Tag: English

In the final years of his life, Marx suffered repeated attacks of bronchitis and other illnesses. On doctor’s orders, he spent weeks on end convalescing by the sea, forbidden to exert himself. In the past, most biographers have passed over this period of Marx’s life very briefly, treating it as barren and unproductive. They can be forgiven for doing so, they had little to go on. Marx published very little in these
years, and only a few of his letters were known.
This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. A steady stream of archive material is becoming available with the regular appearance of new volumes of Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). This is a massive project to publish an “historical-critical” edition of all Marx and Engels’ writings in their original languages, including not only their published works, but also all their letters, drafts and notes (with all their variations, crossings out, corrections, etc.) – indeed, everything they
wrote, just as they wrote it.
This has been a very long time coming, some of this material dates back to the 1830s. The first attempt at such a publication was made soon after the Russian Revolution, by David Riazanov, the great Marx scholar and founder of the MarxEngels Institute in Moscow. He was removed from the project in 1931 (and he was
executed after a brief show trial in 1938). Publication of the volumes of this first MEGA – MEGA1 – was suspended after only 12 of the projected 42 volumes had appeared. The war against the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union then intervened and the project was abandoned. It was revived in a new and expanded form by Soviet and German scholars in the 1970s. The first volume of the second MEGA –
MEGA2 – appeared in 1975. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, responsibility for the project was transferred to a group of international scholars based in Amsterdam.
114 volumes are now planned (scaled back from the original 164), 52 volumes have appeared so far.
This new material is transforming our knowledge and understanding of some important aspects of Marx and Engels’ lives and work. It has shed a flood of new light on the last two years of Marx’s life, the subject of this book. Musto has used it to produce an exceptionally well researched picture of what was previously a little known period of Marx’s work. The book was originally published in Italian in 2016.
Since then, it has been translated into seven other languages. Now, at last, it is available in a very readable English translation by Patrick Camiller.
As Musto observes, most previous intellectual biographies of Marx have focused disproportionately on his early years. Musto cover only the final two years of Marx’s life, 1881-1883. Musto goes in detail through Marx’s correspondence and his notebooks to construct a detailed picture of what Marx was reading, writing, thinking
about and doing during this period. It is a fascinating and remarkably impressive story.
In 1881, Marx was not yet the “towering figure” (77) on the left that he was later to become. His work was familiar only to small band of followers and was only just beginning to reach a wider audience. Only a few of the works by which he is now known had been published and widely circulated, most notably the Communist Manifesto and the first volume of Capital.
Finishing Capital The main task facing Marx was to complete Capital. As Musto observes, there is no definitive edition even of Volume 1 of this work. It first appeared in German in 1867 with a second revised edition in 1873. Marx oversaw and contributed many further revisions and changes to the French translation, which appeared in instalments from 1872-1875. He planned to revise the book thoroughly for a third
German edition incorporating these changes, but he was not able to complete this.
In the 1870s he was working on Volume 2, and he produced a couple of fairly full drafts, as well as more fragmentary drafts of Volume 3. In 1879, however, because of repeated illness, his doctor ordered him to shorten his working day, and he did little further work on these manuscripts. They were edited and completed for publication by Engels after Marx’s death, Volume 2 appearing in 1885, Volume 3 in
1894.
Musto sees no evidence for the widely canvassed view that Marx was unable to complete Capital because of contradictions and problems that he encountered for his views. Marx was a notoriously meticulous author, never happy to publish until he had taken account the latest ideas and developments and incorporated them into his work.
Marx was in the habit of making notes on and copying out passages from the books that he was reading. With the publication of his notes in MEGA2 , we are now getting a very detailed record of this. He studied a remarkable range of topics. In this period, he read works on political economy, Russian society, collective property systems, anthropology, recent developments in the natural sciences (particularly
chemistry and physics) and even mathematics. Some of this reading was connected with his work on Capital, some was research to further his understanding of the genesis of capitalism, and some simply to satisfy his insatiable intellectual curiosity and desire for knowledge.
He had long decided not to attempt to reply to or correct the many
misinterpretations of his views that were in circulation, but in 1880 he read and wrote extensive critical comments on Adolph Wagner’s Manual of Political Economy (1879). [1]
He also kept up to date with many areas of the natural sciences, partly to find out about developments in organic chemistry relevant to agriculture that he was writing about in Capital, Volume 2, and partly from sheer interest. This extended even to mathematics. His study of mathematics had started in connection with economics but later acquired a life of its own. He said he thought about mathematics
for “relaxation” (35). He was particularly intrigued by problems with the calculus and wrote numerous and lengthy notes on this topic. [2]
In the late 1870s, he read a number of works on anthropology. He studied with great attention Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), a pioneering work on American Indian tribal societies. He was particularly interested in the way Morgan showed that social relations change with the development of the productive forces.
He was also concerned to refute the then influential view, put forward by Henry Maine, in his Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, 1875, and others, that the nuclear family was the original building block of society, and to demonstrate that it was a product of later development. Engels later made extensive use of these notes, as he acknowledges, to write his account of the evolution of the family in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). [3]

Developments in Russia
One of the main topics that occupied Marx’s attention during this period were economic, social and political developments in Russia. Earlier in his life, Marx had regarded Russia as the main centre of reaction in Europe, but after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 it became clear that things were changing. In 1869, he taught himself to read Russian, and he began to read about developments in Russia in
detail. By the final years of his life, he had studied Russian conditions very thoroughly and was in correspondence with a number of progressive Russian social thinkers.
The theory of historical development that Marx had put forward from the time he and Engels composed the writings that make up The German Ideology (1845-6), implied that a socialist society could come about only on the basis of a highly socialised system of production, of the sort that was being created by capitalism in Britain and other Western European countries. Although capitalism increased
exploitation and misery, it also created the conditions for overcoming capitalism by transforming production from an individual to a social process. This was a fundamental aspect of Marx’s theory of history, and he held to it throughout his work.
Whether and how these ideas applied to Russia was hotly debated in this period. Some maintained that the rural communes (obshchina) that still existed among the peasantry in Russia provided a basis of common ownership that would enable it to pass directly to socialism. Others argued that Russia would first have to go through a capitalist stage. Marx was often invoked in support of this latter position.
An influential writer who did so was N. K. Mikhailovsky. In November 1877, Marx had drafted a lengthy letter in reply to an article by him in a Russian periodical.
In the end Marx did not send this letter, and it came to light only after his death. In it, Marx denied that he had put forward a universal theory of history, and insisted that he never claimed that a capitalist phase of historical development was inevitable. He accused Mikhailovsky of transforming,

my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed, in order to eventually attain this economic formation which, with a tremendous leap of the productive forces of social labour, assures the most integral development of every individual producer. [4]

The issue was raised again in 1881 when he received a letter from Vera Zasulich, a socialist activist, asking him to set out his views on whether the rural commune in Russia could provide the basis for socialism. He drew on the letter to Mikhailovich that he had drafted in composing his response. This occupied him for the best part of a month and went through four full drafts, before the final version was sent off at
beginning of March.
Marx again insisted that his view that a stage of capitalist private property was inevitable applied only to Western Europe. Other paths were possible elsewhere. To understand real historical transformations, Marx insisted, it is essential to study individual phenomena separately. There is no “all-purpose formula of a general historico-philosophical theory”. [5]
Some have seized on Marx’s comments to argue that Marx entirely altered his views about the transition to socialism as a result of his studies of Russia in his final years. Musto sees no evidence of that. “The drafts of Marx’s letter to Zasulich show no glimpse of the dramatic break with his former positions that some scholars have
detected.” (69)
Although Marx denies that he ever suggested that all societies must inevitably pass through a capitalist stage, he did believe that socialism could be based only on highly socialised forces of production. He didn’t rule out the possibility that Russia could make a transition to socialism without going through a capitalist stage, but he did not positively endorse this view. And he disassociated himself from those, like Bakunin and Herzen, who did. Part of his hesitancy in responding to Zasulich was due to the care he took in expressing his views with precision. In particular, he argued, since Russia was,

