Categories
Journalism

Capital’s faces

Decades pass and, although Capital has often been described as an outdated text, the debate surrounding this book persists. Despite being 157 years old, Karl Marx’s critique of political economy retains all the qualities of a great classic: it sparks new insights with every reading and continues to shed light on key aspects of both the past and the present. Moreover, it has the remarkable ability to place the chronicle of the present ~ and the often-inadequate figures at its helm ~ into the relative perspective they deserve. It is no coincidence that the well known Italian writer and journalist Italo Calvino asserted that a classic is one that helps us “relegate the present to the status of background noise”. Classics point to the essential issues and inescapable truths necessary to understand the problems thoroughly and resolve them. This is why they consistently captivate new generations of readers. A classic remains indispensable despite the passage of time and, in the case of Capital, one could argue that its relevance only grows as capitalism spreads to every corner of the globe and expands into all aspects of our lives.

Returns to Marx

Following the outbreak of the 2007-2008 economic crisis, the rediscovery of Marx’s magnum opus became a real necessity, almost a response to an emergency: bringing back into circulation the text ~ long forgotten after the fall of the Berlin Wall ~ that offered still-relevant interpretative keys to understanding the true causes of capitalism’s destructive madness. As global stock market indices were burning through hundreds of billions of euros, and numerous financial institutions declared bankruptcy, within a few months Capital sold more copies than it had in the previous two decades combined. The current revival of Capital, however, responds to a different need: the need to define, thanks to the substantial body of recent scholarship, which version of the work to trust as the most reliable one.

Marx’s original intention ~ outlined in the early preparatory manuscript of the work (the Grundrisse of 1857-58) ~ was to divide his work into six books. The first three would focus on capital, landed property, and wage labour; the following books would cover the state, foreign trade, and the world market. Over time, Marx’s realization of the impossibility of undertaking such an expensive project forced him to adopt a more feasible approach. He considered leaving out the last three volumes and incorporating parts on landed property and wage labor into the book on capital.

Capital was then conceived as a three-part structure: Book I would focus on The Process of Capitalist Production, Book II on The Process of Circulation of Capital, and Book III on The Overall Process of Capitalist Production. A fourth book was plan – ned to cover the history of theory, but it was never started and is often mistakenly conflated with Theories of Surplus Value.

The Five Versions of Book I

As is well known, Marx was only able to complete Book I of Capital in accordance with his original plan. Books II and III were published posthumously, in 1885 and 1894, respectively, thanks to a massive editorial effort by Friedrich Engels.

While scholars have long debated the reliability of these two volumes ~ based on incomplete, fragmented manuscripts written years apart and containing numerous unresolved the oretical issues ~ fewer have delved into another equally crucial question: whether a definitive version of Book I existed. This debate has resurfaced, capturing the attention of translators and publishers, and this year two major new editions of Capital were released. In Italy ~ the third country after Russia and France to translate the work, which was intended as a key tool in the struggle for proletarian emancipation ~ the text was published by the prestigious Einaudi. This represents the eighth Italian translation, the first having been published in 1886.

In the United States, the prestigious Princeton University Press released, in a print run of 13,000 copies, the first new English translation in fifty years ~ the fourth English edition. First published in 1867, after over two decades of prep – a ratory research, Marx was neverfully satisfied with the structure of the volume. He ended up dividing it into just six lengthy chapters and, notably, was dissatisfied with how he presented the theory of value, which he had to split into two parts: one in the first chapter and the other in an appendix, hastily written after the manuscript had already been submitted. As a result, the work continued to occupy Marx’s attention even after its publication. In preparation for the second edition, published in installments between 1872 and 1873, Marx rewrote the crucial section on the theory of value, added various supplements addressing the distinction between constant and variable capital, surplus value, and the use of machinery and technology. He also reorganized the entire structure of the book, dividing it into seven sections, comprising 25 chapters, which were then meticulously subdivided into paragraphs.

Marx and the Translations of Capital

Marx closely followed the progress of the Russian translation (1872) as much as possible and devoted even more energy to preparing the French version, which appeared in installments bet – ween 1872 and 1875. In fact, he had to spend much more time than anticipated correcting the drafts. Dissatisfied with the work of the translator, who had rendered the text too literally, Marx rewrote entire sections to make the dialectical parts more digestible for the French audience and to implement changes he deemed essential. These revisions were mainly concentrated in the final section, dedicated to the “Process of Accumulation of Capital”.

He also altered the structure of the chapters, which increased after further adjustments to the distribution of the material. In the postscript to the French edition, Marx did not hesitate to assign it “scientific value independent of the original” and observed that it should “also be consulted by readers who know German.” Not by chance, when the possibility of an English edition arose in 1877, Marx emphasized that the translator should “necessarily compare the second German edition with the French edition”, in which he had “added something new and better described many things”. These were not merely stylistic tweaks. The changes Marx made to the various editions also reflected the results of his ongoing studies and the evolution of his critical thought. Marx and Engels differed on the issue. Marx, satisfied with the new version, considered it, in many parts, an improvement over the previous ones.

Engels, on the other hand, while praising the theoretical improvements in certain areas, was highly skeptical of the literary style imposed by the French translation, vigorously writing: “I would consider it a great mistake to take this version as the basis for the English translation.” Consequently, when Engels was asked shortly after his friend’s death to publish the third German edition (1883) of Book I, he limited his changes to “only the most necessary ones”.

In the preface, he informed the reader that Marx’s intention had been to “rework the text largely,” but that his poor health had prevented him from doing so. Engels worked with a German copy, corrected in various places by Marx, and a copy of the French translation, in which Marx had indicated the passages he considered indispensable. Angels kept his revisions to a minimum and could confidently declare: “In this third edition, no word has been changed that I am not certain the author himself would have changed”. However, he did not include all the variations Marx had indicated. The English translation (1887), fully supervised by Engels, was based on the third German edition. Engels claimed that this edition, like the second German edition, was superior to the French translation ~ especially in terms of the structure of the index. The fourth German edition was published in 1890; it was the last one prepared by Engels.

With more time at his disposal, he was able to incorporate ~ though still excluding some ~ other corrections Marx had made to the French version.

Marx and the Translations of Capital

The 1890 Engels edition became the canonical version of Capital, from which most translations worldwide were derived. However, the debate has never truly ended. Which of these five versions presents the best structure for the work? Which edition incorporates the theoretical advancements of the later Marx? The editors of the new American translation decided to rely primarily on the 1872-73 edition ~ the last German edition revised by Marx. A recent new German version (edited by T. Kuczynski) proposed an alternative that, claiming greater fidelity to Marx’s intent, includes additional changes made for the French translation.

The former has the flaw of neglecting parts of the French version that are clearly superior to the German, while the latter produced a text that is confusing and difficult to read. In contrast, the best is to include all the variants of each edition and various other preparatory manuscripts written by Marx in the long process of writing his masterpiece (the Italian translation does so). Nevertheless, no definitive version of Book I exists, and the systematic comparison of the revisions made by Marx and Engels remains a task for future scholars.

Categories
Journalism

The Unusual Genealogy of the Concept of Capitalism

Even though Karl Marx is considered the main critic of capitalism, he rarely used this term. The word was also absent from the early great classics of political economy. Not only did it not find a place in the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but it was also not even used by John Stuart Mill, nor by the generation of economists contemporary with Marx. They rather used capital–commonly used since the 13th century–and capitalism.

The term capitalism did not appear until the mid-19th century. It was a word mainly used by those opposing the existing order of things and had a much more political rather than economic connotation. Some socialist thinkers were the first ones to use this word, always in a disparaging manner. In France, in a reprint of the renowned work L’organisation du travail, Louis Blanc argued that the appropriation of capital–and, through the capital itself, of political power–was monopolised by the wealthy classes. They concentrated it in their own hands and restricted access to it for the other social classes. Far from seeking to overturn the economic foundations of bourgeois society, he spoke in favour of the “suppression of capitalism but not of capital”. In Germany, the economist Albert Schäffle, mocked with the epithet ‘armchair socialist’, in his book Capitalism and Socialism, argued in favour of reforms from the state to ease the bitter conflicts that were widely spreading, due to ‘the hegemony of capitalism’.

