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Janaína de Faria, LSE Review of Books
In Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences, editors Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto and Babak Amini bring together contributors to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth and to discuss the relevance of his theoretical and political legacy today.
The book offers an open-minded, informative and thought-provoking collection of contributions that inspires in-depth discussions not only of past Marxian and Marxist legacies, but also of how we learn from them to act upon our present and future world, writes Janaína de Faria.
Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto and Babak Amini (eds). Palgrave Macmillan. 2019.
Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences, edited by Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto and Babak Amini, brings together a selection of high-quality papers that were presented at one of the largest international conferences organised in 2018 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth and to discuss the relevance of his theoretical and political legacy to today’s world.
As a byproduct of the international diversity of the participants of the conference – held at the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna, India – the book contains sixteen chapters by scholars from and/or based in various parts of the globe and it includes four women among its contributors. This deliberately internationalist approach is undoubtedly welcome and necessary. More fundamentally, it is not a mere formality: the editors do justice to this internationalism in showcasing the heterogeneous nature of the revival of Marxism in the 21st century around the world. This heterogeneity concerns the wide range of complex topics and styles explored in the book as well as its openness to different and controversial (re)interpretations of Marx and Marxism. While the anti-dogmatic perspective can be considered the stamp mark of the book, readers should not expect it to be an easy read for complete beginners in the broad research field on Marx and Marxism.
The structure of the book was designed with consistency by the editors: the various themes are organised under the intertwined umbrellas of Part One, ‘On the Critique of Politics’, and Part Two, ‘On the Critique of Political Economy’. I found this organisation particularly clever because it directly alludes to Marx’s early project in 1844 to write a two-volume work on the Critique of Politics and Political Economy. For reasons explained in his famous 1859 ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx’s studies led him to instead begin with an in-depth study of Political Economy, which later culminated in his (unfinished) masterpiece Capital.
However, as Michael Krätke has pointed out elsewhere, Marx’s plan to develop a critique of politics was deferred, but never abandoned, throughout his lifetime. In my view, despite all the efforts and advances made in the past 150 years or so to unfold the mediating elements between the inner laws of capital accumulation and national and international politics, this articulation remains one of the core frontiers for categorical development within Marxism. The editors’ structuring of the book is thus not only appropriate when it comes to the content of its chapters, but also reminds us of the need to strengthen the theoretical nexus between the critique of politics and the critique of political economy.
It is in this sense that I share my reflections on the theory of fetishism and the theory of interest that were triggered by the seemingly unconnected chapters by Paula Rauhala and Jan Toporowski, respectively presented in Parts One and Two. Rauhala’s analysis brilliantly articulates different interpretations of Capital from West and East Germany by providing the historical context of each side of the country both in terms of the general living conditions of the working class as well as the (geo)political structure under which they lived. Rauhala is especially interested in counterposing West German readings of Capital that stress Marx’s theory of money and commodity fetishism but are dismissive of the underpinning role of the theory of surplus value in Marx’s more complex concept of capital fetishism. Toporowski, in turn, is spot on when he emphasises that Marx antagonised both classical political economy – mainly David Ricardo, who regarded ‘interest as determined by the current rate of profit’ (225) – as well as French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who ‘attributed the evils of capitalism to excessive interest or usury’ (215). For Marx, they both held a fetishistic conception of money and interest.
Rauhala is thus absolutely right when she insists that: ‘fetishism is a crucial concept, and it is present in all three books of Capital. The fetishisms of commodities and money are just the beginning of the story, and after the fourth chapter of the first volume, the concept of fetishism is always related to surplus value and to the mechanisms of its production, circulation, and distribution’ (186). In Chapter Four of the first volume of Capital, one reads that:
“capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in terms of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorises itself independently. […] By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself (Capital, vol. I, Penguin ed. 1990, 255).”
Indeed, Marx further argues in the third volume that ‘in interest-bearing capital […] this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-valorising value, money that makes (breeds) money, and in this form it no longer bears any marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relationship of a thing (money) to itself’ (Economic Manuscripts of 1864-5 [vol. III], Brill ed. 2016, 492-93).
Toporowski particularly discusses Marx’s argument in Capital that capitalist industrial investments allow for the extraction of surplus value from workers, the source of profits, ‘out of which interest may be paid’ (225). It is thus class exploitation that underpins capitalist interest payment but, in contrast to Ricardo’s position, ‘not necessarily from the surplus value produced at the time of the interest payment’ (219). I do have reservations, nonetheless, about Toporowski’s claim that Marx’s theorisation was limited by his ‘time of ‘’classic capitalism’’’ (225), when productive and commercial capitalists depended primarily on past accumulated monetary hoards for loans, through the intermediation of banks. I find this view overlooks the fact that Marx sketched an analysis of the credit system in the third volume of Capital grounded on his concept of fictitious capital, with a particular focus on banking, share capital and public debt assets. Crucially, he was well aware that banks did not rely, in absolute terms, on accumulated deposits and reserves in order to provide credit money for those who demanded it – a feature of the banking system that is today reinforced by post-Keynesians.
In short, Rauhala’s and Toporowski’s chapters highlight that class exploitation and surplus-value extraction cannot be sidelined – they are at the heart of Marx’s critique of political economy’s trinity formula. Capital indeed culminates in revealing that the capitalist mode of production encompasses a particular mode of distribution that reproduces the illusion that revenues (rent, interest, profit, wages) emerge out of things themselves (land, money, machines, labour) instead of from underlying exploitative social relations. The deep political implications of this involve the predominant liberal fetishistic notions of equality, freedom and fairness, which many Marxists may also fall prey to up until today.
Regarding other notable contributions in the edited collection, Ramaa Vasudevan’s chapter on the state-credit standard particularly caught my attention and inspired me to search for her other works. Ajit Sinha’s chapter is very coherent and elaborates effectively on the discussion of the supposedly logical inconsistency in Marx’s exposition of the transformation of value into prices of production in Capital. He takes the standpoint of the Italian economist Piero Sraffa, but readers would have benefitted from a critical engagement with Fred Moseley’s counterarguments on the topic, developed in his latest book, Money and Totality. Kohei Saito’s chapter effectively clarifies the intertwined relation between the economic and political spheres in Marx’s works, and can be read alongside Musto’s and Amini’s contributions, as they complement each other.
I must also mention that I learnt a lot from Miguel Vedda’s discussion on the ‘elective affinity between dialectical materialism and the tradition of essayism’. Vedda convincingly argues that this affinity – ‘not only as a genre but also, and more importantly, as a method of enquiry and even as an ethical and political stance towards the world’ (4) – can be particularly helpful for grasping ‘the possibilities and the limits of Marxism in Latin America’ (5). Finally, it should be noted that Peter Beilharz’s chapter is very impressive, not only when it comes to its academic content, which focuses on the recent revival of interest in Marx’s works across the globe, but also regarding its creative ‘breakdance’ style.
All in all, the book offers an open-minded, informative and thought-provoking collection of contributions that inspires in-depth discussions not only of past Marxian and Marxist legacies, but also of how we learn from them to act upon our present and future world.
Friedrich Engels once wrote that he played “second fiddle” to Marx. On the 200th anniversary of his birth, we should remember the profound influence that Engels had on his friend and comrade, as well as his own theoretical contributions.
Friedrich Engels understood even earlier than Karl Marx the centrality of the critique of political economy. In fact, at the time the two radicals were first getting to know one another, Engels had published many more articles on the topic than his friend.
Born two hundred years ago, on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Germany (today a suburb of Wuppertal), Friedrich Engels was a promising young man whose father, a textile industrialist, had denied him a chance to study at university and instead guided him into his private firm. Engels, an atheist, was self-taught and had a voracious appetite for knowledge. He signed his pieces with a pseudonym to avoid conflict with his conservative, strongly religious family.
The two years he spent in England — where he was sent at the age of twenty-two to work in Manchester, at the offices of the Ermen & Engels cotton mill — were decisive for the maturation of his political convictions. It was there that he personally observed the effects of capitalist exploitation of the proletariat, private property, and competition between individuals. He made contact with the Chartist movement and fell in love with an Irish working woman, Mary Burns, who played a key role in his development.
A brilliant journalist, he published accounts in Germany on English social struggles and wrote for the English-speaking press about the social advances underway on the continent. His Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, published in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher in 1844, aroused great interest in Marx, who at the time had decided to devote all his energies to the same subject. The two began a theoretical and political collaboration that would last for the rest of their lives.
Engels’s Influence
In 1845, Engels published his first book in German, The Condition of the Working Class in England. As its subtitle emphasized, this work was based “on direct observation and genuine sources”: Engels wrote in the preface that real knowledge of proletarian working and living conditions was “absolutely necessary to be able to provide solid ground for socialist theories.” In his introductory dedication, “To the Working Class of England,” Engels further pointed out that his work “in the field” had given him direct, not abstract, “knowledge of the workers’ real lives.” He had never been discriminated against or “treated by them as a foreigner,” and he was happy to see that they were free of the “terrible curse of national narrowness and national arrogance.”
In the same year that the French government expelled Marx because of his communist activities, Engels followed him to Brussels. There, they published The Holy Family, or the Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company (his first joint book with Marx). The two also produced a voluminous manuscript — The German Ideology — though this was unpublished and thus left to the “gnawing criticism of mice.” In the same period, Engels went to England with his friend and showed Marx firsthand what he had earlier seen and understood about the capitalist mode of production. It was then that Marx gave up the critique of post-Hegelian philosophy and began the long journey that led, twenty years later, to the first volume of Capital. The two friends also wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and participated in the revolutions of 1848.
In 1849, following the defeat of the revolution, Marx was forced to move to England, and Engels soon crossed the Channel after him. Marx took up lodgings in London, while Engels went to manage the family business in Manchester, some two hundred miles away. He had become, as he put it, the “second fiddle” to Marx, and in order to support himself and to help his friend (who was often without an income) he agreed to manage his father’s factory in Manchester, until 1870.
The Marx-Engels Correspondence
During these two decades, the two men lived the most intense period of their lives, comparing notes several times a week on the main political and economic events of the age. Most of the 2,500 letters they exchanged date from between 1849 and 1870, during which period they also sent some 1,500 items of correspondence to activists and intellectuals in nearly twenty countries. To this imposing total should be added a good ten thousand letters to Engels and Marx from third parties, and another six thousand which, though no longer traceable, are known with certainty to have existed. This correspondence is a treasure, containing ideas which, in some cases, neither Marx nor Engels succeeded in fully developing in their writings.
Few nineteenth-century correspondences can boast references as erudite as those that flowed from the pens of the two communist revolutionaries. Marx read nine languages, and Engels mastered as many as twelve. Their letters are striking for their constant switching between languages and for their number of learned quotations, including ancient Latin and Greek. The two humanists were also great lovers of literature. Marx knew passages from Shakespeare by heart and never tired of leafing through his volumes of Aeschylus, Dante, and Balzac. Engels was long president of the Schiller Institute in Manchester and worshipped Aristotle, Goethe, and Lessing. Along with constant discussion of international events and revolutionary possibilities, many of their exchanges concerned the major contemporary advances in technology, geology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and anthropology. Marx always considered Engels an indispensable interlocutor, consulting his critical mind whenever he had to take a position on a controversial matter.
While great intellectual companions, the sentimental relationship between the two men was even more extraordinary. Marx confided all his personal difficulties to Engels, beginning with his terrible material hardship and the numerous health problems that tormented him for decades. Engels showed total self-abnegation in helping Marx and his family, always doing everything in his power to ensure them a dignified existence and to facilitate the completion of Capital. Marx was ever grateful for this financial assistance, as we can see from what he wrote one night in August 1867, a few minutes after he had finished correcting the proofs of Volume I: “I owe it to you alone that this was possible.”
Engels’s Theoretical Contribution
Even during those twenty years, however, Engels never ceased to write. In 1850 he published The Peasant War in Germany, a history of the revolts in 1524–25. There, Engels sought to show how similar the middle-class behavior at the time was to that of the petty bourgeoisie during the revolution of 1848–49, and how responsible it had been for the defeats incurred. In order to allow Marx to devote more time to the completion of his economic studies, between 1851 and 1862 Engels also wrote nearly half of the five hundred articles that Marx contributed to the New-York Tribune (the paper with the largest circulation in the United States). He reported to the American public on the course and possible outcomes of the many wars that took place in Europe. On more than one occasion he managed to foresee developments and to anticipate the military strategies used on various fronts, earning for himself the sobriquet by which he was known to all his comrades: “The General.” His journalistic activity continued for a long time, and in 1870–71, while he was also very active in the International Working Men’s Association, he published his Notes on the Franco-Prussian War, a series of sixty articles for the English daily Pall Mall Gazette analyzing the military events preceding the Paris Commune. These were well-received and testified to his insight into military matters.
Over the next fifteen years, Engels made his principal theoretical contributions in a series of writings directed against political opponents in the workers’ movement. Between 1872 and 1873 he wrote a series of three articles for the Volksstaat that were also released, as a pamphlet, with the title The Housing Question. Engels’s intention was to oppose the spread of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas in Germany and to make clear to workers that reformist policies could not replace a proletarian revolution. The Anti-Dühring, published in 1878, which he described as “a more or less connected exposition of the dialectical method and the communist world outlook,” became a crucial point of reference for the formation of Marxist doctrine.
Although Engels’s efforts to popularize Marx — polemicizing with other simplistic readings — should be distinguished from the vulgarizations of the later generation of German Social Democracy, his recourse to the natural sciences did open the way to an evolutionary conception of social phenomena that diminished Marx’s more nuanced analyses. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), a reworking of three chapters of Anti-Dühring, had an even greater impact than the original text. But despite its merits, and the fact that it circulated almost as widely as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Engels’s definitions of “science” and “scientific socialism” would later be used by the Marxist-Leninist vulgate to preclude any critical discussion of the theses of the “founders of communism.”
The Dialectics of Nature, fragments of a project on which Engels worked sporadically between 1873 and 1883, has been the object of huge controversy. For some it was the cornerstone of Marxism, while for others the main culprit in the birth of Soviet dogmatism. Today it should be read as an incomplete work, revealing Engels’s limitations but also the potential contained in his ecological critique. While his use of dialectics there certainly reduced the theoretical and methodological complexity of Marx’s thought, it would be incorrect to hold it responsible — as many have done — for everything they find disagreeable in Marx’s writings, or to blame Engels alone for theoretical errors or even political defeats.
In 1884, Engels published Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, an analysis of the anthropological studies conducted by the American Lewis Morgan. Morgan had discovered that matriarchal relations historically preceded patriarchal relations. For Engels, this was as important a revelation concerning the origins of humanity as “Darwin’s theory [was] for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus-value for political economy.” The family already contained the antagonisms that would later be developed in society and the state. The first class oppression to appear in human history “coincided with the oppression of the female sex by the male.” With regard to gender equality, as well as anticolonial struggles, Engels never hesitated to uphold the cause of emancipation. Finally, in 1886, he published a polemical work that took aim at the resurgence of idealism in German academic circles, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886).
Reading Engels in 2020
Engels outlived Marx by twelve years. During that time, he devoted himself to his friend’s literary estate and to the leadership of the international workers’ movement. His enormous contribution to the growth of workers’ parties in Germany, France, and Britain is evident in a number of journalistic pieces for the major socialist papers of the time, including Die Neue Zeit, Le Socialiste, and Critica Sociale, in greetings to party congresses, as well as the hundreds of letters that he wrote in this period. Engels wrote extensively on the birth and ongoing debates concerning the Second International, whose founding congress took place on July 14, 1889. Even more important, he devoted his energies to the spread of Marxism.
Engels was charged with the extremely difficult task of preparing for publication the drafts of Volumes Two and Three of Capital that Marx had not managed to complete. He also oversaw new editions of previously published works, a number of translations, and wrote prefaces and afterwords to various republications of Marx’s works. In a new introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France (1850), composed a few months before his death, Engels elaborated a theory of revolution that tried to adapt to the new political scene in Europe. The proletariat had become the social majority, he argued, and the prospect of taking power through electoral means — with universal suffrage — made it possible to defend revolution and legality at the same time.
Different from the German Social Democrats, who manipulated his text in a legalistic, reformist sense, Engels insisted that the “fight on the streets” still had its place in the revolution. The revolution, Engels continued, could not be conceived without the active participation of the masses, and this required “long and patient work.” Reading Engels today, two hundred years on from his birth, fills us with a new desire to strike out along the path he blazed.
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Daniel Whittall, Review 31
A Restless Thinker
In the millions of pages written about Karl Marx, his final years have been somewhat neglected.
Sven-Eric Liedman’s biography A World to Win, published in English translation in 2018, assesses Marx’s late notebooks and correspondence on Russia in depth but gives limited attention to the other aspects of Marx’s latter years, including his important trip to Algeria. Mary Gabriel’s excellent Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx attends to the later years but nevertheless treats Algeria briefly and gives little sense of the broader development of Marx’s thought. In Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Gareth Stedman Jones considers Marx’s late interest in Russia at some length, but dismisses the rest of Marx’s last three years by suggesting it ‘was a period entirely dominated by anxieties about health, both his own and that of various members of the family.’ Jonathan Sperber, in Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, does better, again assessing Marx’s work on Russia but also giving only a page to the Algeria trip and focusing, for the final year and a half or so, almost entirely on matters of Marx’s health.
There is scope, then, for a revaluation of Marx’s last few years. Marcelo Musto has familiarised himself deeply with the works of Marx and Engels, including correspondence, notebooks and a wealth of other materials. By reading this work closely and contextualising it with the deep knowledge and critical understanding of the secondary literature evident in his earlier book Another Marx, he has produced a study that breaks new ground in our understanding of Marx between 1881 and 1883, though it also leaves a number of important questions unasked. The Marx of his final years becomes, in Musto’s telling, a restless thinker driven forwards by uncertainty and doubt to voraciously devour, synthesise and apply anew ideas from a dizzying range of fields in the pursuit of a better world.
Living in North London in 1881, the 63-year-old Marx produced a vast quantity of largely unpublished work in spite of his own and his family’s ill health. In the first half of 1881 he completed his so-called Ethnological Notebooks, consisting of over 200 pages of notes based on readings about non-Western and pre-capitalist societies. Simultaneously he worked on his Mathematical Notebooks, producing a detailed study of differential calculus. For Marx maths was both a tool to aid his analysis and understanding of the world and, especially in his later years, an important way to relax while maintaining an active pattern of thought when too drained to read or write at length. In the latter part of 1881 Marx also completed his astonishing Chronological Extracts, containing an astounding 550 pages of extracts and annotations on world history beginning in 91 BC and running through to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
Marx took particular interest in the USA during these years. Writing of California in 1880, he noted that ‘in no other place had revolution by capitalist centralisation been effected with such effrontery at such great speed,’ and Musto suggests that had Marx been able to revise Volume 1 of Capital in these years he would have added more on the USA. He read the American economist Henry George’s 1879 book Progress and Poverty, which proposed a single tax on land value to replace all other taxes. Marx dismissed George’s arguments because of the ‘revolting presumptuousness and arrogance’ of their author, and he had no time for the misguided belief that mere changes in taxation might eradicate all the ‘abuses of capitalist production.’
Beyond America, Marx’s correspondence of 1881-82 shows him attending deeply to events in as diverse a range of places as India, Ireland, and France. Nonetheless, it was Russia that stimulated the greatest re-thinking. Through the 1870s Marx corresponded with leading Russian scholars and he later reflected that ‘in order to reach an informed judgement on economic development in Russia, I learned Russian and then for many years studied official and other publications.’ He was particularly taken by the works of the Russian economist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who he deemed to be ‘a great Russian scholar and critic’ and whose economic works he judged to be ‘excellent.’ Chernyshevsky was especially valuable for Marx in his focus on the obshchina, or peasant village community. As both the Ethnological Notebooks and Chronological Extracts testify, Marx was deeply interested in archaic and pre-capitalist forms of community. Chernyshevsky’s suggestion that the obshchina could be turned in a socialist direction as part of a broader transformation of the productive forces, rather than inevitably abandoned in the face of capitalist industrialisation, was of great importance to Marx’s late thought.
Though he is often characterised as a thinker for whom history passes progressively and inevitably along a series of linear transitions, his late interest in Russia shows Marx himself challenging those who framed Russian history, and the future of the obshchina, in these terms. He was angered by the writings of Nikolai Mikhailovsky, a liberal critic and sociologist, who he felt had tried to transform his arguments into ‘a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they [found] themselves.’ Marx wrote a long letter, which he ultimately never sent, setting out his belief that ‘events of striking similarity, taking place in different historical contexts, [lead] to totally different results,’ and outlining his opposition to the idea that a ‘supra-historical’ theory might act as a ‘master-key’ with which to unlock all historical and political uncertainties. When he wrote a famous letter to the activist Vera Zasulich, at her request, on these matters in which he argued that it was possible to incorporate the obshchina as part of a transition to socialism — he described it as being ‘the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia’ — the letter was kept unpublished because of the importance it may have had to factional disputes within the Russian socialist movement of the time. Misreadings of Marx that insist he proposed a single linear framework for the development towards socialism find one of their origin-points in this moment.
When the second edition of Volume 1 of Capital sold out in 1881, Marx’s German publisher requested that he consider making amendments for a third edition. Marx, though, preferred to focus on completing Volume 2. In the event, neither were possible, and Musto suggests three reasons. First, his German publishers advised that recent changes in the law would make it impossible for the book to be published. Nevertheless, Musto notes that Marx took this apparently bad news surprisingly well, no doubt due to the second reason: at the onset of the 1880s he was waiting to see how an industrial crisis in Britain would be resolved, and his interest in matters in Russia and the USA were becoming increasingly transformative. Changing circumstances in these countries, and Marx’s own evolving ideas, drove him to recognise that ‘certain economic phenomena’ were ‘entering upon a new phase of development and call[ed] for fresh appraisal.’
Marx’s inability to complete Volume 2 was compounded by the third reason — his and his families’ deteriorating health. Marx’s wife Jenny got more unwell as 1881 progressed, and the couple travelled extensively in the hope of finding rest and recuperation. Meanwhile, Marx spent much of the late summer of 1881 caring for his third daughter Eleanor, who had become gravely ill. A strength of Musto’s book is that he demonstrates the immense importance Marx placed on his family and their wellbeing in these years. Marx’s wife Jenny died of liver cancer in December 1881, and he was left doubly bereft when he was pronounced too ill to attend the funeral of his ‘greatest treasure’ by doctors.
Musto’s account of Marx’s trip to Algeria in the first half of 1882 is more comprehensive than anything to be found in the clutch of recent English-language biographies, and reads the trip in the context of the Chronological Notebooks on which Marx was then working. We see Marx hoping to study in more depth questions of communal land ownership in the region, but we also learn more of the debilitating impact his health was having on his capacity to think, read and write in depth and with clarity. Musto explores those of Marx’s observations on Algeria that ‘display a still partly colonial vision,’ whilst also showing how the trip saw Marx criticising the European colonial treatment of Algerians and, in particular, the racist policing experienced by the Arab and north African population at the hands of the colonial powers.
Marx’s Algeria trip matters because it is such an intriguing final journey for him to have taken. Musto helps us to understand the motivations for the trip — largely pushed by Engels, who appears to have seen it as a last great hope for the improvement of his friend’s health as well as an opportunity for Marx to study ‘common ownership among the Arabs’. But we also get a sense of Marx’s loneliness, the ongoing hurt he felt at the loss of his wife, the sense of regret he felt about what he would come to call his ‘ill-calculated expedition’ and the arduous nature of the medical treatments he underwent there. The Marx we find in Musto’s account of his Algeria trip – and the three weeks spent in Monaco on the way back in which he evaluated the place of the casino as the ‘economic basis of Monaco’ frequented by ‘aristocratic idlers or adventurers’ — is a more vulnerable, more human Marx than those we find in many other biographies.
Recuperating on the Isle of White in early 1883, Marx received his final piece of devastating news when his daughter Jenny died in Paris. He left for London, only to be confined to the house on health grounds. He set his last known words to paper in a letter to his doctor on 13th January, and would die of heart failure on the 14th March 1883.
Though Musto’s book is the most detailed account to date of these final years, it remains itself curiously incomplete. Musto promises future works that will explore in greater depth both Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and his Chronological Extracts, and these will be keenly awaited by any reader of The Last Years of Karl Marx. Perhaps more disappointing is the brevity of the treatment of Marx’s attitude to ecology, treated to just over a page here. Musto notes that it was in Marx’s last years that he developed a friendship with Edwin Ray Lankester, an Oxford zoologist who read Capital and engaged with Marx in what Musto describes as a ‘prolific intellectual exchange.’ Yet the content or implications of this exchange is not explored. That this is a loss to the picture that Musto paints of Marx’s final years will be clear to readers of John Bellamy Foster’s recently published book The Return of Nature. Foster suggests that Marx and Lankester’s intellectual exchange was based on sharing a dialectical approach to science, a fierce opposition to eugenics, and a ‘thoroughgoing materialism’ in their approach to social questions.
Nevertheless, in attending closely to Marx’s ideas as they emerged through his theoretical studies, his attentiveness to economic and international events, and his extensive correspondence, Musto gives us a portrait of a thinker in his last years that challenges the representations others have imposed upon him. Instead of the strict determinist for whom economic circumstances dictated all else, what emerges is an attentive and responsive student of the world who ‘spurned any rigid linking of social changes to economic transformations alone.’ Instead of a believer in the natural and inevitable progress from one mode of production to another, Musto’s Marx is a thinker who attends to ‘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.’
After its first meeting, on September 28, 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association (better known as the “First International”) quickly aroused passions all over Europe.
It made class solidarity a shared ideal and inspired large numbers of women and men to struggle against exploitation. Thanks to its activity, workers were able to gain a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, to become more aware of their own strength, and to develop new, more advanced forms of struggle for their rights.
In the beginning, the International was an organization containing various political traditions, the majority of which were reformist rather than revolutionary. Originally, the central driving force was British trade unionism, the leaders of which were mainly interested in economic questions. They fought to improve the workers’ conditions, but without calling capitalism into question. Hence, they conceived of the International primarily as an instrument to prevent the import of workers from abroad in the event of strikes.
The second most important group were the mutualists, long dominant in France. In keeping with the theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they opposed any working-class involvement in politics and the strike as a weapon of struggle.
Then there were the Communists who opposed the very system of capitalist production and argued for the necessity of overthrowing it. At its founding, the ranks of the International also included a number of workers inspired by utopian theories and exiles having vaguely democratic ideas and cross-class conception who considered the International as an instrument for the issuing of general appeals for the liberation of oppressed peoples.
It was Karl Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International and who achieved a non-exclusionary, yet firmly working-class-based political program that won it mass support. Rejecting sectarianism, he worked to bring the International’s various strands together. Marx was the political soul of its General Council (the body that worked out a unifying synthesis of the various tendencies and issued guidelines for the organization as a whole). He drafted all its main resolutions and prepared almost all its congress reports.
But the International was, of course, much more than Marx, brilliant a leader as he was. It was not, as has often been written, the “creation of Marx.” Rather it was a vast social and political movement for the emancipation of the working classes. The International was made possible first of all by the labor movement’s struggles in the 1860s. One of its basic rules — and the fundamental distinction from previous labor organizations — was that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
Marx was essential to the International, but the International had a very positive impact on Marx, too. His direct involvement in workers’ struggles meant that he was prompted to develop and sometimes revise his own ideas, subjecting old certainties to discussion and asking himself new questions, all the while sharpening his critique of capitalism by drawing the broad outlines of a communist society.
Theory and Struggle
The late 1860s and early 1870s were a period rife with social conflicts in Europe. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International, whose reputation quickly spread widely. From 1866 on, strikes intensified in many countries and formed the core of a new and important wave of mobilizations. The International was essential in struggles that were won by workers in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. The scenario was the same in many of these conflicts: workers in other countries raised funds in support of the strikers and agreed not to accept work that would have turned them into industrial mercenaries. As a result, the bosses were forced to compromise on many of the strikers’ demands. These advances were supported by the diffusion of newspapers that either sympathized with the ideas of the International or were veritable organs of the General Council. Both contributed to the development of class consciousness and to the rapid circulation of news concerning the activity of the International.
Across Europe, the association developed an efficient organizational structure and increased the number of its members (150,000 at the peak moment). For all the difficulties bound up with a diversity of nationalities, languages, and political cultures, the International managed to achieve unity and coordination across a wide range of organizations and spontaneous struggles. Its greatest merit was to demonstrate the crucial importance of class solidarity and international cooperation.
The International was the locus of some of the most famous debates of the labor movement, such as that between communism and anarchy. The congresses of the International were also where, for the first time, a major transnational organization came to decisions about crucial issues, which had been discussed before its foundation, that subsequently became strategic points in the political programs of socialist movements across the world. Among these were the indispensable function of trade unions, the socialization of land and means of production, the importance of participating in elections and doing this through independent parties of the working class, women’s emancipation, and the conception of war as an inevitable product of the capitalist system.
The International also spread outside Europe. On the other side of the Atlantic, immigrants who had arrived in recent years began to establish the first sections of the International in the United States, but the organization suffered from two handicaps at birth that it would never overcome. Despite repeated exhortations from the General Council in London, it was unable either to cut across the nationalist character of its various affiliated groups or to draw in workers born in the “New World.” When the German, French, and Czech sections founded the Central Committee of the International for North America, in December 1870, it was unique in the history of the International in having only “foreign-born” members. The most striking aspect of this anomaly was that the International in the United States never produced an English-language press organ. At the beginning of the 1870s, the International reached a total of fifty sections with a combined membership of four thousand, but this was still only a tiny proportion of the American industrial workforce of more than two million.
Peak and Crisis
The most significant moment of the International coincided with the Paris Commune. In March 1871, after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the workers of Paris rose against the new government of Adolphe Thiers and took power in the city. Henceforth, the International was at the center of the storm and gained enormous notoriety.
For capitalists and the middle classes, it represented a great threat to the established order, whereas for workers it fueled hopes for a world without exploitation and injustice. The labor movement had enormous vitality, and that was apparent everywhere. Newspapers linked to the International increased in both number and overall sales. The insurrection of Paris fortified the workers’ movement, impelling it to adopt more radical positions and to intensify its militancy, and not for the first time, France showed that revolution was possible, this time with the goal of building new forms of political association for workers.
The next step to take then, as stated by Marx, was understanding that “the economic movement of the working class and its political action are indissolubly united.” That led the International, at the London Conference of 1871, to push for the foundation of a key instrument of the modern workers’ movement: the political party — although it should be stressed that the understanding of this was much broader than that adopted by communist organizations after the October Revolution.
When the International dissolved itself after the Hague Congress of 1872, it was a very different organization from what it had been at the time of its foundation: reformists no longer constituted its bulk, and anticapitalism had become the political position of the whole association (including new tendencies like the anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin). The wider picture, too, was radically different. The unification of Germany in 1871 confirmed the onset of a new age, with the nation-state the central form of political, legal, and territorial identity.
The initial configuration of the International thus became outmoded, just as its original mission came to an end. The task was no longer preparing for and organizing Europe-wide support for strikes, nor calling congresses proclaiming the usefulness of trade unions or the need to socialize the land and the means of production. Such themes were now part of the International’s collective heritage. After the Paris Commune, the real challenge for the workers’ movement became how to organize to end the capitalist mode of production and overthrow the institutions of the bourgeois world.
Our Internationalism
The 156th anniversary of the First International takes place in a very different context. An abyss separates the hopes of those times from the mistrust so characteristic of our own, the anti-systemic spirit and solidarity of the age of the International from the ideological subordination and individualism of a world reshaped by neoliberal competition and privatization.
The world of labor has suffered an epochal defeat, and the Left is still in the midst of deep crisis. After decades of neoliberal policies, we’ve returned to an exploitative system, similar to that of the nineteenth century. Labor market “reforms” — a term now shed of its original progressive meaning — have introduced more and more “flexibility” with each passing year, creating deeper inequalities. Other major political and economic shifts have succeeded one another, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Among them, there have been the social changes generated by globalization, the ecological disasters produced by the present mode of production, the growing gulf between the wealthy exploitative few and the huge impoverished majority, one of the biggest economic crises of capitalism (the one erupted in 2008) in history, the blustery winds of war, racism and chauvinism, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a context such as this, class solidarity is all the more indispensable. It was Marx himself who emphasized that the confrontation between workers — including between local and migrant workers (who are moreover discriminated) — is an essential element of the domination of the ruling classes. New ways of organizing social conflict, political parties, and trade unions must certainly be invented, as we cannot reproduce schemes used 150 years ago. But the old lesson of the International that workers are defeated if they do not organize a common front of the exploited is still valid. Without that, our only horizon is a war between the poor and unbridled competition between individuals.
The barbarism of today’s world order imposes upon the contemporary workers’ movement the urgent need to reorganize itself on the basis of two key characteristics of the International: the multiplicity of its structure and radicalism in objectives. The aims of the organization founded in London in 1864 are today more timely than ever. To rise to the challenges of the present, however, the new International cannot evade the twin requirements of pluralism and anticapitalism.
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Carl Grey Martin, Socialism and Democracy
Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International
Any author of a book on Marx at the time of the second centenary (1818–2018) should know to provide some justification for it.
Perhaps anticipating a crowded field, Gareth Stedman Jones arrived early with Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion(2016), to be followed by competitors including Michael Hienrich’s first of a three-volume biography, and the equally hefty study by Sven-Eric Liedman. Marcello Musto offers something different in his equally well-timed Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International, at just 248 pages excluding bibliography and index. The subject matter of Marx’s life and works makes any reasonably good retelling hard to resist, but for those determined, like Marx himself, to pursue not knowledge itself but its application toward class mobilization and social transformation, a minimalist approach has practical value. Another Marx feels informed by this larger duty. Thriftily organized rather than exhaustive, it serves as a solid introduction for the newcomer as well as a “philological” (6) handbook for the aficionado.
If one central rationale guides Musto, it is not fundamentally that an inevitable combination of “research advances” and “changed political conditions” (4) has produced new insight about Marx. Rather, close consideration of his drafts and other texts relegated to “minority” status reveals Marx’s consistent method – itself based on close reading. Some two hundred notebooks, including treasuries of excerpts copied from authors (admired and hated alike), “constitute his critical theoretical workshop, indicating the complex itinerary he followed in the development of his thought and the sources on which he drew in working out his own ideas” (3). Complexity, not rigidity. Marx read omnivorously and paid his debts to his sources. So, to reduce Musto’s book to one discovery, it is that a holistic, sequential examination of the textual corpus allows us to see that other Marx: “The most painstaking thinker, never satisfied with the results he has produced” – and not that posthumous, institutionalized figurehead for “dyed-in-the-wool doctrinarism” (4).
On this point, let’s return to one of those competitors, Stedman Jones (hereafter GSJ). His book’s subtitle Greatness and Illusion invites us to place it in the subgenre of critical biography, and indeed the tome asks much more time and attention of us than Musto’s in order to solicit something close to repudiation. To this end the pejorative illusion seems to have three main referents: first, the illusions under which Marx himself fell as theorist and political prognosticator with little influence “beyond a small group of radical intellectuals”; second, the illusions under which objective assessors of Marx’s œuvre and legacy operate, especially concerning the coherence of the unfinished project called Capital; and third, the illusion under which Marx’s followers worked by presuming in him “a thinker of merciless consistency with a commanding vision of the future.” 1 Defensive SPD-driven mythology, writes GSJ, led to “an increasing inflation in Marx’s reputation … about the scale and significance of Marx’s achievement, while areas in which his writings or activities had failed to meet these mythical requirements were glossed over or hidden” (3).
Yet nothing of this willed ignorance (or of what Luxemburg called in Reform or Revolution the revisionists’ “involuntary esteem for Marx”) can redound to the dishonor of Marx himself. Most of the puffing-up done to him by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Musto shows, missed what is integral to Marx’s method, his lasting ideas, or their utility for building communism. Among other things, “the SPD treated the literary legacy of Marx and Engels with the utmost negligence,” not “bother[ing] to compile a list of the writings, or even methodically to collect their voluminous correspondence that was such a valuable source of clarification, sometimes even expansion, of their thought” (3). As remedy, Musto concludes his introduction with a four-page, three-column chronology of all Marx’s writings, which acts like a roadmap to what follows. Just as important, and even more directly relevant to Musto’s project, those texts that were “glossed over or hidden” turn out to show us a better, not a worse, Marx. They are hardly skeletons in closets.
They do, however, suggest a mind in constant, almost dizzying, motion.
Throughout his life, to the vexation of his allies (Engels chiefly), Marx generally “felt the need to continue his studies before trying to give a finished form to the drafts he had written” (50). These hesitations jeopardized (or sank) some book projects, especially during the 1850s, when the gargantuan sketch known as the Grundrissebogged down. Marx’s account in an 1858 letter to Ferdinand Lasselle is representative:
Now I want to tell you how my Economics is getting on. The work is written. I have in fact had the final text in hand for some months. But the thing is proceeding very slowly, because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects that have been the main object of years of study, than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further. (108)
This self-critical, accretive approach would also worsen the fracas of the satirical Herr Vogt (1860). Widely considered “a notable waste of time and energy” (124), for Musto it is a text that could be judged so not primarily on its own merits but rather in relation to the delays that it brought to the delivery of Capital 1. Just as important, Musto notes, the belabored writing of Vogt anticipates the literary qualities of the magnum opus itself. In Vogt Marx demonstrated not only a rich intertextuality but also, complementarily, his hatred for “the intrinsic vulgarity and lack of quality in his adversaries’ works” (125) and his desire to show them how effective polemic should be done. Such qualities would resurface in Capital’s thorough, mocking demolition of the chief bourgeois ideologues who self-servingly twist logic and displace their moral failings onto their victims.
An astounding fact about Marx to put beside his sheer output (Capital 1 alone constitutes an epic aesthetic realization) was his compulsion to compose carefully, grounding his ideas in the most current scholarship, and laying down a knowledge “infrastructure” whenever needed. Put together, they indicate a man of incredible intellectual ambition, curiosity, and talent who consistently checked his own progress; took the wind of political events (writing on them when necessary); thoroughly read and acknowledged his opponents; and learned/relearned when the task demanded it (all qualities that Eleanor Marx emphasized in an 1898 Die Neue Zeit essay). Musto provides many examples, beginning with Marx’s self-directed studies outside of his prescribed coursework as an undergraduate in Berlin. Later, Marx motivated himself to refresh his algebra as accessory to his political economy, and to teach himself Russian in the 1870s so that he could follow cultural and geopolitical currents there.
Marx’s single-mindedness – conditioned by chronic physical illness, endless scrounging for a paltry income, and other domestic turmoil – was, therefore, uniquely dialectical. He did not easily relinquish ideas: he tested them, adapting them substantially when necessary – as, for example, in his major revisions (especially on value theory) to Capital 1 for the first French edition of 1872. GSJ, by contrast, emphasizes what he considers Marx’s stubborn clinging – especially after 1848 – to his own macroeconomic categories (i.e., proletariat/bourgeois), a kind of conceptual inertia that, for GSJ, hampered Marx’s evaluation of events, leading to an underappreciation of, for example, the English working class’s participatory desire for suffrage rather than systemic contestation. But as Musto explores in his chapter on the International – to which Marx devoted “eight years of intense activity” (230) and important texts like the two “Addresses on the Franco-Prussian War” – the British unions’ reformist push toward social legitimation meant no less than a rejection of “anticapitalism” (189).
Nevertheless, Marx criticized even these tendencies from a position of engagement, not solipsism. The final phase of his intellectual life (which both Musto and GSJ use as codas) provides a useful example. The matter was the legacy of the Russian obshchina as an alternative to the privatization–industrialization–re-expropriation sequence for building communal social relations. “With his usual flexibility and lack of schematism” (243), explains Musto, Marx did not automatically reduce such “archaic” formations to steps in a teleology: he thought that here as elsewhere a specific combination of “political will and a favourable set of historical circumstances” conditioned “the survival and radical transformation of the obshchina” (246). In his less generous “Epilogue” GSJ largely strikes this all away, pointing out that the scholarship on which Marx relied on the subject would be discredited, his thought experiments, moreover, ignored by the Second International. But Marx’s intellect, and achievement, were not predictive (let alone “prophetic”). Marx looked widely at the world, and deeply – beyond the manifest to the latent, which an altered or totally unexpected context might quickly reveal, refract, or electrify.
Notes
1 Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Belknap Press: Cambridge, MA, 2016), 229 and 5. Hereafter cited by page parenthetically.
I. The Marx Revival
For more than a decade now, prestigious newspapers and journals with a wide readership have been describing Karl Marx as a far-seeing theorist whose topicality receives constant confirmation. Many authors with progressive views maintain that his ideas continue to be indispensable for anyone who believes it is necessary to build an alternative to capitalism. Almost everywhere, he is now the theme of university courses and international conferences. His writings, reprinted or brought out in new editions, have reappeared on bookshop shelves, and the study of his work, after twenty years or more of neglect, has gathered increasing momentum. The years 2017 and 2018 have brought further intensity to this “Marx revival”, thanks to many initiatives around the world linked to the 150th anniversary of the publication of Capital and the bicentenary of Marx’s birth.
Marx’s ideas have changed the world. Yet despite the affirmation of Marx’s theories, turned into dominant ideologies and state doctrines for a considerable part of humankind in the twentieth century, there is still no full edition of all his works and manuscripts. The main reason for this lies in the incomplete character of Marx’s oeuvre; the works he published amount to considerably less than the total number of projects left unfinished, not to speak of the mountainous Nachlass of notes connected with his unending researches. Marx left many more manuscripts than those he sent to the printers. The sometimes-grinding poverty in which he lived, as well as his constant ill health, added to his daily worries; his rigorous method and merciless self-criticism increased the difficulties of many of his undertakings. Moreover, his passion for knowledge remained unaltered over time and always drove him on to fresh study. Nevertheless, his ceaseless labors would have the most extraordinary theoretical consequences for the future.
Of particular value for a reevaluation of Marx’s achievement was the resumed publication in 1998 of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²), the historical-critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Friedrich Engels. Twenty-eight more volumes have already appeared (40 were published between 1975 and 1989), and others are in the course of preparation. The MEGA² is organized in four sections: (1) all the works, articles, and drafts written by Marx and Engels (with the exception of Capital); (2) Capital and all its preparatory materials; (3) the correspondence—consisting of 4,000 letters by Marx and Engels and 10,000 written to them by others, a large number published for the first time in the MEGA²; and (4) the excerpts, annotations, and marginal notes. This fourth section bears witness to Marx’s truly encyclopedic labors: ever since his time at university, it was his habit to compile extracts from the books he read, often interspersing them with reflections that they suggested to him.
Marx’s literary bequest contains some two hundred notebooks. They are essential for an understanding of the genesis of his theory and of those elements he was unable to develop as he would have wished. The surviving excerpts, covering the long time-span from 1838 to 1882, are written in eight languages (German, ancient Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Russian) and refer to the most varied disciplines. They were taken from works of philosophy, art history, religion, politics, law, literature, history, political economy, international relations, technology, mathematics, physiology, geology, mineralogy, agronomy, anthropology, chemistry, and physics—including not only books and newspaper and journal articles but also parliamentary minutes as well as government statistics and reports. This immense store of knowledge, much of it published in recent years or still waiting to be printed, was the construction site for Marx’s critical theory, and MEGA² has enabled access to it for the first time.
These priceless materials—many available only in German and therefore confined to small circles of researchers—show us an author very different from the one that numerous critics, or self-styled disciples, presented for such a long time. Indeed, the new textual acquisitions in MEGA² make it possible to say that, of the classics of political, economic, and philosophical thought, Marx is the author whose profile has changed the most in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. The new political setting, following the implosion of the Soviet Union, has also contributed to this fresh perception. For the end of Marxism-Leninism finally freed Marx’s work from the shackles of an ideology light years away from his conception of society.
Recent research has refuted the various approaches that reduce Marx’s conception of communist society to superior development of the productive forces. For example, it has shown the importance he attached to the ecological question: on repeated occasions, he denounced the fact that expansion of the capitalist mode of production increases not only the theft of workers’ labor but also the pillage of natural resources. Marx went deeply into many other issues that, 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. Thus, thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become possible to read a Marx very unlike the dogmatic, economistic, and Eurocentric theorist who was paraded around for so long.
II. New Discoveries on the Genesis of the Materialist Conception of History
In February 1845, after 15 intensive months in Paris that were crucial for his political formation, Marx was forced to move to Brussels, where he was allowed residence on condition that he “did not publish anything on current politics” (Marx 1975b:677). During the three years spent in the Belgian capital, he pressed on fruitfully with his studies of political economy and conceived the idea of writing, along with Engels, Joseph Weydemeyer, and Moses Hess, a “critique of modern German philosophy as expounded by its representatives Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner, and of German socialism as expounded by its various prophets” (Marx 1976:72). The resulting text, posthumously published under the title The German Ideology, had a dual aim: to combat the latest forms of neo-Hegelianism in Germany, and then, as Marx wrote to the publisher Carl Wilhelm Julius Leske on August 1, 1846, “to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present” (Marx and Engels 1982:50; cf. Musto 2018:57). This manuscript, on which he worked right up to June 1846, was never completed, but it helped him to elaborate more clearly than before, though still not in a definitive form, what Engels defined for the wider public 40 years later as “the materialist conception of history” (Engels 1990a:519).
The first edition of The German Ideology, published in 1932, as well as all later versions, which only incorporated slight modifications, were sent to the printers with the semblance of a completed book. In particular, the editors of this actually unfinished manuscript created the false impression that The German Ideology included an essential opening chapter on Feuerbach in which Marx and Engels exhaustively set out the laws of “historical materialism” (a term never used by Marx). As stated by Althusser, this was the place where they conceptualized “an unequivocal epistemological break” with their previous writings (Althusser 1996:33). The German Ideology soon turned into one of the most important philosophical texts of the twentieth century. According to Henri Lefebvre (1968:71), it set out the “fundamental theses of historical materialism.” Maximilien Rubel (1980:13) held that this “manuscript contains the most elaborate statement of the critical and materialist concept of history.” David McLellan (1975:37) was equally forthright in maintaining that it “contained Marx’s most detailed account of his materialist conception of history.”
Thanks to Volume I/5 of MEGA², Deutsche Ideologie: Manuskripte und Drucke (1845–1847) (Marx and Engels 2017; 1893 pages), many such claims can now be downsized and The German Ideology restored to its original incompleteness. This edition—which comprises 17 manuscripts with a total of 700 pages plus a 1200-page critical apparatus providing variations and authorial corrections and indicating the paternity of each section—establishes once and for all the fragmentary character of the text. The twentieth-century fallacy of “scientific communism” and all the instrumentalizations of The German Ideology call to mind a phrase to be found in the text itself. For its cogent critique of German philosophy in Marx’s lifetime also sounds an acerbic warning against future exegetical trends: “Not only in its answers, even in its questions there was a mystification” (Marx and Engels 1976:28).
In the same period, the young Trier-born revolutionary extended the studies he had begun in Paris. In 1845, he spent July and August in Manchester delving into the vast English-language economic literature and compiling nine books of extracts (the so-called Manchester Notebooks), mostly from manuals of political economy and books on economic history. The MEGA² volume IV/4, Exzerpte und Notizen Juli bis August 1845 (Marx and Engels 1988), contains the first five of these notebooks, together with three books of Engels’s notes from the same time in Manchester. Volume IV/5, Exzerpte und Notizen Juli 1845 bis Dezember 1850 (Marx and Engels 2015; 650 pages), completes this series of texts and makes their previously unpublished parts available to researchers. It includes Notebooks 6, 7, 8, and 9, containing Marx’s excerpts from 16 works of political economy. The most sizeable of this group came from John Francis Bray’s Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy (1839) and four texts by Robert Owen, in particular his Book of the New Moral World (1849), all of which evince Marx’s great interest at the time in English socialism and his deep respect for Owen, an author whom too many Marxists have over-hastily written off as “utopian.” The volume ends with twenty or so pages that Marx wrote between 1846 and 1850, plus some of Engels’s study notes from the same period.
These studies of socialist theory and political economy were not a hindrance to Marx’s and Engels’s habitual political engagement. The 800 pages and more of the recently published Volume I/7, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe, Februar bis Oktober 1848 (Marx and Engels 2016; 1294 pages), allows us to appreciate the scale of this in 1848, one of the most consuming years of political and journalistic activity in the lives of the authors of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. After a revolutionary movement of unprecedented scope and intensity plunged the political and social order of continental Europe into crisis, governments in place took all possible countermeasures to put an end to the insurrections. Marx himself suffered the consequences and was expelled from Belgium in March. However, a republic had just been proclaimed in France, and Ferdinand Flocon, a minister in the Provisional Government, invited Marx to return to Paris: “Dear and valiant Marx . . . the tyranny banished you, but free France will reopen its doors to you.” Marx naturally set aside his studies of political economy and took up journalistic activity in support of the revolution, helping to chart a recommended political course. After a short period in Paris, in April he moved to the Rhineland and two months later began editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which had meanwhile been founded in Cologne. An intense campaign in its columns weighed in behind the cause of the insurgents and urged the proletariat to promote “the social and republican revolution” (Marx 1977:178).
Nearly all the articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were published anonymously. One of the merits of the MEGA2 volume I/7 is to have correctly attributed the authorship of 36 texts to either Marx or Engels, whereas previous collections had left us in doubt about who wrote which piece. Out of a total of 275, a full 125 are printed here for the first time in an edition of the works of Marx and Engels. An appendix also features 16 interesting documents containing accounts of some of their interventions at the meetings of the League of Communists, the aggregates of the Democratic Society of Cologne and the Vienna Union. Those interested in Marx’s political and journalistic activity during the “year of the revolution,” 1848, will find here much invaluable material to deepen their knowledge.
III. Capital: The Unfinished Critique
The revolutionary movement that rose up throughout Europe in 1848 was defeated within a short space of time, and in 1849, after two expulsion orders from Prussia and France, Marx had no other option than to make his way across the Channel. He would remain in England, an exile and stateless person, for the rest of his life, but European reaction could not have confined him in a better place to write his critique of political economy. At that time, London was the world’s leading economic and financial center, the “demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos” (Marx 1978:134), and therefore the most favorable location from which to observe the latest economic developments of capitalist society. He also became a correspondent for the New-York Tribune, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the United States of America.
For many years Marx awaited the outbreak of a new crisis, and when this materialized in 1857 he devoted much of his time to analyzing its key features. Volume I/16, Artikel Oktober 1857 bis Dezember 1858 (Marx and Engels 2018; 1181 pages), includes 84 articles that he published between autumn 1857 and the end of 1858 in the New-York Tribune, including those expressing his first reactions to the financial panic of 1857. The American daily often printed unsigned editorials, but research for this new volume of MEGA² has made it possible to attribute two more articles to Marx, as well as appending four that were substantially modified by the editors and a further three whose origin remains uncertain.
Driven by a desperate need to improve his economic circumstances, Marx also joined the editorial committee of The New American Cyclopædia and agreed to compose a number of entries for this project (MEGA2 volume I/16 contains 39 of these pieces). Although the payment of $2 per page was very low, it was still an addition to his disastrous finances. Moreover, he entrusted most of the work to Engels, so that he would be able to devote more time to his economic writings.
Marx’s work in this period was remarkable and wide-ranging. Alongside his journalistic commitments, from August 1857 to May 1858 he filled the eight notebooks famously known as the Grundrisse. But he also set himself the strenuous task of an analytic study of the first world economic crisis. Volume IV/14, Exzerpte, Zeitungsausschnitte und Notizen zur Weltwirtschaftskrise (Krisenhefte), November 1857 bis Februar 1858 (Marx 2017; 680 pages), decisively adds to our knowledge of one of the most fertile intervals of Marx’s theoretical production. In a letter to Engels of December 18, 1857, Marx described his feverish burst of activity:
I am working enormously, as a rule until 4 o’clock in the morning. I am engaged on a twofold task: 1. Elaborating the outlines [Grundrisse] of political economy. (For the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential to go into the matter to the bottom, as it is for my own, individually, to get rid of this nightmare.) 2. The present crisis. Apart from the articles for the [New-York] Tribune, all I do is keep records of it, which, however, takes up a considerable amount of time. I think that, somewhere about the spring, we ought to do a pamphlet together about the affair as a reminder to the German public that we are still there as always, and always the same. (Marx and Engels 1983:224)
So Marx’s plan was to work at the same time on two projects: a theoretical work on the critique of the capitalist mode of production, and a more strictly topical book on the vicissitudes of the ongoing crisis. This is why in the so-called Notebooks on Crisis, unlike previous similar volumes, Marx did not compile extracts from the work of other economists but collected a large quantity of news reports on the major bank collapses, on variations in stock market prices, changes in trade patterns, unemployment rates, and industrial output. The particular attention he paid to the latter distinguished his analysis from that of so many others who attributed crises exclusively to the faulty granting of credit and an increase in speculative phenomena. Marx divided his notes among three separate notebooks. In the first and shortest one, entitled “1857 France,” he collected data on the state of French trade and the chief measures taken by the Bank of France. The second, the “Book on the Crisis of 1857,” was nearly twice as long and dealt mainly with Britain and the money market. Similar themes were treated in the slightly longer third notebook, “Book on the Commercial Crisis,” in which Marx annotated data and news items on industrial relations, the production of raw materials, and the labor market.
Marx’s work was as rigorous as ever: he copied from more than a dozen journals and newspapers, in chronological order, the most interesting parts of numerous articles and any other information he could use to summarize what was happening. His principal source was The Economist—a weekly from which he drew roughly half of his notes—although he also frequently consulted Morning Star, The Manchester Guardian, and The Times. All the extracts were compiled in the English language. In these notebooks, Marx did not confine himself to transcribing the main news reports concerning the United States of America and Britain. He also tracked the most significant events in other European countries—particularly France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain—and took a lively interest in other parts of the world, especially India and China, the Far East, Egypt, and even Brazil and Australia.
As the weeks passed, Marx gave up the idea of publishing a book on the crisis and concentrated all his energies on his theoretical work, the critique of political economy, which in his view could brook no further delay. Yet the Notebooks on Crisis remain particularly useful in refuting a false idea of Marx’s main interests during this period. In a letter of January 16, 1858, to Engels, he wrote that “as regards method” to use for his work “Hegel’s Logic had been of great use to him” and added that he wanted to highlight its “rational aspect” (Marx and Engels 1983:249). On this basis, some interpreters of Marx’s work have concluded that when writing the Grundrisse he spent considerable time studying Hegelian philosophy. But the publication of Volume IV/14 makes it quite clear that his main concern at the time was with the empirical analysis of events linked to the great economic crisis that he had been predicting for so long.
Marx’s indefatigable efforts to complete his “critique of political economy” are also the main theme of Volume III/12, Briefwechsel, Januar 1862 bis September 1864 (Marx and Engels 2013; 1529 pages), which contains his correspondence from the beginning of 1862 up to the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association. Of the 425 surviving letters, 112 are exchanges between Engels and Marx, while 35 were written to, and 278 received from, third persons (227 of this group being published here for the first time). The inclusion of the latter—the most significant difference from all previous editions—constitutes a veritable treasure trove for the interested reader, providing a wealth of new information about events and theories that Marx and Engels learned from women and men with whom they had a shared political commitment.
Like all the other MEGA² volumes of correspondence, this one also ends with a register of letters written by, or addressed to, Marx and Engels that have left no more than traces testifying to their existence. These come to a total of 125, nearly a quarter of the number that have survived, and include a full 57 written by Marx. In these cases, even the most rigorous researcher can do no more than speculate about various conjectural hypotheses.
Among the key points of discussion in Marx’s correspondence from the early 1860s were the American Civil War, the Polish revolt against Russian occupation, and the birth of the Social Democratic Party of Germany inspired by the principles of Ferdinand Lassalle. However, a constantly recurring theme was his struggle to make progress in the writing of Capital.
During this period, Marx launched into a new area of research: “Theories of Surplus Value.” Over ten notebooks, he minutely dissected the approach of major economists before him, his basic idea being that “all economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent” (Marx 1988:348). Meanwhile, Marx’s economic circumstances continued to be desperate. On June 18, 1862, he wrote to Engels: “Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable.” The situation was so extreme that Jenny made up her mind to sell some books from her husband’s personal library—although she could not find anyone who wanted to buy them. Nevertheless, Marx managed to “work hard” and expressed a note of satisfaction to Engels: “strange to say, my grey matter is functioning better in the midst of the surrounding poverty than it has done for years” (Marx and Engels 1985:380). On September 10 of the same year, Marx wrote to Engels that he might get a job “in a railroad office” in the new year (ibid.:417). On December 28, he repeated to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann that things had become so desperate that he had “decided to become a ‘practical man’”; nothing came of the idea, however. Marx reported with his typical sarcasm: “Luckily—or perhaps I should say unluckily?—I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting” (ibid.:436).
Along with the financial stresses, Marx suffered a great deal from health problems. Nevertheless, from summer 1863 to December 1865 he embarked on further editing of the various parts into which he had decided to subdivide Capital. In the end, he managed to draw up the first draft of Volume One; the sole manuscript of Volume Three, in which he gave his only account of the complete process of capitalist production; and an initial version of Volume Two, containing the first general presentation of the circulation process of capital.
Volume II/11 of MEGA², Manuskripte zum zweiten Buch des “Kapitals,” 1868 bis 1881 (Marx and Engels 2008; 1850 pages), contains all the final manuscripts pertaining to Volume Two of Capital that Marx drafted between 1868 and 1881. Nine of these ten manuscripts had not been published previously. In October 1867, Marx returned to Capital, Volume Two, but various health issues forced another sudden interruption. A few months later, when he was able to resume work, nearly three years had passed since the last version he had written. Marx completed the first two chapters in the course of the spring of 1868, in addition to a group of preparatory manuscripts—on the relationship between surplus value and rate of profit, the law of the rate of profit, and the metamorphoses of capital—which occupied him until the end of the year. The new version of the third chapter was completed in the course of the next two years. Volume II/11 ends with a number of short texts that the aging Marx wrote between February 1877 and the spring of 1881.
The drafts of Capital, Volume Two, which were left in anything but a definitive state, present a number of theoretical problems. However, a final version of Volume Two was published by Engels in 1885, and it now appears in Volume II/13 of MEGA², entitled Karl Marx: Das Kapital: Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Zweiter Band. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Engels, Hamburg 1885 (Marx 2008; 800 pages).
Finally, Volume II/4.3, Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863–1868, Teil 3 (Marx 2012; 1065 pages), completes the second section of MEGA². This volume, which follows II/4.1 and II/4.2 in the previous series, contains 15 hitherto unpublished manuscripts from autumn 1867 to the end of 1868. Seven of these are draft fragments of Capital, Volume Three; they have a highly fragmentary character, and Marx never managed to update them in a way that reflected the progress of his research. Another three relate to Volume Two, while the remaining five tackle issues concerning the interdependence between Volumes Two and Three and include comments on excerpts from the works of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. The latter are particularly stimulating for economists interested in Marx’s theory of the rate of profit and his ideas on price theory. Philological studies linked to the preparation of this volume have also shown that the original manuscript of Capital, Volume One (of which “Chapter Six: Results of the Immediate Process of Production” used to be considered the only surviving part) actually dates back to the 1863–64 period, and that Marx cut and pasted it into the copy he prepared for publication.
With the publication of MEGA2 volume II/4.3, all the ancillary texts relating to Capital have been made available, from the famous “Introduction,” written in July 1857 during one of the greatest crashes in the history of capitalism, to the last fragments composed in the spring of 1881. We are talking of 15 volumes plus just as many bulky auxiliary tomes that constitute a formidable critical apparatus for the main text. They include all the manuscripts from the late 1850s and early 1860s, the first version of Capital published in 1867 (parts of which would be modified in subsequent editions), the French translation reviewed by Marx that appeared between 1872 and 1875, and all the changes that Engels made to the manuscripts of Volumes Two and Three. Alongside this, the classical box set of the three volumes of Capital appears positively minute. It is no exaggeration to say that only now can we fully understand the merits, limits, and incompleteness of Marx’s magnum opus.
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 Two and Three, written between 1864 and 1881, correspond to approximately 2,350 pages of the MEGA2. Engels successfully published Volume Two in 1885 and Volume Three 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.
IV. The International, Marx’s Researches Following Capital, and Engels’s Final Labors
Immediately after the publication of Capital, Marx resumed militant activity and made a constant commitment to the work of the International Working Men’s Association. This phase in his political biography is documented in Volume I/21, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe, September 1867 bis März 1871 (Marx and Engels 2009; 2,432 pages), which contains more than 150 texts and documents for the period from 1867 to 1871, as well as minutes of 169 meetings of the General Council in London (omitted from all previous editions of the works of Marx and Engels) in which Marx made an intervention. As such, it provides research material for crucial years in the life of the International.
Right from the earliest days, in 1864, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas were hegemonic in France, French-speaking Switzerland, and Belgium, and the mutualists—the name by which his followers were known—were the most moderate wing of the International. Resolutely hostile to state intervention in any field, they opposed socialization of the land and the means of production as well as any use of strikes as a weapon. The texts published in this volume show how Marx played a key role in the long struggle to reduce Proudhon’s influence in the International. They include the documents related to the preparation of the congresses of Brussels (1868) and Basel (1869), where the International made its first clear pronouncement on the socialization of the means of production by state authorities and in favor of the right to abolish individual ownership of land. This marked an important victory for Marx and the first appearance of socialist principles in the political program of a major workers’ organization.
Beyond the International Working Men’s Association’s political program, the late 1860s and early 1870s were rich in social conflicts. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International, whose reputation was spreading ever wider, and to ask it to support their struggles. This period also saw the birth of some IWMA sections of Irish workers in England. Marx was worried about the division that violent nationalism had produced within the ranks of the proletariat, and, in a document that has come to be known as the “Confidential Communication,” he emphasized that “the English bourgeoisie ha[d] not only exploited the Irish misery to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen”; it had also proved able to divide the workers “into two hostile camps” (Marx 1985:120). In his view, “a nation that enslaves another forges its own chains” (ibid.), and the class struggle could not evade such a decisive issue. Another major theme in the volume, treated with particular attention in Engels’s writings for The Pall Mall Gazette, was opposition to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71.
Marx’s work in the International Working Men’s Association lasted from 1864 to 1872, and the brand-new Volume IV/18, Exzerpte und Notizen, Februar 1864 bis Oktober 1868, November 1869, März, April, Juni 1870, Dezember 1872 (Marx and Engels 2019; 1294 pages) provides the hitherto unknown part of the studies he made during those years. Marx’s research took place either close to the printing of Volume One of Capital or after 1867 when he was preparing Volumes Two and Three for publication. This MEGA² volume consists of five books of excerpts and four notebooks containing summaries of more than one hundred published works, reports of parliamentary debates, and journalistic articles. The most sizeable and theoretically important part of these materials involves Marx’s research on agriculture, his main interests here being ground rent, the natural sciences, agrarian conditions in various European countries and the United States, Russia, Japan, and India, and land tenure systems in precapitalist societies.
Marx read attentively Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1843), a work by the German scientist Justus von Liebig that he considered essential because it allowed him to modify his previous belief that the scientific discoveries of modern agriculture solved the problem of soil replenishment. From then on, he took an ever-keener interest in what we would today call “ecology,” particularly soil erosion and deforestation. Among the other books that greatly impressed Marx in this period, a special place should also be assigned to 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. In a letter to Engels on March 25, 1868, he said that he had found Maurer’s books “extremely significant,” since they approached in an entirely different way “not only the primitive age but also the entire later development of the free imperial cities, of the estate owners possessing immunity, of public authority, and of the struggle between the free peasantry and serfdom” (Marx and Engels 1987:557). Marx further endorsed Maurer’s demonstration that private property in land belonged to a precise historical period and could not be regarded as a natural feature of human civilization.
Finally, Marx studied in depth 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). He found the first of these “very interesting,” especially appreciating the part in which Fraas demonstrated that “climate and flora change in historical times.” He described the author as “a Darwinist before Darwin,” who admitted that “even the species have been developing in historical times.” Marx was also struck by Fraas’s ecological considerations and his related concern that “cultivation—when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he naturally does not reach this point)—leaves deserts behind it.” Marx could detect in all this “an unconscious socialist tendency” (Marx and Engels 1987:558–59).
Following the publication of the so-called Notebooks on Agriculture, it can be argued with more evidence than before that ecology might have played a much greater role in Marx’s thinking if he had had the energy to complete the last two volumes of Capital. Of course, Marx’s ecological critique was anticapitalist in its thrust and, beyond the hopes he placed in scientific progress, involved a questioning of the mode of production as a whole.
The scale of Marx’s studies in the natural sciences has become fully apparent since the publication of MEGA² volume IV/26, Exzerpte und Notizen zur Geologie, Mineralogie und Agrikulturchemie, März bis September 1878 (Marx 2011; 1104 pages). In the spring and summer of 1878, geology, mineralogy, and agrarian chemistry were more central to Marx’s studies than political economy. He compiled extracts from a number of books, including The Natural History of the Raw Materials of Commerce (1872) by John Yeats, The Book of Nature (1848) by the chemist Friedrich Schoedler, and Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology (1856), by the chemist and mineralogist James Johnston. Between June and early September, he was grappling with Joseph Jukes’s Student’s Manual of Geology (1857) (see Marx 2011:139–679), from which he copied down the largest number of extracts. The main focus of these is questions of scientific methodology, the stages of the development of geology as a discipline, and its usefulness for industrial and agricultural production.
Such insights awakened in Marx a need to develop his ideas regarding profit, with which he had last intensively occupied himself in the mid-1860s, when he wrote the draft of the part on “The Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground Rent” of Capital, Volume Three. Some of the summaries of natural-scientific texts had the aim of throwing greater light on the material he was studying. But other excerpts, more geared to theoretical aspects, were meant to be used in the completion of Volume Three. Engels later recalled that Marx “combed . . . prehistory, agronomy, Russian and American landownership, geology, etc., in particular to work out, to an extent . . . never previously attempted, the section on ground rent in Volume III of Capital” (Engels 1990b:341). These volumes of MEGA² are all the more important because they serve to discredit the myth, repeated in a number of biographies and studies on Marx, that after Capital he had satisfied his intellectual curiosity and completely given up new study and research.
Three books of MEGA² published in the last decade concern the late work by Engels. Volume I/30, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe Mai 1883 bis September 1886 (Engels 2011; 1154 pages) contains 43 texts that he wrote in the three years following Marx’s death. Of the 29 most important of these, 17 consist of journalistic pieces that appeared in some of the main papers of the European working-class press. For although in this period he was mainly absorbed in editing Marx’s incomplete manuscripts of Capital, Engels did not neglect to intervene on a series of burning political and theoretical issues. He also brought out a polemical work that took aim at the resurgence of idealism in German academic circles, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. A further 14 texts, published as an appendix in this MEGA² volume, are some of Engels’s own translations and a series of articles signed by other authors who benefited from his collaboration.
MEGA² has also published a new set of Engels’s correspondence. Volume III/30, Briefwechsel Oktober 1889 bis November 1890 (Engels 2013; 1512 pages), contains 406 surviving letters from the total of 500 or more that he wrote between October 1889 and November 1890. Moreover, the inclusion for the first time of letters from other correspondents makes it possible to appreciate more deeply the contribution that Engels made to the growth of workers’ parties in Germany, France, and Britain, on a range of theoretical and organizational issues. Some of the items in question concern the birth and many ongoing debates in the Second International, whose founding congress took place on 14 July 1889.
Finally, Volume I/32, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe März 1891 bis August 1895 (Engels 2010; 1590 pages), brings together the writings from the last four and a half years of Engels’s life. There are a number of journalistic pieces for the major socialist papers of the time, including Die Neue Zeit, Le Socialiste, and Critica Sociale, but also prefaces and afterwords to various reprintings of works by Marx and Engels, transcriptions of speeches, interviews and greetings to party congresses, accounts of conversations, documents that Engels drafted in collaboration with others, and a number of translations.
These three volumes will therefore prove highly useful for a deeper study of Engels’s late theoretical and political contributions. The numerous publications and international conferences scheduled for the bicentenary of his birth (1820–2020) will certainly not fail to probe these twelve years following Marx’s death, during which he devoted his energies to the diffusion of Marxism.
V. Another Marx?
What Marx emerges from the new historical-critical edition of his works? In certain respects, he differs from the thinker whom many followers and opponents presented over the years—not to speak of the stone statues to be found in public squares under the unfree regimes of Eastern Europe, which showed him pointing to the future with imperious certainty. On the other hand, it would be misleading to invoke—as do those who over-excitedly hail an “unknown Marx” after each new text appears for the first time—that recent research has turned upside down everything that was already known about him. What MEGA² provides, rather, is the textual basis for rethinking a different Marx: not different because the class struggle drops out of his thought (as some academics would wish, in a variation of the old refrain of “Marx the economist” against “Marx the politician” that vainly seeks to present him as a toothless classic); but radically different from the author who was dogmatically converted into the fons et origo of “actually existing socialism” supposedly fixated on class conflict alone.
The new advances achieved in Marxian studies suggest that the exegesis of Marx’s work is again, as at many other times in the past, likely to become more and more refined. For a long time, many Marxists foregrounded the writings of the young Marx—primarily the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology—while the Manifesto of the Communist Party remained his most widely read and quoted text. In those early writings, however, one finds many ideas that were superseded in his later work. For a long time, the difficulty of examining Marx’s research in the last two decades of his life hampered our knowledge of the important gains he achieved. But it is above all in Capital and its preliminary drafts, as well as in the researches of his final years, that we find the most precious reflections on the critique of bourgeois society. These represent the last, though not the definitive, conclusions at which Marx arrived. If examined critically in the light of changes in the world since his death, they may still prove useful for the task of theorizing, after the failures of the twentieth century, an alternative social-economic model to capitalism.
The MEGA² edition has given the lie to all the claims that Marx is a thinker about whom everything has already been written and said. 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.
References
1. Among the main recent works marking this resurgence of interest, see Musto 2020a.
2. Tomes II/4.1 and II/4.2 were published before the interruption of MEGA², while Tome II/4.3 came out in 2012. This three-part book brings to 67 the total number of MEGA² volumes published since 1975. In the future, some of the further volumes will be published only in digital form.
3. Of particular relevance for the content of Marx’s library was the publication of MEGA² vol. IV/32, Die Bibliotheken von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels (Marx and Engels 1999), which consists of an index of 1,450 books (in 2,100 total volumes)—two-thirds of those owned by Marx and Engels. This compilation indicates all the pages of each volume on which Marx and Engels left annotations and marginalia.
4. For a review of all 13 MEGA² volumes published from 1998—the year of the resumption of this edition—to 2007, see Musto 2007. In this review essay are discussed the 15 volumes—amounting to a total of 20,508 pages—published between 2008 and 2019.
5. In fact, Engels already used this expression in 1859, in his review of Marx’s book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but the article had no resonance and the term began to circulate only after the publication of his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.
6. A few years before the publication of the MEGA² vol. I/5, on the basis of the German edition of the Marx/Engels/Weydemeyer Die Deutsche Ideologie: Artikel, Druckvorlagen, Entwürfe, Reinschriftenfragmente und Notizen zu I. Feuerbach und II Sankt Bruno, which appeared as a special issue (vol. 2003) of the Marx-Engels Jahrbuch, Terrell Carver and David Blank (2014) provided a new English-language edition of the so-called “Chapter on Feuerbach.” The two authors argued for maximum fidelity to the originals, furthermore criticizing the Marx-Engels Jahrbuch edition (now incorporated in MEGA² vol. I/5) on the grounds that, in line with earlier twenty-century editors, it arranged the discrete manuscripts as if they formed the draft of a a fully cohesive, if never completed, work.
7. A small part of this text has recently been translated into English as “Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1867–68 (Excerpt)” (Marx 2019).
8. Volume II/4.2 has recently been translated into English as Fred Moseley (ed.), Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (2015).
9. See Carl-Erich Vollgraf, “Einführung,” in MEGA² vol. II/4.3:421–74 (Marx 2012).
10. Some of them—like the addresses and resolutions presented to the congresses of the International—were instead included in the anthology Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Musto 2014), which appeared on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of this organization.
11. On these questions, see also the work by Kohei Saito (one of the editors of MEGA² vol. IV/18), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017).
12. Marx’s great interest in the natural sciences, for a long time almost completely unknown, is also evident in MEGA² vol. IV/31, Naturwissenschaftliche Exzerpte und Notizen, Mitte 1877 bis Anfang 1883 (Marx and Engels 1999), which presented the notes on organic and inorganic chemistry taken by Marx after 1877.
13. See Marcello Musto, The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (2020b). An important milestone will be the publication of the volume edited by David Smith, Marx’s World: Global Society and Capital Accumulation in Marx’s Late Manuscripts (forthcoming 2021).
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Musto, Marcello. 2018. Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Musto, Marcello, ed. 2020a. The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Musto, Marcello. 2020b. The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Owen, Robert. 1849. The Book of the New Moral World. London: Home Colonization Society.
Rubel, Maximilien. 1980. Marx: Life and Works. London: Macmillan.
Saito, Kohei. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Smith, David, ed. Forthcoming 2021. Marx’s World: Global Society and Capital Accumulation in Marx’s Late Manuscripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Categories
Communism
I. Critical Theories of the Early Socialists
In the wake of the French Revolution, numerous theories began to circulate in Europe that sought both to respond to demands for social justice unanswered by the French Revolution and to correct the dramatic economic imbalances brought about by the spread of the industrial revolution.
The democratic gains following the capture of the Bastille delivered a decisive blow to the aristocracy, but they left almost unchanged the inequality of wealth between the popular and the dominant classes. The decline of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic were not sufficient to reduce poverty in France.
This was the context in which the ‘critical-utopian’ theories of socialism,1 as Marx and Engels defined them in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), rose to prominence. They considered them ‘utopian’2 for two reasons: first, their exponents, in different ways, opposed the existing social order and furnished theories containing what they believed to be ‘the most valuable elements for the enlightenment of the working class’;3 and, second, they claimed that an alternative form of social organization could be achieved simply through the theoretical identification of new ideas and principles, rather than through the concrete struggle of the working class. According to Marx and Engels, their socialist predecessors had believed that
historical action [had] to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolve[d] itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.4
In the most widely read political text in human history, Marx and Engels also took issue with many other forms of socialism both past and present, grouping them under the headings of ‘feudal’, ‘petty-bourgeois’, ‘bourgeois’ or – in disparagement of its ‘philosophical phraseology’ – ‘German’ socialism.5 In general, these theories could be related to one another either in terms of an aspiration to ‘restore the old means of production and exchange, and with them the old property relations and the old society’, or in terms of an attempt to ‘cramp the modern means of production and exchange within the framework of the old property relations’ from which they had broken. For this reason, Marx saw in these conceptions a form of socialism that was both ‘reactionary and utopian’.6
The term ‘utopian’, as opposed to ‘scientific’ socialism, has often been used in a misleading and intentionally disparaging way. In fact, the ‘utopian socialists’ contested the social organization of the age in which they lived, contributing through their writings and actions to the critique of existing economic relations.7 Marx had considerable respect for his precursors:8 he stressed the huge gap separating Saint-Simon (1760-1825) from his cruder interpreters;9 and, whilst he regarded some of Charles Fourier’s (1771-1858) ideas as extravagant ‘humorous sketches’,10 he saw ‘great merit’ in the realization that the transformative aim for labour was to overcome not only the existing mode of distribution but also the ‘mode of production’.11 In Owen’s theories he saw many elements that were worthy of interest and anticipated the future. In Wages, Price and Profit (1865) he noted that already at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (1815), Owen had ‘proclaimed a general limitation of the working day as the first preparatory step to the emancipation of the working class’.12 He had also argued, like no one else, in favour of cooperative production.
Nevertheless, while recognizing the positive influence of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen on the nascent workers’ movement, Marx’s overall assessment of their ideas was negative. He thought that they hoped to solve the social problems of the age with unrealizable fantasies, and he criticized them heavily for spending much of their time on the irrelevant theoretical exercise of building ‘castles in the air’.13
Marx did not take exception only to proposals that he considered wrong or impractical. Above all, he opposed the idea that social change could come about through a priori meta-historical models inspired by dogmatic precepts. The moralism of the early socialists also came in for criticism.14 In his ‘Conspectus on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’ (1874-75), he reproached ‘utopian socialism’ with seeking ‘to foist new illusions onto the people instead of confining its scientific investigations to the social movement created by the people itself’.15 In his view, the conditions for revolution could not be imported from outside.
II. Equality, Theoretical Systems and Future Society: Errors of the Precursors
After 1789, many theorists contended with one another in outlining a new and more just social order, over and above the fundamental political changes that had come with the end of the Ancien Regime. One of the commonest positions assumed that all the ills of society would cease as soon as a system of government based on absolute equality among all its components had been established.
This idea of a primordial, and in many respects dictatorial, communism was the guiding principle of the Conspiracy of Equals that developed in 1796 to subvert the ruling French Directorate. In the Manifesto of the Equals (1795), Sylvain Maréchal (1750-1803) argued that ‘since all have the same faculties and the same wants’, there should be ‘the same education [and] the same nourishment’ for all. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘ should not the like portion and the same quality of food suffice for each according to their wants?’16 The leading figure in the conspiracy of 1796, François-Noël Babeuf (1760-1797), held that application of ‘the great principle of equality’ would greatly extend the ‘circle of humanity’ so that ‘frontiers, customs barriers and evil governments’ would ‘gradually disappear’.17
The vision of a society based on strict economic equality re-emerged in French communist writing in the period after the Revolution of July 1830. In The Voyage to Icaria (1840), a political manifesto written in the form of a novel, Étienne Cabet (1788-1856) depicted a model community in which there would no longer be ‘property, money, or buying and selling’, and human beings would be ‘equal in everything’.18 In this ‘second promised land’,19 the law would regulate almost every aspect of life: ‘every house [would have] four floors’20 and ‘everyone [would be] dressed in the same way’.21
Relations of strict equality are also prefigured in the work of Théodore Dézamy (1808-1871). In the Community Code (1842), he speaks of a world ‘divided into communes, as equal, regular and united as possible’, in which there would be ‘a single kitchen’ and ‘one common dormitory’ for all children. The whole citizenry would live as ‘a family in one single household’.22
Similar views to those circulating in France also took root in Germany. In Humanity As It Is and As It Should Be (1838), Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871) foresaw that the elimination of private property would automatically put an end to egoism, which he simplistically regarded as the main cause of all social problems. In his eyes, ‘the community of goods’ would be ‘the means to the redemption of humanity, transforming the earth into paradise’ and immediately bringing about ‘enormous abundance’.23
All the thinkers who projected such visions fell into the same dual error: they took it for granted that the adoption of a new social model based on strict equality could be the solution for all the problems of society; and they convinced themselves, in defiance of all economic laws, that all that was necessary to achieve it was the imposition of certain measures from on high, whose effects would not later be altered by the course of the economy.
Alongside this naive egalitarian ideology, based on an assurance that all social disparities among human beings could be eliminated with ease, was another conviction equally widespread amongst the early socialists: many believed that it was sufficient to theoretically devise a better system of social organization in order to change the world. Numerous reform projects were therefore elaborated in minute detail, setting out their authors’ theses for the restructuring of society. The priority, in their eyes, was to find the correct formulation, which, once discovered, citizens would then willingly accept as a matter of common sense and gradually implement in reality.
Saint-Simon was one of those who clung to this conviction. In 1819 he wrote in the periodical L’Organisateur (The Organizer): ‘The old system will cease to operate when ideas about how to replace existing institutions with others […] have been sufficiently clarified, pooled and harmonized, and when they have been approved by public opinion.’24 However, Saint-Simon’s views about the society of the future are surprising, and disarming, in their vagueness. In the unfinished New Christianity (1824) he stated that the ‘political disease of the age’ – which caused ‘suffering to all workers useful to society’ and allowed ‘sovereigns to absorb a large part of the wages of the poor’ – depended on the ‘feeling of egoism’. Since this had become ‘dominant in all classes and all individuals’,25 he looked ahead to the birth of a new social organization based on a single guiding principle: ‘all men must behave with one another as brothers’.26
Fourier declared that human existence was grounded upon universal laws, which, once activated, would guarantee joy and delight all over the earth. In his Theory of the Four Movements (1808), he set out what he unhesitatingly called the most ‘important discovery [among] all the scientific work done since the human race began’.27 Fourier opposed advocates of the ‘commercial system’ and maintained that society would be free only when all its components had returned to expressing their passions.28 The main error of the political regime of his age was the repression of human nature.29
Alongside radical egalitarianism and a quest for the best possible social model, a final element common to many early socialists was their dedication to promoting the birth of small alternative communities. For those who organized them, the liberation of these communes from the economic inequalities existing at the time would provide a decisive impetus for the spread of socialist principles and make it easier to argue in their favour.
In The New Industrial and Societal World (1829), Fourier envisaged a novel community structure in which villages would be ‘replaced with industrial phalanges of roughly 1800 persons each’30 Individuals would live in phalansteries, that is, in large buildings with communal areas where they could enjoy all the services they needed. According to the method invented by Fourier, human beings would ‘flutter from pleasure to pleasure and avoid excesses’; they would have brief spells of employment, ‘two hours at the most’, so that each would be able to exercise ‘seven to eight attractive kinds of work in the course of the day’.31
The search for better ways of organizing society also spurred on Owen, who, over the course of his life, founded important experiments in workers’ cooperation. First at New Lanark, Scotland from 1800 to 1825, then at New Harmony in the United States from 1826 to 1828, he tried to demonstrate in actual practice how to realize a more just social order. In The Book of the New Moral World (1836-1844), however, Owen proposed the division of society into eight classes, the last of which ‘will consist of those from forty to sixty years complete’, who would have the ‘final decision’. What he envisaged, rather naively, was that in this gerontocratic system everyone would be able and willing to assume their due role in the governance of society ‘without contest, his fair, full share of the government of society’.32
In 1849 Cabet, too, founded a colony in the United States, at Nauvoo, Illinois, but his authoritarianism gave rise to numerous internal conflicts. In the laws of the ‘Icarian Constitution’, he proposed as a condition for the birth of community that, ‘in order to increase all the prospects of success’, he should be appointed ‘sole and absolute Director for a period of ten years, with the power to run it on the basis of his doctrine and ideas’.33
The experiments of the early socialists – whether the lovingly devised phalansteries or the sporadic cooperatives or the eccentric communist colonies – proved so inadequate that their implementation on a wider scale could not be seriously contemplated. They involved a derisory number of workers and often very limited participation of the collective in policy decisions. Moreover, many of the revolutionaries (non-English ones, in particular) who devoted their efforts to building such communities did not understand the fundamental changes in production that were taking place in their age. Many of the early socialists failed to see the connection between the development of capitalism and the potential for social progress for the working class. Such progress depended on the workers’ capacity to appropriate the wealth they generated in the new mode of production.34
III. Where and why Marx wrote about communism
Marx set himself a completely different task from that of previous socialists; his absolute priority was to ‘reveal the economic law of motion of modern society’.35 His aim was to develop a comprehensive critique of the capitalist mode of production, which would serve the proletariat, the principal revolutionary subject, in the overthrow of the existing social-economic system.
Moreover, having no wish to inculcate a new religion, Marx refrained from promoting an idea which he considered theoretically pointless and politically counter-productive: a universal model of communist society. For this reason, in the ‘Postface to the Second Edition’ (1873) of Capital, Volume I (1867), he made it clear that he had no interest in ‘writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future’.36 He also outlined what he meant by this well-known assertion in the ‘Marginal Notes on Wagner’ (1879-80), where, in response to criticism from the German economist Adolph Wagner (1835-1917), he categorically stated that he had ‘never established a ‘socialist system’’.37
Marx made similar declarations in his political writings. In The Civil War in France (1871), he wrote of the Paris Commune, the first seizure of power by the subaltern classes: ‘The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce by a decree of the people.’ Rather, the emancipation of the proletariat had ‘to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men’. The point was not to ‘realize ideals’ but ‘to set free elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’.38
Finally, Marx said much the same in his correspondence with leaders of the European workers’ movement. In 1881, for instance, when Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis (1846-1919), the leading representative of the Social-Democratic League in the Netherlands, asked him what measures a revolutionary government would have to take after assuming power in order to establish a socialist society, Marx replied that he had always regarded such questions as ‘fallacious’ arguing instead that ‘what is to be done … at any particular moment depends, of course, wholly and entirely on the actual historical circumstances in which action is to be taken.’ He contended that it was impossible ‘to solve an equation that does not comprise within its terms the elements of its solution’; ‘a doctrinaire and of necessity fantastic anticipation of a future revolution’s programme of action only serves to distract from the present struggle.’39
Nevertheless, contrary to what many commentators have wrongly claimed, Marx did develop, in both published and unpublished form, a number of discussions about communist society which appear in three kinds of text. First, there are those in which Marx criticized ideas that he regarded as theoretically mistaken and liable to mislead socialists of his time. Some parts of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology; the chapter on ‘Socialist and Communist Literature’ in the Manifesto of the Communist Party; the criticisms of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the Grundrisse, the Urtext and the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; the texts of the early 1870s directed against anarchism; and the theses critical of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) belong to this category.
To these should be added the critical remarks on Proudhon, Lassalle and the anarchist component of the International Working Men’s Association scattered throughout Marx’s vast correspondence.
The second kind of text is the militant writings and political propaganda written for working-class organizations. In these, Marx tried to provide more concrete indications about the society for which they were fighting and the instruments necessary to construct it. This group comprises the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the resolutions, reports and addresses for the International Working Men’s Association – including Value, Price and Profit and The Civil War in France – and various journalistic articles, public lectures, speeches, letters to militants, and other short documents such as the Minimum Programme of the French Workers’ Party.
The third and final group of texts, which are centered around capitalism, contain Marx’s lengthiest and most detailed discussions of the features of communist society. Important chapters of Capital and the numerous preparatory manuscripts, particularly the highly valuable Grundrisse, contain some of his most salient ideas on socialism. It was precisely his critical observations on aspects of the existing mode of production that prompted reflections on communist society, and it is no accident that in some cases successive pages of his work alternate between these two themes.40
A close study of Marx’s discussions of communism allow us to distinguish his own conception from that of twentieth-century regimes who, while claiming to act in his name, perpetrated a series of crimes and atrocities. In this way, it is possible to relocate the Marxian political project within the horizon that corresponds to it: the struggle for the emancipation of what Saint-Simon called ‘the poorest and most numerous class’.41
Marx’s notes on communism should not be thought of as a model to be adhered to dogmatically,42 still less as solutions to be indiscriminately applied in diverse times and places. Yet these sketches constitute a priceless theoretical treasure, still useful today for the critique of capitalism.
IV. The limits of the initial formulations
Contrary to the claims made by a certain type of Marxist-Leninist propaganda, Marx’s theories were the result not of some innate wisdom but of a long process of conceptual and political refinement. Intense study of economics and many other disciplines, together with observation of actual historical events, particularly the Paris Commune, was extremely important for the development of his thoughts on communist society.
Some of Marx’s early writings – many of which he never completed or published – are often surprisingly regarded as syntheses of his most significant ideas,43 but in fact they display all the limits of his initial conception of post-capitalist society.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote of these matters in highly abstract terms, since he had not yet been able to expand his economic studies and had had little political experience at the time. At some points, he described ‘communism’ as the ‘negation of the negation’, as a ‘moment of the Hegelian dialectic’: ‘the positive expression of the annulled private property’.44 At others, however, inspired by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), he wrote that:
communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.45
Various passages in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were influenced by the theological matrix of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770-1831) philosophy of history: for example, the argument that ‘the entire movement of history [had been] communism’s actual act of genesis’; or that communism was ‘the riddle of history solved’, which ‘knew itself to be this solution’.46
Similarly, The German Ideology, which Marx wrote with Engels and was intended to include texts by other authors,47 contains a famous quotation that has sown great confusion among exegetes of Marx’s work. On one unfinished page we read that whereas in capitalist society, with its division of labour, every human being ‘has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity’, in communist society:
society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.48
Many authors, both Marxist and anti-Marxist, have ingenuously believed that this was the main feature of communist society for Marx – a view they could hold because of their relative unfamiliarity with Capital and various important political texts. Despite the plethora of analysis and discussion regarding the manuscript of 1845-46, they did not realize that this passage was a reformulation of an old – and rather well-known – idea of Charles Fourier’s,49 which was taken up by Engels but rejected by Marx.50
Despite these evident limitations, The German Ideology represented indubitable progress over the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Whereas the latter was informed by the idealism of the Hegelian Left – the group of which he had been part until 1842 – and lacked any concrete political discussion, the former now maintained that ‘it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means’. Communism, therefore, should not be regarded 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’.51
In The German Ideology, Marx also drew a first sketch of the economy of future society. Whereas previous revolutions had produced only ‘a new distribution of labour to other persons’,52
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all naturally evolved premises as the creations of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organization is therefore essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity.53
Marx also stated that ‘empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously’. In his view, this presupposed both ‘the universal development of productive forces’ and ‘the world intercourse bound up with them’.54 Furthermore, Marx confronted for the first time a fundamental political theme that he would take up again in the future: the advent of communism as the end of class tyranny. For the revolution would ‘abolish the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, which is not recognized as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities’.55
Marx continued, together with Engels, to develop his reflections on post-capitalist society in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In this text, which, in its profound analysis of the changes effected by capitalism, towered above the rough and ready socialist literature of the time, the most interesting points on communism concern property relations. Marx observed that their radical transformation was ‘not at all a distinctive feature of communism’, since other new modes of production in history had also brought that about. For Marx, in opposition to all the propaganda claims that communists would prevent personal appropriation of the fruits of labour, the ‘distinguishing feature of communism’ was ‘not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property’,56 of ‘the power to appropriate the products of society […] to subjugate the labour of others’.57 In his eyes, the ‘theory of the communists’ could be summed up in one sentence: ‘the abolition of private property’.58
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx also proposed a list of ten preliminary benchmarks to be achieved in the most advanced economies following the conquest of power. They included ‘abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes’;59 the centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank […]; the centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state […]; free education for all children in public schools’, but also ‘abolition of all right of inheritance’, a Saint-Simonian measure that Marx later firmly rejected.60
As in the case of the manuscripts written between 1844 and 1846, it would be a mistake to regard the measures listed in the Manifesto of the Communist Party – drafted when Marx was just thirty – as his finished vision of post-capitalist society.61 The complete maturation of his thought would require many more years of study and political experiences.
V. Communism as Free Association
In Capital, Volume I, Marx argued that capitalism was a ‘historically determined’62 social mode of production in which the labour product was transformed into a commodity, with the result that individuals had value only as producers, and human existence was subjugated to the act of the ‘production of commodities’.63 Hence ‘the process of production’ had ‘mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him’.64 Capital ‘care[d] nothing for the length of life of labour power’ and attached no importance to improvements in the living conditions of the proletariat. Capital ‘attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.”65
In the Grundrisse, Marx recalled that in capitalism, ‘since the aim of labour is not a particular product [with a relation] to the particular needs of the individual, but money […], the industriousness of the individual has no limits’.66 In such a society, ‘the whole time of an individual is posited as labour time, and he is consequently degraded to a mere labourer, subsumed under labour.’67 Bourgeois ideology, however, presents this as if the individual enjoys greater freedom and is protected by impartial legal norms capable of guaranteeing justice and equity. Paradoxically, despite the fact that the economy has developed to such a level that it can allow the whole society to live in better conditions than before, ‘the most developed machinery now compels the labourer to work for a longer time than the savage does, or than the labourer himself did when he was using the simplest, crudest implements’.68
By contrast, Marx’s vision of communism was of ‘an association of free individuals [ein Verein freier Menschen], working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.’69 Similar definitions are present in many of Marx’s writings. In the Grundrisse, he wrote that postcapitalist society would be based upon ‘collective production [gemeinschaftliche Produktion]’.70
In the Economic Manuscripts of 1863-1867, he spoke of the ‘passage from the capitalist mode of production to the mode of production of associated labour [Produktionsweise der assoziierten Arbeit]’.71 And in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he defined the social organization ‘based on common ownership of the means of production’ as ‘cooperative society [genossenschaftliche Gesellschaft]’.72
In Capital, Volume I, Marx explained that the ‘ruling principle’ of this ‘higher form of society’ would be ‘the full and free development of every individual’.73 In The Civil War in France, he expressed his approval of the measures taken by the Communards, which ‘betoken[ed] the tendency of a government of the people by the people’.74
To be more precise, in his evaluation of the political reforms of the Paris Commune, he asserted that ‘the old centralized Government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers’.75 The expression recurs in the ‘Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’, where he maintained that radical social change would ‘start with self-government of the communities’.76 Marx’s idea of society, therefore, is the antithesis of the totalitarian systems that emerged in his name in the twentieth century. His writings are useful for an understanding not only of how capitalism works but also of the failure of socialist experiences until today.
In referring to so-called free competition, or the seemingly equal positions of workers and capitalists on the market in bourgeois society, Marx stated that the reality was totally different from the human freedom exalted by apologists of capitalism. The system posed a huge obstacle to democracy, and he showed better than anyone else that the workers did not receive an equivalent for what they produced.77 In the Grundrisse, he explained that what was presented as an ‘exchange of equivalents’ was, in fact, appropriation of the workers’ ‘labour time without exchange’; the relationship of exchange ‘completely disappeared’, or it became a ‘mere semblance’.78
Relations between persons were ‘actuated only by self-interest’. This ‘clash of individuals’ had been passed off as the ‘the absolute form of existence of free individuality in the sphere of production and exchange’. But for Marx ‘nothing could be further from the truth’, since ‘in free competition, it is capital that is set free, not the individuals’.79 In the Economic Manuscripts of 1863-1867, he denounced the fact that ‘surplus labour is initially pocketed, in the name of society, by the capitalist’ – the surplus labour that is ‘the basis of society’s free time’ and, by virtue of this, the ‘material basis of its whole development and of civilization in general’.80 And in Capital, Volume I, he showed that the wealth of the bourgeoisie was possible only ‘by converting the whole lifetime of the masses into labour time’.81
In the Grundrisse, Marx observed that in capitalism ‘individuals are subsumed under social production’, which ‘exists outside them as their fate’.82 This happens only through the attribution of exchange-value conferred on the products, whose buying and selling takes place post festum.83 Furthermore, ‘all social powers of production’ – including scientific discoveries, which appear as ‘alien and external’ to the worker84 – are posited by capital. The very association of the workers, at the places and in the act of production, is ‘operated by capital’ and is therefore ‘only formal’.
Use of the goods created by the workers ‘is not mediated by exchange between mutually independent labours or products of labour’, but rather ‘by the circumstances of social production within which the individual carries on his activity’.85 Marx explained how productive activity in the factory ‘concerns only the product of labour, not labour itself’,86 since it is ‘confined to a common place of work under the direction of overseers, regimentation, greater discipline, consistency, and a posited dependence on capital in production itself’.87
In communist society, by contrast, production would be ‘directly social’, ‘the offspring of association distributing labour within itself’. It would be managed by individuals as their ‘common wealth’.88 The ‘social character of production’ (gesellschaftliche Charakter der Produktion) would ‘from the outset make the product into a communal, general one’; its associative character would be ‘presupposed’ and ‘the labour of the individual […] from the outset taken as social labour’.89 As Marx stressed in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, in postcapitalist society ‘individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labour.’90 In addition, the workers would be able to create the conditions for the eventual disappearance of ‘the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour’.91
In Capital, Volume I, Marx emphasized that in bourgeois society ‘the worker exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the worker’.92 Moreover, in parallel to exploitation of the workers, there developed exploitation of the environment. In contrast to interpretations that reduce Marx’s conception of communist society to the mere development of productive forces, he displayed great interest in what we would now call the ecological question.93 He repeatedly denounced the fact that ‘all profess in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker but of robbing the soil’ . This threatens both of ‘the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker’.94
In communism, the conditions would be created for a form of ‘planned cooperation’ through which the worker ‘strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops the capabilities of his species’.95 In Capital, Volume II, Marx pointed out that society would then be in a position to ‘reckon in advance how much labour, means of production and means of subsistence it can spend, without dislocation’, unlike in capitalism ‘where any kind of social rationality asserts itself only post festum’ and ‘major disturbances can and must occur constantly’.96 In some passages of Capital, Volume III, too, Marx clarified differences between a socialist mode of production and a market-based one, foreseeing the birth of a society ‘organized as a conscious association’.97 ‘It is only where production is under the actual, predetermining control of society that the latter establishes a relation between the volume of social labour time applied in producing definite articles, and the volume of the social want to be satisfied by these articles’.98
Finally, in his marginal notes on Adolf Wagner’s Treatise on Political Economy, Marx makes it clear that in communist society ‘the sphere [volume] of production’ will have to be ‘rationally regulated’.99 This will also make it possible to eliminate the waste due to the ‘anarchical system of competition’, which, through its recurrent structural crises, not only involves the ‘most outrageous squandering of labour power and the social means of production’100 but is incapable of solving the contradictions stemming essentially from the ‘capitalist use of machinery’.101
VI. Common ownership and free time
Contrary to the view of many of Marx’s socialist contemporaries, a redistribution of consumption goods was not sufficient to reverse this state of affairs. A root-and-branch change in the productive assets of society was necessary. Thus, in the Grundrisse Marx noted that ‘to leave wage labour and at the same time to abolish capital [was] a self-contradictory and self-negating demand’.102 What was required was ‘dissolution of the mode of production and form of society based upon exchange value’.103 In the address published under the title Value, Price and Profit, he called on workers to ‘inscribe on their banner’ not ‘the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ [but] the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’’104
Furthermore, the Critique of the Gotha Programme made the point that in the capitalist mode of production ‘the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of capital and land ownership, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power’.105 Therefore, it was essential to overturn the property relations at the base of the bourgeois mode of production. In the Grundrisse, Marx recalled that ‘the laws of private property – liberty, equality, property – property in one’s own labour and the ability to freely dispose of it – are inverted into the propertylessness of the worker and the alienation of his labour, his relation to it as alien property and vice versa’.106
And in 1869, in a report of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, he asserted that ‘private property in the means of production’ served to give the bourgeois class ‘the power to live without labour upon other people’s labour’.107 He repeated this point in another short political text, the Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party, adding that ‘the producers cannot be free unless they are in possession of the means of production’ and that the goal of the proletarian struggle must be ‘the return of all the means of production to collective ownership’.108
In Capital, Volume III, Marx observed that when the workers had established a communist mode of production ‘private property of the earth by single individuals [would] appear just as absurd as private property of one human being by another’. He directed his most radical critique against the destructive possession inherent in capitalism, insisting that ‘even an entire society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth’. For Marx, human beings were ‘only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and they have to bequeath it [the planet] in an improved state to succeeding generations, like good heads of the household [boni patres familias]’.109
A different kind of ownership of the means of production would also radically change the life-time of society. In Capital, Volume I, Marx unfolded with complete clarity the reasons why in capitalism ‘the shortening of the working day is […] by no means what is aimed at, in capitalist production, when labour is economized by increasing its productivity’.110 The time that the progress of science and technology makes available for individuals is in reality immediately converted into surplus value. The only aim of the dominant class is the ‘shortening of the labour-time necessary for the production of a definite quantity of commodities’. Its only purpose in developing the productive forces is the ‘shortening of that part of the working day in which the worker must work for himself, and the lengthening […] the other part […] in which he is free to work for nothing for the capitalist’.111 This system differs from slavery or the corvées due to the feudal lord, since ‘surplus labour and necessary labour are mingled together’112 and make the reality of exploitation harder to perceive.
In the Grundrisse, Marx showed that ‘free time for the few’ is possible only because of this surplus labour time of the many.113 The bourgeoisie secures growth of its material and cultural capabilities only thanks to the limitation of those of the proletariat. The same happens in the most advanced capitalist countries, to the detriment of those on the periphery of the system. In the Manuscripts of 1861-1863, Marx emphasized that the ‘free development’ of the dominant class is ‘based on the restriction of development’ among the working class’; ‘the surplus labour of the workers’ is the ‘natural basis of the social development of the other section’. The surplus labour time of the workers is not only the pillar supporting the ‘material conditions of life’ for the bourgeoisie; it also creates the conditions for its ‘free time, the sphere of [its] development’.
Marx could not have put it better: ‘the free time of one section corresponds to the time in thrall to labour of the other section.’114 Communist society, by contrast, would be characterized by a general reduction in labour time. In the ‘Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council’, composed in August 1866, Marx wrote in forthright terms: ‘A preliminary condition, without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive, is the limitation of the working day.’ It was needed not only ‘to restore the health and physical energies of the working class’ but also ‘to secure them the possibility of intellectual development, sociable intercourse, social and political action’.115
Similarly, in Capital, Volume I, while noting that workers’ ‘time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind ’ counted as pure ‘foolishness’ in the eyes of the capitalist class,116 Marx implied that these would be the basic elements of the new society. As he put it in the Grundrisse, a reduction in the hours devoted to labour – and not only labour to create surplus value for the capitalist class – would favour ‘the artistic, scientific, etc., development of individuals, made possible by the time thus set free and the means produced for all of them’.117
On the basis of these convictions, Marx identified the ‘economy of time [and] the planned distribution of labour time over the various branches of production’ as ‘the first economic law [of] communal production’.118 In Theories of Surplus Value (1862-63) he made it even clearer that ‘real wealth’ was nothing other than ‘disposable time’. In communist society, workers’ self-management would ensure that ‘a greater quantity of time’ was ‘not absorbed in direct productive labour but […] available for enjoyment, for leisure, thus giving scope for free activity and development’.119
In this text, so too in the Grundrisse, Marx quoted a short anonymous pamphlet entitled The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, Deduced from Principles of Political Economy, in a Letter to Lord John Russell (1821), whose definition of well-being he fully shared: that is, ‘A nation is truly rich if the working day is six hours rather than twelve. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth) ‘but disposable time, in addition to that employed in immediate production, for every individual and for the whole society.’120 Elsewhere in the Grundrisse he asks rhetorically: ‘What is wealth if not the universality of the individual’s needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive forces? […] What is it if not the absolute unfolding of man’s creative abilities?’121 It is evident, then, that the socialist model in Marx’s mind did not involve a state of generalized poverty, but rather the attainment of greater collective wealth.
VII. Role of the state, individual rights and freedoms
In communist society, along with transformative changes in the economy, the role of the state and the function of politics would also have to be redefined. In The Civil War in France, Marx was at pains to explain that, after the conquest of power, the working class would have to fight to ‘uproot the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule.’ Once ‘labour was emancipated, every man would become a working man, and productive labour [would] cease to be a class attribute.’122
The well-known statement that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’ was meant to signify, as Marx and Engels clarified in the booklet Fictitious Splits in the International, that ‘the functions of government [should] become simple administrative functions’.123 And in a concise formulation in his Conspectus on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, Marx insisted that ‘the distribution of general functions [should] become a routine matter which entails no domination’.124 This would, as far as possible, avoid the danger that the exercise of political duties generated new dynamics of domination and subjugation.
Marx believed that, with the development of modern society, ‘state power [had] 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’.125 In communism, by contrast, the workers would have to prevent the state from becoming an obstacle to full emancipation. It would be necessary to ‘amputate’ ‘the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power, [to wrest] its legitimate functions from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restore [them] to the responsible agents of society’.126 In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx observed that ‘freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it’, and shrewdly added that ‘forms of state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the ‘freedom of the state’’.127
In the same text, Marx underlined the demand that, in communist society, public policies should prioritize the ‘collective satisfaction of needs’. Spending on schools, healthcare and other common goods would ‘grow considerably in comparison with present-day society and grow in proportion as the new society develop[ed]’.128 Education would assume front-rank importance and – as he had pointed out in The Civil War in France, referring to the model adopted by the Communards in 1871 – ‘all the educational institutions [would be] opened to the people gratuitously and […] cleared of all interference of Church and State’. Only in this way would culture be ‘made accessible to all’ and ‘science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it’.129
Unlike liberal society, where ‘equal right’ leaves existing inequalities intact, in communist society ‘right would have to be unequal rather than equal’. A change in this direction would recognize, and protect, individuals on the basis of their specific needs and the greater or lesser hardship of their conditions, since ‘they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal’. Furthermore, it would be possible to determine each person’s fair share of services and the available wealth. The society that aimed to follow the principle ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’130 had before it this intricate road fraught with difficulties. However, the final outcome was not guaranteed by some ‘magnificent progressive destiny’ (in the words of Leopardi), nor was it irreversible.
Marx attached a fundamental value to individual freedom, and his communism was radically different from the levelling of classes envisaged by his various predecessors or pursued by many of his epigones. In the Urtext, however, he pointed to the ‘folly of those socialists (especially French socialists)’ who, considering ‘socialism to be the realization of [bourgeois] ideas, […] purport[ed] to demonstrate that exchange and exchange value, etc., were originally […] a system of the freedom and equality of all, but [later] perverted by money [and] capital’131 In the Grundrisse, he labelled it an ‘absurdity’ to regard ‘free competition as the ultimate development of human freedom’; it was tantamount to a belief that ‘the rule of the bourgeoisie is the terminal point of world history’, which he mockingly described as ‘an agreeable thought for the parvenus of the day before yesterday’.132
In the same way, Marx contested the liberal ideology according to which ‘the negation of free competition [was] equivalent to the negation of individual freedom and of social production based upon individual freedom’. In bourgeois society, the only possible ‘free development’ was ‘on the limited basis of the domination of capital’. But that ‘type of individual freedom’ was, at the same time, ‘the most sweeping abolition of all individual freedom and the complete subjugation of individuality to social conditions which assume the form of objective powers, indeed of overpowering objects […] independent of the individuals relating to one another.’133
The alternative to capitalist alienation was achievable only if the subaltern classes became aware of their condition as new slaves and embarked on a struggle to radically transform the world in which they were exploited. Their mobilization and active participation in this process could not stop, however, on the day after the conquest of power. It would have to continue, in order to avert any drift toward the kind of state socialism that Marx always opposed with the utmost tenacity and conviction.
In 1868, in a significant letter to the president of the General Association of German Workers, Marx explained that in Germany, ‘where the worker is regulated bureaucratically from childhood onwards, where he believes in authority, in those set over him, the main thing is to teach him to walk by himself.’134 He never changed this conviction throughout his life and it is not by chance that the first point of his draft of the Statutes of the International Working Men’s Association states: ‘The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ And they add immediately afterwards that the struggle for working-class emancipation ‘means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties’.135
Many of the political parties and regimes that developed in Marx’s name used the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’136 in an instrumental manner, distorting his thought and moving away from the direction he had indicated. But this does not mean we are doomed to repeat the error.
Translated by Patrick Camiller
References
1. K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6, p. 514.
2. This term had been used by others before Marx and Engels. See, for example, J.-A. Blanqui, History of Political Economy in Europe (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1885), pp. 520–33. M. L. Reybaud, Études sur les Réformateurs contemporains ou socialistes modernes: Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen (Paris: Guillaumin, 1840), pp. 322–41, was the !rst to group these three authors under the category of
modern socialism. Reybaud’s text circulated widely and helped to spread the idea
that they were ‘the entire sum of the eccentric thinkers whose birth our age has
witnessed’, p. vi.
3. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 515.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid, pp. 507–13.
6. Ibid, p. 510.
7. V. Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (Berne: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 23–38, where it is shown that the ‘utopian socialists saw themselves as social scientists’, p. 23. The Marxist- Leninist orthodoxy, for its part, employed the epithet ‘utopian’ in a purely derogatory sense. Cf. the interesting criticism, partly directed at Marx himself, in G. Claeys, ‘Early Socialism in Intellectual History’, History of European Ideas 40 (7): (2014), which !nds in
the de!nitions of ‘science’ and ‘scienti!c socialism’ an example of ‘epistemological authoritarianism’, p. 896.
8. See E. Hobsbawm, ‘Marx, Engels and Pre-Marxian Socialism’, in: E. Hobsbawm (ed.), The History of Marxism. Volume One: Marxism in Marx’s Day (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 1–28.
9. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, vol. 5, pp. 493–510. Engels, who held Saint-Simon in high regard, in Socialism: Utopian and Scienti!c went so far as to assert that ‘almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo’, MECW, vol. 25, p. 292.
10. K. Marx, Capital, volume I (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 403.
11. K. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’, MECW, vol. 29, p. 97.
12. K. Marx, Value, Price and Pro!t, MECW, vol. 20, p. 110.
13. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 516.
14. See D. Webb, Marx, Marxism and Utopia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 30.
15. K. Marx, ‘Conspectus on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 520.
16. S. Maréchal, ‘Manifesto of the Equals or Equalitarians’, in: P. Buonarroti (ed.), Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (London: H. Hetherington, 1836), p. 316.
17. F.-N. Babeuf, ‘Gracchus Babeuf à Charles Germain’, in: C. Mazauric (ed.), Babeuf Textes Choisis (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1965), p. 192.
18. É. Cabet, Travels in Icaria (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), p. 81.
19. Ibid, p. 4.
20. Ibid, p. 54.
21. Ibid, p. 49.
22. T. Dézamy, ‘Laws of the Community’, in: P. E. Cocoran (ed.), Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in France, 1830–48 (London: The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1983), pp. 188–96.
23. W. Weitling, Die Menschheit, wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte (Bern: Jenni, 1845), p. 50.
24. C. H. Saint-Simon, ‘L’Organisateur: prospectus de l’auteur’, in: C. H. de Saint-Simon, OEuvres complètes, vol. III (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), p. 2115.
25. C. H. Saint-Simon, ‘Le nouveau christianisme’, in: C. H. de Saint-Simon, OEuvres complètes, vol. IV (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), p. 3222.
26. Ibid, p. 3216.
27. C. Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 4.
28. Ibid, pp. 13–14.
29. This is the exact opposite of the theory developed by Sigmund Freud, who, in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in: S. Freud (ed.), Complete Psychological Works, vol.21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), pp. 59–148, argued that a non-repressive organization of society would involve a dangerous regression from the level of civilization attained within human relations.
30. C. Fourier, Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, in C. Fourier, OEuvres complètes, vol. VI (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1845), p. 15.
31. Ibid, pp. 67–69.
32. R. Owen, The Book of the New Moral World (New York: G. Vale, 1845), p. 185.
33. É. Cabet, Colonie icarienne aux États-Unis d’Amérique: sa constitution, ses lois, sa situation matérielle et morale après le premier semestre 1855 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1971), p. 43.
34. According to R. Rosdolsky in The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ (London: Pluto Press, 1977), the Romantic socialists, unlike Marx, ‘were totally incapable of grasping the “course of modern history”, i.e., the necessity and historical progressiveness of the bourgeois social order which they criticized, and con!n[ed] themselves to moralistic rejection of it instead’, p. 422.
35. K. Marx, Capital, volume I (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 92.
36. Ibid, p. 99. Marx made this point in reply to a review of his work in Positive Philosophy (La Philosophie Positive), in which the Comtean sociologist Eugène de Roberty (1843–1915) had criticized him for not having indicated the ‘necessary conditions for a healthy production and just distribution of wealth’, see K. Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1872, MEGA!, vol. II/6, pp. 1622–3. A partial translation of de Roberty’s review is contained in S. Moore, Marx on the Choice between Socialism and Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 84–7, although
Moore wrongly claimed that the purpose of Capital was ‘to !nd in the present the basis for predicting the future’, p. 86.
37. K. Marx, ‘Marx’s Notes (1879–80) on Wagner’, in T. Carver (ed.), Texts on Method (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), pp. 182–3.
38. K. Marx, The Civil War in France, MECW, vol. 22, p. 335.
39. K. Marx to F. Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, MECW, vol. 46, p. 66. The vast correspondence with Engels is the best evidence of his consistency in this regard. In the course of forty years of collaboration, the two friends exchanged views on every imaginable topic, but Marx did not spend the least time discussing how the society of the future should be organized.
40. Rosdolsky argued in The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ that, while it is true that Marx rejected the idea of the ‘construction of completed socialist systems’, this does not mean that Marx and Engels developed ‘no conception of the socialist economic and social order (a view often attributed to them by opportunists), or that they simply left the entire matter to [their] grandchildren . . . On the contrary, such conceptions played a part in Marx’s theoretical system . . . We therefore constantly encounter discussions and remarks in Capital, and the works preparatory to it, which are concerned with the problems of a socialist society’, pp. 413–14.
41. C.H. Saint-Simon and B.-P. Enfantin, ‘Religion Saint-Simonienne: Procès’, in:C. deSaint Simon and B.-P. Enfantin,Oeuvres de Saint-Simon&D’Enfantin, vol.XLVII (Paris: Leroux, 1878), p. 378. In other parts of theirwork, the two French proto-socialists use the expression ‘the poorest and most laborious class’. See, for example, idem, ‘Notre politique est religieuse’, ibid, vol. XLV, p. 28.
42. An example of this genre is the anthology K. Marx, F. Engels, and V. Lenin, On Communist Society (Moscow: Progress, 1974), which presents the texts of the three authors as if they constituted a homogenous opus of the Holy Trinity of communism. As in many other collections of this type, Marx’s presence is altogether marginal: even if his name appears on the cover, as the supreme guarantor of the faith of ‘scienti!c socialism’, the actual extracts from his writings (19 pages out of 157) are considerably shorter than those of Engels and Lenin (1870–1924). All we !nd here of Marx the theorist of communist society comes from the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Critique of the Gotha Programme, plus a mere half-page from The Holy Family and a few lines on the dictatorship of the proletariat from the letter of 5 March 1852 to Joseph Weydemeyer (1818–1866). The picture is the same in the diffuse anthology edited by the Finnish communist O. W. Kuusinen, Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism: Manual, second rev. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1963). In part 5, on ‘Socialism and Communism’, Marx is quoted only eleven times, compared with twelve references to the
work ofNikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) and the documents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and !fty quotations from the works of Lenin.
43. See R. Aron, Marxismes imaginaires. D’une sainte famille à l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) which pokes fun at the ‘Parisian para-Marxists’, p. 210, who ‘subordinated Capital to the early writings, especially the economic-philosophical manuscripts of 1844, the obscurity, incompleteness and contradictions of which fascinated the reader’, p. 177. In his view, these authors failed to understand that ‘if Marx had not had the ambition and hope to ground the advent of communism with scienti!c rigour, he would not have needed to work for thirty years on Capital (without managing to complete it). A few pages and a few weeks would have suf!ced’, p. 210. See also, M. Musto, ‘The Myth of the “Young Marx” in the Interpretations of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, Critique, 43 (2) (2015), pp. 233–60. For a description of the fragmentary character of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the incompleteness of the theses contained in them, see M. Musto, Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (London:Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 42–45.
44. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, p. 294. D. Bensaid, ‘Politiques de Marx’, in: K. Marx and F. Engels (eds), Inventer l’inconnu, textes et correspondances autour de la Commune (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008) af!rmed that in its initial phase ‘Marx’s communism is philosophical’, p. 42.
45. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 296.
46. Ibid, p. 297.
47. On the complex character of these manuscripts and details of their composition and paternity, see the recent edition K. Marx and F. Engels, Manuskripte und Drucke zur Deutschen Ideologie (1845–1847), MEGA!, vol. I/5. Some seventeen manuscripts are printed there in their fragmentary form as abandoned by the authors, without the semblance of a completed book. For a critical review, prior to publication of MEGA!, vol. I/5, of this much-awaited edition – and in favour of the greatest !delity to the originals – see T. Carver and D. Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s ‘German Ideology Manuscripts’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 142.
48. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 47. The words written by Marx are indicated in italic.
49. See Fourier, Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire.
50. The only words that belong to Marx – ‘criticize after dinner’, ‘critical critics’, and ‘orcritic’ – actually express his disagreement with the romantic, utopian-inclined views of Engels. We owe the rediscovery and accessible presentation of this important detail to the rigorous philological labours of Wataru Hiromatsu (1933–1994), the editor of the twovolume work with German and Japanese apparatus criticus: W. Hiromatsu (ed.), Die deutsche Ideologie (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo-Shinsha, 1974). Two decades later, T. Carver wrote that this study made it possible to know ‘which words were written in Engels’ hand, which in Marx’s, which insertion can be assigned to each author, and which deletions’, The PostmodernMarx (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) p. 104. Cf. the more recent Carver and Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s ‘German IdeologyManuscripts’, pp. 139–40.Marx was referring sarcastically to the positions of other Young Hegelians he had derided and sharply combatted in a book published a few months earlier, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company. According to Carver, The Postmodern Marx, ‘the famous passage on communist society from The German Ideology cannot now be read as one continuous train of thought agreed jointly between two authors’. In the few words he contributed, Marx was ‘sharply rebuking Engels for straying, perhaps momentarily, from the serious work of undercutting the phantasies of Utopian socialists’, ibid, p. 106. Still, Marx’s marginal insertions were integrated seamlessly into Engels’s initial text by early twentieth-century editors, thereby becoming the canonical description of how human beings would live in communist society ‘according to Marx’.
51. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 38, 49.
52. Ibid, p. 52.
53. Ibid, p. 81.
54. Ibid, p. 49.
55. Ibid, p. 52.
56. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 498.
57. Ibid, p. 500.
58. Ibid, p. 498.
59. Ibid, p. 505. The English translation that Samuel Moore (1838–1911) produced in 1888 in cooperation with Engels, and which is the basis for theMECWedition, renders the German Staatsausgaben [state expenditure] as the less statist, more generic ‘spending for public purposes’.
60. In the International Working Men’s Association, this provision was supported by M. Bakunin (1814–1876) and opposed by Marx. See ‘Part 6: On Inheritance’, in: M. Musto (ed.), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 159–68.
61. Their ‘practical application’ – as the preface to the German edition of 1872 reminded readers – ‘will depend . . . everywhere and at all times on the obtaining historical conditions, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II’. By the early 1870s, the Manifesto of the Communist Party had become a ‘historical document’, which its authors felt they no longer had ‘any right to alter’, in Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 175.
62. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 169.
63. Ibid, p. 172.
64. Ibid, p. 175.
65. Ibid, p. 376.
66. K. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’, MECW, vol. 28., p. 157.
67. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’, p. 94.
68. Ibid.
69. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 171, translation modi!ed.
70. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’,p. 96.
71. K. Marx, Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863–1867, MEGA2, vol. II/4.2, p. 662. Cf. P. Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production (New York: Palgrave, 2016),esp. pp. 59–65 and 157–61.
72. K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, MECW, vol. 24, p. 85.
73. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 739.
74. Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 339.
75. Ibid, p. 332.
76. Marx, ‘Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’, vol. 24, p. 519.
77. On these questions, see E. M. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 1–48.
78. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’, p. 386.
79. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’, p. 38.
80. K. Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–1863, MECW, vol. 30, p. 196.
81. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 667.
82. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’,p. 96.
83. Ibid, p. 108.
84. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’,p. 84.
85. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’,p. 109.
86. Ibid, p. 505.
87. Ibid, pp. 506–07.
88. Ibid, pp. 95–96.
89. Ibid, p. 108.
90. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 85.
91. Ibid, p. 87.
92. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 621.
93. An extensive new literature has sprung up in the past twenty years on this aspect of Marx’s thought. One of the most recent contributions is K. Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Un!nished Critique of Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), esp. pp. 217–55.
94. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 638.
95. Ibid, p. 447.
96. K. Marx, Capital, volume II (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 390.
97. K. Marx, Capital, volume III (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 799.
98. Ibid, p. 186. See B. Ollman (ed.), Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists(London: Routledge, 1998).
99. Marx, ‘Marx’s Notes on Wagner’, p. 188.
100. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 667.
101. Ibid, p. 562.
102. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’, p. 235.
103. Ibid, p. 195. According to P. Mattick, Marx and Keynes (Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 1969) p. 363: ‘For Marx, the law of value “regulates” market capitalism but no other form of social production.’ Therefore, he held that ‘socialism was, !rst of all, the end of value production and thus also the end of the capitalist relations of production’, p. 362.
104. Marx, Value, Price and Pro!t, p. 149.
105. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 88.
106. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’,p. 88.
107. K. Marx, ‘Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance’, MECW, vol.21, p. 65.
108. K. Marx, ‘Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party’, MECW, vol. 24,p. 340.
109. Marx, Capital, volume III, p. 911.
110. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 437.
111. Ibid, p. 438.
112. Ibid, p. 346.
113. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’,p. 93.
114. Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–1863, pp. 192, 191.
115. K. Marx, ‘Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The Different Questions’, MECW, vol. 20, p. 187.
116. Marx, Capital, volume I, p. 375.
117. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’, p. 91.
118. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’, p. 109.
119. Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–1863, p. 390.
120. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’, p. 92.
121. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’, p. 411.
122. Marx, The Civil War in France, pp. 334–5.
123. K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘Fictitious Splits in the International’, MECW, vol. 23, p. 121.
124. Marx, ‘Conspectus on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy’, p. 519.
125. Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 329.
126. Ibid, pp. 332–3.
127. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 94.
128. Ibid, p. 85.
129. Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 332.
130. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 87.
131. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. First Instalment’, p. 180.
132. Marx, ‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse]. Second Instalment’, p. 40.
133. Ibid.
134. ‘K. Marx to J. B. von Schweitzer, 13 October 1868’, MECW, vol. 43, p. 134.
135. K. Marx, ‘Provisional Rules of the Association’, MECW, vol. 20, p. 14.
136. H. Draper has shown that Marx used the term only seven times, mostly in a radically different sense from the one falsely attributed to him by many of his interpreters or by those who have claimed to be continuing the tradition of his thought. See Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Volume 3: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), pp. 385–6.
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Since Karl Marx’s death in 1883, his work has profoundly and continuously influenced generations of scholars across the social sciences and humanities, while inspiring political organizations, parties, and revolutions across the globe.
At least 23 states were formerly run by regimes that claimed to be Marxist, and today four states—China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam— continue to claim his mantle.
Of course, such wide-ranging, real-world influence has been met with vigorous—and often hostile—criticism of Marx and his ideas. An influential line of criticism paints Marx as a rigid, dogmatic thinker, whose most important predictions have been proven wrong by history, thus invalidating his broader theories of history and of capitalism. It is not just hostile critics, however, who have distorted Marx’s thought. Many Marxist traditions—orthodox, Stalinist, Maoist, and others—have turned Marx’s flexible theoretical framework and working hypotheses into rigid ideology and doctrine.
The central thesis of Marcello Musto’s Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International is that this image of Marx is a gross caricature based on a limited reading of a small portion of the latter’s gargantuan output. In fact, Marx was a highly flexible thinker who eschewed dogmatism, explicitly warned against his writings being considered doctrine, and periodically revised his theories—up until his last days—in light of continuous research and study. Marx explicitly resisted “writing recipes . . . for the cook-shops of the future” (p. 5, from Marx’s “Afterword to the Second German Edition” of Capital, Vol. I). He ensured that the official policy of the International Working Men’s Association was “not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever” (p. 179, from Marx’s “Resolutions of the Geneva Congress”).
To make his case, Musto draws from the entire corpus of Marx’s writings—published and unpublished. In the 1920s there was an attempt within the Soviet Union to publish the complete works of Marx and Engels as the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). This project was abandoned during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. The second attempt (the MEGA-2) began in East Berlin in 1975 and resumed in 1990 by the Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung in Amsterdam.
The MEGA has published 55 volumes of a planned total of 114 volumes, including roughly 200 notebooks plus Marx’s extensive correspondence. Musto convincingly argues that these workbooks constitute Marx’s “critical theoretical workshop,” which provides a basis for a reevaluation of his thought (p. 4). Musto presents an intellectual biography of Marx, arguing that although his thought went through many key transformations—his turn from law to philosophy to political economy, his break with Hegel and the left Hegelians, his realization of the importance of the economic factor, his discovery of the proletariat, and hence of class—there was also a remarkable consistency across this evolution.
Take The Paris Manuscripts of 1844. Interpreters such as Louis Althusser argue that these demonstrate an early, humanist Marx, which contrasts with a mature, scientific Marx. By contrast, others have seen in The Paris Manuscripts a Marx whose later ideas are fully foreshadowed, as if the prophet’s ideas came fully formed via some preternatural inspiration. In contrast to both interpretations, Musto shows that The Paris Manuscriptsconsist of a heterogeneous mix of elements that are not closely connected and are “an evident expression of a position in movement” (p. 43).
In 1845 Marx was expelled from Paris to Brussels, where he wrote The Brussels Notebooks and The German Ideology (with Engels), and where he published The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). In 1848 he published The Communist Manifesto (with Engels) and was expelled from Brussels to London, where he wrote The London Notebooks (1850–1853). Over 1857 and 1858 he wrote The Grundrisse—eight notebooks that were the outline of his critique of political economy. Between 1861 and 1863, he filled 23 additional notebooks.
Musto convincingly argues that his unpublished notebooks are key parts of his oeuvre. They demonstrate his intellectual process of devouring every written work relevant to his current subject and painstakingly taking notes with critical commentary. Literally any subject: notebooks XII and XIII of the The London Notebooks are on agrarian chemistry (relevant to his concerns that capitalist production was becoming ecologically unsustainable).
His publications were delayed by a combination of his exhaustive intellectual process, a perfectionist tendency, destitute poverty, and ongoing struggles with ill health. His main income, from his gig as the European correspondent for the New York Tribune (from 1851 to 1862), was scarcely sufficient to support his family. In a letter to a comrade, he lamented that in addition to the “hackwork” (journalism), he has the “quirk” of “finding fault with anything I have written and not looked at for a month, so that I have to revise it completely” (p. 140).
In 1863 Marx began writing what would eventually become the three volumes of Capital. Volume I was published in 1867. In 1869 he decided to learn Russian so he could closely follow events there. In 1871 he prepared a new version of Volume I, modifying the structure of the book and completely rewriting Chapter One. He continued working on the other two volumes until his death in 1883. Volumes II and III were subsequently edited and published from Marx’s notes by Engels.
The last years of Marx’s life were ones of intense political activism. The International Working Men’s Association emerged in 1864 as a heterogeneous collection of reformist British unionists, Proudhonist mutualists from French-speaking countries (who advocated cooperativism but rejected strikes and politics), and communists. Marx took a leading role and, remarkably, united these disparate elements under a common anti-capitalist program. During this period of political organizing, Marx “was stimulated to develop and sometimes revise his ideas, to put old certainties up for discussion and ask himself new questions” (p. 177).
His political struggles profoundly enriched his theoretical understanding. In the International, Marx argued that unions must turn from immediate struggles to wider political organization, that reformist demands were indispensable, and that workers must form a party and engage electoral politics. He convinced the International to adopt socialization of the means of production as a key demand. And although workers must take control of the state, Marx insisted that there could be no blueprint or predetermined plan: the course of the revolution has to be worked out in the movement, and the details and institutions of the socialist system would have to be worked out in the process as well.
Musto’s book is an important contribution to Marxist theory. While it does not substantively advance any particular theory, it provides a sorely needed antidote to the tendency of critics and even many Marxists to seize on a particular writing of Marx—often a single quotation—and use it to discredit Marx’s larger theories. It demonstrates that particular formulations and working hypotheses need to be considered as part of a much larger, evolving body of theory. Marx’s theory provides a framework—asserting the importance of class and class struggle, of the relation between economics and politics, and lying between the material and the ideal—for developing hypotheses and providing an interpretative lens, without being reduced to any particular hypothesis.
Musto kept his authorial voice restrained. This allows for a smooth intellectual biography, but it means a lack of substantive engagement with the ideas—something one could legitimately expect from a book by a sociologist. The book does not have a concluding chapter. Such a chapter could have provided space for Musto to reflect on and provide a critical analysis of where Marx’s theory stood at the end of his life and its relevance for the twenty-first century.
Álvaro García Linera has been vice president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia since 2006.
He is one of the most original voices in the Latin American Left, whose works include Value Form and Community Form (1995) and Plebeian Power (2008). Born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1962, Linera was very young when he first drew close to Marxism and the struggles of the Aymara people, an Indigenous nation in the Andes. In the early 1980s, he moved to Mexico to study mathematics, and he was influenced by the Guatemalan guerrilla movements fighting for the cause of the Indigenous population. After his return to Bolivia, he became one of the founders of the Túpac Katari Guerrilla Army, a political organization that combined Marxist class struggle with Katarist principles (the idea that in Bolivia the Indigenous population suffered both from class and ethnic oppression), promoting Indigenous emancipation. Held in a maximum security prison between 1992 and 1997 for his political activity, he went on to teach sociology and to become an influential intellectual. Later, he joined Evo Morales’ Movement for Socialism, which is the biggest Bolivian political party since 2005. Our conversation with him centered on the situation of progressive forces in Bolivia and other parts of Latin America.
Marcello Musto: Your political commitment is marked by an awareness that most Latin American communist organizations were incapable of speaking to the popular classes as a whole and occupied little more than a function of observers. In Bolivia, for example, the communists’ reliance on the most schematic and economistic Marxism-Leninism prevented them from recognizing the specificity of the Indigenous question and placing it at the center of their political activity. They saw Native peoples as an indistinct “petty-bourgeois” peasant mass with no revolutionary potential. How did you come to realize that it was necessary to build something radically different from the left that existed at the time?
Álvaro García Linera: In Bolivia, food was produced by Indigenous farmers, buildings and houses were built by Indigenous workers, streets were cleaned by Indigenous people, and the elite and the middle classes entrusted the care of their children to them. Yet the traditional left seemed [oblivious] to this and occupied itself only with workers in large-scale industry, paying no attention to their ethnic identity. Though certainly important for work in the mines, they were a minority in comparison with Indigenous workers, who were discriminated against and even more harshly exploited. From the late 1970s on, the Aymara population organized large mobilizations against the dictatorship as well as the democratic governments that arose after its fall. It did so proudly with its own language and symbols, operating through federated communities of campesinos and furthering the birth of a nation under Indigenous leadership. It was a moment of social discovery.
How did you respond to this?
I was a school student at the time, and this Indian insurgency made a great impression on me. It seemed clear that the discourse of social struggle in the classical left, centered only on workers and bourgeois, was one-sided and unsustainable. It had to incorporate Indigenous themes and to reflect on the agrarian community, or collective ownership of the land, as the basis for social organization. Moreover, to understand the women and men who made up the majority of the country and were demanding a different history and place in the world, it was necessary to go more deeply into the ethnic-national aspect of the problem of oppressed peoples. And for this, the schematism of Marxist textbooks seemed to me completely inadequate. It sent me in search of other references, from the store of Indianist ideas to the Marx whose writings on anticolonial struggles and the agrarian commune in Russia had enriched his analysis of oppressed nations.
With the passing of time, the complexity of the subject of social transformation – which was so important in your political thinking and activity – has become an essential question for all progressive forces. As the vision of the proletariat as the only force capable of overthrowing capitalism has waned, and as the myth of the revolutionary vanguard has dissolved, what should be the new starting point for the left?
The problem for the traditional left is that it confused the concept of “the proletarian condition” with a specific historical form of wage labor. The former has spread everywhere and become a worldwide material condition. It is not true that the world of labor is disappearing – there have never been as many workers in the world, in every country. But this huge growth of the global workforce has happened at a time when all the existing trade union and political structures have been breaking up. More than at any time since the early nineteenth century, the working-class condition is once again a condition of and for capital. But now in such a way that the world of workers has become more complex, hybridized, nomadic and deterritorialized. Paradoxically, in an age when every aspect of human life has been commodified, everything seems to happen as if there were no longer any workers.
What is the character of social struggles today? Are the difficulties that political and trade-union organizations face in organizing migrant, insecure and unskilled workers very different from those that existed in the time of twentieth century Fordist production?
The new working class is not unified mainly around labor issues. It does not yet have the strength to do this, and perhaps it will not have it for a long time to come. Social mobilizations no longer take place through classical forms of centralized working-class action, but rather through mixes of different trades, cross-sector issues and flexible, fluid and changeable forms. We are talking of new forms of collective action thrown up by the workers, even if, in many cases, what emerges is less a labor identity than other, complementary features such as territorial conglomerates or groups demanding the right to healthcare, education or public transport.
Instead of reproving these struggles because their forms differ from those of the past, the left should pay attention to this social hybridity or heterogeneity – first of all, to understand the existing struggles and to articulate them with others at a local, national and international level. The subject of change is still “living labor”: workers who sell their labor power in multiple ways. But the organizational forms, discourses and identities are very different from the ones we knew in the twentieth century.
Amid the social complexity of our times, do you think it is necessary to think anew about the concept of class?
Classes, identities, mobilized collectives are not abstractions: They are forms of collective experience of the world that are constructed on a wide scale. Just as they took contingent forms a hundred years ago, they are doing so again through unforeseen and often surprising routes and causes that are very different from those of the past. We should not confuse the concept of social class – a way of statistically classifying people on the basis of their property, resources, access to wealth, etc. – with the actual ways in which they group together on the basis of elective affinities, places of residence, shared problems and cultural characteristics. This is the real movement of the mobilized construction of classes, which only exceptionally coincides with the convergences exhibited in statistical data.
You often quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned under Mussolini. How important has his thought been for your political choices?
Gramsci has been decisive for the development of my own thinking. I began to read him when I was very young, when his writings circulated in between one coup d’état and another. Since then, unlike so many texts containing economistic analyses or philosophical formulations centered more on the aesthetics of words than on reality, Gramsci has helped me to develop a different way of seeing. He spoke of questions such as language, literature, education or common sense which, though seemingly secondary, actually form the web of daily life for individuals and determine their perceptions and collective political inclinations.
Since those early days I have regularly returned to a reading of Gramsci, and he has always revealed new things to me particularly with regard to the molecular formation of the state. I am convinced that Gramsci is an indispensable thinker for the renewal of Marxism in today’s world.
From what you say, it is obvious that the way in which you relate to Marx – who you know very well and about whom you have written a great deal – is very different from that of Soviet Marxism. Do you think that a turn to the Marx of questions and doubts, found in the unfinished manuscripts of his later years, may today be more fruitful than the assertions contained in his published pamphlets and books?
Textbook Marxism always seemed inadequate to me. So, I took the initiative of also delving into authors inspired by Indigenist ideology, as well as a kind of Marxism that spoke to me of hybrid social identities. In this way, I discovered a Marx who taught me about colonial struggles, who spoke about agrarian communities, who kept trying to place the theme of oppressed nations on a solid foundation — a Marx on the margins, more plural and more abounding with questions than with answers. It was these questions that enabled me, over the years, to read differently the Grundrisse, the Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1863 and Capital and to find there elements of the genetic logic of capitalism that other authors, before and after Marx, failed to understand.
In the last four years, almost everywhere in Latin America, governments have come to power that take their cue from reactionary ideologies and seek to reimpose a neoliberal economic agenda. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is the most striking case in point. Is this sharp right turn likely to last a long time?
I think the big problem for the global right is that it has no narrative for the future. The states that preached a free-market liturgy are now building walls against immigrants and goods, as if their presidents were latter-day feudal lords. Those who called for privatizations are now appealing to the very state they used to vilify, in the hope that it will save them from the burden of debts. And those who once favored globalization and spoke of a world that would finally be one now clutch at the pretext of “continental security.”
We are living in a state of planetary chaos, where it is difficult to foresee what the new Latin American right-wing movements will look like in the future. Will they opt for globalization or protectionism? Will they follow policies of privatization or state intervention? They themselves do not know the answers to these questions, since they are sailing in a sea of confusion and can only express short-term views. These forces of the right do not represent a future to which Latin American society can entrust its long-term expectations. On the contrary: They are bringing about a rise in injustices and inequalities. The only tangible future they can offer to new generations is one of anxiety and uncertainty.
In many parts of the world, the sharp decline of traditional political parties has gone together with the rise of new political forces that, in their different ways, are challenging neoliberal globalization and the existing order. The “free market” is no longer seen as synonymous with development and democracy, as it mistakenly was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the debate about alternatives to capitalism is once again arousing considerable interest. What should the Latin American left be doing to turn things around and to open a new cycle of political involvement and emancipation?
The conditions exist for the development of a new progressive stage that will go beyond what was achieved in the last decade. In this context of great uncertainty, there is space for alternative proposals and a collective orientation to new horizons, based on the real involvement of people and the (ecologically sustainable) overcoming of social injustices.
The great task for the left, in overcoming the limits and errors of twentieth-century socialism, is to chart a new horizon that offers solutions to the actual questions that cause suffering to people. It would serve a new “principle of hope” – whatever name we give to it – which promulgates equality, social freedom, and universal rights and capacities as the basis for collective self-determination.
Categories
Introduction
1. From the Grundrisse to the Critical Analysis of Theories of Surplus Value
Marx started to write Capital only many years after he had begun his rigorous studies of political economy. From 1843 onwards, he had already been working, with great intensity, towards what he would later define as his own ‘Economics’.1 It was the eruption of the financial crisis of 1857 that forced Marx to start his work. Marx was convinced that the crisis developing at international level had created the conditions for a new revolutionary period throughout Europe. He had been waiting for this moment ever since the popular insurrections of 1848, and now that it finally seemed to have come, he did not want events to catch him unprepared. He therefore decided to resume his economic studies and to give them a finished form.
This period was one of the most prolific in his life: he managed to write more in a few months than in the preceding years. In December 1857, he wrote to Engels: ‘I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies, so that I might at least get the outlines Grundrisse clear before the deluge’ (Marx to Engels, 8 December 1857, Marx and Engels 1983: 257).2
Marx’s work was now remarkable and wide-ranging. From August 1857 to May 1858, he filled the eight notebooks known as the Grundrisse, while as correspondent of the New-York Tribune (the paper with the largest circulation in the United States of America, with whom he had collaborated since 1851), he wrote dozens of articles on, among other things, the development of the crisis in Europe. Lastly, from October 1857 to February 1858, he compiled three books of extracts, called the Crisis Notebooks (Marx 2017). Thanks to these, it is possible to change the conventional image of a Marx studying Hegel’s Science of Logic to find inspiration for the manuscripts of 1857-58. For at that time he was much more preoccupied with events linked to the long-predicted major crisis. Unlike the extracts he had made before, these were not compendia from the works of economists but consisted of a large quantity of notes, gleaned from various daily newspapers, about major developments in the crisis, stock market trends, trade exchange fluctuations and important bankruptcies in Europe, the United States of America, and other parts of the world. A letter he wrote to Engels in December indicates the intensity of his activity:
I am working enormously, as a rule until 4 o’clock in the morning. I am engaged on a twofold task: 1. Elaborating the outlines of political economy (For the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential to go into the matter to the bottom, as it is for my own, individually, to get rid of this nightmare). 2. The present crisis. Apart from the articles for the [New-York] Tribune, all I do is keep records of it, which, however, takes up a considerable amount of time. I think that, somewhere about the spring, we ought to do a pamphlet together about the affair (Marx to Engels, 18 December 1857, Marx and Engels 1983: 224).3
The Grundrisse were divided in three parts: a methodological ‘Introduction’, a ‘Chapter on Money’, in which Marx dealt with money and value, and a ‘Chapter on Capital’, that was centered on the process of production and circulation of capital, and addressed such key themes as the concept of surplus-value, and the economic formations which preceded the capitalist mode of production. Marx immense effort did not, however, allow him to complete the work. In late February 1858 he wrote to Lassalle:
I have in fact been at work on the final stages for some months. But the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further. […] The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system. I have very little idea how many sheets the whole thing will amount to. […] Now that I am at last ready to set to work after 15 years of study, I have an uncomfortable feeling that turbulent movements from without will probably interfere after all (Marx to Lassalle, 22 February 1858, Marx and Engels 1983: 270-1).
There was no sign of the much-anticipated revolutionary movement, which was supposed to be born in conjunction with the crisis and Marx abandoned the project to write a volume on the current crisis. Nevertheless, he could not finish the work, on which he had been struggling for many years, because he was aware that he was still far away from a definitive conceptualization of the themes addressed in the manuscript. Therefore, the Grundrisse remained only a draft, from which – after he had carefully worked up the ‘Chapter on Money’ –, in 1859, he published a short book with no public resonance: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
In August 1861, Marx again devoted himself to the critique of political economy, working with such intensity that by June 1863 he had filled 23 sizeable notebooks on the transformation of money into capital, on commercial capital, and above all on the various theories with which economists had tried to explain surplus value.4 His aim was to complete A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was intended as the first instalment of his planned work. The book published in 1859 contained a brief first chapter, ‘The Commodity’, differentiated between use value and exchange value, and a longer second chapter, ‘Money, or Simple Circulation’, dealt with theories of money as unit of measure. In the preface, Marx stated: ‘I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the state, foreign trade, world market’ (Marx 1987a: 261).
Two years later, Marx’s plans had not changed: he was still intending to write six books, each devoted to one of the themes he had listed in 1859.5 However, from Summer 1861 to March 1862, he worked on a new chapter, ‘Capital in General’, which he intended to become the third chapter in his publication plan. In the preparatory manuscript contained in the first five of the 23 notebooks he compiled by the end of 1863, he focused on the process of production of capital and, more particularly, on: 1) the transformation of money into capital; 2) absolute surplus value; and 3) relative surplus value.6 Some of these themes, already addressed in the Grundrisse, were now set forth with greater analytic richness and precision.
A momentary alleviation of the huge economic problems that had beset him for years allowed Marx to spend more time on his studies and to make significant theoretical advances. In late October 1861 he wrote to Engels that ‘circumstances ha[d] finally cleared to the extent that [he had] at least got firm ground under [his] feet again’. His work for the New-York Tribune assured him of ‘two pounds a week’ (Marx to Engels, 30 October 1861, Marx and Engels 1985: 323). He had also concluded an agreement with Die Presse. Over the past year, he had ‘pawned everything that was not actually nailed down’, and their plight had made his wife seriously depressed. But now the ‘twofold engagement’ promised to ‘put an end to the harried existence led by [his] family’ and to allow him to ‘complete his book’. Nevertheless, by December, he told Engels that he had been forced to leave IOUs with the butcher and grocer, and that his debt to assorted creditors amounted to one hundred pounds (Marx to Engels, 9 December 1861, Marx and Engels 1985: 332). Because of these worries, his research was proceeding slowly: ‘Circumstances being what they were, there was, indeed, little possibility of bringing [the] theoretical matters to a rapid close’. But he gave notice to Engels that ‘the thing is assuming a much more popular form, and method is much less in evidence than in Part I’ (Marx to Engels, 9 December 1861, Marx and Engels 1985: 333).
Against this dramatic background, Marx tried to borrow money from his mother, as well as from other relatives and the poet Carl Siebel [1836 – 1868]. In a letter to Engels later in December, he explained that these were attempts to avoid constantly ‘pestering’ him. At any event, they were all unproductive. Nor was the agreement with Die Presse working out, as they were only printing (and paying for) half the articles he submitted to them. To his friend’s best wishes for the new year, he confided that if it turned out to be ‘anything like the old one’ he would ‘sooner consign it to the devil’ (Marx to Engels, 27 December 1861, Marx and Engels 1985: 337-8). Things took a further turn for the worse when the New-York Tribune, faced with financial constraints associated with the American Civil War, had to cut down on the number of its foreign correspondents. Marx’s last article for the paper appeared on 10 March 1862. From then on, he had to do without what had been his main source of income since the summer of 1851. That same month, the landlord of his house threatened to take action to recover rent arrears, in which case – as he put it to Engels – he would be ‘sued by all and sundry’ (Marx to Engels, 3 March 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 344). And he added shortly after: ‘I’m not getting on very well with my book, since work is often checked, i.e. suspended, for weeks on end by domestic disturbances’ (Marx to Engels, 15 March 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 352). During this period, Marx launched into a new area of research: Theories of Surplus Value.7 This was planned to be the fifth8 and final part of the long third chapter on ‘Capital in General’. Over ten notebooks, Marx minutely dissected how the major economists had dealt with the question of surplus value; his basic idea was that ‘all economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent’ (Marx 1988: 348).9
In Notebook VI, Marx began with a critique of the Physiocrats. First of all, he recognized them as the ‘true fathers of modern political economy’(Marx 1988: 352), since it was they who ‘laid the foundation for the analysis of capitalist production’ (Marx 1988: 354) and sought the origin of surplus value not in ‘the sphere of circulation’ – in the productivity of money, as the mercantilists thought – but in ‘the sphere of production’. They understood the ‘fundamental principle that only that labour is productive which creates a surplus value’ (Marx 1988: 354). On the other hand, being wrongly convinced that ‘agricultural labour’ was ‘the only productive labour’, they conceived of ‘rent’ as ‘the only form of surplus value’ (Marx 1988: 355). They limited their analysis to the idea that the productivity of the land enabled man to produce ‘no more than sufficed to keep him alive’. According to this theory, then, surplus value appeared as ‘a gift of nature’ (Marx 1988: 357). In the second half of Notebook VI, and in most of Notebooks VII, VIII and IX, Marx concentrated on Adam Smith. He did not share the false idea of the Physiocrats that ‘only one definite kind of concrete labour – agricultural labour – creates surplus value’ (Marx 1988: 391). Indeed, in Marx’s eyes one of Smith’s greatest merits was to have understood that, in the distinctive labour process of bourgeois society, the capitalist ‘appropriates for nothing, appropriates without paying for it, a part of the living labour’ (Marx 1988: 388); or again, that ‘more labour is exchanged for less labour (from the labourer’s standpoint), less labour is exchanged for more labour (from the capitalist’s standpoint)’ (Marx 1988: 393). Smith’s limitation, however, was his failure to differentiate ‘surplus-value as such’ from ‘the specific forms it assumes in profit and rent’ (Marx 1988: 389). He calculated surplus-value not in relation to the part of capital from which it arises, but as ‘an overplus over the total value of the capital advanced’ (Marx 1988: 396), including the part that the capitalist expends to purchase raw materials.
Marx put many of these thoughts in writing during a three-week stay with Engels in Manchester in April 1862. On his return, he reported to Lassalle:
As for my book, it won’t be finished for another two months. During the past year, to keep myself from starving, I have had to do the most despicable hackwork and have often gone for months without being able to add a line to the ‘thing’. And there is also that quirk I have of finding fault with anything I have written and not looked at for a month, so that I have to revise it completely (Marx to Lassalle, 28 April 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 356).
Marx doggedly resumed work and until early June extended his research to other economists such as Germain Garnier [1754 – 1821] and Charles Ganilh [1758 – 1836]. Then he went more deeply into the question of productive and unproductive labour, again focusing particularly on Smith, who, despite a lack of clarity in some respects, had drawn the distinction between the two concepts. From the capitalist’s viewpoint, productive labour
is wage labour which, exchanged against the […] part of the capital that is spent on wages, reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labour capacity), but in addition produces surplus value for the capitalist. It is only thereby that commodity or money is transformed into capital, is produced as capital. Only that wage labour is productive which produces capital (Marx 1989a: 8).
Unproductive labour, on the other hand, is ‘labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue, that is, with wages or profit’ (Marx 1989a: 12). According to Smith, the activity of sovereigns – and of the legal and military officers surrounding them – produced no value and in this respect was comparable to the duties of domestic servants. This, Marx pointed out, was the language of a ‘still revolutionary bourgeoisie’, which had not yet ‘subjected to itself the whole of society, the state, etc.’ illustrious and time-honoured occupations – sovereign, judge, officer, priest, etc. – with all the old ideological castes to which they give rise, their men of letters, their teachers and priests, are from an economic standpoint put on the same level as the swarm of their own lackeys and jesters maintained by the bourgeoisie and by idle wealth – the landed nobility and idle capitalists (Marx 1989a: 197).
In Notebook X, Marx turned to a rigorous analysis of François Quesnay’s [1694 – 1774] Tableau économique (Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 381).10 He praised it to the skies, describing it as ‘an extremely brilliant conception, incontestably the most brilliant for which political economy had up to then been responsible’ (Marx 1989a: 240).
Meanwhile, Marx’s economic circumstances continued to be desperate. In mid-June, he wrote to Engels: ‘Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable’. Already in April, the family had had to re-pawn all the possessions it had only recently reclaimed from the loan office. The situation was so extreme that Jenny made up her mind to sell some books from her husband’s personal library – although she could not find anyone who wanted to buy them.
Nevertheless, Marx managed to ‘work hard’ and in mid-June expressed a note of satisfaction to Engels: ‘strange to say, my grey matter is functioning better in the midst of the surrounding poverty than it has done for years’ (Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 380). Continuing his research, he compiled Notebooks XI, XII and XIII in the course of the summer; they focused on the theory of rent, which he had decided to include as ‘an extra chapter’ (Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 394) in the text he was preparing for publication. Marx critically examined the ideas of Johann Rodbertus [1805 – 1875], then moved on to an extensive analysis of the doctrines of David Ricardo [1772 – 1823].11 Denying the existence of absolute rent, Ricardo had allowed a place only for differential rent related to the fertility and location of the land. In this theory, rent was an excess: it could not have been anything more, because that would have contradicted his ‘concept of value being equal to a certain quantity of labour time’ (Marx 1989a: 359); he would have had to admit that the agricultural product was constantly sold above its cost price, which he calculated as the sum of the capital advanced and the average profit (Cf. Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 396). Marx’s conception of absolute rent, by contrast, stipulated that ‘under certain historical circumstances […] landed property does indeed put up the prices of raw materials’ (Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 398).
In the same letter to Engels, Marx wrote that it was ‘a real miracle’ that he ‘had been able to get on with [his] theoretical writing to such an extent’ (Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 394). His landlord had again threatened to send in the bailiffs, while tradesmen to whom he was in debt spoke of withholding provisions and taking legal action against him. Once more he had to turn to Engels for help, confiding that had it not been for his wife and children he would ‘far rather move into a model lodging house than be constantly squeezing [his] purse’ (Marx to Engels, 7 August 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 399).
In September, Marx wrote to Engels that he might get a job ‘in a railroad office’ in the new year (Marx to Engels, 10 September 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 417). In December, he repeated to Ludwig Kugelmann [1828 – 1902] that things had become so desperate that he had ‘decided to become a “practical man”’; nothing came of the idea, however. Marx reported with his typical sarcasm: ‘Luckily – or perhaps I should say unluckily? – I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 436). Meanwhile, in early November, he had confided to Ferdinand Lassalle [1825 – 1864] that he had been forced to suspend work ‘for some six weeks’ but that it was ‘going ahead […] with interruptions’. ‘However,’ he added, ‘it will assuredly be brought to a conclusion by and by’ (Marx to Lassalle, 7 November 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 426).
During this span of time, Marx filled another two notebooks, XIV and XV, with extensive critical analysis of various economic theorists. He noted that Thomas Robert Malthus [1766 – 1834], for whom surplus value stemmed ‘from the fact that the seller sells the commodity above its value’, represented a return to the past in economic theory, since he derived profit from the exchange of commodities (Marx 1989b: 215). Marx accused James Mill [1773 -1836] of misunderstanding the categories of surplus value and profit; highlighted the confusion produced by Samuel Bailey [1791 – 1870] in failing to distinguish between the immanent measure of value and the value of the commodity; and argued that John Stuart Mill [1806 – 1873] did not realize that ‘the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit’ were two different quantities (Marx 1989b: 373), the latter being determined not only by the level of wages but also by other causes not directly attributable to it.
Marx also paid special attention to various economists opposed to Ricardian theory, such as the socialist Thomas Hodgskin [1787 – 1869]. Finally, he dealt with the anonymous text Revenue and Its Sources – in his view, a perfect example of ‘vulgar economics’, which translated into ‘doctrinaire’ but ‘apologetic’ language the ‘standpoint of the ruling section, i.e. the capitalists’ (Marx 1989b: 450). With the study of this book, Marx concluded his analysis of the theories of surplus value put forward by the leading economists of the past and began to examine commercial capital, or the capital that did not create but distributed surplus value.12 Its polemic against ‘interest-bearing capital’ might ‘parade as socialism’, but Marx had no time for such ‘reforming zeal’ that did not ‘touch upon real capitalist production’ but ‘merely attacked one of its consequences’. For Marx, on the contrary:
The complete objectification, inversion and derangement of capital as interest-bearing capital – in which, however, the inner nature of capitalist production, [its] derangement, merely appears in its most palpable form – is capital which yields ‘compound interest’. It appears as a Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right, whose legitimate demands, arising from its very nature, are however never met and are always frustrated by a mysterious fate (Marx 1989b: 453).
Marx continued in the same vein:
Thus it is interest, not profit, which appears to be the creation of value arising from capital as such [… and] consequently it is regarded as the specific revenue created by capital. This is also the form in which it is conceived by the vulgar economists. […] All intermediate links are obliterated, and the fetishistic face of capital, as also the concept of the capital-fetish, is complete. This form arises necessarily, because the juridical aspect of property is separated from its economic aspect and one part of the profit under the name of interest accrues to capital in itself which is completely separated from the production process, or to the owner of this capital To the vulgar economist who desires to represent capital as an independent source of value, a source which creates value, this form is of course a godsend, a form in which the source of profit is no longer recognisable and the result of the capitalist process – separated from the process itself – acquires an independent existence. In M-C-M’ an intermediate link is still retained. In M-M’ we have the incomprehensible form of capital, the most extreme inversion and materialisation of production relations (Marx 1989b: 458).
Following the studies of commercial capital, Marx moved on to what may be thought of as a third phase of the economic manuscripts of 1861-1863. This began in December 1862, with the section on ‘capital and profit’ in Notebook XVI that Marx identified as the ‘third chapter’(Marx 1976a: 1598-675). Here Marx drew an outline of the distinction between surplus value and profit. In Notebook XVII, also compiled in December, he returned to the question of commercial capital (following the reflections in Notebook XV, Marx 1976a: 1682-773) and to the reflux of money in capitalist reproduction. At the end of the year, Marx gave a progress report to Kugelmann, informing him that ‘the second part’, or the ‘continuation of the first instalment’, a manuscript equivalent to ‘about 30 sheets of print’ was ‘now at last finished’. Four years after the first schema, in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx now reviewed the structure of his projected work. He told Kugelmann that he had decided on a new title, using Capital for the first time, and that the name he had operated with in 1859 would be ‘merely the subtitle’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 435). Otherwise he was continuing to work in accordance with the original plan. What he intended to write would be ‘the third chapter of the first part, namely Capital in General’.13 The volume in the last stages of preparation would contain ‘what Englishmen call “the principles of political economy”’. Together with what he had already written in the 1859 instalment, it would comprise the ‘quintessence’ of his economic theory. On the basis of the elements he was preparing to make public, he told Kugelmann, a further ‘sequel (with the exception, perhaps, of the relationship between the various forms of state and the various economic structures of society) could easily be pursued by others’.
Marx thought he would be able to produce a ‘fair copy’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 435) of the manuscript in the new year, after which he planned to take it to Germany in person. Then he intended ‘to conclude the presentation of capital, competition and credit’. In the same letter to Kugelmann, he compared the writing styles in the text published in 1859 and in the work he was then preparing: ‘In the first part, the method of presentation was certainly far from popular. This was due partly to the abstract nature of the subject […]. The present part is easier to understand because it deals with more concrete conditions’. To explain the difference, almost by way of justification, he added:
Scientific attempts to revolutionize a science can never be really popular. But, once the scientific foundations are laid, popularization is easy. Again, should times become more turbulent, one might be able to select the colours and nuances demanded by a popular presentation of these particular subjects (Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, Marx and Engels 1985: 436).
A few days later, at the start of the new year, Marx listed in greater detail the parts that would have comprised his work. In a schema in Notebook XVIII, he indicated that the ‘first section (Abschnitt)’, ‘The Production Process of Capital’, would be divided as follows:
1) Introduction. Commodity. Money. 2) Transformation of money into capital. 3) Absolute surplus value. […] 4) Relative surplus value. […] 5) Combination of absolute and relative surplus value. […] 6) Reconversion of surplus value into capital. Primitive accumulation. Wakefield’s theory of colonization. 7) Result of the production process. […] 8) Theories of surplus value. 9) Theories of productive and unproductive labour (Marx 1989b: 347).
Marx did not confine himself to the first volume but also drafted a schema of what was intended to be the ‘third section’ of his work: ‘Capital and Profit’. This part, already indicating themes that were to comprise Capital, Volume III, was divided as follows:
1) Conversion of surplus value into profit. Rate of profit as distinguished from rate of surplus value. 2) Conversion of profit into average profit. […] 3) Adam Smith’s and Ricardo’s theories on profit and prices of production. 4) Rent. […] 5) History of the so-called Ricardian law of rent. 6) Law of the fall of the rate of profit. 7) Theories of profit. […] 8) Division of profit into industrial profit and interest. […] 9) Revenue and its sources. […] 10) Reflux movements of money in the process of capitalist production as a whole. 11) Vulgar economy. 12) Conclusion. Capital and wage labour (Marx 1991: 346–7).14
In Notebook XVIII, which he composed in January 1863, Marx continued his analysis of mercantile capital. Surveying George Ramsay [1855 – 1935], Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez [1797 – 1869] and Richard Jones [1790 – 1855], he inserted some additions to the study of how various economists had explained surplus value.
Marx’s financial difficulties persisted during this period and actually grew worse in early 1863. He wrote to Engels that his ‘attempts to raise money in France and Germany [had] come to nought’, that no one would supply him with food on credit, and that ‘the children [had] no clothes or shoes in which to go out’ (Marx to Engels, 8 January 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 442). Two weeks later, he was on the edge of the abyss. In another letter to Engels, he confided that he had proposed to his life’s companion what now seemed an inevitability:
My two elder children will obtain employment as governesses through the Cunningham family. Lenchen is to enter service elsewhere, and I, along with my wife and little Tussy, shall go and live in the same City Model Lodging-House in which Red Wolff once resided with his family (Marx to Engels, 13 January 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 445).
At the same time, new health problems had appeared. In the first two weeks of February, Marx was ‘strictly forbidden [from] all reading, writing or smoking’. He suffered from ‘some kind of inflammation of the eye, combined with a most obnoxious affection of the nerves of the head’. He could return to his books only in the middle of the month, when he confessed to Engels that during the long idle days he had been so alarmed that he ‘indulged in all manner of psychological fantasies about what it would feel like to be blind or insane’ (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 453). Just over a week later, having recovered from the eye problems, he developed a new liver disorder that was destined to plague him for a long time to come. Since Dr. Allen, his regular doctor, would have imposed a ‘complete course of treatment’ that would have meant breaking off all work, he asked Engels to get Dr. Eduard Gumpert [?] to recommend a simpler ‘household remedy’ (Marx to Engels, 21 February 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 460).
During this period, apart from brief moments when he studied machinery, he began to ‘attend a practical (purely experimental) course for working men given by Prof. Willis […] (at the Institute of Geology, where [Thomas] Huxley also lectured)’ (Marx to Engels, 28 January 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 449). Apart from that, however, Marx had to suspend his in-depth economic studies. In March, however, he resolved ‘to make up for lost time by some hard slogging’ (Marx to Engels, 24 March 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 461). He compiled two notebooks, XX and XXI, that dealt with accumulation, the real and formal subsumption of labour to capital, and the productivity of capital and labour. His arguments were correlated with the main theme of his research at the time: surplus value.
In late May, he wrote to Engels that in the previous weeks he had also been studying the Polish question15 at the British Museum: ‘What I did, on the one hand, was fill in the gaps in my knowledge (diplomatic, historical) of the Russian-Prussian-Polish affair and, on the other, read and make excerpts from all kinds of earlier literature relating to the part of the political economy I had elaborated’ (Marx to Engels, 29 May 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 474). These working notes, written in May and June, were collected in eight additional notebooks A to H, which contained hundreds of more pages summarizing economic studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and covering more than a hundred volumes.16
Marx also informed Engels that, feeling ‘more or less able to work again’, he was determined to ‘cast the weight off his shoulders’ and therefore intended to ‘make a fair copy of the political economy for the printers (and give it a final polish)’. He still suffered from a ‘badly swollen liver’, however (Marx to Engels, 29 May 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 474), and in mid-June, despite ‘wolfing sulphur’, he was still ‘not quite fit’ (Marx to Engels, 12 June 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 479). In any case, he returned to the British Museum and in mid-July reported to Engels that he had again been spending ‘ten hours a day working at economics’. These were precisely the days when, in analysing the reconversion of surplus value into capital, he prepared in Notebook XXII a recasting of Quesnay’s Tableau économique (Marx to Engels, 6 July 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 485). Then he compiled the last notebook in the series begun in 1861 – no. XXIII – which consisted mainly of notes and supplementary remarks.
At the end of these two years of hard work, and following a deeper critical re-examination of the main theorists of political economy, Marx was more determined than ever to complete the major work of his life. Although he had not yet definitively solved many of the conceptual and expository problems, his completion of the historical part now impelled him to return to theoretical questions.
2. The Writing of the Three Volumes of Capital
Marx gritted his teeth and embarked on a new phase of his labours. From Summer 1863, he began the actual composition of what would become his magnum opus.17 Until December 1865, he devoted himself to the most extensive versions of the various subdivisions, preparing drafts in turn of Volume I, the bulk of Volume III (his only account of the complete process of capitalist production) (Marx 2015), and the initial version of Volume II (the first general presentation of the circulation process of capital). In the manuscripts of 1863-65, Marx grappled with new themes after his work of previous years. None of these, however, was tackled in an exhaustive manner.18 As regards the six-volume plan indicated in 1859 in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx inserted a number of themes relating to rent and wages that were originally to have been treated in volumes II and III (See Rosdolsky 1977: 27).19 In mid-August 1863, Marx updated Engels on his steps forward:
In one respect, my work (preparing the manuscript for the press) is going well. In the final elaboration the stuff is, I think, assuming a tolerably popular form. […] On the other hand, despite the fact that I write all day long, it’s not getting on as fast as my own impatience, long subjected to a trial of patience, might demand. At all events, it will be 100% more comprehensible than No. l.20
Marx kept up the furious pace throughout the autumn, concentrating on the writing of Volume I. But his health rapidly worsened as a result, and November saw the appearance of what his wife called the ‘terrible disease’ against which he would fight for many years of his life. It was a case of carbuncles,21 a nasty infection that manifested itself in abscesses and serious, debilitating boils on various parts of the body.
Because of one deep ulcer following a major carbuncle, Marx had to have an operation and ‘for quite a time his life was in danger’. According to his wife’s later account, the critical condition lasted for ‘four weeks’ and caused Marx severe and constant pains, together with ‘tormenting worries and all kinds of mental suffering’. For the family’s financial situation kept it ‘on the brink of the abyss’ (Jenny Marx in Enzensberger 1973: 288).
In early December, when he was on the road to recovery, Marx told Engels that he ‘had had one foot in the grave’ (Marx to Engels, 2 December 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 495) – and two days later, that his physical condition struck him as ‘a good theme for a short story’. From the front, he looked like someone who ‘regale[d] his inner man with port, claret, stout and a truly massive mass of meat’. But ‘behind on his back, the outer man, a damned carbuncle’ (Marx to Engels, 4 December 1863, Marx and Engels 1985: 497). In this context, the death of Marx’s mother obliged him to travel to Germany to sort out the legacy. His condition again deteriorated during the trip.
After he returned to London, all the infections and skin complaints continued to take their toll on Marx’s health into the early spring, and he was able to resume his planned work only towards the middle of April, after an interruption of more than five months. In that time, he continued to concentrate on Volume I, and it seems likely that it was precisely then that he drafted the so-called ‘Chapter Six. Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. In this text, Marx returned several times to a very important concept: ‘commodities appear as the purchasers of persons’. In capitalism, ‘means of production and […] means of subsistence confront labour-power, stripped of all material wealth, as autonomous powers, personified in their owners. The objective conditions essential to the realization of labour are alienated from the worker and become manifest as fetishes endowed with a will and a soul of their own’ (Marx 1976b: 1001).22
During this period, the early death of his friend Wilhelm Wolff, of whom both he and Engels were very fond, was a source of great pain for both. Wolff left a legacy of £800 to Marx, thanks to which he was able to move to a larger detached house at No. 1 Modena Villas.23 Despite this improvement in his finances, the arrival of summer did not change his precarious circumstances. Only after a family break in Ramsgate, in the last week of July and the first ten days of August, did it become possible to press on with his work. He began the new period of writing with Volume III: Part Two, ‘The Conversion of Profit into Average Profit’, then Part One, ‘The Conversion of Surplus Value into Profit’ (which was completed, most probably, between late October and early November 1864). During this period, he assiduously participated in meetings of the International Working Men’s Association (Cf. Musto 2014), for which he wrote the Inaugural Address and the Statutes in October. Also in that month, he wrote to Carl Klings [1828 – ?], a metallurgical worker in Solingen who had been a member of the League of Communists, and told him of his various mishaps and the reason for his unavoidable slowness:
I have been sick throughout the past year (being afflicted with carbuncles and furuncles). Had it not been for that, my work on political economy, Capital, would already have come out. I hope I may now complete it finally in a couple of months and deal the bourgeoisie a theoretical blow from which it will never recover. […] You may count on my remaining ever a loyal champion of the working class (Marx to Klings, 4 October 1864, Marx and Engels 1987: 4).
Having resumed work after a pause for duties to the International, Marx wrote Part Three of Volume III, entitled ‘The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’. But his work on this was accompanied with another flare-up of his disease. From January to May 1865, Marx devoted himself to Volume II. The manuscripts were divided into three chapters, which eventually became Parts in the version that Engels had printed in 1885: 1) The Metamorphoses of Capital; 2) The Turnover of Capital; and 3) Circulation and Reproduction. In these pages, Marx developed new concepts and connected up some of the theories in volumes I and III.
In the new year too, however, the carbuncle did not stop persecuting Marx, and around the middle of February, there was another flare-up of the disease. In addition to the ‘foruncles’, which persisted until the middle of the month, the International took up an ‘enormous amount of time’. Still, he did not stop work on the book, even if it meant that sometimes he ‘didn’t get to bed until four in the morning’ (Marx to Engels, 13 March 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 129-30).
A final spur for him to complete the missing parts soon was the publisher’s contract. Thanks to the intervention of Wilhelm Strohn [?], an old comrade from the days of the League of Communists, Otto Meisner [1819 – 1902] in Hamburg had sent him a letter on 21 March that included an agreement to publish ‘the work Capital: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. It was to be ‘approximately 50 signatures24 in length [and to] appear in two volumes’ (Marx 1985b: 361). By signing the agreement, Marx undertook ‘to deliver the complete manuscript […] on or before the last day of May of this year’ (Marx 1985b: 362).
Between the last week of May and the end of June, Marx composed a short text Wages, Price and Profit.25 In it, he contested John Weston’s thesis that wage increases were not favourable to the working class, and that trade union demands for higher pay were actually harmful. Marx showed that, on the contrary, ‘a general rise of wages would result in a fall in the general rate of profit, but not affect the average prices of commodities, or their values’ (Marx 1985a: 144).
In the same period, Marx also wrote Part Four of Volume III, entitling it ‘Conversion of Commodity-Capital and Money-Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant’s Capital)’. At the end of July 1865, he gave Engels another progress report:
There are 3 more chapters to be written to complete the theoretical part (the first 3 books). Then there is still the 4th book, the historical-literary one, to be written, which will, comparatively speaking, be the easiest part for me, since all the problems have been resolved in the first 3 books, so that this last one is more by way of repetition in historical form. But I cannot bring myself to send anything off until I have the whole thing in front of me. Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole, and this can only be achieved through my practice of never having things printed until I have them in front of me in their entirety (Marx to Engels, 31 July 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 173).
Two years later, Marx’s fascination with art reasserted itself in Capital. He advised Engels to read The Unknown Masterpiece (1831) by Honoré de Balzac, which he described as a little ‘masterpiece’ in its own right, ‘full of the most delightful irony’ (Marx to Engels, 25 February 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 348). The hero of the short story is Master Frenhofer, who, obsessed with the wish to make a painting of his as realistic as possible, delays completing it in the search for perfection. To those who ask what is still lacking, he answers: ‘A trifle that’s nothing at all, yet a nothing that’s everything’ (Balzac 2001: 16). To those who ask him to display the canvas, he stubbornly refuses: ‘No, no, it must still be brought to perfection. Yesterday, toward evening, I thought I was done. Yet I’m still not satisfied – I have doubts’ (Balzac 2001: 22). Eventually Balzac’s masterly creation is driven to exclaim: ‘It’s ten years now … that I’ve been struggling with this problem. But what are ten short years when you’re contending with nature?’ (Balzac 2001: 24). And he adds: ‘For a time I believed my painting was done; but now I’m sure several details are wrong, and I won’t have a moment’s peace till I’ve dispelled my doubts’ (Balzac 2001: 32).
It is likely that Marx, with his usual sharpness of wit, identified with Frenhofer. Looking back, his son-in-law Paul Lafargue [1842-1911] said that a reading of Balzac’s story had ‘made a deep impression him because it partly described feelings that he had himself experienced’. Marx, too, was ‘always extremely conscientious about his work’, he ‘was never satisfied with his work – he was always making some improvements and he always found his rendering inferior to the idea he wished to convey’ (Lafargue in Enzensberger 1973: 307).
When unavoidable slowdowns and a series of negative events forced him to reconsider his working method, Marx asked himself whether it might be more useful first to produce a finished copy of Volume I, so that he could immediately publish it, or rather to finish writing all the volumes that would comprise the work. In another letter to Engels, he said that the ‘point in question’ was whether he should ‘do a fair copy of part of the manuscript and send it to the publisher, or finish writing the whole thing first’. He preferred the latter solution, but reassured his friend that his work on the other volumes would not have been wasted:
[Under the circumstances], progress with it has been as fast as anyone could have managed, even having no artistic considerations at all. Besides, as I have a maximum limit of 60 printed sheets,26 it is absolutely essential for me to have the whole thing in front of me, to know how much has to be condensed and crossed out, so that the individual sections shall be evenly balanced and in proportion within the prescribed limits (Marx to Engels, 5 August 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 175).
Marx confirmed that he would ‘spare no effort to complete as soon as possible’; the thing was a ‘nightmarish burden’ to him. It prevented him ‘from doing anything else’ and he was keen to get it out of the way before a new political upheaval: ‘I know that time will not stand still for ever just as it is now’ (Marx to Engels, 5 August 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 175).
Although he had decided to bring forward the completion of Volume I, Marx did not want to leave what he had done on Volume III up in the air. Between July and December1865, he composed, albeit in fragmentary form, Part Five (‘Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital’), Part Six (‘Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent’) and Part Seven (‘Revenues and Their Sources’).27 The structure that Marx gave to Volume III between Summer 1864 and the end of 1865 was therefore very similar to the 12-point schema of January 1863 contained in Notebook XVIII of the manuscripts on theories of surplus value.
In parallel with this work, in the second half of November 1865, Marx asked Engels to obtain from his acquaintance Alfred Knowles, a Manchester manufacturer, some information about the cotton industry, without which he would be unable ‘to write out the second chapter’ (Marx to Engels, 20 November 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 199) of Capital, Volume I.28
The financial relief that allowed him to concentrate fruitfully on his work did not last long, and within a year the economic problems were back. In late July 1865, Marx confessed to Engels that he felt extremely uncomfortable about his plight and that he ‘would rather have had [his] thumb cut off than’ to be writing to him about it. The situation was indeed dramatic: ‘For two months I have been living solely on the pawnshop, which means that a queue of creditors has been hammering on my door, becoming more and more unendurable every day’. Thinking back to what had led to this state, he recalled that he had ‘been unable to earn a farthing and that ‘merely paying off the debts and furnishing the house [had] cost [him] something like £500’ (Marx to Engels, 31 July 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 172).
On top of this, his duties for first conference of the International in London were particularly intense in September. To keep at least a modicum of time for the writing of Capital, Marx ending up telling a few white lies. To comrades in the International, he said he was about to leave on a trip, when in fact he was planning complete isolation so that he could work as much as possible without interruptions. However, he came down with a bad ‘flu that only allowed him to write intermittently’ (Marx to Engels, 19 August 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 172). When the ‘fellows and friends of the “International” discovered after all that [he was] not away’, they sent ‘a summons to attend a meeting of the Sub-committee’ of the General Council to which he belonged. Marx complained to Engels that all this had prevented him from writing, and in addition the ‘four weeks of [his]disappearance’ had been ‘spoiled by the doctor’s prescriptions’ (Marx to Engels, 22 August 1865, Marx and Engels 1987: 188).
3. The Completion of Capital Volume I
At the beginning of 1866, Marx launched into the new draft of Capital, Volume I. In mid-January, he updated Wilhelm Liebknecht [1826 – 1900] on the situation: ‘Indisposition, […] all manner of unfortunate mischances, demands made on me by the International Association etc., have confiscated every free moment I have for writing out the fair copy of my manuscript’. Nevertheless, he thought he was near the end and that he would ‘be able to take Volume 1 of it to the publisher for printing in March’. He added that its ‘two volumes’ would ‘appear simultaneously’ (Marx to Liebknecht, 15 January 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 219). In another letter, sent the same day to Kugelmann, he spoke of being ‘busy 12 hours a day writing out the fair copy’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 15 January 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 221), but hoped to take it to the publisher in Hamburg within two months. Marx was referring here only to Volume I, on the process of production of capital.
Contrary to his predictions, however, the whole year would pass in a struggle with the carbuncles and his worsening state of health. Despite everything, Marx’s thoughts were still directed mainly at the task ahead of him:
What was most loathsome to me was the interruption in my work, which had been going splendidly since January 1st, when I got over my liver complaint. There was no question of ‘sitting’, of course, […]. I was able to forge ahead even if only for short periods of the day. I could make no progress with the really theoretical part. My brain was not up to that. I therefore elaborated the section on the ‘Working-Day’ from the historical point of view, which was not part of my original plan (Marx to Engels, 10 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 223-4).
Marx concluded the letter with a phrase that well summed up this period of his life: ‘My book requires all my writing time’ (Marx to Engels, 10 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 224). How much the more was this true in 1866.
The situation was now seriously alarming Engels. Fearing the worst, he intervened firmly to persuade Marx that he could no longer go on in the same way:
You really must at last do something sensible now to shake off this carbuncle nonsense, even if the book is delayed by another 3 months. The thing is really becoming far too serious, and if, as you say yourself, your brain is not up to the mark for the theoretical part, then do give it a bit of a rest from the more elevated theory. Give over working at night for a while and lead a rather more regular life (Engels to Marx, 10 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 225-6).
Engels immediately consulted Dr. Gumpert, who advised another course of arsenic, but he also made some suggestions about the completion of his book. He wanted to be sure that Marx had given up the far from realistic idea of writing the whole of Capital before any part of it was published. ‘Can you not so arrange things,’ he asked, ‘that the first volume at least is sent for printing first and the second one a few months later?’ (Engels to Marx, 10 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 226). Taking everything into account, he ended with a wise observation: ‘What would be gained in these circumstances by having perhaps a few chapters at the end of your book completed, and not even the first volume can be printed, if events take us by surprise?’ (Engels to Marx, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227).
Marx replied to each of Engels’s points, alternating between serious and facetious tones. With regard to arsenic, he wrote: ‘Tell or write to Gumpert to send me the prescription with instructions for use. As I have confidence in him, he owes it to the best of “Political Economy” if nothing else to ignore professional etiquette and treat me from Manchester’ (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227). As for his work plans, he wrote:
As far as this ‘damned’ book is concerned, the position now is: it was ready at the end of December.29 The treatise on ground rent alone, the penultimate chapter, is in its present form almost long enough to be a book in itself.30 I have been going to the Museum in the day-time and writing at night. I had to plough through the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, in particular Liebig and Schönbein, which is more important for this matter than all the economists put together, as well as the enormous amount of material that the French have produced since I last dealt with this point. I concluded my theoretical investigation of ground rent 2 years ago. And a great deal had been achieved, especially in the period since then, fully confirming my theory incidentally. And the opening up of Japan (by and large I normally never read travel-books if I am not professionally obliged to). So here was the ‘shifting system’ as it was applied by those curs of English manufacturers to one and the same persons in 1848-50, being applied by me to myself (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227).31
Daytime study at the library, to keep abreast of the latest discoveries, and night-time work on his manuscript: this was the punishing routine to which Marx subjected himself in an effort to use all his energies for the completion of the book. On the main task, he wrote to Engels: ‘Although ready, the manuscript, which in its present form is gigantic, is not fit for publishing for anyone but myself, not even for you’ (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227). He then gave some idea of the preceding weeks:
I began the business of copying out and polishing the style on the dot of January first, and it all went ahead swimmingly, as I naturally enjoy licking the infant clean after long birth-pangs. But then the carbuncle intervened again, so that I have since been unable to make any more progress but only to fill out with more facts those sections which were, according to the plan, already finished (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227).
In the end, he accepted Engels’s advice to spread out the publication schedule: ‘I agree with you and shall get the first volume to Meissner as soon as it is ready’. ‘But,’ he added, ‘in order to complete it, I must first be able to sit’ (Marx to Engels, 13 February 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 227).
In fact, Marx’s health was continuing to deteriorate. Finally, Marx let himself be persuaded to take a break from work. On 15 March he travelled to Margate, a seaside resort in Kent, and on the tenth day sent back a report about himself: ‘I am reading nothing, am writing nothing. The mere fact of having to take the arsenic three times a day obliges one to arrange one’s time for meals and for strolling. […] As regards company here, it does not exist, of course. I can sing with the Miller of the Dee:32 ‘I care for nobody and nobody cares for me’ (Marx to Engels, 24 March 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 249).
Early in April, Marx told his friend Kugelmann that he was ‘much recovered’. But he complained that, because of the interruption, ‘another two months and more’ had been entirely lost, and the completion of his book ‘put back once more’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 6 April 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 262). After his return to London, he remained at a standstill for another few weeks because of an attack of rheumatism and other troubles; his body was still exhausted and vulnerable. Although he reported to Engels in early June that ‘there has fortunately been no recurrence of anything carbuncular’ (Marx to Engels, 7 June 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 281), he was unhappy that his work had ‘been progressing poorly owing to purely physical factors’ (Marx to Engels, 9 June 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 282).
In July, Marx had to confront what had become his three habitual enemies: Livy’s periculum in mora (danger in delay) in the shape of rent arrears; the carbuncles, with a new one ready to flare up; and an ailing liver. In August, he reassured Engels that, although his health ‘fluctuate[d] from one day to the next’, he felt generally better: after all, ‘the feeling of being fit to work again does much for a man’ (Marx to Engels, 7 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 303). He was ‘threatened with new carbuncles here and there’, and although they ‘kept disappearing’ without the need for urgent intervention they had obliged him to keep his ‘hours of work very much within limits’ (Marx to Engels, 23 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 311). On the same day, he wrote to Kugelmann: ‘I do not think I shall be able to deliver the manuscript of the first volume (it has now grown to 3 volumes) to Hamburg before October. I can only work productively for a very few hours per day without immediately feeling the effects physically’.
This time too, Marx was being excessively optimistic. The steady stream of negative phenomena to which he was daily exposed in the struggle to survive once more proved an obstacle to the completion of his text. Furthermore, he had to spend precious time looking for ways to extract small sums of money from the pawnshop and to escape the tortuous circle of promissory notes in which he had landed. He also said that ‘for [his] family’s sake’ he ‘must, however unwillingly, […] observe the hygienic’ limitations (linked to the prevention of new carbuncles) until he was ‘fully recovered’ Marx to Kugelmann, 23 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 312).
Marx’s old friend and former member of the League of Communists, Friedrich Lessner, recalled that he ‘often used to speak of the length of the working day’. At the end of the General Council meetings (which ‘he never missed’), Marx more than once said: ‘We are striving for an eight-hour day, but we ourselves often work twice as long in the space of twenty-four hours’. According to Lessner, Marx did ‘much too much’; ‘an outsider has no idea how much energy and time his work for the International cost him’. Besides ‘Marx had to slave away to keep his family and to spend hours in the British Museum collecting material for his historical and economic studies’ (Lessner in Enzensberger 1973: 293).
Very often, Marx’s permanent intellectual curiosity led him to widen his range of studies. For example, despite the pressure to finish his book as well as his political responsibilities, he wrote to Engels in the summer of 1865 that he was ‘studying Comte on the side just now, as the English and French are making such a fuss of the fellow’. He remained firm in what he thought of Comte’s limitations: what attracted him was ‘his encyclopaedic quality, la synthèse’, although ‘Hegel [was] infinitely superior as a whole’. ‘And this shitty positivism came out in 1832!’ he ended (Marx to Engels, 7 July 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 292).
His prediction to Kugelmann that he might be able to take the manuscript to Hamburg in October also proved to be overoptimistic. In August, Marx wrote to Kugelmann that ‘accumulated debts’ had become ‘a crushing mental burden’ and that he had even been thinking of moving to the United States. He was soldiering on, though, convinced that he had ‘a duty to […] remain in Europe and complete the work on which [he had] been engaged for so many years’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 23 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 312). With regard to Capital, he assured his friend that, although he was spending much time writing documents in preparation for the Geneva congress of the International, he would not be attending it himself. ‘For the working class,’ he wrote, ‘what [he was] doing through this work [was] far more important […] than anything [he] might be able to do personally at any congress’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 23 August 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 312).
Writing to Kugelmann in mid-October, Marx expressed a fear that as a result of his long illness, and all the expenses it had entailed, he could no longer ‘keep the creditors at bay’ and the house was ‘about to come crashing down about [his] ears’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 328). Not even in October, therefore, was it possible for him to put the finishing touches to the manuscript. In describing the state of things to his friend in Hannover, and explaining the reasons for the delay, Marx set out the plan he now had in mind:
My circumstances (endless interruptions, both physical and social) oblige me to publish Volume I first, not both volumes together, as I had originally intended. And there will now probably be 3 volumes. The whole work is thus divided into the following parts:
Book I. The Process of Production of Capital.
Book II. The Process of Circulation of Capital.
Book III. Structure of the Process as a Whole.
Book IV. On the History of the Theory.
The first volume will include the first 2 books. The 3rd book will, I believe, fill the second volume, the 4th the 3rd (Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 328).
Reviewing the work, he had done since the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was published in 1859, Marx continued:
It was, in my opinion, necessary to begin again from the beginning in the first book, i.e., to summarize the book of mine published by Duncker in one chapter on commodities and money. I judged this to be necessary, not merely for the sake of completeness, but because even intelligent people did not properly understand the question, in other words, there must have been defects in the first presentation, especially in the analysis of commodities (Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 328-9).
Extreme poverty marked the month of November, too. But Marx was keen to point out that ‘this summer and autumn it was really not the theory which caused the delay, but [his] physical and civil condition’. If he had been in good health, he would have been able to complete the work. He reminded Engels that it was three years since ‘the first carbuncle had been lanced’ – years in which he had had ‘only short periods’ of relief from it (Marx to Engels, 10 November 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 332). Moreover, having been forced to expend so much time and energy on the daily struggle with poverty, he remarked in December: ‘I only regret that private persons cannot file their bills for the bankruptcy court with the same propriety as men of business’ (Marx to Engels, 8 December 1866, Marx and Engels 1987: 336).
At the end of February 1867, Marx was finally able to give Engels the long-awaited news that the book was finished. Now he had to take it to Germany, and once again he was forced to turn to his friend so that he could redeem his ‘clothes and timepiece from their abode at the pawnbroker’s’ (Marx to Engels, 2 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 351);33 otherwise he would not have been able to leave.
Having arrived in Hamburg, Marx discussed with Engels the new plan proposed by Meissner:
He now wants that the book should appear in 3 volumes. In particular he is opposed to my compressing the final book (the historico-literary part) as I had intended. He said that from the publishing point of view […] this was the part by which he was setting most store. I told him that as far as that was concerned, I was his to command (Marx to Engels, 13 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 357).
Despite Marx’s optimism, it should be noted that between 1862 and 1863 he had written only the history of the category of surplus-value – and that he had done this before making significant theoretical progress. A few days later, he gave a similar report to Becker:
The whole work will appear in 3 volumes. The title is Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. The first volume comprises the First Book: ‘The Process of Production of Capital’. It is 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).
After a few days in Hamburg, Marx travelled on to Hannover. He stayed there as the guest of Kugelmann, who finally got to know him after years of purely epistolary relations. Marx remained available there in case Meissner wanted him to help out with the proof-reading.
Marx stayed in Hanover until the middle of May. Happy with the results of the trip, he described his weeks with the Kugelmann family as ‘an oasis in the desert of his life’ (Kugelmann, in Enzensberger 1973: 323).34 The most particularized accounts of Marx during this period have come down to us through the later recollections of Kugelmann’s daughter, Franziska. She described her fears before the arrival of the unknown guest, of her mother’s concern that he would be a man lost in ‘his political ideas’, with the manner of a ‘gloomy revolutionary’. But both she and her mother had to think again as soon as they met Marx in person; he turned out to be a ‘lively gentleman’ and displayed a ‘youthful freshness in his movements and conversation’ (Kugelmann in Enzensberger 1973: 314). In fact, he was ‘a thoroughly likeable and unpretentious presence, not only in get-togethers at home but also in the circle of my parents’ acquaintances’. Franziska also recalled that Marx ‘showed a lively interest in everything, and when someone pleased him in particular, or made an original remark, he would insert his monocle and look at the person with a cheerful and attentive expression’. The hospitality he received was returned with numerous anecdotes. On Hegel, he recounted how he had once said that ‘none of his students had understood him, except [Karl] Rosenkranz – and that he had understood him badly’ (Kugelmann in Enzensberger 1973: 315). Marx also often quoted Friedrich Schiller and once jokingly adapted a famous quotation of his from Wallenstein’s Camp: ‘He who has seen the best of his time has enough for all times!’ (Kugelmann in Enzensberger 1973: 320).
In discussions on the struggle against capitalism, however, Marx spoke in authoritative tones and did not avoid polemic. To one man’s question about who would polish boots in the future society, he replied: ‘You should do it!’ And someone who asked when communism would begin was told ‘the time will come, but we’ll have to be gone by then’ (Kugelmann in Enzensberger 1973: 319).
From Hanover, Marx wrote to other comrades about the forthcoming publication of his work. To Sigfrid Meyer [1840 – 1872], a German socialist member of the International active in organizing the workers’ movement in New York, he wrote: ‘Volume I comprises the Process of Production of Capital. […] Volume II contains the continuation and conclusion of the theory, Volume III the history of political economy from the middle of the 17th century’ (Marx to Meyer, 30 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 367). His schema was unchanged, however, and the idea was still that the second and third volumes would appear together.
Buoyed up with enthusiasm, Marx wrote to Engels in early May that the publisher Meissner was ‘demanding the 2nd volume by the end of the autumn at the latest’. That should have included both Volume II and Volume III, so Marx thought he would have to ‘get his nose to the grindstone’ again, especially as – in the time since he had composed Volume III – ‘a lot of new material relating to the chapters on credit and landed property ha[d] become available’. In the end, he expected to finish the third volume ‘during the winter, so that [he would] have shaken off the whole opus by next spring’. Marx’s overoptimistic predictions were based on the hope that ‘the business of writing’ would be ‘quite different once the proofs for what ha[d] already been done’ started to come in and he felt ‘under pressure from the publisher’ (Engels to Marx, 16 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 382).
In mid-June, Engels became involved in the correction of the text for publication. He thought that, compared with the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘the dialectic of the argument ha[d] been greatly sharpened’ (Engels to Marx, 16 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 381). Marx was heartened by this approval: ‘That you have been satisfied with it so far is more important to me than anything the rest of the world may say of it’ (Marx to Engels, 22 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 383). However, Engels noted that his exposition of the form of value was excessively abstract and insufficiently clear for the average reader; he also regretted that precisely this important section had ‘the marks of the carbuncles rather firmly stamped upon it’ (Engels to Marx, 16 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 380). A further problem was Marx’s rather dysfunctional subdivision of the volume. Its eight hundred pages were structured in just six long chapters, each with very few paragraph breaks. Engels therefore wrote: ‘It was a serious mistake not to have made the development of these rather abstract arguments clearer by means of a larger number of short sections with their own headings. You ought to have treated this part in the manner of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, with short paragraphs, each dialectical transition emphasized by means of a special heading’. Then, ‘a very large class of readers would have found it considerably easier to understand’ (Engels to Marx, 16 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 382). In reply, Marx fulminated against the cause of his physical torments – ‘I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day’ (Marx to Engels, 22 June 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 383) – and convinced himself of the need for an appendix presenting his conception of the form of value in a more popular form. This twenty-page addition was completed by the end of June.
The proof corrections were finished on 16 August 1867, at two in the morning. A few minutes later, he wrote to his friend in Manchester: ‘Dear Fred: Have just finished correcting the last sheet […]. So, this volume is finished. I owe it to you alone that it was possible! […] I embrace you, full of thanks’ (Marx to Engels, 24 August 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 405). A few days later, in another letter to Engels, he summarized what he regarded as the two main pillars of the book: ‘1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the twofold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use value or exchange value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc.’ (Marx to Engels, 24 August 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 407).
Capital was put on sale on 14 September 1867.35 The high price of the book – three thalers – was equivalent to a worker’s weekly wage. Jenny von Westphalen wrote to Kugelmann: ‘There can be few books that have been written in more difficult circumstances, and I am sure I could write a secret history of it which would tell of many, extremely many unspoken troubles and anxieties and torments’(Jenny Marx to Kugelmann, 24 December 1867, Marx 1983: 578). 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 correction process and the final addition, the structure of the work would be considerably expanded over the coming years, and various further modifications would be made to the text. Capital, Volume I, therefore continued to absorb significant energies on Marx’s part even after its publication.
4. In Search of the Definitive Version
In October 1867, Marx returned to Capital, Volume II. But this brought a recurrence of his medical complaints: liver pains, insomnia, and the blossoming of ‘two small carbuncles near the membrum’. Nor did the ‘incursions from without’ or the ‘aggravations of home life’ leave off; there was a certain bitterness in his sage remark to Engels that ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’ (Marx to Engels, 19 October 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 453). As always, his friend helped out and sent all the money he could, together with a hope that it ‘drives away the carbuncles’ (Engels to Marx, 22 October 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 457). That is not what happened, though, and in late November Marx wrote to say: ‘The state of my health has greatly worsened, and there has been virtually no question of working’ (Marx to Engels, 27 November 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 477).
The new year, 1868, began much as the old one had ended. During the first weeks of January, Marx was even unable to attend to his correspondence. His wife Jenny confided to Becker that her ‘poor husband ha[d] once again been laid up and fettered hand and foot by his old, serious and painful complaint, which [was] becoming dangerous through its constant recurrence’ (Jenny Marx to Becker, ‘After 10 January 1868’, Marx and Engels 1987: 580). A few days later, his daughter Jenny reported to Engels: ‘Moor is once more being victimized by his old enemies, the carbuncles, and is, by the arrival of the latest, made to feel very ill at ease in a sitting posture’ (Laura Marx to Engels, 13 January 1868, Marx and Engels 1987: 583). Marx began to write again only towards the end of the month, when he told Engels that ‘for 2-3 weeks’ he would ‘do absolutely no work’; ‘it would be dreadful,’ he added, ‘if a third monster were to erupt’ (Marx to Engels, 25 January 1868, Marx and Engels 1987: 528).
As always, however, he returned as soon as he could to his research. During this period, he took a great interest in questions of history and agriculture, compiling notebooks of extracts from the works of various authors. Particularly important for him was 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. Marx told Engels he had found Maurer’s books ‘extremely significant’, since they approached in an entirely different way ‘not only the primitive age but also the entire later development of the free imperial cities, of the estate owners possessing immunity, of public authority, and of the struggle between the free peasantry and serfdom’ (Marx to Engels, 25 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 557). Marx further approved of Maurer’s demonstration ‘at length that private property in land only arose later’ (Marx to Engels, 14 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 547). By contrast, he waxed sarcastic about those who were ‘surprised to find what is newest in what is oldest, and even egalitarians to a degree that would have made Proudhon shudder’ (Marx to Engels, 25 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 557).
Also in this period, Marx studied in depth 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). Marx found the first of these ‘very interesting’, especially appreciating the part in which Kraas demonstrated that ‘climate and flora change in historical times’. Writing to Engels, he described the author as ‘a Darwinist before Darwin’, who admitted ‘even the species developing in historical times’. He was also struck by his ecological considerations and his related concern that ‘cultivation – when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he naturally does not reach this point) – leaves deserts behind it’. Here too, Marx could detect what he called ‘an unconscious socialist tendency’ (Marx to Engels, 25 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 559).
While affording Marx a little energy for these new scientific studies, the state of his health continued its ups and downs. In late March, he reported to Engels that it was such that he should ‘really give up working and thinking entirely for some time’. But he added that would be ‘hard’ for him, even if he had ‘the means to loaf around’ (Marx to Engels, 25 March 1868, Marx and Engels 1987: 557). The new interruption came just as he was recommencing work on the second version of Volume II – after a gap of nearly three years since the first half of 1865. He completed the first two chapters in the course of the spring (Marx 2008), in addition to a group of preparatory manuscripts – on the relationship between surplus value and rate of profit, the law of the rate of profit, and the metamorphoses of capital – which occupied him until the end of 1868.36
At the end of April 1868, Marx sent Engels a new schema for his work, with particular reference to ‘the method by which the rate of profit is developed’ (Marx to Engels, 30 April 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 21). This would be the last occasion when Marx referred in his correspondence to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. Despite the major economic crises that developed after 1873, Marx never again mentioned this concept to which the whole third section of Volume III (written in 1864-65) is devoted – and which has received so much emphasis in later times; it was as if he thought it to have been superseded. In the same letter, he made it clear that Volume II would present the ‘process of circulation of capital on the basis of the premises developed’ in Capital, Volume I. He intended to set out, in as satisfactory a manner as possible, the ‘formal determinations’ of fixed capital, circulating capital and the turnover of capital – and hence to investigate ‘the social intertwining of the different capitals, of parts of capital and of revenue (=m)’. Instead, Marx had decided to present ‘the conversion of surplus value into its different forms and separate component parts’ (Marx to Engels, 30 April 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 21). In May, however, the health problems were back. In the second week of August, he told Kugelmann of his hope to finish the entire work by ‘the end of September’ 1869 (Marx to Kugelmann, 10 August 1868, Marx and Engels 1988: 82).
But the autumn brought an outbreak of carbuncles, and in Spring 1869, when Marx was still working on the third chapter – entitled in this version ‘The Real Relations of the Circulation Process and the Reproduction Process’ – of Volume II (Marx 2008). His plan to finish it by 1869 seemed realistic, since the second version of the text he had written since Spring 1868 represented an advance in both qualitative and quantitative terms. His liver too yet another turn for the worse. His misfortunes continued in the following years, with troublesome regularity, and prevented him from ever completing Volume II.
There were 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.37 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 new (in reality, insignificant) literature about 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, and in early 1870 Jenny 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 the carbuncle under his arm when it was already very swollen and had hardened’ (Jenny Marx to Engels, ‘About 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. In early summer, summarizing what had happened in the previous months, Marx told Kugelmann that his work had been ‘held up by illness throughout the winter’, and that he had ‘found it necessary to mug up on [his] Russian, because, in dealing with the land question, it ha[d] become essential to study Russian landowning relationships from primary sources’ (Marx to Kugelmann, 27 June 1870, Marx and Engels 1988: 528).
After all the interruptions and a period of intense political activity for the International 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, and this led him to rewrite the first chapter itself. The result of this labour was the manuscript known as ‘Additions and Changes to Capital, Volume I’ (1871-72) (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.38 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 2020). 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). Lessner related that ‘the event, [which was considered] an important sign of the times, turned into a festive occasion for himself and for his family and friends’ (Lessner 1907).
In a letter of May 1872 to Liebknecht, Jenny von Westphalen – who with her daughters had shared the joy of this success and other of Marx’s achievements – described most effectively how gender differences also weighed in the common struggle for socialism. In all existing conflicts, she wrote, ‘we women have the harder part to bear, because it is the lesser one. A man draws strength from his struggle with the world outside, and is invigorated by the sight of the enemy, be their number legion. We remain sitting at home, darning socks. That does nothing to dispel our fears and the gnawing day-to-day petty worries slowly but surely sap our spirit’ (Jenny Marx to Liebknecht, 26 May 1872, Marx and Engels 1989: 580).
In this year, too, the publication of the French edition of Capital got under way. Entrusted to Joseph Roy, who had previously translated some 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 ‘become discouraged when they were “unable to carry straight on”’. He did not feel he could do anything about this ‘disadvantage’, ‘other than constantly caution and forewarn those readers concerned with the truth. There is no royal road to learning and the only people with any chance of scaling its sunlit peaks are those who have no fear of weariness when ascending the precipitous paths that lead up to them’ (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). At the end of his labours, Marx himself remarked that they 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).
In revising the translation (Marx 1989c), 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 the French edition, 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).39
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.40 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 magnum opus.41 In fact, neither the French edition of 1872-75 nor the German edition of 1881 can be considered the definitive version that he would have liked it to be.
The critical spirit with which Marx composed his magnum opus reveals just how distant he was from the dogmatic author that many of his adversaries and self-styled disciples presented to the world. Unfinished though it remained, those who today want to use essential theoretical concepts for the critique of the capitalist mode of production still cannot dispense with reading Marx’s Capital.
Translated from the Italian by Patrick Camiller
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References
1. This expression has been often used by Maximilien Rubel (1981: 192!.). Cf. also Musto (2018: 55–81).
2. The title later given to these manuscripts was inspired by this letter. On Marx’s Grundrisse cf. Musto 2008.
3. A few days later, Marx communicated his plans to Lassalle: ‘The present commercial crisis has impelled me to set to work seriously on my outlines of political
economy, and also to prepare something on the present crisis’ (Marx to Lassalle, 21 December 1857, Marx and Engels 1983: 226).
4. These notebooks total 1,472 quarto pages. See Engels (1996: 6).
5. Previously, in the Grundrisse, Marx had set forth a similar, though less precise, ‘arrangement of the material’ (Marx 1993: 108, 227–8, 264 and 27), at four separate points. He also anticipated the six- part schema planned for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in two letters from the first half of 1858: one to Ferdinand Lassalle (Marx to Lassalle, 22 February 1858, Marx and Engels 1983: 268–71), and one to Friedrich Engels (Marx to Engels, 2 April 1858, Marx and Engels 1983: 296–304). Between February and March 1859, he also drafted a long preparatory index for his work, which in the English edition of Marx (1993), became the ‘Analytical Contents List’, pp. 69–80. On the original plan and its variations, see the by now dated, but still fundamental work by Roman Rosdolsky (1977: 1–62). More limited, however, is Rubel (1974: 379, 389), which claims that Marx did not change the original plan he devised in 1857.
6. These notebooks were ignored for more than 100 years, before a Russian translation was finally published in 1973, in a supplementary Volume 47 of the Marx- Engels Sochinenya. An original German edition appeared only in 1976 in MEGA2, vol. II/3.1.
7. Between 1905 and 1910, Kautsky published the manuscripts in question in a form that deviated somewhat from the originals.
8. It was to have followed: 1) the transformation of money into capital; 2) absolute surplus value; 3) relative surplus value; and 4) a section – one he never actually wrote – on how these three should be considered in combination.
9. In the MECW these manuscripts are indicated with the title Economic Manuscript of 1861–63.
10. This notebook is the last of those comprising the so- called Theories of Surplus-Value, vol. I, in Marx (1989a).
11. These notebooks form part of the Theories of Surplus Value, vol. II, in Marx (1989a).
12. These are the final notebooks that form part of the Theories of Surplus Value, vol. III, in Marx (1989b).
13. See the index to the Grundrisse, written in June 1858 and contained in Notebook M (the same as that of the ‘1857 Introduction’), as well as the draft index for the third chapter, written in 1860: Marx (1987b: 511–17). Michael Heinrich (2016: 107) shows that, after the middle of 1863, Marx no longer used the concept of ‘capital in general’ in the subdivision of his work and never mentioned it again in either his manuscripts or his correspondence. It is therefore possible that he ‘realised that the double requirement which he expected from the section of “Capital in General” – to present specific content […] at a certain level of abstraction […] – could not be fulfilled’.
14. The first chapter had already been outlined in Notebook XVI of the economic manuscripts of 1861–1863. Marx prepared a schema of the second in Notebook XVIII, see Marx (1991: 299).
15. See the more than 60 pages contained in IISH, Marx- Engels Papers, B 98. On the basis of this research, Marx began one of his many unfinished projects, see Marx (1961).
16. IISH, Marx- Engels Papers, B 93, B 100, B 101, B 102, B 103, B 104 contain some 535 pages of notes. Additionally, Marx also used material from three notebooks RGASPI f.1, d. 1397, d. 1691, d. 5583. In order to compile notebooks XXII and XXIII.
17. Heinrich (2011) argued that the manuscripts from this period should be regarded not as the third version of the work begun with the Grundrisse, but as the first draft of Capital. Krätke (2005) indicated that the overall outlook and scope of Capital remained unchanged, even though Marx changed his plans several times after 1857.
18. Heinrich (2016: 111) noted that, when he was writing the second and third volumes, Marx was ‘far away from a situation in which these manuscripts could have served as a direct template for revision before going into print. In this respect one can say that Capital was still in a formation phase’.
19. In his view, Marx set aside the project of also writing books on the state, foreign trade and the world market.
20. With ‘No. 1’ Marx meant the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
21. In recent years, dermatologists have reviewed the discussion on the causes of Marx’s disease. Sam Shuster (2008) suggested that he su!ered from hidradenitis suppurativa, while Rudolf Happle and Arne Koenig (2008) claimed even less plausibly, that the culprit was his heavy smoking of cigars. For Shuster’s reply to this suggestion, see Happle and Koenig (2008: 256).
22. The reasons why Marx did not insert this chapter into the published text of Capital, Volume I, remain unknown. For a commentary on it, see Napoleoni (1975).
23. This street was later renamed Maitland Park Road. Marx dedicated Capital, Volume I, to Wol!, his ‘unforgettable friend. […] Intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat’.
24. Fifty signatures were equivalent to 800 printed pages.
25. This was published in 1898 by Eleanor Marx, as Value, Price and Profit. This commonly used title was taken as the basis for the German translation that appeared the same year in Die Neue Zeit [The New Times].
26. The equivalent of 960 pages. Later, Meissner signaled his openness to modify his agreement with Marx: see Marx to Engels, 13 April 1867, Marx and Engels 1987: 357.
27. This division was followed by Engels when he published Capital, Volume III in 1894. See Vollgraf, Jungnickel and Naron (Spring 2002). See also the more recent: Vollgraf (2012/2013); Roth (2012/2013); and Krätke (2017), especially the final chapter ‘Gibt es ein Marx- Engels-Problem?’ For a critical assessment of Engels’s editing, see Heinrich (1996–1997).
28. Marx used these data in the third chapter of Volume One. It should be noted, however, that in late 1865 Marx still envisaged the publication of Volume One of Capital as a continuation of his writings of 1859. Only from the letter Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866 can we be certain that he had decided to rewrite the first part. See Marx and Engels (1987: 328).
29. Vollgraf (2018: 63–4) points out that, when Marx described Capital as being ‘ready’ since 1865, he was referring to the ‘conceptual architecture’, not the ‘elaboration of the content chapter by chapter, and certainly not the complete exposition’. Marx continued to assess the work remaining to be done on the basis of size, not of ‘the rational core of his arguments’.
30. Marx then inserted his analysis of ground rent into Part Six, ‘The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground Rent’, of Volume III.
31. This realistic assertion clashes with some previous over- confident descriptions of the state of his texts. Since, apart from a few additions, Marx had no further opportunity to work on Volume III after 1865, his statement testifies both to Engels’s huge e!ort in preparing the book for publication and to its highly unfinished character. This should always be borne in mind by its readers and interpreters.
32. A traditional English folk song.
33. The most recent philological studies have shown that, contrary to what has always been believed, the original manuscript of Capital, Volume I, (of which the ‘Chapter Six. Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ was thought to be only surviving part) actually dates back to the 1863–64 period, and that Marx cut and pasted it into the copy he prepared for publication. See Vollgraf (2012).
34. For a full account of this period, see the recent Bönig (2017).
35. The distribution of the book began on 11 September 1867. See Institut für Marxismus- Leninismus, ‘Entstehung und Überlieferung’, in Marx (1983: 674).
36 These texts have recently been published in Marx (2012). The last part constitutes Manuscript IV of Volume II and contains new versions of Part One, ‘The Circulation of Capital’, and Part Two, ‘The Metamorphoses of Capital’.
37. Still unpublished, these notes are included in the IISH notebooks, Marx- Engels Papers, B 108, B 109, B 113 and B 114.
38. In 1867 Marx had divided the book into chapters. In 1872 these became sections, each with much more detailed subdivisions.
39. 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). For confirmation of the merits of this edition, see Anderson (1983) and D’Hondt (1985). On the research of the last period of Marx’s life see Musto 2020 (forthcoming).
40. 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 di!erent, and sometimes contradictory, versions of Marx’s ideas.
41. 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 o! 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 di!erent circumstances. (Marx and Engels 1993: 161).
I. The Limited Participation of the Germans to the International Working Men’s Association
The workers’ organizations that founded the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 were something of a motley. The central driving forces were British trade unionism and the mutualists, long dominant in France but strong also in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. Alongside these two components, there were the communists, grouped around the figure of Karl Marx, elements that had nothing to do with the socialist tradition, such as the followers of Giuseppe Mazzini, and some groups of French, Belgian and Swiss workers who joined the International with them a variety of confused theories, some of a utopian inspiration. The General Association of German Workers – the party led by followers of Ferdinand Lassalle – never affiliated to the International but orbited around it. This organization was hostile to trade unionism and conceived of political action in rigidly national terms.
In 1865, the International expanded in Europe and established its first important nuclei in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. The Prussian Combination Laws, which prevented German political associations from having regular contacts with organizations in other countries, meant that the International was unable to open sections in what was then the German Confederation. The General Association of German Workers – the first workers’ party in history, founded in 1863 and led by Lassalle’s disciple Johann Baptist von Schweitzer – followed a line of ambivalent dialogue with Otto von Bismarck and showed little or no interest in the International during the early years of its existence. It was an indifference shared by Wilhelm Liebknecht, despite his political proximity to Marx. Johann Philipp Becker tried to find a way round these difficulties through the Geneva-based “Group of German-speaking Sections”.
While Liebknecht did not understand the centrality of the international dimension for the struggle of the workers’ movement, Marx also had deep theoretical and political differences with von Schweitzer. In February 1865 he wrote to the latter that “the aid of the Royal Prussian government for co-operative societies,” which the Lassalleans welcomed, was “worthless as an economic measure, whilst, at the same time, it serve[d] to extend the system of tutelage, corrupt part of the working class and emasculate the movement.” Marx went on to reject any possibility of an alliance between the workers and the monarchy:
Just as the bourgeois party in Prussia discredited itself and brought about its present wretched situation by seriously believing that with the ‘New Era’ the government had fallen into its lap by the grace of the Prince Regent, so the workers’ party will discredit itself even more if it imagines that the Bismarck era or any other Prussian era will make the golden apples just drop into its mouth, by grace of the king. It is beyond all question that Lassalle’s ill-starred illusion that a Prussian government might intervene with socialist measures will be crowned with disappointment. The logic of circumstances will tell. But the honour of the workers’ party requires that it reject such illusions, even before their hollowness is punctured by experience. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.
The critique of state socialism was a common theme in Marx’s political reflections during that period. A few days after the letter to Schweitzer, he suggested to Engels that the position of the Lassalleans in Germany was akin to the “alliance of the “proletariat” with the “government” against the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’” which the two of them had firmly opposed in 1847.
Marx’s critique to the policy of German social democracy continued in 1866. In the Instructions for Delegates of the Provisional General Council, prepared for the Geneva congress, Marx underlined the basic function of trade unions against which not only the mutualists but also certain followers of Robert Owen in Britain and of Lassalle in Germany had taken a stand. Lassalle advocated the concept of an ‘iron law of wages’, which held that efforts to increase wages were futile and a distraction for workers from the primary task of assuming political power in the state. Marx wrote:
This activity of the Trades’ Unions is not only legitimate, it is necessary. It cannot be dispensed with so long as the present system of production lasts. On the contrary, it must be generalized by the formation and the combination of Trades’ Unions throughout all countries. On the other hand, unconsciously to themselves, the Trades’ Unions were forming centres of organization of the working class, as the mediaeval municipalities and communes did for the middle class. If the Trades’ Unions are required for the guerrilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour and capital rule.
In the same document, Marx did not spare the existing unions his criticism. For they were “too exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital [and had] not yet fully understood their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself. They therefore kept too much aloof from general social and political movements”.
In September 1868, Marx returned to the question of state socialism. In a letter to Engels, he suggested that what von Schweitzer had described the previous month in Hamburg at the congress of the General Association of German Workers as the “summa of Lassalle’s discoveries” – that is, state credit for the foundation of productive associations – was “literally copied from the programme of French Catholic socialism”, inspired by Philip Buchez [1796-1850], which went back to “the days of Louis-Philippe” [1773-1850].
Instead, strong opposition to the government would have been good for the social struggle: “The most essential thing for the German working class is that it should cease to agitate by permission of the high government authorities. Such a bureaucratically schooled race must undergo a complete course of ‘self help’.”
In a letter to Schweitzer, Marx set out at greater length his differences with the Lassallean tendency. The first question was his opposition to the strategy of “state aid versus self-help”, which Buchez, the leader of Catholic socialism, [… had used] against the genuine workers’ movement in France’, and on the basis of which Lassalle himself had later made “concessions to the Prussian monarchy, to Prussian reaction (the feudal party) and even to the clericals”. For Marx, it was essential that the workers’ struggle should be free and independent. “The main thing is to teach [the worker] to walk by himself”, especially in Germany, where “he is regulated bureaucratically from childhood onwards” and believes in the authority of superiors.
The other significant area of disagreement was the theoretical and political rigidity of Lassalle and his followers. Marx criticized the comrade with whom he had been in touch for many years, on the grounds that “like everyone who claims to have in his pocket a panacea for the sufferings of the masses, [Lassalle] gave his agitation, from the very start, a religious, sectarian character,” and, being the founder of a sect, “he denied all natural connection with the earlier movement, both in Germany and abroad.” Lassalle was guilty of the same error as Proudhon: that of “not seeking the real basis of his agitation in the actual elements of the class movement, but of wishing, instead, to prescribe for that movement a course determined by a certain doctrinaire recipe.” For Marx, any “sect seeks its raison d’être and its point d’honneur not in what it has in common with the class movement, but in the particular shibboleth distinguishing it from that movement.” His opposition to that kind of politics could not have been clearer.
In the fight against state socialism, Marx also took issue with Liebknecht. After one of his speeches in the Reichstag in Summer 1869, Marx commented to Engels: “The brute believes in the future ‘state of democracy’! Secretly that means sometimes constitutional England, sometimes the bourgeois United States, sometimes wretched Switzerland. He has no conception of revolutionary politics.”
What disappointed Marx most was that in the North German Confederation, despite the existence of two political organizations of the workers’ movement – the Lassallean General Association of German Workers and the Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany – there was little enthusiasm for the International and few requests to affiliate to it. During its first three years, German militants virtually ignored its existence, fearing persecution at the hands of the authorities. The weak internationalism of the Germans ultimately weighed more heavily than any legal aspects, however, and declined still further when the movement became more preoccupied with internal matters.
The unification of Germany in 1871 confirmed the onset of a new age in which the nation-state would be the central form of political, legal and territorial identity. This placed a question mark over any supranational body that required its members to surrender a sizeable share of their political leadership. At the same time, the growing differences between national movements and organizations made it extremely difficult for the General Council of the International to produce a political synthesis capable of satisfying the demands of all. Anyway, after the end of the International, in September 1872, Marx continued to criticize the path German Social Democracy any time he had a chance.
II. Against the “Gotha Program” and the Social-Democratic Deviation
At the end of 1874, Marx learned from the papers that the General Association of German Workers, founded by Ferdinand Lassalle, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, linked to Marx, intended to unite into a single political force. Marx and Engels were not consulted about the merits of the project, and it was only in March that they received the draft programme of the new party. Engels then wrote to August Bebel that he could not “forgive his not having told us a single word about the whole business”; and he warned that he and Marx could “never give [their] allegiance to a new party” set up on the basis of Lassallean state socialism. Despite this sharp declaration, the leaders who had been active in building what would become the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD) did not change their positions.
Marx therefore felt obliged to write a long critique of the draft programme for the unification congress to be held on 22 May 1875 in the city of Gotha. In the letter accompanying his text, he recognized that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes”. But in the case of “programmes of principles”, they had to be written with great care, since they set “benchmarks for all the world to … gauge how far the party [has] progressed”. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx inveighed against the numerous imprecisions and mistakes in the new manifesto drafted in Germany.
For example, in criticizing the concept of “fair distribution”, he asked polemically: “Do not the bourgeois assert that present-day distribution is “fair”? And is it not, in fact, the only “fair” distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production?” In his view, the political demand to be inserted into the programme was not Lassalle’s “undiminished proceeds of labour” for every worker, but the transformation of the mode of production. Marx explained, with his customary rigour, that Lassalle “did not know what wages were”. Following bourgeois economists, he “took the appearance for the essence of the matter”. Marx explained:
Wages are not what they appear to be, namely the value, or price, of labour, but only a masked form for the value, or price, of labour power. Thereby the whole bourgeois conception of wages hitherto, as well as all the criticism hitherto directed against this conception, was thrown overboard once for all and it was made clear that the wage-worker has permission to work for his own subsistence, that is, to live only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter’s co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on increasing this gratis labour by extending the working day or by developing productivity, that is, increasing the intensity of labour power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment.
Another controversial point concerned the role of the state. Marx maintained that capitalism could be overthrown only through the “revolutionary transformation of society”. The Lassalleans held that “socialist organization of the total labour arises from the state aid that the state gives to the producers’ co-operative societies which the state, not the worker, calls into being.” For Marx, however, “cooperative societies [were]of value only insofar as they [were] the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of governments or of the bourgeois”; the idea “that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway” was typical of Lassalle’s theoretical ambiguities.
All in all, Marx observed that the political manifesto for the fusion congress showed that socialist ideas were having a hard time penetrating the German workers’ organizations. In keeping with his early convictions, he emphasized that it was wrong on their part to treat “the state as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical and libertarian bases”, instead of “treating existing society as … the basis of the existing state”. By contrast, Wilhelm Liebknecht and other German socialist leaders defended their tactical decision to compromise on programme, on the grounds that this was necessary to achieve a unified party. Once again, Marx had to face up to the great distance between choices made in Berlin and in London; he had already remarked on it in relation to the scant involvement of German organizations in the International Working Men’s Association.
During the spring of 1875, Marx continued the studies he needed to do for some outstanding sections of Capital. At the same time, he reworked parts of Johann Most’s popular compilation of extracts from Volume One, with a view to the printing of a second edition. Between mid-May and mid-August he composed another manuscript for Volume Three, “The Relationship between Rate of Surplus-Value and Rate of Profit Developed Mathematically” (1875), and in September he was animated once again by the desire to progress as much as possible in his writing of Capital, Volume Two.
In the early months of 1876, having received new books and publications with statistics about Russia, Marx engaged in further systematic research into the social-economic changes taking place there. His study, in 1870, of The Situation of the Working Class in Russia (1869) – a work by the economist and sociologist Vassilii Vassilievich Bervi, known by the pen-name N. Flerovsky – had also given him the political motivation to delve deeper into the reality of the country. Marx’s reading in the mid-1870s also included a little book entitled Revolutionary Conservatism (1875) by the Slavophile thinkers Yuri Samarin and Fyodor Dmitriev, and several volumes of the Proceedings of the Tributary Commission from 1872-73.
During this period, there were significantly less social struggles and Marx, whenever his health allowed, dedicated himself to new theoretical questions. He took the opportunity to expand his range of interests to areas he had little explored before. In the spring, he turned his attention to physiology, both botanical and human. In addition, he planned to read new books on subjects of major interest such as agronomy, landownership and credit, again after he had finished his studies for the completion of Capital.
From the middle of March, Marx returned to his research on forms of collective property. Among the texts he summarized by the end of the year were the very important History of the Village Order in Germany (1865-66) by the historian and statesman Georg Ludwig von Maurer, an Essay on the History of Landownership in Spain (1873) by the lawyer and minister Francisco de Cárdenas Espejo, and Common Abodes of the South Slavs (1859) by the writer and politician Ognjeslav Utješenović.
His new research endeavours were interrupted by the summer break, which his physical problems had made a necessity rather than a diversion. Also, in the autumn of 1876, Marx suffered from several and complicated health issues. Despite these tribulations and the constant work pressure from many sides, Marx made a major effort to find a publisher for the German version of Histoire de la Commune de 1871 (1876) by the French journalist and Communard Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray. Between September and the end of 1877, he invested time and energy in revising the translation of what he called “the first authentic history of the Commune”.
III. Political Battles at an International Level
Despite adversities and poor health, Marx continued to follow all the major political and economic events attentively and critically, attempting to envisage the new scenarios to which they might give rise and how these would affect struggles for the emancipation of the working class.
At the beginning of 1877, Jenny von Westphalen communicated to Sorge that her husband was “deeply in the Eastern question and highly elated by the firm, honest bearing of the sons of Mohammed vis-à-vis all the Christian humbugs and hypocritical atrocity mongers”. In April, Tsar Alexander II declared war on Turkey in pursuit of his expansionist aims, using the pretext of the rebellions against Constantinople by Christians living in the European territories of the Ottoman Empire.
Marx had already been active against the British Liberals’ support for Russia: between February and March, together with the journalist Maltman Barry, he had written three short articles – “Mr. Gladstone and Russian Intrigue”, “Mr. Gladstone” and “The Great Agitator Unmasked” – which were printed in Barry’s name in The Whitehall Review and Vanity Fair (and later in various local English, Scottish and Irish papers). Marx reported to Engels that many papers had “shied away” and that the deputy editor of Vanity Fair feared a “libel action”. To Sorge, he wrote with satisfaction that “English parliamentarians in the Commons and the Lords … would throw up their hands in horror if they knew that it was the Red Terror Doctor, as they call me , who had been their souffleur during the oriental crisis.”
Marx was critical of Bracke, however, since in his view “the workers’ press concern[ed] itself too little with the oriental question, forgetting that the government’s politics gamble wantonly with the lives and money of the people”. With excessive optimism, he wrote to Sorge: “That crisis marks a new turning-point in European history.” He thought that Russia had “long been on the verge of an upheaval” and hoped that the Turks might “advance the explosion … through the blows they have dealt … to the Russian army and Russian finances.” “This time”, he concluded, “the revolution will begin in the East, hitherto the impregnable bastion and reserve army of counter-revolution.” Engels reiterated this conviction to the editor of the Italian paper La Plebe, Enrico Bignami: “Once Russia has been spurred to revolution, the whole face of Europe will change. Until now, Old Russia has been the great army of European reaction. It acted as such in 1789, in 1805, in 1815, in 1830 and in 1848. Once this army is destroyed – we shall see!”
When it became clear in February 1878 that the Russians had been victorious, Marx regretted the fact in a letter to Liebknecht, repeating that defeat would not only have “greatly expedited social revolution in Russia” but also brought about “radical change throughout Europe”. Nevertheless, buoyed up by his confident expectations at the time, he predicted to the English Chartist and publicist Thomas Allsop that there would soon be a “succession of wars , which w[ould] precipitate the Social Crisis and engulf all the so-called Powers, those sham-powers , victors and vanquished—to make room for a European Social Revolution”. In a letter he sent to Engels in September, the horizon was similar: “Nothing Russia and Prussia … can now do on the international stage can have other than pernicious consequences for their regime, nor can it delay the latter’s downfall, but only expedite its violent end”.
From time to time, Marx had to concern himself again with the International Working Men’s Association, in order to defend its name and to recall the esteem that its political line still enjoyed. In July 1878, in answer to George Howell – an old member of the organization who had become a reformist trade-unionist – Marx pointed out in an article for The Secular Chronicle that what had gained the International “a worldwide reputation and a place in the history of mankind” was not “the size of its finances” – as Howell had slanderously argued – but ”the strength of its intellect and its abundant energy”.
Marx also continued to trust in developments on the other side of the Atlantic. In July 1877, he noted in a letter to Engels “the first outbreak against the associated capital oligarchy that has arisen since the Civil War”; it would “of course, be suppressed”, but it might “well provide a point of departure for a serious workers’ party in the United States”. Britain, on the other hand, was a country about which the two friends no longer had any illusions. In February 1878, Marx wrote to Liebknecht that “the English working class had gradually become ever more demoralized, as a result of the period of corruption after 1848, and finally reached the stage of being no more than an appendage of the great Liberal Party, i.e., of its oppressors, the capitalists.” In a letter to Eduard Bernstein, Engels was even more realistic: “A genuine workers’ movement in the continental sense is non-existent here;” there might still be strikes, “victorious or otherwise”, but “the working class makes no progress whatsoever” as a result of them.
IV. The Critique of “Armchair Socialism”
Marx never lost sight of the main political developments in Germany. After the major tensions surrounding the Gotha congress had passed, he continued his attempts to orient the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany in an anti-capitalist direction. However, other tendencies were developing that would create fresh occasions of conflict. From 1874 Eugen Dühring, an economics professor at Berlin University, began to receive significant attention from Party intellectuals. Articles in support of his positions appeared in Der Volksstaat (The People’s State), which had been the organ of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany. Therefore, having been asked by Liebknecht to get involved, and having listened to Marx’s view that it was necessary “to criticize Dühring without any compunction”, Engels decided to write a full-scale critique of the German positivist. This task, which extended from late 1876 until July 1878, ended in the book Anti-Dühring (1877-78), whose publication was preceded by excerpts in the columns of Vorwärts [Forward], the daily paper of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany born out of the Gotha fusion congress.
Marx played an active part in the Anti-Dühring project: in the winter 1877, he wrote the key chapter “On ‘Critical History’”, both on Engels’s behalf and in his own name, conceiving it as a response to attacks contained in Dühring’s Critical History of Political Economy and Socialism (1871). Marx shows that “by value Herr Dühring understands five totally different and directly contradictory things, and, therefore, to put it at its best, himself does not know what he wants.” Moreover, in the German economist’s book, the “‘natural laws of all economics’, ushered in with such pomp, prove to be merely universally familiar, and often not even properly understood, platitudes of the worst description.” The “sole explanation” he gives of “economic facts” is that “they are the result of “force”, a term with which the philistine of all nations has for thousands of years consoled himself for everything unpleasant that happens to him, and which leaves us just where we were.” For Marx, Dühring does not try to “investigate the origin and effects of this force”, and, when compelled to elucidate the capitalist exploitation of labour, he “first represents it in a general way as based on taxes and price surcharges” à la Proudhon, then “explains it in detail by means of Marx’s theory of surplus-labour”. The result is totally implausible: “two totally contradictory modes of outlook, … cop[ied] down without taking his breath”.
In the elections of January 1877, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany won nearly half a million votes, raising its share above 9 per cent. But despite this success, the state of the party continued to trouble Marx. Writing to the German doctor Ferdinand Fleckles, he ridiculed the “short pamphlet” entitled The Quintessence of Socialism (1879) of sociologist Albert Schäffle as “fantastic, truly Swabian … picture of the future socialist millennium as … the kingdom come of your cosy petty bourgeois”. In this context, when asked by the journalist Franz Wiede to take a prominent role in founding a new review, Marx commented to Engels: “It would certainly be very nice if a really scientific socialist periodical were to appear. This would provide an opportunity for criticism and counter-criticism in which theoretical points could be discussed by us and the total ignorance of professors and university lecturers exposed, thereby simultaneously disabusing the minds of the general public”. In the end, however, he had to accept that the shortcomings of its contributors would have precluded “the prime requirement in all criticism”: that is, “ruthlessness”. Marx also directed sharp comments against Zukunft [Future], deriding its “endeavour to substitute ideological catch-phrases such as “justice”, etc., for materialist knowledge [and …] to peddle phantasms of the future structure of society”.
In October, Marx complained to Sorge of a “corrupt spirit” spreading in the party, “not so much among the masses as among the leaders”. The agreement with the Lassalleans had “led to further compromise with other waverers”. In particular, Marx had no time for “a whole swarm of immature undergraduates and over-wise graduates who want[ed] to give socialism a “higher, idealistic” orientation”. They thought they could substitute for its “materialist basis” (which “calls for serious, objective study if one is to operate thereon”) a “modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”.
What lay behind these criticisms was never feelings of jealousy or rivalry. Marx wrote to the journalist and parliamentarian Wilhelm Blos that he did not “care a straw for popularity”, reminding him that “such was [his] aversion to the personality cult that at the time of the International , when plagued by numerous moves … to accord [him] public honour, [he] never allowed one of them to enter the domain of publicity”, nor “ever repli[ed] to them, save with an occasional snub”. This attitude had sustained him ever since the political commitments of his youth, so that when the Communist League was born in 1847, he and Engels had joined “only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules”. His only concern had been, and continued to be, that the nascent workers’ organizations should not blur their anti-capitalism and – in the manner of the British labour movement – adopt a moderate, pro-bourgeois line.
A major event in the late 1870s was the attempted assassination of Kaiser Wilhelm I by the anarchist Karl Nobiling in June 1878. Marx’s reactions were later recorded by Kovalevsky: “I happened to be in Marx’s library when he got news of [the] unsuccessful attempt …. [His] reaction was to curse the terrorist, explaining that only one thing could be expected from his attempt to accelerate the course of events, namely, new persecutions of the socialists.” That was precisely what ensued, as Bismarck used the pretext to introduce the Anti-Socialist Laws and get them adopted by the Reichstag in October. Marx commented to Engels: “Outlawing has, from time immemorial, been an infallible means of making anti-government movements ‘illegal’ and protecting the government from the law – ‘legality kills us’.” The debate in parliament took place in mid-September, and Bracke sent Marx the stenographic record of the Reichstag sessions and a copy of the draft legislation. Marx planned to write a critical article for the British press and began to compile extracts and notes for that purpose. In a few pages, he outlined the difference between the mass Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany and the anarchists: the former constituted “the genuine historical movement of the working class; the other … a phantom of a dead-end youth intent on making history, [which] merely shows how the ideas of French socialism are caricatured in the declassed men of the upper classes.”
In rebutting the argument of the Prussian interior minister, August Eulenburg, that the workers’ aims were violent, he made his position quite clear: The objective [is] the emancipation of the working class and the revolution (transformation) of society implicit therein. An historical development can remain “peaceful” only for so long as its progress is not forcibly obstructed by those wielding social power at the time. If in England, for instance, or the United States, the working class were to gain a majority in Parliament or Congress, they could, by lawful means, rid themselves of such laws and institutions as impeded their development. […] However, the “peaceful” movement might be transformed into a “forcible” one by resistance on the part of those interested in restoring the former state of affairs; if (as in the American Civil War and French Revolution) they are put down by force, it is as rebels against “lawful” force.
For Marx, then, the government was “seeking to suppress by force a development it dislike[d] but could not lawfully attack”. That, necessarily, was “the prelude to violent revolution” – “an old story which yet remains eternally true”, he added, quoting Heinrich Heine (1797-1856).
In a letter to Sorge from September 1879, Marx described the new tendencies emerging in the German party. He stressed that people like the publisher Karl Höchberg, “nonentities in theory and nincompoops in practice”, were “seeking to draw the teeth of socialism (which they have rehashed in accordance with academic formulae) and of the Party in particular”. Their aim was “to enlighten the workers, … to provide them, out of their confused and superficial knowledge, with educative elements” and, above all, “to make the party ‘respectable’ in the eyes of the philistines”. They were, he concluded, “poor counter-revolutionary windbags”. With subtle humour, he suggested that Bismarck had “done a lot of good not to himself, but us”, by imposing selective silence in Germany and allowing such windbags “a chance of making themselves plainly heard”.
In a French police report from London, an agent claimed that, “following the death of Lassalle, Marx [had become] the undisputed leader of the German revolutionaries. If the socialist deputies in Germany [were] the official leaders, the divisional commanders, Marx [was] the chief of the general staff. He devised the battle plans and watch[ed] over their implementation.” In reality, Marx’s criticisms of the party often went unheeded, and from his study in London he observed “the depths” to which “parliamentary representatives” had “already been brought by parliamentarism”.
Another polemical focus was the question of who should edit the new journal of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, Der Sozialdemokrat [The Social Democrat], publication of which began in Zurich in September 1879. Marx and Engels, disagreeing with the proposed stance of the paper, felt obliged to send another letter (drafted by Engels) to Bebel, Liebknecht and Bracke. In this “Circular Letter” (1879), as it became known, they denounced the growing consensus in the party behind the positions of Höchberg, the main source of finance for the undertaking. He had recently published an article in the Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik [Annals for Social Science and Social Policy], a reformist journal under his direction, in which he called for a return to the Lassallean spirit. In his view, the Lassalleans had given birth to a political movement open “not only [to] the workers but all honest democrats, in the van of which [should] march the independent representatives of science and all men imbued with a true love of mankind”.
For Marx, all these were views he had firmly rejected since his early years and the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). The “Circular Letter” underlined the dangers of one of Höchberg’s statements: “In short, the working class is incapable of emancipating itself by its own efforts. In order to do so it must place itself under the direction of ‘educated and propertied’ bourgeois who alone have ‘the time and the opportunity’ to become conversant with what is good for the workers.” In the view of this “representative of the petty bourgeoisie”, then, the bourgeoisie was “not to be combated – not on your life – but won over by vigorous propaganda”. Even the decision to defend the Paris Commune had allegedly “put off people otherwise well-disposed towards” the workers’ movement. In conclusion, Engels and Marx noted with alarm that Höchberg’s objective was to make “the overthrow of the capitalist order … unattainably remote” and “utterly irrelevant to present political practice”. One could therefore “conciliate, compromise, philanthropize to one’s heart’ s content. The same thing applie[d] to the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie.” The disagreement was total.
Marx’s tenacious opposition to what he called the “armchair socialist riff-raff” was akin to his view of those who confined themselves to empty rhetoric, however concealed beneath radical language. Following the launch of the journal Freiheit [Freedom], he explained to Sorge that he had reproached its editors not for being “too revolutionary” but for having “no revolutionary content” and “merely indulg[ing] in revolutionary jargon”. In his view, both these positions, though stemming from very different political tendencies, were no danger to the existing system and ultimately made its survival possible.
Marx’s idea of socialism was very different from State socialism and reformism that emerged in the German Social Democratic Party and that became hegemonic after the foundation of the Second International. The Marx revival underway today will be much more effective if Marx’s writings will be re-examined not only for an understanding of how capitalism works but also of the failure of socialist experiences until today. It goes without saying that we cannot today simply rely on what Marx wrote a century and a half ago. But nor should we lightly discount the content and clarity of his analyses or fail to take up the critical weapons he offered for fresh thinking about an alternative society to capitalism.
References
1. At this time, the German party had about 5000 members.
2. Karl Marx to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, 13 February 1865, quoted in Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 18 February 1865,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 42: 96.
3. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 18 February 1865,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 42: 97.
4. Karl Marx, “Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866),” in Workers Unite! The International after 150 Years, ed. Marcello Musto (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 86.
5. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 19 September 1868,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 43: 105.
6. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 26 September 1868,” ibid., 115. Although he declined an invitation to the Hamburg congress, Marx nevertheless found some signs of progress. To Engels he remarked: “I was glad to see that the starting points of any ‘serious’ workers’ movement—agitation for complete political freedom, regulation of the working day and international co-operation of the working class—were emphasised in their programme for the congress. […] [I]n other words, I congratulated them on having abandoned Lassalle’s programme”, Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Engels, 26 August 1868,” ibid., 89–90.
7. Karl Marx, “Marx to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, 13 October 1868,” ibid., 133–5. The actual letter has been lost, but fortunately Marx preserved his draft.
8. Cf. also Marcello Musto, Another Marx: Early Writings to the International (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), esp. chapters 7, 8 and 9.
9. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 10 August 1869,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 43: 343.
10. Cf. Jacques Freymond, ed., Études et documents sur la Première Internationale en Suisse (Geneva: Droz, 1964), x.
11. Cf. Marcello Musto, “Introduction,” in Workers Unite!, esp. 42–51.
12. Frederick Engels, “Engels to August Bebel, 18–28 March 1875,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 60.
13. Ibid., 66.
14. Ibid., 64.
15. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 5 May 1875,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 70.
16. Ibid.
17. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 24, 84.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 92.
20. Ibid., 93.
21. Ibid., 94.
22. Ibid., 93.
23. See Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 3, where he writes, concerning “the antithesis of state and civil society”, that “the state does not reside in, but outside civil society” (ibid., 49). “In democracy, the state as particular is merely particular. The French have recently interpreted this as meaning that in true democracy the state is annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state … no longer passes for the whole” (ibid., 30).
24. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 94.
25. In the calmer waters of 1877, Engels returned to the argument in a letter to Liebknecht: “The moral and intellectual decline of the party dates from the uni!cation and could have been avoided had a little more caution and intelligence been shown at the time” (Frederick Engels “Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 31 July 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45, 257). Years later, Liebknecht recalled that “Marx, who could not survey the condition of things from abroad as well as we in Germany, would not hear of such concessions.” And he claimed: “That I did not make a wrong calculation in this respect has been brilliantly demonstrated by the consequences and the successes.” In McLellan, Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1981), 48.
26. After the printing of the programme rati!ed at Gotha, Engels noted that “not a single critical text” appeared in “the bourgeois press”. Had there been one, it might have noted “the contradictions and economic howlers … and exposed … [the] party to the most dreadful ridicule. Instead of that the jackasses on the bourgeois papers have taken this programme perfectly seriously, reading into it what isn’t there and interpreting it communistically”. He went on to stress that “the workers [were] apparently doing the same” and that this had “made it possible for Marx and himself not to disassociate [themselves] publicly from the programme” (Frederick Engels, “Engels to August Bebel, 12 October 1875,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 98). Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme was published only in 1891, the year in which the Erfurt programme, much closer to his own principles, was adopted. Cf. Boris Nicolaevsky and Otto Maenchen Helfen, Karl Marx— Man and Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), 376, who argued: “The split, which Marx regarded as inevitable, [did not] occur. The Party remained united, and in 1891, at Erfurt, adopted a pure Marxist programme.”
27. Johann Most, Kapital und Arbeit: Ein Populärer Auszug aus “Das Kapital” von Karl Marx (Chemnitz: G. Rübner, n.d. [1873]). The second edition came out in 1876.
28. Karl Marx, “Mehrwertrate und Pro!trate mathematisch behandelt,” in MEGA2 (Berlin: Dietz, 2003), II/14: 19–150.
29. In a letter dated 12 February 1870, Marx wrote to Engels that Flerovsky’s “book shows incontestably that the present conditions in Russia are no longer tenable, that the emancipation of the serfs of course only hastened the process of disintegration, and that fearful social revolution is at the door”, Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 12 February 1870,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 43: 429–30.
30. For a recent edition in English, see Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2007).
31 Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 23 September 1876,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 149. The English translation was done by Eleanor, who at the time, against her father’s wishes, was emotionally attached to the French revolutionary.
32. Jenny Marx, “Jenny Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 20 or 21 January 1877,” ibid., 45: 447. The main reference was to the British Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, author of the highly successful pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (London: William Ridgway, 1876), who, like “all the freemen and stillmen and merrymen”, had depicted the Russians as “civilizers” (ibid.).
33. See Maximilien Rubel, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Karl Marx (Paris: Rivière, 1956), 193. Also, of interest here are two letters to Liebknecht (4 and 11 February 1878), composed in the form of articles, which the Social Democrat leader eventually published in an appendix to the second edition of his pamphlet Zur orientalischen Frage oder Soll Europa kosakisch werden? (Leipzig: Commissions, 1878).
34. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 7 March 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 209.
35. Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 27 September 1877,” ibid., 277–8.
36. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 21 April 1877,” ibid., 223.
37. Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 27 September 1877,” 278.
38. Frederick Engels, “Letter to Enrico Bignami on the General Elections of 1877, 12 January 1878,” in Marx and Engels, Lettere 1874–1879 (Milano: Lotta Comunista, 2006), p. 247. This letter was lost and the only parts we know are the ones included by Bignami in an article he published on La Plebe on 22 January 1878.
39. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 4 February 1878,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 296.
40. Karl Marx, “Marx to Thomas Allsop, 4 February 1878,” ibid., 299.
41. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 24 September 1878,” ibid., 332.
42. Karl Marx, “Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association,” in MEGA2 (Berlin: Dietz, 1985), I/25: 157.
43. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 25 July 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 251.
44. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 11 February 1878,” ibid., 299.
45. Frederick Engels, “Engels to Eduard Bernstein, 17 June 1879,” ibid., 361.
46. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 25 May 1876,” ibid., 119.
47. On the importance of this text, see Karl Kautsky, “Einleitung,” in Friedrich Engels’ Briefwechsel mit Karl Kautsky, ed. Benedikt Kautsky (Vienna: Danubia, 1955), 4, where the German Party theorist recalls that no book did more to advance his understanding of socialism. H.-J. Steinberg, showed that “both Bernstein, who studied Anti-Dühring in 1879, and Kautsky, who did the same in 1880, became ‘Marxists’ through reading that
book,” in Sozialismus und Deutsche Sozialdemokratie (Hannover: Verlag für Literature und Zeitgeschehen, 1967), 23.
48. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 25: 242.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Karl Marx, “Marx to Ferdinand Fleckles, 21 January 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 190. Few years later, in a letter to Karl Kautsky, Engels wrote of the numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings that the German economist Albert Schäf”e and other “armchair socialists [Kathedersozialisten]” displayed in relation to Marx’s work: “to refute, for example, all the monstrous twaddle which Schäf”e alone has assembled in his many fat tomes is, in my opinion, a sheer waste of time. It would #ll a fair- sized book were one merely to attempt to put right all the misquotations from Capital inserted by these gentlemen between inverted commas”. He concluded in peremptory fashion: “They should first learn to read and copy before demanding to have their questions answered”, Frederick Engels, “Engels to Karl Kautsky, 1 February 1881,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 46: 56.
52. Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 July 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 242.
53. Ibid. Engels was certainly in agreement with Marx about this. As he put it in a letter to the zoologist Oscar Schmidt, “ruthless criticism … alone does justice to free science, and … any man of science must welcome [it], even when applied to himself”. Frederick Engels, “Engels to Oscar Schmidt, 19 July 1878,” ibid., 314.
54. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 23 October 1877,” ibid., 285.
55. Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 19 October 1877,” ibid., 283. Steinberg had convincingly demonstrated the theoretical eclecticism among German Party activists at the time. “If we take the mass of members and leaders,” he wrote, “their socialist conceptions may be described as an ‘average socialism’ composed of various elements. The view of Marx and Engels that the Party’s ‘shortcomings’ and theoretical ignorance and insecurity were the negative consequence of the 1875 compromise was only an expression of the Londoners’ warnings about members coming out of the General Association of German Workers,” Steinberg, Sozialismus und Deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 19.
56. Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 19 October 1877,” 283.
57. Karl Marx, “Marx to Wilhelm Blos, 10 November 1877,” ibid., 288.
58. Two years later, Engels wrote in similar vein to Bebel: “You know that Marx and I have voluntarily conducted the defence of the party against its opponents abroad throughout the party’s existence, and that we have never asked anything of the party in return, save that it should not be untrue to itself.” Using diplomatic language, he tried to get comrades in Germany to understand that, although his and Marx’s “criticism might be displeasing to some”, it might be advantageous to the party to have “the presence abroad of a couple of men who, unin!uenced by confusing local conditions and the minutiae of the struggle, compare from time to time what has been said and what has been done with the theoretical tenets valid for any modern proletarian movement”, Frederick Engels, “Engels to August Bebel, 14 November 1879,” ibid., 420–1.
59. McLellan, Karl Marx—Interviews and Recollections, 131.
60. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels, 17 September 1877,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 322. Marx wrote the “nal clause in French—la légalité nous tueharking back to the words used by Odilon Barrot, brie!y prime minister in 1848–49 under Louis Bonaparte, in a speech he gave to the Constituent Assembly in January 1849 that defended the outlawing of “extremist” political forces.
61. Marx, “Marx to Engels, 24 September 1878,” 332.
62. Karl Marx, “The Parliamentary Debate on the Anti-Socialist Laws (Outline of an Article),” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 24: 247.
63. Ibid., 248.
64. Ibid., 249.
65. Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 19 September 1879,” ibid., 413.
66. Ibid.
67. Enzensberger, Gespräche mit Marx und Engels, 490.
68. Marx, “Marx to F. Sorge, 19 September 1879,” 413.
69. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Wilhelm Bracke (“Circular Letter”), 17–18 September 1879,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 45: 402.
70. Ibid., 403.
71. Ibid., 406.
72. Marx, “Marx to Sorge, 19 September 1879,” 412.
73. Ibid., 411. Cf. Frederick Engels to Johann Philipp Becker, 10 April 1880,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 46: 7: “Freiheit [wants] to become, by hook or by crook, the most revolutionary paper in the world, but this cannot be achieved simply by repeating the word ‘revolution’ in every line.”
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