Contemporary with a higher culture; it is linked to a world market dominatedby capitalist production. By appropriating the positive results of this mode of production, it is thus in a position to develop and transform the still archaic form of its rural commune, instead of destroying it. [6]

Just as Russia did not have “to pass through a long incubation period in the engineering industry … in order to utilize machines, steam engines, railways, etc.” – so it might be possible to introduce immediately “the entire mechanism of exchange … which it took the West centuries to devise” (67-8). Nevertheless, the rural commune was an archaic form, very different from socialism as he conceived of it,
and Marx remained sceptical that it could provide a basis for socialist development on its own. He returned to these questions in the Preface to the Second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto written jointly with Engels in 1882. Again, he maintained that socialist transformation of the obshchina was possible, but that would depend on favourable historical conditions. He remained doubtful that it could simply be adapted as a basis for socialism. Russia would be able to avoid a capitalist stage before it could create a socialist society only,

If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development. [7]

Marx and Engels
The joint authorship of this Preface by Marx and Engels is a clear indication of their agreement on these questions. Musto, however, insists on emphasising their differences. He continually contrasts the “flexibility” of Marx’s thinking, with Engels’ “overly schematic” views (27). Engels is dismissed as a precursor of “Second International” thinking that “produced a kind of fatalistic passivity, which … weakened the social and political action of the proletariat”. (32) Marx, by contrast, “rejected the siren calls of a one-way historicism and preserved his own complex, flexible, and variegated conception.” (32)
All this has a comfortingly warm and fuzzy feel about it, but Marx’s importance as a thinker is not like this. It lies in his ability to comprehend particular conditions within the structure of a quite specific and definite over-arching theory.
Marx’s “life purpose”, we are told, was “to provide the worker’s movement with the theoretical basis to destroy capitalism” (11).
The idea that Marx was champing to be at the barricades misrepresents
Marx’s character as it is revealed here. What comes out so strikingly from the picture that Musto draws is that Marx was driven, not so much by a restless activism, as by an insatiable intellectual curiosity and a desire for understanding and truth, often simply for its own sake. This is repeatedly demonstrated by the story that Musto tells,
but when he comes to summarise Marx’s attitudes in general terms, particularly in contrast to Engels, he tends to forget this and resort to platitudes. His asides about Engels constitute an unfortunate descent into caricature and stereotyping. His denigration of Engels is unwarranted and seems designed mainly to praise Marx by
comparison. It does nothing to enhance Musto’s picture of Marx and is the weakest aspect of the book. As my mother used to tell me, you can’t build yourself up by belittling your brother, and the same principle applies here.

Life and death
In the final chapter, Musto turns his attention increasingly to the domestic circumstances of Marx’s life. By 1881, Marx and his household – his wife Jenny, his youngest daughter Eleanor and their long-term servant Helene Demuth, together with three dogs – had moved from a spacious house at 1 Maitland Park Road in the
Chalk Farm area of North London into a more modest terraced house further along the same road, 41 Maitland Park Road (both have now been demolished). The house was full of books. When he was younger and poorer, Marx had relied on the British Museum Library, which was within walking distance of his homes. In his later years, he began to acquire books of his own in many languages, often donated by
admirers. Engels had by then retired from his job in Manchester and moved to an altogether grander house at 122 Regent’s Park Road, facing Primrose Hill, a 15 minute walk away. They saw each other regularly and corresponded frequently when either of them was out of London. His, wife, Jenny, was suffering from cancer of the liver. Her condition worsened in the summer of 1881, and she died in December, leaving Marx bereft.
They had been together for almost 40 years. Marx’s condition worsened. His doctor advised longer and more frequent visits to the coast to benefit from the sea air. He stayed for several weeks in Ventnor in the Isle of Wight. Then a trip further south for warmth and sun was recommended and in February 1882 he embarked on a journey to Algeria, stopping off on the way to visit his elder daughter, Jenny Longuet, and her family in Argenteuil, just outside Paris. This trip was not a success. When he got to Algeria, the weather was unseasonably cold and wet, and he suffered from a lack of
intellectual stimulation. After ten weeks he cut short his stay, and moved to Monaco on the French Riviera, and then back to England, again via Argenteuil.
He was staying again in Ventnor when he received news that his eldest
daughter, Jenny, had died of cancer. Marx was distraught. He returned to London. In the final months of his life, he was looked after by Eleanor, his youngest daughter, and their servant, Helene Demuth. He died peacefully sitting in the chair by his desk on March 24, 1883.
Musto combines a fascinating and detailed intellectual biography with an informative account of Marx’s life in his final years. His book is exceptionally well researched. In a running commentary, much of it in footnotes, he provides a detailed account of the scholarly literature in all the main European languages on the topics he is discussing. He writes in a clear and pleasing style. His book makes a major contribution to our understanding Marx’s life and work. It is highly recommended.

 

[1] Previously published as (Marx 1975).
[2] Previously published as (Marx 1983).
[3] Extended extracts from Marx’s original notes were published in (Marx 1974).
[4] MECW 24, 200. Marx and Engels works are cited from (Marx and Engels 1975),
abbreviated as MECW.
[5] MECW 24, 201.
[6] MECW 24, 362.
[7] MECW 24, 426.

References
Marx, Karl. 1974. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx: (Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock). Edited by Lawrence Krader. Assen: Van Gorcum.
Marx, Karl. 1975. “Notes on Adolph Wagner (1879-80).” In Texts on Method, 179– 219. Oxford: Blackwell.
Marx, Karl. 1983. Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx. London : New York: New Park Publications.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1975. Collected Works [MECW]. 50 vols. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marcello Musto is a Professor in Sociology at York University at Canada and in the book Rethinking Alternatives with Marx has revealed the resilience, power of Marxist ideas in the contemporary contexts of culture, gender equality, migrant rights and protection of the environment, the brilliant book illustrates the culture and society with Marxist viewpoints. The author has put together vari¬ous prestigious scholars, activists who guide us through the frontiers of the struggle for our times, from gender and race to migration and the climate crisis which suggests that Marx’s analyses are arguably resonating even more strongly today than they did in his own time. Marcus Musto has made the book by the efficient innovative perspectives on Marx’s points of view about ecology, migration, gender, the capitalist mode of production, the labour movement, globalization, social relations and the contours of a possible socialist alternative by delving deeper into a new critical discussion of some of the classical themes of Marx’s thought.
The book consists of four parts and each part is segmented into different chapters; the first part is about capitalism, gender and social relations which have been including four chapters that reflect about factory and family as spaces of capital, followed by Marx on Gender, Race and Social Reproduction With the third chapter which is about capital as a social relation form analysis and class struggle and the last chapter in this segment is about commodity and post-modern spectacle.
But in Marx, and in Hegel for that matter, the term functioned differently, less prominently culturally, but more as regards the family, economy and the relationship of both to nature. Rethinking Marx’s treatment of ‘gender’ relations confronts us with a paradox.
On one side, Marx’s approach to ‘gender’, as discussed in his major works, is at best wanting. Whether by gender we refer to male-female relations and the rules by which they are constructed or to the history and origins of the sexual division of labour and patriarchal domination in capital¬ism, in vain we turn to Marx for an analysis of these issues. New forms of governance that depend on collective networks and solidarity rather than profit-oriented market forces and hierarchical command structures.
The second part of this book which is about the environmental crisis and the struggle for nature divulges into three chapters which highlight Primitive Accumulation as the cause of economic and ecological disaster with Marx and the Environmental Catastrophe, with the seventh chapter ‘Finding a Way Out of the Anthropocene: The Theory of “Radical Needs” and the Ecological Transition’ by enlightening the readers in sum, takes capitalism at its word, and demand that our vital and qualitative needs be at last fulfilled.
The third part focuses on the most prominent issue of Migration, Labour and Globalization with three chapters like ‘Accumulation and Its Discontents: Migration and Nativism in Marx’s Capital and Late Manuscripts’ followed by ‘Marx on Migration and the Industrial Reserve Army: Not to Be Misused!’ and the last chapter ‘Globalization, Migrant Labour, and Capitalism: Past and Present’; the chapters deal with the most pertinent issues of migration, Migrant labour has been a feature of global capitalism since the latter’s, beginning. Capitalism needed labour from colonies, semi-colonies, and other parts of the world. Thus, while Atlantic slavery was supplying labour across the ocean, there was an increase in the mobility of labour in post manumission age, when capital became global and global trade became a defining feature of global capitalism.
Communism as a Free Association is the last part of the book which consists of three chapters where the first chapter is the Experience of the Paris Commune and Marx’s Reflections on Communism by the author following Communism as Probability and Contingency and the last chapter of the book which is about Uniting Communism and Liberalism: An Unsolvable Task or a Most Urgent Necessity? This details that humanity finds itself confronted with the task of con-sciously, deliberately and very rapidly revolutionizing its metabolic process and social relationship with nature, between this heaven and earth, its task is to face the plurality of mixed communist and liberal forms of regulating the complex relations of a multiplicity of actors and to shape these forms by solidarity.
The book by Marcello Musto who is an accomplished scholar has devoted his academic career to reviving the understanding of Marx’s ideas and their applications to the contemporary world, driven and passionate about the significance of Marx’s contributions in politics, sociology, the critique of political economy and philosophy, Musto has delivered seven books within the last 3 years. Each of them focuses on a different aspect of Marx’s work and highlights his relevance for finding alternative solutions to the most pressing current issues of capitalism and how it influences culture and society. Furthermore, the book is useful for researchers, academicians in understanding more about the role of capitalist culture in different dimensions of society.

