Category: Interviews

Q: Marx’s theories and his critique of alienation are discussed, in a country like India, only in the academic circles, while the working class is the worst victim. What is the general trend of Marx’s contemporary reception in the world?

A: Well, obviously the dramatical defeat of the international labour movement, at the end of the 20th century has significantly reduced the impact of Marxism from political parties, social movements and – more in general – the political sphere. But there are some signs of change in the world, and also the “return” of Marx in the academia is a poritive phenomenon that might play a positive influence on the new generations.

In fact, despite all the predictions after 1989 that Karl Marx would forever be consigned to oblivion, scholars around the world have again been paying attention to him in the last few years. In a world beset with profound contradictions, analysts are once more turning to a thinker who, hastily dismissed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has become important for an understanding of the present.

After a near-total suspension for more than twenty years, Marx studies have resumed in many European countries – his works have reappeared in bookshops, and new editions of Capital have quickly sold out – as well as in the English-speaking world and Latin America (for example in Brazil). In particular, since the onset of the international financial crisis in 2008, academics, economic analysts and journalists from diverse political and cultural backgrounds are again recognizing the value of Marx’s analysis of the inherent instability of capitalism, and of its self-generated cyclical crises which have such grave effects on political and social life. In all parts of the world, leading daily and weekly papers have also been discussing the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought.

An analogous consensus is enjoyed by the journals open to contributions discussing Marx and various Marxisms, just as there are now international conferences, university courses and seminars dedicated to this author. Finally, even if timidly and in often confused forms – from Latin America to Europe, passing through the alternative globalization movement – a new demand for Marx is also being registered in political terms (see the case of Greece, for example). Some commentators have described this context as “Marx renaissance”.

What remains of Marx today? How useful his thought is to the struggle for emancipation and freedom? What part of his work is most fertile for stimulating the critique of our times? These are some of the questions that receive answers that are anything but unanimous.

If the contemporary Marx renaissance has a certainty, it consists precisely in the discontinuity in respect to the past that was characterized by monolithic orthodoxies that have dominated and profoundly conditioned the interpretation of this thinker. Even though marked by evident limits and the risk of syncretism, a season has arrived that is characterized by many Marxs, and indeed, after the age of dogmatisms, it could not have happened in any other way. The task of responding to these problems is therefore up to the research, theoretical and practical, of a new generation of scholars and political activists.

Q: Let us move on alienation now. What are the main aspects of Marx’s conception of alienation?

A: Alienation was one of the most important and widely debated themes of the 20th century, and Marx’s theorization played a key role in the discussions. Yet, contrary to what one might imagine, the concept itself did not develop in a linear manner, and the publication of previously unknown texts containing Marx’s reflections on alienation (like for example the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in 1932 and the Grundrisse n the 1960s) defined significant moments in the transformation and dissemination of the theory.

Unfortunately – and paradoxically – Marx’s theory of alienation in capitalist society is mostly known through his statements included in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, a very fragmentary text written by a young scholar who was just starting to study political economy.

In the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, alienation is presented as the phenomenon through which the labour product confronts labour ‘as something alien, as a power independentof the producer’. Marx listed four ways in which the worker is alienated in bourgeois society: 1) from the product of his labour, which becomes ‘an alien object that has power over him’; 2) in his working activity, which he perceives as ‘directed against himself’, as if it ‘does not belong to him’; 3) from ‘man’s species-being’, which is transformed into ‘a being alien to him’; and 4) from other human beings, and in relation to their labour and the object of their labour.

On the basis of this definition, many Marxists put the main emphasis on subjectivity, and their concept of alienation remained too narrowly focused on the individual. Moreover, often their account of Marx’s concept based itself only on the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and showed a deep lack of understanding of the specificity and centrality of alienated labour in Marx’s thought. This lacuna prevented them from giving due weight to objective alienation (that of the worker in the labour process and in relation to the labour product) and led them to advance positions that appear disingenuous in their neglect of the underlying structural relations.

Q: In your work you also criticize a “bourgeois” conceptualization of alienation, in which the specificity of capitalist mode of production was completely dismissed.

A: Yes, in the 1950s, for example, the concept of alienation also entered the vocabulary of North American sociology, with an approach quite different from Marxism. Mainstream sociology treated alienation as a problem of the individual human being, not of social relations, and the search for solutions centred on the capacity of individuals to adjust to the existing order, not on collective practices to change society.

Some authors even considered alienation to be a positive phenomenon, a means of expressing creativity, which was inherent in the human condition in general. Another common view was that it sprang from the fissure between individual and society.

American sociology generally saw alienation as a problem linked to the system of industrial production, whether capitalist or socialist, and mainly affecting human consciousness. This major shift of approach ultimately downgraded, or even excluded, analysis of the historical-social factors that determine alienation, producing a kind of hyper-psychologization that treated it not as a social problem but as a pathological symptom of individuals, curable at the individual level.

Whereas in the Marxist tradition the concept of alienation had contributed to some of the sharpest criticisms of the capitalist mode of production, its institutionalization in the realm of sociology reduced it to a phenomenon of individual maladjustment to social norms. In the same way, the critical dimension that the concept had had in philosophy (even for authors who thought it a horizon that could never be transcended) now gave way to an illusory neutrality.

Another effect of this metamorphosis was the theoretical impoverishment of the concept. From a complex phenomenon related to man’s work activity and social and intellectual existence, alienation became a partial category divided up in accordance with academic research specializations. American sociologists argued that this methodological choice enabled them to free the study of alienation from any political connotations and to confer on it scientific objectivity. But, in reality, this a-political ‘turn’ had evident ideological implications, since support for the dominant values and social order lay hidden behind the banner of de-ideologization and value-neutrality.

So, the difference between Marxist and American sociological conceptions of alienation was not that the former were political and the latter scientific. Rather, Marxist theorists were bearers of values opposed to the hegemonic ones in American society, whereas the US sociologists upheld the values of the existing social order, skillfully dressed up as eternal values of the human species. In the American academic context, the concept of alienation underwent a veritable distortion and ended up being used by defenders of the very social classes against which it had for so long been directed.

Q: Let us now go back to Marx. What should be the main textual references for Marx’s conception of alienation, if the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 represent an important but partial elaboration of Marxian ideas?

A: Well, beside the very significant pages of the Grundrisse where Marx exposed his mature and more advanced concept of alienation, one of his best accounts of alienation is contained in the famous section of Capital on ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’, where he shows that, in capitalist society, people are dominated by the products they have created. Here, the relations among them appear not ‘as direct social relations between persons, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things’.

Two elements in this famous passage of Capital mark a clear dividing line between Marx’s conception of alienation and the one held by most of the other theorists of alienation.

First, Marx conceives of fetishism not as an individual problem but as a social phenomenon, not as an affair of the mind but as a real power, a particular form of domination, which establishes itself in market economy as a result of the transformation of objects into subjects. For this reason, his analysis of alienation does not confine itself to the disquiet of individual women and men, but extends to the social processes and productive activities underlying it.

Second, for Marx fetishism manifests itself in a precise historical reality of production, the reality of wage labour; it is not part of the relation between people and things as such, but rather of the relation between man and a particular kind of objectivity: the commodity form.

In bourgeois society, human qualities and relations turn into qualities and relations among things. This theory of what Lukács would call reification illustrated alienation from the point of view of human relations, while the concept of fetishism treated it in relation to commodities. Pace those who deny that a theory of alienation is present in Marx’s mature work, we should stress that commodity fetishism did not replace alienation but was only one aspect of it.

The theoretical advance from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital and its related materials does not, however, consist only in the greater precision of his account of alienation. There is also a reformulation of the measures that Marx considers necessary for it to be overcome. Whereas in 1844 he had argued that human beings would eliminate alienation by abolishing private production and the division of labour, the path to a society free of alienation was much more complicated in Capital and its preparatory manuscripts.

Marx held that capitalism was a system in which the workers were subject to capital and the conditions it imposed. Nevertheless, it had created the foundations for a more advanced society, and by generalizing its benefits humanity would be able to progress along the faster road of social development that it had opened up. According to Marx, a system that produced an enormous accumulation of wealth for the few and deprivation and exploitation for the general mass of workers must be replaced with ‘an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’. This type of production would differ from wage labour because it would place its determining factors under collective governance, take on an immediately general character and convert labour into a truly social activity. This was a conception of society at the opposite pole from Hobbes’s “war of all against all”; and its creation did not require a merely political process, but would necessarily involve transformation of the sphere of production.

The post-capitalist system of production, together with scientific-technological progress and a consequent reduction of the working day, creates the possibility for a new social formation in which the coercive, alienated labour imposed by capital and subject to its laws is gradually replaced with conscious, creative activity beyond the yoke of necessity, and in which complete social relations take the place of random, undifferentiated exchange dictated by the laws of commodities and money.

Q: There is a sort of elitist character that confins the debate on alienation merely to seminars, symposia and high-priced books? What is the way out of it?

A: Actually, this is not a new problem, but something that already happened in the past, when alienation was mostly a concept used by philosophers, with small impact in the political arena. Bringing the theory of alienation outside these circles and this “merely” intellectual space is something that requires a strong political and social movement.

At the beginning of the 1960s, for example, the diffusion of Capital and of the Grundrisse among students and political activists paved the way for a conception of alienation different from the one then hegemonic in sociology and psychology. It was a conception geared to the overcoming of alienation in practice – to the political action of social movements, parties and trade unions to change the working and living conditions of the working class. The publication of what (after the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in the 1930s) may be thought of as the ‘second generation’ of Marx’s writings on alienation therefore provided not only a coherent theoretical basis for new studies of alienation, but above all an anti-capitalist ideological platform for the extraordinary political and social movement that exploded in the world during those years.

In that fantastic epoch, alienation – we can say – left the books of philosophers and the lecture halls of universities, took to the streets and the space of workers’ struggles, and became a critique of bourgeois society in general.

Q: Please tell us about the importance of the concept of alienation in the past decades and also who are the present thinkers in the world that are still working on alienation.

A: In the 1960s a real vogue began for theories of alienation, and hundreds of books and articles were published on it around the world. There was an irresistible fascination of the theory of alienation. It was the age of alienation tout court. Authors from various political backgrounds and academic disciplines identified its causes as commodification, overspecialization, anomie, bureaucratization, conformism, consumerism, loss of a sense of self amid new technologies, even personal isolation, apathy, social or ethnic marginalization, and environmental pollution. If we want to establish an example with recent times, I would say that only the concept of globalization has had a similar impact and fortune.

