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War and the Left

The economic causes of war
While the science of politics has probed the ideological, political, economic and even psychological motivations behind the drive to war, socialist theory has made one of its most compelling contributions by highlighting the nexus between the development of capitalism and the spread of wars.

In the debates of the International Working Men’s Association (1864-1872), César de Paepe, one of its principal leaders, formulated what would become the classical position of the workers’ movement on the question: namely, that wars are inevitable under the regime of capitalist production. In contemporary society, they are brought about not by the ambitions of monarchs or other individuals but by the dominant social-economic model (De Paepe, 2014a; 2014b; Musto, 2014). The socialist movement also showed which sections of the population were struck hardest by the dire consequences of war. At the congress of the International held in 1868, the delegates adopted a motion that called upon workers to pursue “the final abolition of all war”, since they were the ones who would pay – economically or with their own blood, whether they were among the victors or the defeated – for the decisions of their ruling classes and the governments representing them. The lesson for the workers’ movement came from the belief that any war should be considered “a civil war” (Freymond, 1962: 403; Musto 2014: 49), a ferocious clash between workers that deprived them of the means necessary for their survival. They needed to act resolutely against any war, by resisting conscription and taking strike action. Internationalism thus became a cardinal point of the future society, which, with the end of capitalism and the rivalry among bourgeois states on the world market, would have eliminated the main underlying causes of war.

Among the precursors of socialism, Claude Henri de Saint-Simon had taken a decisive stand against both war and social conflict, regarding both as obstacles to the fundamental progress of industrial production. Karl Marx did not develop in any of his writings his views – fragmentary and sometimes contradictory – on war, nor did he put forward guidelines for the correct attitude to be taken towards it. When he chose between opposing camps, his only constant was his opposition to Tsarist Russia, which he saw as the outpost of counter-revolution and one of the main barriers to working-class emancipation. In Capital (1867) he argued that violence was an economic force, “the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one” (Marx, 1996: 739). But he did not think of war as a crucial shortcut for the revolutionary transformation of society, and a major aim of his political activity was to commit workers to the principle of international solidarity. As Friedrich Engels also argued, they should act resolutely in individual countries against the dampening of class struggle that the propagandistic invention of an external enemy threatened to bring about at any outbreak of war. In various letters to leaders of the workers’ movement, Engels stressed the ideological power of the snare of patriotism and the delay to the proletarian revolution resulting from waves of chauvinism. Moreover, in Anti-Dühring (1878), following an analysis of the effects of ever more deadly weaponry, he declared that the task of socialism was “to blow up militarism and all standing armies” (Engels, 1987: 158).

War was such an important question for Engels that he devoted one of his last writings to it. In “Can Europe Disarm?” (1893), he noted that in the previous twenty-five years every major power had tried to outdo its rivals militarily and in terms of war preparations. This had involved unprecedented levels of arms production and brought the Old Continent closer to “a war of destruction such as the world has never seen” (Engels, 1990: 372). According to the co-author of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), “The system of standing armies has been carried to such extremes throughout Europe that it must either bring economic ruin to the peoples on account of the military burden, or else degenerate into a general war of extermination”. In his analysis, Engels did not forget to highlight that standing armies were maintained chiefly for internal political as much as external military purposes. They were intended “to provide protection not so much against the external enemy as the internal one”, by strengthening the forces to repress the proletariat and workers’ struggles. As popular layers paid more than anyone else the costs of war, through the provision of troops to the state and taxes, the workers’ movement should fight for “the gradual reduction of the term of [military] service by international treaty” and for disarmament as the only effective “guarantee of peace” (Engels, 1990: 371).

Tests and collapse
It was not long before a peacetime theoretical debate turned into the foremost political issue of the age, when the workers’ movement had to face real situations in which their representatives initially opposed any support for war. In the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870 (which preceded the Paris Commune), the Social Democrat deputies Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel condemned the annexationist objectives of Bismarck’s Germany and voted against war credits. Their decision to “reject the bill for additional funding to continue the war” (Pelz, 2016: 50) earned them a two-year prison sentence for high treason, but it helped to show the working class an alternative way to build on the crisis.

As the major European powers kept up their imperialist expansion, the controversy on war acquired ever greater weight in the debates of the Second International (1889-1916). A resolution adopted at its founding congress had enshrined peace as “the indispensable precondition of any emancipation of the workers” (Dominick 1982: 343). The supposed peace policy of the bourgeoisie was mocked and characterized as one of “armed peace” and, in 1895, Jean Jaurès, the leader of the French Socialist Party (SFIO), gave a speech in parliament in which he famously summed up the apprehensions of the Left: “Your violent and chaotic society still, even when it wants peace, even when it is in a state of apparent repose, bears war within itself, just as a sleeping cloud bears a storm” (Jaurès, 1982: 32).

As the Weltpolitik – the aggressive policy of Imperial Germany to extend its power in the international arena – changed the geopolitical setting, anti-militarist principles sank deeper roots in the workers’ movement and influenced the discussions on armed conflicts. War was no longer seen only as opening up revolutionary opportunities and hastening the breakdown of the system (an idea on the Left since the Revolutionary War of 1792). It was now viewed as a danger because of its grievous consequences for the proletariat in the shape of hunger, destitution and unemployment. It thus posed a serious threat for progressive forces, and, as Karl Kautsky wrote in The Social Revolution (1902), they would in case of war be “heavily loaded with tasks that are not essential” (Kautsky, 1904: 77) to them, and which would make the final victory more distant rather than bring it closer.

The resolution “On Militarism and International Conflicts”, adopted by the Second International at its Stuttgart Congress in 1907, recapitulated all the key points that had become the common heritage of the workers’ movement. Among these were: a vote against budgets that increased military spending, antipathy to standing armies and a preference for a system of people’s militias, and support for the plan to create courts of arbitration to settle international conflicts peacefully. This excluded a resort to general strikes against any kind of wars, as proposed by Gustave Hervé, since a majority of those present deemed this too radical and too Manichaean. The resolution ended with an amendment drafted by Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Yulii Martov, which stated that

“in case war should break out […], it is the duty [of socialists] to intervene in favour of its speedy termination, and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war, to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule” (Vv. Aa., 1972: 80).

Since this did not, however, compel the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) to make any change of political line, its representatives also voted in favour of it. The text, as amended, was the last document on war that secured unanimous support from the Second International.

More intense competition among capitalist states on the world market, together with the outbreak of a number of international conflicts, made the general picture even more alarming. The publication of Jaurès’s The New Army (1911) encouraged discussion of another central theme of the period: the distinction between offensive and defensive wars and the attitude to be taken to the latter, including in cases where a country’s independence was threatened (see Marcobelli, 2021: 155-227). For Jaurès, the only task of the army should be to defend the nation against any offensive aggression, or any aggressor that did not accept resolution of the dispute through mediation. All military action that came under this category should be considered legitimate. Luxemburg’s clear-sighted critique of this position pointed out that “historical phenomena such as modern wars cannot be measured with the yardstick of ‘justice’, or through a paper schema of defence and aggression” (Luxemburg, 1911). In her view, it was necessary to bear in mind the difficulty of establishing whether a war was really offensive or defensive, or whether the state that started it had deliberately decided to attack or had been forced to do so because of the stratagems adopted by the country that opposed it. She therefore thought that the distinction should be discarded, and further criticized Jaurès’s idea of the “armed nation”, on the grounds that it ultimately tended to fuel the growing militarization in society.

As the years passed, the Second International committed itself less and less to a policy of action in favour of peace. Its opposition to rearmament and war preparations was very lacklustre, and an increasingly moderate and legalistic wing of the SPD traded its support for military credits – and then even for colonial expansion – in return for the granting of greater political freedoms in Germany. Important leaders and eminent theorists, such as Gustav Noske, Henry Hyndman and Arturo Labriola, were among the first to arrive at these positions. Subsequently, a majority of German Social Democrats, French Socialists, British Labour Party leaders and other European reformists ended up supporting the First World War (1914-1918). This course had disastrous consequences. With the idea that the “benefits of progress” should not be monopolized by the capitalists, the workers’ movement came to share the expansionist aims of the ruling classes and was swamped by nationalist ideology. The Second International proved completely impotent in the face of the war, failing in one of its main objectives: the preservation of peace.

Lenin and other delegates at the Zimmerwald conference (1915) – including Leon Trotsky, who drafted the final manifesto – foresaw that “for decades war spending will absorb the best energies of peoples, undermining social improvements and impeding any progress”. In their eyes the war revealed the “naked form of modern capitalism, which has become irreconcilable, not only with the interests of the working masses […] but even with the first conditions of human communal existence” (Vv. Aa., 1915). The warning was heeded by only a minority in the workers’ movement, as was the call to all European workers at the Kienthal Conference (1916):

“Your governments and their newspapers tell you that the war must be continued to kill militarism. They are deceiving you! War has never killed war. Indeed, it sparks feelings and wishes for revenge. In this way in marking you for sacrifice, they enclose you in an infernal circle”.

Finally breaking with the approach of the Stuttgart Congress, which had called for international courts of arbitration, the final document at Kienthal declared that “the illusions of bourgeois pacifism” (Vv. Aa., 1977: 371) would not interrupt the spiral of war but would help to preserve the existing social-economic system. The only way to prevent future military conflicts was for the popular masses to conquer political power and overthrow capitalist property.

Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin were the two most vigorous opponents of the war. Luxemburg extended the theoretical understanding of the Left and showed how militarism was a key vertebra of the state. Displaying a conviction and effectiveness with few equals among other communist leaders, she argued that the “War on war!” slogan should become “the cornerstone of working-class politics”. As she wrote in the Theses on the Tasks of International Social-Democracy (1915), the Second International had imploded because it failed “to achieve a common tactic and action by the proletariat in all countries”. From then on, the “main goal” of the proletariat should therefore be “fighting imperialism and preventing wars, in peace as in war” (Luxemburg, 1915).

In Socialism and War (1915) and many other writings during the First World War, Lenin’s great merit was to identify two fundamental questions. The first concerned the “historical falsification” whenever the bourgeoisie tried to attribute a “progressive sense of national liberation” to what were in reality wars of “plunder” (Lenin, 1971: 299-300), waged with the sole aim of deciding which belligerents were this time to oppress the most foreign peoples and to increase the inequalities of capitalism. The second was the masking of contradictions by the social reformists – or “social-chauvinists”, as he (1971: 306) called them – who ultimately endorsed the justifications for war despite their having defined it as a “criminal” activity in the resolutions adopted by the Second International. Behind their claim to be “defending the fatherland” lay the right that certain great powers had given themselves to “pillage the colonies and to oppress foreign peoples”. Wars were not fought to safeguard “the existence of nations” but “to defend the privileges, domination, plunder and violence” of the various “imperialist bourgeoisies” (Lenin, 1971: 307). The socialists who had capitulated to patriotism had replaced the class struggle with a claim on “morsels of the profits obtained by their national bourgeoisie through the looting of other countries”. Accordingly, Lenin (1971: 314) was in favor of “defensive wars” – not, that is, the national defense of European countries à la Jaurès, but the “just wars” of “oppressed and subjugated peoples” who had been “plundered and deprived of their rights” by the “great slave owning powers”. The most celebrated thesis of this pamphlet – that revolutionaries should seek to “turn imperialist war into civil war” (1971: 315) – implied that those who really wanted a “lasting democratic peace” had to wage “civil war against their governments and the bourgeoisie” (1971: 315). Lenin was convinced of what history would later show to be imprecise: that any class struggle consistently waged in time of war would “inevitably” create a revolutionary spirit among the masses.

Lines of demarcation
The First World War produced divisions not only in the Second International but also in the anarchist movement. In an article published shortly after the outbreak of the conflict, Kropotkin (1914: 76-77) wrote that “the task of any person holding dear the idea of human progress is to squash the German invasion in Western Europe”. This statement, seen by many as ditching the principles for which he had fought all his life, was an attempt to move beyond the slogan of “a general strike against the war” – which had gone unheeded by the working masses – and to avoid the general regression of European politics that would result from a German victory. In Kropotkin’s view, if anti-militarists remained inert, they would indirectly assist the invaders’ plans of conquest, and the resulting obstacle would be even more difficult to overcome for those fighting for a social revolution.

In a reply to Kropotkin, the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta argued that, although he was not a pacifist and thought it legitimate to take up arms in a war of liberation, the world war was not – as bourgeois propaganda asserted – a struggle “for the general good against the common enemy” of democracy, but yet another example of the ruling-class subjugation of the working masses. He was aware that “a German victory would certainly spell the triumph of militarism, but also that a triumph for the Allies would mean Russian-British domination in Europe and Asia” (Malatesta, 1993: 230).

In the Manifesto of the Sixteen, Kropotkin (et al., 1916) upheld the need “to resist an aggressor who represents the destruction of all our hopes of liberation”. Victory for the Triple Entente against Germany would be the lesser evil and do less to undermine the existing liberties. On the other side, Malatesta and his fellow-signatories (1998: 388) of the anti-war manifesto of the Anarchist International (1915) declared: “No distinction is possible between offensive and defensive wars”. Moreover, they added that “None of the belligerents has any right to lay claim to civilization, just as none of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defence”. The First World War, they insisted, was a further episode in the conflict among capitalists of various imperialist powers, which was being waged at the expense of the working class. Malatesta, Emma Goldman, Ferdinand Nieuwenhuis and the great majority of the anarchist movement were convinced that it would an unforgivable error to support the bourgeois governments. Instead, with no ifs or buts, they stuck with the slogan “no man and no penny for the army”, firmly rejecting even any indirect support for the pursuit of war.