Dr. Nupur Pattanaik
Central University of Odisha, India

In The Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello Musto provides an affectionate and careful journey through the final two years of Marx’s life. These years are, as Musto notes (p. 5), frequently neglected in full biographies. Marx prepared almost nothing for publication during these years—only a short (but important) preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. This was due, partly, to illness. He spent almost all of 1882 traveling—to the Isle of Wight, Algeria, and various spas in France and Switzerland—in search of relief from bronchitis and pleurisy. Moreover, these years were dominated by the deaths of his two Jennys: his wife in December of 1881, and his eldest daughter in the first days of 1883.
Despite this, Musto treats these years as intellectually fruitful. Because he was not publishing, reconstructing Marx’s intellectual life entails reporting on his reading notes. These are voluminous, even in these years of illness and grief, and the recitation of their contents can be a bit tedious. Despite Musto’s effort to inject some theoretical interest, the massive “annotated year‐by‐year timeline of world events”—from 91 BCE to the Treaty of Westphalia—that Marx produced late in 1881 (pp. 99–102) seems to have been a way of literally marking time as his wife succumbed to liver cancer.
However, Marx was also regularly corresponding with friends, family members, and activists in the international socialist movement, and his letters are a richer source of insight into theoretical and political questions. The Paris Commune of 1871 had dwarfed all the earlier experiments with communist colonies and cooperative factories. The workers had asserted their right to one of the great cities of Europe and governed it for two months. The destruction of the Commune, however, demonstrated a new that the city was dependent upon the countryside, and that a militant urban proletariat was helpless without the support of a revolutionary peasantry.
Marx, therefore, extended his research “to new areas” (p. 25), oriented above all by the possibility and prospects of social revolution in the countryside. This dovetailed with the development of revolutionary socialism in Russia, and with the question of whether or how the Russian peasant commune might play into this development. The most substantial chapter of Musto’s story treats Marx’s involvement with the Russian revolutionary movement and the questions about Russian social development that occupied populists and socialists.
At the same time, Marx was also involved in the creation and growth of working‐class political parties in France (pp. 44–48, 77–80), England (pp. 82–85), and Germany. (Musto’s book does not devote sustained attention to German Social Democracy. Engels corresponded much more actively than Marx with August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky, and this explains, even if it does not fully justify, this lacuna.) Musto repeatedly claims that Marx’s work in these years stands in sharp contrast with the “dogmatic, economistic, and Eurocentric” picture of Marx produced by the Marxist parties of the Second and Third Internationals (p. 4). His concluding thoughts on Marx are entitled, “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist” (pp. 118–21). Engels claimed that Marx declared this to his son‐in‐law Paul Lafargue, one of the chief propagators of Marx’s ideas in the French Parti Ouvrier. Musto’s book, however, convinces me that Marx
was very much a Marxist—not because he was actually dogmatic, economistic, and Eurocentric, nor because he actually agreed with the Lafargue and Guesde, but because Marx’s late research and correspondence presaged the debates and questions that would be the center of Marxist thought right up through 1917 and beyond. Even if this was not Musto’s intention, it is a valuable contribution.