The concept of alienation seemed to express the spirit of the age to perfection, and indeed, in its critique of capitalist society, it became a meeting ground for anti-Soviet philosophical Marxism and the most democratic and progressive currents in the Catholic world. However, the popularity of the concept, and its indiscriminate application, created a profound terminological ambiguity. Within the space of a few years, alienation thus became an empty formula ranging right across the spectrum of human unhappiness – so all-encompassing that it generated the belief that it could never be modified.

Therefore, beside the political defeat of the critical left, which made of the critique of alienation one of its most important flags, it is understandable why the debate and the publication on this concept have decreased in the past decades.

Recently, the German philosopher Rahel Jaeggi has published a book entitled Alienation (2014 – original German edition 2005), which has re-opened the debate on this concept, but her approach is different from Marxian critique of capitalist society.

Q. Now back to Marx more in general. Some people say that Marxism would live only as an academic tool, as a classic of philosophical thought. Do you agree with this position?

A: If Marx isn’t identifiable with the carved Sphinx of the grey ‘actually existing socialism’ of the twentieth century, it would be equally mistaken to believe that his theoretical and political legacy could be confined to a past that doesn’t have anything more to give to current conflicts, to circumscribe his thought to a mummified classic that has no relevance today, or to confine it to merely academic specialism.

The return of interest in Marx goes well beyond the confines of restricted circles of scholars as does the significant philological research of MEGA2, dedicated to demonstrating the diversity of it in respect to the large number of his interpreters. The rediscovery of Marx is based on his persistent capacity to explain the present: he remains an indispensable instrument for understanding it and being able to transform it.

Faced with the crisis of capitalist society and the profound contradictions that traverse it, there is a return to question that author set aside, too quickly, after 1989. Thus, Jacques Derrida’s affirmation of 1994, that “it will always be an error not to read, re-read and discuss Marx”, which only a few years ago seemed to be an isolated provocation, has found increasing approval.

Q: Is Marx still relevant today?

A: Of course the writings that Marx composed a century and a half ago do not contain a precise description of the world today. It should be stressed, however, that in Capital Marx tried to present the “organization of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average,” and hence in its most complete and most general form. He foresaw that capitalism would expand on a global scale and formulated his own theories on that basis. That is why Marx’s oeuvre is not only a great classic of economic and political thought, but still provides a framework today for understanding all the profound economic and social transformations that have meanwhile occurred, including a rich array of instruments to use in understanding the nature of capitalist development.

If updated and applied to the most recent developments, Marx’s accounts of the dynamic of the capitalist mode of production offer effective means for explaining many of the problems of contemporary society that became fully developed only in the twentieth century.

With the development of capitalism into a system that invades and permeates most aspects of human life, anyone can see that Marx’s thought has been extraordinarily prescient in many fields not addressed by twentieth-century orthodox Marxism. We can say that some of Marx’s analyses have revealed their significance even more clearly than in his own time.

Q: Finally, what are your future plans in terms of publications?

A: The next two years will be very significant for the scholars of Marx. 2017 will be a turning point for the studies on Capital. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of its first publication (1867 – 2017) there will be many new volumes and conference analyzing the most important concepts of one of the books that changed the world. The same in 2018, the year of Marx’s 200th birthday. Among my forthcoming books there are three monographs and edited volumes dedicated to Marx’s magnum opus (The Formation of Marx’s ‘Capital’, Pluto, 2017); to his life (Another Marx: An Essay in Intellectual Biography, Bloomsbury, 2017); and to his contemporary relevance in our contemporary society ) The Marx Revival , Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Prof. Marcello Musto, 40, one of the leading research scholars on Marxism in the 21st century, teaches Sociological Theory at York University (Toronto). His books and articles have been published worldwide in more than 20 languages.

Among his edited and co-authored volumes, reprinted in several editions, there are: Karl Marx’s ‘Grundrisse’, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (2008), Marx for Today and The International After 150 Years: Labour Versus Capital, Then and Now(2015), all published by Routledge. Recently, he has also edited the first anthology on the International Working Men’s Association ever realised in English language, Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Following are excerpts of his interview with The News on Sunday.

If updated and applied to the most recent developments, Marx’s accounts of the dynamic of the capitalist mode of production offer effective means for explaining many of the problems of contemporary society that became fully developed only in the twentieth century.

The News on Sunday: Some people say that Marxism would live only as an academic tool, as a classic of philosophical thought. Do you agree?

Marcello Musto: If Marx isn’t identifiable with the carved Sphinx of the grey ‘actually existing socialism’ of the twentieth century, it would be equally mistaken to believe that his theoretical and political legacy is confined to a past that doesn’t have anything more to give to current conflicts, to circumscribe his thought to a mummified classic that has no relevance today, or to confine it to merely academic specialism.

The return of interest in Marx goes well beyond the confines of restricted circles of scholars as does the significant philological research of MEGA2, dedicated to demonstrating the diversity of it in respect to the large number of his interpreters. The rediscovery of Marx is based on his persistent capacity to explain the present: he remains an indispensable instrument for understanding it and being able to transform it.

Faced with the crisis of capitalist society and the profound contradictions that traverse it, there is a return to the question that the author set aside, too quickly, after 1989. Thus, Jacques Derrida’s affirmation of 1994, that “it will always be a fault not to read and re-read and discuss Marx”, which only a few years ago seemed to be an isolated provocation.

TNS: In one of your writings, you have stated that ‘the research on Marx has still many paths to travel’. Would you elaborate?

MM: Despite all the predictions after 1989 that Karl Marx would forever be consigned to oblivion, scholars around the world have again been paying attention to him in the last few years. In a world beset with profound contradictions, analysts are once more turning to a thinker who, hastily dismissed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has become important for an understanding of the present.

After a near-total suspension for twenty years, Marx studies have resumed in many European countries — his works have reappeared in bookshops, and new editions ofCapital have quickly sold out — as well as in the English-speaking world and Latin America (for example in Brazil). In particular, since the onset of the international financial crisis in 2008, academics, economic analysts and journalists from diverse political and cultural backgrounds are again recognising the value of Marx’s analysis of the inherent instability of capitalism, and of its self-generated cyclical crises which have such grave effects on political and social life. In all parts of the world, leading daily and weekly papers have also been discussing the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought.

Finally, even if timidly and in often confused forms — from Latin America to Europe, passing through the alternative globalisation movement — a new demand for Marx is also being registered in political terms. Some commentators have described this context as “Marx renaissance”.

TNS: What remains of Marx today? How useful his thought is to the struggle for emancipation and freedom? What part of his work is most fertile for stimulating the critique of our times?

MM: These are some of the questions that receive answers that are anything but unanimous.

If the contemporary Marx renaissance has a certainty, it consists precisely in the discontinuity in respect to the past that was characterised by monolithic orthodoxies that have dominated and profoundly conditioned the interpretation of this thinker. Even though marked by evident limits and the risk of syncretism, a season has arrived that is characterised by many Marxs, and indeed, after the age of dogmatisms, it could not have happened in any other way. The task of responding to these problems is therefore up to the research, theoretical and practical, of a new generation of scholars and political activists.

TNS: Is Marx still relevant today?

MM: Of course the writings that Marx composed a century and a half ago do not contain a precise description of the world today. It should be stressed, however, that in Capital,Marx tried to present the “organisation of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average,” and hence in its most complete and most general form. He foresaw that capitalism would expand on a global scale and formulated his own theories on that basis. That is why Marx’s oeuvre is not only a great classic of economic and political thought, but still provides a framework today for understanding all the profound economic and social transformations that have meanwhile occurred, including a rich array of instruments to use in understanding the nature of capitalist development.

If updated and applied to the most recent developments, Marx’s accounts of the dynamic of the capitalist mode of production offer effective means for explaining many of the problems of contemporary society that became fully developed only in the twentieth century.

With the development of capitalism into a system that invades and permeates most aspects of human life, anyone can see that Marx’s thought has been extraordinarily prescient in many fields not addressed by twentieth-century orthodox Marxism. We can say that some of Marx’s analyses have revealed their significance even more clearly than in his own time.

TNS: What has been the role of Engels for the dissemination of the ideas of Marx in the world?

MM: After Marx’s death, in 1883, Friedrich Engels was the first to dedicate himself to the very difficult task — due to the dispersion of the material, obscurity of language and the illegibility of the handwriting — of editing his friend’s legacy. His work concentrated on reconstruction and selection from the original materials, on the publication of unedited or incomplete texts and, at the same time, on the republications and translation of writings already known.

Even if there were exceptions, such as the case of the Theses on Feuerbach, edited in 1888 as an appendix to his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme, which came out in 1891, Engels focused almost exclusively on the editorial work for the completion of Capital, of which only the first volume was published before Marx’s death. This undertaking, lasting more than a decade, was pursued with the explicit intention of realising “a connected and as far as possible complete work”. In the course of his editorial activity, based on a selection of texts that were far from final versions, and actually different variants, Engels had the difficult task to give to the prints the second and third books of Capital.

The completion, in 2014, of the second section of MEGA2 finally allows a critical evaluation of the state of the originals left by Marx and of the value and the limits of Engels’s editorial work.

TNS: Can you tell us more about the fourth section of the MEGA2?

MM: Yes, sure. The novelties of the historical critical edition are very noticeable in the fourth section — called Exzerpte, Notizen, Marginalien. This contains Marx’s numerous summaries and study notes, which constitute a significant testimony to his mammoth work. From his university years, he adopted the life-long habit of compiling notebooks of extracts from the books he read, often breaking them up with the reflections which they prompted him to make.

The literary legacy of Marx contains approximately two hundred notebooks of summaries. These are essential for the knowledge and comprehension of the genesis of his theory and of the parts of it that he didn’t have the chance to develop as he wished. The conserved extracts, which cover the long arch of time from 1838 until 1882, are written in eight languages — German, Ancient Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, Spanish and Russian — and treat the widest range of disciplines. They were taken from texts of philosophy, art, religion, politics, law, literature, history, political economy, international relations, technology, mathematics, physiology, geology, mineralogy, agronomy, ethnology, chemistry and physics, as well as newspaper and journal articles, parliamentary reports, statistics, reports, and publications of government offices — amongst these are the ‘Blue Books’, in particular the Reports of the Inspectors of Factories, which contained investigations of great importance for his studies.

