomnia, and the blossoming of ‘two small carbuncles near the membrum’. Nor did the ‘incursions from without’ or the ‘aggravations of home life’ leave off; there was a certain bitterness in his sage remark to Engels that ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’ (Marx to Engels, 19 October 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 453). As always, his friend helped out and sent all the money he could, together with a hope that it ‘drives away the carbuncles’ (Engels to Marx, 22 October 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 457). That is not what happened, though, and in late November Marx wrote to say: ‘The state of my health has greatly worsened, and there has been virtually no question of working’ (Marx to Engels, 27 November 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 477).

The new year, 1868, began much as the old one had ended. During the first weeks of January, Marx was even unable to attend to his correspondence. His wife Jenny confided to Becker that her ‘poor husband ha[d] once again been laid up and fettered hand and foot by his old, serious and painful complaint, which [was] becoming dangerous through its constant recurrence’ (Jenny Marx to Becker, ‘After 10 January 1868’, Marx and Engels 1987: 580). A few days later, his daughter Jenny reported to Engels: ‘Moor is once more being victimized by his old enemies, the carbuncles, and is, by the arrival of the latest, made to feel very ill at ease in a sitting posture’ (Laura Marx to Engels, 13 January 1868, Marx and Engels 1987: 583). Marx began to write again only towards the end of the month, when he told Engels that ‘for 2-3 weeks’ he would ‘do absolutely no work’; ‘it would be dreadful,’ he added, ‘if a third monster were to erupt’ (Marx to Engels, 25 January 1868, Marx and Engels 1987: 528).

As always, however, he returned as soon as he could to his research. During this period, he took a great interest in questions of history and agriculture, compiling notebooks of extracts from the works of various authors. Particularly important for him was the Introduction to the Constitutive History of the German Mark, Farm, Village, Town and Public Authority (1854) by the political theorist and legal historian Georg Ludwig von Maurer. Marx told Engels he had found Maurer’s books ‘extremely significant’, since they approached in an entirely different way ‘not only the primitive age but also the entire later development of the free imperial cities, of the estate owners possessing immunity, of public authority, and of the struggle between the free peasantry and serfdom’ (Marx to Engels, 25 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 557). Marx further approved of Maurer’s demonstration ‘at length that private property in land only arose later’ (Marx to Engels, 14 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 547). By contrast, he waxed sarcastic about those who were ‘surprised to find what is newest in what is oldest, and even egalitarians to a degree that would have made Proudhon shudder’ (Marx to Engels, 25 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 557).

Also in this period, Marx studied in depth three German works by Karl Fraas: Climate and the Vegetable World throughout the Ages, a History of Both (1847), A History of Agriculture (1852) and The Nature of Agriculture (1857). Marx found the first of these ‘very interesting’, especially appreciating the part in which Kraas demonstrated that ‘climate and flora change in historical times’. Writing to Engels, he described the author as ‘a Darwinist before Darwin’, who admitted ‘even the species developing in historical times’. He was also struck by his ecological considerations and his related concern that ‘cultivation – when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he naturally does not reach this point) – leaves deserts behind it’. Here too, Marx could detect what he called ‘an unconscious socialist tendency’ (Marx to Engels, 25 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 559).

While affording Marx a little energy for these new scientific studies, the state of his health continued its ups and downs. In late March, he reported to Engels that it was such that he should ‘really give up working and thinking entirely for some time’. But he added that would be ‘hard’ for him, even if he had ‘the means to loaf around’ (Marx to Engels, 25 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1987: 557). The new interruption came just as he was recommencing work on the second version of Volume II – after a gap of nearly three years since the first half of 1865. He completed the first two chapters in the course of the spring (Marx 2008), in addition to a group of preparatory manuscripts – on the relationship between surplus value and rate of profit, the law of the rate of profit, and the metamorphoses of capital – which occupied him until the end of 1868.36

At the end of April 1868, Marx sent Engels a new schema for his work, with particular reference to ‘the method by which the rate of profit is developed’ (Marx to Engels, 30 April 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 21). This would be the last occasion when Marx referred in his correspondence to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. Despite the major economic crises that developed after 1873, Marx never again mentioned this concept to which the whole third section of Volume III (written in 1864-65) is devoted – and which has received so much emphasis in later times; it was as if he thought it to have been superseded. In the same letter, he made it clear that Volume II would present the ‘process of circulation of capital on the basis of the premises developed’ in Capital, Volume I. He intended to set out, in as satisfactory a manner as possible, the ‘formal determinations’ of fixed capital, circulating capital and the turnover of capital – and hence to investigate ‘the social intertwining of the different capitals, of parts of capital and of revenue (=m)’. Instead, Marx had decided to present ‘the conversion of surplus value into its different forms and separate component parts’ (Marx to Engels, 30 April 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 21). In May, however, the health problems were back. In the second week of August, he told Kugelmann of his hope to finish the entire work by ‘the end of September’ 1869 (Marx to Kugelmann, 10 August 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 82).

But the autumn brought an outbreak of carbuncles, and in Spring 1869, when Marx was still working on the third chapter – entitled in this version ‘The Real Relations of the Circulation Process and the Reproduction Process’ – of Volume II (Marx 2008). His plan to finish it by 1869 seemed realistic, since the second version of the text he had written since Spring 1868 represented an advance in both qualitative and quantitative terms. His liver too yet another turn for the worse. His misfortunes continued in the following years, with troublesome regularity, and prevented him from ever completing Volume II.

There were also theoretical reasons for the delay. From Autumn 1868 to Spring 1869, determined to get on top of the latest developments in capitalism, Marx compiled copious excerpts from texts on the finance and money markets that appeared in The Money Market Review, The Economist and similar publications.37 His ever-growing interest in developments on the other side of the Atlantic drove him to seek out the most up-to-date information. He wrote to his friend Sigfrid Meyer that ‘it would be of great value … if [he] could dig up some anti-bourgeois material about landownership and agrarian relations in the United States’. He explained that, ‘since [he would] be dealing with rent in [his] 2nd volume, material against H. Carey’s “harmonies” would be especially welcome’ (Marx to Meyer, 4 July 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 61).

Moreover, in Autumn 1869, having become aware of new (in reality, insignificant) literature about changes in Russia, he decided to learn Russian so that he could study it for himself. He pursued this new interest with his usual rigour, and in early 1870 Jenny told Engels that, ‘instead of looking after himself, [he had begun] to study Russian hammer and tongs, went out seldom, ate infrequently, and only showed the carbuncle under his arm when it was already very swollen and had hardened’ (Jenny Marx to Engels, ‘About 17 January 1870’, Marx and Engels 1988: 551). Engels hastened to write to his friend, trying to persuade him that ‘in the interests of the Volume II’ he needed ‘a change of life-style’; otherwise, if there was ‘constant repetition of such suspensions’, he would never finish the book (Engels to Marx, 19 January 1870, Marx and Engels 1988: 408).

The prediction was spot on. In early summer, summarizing what had happened in the previous months, Marx told Kugelmann that his work had been ‘held up by illness throughout the winter’, and that he had ‘found it necessary to mug up on [his] Russian, because, in dealing with the land question, it ha[d] become essential to study Russian landowning relationships from primary sources’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 27 June 1870, Marx and Engels 1988: 528).

After all the interruptions and a period of intense political activity for the International following the birth of the Paris Commune, Marx turned to work on a new edition of Capital, Volume I. Dissatisfied with the way in which he had expounded the theory of value, he spent December 1871 and January 1872 rewriting the 1867 appendix, and this led him to rewrite the first chapter itself. The result of this labour was the manuscript known as ‘Additions and Changes to Capital, Volume I’ (1871-72) (Marx 1983: 1-55). During the revision of the 1867 edition, Marx inserted a number of additions and clarifications and also refined the structure of the entire book.38 Some of these changes concerned surplus value, the difference between constant capital and variable capital, and the use of machinery and technology. He also expanded the new edition from six chapters to seven books containing 25 chapters, themselves subdivided into more detailed sections. The new edition came out in 1872, with a print run of three thousand copies.

The year 1872 was a year of fundamental importance for the dissemination of Capital, since April saw the appearance of the Russian translation – the first in a long series (Musto and Amini Forthcoming 2020). Begun by German Lopatin and completed by the economist Nikolai Danielson, it was regarded by Marx as ‘masterly’ (Marx to Davidson, 28 May 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 385). Lessner related that ‘the event, [which was considered] an important sign of the times, turned into a festive occasion for himself and for his family and friends’ (Lessner 1907).

In a letter of May 1872 to Liebknecht, Jenny von Westphalen – who with her daughters had shared the joy of this success and other of Marx’s achievements – described most effectively how gender differences also weighed in the common struggle for socialism. In all existing conflicts, she wrote, ‘we women have the harder part to bear, because it is the lesser one. A man draws strength from his struggle with the world outside, and is invigorated by the sight of the enemy, be their number legion. We remain sitting at home, darning socks. That does nothing to dispel our fears and the gnawing day-to-day petty worries slowly but surely sap our spirit’ (Jenny Marx to Liebknecht, 26 May 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 580).

In this year, too, the publication of the French edition of Capital got under way. Entrusted to Joseph Roy, who had previously translated some Ludwig Feuerbach’s texts, it was scheduled to appear in batches with the French publisher Maurice Lachâtre, between 1872 and 1875. Marx agreed that it would be good to bring out a ‘cheap popular edition’ (Marx to Lafargue, 18 December 1871, Marx and Engels 1989: 283). ‘I applaud your idea of publishing the translation … in periodic instalments,’ he wrote. ‘In this form the work will be more accessible to the working class and for me that consideration outweighs any other’. Aware, however, that there was a ‘reverse side’ of the coin, he anticipated that the ‘method of analysis’ he had used would ‘make for somewhat arduous reading in the early chapters’, and that readers might ‘become discouraged when they were “unable to carry straight on”’. He did not feel he could do anything about this ‘disadvantage’, ‘other than constantly caution and forewarn those readers concerned with the truth. There is no royal road to learning and the only people with any chance of scaling its sunlit peaks are those who have no fear of weariness when ascending the precipitous paths that lead up to them’ (Marx to Lachâtre, 18 March 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 344).

In the end, Marx had to spend much more time on the translation than he had planned for the proof correction. As he wrote to Danielson, Roy had ‘often translated too literally’ and forced him to ‘rewrite whole passages in French, to make them more palatable to the French public’ (Marx to Danielson, 28 May 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 385).

Earlier that month, his daughter Jenny had told Kugelmann that her father was ‘obliged to make numberless corrections’, rewriting ‘not only whole sentences but entire pages’ (Jenny Marx to Kugelmann, 3 May 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 578) – and a month later she added that the translation was so ‘imperfect’ that he had been ‘obliged to rewrite the greater part of the first chapter’ (Jenny Marx to Kugelmann, 27 June 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 582). Subsequently, Engels wrote in similar vein to Kugelmann that the French translation had proved a ‘real slog’ for Marx and that he had ‘more or less had to rewrite the whole thing from the beginning’ (Engels to Kugelmann, 1 July 1873, Marx and Engels 1989: 515). At the end of his labours, Marx himself remarked that they had ‘consumed so much of [his] time that [he would] not again collaborate in any way on a translation’ (Marx to Sorge, 27 September 1877, Marx and Engels 1991: 276).

In revising the translation (Marx 1989c), moreover, Marx decided to introduce some additions and modifications. These mostly concerned the section on the process of capital accumulation, but also some specific points such as the distinction between ‘concentration’ and ‘centralization’ of capital. In the postscript to the French edition, he did not hesitate to attach to it ‘a scientific value independent of the original’ (Marx 1996: 24). It was no accident that in 1877, when an English edition already seemed a possibility, Marx wrote to Sorge that a translator ‘must without fail … compare the 2nd German edition with the French edition, in which [he had] included a good deal of new matter and greatly improved [his] presentation of much else’ (Marx to Sorge, 27 September 1877, Marx and Engels 1991: 276). In a letter of November 1878, in which he weighed the positive and negative sides of the French edition, he wrote to Danielson that it contained ‘many important changes and additions’, but that he had ‘also sometimes been obliged – principally in the first chapter – to simplify [aplatir] the matter’ (Marx to Danielson, 15 November 1878, Marx and Engels 1991: 343). For this reason, he felt it necessary to clarify later in the month that the chapters ‘Commodities and Money’ and ‘The Transformation of Money into Capital’ should be ‘translated exclusively from the German text’ (Marx to Danielson, 28 November 1878, Marx and Engels 1991: 346).39

The drafts of Capital, Volume II, which were left in anything but a definitive state, present a number of theoretical problems. The manuscripts of Capital, Volume III, have a highly fragmentary character, and Marx never managed to update them in a way that reflected the progress of his research.40 It should also be borne in mind that he was unable to complete a revision of Capital, Volume I, that included the changes and additions he intended to improve his magnum opus.41 In fact, neither the French edition of 1872-75 nor the German edition of 1881 can be considered the definitive version that he would have liked it to be.

The critical spirit with which Marx composed his magnum opus reveals just how distant he was from the dogmatic author that many of his adversaries and self-styled disciples presented to the world. Unfinished though it remained, those who today want to use essential theoretical concepts for the critique of the capitalist mode of production still cannot dispense with reading Marx’s Capital.

Translated from the Italian by Patrick Camiller

References
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Heinrich, Michael (2016) ‘Capital after MEGA. Discontinuities, Interruptions, and New Beginnings’, in Crisis & Critique, 3/2, pp. 92-138.
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Lessner, Frederick (1907) Sixty years in the Social-Democratic movement, before 1848 and after: Recollections of an old Communist, London: Twentieth Century Press.
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Marx, Karl (2017 [1857-58]) Exzerpte, Zeitungsausschnitte und Notizen zur Weltwirtschaftskrise (Krisenhefte). November 1857 bis Februar 1858, in MEGA², IV/14, Berlin: De Gruyter.
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Musto, Marcello (Ed. – 2008), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, London–New York: Routledge.
Musto, Marcello (Ed. – 2014), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later, London–New York: Bloomsbury.
Musto, Marcello (2018), Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International, London–New York: Bloomsbury.
Musto, Marcello (Forthcoming 2020), The Moor’s Last Journey: An Intellectual Biography of the Late Marx, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Musto, Marcello and Amini, Babak (Eds. – Forthcoming 2020) The Routledge Handbook of Marx’s “Capital”: A Global History of Translation, Dissemination and Reception, London-New York: Routledge.
Napoleoni, Claudio (1975) Lezioni sul Capitolo sesto inedito di Marx, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.
Rosdolsky, Roman (1977) The Making of Marx’s Capital, London: Pluto.
Roth, Regina (2012/13) ‘Die Herausgabe von Band 2 und 3 des Kapital durch Engels’, in Marx-Engels Jahrbuch, vol. 2012/13, pp. 168-182.
Rubel, Maximilien (1974) Marx Critique du marxisme, Paris: Payot.
Rubel, Maximilien, (1981) Rubel on Karl Marx: Five Essays in Joseph O’ Malley and Keith Algozin (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shuster, Sam (2008) ‘The nature and consequence of Karl Marx’s skin disease’, in British Journal of Dermatology, vol. 158, no. 1, pp. 1-3.
Vollgraf, Carl-Erich (2012) ‘Einführung’, in MEGA², vol. II/4.3, pp. 421-474.
Vollgraf, Carl-Erich (2012/13) ‘Das Kapital – bis zuletzt ein “Werk im Werden”’, in Marx-Engels Jahrbuch, vol. 2012/13, pp. 113-133.
Vollgraf, Carl-Erich (2018) ‘Marx’s Further Work on Capital’, in Marcel van der Linden and Gerald Hubmann (eds.), Marx’s Capital: An Unfinishable Project?, Leiden: Brill, pp. 56-79.
Vollgraf, Carl-Erich, Jungnickel, Jürgen and Naron, Stephen (2002) ‘Marx in Marx’s Words? On Engels’ Edition of the Main Manuscript of Volume III of Capital’, in International Journal of Political Economy, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 35-78.