The concept of alienation is probably one of the most slippery and controversial in Marxian theory. Since the publication of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in 1932, Marxist intellectuals all over the world have tried to fathom this theoretical category from different perspectives without reaching any consensus about its role in Marx’s thought. In this regard, its labelling as an “individual” or “subjective” condition by authors such as Martin Heidegger, Erich Fromm and the French existentialists has led to a historical misunderstanding of the phenomenon and its implications, dismissing its comprehension as an objective social issue that embodies the very nature of the conflict between capital and labour. Under these precepts, Marcello Musto outlines a concise but rigorous argumentation to introduce a selection of Karl Marx’s writings on alienation, demonstrating that the concept exceeds Marx’s problematisation in the Manuscripts of 1844 and constitutes a key element in later works such as Grundrisse and Capital.
Starting with a short review of the history of the concept, Musto
accounts for how the conceptualisation of alienation has changed
over the centuries. From Hegel’s adoption of the term to Lukács’s elaborations on reification, alienation has been used interchangeably along with the concept of “estrangement” to denote the phenomenon
through which the products of labour confront labour itself “as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (Marx, quoted in Musto 2021: 6). In this sense, Musto notes the contrast between Hegel’s conception of alienation as an ontological manifestation of labour and Marx’s understanding of it as a historically situated condition that affects workers in the context of capitalist society. These distinctions are paramount to differentiate later conceptualisations made by thinkers related to the Frankfurt School and French existentialism, some of whom conceived of alienation as a subjective condition of the human consciousness, overlooking thus the social foundations and implications of the phenomenon. According to Musto, these misunderstandings around the concept were reinforced by theoretical systematisations such as the so-called “epistemological break” proposed by Socialism and Democracy, 2022Althusser, which establishes a separation between Marx’s Early Works (attributed to a “Young Marx”) and his Later Works (related to a “Mature Marx”). The dissemination of Marxian theory as a totality comprised the association of his early writings with a more philosophical approach that kept a strong filiation with Hegelianism, compared to the political economy perspective that characterised his later reflections including Capital. For Musto, these erroneous categorisations of Marx’s work and its continuity downplayed the theory of alienation, now confined to an early and more philosophical stage of a “young Hegelian Marx who had not yet developed Marxism” (Fetscher, quoted in Musto 2021: 17).
The misconceptions around the concept were reinforced after its
institutionalisation by American sociology, states Musto, which “saw
alienation as a problem linked to the system of industrial production,
whether capitalist or socialist, and mainly affecting human consciousness” (27). The phenomenon was thus related to the individual’s maladjustment to social norms, a conception that led to the “theoretical impoverishment” of the concept due to its scientization and neutralisation under academic research specialisations. According to Musto, these reductive conceptions of Marx’s theory of alienation ignore the complex character of the phenomenon as a social and intellectual condition that cannot be detached from the objective determinations of the opposition between capital and living labour-power. In relation to this, Musto shows that Marx, in the Grundrisse and in Capital vol. 1, treats alienation as an objective condition. In the Grundrisse, Marx refers to the process in which the exchange of labour power and products occurs as something “alien and objective” to the workers, involving their subordination to relations that exist independently of them.
This argument probably comprises the first outlining of the notion of
“commodity fetishism”, a process in which exchange value entails
“the social connection between persons [that] is transformed into a
social relation between things” (Marx, quoted in Musto 2021: 30).
Musto thus shows that the theory of alienation cannot be detached
from Marx’s account of commodity fetishism.
The concept of fetishism plays a crucial role in Musto’s argumentation. As Musto points out, it does not seem a coincidence that Lukács’s
concept of reification was coined based on Capital rather than the Manuscripts (which were not yet published when Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness), even though reification has been historically
related to the phenomenon of alienation. Accordingly, Musto contends
that the elaborations by Marx on commodity fetishism in the first
chapter of Capital comprise “one of the best accounts of alienation”
2 Socialism and Democracy(33). In this sense, he argues that the displacement of the relation between producers to a relation between things is part of the same process through which the products of labour appear as something external (or “alien”) and independent to their producers. Therefore, what Lukács called reification presented alienation from the perspective of human relations, while the concept of fetishism addressed it in relation to commodities. In other terms, Marx’s elaborations on the processes of commodification are not necessarily separated from his reflections regarding the alien character of the products of labour, as “commodity fetishism did not replace alienation but was only one aspect of it” (34).
This last remark is probably one of the most interesting considerations in Musto’s introduction, as it demonstrates not only how some
of Marx’s categories have been distorted throughout history but also
that his epistemological conceptions are even more consistent than
some intellectuals have affirmed. Regarding this, the distinction
between a Marx more focused on “subjective issues” in his earlier
works, compared to the “materialistic” thinker that addressed the
objective nature of exploitation and the formation of capital in his
later works, leads to conceiving of his theory as entailing an epistemological excision between the subjective and the objective. However, some of the extracts from Grundrisse presented by Musto are clear about how Marx problematised the separation between the objective and subjective conditions in relation to living labour in the context of capitalist production. In this context, the alienation of the objective conditions of living labour capacity appears as a phenomenon determined by both objective and subjective factors, as “[t]he objective conditions of labour attain a subjective existence vis-à-vis living labour capacity” (Marx, quoted in Musto 2021: 30). Hence, the subjective and the objective are not two separate spheres in Marx’s epistemological perspective but two sides of the same coin. Although the author does not address in depth these epistemological aspects, his remarks throughout this book could influence significantly future philosophical discussions related to the supposed binarism between subjectivity and objectivity within the framework of Marxist theory and even to new ontological considerations regarding the dialectic between matter and idea.
In closing, Musto’s book constitutes a ground-breaking – and
necessary – vindication of the comprehensive character of Marx’s
thought and, particularly, of the concept of alienation as an objective
social phenomenon manifested in the historical reality of production.
While the main attraction for readers could be Marx’s writings,
Musto’s introduction reflects a fundamental commitment to delve
Book Review 3into those texts from a critical and renewed perspective. In this way, his compilation and analysis offer not only a rigorous examination but also a political gesture that illuminates the urgency of revisiting those theoretical categories that will enable us to identify the obstacles to constructing a postcapitalist society.

Few of the numerous biographies of Marx, written both before and after the ‘New Revival’, betray any genuine concern for the tireless intellectual pursuits of his last years; instead, they turn their attention almost wholly to his earlier thoughts, which too are, more often than not, dealt in isolation – hence cut off – from his shaping life experience as a living continuum. In The Last Years of Karl Marx, 1881–1883: An Intellectual Biography Marcello Musto, determined to put to rest such uncritical intellectual prejudices, takes a firm stand against this trend. Drawing support from the huge corpus of Marx’s books, notebooks, letters, marginalia and even the comments of his adversaries, he paints the portrait of an embattled thinker, which nevertheless remains a sensitively nuanced one. At the same time, he correlates what he calls Marx’s ‘existential vicissitudes’ (p. 5) and his academic labours, in the process extending the focus from the subject’s ‘mind, thoughts and ideas’ to his ‘life, personality and character’,1 the coordinates within which the man and his works may be seen as being charted in graphic detail.

In 1859, in a defining gesture bearing on his pertinence as a political economist,2 Marx offered a clarificatory note on what characterized the nature and direction of his learning. Whether in his last years he continued to remain consistent with this specific self-clarification, the present review seeks to examine, in the light, that is, of Musto’s study.

The book opens ‘with a fateful question’ which John Swinton, walking along the beach in September, 1880, once put to Marx. Moving from topic to topic he finally asked what the ‘law of being’ is. While gazing upon the ‘roaring sea’ and the ‘restless multitude upon the beach’, and after a measured silence Marx responded, saying in a voice tempered with self-knowledge – ‘Struggle’ (p. 9)!

What this moment truly evokes is an image of the hero as he emerges in the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica. The ‘noble Poco Andante’3 section, resonating with the walk, the question and Marx’s contemplative gaze, ‘represents the apotheosis of the hero’, which gets ‘transfigured by a vast change of tempo and of instrumentation, and thundered out in all its splendour by the brass’ of ‘the Coda4 which follows it’,5 depicting Marx’s ‘Struggle’ succeeding, almost, as the culmination of his gaze. The music projects the undaunted hero, not as the one who is exalted above the struggling common soul, but as the one who ‘is free to resist myth, “to stand firm against fate,”’ holding ‘out “hope without the lie of religion”’6 and beseeches ‘the spirit of man, charged with the task of making the world as it “should be”’.7 In short, it can be claimed, the music captures Marx and his spirit. Indeed, Eroica in a sense helps unveil the purpose of the account Musto presents, which, to be precise, not only upholds the spirit of ‘late Marx’ but does, at the same time, place upon the readers a realization of the task they too by implication are ‘charged with’.

To return to Musto. He presents Marx in 1881 with his family – his wife diagnosed with cancer, daughter Jennychen in Paris, and he himself seriously ill; his friends, visitors, and his research apparatuses; a humble desk, an elaborate library, newspapers, government records, unpublished writings and the unfinished manuscripts of Capital II. Writing for self-clarification and recasting his thoughts, between end of 1879 and summer of 1880, among other things, Marx studied Maksim Kovalevsky’s Communal Landownership. His purpose was to know how the existing communal landownership and ‘possession rights’ (p. 19) in the colonies were abolished under the superimposed rule of capital with the lust to explore and plunder. The Spanish in Latin America, the British in India and the French in Algeria were but so many facets of colonial pillaging to secure economic gains while also fulfilling a ‘political aim’ (p. 21), that of eliminating resistance of the colonized by destroying their societal foundations.

Next, Musto records how Kovalevsky would introduce Marx to an American anthropologist, Lewis Morgan, whose Ancient Society led him to study anthropology between December 1880 and June 1881. His studies were later collected to form The Ethnological Notebooks. Although Musto refrains from an ‘exhaustive analysis’ (p. 6) of the Notebooks, the material provided in this book is by no means negligible. He maintains that Marx’s ‘precise theoretical-political purpose’ for studying anthropology was, first, to trace capitalism’s genesis through the ‘likely’ sequences in which the modes of production ‘succeeded one another’; and, second, explain the ‘historical foundations’ (p. 26) necessary for societal transformation.