This mine of knowledge, in large part still unpublished, was the building site of Marx’s critical theory. The fourth section of MEGA2, planned for 32 volumes, will provide access to it for the first time.

TNS: Can you tell us what is the ‘Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe’ (MEGA2)?

MM: The first publication of the complete works, the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe(MEGA), started in the 1920s in Moscow. The Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union and the rise of Nazism in Germany led to the early interruption of the publications. The project of a ‘second’ MEGA began in 1975, but was also interrupted, this time following the events of 1989. In 1998, after a difficult phase of reorganisation, in the course of which new editorial principles were approved, the publication of the so-called MEGA2 commenced again.

The complete project, in which scholars of various disciplines from numerous countries participate, is articulated in four sections: the first includes all the works, articles and drafts excluding Capital; the second includes Capital and its preliminary studies starting from 1857; the third is dedicated to the correspondence; while the fourth includes excerpts, annotations and marginalia. Of the 114 planned volumes, more than 60 have already been published (more than 20 since recommencement in 1998), each of which consists of two books: the text plus the critical apparatus, which contains the indices and many additional notes.

This undertaking has great importance considering that a major part of the manuscripts of Marx, of his voluminous correspondence and excerpts and annotations that he used to make while reading, have never been published.

TNS: What are your future plans?

MM: The next two years will be very significant for the scholars of Marx. 2017 will be a turning point for the studies on Capital. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of its first publication (1867-2017) there will be many new volumes and conferences analysing the most important concepts of one of the books that changed the world. The same in 2018, the year of Marx’s 200th birthday. Among my forthcoming books there are three monographs and edited volumes dedicated to Marx’s Magnum Opus (The Formation of Marx’s ‘Capital’, Pluto, 2017); to his life (Another Marx: An Essay in Intellectual Biography, Bloomsbury, 2017); and to his contemporary relevance in our contemporary society (The Marx Revival , Cambridge University Press, 2017).

MARCELLO MUSTO, 39, teaches Sociological Theory at York University (Toronto). His books and articles have been published worldwide in 20 languages.Among his edited and co-authored volumes, reprinted in several editions, are Karl Marx’s ‘Grundrisse’: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (2008 – Chinese translation, CRUP, 2012); Marx for Today (Chinese translation, CRUP, forthcoming 2016); and The International after 150 Years: Labour Versus Capital, Then and Now (2015), all published by Routledge.

He has also edited the first anthology on the International Working Men’s Association ever realised in the English language, Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury 2014). Among his forthcoming books are the monographs Another Marx: An Essay in Intellectual Biography (Bloomsbury 2017); The Formation of Marx’s ‘Capital’ (Pluto, 2017); and the edited volume, The Marx Revival: Major Concepts and New Critiques (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

As part of his broad academic tour in India, he visited Chennai recently to deliver two talks and answered some questions from S.V. Rajadurai, well-known Tamil writer and social activist.

You are known for your work on Marx’s reception in the world. Let’s start this interview with a topic not very known to Indian readers of Marx and Marxism. Could you tell us the most important steps in the history of the publication of Marx and Engels’ complete editions?

The natural executor of the realisation of this opera omnia could not have been anyone other than the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, holder of the Nachlaß and whose members had the greatest linguistic and theoretical competencies. Nevertheless, political conflicts within social democracy not only impeded the publication of the imposing mass of unpublished works by Marx but caused the dispersal of his manuscripts, compromising any suggestion of a systematic edition. Unbelievably, the German party did not curate any, treating their literary legacy with the maximum negligence imaginable. None of its theoreticians drew up a list of the intellectual estate of the two founders. Nor did they dedicate themselves to collecting the correspondence, extensive but extremely dispersed, despite the fact that it was clearly a very useful source of clarification, if not a continuation, of their writings.

The first publication of the complete works, Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), occurred only in the 1920s, at the initiative of David Borisoviè Ryazanov, director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. This undertaking also ran aground, however, owing to the turbulent events of the international workers’ movement, which often established obstacles rather than favoured the publication of their works. The Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union, which also affected the scholars working on the project, and the rise of Nazism in Germany, led to the early interruption of the publication.

The early works were only published in MEGA as late as 1927 for Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and 1932 for Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. As had already occurred with the second and third books of Capital, they were published in editions in which they appeared as completed works, a choice that would later demonstrate itself to be the source of numerous interpretative misunderstandings. Later still, some of the important preparatory works for Capital, in 1933 the draft chapter 6 of Capital on the “Results of the Direct Production Process”, and between 1939 and 1941 Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, better known as the Grundrisse, were published in a print run that secured only a very limited circulation.

The first Russian edition of the collected works was also completed in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1947: the Soèinenija (Complete Works). In spite of the name, it only included a partial number of writings, but with 28 volumes (in 33 books) it constituted the most complete collection in quantitative terms of the two authors at the time. The second Soèinenija, then, appeared between 1955 and 1966 in 39 volumes (42 books). From 1956 to 1968 in the German Democratic Republic, at the initiative of the central committee of the SED, 41 volumes in 43 books of Marx Engels Werke (MEW) were published. Such an edition, however, far from complete, was weighed down by introductions and notes which, following the model of the Soviet edition, guided the reader according to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.

The project of a “second” MEGA, planned as the faithful reproduction with an extensive critical apparatus of all the writings of the two thinkers, was reborn during the 1960s. Nevertheless, these publications, begun in 1975, were also interrupted, this time following the events of 1989. In the 1990s, with the goal of continuing this edition, the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis of Amsterdam and the Karl Marx Haus in Trier formed the Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (IMES). After a difficult phase of reorganisation, in the course of which new editorial principles were approved, the publication of the so-called MEGA2 commenced in 1998.

You have benefited immensely from MEGA2 and have made significant contributions for understanding Karl Marx and his thought in a new light. Can you tell us about this project?

The reorganisation of the ongoing edition of Marx’s writings and the transfer of the MEGA² headquarters to the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften is one of the most significant examples of the renewed interest for Marx’s work in the academia today.

This project, in which scholars of various disciplinary competences from numerous countries participate, is articulated in four sections: the first includes all the works, articles, and drafts excluding Capital; the second includes Capital and its preliminary studies starting from 1857; the third is dedicated to the correspondence; while the fourth includes excerpts, annotations, and marginalia. Of the 114 planned volumes, more than 60 have already been published (more than 20 since recommencement in 1998), each of which consists of two books: the text plus the critical apparatus, which contains the indices and many additional notes.

The editorial acquisitions of MEGA² have produced important results in all the four sections. In the first, Werke, Artikel und Entwürfe, research was recommenced with the publication of many new volumes, in particular on Marx’s journalistic work. The research for the second section of MEGA², ‘Das Kapital’ und Vorarbeiten, has concentrated in recent years on the second and third book of Capital.

The third section of MEGA², Briefwechsel, contains the letters exchanged by Marx and Engels throughout their lives, as well as those between them and the numerous correspondents with whom they were in contact. The total number of the letters in this correspondence is enormous. More than 4,000 written by Marx and Engels (2,500 of which are between themselves) have been found, as well as 10,000 addressed to them by third parties, the large majority of which were unpublished before MEGA2. Furthermore, there is firm evidence of the existence of another 6,000 letters, though these have not been preserved. Several new volumes have been edited which now allow us to re-read important phases of Marx’s intellectual biography through the letters of those with whom he was in contact.

The novelties of the historical critical edition are also noticeable in the fourth section, Exzerpte, Notizen, Marginalien. This contains Marx’s numerous summaries and study notes, which constitute a significant testimony to his mammoth work. From his university years, he adopted the life-long habit of compiling notebooks of extracts from the books he read, often breaking them up with the reflections which they prompted him to make. The Nachlaß of Marx contains approximately 200 notebooks of summaries. These are essential for the knowledge and comprehension of the genesis of his theory and of the parts of it that he didn’t have the chance to develop as he wished. The conserved extracts, which cover the long arch of time from 1838 until 1882, are written in eight languages—German, Ancient Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, Spanish and Russian—and treat the widest range of disciplines. They were taken from texts of philosophy, art, religion, politics, law, literature, history, political economy, international relations, technology, mathematics, physiology, geology, mineralogy, agronomy, ethnology, chemistry, and physics, as well as newspaper and journal articles, parliamentary reports, statistics, reports, and publications of government offices—as amongst these are the famous “Blue Books”, in particular Reports of the inspectors of factories, which contained investigations of great importance for his studies. This immense mine of knowledge, in large part still unpublished, was the building site of Marx’s critical theory. The fourth section of MEGA2, planned for 32 volumes, will provide access to it for the first time.

‘BOOKS, INSTRUMENTS OF WORK’

This is very interesting. Can you give us the example of one special volume you really find useful for the new research on Marx?

Well, I think I’d mention the volume IV/32. If Marx’s manuscripts, before being published, knew numerous ups and downs, the books owned by Marx and Engels suffered an even worse fate. After Engels’ death, the two libraries that contained their books with interesting marginalia and underlinings were ignored and in part dispersed and only subsequently reconstructed and catalogued with difficulty. The volume “Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels, Die Bibliotheken von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels” (IV/32) is in fact the fruit of 75 years of research. It consists of an index of 1,450 books in 2,100 volumes—or two-thirds of those owned by Marx and Engels —which includes notes of all the pages of each volume on which there are annotations. It is a publication in advance which will be integrated when MEGA2 is completed by the index of books not available today (the total number of those that have been recovered is 2,100 books in 3,200 volumes), with indications of marginalia, present in 40,000 pages of 830 texts, and the publication of comments on readings taken in the margins of the volumes. As many who were in close contact with Marx have noted, he did not consider books as objects of luxury, but instruments of work. He treated them badly, folding the corners of pages, and underlining in them. “They are my slaves and have to obey my will,” he said of his books. On the other hand, he indulged in them with extreme devotion, to the point of defining himself as “a machine condemned to devour books in order to expel them, in a different form, on the dunghill of history”. To be able to know some of his readings—and one should nevertheless remember that his library gives only a partial cross-section of the tireless work that he conducted for decades in the British Museum in London—as well as his comments in relation to these, constitute a precious resource for the reconstruction of his research. It also helps to refute the false hagiographical Marxist-Leninist interpretation that has often represented his thought as the fruit of a sudden lightning strike and not, as it was in reality, as an elaboration full of theoretical elements derived from predecessors and contemporaries.