Attitudes to the war also aroused debate in the feminist movement. The need for women to replace conscripted men in jobs that had long been a male monopoly – for a much lower wage, in conditions of overexploitation – encouraged the spread of chauvinist ideology in a sizeable part of the new-born suffragette movement. Some of its leaders went so far as to petition for laws allowing the enlistment of women in the armed forces. Exposure of duplicitous governments – which, in evoking the enemy at the gates, used the war to roll back fundamental social reforms – was one of the most important achievements of the main women communist leaders of the time. Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Sylvia Pankhurst and, of course, Rosa Luxemburg were among the first to embark lucidly and courageously on the path that would show successive generations how the struggle against militarism was essential to the struggle against patriarchy. Later, the rejection of war became a distinctive part of International Women’s Day, and opposition to war budgets on the outbreak of any new conflict featured prominently in many platforms of the international feminist movement.

The end does not justify the means and wrong means damage the end
The deep split between revolutionaries and reformists, widening into a strategic gulf after the birth of the Soviet Union and the growth of ideological dogmatism in the 1920s and 1930s, ruled out any alliance against militarism between the Communist International (1919-1943) and the European Socialist and Social Democratic parties. Having supported the war, the parties making up the Labour and Socialist International (1923-1940) had lost all credit in the eyes of the communists. The Leninist idea of “turning imperialist war into civil war” still had currency in Moscow, where leading politicians and theorists thought a “new 1914” was inevitable. On both sides, then, the talk was more of what to do if a new war broke out than of how to prevent one from beginning. The slogans and declarations of principle differed substantially from what was expected to happen and from what then turned into political action. Among the critical voices in the Communist camp were those of Nikolai Bukharin, a proponent of the slogan “struggle for peace”, and among the Russian leaders more convinced that it was “one of the key issues of the contemporary world”; and Georgi Dimitrov, who argued that not all the great powers were equally responsible for the threat of war, and who favoured a rapprochement with the reformist parties to build a broad popular front against it. Both these views contrasted with the litany of Soviet orthodoxy, which, far from updating theoretical analysis, repeated that the danger of war was built equally, and without distinction, into all the imperialist powers .

Mao Zedong’s (1966: 15) views on the matter were quite different. At the head of the liberation movement against the Japanese invasion, he wrote in On Protracted War (1938) that “just wars” – in which communists should actively participate – are “endowed with tremendous power, which can transform many things or clear the way for their transformation” (1966: 26-27). Mao’s (1966: 53) proposed strategy, therefore, was “to oppose unjust war with just war”, and furthermore to “continue the war until its political objective [is] achieved”. Arguments for the “omnipotence of revolutionary war” recur in Problems of War and Strategy (1938), where he argues that “only with guns can the whole world be transformed” (1965: 219), and that “the seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution” (1965: 225).

In Europe, the escalating violence of the Nazi-Fascist front, at home as well as abroad, and the outbreak of the Second World War (1939-1945) created an even more nefarious scenario than the 1914-18 war. After Hitler’s troops attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Great Patriotic War that ended with the defeat of Nazism became such a central element in Russian national unity that it survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and has lasted until our own days.

With the post-war division of the world into two blocs, Joseph Stalin taught that the main task of the international Communist movement was to safeguard the Soviet Union. The creation of a buffer zone of eight countries in Eastern Europe (seven after the exit of Yugoslavia) was a central pillar of this policy. In the same period, the Truman Doctrine marked the advent of a new type of war: the Cold War. In its support of anti-communist forces in Greece, in the Marshall Plan (1948) and the creation of NATO (1949), the United States of America contributed to avoid the advance of progressive forces in Western Europe. The Soviet Union responded with the Warsaw Pact (1955). This configuration led to a huge arms race, which, despite the fresh memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also involved a proliferation of nuclear bomb tests.

From 1961, under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union began a new political course that came to be known as “peaceful coexistence”. This turn, with its emphasis on non-interference and respect for national sovereignty, as well as economic cooperation with capitalist countries, was supposed to avert the danger of a third world war (which the Cuban missiles crisis showed to be a possibility in 1962) and to support the argument that war was not inevitable. However, this attempt at constructive cooperation was geared only to the USA, not the countries of “actually existing socialism”. In 1956, the Soviet Union had already crushed a revolt in Hungary, and the Communist parties of Western Europe had not condemned but justified the military intervention in the name of protecting the socialist bloc. Palmiro Togliatti, for example, the secretary of the Italian Communist Party, declared: “We stand with our own side even when it makes a mistake” (cit. in Vittoria, 2015: 219). Most of those who shared this position regretted it bitterly in later years, when they understood the devastating effects of the Soviet operation.

Similar events took place at the height of peaceful coexistence, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Faced with demands for democratization and economic decentralization during the Prague Spring, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided unanimously to send in half a million soldiers and thousands of tanks. At the congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party in 1968, Leonid Brezhnev explained the action by referring to what he called the “limited sovereignty” of Warsaw Pact countries: “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries”. According to this anti-democratic logic, the definition of what was and was not “socialism” naturally fell to the arbitrary decision of the Soviet leaders. But this time critics on the Left were more forthcoming and even represented the majority. Although disapproval of the Soviet action was expressed not only by New Left movements but by a majority of Communist parties, including the Chinese, the Russians did not pull back but carried through a process that they called “normalization”. The Soviet Union continued to earmark a sizeable part of its economic resources for military spending, and this helped to reinforce an authoritarian culture in society. In this way, it lost forever the goodwill of the peace movement, which had become even larger through the extraordinary mobilizations against the war in Vietnam.

One of the most important wars in the next decade began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1979, the Red Army again became a major instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy, which continued to claim the right to intervene in what it described as its own “security zone”. The ill-starred decision turned into an exhausting adventure that stretched over more than ten years, causing a huge number of deaths and creating millions of refugees. On this occasion the international Communist movement was much less reticent than it had been in relation to the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Yet this new war revealed even more clearly to international public opinion the split between “actually existing socialism” and a political alternative based on peace and opposition to militarism.

Taken as a whole, these military interventions not only worked against a general arms reduction but served to discredit and globally weaken socialism. The Soviet Union was increasingly seen as an imperial power acting in ways not unlike those of the United States, which, since the onset of the Cold War, had more or less secretly backed coups d’état and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in more than twenty countries around the world. Lastly, the “socialist wars” in 1977-1979 between Cambodia and Vietnam and China and Vietnam, against the backdrop of the Sino-Soviet conflict, dissipated whatever leverage “Marxist-Leninist” ideology (already remote from the original foundations laid by Marx and Engels) had in attributing war exclusively to the economic imbalances of capitalism.

To be on the left is to be against war
The end of the Cold War did not lessen the amount of interference in other countries’ affairs, nor did it increase the freedom of every people to choose the political regime under which it lives. The numerous wars– even without a UN mandate and defined, absurdly, as “humanitarian” – carried out by the USA in the past twenty-five years, to which should be added new forms of conflict, illegal sanctions, and political, economic and media conditioning, demonstrate that the bipolar division of the world between two superpowers did not give way to the era of liberty and progress promised by the neoliberal mantra of the “New World Order”. In this context, many political forces that once lay claim to the values of the Left have joined in a number of wars. From Kosovo to Iraq and Afghanistan – to mention only the main wars waged by NATO since the fall of the Berlin Wall – these forces have each time given their support to armed intervention and made themselves less and less distinguishable from the Right.

The Russian-Ukrainian war has again faced the Left with the dilemma of how to react when a country’s sovereignty is under attack. The failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a political mistake on the part of the government of Venezuela, and it makes denunciations of possible future acts of aggression committed by the United States appear less credible. It is true that, as Marx wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle in 1860 (Marx, 1985: 154; Musto, 2018: 132), “in foreign policy, there’s little to be gained by using such catchwords as ‘reactionary’ and ‘revolutionary’” – that what is “subjectively reactionary [may prove to be] objectively revolutionary in foreign policy”. But left-wing forces should have learned from the twentieth century that alliances “with my enemy’s enemy” often lead to counterproductive agreements, especially when, as in our times, the progressive front is politically weak and theoretically confused and lacks the support of mass mobilizations.

Recalling Lenin’s (1964b: 148) words in The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination:

“The fact that the struggle for national liberation against one imperialist power may, under certain circumstances, be utilized by another ‘Great’ Power in its equally imperialist interests should have no more weight in inducing Social Democracy to renounce its recognition of the right of nations to self-determination”.

Beyond the geopolitical interests and intrigues that are usually also in play, the forces of the Left have historically supported the principle of national self-determination and defended the right of individual states to establish their frontiers on the basis of the express will of the population. The Left has fought against wars and “annexations” because it is aware that these lead to dramatic conflicts between the workers of the dominant nation and the oppressed nation, creating the conditions for the latter to unite with their own bourgeoisie in considering the former as their enemy. In Results of the Discussion on Self-Determination (1916), Lenin (1964a: 329-330) wrote: “If the socialist revolution were to be victorious in Petrograd, Berlin and Warsaw, the Polish socialist government, like the Russian and German socialist governments, would renounce the ‘forcible retention’ of, say, the Ukrainians within the frontiers of the Polish state”. Why suggest, then, that anything different should be conceded to the nationalist government led by Vladimir Putin?

On the other hand, all too many on the Left have yielded to the temptation to become – directly or indirectly – co-belligerents, fuelling a new union sacrée (expression coined in 1914, just to greet the abjuration of the forces of the French left that, at the outbreak of World War I, decided to endorse the war choices of the government). Such a position today serves increasingly to blur the distinction between Atlanticism and pacifism. History shows that, when they do not oppose war, progressive forces lose an essential part of their reason for existence and end up swallowing the ideology of the opposite camp. This happens whenever parties of the Left make their presence in government the fundamental way of measuring their political action – as the Italian Communists did in supporting the NATO interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, or as does much of today’s Unidas Podemos, which joins its voice to the unanimous chorus of the entire Spanish parliamentary spectrum, in favour of sending weapons to the Ukrainian army. Such subaltern conduct has been punished many times in the past, including at the polls as soon as the occasion has arisen.

Bonaparte is not democracy
In the 1850s, Marx composed a brilliant series of articles on the Crimean War that contain many interesting and useful parallels with the present day. In Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century (1857), speaking of the great Muscovite monarch of the fifteenth century – the one considered to have unified Russia and laid the ground for its autocracy – Marx (1986: 86) stated: “One merely needs to replace one series of names and dates with others and it becomes clear that the policies of Ivan III […], and those of Russia today, are not merely similar but identical”. In a piece for the New-York Daily Tribune, however, in opposition to liberal democrats who exalted the anti-Russian coalition, he wrote:

“It is a mistake to describe the war against Russia as a war between liberty and despotism. Apart from the fact that if such be the case, liberty would be for the nonce represented by a Bonaparte, the whole avowed object of the war is the maintenance […] of the Vienna treaties — those very treaties which annul the liberty and independence of nations” (1980: 228).

If we replace Bonaparte with the United States of America and the Vienna treaties with NATO, these observations seem as if written for today.

The thinking of those who oppose both Russian and Ukrainian nationalism, as well as the expansion of NATO, does not show proof of political indecision or theoretical ambiguity. In recent weeks, a number of experts have provided explanations of the roots of the conflict (which in no way reduce the barbarity of the Russian invasion), and the position of those who propose a policy of non-alignment is the most effective way of ending the war as soon as possible and ensuring the smallest number of victims. It is not a question of behaving like the “beautiful souls” drenched in abstract idealism, whom Hegel thought incapable of addressing the actual reality of earthly contradictions. On the contrary: the point is to give reality to the only true antidote to an unlimited expansion of the war. There is no end to the voices calling for higher military spending and further conscription, or to those who, like the European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, think it is Europe’s task to supply the Ukrainians with “the necessary weapons for war” (Borrell, 2022). But in contrast to these positions, it is necessary to pursue ceaseless diplomatic activity based on two firm points: de-escalation and the neutrality of independent Ukraine.

Despite the increased support for NATO following the Russian moves, it is necessary to work harder to ensure that public opinion does not see the largest and most aggressive war machine in the world – NATO – as the solution to the problems of global security. It must be shown that it is a dangerous and ineffectual organization, which, in its drive for expansion and unipolar domination, serves to fuel tensions leading to war in the world.

In Socialism and War, Lenin argued that Marxists differ from pacifists and anarchists in that they “deem it necessary historically (from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical materialism [sic!]) to study each war separately”. Continuing, he asserted that: “In history there have been numerous wars which, in spite of all the horrors, atrocities, distress and suffering that inevitably accompany all wars, were progressive, i.e., benefited the development of mankind” (1971: 299). If that was true in the past, it would be short-sighted to simply repeat it in contemporary societies where weapons of mass destruction are continually spreading. Rarely have wars – not to be confused with revolutions – had the democratizing effect that the theorists of socialism hoped for. Indeed, they have often proved to be the worst way of carrying out a revolution, both because of the cost in human lives and because of the destruction of the productive forces that they entail. Indeed, wars disseminate an ideology of violence, often combined with the nationalist sentiments that have torn the workers’ movement apart. Rarely favouring practices of self-management and direct democracy, they increase instead the power of authoritarian institutions. This is a lesson that the moderate Left, too, should never forget.