Since its first use, there was no shared definition of the concept of capitalism, and this difficulty did not even change later on when the term widely spread and gained its popularity. The works Modern Capitalism, by Werner Sombart, and The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber, were both published at the beginning of the 20th century and meant to show–despite some differences–the essence of capitalism in the spirit of initiative, in the cold rational calculation and the systematic pursuit of personal profit, greatly contributed to the popularisation of this term. However, it was mainly due to the spread of the Marxist critique of society that the word capitalism–to which the Encyclopaedia Britannica did not dedicate an entry until 1922–gained its citizenship in the social sciences.

Moreover, after being left on the margins, when not explicitly rejected, of the theoretical discourse of the main currents of political economy, it was through Marx’s work that the concept of capitalism gained centrality even in this discipline. Rather than being conceived as a synonym for political decisions aimed at benefiting the ruling classes, through Marx it took on the meaning of a specific system of production, based on the private property of factories and the creation of surplus value.

Marx’s unintended contribution to the propagation of the term ‘capitalism’ was, in some ways, paradoxical. Completely absent from the books he printed, even in his manuscripts the term Kapitalismus was used very sporadically. It only appeared on five occasions, always en passant, and without him ever giving a specific description of it. Probably, Marx felt that this notion was not sufficiently focused on political economy, but, instead, linked to a critique of society that was more moral than scientific. Indeed, when he had to choose the title of his magnum opus, he opted for Capital and not ‘Capitalism’.

In place of this word, he preferred other ones that he considered more appropriate to define the existing economic and social system. In the Grundrisse, he referred to the ‘capital mode of production’, while a few years later, starting with the Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, he adopted the formula ‘capitalist mode of production’. This expression also appeared in the First Book of Capital, whose famous incipit, in fact, reads: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production predominates is presented as a huge collection of commodities”. Thereafter, in the French translation, as well as in the second German edition, of Capital Volume I, Marx also used the formula ‘capitalist system’. He repeated it in the preliminary drafts of the famous letter to Vera Zasulich of 1881.

Both in these and in numerous other writings on the critique of political economy, Marx did not provide a concise and systematic definition of what the capitalist mode of production was. An understanding of the modus operandi of capitalism can only be fully grasped by connecting the multiple descriptions of its dynamics contained in Capital.

In Volume I, Marx stated that ‘the characteristic feature of the capitalist epoch is the fact that labour-power also takes the form of a commodity belonging to the worker himself, while his labour takes the form of wage labour’. The crucial difference from the past is that workers do not sell the products of their labour–which in capitalism are no longer their property–but their own labour.

For Marx, the process of capitalist production is based on the separation of labour-power and working conditions, a condition that capitalism ‘reproduces and perpetuates’, so as to guarantee the permanent exploitation of the proletariat. This mode of production ‘forces the worker to constantly sell his labour-power in order to live and constantly enables the capitalist to buy it in order to enrich himself’. Furthermore, Marx emphasised that capitalism differs from all previous modes of productive organisation for another peculiar reason. It is ‘unity of labour process and value-creating process’. He described the process of capitalist production as a mode of production that has a dual nature: ‘on the one hand it is a social labour process for the manufacturing of a product, on the other hand it is a process of capital valorisation’. What drives the capitalist mode of production ‘is not use-value or enjoyment, but exchange-value and [its] multiplication’. The capitalist was described by Marx as a ‘fanatic of the valorisation of value’, a being who ‘unscrupulously forces humanity into production for production’s sake’.

In this way, the capitalist mode of production generates the expansion and concentration of the proletariat, along with an unprecedented level of exploitation of labour-power.

Finally, while it was certainly focused on the economy, Marx’s analysis of the capitalist system was not exclusively aimed at the production relations but constituted an all-embracing critique of bourgeois society including the political dimension, social relations, legal structures, and ideology, as well as the implications they determine on the single individuals. Therefore, he did not consider capital as ‘a thing, but rather as a specific social production relation, belonging to a specific historical formation of society’. It is therefore not eternal and can be replaced–through class struggle–by a different socio-economic organisation.

Categories
Journalism

Why Karl Marx Kept Reworking Capital, Volume I

No matter how many decades pass since Karl Marx’s Capital was first published, and no matter how often it is dismissed as outdated, it time and again returns to the center of debate. At a venerable 157 years of age (it was first published on September 14, 1867), the “critique of political economy” has all the virtues of the great classics: it stimulates new thoughts with each rereading and is capable of illustrating crucial aspects of our present as well as the past.

One great merit of Capital is that it helps us put the developments of the current moment in proper historical perspective. The famous Italian writer Italo Calvino said that one reason why a classic is a classic is that it helps us “relegate the current events to the rank of background noise.” Such works point to essential questions that cannot be skirted around, in order to properly understand them and find a path through them. This is why classics always earn the interest of new generations of readers. They remain indispensable, despite the passage of time.

This is just what we can say of Capital, 157 years since it was first published. It has, in fact, become all the more powerful as capitalism spreads to every corner of the planet — and expands into all spheres of our existence.

After the economic crisis broke out in 2007–8, the rediscovery of Marx’s magnum opus was a real necessity — almost a kind of emergency response to what was happening. If Marx’s great work had been forgotten after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it provided still-valid keys for understanding the true causes of capitalism’s destructive madness. So while the world’s stock market indexes burned hundreds of billions of dollars and numerous financial institutions declared bankruptcy, in just a few months Capital sold more copies than it had over the previous two decades.

Too bad that the Capital revival did not cross paths with what remained of the forces of the political left. They deluded themselves into thinking that they could tinker with a system that was increasingly showing its unreformability. When they did enter government, they adopted mild palliative measures that did nothing to dent increasingly dramatic social-economic inequalities and the ongoing ecological crisis. The results of these choices are there for all to see.

But the present Capital revival did respond to another need: that of defining — also thanks to a heft of recent studies — exactly which is the most reliable version of the text to which Marx devoted most of his intellectual labors. This is a long-unresolved question, resulting from the way that Marx produced and refined his study.

The Many Versions of Volume I

The German revolutionary’s original intention, as he drafted the first preparatory manuscript (the Grundrisse of 1857–58), had been to divide his work into six volumes. The first three were to be devoted to capital, land ownership, and wage labor; the later ones to the state, foreign trade, and the world market.

Marx’s growing realization over the years that such a vast plan was impossible to carry off forced him to develop a more practical project. He thought of leaving out the last three volumes and integrating some parts devoted to land ownership and wage labor into the book on capital. The latter was conceived in three parts: Volume I would be devoted to The Process of Capital Production, Volume II to The Process of Capital Circulation, and Volume III to The Overall Process of Capitalist Production. To these was to be added a Volume IV — devoted to the history of the theory — which, however, was never begun and is often mistakenly confused with Theories of Surplus Value.

As is well known, Marx only actually completed Volume I. The second and third volumes did not see the light of day until after his death; they appeared in 1885 and 1894, respectively, thanks to an enormous editorial effort by Friedrich Engels.

If the most rigorous scholars have repeatedly questioned the reliability of these two volumes, composed on the basis of unfinished and fragmentary manuscripts written years apart and which contained numerous unresolved theoretical problems, few have devoted themselves to another, no less thorny question: whether there was in fact a final version of Volume I.

The dispute has returned to the center of attention of translators and publishers, and in recent years many important new editions of Capital have appeared. In 2024, some of them came out in Brazil, Italy, and indeed the United States, where Princeton University Press this week published the first new English version in fifty years (the fourth one overall) thanks to translator Paul Reitter and editor Paul North.

Published in 1867, after more than two decades of preparatory research, Marx was not fully satisfied with the structure of the volume. He had ended up dividing it into only six very long chapters. Most of all, he was unhappy with the way he had expounded the theory of value, which he had been forced to divide into two parts: one in the first chapter, the other in an appendix written hastily after the manuscript had been delivered. Thus the writing of Volume I continued to absorb some of Marx’s energies even after it was printed.