From his anthropological studies, especially those centred round Morgan, Marx observed the following: the deduction of ‘the gens and not the family’ (p. 27) being the unit of ancient society; the identification of the beginning of ‘history as “the history of class struggle”’ (p. 28) by locating a ‘domestic class’ within the earliest monogamous family; the origin of property relations; and, the transformation of the state’s socio-cultural character from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’ (p. 31) and the relation between the state and individuals.

However, Marx was opposed to the anthropologists’ faith in an evolutionary ‘pregiven course’; instead, he stressed the reality of changes through ‘human intervention’ (p. 33), thus prioritizing the role of political struggle. As on the side, Musto points out how, ironically, in the Second International, a belief analogous to that of the anthropologists in an inevitable progression leading up to socialism, and codified with the rigidity of a sanctified doctrine and advanced in Marx’s name, undermined the role of and need for the workers’ socio-political struggle (p. 32).

Shortly afterwards, between autumn 1881 and winter 1882, Marx studied world history to fill four notebooks, later titled the Chronological Extracts (p. 100), which Musto discusses in a subsequent chapter. He prepared notes on major historical developments from the first to the end of the seventeenth century. He focused on the entangled relationship between capitalism’s progress – beginning with scientific farming, maritime laws, and modern banking8 of the thirteenth-century ‘Italian maritime republics’ (p. 101) to the emergence of the world market – and the birth of the modern states as distinct from those of antiquity (p. 100).

In view of these two diverse studies which the book presents – the colonial and anthropological studies contra the Chronological Extracts – it seems fairly possible to draw the line of inquiry and method adopted by Marx. His inquiry begins with how capitalism instituted ‘categories that are historically specific to that social form’ – viz. private property, the atomistic patriarchal family and wage labour – by continually replacing the ‘commune system of living’, be it in the colonies or in the lands of its provenance. Further, through this inquiry, he seeks to establish even more concretely how capital, through a dynamism of these very historically specific categories, establishes a ‘form of domination, of heteronomy’ by implying history, understood as a natural historico-political ‘marche generale’, to be a ‘universal category of human social life’. Such a reconstruction remains very much in sync with his theory which regards history’s universality in social life, comprehended as ‘an immanently driven directional dynamic’ to be a ‘historically specific feature of capitalist society’ – a form of domination grounded in the ‘category of capital’.9 The upshot of all this is that this way of unraveling the historical specificities of capitalism by a composite reading of texts which runs against the grain of each other – the former condemning or opposing and the latter panegyrizing capitalism – forms a didactic dialectical alliance, which, as in early Marx, is very much there even in his later days.

By the Fall of 1881 Marx would compile the Mathematical Manuscripts. He would write ‘two short manuscripts’ on calculus as part of his study ‘on the history of differential calculus’. He attempted to demonstrate ‘the “mystical” foundation of … differential calculus’ (p. 34) and recast it by concluding how a ‘mathematically correct result is based upon an equally mathematically wrong presupposition at the very foundation  … [which] they’ – namely Newton, Liebniz, Lagrange, and d’Alembert – ‘did not know’!10 Ambitious as it may appear, the concluding statement with its contrasting features was perfectly sensible at a time when scholars used to frame their problematic under the continuing influence of the European Enlightenment tradition.11

However, his importance as a mathematician remains contested between those on one hand who dismiss him as of no significance, and on the other, those who uphold his interpretation on ‘operator calculus’.12 The upshot of the query undertaken is that, for Marx, learning a subject matter mandatorily involved a responsible critique of it, be it for self-clarifications or otherwise. Nevertheless, keeping this debate aside, Musto concludes that mathematics for Marx remained ‘a useful intellectual stimulus’ (p. 35) and a shelter during his personal crises.

Alongside this, Marx dealt with ‘socialist’ political economists. He criticized Adolph Wagner (pp. 24–25) for his purported attempt to lay bare the composition of value and its analysis independent of commodity relations, and Henry George (pp. 38–39) for his idea of creating ‘common property’ by means of a single-point tax on land.

In this context it is pertinent to note that, during Marx’s last years, advanced mathematics was applied in economics, especially by the marginalists – viz. Léon Walras, William Stanley Jevons, and Alfred Marshall. The absence of advanced mathematics in Marx’s economic writings and his mysterious silence regarding the marginalists – the presence notwithstanding of a copy of The progress of the mathematical theory of political economy, with an explanation of the principles of the theory by Jevons in his library13 – would go a long way to account for the dividing line between the economists supporting and opposing socialism.14 The problematic stands in need of a more comprehensive critical examination quite different from those available in plenty on rival economic theories: Marx contra the marginalists.

Another integral part of Marx’s intellectual constitution, to which Musto draws attention, was his role as a political activist – refusing to make predictions about the future socialist state for a socialist congress (p. 35), drawing the Electoral Programme of the Socialist Workers (p. 45), and preparing a 101-point questionnaire for the French socialist workers’ party (p. 46). Alongside this, he also scrupulously observed world historical, political, and economic events – study of the 1873 economic crash (p. 40); migration, ethnic violence, and working-class riot in San Francisco 1877 (p. 40), complications and crisis of the British administration in India (p. 42); and the ‘mass evictions’ in Ireland and criticism of the Land Law (Ireland) Act of 1881 (p. 43). Capturing Marx as an unfailingly vigilant observer and constant participant of ‘social conflicts developing at every latitude’, Musto closes the chapter by showing how he thereby evolved as a ‘citizen of the world’ (p. 48).

The second chapter, the heart of Musto’s book, deals with Marx’s critical assessment of the question of agency vis-à-vis the possibility of socialist transformation in Russia. Marx came to acknowledge peasantry as the revolutionary agent owing to the series of uprising and rabblement (byistva) in Russia, for, indeed, the two years following the 1861 Emancipation Edict’s promulgation witnessed about 1100 insurrections.15 There was also another overriding consideration: the percentage they formed (38% of total Russian population) as against only half a million industrial proletariat. This explains why he concurred with the prevailing Russian revolutionaries’ view that the Russian peasantry and not the proletariat was the potential agent of revolutionary social change.

True, Marx’s thoughts found an explosive purchase in Russia. Nevertheless, as Musto asserts, the significance in this context of Nikolai Chernsyshevky’s ‘left-wing anti-capitalist movement’ (p. 50) could not be belittled. To form an informed judgment of Russia’s socio-economic conditions, Marx taught himself Russian and read Chernyshensky carefully (p. 50).16

In view of the resulting shift in Marx’s theoretical focus Musto provides a short introductory note on Chernyshensky’s works (pp. 50–53), to which further additions are made for a more comprehensive evaluation. Chernsyshevsky in the tradition of Mikhail Lomonorov (1711–1766), Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) (p. 53), et al. firmly believed that given the vast land wealth, and the population historically growing very slowly in Russia – rendering Malthus’ theory of population infructuous17 – if the obshchina’s cooperative farming labour, driven by its common good,18 could be enhanced by fusing it with capitalist acceleration vectors (p. 50–51) – namely, the dynamic composite of technology, agronomy, innovative distribution of farming labour – then the growth in farming would set in motion unprecedented economic prosperity in Russia. Abundant land, farmed to promote enormous yield, low population, and an emancipated obshchina would set the conditions for Chernsyshevsky’s ‘scientific’ social transformation (p. 51): in short, the possibility of bypassing capitalism to attain socialism. This idea of a direct transition into socialism with the peasantry, no more to be dismissed as either ‘a sack of potatoes’19 or ‘an idle mob’ (p. 63) but as the potential revolutionary agent, opened a historical vista relatively new to Marx.