What in your opinion is the contribution of Engels for shaping and developing Marxism?

After Marx’s death in 1883, Friedrich Engels was the first to dedicate himself to the very difficult task —due to the dispersion of the material, obscurity of language and the illegibility of the handwriting—of editing his friend’s legacy. His work concentrated on reconstruction and selection from the original materials, on the publication of unedited or incomplete texts and, at the same time, on the republication and translation of writings already known.

Even if there were exceptions, such as the case of Theses on Feuerbach, edited in 1888 as an appendix to his Ludwig Feuerbach and End of classical German philosophy, and Critique of the Gotha Programme, which came out in 1891, Engels focussed almost exclusively on the editorial work for the completion of Capital, of which only the first volume was published before Marx’s death. This undertaking, lasting more than a decade, was pursued with the explicit intention of realising “a connected and as far as possible complete work” (Preface to Capital, vol. II).

Previously, however, Engels had already directly contributed to a process of theoretical systematisation with his own writings. Appearing in 1879, Anti-Dühring, defined by Engels as the “more or less connected exposition of the dialectical method and of the communist world outlook championed by Marx and myself”, became a crucial point of reference in the formation of “Marxism” as a system and its differentiation from the eclectic socialism widespread at the time. Evolution of Socialism from Utopia to Science had even more importance: it was a re-elaboration, for the purposes of popularisation, of three chapters of the previous work, published for the first time in 1880, and enjoyed a success comparable to that of Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Even if there was a clear difference between this type of popularisation, undertaken in open polemic with the simplistic short-cuts of the encyclopaedic syntheses, and that adopted by the next generation of the German Social Democracy (SPD), Engels’ recourse to the natural sciences sometimes opened the way to the evolutionistic conception of social Darwinism which, soon after, in particular with Kautsky, would also be affirmed in the workers’ movement.

Having in mind the forthcoming 150th anniversary of Marx’s “Capital”, what is the contribution of Engels for the publication of Marx’s masterpiece?

Many of the latest philological insights of the new historical-critical edition highlight a peculiar feature of Marx’s work: incompleteness. Marx left many more manuscripts than printed writings. This was also the case of Capital, whose entire publication, including all the preparatory works from 1857 onwards, has been brought to its accomplishment in the second section of MEGA2 only in 2013.

After Marx’s death, Engels was the first to tackle the challenging enterprise—given the dispersion of the materials, the oddity of Marx’s language and the illegibility of his handwriting—of publishing the fragmentary Nachlaß of his friend. This series of difficulties is especially apparent in the third book of Capital, the only one to which Marx was unable, even roughly, to provide a definitive form. The intense editing activity on which Engels focussed his efforts in the period between 1885 and 1894 resulted in a transition from a very rough text, mainly comprising thoughts recorded in statu nascendi and preliminary notes, to an organic text.

If we, for example, consider Capital vol. III, Engels had to make determinative editorial decisions. The most recent philological acquisitions estimate that Engels’ editorial interventions in this text amount to circa 5,000, a quantity much greater than that which had been assumed up until now. The modifications consist in additions and cancellations of passages in the text, modifications of its structure, insertion of titles of paragraphs, substitutions of concepts, re-elaborations of some formulations of Marx, or translations of words adopted from other languages. The text given to the printers only emerged at the end of this work.

Marx’s manuscripts of Capital recently published by MEGA2 depict, with unequivocal exactitude, the course traversed by them up to their published version and, throwing into sharp relief the number of interventions in the text—far greater than had till now been hypothesised; they allow us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Engels in his role as editor.

MISINTERPRETING MARX

But you have also blamed some Marxists for misinterpreting Marx. Is that correct?

Marx’s thought, indisputably critical and open, fell foul of the cultural climate in Europe at the end of the 19th century. As never before, it was a culture pervaded by the popularity of systematic conceptions—above all by Darwinism. In order to respond to it, the newly born Marxism, which had precociously become an orthodoxy in the pages of the review Die Neue Zeit under Kautsky’s editorship, rapidly conformed to this model.

A schematic doctrine took shape, an elementary evolutionistic interpretation soaked in economic determinism: the Marxism of the period of the Second International (1889–1914). Guided by a firm though naive conviction of the automatic forward progress of history, and therefore of the inevitable replacement of capitalism by socialism, it demonstrated itself to be incapable of comprehending actual developments, and, breaking the necessary link with revolutionary praxis, it produced a sort of fatalistic quietism that promoted stability for the existing order.

The theory of crisis [Zusammenbruchstheorie] or the thesis of the impending end of bourgeois-capitalist society, which found its most favourable expression in the economic crisis of the great depression unfolding during the 20 years after 1873, was proclaimed as the fundamental essence of scientific socialism. Marx’s affirmations, aiming at the delineation of the dynamic principles of capitalism and, more generally, at describing the tendencies of development within them, were transformed into universally valid historical laws from which it was possible to deduce the course of events, even particular details.

The idea of a contradictory agonised capitalism, autonomously destined to break down, was also present in the theoretical framework of the first entirely “Marxist” platform of a political party, The Erfurt Programme of 1891 and in Kautsky’s commentary, which announced how “inexorable economic development leads to the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production with the necessity of a law of nature. The creation of a new form of society in place of the current one is no longer something merely desirable but has become inevitable.” It was the clearest and most significant representation of the intrinsic limits of the conception of the time, as well as of its vast distance from the man who had been its inspiration.

Even Eduard Bernstein, who conceived of socialism as possibility and not as inevitability and hence signalled a discontinuity with the interpretations that were dominant in that period, read Marx in an equally artificial way, which didn’t differ at all from other readings of the time, and contributed to the diffusion of an image of him, by means of the wide resonance of the Bernstein-Debatte, that was equally false and instrumental.

In your writings, you have extended your critique also to Soviet Union and Russian Marxism. Is that true?

Russian Marxism, which in the course of the 20th century played a fundamental role in the popularisation of Marx’s thought, followed this trajectory of systematisation and vulgarisation with even greater rigidity.

Indeed, for its most important pioneer, Georgii Plekhanov, “Marxism is a complete conception of the world”, imbued with a simplistic monism on the base of which the superstructural transformations of society proceed simultaneously with economic modifications. Despite the harsh ideological conflicts of these years, many of the theoretical elements characteristic of the Second International were carried over into those that would mark the cultural matrix of the Third International. This continuity was clearly manifest in Theory of Historical Materialism published in 1921 by Nikolai Bukharin, according to which “in nature and society there is a definite regularity, a fixed natural law. The determination of this natural law is the first task of science.” The outcome of this social determinism, completely concentrated on the development of the productive forces, generated a doctrine according to which “the multiplicity of causes that make their action felt in society does not contradict in the least the existence of a single law of social evolution”.

With the construal of Marxism-Leninism, the process of corruption of Marx’s thought was given its most definitive manifestation. Deprived of its function as a guide to action, theory became its a posteriori justification. The point of no return was reached with ‘Diamat’ (Dialekticeskij materializm), “the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party”. J.V. Stalin’s booklet of 1938, On Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, which had a wide distribution, fixed the essential elements of this doctrine: the phenomena of collective life are regulated by “necessary laws of social development”, “perfectly recognisable”, and “the history of society appears as a necessary development of society, and the study of the history of society becomes a science”. That “means that the science of the history of society, despite all the complexity of the phenomena of social life, can become a science just as exact as, for example, biology, capable of utilising the laws of development of society in order to make use of them in practice” and that, consequently, the task of the party of the proletariat is to base its activity on these laws. It is evident how the misunderstanding of the concepts of the “scientific” and “science” reached its apex. The scientificity of Marx’s method, based on scrupulous and coherent theoretical criteria, was replaced by methodologies of the natural sciences in which contradiction was not involved. Finally, the superstition of the objectivity of historical laws, according to which these operate like laws of nature independently of men’s will, was affirmed.

Next to this ideological catechism, the most rigid and stringent dogmatism was able to find ample space. Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy imposed an inflexible monism that also produced perverse effects on the writings of Marx. Unquestionably, with the Russian revolution Marxism enjoyed a significant moment of expansion and circulation in geographical zones and social classes from which it had, until then, been excluded.

`Nevertheless, the circulation of the texts involved far more manuals of the party, handbooks and ‘Marxist’ anthologies on various arguments, than texts by Marx himself. Furthermore, while the censorship of some texts increased, others were dismembered and manipulated: for example, by practices of extrapolation into purposeful pointed assemblages of citations. The recourse to these was a result of preordained ends, and they were treated in the same way that the bandit Procrustes reserved for his victims: if they were too long, they were amputated, if too short, lengthened.

What are your conclusions, then?

In conclusion, the relation between the promulgation and the non-schematisation of thought, between its popularisation and the need not to impoverish it theoretically, is without doubt very difficult to realise, even more so the critical and deliberately non-systematic thought of Marx. At any rate, nothing worse could have happened to him.

Distorted by different perspectives into being a function of contingent political necessities, he was assimilated to these and reviled in their name. From being critical, his theory was utilised as Bible-like verses and out of these exegeses was born the most unthinkable paradox. Far from heeding his warning against “writing receipts […] for the cook-shops of the future”, he was transformed, instead, into the father of a new social system.

A very rigorous critic and never complacent with his conclusions, he became instead the source of the most obstinate doctrinarianism. A firm believer in a materialist conception of history, he was removed from his historical context more than any other author. From being certain that “the emancipation of the working class has to be the work of the workers themselves”, he was entrapped, on the contrary, in an ideology that saw the primacy of political avant-gardes and the party prevail in their role as proponents of class-consciousness and leaders of the revolution. An advocate of the idea that the fundamental condition for the maturation of human capacities was the reduction of the working day, he was assimilated to the productivist creed of Stakhanovism. Convinced of the need for the abolition of the state, he found himself identified with it as its bulwark. Interested like few other thinkers in the free development of the individuality of men, arguing against bourgeois right which hides social disparity behind mere legal equality, that “right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal”, he was accommodated into a conception that neutralised the richness of the collective dimension of social life into the indistinctness of homogenisation.