References
1. This expression has been often used by Maximilien Rubel (1981: 192!.). Cf. also Musto (2018: 55–81).
2. The title later given to these manuscripts was inspired by this letter. On Marx’s Grundrisse cf. Musto 2008.
3. A few days later, Marx communicated his plans to Lassalle: ‘The present commercial crisis has impelled me to set to work seriously on my outlines of political
economy, and also to prepare something on the present crisis’ (Marx to Lassalle, 21 December 1857, Marx and Engels 1983: 226).
4. These notebooks total 1,472 quarto pages. See Engels (1996: 6).
5. Previously, in the Grundrisse, Marx had set forth a similar, though less precise, ‘arrangement of the material’ (Marx 1993: 108, 227–8, 264 and 27), at four separate points. He also anticipated the six- part schema planned for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in two letters from the first half of 1858: one to Ferdinand Lassalle (Marx to Lassalle, 22 February 1858, Marx and Engels 1983: 268–71), and one to Friedrich Engels (Marx to Engels, 2 April 1858, Marx and Engels 1983: 296–304). Between February and March 1859, he also drafted a long preparatory index for his work, which in the English edition of Marx (1993), became the ‘Analytical Contents List’, pp. 69–80. On the original plan and its variations, see the by now dated, but still fundamental work by Roman Rosdolsky (1977: 1–62). More limited, however, is Rubel (1974: 379, 389), which claims that Marx did not change the original plan he devised in 1857.
6. These notebooks were ignored for more than 100 years, before a Russian translation was finally published in 1973, in a supplementary Volume 47 of the Marx- Engels Sochinenya. An original German edition appeared only in 1976 in MEGA2, vol. II/3.1.
7. Between 1905 and 1910, Kautsky published the manuscripts in question in a form that deviated somewhat from the originals.
8. It was to have followed: 1) the transformation of money into capital; 2) absolute surplus value; 3) relative surplus value; and 4) a section – one he never actually wrote – on how these three should be considered in combination.
9. In the MECW these manuscripts are indicated with the title Economic Manuscript of 1861–63.
10. This notebook is the last of those comprising the so- called Theories of Surplus-Value, vol. I, in Marx (1989a).
11. These notebooks form part of the Theories of Surplus Value, vol. II, in Marx (1989a).
12. These are the final notebooks that form part of the Theories of Surplus Value, vol. III, in Marx (1989b).
13. See the index to the Grundrisse, written in June 1858 and contained in Notebook M (the same as that of the ‘1857 Introduction’), as well as the draft index for the third chapter, written in 1860: Marx (1987b: 511–17). Michael Heinrich (2016: 107) shows that, after the middle of 1863, Marx no longer used the concept of ‘capital in general’ in the subdivision of his work and never mentioned it again in either his manuscripts or his correspondence. It is therefore possible that he ‘realised that the double requirement which he expected from the section of “Capital in General” – to present specific content […] at a certain level of abstraction […] – could not be fulfilled’.
14. The first chapter had already been outlined in Notebook XVI of the economic manuscripts of 1861–1863. Marx prepared a schema of the second in Notebook XVIII, see Marx (1991: 299).
15. See the more than 60 pages contained in IISH, Marx- Engels Papers, B 98. On the basis of this research, Marx began one of his many unfinished projects, see Marx (1961).
16. IISH, Marx- Engels Papers, B 93, B 100, B 101, B 102, B 103, B 104 contain some 535 pages of notes. Additionally, Marx also used material from three notebooks RGASPI f.1, d. 1397, d. 1691, d. 5583. In order to compile notebooks XXII and XXIII.
17. Heinrich (2011) argued that the manuscripts from this period should be regarded not as the third version of the work begun with the Grundrisse, but as the first draft of Capital. Krätke (2005) indicated that the overall outlook and scope of Capital remained unchanged, even though Marx changed his plans several times after 1857.
18. Heinrich (2016: 111) noted that, when he was writing the second and third volumes, Marx was ‘far away from a situation in which these manuscripts could have served as a direct template for revision before going into print. In this respect one can say that Capital was still in a formation phase’.
19. In his view, Marx set aside the project of also writing books on the state, foreign trade and the world market.
20. With ‘No. 1’ Marx meant the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
21. In recent years, dermatologists have reviewed the discussion on the causes of Marx’s disease. Sam Shuster (2008) suggested that he su!ered from hidradenitis suppurativa, while Rudolf Happle and Arne Koenig (2008) claimed even less plausibly, that the culprit was his heavy smoking of cigars. For Shuster’s reply to this suggestion, see Happle and Koenig (2008: 256).
22. The reasons why Marx did not insert this chapter into the published text of Capital, Volume I, remain unknown. For a commentary on it, see Napoleoni (1975).
23. This street was later renamed Maitland Park Road. Marx dedicated Capital, Volume I, to Wol!, his ‘unforgettable friend. […] Intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat’.
24. Fifty signatures were equivalent to 800 printed pages.
25. This was published in 1898 by Eleanor Marx, as Value, Price and Profit. This commonly used title was taken as the basis for the German translation that appeared the same year in Die Neue Zeit [The New Times].
26. The equivalent of 960 pages. Later, Meissner signaled his openness to modify his agreement with Marx: see Marx to Engels, 13 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 357.
27. This division was followed by Engels when he published Capital, Volume III in 1894. See Vollgraf, Jungnickel and Naron (Spring 2002). See also the more recent: Vollgraf (2012/2013); Roth (2012/2013); and Krätke (2017), especially the final chapter ‘Gibt es ein Marx- Engels-Problem?’ For a critical assessment of Engels’s editing, see Heinrich (1996–1997).
28. Marx used these data in the third chapter of Volume One. It should be noted, however, that in late 1865 Marx still envisaged the publication of Volume One of Capital as a continuation of his writings of 1859. Only from the letter Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866 can we be certain that he had decided to rewrite the first part. See Marx and Engels (1987: 328).
29. Vollgraf (2018: 63–4) points out that, when Marx described Capital as being ‘ready’ since 1865, he was referring to the ‘conceptual architecture’, not the ‘elaboration of the content chapter by chapter, and certainly not the complete exposition’. Marx continued to assess the work remaining to be done on the basis of size, not of ‘the rational core of his arguments’.
30. Marx then inserted his analysis of ground rent into Part Six, ‘The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground Rent’, of Volume III.
31. This realistic assertion clashes with some previous over- confident descriptions of the state of his texts. Since, apart from a few additions, Marx had no further opportunity to work on Volume III after 1865, his statement testifies both to Engels’s huge e!ort in preparing the book for publication and to its highly unfinished character. This should always be borne in mind by its readers and interpreters.
32. A traditional English folk song.
33. The most recent philological studies have shown that, contrary to what has always been believed, the original manuscript of Capital, Volume I, (of which the ‘Chapter Six. Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ was thought to be only surviving part) actually dates back to the 1863–64 period, and that Marx cut and pasted it into the copy he prepared for publication. See Vollgraf (2012).
34. For a full account of this period, see the recent Bönig (2017).
35. The distribution of the book began on 11 September 1867. See Institut für Marxismus- Leninismus, ‘Entstehung und Überlieferung’, in Marx (1983: 674).
36 These texts have recently been published in Marx (2012). The last part constitutes Manuscript IV of Volume II and contains new versions of Part One, ‘The Circulation of Capital’, and Part Two, ‘The Metamorphoses of Capital’.
37. Still unpublished, these notes are included in the IISH notebooks, Marx- Engels Papers, B 108, B 109, B 113 and B 114.
38. In 1867 Marx had divided the book into chapters. In 1872 these became sections, each with much more detailed subdivisions.
39. For a list of the additions and modifications in the French translation that were not included in the third and fourth German editions, see Marx (1983: 732–83). For confirmation of the merits of this edition, see Anderson (1983) and D’Hondt (1985). On the research of the last period of Marx’s life see Musto 2020 (forthcoming).
40. The editorial work that Engels undertook after his friend’s death to prepare the unfinished parts of Capital for publication was extremely complex. The various manuscripts, drafts and fragments of Volumes II and III, written between 1864 and 1881, correspond to approximately 2,350 pages of the MEGA2. Engels successfully published Volume II in 1885 and Volume III in 1894. However, it must be borne in mind that these two volumes emerged from the reconstruction of incomplete texts, often consisting of heterogeneous material. They were written in more than one period in time and thus include di!erent, and sometimes contradictory, versions of Marx’s ideas.
41. See, for example, Marx to Danielson, 13 December 1881: In the first instance I must first be restored to health, and in the second I want to finish o! the 2nd vol. […] as soon as possible.… I will arrange with my editor that I shall make for the 3d edition only the fewest possible alterations and additions. […] When these 1,000 copies forming the 3d edition are sold, then I may change the book in the way I should have done at present under di!erent circumstances. (Marx and Engels 1993: 161).

Tags English

Journalism

Pekerja Adat dan Pembaruan Kiri: Percakapan dengan Álvaro García Linera

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date November 1, 2019

Álvaro García Linera dilahirkan di Cochabamba, Bolivia pada tahun 1962.

Ia berkenalan dengan Marxisme dan perjuangan rakyat Aymara ketika masih berusia sangat muda. Pindah ke Meksiko, tempat ia lulus dalam matematika, pada awal 1980-an, ia dipengaruhi oleh gerakan gerilya Guatemala yang memperjuangkan kepentingan masyarakat adat. Setelah kembali ke Bolivia, Linera menjadi salah satu pendiri Pasukan Gerilya Túpac Katari, sebuah organisasi politik yang menggabungkan perjuangan kelas Marxis dengan prinsip-prinsip Kataris yang mempromosikan emansipasi masyarakat adat. Karena aktivitasnya ini, ia dipenjara dengan penjagaan keamanan maksimum antara tahun 1992 dan 1997. Keluar dari penjara ia kemudian mengajar sosiologi dan menjadi intelektual yang berpengaruh. Setelahnya ia bergabung dengan Movement for Socialism (MAS) pimpinan Evo Morales, dan sejak 2006 Linera wakil presiden Negara Plurinasional Bolivia. Dia adalah salah satu suara paling orisinal dari gerakan Kiri Amerika Latin, yang karya-karyanya meliputi Value Form dan Community Form (1995) dan Plebeain Power (2008). Percakapan kami dengannya berpusat pada situasi kekuatan-kekuatan progresif di Amerika Latin dan bagian dunia lainnya.

Marcello Musto: Komitmen politik Anda ditandai oleh kesadaran bahwa sebagian besar organisasi komunis Amerika Latin tidak mampu berbicara kepada kelas-kelas populer secara keseluruhan dan hanya menempati fungsi tidak lebih sebagai pengamat. Di Bolivia, misalnya, ketergantungan mereka pada Marxisme-Leninisme yang paling skematis dan ekonomistik menghalangi mereka untuk mengenali kekhasan masalah masyarakat adat dan menempatkannya di pusat kegiatan politik mereka. Mereka melihat penduduk asli sebagai massa tani “borjuis kecil” tanpa potensi revolusioner. Bagaimana Anda menyadari bahwa perlu membangun sesuatu yang secara radikal berbeda dari kaum Kiri yang ada pada saat itu?

Álvaro García Linera: Di Bolivia, makanan diproduksi oleh petani-petani lokal, bangunan-bangunan dan rumah-rumah dibangun oleh pekerja lokal, jalanan dibersihkan oleh penduduk lokal, dan kaum elite dan kelas menengah memercayakan perawatan anak-anak mereka kepada mereka-mereka ini. Namun kaum Kiri tradisional tampaknya buta akan hal ini dan hanya menyibukkan diri dengan para pekerja di industri skala besar, tanpa memperhatikan identitas etnis mereka. Meskipun, tentu saja, penting untuk mengorganisir para pekerja di pertambangan, namun jumlah mereka adalah minoritas jika dibandingkan dengan para pekerja lokal yang didiskriminasi dan bahkan lebih dieksploitasi. Sejak akhir 1970-an, populasi Aymara mengorganisir mobilisasi besar melawan kediktatoran serta pemerintahan demokratis yang muncul setelah kejatuhannya. Mereka melakukannya dengan bangga, dengan bahasa dan simbol-simbolnya sendiri, yang beroperasi melalui komunitas gabungan dari campesinos (para petani) dan memajukan kelahiran suatu bangsa di bawah kepemimpinan adat. Itu adalah momen penemuan sosial.

Bagaimana Anda merespons ini?

Ketika orang-orang Indian ini memberontak, saat itu saya masih berstatus sebagai siswa sekolah. Pemberontakan itu sangat mengesankan bagi saya. Tampak jelas bahwa wacana perjuangan sosial kaum Kiri klasik, yang hanya berpusat pada pekerja dan borjuis, adalah tidak memadai dan tidak berkelanjutan. Perjuangan itu harus memasukkan tema-tema adat dan untuk merefleksikan komunitas agraria, atau kepemilikan kolektif atas tanah, sebagai dasar untuk organisasi sosial. Selain itu, untuk memahami perempuan dan laki-laki yang merupakan penduduk mayoritas dan yang menuntut sejarah dan tempat yang berbeda di dunia ini, adalah perlu untuk masuk lebih dalam ke aspek etnis-nasional dari masalah rakyat tertindas ini. Dan untuk ini, skematisme buku-buku teks Marxis, bagi saya, tampaknya tidak memadai. Ini mendorong saya untuk mencari referensi-referensi lain, dari penyimpanan ide-ide Indianis ke Marx yang tulisannya tentang perjuangan-perjuangan antikolonial dan komune agraria di Rusia telah memperkaya analisisnya tentang bangsa-bangsa yang tertindas.

Dengan berlalunya waktu, kompleksitas subjek transformasi sosial – yang sangat penting dalam pemikiran dan aktivitas politik Anda – telah menjadi pertanyaan penting bagi semua kekuatan progresif. Ketika visi kaum proletar sebagai satu-satunya kekuatan yang mampu menggulingkan kapitalisme telah berkurang, dan ketika mitos pelopor revolusioner telah bubar, apa yang seharusnya menjadi titik awal baru bagi kaum Kiri?

Masalah dari kaum Kiri tradisional adalah bahwa mereka membingungkan konsep “kondisi proletar” dengan bentuk sejarah yang khusus dari kerja upahan. Yang pertama telah menyebar ke mana-mana dan menjadi kondisi material di seluruh dunia. Tidak benar bahwa dunia kerja menghilang – tidak pernah ada buruh sebanyak ini di dunia, di setiap negara. Tetapi pertumbuhan sangat besar tenaga kerja global ini terjadi pada saat semua serikat buruh dan struktur-struktur politik yang ada terpecah berantakan. Lebih dari kapan pun sejak awal abad ke-19, kondisi kelas pekerja, sekali lagi, merupakan kondisi dari dan untuk kapital. Tetapi saat ini, sedemikian rupa, dunia pekerja menjadi lebih kompleks, terhibridisasi, nomaden, dan tercerabut dari tempat tinggalnya (deterritorial). Paradoksnya, di zaman ketika setiap aspek kehidupan manusia telah dikomodifikasi, semuanya tampak terjadi seolah-olah tidak ada lagi pekerja.

Apa karakter dari perjuangan sosial saat ini? Apakah kesulitan yang dihadapi organisasi-organisasi politik dan serikat pekerja dalam mengorganisir pekerja migran, tidak aman, dan tidak terampil sangat berbeda dengan yang ada pada masa produksi Fordist pada abad ke-20?

Kelas pekerja baru tidak disatukan terutama di seputar masalah perburuhan. Mereka belum memiliki kekuatan untuk melakukan ini, dan mungkin tidak akan memilikinya untuk waktu yang lama ke depan. Mobilisasi sosial tidak lagi terjadi melalui bentuk-bentuk klasik aksi kelas pekerja yang terpusat, melainkan melalui campuran berbagai serikat, isu-isu lintas-sektor, dan bentuk-bentuk yang fleksibel, lancar, dan dapat berubah. Kita berbicara tentang bentuk-bentuk baru aksi kolektif yang dilontarkan oleh para pekerja, bahkan jika, dalam banyak kasus, apa yang muncul kurang identitas buruhnya dibandingkan fitur-fitur pelengkap lainnya seperti konglomerat teritorial atau kelompok-kelompok yang menuntut hak atas perawatan kesehatan, pendidikan atau transportasi umum.

Alih-alih mencibir perjuangan ini karena bentuknya yang berbeda dari masa lalu, kaum Kiri harus memperhatikan hibriditas atau heterogenitas sosial ini – pertama-tama, untuk memahami perjuangan yang ada dan mengartikulasikannya dengan yang lain di tingkat lokal, nasional dan internasional. Subjek perubahan tetaplah “tenaga kerja hidup/living labour”: pekerja yang menjual tenaga kerjanya dalam berbagai cara. Tetapi bentuk-bentuk organisasi, wacana, dan identitas-identitasnya sangat berbeda dari yang kita kenal di abad kedua puluh.

Di tengah kompleksitas sosial zaman kita, menurut Anda apakah perlu kita memikirkan kembali konsep tentang kelas?

Kelas-kelas, identitas, dan kolektif yang dimobilisasi bukanlah abstraksi: mereka adalah bentuk pengalaman kolektif dunia yang dibangun dalam skala luas. Sama seperti mereka mengambil bentuk kontingen seratus tahun yang lalu, mereka melakukannya lagi melalui rute yang tidak terduga dan seringkali mengejutkan serta penyebab yang sangat berbeda dari yang ada di masa lalu. Kita tidak boleh membingungkan konsep kelas sosial – cara mengklasifikasikan orang secara statistik berdasarkan atas properti mereka, sumber daya, akses terhadap kekayaan, dll. – dengan cara aktual di mana mereka dikelompokkan bersama berdasarkan kedekatan elektif, tempat tinggal, masalah bersama dan karakteristik budaya. Ini adalah gerakan nyata dari konstruksi kelas yang dimobilisasi, yang hanya bertepatan dengan konvergensi yang ditunjukkan dalam data statistik.

Anda sering mengutip Antonio Gramsci. Seberapa pentingkah pemikirannya untuk pilihan politik Anda?

Gramsci sangat menentukan dalam pengembangan pemikiran saya. Saya mulai membacanya ketika masih sangat muda, saat tulisan-tulisannya beredar di antara satu kudeta ke kudeta lainnya. Sejak itu, tidak seperti begitu banyak teks yang mengandung analisis ekonomi atau formulasi filosofis yang lebih memusatkan pada estetika kata-kata ketimbang pada realitas, Gramsci telah membantu saya mengembangkan cara pandang yang berbeda. Dia berbicara tentang masalah-masalah seperti bahasa, sastra, pendidikan atau akal sehat yang, meskipun tampaknya sekunder, sebenarnya membentuk jaringan kehidupan sehari-hari bagi individu dan menentukan persepsi dan kecenderungan politik kolektif mereka.
Sejak masa-masa awal itu, saya secara teratur kembali membaca Gramsci, dan dia selalu mengungkapkan hal-hal baru kepada saya, khususnya berkaitan dengan pembentukan molekular negara. Saya yakin bahwa Gramsci adalah pemikir yang sangat diperlukan untuk pembaruan Marxisme di dunia saat ini.

Dari apa yang Anda katakan, jelas bahwa cara Anda berhubungan dengan Marx – yang sangat Anda kenal dan tentang siapa Anda banyak menulis – sangat berbeda dengan Marxisme Soviet. Apakah Anda berpikir bahwa peralihan ke Marx tentang pertanyaan dan keraguan, yang ditemukan dalam manuskrip yang belum selesai di tahun-tahun terakhirnya, hari ini mungkin lebih bermanfaat daripada pernyataan yang terkandung dalam pamflet dan buku yang diterbitkannya?

Buku teks Marxisme selalu tampak tidak memadai bagi saya. Jadi, saya mengambil inisiatif untuk menyelidiki penulis yang diilhami oleh ideologi indigenis, serta Marxis lain dan Marx lain yang berbicara kepada saya tentang identitas sosial hibrida. Dengan cara ini, saya menemukan seorang Marx yang mengajari saya tentang perjuangan kolonial, yang berbicara tentang komunitas agraris, yang terus berusaha menempatkan tema negara-negara tertindas di atas fondasi yang kuat – sebuah Marx di pinggiran, lebih plural dan lebih berlimpah dengan pertanyaan ketimbang dengan jawaban. Pertanyaan-pertanyaan inilah yang memungkinkan saya, selama bertahun-tahun, untuk membaca secara berbeda Grundrisse, Manuskrip tahun 1861-1863 dan Capital dan menemukan elemen-elemen logika genetika kapitalisme yang gagal dipahami oleh penulis lain, sebelum dan sesudah Marx.

Dalam empat tahun terakhir, hampir di mana-mana di Amerika Latin, pemerintah berkuasa yang mengambil isyarat dari ideologi reaksioner dan berupaya untuk menerapkan kembali agenda ekonomi neoliberal. Terpilihnya Jair Bolsonaro di Brasil adalah kasus yang paling mencolok. Apakah belokan tajam ini cenderung bertahan lama?

Saya pikir masalah besar bagi Kanan global adalah ia tidak memiliki narasi untuk masa depan. Negara-negara yang mendewakan liturgi pasar bebas sekarang membangun tembok melawan imigran dan barang-barang, seolah-olah presiden mereka adalah penguasa feodal zaman akhir. Mereka yang menyerukan privatisasi sekarang memohon kepada negara yang mereka gunakan untuk memfitnah, dengan harapan bahwa hal itu akan menyelamatkan mereka dari beban hutang. Dan mereka yang dulu menyukai globalisasi dan berbicara tentang dunia yang akhirnya akan menjadi dunia sekarang dengan dalih “keamanan benua”.

Kita hidup dalam planet yang serba kacau, di mana sulit untuk meramalkan seperti apa Kanan Amerika Latin yang baru di masa depan. Apakah mereka akan memilih globalisasi atau proteksionisme? Apakah mereka akan mengikuti kebijakan privatisasi atau intervensi negara? Mereka sendiri tidak tahu jawaban atas pertanyaan-pertanyaan ini, karena mereka berlayar dalam lautan kebingungan dan hanya bisa mengekspresikan pandangan-pandangan jangka pendek. Kekuatan-kekuatan Kanan ini tidak mewakili masa depan di mana masyarakat Amerika Latin dapat mempercayakan harapan jangka panjangnya. Sebaliknya: mereka makin meningkatkan ketidakadilan dan ketidaksetaraan. Satu-satunya masa depan nyata yang bisa mereka tawarkan kepada generasi baru adalah kegelisahan dan ketidakpastian.

Di banyak bagian dunia, penurunan tajam partai-partai politik tradisional seiring dengan bangkitnya kekuatan-kekuatan politik baru yang, dalam cara mereka yang berbeda, menantang globalisasi neoliberal dan tatanan yang ada. “Pasar bebas” tidak lagi dianggap identik dengan pembangunan dan demokrasi, seperti yang keliru diyakini setelah runtuhnya Tembok Berlin, dan perdebatan tentang alternatif untuk kapitalisme sekali lagi membangkitkan minat yang cukup besar. Apa yang harus dilakukan kaum Kiri Amerika Latin untuk membalikkan keadaan dan membuka siklus baru keterlibatan dan emansipasi politik?

Kondisi-kondisi yang ada bagi tahap pengembangan progresif baru akan melampaui apa yang dicapai dalam dekade terakhir. Dalam konteks ketidakpastian yang besar ini, ada ruang untuk proposal alternatif dan orientasi kolektif ke cakrawala baru, berdasarkan pada keterlibatan nyata orang-orang dan (secara ekologis berkelanjutan) untuk mengatasi ketidakadilan sosial.

Tugas terbesar kaum Kiri, dalam mengatasi batasan dan kesalahan-kesalahan sosialisme abad kedua puluh, adalah memetakan cakrawala baru yang menawarkan solusi untuk pertanyaan-pertanyaan aktual yang menyebabkan penderitaan bagi mayoritas penduduk. Ini akan melayani “prinsip harapan” baru – nama apa pun yang kita berikan – yang menyerukan kesetaraan, kebebasan sosial, hak-hak dan kapasitas-kapasitas universal sebagai dasar penentuan nasib sendiri secara kolektif.

Tags Indonesian

Journalism

O trabalhador indígena e a renovação da esquerda: uma conversa com Álvaro Garcia Linera

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date October 26, 2019

Nascido em Cochabamba em 1962, Álvaro Garcia Linera era muito jovem quando se aproximou do marxismo e das lutas do povo Aymara.

