Tag: English

Totality of the Production and Alienation in Marx

Post author By Ksenia Arapko
Post date July 2, 2014

I. Marx’s Conception of Production in the ‘Introduction’ of 1857
Despite its provisional character and the short period of composition (scarcely a week), the so-called ‘Introduction’ of 1857 contains the most extensive and detailed pronouncement that Marx ever made on epistemological questions related to production. With observations on the employment and articulation of theoretical categories, these pages contain a number of essential formulations. In keeping with his style, Marx alternated in the ‘Introduction’ between exposition of his own ideas and criticism of his theoretical opponents. The text is divided into four sections :

(1) Production in general
(2) General relation between production, distribution, exchange and consumption
(3) The method of political economy
(4) Means (forces) of production and relations of production, relations of production and relations of circulation, etc.
(Marx 1973: 69)

The first part of this article will deal with Marx’s conception of production exposed in the first two sections of this text, while the second will overview Marx’s conception of alienation.The first section opens with a declaration of intent, immediately specifying the field of study and pointing to the historical criterion: ‘[t]he object before us, to begin with, material production. Individuals producing in society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure.’ Marx’s polemical target was ‘the eighteenth-century Robinsonades’ (Marx 1973: 83), the myth of Robinson Crusoe (see Watt 1951: 112) as the paradigm of homo oeconomicus, or the projection of phenomena typical of the bourgeois era onto every other society that has existed since the earliest times. Such conceptions represented the social character of production as a constant in any labour process, not as a peculiarity of capitalist relations. In the same way, civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft] – whose emergence in the eighteenth century had created the conditions through which ‘the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate’ – was portrayed as having always existed (Marx 1973: 83).

In reality, the isolated individual simply did not exist before the capitalist epoch. As Marx put it in another passage in the Grundrisse: ‘He originally appears as a species-being, tribal being, herd animal’ (Marx 1973: 496, trans. modified). This collective dimension is the condition for the appropriation of the earth, ‘the great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labour, as well as the seat, the base of the community [Basis des Gemeinwesens]’ (Marx 1973: 472). In the presence of these primal relations, the activity of human beings is directly linked to the earth; there is a ‘natural unity of labour with its material presuppositions’, and the individual lives in symbiosis with others like himself (Marx 1973: 471). Similarly, in all later economic forms based on agriculture where the aim is to create use-values and not yet exchange-values, the relationship of the individual to ‘the objective conditions of his labour is mediated through his presence as member of the commune’; he is always only one link in the chain (Marx 1973: 486). In this connection, Marx writes in the ‘Introduction’:

The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent [unselbstständig], as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. (Marx 1973: 84)

Similar considerations appear in Capital, vol. I. Here, in speaking of ‘the European Middle Ages, shrouded in darkness’, Marx argues that ‘instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterizes the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organized on the basis of that production’ (Marx 1996: 88). And, when he examined the genesis of product exchange, he recalled that it began with contacts among different families, tribes or communities, ‘for, in the beginning of civilization, it is not private individuals but families, tribes, etc., that meet on an independent footing’ (Marx 1996: 357). Thus, whether the horizon was the primal bond of consanguinity or the medieval nexus of lordship and vassalage, individuals lived amid ‘limited relations of production [bornirter Productionsverhältnisse]’, joined to one another by reciprocal ties (Marx 1973: 162).

The classical economists had inverted this reality, on the basis of what Marx regarded as fantasies with an inspiration in natural law. In particular, Adam Smith had described a primal condition where individuals not only existed but were capable of producing outside society. A division of labour within tribes of hunters and shepherds had supposedly achieved the specialization of trades: one person’s greater dexterity in fashioning bows and arrows, for example, or in building wooden huts, had made him a kind of armourer or carpenter, and the assurance of being able to exchange the unconsumed part of one’s labour product for the surplus of others ‘encourage[d] every man to apply himself to a particular occupation’ (Smith 1961: 19). David Ricardo was guilty of a similar anachronism when he conceived of the relationship between hunters and fishermen in the early stages of society as an exchange between owners of commodities on the basis of the labour-time objectified in them (see Ricardo 1973: 15, cf. Marx 1987a: 300).

In this way, Smith and Ricardo depicted a highly developed product of the society in which they lived – the isolated bourgeois individual – as if he were a spontaneous manifestation of nature. What emerged from the pages of their works was a mythological, timeless individual, one ‘posited by nature’, whose social relations were always the same and whose economic behaviour had a historyless anthropological character (Marx 1973: 83). According to Marx, the interpreters of each new historical epoch have regularly deluded themselves that the most distinctive features of their own age have been present since time immemorial.

Marx argued instead that ‘[p]roduction by an isolated individual outside society … is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other’ (Marx 1973: 84). And, against those who portrayed the isolated individual of the eighteenth century as the archetype of human nature, ‘not as a historical result but as history’s point of departure’, he maintained that such an individual emerged only with the most highly developed social relations (Marx 1973: 83). Marx did not entirely disagree that man was a ζώον πολιτικόν [zoon politikon], a social animal, but he insisted that he was ‘an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society’ (Marx 1973: 84). Thus, since civil society had arisen only with the modern world, the free wage-labourer of the capitalist epoch had appeared only after a long historical process. He was, in fact, ‘the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century’ (Marx 1973: 83).

If Marx felt the need to repeat a point he considered all too evident, it was only because works by Henry Charles Carey, Frédéric Bastiat and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had brought it up for discussion in the previous twenty years. After sketching the genesis of the capitalist individual and demonstrating that modern production conforms only to ‘a definitive stage of social development – production by social individuals’, Marx points to a second theoretical requirement: namely, to expose the mystification practised by economists with regard to the concept of ‘production in general’ [Production im Allgemeinem]. This is an abstraction, a category that does not exist at any concrete stage of reality. However, since ‘all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics’ [gemeinsame Bestimmungen], Marx recognizes that ‘production in general is a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element’, thereby saving pointless repetition for the scholar who undertakes to reproduce reality through thought (Marx 1973: 85).

Although the definition of the general elements of production is ‘segmented many times over and split into different determinations’, some of which ‘belong to all epochs, others to only a few’, there are certainly, among its universal components, human labour and material provided by nature (Marx 1973: 85). For, without a producing subject and a worked-upon object, there could be no production at all. But the economists introduced a third general prerequisite of production: ‘a stock, previously accumulated, of the products of former labour’, that is, capital (Mill 1965: 55). The critique of this last element was essential for Marx, in order to reveal what he considered to be a fundamental limitation of the economists. It also seemed evident to him that no production was possible without an instrument of labour, if only the human hand, or without accumulated past labour, if only in the form of primitive man’s repetitive exercises. However, while agreeing that capital was past labour and an instrument of production, he did not, like Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, conclude that it had always existed.

The point is made in greater detail in another section of the Grundrisse, where the conception of capital as ‘eternal’ is seen as a way of treating it only as matter, without regard for its essential ‘formal determination’ (Formbestimmung). According to this,

capital would have existed in all forms of society, and is something altogether unhistorical. … The arm, and especially the hand, are then capital. Capital would be only a new name for a thing as old as the human race, since every form of labour, including the least developed, hunting, fishing, etc., presupposes that the product of prior labour is used as means for direct, living labour. … If, then, the specific form of capital is abstracted away, and only the content is emphasized, … of course nothing is easier than to demonstrate that capital is a necessary condition for all human production. The proof of this proceeds precisely by abstraction [Abstraktion] from the specific aspects which make it the moment of a specifically developed historical stage of human production [Moment einer besonders entwickelten historischen Stufe der menschlichen Production].
(Marx 1973: 257-8)

In fact, Marx had already criticized the economists’ lack of historical sense in The Poverty of Philosophy:

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any.
(Marx 1976: 174)

For this to be plausible, economists depicted the historical circumstances prior to the birth of the capitalist mode of production as ‘results of its presence’ with its very own features (Marx 1973: 460). As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse:

The bourgeois economists who regard capital as an eternal and natural (not historical) form of production then attempt … to legitimize it again by formulating the conditions of its becoming as the conditions of its contemporary realization; i.e. presenting the moments in which the capitalist still appropriates as not-capitalist – because he is still becoming – as the very conditions in which he appropriates as capitalist.’
(Marx 1973: 460)

From a historical point of view, the profound difference between Marx and the classical economists is that, in his view, ‘capital did not begin the world from the beginning, but rather encountered production and products already present, before it subjugated them beneath its process’ (Marx 1973: 675). For ‘the new productive forces and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing Idea; but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of property’ (Marx 1973: 278). Similarly, the circumstance whereby producing subjects are separated from the means of production – which allows the capitalist to find propertyless workers capable of performing abstract labour (the necessary requirement for the exchange between capital and living labour) – is the result of a process that the economists cover with silence, which ‘forms the history of the origins of capital and wage labour’ (Marx 1973: 489).

A number of passages in the Grundrisse criticize the way in which economists portray historical as natural realities. It is self-evident to Marx, for example, that money is a product of history: ‘to be money is not a natural attribute of gold and silver’, but only a determination they first acquire at a precise moment of social development (Marx 1973: 239). The same is true of credit. According to Marx, lending and borrowing was a phenomenon common to many civilizations, as was usury, but they ‘no more constitute credit than working constitutes industrial labour or free wage labour. And credit as an essential, developed relation of production appears historically only in circulation based on capital’ (Marx 1973: 535). Prices and exchange also existed in ancient society, ‘but the increasing determination of the former by costs of production, as well as the increasing dominance of the latter over all relations of production, only develop fully … in bourgeois society, the society of free competition’; or ‘what Adam Smith, in the true eighteenth-century manner, puts in the prehistoric period, the period preceding history, is rather a product of history’ (Marx 1973: 156). Furthermore, just as he criticized the economists for their lack of historical sense, Marx mocked Proudhon and all the socialists who thought that labour productive of exchange value could exist without developing into wage labour, that exchange value could exist without turning into capital, or that there could be capital without capitalists (see Marx 1973: 248).

Marx’s chief aim in the opening pages of the ‘Introduction’ is therefore to assert the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production: to demonstrate, as he would again affirm in Capital, vol. III, that it ‘is not an absolute mode of production’ but ‘merely historical, transitory’ (Marx 1998: 240).

Evasion of the specificity of capitalist production therefore had both epistemological and political consequences. On the one hand, it impeded understanding of the concrete historical levels of production; on the other hand, in defining present conditions as unchanged and unchangeable, it presented capitalist production as production in general and bourgeois social relations as natural human relations. Accordingly, Marx’s critique of the theories of economists had a twofold value. As well as underlining that a historical characterization was indispensable for an understanding of reality, it had the precise political aim of countering the dogma of the immutability of the capitalist mode of production. A demonstration of the historicity of the capitalist order would also be proof of its transitory character and of the possibility of its elimination.

An echo of the ideas contained in this first part of the ‘Introduction’ may be found in the closing pages of Capital, vol. III, where Marx writes that ‘identification of the social production process with the simple labour process’ is a ‘confusion’ (Marx 1998: 870). For,

to the extent that the labour process is solely a process between man and Nature, its simple elements remain common to all social forms of development. But each specific historical form of this process further develops its material foundations and social forms. Whenever a certain stage of maturity has been reached, the specific historical form is discarded and makes way for a higher one.
(Marx 1998: 870)

Capitalism is not the only stage in human history, nor is it the final one. Marx foresees that it will be succeeded by an organization of society based upon ‘communal production’ (gemeinschaftliche Production), in which the labour product is ‘from the beginning directly general’ (Marx 1973: 172).

II. Production as a totality
In the succeed pages of the ‘Introduction’, Marx passes to a deeper consideration of production and begins with the following definition: ‘All production is appropriation [Aneignung] of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society [bestimmten Gesellschaftsform]’ (Marx 1973: 87). There was no ‘production in general’ – since it was divided into agriculture, cattle-raising, manufacturing and other branches – but nor could it be considered as ‘only particular production’. Rather, it was ‘always a certain social body [Gesellschaftskörper], a social subject [gesellschaftliches Subject], active in a greater or sparser totality of branches of production’ (Marx 1973: 86).

Here again, Marx developed his arguments through a critical encounter with the main exponents of economic theory. Those who were his contemporaries had acquired the habit of prefacing their work with a section on the general conditions of production and the circumstances which, to a greater or lesser degree, advanced productivity in various societies. For Marx, however, such preliminaries set forth ‘flat tautologies’ (Marx 1973: 86) and, in the case of John Stuart Mill, were designed to present production ‘as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history’ and bourgeois relations as ‘inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded’ (Marx 1973: 87). According to Mill, ‘the laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. … It is not so with the distribution of wealth. That is a matter of human institutions solely’ (Mill 1965: 199). Marx considered this a ‘crude tearing-apart of production and distribution and of their real relationship’ (Marx 1973: 87), since, as he put it elsewhere in the Grundrisse, ‘the “laws and conditions” of the production of wealth and the laws of the “distribution of wealth” are the same laws under different forms, and both change, undergo the same historic process; are as such only moments of a historic process’ (Marx 1973: 832).

After making these points, Marx proceeds in the second section of the ‘Introduction’ to examine the general relationship of production to distribution, exchange and consumption. This division of political economy had been made by James Mill, who had used these four categories as the headings for the four chapters comprising his book of 1821, Elements of Political Economy , and before him, in 1803, by Jean-Baptiste Say, who had divided his Traité d’économie politique into three books on the production, distribution and consumption of wealth.

Marx reconstructed the interconnection among the four rubrics in logical terms, in accordance with Hegel’s schema of universality – particularity – individuality: (see Hegel 1969: 666f.) ‘Production, distribution, exchange and distribution form a regular syllogism; production is the universality, distribution and exchange the particularity, and consumption the individuality in which the whole is joined together’. In other words, production was the starting-point of human activity, distribution and exchange were the twofold intermediary point – the former being the mediation operated by society, the latter by the individual – and consumption became the end point. However, as this was only a ‘shallow coherence’, Marx wished to analyse more deeply how the four spheres were correlated with one another (Marx 1973: 89).

His first object of investigation was the relationship between production and consumption, which he explained as one of immediate identity: ‘production is consumption’ and ‘consumption is production’. With the help of Spinoza’s principle of determinatio est negatio, he showed that production was also consumption, in so far as the productive act used up the powers of the individual as well as raw materials (see Spinoza 1955: 370). Indeed, the economists had already highlighted this aspect with their terms ‘productive consumption’ and differentiated this from ‘consumptive production’. The latter occurred only after the product was distributed, re-entering the sphere of reproduction, and constituting ‘consumption proper’. In productive consumption ‘the producer objectifies himself’, while in consumptive production ‘the object he created personifies itself’ (Marx 1973: 90-1).

Another characteristic of the identity of production and consumption was discernible in the reciprocal ‘mediating movement’ that developed between them. Consumption gives the product its ‘last finish’ and, by stimulating the propensity to produce, ‘creates the need for new production’ (Marx 1973: 91). In the same way, production furnishes not only the object for consumption, but also ‘a need for the material’. Once the stage of natural immediacy is left behind, need is generated by the object itself; ‘production not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object’ – that is, a consumer (Marx 1973: 92). So,

production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer. It thus produces the object of consumption, the manner of consumption and the motive of consumption. (Marx 1973: 92)

To recapitulate: there is a process of unmediated identity between production and consumption; these also mediate each other in turn, and create each other as they are realized. Nevertheless, Marx thought it a mistake to consider the two as identical – as Say and Proudhon did, for example. For, in the last analysis, ‘consumption as urgency, as need, is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity’.

Marx then turns to analyse the relationship between production and distribution. Distribution, he writes, is the link between production and consumption, and ‘in accordance with social laws’ it determines what share of the products is due to the producers (Marx 1973: 94). The economists present it as a sphere autonomous from production, so that in their treatises the economic categories are always posed in a dual manner. Land, labour and capital figure in production as the agents of distribution, while in distribution, in the form of ground rent, wages and profit, they appear as sources of income. Marx opposes this split, which he judges illusory and mistaken, since the form of distribution ‘is not an arbitrary arrangement, which could be different; it is, rather, posited by the form of production itself’ (Marx 1973: 594). In the ‘Introduction’ he expresses his thinking as follows:

An individual who participates in production in the form of wage labour shares in the products, in the results of production, in the form of wages. The structure of distribution is completely determined by the structure of production. Distribution itself a product of production, not only in its object, in that only the results of production can be distributed, but also in its form, in that the specific kind of participation in production determines the specific forms of distribution, i.e. the pattern of participation in distribution. It is altogether an illusion to posit land in production, ground rent in distribution, etc. (Marx 1973: 95)

Those who saw distribution as autonomous from production conceived of it as mere distribution of products. In reality, it included two important phenomena that were prior to production: distribution of the instruments of production and distribution of the members of society among various kinds of production, or what Marx defined as ‘subsumption of the individuals under specific relations of production’ (Marx 1973: 96). These two phenomena meant that in some historical cases – for example, when a conquering people subjects the vanquished to slave labour, or when a redivision of landed estates gives rise to a new type of production (see Marx 1973: 96) – ‘distribution is not structured and determined by production, but rather the opposite, production by distribution’ (Marx 1973: 96). The two were closely linked to each other, since, as Marx puts it elsewhere in the Grundrisse, ‘these modes of distribution are the relations of production themselves, but sub specie distributionis’ (Marx 1973: 832). Thus, in the words of the ‘Introduction’, ‘to examine production while disregarding this internal distribution within it is obviously an empty abstraction’.

The link between production and distribution, as conceived by Marx, sheds light not only on his aversion to the way in which John Stuart Mill rigidly separated the two but also on his appreciation of Ricardo for having posed the need ‘to grasp the specific social structure of modern production’ (Marx 1973: 96). The English economist did indeed hold that ‘to determine the laws which regulate this distribution is the principal problem in Political Economy’ (Ricardo 1973: 3), and therefore he made distribution one of his main objects of study, since ‘he conceived the forms of distribution as the most specific expression into which the agents of production of a given society are cast’ (Marx 1973: 96). For Marx, too, distribution was not reducible to the act through which the shares of the aggregate product were distributed among members of society; it was a decisive element of the entire productive cycle. Yet this conviction did not overturn his thesis that production was always the primary factor within the production process as a whole:

The question of the relation between this distribution and the production it determines belongs evidently within production itself. … [P]roduction does indeed have its determinants and preconditions, which form its moments. At the very beginning these may appear as spontaneous, natural. But by the process of production itself they are transformed from natural into historic determinants, and if they appear to one epoch as natural presuppositions of production, they were its historic product for another.
(Marx 1973: 97, trans. modified)

For Marx, then, although the distribution of the instruments of production and the members of society among the various productive branches ‘appears as a presupposition of the new period of production, it is … itself in turn a product of production, not only of historical production generally, but of the specific historic mode of production’ (Marx 1973: 98).
When Marx lastly examined the relationship between production and exchange, he also considered the latter to be part of the former. Not only was ‘the exchange of activities and abilities’ among the workforce, and of the raw materials necessary to prepare the finished product, an integral part of production; the exchange between dealers was also wholly determined by production and constituted a ‘producing activity’. Exchange becomes autonomous from production only in the phase where ‘the product is exchanged directly for consumption’. Even then, however, its intensity, scale and characteristic features are determined by the development and structure of production, so that ‘in all its moments … exchange appears as either directly comprised in production or determined by it’.

At the end of his analysis of the relationship of production to distribution, exchange and consumption, Marx draws two conclusions: (1) production should be considered as a totality; and (2) production as a particular branch within the totality predominates over the other elements. On the first point he writes: ‘The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity’ (Marx 1973: 99). Employing the Hegelian concept of totality, Marx sharpened a theoretical instrument – more effective than the limited processes of abstraction used by the economists – one capable of showing, through the reciprocal action among parts of the totality, that the concrete was a differentiated unity (see Hall 2003: 127) of plural determinations and relations, and that the four separate rubrics of the economists were both arbitrary and unhelpful for an understanding of real economic relations.

In Marx’s conception, however, the definition of production as an organic totality did not point to a structured, self-regulating whole within which uniformity was always guaranteed among its various branches. On the contrary, as he wrote in a section of the Grundrisse dealing with the same argument: the individual moments of production ‘may or may not find each other, balance each other, correspond to each other. The inner necessity of moments which belong together, and their indifferent, independent existence towards one another, are already a foundation of contradictions’. Marx argued that it was always necessary to analyse these contradictions in relation to capitalist production (not production in general), which was not at all ‘the absolute form for the development of the forces of production’, as the economists proclaimed, but had its ‘fundamental contradiction’ in overproduction (Marx 1973: 415).

Marx’s second conclusion made production the ‘predominant moment’ (übergreifende Moment) over the other parts of the ‘totality of production’ (Totalität der Production) (Marx 1973: 86). It was the ‘real point of departure’ (Ausgangspunkt) (Marx 1973: 94), from which ‘the process always returns to begin anew’, and so ‘a definite production determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments’ (Marx 1973: 99). But such predominance did not cancel the importance of the other moments, nor their influence on production. The dimension of consumption, the transformations of distribution and the size of the sphere of exchange – or of the market – were all factors jointly defining and impacting on production.

Here again Marx’s insights had a value both theoretical and political. In opposition to other socialists of his time, who maintained that it was possible to revolutionize the prevailing relations of production by transforming the instrument of circulation, he argued that this clearly demonstrated their ‘misunderstanding’ of ‘the inner connections between the relations of production, of distribution and of circulation’ (Marx 1973: 122). For not only would a change in the form of money leave unaltered the relations of production and the other social relations determined by them; it would also turn out to be a nonsense, since circulation could change only together with a change in the relations of production. Marx was convinced that ‘the evil of bourgeois society is not to be remedied by “transforming” the banks or by founding a rational “money system”’, nor through bland palliatives such as the granting of free credit, nor through the chimera of turning workers into capitalists (Marx 1973: 134). The central question remained the overcoming of wage labour, and first and foremost that concerned production.

III. Alienation: from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital
The overcoming of wage labour was strictly related to another key concept for Marx: alienation. The decisive event that finally revolutionized the diffusion of the concept of alienation was the appearance, in 1932, of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, a previously unpublished text from Marx’s youth. It rapidly became one of the most widely translated, circulated and discussed philosophical writings of the 20th century, revealing the central role that Marx had given to the theory of alienation during an important period for the formation of his economic thought: the discovery of political economy. For, with his category of alienated labour (entfremdete Arbeit), Marx not only widened the problem of alienation from the philosophical, religious and political sphere to the economic sphere of material production; he also showed that the economic sphere was essential to understanding and overcoming alienation in the other spheres. In the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, alienation is presented as the phenomenon through which the labour product confronts labour ‘as something alien, as a power independent of the producer’. For Marx,

‘the externalization [Entäusserung] of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.’
(Marx 1992a: 324)

Alongside this general definition, Marx listed four ways in which the worker is alienated in bourgeois society: 1) from the product of his labour, which becomes ‘an alien object that has power over him’; 2) in his working activity, which he perceives as ‘directed against himself’, as if it ‘does not belong to him’ (Marx 1992a: 327); 3) from ‘man’s species-being’, which is transformed into ‘a being alien to him’; and 4) from other human beings, and in relation to their labour and the object of their labour (Marx 1992a: 330).

For Marx, in contrast to Hegel, alienation was not coterminous with objectification as such, but rather with a particular phenomenon within a precise form of economy: that is, wage labour and the transformation of labour products into objects standing opposed to producers. The political difference between these two positions is enormous. Whereas Hegel presented alienation as an ontological manifestation of labour, Marx conceived it as characteristic of a particular, capitalist, epoch of production, and thought it would be possible to overcome it through ‘the emancipation of society from private property’ (Marx 1992a: 333). He would make similar points in the notebooks containing extracts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy:

‘Labour would be the free expression and hence the enjoyment of life. In the framework of private property it is the alienation of life since I work in order to live, in order to procure for myself the means of life. My labour is not life. Moreover, in my labour the specific character of my individuality would be affirmed because it would be my individual life. Labour would be authentic, active, property. In the framework of private property my individuality has been alienated to the point where I loathe this activity, it is torture for me. It is in fact no more than the appearance of activity and for that reason it is only a forced labour imposed on me not through an inner necessity but through an external arbitrary need.’ (Marx 1992b: 278)

So, even in these fragmentary and sometimes hesitant early writings, Marx always discussed alienation from a historical, not a natural, point of view. In the second half of the 1840s, Marx no longer made frequent use of the term ‘alienation’; the main exceptions were his first book, The Holy Family (1845), jointly authored with Engels, where it appears in some polemics against Bruno and Edgar Bauer, and one passage in The German Ideology (1845-6), also written with Engels. Once he had abandoned the idea of publishing The German Ideology, he returned to the theory of alienation in Wage Labour and Capital, a collection of articles based on lectures he gave to the German Workers’ League in Brussels in 1847, but the term itself does not appear in them, because it would have had too abstract a ring for his intended audience. In these texts, he wrote that wage labour does not enter into the worker’s ‘own life activity’ but represents a ‘sacrifice of his life’. Labour-power is a commodity that the worker is forced to sell ‘in order to live’, and ‘the product of his activity [is] not the object of his activity’ (Marx 1977: 202):

‘the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc. – does he consider this twelve hours’ weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him where these activities cease, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hours’ labour, on the other hand, have no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, drilling, etc. but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed. If the silkworm were to spin in order to continue its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a complete wage-worker.’ (Marx 1977: 203)

Until the late 1850s there were no more references to the theory of alienation in Marx’s work. Following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, he was forced to go into exile in London; once there, he concentrated all his energies on the study of political economy and, apart from a few short works with a historical theme, did not publish another book. When he began to write about economics again, however, in the Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (better known as the Grundrisse), he more than once used the term ‘alienation’. This text recalled in many respects the analyses of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, although nearly a decade of studies in the British Library had allowed him to make them considerably more profound:

‘The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual – their mutual interconnection – here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things; personal capacity into objective wealth.’
(Marx 1993: 157)

The account of alienation in the Grundrisse, then, is enriched by a greater understanding of economic categories and by more rigorous social analysis. The link it establishes between alienation and exchange-value is an important aspect of this. And, in one of the most dazzling passages on this phenomenon of modern society, Marx links alienation to the opposition between capital and ‘living labour-power’:

‘The objective conditions of living labour appear as separated, independent values opposite living labour capacity as subjective being…. The objective conditions of living labour capacity are presupposed as having an existence independent of it, as the objectivity of a subject distinct from living labour capacity and standing independently over against it; the reproduction and realization, i.e. the expansion of these objective conditions, is therefore at the same time their own reproduction and new production as the wealth of an alien subject indifferently and independently standing over against labour capacity. What is reproduced and produced anew is not only the presence of these objective conditions of living labour, but also their presence as independent values, i.e. values belonging to an alien subject, confronting this living labour capacity. The objective conditions of labour attain a subjective existence vis-à-vis living labour capacity – capital turns into capitalist.’ (Marx 1993: 461-2)

The Grundrisse was not the only text of Marx’s maturity to feature an account of alienation. Five years after it was composed, the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ – also known as ‘Capital, Volume One: Book 1, Chapter VI, unpublished’ (1863-4) – brought the economic and political analyses of alienation more closely together. ‘The rule of the capitalist over the worker,’ Marx wrote, ‘is the rule of things over man, of dead labour over the living, of the product over the producer’ (Marx 1976: 990). In capitalist society, by virtue of ‘the transposition of the social productivity of labour into the material attributes of capital’, (Marx 1976: 1058) there is a veritable ‘personification of things and reification of persons’, creating the appearance that ‘the material conditions of labour are not subject to the worker, but he to them’ (Marx 1976: 1054). In reality, he argued:

‘Capital is not a thing, any more than money is a thing. In capital, as in money, certain specific social relations of production between people appear as relations of things to people, or else certain social relations appear as the natural properties of things in society. Without a class dependent on wages, the moment individuals confront each other as free persons, there can be no production of surplus-value; without the production of surplus-value there can be no capitalist production, and hence no capital and no capitalist! Capital and wage-labour (it is thus we designate the labour of the worker who sells his own labour-power) only express two aspects of the self-same relationship. Money cannot become capital unless it is exchanged for labour-power, a commodity sold by the worker himself. Conversely, work can only be wage-labour when its own material conditions confront it as autonomous powers, alien property, value existing for itself and maintaining itself, in short as capital. If capital in its material aspects, i.e. in the use-values in which it has its being, must depend for its existence on the material conditions of labour, these material conditions must equally, on the formal side, confront labour as alien, autonomous powers, as value – objectified labour – which treats living labour as a mere means whereby to maintain and increase itself.’ (Marx 1976: 1005-6)

In the capitalist mode of production, human labour becomes an instrument of the valorization process of capital, which, ‘by incorporating living labour-power into the material constituents of capital,… becomes an animated monster and … starts to act “as if consumed by love”’ (Marx 1976: 1007). This mechanism keeps expanding in scale, until co-operation in the production process, scientific discoveries and the deployment of machinery – all of them social processes belonging to the collective – become forces of capital that appear as its natural properties, confronting the workers in the shape of the capitalist order:

‘The productive forces … developed [by] social labour … appear as the productive forces of capitalism. […] Collective unity in co-operation, combination in the division of labour, the use of the forces of nature and the sciences, of the products of labour, as machinery – all these confront the individual workers as something alien, objective, ready-made, existing without their intervention, and frequently even hostile to them. They all appear quite simply as the prevailing forms of the instruments of labour. As objects they are independent of the workers whom they dominate. Though the workshop is to a degree the product of the workers’ combination, its entire intelligence and will seem to be incorporated in the capitalist or his understrappers, and the workers find themselves confronted by the functions of the capital that lives in the capitalist.’ (Marx 1976: 1054)

Through this process capital becomes something ‘highly mysterious’. ‘The conditions of labour pile up in front of the worker as social forces, and they assume a capitalized form’ (Marx 1976: 1056). Beginning in the 1960s, the diffusion of ‘Capital, Volume One: Book 1, Chapter VI, unpublished’ and, above all, of the Grundrisse paved the way for a conception of alienation different from the one then hegemonic in sociology and psychology. It was a conception geared to the overcoming of alienation in practice – to the political action of social movements, parties and trade unions to change the working and living conditions of the working class. The publication of what (after the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in the 1930s) may be thought of as the ‘second generation’ of Marx’s writings on alienation therefore provided not only a coherent theoretical basis for new studies of alienation, but above all an anti-capitalist ideological platform for the extraordinary political and social movement that exploded in the world during those years. Alienation left the books of philosophers and the lecture halls of universities, took to the streets and the space of workers’ struggles, and became a critique of bourgeois society in general.