And what are your final thoughts about the usefulness of MEGA2 for a new generation of scholars of Marx?

Thanks to the important new publications of MEGA2, the Marx who emerges is in many respects different from the one presented by so many opponents and ostensible followers. It is not at all an “unknown Marx”, as some scholars argue exaggerating, but the stony-faced statue of Marx who pointed the way to the future with dogmatic certainty on the squares of Moscow and Beijing has given way to the image of a deeply self-critical thinker, who, feeling the need to devote energy to further study and checking of his own arguments, left a major part of his lifetime work unfinished.

Any future rigorous contribution to the research on Marx, in India as elsewhere in the world, will have to take into account the new textual acquisitions of MEGA2.

From them emerges the richness of a problematic and polymorphous thought and of a horizon whose distance Marx Forschung (the research on Marx) has still so many paths to travel.

Marcello Musto, Marxist Sociologist from Canada, gave a lecture on 23 rd February at Madras Institute of Development Studies on the political developments in Europe and the condition of leftist political parties.

Coming as it does, at a time of great crisis in Euro Zone and the generalized global recession, the talk was highly relevant. V. Geetha, feminist historian, introduced Marcello Musto and highlighted the important work that he has been carrying out in reviewing and re-interpreting history of Marxist thought from the more recent and hitherto unpublished works of Marx and Engles that are emerging into the academic world.

During his lecture Marcello Musto briefly traced the political scenario as it unfolded since 90s after the ‘Fall of Berlin Wall’, that effective marked the fall of soviet style communism in East Europe and led to greater integration of East Europe into the European Union. He described the left as becoming too defeatist and the disappearance of ideological barriers between centre left(social democrats) and centre right. As the social democrats succumbing to the right wing agenda, dismantled the welfare state that dominated governance in Europe, it has led to the steady erosion of middle class and increased unemployment especially in east Europe that has peaked at 35% of youth population. Other countries such as Greece have even gone higher with over 50% in youth unemployment. Even as European countries grapple with the extreme social costs of this trend, they have been forced to cut down on social sector spending by nearly half. Such policies have decimated the social democrats and allowed for right wing parties to take power. Even where centre left parties have come to power, they don’t have much to present in terms of alternatives to working class. But more importantly it points to the power of an undemocratic troika of institutions with EU, that seem to control national governments. The troika, comprising of the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF, have even forced governments to write these policies into their constitution, titling it as ‘Fiscal Compact’, binding limits to fiscal deficit which is meant to protect the value of their currency, the Euro.

In this condition, Marcello Musto discerned four critical trends in European politics. One a new left politics is coming back in many countries, that is more inward looking, more willing to network with ideologically similar parties and becoming the counter to the present dominant narrative. He also mentioned that in some parts, the radical left has to even place itself in social democratic footing that has been obliterated, in articulation of welfarist demands. But this period has also seen a steady growth of an attitude of ‘anti-politics’ among the people who feel that political parties and political ideas have little to offer in terms of tangible results and they should have more support for ‘technical’ governments. This anti politics culture is also giving rise to ‘populism’ where political leaders come up with populist ideas that is not based on rational or ideologies. He mentioned that it does mark a period of ‘end of ideologies’, where being ‘ideological’ is considered pejorative. The last and the most disturbing phenomenon has been the rise of the neo fascist tendency and related political parties across Europe. He mentioned that there is heightened xenophobia in Europe and a war on liberal culture. ‘Nationalism’ is trumping ‘welfarism’, and is seemingly on the rise in even Scandinavian countries that have been liberal bastions for long.

Discussing further about the possibilities of left politics, he mentioned the case of Syriza in Greece and Podemos of Spain, and said that the parties and the governments do not enjoy the same loyalty among their populace they used to have decades ago. In this situation, he said, an important dilemma for the European left, is the issue of maintaining the European Union. It has not emerged as the creature it was hoped to be and has rather become a centralized, undemocratic force that is pushing policies to the right and impoverishing populations, yet it has allowed for greater movement among the people and has bound them in new ways. He concluded with the question facing the left: So what should be the attitude of the left towards the Union and how are they to engage with it in the future?

The lecture brought out interesting dimensions of political developments in an important yet distant part of the world to the audience. It also pointed to some very interesting trends that resonate with our present condition, where we see the key features of a resurgent fundamentalist political force, the high pitched rhetoric of ‘nationalism’ drown out the concerns and issues of a wide range of people. As V Geetha pointed out, it also brings back the issue of ‘economic determinism’ in that, in spite of a very vibrant and diverse culture and politics, all of Europe is being driven into a direction determined by a handful of people, controlling a few financial institutions. It also raises difficult questions for the left in India, that has seen steady erosion of its base and a lack of inspirational agenda that can invigorate the working masses and draw them towards their ideas.

Newsclick interviewed Professor Marcello Musto who teaches Political Theory at the Department of Political Science of York University (Toronto) on the Left politics in Europe.

The discussion also revolved around The Post-1989 Radical Left in Europe, the results and prospects. On the emergence of the Left in Europe, professor Musto believes that, “at a continental level, a real alternative is conceivable only if a broad spectrum of political and social forces is capable of fighting for and achieving a European conference on the restructuring of public debt. This can happen only if the radical Left develops, with greater resolve and consistency, a variety of political campaigns and transnational mobilizations. These should begin with the rejection of war and xenophobia”.

Rough Transcript (Part I):

Gautam Navlakha (GN): Welcome to Newsclick. Today we have with us Professor of Sociological Theory at York University, Toronto, Canada but an Italian Professor Marcello Musto with us to talk to us about political developments in Europe especially with regard to the Left movement. Welcome Professor Marcello.

Marcelo Musto (MM): Thanks. It’s a pleasure being here with you.

GN: The first question I would like to pose to you is about the political scenario in Europe today. What do you think has dramatically taken place in Europe today.

MM: Well, I would like to start by explaining to people who are listening to us was that the political scenario today in Europe is dramatically changed compared. The idea of Europe that people were used to I don’t know 20 years ago, two decades ago for example. Just to make some examples, we at countries like Italy, France, like Spain, like Greece where there was a very strong polarization of the votes of the political participation thinking about forces like socialist parties and and popular party in Spain or the Socialist Party and New Democracy in in Greece or the Central Left and Centre Right in France, in Italy. So these two parties or sometimes these two coalitions occupied at least 2/3rd of the political scenario and they got at least sometimes more than 2/3rd of the votes

GN: Your are talking after the post second war?

MM: No, I am talking about the last two decades as I said. Then later we can examine the period before. I am talking about the end of the Soviet Union and new political scenario that started with it era. So the end of the Communist Parties. This bipolar organization of politics in this countries but you know we could say the same about Scandinavia where social democracy was very strong or United Kingdom eventhough there is Labour party but conservative and Labour party occupy the space. So the new phenomenon, I would like to start from this point that there are new forces that emerged intopolitical situation of the Europe today. In this new forms emerged in particular I would say after they became in particular after the beginning of the economic crisis where the crisis in United States in 2007 and 2008 arrived to Europe and then later perhaps we want to talk about the role the European Union have in this economic policy etc. So in order to go back to the first part of your question now, we have a political situation in this countries, the countries where there are no longer only two big parties but there are new forces. In these forces in some countries are new moments that did not exists before, make the example of the five star movements for example political party in my country. The first time there they went to the election they became immediately the first party of the country which is something unbelievable to conceive even ten years ago because Italy has this long tradition of the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party, as I told you they had more than 30% of the vote. It has been time this after the end of the world war two. I could make examples like countries like in Spain, National Front in Spain or the famous case of Syriza in Greece. So in order to overview this situation and complete my answer I would say that there are new different forces that emerge in the past years and that collapsed a little bit the political system that exist before. Now, it is now longer Centre Left and Centre Right but sometimes, there are new parties, new political formations. Sometimes Radical Left, sometimes far Right movement, Noe-fascist movement sometimes, some other time populist new demagogic movement for example the case of UK in England they already existed before but they became stronger in the past years and they were the first party in the European elections in 2004. So these new forces created a new political scenario that I want to repeat this again that it was unconceivable a few years ago.

GN: What do you believe is the reason for this collapse of this bi-partisan dominated politics. Or let me put it, add also, this is indicative of also crisis of the ruling classes.

MM: Let’s start with the first part of the question. What created this? First of all the crisis in 2008, they started in 2008 and later became even more complicated in particular for many countries of Southern Europe. Now, there is a debt issue that is very strong and very well known. I am not going into this now. But there is an economic situation now I better give some numbers, sometimes it is boring but I think people should think about this. We have a rate of unemployment in countries like in Greece and Spain that reached one quarter of the population. We have a rate of unemployment in countries like Italy, Portugal or France between 12%-17%, 11% so we have an incredible dramatic phenomenon of more than one million young people between 18 and 29 years old leaving Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece. From these four countries, in case of Portugal, we know there are at least 400,000 young people between 18 and 29 that left the country after 2008. I am talking about small country like Portugal I am talking 400,000 people is huge part of the population. Where did they go. They go in Germany, in England, sometimes when they have very strong qualification they went to get a job outside. This is also a case for Italy you know all this people who became important Professor or working as Doctor, they found the resources to do this and on the other course of Atlantic, North America of course. So you have a very dramatic change in particular a change for the new generation. I would like to stress this sbecause this new generation for the first time after world war 2, they live in worst condition. They have to work now 7 days a week when they get a job when they are likely to get a job. They take 2-3 different jobs so precarious jobs, flexibility is everywhere. No talking about dramatic situation which is the attack to social welfare because in the past 20 years, not only in the past 7-8 years after the crisis but in the past 20 years, the European models has been attacked has been changed dramatically in many places, including in Scandinavia where you know, the flag of social welfare. So there is a dramatic economic change in this situation has generated issues in the society and also the need for new responses. But I would say that the more important reason for the political changes that we have discussed so far is that the fact that these two alliances, these two poles the Centre Right and the Centre Left they have been following more or less the same kind of economic policies. So I don’t want to say Liberals and Socialists are the same. I don’t like to say that the all decades in the night are black. NO. want to be very careful with this. But we can really say that in the past years the policies of the Centre Left became extremely Liberal and they followed all the things that they were fighting 20-25 year ago. I want to contextualize this giving some references for our audience. I am talking about Tony Blair and the Ted in the Labour Party. I am talking about Shrodum in Germany, I am talking about radical changes that destroyed the last presence of social democracy in this part. Perhaps, the only exception to this is —- — in France with plural Left but also in this case they were defeated, the form of 35 hours work in one week. So in this period, the Centre and Left is doing the same politics of conservative or Christian Democratic Party. The policies that are imposed by the European Union from the so called Troika and there are no differences. I mean why should I vote for the socialist party, the Centre Left if actually there are those who follows more the policies of Liberal. Let me say something about if I may about the Eastern Europe because Eastern Europe generally is not considered in the debates about Europe. We are talking about many millions of people. Look at the case of Hungary for example or Poland where the socialist parties introduced this austerity policies against the social welfare and these policies generated the social disaster that happened in the past years. And today, what do you have in these countries. You have a fascist government in Hungary. You have an extremely conservative Right wing, far Right wing government in Poland. By the way first time the parties taking the full majority at the election after 1989 after the end of the so called actually existing socialism and of course there is no way for the Left to open a discourse to have credibility with the workers with the which Europe is facing now.

GN: I think this is a good point to come to an issue which you have dealt with extensively in your writings which is what and how was Left impacted in Europe by the collapse of the Soviet socialism in 1989 and what has been the political trajectory of the Left since then. I think it would be very interesting for our viewers to know that.

MM: Yes, it is a big topic this one only for interview, I will try to give some references. In 1989, there is an epic change, there is a serious change in European policy of course at the end of the Soviet Union, the end of so called socialist regimes of the eastern European countries including German Democratic Republic and it is the end of the Communist parties. The big Communist parties were so strong, so important in political life of countries like Italy, France, historically, the Communist party was around one fifth of votes of the electoral body. So after this period, after this change the majority of this parties you know some of them already started to take some distances from Soviet Union with Euro Communism which was a moderate, a reformist project started in Italy with —–later followed by ———-Spain etc. so the majority of these political forces they joined the social democratic family and they went into this group today called a group of this Socialist and Democrat which is you know in European parliament the group were historically you find the parties like Socialists in France, German social democratic party etc. In Italy, this is the case. The majority of the CPI of the Communist Party, they changed names, they founded new parties, the Democratic Left Party which later became the Democratic Left because when people want to distance themselves political organisations and then this Democratic Left became later the Democratic Party following this idea of Clinton of United States. This is what happened with Romano Pradi in Italy the same time the Blair was doing the new Labour Party. So there is a very strong difference with the Communist Party. A difference not only in terms of social policies but I am thinking about another Dramatic event that we have to consider when we talk about Europe today. The fact that this party participated to the war in Yugoslavia in 1998. The Prime Minister in Italy gave Italian bases to attack former Yugoslavian country was the former leader of the Communist Party and I am thinking about the participation in Afghanistan, participation in Iraq we should see some parties were in favour, some were in favour but there is a big change. So only one this small part of the old Communist parties remain try to reorganize in a very difficult times because these are times where no-liberalism is a mantra, the famous sentence of Margaret Thatcher there is no alternative. In this dramatic scenario, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in Portugal, in Germany later to there is a sort of attempt to reorganize the Left. Sometimes this attempt has been positive and this partIes achieved 8 to 10 percent, 7-10 percent of the votes. Sometimes it is very difficult to open a discourse, to open a space for the Left in these countries because I am also talking about a Labour movement that is changing and most of them talking about unions are no longer representatives of this millions of workers it was in the past, in the 60s, in the 70s the golden age for the Left in Europe and I am also talking about of the difficulties for social movements to reorganize in this new complex political scenario. So these are some changes that happened immediately after the fall of Berlin wall in 1989.

Rough Transcript (Part II)

Gautam Navlakha (GN): You mentioned also both the Socialists and as well as Communists suffered enormously as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Socialism and they were also increasingly they moved Socialists more than the elements from the Communist Party moveowards accepting or adjusting cohabiting with neo-liberalism. Simultaneously you also pointed out that post the crisis 2007-2008 there is another phase of Left consolidation that has come about. Would you take us through that?

Marcello Musto (MM): The first point is very interesting for me. I tried to repeat as much as I can. So if you look at the Communist Party of 1989 of course, they were destroyed sometimes they were taken out of political scenario and in some cases, the beginning of the 90s, the Social Democratic forces they gained more strength because some part of the Communist Parties they joined this political spectrum, this political parties. But later and you can see this very clearly in what happened in the past years this socialist party also suffered a lot as you said by neo-liberalism because in the end by accepting in folds sometimes these policies, this sometimes the ruling classes because you asked me about this they also tried to use this Centre Left government because they knew that one thing is doing what they call reform but actually we are talking about counter reforms social life and social welfare in Europe. One thing is you do this with the Right Wing government think about Belusconi in Italy Adnar in Spain or Chirac Sarkozi in France. One other thing is this reform which I call counter reforms are organised by Centre Left government with strong ties with trade unions. So this is sometimes, the better way, softer way to introduce almost all the demands of the ruling classes. But without general strikes, without too many conflicts in the society this is what happened. But as a result of this later, there was a lack of confidence in Socialist Party or Social Democracy as I said in the beginning of our conversation. If you look at the map of Europe today, you will find no longer socialist parties in Easter European countries you will find a dramatic change in Scandinavia in the North of Europe where the Social Democratic Parties were in power for 50-60-70 years and has been at ithe opposition of Right wing, very conservative government in the past ten years, this is also a very big change. This is also a very significant change. Even in Scandinavia, even in countries like Sweden for example, there is a big change and it is also through in Europe, it is also through when you look at the crisis of Socialist Party in Greece completely disappeared if you look at the crisis of the socialist party in Spain where they lost a big part of their electorate. If you look at all the countries, you look at the ridiculous change made by the German Democratic Socialist Party this is now Merkel party you could not see any differences. So even if you compare this with the time of Gerhard Schröder who was in power for 7 years – 8 years, there is a dramatic change and in the end following this neo-liberal policies in my opinion is been a big mistake and then reason for the political defeat of Socialist Party. Now I guess you want me to bring back me to the other part of the question, the one about Radical Left. So what particular you want me to?

GN: Given the setback suffered by Left in 1989 given that they remain marginalized for so many years or decades or more how has the radical Left tried to re-emerged from the ruins left behind with the collapse of Soviet Socialism and what are the various alternatives that are being tried out?

MM: So that’s a complicated question. I will try to be short. I will try to answer this question in two different point of views.

GH: May I interrupt. The reason I am posing this question is because of a very interesting reference you have been in your writings what you call the plural model. So I like you to come to that by tracking the history of this development in order to realize it’s significance today.

MM: I will. This is the second point I would like to touch the organizational questions of the radical Left in Europe. But before going to this point, I have to mention the another one a small political, which is related to the attempt of this party something about re- foundation of Communist Party, Italy, I am talking about the PCF, the French Communist Party. In France I am talking about either Left in Spain, in the 90s between the second part of the 90s and the beginning of the millennium they all supported, sometimes with the presence of the mainstream government, sometimes just supporting the measures of the laws in parliament they all supported Central Left government. And this Central Left government were not government was not the government that were doing progressive political reforms I am talking about this kind of socialism of social democracy following the neo-liberal agenda in the 90s. So in the end, this participation in thisgovernment, this support to the government has attacked the credibility of these forces. And if you look at the result of these parties after they supported the Centre Left government you will see dramatic defeats in the case as well. You will see party like Refoud…. in Italy fore example they had 8.5% of the vote or the Communists in Spain but after the support to the government, the situation changed dramatically and still today in some countries, the case of Italy, the country where I was born for example, the Left is still trying to recover this support and this new complicated political scenario that I tried to describe in the beginning of our conversation. Now, in these circumstances I would say that the model that I started with Spain or Portugal if you want which is this plural model now the idea that the Communist Party will try to join or merge with other organizations of the Left sometimes in one unique political organization one party. Sometimes leaving their parties their existences, their independence but going together to the elections and having sort of annual assembly where political project is debated, discussed etc. this model that started in this period with the end of the Soviet Union experience is now was the dominant model. If you look at the country per country, the situation of the radical Left today you will find besides some exceptions like the Communists Party in Portugal or the Stalinist Conservatives I would say Communist Party in Greece, you will find country per country new formations, new alliances of the radical Left that bring together the different forces that existed at the time. The example is —Portugal which is now the third political force of Portugal more than 10% of the vote. The example is the Left Front in France which is now in crisis again but was very strong a few years ago. The example is Syriza in Greece and many many other. In every country, in every European country literally now you would see this attempt to merge together the forces of the radical Left. Sometimes with Trotsky’s background, sometimes background related to the classical Communists Parties of the 20th Century. Sometimes also new social movements that brings new contradictions like all the ecological movements that no longer trusts in Green Parties because this Green Parties later said Centre Left or Centre Right is the same and they established alliances, they supported conservative governments which has nothing to do with ecological policies etc. so you see this conglomeration of forces, in the case of Syriza is the most famous one. I believe this is the trend that we can take for dominant trend for the coming years. So the plural Left as you said.

GN: Does this mean the monolithic structure of the parties earlier have now given a way to more democratic organizational form which also addresses the issues as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Socialism.

MM: This definitely means that the model that we know, the democratic centralism, the model of the Communist Party of 20th Century is no longer the reference for the radical Left in the radical Left in Europe. But the question of more democracy, more participation is not an easy question to answer. And I also don’t believe that this essential question can be addressed merrily in the political parties because the first need for the Left today not only the Radical Left, I would say the same for Social Democratic and Socialist Party is to change this model, to sweep this tendency of non participation of anti-politics. Things that I also mentioned little bit before. The first problem today is this sentiment of feeling of being against politics. Politics is the same, there are no differences Left and Right there is no distinction. This is very strong in the many the new populist forces that are becoming so strong, so significant in Europe. As well as the Radical, the Far Right forces. So this is the first question. Then, if this model is going to bring more participation. I don’t know take for example the case of Syriza. Syriza being a not capable to debate to discuss the things that happened this summer, the dramatic things that happened in the conflict with the European Union, the crisis of June-July not even in their party merging outside with Social Movements and all those protests that characterized the countries in the past years. So I look in a positive way this change this pluralistic model but I don’t believe that like many parties and movements say today. There are many, take for example the case of Pirots party in Sweden and Germany that there is this participation of people using the web, you do one click when you add it on and this is the real democracy. To be sincere, to be someone that know little bit history of labour movement , well, having a political party, having an organisation where millions of people used to meet used to discuss, used to decide together is something that Utopian today for this kind of political groups and parties, because we are talking about a different era, we are talking about at least 3 decades of passive revolution of Antonio Gramsci and I will not say I will answer in a negative way. that there is more participation, there is more democracy than 20-30 years ago. But this way, the plural model in my opinion is the only possible way to merge this forces and all these forces not fighting each other but trying to develop an agenda participation of social conflict which is the thing that we need most. So if I may answer this question it is important to have a plural model, to have this wide participation of many forces as possible. But this question is once again political programme of the party is once again the direction this party want sto go is once again the question the democratic force, the democratic model that see the participation of thousand and thousands of human beings in this organization and then hopefully, millions of people in their country. The question is how we reorganize again, how we rethink again an alternative model for Capitalism. So the discrimination point of this parties of this formations of this alliances should be anti capitalism. Should be a very long complicated part that radical Left has to rebuild again

GN: Marcello, before conclude this just want to take you to link up your answer right now, in view of your fact that you also mentioned that the rising absenteeism from people participation in election to as you mentioned, people’s reluctance, I mean popular perception is that all politics is same to neon-populist movement and particularly the right of far right and neon-fascist movement in Europe. What lessons has the Left both for the collapse of Soviet Socialism as well as the mistakes which they committed post that period till economic crisis of 2008 and have they understood the significance of that?

MM: This is a very dangerous question because we could talk about this for hours. I will just try to say that the far right parties, the far right movements, ideologies are those who have taken more advantage of the crisis of 2008. if you look at the political scenario in Europe today I have already mentioned about this little bit in Eastern Europe. But we mentioned the case of National Front in France, the first party at the recent general election and the recent municipal election something unconceivable three years ago. Let me take again the example of Scandinavia where you have neon-fascist movement. Sometimes, it is very important to see because the name of this party have nothing to do with this. We have a party, in Sweden the name if Democratic Party but this is an organization founded by neon-Nazi movement that couple of decades ago that became strong today, now if you look at Norway, if you look at Finland, if you look at Denmark, this party are the second or the third party in the country sometimes more than 20% of the vote. Sometimes being in the government. So it is the clear example of the how much the far right has gained in the past years. But, also going on little bit beyond the analysis of the political parties which is the core, the focus of the interview today. But also if you look at the changes and the consciousness of the European population look at this dramatic evidence and the response that the people have given to the crisis of the refugees or the crisis of people who migrated from other countries, from middle east from Africa. So there is a very strong perception of racism in European society because of course this is coming at the time of this dramatic economic crisis and changes I tried to describe in the first part of our conversation, so this is something that we have to keep in mind and it is something very dangerous we have to see where it is going in the next years. The other part of your question..

GN: My point is that obviously, where they have been able to capitalize on the fall out of the crisis in Europe, the far Right. The Left, whey is it they have not been able to capitalize the anti-capitalist politics which they pursues which is also very necessary because this is also a point that you have made repeatedly in your writings, that compromises that the socialists and the Left made giving in to the capitalist on the one hand and neon-liberals on the other.

MM: Well, in my opinion perhaps I said too quickly because this result of the of 1991 or 1989 this was the victory of the Capitalism over socialism. Even-though this so called socialist model in my opinion has very little to do with the Soviet Union and regimes of the Eastern Europe. This was exactly the victory over socialist, over labor movement. So these forces were literally in a corner at the beginning of the 90s and these years with this new different scenarios not only political, I mention for example the trade union, there is also a lack of confidence in the trade unions but there is also a form of labor that is dramatically to change as you know very well. So it is complicated for the Left to rethink, to reorganize, to rebuild because sometimes you also have to respond to this complicated questions try to avoid that these counter reforms in the society will hit even more the working class or the poorest strata of the population. So you think, whether or not it is possible to achieve something in this coalition with the Centre Left which is perhaps what some political parties try to do in the 90s but there was no way that they got something significant and to the contrary, they were forced to support some of the measures they were opposing, they were strongly opposing before. So it has been a very complicated part, very difficult part and the other things to consider is that all this is happening under this big umbrella of the European Union, this Umbrella, this oppressive that does not allow country to break these impositions of the Troika. So it is a very difficult time and the next year would be difficult as well.

GN: Thank you Marcello. It was really pleasure and Thank you for this.

MM: Thank you for the invitation and I hope I will be back soon.

Mr Musto is the author of the first English-language anthology on the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), Workers Unite!

Academician Marcello Musto interacts with CPI leader D. Pandiyan at an event to launch a book on the history and tradition of international labour unions on Tuesday.

Chennai : Marcello Musto, a Marx scholar and an assistant professor of sociology at York University in Toronto, on Tuesday said that there is a renewed interest in reading Karl Marx across the globe after Capitalism crisis in 2008.

“There is a strong revival for ideas of Karl Marx. There is again a strong necessity to revisiting socialism and communist theories. The death of Karl Marx was declared after the fall of Berlin wall in 1989. After 2008, there is once again revival of Marx. Of course this revival is not political revival. Left is still weak in many parts of the world. This revival is opening again the space for us to rethink socialism,” said Mr Musto said

Mr Musto is the author of the first English-language anthology on the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later. It contains 80 documents and resolutions from the period of the two decades the International was active.

Speaking at a function here to mark the release of Tamil translation of his book by S.V. Rajadurai, he dispelled many myths surrounding the IWMA, better known as the First International and role of Karl Marx. The First International, the first steps of the autonomous organization of the workers in world, was commonly believed to be founded by Marx but it was not so, he said, adding that Marx was not even among the organizers of the meeting that took place at St Martin’s Hall on September 28, 1864. “On that occasion, he sat “in a non-speaking capacity on the platform,” as he recalled in a letter to his friend Engels,” he noted.

Writer S.V. Rajadurai said that book release function helped fulfil his wish to see all the communist parties coming together in a same platform. Senior CPI leader D. Pandian, CPI (M) and CPI state secretary G. Ramakrishnan and R. Mutharasan and CPI (ML) leaders also spoke.

The International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), nowadays better known as the First International, was founded in London in September 1864. Despite the importance of the event, there has not been much attention to its 150th anniversary.

To an extent, this reflects the situation of the present day, with the hegemony of neoliberal politics and, conversely, the weakness of the left, that does not seem to be interested in its own history and the lessons that might be extracted from past experiences.

Luckily, there are exceptions. Marcello Musto, an assistant professor of sociology at York University in Toronto, has contributed to two important presentations of the experience of the First International. Besides the book The International after 150 Years: Labour Versus Capital, Then and Now (Routledge, 2015), which has also been published as a special issue of Socialism and Democracy, he has also edited the first English-language anthology on the IWMA, Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury, 2014), which was published simultaneously in Portuguese and Italian. It contains eighty documents and resolutions from the period of the two decades the International was active. Many of these texts are drafted by workers themselves collectively. Less than half of them are written by Marx or Engels, but they, too, are based on discussions of the General Council of the International. By presenting these original documents, the book provides a fascinating introduction to the first steps of the autonomous organization of the workers: what it was like and what kind of learning processes they went through. The experiences of the First International are again relevant in the present epoch of globalization, which resembles the last decades of the nineteenth century, also characterized by hectic growth of the world market.

Vesa Oittinen (VO): You are known as a Marx scholar. But now you have published, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary, a book about the International, where Marx seems to play, if not a walk-on, only minor role. The book you have edited consists of documents, addresses, and resolutions that have been drawn up collectively and published in the name of the entire body of the International or by different work­er’s organizations. So the International was not a “creation of Marx,” as is often said?

Marcello Musto (MM): No, contrary to one of the myths of Marxism-Leninism, the International Working Men’s Association (from now on, the “International”) was not a “creation of Marx.” Contrary to later fantasies that pictured Marx as the founder of the International, he was not even among the organizers of the meeting that took place at St. Martin’s Hall on September 28, 1864. On that occasion, he sat “in a non-speaking capacity on the platform,” as he recalled in a letter to his friend Engels.

The International was much more than a “creation” of a single indi­vidual—even though this individual was Karl Marx. It was a vast social and political movement for the emancipation of the working classes. And a movement whose fundamental rule (and distinction with previ­ous organizations) was—and we should never forget this point—“that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”

But I have argued that Marx played a minor role only with the foun­dation of the International, not for the whole life of the organization! Marx immediately grasped the potential in the now famous event of St. Martin’s Hall and worked hard to ensure that the new organization successfully carried out its mission. Thanks to the prestige attached to his name—but, again, at the time only in restricted circles (the rep­resentation of Marx as a god is something that was created decades later)—he was appointed to the thirty-four-member standing commit­tee, where he soon gained sufficient trust to be given the task of writing the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Statutes of the International. In these fundamental texts, as in many others that followed, Marx drew on the best ideas of the various components of the International, while at the same time eliminating corporate inclinations and sectarian tones. He firmly linked economic and political struggle to each other, and made international thinking and international action an irreversible choice.

VO: To uphold a unity between so different elements must have been quite a task?

MM: Yes, I want to be clear on this issue. The maintenance of unity was grueling at times, especially as Marx’s anti-capitalism was never the dominant political position within the organization (until 1868— once again despite the myth that has surrounded this organization for decades); the majority of the components of the International were quite moderate.

To secure cohabitation of all the ideological tendencies and political currents that existed in the organization at the time, around a pro­gram so distant from the approaches with which each had started out, was Marx’s great accomplishment. His political talents enabled him to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, ensuring that the International did not swiftly follow the many previous workers’ associations down the path to oblivion. It was Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International, and Marx too who achieved a non-exclusionary, yet firmly class-based, political program that won it a mass character beyond all sectarianism.

The political soul of its General Council was always Marx: he drafted all its main resolutions and prepared all its congress reports. He was “the right man in the right place,” as the German member of the IWMA’s General Council, Johann Georg Eccarius, once put it.

In my Introduction to the volume, I stressed that it was mainly thanks to Marx’s capacities that the International developed its function of political synthesis, unifying the various national contexts in a project of common struggle. But the International was, first of all, the workers’ mobilizations in that period, not the “creation of a philosopher.”

Beside the fundamental contribution of Marx, who changed the initial moderate political strategy of the organization into a coherent anti-cap­italist platform, the achievements of the IWMA mirrored those of the labor movement of the time. The IWMA should not be considered as the arithmetic sum of the various sectarian groups, fighting each other to impose their ideas in the organization (although this was sometimes true, if we look at the story of the congresses). Workers’ struggles played a big role in the definition of the political program of the IWMA, the basic condition of which was to preserve its internal equilibrium.

I’ll give some examples. Some significant components of the IWMA (the majority of the French and the founders of the German Social Democratic Party) were, at the beginning, against the strike as a weapon of struggle. But, from late 1866 on, strikes intensified in many European countries, and their proliferation and positive results for workers convinced all the tendencies of the IWMA of the fact that strikes were a fundamental instrument of struggle. The contribution of real-life men and women, who brought capitalist production to a halt to demand their rights and social justice, shifted the balance of forces in the International and, more significantly, in society as a whole. A similar example could be made regarding the participation of the labor movement in politics. Many tendencies of the IWMA were opposed to that possibility, arguing that workers should only fight for socio­economic improvements (and not in the political arena). Surely Marx contributed to that big step, but it was thanks to the Paris Commune that the IWMA, first, and the labor movement, more generally, realized that they had to create durable and well-organized forms of political association, in order to better fight against capitalism. From these two examples, it can be seen that some of the important political turning points of the IWMA were the result of concrete mobi­lizations of workers, more than purely ideological battles among the various tendencies of the organization.

VO: So Marx had, after all, a strong impact on the International? And do you see any influence of Marx’s practical work in the International and amongst the workers in his theoretical work? He was, after all, simultaneously putting his hand on Capital, whose first volume was published in 1867.

MM: Absolutely! But I believe we can say that also the International had a very positive impact on Marx, not only Marx on the International. Between 1864 and 1872, being completely and directly involved in work­ers’ struggles, Marx was stimulated to develop and sometimes revise his ideas, to put old certainties up for discussion and ask himself new ques­tions, and in particular to sharpen his critique of capitalism by drawing the broad outlines of a communist society. The orthodox Soviet view of Marx’s role in the International, according to which he mechanically applied to the stage of history a political theory he had already forged in the confines of his study, is thus totally divorced from reality.

This is my position. I don’t see any contradictions between consider­ing the International for what it was (a big organization to which more than 150,000 workers were affiliated) and giving credit to Marx. On the contrary, in my opinion, among other things, this is the position that also gives more justice to Marx’s intelligence.

VO: Might one thus say that the International was a “collective intel­lectual” in the sense of Gramsci?

MM: We can definitely use this expression. Gramsci’s conception of “collective intellectual” is strictly related to the twentieth-century political party. But the International is an excellent example of the bond and political connection between masses and leading members (in its case, the General Council), or, in Gramsci’s terms, of compartecipazione attiva e consapevole (active and conscious sharing). We must, however, remain clear that this link was weak much of the time, for the instable and volatile organization that workers had at the time.

VO: However, the First International existed for a relatively short span of time, from 1864 to 1877. Was it thus a failure? The prevalent view is that the IWMA broke down because of insoluble contradictions between different currents and nationalities.

MM: The end of the International was surely accelerated by politi­cal conflicts and also some personal issues among its leaders. But it would be a very idealistic way of writing history, if one would argue that the crisis of the International was due to the clash between Marx and Bakunin. Rather, it was the changes taking place in the world around it that rendered the International obsolete. The growth and transformation of the organizations of the workers’ movement, the strengthening of the nation-state as a result of Italian and German uni­fication, the expansion of the International in countries like Spain and Italy (where the economic and social conditions were very different from those in Britain or France), the repression following the Paris Commune: all these factors together made the original configuration of the International inappropriate to the new times.

Moreover, to respond to the first part of your question, it was not at all a failure. On the contrary, even though the International lasted for only few years, thanks to its activity workers were able to: (1) gain a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of pro­duction; (2) become more aware of their own strength; and (3) develop new and more advanced forms of struggle for their rights and interests. I think that its revolutionary message proved extraordinarily fertile, pro­ducing results over time much greater than those achieved during its existence—that’s why the actual length of its life does not really matter.

Another point to keep in mind is that, despite all the difficulties bound up with a diversity of nationalities, languages, and political cultures, the International managed to achieve unity and coordination across a wide range of organizations and spontaneous struggles. Its greatest merit was to demonstrate the crucial importance of class solidarity and international cooperation.

The International helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labor could not be won in a single country but was a global objective. It also spread an awareness in their ranks that they had to achieve the goal themselves, through their own capacity for organization, rather than by delegating it to some other force; and that—here Marx’s theoretical con­tribution was fundamental—it was essential to overcome the limits of the capitalist system itself, since improvements within it, though neces­sary to pursue, would never eliminate exploitation and social injustice. I wish we could have something similar today! But, of course, it is not merely a question of political organization.

VO: In writing down his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx pointed to the experience of the International and could state that the program of the German Social Democrats was in some respects a step back from the level already reached by the International. The German socialists were heavily influenced by Lassalle, but his ideas do not seem to have had much influence on the International.

MM: Yes, it is true. In the end, the program of the International was coherently anti-capitalist, while the Gotha program of 1875 was a con­fused mix of Lassalleanism and the limited Marxism of Liebknecht. But there is much more to say about the role played (or perhaps better to say “non-played”) by German social democrats in the International.

The General Association of German Workers, the first workers’ party in history, was founded in 1863 and led by Lassalle’s disciple Johann Baptist von Schweitzer; it never affiliated to the International but orbited around it, was hostile to trade unionism, and conceived of political action in rigidly national terms. It 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; this indiffer­ence was shared by Wilhelm Liebknecht, who led the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, despite his political proximity to Marx.

Despite the existence of two political organizations of the workers’ movement, 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. But the picture changed somewhat after 1868, as the fame and successes of the International multiplied across Europe. From that point on, both of the rival parties aspired to represent its German wing. In the struggle against the Lassalleans, Liebknecht tried to play on the closeness of his organization to Marx’s positions, but the affiliation of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany to the International was more formal (or “purely platonic,” as Engels put it) than real, with a minimal material and ideological commitment. Of the 10,000 or so members registered within a year of its foundation, only a few hundred joined the International on an individual basis (a procedure allowed under the Prussian Combination Laws). The weak internationalism of the Germans therefore weighed more heavily than any legal aspects, and it declined still further in the second half of 1870 as the movement became more preoccupied with internal matters.

VO: And what about Bakunin? It has been said that Marx and Engels tried to impose authoritarian ideas on the organization of the International. You seem, however, to evaluate Bakunin’s role more positively than the received Marxist-Leninist historiography used to do.

MM: That is anarchist propaganda. If there was an authoritarian cul­ture in the International it was that of Bakunin. Marx and Engels, or other leaders of the International (including Bakunin, of course) tried to make their ideas hegemonic. But there is nothing strange with that. After the Paris Commune, for example, Marx wanted to create dura­ble and well-organized forms of political association in every country where the International existed because he believed that the struggle should have expanded from the economic sphere to the political sphere (the conquest of power in order to better fight capitalism), not—obvi­ously—because he was an authoritarian!

At the same time, one cannot say that Bakunin was not a socialist. Although he had in common with Proudhon an intransigent opposi­tion to any form of political authority, especially in the direct form of the state, it would be quite wrong to tar him with the same brush as Proudhonian mutualists. Whereas the latter had in effect abstained from all political activity, which weighed heavily on the early years of the International, the autonomists fought for “a politics of social revo­lution, the destruction of bourgeois politics and the state.” It should be recognized that they were among the revolutionary components of the International, and that they offered an interesting critical contribution on the questions of political power, the State, and bureaucracy.

VO: The age when the International was active, was also an era of glo­balization on a scale not previously experienced. Today, we live in an analogous era, with ever-accelerating globalization processes, but we do not have an International. Do you think such an organization is again needed, or are there other ways and possibilities for resistance to capital?

MM: The 150th anniversary of the International, on the contrary, takes place in a very different context. The world of labor has suffered an epochal defeat and is in the midst of a deep crisis. After a long period of neoliberal policies almost everywhere in the world, the system against which workers fought, and had won important victories, has returned to become more exploitative. Decades of assault on the rights of workers have compelled labor organizations to seek new ways forward, to discover avenues of collaboration and solidarity that can again make gains against the enormous power of globalized capital. As before, workers must dis­cover how to turn the power of their numbers and commitment into a force that will realize for them substantial social and economic benefits. The lessons of the International can help to reverse the trend, although the political forms of organization has to be partly reinvented, as we cannot imagine to reproduce a scheme used 150 years ago. Major political and economic shifts have succeeded one another over the past twenty-five years: the collapse of the Soviet bloc; the rise to prominence of ecological issues; social changes generated by globaliza­tion; and one of the biggest economic crises of capitalism in history that, according to International Labour Organization figures, has added another 27 million unemployed since 2008 to bring the global total to more than 200 million. Moreover, labor market “reforms” (a term that, with the time, has changed its original progressive mean­ing), that have introduced, year after year, more “flexibility” and easier termination of workers, have created deeper inequalities—not sup­posed improvements in terms of jobs. The current situation of many European countries, with alarming rates of unemployment, is paradig­matic of this failure.

Nevertheless, the global protest movements that have recently been active in most parts of the world have distinguished themselves so far by the very general character of their demand for social equality, with­out giving sufficient thought to the new problems and radical changes in the world of work. Indeed, in a slightly earlier period, a number of authors had put forward the thesis that the “end of work” was in sight. In this way, labor, having been a key protagonist throughout the twen­tieth century, increasingly has become a weak and secondary player, with unions finding it more difficult to represent and organize younger or migrant workers, in an ever more flexible labor market, where jobs are insecure and increasingly stripped of rights.

Yet, if capitalist globalization has weakened the labor movement, it has also, in many ways, opened new avenues through increased capacity for communication, that may facilitate workers’ international cooperation and solidarity. With the recent crisis of capitalism—which has sharpened more than before the division between capital and labor—the political legacy of the organization founded in London in 1864 has regained pro­found relevance, and its lessons are today more timely than ever.