Já no México, para onde se mudou e se formou em matemáticas no início dos anos 1980, foi influenciado pelos movimentos de guerrilha na Guatemala que lutavam pela causa da população indígena. Após regressar à Bolívia, tornou-se um dos fundadores do exército de guerrilha Túpac Katari, uma organização política que juntava a luta de classes marxista com os princípios Kataristas a favor da emancipação indígena. Esteve preso numa cadeia de segurança máxima entre 1992 e 1997 e foi ensinar sociologia, tornando-se um intelectual influente. Linera aderiu depois ao Movimento pelo Socialismo (MAS) de Evo Morales e é desde 2006 vice-presidente do Estado Plurinacional da Bolívia. Ele é uma das vozes mais originais da esquerda latino-americana, cujas obras incluem Forma Valor e Forma Comunidade (1995) e A Potência Plebeia (2008). A nossa conversa centrou-se na situação das forças progressistas nesta e noutras partes do mundo.

Marcello Musto: O seu compromisso político é marcado pela consciência de que a maioria das organizações comunistas da América Latina não foi capaz de dirigir o seu discurso para o conjunto das classes populares, acabando por ocupar pouco mais do que o lugar de observadores. Na Bolívia, por exemplo, essa dependência em relação ao marxismo-leninismo mais esquemático e economicista impediu-as de reconhecer a especificidade da questão indígena e colocá-la no centro da sua atividade política. Viam os povos nativos como uma massa indiscriminada de camponeses pequeno-burgueses com nenhum potencial revolucionário. Como é que chegou à conclusão de que era necessário construir algo radicalmente diferente da esquerda que existia naquela altura?

Álvaro Garcia Linera: Na Bolívia, a alimentação era produzida por agricultores indígenas, as casas e edifícios eram construídos por trabalhadores indígenas, as ruas eram limpas pela população indígena e a elite e as classes médias confiavam-lhes os cuidados das suas crianças. No entanto, a esquerda tradicional era cega em relação a isto e preocupava-se apenas com os trabalhadores da grande indústria, não prestando atenção à sua identidade étnica. Embora fossem importantes no trabalho nas minas, eram uma minoria em comparação com os trabalhadores indígenas, que eram discriminados e explorados com ainda maior severidade. A partir do final dos anos 1970, a população Aymara organizou grandes mobilizações contra a ditadura, bem como os governos democráticos que surgiram depois dela. Fê-lo orgulhosamente com a sua língua e simbologia própria, funcionando através de comunidades federadas de campesinos e acelerando o nascimento de uma nação sob liderança indígena. Foi um momento de descoberta social.

Como reagiu a isso?

Eu andava na escola nessa altura e essa insurgência índia causou em mim grande impacto. Parecia evidente que o discurso da luta social na esquerda clássica, centrado apenas nos trabalhadores e nos burgueses, era parcial e insustentável. Teria de incorporar os assuntos indígenas e refletir sobre a comunidade agrária e a propriedade coletiva da terra como a base para a organização social. Além disso, para percebermos os homens e mulheres que eram a maioria do país e exigiam uma história e um lugar diferente no mundo, era necessário aprofundar o aspeto étnico-nacional do problema dos povos oprimidos. E para isso o esquematismo das cartilhas marxistas parecia-me completamente inadequado. Isto levou-me a uma busca por novas referências, desde o catálogo de ideias Indianistas até Marx, cujos trabalhos sobre lutas anticoloniais e a comuna agrária na Rússia tinham enriquecido a sua análise das nações oprimidas.

Com o passar do tempo, a complexidade do tema da transformação social — que era tão importante no seu pensamento e atividade política — tornou-se uma questão essencial para todas as forças progressistas. Com o desvanecer da visão do proletariado enquanto única força capaz de derrubar o capitalismo, e com a dissolução do mito da vanguarda revolucionária, qual deve ser o novo ponto de partida para a esquerda?

O problema para a esquerda tradicional é que confundiu o conceito de “condição proletária” com uma forma histórica específica de trabalho assalariado. A primeira alastrou a todo o lado e tornou-se uma condição material generalizada. Não é verdade que o mundo do trabalho esteja a desaparecer — nunca houve tantos trabalhadores no mundo, em todos os países. Mas este crescimento gigantesco da força de trabalho mundial aconteceu numa altura em que as estruturas políticas e sindicais existentes entraram em rotura. Mais do que em qualquer outra altura desde o início do século XIX, a condição da classe trabalhadora é novamente uma condição do, e para, o capital. Mas agora numa forma em que o mundo dos trabalhadores se tornou mais complexo, híbridizado, nómada e desterritorializado. Paradoxalmente, numa época em que todos os aspetos da vida humana foram mercantilizados, tudo parece acontecer como se já não houvesse nenhum trabalhador

Qual é a natureza das lutas sociais hoje em dia? As dificuldades que enfrentam as organizações políticas e sindicais para organizar trabalhadores precários e migrantes são assim tão diferentes daquelas que existiam na altura da produção fordista do século XX?

A nova classe trabalhadora não está principalmente unificada em torno de temas laborais. Ainda não tem a força para o fazer, e talvez não a venha a ter ainda por muito tempo. As mobilizações sociais já não acontecem através das formas clássicas de ação centralizada da classe trabalhadora, mas sim através de misturas de diferentes setores, temas intersetoriais e formas flexíveis, fluidas e mutáveis. Estamos a falar de novas formas de ação coletiva lançadas pelos trabalhadores, mesmo que em muitos casos o que vem à superfície não é tanto uma identidade laboral, mas outros temas complementares como conglomerados territoriais ou grupos que reivindicam acesso à saúde, educação ou transportes públicos.

Em vez de reprovarmos essas lutas porque as suas formas se distinguem das do passado, a esquerda deve estar atenta a este hibridismo ou heterogeneidade — acima de tudo para entender as lutas existentes e articulá-las com outras à escala local, nacional e internacional. O tema da mudança ainda é o “trabalho vivo”: trabalhadores que vendem a sua força de trabalho de muitas maneiras. Mas as formas organizativas, os discursos e identidades são muito diferentes das que conhecemos no século XIX.

Por entre a complexidade social dos nossos tempos, acha que é necessário repensar o conceito de classe?

Classes, identidades, coletivos mobilizados não são abstrações: são formas de experiência coletiva no mundo, construídas em larga escala. Tal como assumiram formas pontuais há cem anos, fazem-no agora de novo através de caminhos e de causas imprevistas e por vezes surpreendentes e muito diferentes das do passado. Não devemos confundir o conceito de classe social — uma maneira de classificar estatisticamente a população com base na sua propriedade, recursos, acesso à riqueza, etc. — com as formas atuais como elas se juntam através de afinidades eletivas, locais de residência, problemas comuns e características culturais. Este é o verdadeiro movimento da construção mobilizada de classes, que apenas coincide excecionalmente com as convergências exibidas nos dados estatísticos.

Cita frequentemente Antonio Gramsci. Qual a importância que o pensamento dele teve nas suas escolhas políticas?

Gramsci foi decisivo para o desenvolvimento do meu próprio pensamento. Comecei a lê-lo quando era muito jovem e as suas obras circulavam entre um golpe de estado e outro. Desde então, ao contrário de tantos textos com análises economicistas ou formulações filosóficas centradas mais na estética das palavras do que na realidade, Gramsci ajudou-me a desenvolver uma maneira diferente de ver as coisas. Ele falava de temas como a linguagem, literatura, educação ou senso comum, que embora pareçam secundários formam de facto a rede da vida no dia-a-a-dia dos indivíduos e determinam as suas perceções e inclinações políticas coletivas.

Desde esses tempos de juventude tenho regressado frequentemente à leitura de Gramsci e ele tem sempre algo novo a revelar-me, em especial no que respeita à formação molecular do estado. Estou convencido que Gramsci é um pensador indispensável para a renovação do marxismo no mundo de hoje.

Das suas palavras parece óbvio que a maneira como se relaciona com Marx — que conhece bem e sobre o qual escreveu tanto — é muito diferente da do marxismo soviético. Acha que recorrer ao Marx das questões e dúvidas, que se encontra nos manuscritos inacabados dos seus últimos anos, pode ser hoje mais frutífero do que nas afirmações contidas nos seus livros e folhetos publicados?

A cartilha marxista sempre me pareceu desadequada. Por isso, tomei a iniciativa de examinar autores inspirados pela ideologia indigenista, bem como outros autores marxistas ou o outro Marx que me falava de identidades sociais híbridas. Desta maneira, descobri um Marx que me ensinou acerca das lutas coloniais, que falava das comunidades agrárias, que continuava a tentar encontrar fundamentos sólidos para o tema das nações oprimidas — um Marx à margem, mais plural e mais cheio de perguntas do que de respostas. Foram essas perguntas que me permitiram, ao longo dos anos, fazer uma leitura diferente dos Grundrisse, dos Manuscritos de 1861-1863 e do Capital, encontrando aqui elementos da lógica genética do capitalismo que outros autores, antes e depois de Marx, não conseguiram compreender.

Nos últimos quatro anos, em quase toda a América Latina, chegaram ao poder governos que se inspiraram em ideologias reacionárias e procuram voltar a impor uma agenda económica neoliberal. A eleição de Jair Bolsonaro no Brasil é o caso mais flagrante. Esta viragem à direita irá durar muito tempo?

Penso que o grande problema para a direita global é que não tem narrativa para o futuro. Os estados que pregavam a liturgia do mercado livre estão agora a construir muros contra os imigrantes e as mercadorias, como se os seus presidentes fossem os senhores feudais dos tempos modernos. Os que exigiam privatizações recorrem agora ao mesmo estado que vilipendiavam, na esperança de que os salve do fardo das dívidas. E os que defendiam a globalização e falavam de um mundo que seria por fim único agarram-se agora ao pretexto da “segurança continental”.

Vivemos numa sociedade de caos planetário, onde é difícil prever como se vão parecer no futuro as novas direitas latino-americanas. Irão optar pela globalização ou pelo protecionismo? Seguirão políticas de privatização ou intervenção estatal? Eles próprios não sabem as respostas a estas perguntas, uma vez que navegam num mar de confusão e apenas podem expressar visões de curto prazo. Essas forças da direita não representam um futuro no qual a sociedade latino-americana possa confiar as suas expetativas a longo prazo. Pelo contrário: elas trazem um aumento das injustiças e desigualdades. O único futuro tangível que conseguem oferecer às novas gerações é um futuro de ansiedade e incerteza.

Em muitas partes do mundo, a queda acentuada dos partidos políticos tradicionais vai a par do crescimento de novas forças políticas que, sob diversas formas, desafiam a globalização neoliberal e a ordem vigente. O “livre mercado” já não é visto como sinónimo de desenvolvimento e democracia, como era erradamente após a queda do Muro de Berlim, e o debate sobre alternativas ao capitalismo está de novo a despertar um grande interesse. O que é que a esquerda latino-americana deve fazer para mudar as coisas e abrir um novo ciclo de envolvimento político e emancipação?

Existem condições para o desenvolvimento de uma nova fase progressista que vá além do que foi conseguido na última década, Neste contexto de enorme incerteza, há espaço para propostas alternativas e um rumo coletivo para novos horizontes, fundados no envolvimento real das pessoas e na superação (ecologicamente sustentável) das injustiças sociais.

A grande tarefa para a esquerda conseguir ultrapassar os limites e os erros do socialismo do século XX é traçar um novo horizonte que dê soluções para as questões que hoje em dia causam sofrimento ao povo. Isso serviria um novo “princípio esperança” — qualquer que seja o nome que lhe dermos — que promulgue a igualdade, a liberdade social e os direitos e aptidões universais como base para a autodeterminação coletiva.

Tags Portuguese

Journalism

کارگر بومی و تجدیدحیات چپ

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date October 23, 2019

گفت‌وگویی با آلوارو گارسیا لینرا

[اشاره]

آلوارو گارسیا لینرا، زاده‌ی کوچابامبا [1] در 1962، هنوز خیلی جوان بود که به مارکسیسم و مبارزات مردم آیمارا [2] نزدیک شد.در اوایل دهه‌ی 1980 به مکزیک رفت و در آنجا در رشته‌ی ریاضیات فارغ‌التحصیل شد؛ تحت‌تاثیر جنبش‌های چریکی گواتمالا قرار گرفت که برای آرمان جمعیت بومی مبارزه می‌کردند. پس از بازگشت به بولیوی، یکی از بنیانگذاران ارتش چریکی توپاک کاتاری شد، سازمانی سیاسی که مبارزه‌ی طبقاتی مارکسیستی را با اصول کاتاریستی[3] که پیشبرد رهایی بومیان را هدف خود قرار داده بود ترکیب کرده بود. بین سال‌های 1992 تا 1997 در یک زندان فوق‌امنیتی محبوس بود؛ پس از آزادی از زندان، جامعه‌شناسی درس می‌داد و به روشنفکری تاثیرگذار بدل شد. بعدها به جنبش برای سوسیالیسم (MAS) ِاوُ مورالس پیوست و از 2006 به بعد معاون رییس‌جمهور دولت چندقومیتی بولیوی شد. او یکی از اصیل‌ترین صاحب‌نظران در چپ آمریکای لاتین با آثاری مانند شکل ارزش و شکل جامعه (1995) و قدرت پلبین (2008) است. گفت‌وگوی ما با او پیرامون وضعیت نیروهای ترقی‌خواه در این بخش و بخش‌های دیگر جهان است.

[گفتگو]

مارچلو موستو: تعهد سیاسی شما با وقوف به اینکه اغلب سازمان‌های کمونیست آمریکای لاتین از سخن گفتن با توده‌های مردم در کل ناتوان هستند و چیزی بیش از عملکرد نظاره‌گران را ندارند، مشخص می‌شود. مثلاً در بولیوی اتکاء آن‌ها به کلی‌ترین و اکونومیستی‌ترین قرائت از مارکسیسم‌ـ لنینیسم مانع از آن شده تا ویژگی مسئله‌ی بومی را تشخیص دهند و آن را در مرکز فعالیت سیاسی خود قرار دهند. آنان بومیان را توده‌های دهقانی «خرده‌بورژوای» ضعیفی می‌دانند که از هیچ توانمندی انقلابی برخوردار نیستند. شما چگونه تشخیص دادید که باید چیزی کاملاً متفاوت با چپی بسازید که در آن زمان وجود داشت؟

آلوارو گارسیا لینرا: در بولیوی کشاورزان بومی خوراک تولید می‌کردند، کارگران بومی ساختمان‌ها و خانه‌ها را می‌ساختند، خیابان‌ها را بومیان نظافت می‌کردند، و نخبگان و طبقات متوسط برای مراقبت از فرزندان‌شان به آنها اعتماد داشتند. با این همه، به نظر می‌رسید چپ سنتی نسبت به این وضعیت نابیناست و ذهنش را فقط کارگران در صنایع بزرگ‌مقیاس اشغال کرده است و به هویت قومی‌شان هیچ توجهی نشان نمی‌دهد. با اینکه بی‌تردید کارگران صنعتی برای کار در معادن اهمیت دارند، در مقایسه با کارگران بومی در اقلیت بودند، کارگران بومی‌ای که در حق‌شان تبعیض اعمال می‌شد و حتی بیرحمانه‌تر استثمار می‌شدند. مردم آیمارا از اواخر دهه‌ی 1970 جنبش‌های بزرگی را علیه دیکتاتوری و دولت‌های دمکراتیک برخاسته از سقوط دیکتاتوری سازمان دادند. بومیان با افتخار این جنبش‌ها را با زبان و نمادهای خود برپا کردند و از طریق جماعت‌های متحد زارعان دهقان (Campesinos) دست به عمل ‌زدند و به زایش یک ملت تحت رهبری بومیان یاری رساندند. این لحظه‌ی کشف اجتماعی بود.

م.م: واکنش شما به این رخداد چه بود؟

آ.گ.ل: من در آن زمان دانش‌آموز بودم و این شورش‌ بومیان تاثیر چشمگیری بر من گذاشت. به نظر روشن می‌رسید که گفتمان مبارزه‌ی اجتماعی در چپ کلاسیک که فقط بر کارگران و بورژواها متکی بود، یک‌سویه و ناپایدار است. این مبارزه می‌بایست درون‌مایه‌های بومی را در برمی‌گرفت و جامعه‌ی زراعی یا مالکیت جمعی بر زمین را به عنوان پایه‌ای برای سازمان اجتماعی بازتاب می‌داد. علاوه بر این، برای فهم زنان و مردانی که اکثریت جمعیت کشور را تشکیل می‌دادند و خواهان تاریخ و جایگاهی متفاوت در جهان بودند، لازم بود وجه قومی ـ ملی مسئله‌ی مردم تحت‌ستم به نحو عمیق‌تری ‌مورد توجه قرار گیرد. و برای این منظور طرح‌اندازی درس‌نامه‌های مارکسیستی کاملاً ناکافی به‌نظرم می‌رسید. این موضوع سبب شد تا به جست‌وجوی منابع دیگری از مخزن ایده‌های جنبش‌های بومیان سرخپوست تا مارکس که نوشته‌هایش درباره‌ی مبارزات ضداستعماری و کمون‌های روستایی در روسیه موجب غنای واکاوی‌اش درباره‌ی ملت‌های تحت‌ستم شده بود، بپردازم.

م.م: پیچیدگی سوژه‌ی دگرگونی اجتماعی ــ که در اندیشه و فعالیت سیاسی شما اهمیتی وافر دارد ــ با گذشت زمان، به مسئله‌ای اساسی برای همه‌ی نیروهای ترقی‌خواه بدل شده است. با علم به اینکه این دیدگاه رنگ باخته که پرولتاریا به عنوان یگانه نیرو قادر به سرنگونی سرمایه‌داری است و اسطوره‌ی پیشاهنگ انقلابی به پایان رسیده، چه چیزی باید آغازگاه جدید چپ باشد؟

آ.گ.ل: مشکل چپ سنتی این است که مفهوم «شرایط پرولتری» را با شکل تاریخی خاصی از کار مزدی خلط می‌کند. شرایط پرولتری در همه جا گسترده است و به یک شرایط مادی در سراسر جهان بدل شده. حقیقت ندارد که جهان کار در حال ناپدیدشدن است ــ هرگز این تعداد کارگر در همه‌ی کشورها نبوده است. اما رشد عظیم نیروی کار جهانی زمانی اتفاق افتاده که همه‌ی اتحادیه‌های کارگری و ساختارهای سیاسی موجود در هم شکسته شده است. شرایط طبقه‌ی کارگر، بیش از هر زمانی از اوایل سده‌ی نوزدهم، بار دیگر همان شرایط مطلوب سرمایه و به نفع سرمایه است، اما اکنون به طریقی که جهان کارگران پیچیده‌تر، در‌آمیخته‌تر، خانه‌به‌دوش‌تر و با وخامت بیشتری روبرو شده است. در عصری که هر جنبه از زندگی انسان کالا شده است، به نحو متناقضی به نظر می‌رسد که هر چیزی می‌تواند رخ ‌دهد، چنان‌که گویی دیگر هیچ کارگری وجود ندارد.

م.م: امروزه سرشت مبارزات اجتماعی چیست؟ آیا مشکلاتی که سازمان‌های سیاسی و اتحادیه‌های کارگری در ایجاد تشکل میان مهاجران، کارگران ناامن و ناماهر با آن دست به گریبان هستند، با مشکلاتی که در زمان تولید فوردیستی سده‌ی بیستم وجود داشت، خیلی فرق دارد؟

آ.گ.ل: طبقه کارگر جدید اساساً پیرامون موضوعات کارگری متحد نمی‌شود. هنوز قدرت انجام این کار را ندارد و شاید برای مدت‌های مدیدی چنین قدرتی نداشته باشد. بسیج‌های اجتماعی دیگر از طریق شکل‌های کلاسیک کنش متمرکز طبقه کارگر رخ نمی‌دهند بلکه از طریق آمیزه‌ای از کسب‌وکارهای متفاوت، موضوعات متقاطع و شکل‌های انعطاف‌پذیر، سیال و تغییرپذیر شکل می‌گیرند. ما از شکل‌های جدید کنش جمعی حرف می‌زنیم که کارگران با شتاب ایجاد می‌کنند، حتی اگر در بسیاری موارد آنچه پدیدار می‌شود از هویت کارگری کمتری در مقایسه با سایر ویژگی‌های مکمل دیگر برخوردار باشد، نظیر [هویت کارگری کنش‌های] کارگران بنگاه‌های هزار شاخه‌ی منطقه‌ای یا گروه‌هایی که خواهان حق سلامتی، آموزش و حمل و نقل عمومی هستند.