IV. Commodity fetishism and de-alienation
One of Marx’s best accounts of alienation is contained in the famous section of Capital on ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’, where he shows that, in capitalist society, people are dominated by the products they have created. Here, the relations among them appear not ‘as direct social relations between persons…, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (Marx 1996: 166):

‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists … in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social. […] It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.’ (Marx 1996: 164-5)

Two elements in this definition mark a clear dividing line between Marx’s conception of alienation and the one held by most of the other authors we have been discussing. First, Marx conceives of fetishism not as an individual problem but as a social phenomenon, not as an affair of the mind but as a real power, a particular form of domination, which establishes itself in market economy as a result of the transformation of objects into subjects. For this reason, his analysis of alienation does not confine itself to the disquiet of individual women and men, but extends to the social processes and productive activities underlying it. Second, for Marx fetishism manifests itself in a precise historical reality of production, the reality of wage labour; it is not part of the relation between people and things as such, but rather of the relation between man and a particular kind of objectivity: the commodity form.

In bourgeois society, human qualities and relations turn into qualities and relations among things. This theory of what Lukács would call reification illustrated alienation from the point of view of human relations, while the concept of fetishism treated it in relation to commodities. Pace those who deny that a theory of alienation is present in Marx’s mature work, we should stress that commodity fetishism did not replace alienation but was only one aspect of it (Cf. Schaff 1980: 81).

The theoretical advance from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital and its related materials does not, however, consist only in the greater precision of his account of alienation. There is also a reformulation of the measures that Marx considers necessary for it to be overcome. Whereas in 1844 he had argued that human beings would eliminate alienation by abolishing private production and the division of labour, the path to a society free of alienation was much more complicated in Capital and its preparatory manuscripts. Marx held that capitalism was a system in which the workers were subject to capital and the conditions it imposed. Nevertheless, it had created the foundations for a more advanced society, and by generalizing its benefits humanity would be able to progress along the faster road of social development that it had opened up.

According to Marx, a system that produced an enormous accumulation of wealth for the few and deprivation and exploitation for the general mass of workers must be replaced with ‘an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’ (Marx 1996: 171). This type of production would differ from wage labour because it would place its determining factors under collective governance, take on an immediately general character and convert labour into a truly social activity. This was a conception of society at the opposite pole from Hobbes’s “war of all against all”; and its creation did not require a merely political process, but would necessarily involve transformation of the sphere of production. But such a change in the labour process had its limits:

‘Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.’
(Marx 1998: 959)

This post-capitalist system of production, together with scientific-technological progress and a consequent reduction of the working day, creates the possibility for a new social formation in which the coercive, alienated labour imposed by capital and subject to its laws is gradually replaced with conscious, creative activity beyond the yoke of necessity, and in which complete social relations take the place of random, undifferentiated exchange dictated by the laws of commodities and money. It is no longer the realm of freedom for capital but the realm of genuine human freedom.

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Watt, Ian (1951) ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, Essays in Criticism, Vol. I, No. 2: 95-119.

Tags English

Book chapter

Introduction

Post author By Ksenia Arapko
Post date February 26, 2014

I. Opening Steps
On 28 September 1864, St. Martin’s Hall in the very heart of London was packed to overflowing with some two thousand workmen. They had come to attend a meeting called by English trade union leaders and a small group of workers from the Continent: the advance notices had spoken of a “deputation organized by the workmen of Paris”, which would “deliver their reply to the Address of their English brethren, and submit a plan for a better understanding between the peoples” . In fact, when a number of French and English workers’ organizations had met in London a year earlier, in July 1863, to express solidarity with the Polish people against Tsarist occupation, they had also declared what they saw as the key objectives for the working-class movement. The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by the prominent union leader George Odger (1813-1877) and published in the bi-weekly The Bee-Hive, stated:

A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages; and we are sorry to say that this has been done, though not from any desire on the part of our continental brethren to injure us, but through a want of regular and systematic communication between the industrial classes of all countries. Our aim is to bring up the wages of the ill-paid to as near a level as possible with that of those who are better remunerated, and not to allow our employers to play us off one against the other, and so drag us down to the lowest possible condition, suitable to their avaricious bargaining .

The organizers of this initiative did not imagine – nor could they have foreseen – what it would lead to shortly afterwards. Their idea was to build an international forum where the main problems affecting workers could be examined and discussed, but this did not include the actual founding of an organization to coordinate the trade union and political action of the working class. Similarly, their ideology was initially permeated with general ethical-humanitarian elements, such as the importance of fraternity among peoples and world peace, rather than class conflict and clearly defined political objectives. Because of these limitations, the meeting at St. Martin’s Hall might have been just another of those vaguely democratic initiatives of the period with no real follow-through. But in reality it gave birth to the prototype of all organizations of the workers’ movement, which both reformists and revolutionaries would subsequently take as their point of reference: the International Working Men’s Association .

It was soon arousing passions all over Europe. It made class solidarity a shared ideal and inspired large numbers of men and women to struggle for the most radical of goals: changing the world. Thus, on the occasion of the Third Congress of the International, held in Brussels in 1868, the leader writer of The Times accurately identified the scope of the project:

It is not … a mere improvement that is contemplated, but nothing less than a regeneration, and that not of one nation only, but of mankind. This is certainly the most extensive aim ever contemplated by any institution, with the exception, perhaps, of the Christian Church. To be brief, this is the programme of the International Workingmen’s Association .

Thanks to the International, the workers’ movement was able to gain a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, to become more aware of its own strength, and to develop new and more advanced forms of struggle. The organization resonated far beyond the frontiers of Europe, generating hope that a different world was possible among the artisans of Buenos Aires, the early workers’ associations in Calcutta, and even the labour groups in Australia and New Zealand that applied to join it.

Conversely, news of its founding inspired horror in the ruling classes. The idea that the workers too wanted to play an active role in history sent shivers down their spine, and many a government set its sights on eradicating the International and harried it with all the means at its disposal.

II. The Right Man in the Right Place
The workers’ organizations that founded the International were something of a motley. The central driving force was British trade unionism, whose leaders – nearly all reformist in their horizons – were mainly interested in economic questions; they fought to improve the workers’ conditions, but without calling capitalism into question. Hence they conceived of the International as an instrument that might favour their objectives, by preventing the import of manpower from abroad in the event of strikes.

Another significant force in the organization was the mutualists, long dominant in France but strong also in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. In keeping with the theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), they were opposed to any working-class involvement in politics and to the strike as a weapon of struggle, as well as holding conservative positions on women’s emancipation. Advocating a cooperative system along federalist lines, they maintained that it was possible to change capitalism by means of equal access to credit. In the end, therefore, they may be said to have constituted the right wing of the International.

Alongside these two components, which formed the numerical majority, there were others of a different hue again. The third in importance were the communists, grouped around the figure of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and active in small groupings with very limited influence – above all in a number of German and Swiss cities, and in London. They were anticapitalist: that is, they opposed the existing system of production and espoused the necessity of political action to overthrow it.

At the time of its founding, the ranks of the International also included elements that had nothing to do with the socialist tradition, such as certain groups of East European exiles inspired by vaguely democratic ideas. Among these were followers of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), whose cross-class conception, mainly geared to national demands, considered the International useful for the issuing of general appeals for the liberation of oppressed peoples .

The picture is further complicated by the fact that some groups of French, Belgian and Swiss workers who joined the International brought with them a variety of confused theories, some of a utopian inspiration; while the General Association of German Workers – the party led by followers of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864), which never affiliated to the International but orbited around it – was hostile to trade unionism and conceived of political action in rigidly national terms.

All these groups, with their complex web of cultures and political/trade union experiences, made their mark on the nascent International. It was an arduous task indeed to build a general framework and to keep such a broad organization together, if only on a federal basis. Besides, even after a common programme had been agreed upon, each tendency continued to exert a (sometimes centrifugal) influence in the local sections where it was in the majority.

To secure cohabitation of all these currents in the same organization, around a programme so distant from the approaches with which each had started out, was Marx’s great accomplishment. His political talents enabled him to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, ensuring that the International did not swiftly follow the many previous workers’ associations down the path to oblivion . It was Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International, and Marx too who achieved a non-exclusionary, yet firmly class-based, political programme that won it a mass character beyond all sectarianism. The political soul of its General Council was always Marx: he drafted all its main resolutions and prepared all its congress reports (except the one for the Lausanne Congress in 1867, when he was totally occupied with the proofs for Capital). He was “the right man in the right place” , as the German workers’ leader Johann Georg Eccarius (1818-1889) once put it.

Contrary to later fantasies that pictured Marx as the founder of the International, he was not even among the organizers of the meeting at St. Martin’s Hall. He sat “in a non-speaking capacity on the platform” , he recalled in a letter to his friend Engels. Yet he immediately grasped the potential in the event and worked hard to ensure that the new organization successfully carried out its mission. Thanks to the prestige attaching to his name, at least in restricted circles, he was appointed to the 34-member standing committee , where he soon gained sufficient trust to be given the task of writing the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Statutes of the International. In these fundamental texts, as in many others that followed, Marx drew on the best ideas of the various components of the International, while at the same time eliminating corporate inclinations and sectarian tones. He firmly linked economic and political struggle to each other, and made international thinking and international action an irreversible choice .

It was mainly thanks to Marx’s capacities that the International developed its function of political synthesis, unifying the various national contexts in a project of common struggle that recognized their significant autonomy, but not total independence, from the directive centre . The maintenance of unity was gruelling at times, especially as Marx’s anticapitalism was never the dominant political position within the organization. Over time, however, partly through his own tenacity, partly through occasional splits, Marx’s thought became the hegemonic doctrine . It was hard going, but the effort of political elaboration benefited considerably from the struggles of those years. The character of workers’ mobilizations, the antisystemic challenge of the Paris Commune, the unprecedented task of holding together such a large and complex organization, the successive polemics with other tendencies in the workers’ movement on various theoretical and political issues: all this impelled Marx beyond the limits of political economy alone, which had absorbed so much of his attention since the defeat of the 1848 revolution and the ebbing of the most progressive forces. He was also stimulated to develop and sometimes revise his ideas, to put old certainties up for discussion and ask himself new questions, and in particular to sharpen his critique of capitalism by drawing the broad outlines of a communist society. The orthodox Soviet view of Marx’s role in the International, according to which he mechanically applied to the stage of history a political theory he had already forged in the confines of his study, is thus totally divorced from reality .

III. Membership and Structure
During its lifetime and in subsequent decades, the International was depicted as a vast, financially powerful organization. The size of its membership was always overestimated, whether because of imperfect knowledge or because some of its leaders exaggerated the real situation or because opponents were looking for a pretext to justify a brutal crackdown. The public prosecutor who arraigned some of its French leaders in June 1870 stated that the organization had more than 800,000 members in Europe ; a year later, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, The Times put the total at two and a half million; and Oscar Testut (1840-unk.), the main person to study it in the conservative camp, predicted this would rise above five million .

In reality, the membership figures were much lower. It has always been difficult to arrive at even approximate estimates, and that was true for its own leaders and those who studied it most closely . But the present state of research allows the hypothesis that, at its peak in 1871-1872, the tally reached more than 150,000: 50,000 in Britain, more than 30,000 in both France and Belgium, 6,000 in Switzerland, about 30,000 in Spain, ??????? in Italy, more than 10,000 in Germany (but mostly members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party), plus a few thousand each in a number of other European countries, and 4,000 in the United States .

In those times, when there was a dearth of effective working-class organizations apart from the English trade unions and the General Association of German Workers, such figures were certainly sizeable. It should also be borne in mind that, throughout its existence, the International was recognized as a legal organization only in Britain, Switzerland, Belgium and the United States. In other countries where it had a solid presence (France, Spain, Italy), it was on the margins of legality for a number of years, and its members were subject to persecution. To join the International meant breaking the law in the 39 states of the German Confederation, and the few members in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were forced to operate in clandestine forms.

On the other hand, the Association had a remarkable capacity to weld its components into a cohesive whole. Within a couple of years from its birth, it had succeeded in federating hundreds of workers’ societies; from the end of 1868, thanks to propaganda conducted by followers of Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), other societies were added in Spain, and after the Paris Commune sections sprang up also in Italy, Holland, Denmark and Portugal. The development of the International was doubtless uneven: while it was growing in some countries, it was elsewhere remaining level or falling back under the blows of repression. Yet a strong sense of belonging prevailed among those who joined the International for even a short time. When the cycle of struggles in which they had taken part came to an end, and adversity and personal hardship forced them to take a distance, they retained the bonds of class solidarity and responded as best they could to the call for a rally, the words of a poster or the unfurling of the red flag of struggle, in the name of an organization that had sustained them in their hour of need .

Members of the International, however, comprised only a small part of the total workforce. In Paris they never numbered more than 10,000, and in other capital cities such as Rome, Vienna or Berlin they were rare birds indeed. Another aspect is the character of the workers who joined the International: it was supposed to be the organization of wage-labourers, but very few actually became members; the main influx came from construction workers in England, textile workers in Belgium, and various types of artisans in France and Switzerland.

In Britain, with the sole exception of steelworkers, the International always had a sparse presence among the industrial proletariat . Nowhere did the latter ever form a majority, at least after the expansion of the organization in Southern Europe. The other great limitation was the failure to draw in unskilled labour , despite efforts in that direction beginning with the run-up to the first congress. The Instructions for Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The Different Questions are clear on this:
Apart from their original purposes, they [trade unions] must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centres of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction.

Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the non-society men into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as the agricultural labourers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions .

In Britain too, however, unskilled workers did not stream into the International, the one exception being diggers. The great majority of members there came from tailoring, clothing, shoemaking and cabinet-making – that is, from sectors of the working class that were then the best organized and the most class-conscious. In the end, the International remained an organization of employed workers; the jobless never became part of it. The provenance of its leaders reflected this, since all but a few had a background as artisans or brainworkers.

The resources of the International are similarly complicated. There was talk of fabulous wealth at its disposal , but the truth is that its finances were chronically unstable. The membership fee for individuals was one shilling, while trade unions were supposed to contribute threepence for each of their members. In many countries, however, individual subscriptions were few and far between, and in Britain the contributions from trade unions were so unreliable and so often scaled down that the General Council had to face facts and leave them free to pay what they could. The sums collected were never higher than a few score pounds per annum , barely enough to pay the general secretary’s wage of four shillings a week and the rent for an office from which the organization was often threatened with eviction for arrears.

In one of the key political-organizational documents of the International, Marx summarized its functions as follows: “It is the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever” .

Despite the considerable autonomy granted to federations and local sections, the International always retained a locus of political leadership. Its General Council was the body that worked out a unifying synthesis of the various tendencies and issued guidelines for the organization as a whole. From October 1864 until August 1872 it met with great regularity, as many as 385 times. In the room filled with pipe and cigar smoke where the Council held its sessions on Wednesday evening, its members debated a wide range of issues, such as: working conditions, the effects of new machinery, support for strikes, the role and importance of trade unions, the Irish question, various foreign policy matters, and, of course, how to build the society of the future. The General Council was also responsible for drafting the documents of the International: circulars, letters and resolutions for current purposes; special manifestos, addresses and appeals in particular circumstances .

IV. The Formation of the International
The lack of synchrony between the key organizational junctures and the main political events in the life of the International makes it difficult to reconstruct its history in chronological sequence. In terms of organization, the principal stages were: 1) the birth of the International (1864-1866), from its foundation to the First Congress (Geneva 1866); 2) the period of expansion (1866-1870); 3) the revolutionary surge and the repression following the Paris Commune (1871-1872); and 4) the split and crisis (1872-1877). In terms of its theoretical development, however, the principal stages were: 1) the initial debate among its various components and the laying of its own foundations (1864-1865); 2) the struggle for hegemony between collectivists and mutualists (1866-1869); and 3) the clash between centralists and autonomists (1870-1877). The following paragraphs will cover both the organizational and theoretical aspects.

Britain was the first country where applications were made to join the International; the 4,000-member Operative Society of Bricklayers affiliated in February 1865, soon to be followed by associations of construction workers and shoemakers. In the first year of its existence, the General Council began serious activity to publicize the principles of the Association. This helped to broaden its horizon beyond purely economic questions, as we can see from the fact that it was among the organizations belonging to the (electoral) Reform League founded in February 1865.

In France, the International began to take shape in January 1865, when its first section was founded in Paris. Other major centres appeared shortly afterwards in Lyons and Caën. But it remained very limited in strength, unable to increase its base in the French capital, and during this period many other workers’ organizations exceeded it in size; the Association had little ideological influence, and the relationship of forces as well as its own lack of political resolve made it impossible even to establish a national federation. Nevertheless, the French supporters of the International, who were mostly followers of Proudhon’s mutualist theories, established themselves as the second largest group at the first conference of the organization, held in London between 25 and 29 September and attended by 30 delegates from England, France, Switzerland and Belgium, with a few representatives from Germany, Poland and Italy. Each of these provided information about the first steps taken by the International, especially at an organizational level. This conference decided to call the first general congress for the following year and laid down the main themes to be discussed there.

In the period between these two gatherings, the International continued to expand in Europe and established its first important nuclei in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. The Prussian Combination Laws, which prevented German political associations from having regular contacts with organizations in other countries, meant that the International was unable to open sections in what was then the German Confederation. The General Association of German Workers – the first workers’ party in history , founded in 1863 and led by Lassalle’s disciple Johann Baptist von Schweitzer (1833-1875) – followed a line of ambivalent dialogue with Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) and showed little or no interest in the International during the early years of its existence; it was an indifference shared by Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1890), despite his political proximity to Marx. Johann Philipp Becker (1809-1886), one of the main leaders of the International in Switzerland, tried to find a way round these difficulties through the Geneva-based “Group of German-speaking Sections”, and for a long time he was the sole organizer of the early internationalist nuclei in the German Confederation.

These advances were greatly favoured by the diffusion of newspapers that either sympathized with the ideas of the International or were veritable organs of the General Council. Both categories contributed to the development of class consciousness and the rapid circulation of news concerning the activity of the International. Of those that appeared in the first few years of its existence, special mention should be made of the weekly The Bee-Hive and The Miner and Workman’s Advocate (later The Workman’s Advocate and then The Commonwealth), both published in London; the French-language weekly Le Courrier International, also published in London; La Tribune du Peuple, the official organ of the International in Belgium from August 1865; the Journal de l’Association Internationale des Travailleurs, the organ of the section in French-speaking Switzerland; Le Courrier Français, a Proudhonian weekly published in Paris; and Becker’s Der Vorbote in Geneva .

The activity of the General Council in London was decisive for the further strengthening of the International. In Spring 1866, with its support for the strikers of the London Amalgamated Tailors, it played an active role for the first time in a workers’ struggle, and following the success of the strike five societies of tailors, each numbering some 500 workers, decided to affiliate to the International. The positive outcome of other disputes attracted a number of small unions, so that, by the time of its first congress, it already had 17 union affiliations with a total of more than 25,000 new members. The International was the first association to succeed in the far from simple task of enlisting trade union organizations into its ranks .

Between 3 and 8 September 1866, the city of Geneva hosted the first congress of the International, with 60 delegates from Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland. By then the Association could point to a very favourable balance-sheet of the two years since its foundation, having rallied to its banner more than one hundred trade unions and political organizations. Those taking part in the congress essentially divided into two blocs. The first, consisting of the British delegates, the few Germans and a majority of the Swiss, followed the directives of the General Council drawn up by Marx (who was not present in Geneva). The second, comprising the French delegates and some of the French-speaking Swiss, was made up of mutualists. At that time, in fact, moderate positions were prevalent in the International, and the mutualists, led by the Parisian Henri Tolain (1828-1897), envisaged a society in which the worker would be at once producer, capitalist and consumer. They regarded the granting of free credit as a decisive measure for the transformation of society; considered women’s labour to be objectionable from both an ethical and a social point of view; and opposed any interference by the state in work relations (including legislation to reduce the working day to eight hours) on the grounds that it would threaten the private relationship between workers and employers and strengthen the system currently in force.

Basing themselves on resolutions prepared by Marx, the General Council leaders succeeded in marginalizing the numerically strong contingent of mutualists at the congress, and obtained votes in favour of state intervention. On the latter issue, in the section of the Instructions for Delegates of the Provisional General Council relating to “Juvenile and children’s labour (both sexes)”, Marx had spelled things out clearly:

This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts .

Thus, far from strengthening bourgeois society (as Proudhon and his followers wrongly believed), these reformist demands were an indispensable starting point for the emancipation of the working class.

Furthermore, the “instructions” that Marx wrote for the Geneva congress underline the basic function of trade unions against which not only the mutualists but also certain followers of Robert Owen (1771-1858) in Britain and of Lassalle in Germany had taken a stand:

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

In the same document, Marx did not spare the existing unions his criticism. For they were

too exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital [and had] not yet fully understood their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself. They therefore kept too much aloof from general social and political movements .

He had argued exactly the same a year earlier, in an address to the General Council on 20 and 27 June that was posthumously published as Value, Price and Profit:

[T]he working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wages system!”

V. Growing Strenght
From late 1866 on, strikes intensified in many European countries. Organized by broad masses of workers, they helped to generate an awareness of their condition and formed the core of a new and important wave of struggles. Although some governments of the time blamed the International for the unrest, most of the workers in question did not even know of its existence; the root cause of their protests was the dire working and living conditions they were forced to endure. The mobilizations did, however, usher in a period of contact and coordination with the International, which supported them with declarations and calls for solidarity, organized fund-raising for strikers, and helped to fight attempts by the bosses to weaken the workers’ resistance.

It was because of its practical role in this period that workers began to recognize the International as an organization that defended their interests and, in some cases, asked to be affiliated to it . The first major struggle to be won with its support was the Parisian bronze workers’ strike of February-March 1867. Also successful in their outcome were the ironworkers’ strike of February 1867 at Marchienne, the long dispute in the Provençal mineral basin between April 1867 and February 1868, and the Charleroi miners’ strike and Geneva building workers’ strike of Spring 1868. The scenario was the same in each of these events: workers in other countries raised funds in support of the strikers and agreed not to accept work that would have turned them into industrial mercenaries, so that the bosses were forced to compromise on many of the strikers’ demands. In the towns at the centre of the action, hundreds of new members were recruited to the International. As later observed in a report of the General Council: “It is not the International Working Men’s Association that pushes people into strikes, but strikes that push workers into the arms of the International Working Men’s Association” .

Thus, for all the difficulties bound up with the diversity of nationalities, languages and political cultures, the International managed to achieve unity and coordination across a wide range of organizations and spontaneous struggles. Its greatest merit was to demonstrate the absolute need for class solidarity and international cooperation, moving decisively beyond the partial character of the initial objectives and strategies.

From 1867 on, strengthened by success in achieving these goals, by increased membership and by a more efficient organization, the International made advances all over Continental Europe. It was its breakthrough year in France in particular, where the bronze workers’ strike had the same knock-on effect that the London tailors’ strike had produced in England. The number of members neared one thousand in Paris and passed the five hundred mark in Lyons and Vienne. Seven new sections were established, including one in Algiers on the southern shores of the Mediterranean (which, however, consisted only of French workers). Belgium too saw a rise in affiliations following the strikes, and as did Switzerland, where workers’ leagues, cooperatives and political societies enthusiastically applied to join. The International now had 25 sections in Geneva alone, including the German-speaking one that served as a base for propaganda among the workers of the German Confederation.

But Britain was still the country where the International had its greatest presence. In the course of 1867, the affiliation of another dozen organizations took the membership to a good 50,000 – an impressive figure if we bear in mind that it was reached in just two years, and that the total unionized workforce was then roughly 800,000 . Nowhere else did the membership of the International ever reach that level (in absolute terms, if not as a proportion of the population). In contrast to the progression of the 1864-1867 period, however, the subsequent years in Britain were marked by a kind of stagnation. There were several reasons for this, but the main one was that, as we have seen, the International did not manage to break through into factory industry or the world of unskilled labour. The only exception in the latter was the United Excavators, which affiliated after the strike of August 1866, while the Malleable Ironworkers were among the rare few that signed up from the great factories of the North and the Midlands. The voice of the International did not reach either the coal and cotton industry or the engineering workers (who, because of their technical skills, never felt threatened by foreign competition). Those who joined the International in the greatest numbers were the construction workers.

The 9,000-strong Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, whose secretary Robert Applegarth (1834-1924) sat on the General Council, represented a fifth of the total membership; they were followed by the tailors, cobblers, cabinetmakers, binders, ribbonweavers, web weavers, saddlers and cigarmakers – all trades unaltered by the Industrial Revolution. In January 1867, the London Trades Council decided to cooperate with the International but voted against affiliation; the episode brought it home to the General Council that it was unable to expand beyond its existing sphere of influence.

The growing institutionalization of the labour movement further contributed to this slowdown in the life of the International. The Reform Act, resulting from the battle first joined by the Reform League, expanded the franchise to more than a million British workers. The subsequent legalization of trade unions, which ended the risk of persecution and repression, allowed the fourth estate to become a real presence in society, with the result that the pragmatic rulers of the country continued along the path of reform, and the labouring classes, so unlike their French counterparts, felt a growing sense of belonging as they pinned more of their hopes for the future on peaceful change . The situation on the Continent was very different indeed. In the German Confederation, collective wage-bargaining was still virtually non-existent. In Belgium, strikes were repressed by the government almost as if they were acts of war, while in Switzerland they were still an anomaly that the established order found it difficult to tolerate. In France, it was declared that strikes would be legal in 1864, but the first labour unions still operated under severe restrictions.

This was the backdrop to the congress of 1867, where the International assembled with a new strength that had come from continuing broad-based expansion. Some bourgeois newspapers, including The Times, sent correspondents to follow its proceedings between 2 and 8 September. Again it was a Swiss city, Lausanne, that hosted the occasion, receiving 64 delegates from 6 countries (with one each from Belgium and Italy). Marx was busy working on the proofs of Capital and absent from the General Council when preparatory documents were drafted as well as from the congress itself. The effects were certainly felt, as is evident in the congress’s focus on bald reports of organizational growth in various countries and Proudhonian themes (such as the cooperative movement and alternative uses of credit) dear to the strongly represented mutualists.

Also discussed there was the question of war and militarism, at the request of the League for Peace and Freedom, whose inaugural congress was due to be held immediately afterwards. In the course of the debate, the delegate from Brussels, César de Paepe (1841-1890), one of the most active and brilliant theoreticians of the International, formulated what later became the classical position of the workers’ movement: that wars are inevitable in a capitalist system.

If I had to express my sentiments to the Geneva [Peace] Congress, I would say: we want peace as much as you do, but we know that so long as there exists what we call the principle of nationalities or patriotism, there will be war; so long as there are distinct classes, there will be war. War is not only the product of a monarch’s ambition […] the true cause of war is the interests of some capitalists; war is the result of the lack of equilibrium in the economic world, and the lack of equilibrium in the political world .

Finally, there was a discussion of women’s emancipation , and the congress voted in favour of a report stating that “the efforts of nations should tend toward state ownership of the means of transport and circulation” . This was the first collectivist declaration approved at a congress of the International. However, the mutualists remained totally opposed to the socialization of land ownership, and a deeper discussion of the issue was postponed until the next congress.

VI. Defeat of the mutualists
Right from the earliest days of the International, Proudhon’s ideas were hegemonic in France, French-speaking Switzerland, Wallonia and the city of Brussels. His disciples, particularly Tolain and Ernest Édouard Fribourg (unk.), succeeded in making a mark with their positions on the founding meeting in 1864, the London Conference of 1865, and the Geneva and Lausanne Congresses. For four years the mutualists were the most moderate wing of the International. The British trade unions, which constituted the majority, did not share Marx’s anticapitalism, but nor did they have the same pull on the policies of the organization that the followers of Proudhon were able to exercise.

Basing themselves on the theories of the French anarchist, the mutualists argued that the economic emancipation of the workers would be achieved through the founding of producer cooperatives and a central People’s Bank. Resolutely hostile to state intervention in any field, they opposed socialization of the land and the means of production as well as any use of the strike weapon. In 1868, for example, there were still many sections of the International that attached a negative, anti-economic value to this method of struggle. The Report of the Liège Section on Strikes was emblematic in this regard: “The strike is a struggle. It therefore increases the bubbling of hatred between the people and the bourgeoisie, separating ever further two classes that should merge and unite with each other” . The distance from the positions and theses of the General Council could scarcely have been greater.

Marx undoubtedly played a key role in the long struggle to reduce Proudhon’s influence in the International. His ideas were fundamental to the theoretical development of its leaders, and he showed a remarkable capacity to assert them by winning every major conflict inside the organization. With regard to the cooperation, for example, in the 1866 Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The Different Question, he had already declared that:

To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and cooperative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realized save by the transfer of the organized forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.

Recommending to the workers “to embark in cooperative production rather than in cooperative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system, the former attacks its groundwork” . The workers themselves, however, were already sidelining Proudhonian doctrines; it was above all the proliferation of strikes that convinced the mutualists of the error of their conceptions. Proletarian struggles showed both that the strike was necessary as an immediate means of improving conditions in the present and that it strengthened the class consciousness essential for the construction of future society. It was real-life men and women who halted capitalist production to demand their rights and social justice, thereby shifting the balance of forces in the International and, more significantly, in society as a whole. It was the Parisian bronze workers, the weavers of Rouen and Lyons, the coal miners of Saint-Étienne who – more forcefully than in any theoretical discussion – convinced the French leaders of the International of the need to socialize the land and industry. And it was the workers’ movement that demonstrated, in opposition to Proudhon, that it was impossible to separate the social-economic question from the political question .

The Brussels Congress, held between 6 and 13 September 1868 with the participation of 99 delegates from France, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Spain (one delegate) and Belgium (55 in total) , finally clipped the wings of the mutualists. The highpoint came when the assembly approved De Paepe’s proposal on the socialization of the means of production – a decisive step forward in defining the economic basis of socialism, no longer simply in the writings of particular intellectuals but in the programme of a great transational organization. As regards the mines and transport, the congress declared:

1. That the quarries, collieries, and other mines, as well as the railways, ought in a normal state of society to belong to the community represented by the state, a state itself subject to the laws of justice.
2. That the quarries, collierries, and other mines, and Railways, be let by the state, not to companies of capitalists as at present, but to companies of working men bound by contract to guarantee to society the rational and scientific working of the railways, etc., at a price as nearly as possible approximate to the working expense. The same contract ought to reserve to the state the right to verify the accounts of the companies, so as to present the possibility of any reconsitution of monopolies. A second contract ought to guarantee the mutual right of each member of the companies in respect to his fellow workmen.

As to landed property, it was agreed that:

that the economical development of modern society will create the social necessity of converting arable land into the common property of society, and of letting the soil on behalf of the state to agricultural companies under conditions analagous to those stated in regard to mines and railways.

And similar considerations were applied to the canals, roads and telegraphs:

Considering that the roads and other means of communication require a common social direction, the Congress thinks they ought to remain the common property of society.

Finally, some interesting points were made about the environment:

Considering that the abandonment of forests to private individuals causes the destruction of woods necessary for the conservation of springs, and, as a matter of course, of the good qualities of the soil, as well as the health and lives of the population, the Congress thinks that the forests ought to remain the property of society .

In Brussels, then, the International made its first clear pronouncement on the socialization of the means of production by state authorities . This marked an important victory for the General Council and the first appearance of socialist principles in the political programme of a major workers’ organization.

In addition, the congress again discussed the question of war. A motion presented by Becker, which Marx later summarized in the published resolutions of the congress, stated:

The workers alone have an evident logical interest in finally abolishing all war, both economic and political, individual and national, because in the end they always have to pay with their blood and their labour for the settling of accounts between the belligerents, regardless of whether they are on the winning or losing side .

The workers were called upon to treat every war “as a civil war” . De Paepe also suggested the use of the general strike – a proposal that Marx dismissed as “nonsense” , but which actually tended to develop a class consciousness capable of going beyond merely economic struggles.

If the collectivist turn of the International began at the Brussels Congress, it was the Basel Congress held the next year from 5 to 12 September that consolidated it and eradicated Proudhonism even in its French homeland. This time there were 78 delegates at the congress, drawn not only from France, Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Belgium, but also, a clear sign of expansion, from Spain, Italy and Austria, plus a representative from the National Labor Union in the United States. The presence of the latter, as well as of Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900) on behalf of one of the first organized working-class political forces (the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, founded in Eisenach a few weeks earlier), helped to make the congress more solemn and to imbue it with hope. The catchment area of the association required to challenge the rule of capital was visibly enlarged, and the record of the proceedings as well as general reports on on the activity of the congress transmitted the enthusiasm of the workers gathered there.

The resolutions of the Brussels Congress on landed property were reaffirmed, with 54 votes in favour, 4 against, and 13 abstentions. Eleven of the French delegates – including Eugène Varlin (1838-1871), later a prominent figure in the Paris Commune – even approved a new text which declared “that society has the right to abolish individual ownership of the land and to make it part of the community” ; 10 abstained and 4 (including Tolain) voted against. After Basel, France was no longer mutualist.

The Basel Congress was also of interest because Mikhail Bakunin took part in the proceedings as a delegate. Having failed to win the leadership of the League for Peace and Freedom, he had founded the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy in September 1868 in Geneva, and in December this had applied to join the International. The General Council initially turned down the request, on the grounds that the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy continued to be affiliated to another, parallel transnational structure, and that one of its objectives – “the equalization of classes” – was radically different from a central pillar of the International, the abolition of classes. Shortly afterwards, however, the Alliance modified its programme and agreed to wind up its network of sections, many of which anyway existed only in Bakunin’s imagination . On 28 July 1869, the 104-member Geneva section was accordingly admitted to the International . Marx knew Bakunin well enough, but he had underestimated the consequences of this step. For the influence of the famous Russian revolutionary rapidly increased in a number of Swiss, Spanish and French sections (as it did in Italian ones after the Paris Commune), and at the Basel Congress, thanks to his charisma and forceful style of argument, he already managed to affect the outcome of its deliberations. The vote on the right of inheritance, for example, was the first occasion on which the delegates rejected a proposal of the General Council . Having finally defeated the mutualists and laid the spectre of Proudhon to rest, Marx now had to confront a much tougher rival, who formed a new tendency – collectivist anarchism – and sought to win control of the organization.

VII. Development Across Europe and Opposition to the Franco-Prussian War

The late Sixties and early Seventies were a period rich in social conflicts. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International, whose reputation was spreading ever wider, and despite its limited resources the General Council never failed to respond with appeals for solidarity to its European sections and the organization of fund-raising. This was the case in March 1869, for example, when 8,000 silk dyers and ribbon weavers in Basel asked for its support. The General Council could not send them more than four pounds from its own funds, but it issued a circular that resulted in the collection of another £300 from a number of workers’ groups in various countries. Even more significant was the struggle of Newcastle engineering workers to reduce the working day to nine hours, when two emissaries of the General Council, James Cohn [Cohen] (unk.) and Eccarius, played a key role in stymying the bosses’ attempt to introduce blackleg labour from the Continent. The success of this strike, a nationwide cause célèbre, served as a warning for the English capitalists, who from that time on gave up recruiting workers from across the Channel .

The year 1869 witnessed significant expansion of the International all over Europe. Britain was an exception in this respect, however. The Trades Union Congress, meeting in Birmingham in August, recommended that all its member organizations should become part of the International. But the appeal fell on deaf ears, and the level of affiliation remained more or less the same as in 1867. While the union leaders fully backed Marx against the mutualists, they had little time for theoretical issues and did not exactly glow with revolutionary ardour. This was the reason why Marx for a long time opposed the founding of a British federation of the International independent of the General Council.

In every European country where the International was reasonably strong, its members gave birth to new organizations completely autonomous from those already in existence, forming local sections and/or national federations as their number warranted. In Britain, however, the unions that made up the main force of the International naturally did not disband their own structures; besides, the London-based General Council fulfilled two functions at once, as world headquarters and as the leadership for Britain. In any case, the trade union affiliations kept some 50,000 workers in its orbit of influence, at a time when the International was making headway all across the Continent.

In France, the repressive policies of the Second Empire made 1868 a year of serious crisis for the International: all its sections disappeared, with the single exception of Rouen. The following year, however, saw a revival of the organization. Tolain ceased to be its figurehead in the aftermath of the Basel Congress, and new leaders such as Varlin, who had abandoned mutualist positions, came to the fore. The peak of expansion for the International came in 1870, but the real membership figures fell far short of the fantasies that some writers concocted and spread among the public. It should also be remembered that, despite its considerable growth, the organization never took root in 38 of the 90 départements that existed at the time in France. It is possible that the membership in Paris rose as high as 10,000, much of it affiliated to the International through cooperative societies, trade associations and resistance societies. Rigorous estimates would point to a figure of 3,000 each in Rouen and Lyons (where an uprising led to the proclamation of a People’s Commune in September 1870 that was later drowned in blood) and to a little more than 4,000 in Marseilles. The national total can be estimated as more than 30,000 . Thus, although the International did not become a true mass organization in France, it certainly grew to a respectable size and aroused widespread interest, as we may gauge from the membership application that the Positivist Proletarians of Paris submitted to the General Council . From 1870, even some disciples of Blanqui overcame their early reservations about an organization inspired by Proudhonian moderation and, witnessing the enthusiasm for it among workers, began to join it in their turn. Certainly much water had passed under the bridge since 1865, when the French sections of the International founded by Tolain and Fribourg had been little more than glorified “study societies” . The guidelines for the organization in France now centred on the promotion of social conflict and political activity.

In Belgium, the period following the Brussels Congress of 1868 had been marked by the rise of sydicalism, a series of victorious strikes, and the affiliation of numerous workers’ societies to the International. Membership peaked in the early seventies at several tens of thousands, probably exceeding the number in the whole of France. It was here that the International achieved both its highest numerical density in the general population and its greatest influence in society.

The positive evolution during this period was also apparent in Switzerland. In 1870 the total membership stood at 6,000 (out of a working population of roughly 700.000), including 2,000 in the 34 Geneva sections and another 800 in the Jura region. Not long afterwards, however, Bakunin’s activity divided the organization into two groups of equal size. These confronted each other at the congress of the Romande Federation in April 1870, precisely on the question of whether the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy should be admitted to the Federation . When it proved impossible to reconcile their positions, the proceedings continued in two parallel congresses, and a truce was agreed only after an intervention by the General Council. The group aligned with London was slightly smaller, yet retained the name Romande Federation, whereas the one linked to Bakunin had to adopt the name Jura Federation, even though its affiliation to the International was again recognized.

The leading lights in the former were Nikolai Utin (1845-1883), who had founded in Geneva the first Russian section of the International , and Johann Philipp Becker, who, despite his collaboration with Bakunin between Summer 1868 and February 1870, had managed to prevent the Swiss organization from falling entirely into his hands. Anyway, the consolidation of the Jura Federation represented an important stage in the building of an anarcho-federalist current within the International. Its most prominent figure was the young James Guillaume (1844-1916), who played a key role in the dispute with London.

During this period, Bakunin’s ideas began to spread in a number of cities, especially in Southern Europe, but the country where they took hold most rapidly was Spain. In fact, the International first developed in the Iberian peninsula through the activity of the Neapolitan anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli, who, at Bakunin’s request, travelled to Barcelona and Madrid between October 1868 and Spring 1869 to help found sections of the International and groups of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy (of which he was a member). His trip achieved its purpose. But his distribution of documents of both international organizations, often to the same people, was a prime example of the Bakuninite confusion and theoretical eclecticism of the time; the Spanish workers founded the International with the principles of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy. Still, Fanelli won over important cadres such as Anselmo Lorenzo (1841-1914), who had previously been exposed to Proudhon’s texts translated into Spanish by the future Spanish president Francisco Pi y Margall (1824-1901). And adulterated though they were in various ways, the ideas of the International got through to a fledgling workers’ movement eager to organize and engage in struggle. At the Basel Congress, the Spanish delegate Rafael Farga Pellicer (1840-1890) could already point to the existence of several dozen sections.

In the North German Confederation, despite the existence of two political organizations of the workers’ movement – the Lassallean General Association of German Workers and the Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany – there was little enthusiasm for the International and few requests to affiliate to it. During its first three years, German militants virtually ignored its existence, fearing persecution at the hands of the authorities. But the picture changed somewhat after 1868, as the fame and successes of the International multiplied across Europe. From that point on, both of the rival parties aspired to represent its German wing. In the struggle against the Lassalleans – whose leader, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer (1833-1875), never applied to affiliate their General Association – Liebknecht tried to play on the closeness of his organization to Marx’s positions, but the affiliation of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany to the International was more formal (or “purely platonic” , as Engels put it) than real, with a minimal material and ideological commitment. Of its 10,000 or so members registered within a year of its foundation, only a few hundred joined the International on an individual basis (a procedure allowed under the Prussian Combination Laws) . The weak internationalism of the Germans therefore weighed more heavily than any legal aspects, and it declined still further in the second half of 1870 as the movement became more preoccupied with internal matters .

There were two pieces of good news to make up for the German limitations. In May 1869, the first sections of the International were founded in the Netherlands, and they began to grow slowly in Amsterdam and Friesland. Soon afterwards, the International also began to pick up in Italy, where it had previously been present only in a handful of centres that had little or no relation with one another.

More significant still, at least symbolically and for the hopes it awakened, was the new mooring on the other side of the Atlantic, where immigrants who had arrived in recent years began to establish the first sections of the International in the United States. However, the organization suffered from two handicaps at birth that it would never overcome. Despite repeated exhortations from London, it was unable either to cut across the nationalist character of its various affiliated groups or to draw in workers born in the New World. When the German, French and Czech sections founded the Central Committee of the IWA for North America, in December 1870, it was unique in the history of the International in having only “foreign-born” members. The most striking aspect of this anomaly was that the International in the United States never disposed of an English-language press organ.

Against this general background, marked by evident contradictions and uneven development between countries, the International made provisions for its fifth congress in September 1870. This was originally scheduled to be held in Paris, but repressive operations by the French government made the General Council opt instead for Mainz; Marx probably also thought that the greater number of German delegates close to his positions would help to stem the advance of the Bakuninists. But then the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, on 19 July 1870, left no choice but to call off the congress.

The conflict at the heart of Europe meant that the top priority now was to help the workers’ movement express an independent position, far from the nationalist rhetoric of the time. In his First Address on the Franco-Prussian War, Marx called upon the French workers to drive out Charles Louis Bonaparte (1808-1873) and to obliterate the empire he had established eighteen years earlier. The German workers, for their part, were supposed to prevent the defeat of Bonaparte from turning into an attack on the French people:

in contrast to old society, with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose international rule will be Peace, because its national ruler will be everywhere the same – Labour! The pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men’s Association .

This text, in 30,000 copies (15,000 for Germany and 15,000 for France, printed in Geneva), was the first major foreign policy declaration of the International. One of the many who spoke enthusiastically in support of it was John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): “there was not one word in it that ought not to be there,” he wrote, and “it could not have been done with fewer words” .

The leaders of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel (1840-1913), were the only two members of parliament in the North German Confederation who refused to vote for the special war budget , and and sections of the International in France also sent messages of friendship and solidarity to the German workers. Yet the French defeat sealed the birth of a new and more potent age of nation-states in Europe, with all its accompanying chauvinism.

VIII. The International and Paris Commune
After the German victory at Sedan and the capture of Bonaparte, a Third Republic was proclaimed in France on 4 September 1870. In January of the following year, a four-month siege of Paris ended in the French acceptance of Bismarck’s conditions; an ensuing armistice allowed the holding of elections and the appointment of Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) as President of the Republic, with the support of a huge Legitimist and Orleanist majority. In the capital, however, Progressive-Republican forces swept the board and there was widespread popular discontent. Faced with the prospect of a government that wanted to disarm the city and withhold any social reform, the Parisians turned against Thiers and on 18 March initiated the first great political event in the life of the workers’ movement: the Paris Commune.

Although Bakunin had urged the workers to turn patriotic war into revolutionary war , the General Council in London initially opted for silence. It charged Marx with the task of writing a text in the name of the International, but he delayed its publication for complicated, deeply held reasons. Well aware of the real relationship of forces on the ground as well as the weaknesses of the Commune, he knew that it was doomed to defeat. He had even tried to warn the French working class back in September 1870, in his Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War:

Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French workmen […] must not allow themselves to be swayed by the national souvenirs of 1792 […]. They have not to recapitulate the past, but to build up the future. Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of republican liberty, for the work of their own class organization. It will gift them with fresh herculean powers for the regeneration of France, and our common task – the emancipation of labour. Upon their energies and wisdom hinges the fate of the republic .

A fervid declaration hailing the victory of the Commune would have risked creating false expectations among workers throughout Europe, eventually becoming a source of demoralization and distrust. Marx therefore decided to postpone delivery and stayed away from meetings of the General Council for several weeks. His grim forebodings soon proved all too well founded, and on 28 May, little more than two months after its proclamation, the Paris Commune was drowned in blood. Two days later, he reappeared at the General Council with a manuscript entitled The Civil War in France; it was read and unanimously approved, then published over the names of all the Council members. The document had a huge impact over the next few weeks, greater than any other document of the workers’ movement in the nineteenth century. Three English editions in quick succession won acclaim among the workers and caused uproar in bourgeois circles. It was also translated fully or partly into a dozen other languages, appearing in newspapers, magazines and booklets in various European countries and the United States.

Despite Marx’s passionate defence, and despite the claims both of reactionary opponents and of dogmatic Marxists eager to glorify the International , it is out of the question that the General Council actually pushed for the Parisian insurrection. Prominent figures in the organization did play a role – Leo Frankel (1844-1896), for example, though Hungarian by origin, was placed in charge of work, industry and trade – but the leadership of the Paris Commune was in the hands of its radical Jacobin wing. Of the 85 representatives elected at the municipal elections of 26 March , there were 15 moderates (the so-called “parti des maires”, a group of former mayors of the arrondissements) and 4 Radicals, who immediately resigned and never formed part of the Council of the Commune. Of the 66 remaining, 11, although revolutionary, were without a clear political tendency, 14 came from the Committee of the National Guard, and 15 were radical-republicans and socialists; in addition there were 9 Blanquists, and 17 members of the International . Among the latter were Édouard Vaillant (1840-1915), Benoît Malon (1841-1893), Auguste Serrailler (1840-1872), Jean-Louis Pindy (1840-1917), Albert Theisz (1839-1881), Charles Longuet (1839-1903) and the previously mentioned Varlin and Frankel. However, coming as they did from various political backgrounds and cultures, they did not constitute a monolithic group and often voted in different ways. This too favoured the hegemony of the Jacobin perspective of radical republicanism, which was reflected in the Montagnard-inspired decision in May (approved by two thirds of the Council, including the Blanquists) to create a Committee of Public Safety. Marx himself pointed out that “the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it have been” .

During the “bloody week” (21-28 May) that followed the irruption of the Versaillais into Paris, some ten thousand Communards were killed in fighting or summarily executed; it was the bloodiest massacre in French history. Another 43,000 or more were taken prisoner, 13,500 of whom were subsequently sentenced to death, imprisonment, forced labour or deportation (many to the remote colony of New Caledonia). Another 7,000 managed to escape and take refuge in England, Belgium or Switzerland. The European conservative and liberal press completed the work of Thiers’s soldiers, accusing the Communards of hideous crimes and trumpeting the victory of “civilization” over the insolent workers’ rebellion. From now on, the International was at the eye of the storm, held to blame for every act against the established order. “When the great conflagration took place at Chicago,” Marx mused with bitter irony, “the telegraph round the world announced it as the infernal deed of the International; and it is really wonderful that to its demoniacal agency has not been attributed the hurricane ravaging the West Indies” .

Marx had to spend whole days answering press slanders about the International and himself : “at this moment”, he wrote, [he was] “the best calumniated and the most menaced man of London” . Meanwhile, governments all over Europe sharpened their instruments of repression, fearing that other uprisings might follow the one in Paris. Thiers immediately outlawed the International and asked the British prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), to follow his example; it was the first diplomatic exchange relating to a workers’ organization. Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) exerted similar pressure on the Swiss government, arguing that it would a serious mistake to continue tolerating “that International sect which would like to treat the whole of Europe as it treated Paris. Those gentlemen […] are to be feared, because they work on behalf of the eternal enemies of God and mankind” . Such language resulted in an agreement between France and Spain to extradite refugees from beyond the Pyrenees, and in repressive measures against the International in Belgium and Denmark. While London dragged its feet, unwilling to violate its principles of asylum, representatives of the German and Austro-Hungarian governments met in Berlin in November 1872 and issued a joint statement on the “social question”:

1) that the tendencies of the International are in complete contrast with, and antagonistic to, the principles of the bourgeois society; they must therefore be vigorously repelled;
2) that the International constitutes a dangerous abuse of the freedom of assembly and, following its own practice and principle, state action against it must be international in scope and must therefore be based on the solidarity of all governments;
3) that even if some governments do not intend to pass a special law [against the International], as France has done, the ground should be cut from beneath the feet of the International Working Men’s Association and its harmful activities .

Lastly, Italy was not spared the onslaught. Most notably, Mazzini – who for a time had looked to the International with hope – considered that its principles had become those of “denial of God, […] the fatherland, […] and all individual property” .

Criticism of the Commune even spread to sections of the workers’ movement. Following the publication of The Civil War in France, both the trade union leader George Odger and the old Chartist Benjamin Lucraft (1809-1897) resigned from the International, bending under the pressure of the hostile press campaign. However, no trade union withdrew its support for the organization – which suggests once again that the failure of the International to grow in Britain was due mainly to political apathy in the working class .

Despite the bloody denouement in Paris and the wave of calumny and government repression elsewhere in Europe, the International grew stronger and more widely known in the wake of the Commune. For the capitalists and the middle classes it represented a threat to the established order, but for the workers it fuelled hopes in a world without exploitation and injustice . Insurrectionary Paris fortified the workers’ movement, impelling it to adopt more radical positions and to intensify its militancy. The experience showed that revolution was possible, that the goal could and should be to build a society utterly different from the capitalist order, but also that, in order to achieve this, the workers would have to create durable and well-organized forms of political association .

This enormous vitality was apparent everywhere. Attendance at General Council meetings doubled, while newspapers linked to the International increased in both number and overall sales. Among those which made a serious contribution to the spread of socialist principles were: L’Égalité in Geneva, at first a Bakuninist paper, then – after a change of editor in 1870 – the main organ of the International in Switzerland; Der Volksstaat in Leipzig, the organ of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party; La Emancipación in Madrid, the official paper of the Spanish Federation; Il Gazzettino Rosa in Milan, which went over to the International following the events in Paris; Socialisten, the first Danish workers’ newssheet; and, probably the best of them all, La Réforme Sociale in Rouen .

Finally, and most significantly, the International continued to expand in Belgium and Spain – where the level of workers’ involvement had already been considerable before the Paris Commune – and experienced a real breakthrough in Italy. Many Mazzinians, disappointed with the positions taken by their erstwhile leader, joined forces with the organization and were soon among its principal local leaders. Even more important was the support of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Although he had only a vague idea of the Association whose headquarters were in London , the “hero of the two worlds” decided to throw his weight behind it and wrote a membership application that contained the famous sentence: “The International is the sun of the future!” Printed in dozens of workers’ newssheets and papers, the letter was instrumental in persuading many waverers to join the organization.

The International also opened new sections in Portugal, where it was founded in October 1871, and in Denmark, in the same month, it began to link up most of the newly born trade unions in Copenhagen and Jutland. Another important development was the founding of Irish workers’ sections in Britain, and the workers’ leader John MacDonnell was appointed the General Council’s corresponding secretary for Ireland. Unexpected requests for affiliation came from various other parts of the world: some English workers in Calcutta, labour groups in Victoria, Australia and Christchurch, New Zealand, and a number of artisans in Buenos Aires.

IX. The London Conference of 1871
Two years had passed since the last congress of the International, but a new one could not be held under the prevailing circumstances. The General Council therefore decided to organize a conference in London; it took place between 17 and 23 September 1871, in the presence of 22 delegates from Britain (Ireland too being represented for the first time), Belgium, Switzerland and Spain, plus the French exiles. Despite the efforts to make the event as representative as possible, it was in fact more in the way of an enlarged General Council meeting.

Marx had announced beforehand that the conference would be devoted “exclusively to questions of organization and policy” , with theoretical discussions left to one side. He spelled this out at its first session:

The General Council has convened a conference to agree with delegates from various countries the measures that need to be taken against the dangers facing the Association in a large number of countries, and to move towards a new organization corresponding to the needs of the situation. In the second place, to work out a response to the governments that are ceaselessly working to destroy the Association with every means at their disposal. And lastly to settle the Swiss dispute once and for all .

Marx summoned all his energies for these priorities: to reorganize the International, to defend it from the offensive of hostile forces, and to check Bakunin’s growing influence. By far the most active delegate at the conference, Marx took the floor as many as 102 times, blocked proposals that did not fit in with his plans, and won over those not yet convinced . The gathering in London confirmed his stature within the organization, not only as the brains shaping its political line, but also as one of its most combative and capable militants.

The most important decision taken at the conference, for which it would be remembered later, was the approval of Vaillant’s Resolution IX. The leader of the Blanquists – whose residual forces had joined the International after the end of the Commune – proposed that the organization should be transformed into a centralized, disciplined party, under the leadership of the General Council. Despite some differences, particularly over the Blanquist position that a tightly organized nucleus of militants was sufficient for the revolution, Marx did not hesitate to form an alliance with Vaillant’s group: not only to strengthen the opposition to Bakuninite anarchism within the International, but above all to create a broader consensus for the changes deemed necessary in the new phase of the class struggle. The resolution passed in London therefore stated:

that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes; that this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes; and that the combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economic struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists.

The conclusion was clear: “the economic movement [of the working class] and its political action are indissolubly united” .

Whereas the Geneva Congress of 1866 established the importance of trade unions, the London Conference of 1871 shifted the focus to the other key instrument of the modern workers’ movement: the political party. It should be stressed, however, that the understanding of this was much broader than that which developed in the twentieth century. Marx’s conception should therefore be differentiated both from the Blanquists’ – the two would openly clash later on – and from Lenin’s, as adopted by Communist organizations after the October Revolution . For Marx, the self-emancipation of the working class required a long and arduous process – the polar opposite of the theories and practices in Sergei Nechaev’s (1847-1882) Catechism of a Revolutionary, whose advocacy of secret societies was condemned by the delegates in London but enthusiastically supported by Bakunin.

Only four delegates opposed Resolution IX at the London Conference, arguing for the need of having an “abstensionist” position of not engaging in politics, but Marx’s victory soon proved to be ephemeral. For the call to establish what amounted to political parties in every country and to confer broader powers on the General Council had grave repercussions in the internal life of the International; it was not ready to move so rapidly from a flexible to a politically uniform model of organization . The last decision taken in London was to set up a British Federal Council. Since, in Marx’s view, the conditions for a revolution on the Continent had diminished with the defeat of the Paris Commune, it was no longer necessary to exercise close supervision over British initiatives .

Marx was convinced that virtually all the main federations and local sections would back the resolutions of the Conference, but he soon had to think again. On 12 November, the Jura Federation called a congress of its own in the small commune of Sonvilier, and, although Bakunin was unable to attend, it officially launched the opposition within the International. In the Circular to All Federations of the International Working Men’s Association issued at the end of the proceedings, Guillaume and the other participants accused the General Council of having introduced the “authority principle” into the International and transformed its original structure into “a hierarchical organization directed and governed by a committee”. The Swiss declared themselves “against all directing authority, even should that authority be elected and endorsed by the workers”, and insisted on “retention of the principle of autonomy of the Sections”, so that the General Council would become “a simple correspondence and statistical bureau” . Lastly, they called for a congress to be held as soon as possible.

Although the position of the Jura Federation was not unexpected, Marx was probably surprised when signs of restlessness and even rebellion against the political line of the General Council began to appear elsewhere. In a number of countries, the decisions taken in London were judged an unacceptable encroachment on local political autonomy. The Belgian Federation, which at the conference had aimed at mediation between the different sides, began to adopt a much more critical stance towards London, and the Dutch too later took their distance. In Southern Europe, where the reaction was even stronger, the opposition soon won considerable support. Indeed, the great majority of Iberian Internationalists came out against the General Council and endorsed Bakunin’s ideas, partly, no doubt, because these were more in keeping with a region where the industrial proletariat had a presence only in the main cities, and where the workers’ movement was still very weak and mainly concerned with economic demands. In Italy too, the results of the London Conference were seen in a negative light. Those who followed Mazzini gathered in Rome from 1 to 6 November 1871, in the General Congress of Italian Workers’ Societies (the more moderate labour bloc), while most of the rest fell in with Bakunin’s positions. Those who met at Rimini between 4 and 6 August 1872 for the founding congress of the Italian Federation of the International took the most radical position against the General Council: they would not participate in the forthcoming congress of the International but proposed to hold an “anti-authoritarian general congress” in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. In fact, this would be the first act of the impending split.

The organization also saw a serious conflict explode on the other side of the Atlantic, albeit over different issues. In the course of 1871, the International had grown in a number of cities there, reaching a total of 50 sections with a combined membership of 2,700 . The figure increased further the next year (probably to around 4,000), but this was still only a tiny proportion of the American workforce of two million or more, and the organization was still unable to expand outside immigrant communities to draw in workers born in the United States. Internal strife also had a damaging effect, since the American Internationalists, largely based in New York, split into two in December 1871, each group claiming to be the legitimate representative of the International in the USA.

The first and initially larger of the two, known as the Spring Street Council, proposed an alliance with the most liberal groups of American society; it could count on the support of Eccarius, the corresponding secretary for the General Council, and its most active branch was Section 12 . The second, with its headquarters at the Tenth Ward Hotel, maintained the orientation to the working class and had its most important figure in Friedrich Adolph Sorge (1828-1906). In March 1872, the General Council called for the holding of a unity congress in July, but the initiative failed and the split became official in May. The differences caused a haemmorhage of members from the International. The Tenth Ward Hotel group held its congress between 6 and 8 July 1872, giving birth to the North American Confederation with a membership of 950 spread among 22 sections (12 German, 4 French, 1 each Irish, Italian and Scandinavian, and only 3 English-speaking). Meanwhile, in May, some members of the Spring Street Council had attended the convention of the Equal Rights Party, which was standing Victoria Woodhull for the presidency of the United States; its lack of a class platform, with no more than general promises of regulation of working conditions and measures of job creation, persuaded some sections to abandon the Council, leaving it with only 1,500 members. After the birth of the American Confederation in July, the Council retained only 13 sections with a total of less than 500 members (mainly artisans and intellectuals), but these joined forces with the European federations challenging the line of the General Council.

The feuding across the Atlantic also harmed relations among members in London. John Hales (1839-unk), the secretary of the General Council from 1871 to 1872, took over Eccarius’s position as U.S. corresponding secretary, but followed the same policy. Very soon, both men’s personal relations with Marx took a turn for the worse, and in Britain too the first internal conflicts began to emerge. Support for the General Council also came from the majority of the Swiss, from the French (now mostly Blanquists), the weak German forces, the recently constituted sections in Denmark, Ireland and Portugal, and the East European groups in Hungary and Bohemia. But they added up to much less than Marx had expected at the end of the London Conference.

The opposition to the General Council was varied in character and sometimes had mainly personal motives; a strange alchemy held it together and made leadership of the International even more difficult. Still, beyond the fascination with Bakunin’s theories in certain countries and Guillaume’s capacity to unify the various oppositionists, the main factor militating against the resolution on “Working-Class Political Action” was an environment unwilling to accept the qualitative step forward proposed by Marx. For all the accompanying claims of utility, the London turn was seen by many as crass interference; not only the group linked to Bakunin but most of the federations and local sections regarded the principle of autonomy and respect for the diverse realities making up the International as one of the cornerstones of the International. This miscalculation on Marx’s part accelerated the crisis of the organization .

X. The end of the International
The final battle came towards the end of Summer 1872. After the terrible events of the previous three years – the Franco-Prussian war, the wave of repression following the Paris Commune, the numerous internal skirmishes – the International could at last meet again in congress. In the countries where it had recently sunk root, it was expanding through the enthusiastic efforts of union leaders and worker-activists suddenly fired by its slogans: it was in 1872 that the organization experienced its fastest growth in Italy, Denmark, Portugal and the Netherlands, at the very time when it was banned in France, Germany and the Austro-Hunarian Empire. Yet most of the membership remained unaware of the gravity of the conflicts that raged on within its leading group .

The Fifth Congress of the International took place in The Hague between 2 and 7 September, attended by 65 delegates from a total of 14 countries. There were 18 French (including 4 Blanquists coopted onto the General Council), 15 German, 7 Belgian, 5 British, 5 Spanish, 4 Swiss, 4 Dutch, 2 Austrian, and 1 each Danish, Irish, Hungarian, Polish and Australian (W.E. Harcourt [unk.], from the Victoria section). The Frenchman Paul Lafargue was nominated by the Lisbon Federation (as well as the Madrid Federation). The Italian Internationalists failed to send their 7 delegates, but even so it was certainly the most representative gathering in the history of the International.

The crucial importance of the event impelled Marx to attend in person , accompanied by Engels. In fact, it was the only congress of the organization in which he took part. Neither De Paepe (perhaps aware that he would be unable to play the same mediating role as in London the previous year) nor Bakunin made it to the Dutch capital. But the “autonomist” contingent, opposed to the decisions of the General Council, was present in strength, comprising all the delegates from Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, a half of those from Switzerland, plus others from Britain, France and the United States: a total of 25 in all.

By an irony of fate, the congress unfolded in Concordia Hall, although concord was little in evidence there; all the sessions were marked by irreducible antagonism between the two camps, resulting in debates that were far poorer than at the two previous congresses. This hostility was exacerbated by three days of sterile wrangling over the verification of credentials. The representation of the delegates was indeed completely skewed, not reflecting the true relationship of forces within the organization. In Germany, for instance, there were no sections of the International as such, while in France they had been driven underground and their mandates were highly debatable. Other representatives had been delegated as members of the General Council and did not express the will of any section. Approval of the Hague Congress resolutions was possible only because of its distorted composition. Though spurious and in many respects held together by instrumental purposes, the coalition of delegates that was in the minority at the congress actually constituted the most numerous part of the International .

The most important decision taken at The Hague was to incorporate Resolution IX of the 1871 London Conference into the statutes of the Association, as a new article 7a. Whereas the Provisional Statutes of 1864 had stated that “the economic emancipation of the working class is the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means”, this insertion mirrored the new relationship of forces within the organization. Political struggle was now the necessary instrument for the transformation of society since: “the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies, and for the enslavement of labour. The conquest of political power has therefore become the great duty of the working class.”

The International was now very different from how it had been at the time of its foundation: the radical-democratic components had walked out after being increasingly marginalized; the mutualists had been defeated and many converted; reformists no longer constituted the bulk of the organization (except in Britain); and anticapitalism had become the political line of the whole Association, as well as of recently formed tendencies such as the anarcho-collectivists. Moreover, although the years of the International had witnessed a degree of economic prosperity that in some cases made conditions less parlous, the workers understood that real change would come not through such palliatives but only through the end of human exploitation. They were also basing their struggles more and more on their own material needs, rather than the initiatives of particular groups to which they belonged.

The wider picture, too, was radically different. The unification of Germany in 1871 confirmed the onset of a new age in which the nation-state would be the central form of political, legal and territorial identity; this placed a question mark over any supranational body that financed itself from membership dues in each individual country and required its members to surrender a sizeable share of their political leadership. At the same time, the growing differences between national movements and organizations made it extremely difficult for the General Council to produce a political synthesis capable of satisfying the demands of all. It is true that, right from the beginning, the International had been an agglomeration of trade unions and political associations far from easy to reconcile with one another, and that these had represented sensibilities and political tendencies more than organizations properly so called. By 1872, however, the various components of the Association – and workers’ struggles, more generally – had become much more clearly defined and structured. The legalization of the British trade unions had officially made them part of national political life; the Belgian Federation of the International was a ramified organization, with a central leadership capable of making significant, and autonomous, contributions to theory; Germany had two workers’ parties, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany and the General Association of German Workers, each with representation in parliament; the French workers, from Lyons to Paris, had already tried “storming the heavens”; and the Spanish Federation had expanded to the point where it was on the verge of becoming a mass organization. Similar changes had occurred in other countries.

The initial configuration of the International had thus become outmoded, just as its original mission had come to an end. The task was no longer to prepare for and organize Europe-wide support for strikes, nor to call congresses on the usefulness of trade unions or the need to socialize the land and the means of production. Such themes were now part of the collective heritage of the organization as a whole. After the Paris Commune, the real challenge for the workers’ movement was a revolutionary one: how to organize in such a way as to end the capitalist mode of production and to overthrow the institutions of the bourgeois world. It was no longer a question of how to reform the existing society, but how to build a new one . For this new advance in the class struggle, Marx thought it indispensable to build working-class political parties in each country. The document To the Federal Council of the Spanish Region of the International Working Men’s Association, written by Engels in February 1871, was one of the most explicit statements of the General Council on this matter:

Experience has shown everywhere that the best way to emancipate the workers from this domination of the old parties is to form in each country a proletarian party with a policy of its own, a policy which is manifestly different from that of the other parties, because it must express the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the working class. This policy may vary in details according to the specific circumstances of each country; but as the fundamental relations between labour and capital are the same everywhere and the political domination of the possessing classes over the exploited classes is an existing fact everywhere, the principles and aims of proletarian policy will be identical, at least in all western countries. […] To give up fighting our adversaries in the political field would mean to abandon one of the most powerful weapons, particularly in the sphere of organization and propaganda .

From this point on, therefore, the party was considered essential for the struggle of the proletariat: it had to be independent of all existing political forces and to be built, both programmatically and organizationally, in accordance with the national context. At the General Council session of 23 July 1872, Marx criticized not only the abstentionists (who had been attacking Resolution IX of the London Conference) but the equally dangerous position of “the working classes of England and America”, “who let the middle classes use them for political purposes” . On the second point, he had already declared at the London Conference that “politics must be adapted to the conditions of all countries” , and the following year, in a speech in Amsterdam immediately after the Hague Congress, he stressed:

Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labour; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics. But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same. […] We do not deny that there are countries […] where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labour .

Thus, although the workers’ parties emerged in different forms in different countries, they should not subordinate themselves to national interests . The struggle for socialism could not be confined in that way, and especially in the new historical context internationalism must continue to be the guiding beacon for the proletariat, as well as its vaccine against the deadly embrace of the state and the capitalist system.

During the Hague Congress, harsh polemics preceded a series of votes. Following the adoption of article 7a, the goal of winning political power was inscribed in the statutes, and there was also an indication that a workers’ party was essential instrument for this. The subsequent decision to confer broader powers on the General Council – with 32 votes in favour, 6 against and 12 abstentions – made the situation even more intolerable for the minority, since the Council now had the task of ensuring “rigid observation of the principles and statutes and general rules of the International”, and “the right to suspend branches, sections, councils or federal committees and federations of the International until the next congress” .

For the first time in the history of the International, its highest congress also approved (by 47 votes in favour and 9 abstentions) the General Council’s decision to expel an organization: namely, the New York Section 12. Its motivation was as follows: “The International Working Men’s Association is based on the principle of the abolition of classes and cannot admit any bourgeois section” . The expulsions of Bakunin (25 for, 6 against, 7 abstentions) and Guillaume (25 for, 9 against, 8 abstentions) also caused quite a stir, having been proposed by a commission of enquiry that described the Alliance for Socialist Democracy as “a secret organization with statutes completely opposite to those of the International” . The call to expel Adhemar Schitzguébel (1844-1895), on the other hand, one of the founders and most active members of the Jura Federation, was rejected by a vote of 15 for, 17 against and 7 abstentions) . Finally, the congress authorized publication of a long report, The Alliance for Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association, which traced the history of the organization led by Bakunin and analysed its public and secret activity country by country. Written by Engels, Lafargue and Marx, the document was published in French in July 1873.

The opposition at the congress was not uniform in its response to these attacks, some abstaining and others voting against. On the final day, however, a joint declaration read out by the worker Victor Dave (1845-1922) from the Hague section stated:

1. We the […] supporters of the autonomy and federation of groups of working men shall continue our administrative relations with the General Council […].
2. The federations which we represent will establish direct and permanent relations between themselves and all regularly branches of the Association. […].
4. We call on all the federations and sections to prepare between now and the next general congress for the triumph within the International of the principles of federative autonomy as the basis of the organization of labour .

This statement was more a tactical ploy, designed to avoid responsibility for a split that by then seemed inevitable, rather than a serious political undertaking to relaunch the organization. In this sense, it was similar to the proposals of the “centralists” to augment the powers of the General Council, at a time when they were already planning a far more drastic alternative.

For what took place in the morning session on 6 September – the most dramatic of the congress – was the final act of the International as it had been conceived and constructed over the years. Engels stood up to speak and, to the astonishment of those present, proposed that “the seat of the General Council [should] be transferred to New York for the year 1872-1873, and that it should be formed by members of the American federal council” . Thus, Marx and other “founders” of the International would no longer be part of its central body, which would consist of people whose very names were unknown (Engels proposed 7, with the option to increase the total to a maximum of 15). The delegate Maltman Barry (1842-1909), a General Council member who supported Marx’s positions, described better than anyone the reaction from the floor:

Consternation and discomfiture stood plainly written on the faces of the party of dissension as [Engels] uttered the last words. […] It was sometime before anyone rose to speak. It was a coup d’état, and each looked to his neighbour to break the spell .

Engels argued that “inter-group conflicts in London had reached such a pitch that [the General Council] had to be transferred elsewhere” , and that New York was the best choice in times of repression. But the Blanquists were violently opposed to the move, on the grounds that “the International should first of all be the permanent insurrectionary organization of the proletariat” and that “when a party unites for struggle […] its action is all the greater, the more its leadership committee is active, well armed and powerful”. Vaillant and other followers of Blanqui present at The Hague thus felt betrayed when they saw “the head” being shipped “to the other side of the Atlantic [while] the armed body was fighting in [Europe]” . Based on the assumption that “the International had had an initiating role of economic struggle”, they wanted it to play “a similar role with respect to political struggle” and its transformation into an “international workers’ revolutionary party” . Realizing that it would no longer be possible to exercise control over the General Council, they left the congress and shortly afterwards the International.

Many even in the ranks of the majority voted against the move to New York as tantamount to the end of the International as an operational structure. The decision, approved by only three votes (26 for, 23 against), eventually depended on 9 abstentions and the fact that some members of the minority were happy to see the General Council relocated far from their own centres of activity.

Another factor in the move was certainly Marx’s view that it was better to give up the International than to see it end up as a sectarian organization in the hands of his opponents. The demise of the International, which would certainly follow the transfer of the General Council to New York, was infinitely preferable to a long and wasteful succession of fratricidal struggles.

Still, it is not convincing to argue – as many have done – that the key reason for the decline of the International was the conflict between its two currents, or even between two men, Marx and Bakunin, however great their stature. Rather, it was the changes taking place in the world around it that rendered the International obsolete. The growth and transformation of the organizations of the workers’ movement, the strengthening of the nation-state as a result of Italian and German unification, the expansion of the International in countries like Spain and Italy (where the economic and social conditions were very different from those in Britain or France), the drift towards even greater moderation in the British trade union movement, the repression following the Paris Commune: all these factors together made the original configuration of the International inappropriate to the new times.

Against this backdrop, with its prevalence of centrifugal trends, developments in the life of the International and its main protagonists naturally also played a role. The London Conference, for instance, was far from the saving event that Marx had hoped it would be; indeed, its rigid conduct significantly aggravated the internal crisis, by failing to take account of the prevailing moods or to display the foresight needed to avoid the strengthening of Bakunin and his group . It proved a Pyrrhic victory for Marx – one which, in attempting to resolve internal conflicts, ended up accentuating them. It remains the case, however, that the decisions taken in London only speeded up a process that was already under way and impossible to reverse.

In addition to all these historical and organizational considerations, there were others of no lesser weight regarding the chief protagonist. As Marx had reminded delegates at a session of the London Conference in 1871, “the work of the Council had become immense, obliged as it was to tackle both general questions and national questions” . It was no longer the tiny organization of 1864 walking on an English and a French leg; it was now present in all European countries, each with its particular problems and characteristics. Not only was the organization everywhere wracked by internal conflicts, but the arrival of the Communard exiles in London, with new preoccupations and a variegated baggage of ideas, made it still more arduous for the General Council to perform its task of political synthesis.

Marx was sorely tried after eight years of intense activity for the International . Aware that the workers’ forces were on the retreat following the defeat of the Paris Commune – the most important fact of the moment for him – he therefore resolved to devote the years ahead to the attempt to complete Capital. When he crossed the North Sea to the Netherlands, he must have felt that the battle awaiting him would be his last major one as a direct protagonist.

From the mute figure he had cut at that first meeting in St. Martin’s Hall in 1864, he had become recognized as the leader of the International not only by congress delegates and the General Council but also by the wider public. Thus, although the International certainly owed a very great deal to Marx, it had also done much to change his life. Before its foundation, he had been known only in small circles of political activists. Later, and above all after the Paris Commune – as well as the publication of his magnum opus in 1867, of course – his fame spread among revolutionaries in many European countries, to the point where the press referred to him as the “red terror doctor”. The responsibility deriving from his role in the International – which allowed him to experience up close so many economic and political struggles – was a further stimulus for his reflections on communism and profoundly enriched the whole of his anticapitalist theory.

XI. Marx versus Bakunin
The battle between the two camps raged in the months following the Hague Congress, but only in a few cases did it centre on their existing theoretical and ideological differences. Marx often chose to caricature Bakunin’s positions, painting him as an advocate of “class equalization” (based on the principles of the 1869 programme of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy) or of political abstentionism tout court. The Russian anarchist, for his part, who lacked the theoretical capacities of his adversary, preferred the terrain of personal accusations and insults. The only exception that set forth his positive ideas was the incomplete Letter to La Liberté (a Brussels paper) of early October 1872 – a text which, never sent, lay forgotten and was of no use to Bakunin’s supporters in the constant round of skirmishes. The political position of the “autonomists” emerges from it clearly enough:

There is only one law binding all the members […] sections and federations of the International […]. It is the international solidarity of workers in all jobs and all countries in their economic struggle against the exploiters of labour. It is the real organisation of that solidarity through the spontaneous action of the working classes, and the absolutely free federation […] which constitutes the real, living unity of the International. Who can doubt that it is out of this increasingly widespread organisation of the militant solidarity of the proletariat against bourgeois exploitation that the political struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie must rise and grow? The Marxists and ourselves are unanimous on this point. But now comes the question that divides us so deeply from the Marxists. We think that the policy of the proletariat must necessarily be a revolutionary one, aimed directly and solely at the destruction of States. We do not see how it is possible to talk about international solidarity and yet to intend preserving States […] because by its very nature the State is a breach of that solidarity and therefore a permanent cause of war. Nor can we conceive how it is possible to talk about the liberty of the proletariat or the real deliverance of the masses within and by means of the State. State means dominion, and all dominion involves the subjugation of the masses and consequently their explanation for the same of some ruling minority. We do not accept, even in the process of revolutionary transition, either constituent assemblies, provincial government or so called revolutionary dictatorships; because we are convinced that revolution is only sincere, honest and real in the hand of the masses, and that when it is concentrated into those of a few ruling individuals it inevitably and immediately becomes reaction .

Thus, although Bakunin had in common with Proudhon an intransigent opposition to any form of political authority, especially in the direct form of the state, it would be quite wrong to tar him with the same brush as the mutualists. Whereas the latter had in effect abstained from all political activity, weighing heavily on the early years of the International, the autonomists – as Guillaume stressed in one of his last interventions at the Hague Congress – fought for “a politics of social revolution, the destruction of bourgeois politics and the state” . It should be recognized that they were among the revolutionary components of the International, and that they offered an interesting critical contribution on the questions of political power, the State and bureaucracy.

How, then, did the “negative politics” that the autonomists saw as the only possible form of action differ from the “positive politics” advocated by the centralists? In the resolutions of the International Congress of Saint-Imier, held between 15 and 16 September 1872 on the proposal of the Italian Federation and attended by other delegates returning from The Hague, it is stated that “all political organization can be nothing other than the organization of domination, to the benefit of one class and the detriment of the masses, and that if the proletariat aimed to seize power, it would itself become a dominant and exploiting class.” Consequently, “the destruction of all political power is the first task of the proletariat”, and “any organization of so-called provisional and revolutionary political power to bring about such destruction can only be a further deception, and would be as dangerous to the proletariat as all governments existing today” . As Bakunin stressed in another incomplete text, “The International and Karl Marx”, the task of the International was to lead the proletariat “outside the politics of the State and of the bourgeois world”; the true basis of its programme should be “quite simple and moderate: the organization of solidarity in the economic struggle of labour against capitalism” . In fact, while taking various changes into account, this declaration of principles was close to the original aims of the organization and pointed in a direction very different from the one taken by Marx and the General Council after the London Conference of 1871 .

This profound opposition of principles and objectives shaped the climate in The Hague. Whereas the majority looked to the “positive” conquest of political power , the autonomists painted the political party as an instrument necessarily subordinate to bourgeois institutions and grotesquely likened Marx’s conception of communism to the Lassallean Volksstaat that he had always tirelessly combated . However, in the few moments when the antagonism left some space for reason, Bakunin and Guillaume recognized that the two sides shared the same aspirations . In The Alleged Splits in the International, which he wrote together with Engels, Marx had explained that one of the preconditions of socialist society was the elimination of the power of the state:

All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of the proletarian movement — i.e., abolition of classes — is attained, the power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions.

The irreconcilable difference stemmed from the autonomist insistence that the aim must be realized immediately. Indeed, since they considered the International not as an instrument of political struggle but as an ideal model for the society of the future in which no kind of authority would exist, Bakunin and his supporters proclaim

anarchy in proletarian ranks as the most infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext, [they ask to] the International, at a time when the Old World is seeking a way of crushing it, to replace its organization with anarchy .

Thus, despite their agreement about the need to abolish classes and the political power of the state in socialist society, the two sides differed radically over the fundamental issues of the path to follow and the social forces required to bring about the change. Whereas for Marx the revolutionary subject par excellence was a particular class, the factory proletariat, Bakunin turned to the “great rabble of the people”, the so-called “lumpenproletariat”, which, being “almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, carries in its inner being and in its aspirations, in all the necessities and miseries of its collective life, all the seeds of the socialism of the future” . Marx the communist had learned that social transformation required specific historical conditions, an effective organization and a long process of the formation of class consciousness among the masses ; Bakunin the anarchist was convinced that the instincts of the common people, the so-called “rabble”, were both “invincible as well as just”, sufficient by themselves “to inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution” .

Another disagreement concerned the instruments for the achievement of socialism. Much of Bakunin’s militant activity involved building (or fantasizing about building) small “secret societies”, mostly of intellectuals: a “revolutionary general staff composed of dedicated, energetic, intelligent individuals, sincere friends of the people above all” , who will prepare the insurrection and carry out the revolution. Marx, on the other hand, believed in the self-emancipation of the working class and was convinced that secret societies conflicted with “the development of the proletarian movement because, instead of instructing the workers, these societies subject them to authoritarian, mystical laws which cramp their independence and distort their powers of reason” . The Russian exile opposed all political action by the working class that did not directly promote the revolution, whereas the stateless person with a fixed residence in London did not disdain mobilizations for social reforms and partial objectives, while remaining absolutely convinced that these should strengthen the working-class struggle to overcome the capitalist mode of production rather than integrate it into the system.

The differences would not have diminished even after the revolution. For Bakunin, “abolition of the state [was] the precondition or necessary accompaniment of the economic emancipation of the proletariat” ; for Marx, the state neither could nor should disappear from one day to the next. In his Political Indifferentism, which first appeared in Almanacco Repubblicano in December 1873, he challenged the hegemony of the anarchists in Italy’s workers’ movement by asserting that

if the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then [according to Bakunin] they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form .

It should be recognized, however, that despite Bakunin’s sometimes exasperating refusal to distinguish between bourgeois and proletarian power, he foresaw some of the dangers of the so-called “transitional period” between capitalism and socialism – particularly the danger of bureaucratic degeneration after the revolution. In his unfinished The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution, on which he worked between 1870 and 1871, he wrote:

But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all. All will be equal, not only from the juridical and political point of view, but from the economic point of view. […] There will therefore be no longer any privileged class, but there will be a government, and, note this well, an extremely complex government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. […] It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. […] Every state, even the most republican and most democratic state […] are in their essence only machines governing the masses from above, through an intelligent and therefore privileged minority, allegedly knowing the genuine interests of the people better than the people themselves .

Partly because of his scant knowledge of economics, the federalist path indicated by Bakunin offered no really useful guidance on how the question of the future socialist society should be approached. But his critical insights already point ahead to some of the dramas of the twentieth century.

XII: After Marx: The “Centralist” and the “Autonomist” International
The International would never be the same again. The great organization born in 1864, which had successfully supported strikes and struggles for eight years, adopted an anticapitalist programme and established a presence in all European countries, finally imploded at the Hague Congress. Nevertheless, the story does not end with Marx’s withdrawal, since two groupings, much reduced in size and without the old political ambition and capacity to organize projects, now occupied the same space. One was the “centralist” majority issuing from the final congress, which favoured an organization under the political leadership of a General Council. The other was the “autonomist” or “federalist” minority, who recognized an absolute autonomy of decision-making for the sections.

In 1872, the strength of the International was not yet diminished. Displaying the uneven development that had characterized it in the past, its expansion in certain countries (above all, Spain and Italy) had compensated for its contraction in others (Britain, for example). The dramatic outcome at The Hague had split the organization, making many activists, especially in the “centralist” camp, realize that an important chapter in the history of the workers’ movement had run its course. Along with the North American Federation, limited forces in Europe aligned themselves in support of the new General Council in New York: the Romande Federation and a number of German-speaking sections in Switzerland, both shored up by Becker’s unflagging initiative; the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which gave its unreserved but barely visible support; the new Austrian sections, which, unlike the ghostly Germans, actually scraped together a little money to forward from their members’ dues; and the remote federations of Portugal and Denmark. In Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, however, few followed the new directives; the organization had not made a name for itself in Ireland; and by 1873 no section of the International remained in France. There was also Britain, of course, but in November 1872 – owing to personal clashes going back to long before the Hague Congress – the British Federal Council split into two feuding groups that each claimed to represent the International in the country. Hales, acting in the name of 16 sections and with the backing of such eminent Internationalists as Hermann Jung (1830-1901) and Thomas Motterhead (1825-1884), disavowed the General Council in New York and called a new congress of the British Federation for January 1873. Both Hales and Eccarius performed some astounding political somersaults, for although they were reformists by conviction and argued for participation in elections – their idea was to convert the International into a political party with trade union support that would ally itself with the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie – they officially lined up with abstentionists led by Guillaume and Bakunin. Engels responded to these developments with two circulars recognizing the decisions taken at The Hague; they were signed by important leaders in Manchester and on the “official” British Federal Council, plus the well-known former members of the General Council Dupont and Friedrich Lessner (1825-1910). The congress of the Council then took place in June, but those taking part in it had to swallow the bitter truth that, with the departure of the General Council for New York (which everyone saw as the end of the organization) the British trade unions no longer felt involved . Thus, all that the two groups had in common was a rapid decline.

The general congress of the “centralists” took place in the city that had once hosted the first congress of the International: Geneva. Thanks to Becker’s efforts, it was attended by 28 delegates – including (for the first time) two women. But 15 of these were from Geneva itself, and the representation of sections from other countries was limited to a couple of Germans. Having seen the climate of demobilization in Europe, the General Council decided not to send a representative from New York, and even Serrailler, the man appointed by the British Federation, failed to make the trip. In fact, this was the end of the centralist International.

Across the Atlantic, where Sorge was trying hard to keep the flame alight, the North American Federation was on the verge of collapse. Its financial situation, worsening with the decline in membership to less than one thousand (few of whom paid dues), made even the buying of postage stamps a difficult proposition. Reduced to matters concerning only the United States, it found American workers alternating between attitudes of hostility and indifference, even in response to the Manifesto to the Working People of North America that it issued in November 1873. Sorge eventually resigned as general secretary, and from then on the two-and-a-half remaining years of its history were little more than a chronicle of a death foretold. The final dissolution came on 15 July 1876, when ten delegates representing 635 members met in Philadelphia, before hurrying to the founding congress of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, timed to coincide with the first US world fair, the Centennial Exhibition.

Although the “centralist” organization only continued to operate for a short while in a couple of countries and they made no further contribution to the development of theory; the autonomists, on the other hand, had a real, active existence for some years to come. At the congress in Saint-Imier, attended by Swiss, Italians, Spanish and French, it was established that “no one has the right to deprive the autonomous federations and sections of the incontestable right to determine for themselves and pursue the line of political conduct that they believe to be best” – an option for federalist autonomy within the International that underlay the offer of a “pact of friendship, solidarity and mutual defence” . This position was the work of Guillaume. Unlike Bakunin, who would have preferred something more intransigent, the younger but more prudent Swiss activist had set his sights on expanding their support beyond the Jura, Spain and Italy, and winning over all the other federations opposed to the London line . His tactics won the day. The birth of a new International would be carefully prepared, without forcing matters through high-sounding declarations.

New affiliations came one after another over the next few months. The autonomist stronghold remained Spain, where the persecutions launched by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta (1825-1903) failed to prevent the organization from flourishing. By the time of its federal congress in Cordoba, held between December 1872 and January 1873, it had some 50 federations comprising more than 300 sections, with a total membership of more than 25,000 (7,500 in Barcelona) . From late 1872 on, the autonomists also widened their support in new countries. In December, the Brussels congress of the Belgian Federation declared the resolutions of The Hague null and void, refused to recognize the General Council in New York, and added its signature to the Saint-Imier Pact . In January 1873, the British rebels headed by Hales and Eccarius followed suit, and the Dutch Federation joined them the next month .

Although the autonomists – who had also retained contacts in France, Austria and the United States – became the majority of a new International, the coalition was in reality a congeries of the most varied doctrines. It included: the Swiss anarcho-collectivists headed by Guillaume and Schwitzgébel (Bakunin withdrew from public life in 1873 and died in 1876); the Belgian federation under the leadership of De Paepe, for which the people’s state (Volksstaat) should acquire greater powers and competences, beginning with the management of all public services; the ever more radical Italians, who eventually adopted insurrectionary positions (“propaganda of deeds”) doomed to failure; and British advocates of participation in elections and an alliance with progressive bourgeois forces. In 1874, contacts were even established with the Lassalleans of the General Association of German Workers.

The above scenario demonstrates that the prime antagonism that led to the split at the Hague Congress was neither between a group ready to stoop to deals with the state and an intransigent party more inclined to revolution, nor between proponents and opponents of political action. Rather, the chief cause of the radical and widespread opposition to the General Council was the turn rushed through at the London Conference in 1871. The Jura and Spanish federations, and later the newly formed Italian federation, would never have accepted Marx’s call to build working-class political parties: above all, the social-economic conditions in those countries made it unthinkable. A more cautious approach, however, might have kept the support of the Belgians – who for a number of years had been key to the balance within the Association – and other recently formed federations like the Dutch. A lower level of internal conflict would also have averted the split in Britain, which had more to do with personality clashes than with disagreements over policy. And, as some autonomists had foreseen, the moving of the General Council to New York left them with greater political scope and helped them to assert themselves after 1872. The fact remains, however, that in Marx’s view the “first” International had completed its historical task and the time had come to bring the curtain down.

The autonomists’ “first” congress – or, as they said, the “sixth congress”, counting the five of the International – was attended by 32 delegates, from Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland. It met in Geneva from 1 to 6 September 1873, the week before the congress of the centralists, and declared that it opened a “new era in the International” . It was unanimously decided to abolish the General Council, and for the first time at a congress of the International there was a debate about anarchist society . The theoretical-political armoury of the Internationalists was also enriched by the idea of the general strike as a weapon to achieve the social revolution. The groundwork was thus laid for what came to be known as anarcho-synicalism .

The next congress, held in Brussels from 7 to 13 September 1874, brought together 16 delegates: one from Britain (Eccarius), one from Spain and the rest from Belgium. Of the latter 14, two had the mandate of a French (Paris) or Italian (Palermo) section, while another two were German Lassalleans resident at the time in Belgium. Guillaume stated that one of these, Karl Frohme (1850-1933), actually represented the General Association of German Workers. Yet despite the fact that anarchists and Lassalleans were poles apart on the map of socialism, Guillaume motivated their presence by referring to the new rules approved by the Geneva Congress in 1873, under which the workers of each country were free to decide the best means of achieving their emancipation . All the same, this International had mostly become a place where an ever smaller (and ever less representative) number of leaders met to discuss in abstracto the workers’ material conditions and the action required to change them. The debate in 1874 was between anarchism and the people’s state (Volksstaat), and De Paepe, returning after three years to a congress of the International, was the main protagonist. In one of his interventions, he claimed that “in Spain, in parts of Italy and in the Jura, they are pro-anarchist, [whereas] in Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and America, they are for a workers’ state (with Belgium still fluctuating between the two)” . Once again no collective decision was taken, and the congress agreed unanimously that it was up to “any federation and socialist democratic party in each country to decide which political line it thought it should follow” .

The discussion at the Eighth Congress, held in Berne between 26 and 30 October 1876, followed the same lines. There were 28 delegates, including 19 Swiss (17 from the Jura Federation), 4 from Italy, 2 each from Spain and France, and De Paepe representing Belgium and the Netherlands. The proceedings showed the total incompatibility between the positions of De Paepe and Guillaume , but they ended in agreement on a proposal from the Belgian Federation to call a world socialist congess for the following year, with invitations to be sent to “all fractions of the socialist parties of Europe” .

Before that could happen, however, the last congress of the International was held in Verviers, between 6 and 8 September 1877. It brought together 22 delegates: 13 from Belgium, 2 each from Spain, Italy, France and Germany, and Guillaume representing the Jura Federation. There were also three observers from socialist groups with a purely consultative function – one was Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), later to become the founding father of anarcho-communism – but the only active participants were anarchists, including some like the Italian Andrea Costa (1851-1910) who would shortly go over to socialism. Thus, the autonomist International too, which had retained mass roots only in in Spain, had run its course. Their perspective was overtaken by a growing realization throughout the European workers’ movement that it was crucially important to participate in the political struggle by means of organized parties. With the end of the autonomist experience, there was also a definitive parting of the ways between anarchists and socialists.

XIII. The new International
From 9 to 16 September 1877, the city of Ghent hosted the Universal Socialist Congress, with more countries represented than at any comparable event before. Some three thousand workers welcomed delegates from nine countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Russia and Belgium), some of whom additionally held a mandate from an organization in another country (Denmark, the United States and, for the first time, labour groups in Greece and Egypt). Historic leaders of the International such as De Paepe and Liebknecht were present, as were Frankel, Guillaume, Hales and others, testifying to the importance of the organization for a whole generation of the European labour movement.

In the concluding Manifesto to Workers’ Organizations and Societies in All Countries, written by De Paepe and the future Belgian Socialist leader Louis Bertrand (1856-1943), the congress called for the establishment of a “General Union of the Socialist Party”. A large majority also signed a “pact”:

Inasmuch as social emancipation is inseparable from political emancipation; inasmuch as the proletariat, organized in a separate party opposed to all the parties of the possessing classes, must avail itself of all the political means tending to promote the liberation of its members; and inasmuch as the struggle against the dominion of the possessing classes must be worldwide in its scope and not merely local or national, and success in this struggle will depend upon harmonious and united activity on the part of the organizations in different lands – the undersigned delegates to the Universal Socialist Congress at Ghent decide that it is incumbent on the organizations they represent to furnish one another with material and moral support in all their industrial and political endeavours.

Six years after the London Conference of 1871, the Ghent theses confirmed that Marx had merely been in advance of the times. For the same document affirmed:

We urge the necessity of political action as a powerful means of agitation, propaganda, popular education and association. The present organization of society must be combated on all sides at once and with all the means at our disposal. […] Socialism should not be just theoretical speculation about the likely organization of future society; it should be real and living, involved with the actual aspirations, immediate needs and daily struggles of the proletarian class against those who control the social capital as well as social power.

To wrest a political right from the bourgeoisie, to organize formerly isolated workers into an association, to obtain a reduction in working hours through strike action or resistance societies: these mean both working to build a new society and engaging in actual explorations with regard to the social arrangements of the future.

Let the still unassociated workers organize and form associations! Let those who are organized only at the level of the economy descend into the political arena; they will find there the same adversaries and the same battle, and any victory scored at one of these levels will signal a triumph in the other!
Let the disinherited class in each nation form itself into a vast party distinct from all the bourgeois parties, and let this social party march hand in hand with those of other countries!
To claim all your rights, to abolish all privileges, workers of the world, unite!

In later decades, the workers’ movement adopted a socialist programme, expanded throughout Europe and then the rest of the world, and built new structures of supranational coordination. Apart the continuity of names (the Second International from 1889-1916, the Third International from 1919 to 1943), each of these structures constantly referred to the values and doctrines of the First International. Thus, its revolutionary message proved extraordinarily fertile, producing results over time still greater than those achieved during its existence.

The International helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labour could not be won in a single country but was a global objective. It also spread an awareness in their ranks that they had to achieve the goal themselves, through their own capacity for organization, rather than by delegating it to some other force; and that – here Marx’s theoretical contribution was fundamental – it was essential to overcome the capitalist mode of production and wage labour, since improvements within the existing system, though necessary to pursue, would not eliminate dependence on employers’ oligarchies.

An abyss separates the hopes of those times from the mistrust so characteristic of our own, the antisystemic spirit and solidarity of the age of the International from the ideological subordination and individualism of a world reshaped by neoliberal competition and privatization. The passion for politics among the workers who gathered in London in 1864 contrasts sharply with the apathy and resignation prevalent today.

And yet, while the world of labour has been reverting to conditions of exploitation similar to those of the nineteenth century, the project of the International has once again acquired an extraordinary topicality. Today’s barbarism of the “world order”, ecological disasters produced by the present mode of production, the growing gulf between the wealthy exploitative few and the huge impoverished majority, the oppression of women, and the blustery winds of war, racism and chauvinism, impose upon the contemporary workers’ movement the urgent need to reorganize itself on the basis of two key characteristic of the International: the multiplicity of its structure and radicalism in objectives. The aims of the organization founded in London 150 years ago are today more vital than ever. To rise to the challenges of the present, however, the new International cannot evade that twin requirement: it must be plural and it must be anticapitalist.

Appendix: International Working Men’s Association: Timeline and Membership
The first part of this appendix lists in chronological order all the congresses and conferences of the Interrnational: the unitary ones from the foundation in 1864 to the split at the Hague Congress in 1872; then the separate “autonomist” and “centralist” events beginning in 1873.

The second part is a table containing membership data for the International in various countries. Precise figures are impossible to establish for several reasons: 1) only a small number of workers’ movement organizations at the time – above all, the British trade unions and the German socialist parties – kept an exact count; 2) workers mostly joined the International not on an individual basis but through the affiliation of trade unions and other collective bodies; and 3) the International was illegal for some of the period in a number of countries, making it especially difficult to evaluate its size.

This is perhaps why – with the exception of the invaulable collective work La Première Internationale: l’institute, l’implantation, le rayonnement (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1968) – none of the many books on the International has ventured to calculate its total membership. If it has seemed useful to attempt this here, at the risk of some approximation and imprecision, this is largely because most publications in the past bandied around excessive figures that created a misleading picture of the reality.

The first column of the table lists – in chronological order of foundation – the countries where the International established a presence; it does not include Australia, New Zealand or India, for example, where it had only sporadic contacts with small groups of workers. Nor does it cover Russia, since the International never managed to penetrate that country (although some exiles founded a circle in Switzerland). The second column gives the years in which the organization reached its peak in the respective countries, while the third offers an approximate figure for the size of its membership. These totals have been calculated from the studies in La Première Internationale: l’institute, l’implantation, le rayonnement and other monographs listed in the bibliography at the end of this book.

Timeline

Conferences and Congresses (1864-1872)

London Conference: 25–29 September, 1865

I Congress: Geneva, 3–8 September, 1866

II Congress: Lausanne, 2–8 September, 1867

III Congress: Brussels, 6–13 September, 1868

IV Congress: Basel, 6–12 September, 1869

London Delegate Conference: 17–23 September, 1871

V Congress: The Hague, 2–7 September, 1872

The “Autonomist” International

VI Congress: Geneva, 1–6 September, 1873

VII Congress: Brussels, 7–13 September, 1874

VIII Congress: Berne, 26–30 October, 1876

IX Congress: Verviers, 6–8 September, 1877

The “Centralist” International

VI Congress: Geneva, 7–13 September, 1873

Philadelphia Delegate Conference: 15 July, 1876

Membership Table

Country	Peak Year	Membership
Britain	1867	50,000
Switzerland	1870	6,000
France	1871	More than 30,000
Belgium	1871	More than 30,000
USA	1872	4,000
Germany	1870	11,000 (including the members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party)
Spain	1873	About 30,000
Italy	1872	?????
Netherlands	1872	Less than 1,000
Denmark	1872	A couple of thousands
Portugal	1872	Less than 1,000
Ireland	1872	Less than 1,000
Austria-Hungary	1872	A couple of thousands

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Reviews

George C. Comninel, Socialism and Democracy

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date January 1, 2014

Workers Unite! The International 150 years later by Marcello Musto (ed.)

What is most distinctive about this book is that, instead of being about “Marx and the International,” it is about the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) itself – though fully recognizing the important role that Marx played within it. This makes it a rarity.

More importantly, it is a unique anthology of documents from the International as a whole, including reports and resolutions from the Paris bookbinders, the Central Section of Working Women of Geneva, and other little-known or unknown authors – to say nothing of several by Mikhail Bakunin.

Marxists have tended to approach the First International as something of a sidebar to Marx’s career. Both the Second and Third Internationals claimed to be directly and fundamentally Marxist, and Lenin’s State and Revolution provided an especially powerful link between what Marx wrote about the Paris Commune – on behalf of the First International – and the Bolshevik politics of revolution. The solidification of this link in “official” Marxism during the Stalinist era effectively cast the retrospective reading of Marx – particularly his political writing in the era of the International – through a Bolshevik lens. Subsequently, neither anti-Communists nor Leninists of any stripe have had reason to challenge this view.

The perspective of this book, however, is fundamentally different. The centrality of Marx’s role within the International is, of course, not in question. Indeed, as Musto observes from the start, Marx was the “political soul” of the General Council of the IWA, writing all of its main resolutions and all but one of the reports of its Congresses. Yet Marx had no role in the decision to found the International; he was never able to take for granted that his views would carry the day in debates; and much of his “leadership” included taking responsibility for day-to-day matters (even to the extent of ensuring that adequate office supplies were on hand).

Perhaps because of the importance of retaining paper copies of all sorts of transactions at the time, and certainly due to the conscientious efforts of the IWA itself to make its work known through the publication of significant addresses and the resolutions of its Congresses, a very large quantity of material relating to the organization has been preserved. Some of this material, such as Marx’s Inaugural Address, his Value, Price and Profit, and The Civil War in France, has been widely available ever since its publication by the International itself, or subsequently in the late 19 th or early 20th century in connection with the Second International. In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the International, finally, there was a significant effort by Progress Publishers in Moscow to make the rest of the material (at least insofar as it conformed with its view of the IWA) available in limited editions intended for libraries and specialists.

But there has been no previous anthology from the documents of the First International (which in total amount to more than 7000 pages) intended for the general reader. Moreover, most of the previously published documents that were in French – including the proceedings of the Congresses – have never been translated into English. And the orientation not only of the Moscow-based publications, but also of Marxists generally, meant that the documents – indeed even the existence – of a Bakuninist International following upon the great split in 1872 did not receive appropriate recognition. In its efforts to overcome all these limitations, this book marks a crucial breakthrough.

All the most significant documents, including the major pieces by Marx that have long been widely available, are reproduced in the book. Yet, whereas those pieces have previously for the most part been presented in the context of collections of Marx’s political writings, here they are presented in their more immediate historical context as contributions to the collective formulation of political positions taken by the International as a whole. In addition to the previously disseminated addresses and resolutions, there are excerpts from the minutes of the General Council (GC) and Congresses, including synopses of speeches by Marx, Bakunin, and many other participants. Importantly, the selection of such excerpts has not been made with a view towards highlighting the importance of Marx (which, of course, is also not denied), but to reveal the sometimes intense debates that were pursued, and the real importance of contributions from a variety of other participants, some of whom are barely known to history.

The Introduction and notes provide a clear and concise historical context for each of the documents, and accounts of their prior publication. Especially notable is the attention given not just to the positions taken by the GC, but also to those taken by local sections and federations on the major issues of the day. The independence of thought that can be seen in the history of these sections, and in the positions they articulated, is a revelation. We encounter not only the views of Marx and his most notable antagonists, but also those of committed socialists who fell into neither camp.

For example, there is the position taken by the Central Section of Working Women of Geneva in 1872. Their mandated resolution for the Hague Congress included two fundamentally important points that they had developed independently:

Considering first: that the working woman’s needs are equal to those of the working man and that the pay for her work is much less, the central Section of Working Women requests the Congress to include in its resolutions that henceforth agreements reached between employers and strikers of a trade in which women are employed will stipulate the same advantage for them as for men….

Considering, secondly: that the more different groups of opinion there are on the ways of achieving the same aim, the emancipation of labour, the easier it is to generalize the working class movement without losing any of the forces (even the most widely diverging) to concur in the final result; that it is advisable to leave to individuals, within the principles of the International, the right to group according to their tastes and their opinions.

Consequently: the Working Women of the Central Section demand: that the General Council shall not have the power to reject any section, whatever particular purpose it proposes, whatever its principles, provided that purpose and principles are not capable of harming those of the International Working Men’s Association and are compatible with the General Rules.

This is an important call for a broad conception of the mission of the International. It tended to be favourable to the position of Bakunin within it, but was not itself Bakuninist, and seems to have genuinely favoured the widest possible range of views compatible with the International. At the same time, it conceived this position in conjunction with advancing the interests of women workers. It is very much to the Musto’s credit that he presents this position for us to consider.

The thematic selection and arrangement of documents encourages us to appreciate the International as a vitally democratic association. It opens with the founding documents of the International. It then continues, in accord with the actual development of debates, with sections on “Labour”, “Trade Unions and Strikes”, the “Cooperative Movement and Credit”, “Inheritance”, “Collective Ownership and the State”, “Education”, the Paris Commune, a broad range of international issues, and crucial issues of working-class political action and organization. The selections broadly reflect the ideas within the International as a whole, including not only those that are well known, but also less well-known positions put forward by Marx and his main opponents as well as ideas emanating from local sections and individual members.

Under “Labour”, for example, there is an excerpt from the report of the committee on labour and capital that was presented to the Lausanne Congress of 1867. The report’s authors were a Parisian bookbinder, a Swiss artisan, a Parisian weaver, a mechanic from Lyon, and a Parisian bronze worker. The excerpt focuses upon the effects of machinery, and in brief compass addresses both its great promise and the enormous problems it brings:

The Committee acknowledges that, of all the means used to date, machinery is the most powerful to achieve the outcome we seek, namely the betterment of the material conditions of the working class; yet, to arrive at this end, it is of the utmost urgency that labour take hold of the means of production… With the invention of machinery, the division of labour becomes necessary… Unfortunately, in this way, all noble ambition in man has been annihilated and his liberty completely nullified as he passes into the condition of a machine, henceforth the property of the one who employs him and holds him in a state of complete dependence.

Also included in this section is a synopsis of an intervention by Marx on the subject of machinery at the 1868 GC meeting. As one might expect, the author of Capital made a number of important points, but the prior contribution from the committee of industrial workers stands up well even in direct comparison with Marx’s comments. It is enlightening to see not only that the workers were up to the task, but that they recognized the importance of this issue and undertook to address it within the broader mandate of their committee. Workers’ reports to other congresses make a similarly strong impression. All these reports were originally in French, and none has previously been translated into English.

One finds the same sorts of valuable documents in each section of the anthology. Under “Trade Unions and Strikes”, there are texts from two articles that Marx wrote at the request of the General Council (he was in fact nearly always called upon to present the public face of the International, though at his suggestion all public statements were always signed by all members of the GC). These articles, on the need to oppose strikebreakers and on the Belgian government’s vicious massacre of workers, are not widely known, and they reflect an important aspect of Marx’s ideas and political commitment. The remaining eight documents, however, are from reports and resolutions prepared by others, primarily workers, for the annual congresses, six of which have never previously appeared in English.

The real concerns of the members of the International, and the serious debates that they had over many basic issues of socialism, the advancement of class interests, and forms of political practice, emerge clearly from these documents. It is not only that there were important political differences from the start, and other, even more profound, differences that came to the fore over the life of the International. What is even more striking is the extent to which many of the positions being put forward, familiar to so many today, were being articulated more or less for the first time. Here is a record of the working class initially feeling its way through the issues that have since become central to socialism, trade unionism, anarchism, and social democratic reform.

Musto, in the Introduction, gives an excellent account of each of the major periods of the International, from a balanced but critical perspective. He is attentive to all the positions that co-existed within the IWA, treating each fairly and without partisanship. His acknowledgement of the important role played by Bakunin and his supporters is rare from someone who is so clearly himself a Marxist. Indeed, he goes further, to give serious consideration to the “autonomist” IWA established by the Bakuninists, which lasted for five years after the 1872 Hague Congress expelled Bakunin. Moreover, Musto treats this organization as part of the history of the IWA, rather than conceiving the International as having come to an end with the removal of the GC to New York. Such an approach could never have been taken by anyone associated with the Communist Parties of old. Even the “centralist” IWA, which survived in New York from 1872 to 1876, is incorporated as a part of the overall history. Documents from both these organizations which survived after the end of the London GC are included.

Musto also challenges the figures that have been put forward regarding the membership of the IWA, which has been hugely inflated by friend and foe alike. Tracking down numbers from the most reliable sources, he arrives at figures that are only one-half to as little as one-twentieth of previous estimates. This scrupulous attention to historical accuracy is evident throughout the book, as is Musto’s even-handedness. One can be confident that his account of the IWA’s struggles – and of the ideas of its central protagonists – is reliable.

Notes provide information for each of the excerpts and their authors. The bibliography lists all the reports from the congresses and conferences that were published by the IWA at the time, as well as the collections of original documents that were primarily published in the 1960s and 1970s. There is also a comprehensive listing of the major secondary works, not only in English, but also in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Finally, included as an appendix are the lyrics to the workers’ anthem, The Internationale.

The last time that the First International received much attention was in 1964, in conjunction with its 100th anniversary. Much of what has been written in the past reflected political and academic positions associated with the Cold War, and the world has of course changed enormously since the mid-1960s. Not only is this anthology unique (one would have to access more than ten volumes, several in French, and none readily available outside research libraries, to read the material otherwise); it has been put together with present-day concerns in mind, as men and women from 150 years ago to speak to us today in all their diversity.

What do they say? We can read, from 1867, the assertion that work is the main expression of human destiny in the modern age, displacing the role of religion, and that it is for this reason that women should have every right to fully and freely engage in the world of work – with maternity leave among the means to make this feasible. We read calls from the workers of one nation to those of another to respect an on-going strike – a call which is successful and leads to victory. We read Bakunin arguing, despite his opposition to the state in every form, that the state should outlaw inheritance, with Marx responding that this is surely to put the cart before the horse, and that what needs to be abolished is the power of capital, after which inheritance is hardly an issue at all. We read Marx discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the systems of public education in some American states, asserting the importance of the American war against slavery as ushering in a new era of the rights of labour, and maintaining the crucial novelty of the International itself as an organization founded by workers and built through their own efforts to become a force for them “to emancipate themselves”. We read the American General Secretary in New York putting forward the view that “When, upon its birth, bourgeois society solemnly proclaimed ‘the freedom of the individual,’ a new slavery of the working classes resulted from this principle.”

Much in this anthology is surprising, some of it is moving, and all of it is valuable. If you have ever been stirred by The Internationale, this book is for you. Yet, aside from those with a strong commitment to either Marxism or anarchism, and those for whom the history of the working class is deeply important, this book will be useful to anyone with an interest in the actual practice of politics, and especially the relationship between grassroots activism on the one hand and visionary leadership on the other.

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Reviews

Robert Ware, Philosophy in Review

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date January 1, 2013

Marx is back, after making a steady return since the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 1998. It has taken decades of work to rethink, reapply, rework, and restore Marx to get to the renaissance that is clearly underway today.

At the forefront of this renaissance is Marx for Today, a collection of nine probing articles by important authors, including the editor, Marcello Musto, in Part I and a survey of recent intellectual and social movements in ten regions of the world by participant reporters in Part II.

(This is an expanded edition of a special issue of Socialism and Democracy 24.3 [2010]; Chinese and Spanish translations are about to see print.)

The return of Marx, and of Marxism, has been aided by the release from what was once called “actually existing socialism”, operating as it did through ideological lenses of simplistic mandatory texts in which large parts of the real Marx were neglected or distorted. Outside the ‘socialist camp’ Marx’s work, as explained in Part II, was prohibited, censored, and otherwise blocked for reasons as different as strict capitalism in South Korea, strict juche in North Korea, and other reasons elsewhere.

In Part I, many of the sources of misunderstandings, misapplications, and mistranslations are taken up, where the usual suspects are criticized, for example Lenin, Stalin, and Mao (Chattopadhyay), Stalin and diamat (Anderson), or the liberal contingent (Carver). These are among the sources that corrupted Marx’s ideas into a dogmatic system. There were also areas of neglect, for example when it comes to alienation and free association. Many authors, in both parts of this book, discuss the neglect of core parts of Marx’s work, such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 with the now famous section on alienated labor and the Grundrisse, which was preparatory to Capital (Marx’s magnum opus) with a wide swath of topics including alienation. (See Marcello Musto, ed., Karl Marx’s Grundrisse [Routledge 2008].)

Musto gives a detailed account of the neglect and distortion of the concept of alienation on both sides of the socialist-capitalist split, which illustrates many of the problems that obscured the richness of Marx’s work. First, the manuscripts were not brought to light until nearly a century after they were written, and then they were largely ignored. Next, they were treated as juvenilia to be abandoned and later said to be irrelevant in the modern world and in socialist society. In the meantime, authors from divergent political positions twisted the notion of alienation in various ways until the term became unrecognizable and did indeed lose most of its relevance. According to Musto, only a return to Marx’s original work will save his original idea with its contemporary significance.

Most of the papers in Part I discuss the ways in which Marxism has been corrupted and mangled. Some discuss new applications of Marxism, while others discuss Marx in the light of contemporary politics. Everyone seems to agree about what they are against. In both parts of the book we see sustained attacks on a dogma of dialectical materialism, often called “diamat,” which is variously thought to use a unique unintelligible methodology, the dialectic, with strict deterministic laws about a narrow form of materialism. It became a system of thought that promised universal unilinear progress to the bounties of communism after capitalism is overthrown. Like others, Anderson rejects these ideas of a “totalizing” grand narrative (27). Some would jettison anything regarded as Marx’s special methodology while others would have us return to Marx’s distinctive methods of investigation. Carver explicitly criticizes those who have “constructed [Marx] as a theorist”, (117) and praises Marx’s sarcasm and rhetoric, with their political role, and for having explicitly “rejected systems of every kind … [for] critical insight” (132, quoting Marx in the rarely read Herr Vogt).

Questions of methodology are connected with a wealth of other topics, such as laws, structure, society, and human nature, which are mostly left, in Part I, to other times and places, although they are certainly understood as Marxian topics for today. Methodology has a place in some of the reports in Part II on Marx in the world. Hoff, for example, writes of the German trend of a “new Reading-of-Marx”, the aim of which is “to reconstruct Marxian method”. (202) Astonishingly, however, in his report on the Anglophone world, Blackledge says nothing about analytical Marxism, which has notoriously rejected dialectics and has been influential in discussing new methods for Marxism in several disciplines.

With an emphasis on textual and interpretive accuracy, the articles in Part I focus on other topics: nation, ethnicity, and race in Anderson; state and politics in Chattopadhyay; rhetoric and politics in Carver; human development and community in Lebowitz; emancipation and freedom in Cominel and in Musto; political tactics in Wallis; class struggle and democracy in Wolff; and democratic responses to ‘universal’ capitalism in Wood.

In general, the book is about overcoming injustice and oppression and securing human freedom through new alternatives. Interestingly, Part I, which is more discursive and investigative, focuses mostly on forms of freedom in new societies while Part II, which is more descriptive, focuses mostly on struggles in the face of inequality and exploitation. The theoreticians struggle to understand the future, while the activists and their movements struggle to build a future. The point of it all is to create a new world.

There is an emphasis throughout on community and, more generally, emancipation and free association. The idea of alienation connects to a story—with complications rarely recognized—of freedom and liberated people in a new socialist society or a new socialist people (see here Lebowitz’s essay) in a liberated socialist society. Not surprisingly, there are shoals still to be navigated, including some, I suspect, in this volume. Cominel, for example, proclaims “the complete emancipation of humanity” (91) and “overcoming alienation, in all of its forms” (85). This sounds like a totalizing narrative of a different sort, one that Marx was not immune from, as seen in Musto’s apparent acceptance of what Marx promoted, perhaps rashly. In Capital, Marx imagined an association of free people labouring “in full self-awareness as one single social labour force” (114). The idea that alienation and individualism would be totally eliminated in a new socialist world is not much more believable than that abuse in all its forms would be totally eliminated after capitalism. Even the best society that can be imagined will have defects.

Such thoughts lead to another focus of concern that arises in Lebowitz’s discussion. If human beings are alienated and fragmented by capitalism, he claims, production should be reorganized to produce “socialist human beings” so that “everyone is able to develop his/her full potential” (68). If we are to “win a new world” (as the Communist Manifesto puts it), to what extent do we produce a new society and to what extent does that require producing new human beings? And if new human beings are to be produced, who would produce them? A danger of setting out new alternatives is that of creating new shackles, of constraining free choices for people in the future.

It is salutary at this juncture to remember what Engels said about lovers of the future not caring about what old dreamers wanted. As Engels said, “a new generation… will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual.” ( Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 26, “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, Chap. II, Part 4.) Engels would probably have said this about many other aspects of society, although there are also other approaches to take. Chattopadhyay, in criticizing Lenin’s discussion of a socialist state, is probably technically right when he says that Marx envisioned a stateless society: still, Lenin was interpreting Marx’s comments about “the future state of communist society”, claiming that the question of what “transformation the state [will] undergo in communist society … can only be answered scientifically”. (“Critique of the Gotha Program”, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 24, 94.) There is probably much about a new future that cannot, and sometimes should not, be charted out now, whether it is through conjectures and ideals or through scientific investigation.

If Marx is back (or still around), with all the problems to be better understood and the world to be changed, where is he? Practically everywhere, as revealed in Part II, which is richly informative about work on Marx—in movements, research, and publications—in countries (and regions) throughout the world.

There is no way to review all this work. It is encyclopedic, as it should be, and helpful in showing the political contexts from which Marxism rose or within which it has been sustained. Some things stand out in their absence. I would have expected attention to be given to liberation theology in Latin America and its influence. More might have been said about directions of Marxism in unique areas with their own histories and cultures. I would note conferences in North America such as those organized by Rethinking Marxism and the Radical Philosophy Association and various left-wing groups. One would also hope for something about Australia and New Zealand. Noting the absence of some things only increases the force, however, of the richness of Marxism in the world today. What Ducange says concerning Marxist studies in France applies equally well to this book: “a rich array of work whose multiple dimensions … clash sharply with the virulent anti-Marxism of the 1980s which had made the reading of Marx almost impossible.” (196) Part II of Marx for Today shows that there can be “a thousand Marxisms” (using Toxel’s idea at 193). What is not noted in this regional review is the huge global development of international work involving Marxist studies, from the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto to the numerous meetings of the World Social Forum and many international conferences and alliances around the world. Marxism is cropping up both regionally and globally.

How can we determine that we are getting to the real Marx, or the best Marx for today? That is a central question if we are to retrieve Marx for today. If Marx’s theories (pace Carver) were a science of a sort, then how would that science best be practiced today? Should ‘Marxism’ develop as much as ‘Darwinism’ has, for example? If Marx’s ideas were not a science but a reflection of the culture and structures of society, then how would the changes of those affect the appropriateness of his ideas today? Marx expected change, and would certainly expect a change of ideas as the world changes. Marxism for yesterday is not simply Marxism for today, despite many common structures and common themes.

In this book one can sense a shift in Marxist studies. In the past, and for Marx himself, the core and focus of attention was a materialist conception of history based on economic systems. Marx in his day, like Marxism since, always included a glance to the future, with the concern about the future being largely focused on the development of economic systems. Marxists in the past tried to answer the question of where we are going by positing a ‘science’ that made reference to progressive epochs.

Today, as this book shows, there is a shift in focus to questions about human freedom in a future society. Many, perhaps most, still consider the economy basic and at the core of the ‘theory’, but ideas about alienation, participation, and cooperation loom larger and receive more attention. Today, Marxists are turning their attention to what a better world might be like and showing how another, socialist, society would at least mitigate many of the problems of actually existing capitalism.

Marx for Today is a good book to engage us in a renaissance of Marx and his legacies of problems and insights.

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Reviews

Dunja Larise, Political Studies Review

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date January 1, 2013

The aim of this collection of essays is to offer new interpretations of Marx’s writings by showing his distance from the dogmatic and economistic streams of Marxism of the twentieth century, as well as to suggest the usefulness of his theoretical work for the contemporary world. The first part of the volume assembles texts that focus on the re-reading and reinterpretation of Marx’s work from an interdisciplinary and contemporary perspective. The second part deals with the global reception of Marx after 1990.

The first contributions examine the crucial points of liberal, post-colonial, feminist and ecological criticism of Marx by setting them against novel readings of Marx’s writings. In this vein Kevin Anderson challenges the post-colonial criticism of Marx, notably by Edward Said who, according to Anderson, ignores Marx’s early writings, and accuses Marx of adopting a unilinear and Eurocentric mode of development, thereby failing to incorporate race, ethnicity and gender in his theory. Anderson offers numerous passages of Marx’s writings on India, China, Poland and Ireland to refute this accusation.

Similarly, Paresh Chattopadhyay corrects some deep reaching misunderstandings about Marx’s visions of socialism and communism, showing that the concept of real existing socialism, conceived as a transition from capitalism to communism, is Lenin’s invention, and has nothing in common with Marx’s idea of socialism as the free and equal association of individuals. Michael Lebowitz reinterprets the Marxian idea of the inherent tendency of capitalism to transgress all barriers in the context of climate change, whereas Georg Comninel re-reads Marx’s theory of emancipation.

Musto, Craver and Wallis reassess Marx from the perspective of political philosophy, while Rick Wolf approaches Marx’s writings from an economic perspective. He traces Marx’s theories of crisis, focusing not only on contradictions inherent in the cyclic nature of capitalist modes of production, but also elaborating possible Marxian solutions to its recurrent crises. Elen Meiskins Wood assesses the actuality of Marx’s writings from a historical perspective.

The second part of the work offers valuable insights concerning the reception of Marx and Marxism in different parts of the world after 1990. The articles introduce the main actors, theories and difficulties for the new and critical perception of Marx after 1990 in Europe, Latin America, the anglophone world and Asia.

Marx for Today is a valuable and a highly commendable book for all those who wish to understand the value and the actuality of Marx’s theories for the present time, as well as for those who do not wish stereotypes and prejudices to inform their opinion of one of the most important thinkers of our times.

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Reviews

Jordy Cummings, Studies in Marxism

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date January 1, 2013

Marcello Musto’s new edited volume Marx for Today is a superlative collection of essays by a fantastic roster of today’s most important Marxist thinkers.

Grouped together, these essays coalesce into something greater than its parts, forming a whole that drives home the point that Marx as theorist and scientist of human emancipation is even more relevant in the second decade of the 21st century than he was in his own lifetime, as Ellen Wood points out in her contribution.

Rescued, as Musto puts it in his introduction, from the debris of misinterpretation, whether officially propagated or based on misinterpretations of poorly put-together texts, Marx’s spectre, the spectre of 21st socialism is haunting the bourgeoisie in unexpected places, from Wall Street to Nepal to Latin America. What is more, as is shown in this volume, going back and reconsidering Marx’s own work, Marxian research is experiencing a veritable renaissance. The first half of the book, featuring essays by leading figures in English language Marxism, including Wood, Kevin Anderson, Michael Lebowitz among others, centred around reading Marx against the grain, both of orthodox Marxism and the ‘western Marxism’ that supplanted it. The second half of the book is an examination, redolent of Musto’s excellent volume on the Grundrisse, of recent Marxian research on a global scale.

There is sometimes a tendency, in analysis of political theory, from Machiavelli to Marx, to attempt a dry, disinterested tone. On the other hand, and in particular among Marxists, there is a tendency towards hagiography and veneration. Of course, written by Marxists, this volume engages with the practical questions posed by Marx. Yet it is not without very original contributions in regards to Marx’s mode of exposition. while he may bend the stick a tad too far in his disavowal of Marx as a ‘system builder’, Terrell Carver’s resuscitation of the much-maligned Herr Vogt to take a close look at Marx’s use of rhetoric, the construction of his published work and his use of sarcasm and satire, were tools in his political-writer’s toolbox, the pen and paper as a weapon in the battle for human emancipation. Carver, like all of the writers collected here produce marvellous prose, and so recognize how to read Marx is as important as what one learns from reading him. All of the arguments made in this volume are based specifically on reading Marx’s own work, within its specific context, and only in that sense can we see its relevance for Marxian inquiry and socialist practice in these times.

A great hallmark of the highly prolific Musto’s work, both written and in his edited volumes, is that Marxism has always been international, not merely European, and this theoretical internationalism was Marx’s intent. Indeed, as Musto points out in his introduction, very soon after Marx died, his ‘name was soon on the lips of the workers in Detroit and Chicago, as on those of the first Indian socialists in Calcutta.’ Indeed, underlying the narrative of this collection is not just the globality of Marxism, but the openness, the heterodoxy, the context-specific quality of its reception and praxis of intellectuals and activists. And indeed, Marx is indeed again inspiring the social movements, from

Occupy Wall Street (which Ellen Wood writes about far more approvingly than other recent social movements) to the Wisconsin uprising, from the uprisings in West Asia to the people’s wars in Central and South Asia. As opposed to making a ‘retreat from class’, new generations of Marxist scholar/activists are broadening their understanding of the socialist project, ‘what we are for as well as what we are against’, whilst retaining the core conception of moving beyond alienated labour. Certainly Kevin Anderson’s reading of Marx as multilinear, thus nowhere near the economistic reductionist that he has been portrayed, shows a need for fluid conceptions of the socialist project. In turn, as George Comninel points out, in his reading of emancipation in Marx’s early work, ‘the realization of full human freedom requires the elimination of our collective subordination of any form of sovereign power.’ As Comninel recently pointed out in a talk at the Left Forum, Marx was to a certain extent a philosophical anarchist. But philosophical anarchism, that is to say, moving towards what Paresh Chattopopadhy, in a provocative and convincing contribution, calls ‘something that has not yet been tried… the associated mode of production,’ requires practical communism.

Perhaps the best explanation for Marx’s current relevance comes from Ellen Wood’s above- mentioned contention. The classical Marxist theorists and revolutionaries- Luxemburg, Trotsky, Mao, Gramsci– however profound and important their contributions may have been, they were operating under a presupposition of some degree of ‘non-capitalism’, that the total subsumption of the planet under capital would short-circuit and finding a way to push this process was the role of Marxist theory. On the other hand, capitalism, in the 21st century, is universal. Yet capitalism’s universality ‘can only universalize its contradictions, its polarizations between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. Its successes are also its failures.’ With a full universalization of capitalism and its contradictions, we are both more subject on a global scale to the compulsions of the market, but equally more able, by implication, to move beyond it.

This then leaves the question, how to construct the new socialist political subject? Michael Lebowitz, who has done so much to inspire a re-invention of the socialist project, works with Marx’s famous metaphor of turning ‘limits into barriers’ to argue against a fatalistic understanding of capitalist crises, emphasizing the role of human agency and human development in a refounded socialism. Musto’s own essay gives an account of the various uses of the concept of ‘alienation’, Marxist and non-Marxist, and envisions a disalienated future socialist society that would reverse the ‘war of all against all’ that constitutes capitalist social property relations, in which the product no longer rules over the producer. This indeed marks the other hallmark of this volume and much of Musto’s work, refounding and redeveloping a theory of alienation without lapsing into either voluntarism or determinism, balancing context and agency. Without a theory of alienation, a theory of class struggle and a theory of human emancipation is not possible. Yet all too often theories of alienation have confused alienation with objectification.

The second half of the text, as noted, is a survey of Marx’s reception in many different parts of the world. A survey of Marxism in Latin America, against the backdrop of the ‘pink tide’ is covered both in respect to Spanish languages for much of the continent, and for Brazil. The latter looks at Marxism among oppositional forces while the former is related to the influence of Marxism on these states, and the question of a transition to socialism. Paul Blackledge gives an excellent survey of English language Marxism, while there are also entries on Italy, Russia, Germany and France. Perhaps most fascinating, however, are the three essays on East Asia, where a veritable renaissance of Marxian research is taking place. Japanese Marxists have long been known for their exactitude

around the Marxian tradition, but the ‘resdiscovery’ of Marxism in South Korea, against the backdrop of post-Asian crisis capitalism is a real eye opener. The article on the contradictions of a state in which Marxism is nominally ‘official’ as in China, with its ‘New Left’ but also strong opposition to the renewal of Marxism and Maoism adds to this international approach. If there was to be one complaint, it would be the lack of featuring of South, Central and West Asia, where popular uprisings have taken influence from the Marxist tradition.

This can only but scratch the surface of one of the finest volumes on Marx’s work produced in the last few years. It is sophisticated enough for jaded Marxist intellectuals, yet accessible enough for students to read whilst reading Marx for their first time. It is political enough for those who connect their practice with their theory, but not so overbearingly political as to be sectarian. Marx for Today is certainly a book for today!

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Reviews

Tom Whittaker, Counterfire

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date November 23, 2012

Marx for Today

Having been declared officially dead and consigned to history’s proverbial dustbin roundabout 1989, Marx has returned surprisingly quickly, popping up in various places. For Marcello Musto, the editor of this collection of essays on Marx, there ‘has always been a “return to Marx”’.

For the eminent poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida, ‘it will always be a mistake not to read and reread and discuss Marx’ (p.4).

Not That Dead

Since 1989, we have experienced not only the publication of Derrida’s own Spectres of Marx (1993), but also the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto (1998), which saw Marx partially rehabilitated as a prophet of globalisation. Right about some of the ways in which capitalism would develop if still wrong about everything else. The year 1999 saw Marx beat Einstein, Darwin and Newton to the title of ‘greatest thinker of the millennium’ in a BBC poll.

However, if Marx never fully went away, the discussion surrounding him did feel a little quaint. Getting it ‘right about globalisation’ was hardly going to make the ruling classes tremble. Forward to 2012, deep into the most severe global recession since the 1930s, and the tone of debate is rather more serious. A recent BBC2 series, Masters of Money featured episodes on Keynes, Hayek and Marx with the last word going to Marx. It was a portentous one at that, namely that the system is in severe crisis, and rather than being just an aberration, such crises are inherent in the nature of capitalism itself.

Actively seeking to move beyond capitalism, as Marx wished to do, was still considered off-limits, and footage from inside a former Stasi prison in East Germany served to underline this point. However, such predictable cheap shots aside, Marx’s critique of capitalism, of its crisis-ridden tendencies and production of class polarisation was unmistakably back in the political mainstream.

Returning to Marx Today

These are then opportune circumstances in which to publish a collection of academic articles entitled Marx for Today? Marcello Musto writes in the introduction that Marx ‘probed the logic of the system more deeply than any other modern thinker’ (p.7). This collection of essays gives scope to both the depth and breadth of Marx’s thought, covering a diverse range of themes; nationalism and ethnicity, alienation, democracy, emancipation and the outlines of a future of post-capitalist society. It also contains a section examining the dissemination of Marx’s thought across the world, beyond North American and the core European countries to include Brazil, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan.

Recipes and Cook-shops

Any ‘return to Marx’ has it dangers, and Musto is keen to avoid the rigid adherence to a set of scriptures that characterised the Marxism of both the Second International and, once Stalin had consolidated his power, also the Third International. Marx himself warned, seemingly to little avail, against ‘recipes for the cook-shops of the future’ (p.3). Musto gives a lucid description of the inadequacies of the Marxism of the Second International, describing it as ‘schematic’, ‘economic determinist’ and of having a ‘naive belief in the automatic forwards march of history, and therefore in the inevitability of the replacement of capitalism by socialism’ (p.1).

Following the barbarities of the twentieth century and confronting the impending ecological disaster of the twenty-first, notions such as the ‘forwards march of history’ seem rather absurd. Yet Marx’s warning against recipes and cook-shops still stands. Any rereading of his works for today must seek to avoid doctrinal introspection in favour of an active engagement with the economic, social, political, military and ecological realities encircling us.

On this latter point, Musto reminds us that ‘Marx’s analysis of capitalism was not merely an economic investigation but was also relevant to the understanding of power structures and human relations’ (p.7). Certainly, the range of essays included in this volume attempt to do justice to Marx breadth of vision. What follows below amounts to no more than a short summary of some of the essays included in this volume.

‘Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity’

Kevin Anderson seeks to address what he sees as the barriers that continue to block ‘returning to Marx as the primary source of leftist critique of capitalist modernity as a whole, and as providing the theoretical grounds for its overcoming’ (p.20). For Anderson, this barrier is that wide sections of left and progressive academic circles believe, not that Marx was too radical, but that he was not radical enough. For post-modernists, Marx stands accused of having constructed a ‘grand narrative’ explaining historical development in far too a linear fashion. On this count, the likes of Foucault and Deleuze are actually more radical than Marx (p.20).

In a similar vein it is said that whilst Marx’s model may help explain class and economic factors it neglects gender, ethnicity, race and nationalism. Edward Said famously accused Marx of eurocentricism in his book Orientalism, and Anderson is concerned to defend Marx’s understanding of non-western societies and nationalism. This Anderson does through a detailed rereading of his writings on India, China, Russia, Ireland, Poland and the American Civil War. Against Said, Anderson makes three essential points about Marx’s work; (1) it does address the specificities of nation, ethnicity and race; (2) Marx made a significant original contribution in theorising how indigenous forms of resistance to capital need to link up with the working classes in more technologically advanced sectors of the world economy; (3) Marx’s theorisation of how race, ethnicity and nationalisation intersect with class struggle remains relevant today (p.35).

‘Revisiting Marx’s Concept of Alienation’

Marcello Musto seeks to examine how Marx’s concept of alienation developed between his earlier and later works and also how various non-Marxist thinkers adapted, and often distorted the concept during the twentieth century. In the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, which first appeared in 1932, Marx focused on the different ways that the worker is alienated under capitalist society; from both the product and process of their labour, from their ‘species-being’, and in relation to other human beings (p.95). Musto argues that for Marx alienation was ‘a particular phenomenon within a precise form of economy: that is wage labour and the transformation of labour products into objects standing opposed to producers’ (p.95). Marx considered alienation from a historical and not natural point of view.

However, in the hands of writers such as Herbert Marcuse alienation became associated with labour in general, rather than specifically wage labour, and with technological domination, rather than capitalist relations of production (pp.96-8). For Horkheimer and Adorno, alienation was the result of social control and the manipulation of human needs by the mass media, of a technological rationale dominating society (p.98). For psychoanalysis and existentialism, albeit in different ways, alienation was primarily about individual subjectivity, and its objective basis in capitalist relations of production was downplayed (pp.98-100). Within mainstream sociology and psychology the conception of alienation then hegemonic was even more individualistic (p.105). Therefore, in differing ways, all these theories pointed to agents other than the working class to overcome alienation.

According to Musto, the challenge to the individualistic conception of alienation came with the wider diffusion of Marx’s mature writings on the topic during the 1960s (p.112). In Grundrisse and Capital, volume one, Marx elaborated on his earlier concept of alienation, giving it a firmer grounding in economic categories and linking it with exchange value. This culminated in his theory of commodity fetishism which sought to explain how social relations between people take on the appearance of material relations between things (pp.110-13).

For Musto the crucial importance of Marx’s mature work on alienation was that:

‘It was a conception geared to the overcoming of alienation in practice – to the political and action of social movements, parties and trade unions to change the working and living conditions of the working class’ (p.112).

In the context of the political and social rebellions of the 1960s, Marx’s work on alienation provided:

‘an anti-capitalist ideological platform for the extraordinary political and social movement that exploded in the world during those years. Alienation left the books of philosophers and the lecture halls of universities, took to the streets and the space of workers’ struggles, and became a critique of bourgeois society in general’ (p.112).

The 60s radicals who dreamed of a world without alienation were to be disappointed. As the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s were turned back and as neo-liberalism set in and then consolidated its hold, alienation increased considerably. However, as financial markets and eco-systems enter rapid meltdown both the relevance of Marx’s critique of alienation and its ability to inspire new social movements should be obvious.

‘In Capitalist Crisis, Rediscovering Marx’

Ricardo Wolff describes capitalism as an economic system oscillating between periods of limited state intervention in the markets and private property, and periods of relatively more state intervention; periods of private capitalism followed by state capitalism (p.148). Two alternative, mainstream and non-Marxian theories have sought to explain the working of this system over the course of the twentieth century, namely the Keynesian and the neo-classical schools of economic thought (p.148). Since the 1970s and the onset of neo-liberalism, the neo-classical school has been by far the dominant school of the thought with the Keynesian alternative largely marginalised.

Since the crash in 2008 Keynesianism has made something of a recovery. However, for Wolff, ‘the Keynesian message remains what it always was: state intervention must save capitalism from its private form’ (p.150). Keynesian policies may temporarily reinvigorate the system but crises will recur paving the way for another oscillation back towards the private form of capitalism. For Wolff, the problem is that both schools of thought accept the capitalist structure of production:

‘The oscillations between the two forms of capitalism and between the two mainstream theories prevent crises in capitalism becoming crises of capitalism, wherein the capitalist production system itself is thrown into question. Oscillation between the two theories shapes and contains public debate when capitalist crisis cause serious social suffering. It keeps the range of discussable solutions to more or less regulation, more or less monetary or fiscal policies, and so on. That range keeps the public from imagining, let alone considering, the Marxian alternative solution, namely a transition out of either form of capitalism into a different system’ (p.151).

By contrast, Wolff suggests that the Marxian response to repeated economic crises would ‘not favour one form of capitalism over another’, but would seek to change the system and to move society beyond capitalism (p.159). Wolff then seeks to sketch out how this might be done on a micro-level, apparently in order to correct a bias in traditional socialist thinking towards the macro-dimensions of post-capitalist society (p.159).

Undoubtedly Wolff is right to emphasise the opportunity created by the economic crises for a revival of both a Marxian economic critique of the system, and a political programme to challenge it, however, his formulation of the deficiencies of both the neo-classical and Keynesian solution is highly problematic in its indifference to the often widely varying content of the two solutions. Crudely put, both Clement Atlee and Margaret Thatcher accepted the capitalist structure of production, but it would be strange for a Marxist to see no difference between them.

Our current conjuncture presents an immediate political choice between programmes of savage austerity, faithful to the tenets of neo-classical theory, or some sort of ‘Keynesian’ alternative. Even in Greece, a move towards the conquest of state power and the construction of a post-capitalist economy along Marxian lines is not yet on the immediate horizon. In such circumstances, simply dismissing this choice as one between two forms of capitalism and insisting on the Marxian alternative runs the risk of sounding a little abstentionist.

Of course, for the radical left, pursuing a ‘Keynesian’ solution should not mean seeking to stabilise the capitalist structure of production, but rather of creating a movement that, whilst pressing for limited reforms, begins to point beyond the logic of the system as a whole. This means something along the lines of what Trotsky referred to as a transitional programme. In this sense, it may well be that the road to Marx lies through a series of escalating popular mobilisations that seek to impose a ‘Keynesian’ programme as an alternative to austerity.

The ‘Lesser Evil’ as Argument and Tactic, from Marx to the Present

Rather usefully, the reasoning for such an argument can be found elsewhere in the book. In an interesting essay Victor Wallis examines the concept of the ‘lesser evil’ within the Marxist tradition. This he defines as, ‘decisions as to whether to give momentary tactical support to one or another bourgeois political formation’ (p.134). Wallis argues that within a democratic republic this usually means ‘advocating a united front [sic] with particular bourgeois parties against repression or in favour of progressive social policies’ (p.134). As an aside here, there is, of course, an important difference between a united front of working class forces, reformist or revolutionary, and a ‘popular front’ strategy which can risk subordinating the working class to bourgeois leadership for the sake of the lesser evil.

Of course the concept of the lesser evil itself is one of some controversy within the Marxist tradition. This is hardly surprising given all the occasions it which it has been used as justification for various wretched compromises with capitalism and imperialism by both the Second and Third Internationals. Currently in the USA it constitutes a ‘system induced imperative’, with the Republican–Democrat duopoly operating as a permanent drag to the right (pp.139-141). Yet for all this, the concept of the lesser evil is still essential to the growth of an independent working-class movement.

‘Maximalists sometimes use the derogatory expression “lesser evilism” in an attempt to discredit the idea of giving even limited and transitory support to any bourgeois formation. In fact, however, determinations of lesser evil (or least damage) are inherent in any decision requiring defensive calculations, as opposed to the unobstructed pursuit of one’s positive goal. To avoid such calculations is impossible: the challenge for a revolutionary party is to keep them within appropriate bounds’ (p.135).

Within the Marxist tradition it was Lenin who reflected more than most as to how to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable compromises, a point he outlined in a memorable example:

‘One must distinguish between a man who has given up his money and fire-arms to bandits so as to lessen the evil they can do … and a man who gives his money and fire-arms and bandits so as to share in the loot’ (p.139).

Referring to the controversy above, Keynesian policies could well be a means stabilising capitalism, (of ‘sharing in the loot’). However, they could also help form the basis of a programme both to defend working people from the effects of austerity, (of lessening the evil the bandits can do), and to increase people’s confidence to challenge more fundamentally the imperatives of the system.

Conclusion

If rereading Marx today means that we recommit to his long-term goal of a society of the associated producers, then that is all for the good. Yet we must also heed Marx’s warning about recipes and cook-shops for the future. Doctrinal purity should not be our objective. The road to a society of the associated producers will require many tactical and conjunctural decisions requiring compromise and the question will be whether these are kept within ‘appropriate bounds’. Seeking to make any sort of political and social reality out of Marx’s ideas will necessitate adaptation and improvisation in circumstances that cannot always be foreseen.

In this sense, the bold experiment taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the most desperate of circumstances is of enormous use to us today. In this sense, one of the more disappointing aspects of Marx for Today is the treatment given to Lenin and the early years of the Russian revolution by Paresh Chattopadhyah (pp.45-9). Seeking to dissociate Lenin from Marx, by lumping him together with Stalin and Mao under the rubric of ‘anti-emancipatory socialism’ (p.43) involves treading a tedious and well-worn path.

However, considered overall, Marx for Today is a stimulating book that does justice to the depth and breadth of Marx’s thought and which makes a strong claim for his contemporary relevance.

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Reviews

Nick Taylor, The London School of Economics and Political Science

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date July 23, 2012

Since the onset of global crisis in recent years, academics and economic theorists have been drawn to Marx’s analysis of the inherent instability of capitalism. The rediscovery of Marx is based on his continuing capacity to explain the present.

In the context of what some commentators have described as a “Marx renaissance”, the aim of this book, edited by Marcello Musto, is to make a close study of Marx’s principal writings in relation to the major problems of our own society, and to show why and how some of his theories constitute a precious tool for the understanding and critique of the world in the early twenty-first century.

Marcello Musto has produced an edited volume which provides not only a robust defence of the continuing relevance of Marx to our times but also new and challenging perspectives for those already accepting of such relevance. Musto, a Visiting Professor of Political Theory at York University (Toronto), has considerable experience in both areas, having previously edited Karl Marx’s Grundrisse 150 Years Later. Indeed, the depth and breadth of his knowledge of Marx’s texts can hardly be in doubt, as he has carried out extensive research on the latest historical-critical edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels, known as MEGA². Here this knowledge is demonstrated in Musto’s introduction which outlines some of the ways in which twentieth-century Marxism distorted Marx’s thought and why we should celebrate a revival of interest in the original texts. It also provides a useful chronology of Marx’s writings across his lifetime.

Marx for Today is split into two parts. Part One offers new interpretations of Marx’s writings and Part Two presents the ‘global reception’ of Marx across a range of countries including South Korea, China, France as well as Hispanic America. The first set of essays are likely to have a much wider appeal; Marxist scholars will find the shorter global reception surveys of useful reference, providing as they do a “who’s who” of those who have published on Marx in the last decade or so across the world.

The new interpretations in Part One offer a comprehensive look at Marx’s thought and feature a number of notable scholars such as Kevin Anderson, George Comninel, Terell Carver, Michael Lebowitz, Rick Wolff and Ellen Wood (whose chapter is in large part a reprint of a 1997 article). Stand-out contributions come from Anderson on Marx and non-western societies, nationalism and ethnicity, Musto himself in a chapter on alienation and Carver on Marx’s rhetoric. Rick Wolff also provides an excellent chapter outlining a Marxist approach to the global financial crisis and some suggestions for installing democracy in the workplace.

Anderson’s chapter challenges the view – common to post-colonial critics – that Marx was eurocentric, that he was unconcerned with race, nationalism and ethnicity and that he prescribed a single path to development. He shows another side to Marx, one which came to focus increasingly on and give support to resistance to colonialism in India, national liberation in Ireland and Poland, and anti-slavery movements in the U.S. Of particular interest is the existence of notes that Marx made in his last years of anthropological studies in India and elsewhere, many analysing communal forms of property and some of which have yet to be published.

Carver’s chapter urges us to read Marx as a ‘trouble-making journalist’ and explores the use of satire and scorn as a political strategy in his writings, in particular a little-known piece called ‘Herr Vogt’. Marx’s rhetorical flourishes, Carver argues, had a serious, if cryptic purpose: ‘the parodic qualities of the presentation – and subtle ironies of the covertly critical wit – misled many if not most readers into reproducing as truth the very “truths” that Marx was painstakingly … deconstructing as collective illusions.’ Similar rhetorical strategies, we are told, may be found in Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” or Private Eye, if only in method.

What many of the contributions highlight is the importance of returning to Marx’s texts to see what he actually wrote, rather than relying on second-hand characterizations. The diversity of topics in this book suggests that there is still much to be salvaged from the original works. But nowhere are we told that there is one, “true” representation of the author; on the contrary, many of the chapters celebrate the multiplicity of Marxisms that exists to the present day. What would have been welcome in Part Two of the book on Marx’s ‘global reception’ is more of a joining-up of the Marxist intellectual scene with national histories – something that Sobrino manages well in his piece on Marxism in Hispanic America, a task perhaps made simpler due to the violent history of left-right political conflicts in the region.

I would recommend this book to those already familiar with some of Marx’s works. Though most of the chapters are accessible and the introduction provides an outline of Marx’s intellectual objectives, some prior knowledge of the texts will bring greater rewards for the reader.

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Journalism

Marx: The return of the giant

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date July 19, 2012

If an author’s eternal youth consists in his capacity to keep stimulating new ideas, then it may be said that Karl Marx has without question remained young.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, conservatives and progressives, liberals and post-communists almost unanimously decreed Marx’s final disappearance, yet his theories have once again become highly topical – with a speed that is in many respects surprising. Since 2008, the ongoing economic crisis and the deep contradictions tearing capitalist society apart have aroused new interest in an author too hastily set aside after 1989, and hundreds of newspapers, magazines and TV or radio stations have featured Marx’s analyses in Capital and in the articles he wrote for the New-York Tribune, while he was observing the panic of 1857, i.e., the first international financial crisis of history.

After twenty years of silence, people in many countries are again writing and talking about Marx. In the English-speaking world, conferences and university courses on his thought are back in fashion. Capital is once more a bestseller in Germany, while a manga version of it has been brought out in Japan. In China a huge new edition of his collected works is being published (with translations from the German and not, as in the past, from Russian). In Latin America a new demand for Marx has made itself felt among people active in politics.

New Research Paths

This rediscovery has been accompanied on the academic front with the resumption of the new historical-critical German edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels, the MEGA². The new German edition is organized into four sections: (1) the written works and articles; (2) Capital and all its preparatory manuscripts; (3) the correspondence; and (4) the notebooks of excerpts. Of the 114 planned volumes, 58 have been published so far (18 since the resumption of the project in 1998). This project has been publishing many unfinished works of Marx in the state in which he left them, instead of with the editorial interventions that often marked them in the past.

Thanks to this important innovation as well as the publication for the first time of various notebooks, the Marx who emerges is in many respects different from the one presented by so many opponents and ostensible followers. The stony-faced statue who pointed the way to the future with dogmatic certainty on the squares of Moscow and Beijing has given way to the image of a deeply self-critical thinker, who, feeling the need to devote energy to further study and checking of his own arguments, left a major part of his lifetime work unfinished.

Various established interpretations of Marx’s work are therefore being opened up for discussion. For instance, the first hundred pages of The German Ideology – a text much debated in the twentieth century but nearly always considered complete – have now been published in chronological order and in their original form of seven separate fragments. It has been discovered that these were leftovers from other sections of the book on two Left Hegelian authors, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. The first edition published in Moscow in 1932, however, as well as the many later versions with only slight modifications, created the false impression of an opening ‘Chapter on Feuerbach’ in which Marx and Engels exhaustively set out the laws of historical materialism (a term never used by Marx) or – as the French Marxist Louis Althusser roundly put it – conceptualized ‘an unequivocal epistemological break’.

Another interesting aspect of this edition is the clearer distinction between the parts of the manuscript written by Marx and by Engels. This leads to a very different reading of certain passages that used to be thought of as an integrated whole. Take, for example, the sentence that various authors, in a spirit of either fierce criticism or ideological defence, have treated as one of Marx’s main descriptions of post-capitalist society: ‘society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner…’. We now know that this came from the pen of Engels (then still under the influence of the French utopian socialists) and did not at all meet with the favour of his closest friend.

The philological acquisitions are also of importance for Marx’s magnum opus. Four new volumes of MEGA² published in the last ten years, which contain all the missing drafts of Volumes Two and Three of Capital (left uncompleted by Marx), allow us to reconstruct Engels’s entire process of selection, composition and correction in the editing of Marx’s manuscripts. We can thus see which of his several thousand alterations (a figure unthinkable until very recently) were the most significant in the long period of his labours between 1883 and 1894, and ascertain where he was able instead to stick with Marx’s original text – which, even in the case of the famous law of the tendency of the falling rate of profit, was clearly not meant to represent the final summation of his research.

Not Only a Classic

To relegate Marx to the position of an embalmed classic suitable only for specialist academic research would be a mistake on a par with his transformation into the doctrinal source of ‘actually existing socialism’. For in reality his analyses are more topical than ever. When Marx wrote Capital, the capitalist mode of production was still in a relatively early period of its development. Today, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of capitalism to new areas of the planet (first and foremost China), it has become a completely global system that is invading and shaping all (not only the economic) aspects of human existence. In these conditions, Marx’s ideas are proving to be more fertile than they were in his own time.

Moreover, today economics not only dominates politics, setting its agenda and shaping its decisions, but lies outside its jurisdiction and democratic control. In the last three decades, the powers of decision-making have passed inexorably from the political to the economic sphere. Particular policy options have been transformed into economic imperatives. This shunting of parts of the political sphere into the economy, as a separate domain impervious to change, involves the gravest threat to democracy in our times. National parliaments find their powers taken away and transferred to the market. Standard & Poor’s ratings and the Wall Street index – those mega-fetishes of contemporary society – carry incomparably more weight than the will of the people. At best political government can ‘intervene’ in the economy (when necessary to mitigate the destructive anarchy of capitalism and its violent crises), but they cannot call into question its rules and fundamental choices.

After twenty years in which paeans of praise for market society had to face only the vacuity of assorted postmodernisms, the new ability to survey the horizon from the shoulders of a giant such as Marx is a positive development not only for all the scholars interested in a serious understanding of our contemporary society, but also for anyone involved in the political and theoretical quest for a democratic alternative to capitalism.

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Reviews

Michael Maidan, Marx and Philosophy. Review of Books

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date June 18, 2012

This collection of essays marking the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the composition by Marx of the Grundrisse comprises 32 essays and a Foreword by Eric Hobsbawn.

Part I (Critical Interpretations) contains eight interpretative essays on different aspects of the Grundrisse. Part II looks at the history of the composition of the Grundrisse. Finally, part III reviews the history of the publication, translation and international reception of Marx’s 1857-8 notebooks.

In Part I, chapter one, Marcello Musto provides a balanced account of Marx’s 1857 ‘Introduction’. Musto remarks that in no other work does Marx discuss his ideas about method in such an open way, making these pages ‘extraordinarily important’ (26). But Musto emphasizes the tentative nature of the ‘Introduction’, intended more for personal clarification than as a treatise on methodology.

The second chapter, by Bischoff and Lieber, reviews Marx’s understanding of the relationship between money and capital in the Grundrisse. The authors claim that in the Grundrisse Marx develops the concepts that would allow him to ‘arrive at a notion of bourgeois society as a totality’ (33). And that the fact that the Grundrisse is a ‘rough draft’ is what ‘makes it easier to grasp the interconnectedness of the whole’ (33).

In chapter three, Terrell Carver writes about the concept of alienation in the Grundrisse. Carver proposes a broad understanding of alienation, which includes, among other things, also what Marx describes as ‘division of labor’ and as fetishism. This allows Carver to sidestep the traditional identification of alienation with a philosophically and anthropologically laden vocabulary. Carver’s position is that ‘the vocabulary of alienation suited Marx’s overall argument concerning the relation between labor and capital … as it developed in manuscript and published form, from early 1840s onwards’ (60). While there are terminological differences between the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and Capital, such differences are due to context, to the intended public, etc., not to substance. He states that the sections of the Grundrisse that have a general reference to the problem of alienation — whether or not they use the words we come to identify with alienation — are ‘more complex and more referential to the theory of political economy, to the history of production processes and to contemporary social conditions’ (61). But, we must note, Carver is able to reach this conclusion by making alienation and related concepts important but not central to Marx’s thought.

Enrique Dussel writes in chapter four about Marx’s discovery of ‘surplus value’. Marx had already an intuition of this concept in the Manuscripts of 1844, and the notion appears in the Notes on Ricardo (1851 but published together with the Grundrisse), but it is only in the Grundrisse, in later writings and finally in Capital, that Marx develops ‘surplus value’ in all its nuances (68). He notes Marx’s comments on the `civilizing influence’ of capital but adds that this influence is not exercised in the service of humanity but for the increase in value of capital itself (72). Dussel also finds support for the ‘theory of dependence’ in Marx’s comments on how a difference in surplus value before the increase of productive forces affects the production of new surplus value (73, quoting Grundrisse, trans. Nicolaus, 340).

Ellen Meiksins Wood contributes an essay on the ‘Forms that Precede Capitalist Production’ section of the Grundrisse. She agrees with Marx’s project to study the various ways in which the division of labor disrupts the primitive unity between workers and the conditions of their labor and subsistence, but questions the validity of Marx’s typology of pre-capitalist social formations: the Oriental or Asiatic, the Ancient or Classical (Greek and Roman), and a Feudal form which derives from a Germanic path out of the primitive community. Wood summarizes the objections made to Marx’s Oriental form (80-1) which, in her view, is far more accurate than the other two. Indeed we know of societies which resemble Marx’s description of the Oriental form, and possibly they were the rule rather than the exception in ancient civilization (81). But, there is no evidence for Marx’s claim of a direct transition from a ‘primitive’ to an ‘ancient form’ (the Greek city-state with its class conflict). She also finds problems with the Germanic type, important for Marx’s theory because of its relationship with Feudalism and hence with the origins of Capitalism. In Capital, she notes, Marx offers a different kind of explanation for the origins of Capitalism, one in which not the interstices of the old feudal world but its internal dynamics play the central role (85).

John Bellamy Foster proposes an ecological reading of the Grundrisse. Based on recent research, he claims that ‘an ecological-materialistic critique was embedded in all of Marx’s work’ (95). He summarizes Marx’s views on the relationship between man and nature, nature as man’s inorganic body, and other well known positions of Marx. But the main crux of the argument lies in the question whether Marx believes, as some ecologists seem to think, that there are natural limits to growth. He engages with Marx’s criticism of Malthus in the last section of his essay, stating that Marx believed that overpopulation was relative to different modes of social production. Malthus treats the barriers that checked the growth of plants and animals as absolute, a position that Marx rejects. So it would seem that while Marx rejected a metaphysical ecologism, he supported the romantic and philosophical aspiration of ‘a genuine community with the earth’ (105).

In Chapter seven Iring Fetscher revisits Marx’s vision of a communist society. He shows that beyond the shortening of the work day, and the replacement of repetitive activity by machinery, in the Grundrisse Marx evokes an ideal of ‘universally developed individuals’ and hence, a radical transformation of man’s activity.

In the eighth and last chapter of this part, Moishe Postone proposes to use the Grundrisse as an hermeneutic and critical tool to engage with Capital and with the future of critical social thought. Postone deals with issues that have been already presented in many of the previous essays, and his paper can therefore be seen as a summation as well as an original take on the issues raised by Bischoff and Lieber, Dussel, Foster and Fetscher.

Postone introduces his position with three claims: (i) critical social theory has not kept up with the socio-economic developments of the last three decades; (ii) post-modernism has not been able to fill in the void left by the demise of Marxism; (iii) a return to traditional Marxist theory is neither possible nor desirable, among other reasons, because of Marxism’s inability to offer a convincing theory of the nature of what Postone calls ‘communist regimes of accumulation’. Traditional Marxism claims that class societies are characterized by the conflict between transhistorical labor and particularistic and fragmenting social relations that prevent the full realization of labor’s potential. Postone believes that Marx had a very different understanding of the nature of labor and its role in capitalism. In the Grundrisse, Marx makes it clear that overcoming capitalism involves the abolition of ‘value as a social form of wealth’ (125). Marx’s theory should be understood as a critique of labor in capitalism rather than a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labor (128). For Postone that means that human activity in capitalism has a form that is peculiar to this society, and which is totally different from what may be seen from afar as fulfilling a similar function in earlier societies. The mediating activity of labor in capitalism is not intrinsic to labor (131). Postone claims that these insights, taken from different sections in the Grundrisse, including sections in which Marx addresses the question of automation and the potential for machines to replace human labor, not only enable a richer reading of Capital, but they can also help rebuild a critical theory of society. And he concludes: ‘Marx’s analysis thus implies a notion of overcoming capitalism that neither uncritically affirms industrial production … nor romantically rejects technological progress per se … his theory points to the possibility that what was historically constituted in alienated form could be appropriated and, thereby, fundamentally transformed.’ (134)

Part II looks at Marx the author and his circumstances when working on the Grundrisse. Musto depicts the dire economic conditions of Marx and his family. Krätke contributed two short essays, one on Marx as a economic analyst during the 1850s, and a second one which draws heavily on still unpublished notes on the economic crisis taken by Marx during the period he was working on the Grundrisse. This is material soon to be published in section iv, vol. 14 of the MEGA2 edition and which can throw new light on the composition of the first chapters of the Grundrisse.

Part III contains a broad study of the reception of the Grundrisse in a number of European and non-European languages, and in different regions and countries. Of particular interest are the chapters on the publication and early reception in German and in Russian; this last because the transcription of the manuscripts was made in Russia, and the initial diffusion of the Grundrisse was first reluctantly encouraged and then de-emphasized by Soviet authorities. Regarding the translations to other languages and the interest in the Grundrisse, a quick look at the stories in the different chapters of this section reveals that the Grundrisse first received systematic attention in the post-1968 period, even though it was already available in German in 1939-41 and then in a more accessible edition from 1953. It is in the aftermath of the student revolt that the few book length essays based on the Grundrisse (by Rosdolsky, Negri, Postone, Dussel, and a few others) were published.

It may be more than just a coincidence for this book to be published when a new economic crisis, one of unprecedented virulence and still unknown consequences, was insinuating itself in the US and in Europe. This crisis, like the one that motivated Marx’s work on the Grundrisse, came after a period of relative political de-mobilization and profound crisis in the Left. What should we learn from the Grundrisse in this context? This is not a question that this volume sets out to answer, but hopefully these essays will help those who would again attempt to draw on the lessons of the Grundrisse for the construction of a critical understanding of our times.

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Interviews

TMC at Left Forum

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date March 18, 2012

Toronto Media Co-op: Where are you from?

Marcello Musto: I’m originally from Naples, Italy but I have lived in Toronto since Sept, 2009. I work in the department of Political Science at York university, probably the most radical political science department in the Anglophone world.

TMC: Why are you here?

MM: This is the second year that I organized panels here and there are maybe two main things I do at the Left Forum.

The first is organizing panels on Marx and Marxism. After the latest economic crisis Marx is once again a la mode. After the last 3-4 years there have been many conferences dedicated to Marx, and I’ve done panels here over the last 3-4 years working with Marxist’s main theory.

I’ve also been organizing this panel for the second year, The Left In Crisis. The reasons I’m organizing this is because the left needs to understand this: the North American movement is very weak, but they don’t understand what’s happening in other parts of the world. So my task here is to organize this delegation to bring them here but also to let the people in North America know what’s going on with the movement in India, India, China, South Korea, Turkey, etc.

TMC: What do you feel comes out of Left Forum?

MM: My idea is that the Left Forum is still very weak and is much less organized and strong than the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, for example. But this is not because there are more people there, it simply reflects the actual movement in North America. Therefore the forum is isolated, weak and not organized and I don’t think it will offer a lot now in this historical phase as a manifestation of what to do. Today is exciting but it is very vague and I can feel a weakness in terms of collaboration.

TMC: Then why do you come here?

MM: I come because this is what we have and – as I said – I’m from Naples… we have to make the pizza with what ingredients we have. Hopefully, there will be something better in the future.

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Marx’s Early Writings: Once More onto the Breach (Talk)

Post author By Enrico Campo
Post date March 17, 2012

Tags English

Book chapter

Introduction

Post author By Marcello Musto
Post date January 1, 2012

Dominant Marxisms of the XIX and XX century
Few men have shaken the world as Karl Marx did. His death, almost unnoticed in the mainstream press, was followed by echoes of fame in such a short period of time that few comparisons can be found in history. His name was soon on the lips of the workers of Detroit and Chicago, as on those of the first Indian socialists in Calcutta. His banner image formed the backdrop at the first Bolshevik congress in Moscow after the revolution. His thought inspired the programmes and statutes of all the political and union organizations of the workers’ movement, from continental Europe to Shanghai. His ideas changed philosophy, history and economics irreversibly.

Yet it was not long before attempts were made to turn his theories into a rigid ideology. Marx’s thought, indisputably critical and open, even if sometimes tempted by determinism, fell foul of the cultural climate in late nineteenth-century Europe. It was a culture pervaded by systematic conceptions – above all by Darwinism. In order to respond to it, the ‘Orthodox Marxism’ newly born in the pages of Karl Kautsky’s review Die Neue Zeit rapidly conformed to this model.

A decisive factor that helped to consolidate this transformation of Marx’s œuvre was the forms in which it reached the reading public. Abridgements, summaries and truncated compendia were given priority, as we can see from the small print of his major works. Some bore marks of ideological instrumentalization, and some texts were recast by those to whose care they had been entrusted. This practice, encouraged by the incomplete state of many manuscripts at the time of Marx’s death, was in some cases compounded by a kind of censorship. The form of the manual, though certainly an effective means of worldwide diffusion, also led to considerable distortions of his complex thought; the influence of positivism, in particular, translated it into a theoretically impoverished version of the original. [1]

These processes gave rise to a schematic doctrine, an elementary evolutionist interpretation soaked in economic determinism: the Marxism of the Second International (1889–1914). Guided by a firm though naive belief in the automatic forward march of history, and therefore in the inevitable replacement of capitalism by socialism, it proved incapable of comprehending actual developments, and, breaking the necessary link with revolutionary praxis, it produced a sort of fatalistic passivity that contributed to the stabilization of the existing order. [2]

The theory of the impending collapse of bourgeois-capitalist society [Zusammenbruchstheorie], which found fertile soil in the great twenty-year depression after 1873, was proclaimed to be the fundamental essence of ‘scientific socialism’. Marx’s analyses, which had aimed to delineate the dynamic principles of capitalism and to describe its general tendencies of development, [3] were transformed into universally valid historical laws from which it was possible to deduce the course of events, even particular details.

The idea of a capitalism in its death agony, destined to founder on its own contradictions, was also present in the theoretical framework of the first entirely Marxist platform of a political party, The Erfurt Programme of 1891 of German Social Democracy. According to Kautsky’s expository commentary on it, ‘inexorable economic development leads to the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production with the necessity of a law of nature. The creation of a new form of society in place of the current one is no longer something merely desirable but has become inevitable.’ [4] This clearly demonstrated the limits of the prevailing conceptions, as well as their vast distance from the man who had inspired them.

Russian Marxism, which in the course of the XX century played a fundamental role in the popularization of Marx’s thought, followed this trajectory of systematization and vulgarization with even greater rigidity. Indeed, for its most important pioneer, Georgii Plekhanov, ‘Marxism is an integral world outlook’, [5] imbued with a simplistic monism according to which the super-structural transformations of society proceed simultaneously with economic modifications. Despite the harsh ideological conflicts of these years, many of the theoretical elements characteristic of the Second International were carried over into those that would mark the cultural matrix of the Third International. This continuity was clearly manifest in the Theory of Historical Materialism, published in 1921 by Nikolai Bukharin, according to which ‘in nature and society there is a definite regularity, a fixed natural law. The determination of this natural law is the first task of science.’ [6] The outcome of this social determinism, completely focused on the development of the productive forces, generated a doctrine in which ‘the multiplicity of causes that make their action felt in society does not contradict in the least the existence of a single law of social evolution’. [7]

The degradation of Marx’s thought reached its climax in the construal of Marxism-Leninism, given definitive form in Soviet-style ‘Diamat’ (dialekticheskii materializm), ‘the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party’. [8],. Deprived of its function as a guide to action, theory here became its a posteriori justification. J. V. Stalin’s booklet of 1938, On Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, which had a wide distribution, fixed the essential elements of this doctrine: the phenomena of collective life are regulated by ‘necessary laws of social development” that are ‘perfectly recognisable”, and ‘the history of society appears as a necessary development of society, and the study of the history of society becomes a science’. This ‘means that the science of the history of society, despite all the complexity of the phenomena of social life, can become a science just as exact as, for example, biology, capable of utilising the laws of development of society in order to make use of them in practice’; [9] consequently, the task of the party of the proletariat is to base its activity on these laws. The concepts of ‘scientific’ and ‘science’ here involve an evident misunderstanding. The scientific character of Marx’s method, grounded upon scrupulous and coherent theoretical criteria, is replaced with a methodology in which there is no room for contradiction and objective historical laws are supposed to operate like laws of nature independently of human will.

The most rigid and stringent dogmatism was able to find ample space alongside this ideological catechism. Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy imposed an inflexible monism that also produced perverse effects in the interpretation of Marx’s writings. Unquestionably, with the Soviet revolution Marxism enjoyed a significant moment of expansion and circulation in geographical zones and social classes from which it had, until then, been excluded. Nevertheless, this process of dissemination consisted far more of Party manuals, handbooks and specific anthologies than of complete texts by Marx himself.

The crystallization of a dogmatic corpus preceded an identification of the texts that it would have been necessary to read in order to understand the formation and evolution of Marx’s thought. [10] The early writings, in fact, were published in the MEGA only in 1927 (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) and 1932 ( Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology), in editions which – as already in the case of the second and third volumes of Capital – made them appear as completed works; the choice would be the source of many false interpretative paths. [11] Later still, some of the important preparatory works for Capital (in 1933 the draft chapter 6 of Capital on the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, and between 1939 and 1941 the Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, better known as the Grundrisse) were published in print runs that secured only a very limited circulation [12]. Moreover, when they were not concealed for fear that they might erode the dominant ideological canon, these and other previously unpublished texts were subject to politically motivated exegesis along lines that were largely laid down in advance; they never resulted in a serious comprehensive revaluation of Marx’s work.

While the selective exclusion of texts became common practice, others were dismembered and manipulated: for example, through insertion into collections of quotations for a particular purpose. Often these were treated in the same way that the bandit Procrustes reserved for his victims: if they were too long, they were amputated, if too short, lengthened.

Distorted to serve contingent political necessities, Marx became identified with them in many people’s minds and was often reviled as a result. His theory passed into a set of bible-like verses that gave birth to the most unthinkable paradox. Far from heeding his warning against ‘recipes for the cook-shops of the future’, [13] those responsible transformed him into the progenitor of a new social system. A most rigorous critic who had never been complacent with his conclusions, he turned into the source of the most obstinate doctrinarism. A firm champion of a materialist conception of history, he was removed more than any other author from his historical context. From being certain that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves’, [14] he was entrapped in an ideology that gave primacy to political vanguards and parties in their role as proponents of class consciousness and leaders of the revolution. An advocate of the idea that a shorter working day was essential to the blossoming of human capacities, he was assimilated to the productivist creed of Stakhanovism. Convinced of the need for the withering away of the State, he found himself identified with it and used to shore it up. Interested like few other thinkers in the free development of human individuality, arguing against bourgeois right (which hides social disparity behind mere legal equality) that ‘right would have to be unequal rather than equal’, [15] he was fitted into a conception that neutralized the richness of the collective dimension of social life into the indistinctness of homogenization.

II. Returns to Marx
Owing to theoretical disputes or political events, interest in Marx’s work has fluctuated over time and gone through indisputable periods of decline. From the early XX century ‘crisis of Marxism’ to the dissolution of the Second International, and from debates on the contradictions of Marx’s economic theory to the tragedy of ‘actually existing socialism’, criticism of the ideas of Marx seemed persistently to point beyond the conceptual horizon of Marxism. Yet there has always been a ‘return to Marx’. A new need develops to refer to his work – whether the critique of political economy, the formulations on alienation, or the brilliant pages of political polemic – and it has continued to exercise an irresistible fascination for both followers and opponents.

Pronounced dead after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marx has again become the focus of widespread interest. His ‘renaissance’ is based on his continuing capacity to explain the present; indeed, his thought remains an indispensable instrument with which to understand and transform it. In face of the crisis of capitalist society and the profound contradictions that traverse it, this author who was over-hastily dismissed after 1989 is once more being taken up and interrogated. Thus, Jacques Derrida’s assertion that ‘it will always be a mistake not to read and reread and discuss Marx’ [16] – which only a few years ago seemed an isolated provocation – has found increasing approval. [17]

Furthermore, the secondary literature on Marx, which all but dried up twenty years ago, is showing signs of revival in many countries, both in the form of new studies and in booklets in various languages with titles such as Why Read Marx Today? [18] Journals are increasingly open to contributions on Marx and Marxisms, just as there are now many international conferences, university courses and seminars on the theme. In particular, since the onset of the international economic crisis in mid-2007, academics and economic theorists from various political and cultural backgrounds have again been drawn to Marx’s analysis of the inherent instability of capitalism, whose self-generated cyclical crises have grave effects on political and social life. Finally, although timid and often confused in form, a new demand for Marx is also making itself felt in politics – from Latin America to the alternative globalization movement.

III. Marx and the First World Financial Crisis
Following the defeat of the revolutionary movement that rose up throughout Europe in 1848, Marx convinced himself that a new revolution would emerge only after the outbreak of a fresh crisis. Settled in London in March 1850, having received expulsion orders from Belgium, Prussia and France, he ran the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue, a monthly that he planned as the locus for ‘comprehensive and scientific investigation of the economic conditions which form the foundation of the whole political movement’.[19] In The Class Struggles in France, which appeared as a series of articles in that journal, he asserted that ‘a real revolution … is only possible in periods when … the modern forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production come into collision with each other. … A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis.’ [20]

During the same summer of 1850 Marx deepened the economic analysis he had begun before 1848, and in the May-October 1850 issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-okonomische Revue he reached the important conclusion that ‘the commercial crisis contributed infinitely more to the revolutions of 1848 than the revolution to the commercial crisis’. [21] From now on economic crisis would be fundamental to his thought, not only economically but also sociologically and politically. Moreover, in analysing the processes of rampant speculation and overproduction, he ventured to predict that, ‘if the new cycle of industrial development which began in 1848 follows the same course as that of 1843-47, the crisis will break out in 1852’. The future crisis, he stressed, would also erupt in the countryside, and ‘for the first time the industrial and commercial crisis [would] coincide with a crisis in agriculture’. [22] Marx’s forecasts over this period of more than a year proved to be mistaken.

Yet, even at moments when he was most convinced that a revolutionary wave was imminent, his ideas were very different from those of other European political leaders exiled in London. Although he was wrong about how the economic situation would shape up, he considered it indispensable to study the current state of economic and political relations for the purposes of political activity. By contrast, most of the democratic and communist leaders of the time, whom he characterized as ‘alchemists of the revolution’, thought that the only prerequisite for a victorious revolution was ‘adequate preparation of their conspiracy’. [23]

In this period, Marx also deepened his studies of political economy and concentrated, in particular, on the history and theories of economic crises, paying close attention to the money-form and credit in his attempt to understand their origins. Unlike other socialists of the time such as Proudhon – who were convinced that economic crises could be avoided through a reform of the money and credit system – Marx came to the conclusion that, since the credit system was one of the underlying conditions, crises could at most be aggravated or mitigated by the correct or incorrect use of monetary circulation; the true causes of crises were to be sought, rather, in the contradictions of production. [24]

Despite the economic prosperity, Marx did not lose his optimism concerning the imminence of an economic crisis, and at the end of 1851 he wrote to the famous poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, an old friend of his: ‘The crisis, held in check by all kinds of factors…, must blow up at the latest next autumn. And, after the most recent events, I am more convinced than ever that there will not be a serious revolution without a commercial crisis.’ [25] Marx did not keep such assessments only for his correspondence but also wrote of them in the New-York Tribune. Between 1852 and 1858, economic crisis was a constant theme in his articles for the North American newspaper. Marx did not look upon the revolutionary process in a determinist manner, but he was sure that crisis was an indispensable prerequisite for its fulfilment. In an article of June 1853 on ‘Revolution in China and Europe’, he wrote: ‘Since the commencement of the eighteenth century there has been no serious revolution in Europe which has not been preceded by a commercial and financial crisis. This applies no less to the revolution of 1789 than to that of 1848.’. [26] The point was underlined in late September 1853, in the article ‘Political Movements: Scarcity of Bread in Europe’:

neither the declamation of the demagogues, nor the twaddle of the diplomats will drive matters to a crisis, but … there are approaching economical disasters and social convulsions which must be the sure forerunners of European revolution. Since 1849 commercial and industrial prosperity has stretched the lounge on which the counter-revolution has slept in safety. [27]

Traces of the optimism with which Marx awaited events may be also found in the correspondence with Engels. In one letter, for example, from September 1853, he wrote: ‘Things are going wonderfully. All h[ell] will be let loose in France when the financial bubble bursts.’ [28] But still the crisis did not come.

Without losing his hopes, Marx wrote again on the crisis for the New-York Tribune in 1855 and 1856. In March 1855, in the article ‘The Crisis in England’, he argued:

A few months more and the crisis will be at a height which it has not reached in England since 1846, perhaps not since 1842. When its effects begin to be fully felt among the working classes, then will that political movement begin again, which has been dormant for six years. … Then will the two real contending parties in that country stand face to face – the middle class and the working classes, the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. [29]

And in ‘The European Crisis’, which appeared in November 1856, at a time when all the columnists were confidently predicting that the worst was over, he maintained:

The indications brought from Europe … certainly seem to postpone to a future day the final collapse of speculation and stock-jobbing, which men on both sides of the sea instinctively anticipate as with a fearful looking forward to some inevitable doom. That collapse is none the less sure from this postponement; indeed, the chronic character assumed by the existing financial crisis only forebodes for it a more violent and destructive end. The longer the crisis lasts the worse the ultimate reckoning. [30]

During the first few months of 1857, the New York banks stepped up their volume of loans, despite the decline in deposits. The resulting growth in speculative activity worsened the general economic conditions, and, after the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company became insolvent, the prevailing panic led to numerous bankruptcies. Loss of confidence in the banking system then produced a contraction of credit, a drying up of deposits and the suspension of money payments. From New York the crisis rapidly spread to the rest of the United States of America and, within a few weeks, to all the centres of the world market in Europe, South America and the East, becoming the first international financial crisis in history.

After the defeat of 1848, Marx had faced a whole decade of political setbacks and deep personal isolation. But, with the outbreak of the crisis, he glimpsed the possibility of taking part in a new round of social revolts and considered that his most urgent task was to analyse the economic phenomena that would be so important for the beginning of a revolution. In that period, Marx’s work was remarkable and wide-ranging. From August 1857 to May 1858 he filled the eight notebooks known as the Grundrisse, while as New-York Tribune correspondent, he wrote many articles on the development of the crisis in Europe. Lastly, from October 1857 to February 1858, he compiled three books of extracts, called the Books of Crisis. [31]

In reality, however, there was no sign of the long-awaited revolutionary movement that was supposed to spring up along with the crisis, and this time, too, another reason for Marx’s failure to complete the manuscript was his awareness that he was still far from a full critical mastery of the material. TheGrundrisse therefore remained only a rough draft. He published in 1859 a short book that had no public resonance: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Another eight years of feverish study and enormous intellectual efforts would pass before the publication of Capital, Volume One.

IV. Capitalism as an historical mode of production
The writings that Marx composed a century and a half ago do not contain, of course, a precise description of the world today. It should be stressed, however, that the focus of Capital was not on XIX century capitalism either, but rather – as Marx put it in the third volume of his magnum opus – on the ‘organization of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average’[32] , and hence on its most complete and most general form.

When he was writing Capital, capitalism had developed only in England and a few other European industrial centres. Yet he foresaw that it would expand on a global scale, and formulated his theories on that basis. This is why Capital is not only a great classic of economic and political thought, but still provides today, despite all the profound transformations that have intervened since the time it was written, a rich array of tools with which to understand the nature of capitalist development. This has become more apparent since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of the capitalist mode of production to new areas of the planet like China. Capitalism has become a truly worldwide system, and some of Marx ’s insights have revealed their significance even more clearly than in his own time. [33] He probed the logic of the system more deeply than any other modern thinker, and his work, if updated and applied to the most recent developments, can help to explain many problems that did not manifest themselves fully during his lifetime. Finally, Ma rx’s analysis of capitalism was not merely an economic investigation but was also relevant to the understanding of power structures and social relations. With the extension of capitalism into most aspects of human life, his thought turns out to have been extraordinarily prescient in many fields not addressed by XX century orthodox Marxism. One of these is certainly the transformations brought about by so-called globalization.

In his critique of the capitalist mode of production, one of Marx’s permanent polemical targets was ‘the eighteenth-century Robinsonades’, the myth of Robinson Crusoe as the paradigm of homo oeconomicus, or the projection of phenomena typical of the bourgeois era onto every other society that has existed since the earliest times. Such a conception presented the social character of production as a constant in any labour process, not as a peculiarity of capitalist relations. In the same way, civil society [ bürgerliche Gesellschaft] – whose emergence in the eighteenth century had created the conditions through which ‘the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate’ – was portrayed as having always existed.[34] In Capital, Volume One, in speaking of ‘the European Middle Ages, shrouded in darkness’, Marx argues that ‘instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterizes the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organized on the basis of that production.’ [35] And, when he examined the genesis of product exchange, he recalled that it began with contacts among different families, tribes or communities, ‘for, in the beginning of civilization, it is not private individuals but families, tribes, etc., that meet on an independent footing’. [36]
The classical economists had inverted this reality, on the basis of what Marx regarded as fantasies with an inspiration in natural law. In particular, Adam Smith had described a primal condition where individuals not only existed but were capable of producing outside society. A division of labour within tribes of hunters and shepherds had supposedly achieved the specialization of trades: one person’s greater dexterity in fashioning bows and arrows, for example, or in building wooden huts, had made him a kind of armourer or carpenter, and the assurance of being able to exchange the unconsumed part of one’s labour product for the surplus of others ‘encourage[d] every man to apply himself to a particular occupation’. [37] David Ricardo was guilty of a similar anachronism when he conceived of the relationship between hunters and fishermen in the early stages of society as an exchange between owners of commodities on the basis of the labour-time objectified in them [38].

In this way, Smith and Ricardo depicted a highly developed product of the society in which they lived – the isolated bourgeois individual – as if he were a spontaneous manifestation of nature. What emerged from the pages of their works was a mythological, timeless individual, one ‘posited by nature’ [39], whose social relations were always the same and whose economic behaviour had a historyless anthropological character. According to Marx, the interpreters of each new historical epoch have regularly deluded themselves that the most distinctive features of their own age have been present since time immemorial.

Against those who portrayed the isolated individual of the eighteenth century as the archetype of human nature, ‘not as a historical result but as history’s point of departure’, Marx maintained that such an individual emerged only with the most highly developed social relations. Thus, since civil society had arisen only with the modern world, the free wage-labourer of the capitalist epoch had appeared only after a long historical process. He was, in fact, ‘the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century’. [40]

The mystification practised by economists regarded also the concept of production in general. In the 1857 ‘Introduction’, Marx argued that, although the definition of the general elements of production is ‘segmented many times over and split into different determinations’, some of which ‘belong to all epochs, others to only a few’, [41] there are certainly, among its universal components, human labour and material provided by nature. For, without a producing subject and a worked-upon object, there could be no production at all. But the economists introduced a third general prerequisite of production: ‘a stock, previously accumulated, of the products of former labour’, that is, capital. [42] The critique of this last element was essential for Marx, in order to reveal what he considered to be a fundamental limitation of the economists. It also seemed evident to him that no production was possible without an instrument of labour, if only the human hand, or without accumulated past labour, if only in the form of primitive man’s repetitive exercises. However, while agreeing that capital was past labour and an instrument of production, he did not, like Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, conclude that it had always existed.

The point is made in greater detail in a section of the Grundrisse, where the conception of capital as ‘eternal’ is seen as a way of treating it only as matter, without regard for its essential ‘formal determination’ (Formbestimmung). According to this,
capital would have existed in all forms of society, and is something altogether unhistorical. … The arm, and especially the hand, are then capital. Capital would be only a new name for a thing as old as the human race, since every form of labour, including the least developed, hunting, fishing, etc., presupposes that the product of prior labour is used as means for direct, living labour. … If, then, the specific form of capital is abstracted away, and only the content is emphasized, … of course nothing is easier than to demonstrate that capital is a necessary condition for all human production. The proof of this proceeds precisely by abstraction from the specific aspects which make it the moment of a specifically developed historical stage of human production. [43]

If the error is made of ‘conceiving capital in its physical attribute only as instrument of production, while entirely ignoring the economic form [ökonomischen Form] which makes the instrument of production into capital’, [44] one falls into the ‘crude inability to grasp the real distinctions’ and a belief that ‘there exists only one single economic relation which takes on different names’. [45] To ignore the differences expressed in the social relation means to abstract from the differentia specifica, that is the nodal point of everything. [46] Thus, in the ‘Introduction’, Marx writes that ‘capital is a general [allgemeines], eternal relation of nature’, ‘that is, if I leave out just the specific quality which alone makes “instrument of production” and “stored-up labour” into capital’. [47]
In fact, Marx had already criticized the economists’ lack of historical sense in The Poverty of Philosophy:

For this to be plausible, economists depicted the historical circumstances prior to the birth of the capitalist mode of production as ‘results of its presence’ [49] with its very own features. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse:

A number of passages in the Grundrisse criticize the way in which economists portray historical as natural realities. It is self-evident to Marx, for example, that money is a product of history: ‘to be money is not a natural attribute of gold and silver’, [53] but only a determination they first acquire at a precise moment of social development. The same is true of credit. According to Marx, lending and borrowing was a phenomenon common to many civilizations, as was usury, but they ‘no more constitute credit than working constitutes industrial labour or free wage labour. And credit as an essential, developed relation of production appears historically only in circulation based on capital.’ [54] Prices and exchange also existed in ancient society, ‘but the increasing determination of the former by costs of production, as well as the increasing dominance of the latter over all relations of production, only develops fully … in bourgeois society, the society of free competition’; or ‘what Adam Smith, in the true eighteenth-century manner, puts in the prehistoric period, the period preceding history, is rather a product of history.’ [55] Furthermore, just as he criticized the economists for their lack of historical sense, Marx mocked Proudhon and all the socialists who thought that labour productive of exchange value could exist without developing into wage labour, that exchange value could exist without turning into capital, or that there could be capital without capitalists. [56] Marx’s aim was therefore to assert the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production: to demonstrate, as he would again affirm in Capital, Volume Three, that it ‘is not an absolute mode of production’ but ‘merely historical, transitory’. [57]

This viewpoint implies a different way of seeing many questions, including the labour process and its various characteristics. In the Grundrisse Marx wrote that ‘the bourgeois economists are so much cooped up within the notions belonging to a specific historic stage of social development that the necessity of the objectification of the powers of social labour appears to them as inseparable from the necessity of their alienation’. [58] Marx repeatedly took issue with this presentation of the specific forms of the capitalist mode of production as if they were constants of the production process as such. To portray wage labour not as a distinctive relation of a particular historical form of production but as a universal reality of man’s economic existence was to imply that exploitation and alienation had always existed and would always continue to exist.
Evasion of the specificity of capitalist production therefore had both epistemological and political consequences. On the one hand, it impeded understanding of the concrete historical levels of production; on the other hand, in defining present conditions as unchanged and unchangeable, it presented capitalist production as production in general and bourgeois social relations as natural human relations. Accordingly, Marx’s critique of the theories of economists had a twofold value. As well as underlining that a historical characterization was indispensable for an understanding of reality, it had the precise political aim of countering the dogma of the immutability of the capitalist mode of production. A demonstration of the historicity of the capitalist order would also be proof of its transitory character and of the possibility of its elimination. Capitalism is not the only stage in human history, nor is it the final one. Marx foresees that it will be succeeded by an ‘an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’. [59]

V. Why Marx again?
Liberated from the abhorrent function of instrumentum regni, to which it had been consigned in the past, and from the chains of Marxism-Leninism from which it is certainly separate, Marx’s work has been redeployed to fresh fields of knowledge and is being read again all over the world. The full unfolding of his precious theoretical legacy, wrested from presumptuous proprietors and constricting modes of use, has become possible once more. However, if Marx no longer stands as a carved sphinx protecting the grey ‘actually existing socialism’ of the XX century, it would be equally mistaken to believe that his theoretical and political legacy can be confined to a past that has nothing more to give to current conflicts. The rediscovery of Marx is based on his persistent capacity to explain the present: he remains an indispensable instrument for understanding it and transforming it.

After years of postmodern manifestoes, solemn talk of the ‘end of history’ and infatuation with vacuous ‘biopolitical’ ideas, the value of Marx’s theories is again more and more extensively recognized. What remains of Marx today? How useful is his thought to the workers’ struggle for freedom? What part of his work is most fertile for stimulating the critique of our times? These are some of the questions that receive a wide range of answers. If one thing is certain about the contemporary Marx revival, it is a rejection of the orthodoxies that have dominated and profoundly conditioned the interpretation of his thought. Although marked by evident limits and the risk of syncretism, this new period is characterized by the multiplicity of theoretical approaches. [60] After the age of dogmatisms, perhaps it could not have been otherwise. The task of responding to the challenge, through researches both theoretical and practical, lies with an emerging generation of scholars and political activists.

Among the ‘Marxes’ that remain indispensable, at least two may be mentioned here. One is the critic of the capitalist mode of production: the tireless researcher who studied its development on a global scale and left an unrivalled account of bourgeois society; the thinker who, refusing to conceive of capitalism and the regime of private property as immutable scenarios intrinsic to human nature, still offers crucial suggestions for those seeking alternatives. The other is the theoretician of socialism: the author who repudiated the idea of state socialism, already propagated in his time by Lassalle and Rodbertus, and envisaged the possibility of a complete transformation of productive and social relations, not just a set of bland palliatives for the problems of capitalist society.
Without Marx we will be condemned to critical aphasia. The cause of human emancipation will therefore continue to need him. His ‘spectre’ is destined to haunt the world and shake humanity for a good while to come.

VI. Appendix: Chronological Table of Marx’s Writings
Given the size of Marx’s intellectual output, the following chronology can only include his most important writings; its aim is to highlight the unfinished character of many of Marx’s texts and the chequered history of their publication. In relation to the first point, the titles of manuscripts that he did not send to press are placed between square brackets, as a way of differentiating them from finished books and articles. The greater weight of the former in comparison with the latter emerges as a result. The column relating to the second point contains the year of first publication, the bibliographical reference and, where relevant, the name of the editor or editors. Any changes that these made to the originals are also indicated here. When a published work or manuscript was not written in German, the original language is specified. Finally, the following abbreviations have been used in the table: MEGA ( Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, 1927-1935); SOC (K. Marks i F. Engel’s Sochineniia, 1928-1946); MEW (Marx-Engels-Werke, 1956-1968); MECW (Marx-Engels Collected Works, 1975-2005); MEGA² (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, 1975-…).

Year	Title	Information about Editions
1841	[Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature]	1902: in Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, ed. by Mehring (partial version). 1927: in MEGA I/1.1, ed. by Ryazanov.
1842-43	Articles for the Rheinische Zeitung	Daily published in Cologne
1843	[Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State]	1927: in MEGA I/1.1, ed. by Ryazanov
1844	Essays for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher	Including On the Jewish Question and A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Only one issue, published in Paris. The majority of copies were confiscated by the police.
1844	[Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844]	1932: in Der historische Materialismus, ed. by Landshut and Mayer, and in MEGA I/3, ed. by Adoratskii (the editions differ in content and order of the parts). The text was omitted from the numbered volumes of MEW and published separately.
1845	The Holy Family (with Engels)	Published in Frankfurt-am-Main.
1845	[Theses on Feuerbach]	1888: appendix to republication of Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy by Engels.
1845-46	[The German Ideology] (with Engels)	1903-1904: in Dokumente des Sozialismus, ed. by Bernstein (partial version with editorial revisions). 1932: in Der historische Materialismus, ed. by Landshut and Mayer, and in MEGA I/3, ed. by Adoratskii (the editions differ in content and order of the parts).
1847	Poverty of Philosophy	Printed in Brussels and Paris. Text in French.
1848	Speech on the Question of Free Trade.	Published in Brussels. Text in French.
1848	Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Engels)	Printed in London. Began to circulate widely in the 1880s.
1848-49	Articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.	Organ der Demokratie Daily appearing in Cologne. Includes Wage Labour and Capital.
1850	Articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue.	Monthly printed in Hamburg in small run. Includes The Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850.
1852	The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte	Published in New York in the first issue of Die Revolution. Most of the copies were not collected from the printers for financial reasons. Only a small number reached Europe. The second edition – revised by Marx – appeared only in 1869.
1851-62	Articles for the New-York Tribune	Many of the articles were written by Engels.
1852	[Great Men of the Exile] (with Engels)	1930: in Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa (Russian edition). The manuscript had previously been hidden by Bernstein.
1853	Revelations concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne	Published as an anonymous pamphlet in Basle (nearly all two thousand copies were confiscated by the police) and in Boston. Republished in 1874 in Volksstaat (with Marx identified as the author) and in 1875 in book form.
1853-54	Lord Palmerston Text in English.	Originally published as articles in the New-York Tribune and The People’s Paper, and subsequently in booklet form.
1854	The Knight of the Noble Consciousness	Published in New York in booklet form.
1856-57	Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century	Text in English. Though already published by Marx, it was subsequently omitted from his works and published in the “socialist” countries only in 1986, in MECW.
1857	[Introduction]	1903: in Die Neue Zeit, ed. by Kautsky, with various discrepancies from the original.
1857-58	[Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy]	1939-1941: edition with small print run. 1953: republication allowing wide circulation.
1859	Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy	Published in Berlin in a thousand copies.
1860	Herr Vogt	Published in London with little resonance.
1861-63	[Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (manuscript of 1861-1863)	1905-1910: Theories of Surplus-Value, ed. by Kautsky (in revised version). A text conforming to the original appeared only in 1954 (Russian edition) and 1956 (German edition). 1976-1982: manuscript published in full in MEGA² II/3.1-3.6.
1863-64	[On the Polish Question]	1961: Manuskripte über die polnische Frage, ed. by the IISG.
1863-67	[Economic manuscripts of 1863–1867]	1894: Capital. Volume Three. The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, ed. by Engels (who also used later manuscripts published in MEGA² II/14 and the forthcoming MEGA² II/4.3). 1933: Volume One. Unpublished Chapter VI, in Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa. 1988: publication of manuscripts of Volume One and Volume Two, in MEGA² II/4.1. 1992: publication of manuscripts of Volume Three, in MEGA² II/4.2.
1864-72	Addresses, resolutions, circulars, manifestos, programmes, statutes of the International Workingmen’s Association.	Texts mostly in English, including Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association and The Fictitious Splits in the International (with Engels).
1865	[Wages, Price and Profit]	1898: ed. by Eleanor Marx. Text in English.
1867	Capital. Volume One. The Process of Production of Capital	Published in a thousand copies in Hamburg. Second edition in 1873 in 3,000 copies. Russian translation in 1872.
1870	[Manuscript of Volume Two of Capital]	1885: Capital. Volume Two. The Process of Circulation of Capital, ed. by Engels (who also used the manuscript of 1880-1881 and the shorter ones of 1867-1868 and 1877-1878, published in MEGA² II/11).
1871	The Civil War in France Text in English.	Numerous editions and translations in a short space of time.
1872-75	Capital. Volume One. The Process of Production of Capital (French edition)	Text reworked for the French edition, which appeared in instalments. According to Marx, it had a “scientific value independent of the original”.
1874-75	[Notes on Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy]	1928: in Letopisi marxisma, with a preface by Ryazanov (Russian edition). Manuscript with excerpts in Russian and comments in German.
1875	[Critique of the Gotha Programme]	1891: in Die Neue Zeit, ed. by Engels, who altered a few passages from the original.
1875	[Relationship between Rate of Surplus-Value and Rate of Profit Developed Mathematically]	2003: in MEGA² II/14.
1877	“From Kritische Geschichte” (a chapter in Anti-Dühring by Engels)	Published in part in Vorwärts and then in full in the book edition.
1879-80	[Notes on Kovalevskii’s Rural Communal Property]	1977: in Karl Marx über Formen vorkapitalistischer Produktion, ed. by IISG.
1879-80	[Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie]	1932: in Das Kapital (partial version). 1933: in SOC XV (Russian edition).
1880-81	[Excerpts from Morgan’s Ancient Society]	1972: in The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, ed. by the IISG. Manuscript with excerpts in English.
1881-82	[Chronological excerpts 90 BC to approx. 1648]	1938-1939: in Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa (partial version, Russian edition). 1953: in Marx – Engels – Lenin – Stalin, Zur deutschen Geschichte (partial version).

References
1. Cf. Franco Andreucci, La diffusione e la volgarizzazione del marxismo, in Eric J. Hobsbawm et al. (eds ), Storia del marxismo, vol. 2, Einaudi, Turin (1979), p. 15.
2. Cf. Erich Matthias, “Kautsky und der Kautskyanismus”, Marxismusstudien, Vol. II (1957), p. 197.
3. Cf. Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, Monthly Review: New York/London 1942, pp. 19 and 191.
4. Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm, in seinem grundsätzlichen Teil erläutert, J.H.W. Dietz: Hannover 1964, pp. 131f. Cf. the English translation by William E. Bohn first published in 1911: Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program), W. W. Norton & Co.: New York 1971, p. 117.
5. George V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism, Lawrence & Wishart: London 1969, p. 21.
6. Nikolai I. Bukharin, Theory of Historical Materialism, International Publishers: Moscow 1921, p. 18.
7. Ibid., p. 248. Opposing this conception was Antonio Gramsci, for whom “the posing of the problem as a research into laws, of constant, regular and uniform lines, is linked to a need, conceived in a puerile and naive way, to resolve peremptorily the practical problem of the predictability of historical events’. His clear refusal to reduce Marx’s philosophy of praxis to a crude sociology, to ‘a mechanical formula which gives the impression of holding the whole of history in the palm of its hand’, (Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Valentino Gerratana (ed.), Einaudi: Turin 1975, pp. 1403 and 1428; Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence & Wishart: London 1973, p. 428) took aim beyond Bukharin’s text at the general orientation that later predominated in the Soviet Union.
8. Josef V. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Lawrence & Wishart: London 1941, p. 5.
9. Ibid., pp. 13-15.
10. Cf. Maximilien Rubel, Marx critique du marxisme, Payot: Paris 1974, p. 81.
11. Cf., for example, Marcello Musto, ‘Marx in Paris. Manuscripts and notebooks of 1844’, Science & Society, vol. 73, no. 3 (July 2009), pp. 386-402; and Terrell Carver ‘ The German Ideology Never Took Place”, History of Political Thought , vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 107-127.
12. See Marcello Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 years Later, Routledge: London/New York 2008, esp. pp. 179-212.
13. Karl Marx, ‘Postface to the Second Edition’, in Capital, Volume One, Vintage: New York 1977, p. 99.
14. Karl Marx, ‘Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s Association’, Marx-Engels Collected Works (hereafter MECW) vol. 20, New York: International Publishers, 1985, p. 14.
15. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, MECW vol. 24, Lawrence & Wishart: London 1989, p. 87.
16. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, Routledge: London, 1994, p. 13.
17. In recent years, newspapers, periodicals and TV or radio programs have repeatedly discussed the current relevance of Marx. In 2003, the weekly Nouvel Observateur devoted a whole issue to the theme Karl Marx – le penseur du troisième millénaire? Soon after, Germany paid its tribute to the man it once forced into a 40-year exile: in 2004, more than 500,000 viewers of the national television station ZDF voted Marx the third most important German personality of all time (he was first in the category of ‘contemporary relevance’), and during the national elections of 2005 the mass-circulation magazine Der Spiegel carried his image on the cover, giving the victory sign, under the title Ein Gespenst kehrt zurück. The same year, a poll conducted by BBC Radio Four gave Marx the accolade of the philosopher most admired by its listeners. And, after the outbreak of the recent economic crisis, in all parts of the world, leading daily and weekly papers have been discussing the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought.
18. For a full survey, see Part Two of this volume: ‘Marx’s Global Reception Today’. One of the significant scholarly examples of this new interest is the continuation of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), the historico-critical edition of the complete works, which resumed in 1998 after the interruption that followed the collapse of the socialist countries. See Marcello Musto, ‘The rediscovery of Karl Marx’, International Review of Social History, vol. 52, n. 3 (2007), pp. 477-98.
19. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Announcement of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue’, MECW 10, p. 5.
20. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, MECW 10, p. 135.
21. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Review: May-October 1850’, MECW 10, p. 497.
22. Ibid., p. 503.
23. Karl Marx, ‘Reviews from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue No.4’, MECW 10, p. 318. One example of this was the manifesto ‘To the Nations’, issued by the ‘European Democratic Central Committee’, which Giuseppe Mazzini, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Arnold Ruge had founded in London in 1850. According to Marx, this group were implying ‘that the revolution failed because of the ambition and jealousy of the individual leaders and the mutually hostile views of the various popular educators’. Also ‘stupefying’ was the way in which these leaders conceived of ‘social organization’: ‘a mass gathering in the streets, a riot, a hand-clasp, and it’s all over. In their view indeed revolution consists merely in the overthrow of the existing government; once this aim has been achieved, “the victory” has been won.’ (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Review: May-October 1850’, MECW 10, pp. 529-30).
24. See Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 3 February 1851, MECW 38, p. 275.
25. Karl Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath, 27 December 1851, MECW 38, p. 520.
26. Karl Marx, ‘Revolution in China and Europe’, MECW 12, p. 99.
27. Karl Marx, ‘Political Movements. – Scarcity of Bread in Europe’, MECW 12, p. 308.
28. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 28 September 1853, MECW 39, p. 372.
29. Karl Marx, ‘The Crisis in England’, MECW 14, p. 61.
30. Karl Marx, ‘The European Crisis’, MECW 15, p. 136.
31. These notebooks have not yet been published. Cf. Michael Krätke, ‘Marx’s “Books of Crisis” of 1857-8’, in Marcello Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, cit., pp. 169-75.
32. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III, International Publishers: New York [n.d.], p. 577.
33. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, London: Cambridge University Press 1995.
34. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, cit., p. 83.
35. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, cit., p. 88.
36. Ibid., p. 357. This mutual dependence should not be confused with that which establishes itself among individuals in the capitalist mode of production: the former is the product of nature, the latter of history. In capitalism, individual independence is combined with a social dependence expressed in the division of labour (see Karl Marx, ‘Original Text of the Second and the Beginning of the Third Chapter of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, MECW 29, Moscow: Progress Publishers, p. 465). At this stage of production, the social character of activity presents itself not as a simple relationship of individuals to one another ‘but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual – their mutual interconnection – here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing’ (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, cit. p. 157).
37. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, London: Methuen 1961, p. 19.
38. See David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, London: J. M. Dent & Sons. 1973: 15; cf. Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in MECW 29, Moscow: Progress Publishers, p. 300.
39. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin: New York 1973, p. 83.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., p. 85.
42. John Stuart Mill Principles of Political Economy, vol. I, Routledge & Kegan Paul: London 1965, pp. 55f.
43. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, cit., pp. 257-8.
44. Ibid., p. 591.
45. Ibid., p. 249.
46. Ibid., p. 265.
47. Ibid., p. 86.
48. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW 6, Progress: Moscow 1976, p. 174.
49. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, cit., p. 460.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., p. 675.
52. Ibid., p. 489.
53. Ibid., p. 239.
54. Ibid., p. 535.
55. Ibid., p. 156.
56. See ibid., p. 248.
57. Karl Marx, Capital, volume III, cit., p. 240.
58. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, cit., p. 832.
59. Karl Marx, Capital, volume one, cit. p. 171.
60. Cf. André Tosel, Le marxisme du 20 ͤ siècle, Paris: Syllepse 2009, pp. 79f.

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