In preparation for the second edition, sold in installments between 1872 and 1873, Marx rewrote the crucial section on the theory of value, inserted several additions concerning the difference between constant and variable capital and on surplus value, as well as on the use of machines and technology. He also remodeled the entire structure of the book, dividing it into seven parts, comprising twenty-five chapters, in turn carefully divided into sections.

Marx closely followed the process of the Russian translation (1872) and devoted even more energy to the French version, which appeared — also in installments — between 1872 and 1875. He had to spend much more time than expected checking the translation. Dissatisfied with the translator’s over-literal text, Marx rewrote entire pages in order to make the parts laden with dialectical exposition easier for the French audience to digest, and to make what he considered necessary changes. They mostly concerned the final section, devoted to “The Process of Capital Accumulation.” He also broke down the text into more chapters. In the postscript to the French edition, Marx wrote that the French version had “a scientific value independent of the original” and noted that it should “also be consulted by readers familiar with the German language.”

Unsurprisingly, when an English edition was suggested in 1877, Marx pointed out that the translator would “necessarily have to compare the second German edition with the French one,” since in this latter edition he had “added something new and . . . described many things better.” These were not, therefore, mere stylistic retouches. The changes he added to the various editions also integrated the results of his ongoing studies and the developments of his ever-evolving critical thinking.

Marx revisited the French version, highlighting its pros and cons, again the following year. He wrote to Nikolai Danielson, the Russian translator of Capital, that the French text contained “many important variations and additions,” but admitted that he had “also been forced, especially in the first chapter, to ‘flatten’ the exposition.” He thus felt the need to clarify that the chapters on “The Commodity and Money” and “The Transformation of Money into Capital” should be “translated exclusively following the German text.” In any case, it can be said that the French version constituted much more than a translation.

Marx and Engels had different ideas on the matter. The author was pleased by the new version, considering it, in many parts, an improvement over earlier ones. But Engels, while complimenting some of the theoretical improvements made, was skeptical about the literary style imposed by the French language. He wrote, “I think it would be a grave mistake to use the French version as a basis for an English translation.”

So when he was asked, shortly after his friend’s death, to prepare the third German edition (1883) of Volume I, Engels made “only the most necessary alterations.” His preface told readers that Marx had intended “to re-write a great part of the text of Volume I,” but that ill health had prevented him from doing so. Engels made use of a German copy, corrected in several places by the author, and a copy of the French translation, in which Marx had indicated the changes that he considered indispensable. Engels was sparing in his interventions, reporting that “not a single word was changed in this third edition without my firm conviction that the author would have altered it himself.” However, he did not include all the changes pointed out by Marx.

The English translation (1887), fully supervised by Engels, was based on the third German edition. He asserted that this text, like the second German edition, was superior to the French translation — not least because of the chapter structure. He clarified in the preface to the English text that the French edition had been used primarily to test “what the author himself was prepared to sacrifice wherever something of the full import of the original had to be sacrificed in the rendering.” Shortly beforehand, in the article “How Not to Translate Marx,” Engels had cuttingly criticized John Broadhouse’s dismal translation of some pages of Capital, stating that “powerful German requires powerful English to render it . . . new coined German terms require the coining of corresponding new terms in English.”

The fourth German edition came out in 1890; it was the last one prepared by Engels. With more time on his hands, he was able to integrate several corrections made by Marx to the French version, while excluding others. Engels stated in the preface, “After again comparing the French edition and Marx’s manuscript remarks I have made some further additions to the German text from that translation.” He was very satisfied with his final result, and only the popular edition prepared by Karl Kautsky in 1914 made further improvements.

In Search of the Final Version

Engels’s 1890 edition of Capital, Volume I, became the canonical version from which most translations worldwide were translated. To date, Volume I has been published in sixty-six languages, and in fifty-nine of these projects Volume II and Volume III have also been translated. With the exception of the Communist Manifesto, cowritten with Engels and likely printed in over five hundred million copies, as well as Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, which had an even greater circulation — no other classic of politics, philosophy, or economics has had a circulation comparable to that of Volume I of Capital.

Still, the debate over the best version has never gone away. Which of these five editions presents the best structure? Which version includes the theoretical acquisitions of the later Marx? Although Volume I does not present the editorial difficulties of Volumes II and III, which include hundreds of changes made by Engels, it still is quite a headache.

Some translators have decided to rely on the 1872–73 version — the last German edition revised by Marx — as in the case of Reitter and North with the new English edition. A 2017 German version (edited by Thomas Kuczynski) proposed a variant that — claiming greater fidelity to Marx’s own intentions — includes additional changes prepared for the French translation but disregarded by Engels. The first choice has the limitation of neglecting parts of the French version that are certainly superior to the German one, whereas the second has produced a confusing and difficult-to-read text.

Better, therefore, are editions that enclose an appendix with the variants made by Marx and Engels for each version and also some of Marx’s important preparatory manuscripts, so far published only in German and a few other languages. However, there is no definitive version of Volume I. The systematic comparison of the revisions made by Marx and Engels still depends on further research by their most careful students.

Marx has often been called antiquated, and opponents of his political thought love to declare him defeated. But once again, a new generation of readers, activists, and scholars is laying their hands on his critique of capitalism. In dark times such as the present, this is a small good omen for the future.

Categories
Past talks

Marx’s Historical Materialism: From the “1857 Introduction” to the Latest Research

On which theoretical basis to build the critique of bourgeois society? This consideration led Marx to go more deeply into problems of method, when he started to write Capital, and to formulate the guiding principles for his research. The upshot was one of the most extensively debated manuscripts in the whole of his oeuvre: the so-called ‘Introduction’ of 1857. This text contains the most extensive and detailed pronouncement that Marx ever made on epistemological questions and is essential to understand his conception of historical materialism beyond his early writings. In this lecture, Professor Musto will start with the analysis of this topical text and will continue to analyse Marx’s historical materialism in light of his latest research made between 1879 and 1882. Usually focused only on the analysis of The German Ideology and of the so-called “young Marx”, this lecture will play more attention to the mature elaboration of Marx and on the theoretical implications for us today.

Categories
Reviews

Mauricio Betancourt, Monthly Review

The Last Years of Karl Marx, the enhanced English translation of Marcello Musto’s engaging book, L’ultimo Marx, 1881–1883 (Donzelli Editore, 2016), has proven a very popular work within Marxian scholarship worldwide. So far, it has been translated into twenty languages, with additional translations on the way for 2024. In fact, Musto’s is perhaps the most translated book on Marx as of late. This success is importantly due to the fact that, of the more than twenty-five books on Marx’s life and/or work, few had really delved into the Moor’s (as he was known by his family and closest comrades) final years on the planet. Musto fills in this gap in a powerful, meticulously researched, and succinct manner, weaving the history of Marx’s intellectual labor with his personal and activist life. To do so, he draws on hundreds of primary (and key secondary) sources, mainly stemming from the Marx/Engels Collected Works. In addition, he utilizes Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, also known as MEGA), the Marx-Engels-Werke, and some of Marx’s still unpublished manuscripts, held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow.

Among other things, Musto’s book challenges many enduring and pervasive myths about “Old Nick” (another nickname Marx’s family gave him during the last years of his life), such as that he was Eurocentric, a determinist, or a dogmatist. [1] He also dispels the claim that Marx ceased to do research, write, or be intellectually and politically active toward the end of his life. Instead, Musto shows us an open-minded, humble, shrewd, incisive, sardonic, well-read, astoundingly intelligent, loving, and yet complex, vulnerable, and ailing human being, a polymath enamored with knowledge who was trying to advance the cause of socialism to the best of his abilities and using the best tools at his disposal, while also grieving major personal losses.