به جای سرزنش این مبارزات به دلیل اینکه شکل‌هایشان با شکل‌های مبارزات گذشته فرق دارد، چپ می‌بایست به پیوندخوردگی یا ناهمگنی توجه کند ــ پیش از هرچیز مبارزات موجود را درک کند و آن‌ها را با مبارزات دیگر در سطح محلی، ملی و بین‌المللی مفصل‌بندی کند. «کار زنده» هنوز موضوع تغییر است: کارگرانی که نیروی کارشان را به شیوه‌های گوناگونی فروخته‌اند. اما شکل‌های سازمانی، گفتمان‌ها و هویت‌ها بسیار متفاوت از شکل‌ها، گفتمان‌ها و هویت‌هایی است که در سده‌ی بیستم می‌شناختیم.

م.م: آیا شما فکر می‌کنید که در بحبوحه‌ی پیچیدگی اجتماعی این زمانه، اندیشیدن به مفهوم طبقه لازم است؟

آ.گ.ل: طبقات، هویت‌ها و جماعت‌های بسیج‌شده انتزاعات نیستند: آن‌ها شکل‌های تجربه‌ی جمعی جهان هستند که در مقیاسی گسترده برساخته می‌شوند. همان‌طور که صد سال پیش شکل‌های تصادفی را برمی‌گزیدند، اکنون بار دیگر از طریق مسیرها و علت‌های پیش‌بینی‌نشده و اغلب شگفت‌انگیزی که بسیار متفاوت با گذشته‌اند چنین می‌کنند. ما نباید مفهوم طبقه‌ی اجتماعی ــ راهی برای طبقه‌بندی آماری افراد براساس دارایی، منابع، دسترسی به ثروت و غیره ــ را با شیوه‌های بالفعلی که در آن برپایه‌ی همبستگی‌های گزیده، محل اقامت، مسائل مشترک و خصیصه‌های فرهنگی گروه‌بندی می‌شوند، مغشوش سازیم. این یک جنبش واقعی برساخت متحرک طبقات است که فقط از سر تصادف با تلاقی‌گاه‌های ارائه‌شده در داده‌های آماری منطبق‌اند.

م.م: شما اغلب از آنتونیو گرامشی نقل می‌کنید. اندیشه‌ی او برای انتخاب‌های سیاسی‌تان چقدر اهمیت داشته است؟

آ.گ.ل: گرامشی برای بسط اندیشه‌هایم تعیین‌کننده بوده است. وقتی خیلی جوان بودم، شروع به خواندن نوشته‌هایش کردم، آن‌هم زمانی‌که این نوشته‌ها در فاصله‌ی بین کودتاها انتشار می‌یافت. از آن زمان به بعد، برخلاف بسیاری متن‌ها که حاوی واکاوی اقتصادی یا صورت‌بندی‌های فلسفی بودند و تمرکزشان زیبایی‌شناسی واژه‌ها بود و نه واقعیت، گرامشی به من کمک کرد شیوه‌ی دیگری از نگریستن را در خودم رشد بدهم. او از مسائلی مانند زبان، ادبیات، آموزش یا عقل‌ سلیم سخن می‌گفت که با اینکه ظاهراً حاشیه‌ای به نظر می‌رسند، عملاً شبکه‌ی زندگی روزمره‌ی افراد را تشکیل می‌دهند و ادراکات و تمایلات سیاسی جمعی‌شان را تعیین می‌کنند.

از همان روزهای نخستین به‌طور منظم سراغ گرامشی می‌رفتم و او همیشه نکات جدیدی را برایم آشکار می‌کرد، به ویژه در زمینه‌ی تشکیل مولکولی دولت. معتقدم که گرامشی متفکری است اجتناب‌ناپذیر برای تجدیدحیات مارکسیسم در جهان امروز.

م.م: براساس آنچه می‌گویید، روشن است که شیوه‌ای که خودتان را به مارکس مرتبط می‌کنید ــ که شما بسیار خوب او را می‌شناسید و مطالب زیادی درباره‌ی آن نوشته‌اید ــ بسیار متفاوت از شیوه‌ی مارکسیسم روسی است. آیا فکر می‌کنید که چرخش به سوی مارکسِ سرشار از پرسش‌ها و تردیدها، که در دست‌نوشته‌های پایان‌نیافته‌ی واپسین سال‌های زندگیش یافت می‌شود، ممکن است سودمندتر از احکامی باشد که در جزوه‌ها و کتاب‌های انتشاریافته‌اش گنجیده است؟

آ.گ.ل: مارکسیسمِ درس‌نامه‌ای همیشه برایم ناکافی بود. بنابراین، دست به این ابتکار زدم که به کندوکاو درباره‌ی نویسندگانی بپردازم که از ایدئولوژی بومی‌گراها سرمشق می‌گرفتند و نیز به مارکسیست‌های دیگر و مارکسِ دیگری رجوع کردم که با من از هویت‌های اجتماعی تلفیقی سخن می‌گفت. به این طریق، مارکسی را کشف کردم که به من درباره‌ی مبارزات استعماری می‌آموخت، از جماعت‌های روستایی سخن می‌گفت و می‌کوشید درونمایه‌ی ملت‌های تحت‌ستم را بر بنیادی استوار قرار دهد ــ مارکسی که در خصوص حاشیه‌های سرمایه‌داری، دل‌مشغول پرسش‌هاست تا پاسخ‌ها. این سوالات بود که مرا در خلال سال‌ها قادر ساخت به نحو متفاوتی گروندریسه، دست‌نوشته‌های 1861ـ1863 و سرمایه را بخوانم و در آن عناصر منطق تکوینی سرمایه‌داری را بیابم که نویسندگان دیگر، قبل و بعد از مارکس، آن را نفهمیدند.

م.م: در چهار سال اخیر، تقریباً در همه جای آمریکای لاتین، دولت‌هایی به قدرت رسیده‌اند که ایدئولوژی‌های ارتجاعی را سرمشق خود قرار داده‌اند و می‌کوشند دوباره برنامه‌ی اقتصادی نولیبرالی را تحمیل کنند. انتخاب ژائیر بولسونارو در برزیل تکان‌دهنده‌ترین نمونه‌ی قابل‌اشاره است. آیا احتمال دارد این چرخشِ تند به راست مدت مدیدی ادامه داشته باشد؟

آ.گ.ل: من فکر می‌کنم معضل بزرگ راست جهانی این است که هیچ روایتی برای آینده ندارد. دولت‌هایی که موعظه‌گر بازار آزاد بودند، اکنون در مقابل مهاجران و کالاها دیوار می‌کشند، گویی روسای جمهوری‌شان اربابان فئودالی مدرن هستند. آنهایی که خواهان خصوصی‌سازی بودند اکنون به هر دولتی متوسل می‌شوند که سابقاً از آنها بدگویی می‌کردند، با این امید که آن‌ها را از بار بدهی‌ها خلاص کنند. و آنهایی که روزگاری طرفدار جهانی‌شدن بودند و از جهانی سخن می‌گفتند که سرانجام یکی خواهد شد، اکنون به دستاویز «امنیت قاره‌ای» چنگ انداخته‌اند.

ما در در وضعیت بی‌سروسامانی سیاره‌ای زندگی می‌کنیم که در آن به دشواری می‌توان پیش‌بینی کرد که راست‌های جدید آمریکای لاتین در آینده چه خواهند کرد. آیا جهانی‌شدن را انتخاب می‌کنند یا حمایت‌گرایی را؟ آیا سیاست‌های خصوصی‌سازی را دنبال خواهند کرد یا دخالت دولت را؟ خودشان هم پاسخ به این سوالات را نمی‌دانند زیرا در دریایی از اغتشاش قایق‌رانی می‌کنند و فقط می‌توانند چشم‌اندازهای محدود را بیان کنند. این نیروهای راست آینده‌ای را نمایندگی نمی‌کنند که جامعه‌ی آمریکای لاتین بتواند انتظارات درازمدت خود را به آنها واگذار کند. برعکس: آنها باعث صعود بی‌عدالتی و نابرابری خواهند شد. یگانه آینده‌ی ملموسی که آنها می‌توانند به نسل‌های جدید بدهند آینده‌ای است سرشار از اضطراب و عدم‌قطعیت.

م.م: در بسیاری از نقاط جهان، زوال شدید احزاب سیاسی سنتی پا به پای ظهور نیروهای سیاسی جدیدی بوده است که هر یک به سیاق متفاوت خویش جهانی‌شدن نولیبرالی و نظم موجود را به چالش می‌کشد. بازار آزاد دیگر مترادف با توسعه و دمکراسی قلمداد نمی‌شود، چنانکه به نادرست پس از سقوط دیوار برلین چنین تلقی می‌شد، و بحث درباره‌ی بدیل‌های سرمایه‌داری بار دیگر علاقه‌ی چشمگیری را برمی‌انگیزاند. چپ آمریکای لاتین چه می‌بایست بکند تا به این وضعیت رونقی بدهد و چرخه‌ی جدیدی از دخالت و رهایی سیاسی را آغاز کند؟

آ.گ.ل: شرایط برای ایجاد یک مرحله‌ی جدید ترقیخواه، فراتر از آنچه در دهه‌ی گذشته به دست آمده، مهیاست. در این مرحله از تزلزل و نابه‌سامانی بزرگ، فضایی برای پیشنهادات بدیل و جهت‌گیری جمعی به سوی افق‌های جدید وجود دارد که متکی است بر دخالت واقعی مردم و غلبه (پایدار از لحاظ زیست‌محیطی) بر بی‌عدالتی‌های اجتماعی.

وظیفه‌ی بزرگ چپ، در غلبه بر محدودیت‌ها و خطاهای سوسیالیسم سده‌ی بیستم، ترسیم افق جدیدی است که راه‌حل‌هایی را برای مسائل بالفعلی که باعث عذاب مردم است ارائه ‌دهد. این افق در خدمت «اصل امید» جدیدی است ــ هر نامی که دوست دارید به آن بدهید ــ که برابری، آزادی اجتماعی و حقوق و ظرفیت‌های جهان‌شمولی را به عنوان پایه‌ای برای خودتعینی جمعی اشاعه می‌دهد.

Tags Farsi

Book chapter

Marx’s Critique of German Social Democracy

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date October 7, 2019

I. The Limited Participation of the Germans to the International Working Men’s Association
The workers’ organizations that founded the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 were something of a motley. The central driving forces were British trade unionism and the mutualists, long dominant in France but strong also in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. Alongside these two components, there were the communists, grouped around the figure of Karl Marx, elements that had nothing to do with the socialist tradition, such as the followers of Giuseppe Mazzini, and some groups of French, Belgian and Swiss workers who joined the International with them a variety of confused theories, some of a utopian inspiration. The General Association of German Workers – the party led by followers of Ferdinand Lassalle – never affiliated to the International but orbited around it. This organization was hostile to trade unionism and conceived of political action in rigidly national terms.

In 1865, the International expanded in Europe and established its first important nuclei in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. The Prussian Combination Laws, which prevented German political associations from having regular contacts with organizations in other countries, meant that the International was unable to open sections in what was then the German Confederation. The General Association of German Workers – the first workers’ party in history, founded in 1863 and led by Lassalle’s disciple Johann Baptist von Schweitzer – followed a line of ambivalent dialogue with Otto von Bismarck and showed little or no interest in the International during the early years of its existence. It was an indifference shared by Wilhelm Liebknecht, despite his political proximity to Marx. Johann Philipp Becker tried to find a way round these difficulties through the Geneva-based “Group of German-speaking Sections”.

While Liebknecht did not understand the centrality of the international dimension for the struggle of the workers’ movement, Marx also had deep theoretical and political differences with von Schweitzer. In February 1865 he wrote to the latter that “the aid of the Royal Prussian government for co-operative societies,” which the Lassalleans welcomed, was “worthless as an economic measure, whilst, at the same time, it serve[d] to extend the system of tutelage, corrupt part of the working class and emasculate the movement.” Marx went on to reject any possibility of an alliance between the workers and the monarchy:

Just as the bourgeois party in Prussia discredited itself and brought about its present wretched situation by seriously believing that with the ‘New Era’ the government had fallen into its lap by the grace of the Prince Regent, so the workers’ party will discredit itself even more if it imagines that the Bismarck era or any other Prussian era will make the golden apples just drop into its mouth, by grace of the king. It is beyond all question that Lassalle’s ill-starred illusion that a Prussian government might intervene with socialist measures will be crowned with disappointment. The logic of circumstances will tell. But the honour of the workers’ party requires that it reject such illusions, even before their hollowness is punctured by experience. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.

The critique of state socialism was a common theme in Marx’s political reflections during that period. A few days after the letter to Schweitzer, he suggested to Engels that the position of the Lassalleans in Germany was akin to the “alliance of the “proletariat” with the “government” against the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’” which the two of them had firmly opposed in 1847.

Marx’s critique to the policy of German social democracy continued in 1866. In the Instructions for Delegates of the Provisional General Council, prepared for the Geneva congress, Marx underlined the basic function of trade unions against which not only the mutualists but also certain followers of Robert Owen in Britain and of Lassalle in Germany had taken a stand. Lassalle advocated the concept of an ‘iron law of wages’, which held that efforts to increase wages were futile and a distraction for workers from the primary task of assuming political power in the state. Marx wrote:

This activity of the Trades’ Unions is not only legitimate, it is necessary. It cannot be dispensed with so long as the present system of production lasts. On the contrary, it must be generalized by the formation and the combination of Trades’ Unions throughout all countries. On the other hand, unconsciously to themselves, the Trades’ Unions were forming centres of organization of the working class, as the mediaeval municipalities and communes did for the middle class. If the Trades’ Unions are required for the guerrilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour and capital rule.

In the same document, Marx did not spare the existing unions his criticism. For they were “too exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital [and had] not yet fully understood their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself. They therefore kept too much aloof from general social and political movements”.

In September 1868, Marx returned to the question of state socialism. In a letter to Engels, he suggested that what von Schweitzer had described the previous month in Hamburg at the congress of the General Association of German Workers as the “summa of Lassalle’s discoveries” – that is, state credit for the foundation of productive associations – was “literally copied from the programme of French Catholic socialism”, inspired by Philip Buchez [1796-1850], which went back to “the days of Louis-Philippe” [1773-1850].

Instead, strong opposition to the government would have been good for the social struggle: “The most essential thing for the German working class is that it should cease to agitate by permission of the high government authorities. Such a bureaucratically schooled race must undergo a complete course of ‘self help’.”

In a letter to Schweitzer, Marx set out at greater length his differences with the Lassallean tendency. The first question was his opposition to the strategy of “state aid versus self-help”, which Buchez, the leader of Catholic socialism, [… had used] against the genuine workers’ movement in France’, and on the basis of which Lassalle himself had later made “concessions to the Prussian monarchy, to Prussian reaction (the feudal party) and even to the clericals”. For Marx, it was essential that the workers’ struggle should be free and independent. “The main thing is to teach [the worker] to walk by himself”, especially in Germany, where “he is regulated bureaucratically from childhood onwards” and believes in the authority of superiors.

The other significant area of disagreement was the theoretical and political rigidity of Lassalle and his followers. Marx criticized the comrade with whom he had been in touch for many years, on the grounds that “like everyone who claims to have in his pocket a panacea for the sufferings of the masses, [Lassalle] gave his agitation, from the very start, a religious, sectarian character,” and, being the founder of a sect, “he denied all natural connection with the earlier movement, both in Germany and abroad.” Lassalle was guilty of the same error as Proudhon: that of “not seeking the real basis of his agitation in the actual elements of the class movement, but of wishing, instead, to prescribe for that movement a course determined by a certain doctrinaire recipe.” For Marx, any “sect seeks its raison d’être and its point d’honneur not in what it has in common with the class movement, but in the particular shibboleth distinguishing it from that movement.” His opposition to that kind of politics could not have been clearer.

In the fight against state socialism, Marx also took issue with Liebknecht. After one of his speeches in the Reichstag in Summer 1869, Marx commented to Engels: “The brute believes in the future ‘state of democracy’! Secretly that means sometimes constitutional England, sometimes the bourgeois United States, sometimes wretched Switzerland. He has no conception of revolutionary politics.”
What disappointed Marx most was that in the North German Confederation, despite the existence of two political organizations of the workers’ movement – the Lassallean General Association of German Workers and the Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany – there was little enthusiasm for the International and few requests to affiliate to it. During its first three years, German militants virtually ignored its existence, fearing persecution at the hands of the authorities. The weak internationalism of the Germans ultimately weighed more heavily than any legal aspects, however, and declined still further when the movement became more preoccupied with internal matters.

The unification of Germany in 1871 confirmed the onset of a new age in which the nation-state would be the central form of political, legal and territorial identity. This placed a question mark over any supranational body that required its members to surrender a sizeable share of their political leadership. At the same time, the growing differences between national movements and organizations made it extremely difficult for the General Council of the International to produce a political synthesis capable of satisfying the demands of all. Anyway, after the end of the International, in September 1872, Marx continued to criticize the path German Social Democracy any time he had a chance.

II. Against the “Gotha Program” and the Social-Democratic Deviation
At the end of 1874, Marx learned from the papers that the General Association of German Workers, founded by Ferdinand Lassalle, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, linked to Marx, intended to unite into a single political force. Marx and Engels were not consulted about the merits of the project, and it was only in March that they received the draft programme of the new party. Engels then wrote to August Bebel that he could not “forgive his not having told us a single word about the whole business”; and he warned that he and Marx could “never give [their] allegiance to a new party” set up on the basis of Lassallean state socialism. Despite this sharp declaration, the leaders who had been active in building what would become the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD) did not change their positions.

Marx therefore felt obliged to write a long critique of the draft programme for the unification congress to be held on 22 May 1875 in the city of Gotha. In the letter accompanying his text, he recognized that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes”. But in the case of “programmes of principles”, they had to be written with great care, since they set “benchmarks for all the world to … gauge how far the party [has] progressed”. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx inveighed against the numerous imprecisions and mistakes in the new manifesto drafted in Germany.

For example, in criticizing the concept of “fair distribution”, he asked polemically: “Do not the bourgeois assert that present-day distribution is “fair”? And is it not, in fact, the only “fair” distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production?” In his view, the political demand to be inserted into the programme was not Lassalle’s “undiminished proceeds of labour” for every worker, but the transformation of the mode of production. Marx explained, with his customary rigour, that Lassalle “did not know what wages were”. Following bourgeois economists, he “took the appearance for the essence of the matter”. Marx explained:

Wages are not what they appear to be, namely the value, or price, of labour, but only a masked form for the value, or price, of labour power. Thereby the whole bourgeois conception of wages hitherto, as well as all the criticism hitherto directed against this conception, was thrown overboard once for all and it was made clear that the wage-worker has permission to work for his own subsistence, that is, to live only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter’s co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on increasing this gratis labour by extending the working day or by developing productivity, that is, increasing the intensity of labour power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment.

Another controversial point concerned the role of the state. Marx maintained that capitalism could be overthrown only through the “revolutionary transformation of society”. The Lassalleans held that “socialist organization of the total labour arises from the state aid that the state gives to the producers’ co-operative societies which the state, not the worker, calls into being.” For Marx, however, “cooperative societies [were]of value only insofar as they [were] the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of governments or of the bourgeois”; the idea “that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway” was typical of Lassalle’s theoretical ambiguities.

All in all, Marx observed that the political manifesto for the fusion congress showed that socialist ideas were having a hard time penetrating the German workers’ organizations. In keeping with his early convictions, he emphasized that it was wrong on their part to treat “the state as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical and libertarian bases”, instead of “treating existing society as … the basis of the existing state”. By contrast, Wilhelm Liebknecht and other German socialist leaders defended their tactical decision to compromise on programme, on the grounds that this was necessary to achieve a unified party. Once again, Marx had to face up to the great distance between choices made in Berlin and in London; he had already remarked on it in relation to the scant involvement of German organizations in the International Working Men’s Association.