Previously, Marx had emphasized the expansion of capital being a ‘necessary pre-requisite’ (p. 54) for social change. Gleaning through his sprawling oeuvre, Musto depicts how capitalist production itself generates ‘the condition for’ emancipation of labourers (p. 56) by assimilating them into a cooperative whole under the gruelling conditions of production and establishing a ‘universality’ (p. 57) of working relations determined by socially necessary labour time. Simultaneously, the necessary ‘material premise[s]’ (p. 57) are supplied by its advanced productive forces. With the development of a political will for communism, a key component missing with the British workers (p. 49), the fetters of capitalist production can be broken by its own constitutive forces. However, Marx never codified this conviction into a teleological theory of social change.

In clarifying his views, Marx in his letter to Otecestvenniye Zapisky (1877), explained that his study of capitalism’s genesis was limited to Western Europe; it was not, unlike what Mikhailovky held, a universalist ‘historico-philosophical theory’ (p. 64) indifferent to widely divergent social conditions. Upon this view, then, capitalism was not a ‘condition precedent’ to socialism or communism; instead, societies evolving within historical parameters different from those of Europe, could, he argued, ‘develop [their] own historical foundations’ (p. 64), albeit demanding different strategies, but, ripen for a socialist revolution just as much as those arising out of class antagonism under capitalist production. It is in the context of such a broad explanatory paradigm that Musto prioritizes the theoretical insights in the drafts and the final letter to Vera Zasulich.

For a majorly agrarian Russia still at an embryonic stage of capitalism to become a privileged locus for a socialist transformation, ‘rebellion or resistance’ (p. 68) needed to be furnished with a few key vectors, which, according to Marx, were then present in Russia. They were, first, the opportunities to supplant parcel with collective labour (p. 70) provided by the obshchina with its cooperative labour process independent of ‘blood relations’ (p. 68) and organizational knowhow of the ‘artel’. Next, Russia’s coexistence with the capitalist world market would enable it to quarry the advanced forces of production to complement the cooperative labour process. Finally, a revolutionary ‘political will’ erupting in the rebellions which followed the imposition of the 1861 Edict and the newly emerging antagonistic property relations (p. 120–121) led Marx to conclude in favour of a possible socialist revolution there.

It is against the backdrop of what may be called theoretical mutation of this kind that Musto postulates a fruitful strategy of reading Marx. To start with, as he argues, Marx’s research method consists in testing previously formulated hypotheses within evolving historical conditions to try them out in order to evaluate their consistency and resolve doubts enabling the scope for opening new directions of studies. As for a general method, to be deduced from his research procedure, Musto maintains, any determination of possible historical courses should be based upon existing historical contexts and not abstract laws (p. 73) which German metaphysicians tend to champion. This explains why, as he seems to claim, through a relentless theoretical auto-critique, Marx liberated himself from the captivity of the tradition of the German Enlightenment thinkers to which he had begun by swearing allegiance.

Along with the above formulation another insight pertains to what Musto claims to be Marx’s newly developed conviction. That is, with an access to advanced productive forces, structurally similar socio-political conditions – cooperative working-relations, antagonistic class-relations and a defiant political will – within radically different modes of productions could stimulate headway into socialism. Through this insight, Musto, while highlighting Marx’s position on social transformation in Russia, simultaneously sheds light on an enlarged vision of revolution possibly breaking out in various historical conditions, extending way beyond his specific take on Russia. In doing so, he reiterates Marx’s insistence on attentively observing ‘historical specificities’ (p. 76). Unless the readers of Marx come to terms with this, any deep penetration into Marx’s unique dialectical method will continue to elude their grasp.

Notwithstanding the rich theoretical potentials the Zasulich papers possess, published in 1924, they would be routinely adduced as a standard proof of Marx’s ‘undermined capacity for work’.20 In the third chapter of his book, Musto addresses himself to the task of lifting this illegitimate burden Marx was long made to carry.

In the same chapter Musto has also brought into focus an unhappy historical concurrence: while his ideas began to spread, gaining wide recognition, (pp. 77–85) his health continued to deteriorate. Along with discussing the occasional trips made in the hope of improving his health, and the death, eventually, of his wife (pp. 94–99), Musto raises the question why Marx could never complete Capital II. In addition to his failing health, Musto advances two other contributory factors. First, Marx anticipated the upcoming industrial crisis to supply rich insights; next, he also wanted to study the changing socio-economic developments in Russia and America, analysing and tuning them to perfection before Capital II was made public (pp. 90–91).

Yet, Musto firmly maintains, the fact that Capital II and III remained incomplete should by means be made to weigh against Marx intellectually; on the contrary, he rather regards this incompleteness as testifying to the rigour of his critical method demanding a process of insistent examination and re-examination of his claims. What bears this out is that Capital I too never reached a ‘definite version’ (p. 93) as is evident from the additions and alterations he kept making in the German, the French (p. 93), and also the American edition.21 Commensurate as it is with his strategy of reading Marx, Musto asserts that any hunt for a ‘definite’ Marx would be futile since he, following his own chosen motto ‘De omnibus dubitandum’,22 never stopped pushing his interpretations to the extent possible in order to break new frontiers.

However, Musto remains silent about the analytical complexities – viz. those surrounding transformation of value, falling rate of profit, reproduction chain, or the Asiatic mode of production – which stalwarts like Achille Loria, Böhm-Bawerk, Oskar Lange, and all their epigones claim to have prevented him from completing Capital II and proceeding further.23 Following this line of thought, an assumption has been floated that those complexities had some bearing on the origin of his illness24 which, upon this view would rapidly blunt his intellectual productivity. Be this as it may, the contrasting views should not be regarded as a loss but rather as providing an opportunity for further research.

As his life drew to a close, though he was plagued by a number of debilitating infirmities, Marx’s passion for knowledge refused to grow any less. Sieving through numerous correspondences and exchanges, Musto in the final chapter chronicles those years. Mostly away from home, he was hoping to recover and get ‘down to any real work’ (p. 118), with a thorough revision, in particular, of the third German edition of Capital I being a top priority.

Unfortunately, returning to Capital remained a chimera. Nonetheless, he stayed immersed in a wide spectrum of studies and interests. They broadly encompassed, inter alia, a bewildering array of subjects: current affairs such as the ‘British invasion of Egypt’, the troublesome ‘ultra-revolutionary’ position of the French Workers’ Party (p. 119), the changing socio-economic conditions of Russia (p. 121); political and economic issues such as the condition of Arabs in French occupied Algeria (p. 109), the ‘financial blackmail’ by the Anglo-German creditors following Egypt’s debt (p. 119); and, natural and physical sciences such as the recent progress in thermodynamics, electricity and its applications, ecology, zoology, biology and physiology (pp. 116–117).

Musto has dealt in brief on Marx’s growing interests in the applications of electricity. What can be added to Musto’s account is the impact of the advances in the practical uses of electricity on production and their possible bearings on Marx’s theories. After the application of electricity in telegraph, the next big leap came in the early 1880s with the electrical motors in industries and electrification of street and building lights. The first World Electrical Congress (September, 1881) in Paris followed by the next held in Munich (1882) made clear that the production system in advanced countries would enter an altogether new phase.25 Such developments gave rise to a plethora of questions. Would these progressively qualitative changes in production not bear on Marx’s theories through changes in the organic composition of capital, the rate of profit,26 and, finally, the measurement of labour-time? Systematically to marshal the huge mass of notes he left behind demands a sensitive and conscientious grasp of the elusive intellectual design underlying what is apparently disparate. The book being a biography, albeit an intellectual one, it is not to such a task of any major systematization that Musto has addressed himself.