In one of the most fertile passages of Reflections on War (1933), Simone Weil (2021: 101) wonders if it is possible that “a revolution can avoid war”. In her view, this is the only “feeble possibility” that we have if we do not want to “abandon all hope”. Revolutionary war often turns into the “tomb of the revolution”, since “the armed citizenry are not given the means of waging war without a controlling apparatus, without police pressure, without a special court, without punishment for desertion”. More than any other social phenomenon, war swells the military, bureaucratic and police apparatus. “It leads to the total effacement of the individual before state bureaucracy”. Hence, “if the war does not end immediately and permanently […] the result will be merely one of those revolutions that, in Marx’s words, perfect the state apparatus instead of shattering it” or, more clearly still, “it would even mean extending under another form the regime we want to suppress”. In the event of war, then, “we must choose between obstructing the functioning of the military machine in which we ourselves constitute the cogs, or helping that machine to blindly crush human lives” (2021: 101-102).

For the Left, war cannot be “the continuation of politics by other means”, to quote Clausewitz’s famous dictum. In reality, it merely certifies the failure of politics. If the Left wishes to become hegemonic and to show itself capable of using its history for the tasks of today, it needs to write indelibly on its banners the words “anti-militarism” and “No to war!”

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Categories
Reviews

Brian K. Obach, Contemporary Sociology. A Journal of Reviews

Rethinking Alternatives with Marx: Economy, Ecology and Migration is a volume edited by Marcello Musto in which a number of renowned international scholars critically engage a wide range of Marxist concepts. Some reevaluate dominant interpretations of classic works while others apply concepts to contemporary conditions or to our potential future. Several of the authors draw not only on Marx’s vast body of published work, but also numerous unfinished works, notes, drafts, letters and other materials made available through MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe), a project compiling the entire collection of writings by Marx and Engels. Thus, some of the work draws on material that may be new even to those well versed in Marxist literature.

This volume is part of the Marx, Engels, and Marxisms series that includes numerous edited volumes and sole-authored monographs addressing many facets of Marx, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxist theory, labor, and social movements. The subtitle for this volume, “Economy, Ecology and Migration,” is somewhat of a misnomer. Of course all the chapters address the economy, given its centrality to any Marxist analysis; but of the 13 chapters, just three focus specifically on environmental matters and three address migration. The rest cover an eclectic mix of subjects, all of which are loosely organized into four parts.

The first part, “Capitalism, Gender and Social Relations,” includes two chapters that explicitly concern gender questions. Both authors seek to expand notions of anti-capitalist struggle to allow space for gender and family. In her analysis of class, Himani Bannerji examines the whole set of social relations that constitute one’s class position. That would include family relations that are ultimately as vital to production as factory work. Silvia Federici takes Marx to task for his sparse and superficial analysis of gender given the essential economic contributions that women have made not just in terms of social reproduction, but as unpaid laborers in the home, as slaves, and as underpaid wage workers subject to an array of violence and abuse at the hands of capitalists and male workers exercising power over women through the “patriarchy of the wage.”

The following two chapters in this section depart from the gender theme. Bob Jessop refutes charges of Marxist determinism and calls for a “form analytic historical approach.” This recognizes that the course of class struggle is far from determined by economic or technological forces, but rather it is ever changing based on the state and economic terrain as well as shifts in organization, strategy, tactics and other fluid variables. Workers can pursue a wide range of gains short of revolutionary transformation. This section of the book concludes with a densely written but poetic chapter elaborating on Marx’s concepts of use and exchange value.

The second part of the book is dedicated to environmental crisis. All three authors in this section address the ecologically destructive tendencies innate to capitalism. While Marx has been characterized as a Promethean anticipating complete human domination of the natural world, Kohei Saito teases out the ecosocialist in Marx. Through a textual exegesis of Capital Volume 1, Saito argues that the wealth under communism that Marx alludes to does not necessarily mean material riches and that natural limits will persist. The “original unity” between humans and nature will be restored as will a balanced metabolism between the social and the natural.

The other two chapters in this section offer ideas about how we might achieve that balance. Razmig Keucheyen draws on the work of Gorz and Heller to propose how to collectively reconceive of “need” in ways that would be ecologically sustainable as we transition away from the destructive consumerism endemic to capitalism. Gregory Claeys expresses doubt about whether we will ever get there. Instead he predicts, “The planet will burn, and we will likely be exterminated fighting over the charred remnants” (p. 114). Despite his grim assessment, Claeys offers a series of reforms, from bans on advertising to population control, that he suggests would help mitigate the crisis.

Migration is the subject of the third section. The forced migration of peasants to the city during the enclosures is a central focus for Marx, as is the slave trade, but there is less published material on international worker migration. A long and detailed historical chapter by David Norman Smith draws on Marx’s unpublished works to assess his views on this subject. This includes an examination of competition among workers and the resultant nativism, an analysis very relevant to contemporary working-class struggles. On a related theme, Pietro Basso poses a challenge to current thinkers who, he argues, are misinterpreting Marx to promote what he views as anti-immigrant policies.

The final part of the book addresses an issue on which Marx was especially and perhaps intentionally unclear. It includes three chapters that consider what the future communist society will look like, or at least what it will not look like. Editor Marcello Musto examines the structural failure of the Paris Commune to inform the organization of the post-capitalist state, while Álvaro García Linera identifies the Soviet Union’s inability to move beyond state ownership and to secure true freedom for its people. Michael Brie takes up that theme in the final chapter as he theorizes about a communist society that incorporates liberal notions of individual liberty. Authors in this section comb Marx’s writings for ideas about how a post-capitalist social order can be constructed that meets human needs and allows for individual and social fulfillment, all while living within the natural limits of planetary systems.

As is evident, the chapters in this volume are very diverse in terms of focus, but they also differ greatly in terms of style, and even length. The shortest is just 13 pages while the longest is almost 70. Some chapters would be suitable for a lay audience, while others are geared toward those already in possession of a deep understanding of Marx. Some dissect historical developments while others speculate about the future. A positive interpretation of this would be that there is something here for everyone. A more critical view would be that the volume lacks focus. Either way, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx is a testament to the richness and persistent relevance of Marx’s work. After over a century and a half of examination, scholars can still find material over which to engage in fruitful debate. And, in a more practical sense, Marx can still offer insight into how to understand and to carry out struggle in a world characterized by exploitation, white supremacy, patriarchy, and ecological devastation. This volume allows us to continue to learn from one of the most brilliant social theorists of all time.

Categories
Journal Articles

A Reappraisal of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks

Introduction
For a long time, the difficulty of examining Marx’s research in the final years of his life, especially the early 1880s, hampered our knowledge of the important gains he achieved. This is why all the biographers of Marx devoted so few pages to his activity after the winding up of the International Working Men’s Association[1]. Not by chance, they nearly always used the generic title “the last decade” for this part of their work. Wrongly thinking that Marx had given up the idea of completing his work, they failed to look more deeply into what he actually did during that period. But if there was some justification for this in the past, it is hard to understand why the new materials available in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²) – the historical-critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Friedrich Engels – and the volume of research on the “late Marx” since the 1970s have not led to a more significant change in this tendency[2].

Contrary to those who claimed that his intellectual curiosity and theoretical acumen faded in his final years, the recent scholarship on Marx has demonstrated that he continued to work whenever circumstances allowed it. He not only pursued his research but extended it to new areas (see Anderson 2010, and Musto 2020a). Marx went deeply into many other issues which, though often underestimated, or even ignored, by scholars of his work, are acquiring crucial importance for the political agenda of our times. Among these are individual freedom in the economic and political sphere, gender emancipation, the critique of nationalism, the emancipatory potential of technology, and forms of collective ownership not controlled by the state.

Furthermore, Marx undertook thorough investigations of societies outside Europe and expressed himself unambiguously against the ravages of colonialism. It is a mistake to suggest otherwise. Marx criticized thinkers who, while highlighting the destructive consequences of colonialism, used categories peculiar to the European context in their analysis of peripheral areas of the globe. He warned a number of times against those who failed to observe the necessary distinctions between phenomena, and especially after his theoretical advances in the 1870s he was highly wary of transferring interpretive categories across completely different historical or geographical fields. All this is now clear, despite the scepticism still fashionable in certain academic quarters.

In 1881 and 1882, Marx made remarkable progress in relation to anthropology, pre-capitalist modes of production, non-Western societies, socialist revolution and the materialist conception of history. He also closely observed the main events in international politics, as we can see from his letters expressing resolute support for the Irish liberation struggle and the Populist movement in Russia, and firm opposition to British colonial oppression in India and Egypt and to French colonialism in Algeria. He was anything but eurocentric, economistic, or fixated only on class conflict. Marx thought the study of new political conflicts, new themes and geographical areas to be fundamental for his ongoing critique of the capitalist system. It enabled him to open up to national specificities and to consider the possibility of an approach to communism different from the one he had previously developed.

Anthropology, Family and Gender: The Revolution of Morgan’s Ancient Society
Between December 1880 and June 1881, Marx’s research interests focused on a new discipline: anthropology. He began with Ancient Society (1877), a work by the U.S. anthropologist Lewis Morgan (1818-1881), which the Russian ethnologist Maksim Kovalevsky (1851-1916) had brought back from a trip to North America and sent to Marx two years after its publication.

What struck Marx most was the way in which Morgan treated production and technological factors as preconditions of social progress, and he felt moved to assemble a compilation of a hundred densely packed pages.[3] These make up the bulk of what are known as the The Ethnological Notebooks (1880-81).[4] They also contain excerpts from other works: Java, or How to Manage a Colony (1861) by James Money (1818-1890), a lawyer and Indonesia expert; The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon (1880) by John Phear (1825-1905), president of the supreme court of Ceylon; and Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (1875) by the historian Henry Maine (1822-1888), amounting to a total of another hundred sheets.[5] Marx’s comparative assessments of these authors lead one to suppose that he compiled all this material in a fairly short period in an effort to get really on top of it.

In his previous research, Marx had already examined and extensively commented on past social-economic forms – in the first part of The German Ideology, in the long section of the Grundrisse entitled “Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production,” and in Capital, Volume One. In 1879, his reading of Kovalevsky’s Common Land Ownership directed him once more to the subject. But it was only with the The Ethnological Notebooks that he engaged in more comprehensive and up to date study.

The aim of Marx’s new research was to widen his knowledge of the historical periods, geographical areas and thematic topics that he considered essential for his continuing critique of political economy. It also enabled him to acquire specific information about the social characteristics and institutions of the remote past, acquainting him with material that was not in his possession when he had written the manuscripts of the 1850s and 1860s. Finally, it acquainted him with the latest theories advanced by the most eminent contemporary scholars.

Marx devoted himself to these often time-consuming anthropological studies during the same period in which he aimed to complete Capital, Volume Two (see Musto 2018; 2019). The precise theoretical-political purpose behind them was to reconstruct the most likely sequence in which the different modes of production had succeeded one another over time, with a particular focus on the birth of capitalism. He believed that this would give his theory of the possible communist transformation of society stronger historical foundations.[6]

In The Ethnological Notebooks, Marx therefore put together compilations and interesting notes on prehistory, on the development of family bonds, on the condition of women, on the origins of property relations, on community practices in precapitalist societies, on the formation and nature of state power, on the role of the individual, and on more modern aspects such as the racist connotations of certain anthropological approaches and the effects of colonialism.

On the particular theme of prehistory and the development of family ties, Marx drew a number of priceless indications from the work of Morgan. As Hyndman recalled: “when Lewis H. Morgan proved to Marx’s satisfaction in his Ancient Society that the gens[7] and not the family was the social unit of the old tribal system and ancient society generally, Marx at once abandoned his previous opinions” (Hyndman 1911, 253-254).

It was Morgan’s research on the social structure of primitive peoples that allowed him to overcome the limits of traditional interpretations of kinship, including the one advanced by the German historian Barthold Niebuhr (1786-1831) in Roman History (1811-12). In contrast to all previous hypotheses, Morgan showed that it had been a grave error to suggest that the gens “postdated the monogamous family” and was the result of “an aggregate of families” (Morgan 1877, 515). His studies of prehistoric and ancient society led him to the conclusion that the patriarchal family should be seen not as the original basic unit of society but as a form of social organization more recent than was generally believed. It was an organization “too weak to face alone the hardships of life” (472). It was much more plausible to assume the existence of a form like that of the American native peoples, the sindiasmic family, which practised a “communism in living” (Marx 1972, 115).

On the other hand, Marx constantly polemicized against Maine, who in his Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (1875) had visualized “the private family” as “the basis out of which the sept and clan developed.” Marx’s scorn for this attempt to reverse time’s arrow by transposing the Victorian era into prehistory led him to assert that this “blockheaded Englishman started not from the gens but from the Patriarch, who later became the chief – what inanities!” (292) His mockery gradually reaches a crescendo: “Maine after all cannot get the English private family out of his head” (309); he “transports the Roman ‘patriarchal’ family into the very beginning of things” (324). Nor did Marx spare Phear, of whom he said: “The ass bases everything on private families!” (281).

Morgan gave Marx further food for thought with his remarks on the concept of the family, since in its “original meaning” the word family – which has the same root as famulus or servant – “had no relation to the married pair or their children, but to the body of slaves and servants who laboured for its maintenance, and were under the power of the pater familias” (Morgan 1877, 469). On this, Marx noted:

The modern family contains the germ not only of servitus (slavery) but also serfdom, since it contains from the beginning a relation to services for agriculture. It contains in miniature all the antagonisms within itself, which are later broadly develop in society and its State. (…) The monogamous family presupposed, in order to have an existence separate from others, a domestic class that was everywhere directly constituted by slaves. (Marx 1972, 120)

Developing his own thoughts elsewhere in the compendium, Marx wrote that “property in houses, lands and herds” was bound up with “the monogamous family” (210). In fact, as the Manifesto of the Communist Party suggested, this was the starting point of history as “the history of class struggle” (Marx and Engels 1976, 482).[8]

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) – a book that the author described as “the fulfilment of a behest” and no more than a “meagre substitute” for what his “dear friend” had not lived to write (Engels 1990, 131) – Engels completed Marx’s analysis in The Ethnological Notebooks. Monogamy, he argued, represented the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes hitherto unknown throughout preceding history. In an old unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846, I find the following: “The first division of labour is that between man and woman for child breeding” (173). And today I can add: The first class antithesis which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy [… is] the cellular form of civilized society, in which we can already study the nature of the antitheses and contradictions, which develop fully in the latter. (173-174)[9]

Engels’s thesis posited an overly schematic relationship between economic conflict and gender oppression that was absent from Marx’s – fragmentary and highly intricate – notes.[10] Marx too paid close attention to Morgan’s considerations on parity between the sexes, which argued that pre-Greek ancient societies were more progressive in respect of the treatment and behaviour of women. Marx copied the parts of Morgan’s book that showed how, among the Greeks, “the change of descent from the female line to the male was damaging for the position and rights of the wife and woman.” Indeed, Morgan had a very negative assessment of the Greek social model. “Greeks remained barbarians in their treatment of women at the height of their civilization; their education superficial, (…) their inferiority inculcated as a principle upon them, until it came to be accepted as a fact by the women themselves.” Moreover, there was “a principle of studied selfishness among the males, tending to lessen the appreciation of women, scarcely found among savages.” Thinking of the contrast with the myths of the classical world, Marx added an acute observation: “the condition of the goddesses on Olympus is a reminder of the position of women, once freer and more influential. Juno greedy for power, the goddess of wisdom springs from the head of Zeus” (Marx, 1972, 121). For Marx, memory of the free divinities of the past provided an example for possible emancipation in the present.[11]

From the various authors he studied, Marx recorded many important observations on the role of women in ancient society. For example, referring to the work Matriarchy (1861) by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Bachofen (1815-1887), he noted: “The women were the great power among the gens and everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion required, ‘to knock off the horns’, as it was technically called, from the head of a chief, and send him back to the ranks of warriors. The original nomination of the chiefs also always rested with them” (Marx, 1972, 116).[12]

Property Relations, the Individual and the Function of the State
Marx’s reading of Morgan also gave him an angle on another important question: the origin of property relations. For the celebrated anthropologist established a causal relation between the various types of kinship structure and social-economic forms. In his view, the factors in western history that accounted for the affirmation of the descriptive system – which described blood relatives and specified everyone’s kinship (for example, “brother’s son for nephew, father’s brother for uncle, father’s brother’s son for cousin”) – and the decline of the classificatory system – which grouped blood relatives into categories without specifying proximity or distance in relation to Ego (“e.g., my own brother and my father’s brother’s sons are in equal degree my brothers”) – had to do with the development of property and the state (Brown 2012, 123, 104; 164, 136; see also Godelier 1977, 67-8, 101-2).

Morgan’s book is divided into four parts: (1) Growth of Intelligence through Inventions and Discoveries, (2) Growth of the Idea of Government, (3) Growth of the Idea of the Family and (4) Growth of the Idea of Property. Marx changed the order to (1) inventions, (2) family, (3) property and (4) government, in order to bring out more clearly the nexus between the last two.

Morgan’s book argued that, although “the rights of wealth, of rank and of official position” had prevailed for thousands of years over “justice and intelligence,” there was ample evidence that “the privileged classes” were a “burdensome” (Morgan 1877, 551) influence on society. Marx copied out almost in full one of the final pages of Ancient Society on the distortions that property could generate; it operated with concepts that made a deep impression on him:

Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. (551-2)

Morgan refused to believe that the “final destiny of mankind” was the mere pursuit of riches. He issued a stark warning:

The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It (a higher plan of society)[13] will be a revival, in a higher form (of society), of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes. (551-2)

Bourgeois “civilization,” then, was itself a transitory stage. It had arisen at the end of two long epochs, the “savage state” and the “barbaric state” (the terms current at the time), which followed the abolition of communal forms of social organization. These forms imploded following the accumulation of property and wealth and the emergence of social classes and the state. But sooner or later prehistory and history were destined to join up once again (see Godelier 1977, 124).[14]

Morgan considered ancient societies to have been very democratic and solidaristic. As for the present, he limited himself to a declaration of optimism about the progress of humanity, without invoking the necessity of political struggle.[15] Marx, however, did not envisage a socialist revival of “the myth of the noble savage.” He never hoped for a return to the past, but – as he made clear when copying Morgan’s book – looked to the advent of a “higher form of society” (Marx 1972, 139)[16] based on a new mode of production and consumption. This would come about not through mechanical evolution, but only through conscious working-class struggle.

All of Marx’s anthropological reading had a bearing on the origins and functions of the state. The excerpts from Morgan summarized its role in the transition from barbarism to civilization, while his notes on Maine concentrated on analysis of the relations between the individual and the state (see Krader 1972, 19). Consistent with his most significant theoretical texts on the subject, from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law[17] (1843) to The Civil War in France (1871),[18] The Ethnological Notebooks also present the state as a power subjugating society, a force preventing the full emancipation of the individual.

In the notes he wrote in 1881, Marx stressed the parasitic and transitory character of the state:

Maine ignores the much deeper point: that the seeming supreme independent existence of the state is only seeming and that it is in all its forms an excrescence of society; just as its appearance itself arises only at a certain stage of social development, it disappears again as soon as society has reached a stage not yet attained.

Marx followed this up with a critique of the human condition under the given historical circumstances. The formation of civilized society, with its transition from a regime of common to individual property, generated a “still one-sided (…) individuality” (Marx, 1972, 329; cf also Krader 1972, 59). If the “true nature [… of the state] appears only when we analyse its content,” that is, its “interests,” then this shows that these interests “are common to certain social groups” and therefore “class interests.” For Marx, “the state is built on and presupposes classes.” Hence the individuality that exists in this type of society is “a class individuality,” which in the last analysis is “based on economic presuppositions” (329).

Against Racism and Colonialism
In The Ethnological Notebooks, Marx also made a number of observations on the racist connotations of many of the anthropological reports he was studying (see Krader 1972, 37; Ward Gailey, 2006, 36). His rejection of such ideology was categorical, and he commented caustically on the authors who expressed it in this way. Thus, when Maine used discriminatory epithets, he firmly interjected: “again this nonsense!” Moreover, expressions such as “the devil take this ‘Aryan’ jargon!” (Marx, 1972, 324) keep recurring.

Referring to Money’s Java, or How to Manage a Colony and Phear’s The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon, Marx studied the negative effects of the European presence in Asia. He was not at all interested in Money’s views on colonial policy, but he found his book useful for the detail it gave about commerce (see Tichelman 1983, 18).[19] He adopted a similar approach to Phear’s book, focusing mainly on what he reported about the state in Bengal and ignoring his weak theoretical constructions.

The authors whom Marx read and summarized in The Ethnological Notebooks had all been influenced – with various nuances – by the evolutionary conceptions of the age, and some had also become firm proponents of the superiority of bourgeois civilization. But an examination of The Ethnological Notebooks clearly shows that their ideological assertions had no influence on Marx.

Marx strongly opposed to colonialism anytime he could. In 1879 he had taken an interest in the land question in French-ruled Algeria. Based on the considerations written by Kovalevsky in the book Common Landownership: The Causes, Course and Consequences of Its Decline (1879), Marx was able to better criticize the negative changes introduced by French settlers in relation to the common landownership that existed in Algeria. From Kovalevsky, he copied down: “Formation of private landownership (in eyes of French bourgeois) is a necessary condition for all progress in the political and social sphere. Further maintenance of communal property ‘as a form which supports communist tendencies in the minds is dangerous both for the colony and for the homeland” (Marx 1975b, 405)[20]. He also extracted the following points from Communal Landownership:

the distribution of clan holdings is encouraged, even prescribed, first, as means of weakening subjugated tribes which are ever standing under impulsion to revolt; second, as the only way to a further transfer of landownership from the hands of the natives into those of the colonists. The same policy has been pursued by the French under all regimes. (…) The aim is ever the same: destruction of the indigenous collective property and its transformation into an object of free purchase and sale, and by this means the final passage made easier into the hands of the French colonists (Marx 1975b, 405).

As for the legislation on Algeria proposed by the Left Republican Jules Warnier (1826-1899) and passed in 1873, Marx (1975b, 411) endorsed Kovalevsky’s claim that its only purpose was “expropriation of the soil of the native population by the European colonists and speculators”. The effrontery of the French went as far as ‘direct robbery’, or conversion into “government property” (1975b, 412), of all uncultivated land remaining in common for native use. This process was designed to produce another important result: elimination of the danger of resistance by the local population. Again through Kovalevsky’s words, Marx (1975b, 408 and 412) noted:

the foundation of private property and the settlement of European colonists among the Arab clans [would] become the most powerful means to accelerate the process of dissolution of the clan unions. (…) The expropriation of the Arabs intended by the law had two purposes: 1) to provide the French as much land as possible; and (2) to tear away the Arabs from their natural bonds to the soil to break the last strength of the clan unions thus being dissolved, and thereby any danger of rebellion.

Marx (1975b, 412) commented that this type of “individualization of landownership” had not only secured huge economic benefits for the invaders but also achieved a “political aim (…): to destroy the foundation of this society”. The same happened with India. Having examined forms of landownership in that country in the Notebooks on Indian History (664-1858), that he compiled in 1879-80, Marx described the invaders with such terms as “British dogs” (2001, 165, 176, 180), “usurpers” (155-56, 163), “English hypocrites” or “English intruders” (81). By contrast, the Indian resistance struggles were always accompanied with expressions of solidarity[21]. It was no accident that Marx always replaced Sewell’s term ‘mutineers’ with “insurgents” (Marx 2001 163-4, 184). His forthright condemnation of European colonialism was quite unmistakable.

In 1881, after profound theoretical research and careful observation of changes in international politics, not to speak of his massive synopses on India included in the Ethnological Notebooks, referring to the “East Indies,” Marx (1989, 365) noted: “Everyone except Sir Henry Maine and others of his ilk realizes that the suppression of communal landownership out there was nothing but an act of English vandalism, pushing the native people not forwards but backwards”. All the British “managed to do was to ruin native agriculture and double the number and severity of the famines” (368).

A similar example can also be found with relation to Egypt. When Joseph Cowen (1829-1900), an MP and president of the Cooperative Congress – Marx considered him “the best of the English parliamentarians” – justified the British invasion of Egypt[22], Marx expressed his total disapproval to his daughter Eleanor on January 9, 1883. Above all, he railed at the British government: “Very nice! In fact, there could be no more blatant example of Christian hypocrisy than the ‘conquest’ of Egypt – conquest in the midst of peace!” But Cowen, in a speech on 8 January 1883 in Newcastle, expressed his admiration for the “heroic exploit” of the British’ and the “dazzle of our military parade;” nor could he “help smirking over the entrancing little prospect of all those fortified offensive positions between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean and, into the bargain, an ‘African-British Empire’ from the Delta to the Cape”. It was the “English style”, characterized by “responsibility” for the “home interest”. In foreign policy, Marx concluded, Cowen was a typical example of “those poor British bourgeois, who groan as they assume more and more ‘responsibilities’ in the service of their historic mission, while vainly protesting against it” (Marx and Engels 1992, 422-3).

Marx also took a close interest in the economic side of what was happening in Egypt, as we can see from his eight pages of excerpts from “Egyptian Finance” (1882), an article by Michael George Mulhall (1836-1900) that appeared in the October issue of the London Contemporary Review. His own notes concentrated on two aspects. He reconstructed the financial blackmail operated by Anglo-German creditors after the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Ismail Pasha (1830-1895), had dramatically plunged the country into debt. Moreover, he sketched the oppressive taxation system devised by Ismail Pasha that extracted a terrible price from the population, showing particular attention to, and solidarity with, the forced dislocation of many Egyptian peasants[23].

Conclusion
Theories of progress, hegemonic in the nineteenth century and widely shared by anthropologists and ethnologists, postulated that events would follow a pregiven course because of factors external to human action; a rigid sequence of stages had the capitalist world as its sole and uniform destination.

Within the space of a few years, a naïve belief in the automatic advance of history also took root in the Second International. The only difference with the bourgeois version was the prediction that a final stage would follow the inevitable “collapse” of the capitalist system: namely, the advent of socialism (itself subsequently defined as “Marxist!”) (Cf. Musto 2007, 479-480). Not only was this analysis cognitively unsound; it produced a kind of fatalistic passivity, which became a stabilizing factor for the existing order and weakened the social and political action of the proletariat. Opposing this approach that so many regarded as “scientific,” and which was common to the bourgeois and socialist visions of progress, Marx rejected the siren calls of a one-way historicism and preserved his own complex, flexible and variegated conception.

Whereas, in comparison with the Darwinist oracles, Marx’s voice might seem uncertain and hesitant, he actually escaped the trap of economic determinism into which many of his followers and ostensible continuators tended to fall – a position, light years from the theories they claimed to have inspired them, which would lead many into one of the worst characterizations of “Marxism.”

In his manuscripts, notebooks and letters to comrades and activists, as well as in the few public interventions he could still make against declining physical capacities, Marx persevered with his efforts to reconstruct the complex history of the passage from antiquity to capitalism. From the anthropological studies that he read and summarized, he drew confirmation that human progress had proceeded more quickly in epochs when the sources of subsistence were expanding, from the birth of agriculture on. He treasured the historical information and data, but did not share the rigid schemas suggesting an inescapable sequence of stages in human history.

Marx spurned any rigid linking of social changes to economic transformations alone. Instead, he highlighted the specificity of historical conditions, the multiple possibilities that the passing of time offered, and the centrality of human intervention in the shaping of reality and the achievement of change (see Gailey 2006, 35, 44). These were the salient features of Marx’s theoretical elaboration in The Ethnological Notebooks and, more in general, in the final years of his life.

There is still so much to learn from Marx. Today it is possible to do this by studying not only what he wrote in his published works but also the questions and doubts contained in his unfinished manuscripts. This consideration is all the more valid for the complex, but very rich, notes that we call The Ethnological Notebooks.

References
1. See, for example, Mehring (2003, 501-32), Rühle (2011, 359-70), Vorländer (1929, 248-78), Nicolaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen (1976, 392-407), and McLellan (1973, 412-51). Even Maximilien Rubel (1957, 416-34), justly famed for his close textual studies, did not go beyond the limits of his predecessors in Karl Marx. Essai de biographie intellectuelle. In Marx: Life and Works, the French scholar wrote that “the last ten years of Marx’s life were like a slow agony” during which “his activity [was] limited to correspondence and a few articles”. But he added: “Nevertheless – even in a period so poor in published work – Marx filled about 50 notebooks, almost exclusively devoted to extracts from his reading. His ‘literary bulimia’ yielded nearly 3,000 pages of microscopic writing. To this should be added, finally, “tons” of statistical material which, at his death, left Engels dumbfounded” (1980, 100).
2. Biographies published in recent years exemplify how, even since the resumption of the MEGA² project, the work of the ‘late Marx’ has been overlooked by the vast majority of scholars. Jonathan Sperber’s (2013) insignificant Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life simply ignored Marx’s late writings. Gareth Stedman Jones’s (2016) lengthy Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion examined the whole period from 1872 to 1883 only in a short epilogue, while devoting five chapters (170 pages) to Marx’s early life (1818-1844), when he published only two journal articles and had just initiated the study of political economy, and three chapters (150 pages) to the time frame 1845-1849. In Sven-Eric Liedman’s (2018) 750-page A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx, there are only two very short sections dedicated to what Marx did after the Critique of the Gotha Programme. One of them – a superficial analysis of Morgan’s Ancient Society (Liedman, A World to Win, 507-13) – is strangely located before the consideration of writings like Herr Vogt (published in 1860) and Marx’s participation in the International Working Men’s Association (1864-1872). The choice of a non-chronological order impedes a clear understanding of Marx’s theoretical evolution during the final phase of his life. Common to all three of these biographies is a scant attention to the secondary literature.
3. To learn about the way Marx used to work and take notes from the books he used to read see Musto (2020c).
4. This title was given posthumously by Lawrence Krader (1919-1998), the editor of these manuscripts. However, the content of these studies is more accurately related to anthropology, hence the title of the section in the present article.
5. The parts from Phear and Maine were included in Karl Marx (1972, 243-336); Marx did not leave a precise dating of his work. Krader, the main researcher of these texts, argued that Marx first familiarized himself with Morgan’s book and then compiled the excerpts – see “Addenda” (87). See also Kautsky’s testimony from his trip to London in March-June 1881 that “prehistory and ethnology were then intensively preoccupying Marx” (Enzensberger 1973, 552).
6. According to Maurice Bloch (1983), Marx wanted first of all “to reconstruct a general history and theory of society in order to explain the coming to be of capitalism.” But he also had a “rhetorical” interest linked to the need for “examples and cases to show that the institutions of capitalism are historically specific and therefore changeable.” However, this second “rhetorical use of anthropological material was never completely separate from the historical use, and the mixture of the two became (…) the source of many problems” (10). Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2012), have written that “Marx’s main effort in his final years was to give a new historical foundation to the perspective of communism, at the risk of seriously endangering a theoretical edifice constructed on the basis of the nineteenth-century evolutionist and progressivist episteme” (667). Polemicizing against those who underrate the importance of Marx’s last notebooks, Heather Brown (2012, 147) argued that they “contain some of his most creative attempts at working through the development of human society.” On Marx’s conception of post-capitalist society see Musto (2020b).
7. The gens was a unit “consisting of blood relatives with a common descent,” see Henry Morgan (1877, 35).
8. In a note to the 1888 English edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Engels wrote: “The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes” (Marx and Engels 1976, 482).
9. In this work, Engels actually published some of Marx’s comments on Morgan’s book.
10. Cf. Raya Dunayevskaya (1991, 173): “Marx (…) showed that the elements of oppression in general, and of women in particular, arose from within primitive communism, and not only related to change from ‘matriarchy.’”
11. Cf. Brown (2012, 172): “in ancient Greece (…) women were clearly oppressed, but, for Marx, their mythology had the potential to illustrate to them (…) how much freer they could be.”
12. Brown (2012, 160ff), has diligently compiled many other considerations that attracted Marx’s attention.
13. The words in brackets were added by Marx (1972, 139).
14. For a critique of any possible “return to an original state of unity,” see Daren Webb (2000, 113ff).
15. Engels wrongly believed that Morgan’s political positions were very progressive. See, for example, Friedrich Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, March 7, 1884, where he wrote that Ancient Society was “a masterly exposé of primitive times and their communism. [Morgan had] rediscovered Marx’s theory of history all on his own, (…) drawing communist inferences in regard to the present day,” (Marx and Engels 1995, 115-116). Marx never expressed himself in such terms. On the thought of the American anthropologist, see Daniel Moses (2009).
16. According to Krader (1972, 14): “Marx made it clear, as Morgan did not, that this process of reconstitution will take place on another level than the old, that it is a human effort, of man for and by himself, that the antagonisms of civilization are not static or passive, but are comprised of social interests which are ranged for and against the outcome of the reconstitution, and this will be determined in an active and dynamic way.” As Maurice Godelier (2012, 78) pointed out, in Marx there was never any “idea of a primitive ‘El Dorado.’” He never forgot that in primitive “classless societies” there were “at least three forms of inequality: between men and women, between senior and junior generations, and between autochthons and foreigners.”
17. In this work, Marx analysed the “opposition” between “civil society” and “the state;” the state does not lie “within” society but stands “over against it.” “In democracy the state as particular is merely particular. (…) The French have recently interpreted this as meaning that in true democracy the political state is annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state (…) no longer passes for the whole” (Marx 1975a, 30).
18. Thirty years later, the critique is more sharply focused: “At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labour, the State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism” (Marx 1986, 329).
19. See also Engels’s view of Money, as he wrote in his letter to Kautsky dated February 16, 1884: “It would be a good thing if someone were to take the trouble to throw light on the proliferation of state socialism, drawing for the purpose on an exceedingly flourishing example of the practice in Java. All the material is to be found in Java, How to Manage a Colony (…). Here one sees how the Dutch have, on the basis of the communities’ age-old communism, organized production for the benefit of the state and ensured that the people enjoy what is, in their own estimation, a quite comfortable existence; the consequence is that the people are kept in a state of primitive stupidity and the Dutch exchequer rakes in 70 million marks a year” (Marx and Engels 1995, 102-103).
20. The words in brackets are Marx’s, while those between quotation marks are from the Annales de Assemblée Nationale, 1873, VIII, Paris 1873, included in Kovalevsky’s book.
21. According to Anderson “these passages indicate a shift from [Marx’s] 1853 view of Indian passivity in the face of conquest;” he “often ridicules or excises (…) passages from Sewell portraying the British conquest of India as a heroic fight against Asiatic barbarism”. Since the articles on the Sepoy revolt, which Marx published in the New-York Tribune in 1857, his “sympathy” for the Indian resistance had “only increased” (Anderson 2010, 216, and 218).
22. Marx was referring to the war of 1882, which opposed Egyptian forces under Ahmad Urabi (1841-1911) and troops from the United Kingdom. It concluded with the battle of Tell al-Kebir (13 September 1882), which ended the so-called Urabi revolt that had begun in 1879 and enabled the British to establish a protectorate over Egypt.
23. Karl Marx, IISH Amsterdam, Marx-Engels Papers, B 168, 11-18. See David Smith (2021), whose comments on these notes bring out their relevance for us today.

Bibliography
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Godelier, Maurice. 1977. Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology. London: Verso.
Godelier, Maurice. 2012. The Mental and the Material. London: Verso.
Hyndman, Henry Mayers. 1911. The Record of an Adventurous Life. London: Macmillan.
Krader, Lawrence. 1972. “Introduction.” In Karl Marx, The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, edited by Lawrence Krader, 1-90. Assen: Van Gorcum.
Liedman, Sven-Eric. 2018. A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx. London: Verso.
Marx, Karl. 1972. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, edited by Lawrence Krader Assen: Van Gorcum.
Marx, Karl. 1975a. “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.” In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 3, 3-129. New York: International Publishers.
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Ward Gailey, Christine. 2006. “Community, State, and Questions of Social Evolution in Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks.” In The Politics of Egalitarianism, edited by Jacqueline Solway, 31–52. New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books.
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Introduction: The Making and the Dissemination of Le Capital

Capital: An Unfinished Masterpiece
In February 1867, after several years of hard work, Marx was finally able to give Engels the long-awaited news that Volume I of his masterpiece was finished. Marx went to Hamburg to deliver the manuscript and, in agreement with his editor Otto Meissner, it was decided that Capital would appear in 3 volumes. The first of them – ‘The Process of Production of Capital’ – was put on sale on 14 September. A few months before that date, Marx had written to his friend Johann Philipp Becker that the publication of his book was, ‘without question, the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included)’ (Marx to Becker, 17 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 358).

Following the final modifications, the table of contents was as follows:

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

Despite the long labour of composition before 1867, the structure of Capital would be considerably expanded over the coming years, and various further modifications would be made to the text. Volume I therefore continued to absorb significant energies on Marx’s part even after its publication.

In October 1867, Marx returned to Capital, Volume II. But this brought a recurrence of his health issues: liver pains, insomnia and carbuncles (see Musto 2018). The new year began much as the old one had ended and at times he was even unable to attend to his correspondence. As soon as he could return to work, he took a great interest in questions of history, agriculture and ecology, compiling notebooks of extracts from works by various authors. Particularly important for him were the Introduction to the Constitutive History of the German Mark, Farm, Village, Town and Public Authority (1854), by the political theorist and legal historian Georg Ludwig von Maurer, and three German works by Karl Fraas: Climate and the Vegetable World throughout the Ages, a History of Both (1847), A History of Agriculture (1852) and The Nature of Agriculture (1857).

While affording Marx a little energy for these new scientific studies, the state of his health continued its ups and downs. Anyway, he was able to put together a group of preparatory manuscripts on the relationship between surplus value and rate of profit, the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, and the metamorphoses of capital – which occupied him until the end of 1868 (See Musto 2019: 26-7). The next year, however, the carbuncles flared up with exhausting regularity and his liver took another turn for the worse. Despite his plan to finish Volume II by September 1869, which had once seemed realistic, his continuing misfortunes over the following years prevented him from ever completing the second part of his magnum opus.

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

The Search for the Definitive Version of Volume I and Le Capital
After many more interruptions and a period of intense political activity for the International Working Men’s Association, following the birth of the Paris Commune, Marx turned to work on a new edition of Capital, Volume I. Dissatisfied with the way in which he had expounded the theory of value, he spent December 1871 and January 1872 rewriting the 1867 appendix (See Musto 2018: 167-8). This led him to address again the first chapter itself, resulting in the manuscript known as ‘Additions and Changes to Capital, Volume I’ (Marx 1983: 1-55). During the revision of the 1867 edition, Marx inserted a number of additions and clarifications and also refined the structure of the entire book. Some of these changes concerned surplus value, the difference between constant capital and variable capital, and the use of machinery and technology. He also expanded the new edition from six chapters to seven books containing 25 chapters, themselves subdivided into more detailed sections. The new edition came out in 1872, with a print run of three thousand copies.

The year 1872 was a year of fundamental importance for the dissemination of Capital, since April saw the appearance of the Russian translation – the first in a long series (Musto and Amini, forthcoming 2023). Begun by German Lopatin and completed by the economist Nikolai Danielson, it was regarded by Marx as ‘masterly’ (Marx to Davidson, 28 May 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 385).

In this year, too, the publication of the French edition of Capital got under way. Entrusted to Joseph Roy, who had previously translated some of Ludwig Feuerbach’s texts, it was scheduled to appear in batches with the French publisher Maurice Lachâtre, between 1872 and 1875. Marx agreed that it would be good to bring out a ‘cheap popular edition’ (Marx to Lafargue, 18 December 1871, Marx and Engels 1989: 283). ‘I applaud your idea of publishing the translation […] in periodic instalments’, he wrote. ‘In this form the work will be more accessible to the working class and for me that consideration outweighs any other.’ Aware, however, that there was a ‘reverse side’ of the coin, he anticipated that the ‘method of analysis’ he had used would ‘make for somewhat arduous reading in the early chapters’, and that readers might ‘be put off’ when they were ‘unable to press straight on in the first place’. He did not feel he could do anything about this ‘disadvantage’, ‘other than alert and forewarn readers concerned with the truth. There is no royal road to learning and the only ones with any chance of reaching its sunlit peaks are those who do not fear exhaustion as they climb the steep upward paths” (Letter 4 in Part IV of this volume; also Marx to Lachâtre, 18 March 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 344).

In the end, Marx had to spend much more time on the translation than he had planned for the proof correction. As he wrote to Danielson, Roy had ‘often translated too literally’ and forced him to ‘rewrite whole passages in French, to make them more palatable to the French public’ (Marx to Danielson, 28 May 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 385). Earlier that month, his daughter Jenny had told Kugelmann that her father was ‘obliged to make numberless corrections’, rewriting ‘not only whole sentences but entire pages’ (Jenny Marx to Kugelmann, 3 May 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 578) – and a month later she added that the translation was so ‘imperfect’ that he had been ‘obliged to rewrite the greater part of the first chapter’ (Jenny Marx to Kugelmann, 27 June 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 582). Subsequently, Engels wrote in similar vein to Kugelmann that the French translation had proved a ‘real slog’ for Marx and that he had ‘more or less had to rewrite the whole thing from the beginning’ (Engels to Kugelmann, 1 July 1873, Marx and Engels 1989: 515).

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

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

Marx through Le Capital
Following its original appearance in German in 1867, Capital was published in its entirety in only three more editions during Marx’s lifetime. All of them came out, at least in part, in 1872: the Russian translation in the month of March, the revised second German edition – in nine parts – between Spring of that year and January 1873, and the series of 44 instalments of the French translation, from September 1872 to May 1875.

The appearance of Le Capital, translated by Joseph Roy and revised by Marx himself, had considerable importance for the diffusion of his work around the world. It was used for the translation of many extracts into various languages – the first in English and Spanish, for example – as well as for compendia such as the one put together in 1879 by the Italian anarchist Carlo Cafiero, which received Marx’s approval and achieved a wide circulation. More generally, Le Capital represented the first gateway to Marx’s work for readers in various countries. The first Italian translation – published in instalments between 1882 and 1884 and then as a book in 1886 – was made directly from the French edition, as was the translation that appeared in another Mediterranean country (Greece) in 1927. In the case of Spanish, Le Capital made it possible to bring out some partial editions and two complete translations: one in Madrid, in 1967, and one in Buenos Aires, in 1973. Since French was more widely known than German, it was thanks to this version that Marx’s critique of political economy was able to reach many countries in Latin America more rapidly. Much the same was true for Portuguese-speaking countries. In Portugal itself, Capital circulated only through the small number of copies available in French, until an abridged version appeared in Portuguese shortly before the fall of the Salazar dictatorship. In general, political activists and researchers in both Portugal and Brazil found it easier to approach Marx’s work via the French translation than in the original. The few copies that found their way into Portuguese-speaking African countries were also in that language.

Colonialism also partly shaped the mechanisms whereby Capital became available in the Arab world. While in Egypt and Iraq it was English that featured most in the spread of European culture, the French edition played a more prominent role elsewhere, especially in Algeria, which in the 1960s was a significant center for the circulation of Marxist ideas in the Maghreb, as well as in the Levant, where two full Arabic translations of Capital appeared in Syria and Lebanon, in 1956 and 1970 respectively. Moreover, between 1966 and 1970, a serialized Farsi edition was produced in exile, in the German Democratic Republic.

The great significance of Le Capital stretched to other parts of Asia. The first Vietnamese translation of Volume I, published between 1959 and 1960, was based on the Roy edition. The highly rigorous studies of Marx in Japan in the second half of the twentieth century enabled a Japanese translation of Capital to appear there in 1979, preceded by two anastatic reprints of the French edition in 1967 and 1976. As to China, a Mandarin translation first came out in 1983 – in a series of publications to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Marx’s death.

Thus, as well as being often consulted by translators around the world and checked against the fourth German edition – published by Engels in 1890 –, Le Capital has until now served as the basis for complete translations into eight languages, to which we should add numerous partial editions in various countries (Marcello Musto and Babak Amini forthcoming 2023). One hundred and fifty years since its first publication, it continues to be a source of stimulating debate among people interested in Marx’s work.

In a letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, the last general secretary of the International Working Men’s Association, Marx himself remarked that with Le Capital he had ‘consumed so much of [his] time that [he would] not again collaborate in any way on a translation’ (Marx to Sorge, 27 September 1877, Marx and Engels 1991: 276). The toil and trouble that he put into producing the best possible French version were remarkable indeed. But we can certainly say they were well rewarded.

References
1. Still unpublished, these notes are included in the IISH notebooks, Marx-Engels Papers, B 108, B 109, B 113 and B 114.
2. In early 1870 Marx’s wife told Engels that, ‘instead of looking after himself, [he had begun] to study Russian hammer and tongs, went out seldom, ate infrequently, and only showed a carbuncle under his arm when it was already very swollen and had hardened’ (Jenny Marx to Engels, 17 January 1870, Marx and Engels 1988: 551). Engels hastened to write to his friend, trying to persuade him that ‘in the interests of the Volume II’ he needed ‘a change of life-style’; otherwise, if there was ‘constant repetition of such suspensions’, he would never finish the book (Engels to Marx, 19 January 1870, Marx and Engels 1988: 408). The prediction was spot on.
3. In 1867 Marx had divided Capital, Volume I, into chapters. In 1872 these became sections, each with much more detailed subdivisions.
4. For a list of the additions and modifications in the French translation that were not included in the third and fourth German editions, see Marx 1983: 732-83.
5. The editorial work that Engels undertook after his friend’s death to prepare the unfinished parts of Capital for publication was extremely complex. The various manuscripts, drafts and fragments of volumes II and III, written between 1864 and 1881, correspond to approximately 2,350 pages of the MEGA2. Engels successfully published Volume II, in 1885, and Volume III, in 1894. However, it must be borne in mind that these two volumes emerged from the reconstruction of incomplete texts, often consisting of heterogeneous material. They were written in more than one period in time and thus include different, and sometimes contradictory, versions of Marx’s ideas.
6. See, for example, Marx to Danielson, 13 December 1881: ‘In the first instance I must first be restored to health, and in the second I want to finish off the 2nd vol. […] as soon as possible. […] I will arrange with my editor that I shall make for the 3d edition only the fewest possible alterations and additions. […] When these 1,000 copies forming the 3d edition are sold, then I may change the book in the way I should have done at present under different circumstances’ (Marx and Engels 1993: 161).
7. See the section ‘The Early Dissemination of Capital in Europe’ in Musto 2020: 77-85.

Bibliography
Cafiero, Carlo (1879), Il Capitale di Carlo Marx brevemente compendiato da Carlo Cafiero, Milan: Bignami.
Marx, Karl (1983 [1867]) Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1867 Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), vol. II/5, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, Karl (1996 [1875]) ‘Afterword to the French Edition’, in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 35: Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Moscow: Progress Publishers, p. 24.
Marx, Karl, IISH, Marx-Engels Papers, B 108, B 109, B 113 and B 114.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1987) Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 42: Letters, 1864–68, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1988) in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 43: Letters 1868–70, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1989) in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 44: Letters 1870–73, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1991) in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 45: Letters 1874–79, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1993) in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 46: Letters 1880–83, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Musto, Marcello (2018), Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International, London–New York: Bloomsbury.
Musto, Marcello (2019) “Introduction: The Unfinished Critique of Capital”, in Marcello Musto (Ed.), Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, London–New York: Routledge, pp. 1-35.
Musto, Marcello (2020) The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Musto, Marcello and Amini, Babak eds. (2023 forthcoming), The Routledge Handbook of Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Global History of Translation, Dissemination and Reception, London-New York: Routledge.

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Discussion on Book Workers Unite! (Talk)

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Reviews

Tim Hayslip, Marx and Philosophy. Review of Books

The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations, edited by Marcello Musto, consists of 22 chapters dealing with a wide variety of topics written by well-known contemporary Marxist thinkers. The reader is not confronted by a single argument, but rather with an overview of the remarkably fractious character of current Marxist scholarship. Consequently, any assessment of the book must inevitably be influenced by one’s overall assessment of Marx’s leading academic successors. In this brief review, I have chosen not to try to describe briefly all the chapters in the book, as an adequate treatment of each is impossible in the space allowed. Instead I have chosen to discuss some of its main limitations and consider a few chapters that focus on Marxism as a response to the conditions of the world.

Those with minimal prior knowledge of Marxist thought may benefit from beginning with the final chapter by the late Immanuel Wallerstein who provides an overview of how Marxism’s development has been connected to geopolitical developments. Wallerstein argues that the origins of Marxism both “as an ideology and as a movement,” arose not from Marx’s own conscious efforts but after Marx’s death when “Engels assumed the heritage with panache” (Wallerstein, 378). Engels’ frequent interventions into the politics of the nascent German Social Democratic Party (SPD) consolidated Marx’s theoretical legacy and established the SPD as an important locus for debates about political strategy.

Although factions within the SPD debated whether socialism could be achieved through an electoral path or if revolutionary insurrection would be necessary, and the SPD leadership spoke of the necessity of insurrection, they did little to develop a revolutionary avant-garde. The party instead focused on “creating a powerful network of structures in the larger ‘civil society’” (Wallerstein, 379).

Wallerstein describes a lasting schism developing between the factions over the question of whether to support `their’ nation’s war efforts in World War One. This schism was later solidified by the formation of the Communist Party of Germany and the course of the Russian Revolution. Conceptually, reformist and revolutionary parties diverged over the question of how to win socialism, with social democrats focusing on growing the welfare state and renouncing any attempt to control the means of production, while the USSR transformed Marxism into an apologia for ‘actually existent socialism’. However, in practice, the Soviet leadership and Western social democrats were increasingly united by supporting state-led economic development (Wallerstein, 380-2).

Yet, radicals increasingly abandoned both of these methods that “had not ‘changed the world’, as they had promised” (Wallerstein, 388). Some radicals added gender and ecological concerns to these classical Marxist concerns. Others embraced post-modernism and rejected the idea of an authoritative theory of history, a ‘metanarrative’, in favor of theoretical pluralism.

Wallerstein (389) writes that after the dissolution of the USSR, some Marxists “began to adopt openly neo-liberal arguments, or at best post-Marxist social-democratic positions. But once again reality caught up.” Reality manifested itself in the forms of capitalist malaise, neoliberalism, and the 2008 global financial crisis. Together, these realities grew the audience for critiques of the economic status quo and revived Marxism.

In the chapter he wrote, editor Marcello Musto documents how the early, utopian socialists were responding to a similar impetus: the inequalities that persisted in the wake of the French Revolution. These early socialists hoped to transform society by championing new ideas and egalitarian principles. They felt that “equality could be the solution for all the problems of society” (Musto, 27).

Marx criticized such moralism from above, insisting on the necessity of workers’ self-emancipation. The development of nineteenth century capitalism was enabling social progress that presented workers greater opportunities for personal development and enlightenment than ever before. However, they were unable to benefit fully from the “time that the progress of science and technology makes available [because what should be free time] is in reality immediately converted into surplus-value” (Musto, 43). Communism was then and still remains necessary for workers to freely control their own lives.

Musto quotes a response Marx gave when asked about the proper policy a revolutionary government would enact to establish a socialist society. He stressed that the proper policy “at any particular moment depends, of course, wholly and entirely on the actual historical circumstances” (Musto, 31). Furthermore, as Marx says, communism ought to be conceived not as “a state of affairs to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself, [but as] the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (Musto, 35).

Since Marxists see reality itself as having contradictory elements, it should not be surprising that the various viewpoints espoused in The Marx Revival are contradictory. Readers familiar with Marx’s own writings and theories may also notice divergences from them. While this is to be expected given the historical development Wallerstein describes, a limitation of the book is that these dissonant viewpoints are not brought into conversation with one another.

The four entries for the “rate of profit” in the index are merely presented alongside one another. For those drawn to Marxism by Marx’s analysis of crises, the few entries concerned with Marx’s economics may itself be viewed as a shortcoming of the book, albeit a characteristic it seems to share with contemporary academic Marxism in general.

Alex Callinicos’ chapter titled ‘Class Struggle’ provides a sympathetic outline of Marx’s falling rate of profit theory. Briefly, competition forces businesses to “invest increasingly heavily in means of production” resulting in its growth relative surplus value (profit). Despite the tendency for return on investment to fall, Marx disagreed with David Ricardo’s denial of the possibility of wages and prices rising simultaneously. If an economy grows quickly enough, increasing real wages are consistent with rising inequality (Callinicos, 97). Thus, the distribution of income between wages and profits is not the root cause of falling profitability. Instead, faced with falling returns of their investments or even bankruptcy, capitalists are strongly incentivized to economize on all costs, including wages. In a related vein, Seongjin Jeong’s ‘Globalization’ describes how the development of the world market has sped economic growth and constituted “a powerful countervailing force to the crisis tendency of the falling rate of profit” (Jeong, 297).

The remaining two references for the rate of profit in the book appear in Michael Kratke’s chapter titled ‘Capitalism’. The first mention repeats Jeong’s assessment of the relationship between capitalism and globalization, while Kratke’s second mention shows the importance Marx assigned to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the central role it would play in how capitalism “would eventually undermine itself”. However, Kratke adds that “Marx failed to establish the falling rate of profit as a law connected to technological changes” (Kratke, 21). One could say that these writers are debating but without the opportunity to address one another’s arguments.

A fifth unlisted reference to the rate of profit appears in ‘Proletariat’ written by Marcel van der Linden. He argues that since Marx describes the proletariat as the source of profit, the profitability of slave plantations was inconsistent with the labor theory of value. That profit was simply interest earned on the purchase of slaves, rather than value they had created. Marx himself “was apparently not completely convinced of his own analysis” in which slaves were categorized as an anomalous form of surplus value-producing constant capital. While neither Marx nor contemporary Marxism are without faults, I was surprised to find an interpretation that reinforces the common trope that Marx was blind to forms of exploitation and oppression aside from those faced by the working class within a book clearly intended to provide a sympathetic introduction to his ideas.

Its presence is especially regrettable when we examine a passage central to van der Linden’s argument. Marx (Capital: Volume III, Penguin, 1981, 761-62) wrote, “The confusion between ground-rent itself and the form of interest that it assumes for the purchaser of the land … cannot but lead to the most peculiar and incorrect conclusions … for the slaveowner who has paid cash for his slaves, the product of their labour simply represents the interest on the capital invested in their purchase.” Far from agreeing with the slaveowner, Marx was declaring this perspective is “peculiar and incorrect” in that it mistakes surplus value for interest. The confusingly anomalous status of laboring slaves appearing to their ‘masters’ as surplus value-creating ‘property’ while actually being super exploited people enables the production of profit without the significant exploitation of wage-earners in a capitalist framework.

Still, these limitations should not taint what is otherwise a very worthwhile book and well-rounded representation of contemporary Marxism. Musto’s main achievement as editor is in compiling a collection of contributions that demonstrate the continuing relevance of the Marxist theoretical corpus to a wide variety of topics from gender relations to nationalism and from colonialism to religion. I hope that attentive readers who notice the disagreements between the chapters are thereby spurred to deepen their investigations.

The wide-ranging contents of this collection suggests that it should serve as an excellent text for college and university students who already possess some familiarity with Marxism, as well as an introduction to some of the main themes of academic Marxism for a wider audience of activists. As clouds seem to again be gathering for a geopolitical and economic storm, the audience for Marx’s critiques will almost certainly grow, and the world may soon become haunted by The Marx Revival.

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Of Le Capital

On September 17 of 1872 came out the French translation of Marx’s ‘Capital’, to which he contributed by developing his ideas about capital accumulation and colonialism. 150 years ago, this text helps us to better understand Marx as a thinker who expressed himself unambiguously against the ravages of colonialism.

In February 1867, after more than two decades of Herculean work, Marx was finally able to give his friend Friedrich Engels the long-awaited news that the first part of his critique of political economy was finished. Thereafter, Marx travelled from London to Hamburg to deliver the manuscript of Volume I (“The Process of Production of Capital”) of his magnum opus and, in agreement with his editor Otto Meissner, it was decided that Capital would appear in three parts. Brimming with satisfaction, Marx wrote that the publication of his book was, ‘without question, the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie’.
Despite the long labour of composition before 1867, the structure of Capital would be considerably expanded over the coming years, and Volume I too continued to absorb significant energies on Marx’s part, even after its publication. One of the most evident examples of this commitment was the French translation of Capital published in 44 instalments between 1872 and 1875. This volume was not a mere translation, but a version ‘completely revised by the author’.

The Search for the Definitive Version of Volume I

After some interruptions due to his poor health, and after a period of intense political activity for the International Working Men’s Association, Marx turned to work on a new edition of Capital, Volume I, at the beginning of the 1870s. Dissatisfied with the way in which he had expounded the theory of value, he spent December 1871 and January 1872 rewriting what he had published in 1867. A reprint of Das Kapital that included the changes made by Marx came out in 1872. This year had fundamental importance for the dissemination of Capital, since it also saw the appearance of the Russian and French translations. Entrusted to Joseph Roy, who had previously translated some texts of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, it appeared in batches with the publisher Maurice Lachâtre. The first one was published 150 years ago, on September 17.

Marx agreed that it would be good to bring out a ‘cheap popular edition’. ‘I applaud your idea of publishing the translation […] in periodic instalments’, he wrote. ‘In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class and for me that consideration outweighs any other’, he argued with his publisher. Aware, however, that there was a ‘reverse side’ of the coin, he anticipated that the ‘method of analysis’ he had used would ‘make for somewhat arduous reading in the early chapters’, and that readers might ‘be put off’ when they were ‘unable to press straight on in the first place’. He did not feel he could do anything about this ‘disadvantage’, ‘other than alert and forewarn readers concerned with the truth. There is no royal road to learning and the only ones with any chance of reaching its sunlit peaks are those who do not fear exhaustion as they climb the steep upward paths”.
In the end, Marx had to spend much more time on the translation than he had initially planned for the proof correction. As he wrote to the Russian economist Nikolai Danielson, Roy had ‘often translated too literally’ and forced him to ‘rewrite whole passages in French, to make them more palatable to the French public’. Earlier that month, his daughter Jenny had told family friend Ludwig Kugelmann that her father was ‘obliged to make numberless corrections’, rewriting ‘not only whole sentences but entire pages’. Subsequently, Engels wrote in similar vein to Kugelmann that the French translation had proved a ‘real slog’ for Marx and that he had ‘more or less had to rewrite the whole thing from the beginning’.

In revising the translation, moreover, Marx decided to introduce some additions and modifications. In the postscript to Le Capital, he did not hesitate to attach to it ‘a scientific value independent of the original’ and stated that the new version ‘should be consulted even by readers familiar with German’. The most interesting point, especially for its political value, concerns the historical tendency of capitalist production. If in the previous edition of Capital Marx had written that ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those less developed, the image of its own future’, in the French version the words in italics were substituted with ‘to those that follow it up the industrial ladder’. This clarification limited the tendency of capitalist development only to Western countries that were already industrialized.
He was now fully aware that the schema of linear progression through the ‘Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production’, which he had drawn in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), was inadequate for an understanding of the movement of history. He did not see historical development in terms of unshakeable linear progress towards a predefined end. The more pronounced multilinear conception that Marx developed in his final years led him to look even more attentively at the historical specificities and unevenness of political and economic development in different countries and social contexts. This approach certainly increased the difficulties he faced in the already bumpy course of completing the second and third volumes of Capital. In the last decade of his life, Marx undertook thorough investigations of societies outside Europe and expressed himself unambiguously against the ravages of colonialism. It is a mistake to suggest otherwise. Marx criticized thinkers who, while highlighting the destructive consequences of colonialism, used categories peculiar to the European context in their analysis of peripheral areas of the globe. He warned a number of times against those who failed to observe the necessary distinctions between phenomena, and especially after his theoretical advances in the 1870s he was highly wary of transferring interpretive categories across completely different historical or geographical fields. All this is clearer thanks to Le Capital.

In a letter of 1878, in which Marx weighed the positive and negative sides of the French edition, he wrote to Danielson that it contained ‘many important changes and additions’, but that he had ‘also sometimes been obliged to simplify the matter’. Engels was of this opinion and did not include all the changes made by Marx in the fourth German edition of Capital that he published in 1890, seven years after Marx’s death. Marx was unable to complete a final revision of Capital, Volume I, that included the improvements and additions he intended to improve his book. In fact, neither the French edition of 1872-75, nor the third German edition – that came out in 1881 –, can be considered the definitive version that Marx would have liked it to be.

Marx through Le Capital

Le Capital had considerable importance for the diffusion of Marx’s work around the world. It was used for the translation of many extracts into various languages – the first in the English language, for example. More generally, Le Capital represented the first gateway to Marx’s work for readers in various countries (the first Italian and Greek translation were made from the French edition). Since French was more widely known than German, it was thanks to this version that Marx’s critique of political economy was able to reach Spain and many countries in Hispanic America more rapidly. Much the same was true for Portuguese-speaking countries.

Colonialism also partly shaped the mechanisms whereby Capital became available in the Arab world. The French edition played a prominent role in Algeria, which in the 1960s was a significant center for facilitating the circulation of Marxist ideas in “non-aligned” countries. The significance of Le Capital stretched also to Asia, as demonstrated by the fact that the first Vietnamese translation of Volume I (1959-60), was conducted on the French edition.
One hundred and fifty years since its first publication, Le Capital continues to be a source of stimulating debate among scholars and activists interested in Marx’s critique of capitalism. It has had a significant circulation, and the additions and changes made by Marx, during the revision of its translation, contributed to the anti-colonial and universal dimension of Capital that is becoming widely recognized nowadays thanks to some of the newest and most insightful contributions in Marx studies.

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When Marx Translated Capital

Today marks 150 years since the first French edition of Capital. This wasn’t just a translation but a “completely revised” work — showing how Karl Marx’s research continually renewed his critical perspective on capitalist development.

In February 1867, after more than two decades of herculean work, Karl Marx told his friend Friedrich Engels that the first part of his long-awaited critique of political economy was finally complete. Marx travelled from London to Hamburg to deliver the manuscript of Volume I (“The Process of Production of Capital”) of his magnum opus and, in agreement with his editor, Otto Meissner, it was decided that Capital would appear in three parts. Brimming with satisfaction, Marx wrote that the publication of his book was, “without question, the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie.”

Despite the long labor of composition before 1867, the structure of Capital would be considerably expanded over the coming years, and Volume I itself continued to absorb significant energies on Marx’s part, even after its publication. One of the most evident examples of this commitment was the French translation of Capital, published in forty-four installments between 1872 and 1875. This volume was not a mere translation but a version “completely revised by the author” in which Marx deepened the section on the process of capital accumulation and better developed his ideas about the distinction between the “concentration” and “centralization” of capital.

Seeking the Definitive Version

After interruptions due to poor health — and after a period of intense political activity for the International Working Men’s Association — Marx turned to work on a new edition of Capital, Volume I, at the beginning of the 1870s. Dissatisfied with how he had expounded the theory of value, he spent December 1871 and January 1872 rewriting what he had published in 1867. A reprint of Das Kapital in German that included the changes made by Marx came out in 1872. This was a key year for the dissemination of Capital, since it also saw the appearance of the Russian and French translations. Entrusted to Joseph Roy, who had previously translated some texts of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, the latter appeared in batches with the publisher Maurice Lachâtre. The first one was published 150 years ago, on September 17, 1872.

Marx agreed that it would be good to bring out a “cheap popular edition.” “I applaud your idea of publishing the translation . . . in periodic installments,” he wrote. “In this form, the book will be more accessible to the working class, and for me that consideration outweighs any other,” he argued with his publisher. Aware, however, that there was a “reverse side” of the coin, he anticipated that the “method of analysis” he had used would “make for somewhat arduous reading in the early chapters,” and that readers might “be put off” when they were “unable to press straight on in the first place.” He did not feel he could do anything about this “disadvantage,” other than alert and forewarn “readers concerned with the truth.” As Marx wrote in a well-known sentence of the preface to the French edition of Capital, “There is no royal road to learning and the only ones with any chance of reaching its sunlit peaks are those who do not fear exhaustion as they climb the steep upward paths.”

In the end, Marx had to spend much more time on the translation than he had initially planned for the proof correction. As he wrote to the Russian economist Nikolai Danielson, Roy had “often translated too literally,” forcing Marx himself to “rewrite whole passages in French, to make them more palatable to the French public.” Earlier that month, his daughter Jenny had told family friend Ludwig Kugelmann that her father was “obliged to make numberless corrections,” rewriting “not only whole sentences but entire pages.” Subsequently, Engels wrote to Kugelmann in a similar vein that the French translation had proved a “real slog” for Marx and that he “more or less had to rewrite the whole thing from the beginning.”

In revising the translation, moreover, Marx decided to introduce some additions and modifications. In the postscript to Le Capital, he did not hesitate to attach to it “a scientific value independent of the original” and stated that the new version “should be consulted even by readers familiar with German.” The most interesting point, especially for its political value, concerns the historical tendency of capitalist production. If in the previous edition of Capital, Volume I, Marx had written that “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those less developed, the image of its own future,” in the French version, the words in italics were substituted with “to those that follow it up the industrial ladder.” This clarification limited the tendency of capitalist development only to Western countries that were already industrialized.

Following a more in-depth study of history, Marx was now fully aware that the schema of linear progression through the “Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production,” which he had drawn in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in 1859, was inadequate for an understanding of the movement of history, and that it was indeed advisable to steer clear of any philosophy of history. He did not see historical development in terms of unshakable linear progress toward a predefined end. The more pronounced multilinear conception that Marx developed in his final years led him to look even more attentively at the historical specificities and unevenness of political and economic development in different countries and social contexts. This approach certainly increased the difficulties he faced in the already bumpy course of completing the second and third volumes of Capital.

In the last decade of his life, Marx undertook thorough investigations of societies outside Europe and expressed himself unambiguously against the ravages of colonialism. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise, and to attribute him a Eurocentric view of societal development. Marx criticized thinkers who, while highlighting the destructive consequences of colonialism, used categories peculiar to the European context in their analyses of peripheral areas of the globe. He repeatedly warned against those who failed to observe the necessary distinctions between phenomena, and — especially after his theoretical advances in the 1870s — he was highly wary of transferring interpretive categories across completely different historical or geographical fields. All this is clearer thanks to Le Capital.

In 1878, in a letter in which Marx weighed the positive and negative sides of the French edition, he wrote to Danielson that it contained “many important changes and additions,” but that he had “also sometimes been obliged — principally in the first chapter — to simplify the matter.” Later, Engels thought that these additions were simplifications not worth reproducing, and he did not include all the changes made by Marx to Le Capital in the fourth German edition of Capital, published in 1890, seven years after Marx’s death. Marx was unable to complete a final revision of Capital, Volume I. In fact, neither the French edition of 1872–75 nor the third German edition issued in 1881 can be considered the definitive version that Marx would have liked it to be.

Marx Through Le Capital

Le Capital had considerable importance for the diffusion of Marx’s work around the world. It was used for the translation of many extracts into various languages — the first in the English language, published in 1883, for example. More generally, Le Capital represented the first gateway to Marx’s work for readers in various countries. The first Italian translation — published between 1882 and 1884 — was made directly from the French edition. In the case of Spanish, Le Capital made it possible to bring out some partial editions and two complete translations: one in Madrid, in 1967, and one in Buenos Aires, in 1973. Since French was more widely known than German, it was thanks to this version that Marx’s critique of political economy was able to reach many countries in Hispanic America more rapidly. Much the same was true for Portuguese-speaking countries. In Portugal itself, Capital circulated only through the small number of copies available in French until an abridged version appeared in Portuguese, shortly before the fall of the Salazarist dictatorship in 1974. In general, political activists and researchers in both Portugal and Brazil found it easier to approach Marx’s work via the French translation than in the original. The few copies that found their way into Portuguese-speaking African countries were also in that language.

Colonialism also partly shaped the mechanisms whereby Capital became available in the Arab world. While in Egypt and Iraq it was English that featured most in the spread of European culture, the French edition played a more prominent role elsewhere, especially in Algeria, which, in the 1960s, was a significant center for facilitating the circulation of Marxist ideas in “non-aligned” countries. The significance of Le Capital stretched also to Asia, as demonstrated by the fact that the first Vietnamese translation of Volume I, published between 1959 and 1960, was based on the French edition.

Thus, as well as being often consulted by translators around the world and checked against the 1890 edition published by Engels, which became the standard version of Das Kapital, the French translation has served as the basis for complete translations of Capital into seven languages. One hundred and fifty years since its first publication, it continues to be a source of stimulating debate among scholars and activists interested in Marx’s critique of capitalism.

In a letter to his longtime comrade Friedrich Adolph Sorge, Marx remarked that with Le Capital, he had “consumed so much of [his] time that [he would] not again collaborate in any way on a translation.” That is exactly what happened. The toil and trouble that he put into producing the best possible French version were remarkable indeed. But we can say they were well rewarded. Le Capital has had a significant circulation, and the additions and changes made by Marx during the revision of its translation contributed to the anti-colonial and universal dimension of Capital that is becoming widely recognized nowadays, thanks to some of the newest and most insightful contributions in Marx studies.

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Karl Marx’s Final Years – with Mitch Jeserich (Interview)

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The end of the Italian government explained by Karl Marx

The government of national unity led by “technician” Mario Draghi has imploded due to political divisions that the former president of the European Central Bank could no longer contain.

Few know that, among the many topics to which he devoted his interest, Marx also dealt with the critique of the so-called ‘technical government’. As a contributor to the New York Tribune, one of the widest circulation dailies of his time, Marx observed the political and institutional developments that led to one of the first technical governments in history: the Earl of Aberdeen cabinet that lasted from December 1852 to January 1855.
Marx’s reports stood out for their perceptiveness and sarcasm. The Times celebrated the events that occurred in 1852 as a sign that Britain was at the beginning of a time ‘in which party spirit is to fly from the earth, and genius, experience, industry and patriotism are to be the sole qualifications for office’. The London-based newspaper called on ‘men of every class of opinion’ to rally behind the new government because ‘its principles command universal assent and support’. Similar arguments were used in February 2021, when Mario Draghi, the former President of the European Central Bank, became Prime Minister of Italy.

In the 1853 article A Superannuanted Administration: Prospect of the Coalition Ministry, Marx had scoffed at the viewpoint of The Times. What the major British newspaper found so modern and enthralling was for him sheer farce. When The Times announced ‘a ministry composed entirely of new, young and promising characters’, Marx mused that ‘the world will certainly be not a little puzzled to learn that the new era in the history of Great Britain is to be inaugurated by all but used-up octogenarians’. Alongside the judgments of individuals there were others, of greater interest, concerning their policies: ‘We are promised the total disappearance of party warfare, nay even of parties themselves’, Marx noted. ‘What is the meaning of The Times?’ The question is unfortunately all too topical today, in a world where the rule of capital over labour has become as feral as it was in the middle of the nineteenth century. The separation between economics and politics, that differentiates capitalism from previous modes of production, has reached a highest point. Economics not only dominates politics, setting its agenda and shaping its decisions, but lies outside its jurisdiction and democratic control – to the point where a change of government no longer changes the directions of economic and social policy. They must be immutable.

In the last thirty years, the powers of decision-making have passed from the political to the economic sphere. Partisan policy options have been transformed into economic imperatives which disguise a highly political and reactionary project behind an ideological mask of apolitical expertise. 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, already drained of representative value by skewed electoral systems and authoritarian revisions of the relationship between executive and legislature, find their powers taken away and transferred to the ‘market’. Standard & Poor’s ratings and the Wall Street index – these mega-fetishes of contemporary society – carry incomparably more weight than the will of the people. At best political government can ‘intervene’ in the economy (sometimes, the ruling classes need to mitigate the destructive anarchy of capitalism and its violent crises), but they cannot call into question its rules and fundamental choices.

A prominent representative of this policy was former Italian Prime Minister Draghi, for 17 months leading a very broad coalition including the Democratic Party, his longtime enemy Silvio Berlusconi, the populists of the Five Star Movement and the far-right Northern League party. Behind the facade of the term ‘technical government’ – or as they say of the ‘government of the best’ or the ‘government of all the talents’ – we can make out a suspension of politics. In recent years, it has come to be argued that new elections should not be granted after a political crisis; politics should hand over the whole control to economics. In an article of April 1853, Achievements of the Ministry, Marx wrote that ‘the Coalition (“technical”) Ministry represents impotency in political power’. Governments no longer discuss which economic orientation to take. Now economic orientations bring about the birth of governments.

In recent years, in Europe the neoliberal mantra has repeated that, to restore market ‘confidence’, it was necessary to proceed rapidly down the road of ‘structural reforms’, an expression now used as a synonym for social devastation: in other words, wage cuts, attacks on workers’ rights over hiring and firing, increases in the pension age, and large-scale privatization. The new ‘technical governments’, headed by individuals with a background in some of the economic institutions most responsible for the economic crisis have gone down this path – claiming to do this ‘for the good of the country’ and ‘the well-being of future generations’. Moreover, the economic power and the mainstream media have attempted to silence anyone who has raised a discordant voice.
As of today, Draghi is no longer the Italian Prime Minister. His majority has imploded because of the too-different policies of the parties that supported him, and Italy will go to early elections on September 25. If the Left is not to disappear, it must also have the courage to propose the radical policies necessary to address the most urgent contemporary issues, starting from the ecological crisis. The last people who can carry out a program of social transformation and redistribution of the wealth are the ‘technicians’ – actually very political – like banker Mario Draghi. He will not be missed.

 

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Journalism

The Rule of “Experts” Is Destroying Democracy

Among the many topics to which Karl Marx devoted his interest, one of the less well-known is his critique of so-called “technical government” — that is, governments led by supposed “experts” not affiliated with political parties. As a contributor to the New York Tribune, one of the widest- circulation dailies of his day, Marx observed the institutional developments that led to one of the first such governments in history: the Earl of Aberdeen’s cabinet in Britain, from December 1852 to January 1855.
Marx’s reports stood out for their perceptiveness and sarcasm. The Times celebrated these events as a sign that Britain was at the beginning of a time “in which party spirit is to fly from the earth, and genius, experience, industry and patriotism are to be the sole qualifications for office.” The London- based daily called on “men of every class of opinion” to rally behind the new government because “its principles command universal assent and support.”

Similar arguments were used in February 2021, when Mario Draghi became Italy’s prime minister. The fanfare around Draghi, who had been governor of the Bank of Italy from 2006 to 2011 and president of the European Central Bank from 2011 to 2019, was akin to that of the Times in 1852. All conservative and liberal press organs, including those of the moderate left, joined in a crusade against the irresponsible political parties and in favor of the “savior” Draghi. With his resignation on Thursday, the experiment has once again come to an end.
In the 1853 article “A Superannuated Administration: Prospect of the Coalition Ministry,” Marx scoffed at the Times’ viewpoint. What the major British newspaper found so modern and enthralling was, for him, sheer farce. When The Times announced “a ministry composed entirely of new, young and promising characters,” Marx mused that
the world will certainly be not a little puzzled to learn that the new era in the history of Great Britain is to be inaugurated by all but used-up octogenarians, bureaucrats who served under almost every Administration since the close of the last century, twice dead of age and exhaustion and only resuscitated into an artificial existence.
Alongside the judgments on individuals there were others, of greater interest, concerning their policies: “We are promised the total disappearance of party warfare, nay even of parties themselves,” Marx noted. “What is the meaning of The Times?”

The question is unfortunately all too topical today, in a world where the rule of capital over labor has become as feral as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. The separation between economics and politics, which differentiates capitalism from previous modes of production, has reached a high point. Economics not only dominates politics, setting its agenda and shaping its decisions, but lies outside its jurisdiction and democratic control — to the point where a change of government no longer changes the directions of economic and social policy. They must be immutable.

Economic “Imperatives”

In the last thirty years, the powers of decision-making have passed from the political to the economic sphere. Partisan policy options have been transformed into economic imperatives that disguise a highly political and reactionary project behind an ideological mask of apolitical expertise. 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, already drained of representative value by skewed electoral systems and authoritarian revisions of the relationship between executive and legislature, find their powers taken away and transferred to the “market.” Standard & Poor’s ratings, the Wall Street index, and the bid-ask spread — these megafetishes of contemporary society — carry incomparably more weight than the will of the people. At best governments can “intervene” in the economy (sometimes, the ruling classes need to mitigate the destructive anarchy of capitalism and its violent crises), but they cannot call into question its rules and fundamental choices.

From February 2021 until his resignation last Thursday, Draghi was a prominent representative of this policy. For seventeen months he led a very broad coalition including the centrist Democratic Party, its longtime enemy Silvio Berlusconi, the populists of the Five Star Movement, and Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega. Behind the facade of the term “technical government” — or as they say, the “government of the best” — we can see a suspension of politics.
This phenomenon is not new in Italy. Since the end of the First Republic in the early 1990s, there have been numerous governments with “technical” leadership or without political party representatives. These include the government of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, previously governor of the Bank of Italy for fifteen years, from 1993 to 1994 (and subsequently elected to the office of president of Italy from 1999 to 2006); the government of Lamberto Dini, former director general of the Bank of Italy, after a long career at the International Monetary Fund, in 1995-96; and the government of Mario Monti, the former European Commissioner for Competition with previous relevant experience on the Rockefeller Group’s Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group steering committee, and as an international adviser to Goldman Sachs, from 2011 to 2013.

In recent years, it has been argued that new elections should not be granted after a political crisis; politics should hand over total control to economics. In an April 1853 article, “Achievements of the Ministry,” Marx wrote that “the Coalition [‘technical’] Ministry represents impotency in political power.” Governments no longer discuss which economic orientation to take. Now the dominant economic orientations bring about the birth of governments.
In Europe in recent years, the neoliberal mantra has been repeated that to restore market “confidence” it was necessary to proceed rapidly down the road of “structural reforms” — an expression now used as a synonym for social devastation: in other words, wage cuts, attacks on workers’ rights over hiring and firing, increases in the pension age, and large-scale privatization.
The new “technical governments,” headed by individuals with a background in some of the economic institutions most responsible for the economic crisis, have gone down this path — claiming to do this “for the good of the country” and “the well-being of future generations.” Moreover, the economic powers and the mainstream media have attempted to silence anyone who has raised a discordant voice.

Following his resignation, Draghi is no longer to be Italy’s prime minister. His majority has imploded because of the too-different policies of the parties that supported him, and Italy will go to early elections on September 25. If the Left is not to disappear, it must also have the courage to propose the radical policies necessary to address the most urgent contemporary issues, starting from the ecological crisis. The last people who could carry out a program of social transformation and redistribution of the wealth are the “technicians” — actually very political figures — like the central banker Mario Draghi. He will not be missed.

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