During the spring of 1875, Marx continued the studies he needed to do for some outstanding sections of Capital. At the same time, he reworked parts of Johann Most’s popular compilation of extracts from Volume One, with a view to the printing of a second edition. Between mid-May and mid-August he composed another manuscript for Volume Three, “The Relationship between Rate of Surplus-Value and Rate of Profit Developed Mathematically” (1875), and in September he was animated once again by the desire to progress as much as possible in his writing of Capital, Volume Two.

In the early months of 1876, having received new books and publications with statistics about Russia, Marx engaged in further systematic research into the social-economic changes taking place there. His study, in 1870, of The Situation of the Working Class in Russia (1869) – a work by the economist and sociologist Vassilii Vassilievich Bervi, known by the pen-name N. Flerovsky – had also given him the political motivation to delve deeper into the reality of the country. Marx’s reading in the mid-1870s also included a little book entitled Revolutionary Conservatism (1875) by the Slavophile thinkers Yuri Samarin and Fyodor Dmitriev, and several volumes of the Proceedings of the Tributary Commission from 1872-73.
During this period, there were significantly less social struggles and Marx, whenever his health allowed, dedicated himself to new theoretical questions. He took the opportunity to expand his range of interests to areas he had little explored before. In the spring, he turned his attention to physiology, both botanical and human. In addition, he planned to read new books on subjects of major interest such as agronomy, landownership and credit, again after he had finished his studies for the completion of Capital.

From the middle of March, Marx returned to his research on forms of collective property. Among the texts he summarized by the end of the year were the very important History of the Village Order in Germany (1865-66) by the historian and statesman Georg Ludwig von Maurer, an Essay on the History of Landownership in Spain (1873) by the lawyer and minister Francisco de Cárdenas Espejo, and Common Abodes of the South Slavs (1859) by the writer and politician Ognjeslav Utješenović.

His new research endeavours were interrupted by the summer break, which his physical problems had made a necessity rather than a diversion. Also, in the autumn of 1876, Marx suffered from several and complicated health issues. Despite these tribulations and the constant work pressure from many sides, Marx made a major effort to find a publisher for the German version of Histoire de la Commune de 1871 (1876) by the French journalist and Communard Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray. Between September and the end of 1877, he invested time and energy in revising the translation of what he called “the first authentic history of the Commune”.

III. Political Battles at an International Level
Despite adversities and poor health, Marx continued to follow all the major political and economic events attentively and critically, attempting to envisage the new scenarios to which they might give rise and how these would affect struggles for the emancipation of the working class.

At the beginning of 1877, Jenny von Westphalen communicated to Sorge that her husband was “deeply in the Eastern question and highly elated by the firm, honest bearing of the sons of Mohammed vis-à-vis all the Christian humbugs and hypocritical atrocity mongers”. In April, Tsar Alexander II declared war on Turkey in pursuit of his expansionist aims, using the pretext of the rebellions against Constantinople by Christians living in the European territories of the Ottoman Empire.

Marx had already been active against the British Liberals’ support for Russia: between February and March, together with the journalist Maltman Barry, he had written three short articles – “Mr. Gladstone and Russian Intrigue”, “Mr. Gladstone” and “The Great Agitator Unmasked” – which were printed in Barry’s name in The Whitehall Review and Vanity Fair (and later in various local English, Scottish and Irish papers). Marx reported to Engels that many papers had “shied away” and that the deputy editor of Vanity Fair feared a “libel action”. To Sorge, he wrote with satisfaction that “English parliamentarians in the Commons and the Lords … would throw up their hands in horror if they knew that it was the Red Terror Doctor, as they call me , who had been their souffleur during the oriental crisis.”

Marx was critical of Bracke, however, since in his view “the workers’ press concern[ed] itself too little with the oriental question, forgetting that the government’s politics gamble wantonly with the lives and money of the people”. With excessive optimism, he wrote to Sorge: “That crisis marks a new turning-point in European history.” He thought that Russia had “long been on the verge of an upheaval” and hoped that the Turks might “advance the explosion … through the blows they have dealt … to the Russian army and Russian finances.” “This time”, he concluded, “the revolution will begin in the East, hitherto the impregnable bastion and reserve army of counter-revolution.” Engels reiterated this conviction to the editor of the Italian paper La Plebe, Enrico Bignami: “Once Russia has been spurred to revolution, the whole face of Europe will change. Until now, Old Russia has been the great army of European reaction. It acted as such in 1789, in 1805, in 1815, in 1830 and in 1848. Once this army is destroyed – we shall see!”

When it became clear in February 1878 that the Russians had been victorious, Marx regretted the fact in a letter to Liebknecht, repeating that defeat would not only have “greatly expedited social revolution in Russia” but also brought about “radical change throughout Europe”. Nevertheless, buoyed up by his confident expectations at the time, he predicted to the English Chartist and publicist Thomas Allsop that there would soon be a “succession of wars , which w[ould] precipitate the Social Crisis and engulf all the so-called Powers, those sham-powers , victors and vanquished—to make room for a European Social Revolution”. In a letter he sent to Engels in September, the horizon was similar: “Nothing Russia and Prussia … can now do on the international stage can have other than pernicious consequences for their regime, nor can it delay the latter’s downfall, but only expedite its violent end”.

From time to time, Marx had to concern himself again with the International Working Men’s Association, in order to defend its name and to recall the esteem that its political line still enjoyed. In July 1878, in answer to George Howell – an old member of the organization who had become a reformist trade-unionist – Marx pointed out in an article for The Secular Chronicle that what had gained the International “a worldwide reputation and a place in the history of mankind” was not “the size of its finances” – as Howell had slanderously argued – but ”the strength of its intellect and its abundant energy”.

Marx also continued to trust in developments on the other side of the Atlantic. In July 1877, he noted in a letter to Engels “the first outbreak against the associated capital oligarchy that has arisen since the Civil War”; it would “of course, be suppressed”, but it might “well provide a point of departure for a serious workers’ party in the United States”. Britain, on the other hand, was a country about which the two friends no longer had any illusions. In February 1878, Marx wrote to Liebknecht that “the English working class had gradually become ever more demoralized, as a result of the period of corruption after 1848, and finally reached the stage of being no more than an appendage of the great Liberal Party, i.e., of its oppressors, the capitalists.” In a letter to Eduard Bernstein, Engels was even more realistic: “A genuine workers’ movement in the continental sense is non-existent here;” there might still be strikes, “victorious or otherwise”, but “the working class makes no progress whatsoever” as a result of them.

IV. The Critique of “Armchair Socialism”
Marx never lost sight of the main political developments in Germany. After the major tensions surrounding the Gotha congress had passed, he continued his attempts to orient the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany in an anti-capitalist direction. However, other tendencies were developing that would create fresh occasions of conflict. From 1874 Eugen Dühring, an economics professor at Berlin University, began to receive significant attention from Party intellectuals. Articles in support of his positions appeared in Der Volksstaat (The People’s State), which had been the organ of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany. Therefore, having been asked by Liebknecht to get involved, and having listened to Marx’s view that it was necessary “to criticize Dühring without any compunction”, Engels decided to write a full-scale critique of the German positivist. This task, which extended from late 1876 until July 1878, ended in the book Anti-Dühring (1877-78), whose publication was preceded by excerpts in the columns of Vorwärts [Forward], the daily paper of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany born out of the Gotha fusion congress.

Marx played an active part in the Anti-Dühring project: in the winter 1877, he wrote the key chapter “On ‘Critical History’”, both on Engels’s behalf and in his own name, conceiving it as a response to attacks contained in Dühring’s Critical History of Political Economy and Socialism (1871). Marx shows that “by value Herr Dühring understands five totally different and directly contradictory things, and, therefore, to put it at its best, himself does not know what he wants.” Moreover, in the German economist’s book, the “‘natural laws of all economics’, ushered in with such pomp, prove to be merely universally familiar, and often not even properly understood, platitudes of the worst description.” The “sole explanation” he gives of “economic facts” is that “they are the result of “force”, a term with which the philistine of all nations has for thousands of years consoled himself for everything unpleasant that happens to him, and which leaves us just where we were.” For Marx, Dühring does not try to “investigate the origin and effects of this force”, and, when compelled to elucidate the capitalist exploitation of labour, he “first represents it in a general way as based on taxes and price surcharges” à la Proudhon, then “explains it in detail by means of Marx’s theory of surplus-labour”. The result is totally implausible: “two totally contradictory modes of outlook, … cop[ied] down without taking his breath”.

In the elections of January 1877, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany won nearly half a million votes, raising its share above 9 per cent. But despite this success, the state of the party continued to trouble Marx. Writing to the German doctor Ferdinand Fleckles, he ridiculed the “short pamphlet” entitled The Quintessence of Socialism (1879) of sociologist Albert Schäffle as “fantastic, truly Swabian … picture of the future socialist millennium as … the kingdom come of your cosy petty bourgeois”. In this context, when asked by the journalist Franz Wiede to take a prominent role in founding a new review, Marx commented to Engels: “It would certainly be very nice if a really scientific socialist periodical were to appear. This would provide an opportunity for criticism and counter-criticism in which theoretical points could be discussed by us and the total ignorance of professors and university lecturers exposed, thereby simultaneously disabusing the minds of the general public”. In the end, however, he had to accept that the shortcomings of its contributors would have precluded “the prime requirement in all criticism”: that is, “ruthlessness”. Marx also directed sharp comments against Zukunft [Future], deriding its “endeavour to substitute ideological catch-phrases such as “justice”, etc., for materialist knowledge [and …] to peddle phantasms of the future structure of society”.

In October, Marx complained to Sorge of a “corrupt spirit” spreading in the party, “not so much among the masses as among the leaders”. The agreement with the Lassalleans had “led to further compromise with other waverers”. In particular, Marx had no time for “a whole swarm of immature undergraduates and over-wise graduates who want[ed] to give socialism a “higher, idealistic” orientation”. They thought they could substitute for its “materialist basis” (which “calls for serious, objective study if one is to operate thereon”) a “modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”.

What lay behind these criticisms was never feelings of jealousy or rivalry. Marx wrote to the journalist and parliamentarian Wilhelm Blos that he did not “care a straw for popularity”, reminding him that “such was [his] aversion to the personality cult that at the time of the International , when plagued by numerous moves … to accord [him] public honour, [he] never allowed one of them to enter the domain of publicity”, nor “ever repli[ed] to them, save with an occasional snub”. This attitude had sustained him ever since the political commitments of his youth, so that when the Communist League was born in 1847, he and Engels had joined “only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules”. His only concern had been, and continued to be, that the nascent workers’ organizations should not blur their anti-capitalism and – in the manner of the British labour movement – adopt a moderate, pro-bourgeois line.

A major event in the late 1870s was the attempted assassination of Kaiser Wilhelm I by the anarchist Karl Nobiling in June 1878. Marx’s reactions were later recorded by Kovalevsky: “I happened to be in Marx’s library when he got news of [the] unsuccessful attempt …. [His] reaction was to curse the terrorist, explaining that only one thing could be expected from his attempt to accelerate the course of events, namely, new persecutions of the socialists.” That was precisely what ensued, as Bismarck used the pretext to introduce the Anti-Socialist Laws and get them adopted by the Reichstag in October. Marx commented to Engels: “Outlawing has, from time immemorial, been an infallible means of making anti-government movements ‘illegal’ and protecting the government from the law – ‘legality kills us’.” The debate in parliament took place in mid-September, and Bracke sent Marx the stenographic record of the Reichstag sessions and a copy of the draft legislation. Marx planned to write a critical article for the British press and began to compile extracts and notes for that purpose. In a few pages, he outlined the difference between the mass Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany and the anarchists: the former constituted “the genuine historical movement of the working class; the other … a phantom of a dead-end youth intent on making history, [which] merely shows how the ideas of French socialism are caricatured in the declassed men of the upper classes.”

In rebutting the argument of the Prussian interior minister, August Eulenburg, that the workers’ aims were violent, he made his position quite clear: The objective [is] the emancipation of the working class and the revolution (transformation) of society implicit therein. An historical development can remain “peaceful” only for so long as its progress is not forcibly obstructed by those wielding social power at the time. If in England, for instance, or the United States, the working class were to gain a majority in Parliament or Congress, they could, by lawful means, rid themselves of such laws and institutions as impeded their development. […] However, the “peaceful” movement might be transformed into a “forcible” one by resistance on the part of those interested in restoring the former state of affairs; if (as in the American Civil War and French Revolution) they are put down by force, it is as rebels against “lawful” force.

For Marx, then, the government was “seeking to suppress by force a development it dislike[d] but could not lawfully attack”. That, necessarily, was “the prelude to violent revolution” – “an old story which yet remains eternally true”, he added, quoting Heinrich Heine (1797-1856).

In a letter to Sorge from September 1879, Marx described the new tendencies emerging in the German party. He stressed that people like the publisher Karl Höchberg, “nonentities in theory and nincompoops in practice”, were “seeking to draw the teeth of socialism (which they have rehashed in accordance with academic formulae) and of the Party in particular”. Their aim was “to enlighten the workers, … to provide them, out of their confused and superficial knowledge, with educative elements” and, above all, “to make the party ‘respectable’ in the eyes of the philistines”. They were, he concluded, “poor counter-revolutionary windbags”. With subtle humour, he suggested that Bismarck had “done a lot of good not to himself, but us”, by imposing selective silence in Germany and allowing such windbags “a chance of making themselves plainly heard”.

In a French police report from London, an agent claimed that, “following the death of Lassalle, Marx [had become] the undisputed leader of the German revolutionaries. If the socialist deputies in Germany [were] the official leaders, the divisional commanders, Marx [was] the chief of the general staff. He devised the battle plans and watch[ed] over their implementation.” In reality, Marx’s criticisms of the party often went unheeded, and from his study in London he observed “the depths” to which “parliamentary representatives” had “already been brought by parliamentarism”.

Another polemical focus was the question of who should edit the new journal of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, Der Sozialdemokrat [The Social Democrat], publication of which began in Zurich in September 1879. Marx and Engels, disagreeing with the proposed stance of the paper, felt obliged to send another letter (drafted by Engels) to Bebel, Liebknecht and Bracke. In this “Circular Letter” (1879), as it became known, they denounced the growing consensus in the party behind the positions of Höchberg, the main source of finance for the undertaking. He had recently published an article in the Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik [Annals for Social Science and Social Policy], a reformist journal under his direction, in which he called for a return to the Lassallean spirit. In his view, the Lassalleans had given birth to a political movement open “not only [to] the workers but all honest democrats, in the van of which [should] march the independent representatives of science and all men imbued with a true love of mankind”.

For Marx, all these were views he had firmly rejected since his early years and the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). The “Circular Letter” underlined the dangers of one of Höchberg’s statements: “In short, the working class is incapable of emancipating itself by its own efforts. In order to do so it must place itself under the direction of ‘educated and propertied’ bourgeois who alone have ‘the time and the opportunity’ to become conversant with what is good for the workers.” In the view of this “representative of the petty bourgeoisie”, then, the bourgeoisie was “not to be combated – not on your life – but won over by vigorous propaganda”. Even the decision to defend the Paris Commune had allegedly “put off people otherwise well-disposed towards” the workers’ movement. In conclusion, Engels and Marx noted with alarm that Höchberg’s objective was to make “the overthrow of the capitalist order … unattainably remote” and “utterly irrelevant to present political practice”. One could therefore “conciliate, compromise, philanthropize to one’s heart’ s content. The same thing applie[d] to the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie.” The disagreement was total.

Marx’s tenacious opposition to what he called the “armchair socialist riff-raff” was akin to his view of those who confined themselves to empty rhetoric, however concealed beneath radical language. Following the launch of the journal Freiheit [Freedom], he explained to Sorge that he had reproached its editors not for being “too revolutionary” but for having “no revolutionary content” and “merely indulg[ing] in revolutionary jargon”. In his view, both these positions, though stemming from very different political tendencies, were no danger to the existing system and ultimately made its survival possible.
Marx’s idea of socialism was very different from State socialism and reformism that emerged in the German Social Democratic Party and that became hegemonic after the foundation of the Second International. The Marx revival underway today will be much more effective if Marx’s writings will be re-examined not only for an understanding of how capitalism works but also of the failure of socialist experiences until today. It goes without saying that we cannot today simply rely on what Marx wrote a century and a half ago. But nor should we lightly discount the content and clarity of his analyses or fail to take up the critical weapons he offered for fresh thinking about an alternative society to capitalism.

References
1. At this time, the German party had about 5000 members.
2. Karl Marx to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, 13 February 1865, quoted in Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 18 February 1865,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 42: 96.
3. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 18 February 1865,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 42: 97.
4. Karl Marx, “Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866),” in Workers Unite! The International after 150 Years, ed. Marcello Musto (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 86.
5. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 19 September 1868,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 43: 105.
6. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 26 September 1868,” ibid., 115. Although he declined an invitation to the Hamburg congress, Marx nevertheless found some signs of progress. To Engels he remarked: “I was glad to see that the starting points of any ‘serious’ workers’ movement—agitation for complete political freedom, regulation of the working day and international co-operation of the working class—were emphasised in their programme for the congress. […] [I]n other words, I congratulated them on having abandoned Lassalle’s programme”, Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Engels, 26 August 1868,” ibid., 89–90.
7. Karl Marx, “Marx to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, 13 October 1868,” ibid., 133–5. The actual letter has been lost, but fortunately Marx preserved his draft.
8. Cf. also Marcello Musto, Another Marx: Early Writings to the International (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), esp. chapters 7, 8 and 9.
9. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 10 August 1869,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 43: 343.
10. Cf. Jacques Freymond, ed., Études et documents sur la Première Internationale en Suisse (Geneva: Droz, 1964), x.
11. Cf. Marcello Musto, “Introduction,” in Workers Unite!, esp. 42–51.
12. Frederick Engels, “Engels to August Bebel, 18–28 March 1875,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 60.
13. Ibid., 66.
14. Ibid., 64.
15. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 5 May 1875,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 70.
16. Ibid.
17. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 24, 84.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 92.
20. Ibid., 93.
21. Ibid., 94.
22. Ibid., 93.
23. See Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 3, where he writes, concerning “the antithesis of state and civil society”, that “the state does not reside in, but outside civil society” (ibid., 49). “In democracy, the state as particular is merely particular. The French have recently interpreted this as meaning that in true democracy the state is annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state … no longer passes for the whole” (ibid., 30).
24. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 94.
25. In the calmer waters of 1877, Engels returned to the argument in a letter to Liebknecht: “The moral and intellectual decline of the party dates from the uni!cation and could have been avoided had a little more caution and intelligence been shown at the time” (Frederick Engels “Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 31 July 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45, 257). Years later, Liebknecht recalled that “Marx, who could not survey the condition of things from abroad as well as we in Germany, would not hear of such concessions.” And he claimed: “That I did not make a wrong calculation in this respect has been brilliantly demonstrated by the consequences and the successes.” In McLellan, Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1981), 48.
26. After the printing of the programme rati!ed at Gotha, Engels noted that “not a single critical text” appeared in “the bourgeois press”. Had there been one, it might have noted “the contradictions and economic howlers … and exposed … [the] party to the most dreadful ridicule. Instead of that the jackasses on the bourgeois papers have taken this programme perfectly seriously, reading into it what isn’t there and interpreting it communistically”. He went on to stress that “the workers [were] apparently doing the same” and that this had “made it possible for Marx and himself not to disassociate [themselves] publicly from the programme” (Frederick Engels, “Engels to August Bebel, 12 October 1875,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 98). Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme was published only in 1891, the year in which the Erfurt programme, much closer to his own principles, was adopted. Cf. Boris Nicolaevsky and Otto Maenchen Helfen, Karl Marx— Man and Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), 376, who argued: “The split, which Marx regarded as inevitable, [did not] occur. The Party remained united, and in 1891, at Erfurt, adopted a pure Marxist programme.”
27. Johann Most, Kapital und Arbeit: Ein Populärer Auszug aus “Das Kapital” von Karl Marx (Chemnitz: G. Rübner, n.d. [1873]). The second edition came out in 1876.
28. Karl Marx, “Mehrwertrate und Pro!trate mathematisch behandelt,” in MEGA2 (Berlin: Dietz, 2003), II/14: 19–150.
29. In a letter dated 12 February 1870, Marx wrote to Engels that Flerovsky’s “book shows incontestably that the present conditions in Russia are no longer tenable, that the emancipation of the serfs of course only hastened the process of disintegration, and that fearful social revolution is at the door”, Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 12 February 1870,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 43: 429–30.
30. For a recent edition in English, see Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2007).
31 Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 23 September 1876,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 149. The English translation was done by Eleanor, who at the time, against her father’s wishes, was emotionally attached to the French revolutionary.
32. Jenny Marx, “Jenny Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 20 or 21 January 1877,” ibid., 45: 447. The main reference was to the British Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, author of the highly successful pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (London: William Ridgway, 1876), who, like “all the freemen and stillmen and merrymen”, had depicted the Russians as “civilizers” (ibid.).
33. See Maximilien Rubel, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Karl Marx (Paris: Rivière, 1956), 193. Also, of interest here are two letters to Liebknecht (4 and 11 February 1878), composed in the form of articles, which the Social Democrat leader eventually published in an appendix to the second edition of his pamphlet Zur orientalischen Frage oder Soll Europa kosakisch werden? (Leipzig: Commissions, 1878).
34. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 7 March 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 209.
35. Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 27 September 1877,” ibid., 277–8.
36. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 21 April 1877,” ibid., 223.
37. Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 27 September 1877,” 278.
38. Frederick Engels, “Letter to Enrico Bignami on the General Elections of 1877, 12 January 1878,” in Marx and Engels, Lettere 1874–1879 (Milano: Lotta Comunista, 2006), p. 247. This letter was lost and the only parts we know are the ones included by Bignami in an article he published on La Plebe on 22 January 1878.
39. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 4 February 1878,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 296.
40. Karl Marx, “Marx to Thomas Allsop, 4 February 1878,” ibid., 299.
41. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 24 September 1878,” ibid., 332.
42. Karl Marx, “Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association,” in MEGA2 (Berlin: Dietz, 1985), I/25: 157.
43. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 25 July 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 251.
44. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 11 February 1878,” ibid., 299.
45. Frederick Engels, “Engels to Eduard Bernstein, 17 June 1879,” ibid., 361.
46. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 25 May 1876,” ibid., 119.
47. On the importance of this text, see Karl Kautsky, “Einleitung,” in Friedrich Engels’ Briefwechsel mit Karl Kautsky, ed. Benedikt Kautsky (Vienna: Danubia, 1955), 4, where the German Party theorist recalls that no book did more to advance his understanding of socialism. H.-J. Steinberg, showed that “both Bernstein, who studied Anti-Dühring in 1879, and Kautsky, who did the same in 1880, became ‘Marxists’ through reading that
book,” in Sozialismus und Deutsche Sozialdemokratie (Hannover: Verlag für Literature und Zeitgeschehen, 1967), 23.
48. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 25: 242.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Karl Marx, “Marx to Ferdinand Fleckles, 21 January 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 190. Few years later, in a letter to Karl Kautsky, Engels wrote of the numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings that the German economist Albert Schäf”e and other “armchair socialists [Kathedersozialisten]” displayed in relation to Marx’s work: “to refute, for example, all the monstrous twaddle which Schäf”e alone has assembled in his many fat tomes is, in my opinion, a sheer waste of time. It would #ll a fair- sized book were one merely to attempt to put right all the misquotations from Capital inserted by these gentlemen between inverted commas”. He concluded in peremptory fashion: “They should first learn to read and copy before demanding to have their questions answered”, Frederick Engels, “Engels to Karl Kautsky, 1 February 1881,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 46: 56.
52. Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 July 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 242.
53. Ibid. Engels was certainly in agreement with Marx about this. As he put it in a letter to the zoologist Oscar Schmidt, “ruthless criticism … alone does justice to free science, and … any man of science must welcome [it], even when applied to himself”. Frederick Engels, “Engels to Oscar Schmidt, 19 July 1878,” ibid., 314.
54. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 23 October 1877,” ibid., 285.
55. Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 19 October 1877,” ibid., 283. Steinberg had convincingly demonstrated the theoretical eclecticism among German Party activists at the time. “If we take the mass of members and leaders,” he wrote, “their socialist conceptions may be described as an ‘average socialism’ composed of various elements. The view of Marx and Engels that the Party’s ‘shortcomings’ and theoretical ignorance and insecurity were the negative consequence of the 1875 compromise was only an expression of the Londoners’ warnings about members coming out of the General Association of German Workers,” Steinberg, Sozialismus und Deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 19.
56. Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 19 October 1877,” 283.
57. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Blos, 10 November 1877,” ibid., 288.
58. Two years later, Engels wrote in similar vein to Bebel: “You know that Marx and I have voluntarily conducted the defence of the party against its opponents abroad throughout the party’s existence, and that we have never asked anything of the party in return, save that it should not be untrue to itself.” Using diplomatic language, he tried to get comrades in Germany to understand that, although his and Marx’s “criticism might be displeasing to some”, it might be advantageous to the party to have “the presence abroad of a couple of men who, unin!uenced by confusing local conditions and the minutiae of the struggle, compare from time to time what has been said and what has been done with the theoretical tenets valid for any modern proletarian movement”, Frederick Engels, “Engels to August Bebel, 14 November 1879,” ibid., 420–1.
59. McLellan, Karl Marx—Interviews and Recollections, 131.
60. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 17 September 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 322. Marx wrote the “nal clause in French—la légalité nous tueharking back to the words used by Odilon Barrot, brie!y prime minister in 1848–49 under Louis Bonaparte, in a speech he gave to the Constituent Assembly in January 1849 that defended the outlawing of “extremist” political forces.
61. Marx, “Marx to Engels, 24 September 1878,” 332.
62. Karl Marx, “The Parliamentary Debate on the Anti-Socialist Laws (Outline of an Article),” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 24: 247.
63. Ibid., 248.
64. Ibid., 249.
65. Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 19 September 1879,” ibid., 413.
66. Ibid.
67. Enzensberger, Gespräche mit Marx und Engels, 490.
68. Marx, “Marx to F. Sorge, 19 September 1879,” 413.
69. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Wilhelm Bracke (“Circular Letter”), 17–18 September 1879,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 402.
70. Ibid., 403.
71. Ibid., 406.
72. Marx, “Marx to Sorge, 19 September 1879,” 412.
73. Ibid., 411. Cf. Frederick Engels to Johann Philipp Becker, 10 April 1880,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 46: 7: “Freiheit [wants] to become, by hook or by crook, the most revolutionary paper in the world, but this cannot be achieved simply by repeating the word ‘revolution’ in every line.”

Bibliography
Engels, Frederick. “On the Socialist movement in Germany, France, the United States and Russia.” In MECW. Vol. 24, 203-6. New York: International Publishers, 1987.
Engels, Frederick. “Letter to Enrico Bignami on the General Elections of 1877.” In Marx and Engels, Lettere 1874-1879, 246-8. Milano: Lotta Comunista, 2006.
Engels, Frederick. “Anti-Dühring.” In MECW. Vol. 25, 5-309. New York: International Publishers, 1987.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Gespräche mit Marx und Engels. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1973.
Freymond, Jacques. Études et documents sur la Première Internationale en Suisse. Geneva: Droz, 1964.
Gladstone, William. The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. London: William Ridgway, 1876.
Kautsky, Karl. “Einleitung.” In Friedrich Engels’ Briefwechsel mit Karl Kautsky, edited by Benedikt Kautsky, 1-55. Vienna: Danubia, 1955.
Liebknecht, Wilhelm. Zur orientalischen Frage oder Soll Europa kosakisch werden? Leipzig: Commissions, 1878.
Lissagaray, Prosper Olivier. History of the Paris Commune of 1871. St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2007.
Marx, Karl. “Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association.” in MEGA². Vol. I/25, 157. Berlin: Dietz, 1985.
Marx, Karl. “Mehrwertrate und Profitrate mathematisch behandelt.” In MEGA². Vol. II/14, 19-150. Berlin: Dietz, 2003.
Marx, Karl. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.” In MECW. Vol. 3, 3-129. New York: International Publishers, 1975.
Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Programme. In MECW. Vol. 24, 81-99. New York: International Publishers, 1987.
Marx, Karl. “The Parliamentary Debate on the Anti-Socialist Laws (Outline of an Article).” In MECW. Vol. 24, 240-50. New York: International Publishers, 1987.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. Correspondence. In MECW. Vols. 41–46. New York: International Publishers, 1985-1992.
Marx, Karl. “Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866).” In Workers Unite! The International after 150 Years, edited by Marcello Musto, 83-8. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
McLellan, David. Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections. New York: Barnes&Noble, 1981.
Most, Johann. Kapital und Arbeit: Ein Populärer Auszug aus “Das Kapital” von Karl Marx. Chemnitz: G. Rübner, n.d. [1873].
Musto, Marcello. “Introduction.” In Workers Unite! The International after 150 Years, edited by Marcello Musto, 1-68. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Musto, Marcello. Another Marx: Early Writings to the International. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Nicolaevsky, Boris, and Otto Maenchen Helfen. Karl Marx – Man and Fighter. London: Methuen, 1936.
Rubel, Maximilien. Bibliographie des œuvres de Karl Marx. Paris: Rivière, 1956.
Steinberg, H.-J. Sozialismus und Deutsche Sozialdemokratie. Hannover: Verlag für Literature und Zeitgeschehen, 1967.

Tags English

Journalism

Mitos ‘Marx Muda’ dalam Penafsiran-penafsiran atas Naskah-naskah Ekonomi-Filsafat tahun 1844 (Bagian I)

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date October 2, 2019

Dua edisi dari 1932
Naskah-naskah Ekonomi-Filsafat tahun 1844 (Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884) adalah salah satu di antara tulisan-tulisan paling terkenal Marx, dan yang paling banyak diterbitkan di seluruh dunia.
Tetapi meskipun buku ini telah memainkan peran utama dalam interpretasi keseluruhan pemikiran Marx, namun untuk waktu yang lama, buku ini tidak dikenal hingga kemudian terbit hampir seabad setelah penyusunannya.
Penerbitan naskah-naskah ini sama sekali bukan akhir dari cerita. Sebaliknya, penerbitannya telah memicu perselisihan yang panjang tentang karakter dari teks tersebut. Beberapa menganggapnya sebagai karya yang belum matang dibandingkan dengan kritik Marx selanjutnya tentang ekonomi politik. Yang lain menilainya sebagai landasan filosofis yang tak ternilai untuk pemikirannya, yang kehilangan intensitasnya selama bertahun-tahun saat ia mengerjakan penulisan Kapital. Oleh karena itu, bidang penelitian menyangkut hubungan antara teori-teori ‘muda’ dari Naskah-naskah Ekonomi-Filsafat tahun 1844 dan yang ‘matang’ dari Kapital bergantung pada pertanyaan-pertanyaan berikut: Dapatkah tulisan-tulisan ‘Marx Muda’ dianggap sebagai bagian integral dari ‘Marxisme’? Apakah ada kesatuan inspirasi dan realisasi organik di seluruh karya Marx? Atau haruskah dua Marx yang berbeda diidentifikasi di dalamnya?
Konflik penafsiran juga memiliki sisi politik. Para sarjana Marx di Uni Soviet setelah awal dekade tiga puluhan, juga sebagian besar peneliti yang dekat dengan partai-partai Komunis di dalam atau terkait dengan ‘blok sosialis’, menawarkan analisis reduksionis dari Naskah-naskah Ekonomi-Filsafat tahun 1844. Sedangkan mereka yang ada dalam tradisi kritis Marxisme, menetapkan nilai yang lebih tinggi pada teks-teks ini dan menemukan di dalamnya argumen yang paling kuat (terutama dalam kaitannya dengan konsep alienasi) untuk menghancurkan monopoli penafsiran yang dilakukan oleh Uni Soviet atas karya Marx. Dalam setiap kasus, pembacaan instrumentalis menjadi contoh yang jelas tentang bagaimana konflik-konflik teoretis dan politik telah berulang kali mendistorsi karya Marx guna melayani tujuan yang tidak berkaitan dengannya.
Edisi lengkap pertama dari Naskah-naskah Ekonomi-Filsafat tahun 1844 diterbitkan pada tahun 1932, dalam bahasa Jerman. Bahkan, dua versi terbit pada tahun yang sama, dan ini menambah kebingungan tentang teks tersebut. Para sarjana Sosial Demokrat seperti Siegfried Landshut dan Jacob Peter Mayer, memasukkan naskah-naskah itu ke dalam koleksi dua jilid berjudul Historical Materialism: Early Writings. Versi kedua dari Naskah-naskah Ekonomi-Filsafat tahun 1844 yang muncul pada tahun 1932 adalah yang diedit oleh Institute Marx-Engels (IME) di Moskow dan diterbitkan dalam volume ketiga Bagian Satu dari karya-karya Marx dan Engels (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe). Ini adalah edisi ilmiah lengkap pertama, dan yang pertama-pertama menggunakan nama yang kemudian terkenal sebagai Naskah-naskah Ekonomi-Filsafat tahun 1844.

Satu atau dua Marx? Perselisihan tentang kesinambungan pemikiran Marx
Dua edisi tahun 1932 memunculkan banyak kontroversi karakter hermeneutik atau politik, di mana teks Marx sering terjepit di antara dua penafsran ekstrem. Yang pertama memahaminya sebagai ekspresi semata dari teori anak muda yang secara negatif diilhami oleh konsep-konsep dan terminologi filosofis, sementara yang lain menganggapnya sebagai ekspresi tertinggi humanisme Marx dan inti mendasar dari keseluruhan teori kritisnya. Dengan berlalunya waktu, para pendukung dari kedua posisi ini terlibat dalam debat yang hidup, menawarkan jawaban yang berbeda mengenai ‘kesinambungan’ dari pemikiran Marx. Apakah sebenarnya ada dua pemikir yang berbeda: Marx muda dan Marx tua? Atau apakah hanya ada satu Marx, yang keyakinannya tetap sama selama beberapa dekade?
Pertentangan antara kedua pandangan ini menjadi semakin tajam. Yang pertama, menyatukan ortodoksi Marxis-Leninis dengan orang-orang di Eropa Barat dan di tempat lain yang berbagi prinsip teoretis dan politiknya, meremehkan atau sama sekali mengabaikan pentingnya tulisan-tulisan awal Marx; mereka menyajikan karya-karya awal itu sebagai sepenuhnya dangkal dibandingkan dengan karya-karyanya kemudian dan, dengan demikian, mengembangkan konsepsi yang jelas anti-humanis dari pemikirannya. Pandangan kedua, yang diadvokasi oleh kelompok penulis yang lebih heterogen, memiliki isu bersama yakni penolakan terhadap dogmatisme Komunisme resmi dan korelasi yang ingin dibangun oleh para eksponennya antara pemikiran Marx dan politik Uni Soviet.
Kutipan dari dua protagonis utama di tahun 1960-an berikut ini memberikan contoh yang paling mendekati untuk menjelaskan pengertian dari perdebatan itu. Bagi Louis Althusser, sebagai proponen pendekatan pertama mengatakan:
Pertama-tama, setiap diskusi tentang Karya-karya Awal Marx adalah sebuah diskusi politik. Perlu kita ingatkan bahwa Karya-karya Awal Marx (…) yang ditemukan oleh Sosial-Demokrat dan
dieksploitasi oleh mereka dengan maksud menghancurkan Marxisme-Leninisme? (…) Inilah lokasi dari diskusi ini: Marx Muda. Hal yang benar-benar dipertaruhkan di dalamnya: Marxisme. Ketentuan diskusi: apakah Marx Muda sudah dan sepenuhnya Marx.
Iring Fetscher, di sisi lain, berpendapat:
Tulisan-tulisan awal Marx, intinya secara tegas menyatakan pembebasan manusia dari segala bentuk eksploitasi, dominasi dan alienasi, sehingga pembaca Soviet harus memahami komentar-komentar ini sebagai kritik terhadap situasinya sendiri di bawah dominasi Stalinis. Karena alasan ini, tulisan-tulisan awal Marx tidak pernah diterbitkan dalam edisi besar dan murah dalam bahasa Rusia. Mereka dianggap sebagai karya yang relatif tidak signifikan dari Marx muda yang Hegelian yang belum mengembangkan Marxisme.
Kedua belah pihak yang berselisih ini telah mendistorsi teks Marx tersebut dengan berbagai cara. Kalangan ‘Ortodoks’ menyangkal pentingnya Naskah-naskah Ekonomi-Filsafat tahun 1844 (meskipun sangat diperlukan untuk memahami evolusi pemikiran Marx) dan dengan teguh memegang keyakinan ini sehingga mereka mengeluarkan naskah-naskah tersebut dari edisi Rusia dan Jerman pada karya lengkap Marx dan Engels. Di sisi lain, banyak perwakilan dari apa yang disebut ‘Marxisme Barat’, serta sejumlah filsuf eksistensialis, mengambil sketsa yang belum selesai dari seorang mahasiswa muda yang tidak mahir dalam teori ekonomi dan melabelinya nilai yang lebih besar ketimbang Kapital, produk yang dihasilkan setelah melalui lebih dari dua puluh tahun penelitian.

Tags Indonesian

Reviews

Erick Kayser, Revista de Historia

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date October 1, 2019

Resenha do livro: MUSTO, Marcello. O velho Marx: uma biografia de seus últimos anos (1881-1883). São Paulo: Boitempo, 2018.

Karl Marx seguramente figura entre os autores mais debatidos e analisados nos últimos cem anos.

A vasta bibliografia que toma o pensamento de Marx por objeto poderia sugerir que falta pouco a ser dito de forma original. No entanto, a produção intelectual em torno de Marx parece escapar a este itinerário lógico e surge como uma fonte inesgotável de reflexões que, de diferentes maneiras, segue instigando e propiciando um renovado debate. É esta capacidade de constante atualização que alimenta as diversas tradições no âmbito das culturas marxistas e, mesmo, o renovado (e variado) interesse do pensamento crítico de forma geral. Se é inegável, por um lado, que a vida e obra de Marx jamais deixaram de ser objeto de pesquisa ao redor do mundo, por outro, no período aberto após o fim da União Soviética e o ocaso do chamado “socialismo real”, o legado do pensador alemão parecia encontrar-se numa encruzilhada fatal. A crise econômica de 2008 mudou sensivelmente este cenário, renovando o interesse em Marx e o afirmando como um dos autores mais debatidos no século XXI. Não apenas suas análises e elaborações teóricas ganharam um novo impulso junto ao grande público, mas também sua trajetória de vida desperta curiosidade, como atesta o sucesso do filme O jovem Karl Marx, dirigido por Raoul Peck e lançado em 2017. Neste contexto, o livro O velho Marx: uma biografia de seus últimos anos (1881-1883), escrito por Marcello Musto e publicado em 2018 pela editora Boitempo, surge como uma importante contribuição na busca por preencher lacunas e por aprimorar a nossa compreensão do legado de Marx. Por se tratar de uma biografia intelectual, a obra se coloca o duplo desafio de explorar tanto os aspectos da vida privada de Marx quanto suas reflexões teóricas. O resultado do trabalho de Musto foi, em larga medida, exitoso ao enfrentar estes desafios. Amparando-se em uma vasta documentação, composta por manuscritos que vieram a público apenas recentemente e cuja maior parte ainda não tem tradução do alemão nem foi publicada em livro, a obra de Musto configura um importante acréscimo editorial no Brasil. Através de sua pesquisa cotejando correspondências de Marx com seu amigo e parceiro intelectual Friedrich Engels, bem como de familiares e companheiros de luta política, é composta uma rica imagem sobre os derradeiros anos de vida do Mouro, apelido que foi dado ao pensador alemão ainda em vida por amigos e familiares. Esta reconstituição nos permite vislumbrar quem foi Marx com maior precisão e complexidade, desfazendo mitos há muito difundidos. Um destes equívocos era afirmar que Marx, em seus derradeiros anos de vida, deixou de produzir intelectualmente. Estando imerso em dramas familiares, como a doença que ceifaria a vida de sua esposa, Jenny von Westphalen, em dezembro de 1881, ou ainda as debilidades físicas que assolavam o Mouro, especialmente seus graves problemas respiratórios, que
supostamente o teriam feito abandonar a atividade teórica. Porém, esta percepção cai por terra ao observarmos os manuscritos escritos no seu último período. Longe de ser alguém cuja curiosidade intelectual estivesse saciada, vemos Marx ampliando suas áreas de estudos para, por exemplo, a Antropologia, dedicando atenção às sociedades pré-capitalistas e, principalmente, à comuna agrícola russa, motivo que o levou a aprender russo. Continuava um leitor atento dos principais acontecimentos da política internacional, seja através da grande imprensa ou através da imprensa operária e das correspondências que trocava com intelectuais e militantes políticos de diferentes países. Também o acompanha um contínuo estudo da matemática que, desde fins da década de 1870, recebera uma dedicação mais sistemática que daria origem a algumas centenas de páginas que, posteriormente, viriam a ser conhecidas como Manuscritos matemáticos.1 O livro de Musto também nos traz Marx preocupado com a repercussão de O Capital, que ele considerava a sua magnum opus e cujo primeiro volume ganhara uma nova impressão na Alemanha, ao mesmo tempo que era publicado em fascículos na França e já havia sido traduzido para o russo (MUSTO, 2018, p. 85). O projeto de Marx era publicar O Capital em três volumes, no entanto, o caráter exaustivo de sua pesquisa e certa dose de perfeccionismo na produção textual mudaram os planos iniciais. Sobre este aspecto, Musto aponta que “Marx jamais publicou ‘nada que não tivesse reelaborado várias vezes, até encontrar a forma adequada’, e afirmou que ‘preferia queimar seus manuscritos a publicá-los incompletos’” (MUSTO, 2018, p. 23). Além disto, as inúmeras interrupções por motivos pessoais protelaram a conclusão de O Capital, motivo de inúmeras aflições para Marx, como vemos em suas cartas para Engels. Desafortunadamente, ele não concluiria em vida sua principal obra, cabendo a seu fiel amigo Engels o trabalho de compilar e publicar os dois volumes, lançados em 1885 e 1894, respectivamente. Ao contrário do que poderiam supor alguns, o estudo do último Marx revela, como aponta Musto (2018, p. 11), “uma figura completamente diferente da esfinge granítica de Marx colocada no centro das praças pelos regimes do Leste europeu, que indicava o futuro como certeza dogmática”. No período final de sua vida, o pensador alemão manteve a inquietação e a ousadia intelectual. Como exemplo de seu perfil e de sua postura intelectual, cujo rigor não se confunde com dogmatismo, há o famoso caso, com ares de anedota, de que Marx, quando confrontado pelos admiradores que se afirmavam “marxistas” após lerem sua obra – mas que efetivamente não conheciam suas ideias –, teria respondido, com reprovação, que “tudo que
sei é que não sou marxista”. A frase de Marx ficaria eternizada em uma carta de Engels de 1882, em que narra o caso para Eduard Bernstein, sendo depois
reproduzida, com significativas alterações, por diversos autores e em contextos distintos (MUSTO, 2018, p. 129). Na maturidade, Marx lamentava “o que é terrível é estar ‘velho’ o bastante para poder apenas prever, em vez de ver” (MUSTO, 2018, p. 29). Num despretensioso exercício de imaginação, talvez possamos pensar que, caso Marx tivesse vivido tempo suficiente para presenciar a forma majoritária como suas ideias foram interpretadas no século XX, possivelmente voltaria a afirmar que não era marxista. De fato, a leitura hegemônica da sua obra foi apresentada quase como uma ciência exata, com altas doses de economicismo e positivismo, segundo aquilo que, grosso modo, se denomina “marxismo científico” e com o conceito de revolução fortemente arraigado em determinismos históricos. Porém, o exame pormenorizado dos escritos de Marx, principalmente do período final de sua vida, afasta-os deste tipo de leitura. Como aponta Löwy (2018) na orelha do livro de Musto, esses textos revelam “um Marx extraordinariamente ‘heterodoxo’, isto é, pouco conforme com o marxismo pseudo-ortodoxo que tanto estrago fez no curso do século XX”. O estudo das obras do “último Marx” sugere variadas possibilidades de renovação dos estudos marxianos e, mesmo, marxistas, com maior riqueza metodológica, de objetos, campos de estudos e, em decorrência, com novas possibilidades políticas. O exame do velho Marx também nos permite revisitar uma antiga mas ainda viva polêmica: a relação de Marx com o eurocentrismo. Trata-se de um debate inaugurado em parte ou de forma mais relevante por Edward Said em seu livro Orientalismo, de 1978, no qual, em um trecho muito comentado, Said debate alguns artigos jornalísticos de Marx dedicados à Índia. Escritos na década de 1850, nestes artigos Marx expõe uma mal disfarçada
perspectiva eurocêntrica com relação ao “atraso” da Índia e aos efeitos “benéficos” da presença colonial do Império Britânico para o desenvolvimento indiano. Said afirmará que estes trechos manifestam o orientalismo contido no pensamento de Marx e, em decorrência, os limites inerentes à sua teoria crítica (SAID, 1996, p. 161-163).2 Pode-se argumentar, com boa dose de razão, que estas passagens de Marx sobre a Índia não constituem parte de sua obra teórica, ocupando um lugar menor no conjunto de suas reflexões. No entanto, não é muito difícil encontrar outras passagens em Marx que atestam uma concepção eurocêntrica do mundo, para além de possíveis vícios de linguagem oitocentistas. Como em A Ideologia Alemã, de 1846, escrito junto com Engels, no qual se lê que, para poder existir o socialismo, as sociedades deveriam passar por um capitalismo plenamente desenvolvido (MARX; ENGELS, 2014, p. 39), inviabilizando conceitualmente a possibilidade do socialismo para além das fronteiras do Ocidente; ou no Manifesto Comunista, de 1848, quando, ao apontar para a ascensão do mercado mundial capitalista, Marx e Engels (2012, p. 22) afirmam que este “arrasta para a civilização todas as nações, incluindo as mais bárbaras”. Este é um tema cujo conteúdo crítico exige um aprofundamento que transcende os objetivos e possibilidades desta resenha, ainda assim, tentaremos apontar pistas que auxiliem a esboçar um melhor entendimento sobre a questão. A obra de Marx, em seu conjunto, não nos permite apontar para um pensador eurocêntrico stricto sensu, havendo pontos substanciais de inflexão que apontam, mesmo em seus escritos juvenis, para um processo de superação deste paradigma.3 O principal vetor de distorções eurocêntricas identificáveis nas reflexões de Marx deriva da Filosofia da História de herança hegeliana, com sua noção de uma História Universal – tendo a Europa por paradigma e sinônimo de Universal – e sua distinção arbitrária entre “povos com história” e “povos sem história”. Nesta questão específica, Marcello Musto (2018, p. 73-74) aponta que os escritos de Marx sobre a Índia, criticados por Said, efetivamente expõem “uma reflexão parcial e ingênua sobre o colonialismo”, reconhecendo a mudança de postura do Mouro sobre o tema no fim de sua vida. No entanto, Musto peca por não explorar esta mudança filosófica, pelo contrário, ele a minimiza, destacando possíveis elementos de continuidade (MUSTO, 2018, p. 76-77). Ainda que falar em “ruptura filosófica” entre o jovem e o velho Marx seja exagerado (e até mesmo indevido), esta mudança não pode ser menosprezada. O paradigma hegeliano da história foi paulatinamente superado por Marx a partir da década de 1860, quando se defronta com a questão da Irlanda – onde percebe que a luta de emancipação nacional irlandesa poderia ser condicionante para uma revolução inglesa –, da Polônia e da Rússia.4 Nos anos seguintes, Marx aprofundaria seus estudos sobre a Rússia, em particular sobre o campesinato russo, bem como sobre os povos asiáticos, consolidando uma perspectiva da História que rompe com aspectos unilineares e evolucionistas do materialismo histórico. Com implicações metodológicas e políticas significativas, a partir desta mudança filosófica, Marx aprofunda uma percepção dialética e policêntrica que admite formas variadas de transformação social e que abre a possibilidade teórica das revoluções socialistas irromperem na periferia do sistema capitalista, o que viria a se comprovar empiricamente décadas depois. O livro de Musto demonstra que a inquietação intelectual de Marx ainda estava em curso em seus últimos anos de vida. Exemplar, neste sentido, é o capítulo destinado à controvérsia sobre o desenvolvimento do capitalismo na Rússia, no qual o exame das correspondências com socialistas russos e, em particular, com Vera Zasulitch expõe importantes conclusões a que Marx havia chegado. As principais seriam que a obstchina (comunidade rural
russa) não deveria necessariamente ser dissolvida e incorporada ao capitalismo, podendo a transformação socialista ocorrer diretamente (MUSTO, 2018,
p. 74-77). Esta conclusão é importante pois, ao contrário de certas leituras apressadas ou distorcidas de Marx, ela reafirma que seu instrumental crítico não assume um caráter supra-histórico e alheio às especificidades de ambientes históricos distintos. Como Marx explicita ao ser indagado pelos russos sobre a necessidade de terem de passar pelas mesmas etapas do desenvolvimento europeu para alcançarem uma revolução comunista, respondendo que “só levo em conta esse raciocínio na medida em que ele se baseia nas experiências europeias” (MUSTO, 2018, p. 72). Além do debate acerca do papel do campesinato russo para a transição ao socialismo, outra questão relevante relacionada aos povos não europeus trazida pelo livro de Musto são os estudos antropológicos e etnográficos empreendido por Marx no fim de sua vida. O Mouro dedicaria especial atenção ao livro A sociedade antiga do antropólogo estadunidense Lewis H.
Morgan, legando um conjunto de notas que posteriormente seria compilado nos Cadernos etnológicos. Musto (2018, p. 31) aponta que, ao contrário do título
dado pelo editor Lawrence Krader, o conteúdo desses manuscritos pouco versa sobre etnologia, concentrando-se preferencialmente na Antropologia. Entre os objetos investigados, destaca-se a análise da propriedade comunal nas sociedades pré-capitalistas e a preocupação de Marx em compreender as transformações nas relações de gênero e no nascimento do patriarcado, historicamente mais recente do que até então se supunha. As conclusões contidas nos Cadernos etnológicos seriam utilizadas, em parte, por Engels em seu livro A origem da família, da propriedade privada e do Estado, lançado em 1884 e no qual completaria a análise de Marx (MUSTO, 2018, p. 34-35). No quarto capítulo, Musto nos traz um quadro geral sobre um dos episódios menos conhecidos e estudados da vida de Marx: o período de dois meses em que viveu na Argélia. Único momento transcorrido longe da Europa, Marx buscaria em solo africano um clima mais propício para superar sua grave enfermidade respiratória. Deste período legaria algumas reflexões sobre o mundo árabe e a presença da ocupação francesa neste território. Uma observação final sobre O velho Marx diz respeito ao desfecho do livro. Num texto vívido e com uma carga de emoção dosada de forma elegante, é difícil o leitor ficar indiferente. O impacto assenta-se na descrição da sequência de infortúnios vividos por Marx: as dores pelo falecimento da esposa e pela inesperada morte de sua filha mais velha; seguido pelo agravamento de sua doença pulmonar e, como consequência desta, a peregrinação
em busca de climas amenos na França, Mônaco e Argélia e, por fim, seu retorno a Londres, onde falece em 14 de março de 1883. Nestas páginas, o personagem mitificado, cujas ideias inspiraram tantas pessoas ao redor do mundo, cede lugar a uma figura de maior complexidade e envolto, como todos nós, na tragédia da vida e da morte. Musto nos faz lembrar que antes ou, acima de tudo, Marx foi um homem.

1. Este texto ganharia uma edição russa, editada por Sofya Yanovskaya e publicada em 1968, e teria também uma tradução em inglês de 1983 e, mais recentemente, em 2005, uma edição em italiano.

2. Para um exame pormenorizado dos limites das críticas de Said a Marx, ver Ahmad (2008, p. 221-242).

3. Como demonstrado por Anderson (2010).

4. Para um exame da virada de Marx e da superação da Filosofia da História de Hegel, ver Dussel (1990).

Referências Bibliográficas

AHMAD, Aijaz. In theory: classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso, 2008.
ANDERSON, Kevin. Marx at the Margins: on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western societies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
DUSSEL, Enrique. El último Marx (1863-1882) y la liberación latinoamericana. México, DF: Siglo XXI, 1990.
LÖWY, Michael. [Orelha]. In: MUSTO, Marcello. O velho Marx: uma biografia de seus últimos anos (1881-1883). São Paulo: Boitempo, 2018.
MARX, Karl & ENGELS, Friedrich. A Ideologia Alemã. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014
MARX, Karl & ENGELS, Friedrich. El manifiesto comunista. Madrid: Nórdica Libros, 2012.
MUSTO, Marcello. O velho Marx: uma biografia de seus últimos anos (1881-1883). São Paulo: Boitempo, 2018.
SAID, Edward W. Orientalismo: o Oriente como invenção do Ocidente. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996.

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Reviews

Francesco Ricci, Trotskismo oggi

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date October 1, 2019

Una monografia imperdibile
Il Karl Marx di Marcello Musto

Il bicentenario della nascita di Marx, caduto l’anno scorso (1818-2018), ha riempito gli scaffali delle librerie con nuovi saggi, biografie, ristampe di testi di Marx e di libri a lui dedicati.

Purtroppo, per quanto ci è stato possibile vedere, da questa gran quantità di carta emergono non più di una manciata di titoli davvero interessanti in lingua italiana (tra questi segnaliamo l’antologia curata da Stefano Petrucciani, Il pensiero di Karl Marx, Carocci editore, con saggi di Sgrò, Cingoli, Fineschi, ecc.); e forse altri quattro o cinque pubblicazioni in lingue estere (vogliamo consigliare in particolare: Gustavo Machado, Marx e a historia, Editora Sundermann, in portoghese).
Tra i pochi titoli meritevoli, spicca sicuramente, per profondità, erudizione, qualità della scrittura, il lavoro di Marcello Musto: Karl Marx, Biografia intellettuale e politica. 1857-1883 (Einaudi, 2018).

Una lettura contro-corrente

Pur avendo ricevuto alcune recensioni di peso (un elogio da parte di Umberto Curi sul Corriere della Sera, Corrado Augias sul Venerdì e in tv, Guido Liguori su Critica Marxista), questo libro non ha evidentemente attirato le simpatie né della critica borghese né di quella riformista. E il motivo è presto detto: Musto presenta un Marx militante rivoluzionario quale punto di riferimento imprescindibile per chi voglia cambiare il mondo; un recupero possibile solo liberando Marx dalle tante deformazioni dei tanti che si sono richiamati al suo nome; sottraendolo in particolare alla vulgata stalinista che ha imperato nel secolo scorso. «Provarci ancora»: a battersi per realizzare la dittatura del proletariato che Marx indicava come via per la liberazione dell’umanità. Quel «provarci ancora» con cui Musto chiude il suo libro spiega il silenzio o l’insofferenza con cui è stato accolto in certi ambienti. Esemplificativa la recensione del Giornale: «Di fronte al fallimento catastrofico del comunismo persiste nell’area degli studiosi che si richiamano al marxismo l’incrollabile convinzione (… sulla) purezza benefica della dottrina elaborata da Marx. (…) Per carità, lasciamo stare, non è il caso».(1)
E’ chiaro che i critici borghesi, così come le loro code riformiste, preferiscono i libri in cui si presenta un Marx passato per le forbici del barbiere, ridotto a innocua icona, il Marx «filosofo utopista» o il Marx «che ha scritto cose interessanti sull’economia, purché siano separate dal progetto politico del comunismo». In definitiva, appunto, un Marx opposto a quello che presenta Musto, che invece coniuga lo scienziato col rivoluzionario.

L’uso scrupoloso delle fonti

Ma ciò che rende importante questo libro di Musto, così come i suoi lavori precedenti, non è ovviamente il fatto che sostenga una tesi molto prossima alla nostra: sono le profonde conoscenze della materia, l’analisi intelligente e fuori da ogni stereotipo, il rigore filologico. Rigore che questo giovane ricercatore ha già dimostrato producendo una fitta lista di titoli su Marx, tradotti in svariate lingue. Italiano, professore presso la York University di Toronto, Musto è tra i collaboratori della Mega 2, cioè del progetto, ripreso nel 1998, dopo l’interruzione prodotta dal crollo dello stalinismo, di pubblicare l’opera intera di Marx, che per quasi una metà (essenzialmente appunti e quaderni di studio) è ancora inedita. Da questi inediti, come precisa Musto, non escono scoperte che stravolgono quanto già si sapeva (o meglio: si poteva sapere) su Marx: ma certo aiutano a demistificare le false ricostruzioni con cui ci hanno sommersi liberali e stalinisti.

Gli altri importanti lavori di Musto

Tra i libri precedenti a questo, suggeriamo in particolare la lettura di Ripensare Marx e i marxismi (Carocci, 2011) e L’ultimo Marx. 1881-1883 (Donzelli editore, 2016). Nel primo dei due, una raccolta di saggi pubblicati su varie riviste, Musto prendeva in esame in particolare il periodo 1818-1860, cioè dalla nascita di Marx al periodo antecedente la battaglia nella Prima Internazionale. Nel secondo, riportava alla luce le riflessioni dell’ultimissimo Marx (gli ultimi tre anni di vita) su temi come il «dibattito russo» (su cui poi torniamo), il colonialismo e più in generale faceva emergere la falsità del mito di un presunto «eurocentrismo» di Marx. Un sentiero poco battuto dagli studiosi (perché contrasta tanto con la lettura liberale come con quella stalinista), eccezion fatta per gli importanti lavori di Michael Lowy (The politics of combined and uneven development, 2010) e di Kevin B. Anderson (Marx at the margins, 2010).(2)

Un Marx di carne e non di marmo

L’ultimo lavoro di Musto, per i tipi di Einaudi, di cui ci occupiamo qui, prende in esame il periodo che va dal 1857 (l’avvio del lavoro di Marx per i Grundrisse)(3) fino al 1883 (la morte). Costituisce cioè una specie di congiunzione, con alcuni periodi sovrapposti, dei due libri precedentemente citati.
Si tratta di un libro di piacevole lettura: Musto rifugge dal tipico linguaggio degli accademici, perché si rivolge non agli accademici ma piuttosto – in coerenza con la sua comprensione di Marx come imprescindibile strumento di emancipazione rivoluzionaria – al lettore comune, ai giovani, ai militanti. Il libro coniuga l’analisi delle opere di Marx di quel periodo con la descrizione dell’attività politica militante, inserendo qui e là anche gustosi aneddoti che oltre a rendere gradevole la lettura ci consegnano un Marx uomo e non statua di piombo, vivo, con i suoi limiti e difetti, con il suo genio, i suoi molti malanni e disgrazie familiari, la sua povertà, i suoi sigari, le sue letture enciclopediche, la sua grande passione per la letteratura.
Ma le parti più interessanti, come dicevamo, sono quelle che Musto riserva a dimostrare che la plumbea statua di Marx scolpita dallo stalinismo è, come tutto quello che lo stalinismo produsse, un falso.

Contro l’invenzione del Marx evoluzionista

Smentendo la gran parte delle letture ancora oggi circolanti, Musto dimostra che Marx non cessò mai, fino agli ultimi mesi di vita, né di fare militanza né di studiare né di sviluppare la sua teoria, che non era per niente quel sistema «chiuso» e dogmatico che ci viene in genere presentato. Ancora negli ultimi anni Marx avanzava nella elaborazione a partire dallo studio della realtà, approfondendo decine di discipline diverse, inclusa l’antropologia, l’algebra, le scienze naturali, ecc.
Anche il Marx «eurocentrico», determinista-meccanicista, viene demolito come un falso inventato da critici in malafede (e spesso pure ignoranti). Lo confermano gli studi dedicati da Marx alla Russia (per compierli apprese in pochi mesi, nell’autunno 1868, anche la lingua russa); la famosa lettera del 1881 a Vera Zasulich; il dibattito coi populisti russi (in cui compare il concetto di «sviluppo diseguale e combinato», poi rielaborato da Trotsky come base della teoria della rivoluzione permanente); la lettera alla rivista populista Otiecestvennye Zapiski (1877) in cui Marx chiarisce di non avere nulla a che fare con una teoria storico-filosofica per cui a ogni popolo sarebbe imposto un uguale cammino. Tutta una elaborazione, su cui Musto si sofferma, che evidenzia come il Marx dagli anni Settanta e seguenti ha conosciuto una evoluzione delle proprie posizioni rispetto agli anni Quaranta (sempre dell’Ottocento). Come sottolinea Musto, non si tratta di una «svolta» rispetto al Marx precedente – che già non aveva nulla a che fare col determinismo meccanicistico – ma certo è uno sviluppo importante.
Si tratta di questioni fondamentali non solo per respingere l’idea falsa del Marx (inventato dalla Seconda Internazionale nell’epoca del suo declino) sostenitore del colonialismo come «progresso»; ma soprattutto perché su questo presunto Marx «fatalista», teorico della storia come inevitabile successione di tappe, si poggiarono i menscevichi per definire «prematura» la rivoluzione socialista in Russia e in seguito si appoggiarono gli stalinisti per avanzare la loro politica tappista, base ideologica per sostenere la collaborazione di classe con la cosiddetta borghesia «progressista».
Tutta questa importantissima elaborazione di Marx lo condurrà, insieme ad Engels, a pronosticare, nella prefazione del 1882 alla seconda edizione russa del Manifesto, la possibilità che la rivoluzione russa «serva come segnale a una rivoluzione operaia in Occidente, in modo che entrambe si completino (…)». Non è certo la teoria trotskiana della rivoluzione permanente ma, come ha giustamente osservato Lowy, ne costituisce una parziale ma geniale intuizione. Senza per questo – è fondamentale la precisazione di Musto – pensare che l’ultimo Marx abbia anticipato in qualche modo posizioni «terzomondiste»: Marx non pensa a un comunismo della povertà; e continuerà, fino all’ultimo, a vedere nella classe operaia industriale il motore della rivoluzione socialista (v. il capitolo 9).
Musto demolisce, pagina dopo pagina, il Marx evoluzionista, pura invenzione di studiosi che ben poco conoscono di Marx. Scrive Musto: «A siffatta impostazione ritenuta da tanti “scientifica”, in cui si riconoscevano sia quella già affermatasi di natura borghese sia quella che iniziava a emergere nel fronte socialista, Marx seppe opporsi senza cedimenti a coloro che annunciavano il corso univoco della storia. Egli conservò il suo peculiare approccio: analitico, duttile e multilineare. Al cospetto di tanti oracoli darwinisti, Marx seppe sfuggire alla trappola del determinismo nella quale caddero, invece, molti dei suoi seguaci e dei suoi presunti continuatori» (p. 193). Sul tema, cruciale, insiste anche più avanti: «Per Marx il futuro restava nelle mani della classe lavoratrice e nella sua capacità di determinare, con le sue lotte e attraverso le proprie organizzazioni di massa, rivolgimenti sociali e la nascista di un sistema economico-politico alternativo» (p. 227). Ecco ben distrutta ogni pretesa di addebitare al povero Marx una concezione del socialismo come «inevitabile».

L’elaborazione del Capitale

Ma questi temi (che costituiscono in realtà la terza sezione in cui è diviso il libro), di un Marx meno conosciuto, non sono gli unici ad impegnare Musto. Altrettanto interessante è il percorso con cui veniamo accompagnati (prima sezione del libro) nel lavoro di elaborazione dell’opera principale di Marx, Il Capitale. Studi, idee, lavori preparatori, ripensamenti, tutto questo ci viene raccontato quasi fossimo lì presenti, seguendo la corrispondenza di Marx. E reso ancora una volta comprensibile proprio grazie all’intreccio con la vita politica e quella privata, le difficoltà gigantesche che Marx dovette scavalcare per proseguire il suo lavoro (che peraltro, come noto, rimarrà incompiuto, essendo pubblicato in vita solo il primo dei libri previsti; mentre gli altri saranno pubblicati da Engels).

Un Marx militante

La seconda sezione in cui è diviso il libro è dedicata prevalentemente alla militanza politica di Marx, alla Prima Internazionale, alla sua battaglia di frazione in essa, e a quell’evento capitale (nella vita di Marx così come nella storia dell’umanità) che fu la Comune.
Qui Musto ricostruisce i fatti, rifiutando la vulgata del «Marx fondatore» dell’Internazionale: ne divenne il principale dirigente, ma dopo una lunga battaglia di frazione. Ne scrisse il programma fondativo (l’Indirizzo inaugurale), ma a esso guadagnò la comprensione cosciente della maggioranza dell’Internazionale solo dopo anni di lotte, solo dopo la Comune del 1871. E’ quanto per parte nostra, su questa rivista, abbiamo in vari articoli cercato da anni di dimostrare, scontrandoci con le interpretazioni prevalenti. Per questo concordiamo pienamente con il giudizio di Musto: «(…) nel tempo, a volte anche attraverso scontri e rotture, grazie all’incessante tenacia del suo operato, il pensiero di Marx divenne la dottrina egemone» (p. 96).
Le dimensioni relativamente contenute del libro (circa 300 pagine) impediscono tuttavia a Musto di approfondire ulteriormente questa parte. E’ un peccato perché di conseguenza risulta un po’ debole la parte sulla Comune di Parigi (p. 122-128) e sui suoi effetti nello sviluppo del marxismo e delle organizzazioni rivoluzionarie. Qui la necessità di sintetizzare, ma forse anche uno scarso uso delle migliori fonti disponibili, induce Musto, a nostro avviso, a ripetere qualche luogo comune sul tema, pur in un libro che, come abbiamo detto, rifugge dai luoghi comuni. Ad esempio poco precise sono le annotazioni sulla composizione politica della Comune e sull’influsso politico che ebbe in essa la Prima Internazionale. Qui Musto usa, come fonti secondarie, i testi di storici come Haupt, Rougerie, ecc. Ma ci sarebbero fonti più aggiornate e che vanno più in profondità, basandosi su ricerche degli anni successivi. Ciò lo conduce a una interpretazione del dibattito successivo alla Comune che ci sembra non sempre condivisibile. Basandosi soprattutto sull’interpretazione di un vecchio libro di Molnar (Le déclin de la première internationale, 1963) e sui testi del «marxologo» (con lenti anarcoidi) Rubel, Musto vede nelle Conferenze di Londra (settembre 1871) e dell’Aja (settembre 1872) essenzialmente una «crisi dell’Internazionale». Mentre ci sembra più corretto affermare che in quelle due conferenze, grazie alla Comune, Marx vinse una delle battaglie più importanti, quella che (come spiegò anni dopo Engels), consentiva di sciogliere l’Internazionale per avviare la costruzione di una nuova Internazionale e di nuovi partiti basati integralmente sulle concezioni marxiane. Tutto ciò fu possibile grazie alla Comune: che in questo senso fu certo una «sconfitta» ma che contraddittoriamente portò al maggior sviluppo del marxismo e alla grande diffusione delle opere di Marx (lo stesso Manifesto del 1848 iniziò a conoscere traduzioni e una diffusione di massa appunto dopo e grazie alla Comune; come ricorda Dommanget fino ad allora era sconosciuto persino ai dirigenti comunardi).
Notevole e acuta è invece la sintesi che Musto fa del dibattito tra Marx e Bakunin: anche qui contribuendo ad eliminare tutta una serie di luoghi comuni che vengono ripetuti da decenni (tipo quelli sullo “scontro di personalità”, la “rivalità rancorosa”, ecc.). Le ragioni politiche e programmatiche della rottura tra marxismo e anarchismo sono analizzate con grande chiarezza.

Il socialismo degli utopisti e quello di Marx

Di grande interesse è pure la quarta e ultima sezione del libro, dedicata a ricostruire la teoria politica di Marx, a partire dalla sua critica alle varie concezioni utopistiche del socialismo, evidenziando la differenza di fondo con il socialismo «scientifico» (ricordiamo che Marx stesso aveva precisato che con questa espressione andava inteso solo che si trattava di un socialismo contrapposto appunto a quello utopistico, senza pretese di comparire tra le scienze matematiche…). Peccato solo che, immaginiamo sempre per ragioni di spazio, non venga qui sviluppato adeguatamente lo studio sull’importanza che ebbe per Marx (e per tutto il movimento operaio) la Congiura degli Eguali di Babeuf (Musto vi dedica solo una paginetta, nel cap. 10). Appare nel libro come un semplice episodio, tra le fantasie di Cabet (Viaggio a Icaria) e quelle di Dézamy (Codice della Comunità). In una nota Musto chiarisce correttamente che Marx distingueva in realtà Babeuf (e Weitling) dagli utopisti, perché i primi identificavano la classe operaia (o la nascente classe operaia, nel caso di Babeuf) come soggetto del cambiamento: ma sottovaluta la conclusione del ragionamento di Marx: proprio perché costruito nel vivo delle lotte operaie, come partito di militanti, centralizzato, d’avanguardia, quello di Babeuf era stato (a detta di Marx) il «primo partito comunista realmente operante». Non a caso ad esso si ispirerà la Lega dei Comunisti (e, aggiungiamo noi, a questi due precedenti si ispirerà Lenin nella costruzione del Partito bolscevico).

Un libro da non perdere

I pochi limiti che ci sembra di aver individuato nel libro di Musto – è bene precisarlo – sono contenuti in un libro di grande valore. Un testo di cui raccomandiamo la lettura e anche lo studio a ogni militante marxista, insieme alle altre opere di Musto, oggi di gran lunga uno dei pochi studiosi seri e profondi dell’opera, scientifica e militante, di Marx.

Note

(1) G. Berti, «A volte purtroppo ritornano, la seconda carriera di Marx», Il Giornale, 17/01/19.
(2) Sull’importanza di questi studi, anche per meglio comprendere il legame (continuità e sviluppo innovativo) tra Marx, la successiva elaborazione di Trotsky (teoria-programma della rivoluzione permanente) e il Lenin che «riarma» il Partito bolscevico con le Tesi di aprile, ci permettiamo di rimandare al nostro: «Il programma e il partito che vinsero a Ottobre. Il filo rosso da Marx ai bolscevichi», Trotskismo oggi, n. 11, ottobre 2017.
(3) Segnaliamo che Musto è anche curatore, per le Edizioni Ets, 2008, di una interessante antologia di saggi di vari autori sui Grundrisse (cioè i Lineamenti fondamentali di critica dell’economia politica, scritti da Marx nel 1857-1858).

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Reviews

Paula Rauhala, Das Argument

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date October 1, 2019

Diese intellektuelle Biografie beschäftigt sich mit einigen marxschen Frühschriften (wobei die Feuerbach-Thesen vernachlässigt werden), der Entstehung des Kapital und den politischen Aktivitäten in der Internationalen Arbeiter-Assoziation.

Musto, der an der York University in Kanada lehrt, hat bereits zuvor zu diesem Themenkomplex publiziert (Karl Marx, L’alienazione, 2010; Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later, 2014; Der späte Marx. Eine intellektuelle Biografie der Jahre 1881 bis 1883, 2018).
Im ersten Teil des jetzigen Buchs geht es um die gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse, die einen »Studenten aus einer jüdischen Familie in der deutschen Provinz« darauf vorbereiteten, »ein junger Revolutionär mit Kontakten zu den radikalsten Gruppierungen der französischen Hauptstadt« zu werden (32). In Paris machte sich Marx mit der Politischen Ökonomie vertraut.
Dies führt zum Thema des zweiten Teils, der Entstehung des marxschen Hauptwerks von den frühen Londoner Notizbüchern zu Beginn der 1850er Jahre bis zum letzten Manuskript von Band 2 des Kapitals (1881). Musto verknüpft Marx’ theoretisches Ringen mit dem Kampf gegen seine Gesundheitsprobleme. Die Geschichte, die so entsteht, ist interessant, und die theoretischen Probleme werden ausgewogen diskutiert.
Im Unterschied zu anderen Marx-Biografien unterstreicht Musto im dritten Teil die Bedeutung, die Marx’ politischen Aktivitäten und seinem Organisationstalent zukommen. Er zeigt, wie Marx dafür sorgte, dass verschiedenste Strömungen sich »in derselben Organisation auf ein Programm« einigten, »das von den Ansätzen, die sie zu Beginn vertreten hatten, stark abwich« (173). Die frühe Internationale war »bunt gemischt« (174). Britische Gewerkschaftsbewegung, französischer Mutualismus oder Anarchismus, Utopismus sowie Strömungen, die mit der sozialistischen Tradition nichts zu tun hatten, trafen dort auf den Kommunismus von Marx und seinen Verbündeten. Marx und Engels, die an der »Sektenbewegung« die »Elemente des Fortschritts« betonen für jene Frühphase, »in der das Proletariat sich noch nicht hinreichend entwickelt hat, um als Klasse zu handeln« hatte, wie sie rückblickend schreiben (1872, MEW 18, 32ff), gelang es, »das scheinbar Unvereinbare miteinander in Einklang zu bringen« (174).
Doch war bei diesem Sieg der kommunistischen Linie gegen den Mutualismus Marx’ energisches Vorgehen ebenso wichtig wie die Wirklichkeit der proletarischen Kämpfe, insbesondere der Streik. »Es waren wirkliche Männer und Frauen, die die kapitalistische Produktion zum Stocken brachten, um ihre Rechte und soziale Gerechtigkeit einzufordern, und die damit das Kräfteverhältnis in der Internationalen und – wichtiger noch – in der ganzen Gesellschaft veränderten« (190). Mehr noch als die theoretischen Debatten waren es diese Ereignisse, die die französischen Anführer der Internationalen von der Notwendigkeit überzeugten, »das Land und die Industrie zu vergesellschaften« (ebd.). Musto zeigt, dass es Marx in der Internationalen stets darum ging, eine gemeinsame Linie gegen die feindliche Klasse zu finden (194). »Die Sekte [dagegen] sucht ihre raison d’être und ihren point d’honneur nicht in dem, was sie mit der Klassenbewegung gemein hat, sondern in dem besondren Schibboleth, das sie von ihr unterscheidet.« (MEW 32, 569) – Eine Lehre, die angesichts der geschwächten internationalen linken Bewegung heute ernst genommen werden sollte.
Hinlänglich bekannt ist, was Musto am Briefwechsel mit Vera Sassulitsch aufzeigt, dass es nämlich zu Marx’ Lebzeiten noch möglich war, den in Diskussionen praktizierten Rückgriff auf Marx als autoritative Instanz zu hinterfragen. Sassulitsch schreibt, in der Debatte um die russische Dorfgemeinde werde oft gesagt, sie sei eine »archaische Form […], die die Geschichte […] zum Untergang verurteilt hat«; ferner behaupteten jene, die das prophezeien, sie seien »Ihre Schüler« (MEW 19, 572, Fn. 155). Marx antwortete hingegen, die »historische Unvermeidlichkeit« des Übergangs zur kapitalistischen Produktionsweise sei »ausdrücklich auf die Länder Westeuropas beschränkt« (MEW 19, 242). Eine sozialistische Entwicklung ausgehend von der obschtchina sei nicht auszuschließen. Musto unterstreicht damit, dass nach Marx die sozioökonomische Entwicklung keineswegs »eine feste Abfolge bereits definierter Stadien« durchlaufen musste. Stattdessen betont Marx »die Spezifizität historischer Verhältnisse und die Zentralität des menschlichen Eingreifens bei der Gestaltung der Realität und der Verwirklichung des Sozialismus« (248).
Warum noch eine Marx-Biografie? Warum nicht, wenn man es so wie dieses Buch schafft, Marx’ intellektuelle Entwicklung in ihren sozialen und politischen Kontexten unterhaltsam darzustellen und gleichzeitig Themen und Debatten hervorzuheben, die ihre Relevanz für die Gegenwart haben. In dieser Hinsicht ähnelt Mustos Biographie der von Sven-Eric Liedman. Beide zeigen im Unterschied etwa zu den Biografien von Jonathan Sperber und Gareth Stedman Jones (vgl. Klaus Webers Besprechung in Arg. 329, 646–660), wie grundwichtig Marx auch für heutige Kapitalismuskritik ist.

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Reviews

Salvatore Carrubba, Radio24

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date September 15, 2019

“Karl Marx” di Marcello Musto
(Einaudi, 344 p., € 30,00)

Tags Italian

Reviews

Riccardo Bonfiglioli, Montesquieu.it

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date September 1, 2019

The purpose of this review is to highlight the main features of the book “Karl Marx. Biografia intellettuale e politica. 1857-1883” written by Marcello Musto.

An attempt will be made to underline the importance of the relation between theory and biographical events of Marx’s life, in the background of his historical time, as a key for a greater understanding of Marx’s works.

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Reviews

Aktief

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date September 1, 2019

In 2018 hadden we een Marx-jaar. Op de Nederlandstalige boekenmarkt bleef het opvallend stil.

Alleen Walter Weyns, docent sociologie aan de UAntwerpen, bracht een kort boekje uit. Een klein overzicht met helaas enkele gekende (Popperiaanse) platitudes. Dit staat in schril contrast met de internationale Marx revival de afgelopen jaren. In de VS, GB, Duitsland en Frankrijk is een nieuwe generatie aan humane wetenschappers opgestaan, die zich danig laat inspireren door Marx’ werk. Marcello Musto is een van bekendste protagonisten. Hij besloot aandacht te schenken aan de viering van 150 jaar Eerste Internationale. Hij verzamelde een schare aan onderzoekers om in elf hoofdstukken uit de doeken te doen waarom de Eerste Internationale van monumentaal belang was. Laten we onmiddellijk overgaan tot een algemene evaluatie van de ingediende hoofdstukken. Een geredigeerd boek heeft altijd het grootste probleem om een rode draad doorheen de bijdragen te behouden. Dit boek kent ook dit oud euvel. Niet dat de bijdragen kwalitatief ondermaats zijn. Eerder zijn de latere hoofdstukken wel zeer los verbonden met het thema van de Eerste Internationale. Het zijn case studies over hoe de hedendaagse protestbewegingen zich verzamelen rond vakbonden of hoe dat de syndicale beweging te maken krijgt met het neoliberale offensief. Aangevuld met getuigenissen van syndicale werkers op mondiaal vlak. Musto’s en Comninel’s bijdragen over de Eerste Internationale zijn dan juist een ideaal overzicht over haar ontstaansgeschiedenis. Deze Internationale bestond uit een bonte mix aan arbeidersorganisaties. De Britse vakbewegingen waren de centrale spil. Dit is niet verwonderlijk. In 1864, een kleine dertig jaar voor de opkomst van moderne en nationale syndicale organisaties, waren de Britten de avant-garde betreffende de zelf-organisatie van de arbeiders. De Brits vakbewegingen waren gekenmerkt door organisatie volgens sector, en hadden voornamelijk een economische eisenpakket. Zij waren weinig actief op politiek vlak na het uiteenvallen van het Chartism als directe voorloper van het Britse socialisme. Na een woelige tijd met vele slachtoffers waren deze vakbewegingen ook opvallend weinig revolutionair ingesteld. Op het continent, alvast in Frankrijk en België, stonden de mutualisten van Proudhon nog zeer sterk binnen de ontluikende arbeidersbeweging. De Proudhonisten waren rabiaat gekant tegen politieke actie en geloofden eerder dat alleen een stakingsbeweging de staat op haar knieën kon krijgen. Ook geloofden zij dat de een coöperatieve beweging het kapitalisme als economisch systeem gradueel kon transformeren. Onderzoekers beschouwen dan ook de Proudhonisten als de rechterzijde van de Internationale. Een derde, meest radicale, factie waren de communisten onder leiding van Karl Marx. Rondom de Internationale zwierven dan nog de meest uiteenlopende stromingen, gaande van resterende utopisten tot aanhangers van Ferdinand Lasalle. Het was dan ook te danken aan Marx dat de Internationale niet onmiddellijke implodeerde door sektarische gevechten. Hij gaf de organisatie een klare theorie en schipperde tussen democratisch pluralisme en een uitgetekende koers naar het ontwikkelen van een massabeweging. De redacteurs van het boek hebben vervolgens ook een aantal documenten van de Internationale getranscribeerd, wat dan ook handig is om een algemene indruk te krijgen over het programmatisch luik. Dit boek is dan ook een must have voor eenieder die geïnteresseerd is in de vroege dagen van de Europese arbeidersbeweging.

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