Nonetheless, with the vast erudition informing the book plus, of course, the moral energy such an enterprise involves, has a lot to offer. One of the cardinal merits whereby the reader stands to benefit substantially is its success in beating off the largely prevalent belief that Marx in his last years was reduced to no better than a sorry knight-errant haplessly entrapped in his own theoretical befuddlement. Discarding such beliefs and by stitching together the unfinished work in progress and the whole range of disciplines Marx was pre-occupied with in his last years, Musto in keeping with the new materials of Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA II)27 presents a systematically connected bold socio-political reading of Marx. His emphasis, in the present study he offers, is on the method Marx deploys as he looks critically into the historical process. To these accomplishments of the book, what should certainly be mentioned is the way, thanks to his lapidary prose, the valuable study engages the reader. While highlighting the book’s contributions, this review has attempted throughout to offer a few relevant critical upshots aimed at a further contextualization of the various studies with which late Marx was pre-occupied.

At this point, something like a complementary appreciation may not be amiss. Marx engaged in diverse studies not to satisfy interests peripheral or foreign to his project; his purpose was to assimilate natural sciences, social sciences and human history into his critique to expose, among other things, how their true potentialities were being undermined by being ‘forced into the service of capital’.28 In insistently exposing the truth, his critique simultaneously addresses the task of defining the new organization of society as a field of convergence of these disciplines freely developing in consonance with the new role assigned to people in relation to each other and also to nature. To further enrich Marx’s ideas, it now becomes imperative to develop them with these considerations and Musto’s book strongly points towards this direction.

Postlude
For a world that has obstinately denied a system’s fundamentally exploitative core to be rooted in the appropriation of time,29 it perhaps is time to believe the Devil when with a canny insight he said ‘system teaches you how time is won’.30 To organize ‘struggle’ remains the need of the hour, and for that it is necessary to go back to the thoughts of the man who ‘has stood and yet stands behind more of earthquakes which have convulsed nations and destroyed thrones, and do now menace and appal crowned heads and established frauds’ (p. 8).

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Aniruddha Lahiri, John Hutnyk, Marcello Musto and Himani Banneji, for their critical responses and suggestions that helped me clarify various aspects of this writing. My sincere thanks to the reviewers for their kind words and Christopher Recamara of Taylor and Francis Group for editorial assistance.

Additional information
Notes on contributors
Arkayan Ganguly
Arkayan Ganguly is an independent scholar and activist, with a strong interest in Marx and Marxism, currently pursuing graduate studies in Political Science at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, India. Email: arkayan.ganguly@gmail.com
Notes
1 Paul J Korshin, ‘The Development of Intellectual Biography in the Eighteenth Century’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 73:4 (1974), p. 514.

2 Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 29 (Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1987), p. 261.

3 Ludwig van Beethoven, ‘Symphony No.3 in E-flat Major (“Eroica”), Op.55’, in First, Second and Third Symphonies in full Orchestral Score (New York: Dover Publication, Inc., 1976), pp. 347–360 (Bar 349–430).

4 van Beethoven, op. cit., pp. 360–368 (Bar 431–473).

5 R.W.S. Mendl, ‘The “Eroica” Symphony’, The Musical Times, 65 (1924), p. 127.

6 Daniel K.L. Chua, ‘Beethoven’s Other Humanism’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 62:3 (2009), p. 572; Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 169 and p. 174.

7 Daniel K.L. Chua, ‘Beethoven’s Other Humanism’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 62:3 (2009), p. 572; Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 163.

8 Michael R Krätke, ‘Marx and World History’, International Review of Social History, 63:1 (2018), p. 15.

9 Moise Postone, ‘Capital and Temporality’, in Marcello Musto (ed.) The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 161.

10 Pradip Baksi, ‘The Historical Course of Development’, in Karl Marx Mathematical Manuscript: Together with a Special Supplement (Calcutta: Viswakosh Parishad, 1994), p. 78.

11 Karl Marx, Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) IV/31: Naturwissenschaftliche Exzerpte Und Notizen Mitte 1877 Bis Anfang 1883 (Amsterdam: Akademie Verlag, 1999), p. 635.

12 Leon Smolnski, ‘Karl Marx and Mathematical Economics’, Journal of Political Economy, 81:5 (1973), p. 1192; Peter Hans Mathews, ‘The Dialectics of Differentiation: Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts and Their Relation to his Economics’, Review of Social Economy, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764.2019.1664758, p. 12.

13 Karl Marx, Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) IV/32: Die Bibliotheken Von Karl Marx Und Friedrich Engels (Amsterdam: Akademie Verlag, 1999), p. 355.

14 Smolnski, ‘Karl Marx and Mathematical Economics’, op. cit., pp. 1200–1201.

15 McClellon Woodford, ‘Russians in the IWMA: The Background’, in Fabrice Bensimon et al. (eds) “Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth”: The First International in a Global Perspective (Boston: Brill, 2018), p. 194.

16 Karl Marx, Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) IV/32: Die Bibliotheken Von Karl Marx Und Friedrich Engels (Amsterdam: Akademie Verlag, 1999), pp. 184–187.

17 S.T. Turin, ‘Nicholas Chernyshevsky and John Stuart Mill’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 9:25 (1930), p. 32.

18 Natasha Grigorian, ‘Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky: Thought Experiments an Visions of the Future’, Whatif Wasärewenn 2014, https://cms.uni-konstanz.de/fileadmin/archive/dfg-what-if/index.php%3FeID=tx_nawsecuredl&u=0&g=0&t=1519822704&hash=9d5fa3d1d42458737ddf8cf7ed36e808b36f8732&file=fileadmin%252F_migrated%252Fcontent_uploads%252FPreprint_Series_5.pdf, p. 7.

19 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 11 (Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1979), p. 187.

20 David Ryazanov, ‘The Discovery of the Draft (1924)’, in Teodor Shannin (ed.) Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘the Peripheries of Capitalism’ (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 129.

21 Regina Roth, ‘Concepts in Examining the Legacy of Karl Marx’, The European Journal of The History of Economic Thought, 25:5 (2018), p. 758 and pp. 771–777.

22 Karl Marx, ‘Confessions’, in Teodor Shannin (ed.) Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘the Peripheries of Capitalism” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 140.

23 Ludo Cuyvers, ‘Why Did Marx’s Capital Remain Unfinished? On Some Old and New Arguments’, Science & Society 84:1 (2020), pp. 19–31.

24 Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Penguin Books, 2017), p. 419.

25 Karl Marx, Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) IV/31: Naturwissenschaftliche Exzerpte Und Notizen Mitte 1877 Bis Anfang 1883 (Amsterdam: Akademie Verlag, 1999), p. 633.

26 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 transl. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 781 n. 11.

27 Marcello Musto, ‘Review Essay: The Rediscovery of Karl Marx’, International Review of Social History, 52:3 (2007), pp. 477–498; ‘Marx is Back: The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Project’, Rethinking Marxism, 22:2 (2010), pp. 290–291; ‘New Profiles of Marx after the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2)’, Contemporary Sociology, 45:5 (2020), p. 416.

28 Karl Marx, ‘Outline of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse], Second Instalment’, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 29 (Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1979), p. 90; Amy E Wendling, ‘Technology and Science’, in Marcello Musto (ed.) The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 367.

29 Michael R. Krätke, ‘Capitalism’, in Marcello Musto (ed.) The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 11.

30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Parts One and Two (31st ed.) (Chicago: William Benton, 1989), p. 45.