For example, in terms of his late wide-ranging intellectual activity, Musto shows how, in the last five years of his life (1878–83), Marx studied subjects as diverse as anthropology, chemistry, agriculture, physics, mathematics (algebra and calculus), geometry, geology, mineralogy, monogamy, communal land ownership, precapitalist modes of production, non-Western societies, British colonialism in India and Egypt, French colonialism in Algeria, Indigenous societies in Australia, and the unfolding of capitalism in the United States. [2] Moreover, he did this all while learning Russian (to better understand Russia’s history and political economy, including the obshchina [rural commune], and authors like Nikolay Chernyshevsky); participating in the Dogberry Club (a biweekly Shakespeare reading group comprised of some family and close friends); advising some French, German, and Russian workers’ movements and meetings, or corresponding with some of their leaders (including Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, Georg Wilhelm Hartmann, Karl Hirsch, and Karl Kautsky); and trying to complete the second volume of Capital. Indeed, nothing human was alien to Marx, and he could justly call himself a “citizen of the world,” convinced that the “law of being” was simple: to struggle. The whole world was contained in his modest but vastly rich library, Musto tells us.

Regarding his alleged dogmatism, Musto illustrates how Marx, unsatisfied with Joseph Roy’s translation, himself rewrote large parts of the French edition of the first volume of Capital (originally in German)—but not without introducing countless additions and modifications. At the same time, the second and third volumes were but drafts in incipient stages that underwent some changes, but Marx did not have enough life left to develop them as he intended. [3] Thus, there is no such thing as a definitive version of these works, or of any of Marx’s publications for that matter, which constitute but a fraction of what he wrote, and in turn, a fraction of what he intended to write. These texts were alive, experiencing a permanent process of revision, edition, and enhancement, whereby Marx interrogated his own ideas. As Musto argues: “The critical spirit with which Marx composed his Capital reveals just how distant he was from the dogmatic author that many of his adversaries and self-styled disciples presented to the world” (93). Similarly, distancing himself from the distortions or the potential or actual setting in stone of his ideas, carried out by some authors and movements in his name (especially in France), toward the end of his life, Marx famously said to Paul Lafargue (his son-in-law, married to his second daughter, Laura): “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist [Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste].” In this vein, Musto constantly emphasizes the distinction between Marx’s own evolving ideas and the historical attempts to establish socialism in the twentieth century, especially in the Soviet case.

Relatedly, Musto dedicates a good number of pages to Marx’s treatment of the “Russian question,” including his reply to Nikolay Mikhailovsky’s 1877 article and Vera Zasulich’s famous 1881 letter on whether the Russian obshchina could circumvent capitalist development and transition directly into socialism, to which Marx answered affirmatively. This illustrates how Marx enhanced his theses on the historical inevitability of the transition from feudalism to capitalism (and then to socialism), including the clarification that this line of evolution was restricted to the countries of Western Europe, while other evolutionary paths toward socialism were possible elsewhere.

Musto also shows us very poignant and difficult events of Marx’s final years, such as this one recalled by Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, which took place in 1881, shortly before the death of Jenny von Westphalen, Marx’s wife since 1843: “Our mother lay in the large front room, Moor in the little room behind.… Never shall I forget the morning when he felt strong enough to go into my mother’s room. When they were together they were young again—she a loving girl and he a loving youth, on the threshold of life, not an old man devastated by illness and an old dying woman parting from each other for life” (98).

Importantly, Musto dedicates some pages to the little-known seventy-two days Marx spent in Algiers, Algeria, from February 20 to May 2, 1882, the only time he ever spent outside of Europe. Following the death of his wife, Marx’s doctor at that time (Bryan Donkin, a close friend of E. Ray Lankester) advised him to rest in a warm place to treat his worsening chronic bronchitis. Given Marx was a stateless person without a passport, and following some deliberation with his doctor, Engels, and Lafargue, he headed for Algiers, where he unsuccessfully tried to finish the second volume of Capital. It was also during the end of this trip that Marx’s famous last photograph was taken, which can be seen on the cover of Musto’s book.

Covering other aspects of Marx’s personal life and health, Musto writes about the Marx family dogs, Toddy and Whisky (the name of the third dog is unknown), as well as of Marx’s soft spot for dogs. He describes Marx’s demeanor as a grandfather, of how his doctor forbade him to smoke, his chronic cough, pleurisy, insomnia issues, and rheumatism, as well as his view that one “has to treat one’s physique with as much diplomacy as everything else” (86). Musto also deals with the death (from cancer of the liver) of Marx’s eldest daughter, Jenny, on January 11, 1883, sixty-three days before Marx’s own. Naturally, this pained Marx profoundly, his only temporary and partial relief being a severe headache that distracted him from his emotional distress. As Marx himself put it: “Physical pain is the only ‘stunner’ of mental pain” (123). In fact, these were Marx’s last known written words.

Although Musto mentions Marx’s engagement with ecology and biology during the last phase of his life, he does not emphasize this issue enough relative to other aspects examined in the book (for example, his analysis of the development of capitalism in Russia). Thus, even though he addresses Marx’s involvement with physician Sergei Podolinsky’s analysis of labor and energetics from 1880 to 1882 (as well as Marx and Engels’s extant and missing correspondence on the subject) and Marx’s friendship with evolutionary biologist E. Ray Lankester, he does not delve into these issues. Looking into and interrelating these episodes to the rest of Marx’s thought and activities in this last phase would have enhanced the book.

Marx died on March 14, 1883, very possibly due to the spread of pulmonary tuberculosis. He spent his last two months reading publisher’s catalogs and French novels, mainly by Frédéric Soulié. Musto goes on to briefly refer to Marx’s funeral, and to reflect on his worldwide influence, starting with the fact that, at the time of his death, Marx was not by any means the renowned figure he became in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Musto importantly mentions, too—citing Boris Nicolaevsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen—that “perhaps one socialist in a thousand has ever read [Marx]…and of a thousand anti-Marxists not even one has read Marx.” Musto’s work, by reviving interest in Marx, is a step toward reversing that.

[1] Musto does mention that, during his stay in Algiers in 1882, “Marx made a number of interesting observations in his sixteen letters…some of which still display a still partly colonial vision” (108). Yet, at the same time, Musto also argues, Marx’s relentless critique of British and French colonialism, as well as his deep knowledge of non-European societies, both historically and in his time, show a more nuanced and complete description of Marx’s thought in this regard.

[2] At least since 1860, doing mathematics—especially calculus—was perhaps Marx’s main way to distract himself from mental suffering, relax, and “maintain the necessary quietness of mind” (33, 97).

[3] Following a monumental effort spanning several years and compromising his own health in the process, Frederick Engels, Marx’s closest friend and long-time collaborator, prepared and published the second and third volumes of Capital in 1885 and 1894, respectively, utilizing Marx’s notes and drafts for these manuscripts as best as he could.

Categories
Journalism

Karl Marx Supported Arab Liberation

Late in life, Karl Marx had a brief encounter with the Arab world. Though he was never able to study the region in detail, Marx’s writings confirm his support for Arab struggles against their colonial oppressors.

In the winter of 1882, during the last year of his life, Karl Marx had severe bronchitis, and his doctor recommended a period of rest in a warm place. Gibraltar was ruled out because Marx needed a passport to enter the territory, and as a stateless person, he was not in possession of one. The German Empire of Otto Von Bismarck was covered in snow and forbidden to him in any case. Italy was out of the question since, as Friedrich Engels put it, “the first proviso where convalescents are concerned is that there should be no harassment by the police.”

Engels and Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, convinced the patient to head for Algiers. At the time, the capital of French Algeria enjoyed a reputation as a good destination to escape the rigors of the European winter. As Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx later recalled, what really pushed Marx into making this unusual trip was his number one goal: to complete Capital.

Marx crossed England and France by train and then the Mediterranean by boat. He lived in Algiers for seventy-two days, the only time in his life that he spent outside Europe. As the days passed, Marx’s health did not improve, but his suffering was not only bodily. He was very lonely after the death of his wife and wrote to Engels that he was feeling “deep attacks of profound melancholy, like the great Don Quixote.” Because of his deteriorating health, Marx also missed engaging in serious intellectual activity.

The Introduction of Private Property
Due to a series of unfavorable events during his stay, Marx was never able to get to the bottom of Algerian social reality. Nor was it possible for him to study the characteristics of common ownership among the Arabs — a topic that had interested him greatly since a few years earlier.

Earlier, in 1879, Marx had copied, in one of his study notebooks, portions of Russian sociologist Maksim Kovalevsky’s book, Communal Landownership: Causes, Course and Consequences of its Decline. The passages were dedicated to the importance of common ownership in Algeria before the arrival of the French colonizers, as well as to the changes that they introduced. From Kovalevsky, Marx copied down: “The formation of private landownership — in the eyes of French bourgeois — is a necessary condition for all progress in the political and social sphere.” Further maintenance of communal property, “as a form which supports communist tendencies in the minds, is dangerous both for the colony and for the homeland.”

Marx was also drawn to the following remarks of Kovalevsky: “the transfer of landownership from the hands of the natives into those of the colonists has been pursued by the French under all regimes. . . . The aim is ever the same: the destruction of the indigenous collective property and its transformation into an object of free purchase and sale, and by this means the final passage made easier into the hands of the French colonists.”

Regarding legislation on Algeria proposed by the Left Republican Jules Warnier, Marx endorsed Kovalevsky’s claim that its only purpose was “the expropriation of the soil of the native population by the European colonists and speculators.” The effrontery of the French went as far as “direct robbery” or conversion into “government property” of all uncultivated land remaining in common for native use. This process was designed to produce another important result: the elimination of the danger of resistance by the local population.

“This type of individualization of landownership had not only secured huge economic benefits for the invaders but also achieved a ‘political aim: to destroy the foundation of this society.”

 

Again, through Kovalevsky’s words, Marx noted: “The foundation of private property and the settlement of European colonists among the Arab clans would become the most powerful means to accelerate the process of dissolution of the clan unions. . . . The expropriation of the Arabs intended by the law had two purposes: 1) to provide the French with as much land as possible, and 2) to tear away the Arabs from their natural bonds to the soil, to break the last strength of the clan unions thus being dissolved, and thereby any danger of rebellion.”

Marx noted that this type of individualization of landownership had not only secured huge economic benefits for the invaders but also achieved a “political aim: to destroy the foundation of this society.”

Reflections on the Arab World
In February 1882, while Marx was in Algiers, an article appearing in a local daily documented the injustices of the newly crafted property system. As reported by The News, any French citizen at that time could acquire a concession of more than 100 hectares of Algerian land without even leaving France; they could also resell it to a native for 40,000 francs. On average, the colons sold every parcel of land they had bought for 20-30 francs at the price of 300 francs.

Owing to his ill health, Marx was unable to study this matter. However, in the sixteen surviving letters written by Marx (the others were lost), he made several interesting observations from the southern rim of the Mediterranean. The ones that really stand out are those dealing with social relations among Muslims.

“In his letters, Marx scornfully attacked the Europeans’ violent abuses and constant provocations, decrying their ‘bare-faced arrogance and presumptuousness.”

Marx was profoundly struck by some characteristics of Arab society. For a “true Muslim,” he commented, “such accidents, good or bad luck, do not distinguish Mahomet’s children. Absolute equality in their social intercourse is not affected. On the contrary, only when corrupted, do they become aware of it. Their politicians justly consider this same feeling and practice of absolute equality as important. Nevertheless, they will go to rack and ruin without a revolutionary movement.”

In his letters, Marx scornfully attacked the Europeans’ violent abuses and constant provocations, decrying their “bare-faced arrogance and presumptuousness vis-à-vis the ‘lesser breeds,’ [and] grisly, Moloch-like obsession with atonement” regarding any act of rebellion. He also emphasized that, in the comparative history of colonial occupation, “the British and Dutch outdo the French.”

In Algiers itself, Marx reported to Engels of a progressive judge, Fermé, who spoke to him of “a form of torture . . . to extract ‘confessions’ from Arabs, naturally done (like the English in India) by the police.” He had reported to Marx that “when, for example, a murder is committed by an Arab gang, usually with robbery in view, and the actual miscreants are in the course of time duly apprehended, tried and executed, this is not regarded as sufficient atonement by the injured colonist family. They demand into the bargain the ‘pulling in’ of at least half a dozen innocent Arabs. . . . When a European colonist dwells among those who are considered the ‘lesser breeds,’ either as a settler or simply on business, he generally regards himself as even more inviolable than the king.”

Against the British Colonial Presence in Egypt
Similarly, a few months later, Marx did not pull any punches regarding the British presence in Egypt. The war of 1882, waged by British troops, ended the so-called Urabi revolt that had begun in 1879 and enabled the United Kingdom to establish a protectorate over Egypt. Marx was furious with progressives who proved incapable of maintaining an autonomous class position, warning that it was necessary for workers to resist the nationalist rhetoric of the state.

When Joseph Cowen, an MP and president of the Cooperative Congress — considered by Marx “the best of the English parliamentarians” — justified the British invasion of Egypt, Marx expressed his total disapproval. Naturally, he also railed against the British government: “Very nice! In fact, there could be no more blatant example of Christian hypocrisy than the ‘conquest’ of Egypt – a conquest amid peace!”

But he reserved special criticism for the “radical” Cowen. In a speech on January 8, 1883, in Newcastle, Cowen had expressed his admiration for the “heroic exploits” of the British and the “dazzle of our military parade;” nor could he “help smirking over the entrancing little prospect of all those fortified offensive positions between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean and, into the bargain, an ‘African-British Empire’ from the Delta to the Cape.”

Late in life, Marx engaged in probing investigations of societies outside Europe and expressed himself unambiguously against the ravages of colonialism.
It was, in Cowen’s eyes, an “English style” empire, characterized by “responsibility” for the “home interest.” In foreign policy, Marx concluded, Cowen was a typical example of “those poor British bourgeois, who groan as they assume more and more ‘responsibilities’ in the service of their historic mission, while vainly protesting against it.”

Eurocentric Marx?
Late in life, Marx engaged in probing investigations of societies outside Europe and expressed himself unambiguously against the ravages of colonialism. It is dishonest to suggest otherwise, despite how fashionable it has become in liberal academic quarters to “take Marx to task” for his Eurocentrism.

During his life, Marx closely followed the main events in international politics, and, as we can see from his writings and letters in the 1880s, he expressed firm opposition to British colonial oppression in India and Egypt, as well as to French colonialism in Algeria. Marx was anything but Eurocentric, nor was he “fixated” only on class conflict, as many like to claim. Marx thought the study of new political conflicts and “peripheral” areas to be fundamental for his ongoing critique of the capitalist system. Most importantly, he always took the side of the oppressed against the oppressors.

Categories
Interviews

Don’t Dismiss Marx. His Critique of Colonialism Is More Relevant Than Ever

During the last couple of decades, we have been witnessing a resurgence of interest in the thought and work of Karl Marx, author of major philosophical, historical, political and economic works — and of course, of The Communist Manifesto, which is perhaps the most popular political manifesto in the history of the world. This resurgence is largely due to the devastating consequences of neoliberalism around the world — unprecedented levels of economic inequality, social decay and popular discontent, as well as intensifying environmental degradation bringing the planet ever closer to a climate precipice — and the inability of the formal institutions of liberal democracy to solve this growing list of societal problems. But is Marx still relevant to the socio-economic and political landscape that characterizes today’s capitalist world? And what about the argument that Marx was Eurocentric and had little or nothing to say about colonialism?

Marcello Musto, a leading Marxist scholar, and professor of sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada, who has been a part of the revival of interest in Marx, contends in an exclusive interview for Truthout that Marx is still very much relevant today and debunks the claim that he was Eurocentric. In the interview that follows, Musto argues that Marx was, in fact, intensely critical of the impact of colonialism.

C.J. Polychroniou: In the last decade or so there has been renewed interest in Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism among leftist public intellectuals. Yet, capitalism has changed dramatically since Marx’s time and the idea that capitalism is fated to self-destruct because of contradictions that arise from the workings of its own logic no longer commands intellectual credibility. Moreover, the working class today is not only much more complex and diverse than the working class of the industrial revolution but has also not fulfilled the worldwide historical mission envisioned by Marx. In fact, it was such considerations that gave rise to post-Marxism, a fashionable intellectual posture from the 1970s to the 1990s, which attacks the Marxist notion of class analysis and underplays the material causes for radical political action. But now, it seems, there is a return once again to the fundamental ideas of Marx. How should we explain the renewed interest in Marx? Indeed, is Marx still relevant today?

Marcello Musto: The fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by two decades of conspiracy of silence on Marx’s work. In the 1990s and 2000s, the attention toward Marx was extremely scarce and the same can be said for the publication, and discussion, of his writing. Marx’s work — no longer identified with the odious function of instrumentum regni of the Soviet Union — became the focus of a renewed global interest in 2008, after one of the biggest economic crises in the history of capitalism. Prestigious newspapers, as well as journals with wide readerships, described the author of Capital as a farsighted theorist, whose topicality received confirmation one more time. Marx became, almost everywhere, the theme of university courses and international conferences. His writings reappeared on bookshop shelves, and his interpretation of capitalism gathered increasing momentum.

In the last few years, there has also been a reconsideration of Marx as a political theorist and many authors with progressive views maintain that his ideas continue to be indispensable for anyone who believes it is necessary to build an alternative to the society in which we live. The contemporary “Marx revival” is not confined only to Marx’s critique of political economy, but also open to rediscovering his political ideas and sociological interpretations. In the meantime, many post-Marxist theories have demonstrated all their fallacies and ended up accepting the foundations of the existing society — even though the inequalities that tear it apart and thoroughly undermine its democratic coexistence are growing in increasingly dramatic forms.

Marx argued that the expansion of the capitalist mode of production increases not only the exploitation of the working class, but also the pillage of natural resources.

Certainly, Marx’s analysis of the working class needs to be reframed, as it was developed on the observation of a different form of capitalism. If the answers to many of our contemporary problems cannot be found in Marx, he does, however, center the essential questions. I think this is his greatest contribution today: he helps us to ask the right questions, to identify the main contradictions. That seems to me to be no small thing. Marx still has so much to teach us. His elaboration helps us better understand how indispensable he is in rethinking an alternative to capitalism — today, even more urgently than in his time.

Marx’s writings include discussions of issues, such as nature, migration and borders, which recently have received renewed attention. Can you briefly discuss Marx’s approach to nature and his take on migration and borders?

Marx studied many subjects — in the past often underestimated, or even ignored, by his scholars — which are of crucial importance for the political agenda of our times. The relevance that Marx assigned to the ecological question is the focus of some of the major studies devoted to his work over the past two decades. In contrast to interpretations that reduced Marx’s conception of socialism to the mere development of productive forces (labor, instruments and raw material), he displayed great interest in what we today call the ecological question. On repeated occasions, Marx argued that the expansion of the capitalist mode of production increases not only the exploitation of the working class, but also the pillage of natural resources. He denounced that “all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker but of robbing the soil.” In Capital, Marx observed that the private ownership of the earth by individuals is as absurd as the private ownership of one human being by another human being.

Marx was also very interested in migration and among his last studies are notes on the pogrom that occurred in San Francisco in 1877 against Chinese migrants. Marx railed against anti-Chinese demagogues who claimed that the migrants would starve the white proletarians, and against those who tried to persuade the working class to support xenophobic positions. On the contrary, Marx showed that the forced movement of labor generated by capitalism was a very important component of bourgeois exploitation and that the key to combating it was class solidarity among workers, regardless of their origins or any distinction between local and imported labor.

One of the most frequently heard objections to Marx is that he was Eurocentric and that he even justified colonialism as necessary for modernity. Yet, while Marx never developed his theory of colonialism as extensively as his critique of political economy, he condemned British rule in India in the most unequivocal terms, for instance, and criticized those who failed to see the destructive consequences of colonialism. How do you assess Marx on these matters?

The habit of using decontextualized quotations from Marx’s work dates much before Edward Said’s Orientalism, an influential book that contributed to the myth of Marx’s alleged Eurocentrism. Today, I often read reconstructions of Marx’s analyses of very complex historical processes that are outright fabrications.

Already in the early 1850s, in his articles (contested by Said) for the New-York Tribune — a newspaper with which he collaborated for more than a decade — Marx had been under no illusion about the basic characteristics of capitalism. He well knew that the bourgeoisie had never “effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation.” But he had also been convinced that, through world trade, development of the productive forces and the transformation of production into something scientifically capable of dominating the forces of nature, “bourgeois industry and commerce [would create] these material conditions of a new world.” These considerations reflected no more than a partial, ingenuous vision of colonialism held by a man writing a journalistic piece at barely 35 years of age.

For Marx, the suppression of communal landownership in India was nothing but an act of English vandalism, pushing the native people backwards, certainly not forwards.

Later, Marx undertook extensive investigations of non-European societies and his fierce anti-colonialism was even more evident. These considerations are all too obvious to anyone who has read Marx, despite skepticism in some academic circles that represent a bizarre form of decoloniality and assimilate Marx to liberal thinkers. When Marx wrote about the domination of England in India, he asserted that the British had only been able to “destroy native agriculture and double the number and intensity of famines.” For Marx, the suppression of communal landownership in India was nothing but an act of English vandalism, pushing the native people backwards, certainly not forwards.

Nowhere in Marx’s works is there the suggestion of an essentialist distinction between the societies of the East and the West. And, in fact, Marx’s anti-colonialism — particularly his ability to understand the true roots of this phenomenon — contributes to the new contemporary wave of interest in his theories, from Brazil to Asia.

The last journey that Karl Marx undertook before he died was in Algiers. Can you highlight his reflections on the Arab world and what he thought of the French occupation of Algeria?

I have told this story — so little known — in my recent book, The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography. In the winter of 1882, during the last year of his life, Marx had a severe bronchitis and his doctor recommended him a period of rest in a warm place like Algiers, in order to escape the rigors of winter. It was the only time in his life that he spent outside Europe.

Owing to his ill health, Marx was unable to study Algerian society as he would have liked. In 1879, he had already examined the French occupation of Algeria and had argued that the transfer of landownership from the hands of the natives into those of the colonists’ had a central aim: “the destruction of the indigenous collective property and its transformation into an object of free purchase and sale.” Marx had noted that this expropriation had two purposes: to provide the French as much land as possible; and to tear away the Arabs from their natural bonds to the soil, which meant to break any danger of rebellion. Marx commented that this type of individualization of landownership had not only secured huge economic benefits for the invaders but also achieved a political aim: “to destroy the foundation of the society.”

Marx closely observed the main events in international politics and expressed firm opposition to British colonial oppression in India, to French colonialism in Algeria, and to all the other forms of colonial domination.

Although Marx could not pursue this research further, he made a number of interesting observations on the Arab world when he was in Algiers. He attacked, with outrage, the violent abuse from the French, their repeated provocative acts, their shameless arrogance, presumption and obsession with taking revenge — like Moloch in the face of every act of rebellion by the local Arab population.

In his letters from Algiers, Marx reported that when a murder is committed by an Arab gang, usually with robbery in view, and the actual miscreants are in the course of time duly apprehended, tried and executed, this is not regarded as sufficient atonement by the injured colonist family. They demand into the bargain the “pulling in” of at least half a dozen innocent Arabs: “A kind of torture is applied by the police, to force the Arabs to ‘confess,’ just as the British do in India.” Marx wrote that when a European colonist dwells among those who are considered the “lesser breeds,” either as a settler or simply on business, he generally regards himself as even more inviolable than the king. And Marx also emphasized that, in the comparative history of colonial occupation, “the British and Dutch outdo the French.”

Do these reflections shed any light on Marx’s general perspective on colonialism?

Marx always expressed himself unambiguously against the ravages of colonialism. It is a mistake to suggest otherwise, despite the instrumental scepticism so fashionable nowadays in certain liberal academic quarters. During his life, Marx closely observed the main events in international politics and, as we can see from his writings and letters, he expressed firm opposition to British colonial oppression in India, to French colonialism in Algeria, and to all the other forms of colonial domination. He was anything but Eurocentric and fixated only on class conflict. Marx thought the study of new political conflicts and peripherical geographical areas to be fundamental for his critique of the capitalist system. Most importantly, he always took the side of the oppressed against the oppressors.

Categories
Reviews

Howard Engelskirchen, Science & Society

I was in Paris a year and a little more after May 1968 and found myself within the swirl of effects generated by Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital. I met with Poulantzas to discuss law and studied with Bettelheim at the Sorbonne. Certainly, I was influenced by the book, but I was new to Marxism, and, in any event, the proposal of an ‘epistemological break’ between the young Marx and his younger self’s scientific successor did not hold my attention. In addition to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the Results of the Immediate Process of Production (Capital’s unpublished Chapter 6) was available as well as the Grundrisse, and it was all too new, too interesting, and too far-reaching to justify quarantining any of it. Thus, more than a half-century later, it is a pleasure to read the resource Marcello Musto has provided in Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. On this topic, it confirms the impressive continuity of Marx’s thought. One sees consistent themes developed from the first excerpts of the 1844 Manuscripts to the last sections of Capital I and III. In the book’s Introduction, “Alienation Redux” (available at his website: http://www.marcellomusto .org; see a shorter review for the Jacobin also there available), Professor Musto identifies three lines of debate triggered by the 1844 Manuscripts among Marxists: (1) the idea that this text represents the preeminent core of his thought, (2) the idea of a split between the young left-Hegelian or humanist Marx and mature scientific iterations of him, and (3) a third approach that sees a continuity in his development. Musto places himself in the latter camp, and the materials gathered reflect this: excerpts are collected from the 1844 Manuscripts, “Comments on James Mill,” The Holy Family, The German Ideology, Wage Labour and Capital, the “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper,” the Grundrisse, the original text of a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, On the Critique of Political Economy (Manuscript 1861–63), the Theories of Surplus Value, the Economic Manuscripts of 1863–1865, the Results of the Immediate Process of Production, as well as from volumes I and III of Capital. Continuity underscores a methodological lesson for us all: In the rigor and persistence of his work, Marx’s early themes were developed not just as science but with a truly breathtaking penetration and vision. Rather than leaving the insights of his youth behind, they became a provocation for transforming classical political economy — involving precisely an ‘epistemological break’ — and in the process (as I argued in Capital as a Social Kind) foreshadowing contemporary scientific realism as a philosophy for science. Tools to elaborate his early ideas were not at hand, so he went about crafting them. Thus, in notebooks for his Doctoral Dissertation (in volume 1 of Marx Engels Collected Works), Marx wrote, “Every separation is separation of a unity” (493), and, indeed, alienation can be understood as a separation severed from the unity to which it belongs. But then we notice in the generality of this aphorism a seed of what is worked out in Chapter 26 of Capital I as the very basis of capitalist production; primitive accumulation there means the separation of the producer from the land, the expropriation of the peasant. Plainly, if the worker is separated from the conditions of production, there can be no production at all. Yet, as Musto’s excerpts abundantly show, for capital, the joining required reproduces the alienation of the starting point: separation is perpetuated in the labor process (e.g., 54, 64–65, 88–91, 150) and reproduced in the result (e.g., 52, 83, 103, 149–50).
In his “Introduction,” Musto offers a critique not only of those who emphasize the early writings at the expense of the scope of Marx’s scientific achievements to come but extends this critique to those who “[pass] backward and forward from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital, as if Marx’s work were a single timeless and undifferentiated text” (20). It is not hard to find misinterpretations of Marx of all sorts, but in my view there is room to push back here. For sure, an undifferentiated reading of anything, including a single text, can only loosely be called a reading at all, and without doubt, attention must be paid to the trajectory of scientific growth and maturation of Marx’s thought. However, reading Marx’s texts whole seems important — there tend to be always new provocations to gain a fuller grasp of what he is about, and fresh confrontation with the early writings can raise questions till then unsuspected or clarify puzzles long ago put on hold. Indeed, Musto’s small collection gives us precisely a chance to read as a rough whole the concept of alienation as a focal motif in Marx’s thought. For example, conflicts over the Young Marx/Mature Marx led, as Professor Musto recounts, to counterposing the rigor of Marx’s analysis of exploitation with a humanist emphasis on alienation (20). However, a more philosophically grounded understanding of Marx’s science recognizes alienation and exploitation as a unity — as I argue in “Karl Marx and the Riddle of the Nicomachean Ethics 5.5” (forthcoming), the separation of the worker from the conditions of production provides the structural possibility of exploitation such that these are the same thing grasped from two different perspectives; alienation’s exploitative potential as structure is realized in the actual appropriation of laboring activity and the alienating separation it reproduces (see the Grundrisse excerpt quoted at 96: “the same relation from opposite poles”). The texts excerpted are organized chronologically, and the different works from which they are taken are each introduced by a brief paragraph suggesting points of significance. Actually, it can be helpful to read these paragraphs one after another for the overview doing so provides. Professor Musto’s “Introduction” is organized into nine parts: (1) the origin of the concept, (2) the rediscovery of alienation, (3) other concepts of alienation, (4) the debate on the conception of alienation in Marx’s early writings, (5) the irresistible fascination of the theory of alienation, (6) alienation theory in north American sociology, (7) the concept of alienation in Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, (8) commodity fetishism, and, importantly, (9) communism, emancipation, and freedom. The introductory paragraph of this last section is an unusually succinct gathering of a half dozen quotations from Marx, all too rarely emphasized; taken together, they provide an impressively compelling frame for our revolutionary path. Finally, there is a significant omission: while the excerpts are organized from first to later pages according to the text from which they are taken, they are not cited to their source, so it becomes a challenge for the reader to follow up on any particular passage. Professor Musto informs me that this is not true of the Italian edition and assures me also that he will have a reference list on his website connecting each excerpt to the page where it may be found. In sum, thanks to Marcello Musto for revisiting the concept of alienation and highlighting the importance of interrogating this theme today.

Categories
Reviews

Matthijs Krul, Notes & Commentaries

In this intellectual biography, the Italian sociologist and Marxologist Marcello Musto seeks to rehabilitate the theoretical and political output of the last years of Marx’s life. Covering the period from roughly 1879 to his death in 1883, Musto tries to counter a tendency observed both in academic philosophy and in many biographies of Marx, namely to treat his final years after the publication of Capital as more or less uninteresting and a period of intellectual decline, usually skipped over entirely or at least given short shrift. To support this aim, Musto builds on the much greater manuscript knowledge of Marx’s work, thanks to the MEGA2 project, as well as the re-evaluation of the richness of Marx’s late theorizing, as seen in works like e.g. Kevin B. Anderson’s Marx at the Margins.

 

In some respects, the book – which consists of four essay-length pieces with a brief introduction by the author – must be considered successful in this regard. The combination of personal biographical material, in-depth theoretical discussion, and political and social context in the book gives a real stimulus to taking the last years of Karl Marx seriously. Some of the material discussed will be quite familiar to people well-versed in ‘high Marxology’: the famous draft letters to Vera Zasulich on the possible persistence of the Russian mir, or the work Marx undertook on revising for translations of Capital volume 1 and the publication of volume 2, or Marx’s engagement with the then highly popular ideas of the American economic reformer Henry George. Musto provides some helpful additional context to Marx’s well-known comments on the work of the political economist Adolf Wagner, whose work was representative of the so-called ‘state socialism’ of the time, a highly conservative form of dirigisme that would eventually play a role in defining some non-Marxist strands of social-democracy.

 

Even so, there is a lot that was quite new (to me, in any case), either in content or in degree. While scholars probably know that Marx wrote mathematical manuscripts, Musto shows just how thoroughly he engaged with pure maths – especially calculus – as an intellectual hobby, something undertaken for pleasure and mental relaxation as much as for the purposes of supporting his theoretical work. Remarkable to me was learning that Marx engaged on a chronological timeline of world history, with short notes and comments, covering global history from about the time of Caesar onwards. This seems to me something of enormous intellectual interest even though it is apparently still largely unpublished anywhere (the references provided give the IISH source material).

 

There are also some interesting observations from Marx from his brief stay in Algeria, the only time Marx ever left Europe, something typically only alluded to in biographies because it provided us with the last photograph of the man before his death. (It turns out Marx shaved his beard immediately afterwards! Musto gives us a ‘reconstructed’ version of the photo showing what he might have looked like with less hair – it turns out this is something of a cross between Sigmund Freud and Jules Verne.)

 

Some of the material is interesting but more tragic in nature. The biographical matter is rather grim reading, a chronicle of Marx’s ever-worsening ill health (Musto suggests he had bronchitis that seems to have worsened into tuberculosis) and the loss of his wife and then one of his daughters. He shows how the impression of a lack of intellectual fertility in this period is rather to be blamed on the dispersed and fragmented nature of his writings and activities, often induced by his bouts of illness, which have given the impression of a lack of systematicity.

 

But in fact Marx did a great deal, and in some respects was at the height of his abilities. Not just in the revisions of Capital, including preparing the French edition often considered the ‘canonical’ version, but also in working through huge amounts of new material: for the question of Russia, for the anthropology of ancient society, for the development of a political programme for the French communists (of the Guesde faction), for the study of the effect of the railways and the growth of joint stock companies, and for the study of colonialism. Merely the constant interruption of illness and the need to move to warmer climes or keep to his bed forced periods of inactivity on him, and prevented much of this labor from being worked up into published or publishable materials.

 

In this sense, Musto succeeds quite well in demonstrating that Marx died not a doting old man well past his prime, but really at the prime of his intellectual powers and especially at a time when his theoretical range had if anything markedly widened compared to his early years.

 

Unfortunately the book also has some less felicitous aspects. In his eagerness to underline how Marx’s thought gained in scope and subtlety as it matured, Musto constantly wants to tell us just how flexible and how undogmatic he was, which ultimately comes to sound so defensive that it achieves rather the opposite. It is an irritating habit of Marxologists, who by nature tend to be fans of the man as well, that they are always so keen to contrast in everything the Marx Who Was Right with the Everyone Else Who Was Wrong. The contrast is inevitably made in an ad hoc fashion against a litany of figures whom such a Marxologist wants to blame for a perceived bad reputation Marxism has: whether it’s the Soviets, or Engels, or the Frankfurt School, or the liberal interpreters does not really matter.

 

While it’s right of course to point out when later commentators or interpreters have misread Marx or use him poorly, this kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ practice generally does more harm than good for rehabilitating Marx’s reputation, and is annoying for a reader who isn’t looking for a convenient target to shove the ‘blame’ onto (especially poor Engels is often the most convenient straw figure here, and Musto abuses him similarly).

 

The more Musto cites Marx seemingly just to tell the reader “See! Look how flexible and nondogmatic this is!!”, the less interested one becomes in what Marx was actually saying, since it is (so to speak) damned with vague praise. Here the old novelists’ adage “show, not tell” would have served the author better: whether Marx’s arguments are wise or subtle is a subjective judgment best left to the reader, not imposed by the author, however enthusiastic he is. The fact the individual parts of the book were probably written or published as separate essays also adds a considerable amount of unnecessary repetition and some clunky structure to the overall work, which is all the more a shame given how short it is.

 

That said, for a solid systematic overview of what Marx – indeed continuously in collaboration with Engels – was up to during the last years of his life, this work is probably as good as it gets, short of consulting the relevant MEGA2 volumes oneself when they are fully published. Musto finely balances the focus on intellectual-theoretical biography with information about Marx’s social and family circle, political acquaintances and antagonists, his travels, and the many different subjects and themes of interest to Marx in his final days. In so doing, he provides a stimulating portrait of genius at work, and makes one all the more lament how the state of medical knowledge in the Victorian era ultimately cut short the fervor of his wide-ranging mind.

Categories
Reviews

Branko Milanovic, Intervention. Journalism as Emancipation

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

Categories
TV

New Books Network Podcast – The Last Years of Karl Marx: 1881 1883 An Intellectual Biography (Talk)

Categories
Reviews

Alexander Miller, Capital & Class

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

Categories
Reviews

Paul Blackledge, New Political Science

Marx, or so Marcello Musto argues in this useful study of his work during the last years of his life, has been ill served within the academy. It is not simply that the textbooks continue to reproduce a ridiculous image of Marxism as a form of economic determinism and class reductionism, it is also that even amongst more serious Marx scholars the rebuttal of these charges tends to be made through one-sided reference to his early writings.
The scholarly appeal of Marx’s early writings is obvious enough. One of the joys of teaching Marx includes witnessing students, previously fed a diet of the textbook caricature of his work, respond to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Without denying the power of this manoeuvre, Musto aims to show that, right up until his death, Marx continued to develop his ideas in a manner that shatters any attempt to dismiss his mature work as a crude variant of materialism.
Insofar as Musto details the power of Marx’s research from the last years of his life, he helps overturn the caricatured distinction between a (good) young Marx against a (bad) mature Marx. The key text whose interrogation forms the core of Musto’s book is Marx’s famous response to Vera Zasulich’s 1881 request for his thoughts on Russia’s peasant communes. The actual reply sent to Zasulich amounted to only a page in volume twenty-four of the Collected Works. However, the brevity of this letter should in no way be interpreted as indicating Marx’s lack of interest in the subject. He had penned three earlier and significantly more substantial drafts of this letter over the previous three weeks, and the ideas contained in these letters had roots in a decade-long research project into Russian history, sociology and politics. In fact, so serious had Marx taken this research on this subject that he attempted to master the Russian language in the 1870s, according to his wife Jenny, “as if it was a matter of life and death.”
Marx’s response to Zasulich is doubly interesting because in it he makes direct reference to the claim, made in the preface to the first edition of Capital, that “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” While this passage would seem to suggest that, for Marx, Russia would follow were Britain led, in his letter to Zasulich, he wrote that “the analysis in Capital … provides no reasons for or against the Russian commune” because the claims made in Capital relate only to those West European countries in which capital accumulation had already begun, and not to states which had yet to start down that path.
A number of commentators have claimed that this argument evidences Marx’s shift from a unilinear to a multilinear model of historical development.[1] As against these writers, Musto seems to agree with those theorists who have stressed that Marx, in his most mature writings, deepened rather than broke with the approach taken in Capital: thus he writes that the replies to Zasulich “show no glimpse of the dramatic break with his former positions that some scholars have detected” (69).
Nevertheless, Musto prevaricates on this point. Despite believing there was no “dramatic break” in Marx’s thought, he argues that in the last decade of his life Marx had become 1 I draw on my survey of this literature in Blackledge, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 29–32. NEW POLITICAL SCIENCE aware that the claim, made in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that history has moved through “the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production” was “completely inadequate” (100). Now if this statement is true, it would seem to imply that Marx’s letters to Zasulich did mark a “dramatic break” with his former unilinear position. As it happens, I think Musto is right to claim that there was no dramatic break in Marx’s thought towards the end of his life because he is wrong to dismiss the 1859 schema as completely inadequate.
The apparent paradox between the 1859 preface and the reply to Zasulich can be resolved once we accept, with Eric Hobsbawm, that the stages outlined by Marx in the former text are best understood as suggesting a logical progression towards growing human individualisation rather than a simple unilinear model of actual historical progress. Indeed, it would seem perverse to ascribe a unilinear model of social evolution to Marx in 1859 given that only eighteen months earlier he had, in the Grundrisse, detailed a wide variety of pre-capitalist economic formations alongside a multiplicity of paths taken through human history.
Readers of the Grundrisse will find it difficult to accept Musto’s claim that Marx’s thought became “more flexible” as he grew older (76). Marx’s historical and political writings evidence that he had always been an eminently flexible thinker, and he had always insisted on rooting theoretical generalisations in detailed empirical work. It was not for nothing that Engels complained to Marx that “as long as you still have a book before you that you consider important, you do not get down to writing.”
Rather than show that Marx moved from a less to a more flexible framework as he grew older, the evidence presented by Musto in this book points to a much more interesting process: as is implied both by Engels’s comments above and by the methodological introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx viewed all his works as provisional points on the road to increasingly concrete analyses rooted in hard, detailed research.
Musto is to be congratulated for adding to our awareness of Marx’s continued deepening of his understanding of the world right up until his death, and we can heartily agree with him that we continue to have much to learn from Marx. Perhaps the chief lesson for us comes from the 1872 Preface to Capital where he wrote: “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” Marx continued this climb right up to his death, and we could do worse than follow his lead.

 

[1] I draw on my survey of this literature in Blackledge, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 29–32.