 

Marcello Musto, one of the leading forces behind the recent revival of studies on Karl Marx, has produced yet another rigorous, insightful, and cohesive edited work. The book brings together some of the most renowned and innovative scholars in the world on topics that are urgently relevant to our contemporary situation. It engages with issues as broad as gender and social reproduction, ecology and migration, and Marxian visions of alternatives to capitalism. This volume is as much about rethinking alternative interpretations of Marx’s ideas as it is about their relevance to the question of alternatives to capitalism. To remain within the confines of this review, I will focus only on seven of the thirteen contributions in the book.
Himani Bannerji begins her chapter, ‘The Factory and the Family as Spaces of Capital’, with a familiar critique of family as a fundamental element for the reproduction of capital that is systematically made invisible and held to function mostly on the back of the unpaid labour of women. Bannerji then shows how her interpretation of Marx’s critique of capitalism perfectly accommodates this critique of family. She conceives of the fundamental relation between the family and the factory in Marx based on an expanded definition of ‘mode of production’ as a social rather than a mere economic relation. She illustrates the connection between family and class, consequently presenting the family as yet another space of class struggle just like the factory as integral parts of the reproduction of capitalist social relation. However, the chapter falls short of exploring the internal dynamics of class struggle within that space and in relation to the larger sphere of power struggle articulated in either class or non-class terms. Notably, the specific ways in which gender dynamics influence class struggle within and outside the family remains undertheorized in this chapter.
The role of gender in the reproduction of capitalist social relation is the core of Silvia Federici’s chapter, ‘Marx on Gender, Race, and Social Reproduction: A Feminist Perspective’. Less sympathetic than Bannerji towards Marx’s approach to social reproduction, Federici claims that Marx’s critique of political economy is still ‘written from a male viewpoint’ (p. 29). This is despite her acknowledgment of the generative quality of Marx’s ideas for feminism and his clear stance against the subjugation of women. Federici argues that Marx does not consider the gender question as structurally fundamental to the capitalist organization of production and the specific ways in which women are exploited. Federici draws parallels with Marx’s treatment of ‘race’ in his analysis but underscores where this breaks down particularly regarding Marx’s differential stance towards ‘race’ as integral to the working-class struggle. The chapter does not however engage with Marx’s manuscripts after the publication of Capital. This leaves open the question of the extent to which Marx began to incorporate the question of gender into his analysis more systematically as he did with regards to ‘race’ in the last fifteen years of his life.
The second part of the book turns to the socio-ecological question. Kohei Saito’s chapter, ‘Primitive Accumulation as the Cause of Economic and Ecological Disaster’, demonstrates the foundation of critical ecology in Marx’s analysis, particularly in Capital. Saito centers his interpretation on Marx’s conception of ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital and shows how the economic and the ecological are structurally linked in his framework. Accordingly, Marx’s conception of labour as a process between workers and nature lays the ground for understanding capital’s simultaneous exploitation of workers and nature. It is under capitalism that social and natural wealth appears as an immense collection of commodities – i.e. the commodification of labor-power and nature. Saito explains why Marx’s conception of communism is still sensitive to ‘natural scarcities’ while rejecting the ‘artificial scarcities’ produced by capital in its commodification of nature.
The core question of Gregory Claeys’s chapter, ‘Marx and Environmental Catastrophe’, is how socialists should come to terms with the current patterns of consumption, while recognizing the finite resources of our planet, and conceive of ‘some compensatory advantage’ (p. 121) to make their transformative project palatable to the middle classes for their support. Claeys argues that there is an ambiguity in Marx’s conception of needs in his rejection of slavish devotion to satisfying them and the limitless expansion of their fulfillment after the socialist revolution. He provides a historical overview of the transformation of consumption in the USSR and their resemblance to the West in seeing consumption as a byproduct of industrialization. Therefore, he calls for a rethinking of consumption. However, the complex process of building class power needed for such transformation is effectively replaced by a series of policy proposals, some of which are egalitarian (e.g. reduction of work time and increasing public luxury) while others seem strangely autocratic (e.g. legislation against fashion advertisement, and reduction of the population). The democratization of economic relations is dealt with in passing towards the end of the chapter.
Razmig Keucheyan, building heavily on André Gorz and Agnes Heller’s works, argues that a radical theory of needs is essential for our conception of overcoming capitalism. He holds that a radical theory of needs can lead us to a critique of capitalist destruction of nature. Keucheyan argues while capitalism increasingly provides the material basis necessary for the possibility of realizing ‘radical needs’ (loving, being loved, creativity, autonomy, etc.), it also prevents their actual realization as its development intensifies the process of commodification and therefore alienation in society. It is in the unfulfillment of these radical needs despite their growing material possibility that Keucheyan sees the seed of a revolutionary transformation of capitalism. Towards the end of the chapter, Keucheyan switches the focus to the sphere of production by arguing that ‘it is production – that is capitalist production – which determines needs’ (p. 139). Such a surprisingly deterministic account of the primacy of production overlooks the complex ways in which consumption and production are reciprocally linked in capitalism. It is also confused about the supposed locus of revolutionary transformation: among the affluent consumers whose satisfaction of radical needs has become increasingly hindered by the development of capitalism (p. 137), or among the producers whose critical position supposedly gives them constitutive power over the sphere of consumption (p. 140). The consideration of how transformative projects would impact different spheres of society is critical to carrying out a successful counter-hegemonic movement. However, this requires a nuanced understanding of the asymmetrical codetermination of these spheres – and in that not just in the Global North but in their combined and uneven development throughout the world.
David Norman Smith’s chapter, ‘Accumulation and its Discontents: Migration and Nativism in Marx’s Capital and Late Manuscripts’, shows how Marx was engaged in a radical expansion of his framework to incorporate an entangled history of capitalist development. Smith paints an astonishing picture of how the many different threads that Marx was following at least in the last two decades of his life, including his studies on anthropology, natural sciences, colonialism, global migration, dynamics of racism, and subaltern resistance, were all pieces of a coherent set of objectives that Marx had foreseen in advancing his critique of capitalism. While highlighting where Marx engages in elaborations, revisions, and corrections of his ideas, Smith illustrates a clear continuity between Marx’s late manuscripts and his earlier ideas. The chapter is particularly relevant to our contemporary predicament amidst mass migration, rising xenophobia, and racist policies. It explains how Marx, in his uncompromising commitment to working-class emancipation, made sense of the dynamics of racism and patterns of migration within the working class and their connection to the global dynamics of capitalism and colonialism.
The last part of the book explores the communist alternative to capitalism. Michael Brie’s chapter, ‘Uniting Communism and Liberalism: An Unsolved Task or a Most Urgent Necessity?’, explores the reasons behind the failure of the past experiences with 20th-century communism. He traces the failure of those movements in their ‘inability to do justice to the double demand of preserving the liberal heritage and implementing solidarity, communist objective’ (p. 314). The chapter traces the development of Marx’s solution to ‘the contradiction between the freedom of individuals and the sociality of their conditions of life’ (p. 324) that concerns any complex society towards his vision of communism as the association of free individuals. Brie argues that despite its elegance, it is effectively a deflection of this fundamental contradiction, with serious consequences for individual and civil liberties under communism. But in his attempt to offer the outlines of a solution, Brie falls back on an orthodoxy, arguably rejected by Marx himself, that separates socialism and communism, and reserves socialism as a mediation between communism and liberalism. This framework raises liberalism to a status with regards to individual and civil liberties that is unduly both in its theory and history. I believe Marx has much to offer concerning individual and civil freedoms in a democratic socialist/communist society. He succeeds in transcending the logical contradictions (not to mention the historical incoherency) of liberalism without scarifying its democratic elements – which within the liberal framework remain essentially unfulfilled. The reasons behind the colossal failure of much of the actually-existing socialism to uphold and enhance those essential freedoms should be sought elsewhere.
Overall, the contributions of this book illustrate the frontiers of Marxist scholarship on the most relevant topics of our time. Their innovative interpretations of Marx’s work, especially in the light of the publication of previously unknown manuscripts, question some of the most entrenched orthodoxies and demonstrate the relevance of Marx’s ideas for critical examination of capitalism and visions of alternative social relation.

Babak Amini
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK