George-c-comninel-alienation-and-emancipation-in-the-work-of-karl-marx.pdf

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ALIENATION AND EMANCIPATION IN THE WORK OF KARL MARX GEORGE C. COMNINEL

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms Series Editors Marcello Musto York University Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver University of Bristol Bristol, UK

The volumes of this series challenge the ‘Marxist’ intellectual traditions to date by making use of scholarly discoveries of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe since the 1990s, taking on board interdisciplinary and other new critical perspectives, and incorporating ‘reception studies’. Authors and editors in the series resist oversimplification of ideas and reinscription of traditions. Moreover, their very diversity in terms of language, local context, political engagement and scholarly practice mark the series out from any other in the field. Involving scholars from different fields and cultural backgrounds, the series editors ensure tolerance for differences within and between provocative monographs and edited volumes. Running contrary to 20th century practices of simplification, the books in this innovative series revitalize Marxist intellectual traditions. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812

George C. Comninel

Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx

George C. Comninel Department of Politics York University Toronto, Canada

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-1-137-57623-1    ISBN 978-1-137-57534-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942019 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Andrey_KZ / Getty Images Cover design by Tjaša Krivec Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature America, Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

Praise for Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx

“With this comprehensive book, George Comninel builds on the best of Marx’s major writings and political initiatives, while identifying mistaken and problematic aspects of his theoretical and political legacy. Comninel’s long-­standing commitment to improving and developing historical materialism has thus yielded an enormous contribution to social theory, historical sociology and political economy, while providing crucial guidelines for class formation and socialist strategy in our time.” —Leo Panitch, Professor Emeritus, York University, Canada, and Co-editor, Socialist Register “This work is a penetrating analysis of the fate of Marxism in the 20th and 21st Centuries. George Comninel both describes the distortion of Marxism in Stalinist Russia and the post-Soviet rebirth of Marxism in the 21st Century led predominantly by the recognition of the Hegelian influence on Marx. All those interested in the contemporary revival of Marxism are required to read this book.” —Norman Levine, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA “By locating Marx’s works in the historical context, George Comninel has provided in this book an insightful interpretation of the development of Marx’s ideas of alienation and emancipation through the critique of political economy as well as a persuasive articulation of the tension between the liberal ideas retained in Marx’s works and Marx’s own historical materialist approach to history.” —Zhang Shuangli, Professor, Fudan University, China

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This book is dedicated to the memory of Ellen Meiksins Wood, a great friend, inspiring mentor, and true comrade.

Series Foreword

The Marx Revival The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Whether the puzzle is the economic boom in China or the economic bust in “the West”, there is no doubt that Marx appears regularly in the media nowadays as a guru, and not a threat, as he used to be. The literature dealing with Marxism, which all but dried up 25 years ago, is reviving in the global context. Academic and popular journals and even newspapers and online journalism are increasingly open to contributions on Marxism, just as there are now many international conferences, university courses, and seminars on related themes. In all parts of the world, leading daily and weekly papers are featuring the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought. From Latin America to Europe, and wherever the critique to capitalism is remerging, there is an intellectual and political demand for a new critical encounter with Marxism.

Types of Publications This series brings together reflections on Marx, Engels, and Marxisms from perspectives that are varied in terms of political outlook, geographical base, academic methodologies, and subject matter, thus challenging many preconceptions as to what “Marxist” thought can be like, as opposed to what it has been. The series will appeal internationally to intellectual communities that are increasingly interested in rediscovering the most powerful critical analysis of capitalism: Marxism. The series editors will ensure that authors and editors in the series are producing overall an eclectic and stimulating yet ix

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synoptic and informative vision that will draw a very wide and diverse audience. This series will embrace a much wider range of scholarly interests and academic approaches than any previous “family” of books in the area. This innovative series will present monographs, edited volumes, and critical editions, including translations, to Anglophone readers. The books in this series will work through three main categories: Studies on Marx and Engels The series will include titles focusing on the oeuvre of Marx and Engels which utilize the scholarly achievements of the ongoing Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, a project that has strongly revivified the research on these two authors in the past decade. Critical Studies on Marxisms Volumes will awaken readers to the overarching issues and world-­changing encounters that shelter within the broad categorization “Marxist”. Particular attention will be given to authors such as Gramsci and Benjamin, who are very popular and widely translated nowadays all over the world, but also to authors who are less known in the English-speaking countries, such as Mariátegui. Reception Studies and Marxist National Traditions Political projects have necessarily required oversimplifications in the twentieth century, and Marx and Engels have found themselves “made over” numerous times and in quite contradictory ways. Taking a national perspective on “reception” will be a global revelation and the volumes of this series will enable the worldwide Anglophone community to understand the variety of intellectual and political traditions through which Marx and Engels have been received in local contexts.

Titles Published 1. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.

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. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 3 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017.

Titles Forthcoming Robert Ware, Marx on Emancipation and the Socialist Transition Jean-Numa Ducange and Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century Vladimir Puzone and Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre Xavier LaFrance and Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism

Preface

The book that follows pulls together ideas and writings about Karl Marx that have developed over many years. My original work, with which I am still engaged, broadly addressed class struggles and historical political development, with a particular focus on the French Revolution. Like many others, I was initially attracted by the epochal character of the Revolution, and widespread acceptance that it constituted a “class revolution”. Aside from the broadly recognized account of its leadership embodying the interests of the French bourgeoisie as a class rising to ascendancy, there seemed much to learn from research focussed on the radical popular movement in the Revolution, with leading contributions by such Marxist historians as George Rudé and Albert Soboul.1 From the start, however, I found myself compelled to address the relatively recent but increasingly influential “revisionist” conception of the Revolution. During the 1970s, a growing wave of French revisionist historians followed the lead of the deeply anti-Marxist British historian Alfred Cobban. Their challenge to the classic account of a bourgeois class revolution became more and more emphatically ideological, embracing Cobban’s characterization of the conception as a distortion of historical evidence driven by Marxist theory.2 Notwithstanding this ideological intent, however, there did indeed appear to be a deeply problematic disjuncture between the terms of the classic account of “bourgeois revolution”—not only prominent in Marx’s own writings, and a touchstone of Marxist historiography, but long accepted by mainstream historians—and a growing body of evidence that in fact no capitalist class had been involved. xiii

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In a process worthy of a major study in the sociology of knowledge, or the social history of political theory, as the revisionist history took hold in France during the decade following 1968, Marxist ideas that had enjoyed a preeminent status in major areas of French intellectual life were all but totally driven from the academy. The historiography of the French Revolution was hardly alone in this onslaught, but the revisionist historians played a major role in undermining the credibility of Marxist theories and concepts. Thrown on the defensive, some French Marxist historians attempted to salvage the idea of bourgeois revolution while coming to terms with the strong evidence that neither a class of capitalists nor developing capitalism was involved in the confrontations of the time. Unfortunately, they found themselves denounced by immovable defenders of the purest orthodoxy.3 That orthodox Marxist position—which sadly continues to persist among a new generation of mostly English historians unwilling or unable to face the historical evidence—was simply to trumpet the fundamental “truth” behind Marxist theory; to argue that evidence of capitalist development was being missed or ignored; and to impugn the political motivation of anyone who attempted to reconcile class analysis with the new evidence.4 Historians were compelled to address in some way issues of what had long been accepted as Marxist theory. The historiographical mainstream, not only in French but subsequently also in English-speaking academia, increasingly came to embrace post-structuralist and postmodern perspectives, generally decrying any effort to “impose” a single historical truth. Those of us who continued to believe in the centrality of class struggle in history became voices in the wilderness as we sought to reconcile evidence and theory. Among the now much-depleted numbers of Marxists, there were those who simply held fast to the orthodoxy that formerly prevailed. As a result of “the new history” embracing the cultural turn in social science, there was relatively little attention being paid to the social and economic issues that long had loomed large in historiography. In recent decades, therefore, few historians have even bothered to address the “orthodox” Marxist true believers for whom evidence could never overmaster ideas drawn from theory, although nothing of consequence has yet been brought forward as evidence to support the discredited conception of bourgeois revolution. My own approach focussed on the fact that the idea of bourgeois revolution was not original to Marx, but had in fact been an expression of liberal ideology from its origin during the French Revolution. It not only

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predated Marx’s birth by decades but never actually was consistent with the idea of class struggle between oppressor and oppressed, which was at the heart of Marx’s truly original conception of historical development. Since there can be no doubt that Marx accepted the widespread idea of bourgeois revolution and integrated it within his work, my approach necessarily entailed coming to terms with what was essential and unique in his own ideas; how his theoretical perspective developed; how his genuinely original contributions were consistent and remained unchallenged by any evidence; and how, unfortunately, liberal ideology not only was incorporated into his work but subsequently was even taken by others to define it.

This Book For these reasons, I have frequently returned to take up the issues of Marx’s theory, particularly his conceptions of precapitalist versus capitalist forms of class society, and, more generally, the issues of historical class analysis. My approach to understanding Marx’s ideas is in many ways inspired by the work of the late social historians of political theory, Neal Wood and Ellen Meiksins Wood, with whom I studied (for more on my approach, see Chap. 1). Ellen Wood, of course, was also known for her significant contributions as a Marxist theorist, but in her final two books she set out how she conceived the social history of political theory.5 The “social history of political theory” particularly emphasizes the ways in which the social, political, and economic context of an author—and not merely the contemporary context of ideas—not only powerfully shaped the author’s thought but generally constituted the terrain of its engagement. One purpose of this book is to bring that approach to bear with respect to the ideas of Marx. The crucial starting point for this must be the French Revolution, the opponents of which carried their opposition almost without distinction from 1792 (the first war of the Revolutionary era), into and through the Napoleonic Wars, ending just three years before Marx’s birth. Indeed, as will be argued throughout much of what follows, the French Revolution was the single greatest determinant of politics, social change, and culture during the first half of the nineteenth century. Its historical impact—and impact on the idea of history—can hardly be overstated. I particularly take up these latter ideas in the Introduction, which also attempts to provide an overview of the book’s essential argument instead of just posing the questions to be addressed.

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My engagement with the issues of history and theory has not been limited to the confines of directly historical analysis. When I published my book on the French Revolution, I was a member of the Sociology Department at the University of Western Ontario, teaching social theory. Since 1990, I have been a member of the Political Science Department at York University, where I teach the history of political theory. In both of these contexts, I have taught Marxist theory to both undergraduate and graduate students. I have also benefited from more than 25 years of teaching “The Theory and Practice of the State in Historical Perspective”, the full-year graduate seminar created by Neal and Ellen Wood. I was a student in that course when they first taught it, and it was in and through the course that Neal and Ellen, and I—as well as other students over time—became involved with the practice of what has come to be called “Political Marxism”. Through this teaching, I found myself addressing, and writing about, key questions with respect to understanding Marx’s work, in addition to the issues of historical analysis with which my career began. This book grows from confronting those theoretical questions. It is always a challenge to write about any significant aspect of Marx’s work. Widely recognized as one of the greatest social thinkers, there are many points of entry into his ideas—political, philosophical, historical, economic, sociological, and so on. His ideas encompass the whole of human history and the future of humanity, yet he also wrote in concrete detail about the politics of Second Empire France, and the American Civil War. No one work, or even an entire career, can hope to adequately cover the whole of what Marx had to say in a serious and critical way (in keeping with his own injunction, expressed to Arnold Ruge in 1843, to carry out “ruthless criticism of all that exists”). This book is indelibly marked by its origin in confronting issues of history, but equally by its focus on the twin issues of alienation and emancipation, with which Marx began his serious theoretical work in 1843, and which remained central to his efforts for the rest of his life. It is this thread of Marx’s thought that has always gripped me: what makes a revolution necessary, and what must be achieved through it? As what follows will maintain, this thread initially runs from Marx’s early “philosophical” manuscripts (never so much philosophical in themselves as critical of mere philosophy) [see Chaps. 2, 3, and 4], through The Communist Manifesto [Chaps. 6 and 7], with particular attention to the early political writings of the 1840s [Chaps. 4 and 5]. While Marx had

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much to say during and in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848—with his observations on French politics revealing a great deal about his ideas on the nature of the state—this thread is once again, as in 1844, taken up most clearly in his pursuit of the critique of political economy, primarily in the Grundrisse and Capital [Chaps. 8, 9, 10 and 11]. It is in this context that he particularly confronts the forms of class society that precede capitalist production, and their essential differences from capitalism, the historical character of so-called primitive accumulation, and the nature and methods of historical materialism. At the same time, it was precisely during the period of his getting the first volume of Capital into publication that he was engaged in the longest and most complicated concrete political project of his life in the International Working Men’s Association [Chap. 12]. It really is only in considering the whole of this thread in his life’s work that one is in a position to take account of Marx’s epochal contribution to historical social theory, comprising the nature, and meaning for humanity, of alienation and emancipation [Chap. 13].

A Note on “Political Marxism” and “Capitalism” As noted above, my work joins with that of Ellen Meiksins Wood, Robert Brenner, and a rising generation of scholars in practising “Political Marxism”. As is so often the case with controversial stances, the name first was applied by an opponent, Guy Bois.6 It was intended to convey a perceived defect—that in the place of economically conceived categories and processes, this sort of Marxism was informed by political categories and processes. Although this is a misrepresentation of the actual analysis, one crucial aspect of our approach is, in fact, to emphasize that in precapitalist forms of class society the supposed separation of political and economic spheres of social existence does not exist even in superficial appearance (as it does in capitalism). In precapitalist class societies, social surplus is extracted from the direct producers (largely peasants) through relationships of extra-economic coercion, not through a seemingly purely economic relationship such as that of wage labour in capitalism. As a result, social property relations in precapitalist societies may be particularly characterized by what Brenner has called “politically constituted property”, such as the privately owned venal offices of the absolutist state in ancien régime France. For this reason, after some original reluctance, those of us who take this approach have reconciled ourselves to the use of this once pejorative term.

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One irony is that some recent critics of this approach have asserted that, rather than not being “economic” enough, the problem is that we are too economically determinist. This might even seem comical to those who have read Ellen Wood, Brenner, or me on the subject, but once again, there is a reason for the allegation, even if it is wrong. At the root of this claim is that we (and I am often singled out for particular criticism due to my work challenging the idea of “bourgeois revolution”) take too extreme a view of what constitutes capitalism. This has everything to do with the delineation of capitalist and non-capitalist forms of society, in which I carefully follow Marx’s terms of analysis in Capital and the Grundrisse. As Brenner, Wood, and I have maintained, there is, in fact, a sharp distinction between capitalist and non-capitalist social relations, despite frequent points of similarity and continuity. Neglecting this crucial difference can only lead to confusion, and so the importance of insisting on it. It is not, of course, as if Political Marxists have a monopoly on the conception of capitalist society, and that others are not permitted to conceive it differently if they choose. There is, however, something very specific about the conception with which we work, and it is directly derived from Marx’s critique of political economy. Unfortunately for our Marxist opponents, one cannot reject this conception without rejecting the core of Marx’s work. One could easily write an entire book just on the differences between capitalist and precapitalist social relations, but the key issue is fairly easily summarized, as I have tried to do in my work, and Ellen Wood did in hers. The capitalist extraction of social surplus occurs through the formally economic relations of wage labour, by which the worker is paid for the time at work, and all that is produced during that time belongs entirely to the capitalist employer. In Marx’s value analysis, the worker is compensated for the value of the capacity to work over that period—for her labourpower—not for the value of what is produced through that labour. The value of labour-power is essentially the socially normal cost of living for the worker, which is usually not at the level of bare survival, and may well include items of relative luxury. If the cost of living of workers, on average, was greater than or equal to what they produced during their employment, there could be no capitalism. In fact, however, it is just as characteristic of capitalist society as precapitalist7 societies for those engaged in labour to produce a surplus beyond their own needs in the normal course of production. The major difference is that in precapitalist societies what is primarily produced are the immediate requirements for subsistence,

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whereas in capitalist society the full range of social needs is only acquired through extensive market relations. It is immediately obvious when half of what a sharecropper produces is taken away by the owner of the land, just as it is obvious that the sharecropping family subsists primarily on what is left. It is this naked exploitation of producers that necessitates extraeconomic coercion, without which landlords would be unable to compel tenants to surrender so large a part of their annual labour. Yet, while there is no such obvious exploitation in the capitalist wage relation—which is why political economic analysis is required to understand not only the mystery of economic equilibrium but even the source of profit—and no manifest extra-economic coercion, it is not the case that no coercion is involved. In the terms that Ellen Wood used in her work, the operation of the market does not only present opportunity—as economists are fond of maintaining; the market is also a source of compulsion, from which it is all but impossible for workers to escape. Behind this compulsion is the historic separation of the labouring majority from the land on which they once directly secured their subsistence and produced a surplus. This fundamental separation of labourers from the historically constituted form of the means of production is the real story of so-called primitive accumulation, as Marx argued in Capital. As a result, there is no practical alternative for the great majority but to seek employment for wages. The real secret of capitalist social relations, however, lies in a second form of compulsion that is experienced by the capitalists themselves. Through his account of relative surplus value, Marx described the advantage an individual capitalist can realize in the market through increasing productivity—paying the same in wages while achieving a greater output, and so being able to sell at a lower price while still making a profit. In consequence, other capitalists in the same type of production are compelled to match or exceed that increase in productivity. Any capitalist enterprise that cannot maintain the prevailing rate of surplus value over time is doomed to failure as other capitalists win customers away through a price advantage. A great deal of Capital is devoted to the analysis of this dynamic and its implications for the system of capitalist production as a whole. The idea of relative surplus value is indeed at the heart of Marx’s account of capitalist society. Yet, while those of us raised in capitalist society and wholly inured to its normal practices may take for granted that the owners of the means of production can make changes in production processes that will yield

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productivity improvements, for most of history this was not possible at all. In medieval guilds, for example, guild members were subject to its rules and regulation of production, and employers—whether outsiders or, more usually, masters within the guild—could do nothing that contravened these norms. As the work of E. P. Thompson revealed in impressive detail, the struggles by which British owners of capital acquired real and effective control over the processes of production played out over centuries. Not before the middle of the nineteenth century did what Marxists call the “real subsumption of labour to capital” become anything like characteristic of wage employment. In pre-revolutionary France, large factories existed—some using the most sophisticated technology of the day—but not the management of wage workers within them.8 Further, in nineteenth-­ century France—directly as a result of the Revolution!—labour law had literally come to prohibit employers from interfering in the processes of production as immediately organized by the workers themselves [see Chaps. 2 and 12]. At the time Marx wrote Capital, the real subsumption of labour to capital had only begun to be normal in Britain, was legally prohibited in France, and stood in stark contrast to the forms of artisanal production that continued to be dominant in most of Europe. Marx had a clear, and still unsurpassed, understanding of the nature of capitalist social relations; but at that time the economic reality of European societies lagged far behind England, despite awareness of its advantage. It is for this reason that one must be “extreme” in judging whether or not capitalism exists. There were factories and wage labour in ancient Greece and Rome. In eighteenth-century France, commercial relations were enormously significant, and growing technical expertise in manufacturing ultimately led to the Jacquard loom. Yet in neither the ancient world nor the ancien régime did what Marx understood as capitalism actually exist. Even in England, where enclosures brought about so-called primitive accumulation starting at the end of the fifteenth century, and where agrarian capitalist social relations were well established by the mid-­ sixteenth century, there was a long epoch of class struggles before industrial capitalist production began to become dominant in the nineteenth century.9 If the role of relative surplus value and the real subsumption of labour to capital is not taken seriously in understanding whether capitalism exists, or not, the whole history of European society can be reduced to stages of capitalist development, perhaps interrupted by a feudal hiatus. There are, of course, some social thinkers who have preferred to conceive history in this way, such as Max Weber. The conception of capitalism that

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Weber put across, as also his concept of class, was intended to be a refutation of Marx. Instead of following Marx’s theoretical analysis—or even merely respecting the evidence of history, it simply is not acceptable to take a superficial and haphazard approach to conceiving the nature of capitalist society. Toronto, Canada

George C. Comninel

Notes 1. George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793–1794 (Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books). 2. Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968). See my Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987). 3. See my discussion of Régine Robin in Rethinking the French Revolution. 4. This was most readily apparent in the reaction of the great historian Albert Soboul, as discussed in Rethinking the French Revolution. 5. See particularly the first chapters of both Ellen M. Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London: Verso, 2008), and Wood, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment (London: Verso, 2012). Perhaps her most notable works of Marxist theory were Democracy against Capitalism (London: Verso, 1995), and The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1986), in addition to a number of works of historical analysis of class societies. 6. Guy Bois, “Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy”, in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-­ Industrial Europe, ed. T.  H. Aston and C.  H. E.  Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 115. 7. Although much of my work deals with the analysis of precapitalist societies, this book does not deal directly with that subject. It will, however, be the subject of a forthcoming book. 8. Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 284–5. With work organized in “guild-like” ways, these really operated as manufactories notwithstanding the use of advanced machinery. 9. Zmolek’s Rethinking the Industrial Revolution provides a detailed history of these struggles.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the comments and criticisms of many graduate students who have studied with me over the years—too many to name individually—as well as various scholars and students who have responded to these ideas at conferences. I want to thank Terrell Carver for his generous and extensive comments on what I wrote about The German Ideology, though of course any errors that remain are solely my responsibility. I also would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Babak Amini as I worked to bring together a range of unwieldy texts. Finally, I want to offer a somewhat unusual, and perhaps unexpected, acknowledgment to my now retired colleague and former Dean, Robert Drummond. Some time ago, Bob transferred to me one of his own teaching credits, making it possible for me to become Department Chair without derailing the book on which I was working. As it happens, that was a different book, and it is still in progress, but I did not want to miss this opportunity to thank him for his selfless generosity.

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Contents

1 Introduction   1 2 Approaching Marx’s Theory  33 3 Emancipation in Marx’s Early Work  65 4 The Developing Conception of Historical Materialism  89 5 Problems of The German Ideology 111 6  The German Ideology versus Historical Materialism 123 7 The Puzzle of the Manifesto of the Communist Party 151 8 Debating Marx’s Conception of Class in History 187 9 Historical Materialism and the Specificity of Capitalism 203 10 Capital as a Social Relation 219

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11 Capital and Historical Materialism 235 12 Marx and the Politics of the First International 255 13 Marx and Social Theory 281 Bibliography 323 Index 335

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Karl Marx was never an academic. After abandoning the career in law that his father wanted for him, and completing a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1841, he became a radical journalist and political activist. Throughout his life, during which his family suffered from real poverty, he remained on this basis an agitator for human freedom. The greatest part of his writings—both published and unpublished—were devoted to the critique of political economy, and it was through this medium that he particularly confronted the dominant ideas of his time, especially historical social theory or the philosophy of history. On these grounds, he certainly qualifies as a great philosopher, yet his purpose was never merely philosophical. His main objective, from even before he encountered political economy, was always the realization of human emancipation, which from the start he understood to be more than simply a political goal. Already inclined to pursue a radical project of revolutionary transformation going beyond the achievements of the French Revolution, Marx had at university overcome his initial dislike of G. W. F. Hegel’s apparently conservative philosophy to work with the Left Hegelians.1 Together with Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess, and others, Marx embraced a view that the social and intellectual development of humanity that had been realized over the course of history—the fundamental subject of Hegel’s philosophy—had not, in fact, reached its pinnacle in the Prussian monarchy of his day. It was through this Left © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_1

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Hegelian perspective that Marx first came to appreciate both the nature of alienation in society and the extent to which human emancipation had at its core overcoming alienation in its various forms. From the beginning, but especially after his first encounter with political economy in 1844, Marx understood the issues of alienation and emancipation to lie at the heart of historical social development. In 1843, having been forced from his career as newspaper editor due to the suppression of its issues by reactionary Prussian censors, Marx undertook to analyse seriously the forms of alienation obstructing human freedom. He began with a close critique of part of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.2 Where the Left Hegelians, particularly following Ludwig Feuerbach, had already criticized religion as a form of human alienation—their central philosophical challenge to Hegel himself—Marx went beyond this to find alienation also in the form of the state.3 Moses Hess had recently published a book chapter that criticized money also to be a form of alienation.4 Shortly after—in the article “On The Jewish Question”, written for the Deutsch-Franzöische Jahrbücher that Marx co-edited, and challenging Bauer’s preoccupation with religion—Marx reproduced this insight, but extended it to include more generally wealth in the form of property.5 Through these works of 1843, but especially as a result of encountering the ideas of Frederick Engels—writing for the same journal—Marx was brought to confront the ideas that political economists had advanced about capitalist society. As a result of this, he was led to consider how the human condition in his day should be understood in relation to social development in history and to a future realization of humanity’s real potential. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx advanced the idea that alienation of labour constituted the essential form of exploitation, and was, in fact, the source of private property, not its consequence. Though he was still a long way from the critique of political economy achieved in Capital, already he recognized that the antagonistic social relations between workers and capitalists had a profound significance in human history. Indeed, he asked, “What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?”6 He conceived “the entire movement of history” in a broad sweep from early social forms (“ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.”)—where the “antithesis between lack of property and property” remained as yet undeveloped—to labour and capital, which, in their opposition, “constitute

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private property as its developed state of contradiction”.7 He then conceived this contradiction-laden historical process to result in “Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man.”8 The reduction of the mass of humanity to exploited labour first led to expanded productive capacities, then—through communism—to greater human freedom. The classic articulation of this analysis, of course, is later contained in The Communist Manifesto. Like Hegel and many others, Marx understood history in terms of developmental processes shaping human society. The philosophical cast of his early thought—human capacities realized through sequential historical forms, expressing successively higher levels of social experience—is unmistakable. This was, however, equally central to most varieties of social theory emerging over the last three centuries, informing historiography, sociology, and political science. Yet, while Marx began with such ideas, his approach to history did not end there. On the one hand, engaging with the capitalist system of production compelled him to address how it differed from previous forms of society, and how it came to be. On the other hand, in later life, he began to consider seriously the sociopolitical situation and potential for emancipation in societies outside the framework of Western philosophy and social theory, like India and Russia. This brought him to consider other historical trajectories, both in actual development and as alternative possibilities. It is essential to confront historical social theory in appropriating Marx’s ideas today. His critique of political economy is widely recognized as relevant today, even by mainstream economists, but what of his project of concluding the long history of human exploitation and unfreedom? Despite the widespread presumption that his historical theory is fundamentally based on a sequence of modes of production, there is no account of such that stands as definitive.9 Indeed, many grounds exist for challenging unilinear and universal conceptions of historical development (as Marx himself came to do in his later years). Moreover, Marx relied upon existing historical ideas since proved wrong, leaving several concepts to be squared with evidence. Faced with such doubts and challenges, we must take heart from Marx’s willingness to stray beyond the framework with which he began, and learn from his ongoing efforts to advance historical understanding.

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The Importance of the French Revolution to Marx’s Ideas Born in Trier—a formerly free city that reactionary Prussia acquired in defeating France—Marx was from his youth preoccupied with the politics of the French Revolution and their limits. Indeed, the French Revolution dominated the world of Marx’s youth and had a profound impact on his personal and intellectual development. The Revolution’s issues and controversies, politics and ideology, achievements and failures—together with the profound reshaping of societies for which it was responsible—continued to be primary determinants of the European social context until at least the revolutions of 1848.10 For more than two decades, near constant warfare had embroiled Europe, with corollaries stretching from North Africa to the Caribbean, to North America. The impact of the Revolution on the nineteenth century was in many ways comparable to the impact that the First and Second World Wars had on the twentieth century. The Revolution both loomed as an obvious and crucial historical turning point in Marx’s ideas, and had enormous influence on his early work. This was not due to any role it may be supposed to have played in the transition from feudal class relations to those characteristic of capitalist society, but fundamentally because the Revolution trumpeted the cause of freedom: liberté, égalité, fraternité. The class interests generally identified with the bourgeoisie in the Revolution—even by Marx—were all immediately political: republicanism, liberal rights, modestly representative democracy, and nation building. Together, these goals defined the core mission of Jacobin politics. Above all, such objectives were recognized to be antithetical to aristocratic privilege and absolute monarchy, and it was in this sense specifically that the Revolution was understood to have marked a break with feudalism. The final defeat of the Revolution in 1815—when the vestiges of Jacobin politics, and any scant hope for a return to democracy notwithstanding the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte, were crushed by the vindictive and reactionary Holy Alliance—cast dark shadows across Europe. In much of Europe, the Revolution had shone as a beacon of freedom, and growing numbers of liberals and radicals had looked to France with hope even under Napoleon’s leadership.11 Though Britain had played a major role in his defeat—and took possession of the man himself—Continental Europe now was completely dominated by the Russian Tsar, Austrian Emperor, and Prussian King, with their respective structures of privileged aristocracy, official religion, and unbridled power.

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Both the Revolution and its defeat had an especially dramatic impact on Marx’s family and his birthplace of Trier. The oldest city north of the Alps, Trier had been a cosmopolitan residence of Roman emperors and, during the fourth century, the administrative capital of the Western Roman Empire. As a major city, there would have been Jewish residents during its Roman heyday. By 1096, there was a significant Jewish community that, despite initial efforts by its ruling Archbishop to shield them, was subjected to forced conversion during the First Crusade.12 One of seven Electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Archbishop, held considerable power and influence, and, no doubt, partly for this reason, Trier remained thoroughly Catholic during and after the Reformation. Close to France, and often under its influence, the Revolution saw Trier fully incorporated as the capital city of a French Départment. At Marx’s birth, there were perhaps 100 Jews in the city proper (but more in its countryside) and a total of perhaps 300 Protestants (mostly the result of its acquisition by Prussia), in a population of more than 11,000.13 Marx’s family not only was Jewish but, on his grandmother’s side, had long provided Trier with chief rabbis. His paternal grandfather and uncle then held that position, in turn; his mother also came from a (Dutch) rabbinical family. His father, Herschel, however, had benefited from the French Republic’s granting of citizenship to Jews (notwithstanding its later revocation by Bonaparte) and studied law. He was on the verge of being admitted to the bar when Trier was handed over to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna. Though his colleagues pressed the Prussian justice minister to make an exception for him, this was denied. As a result, Herschel Marx—one of only three Rhineland Jews in a legal profession— did as most of the leading Jews in Trier (and many Jews across Prussia) did in the early nineteenth century, and converted to Christianity.14 He did not, however, convert to the Catholic faith of more than 96% of his neighbours, nor even to one of the conventional churches of Lutheranism or Calvinism. Instead, he was baptized in the new church that King Friedrich Wilhelm III brought into being as part of a forcible (though ultimately unsuccessful) effort to merge the dominant Protestant sects. Clearly an intelligent and ambitious man, Herschel Marx’s legal practice prospered. Soon, indeed, he purchased a home on the leading residential street in Trier, next door to the Baron von Westphalen, newly appointed to oversee the city on behalf of Prussia. Now known as Heinrich, Herr Marx and the Baron became close friends, as did their children.

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Prosperous and successful as Heinrich Marx was, however, he remained deeply committed to the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment and—like Trier as a whole—he increasingly came to lament the defeated ideals of the French Revolution, notwithstanding his (and their) embrace of Prussian identity.15 Indeed, in 1834, Heinrich came to the attention of Prussian authorities for a stirring toast with obvious liberal inclinations. Shortly after, he took part in a celebration at the Casino Club (involving much wine) in the course of which a number of French revolutionary songs were sung.16 All of the participants were prosperous burghers of Trier, which had become one of the most liberal communities in all of Prussia. For 15-year-old Karl, both his father’s active enthusiasm—he already had been well steeped in Enlightenment ideas—and the repressive response of the government—which put an end to the Casino Club, and put Trier under watch—would have made strong impressions. If then, Karl proved prescient in early 1848, declaring that a revolutionary spectre was haunting Europe mere weeks before revolutions broke out, it should perhaps not be surprising that at that time his hometown proved to be a leading centre for radicalism and democracy, as Germany began to work its way through—if still very incompletely—issues that gripped France after 1789.17 Throughout his youth, Marx was confronted both intellectually and intimately with the politics, legacies, and possibilities raised by the French Revolution. It remained the touchstone for progressive politics of any sort, since in most of Europe any effort to realize basic rights, civil equality, and/or political engagement by the people was not only deeply subversive but inherently revolutionary. The issues of the Revolution remained alive. There existed growing desire for liberal rights and representative government even among the well-to-do; aspirations to realize the Jacobin republican project among professionals and functionaries; and the still unrealized possibility of radical direct democracy that might confront “the social question”, which stirred increasing numbers of workers. It was in this historical context that Marx grew to maturity, undertook his academic studies, and began work as a journalist.

History and Social Theory The Revolution’s social, political, and cultural impacts were widely recognized to be historically significant on a world scale. Its magnitude, the profound issues that it raised, and the extent to which its achievements were as yet unrealized in so many different national contexts contributed

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to the understanding that it was truly unprecedented and epoch defining. Indeed, the Revolution was broadly conceived to have been not just historic but historically transformative. Among liberals and radicals everywhere, the Revolution was understood in terms of a historic class struggle—the result of a fundamentally necessary struggle by the bourgeoisie18 against the aristocracy and absolute monarchy. These efforts by the bourgeoisie were seen not only to have been a means of advancing their particular interests but to have inherently embodied the advancement of historical progress.19 Far from being limited to Hegelian philosophers, the idea that history was inherently an unfolding of progress in human society was a key thread running through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal thought, from political economy to mainstream historiography, to the emerging ideas of sociology. This sense of a progressive substance to history has been hugely influential, yet deeply problematic. The very idea of history is subject to debate, freighted with meanings and implications tied to barely acknowledged presuppositions. The term itself derives from the Greek word for “inquiry”, knowledge acquired for analysis.20 The narrative form that it takes in relating past events, however, was so compelling that it subsequently provided the word for “story” in most European languages. From ancient Greece through the Renaissance, the narratives of history invariably conveyed a particular point of view: tales of notable, exemplary or ill-fated persons and events, retold as illustrations for guidance and moral instruction. Even Niccolo Machiavelli, whose works were infused with history, discerned in it only recurring patterns: origin, maturation, prowess, decay, and ruin, variously repeated through Fortune’s great wheel. To his mind, the lessons of history were valuable because Fortune dictates only half of human affairs, the rest determined by the efforts of men. Like the best ancient historians, Machiavelli highlighted object lessons in statecraft, the successes and failures to be discerned in the histories of states. No more than the ancients, however, did he see history as something having meaning or substance of its own. In the course of the modern age, however—which self-consciously separated itself from antiquity by conceiving the existence of a “middle” age (or ages)—a different sense of history emerged. In respect of the epochal transformations experienced across “the West” (the former Western Roman Empire, with lands assimilated to it), history came eventually to be conceived in terms of ongoing developments of social change. Even more,

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the idea grew that in the development of social forms over time there was a narrative arc that gave meaning and shape to history as a whole. No longer just instructive tales, history increasingly became a thing and acquired substance and direction. This view was premised on shared European experiences from the end of Roman antiquity: Germanic successor kingdoms; the spread of feudalism; its crisis and collapse; the dawn of the modern age.21 Relative to this, the essentially philosophical approach to history retrospectively framed advances in economy, technology, politics, and culture into a compelling narrative of progress. The long medieval hiatus in the “middle” of this narrative—attributed to the arbitrary imposition of aristocratic power, privileges, and monopolies—only contributed to the ideological substance of the narrative. Viewed in philosophical terms, history as progress has become understood in relation to the realization of human potential, constituting a telos of human social evolution. Where for an ancient philosopher like Aristotle the telos of humanity was essentially timeless, the idea of inherent historical development provided instead a fundamentally temporal dimension. This arrow of historical progress was famously captured in John Locke’s assertion that “in the beginning, all the world was America”.22 This view of history as progress did not emerge immediately with modernity, nor across all European contexts at once. In the sixteenth-­ century France, Protestant constitutional theorists advocated the constraint of royal power and “revival of liberty” almost entirely in terms of the restoration of (feudal) rights from bygone ages.23 Even in the eighteenth century, Charles, Baron de Montesquieu, differed little from Machiavelli in his conception of history.24 In early modern England, however, a conception of history as the ongoing and inherent progress of humanity first emerged in close association with political and economic liberalism.25 This “Whig” conception of history as progress infused Locke’s philosophy and became ascendant in Hanoverian England and the Scottish Enlightenment.26 Such notable members of the French-speaking Enlightenment as Jean-Jacques Rousseau27 and Voltaire (Candide) rejected this inherently progressivist liberal world-view, but it spread across Continental Europe with the emergent discourses of liberalism, before and especially during the French Revolution. Virtually all social theory and historiography since the eighteenth century have to some extent been

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informed by this “Whig” perspective.28 Most historians, of course, focus on a fairly narrow period, generally in relation to a larger epoch. Yet, though they may resist generalizing about history as a whole, they can hardly avoid the many conceptions—whether or not acknowledged in relation to some theoretical approach—derived from historically informed social theory. Indeed, with rare and marginal exceptions, social theorists for more than two centuries have been inclined to see the course of history—at least over long periods, and perhaps not without periods of exception— as shaped by inherent and progressive forces of development. These underlying historical forces generally are conceived in relation to growth, or growing complexity, in population, family structures, division of labour, rationality, technology, forms of production, trade, and/or urbanism. It is significant that such conceptions of history as inherent progressive social development emerged only in the self-described “West”, although Asian societies in the early modern era had comparable or even greater population density, complexity, bureaucracy, technology, and even commerce.29 The West arrogated a historical narrative of social progress to itself, and the terms of this narrative are telling. Early on, the classically liberal Whig conception of history was specifically cast in terms of a sequence of social forms grounded in characteristic “modes of subsistence”—in order, hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, and ultimately commerce. This eminently materialist stages theory of history was—strikingly—independently articulated in the nascent liberal conceptions of Adam Smith in Britain and A. R. J. Turgot in France around 1750, and widely accepted before the French Revolution.30 Linked to political economy from its origins with those two profoundly influential thinkers, this historical conception of progress was premised upon the growth over time of social complexity, division of labour, and individual autonomy. It built on Locke’s liberal ideology of improvement, combining the development of personal liberty with freedom of property and trade.31 Appealing from the start to liberals who were inclined to argue for a combination of responsible government with an open economy, this conception of progress became notorious when it p ­ rovided political moderates and radical Jacobins alike with the historical justification of “necessity” for the violence incurred during the Revolution.

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The Riddle of History Among those not actively defending the old regime, the idea of the French Revolution as the historically necessary task of an inherently progressive bourgeois class—overthrowing aristocratic class privilege to usher in modern, liberal commercial society—was broadly accepted long before Marx entered university. Although it was François Guizot—the Sorbonne historian of “bourgeois civilization” turned Foreign Minister—who expelled Marx from France in 1845, Marx always credited him, along with other liberal historians, for identifying the role of class in history. Regrettably, although Marx created a truly original and critical conception of history as the history of struggle in class societies, he never really confronted the differences between the liberal ideas and his own. It is therefore necessary when reading Marx to distinguish between statements derived through his own critical analysis, and those merely expressing conventional liberal accounts. History necessarily figured in Marx’s critical engagement with Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel had absorbed, re-interpreted, and integrated ideas from across the range of liberal thought into an idealist variant of liberal historical progress, uniting philosophy of history and history of philosophy. His so-called master-slave dialectic32 and entire conception of civil society are informed by liberal views of European history since the Middle Ages as propelled by the rising bourgeoisie, first asserted during the Revolution and maintained by Guizot and other liberals thereafter. Hegel, however, formally stood the materialism inherent in prevailing liberal accounts on its head, ostensibly framing history in idealist philosophical terms that resonated nicely with the religiosity of the Prussian monarchy. In Hegel’s conception, the historical development of social forms corresponded to the realization of philosophical truth. Where Aristotle understood the social forms of classical Greece as timelessly conducive to the good life—the natural and eternal end of humanity—Hegel accepted the liberal idea of human existence developing through stages having corresponding social forms. At each stage, the ensemble of social forms constitutes a whole, realizing the best social life possible at the time, while continuing to develop, individually and together, in conjunction with human consciousness and activity: “The life of the ever-present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments.”33 The fullest dialectical development of human society through history corresponds to the ultimate development of ethical life in the state, the realization of universal Spirit, and humanity’s true telos. In this way, Absolute Spirit, easily read as God,

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comes to realize self-consciousness in the world. Reactionary theocracy and conservative liberalism joined in applause for Hegel.34 The Left Hegelians to whom Marx was drawn attempted to re-invert this idealist conception. Against Hegel, they articulated a materialist critique of religion as human alienation but remained primarily preoccupied with religion.35 For Marx, already more than a radical democrat, and deeply concerned with “the social question” and forms of freedom and equality that transcended the merely political, the key issues were instead the failure of the French Revolution in its historic mission, and the limitations inherent in that mission. His ideas and associates precluded an academic career, but, driven from journalism by censorship, he proposed to undertake a history of the radical phase of the Revolution.36 With such a work in mind, he sought to clarify his ideas through a critique of Hegel’s political thought. In his profoundly original manuscript, “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”,37 Marx applied to the state the concept of “abstraction”—alienation from human social reality—that Left Hegelians advanced against religion: “Just as it is not religion which creates man, but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution which creates the people but the people which creates the constitution”.38 Rejecting Hegel’s idealism, but retaining his conception of history as development, Marx asserted: It is obvious that the political constitution as such is brought into being only where the private spheres have won an independent existence. Where trade and landed property are not free and have not yet become independent, the political constitution too does not yet exist. The Middle Ages were the democracy of unfreedom. The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern times, because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern times.39

Marx had as yet no familiarity with political economy beyond what was in Hegel.40 This first articulation of the modern separation of state from civil society emerged, then, from the political side. He conceived the political form of the state to embody alienation inherently: “democracy is the essence of all state constitutions  – socialised man as a particular state ­constitution”,41 which, however, is to say the state is our collective human capacity projected into a form exercising power over us. He argued it never could realize the universal in society as Hegel had claimed; in concrete terms, not least because state personnel have strong “particular” interests in the state itself as a form of private property.42

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The conflict between universal human interests and the interests of property owners came to the fore in his articles for the German-French Yearbook [Deutsch-Franzöische Jahrbücher]. In “On The Jewish Question”, Marx challenged Bruno Bauer’s preoccupation with ending official religion to create a constitutional state. Merely political emancipation frees citizens from neither religion nor the dominance of property and trade, protected as private matters in the political state. Then, in its second section, he extended the concept of alienation to economic relations: Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity – money – on them.43

It was not theology that needed supersession, but alienated economic life, recasting the end of historical progress as social emancipation. In “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction”, he went further, identifying for the first time the propertyless proletariat as a revolutionary agent of world-historical significance. Social emancipation requires “a class with radical chains”, claiming no “particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it”: “This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat”.44 After completing this article, Marx turned his attention to the major political economists cited by Frederick Engels in “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, written for the Yearbook, producing his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. After these manuscripts, the critique of political economy became the primary medium for Marx’s development and practice of historical materialism. Contrary to the claim that he had a subsequent “epistemological break”, it was here, in 1844, that he established the frame for his life’s work. In only the first few manuscript pages, under the heading “Wages of Labour”, Marx first conceived specifically capitalist social relations of ­production—systemically comprehensible only as an abstract whole, still incompletely formulated by political economy—to be the basis of modern exploitive class society. With his very first words—“Wages are determined by the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker”45—Marx entered a new terrain of class conflict. As capitalist production transforms the world through

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modern industry, its system of wage labour more and more reduces the worker to insecurity and misery: “like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work”, though only as a worker; when not working, the worker does not exist for the capitalist economy. Regardless of the economic cycle, whether growing, declining, or static, workers suffer. At the end of this first section, proposing “to rise above the level of political economy”, Marx brought his critique to bear upon historical development, posing two monumental questions. The first, noted above, queried the role of abstract labour in the historical development of humanity. The second, illuminating his previously declared objective of social emancipation, queried the errors of “piecemeal reformers” who sought only better wages for workers.46 These questions established a framework for conceiving working-class social revolution to end the capitalist system of wage labour and realize true human emancipation. Through this approach, Marx articulated a profoundly different overview of the social evolution of humanity than previously expressed in liberal historical social theory or philosophical history. While retaining a Hegel-like recognition of history as social development conceived in its entirety, in these manuscripts Marx brought critical analysis of this development beyond the idea of alienation in the form of the state, beyond even alienation in monetary exchange, to conceive alienation of labour as underpinning historical development. In admittedly difficult passages, Marx asserts that the alienation of labour is the key to “the movement of history”: given the “reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour”, revolutionary self-emancipation by the proletariat not only ends their exploitation as a class but realizes “the goal of human development”.47 Marx’s conception does not merely stand Hegel’s idealism “right side up” to conform to conventional liberal materialism. Instead, his historical materialism conceived antagonistic class relations to be at the core of history just as much as they were at the core of the modern economy. Marx rejected any fictitious primordial account of the origin of property, the linchpin of political economy and starting point for explanations of “the social problem”. He proposed “to start out from a present-day economic fact” rather than an imaginary primordial condition: the labour of the worker producing commodities for wages creates wealth for the capitalist, but is realized for the worker as loss, its “appropriation as estrangement, as alienation”.48

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If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, and if it confronts him as an alien power, this is only possible because it belongs to a man other than the worker.49 Thus through estranged, alienated labour, the worker creates the relationship of another man, who is alien to labour and stands outside it, to that labour. The relation of the worker to labour creates the relation of the capitalist… to that labour. Private property is therefore the product, result and necessary consequence of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.50

However, property does not exist only in its fully realized modern form. The historical development of forms of property is, therefore, the development of alienation of labour. Capital and labour, as such, are the forms of “private property in its developed relation of contradiction”.51 It is the alienation of labour in the various forms of its development—the appropriation of surplus product in a concrete relationship that gives real form to wealth and its owner, as also to the immediate producer, and to production itself—that constituted real property relations throughout history. Finally, in the developed capitalist form of “abstract labour”, the antagonism is starkly exposed, no longer hidden as mere inequality of property. The emancipation of society from private property necessarily takes “the political form of the emancipation of the workers”, but it constitutes the basis for universal human emancipation.52 More than just a workers’ political movement, communism “is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement”: “It is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution”.53 It is this conclusion—at once political and historical-theoretical, answering both questions from “Wages of Labour”—that first expressed the basis for the rest of Marx’s work.

The History of Class Struggles It is the antagonism central to this historical perspective—translated from philosophical language to that of practical politics—with which The Communist Manifesto opens: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight…54

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This fundamental premise, informed by critical engagement with Hegel and the Left Hegelians but specifically derived from and developed through the critique of political economy, remained central to Marx’s thought. It is, indeed, history in this sense—humanity developing through the historical antagonisms and contradictions of class exploitation, eventually achieving civilization truly united with freedom—that makes it meaningful to speak of his social theory as “historical materialism”. It is crucial that this conception of history identifies the broad arc of social change upon which historical philosophy and social theory have been premised as driven by polar opposition between those who produce and appropriators of the product of their labour. As first identified in 1844, stated so clearly in the Manifesto, and underpinning of all Marx’s subsequent work, fundamental class relations involve exploitation of one class by another, maintained through oppression. In Marx’s thought, classes are not ranks in society, nor conceived in isolation as economic categories. It is the fundamental antagonism between the class of people producing society’s surplus, and the class of those possessing the power to appropriate it for themselves, that drives history—not some unfolding of natural capacities, nor the rise of one class without reference to another. The fundamental classes are paired—“oppressor and oppressed”—by the alienation of labour. However, after noting (in the problematic manuscripts of “The German Ideology”) that Entfremdung (alienation or estrangement) was “a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers”,55 Marx largely abandoned its use in this sense. While no single term took the place of “alienation of labour”, the idea itself remained central to his work. In the Manifesto and Class Struggles in France, he referred to “exploitation”, but also the “antagonism” of classes. In the Grundrisse, Marx did use “alienation” on several occasions. In analysing the development of individual economic autonomy in relation to social interdependence through exchange, he observed that the universality of “production on the basis of exchange values” in turn produces “the alienation of the individual from himself and from others”.56 He also used the term in relation to the “appropriation of alien labour without exchange, without equivalent”, described as the “alienation of labour”, predicated on propertylessness.57 In general, however, in pursuing the critique of political economy he came to express the alienation of labour simply in terms of “appropriation”, sometimes explicitly of “surplus”. Most importantly, in a major theoretical advance beyond his 1844 critique, beginning with the Grundrisse he came to conceive the form of

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surplus appropriation in the capitalist mode of production specifically as surplus value. In Capital, he consistently focused on the appropriation of surplus in this form. Capital famously eschews a historical approach in order to analyse synchronically the system of social relations of production based upon generalized commodity exchange, but there are points where Marx was compelled to set aside such ahistorical analysis. While the global system of social relations must be conceived in terms of an abstract and idealized whole, Marx differed from the classical political economists (and later economists) by historicizing it. His critique of political economy recognized that capitalism did not embody timeless principles of production, but was based on historically specific—and unique—conditions and social relationships. This historical conception of capitalist social relations, in contrast to the “timeless” concepts of the political economists, is particularly clearly stated in the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse. Again rejecting an imaginary primordial starting point—the “individual and isolated hunter and fisherman” of Smith and Ricardo—Marx stressed that production is necessarily and profoundly social: when we speak of production, we always have in mind production at a definite stage of social development, production by social individuals. It might therefore seem that, in order to speak of production at all, we must either trace the historical process of development in its various phases, or else declare at the very beginning that we are dealing with one particular historical epoch, for instance with modern bourgeois production, which is indeed our real subject-matter.58

Marx devoted a whole section of these manuscripts to “Forms Preceding Capitalist Production”,59 which was published in English before the rest of the Grundrisse. In his introduction, historian Eric Hobsbawm addressed the many problems Marxists had making sense of world history using only a few “orthodox” historical modes of production, as well as the limitations of the several short accounts of them in Marx’s work. He observed The general theory of historical materialism requires only that there should be a succession of modes of production, though not necessarily any particular modes, and perhaps not in any particular predetermined order.60

The history of class struggles, therefore, largely remained (and still remains) to be written.

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History was not Marx’s primary purpose, however, and after commenting on the relationship between the anatomy of humans and the anatomy of the ape, he decided it was “wrong” to follow a historical method of exposition: The point at issue is not the place the economic relations took relative to each other in the succession of various forms of society in the course of history… but their position within modern bourgeois society.61

For this reason, Capital begins with the abstract form of the commodity, not with history. This was neither abandonment nor repudiation of historical materialism, however. The generalized capitalist system of commodity production depends on there being workers lacking rights to the means of production and obliged to work for wages in order to survive. Not only does this condition differ from the almost unmediated engagement with nature of early human bands, before production of agrarian surpluses made “civilization” possible; it also differs from the immediate possession of land by peasant families in precapitalist agrarian societies, whatever their formal property relations. As Ellen Wood has argued, through the critique of political economy, Marx increasingly came to conceive historical development in terms of processes that produced the social forms—property, law, and other social relations—that are preconditions for the specific relations of capitalist production.62 This first appeared in the Grundrisse’s long section on precapitalist forms, but as Wood notes, “the remnants of the older view [based on Smith’s stages] are still visible”.63 In Capital, however, Marx historicized capitalism not only without relying on, but in opposition to, the progressivism of liberal political economy. And so, after his lengthy analysis of how capitalist social relations operate, Marx briefly turned to consider how they came into existence.

Precapitalist Societies Marx rejected yet another imaginary starting point of political economy— that “primitive accumulation” was savings made by a “frugal elite” of future capitalists while others squandered everything—asserting that “so-­ called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production”.64 It is here that Marx most clearly addressed the transition from feudalism to

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capitalism, conceived in concrete historical terms, not as universal history. Of particular significance is his observation that “In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form”.65 Whereas in all prior forms of class society the greatest part of social surplus was produced by peasants directly occupying the land, enclosures created a class of workers with no access to means of production, and who therefore depended on wages. During the transitional era of specifically agrarian capitalism corresponding to the period of enclosures (sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries), English peasants were transformed into a minority of capitalist farmers, on one hand, and a majority of wage labourers, on the other, creating the conditions for generalized industrial capitalism. These processes of enclosure were unique to England, and it is specifically to these processes that capitalist social relations of production can be traced.66 Marx offered even more profound insight into historical-social analysis in Volume III of Capital, when considering the nature and origin of ground rent. Theoretical analysis of ground rent is very complex but, with industry only recently contributing more to total output than agriculture in the very home of the Industrial Revolution, it remained important. Ricardo’s advances in analysing differential ground-rent clarified how and why better land received higher rents, but not how or why rent is due on even the worst land. From the start, historical issues were inescapable in dealing with agriculture: The form of landed property which we shall consider here is a specifically historical one, a form transformed through the influence of capital and of the capitalist mode of production, either of feudal landownership, or of small-peasant agriculture…67

Through lengthy analysis, Marx explored not one, but two forms of differential rent (each distinct from normal profit, monopoly profit, and interest), and their relationship to rent on the worst land.68 Ultimately, this analysis of capitalist ground rent requires recognizing yet another form of rent—absolute rent—which is not determined by capitalist relations of production and exchange but imposed upon them.69 It is specifically this capitalist phenomenon that led Marx to begin analysing the “Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent” with precapitalist forms of rent: not deductions from surplus value (which did not then exist) but the characteristic historical form of appropriating “unpaid surplus labour”.

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Focusing on the crucial difference between capitalist wageworkers who are free but divorced from means of production, and peasant producers occupying the land, he observed that “surplus-labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed might be”.70 The continuity with his earlier historical conception of opposition between “oppressor and oppressed” is clear, and underscored by the even more general observation that follows: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element… It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers… which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.71

Although, as Hobsbawm noted, there is no canonical statement of historical modes of production in Marx’s work, this insight into the social structure of all class societies—articulated in one of his most theoretically developed manuscripts—provides crucial insight into how they should be analysed in historical materialist terms. It is important that Marx’s analysis of precapitalist societies based on production by independent peasant households, immediately introducing the above statement, includes two distinct forms. The first is European feudalism, with serfs producing rent for their feudal lords. In the second, however—identified as Asian—there are no private landowners, and rent is appropriated by a state that is both sovereign and landlord. In these pages Marx specifically used the term “mode of production” to distinguish between different, specific, forms of appropriation (and their associated property relationships), thus drawing a clear distinction between the feudal and “Asiatic” modes of production. The latter concept has been the subject of great debate. This has largely concerned the nature of Asian societies in Marx’s day and since, and much use of the concept, by Marxists and critics alike, has been deeply problematic. There is, however, no doubt that a number of ancient societies— Egyptian, Mycenaean, Andean, Meso-American, and others, including early China—were characterized by an absence of private property in land

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and appropriation of peasant surpluses by a state hierarchy.72 It does seem, therefore, that in historical terms Marx’s use of this concept has a solid foundation. More to the point, Marx identified “economically” similar independent households of serfs and Asian peasants as equally requiring extra-economic coercion, immediately underpinning his observation on the specific economic forms of the appropriation of surplus. Regardless of the historical realities, this distinction speaks to Marx’s theoretical perspective. Since the peasant households in these two cases are said to be involved in the same form of material production, differing only with respect to the relationship between producers and appropriators, it cannot be that for Marx only one mode of production existed for each productive form or technology. Given his analysis, there is no reason why there could not be several modes of production based on peasant household production, distinguished by different sets of social relations of property and forms of coercion by which “unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers”. This goes a long way towards justifying Perry Anderson’s little-noticed assertion that a “scrupulous and exact taxonomy of these legal and political configurations is thus a pre-condition of establishing any comprehensive typology of precapitalist modes of production”.73

Beyond Initial Premises Marx also took up history in fundamentally political works besides the Manifesto, particularly when addressing developments in France after 1848. There are, indeed, strikingly original insights in these works reflecting Marx’s grasp of history, and its importance, even where his observations might seem to stand at odds with the broad historical frame he had articulated. Reviewing Guizot’s work on the success of the English Revolution relative to that of France, Marx chided him for forgetting the history he once had known in his blinkered defence of the late Orleanist regime.74 What is striking is that the historical analysis in this review is every bit as nuanced as Guizot’s best work, and still rings true. In arguing that the English success in forging an enduring constitutional monarchy was no matter of national “character”, but a reflection of a historical social context different from France in 1789—not least that the landed property of English landlords was already fundamentally “bourgeois”—Marx’s analysis seems to undercut the broadly accepted view that England and France had comparable class revolutions, with the French case if anything reflecting more complete development.

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Similarly, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is far too astute in its evaluation of historical dynamics—from the 1789 Revolution to the 1852 debacle of Second Republic yielding to Second Empire—simply to conform to the ostensible account offered in The Manifesto. Marx’s own analysis of developments since the Revolution, and of the politically active classes of mid-nineteenth-century France, do not easily square with his acceptance of the liberal idea that 1789 had already been a “bourgeois revolution” made by a capitalist class challenging a decrepit landed aristocracy.75 Still, while proving he was too good an analyst to force facts to “fit” theory, it was not his purpose to develop novel historical ideas in these works, notwithstanding their grounding in history. His observations are valuable for entering into the processes of class politics, but he was above all addressing issues of his day, not history. Later in life, however, Marx devoted much study to questions of history outside the frame of conventional Eurocentric social theory. While his historical conception of history as the history of class struggles differed profoundly from that of milquetoast liberals, during the decades he devoted to the critique of political economy—but also to socialist politics, especially the International Workingmen’s Association—he had little time to enter into historical study proper. During his last decade, however, after disputes within the International led to its removal to New York, he continued working on revisions to Capital, and engaged in much correspondence over contemporary politics, but he also undertook new studies driven by the question of whether societies that had not experienced European history were condemned to repeat it.76 Conventional liberal social theory broadly conceived two possibilities for non-European societies: either they were too different in climate, culture or “racial” temperament to follow the example of Europe; or they were able if only they would “Westernize”. Some theorists thought one or the other; some thought one or the other applied in individual cases. Marx, as argued above, originally began with ideas informed by such theoretical views, but—distinctively—he did not presume European history to be the embodiment of inherent human progress or realization of universal Spirit. What mattered to Marx about the history of class struggles was bringing them to an end through the general emancipation of humanity. It was this commitment, from which he never faltered, that led him in a different theoretical direction. Societies outside Europe where the appropriation of surplus already existed had endured their own bloody histories. If it were possible to avoid the convulsion and suffering inherent in transition

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to the capitalist mode of production while at the same time realizing human freedom, so much the better. Where people had yet to be subjected to any form of the alienation of labour, the possibility of securing the benefits of civilization without entering that form of oppression clearly was desirable. Among the immediate social examples, two were particularly salient. India had experienced a history of great civilization based on different social relations of peasant production than Europe and then been reduced to colonial status by Britain. It had been subjected to market forces by the chief capitalist society, yet much of the effect of this had been to undermine its indigenous industries. Throughout most of its vast extent, peasant production endured, and was even reinforced, yet had been subjected to formally capitalist laws and governance. Russia, by contrast, had voluntarily adopted Western culture at the level of its elites. Not only had peasant village society remained largely undisturbed, but there had been comparatively little introduction of capitalist social relations in any form in Russia, and serfdom had only recently been abolished. Among its intellectuals, however, Western political ideas were influential, not least radical and revolutionary ideas. Marx was familiar with a variety of views on Indian society, which contributed to his observations (rightly or wrongly) on the “Asiatic” mode of production. British relations with India were of course also a regular feature of business news. His friend Maxim Kovalevsky introduced him to the work of Lewis Morgan, and having previously taught himself to read Russian, he read and annotated Kovalesvsky’s own work.77 He also undertook a detailed study of Indian history,78 and conducted other ethnographic research.79 Little, however, from his ethnographic/historical studies of this period found their way into print until a century after his death. His unfulfilled intention to write on Morgan’s pioneering studies of early social forms did, however, lead Engels to produce (drawing on Marx’s notes) The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In this period, Marx received an inquiry from the Russian Vera Zasulich, raising questions about his views on capitalist development. She particularly wanted his ideas on “the theory of the historical inevitability for all countries of the world to pass through all the phases of capitalist production”,80 and that “the rural commune is an archaic form which history, scientific socialism—in a word all that is the most indisputable—condemns to death”,81 as maintained by Russian “Marxists”. In response, Marx wrote three extensive drafts,82 before sending a very short letter.

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Throughout, Marx stressed that his analysis in Capital referred to the inevitable transformation of private property in Western Europe and that the historical absence of private property in Russian peasant villages created a fundamentally different context, making the preservation of communal property potentially a “fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia”.83

Implications for Today Little can be confidently asserted about the direction of Marx’s thought at this late point in his life, but it certainly seems he was prepared to question the inevitability of the Western European path of historical development. In understanding the implications of this development, however, it is essential to appreciate that Marx was never primarily a social theorist abstractly interested in history. Even before his early critical engagement with the ideas of Hegel, Marx was preoccupied with the problem of human unfreedom—that, as Rousseau began The Social Contract, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”.84 This preoccupation led Marx to overcome his initial distaste for Hegel, to follow the Left Hegelians in extending the analysis of alienation. After his profound and original ­recognition that the state was in itself, necessarily, a form of alienation— giving Marx theoretical priority among those for whom the political form of the state is fundamentally incompatible with true freedom85—it was a confrontation with actually existing exploitation, the capitalist alienation of labour, that brought him to an appreciation of the historical dimension of unfreedom. In his first thoughts on the subject in 1844, development of the alienation of labour was merely development of the social form of private property, from the ancient world to the modern form that was described by political economy. Soon, however, he integrated this concept of development with the accepted view that history progressed through specific stages—modes of subsistence—but instead framed these stages in terms of exploitation: the history of class struggles. He never advanced any single definitive sequence of such historical forms of exploitation or “modes of production”, nor was such a sequence necessary. Marx recognized capitalist social relations of production to constitute the fullest possible development of private property, the ultimate manifestation of the alienation of labour. Whereas all precapitalist forms of property necessarily depend upon the extortion of surplus through overt extra-economic coercion, the alienation of labour in capitalism uniquely

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appears to be purely economic in form. This follows from the prior separation of direct producers from access to essential means of production, and a formal and apparent separation of political and economic spheres of social relations. As Ellen Wood suggested, one can conceive the existence of a continuum in social relations of exploitation from one extreme, in which there is no separation at all between the state and property—the so-called “Asiatic” mode of production as described by Marx in Volume III of Capital—to the other extreme, embodied in the specific and unique formal separation of the political and economic that is characteristic of capitalist social relations.86 All other forms of precapitalist class society are located between these extremes, combining private relations of property with the form of the state, and with extra-economic coercion having a direct role in the appropriation of surplus. This continuum, however, does not constitute a sequence of stages of social development, beyond the original form of systematic social exploitation, upon which early “civilizations” appear to have been based, having lacked property in land (other than through the state). Only retrospectively, after the unique form of capitalist production of surplus value through formally free economic r­ elations was established, could the multiple varieties of precapitalist appropriation of surplus properly be comprehended in their collective difference from capitalism. No historical sequence is implied in their variety. No “progress” is manifested in their differences. Nothing leads necessarily or teleologically towards the capitalist form of social property relations. This is, of course, what Hobsbawm’s observation implied. Philosophical history is fundamentally and profoundly wrong, and conventional Marxist accounts of history grounded upon it are at odds with both fact and Marx’s truly original ideas. There is no arrow of necessary historical progress other than that which might (wrongly) be imposed after the fact, taking the world we know today as the starting point for a story of development projected onto the past. Capitalism was neither necessary nor inevitable, and only its unlikely development through historical processes unique to England made it even seem plausible as a form of society (if, at the same time, so difficult to comprehend as a whole as to require a new, dismal, form of science).87 After becoming established and spreading across the globe, however, capitalism has so transformed the daily social relations we take for granted that the absurd and ahistorical claims of economists that it is “natural” generally go unchallenged.

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No more than there was a teleology of development in the past is there one at work today. Through Marx’s critical analysis, however, we can understand how it is that the capitalist mode of production, while never the inevitable “end of history”, does, in fact, constitute the final form of class society. As the logically complete development of the exploitive potential of private property relations, it has removed extra-economic coercion from the alienation of labour, leaving only the abstract economic relations of seemingly free market exchange. This is not to say that it would be impossible to reconstitute at least temporarily some form of class society again founded on coercion, but it is hard to see how it could be sustained for long (provided we do not bomb or pollute ourselves back to a Stone Age). If, therefore, capitalist social relations are not going to remain with humanity forever—not merely centuries or millennia, but as long as we exist—we will have to forge a new way forward. This possibility and need are what Marx saw in communism in 1844. There is no philosophical guarantee of a future free from alienation and exploitation, but there is every reason to believe we can, and must, create one. Not only does Marx’s work help to locate the present form of society in relation to the history of humanity, it offers insight into how we can move forward. The central point of his work is that misery and oppression are products of the forms of society we construct for ourselves, the majority compelled to resist the exploitation that benefits the power-bearing minority. History does not occur through a rigid frame of categories, but neither is it contingent happenstance, open to myriad subjective narratives. Social relations of exploitation—appropriation of surplus backed by oppression— have throughout history provided both internal contradictions and limitations, and impulses towards change, operating within each of the societal forms through which they have been constituted. It is characteristic of the capitalist mode of production that it inclines towards formal equality and liberty, yet operates to frustrate substantive equality and real freedom. Almost all of the world is now subjected to capitalist social relations, but nowhere are we left without choice as to our future. We are not bound by the dead weight of the past, though we face legacies from each of the societies we constructed over time. Marx gave us insight into how this world, in all its complexity, came to be, but also pointed towards the capacity for coming together in a struggle against alienation in all its forms. As in his day, but with a still greater development of inherent social contradictions, we face the future with only our chains to lose.

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Notes 1. These philosophers are often referred to as the “Young Hegelians”. Whatever their failings, they were variously recognized to be radicals in the context of the day, and the primary distinction was always political, not a question of age. 2. G.  W. F.  Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 3. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, MECW, vol. 3, 29–33, 49; Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 154. 4. Moses Hess, Einundzwanzig Bogen Aus Der Schweiz (Zurich: Verlag Das Literarisches, 1843). The same volume contained the chapter by Bruno Bauer that Marx addresses in the second part of “On The Jewish Question”. 5. Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 172–4. 6. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 241. 7. Ibid., 293–4. 8. Ibid., 296. 9. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965). 10. As will be argued later in this book, until after 1848, capitalism in any form, and its industrial revolution, were almost entirely absent from the European continent, and only just becoming truly dominant in England. 11. Beethoven famously had originally dedicated his Third—“Heroic”— Symphony to Napoleon, only retracting the dedication after hearing that Bonaparte had crowned himself Emperor. Many less discerning, or more desperate, residents of oppressive monarchies continued to look to the Emperor in hopes of liberation. 12. Robert Chazan, God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 86–93. 13. Boris Nicolaievsky, and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), 7; Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (New York: Norton, 2013), 6. Such numbers are more indicative than definitive. 14. Sperber, Karl Marx, 17. 15. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, 8. 16. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, 9–10; Sperber, Karl Marx, 28–9. 17. Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 181.

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18. The term bourgeoisie in old regime France referred to townspeople able to live without performing demeaning labour, but lacking noble status. Only Marx’s loose use of it as a synonym for the class of capitalists—informed by pervasive liberal ideas about the causes of the French Revolution—gave to it that particular sense. In fact, most bourgeois had been lawyers and owners of state offices, and no more than 10% engaged in commerce or industry of any sort. While these bourgeois generally were the wealthiest, they normally purchased ennobling offices in the state as soon as possible, leaving behind both their bourgeois status and commercial business, which was incompatible with nobility. François Guizot—renown liberal historian and politician, but a politically conservative liberal—gave lectures at the Sorbonne in the early 1820s (François Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe (New York: Appleton, 1896)) that, while more conciliatory than the work of other, more radical liberal historians, still emphasized the rise of the bourgeoisie and their struggle for progress as central to European history. See George C.  Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987). 19. This is the core idea of the concept of bourgeois revolution, and it is perfectly captured in the first section, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, of The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6). While Guizot expressed largely moderate views on the historical role of the bourgeoisie, the significance of their revolutionary role was emphasized by other liberal historians. In 1817, Augustin Thierry wrote “Vue des révolutions d’Angleterre”, a history of the heroic liberalism of the English Civil War that really was a thinly veiled account of the Revolution in France (in vol. 6 of Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, 1851). In 1824, François Mignet published the first liberal history of the Revolution in terms of a class revolution of the bourgeoisie (History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 (London: David Bogue, 1846)), the account with which The Manifesto most strongly resonates. As I noted in Rethinking the French Revolution (72–3), the very first account cast in terms of bourgeois class revolution actually was written by the leading revolutionary Antoine Barnave in 1792, but it was not published until 1843. 20. Oxford English Dictionary: “ancient Greek ιστορία inquiry, knowledge obtained by inquiry, account of such inquiries, narrative”, OED Online, September 2012, Oxford University Press, December 4, 2012. 21. Feudalism is widely misunderstood to correspond to the manorialism of the early Middle Ages, when in fact it emerged through a sudden social transformation around the year 1000 that had profound impact on subsequent European history. See George C. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53;

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George C.  Comninel, “Feudalism”, in The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, ed. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012), 131–7. 22. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301. 23. Ellen M. Wood, Liberty and Property (London: Verso, 2012), 153–61. 24. Ibid., 175–6. 25. Ibid., 257, 308–10; Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 67–8; George C. Comninel, “Marx’s Context”, History of Political Thought XXI (2000): 474. 26. For the classic critical account, see Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931). 27. Wood, Liberty and Property, 193. 28. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution. 29. They did not, however, have comparable private social property relations in the primary means of production, as will be discussed below. 30. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 64–74. 31. For more on the nature and influence of Locke’s ideas, see Neal Wood’s books The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) and John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 32. “Master and slave” is a poor translation of Herrschaft und Knectschaft, which really means lordship and servitude. Discussion of this concept rarely recognizes that the idea of class struggle between bourgeoisie and aristocracy was in circulation before Hegel completed his Habilitation, and was commonplace before the defeat of Napoleon. It is impossible to understand Hegel without recognizing the view—widespread among reactionaries and conservative liberals—that the aristocracy of the old regime descended from Germanic conquerors; whereas the Third Estate descended from those reduced to servitude. The other side to that coin was the liberal emphasis on the long historical rise of the bourgeoisie relative to the lords following the Germanic conquests, eventually displacing them as the basis for the modern nation—ideas central to Guizot’s work. Hegel’s dialectic in this regard, as so often in his work, slyly brought together the reactionary and the liberal, ceding the future to the latter without repudiating the former. 33. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), 79. 34. The subtlety of Hegel’s thought is such that it is not impossible to see in his ideas a more materialist unfolding of the universe, the comprehension of which, by the human mind, constitutes the basis for the Idea. The human mind, after all, can be understood to be the only form of consciousness that exists. Thus, the material historical development of human con-

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sciousness can be equated with that of consciousness itself, turning the history of philosophy into the development of Mind, as such. Marx clearly did not credit Hegel with the possibility of such a slyly materialist conception, and Hegel certainly did not force such a view on his readers. Whatever Hegel’s own conception, he certainly never sought to promote liberal—let alone radical—ideas in any obvious way. 35. Marx, “On The Jewish Question”. 36. Karl Marx, “From the Mémoires de R.  Levasseur (De La Sarthe). Paris, 1829”, MECW, vol. 3, n177, 606. 37. The title in the MECW refers to “Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, though the standard translation of the German original is Philosophy of Right. 38. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, MECW, vol. 3, 29. 39. Ibid., 31–2. 40. Other than the protectionist ideas of List’s “national economy”. 41. Ibid., 30. 42. Ibid. 47. State office as a form of “politically constituted property” was central to the politics of France from the Revolution through the whole of the nineteenth century, and figured importantly in Prussia. 43. Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 174. 44. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, 186. 45. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 235. As revealed in the detailed notes of the MECW, these manuscripts are not, and never have been, published in the order in which they were written. 46. Ibid., 241. 47. Ibid., 358. 48. Ibid., 323. 49. Ibid., 330. 50. Ibid., 331–2. 51. Ibid., 345. 52. Ibid., 333. 53. Ibid., 348. 54. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 482. 55. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, vol. 5, 48. For an extensive discussion of the many problems of the manuscripts published as “The German Ideology”, see Chaps. 5 and 6, this volume. 56. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 162. For a variety of reasons, this is my preferred edition. In the MECW, the Grundrisse appears as Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58, (First Version Of Capital), in vol. 28 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), and the cited passage is on p. 99, in a different translation using the word “estrangement” instead of “alienation”.

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57. Marx, Grundrisse, 515. In the MECW edition, this passage appears on p. 438, with the cited words identically translated. 58. Marx, Grundrisse, 17–23. 59. Ibid., 399–439. 60. Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, 19. 61. Marx, Grundrisse, 28–44. 62. Ellen M.  Wood, “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production’”, Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of Political Economy 150 Years Later, ed. Marcello Musto (London; New  York: Routledge, 2008), 70–92. 63. Ibid., 87. 64. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 705–6. 65. Ibid., 707. 66. George C. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53; Ellen M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002). 67. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 609. 68. While actual rent on the worst land affects the whole structure of rents, it has no effect on differential rent, which can therefore be calculated as if the worst land has no rent. 69. Ibid., 749–51. 70. Ibid., 777. 71. Ibid., 777–8. 72. Ellen M.  Wood, Capitalism against Democracy: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 34–7. Wood, “Historical Materialism in Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production”, 80–2. 73. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974). Regrettably, Anderson recognized the possibility of new modes of production only in the histories of non-European societies. 74. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, “Guizot, Pourquoi La Révolution d’Angleterre a-T-Elle Réussi? Discours Sur L’histoire de La Révolution d’Angleterre, Paris, 1850”, MECW, vol. 10, 251–6. 75. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 202–3. 76. Kevin B. Anderson, “Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity”, Socialism and Democracy 24, no. 3 (2010): 7–22. 77. Karl Marx, “Excerpts from M.  M. Kovalevskij (Kovalelvsky)”, in The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975), 343–412.

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78. Karl Marx, Notes on Indian History: (664–1858) (New York: International Publishers, 1960). 79. Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, ed. Lawrence Krader, 2nd ed. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974). 80. Karl Marx, “Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich”, MECW, vol. 24, n398, 640. 81. Ibid., n400, 641. 82. Ibid., n397 and n398, 640. 83. Karl Marx, “Letter to Vera Zasulich” MECW, vol. 24, 371; Anderson, “Not Just Capital and Class”, 11–2. 84. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 17. 85. Setting aside early modern radicals who couched their beliefs in religious terms. 86. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 34–6. 87. As Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957), capitalism is unique as a system for the social organization of production and distribution because these essential human functions are not embedded in broader structures of normative social relationships—such as kinship, custom, and law—but stand apart in what is construed to be an autonomous economic sphere. It is because the “disembedded” capitalist economy is determined as a whole by the fundamentally unplanned consequences of myriad individual economic relationships that it must be approached by means of abstract analysis and the deduction of “laws”. On the historical connection between political economy and agrarian capitalism (and, subsequently, industrial capitalism), see David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

CHAPTER 2

Approaching Marx’s Theory

The Significance of Context for Theory There are approaches to the study of political theory (and, to a lesser extent, social theory more broadly) that conceive it to be fundamentally a form of philosophy that embodies timeless truths. Alternatively, however, as the work of Neal Wood and Ellen Meiksins Wood amply demonstrated, when considering historical works of political theory, there is much to be gained from situating them in relation to the specific social and political contexts in which, and for which, they were written.1 Despite certain philosophical stances that might flatly reject such a point of view, this seems at least for most to be an uncontroversial claim. Still, much hinges on what is meant by “context”. Many scholars of the history of political thought lavish attention on the “discursive context” of an author’s work, situating the text in the bodies of literature that provided, or helped to shape, particular themes or arguments. This approach can certainly be very helpful in comprehending a text as it was intended to be understood when written and was so understood by contemporaries. It sheds, however, little light on the social and political concerns that inspired and underpinned the particular arguments advanced in historical works of social and political theory. For example, while it is evident that Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth in the sixteenth century owes much to a variety of discursive sources—ranging from Aristotle, to the Renaissance humanists, to debates both within, and against, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_2

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Church—Bodin’s careful arguments on behalf of absolute sovereignty against the Huguenot theorists of resistance cannot be understood adequately by exclusive reference to such discursive antecedents. It is also necessary for scholars of his work to take account of Bodin’s specifically political purposes in articulating the position of the politiques in support of absolute monarchy during the horrific violence of the Wars of Religion. Taking account of this social-historical context also tellingly reveals profound differences between French and English societies in the development of their respective forms of state, and characteristic social property relations, during the early modern period.2 These differences in social-­ historical context can indeed tell us more than we might learn simply from considering the fundamentally similar discursive contexts in France and England at the time. There is nothing exceptional about this case in the history of political thought. On the one hand, the historically significant works of political theory have almost invariably emerged from contexts of dramatic political confrontation. From Plato and Aristotle’s principled opposition to the policies and practices of democratic Athens; to Machiavelli’s consideration of what was possible, and to be preferred, as the Medicis brought the era of the Florentine republic to an end; to the raging debates engendered by (very different) revolutions in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-­century France, the history of political thought has been dominated by purposive interventions issued in different and distinctive contexts of political conflict. On the other hand, it is necessary to recognize that such political confrontations themselves must be considered in relation to the ongoing development of distinctive and historically specific social forms. In the first place, it is important to be aware of the different patterns of development that occurred within the various western European national societies (despite a broad inclination to attribute to them a common history in parallel with the extent of their shared literature). Above all, this means that when studying early modern and modern political thought, it is important to attend to the distinctive character of, and profound differences between, precapitalist3 and capitalist forms of society, particularly with respect to the relation between the economic and political spheres. It is especially important not to presume the existence of capitalist social relations, or even signs of their early development, on the basis of superficial evidence. It is, in fact, precisely in these terms that the profound ­differences between the early modern societies of France and England must be understood.

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The Specific Social Context of Capitalist Society A full appreciation of this point requires careful clarification of the meaning of “capitalism”. The term may, like any other, be arbitrarily endowed with different meanings by various authors, and it is pointless to insist that one definition is what it really means. What is essential is to be clear and consistent in one’s use of the term, and to ensure that it conveys the meaning one has in mind. In this way, if someone will insist that capitalism really means one thing, one may be prepared to assert, if necessary, that some other term can be substituted to refer instead to a conception that is altogether different. Famously, Max Weber and Karl Marx had very different conceptions of what “capitalism” means. Rather than arguing that one or the other is correct, one must be clear as to the differences, and the reasons for using one conception as opposed to the other. The most common understanding of “capitalism” (one roughly corresponding to Max Weber’s widely recognized definition)4 is simply that of systematic buying and selling in the market for profit. For Weber, capitalists had played a role in ancient Greece and Rome but were marginalized at the fall of the Roman Empire. They subsequently figured centrally in the emergence of the modern world: first through the snowballing of trading activity that began in the later Middle Ages, and then most dramatically through the Industrial Revolution and the growing social impact of applied technology. From our point of view, however, this conception of capitalism conflates simple profit-making in the market, which has occurred throughout Western history,5 with a very specific set of production relations centred on the market, but differing markedly from those found in earlier forms of production for the market. Indeed, Weber himself had recognized the distinction between mere profit making in trade (though he took this to constitute “capitalism”) and the crucial modern development of what he termed the “capitalist organisation of labour”.6 In our usage, however—consistent with Marx’s conception developed through the critique of political economy— capitalism is an integrated system of production. This distinction of capitalist production from mere commerce—which most importantly further signifies more than just the fact of production for the market—is fundamental. Specifically, by this conception, capitalism is the intrinsically marketdependent and market-regulated production of goods for exchange—the production of commodities regulated by relations between commodities— based on social relations in which all of what economists describe as the “factors of production” have been thoroughly commodified.

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Such commodified means of production include not only land, raw material, and equipment, but the money form of capital itself, and—above all—the very labouring capacity of workers purchased through wages. Only those owning sufficient capital can get market access to the material means of production, which must then be carefully organized and systematically improved in competition with other owners of capital supplying similar goods to the same market. Failure to be competitive in production, a standard constantly driven higher through the application of ingenuity and capital resources to create new technology—a distinctive capitalist dynamic of productivity—ultimately means failure in the market. One crucial element is that the commodified labouring capacity of workers must further be subject to regulation by the market, which in Marx’s terms is described as the real subsumption of labour to capital. Not only does capital in principle purchase the labouring capacity of workers to use in production, but the use of this “factor of production” is itself regulated by capitalist competition, the labour process being transformed to better serve the interests of capital regardless of the consequences of this transformation upon the workers themselves. Where workers are able to resist the demands of capital in relation to the labour process, and so are able to continue to control production themselves, this stands in fundamental opposition to the very existence of capitalist social relations. It may well be possible to make a profit by selling commodities produced by artisans who control their own labour, but such profit making does not constitute capitalism in the terms intended here.7 The key point for our purposes is to establish precisely a conception that sharply distinguishes between societies in which systematic market exchanges and commercial profit making may have existed, and those specifically capitalist societies in which fundamental forms of social production are inherently subjected to the characteristic relations of market dependency and market regulation. It is these attributes of capitalist production that are central to the conception of capitalism that Marx developed, and on which basis he recognized it to be a unique form of social organization. It is essential, for this reason, to insist upon a precise differentiation of specifically capitalist social relations of production from other social ­relations of production and circulation in which market exchange, wage labour, and/or systematic profit-making may exist, but without having determining impact on production itself. Insisting upon such clear conceptual differentiation is rigorously historical and theoretical, identifying a distinctive form of societal organization that has unique social characteristics

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and historical implications, in contrast with other historical forms that are at most superficially similar. In the terms that Marx would later develop and articulate in Capital, the social relations of production in capitalist society are driven by competition among different owners of capital. While acknowledging, and even analysing at length, the possibility for monopolies to exist, Marx asserted that the uniquely dynamic character of the industrial capitalist economy followed from the competition between producing enterprises to gain an advantage in the market. Innovations in production machinery, processes or output, or achieving “efficiencies” through tighter management of employed labour, lead to gains in productivity. The innovating enterprise gains an advantage in the market by being able to sell for less while making the same or higher profit—until competitors find ways to match that advantage. This relentless ratcheting up of “relative surplus value”8 leads to commodities becoming cheaper, as enterprises also attempt to gain in the market by producing new or improved goods. In a growing capitalist economy, the reduced demand for labour in enterprises achieving productivity gains is more than offset by the demand for labour in new lines of production and/or new enterprises. Obviously, workers are not entirely without influence in this system, though they are largely limited to pressing for better wages, hours or working conditions through the threat of withholding their labour. As Ellen Wood emphasized, in this system of production the market does not merely provide an “opportunity”—it imposes imperatives. Workers have no realistic alternative to selling their capacity to labour to capitalist enterprises for their subsistence, and they are obliged to accept (if not without setting some limits through struggle) the control of management over their work. At the same time, producing enterprises that do not keep up with productivity gains will eventually fail, as each capital essentially tries to beggar the others. Where this systematic structuring of the forms and processes of production through market imperatives does not exist, there is no capitalism—even if commodities are produced and exchanged, and workers are paid wages. There were factories in the ancient world with wage labour, producing large numbers of commodities such as amphora for the transport of wine and oil. This production was not, however, subject to the regulating effects of market imperatives—there was no drive to innovate or increase productivity—and it did not constitute capitalism in Marx’s sense.

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Recognition of the truly unique character of specifically capitalist social relations was present in Marx’s thought from his 1844 manuscripts on, though it certainly was deepened through the theoretical breakthroughs in his later development of the critique of political economy leading to Capital. The most important points are clearly articulated in the section known as “Estranged Labour”, which follows upon the ideas developed in the first section, “Wages of Labour”. The point of departure is the alienation of labour identified in that section, and the profound implications it has in specifically capitalist social relations, above all in augmenting the property of the owner of the means of production at the expense of the worker engaged in production. Marx noted that “[p]olitical economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us,” and against this asserted, “Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does when he tries to explain.” He declared, instead, that “[w]e proceed from an actual economic fact”. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces  – labour’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realisation of labour appears as loss of realisation for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.9

“Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.”10 Marx achieves two crucial objectives in this analysis. First, he establishes that it is through the seemingly simple production of commodities under the capitalist system of wage labour that workers are immediately exploited. Private property in the means of production is a social relationship—not

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a thing—and the means by which the fruits of previously achieved exploitation are brought to bear on the worker, through antagonistic relations of wage labour, to increase the property of the employer without regard to the worker’s well-being. Second, the exploitation realized in the private property of means of production—capital—is the consequence, indeed, the embodiment, of the underlying power that controls the processes of social reproduction, a system grounded in its relentless logic of self-expansion. Capital is thus the governing power over labour and its products. The capitalist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human qualities, but inasmuch as he is an owner of capital. His power is the purchasing power of his capital, which nothing can withstand. Later we shall see first how the capitalist, by means of capital, exercises his governing power over labour, then, however, we shall see the governing power of capital over the capitalist himself.11

It is essential to Marx’s conception of capitalism that it is a system of economic compulsion: both of capital over labour and of the systemic whole over each capital. It is this idea of capitalism being predicated upon the compulsion of market relations, and not just the enjoyment of market “opportunities” to make profit, that was central to how Ellen Wood explained its character. This structural system of capitalist social relations is at the core of what Marx, no less than the classical political economists, sought to make clear about the operation of the “unseen hand” of the market identified by Adam Smith. The operation of the unseen hand and the many specific implications of market relations on social experience are realized where the conditions of a “market society”—not merely a society in which markets exist—prevail. This form of social organization, founded upon the global compulsion of market competition in shaping the concrete processes of production in workplaces, and in determining the developing relations among individual capitals, is the fullest realization of the inherent character of capitalist social relations. What Marx referred to as “the movement of property”, its broad historical development, has therefore culminated in this very specific, but increasingly generalized form—which he would later identify with the “industrial form” of capitalist production. This ultimate realization of the alienation of labour went beyond its previous limitation of being grounded

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in land, and so “dealing the death-blow to rent  – that last, individual, natural mode of private property and source of wealth existing independently of the movement of labour, that expression of feudal property”12: All wealth has become industrial wealth, the wealth of labour; and industry is accomplished labour, just as the factory system is the perfected essence of industry, that is of labour, and just as industrial capital is the accomplished objective form of private property. We can now see how it is only at this point that private property can complete its dominion over man and become, in its most general form, a world-historical power13

Even in 1844, then, Marx had conceived the “reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour” in terms of the long historical development of the alienation of labour. This conception of capitalist social relations is clearly not just an extension of the social relations of market exchanges as have existed for millennia. While the commodity is the logical foundation of the system of capitalist social relations, capitalism does not exist simply because commodities are exchanged for profit on the market. Rather, capitalism exists because the worker has become no more than a factor of production under the control of capital—“like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work”, yet is owed nothing more from capital than that. Without this reduction of the worker to a direct and more or less absolute subordinate to the needs of capital, the social relations of capitalist production would not exist. It is not, of course, that workers do not struggle against this loss of power, their virtually complete loss of control in the processes of labour in which they are engaged—but their resistance does not fully succeed, or the inherent logic of capitalist production would be defeated. It is on this basis that it may be said that capitalism only exists where the direct producers have been reduced to a condition of market dependency. It is not, however, simply a question of workers being dependent on ­market relations for subsistence—what is crucial is that this market dependency is realized in the form of subordination to the control of capital. This idea was later expressed in Capital as the real subsumption of labour to capital14 (the merely “formal” subsumption existing where the employment of labour by capital has not been realized in the form of active control over production). Where capital does not maintain a real subordination of labour to its control, the distinctive and inherently crucial capacity to

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develop and extend relative surplus value—the achievement of (temporary) market advantage through innovation in productivity—is not possible. Looking retrospectively at the history of industrial production, it might seem as if the real subsumption of labour to capital was virtually guaranteed by the position of the employer relative to the worker. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Not only was the situation of the worker maintained through resistance over significant periods of time, however unsuccessfully in the long run, but in some contexts, the control of workers themselves over their labour were ensconced in socially recognized rights. Perhaps the most striking instance of this was in the aftermath of the French Revolution.15

Precapitalist France in the Nineteenth Century When understood in these terms, capitalism was found only in Britain before the defeat of Napoleon, having developed first in English agriculture, then spreading into manufactures there to engender a general system of capitalist production.16 There have usually been wageworkers in precapitalist societies, but their labour was never systematically organized and controlled by those who employed them, nor did markets regulate the processes of production in which they were employed. Workers were instead hired to do work of a well-defined sort, in the way they themselves understood how to do it. Even in the occasional precapitalist factories, labour processes were controlled by guilds, laws, tradition and the workers themselves—not by owners of capital.17 Only after English capitalism(emerging from agriculture) transformed the practices of industrial production, with capitalists imposing discipline and multiplying productivity through mechanical innovations in market-dependent and market-regulated production, did capitalism begin to spread to the rest of Europe, transforming it over the course of the next century and more. The extent to which nineteenth-century France truly differed from England has rarely been accorded proper recognition since it was not simply a matter of degree. An essential condition of the capitalist mode of production is that capital controls the process of production through management, the subordination (or subsumption) of labour to capital. Marx recognized beyond the formal subordination of labour to capital, the need for its real subordination—through which capital not only has an inherent right to control production but successfully intervenes to do so. In France, however, workers—both in legal principle and in practice within

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the workplace—largely retained the right to control production themselves. In labour law, there had long existed a fundamental difference between louage d’ouvrage (contract for work) and louage de service (contract of service).18 This distinction continues to this day: someone working under louage d’ouvrage is essentially a “contractor”, recognized in law as not being a subordinate of the person contracting for service, and therefore retaining rights with respect to the performance of work. The louage de service, by contrast, was the characteristic form of contract for a subordinate person, such as in domestic service, but in the twentieth century, it became the basis for the standard capitalist contract of employment.19 Whereas for much of the nineteenth century British labour law built upon and strengthened the common law relationship of “master and servant”, labour law in France from 1789 to the latter part of the nineteenth century instead built upon the liberty of the worker. Legal oversight of labour contracts was transformed from a police matter of public order into a civil issue of mutual contractual obligations, overseen by local labour tribunals.20 In this regard, “the contrast between France and England between 1789 and 1875 was therefore complete”.21 On the English side, “a logic of industrial subordination” took the employers’ good faith for granted; on the French side, “a concern for fairness” instead actively compensated for inequality in economic status, holding employers to account for the consequences of their management.22 In France, there was a formal recognition of the difference between “workers” (ouvriers) and “day labourers” (journaliers, who were under louage de service), with the latter comprising only 10% of industrial employees and enduring real subordination to the commands of the employer—unlike the great majority of workers, who continued to enjoy louage d’ouvrage. Indeed, there is a “perfect pattern of inverse symmetry” between France and England with respect to collective bargaining versus face-to-face negotiations by individual workers.23 In France, collective bargaining was banned, but workers benefited from the legal recognition of their rights as individuals relative to their employer; in England, workers were personally subject to their employer as “master”, but increasingly the law made room for the “voluntary” choice of collective representation. As a result of the French Revolution—buttressed locally by workers’ demands, and seemingly without concern at higher levels of the state— legal practice insisted on recognizing contractual equality in social terms, not just in formal economic terms. This was grounded upon the liberty of the individual worker, with local labour tribunals acting as conciliators

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seeking to balance interests and achieve peace and fairness in the workplace. It is clear, therefore, based upon a large and growing body of evidence, that the basic capitalist social relationship of the subordination of labour to capital in industry was very far from fully realizable—if perhaps not quite actually illegal—down to the last decades of the nineteenth century. Just as the French Revolution had the effect of buttressing the rights and customs of peasants, preventing any development of capitalist production on the land, so also it not merely reinforced but greatly increased the rights of workers in industry. This provided a profoundly different context for labour. It was not, of course, as if the French state took away all rights of property owners; but it had a predisposition towards benefiting great property holders in relation to the state itself, as well as large-scale trade and industry, while generally neglecting the position of small-scale proprietors in relation to production. This state-centric form of class relations had been characteristic of the old regime, and while important institutional changes certainly followed as a result of the Revolution, the continuity is striking.24 This entrenchment of precapitalist economic patterns goes a long way towards explaining the slow rate of industrialization in France and sheds light on the historically distinctive development of its labour organizations. It has long been recognized that, after the Revolution abolished guilds as holdovers from the feudal past, the workers continued to rely upon their compagnonnages, journeymen’s societies that equally had roots in the middle ages.25 In addition, workers increasingly developed various forms of mutual-aid society. Together with the legal regime of louage d’ouvrage, these forms both expressed and reinforced a corporatist character in workers’ organizations. The form of workers’ associations stood in integral, yet ironic, connection with the recognition of the rights of workers relative to employers: workers in a given trade developed a collective identity with respect to social needs and political participation, in part on the basis of their relative security and strongly held identity as individual members of that trade. This relative strength of French workers as individuals contrasted greatly with the characteristic form of capitalist social relations of wage labour, above all as realized in England, and provided a powerful historical foundation for the subsequent development of syndicalism in France. Of course, workers’ interests were not always met through the conciliation of the labour tribunals, and strikes did occur. Still, in keeping with the strong legal recognition of their rights as individuals, as well as the

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role of the state in preserving “public order”, strikes were entirely illegal until 1864, and strikers were frequently prosecuted.26 In the absence of collective bargaining, with most terms of employment recognized with respect to the trade as a whole in each locality, there were no trade unions as such. When, therefore, workers did resort to strikes, they organized ad hoc, secret, sociétés de resistance solely for that purpose—yet another development that contributed to French syndicalism. All of these tendencies were profoundly reinforced by the small-scale and artisanal production typical of French industry—as late as 1896, 36% of industrial workers were employed in workshops of 5 or fewer, and 64% in workplaces of less than 50.27

The Ancien Régime and Precapitalist Social Regulation Returning to the social and political contexts for Bodin’s work, as Ellen Wood argued, political thought in early modern France was profoundly influenced by a very different relationship between state and society than that characteristic of capitalism.28 Fundamental to the structure of capitalist social relations is an apparent separation of the political and the economic, forming seemingly distinct spheres of state and civil society—a separation that is absent even in principle from precapitalist societies.29 Indeed, a crucial “economic” fact of early modern France was the existence of what Robert Brenner has characterized as “politically constituted property”.30 This comprised claims to residual benefits from possession of formerly feudal parcellized political jurisdictions, outright ownership of venal offices in an expanding monarchical state apparatus, and various other calls upon state-centred income and power. These claims were the subject of endless negotiation and struggle between the architects of the “absolute” monarchy and the national and regional aristocracies of the nobility.31 In this social context, the polemical opposition between the Protestant Huguenots’ resistance to central monarchical authority and the absolutist political project of the politiques necessarily takes on a social and economic significance that is wholly absent from any comparable debate over constitutional authority in a capitalist society.32 In articulating the rights of “lesser magistrates”—specifically identified as noble seigneurs—against claims that the monarchy enjoyed the “absolute” power of undivided sovereignty, Huguenot tracts transparently expressed the interests of disaffected regional nobles. Those who were being excluded from the

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processes of co-optation, reallocation and elevation by which a new “absolutist” structure of politically constituted property was being constructed in early modern France had good reason to embrace Protestantism. This legitimized their opposition to the formally Catholic institutions of the monarchy, while they had little to lose from the religious exclusion from the burgeoning absolutist state apparatus that was a consequence. This Catholic absolutist state structure became firmly entrenched by the eighteenth century, following the Fronde’s last spasm of decentralizing resistance. By 1787, when aristocrats once again pressed their own interests against those of the king, they had come to articulate their opposition to “absolute” monarchy wholly in terms of rights which they claimed within the central state, and no longer in fundamental opposition to it. The prevailing form of politically constituted property had by then been definitively transformed into claims upon the centralized power and centrally collected revenues of the monarchical state. This new constellation of aristocratic political interests was promoted by Montesquieu. In striking contrast to the earlier position of the Huguenots, Montesquieu defended the rights of noble magistrates such as himself (a President of the parlement of Bordeaux) to counter royal prerogative entirely through the principle of the “separation of powers” within the state.33 It is essential to recognize that the historical context for the development of French political ideas continued to be defined by precapitalist social interests, based primarily upon the role of the state as a locus for careers and a principal source of income. Capitalism did not emerge in France until well into the nineteenth century (initially through the introduction of limited new factory production on the British model that fell outside the purview of local labour tribunals), and this point is of great significance in understanding the French Revolution and political thought in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods.34 The same consideration applies to political thinking in other parts of continental Europe. By contrast, the context for early modern political thought in England was very different. In England—and in England alone—a unique system of social property relationships developed. This system provided the basis for capitalism as a distinctive mode of production and progressively transformed society and the state over the course of the early modern period. As Neal Wood and Ellen Meiksins Wood argued, this particular historical context is crucial to understanding the history of English political thought from Sir Thomas Smith, through Hobbes and Locke, to Mill and beyond.35

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Since these approaches to the historical social contextualization of French and English political thought have been underpinned by a historical materialist understanding of the development of state and society,36 it is especially appropriate for this method also to be extended to the development of the political thought of Karl Marx. In this case, it is important to recognise that although most of Marx’s writings were done in England, the first and long the most highly developed capitalist society, his early works were the products of studies undertaken in precapitalist continental Europe. Nevertheless, it was in Marx’s earliest writings, specifically in the development of his ideas between the summer of 1843 and the summer of 1844, that precapitalist Europe first confronted the profound new reality of capitalist social relations, through Marx’s critical encounter with the classical political economists. One lesson we may learn for a contextually specific consideration of these works is the paradoxical one that Marx’s critical insights into the nature of capitalist society may well have been facilitated by the very absence of capitalist presuppositions in his intellectual formation: he had, to the end of 1843, no knowledge whatever of the basic ideas of political economy.37 A second lesson is that, considered in relation to the development of political thought in precapitalist Europe from Machiavelli through Hegel, the contributions made by Marx in his earliest works, even before the astonishing insights subsequently achieved through his critique of political economy, were significant in their own right. This line of analysis runs diametrically counter to the usually accepted conceptions of historical development, by which it is assumed that all of Western Europe (at least) took part in a broad, uniform and systemically integrated evolution of modern society—including capitalism—from the common experience of medieval feudalism. As I have argued, that ­conception not only underpins the major nineteenth-century contributions to historical social theory, as well as virtually all of their extensions into twentieth-­century thought, but is also particularly central to the idea of historical progress expressed in liberal (and subsequently Marxist) discourse since the mid-eighteenth century. The case against this general conception depends upon careful delineation of the particular attributes that distinguish capitalist society from the societies that preceded it, in terms coinciding with Marx’s critique of political economy. The economies of precapitalist European societies remained “embedded” (to use Karl Polanyi’s phrase) in larger systems of collective social regulation. The questions of who would produce what and how were in

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principle subject to determination by custom, law, collective bodies, and state regulation, in various combinations. They were not determined by the operation of market principles upon “factors of production”, even when (as for example in medieval and Renaissance Florence) a good deal of what was produced was intended for market. What seem to us from a capitalist perspective to have been “economic” issues were previously subjected to normative moral, political, and customary regulation by society, in much the same way as socially relevant practices that might instead be characterized as religious, familial, associative or political. All such issues of collective social life were simultaneously moral, legal and political. Throughout the history of political thought, from ancient Greece into the nineteenth century, they were understood to be subject to social regulation. Taken together, these comprised the substance of moral philosophy. The integration of these various social elements can be seen, for example, in the way Aristotle considers education, household management, and the regulation of trade, among other things, in his Politics, itself directly linked to his Nichomachean Ethics.38 Precapitalist moral regulation acknowledges no supremacy of the market. According to Aristotle, exchange should be governed by “proportionate equality”—based on the inherent relative merits of different forms of activity—and not the crass equality dictated by the market.39 It was not that Aristotle did not understand the market, but rather that he conscientiously rejected it as a template for social organization. Yet, though the market disturbed the moral order of Athens more than Aristotle liked, it continued to be hemmed in by custom and law. In medieval society, Aquinas likewise warned of the dangers of the market, and outright rejected usury, which was in fact outlawed. Still later, so closely was economic life regulated in ancien régime France that royal inspectors destroyed bolts of cloth that did not meet the standards. Such interference with what economists see as the “natural” regulation of the economy by market forces is, of course, wholly inconsistent with the premises of capitalist society. It is, however, perfectly normal within the theory and practice of precapitalist societies.

The Novelty of Capitalist Social Regulation The classic argument against “interfering” with market principles, and for a laissez-faire approach to the economy instead, was taken from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith articulated a sustained critique of what

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he saw in the contemporary “continental system” of regulating trade and production through laws, intermediary corporate bodies and the state. Smith was himself a moral philosopher. Yet, writing in capitalist Britain, he clearly distinguished between the overt forms of normative regulation appropriate to law, custom, ethics and religion, and the providential efficiency realized through the “unseen hand” of the market. The morality of the market principle lay not in complying with norms, but in securing a greater good for a greater number. Whether in the grim calculations of Reverend Malthus or in the Benthamites’ optimistic calculus of utility, the English development of capitalism led to the idea of an autonomous sphere of the economy, taken to be subject to a qualitatively distinct order of social rationality—and increasingly conceived to be eternal, immutable, and knowable through “natural” laws. As Neal Wood argued, the specifically capitalist character of English society, and its emerging political-economic conceptions were profoundly important determinants of John Locke’s thought.40 Indeed, in the course of the period during which agrarian capitalism took form and transformed English society, roughly from the first of the Tudors to the last of the Hanoverians, a distinctive body of social thought—comprising both political theory and political economy—reflected these developments, coming together ultimately in the classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill.41 Elsewhere in Europe, however, social and political thought remained tied to the very different particularities of precapitalist societies, as we have seen in the controversies of the French Religious Wars. The absolutist and constitutionalist thought that emerged in early modern France and England differed fundamentally. Both societies were marked by the political dominance of propertied classes, but these classes and their interests inherently differed, based on very different forms and legal regimes of social property. Throughout the histories of Western class societies, dominant classes have been plagued by the contradictions flowing from their dual social interests: on the one hand, maintaining the political power of the state, while on the other hand preserving the forms of social power directly manifested in private property. Because precapitalist forms of class relations have all been characterized by extra-economic coercion—the foundation for Brenner’s conception of “politically constituted property”—there is an unresolvable tension between the twin ruling class interests of maintaining a strong state and preserving individual property. As the Roman Republic grew, it faced recurrent threats of leaders

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like Sulla or Caesar achieving pre-eminent power, which resulted in the transition from Republic to Empire.42 Subsequently, however, the ability of great senatorial families in the West to evade taxes on their property, widely extended through patronage, undermined the capacity of the Imperial state to maintain itself.43 From Aristotle and Cicero, through the medieval conciliar debates, to the ancien régime, a central enduring problem for Western political thought has been “Who rules, and how is that rule to be constituted?”—a problem largely absent from the social thought of China and Islam, for example—because of the contradictions generated by politically constituted property. Only in capitalist society, with its formal separation of political and economic powers, confining class relations to the nominally non-political sphere of the economy, has it proved possible to resolve the recurrent contradictions in constituting power through the novel form of the liberal state. In the ancient world, the contradictions of ruling class power revolved about the political constitution of society as an inherently solidaristic, moral, legal, and economic community, whether Greek polis or Roman res publica. The contradiction was given a somewhat different form by the medieval development of feudalism, in which the basic property form became the seigeurie, literally a local jurisdiction of formally parcellized sovereign power. In place of the typically republican self-government of free property owners—expanded in Athens to include all free men as citizens, or narrowed in Rome primarily to the circles of senatorial nobility— the feudal state took the form of village-sized parcels of independent jurisdiction, grouped within constantly shifting hierarchies of feudal rank. In this context, the inherent contradictions between state power and private property took the form of a dynamic tension between the centralization of authority through the reassertion of monarchical power, and the resistance by individual nobles seeking to preserve more decentralized autonomy. It was of course through this dynamic that France, with its regular spasms of civil war, developed the “absolutist” monarchy from the late fifteenth century down to the great crisis of the Revolution. Other European societies (with England being exceptional due to its development of capitalism from a unique variant of feudalism) each followed their own historically specific trajectory of national organization—or disorganization—of the state.

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The Ideal of Liberty Notwithstanding the feudal/monarchical dynamic generated in the aftermath of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the ideal of liberty in a solidaristic self-governing republic did not disappear entirely. No longer representing the interests of wealthy aristocrats, as it did for Aristotle or Cicero, the republican ideal stood as a challenge to prevailing forms of constituted power. Aided by geography, the smallholders of the Swiss cantons successfully achieved republican liberty at the end of the feudal era, and were an inspiration to Machiavelli, the great theorist of republicanism.44 Unfortunately for Machiavelli, the very success of feudalism in northern Europe, and its transformation into a range of national “absolutist” states, undermined the conditions that had in the first place produced the flowering of Italian republican city-states between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.45 Brushing aside Machiavelli’s idea that good and frugal government—such as a republic might provide—was the best course for preserving power, the Medicis, like rulers throughout northern Italy, transformed a once vibrant republic into a sleepy principality, extinguishing the hopes for republican renewal. While Europe had a variety of specific contexts of class society, including the unique society emerging in England, European thinkers continued to read each other, together with theorists from the past, as they formulated ideas in each particular context. Rousseau, for example, rejected the radically asocial conceptions of the state of nature put forward by Hobbes and Locke, which gave the former an atomistically individualist defence of absolute sovereignty, and the latter an atomistic foundation for liberalism. Conceiving a far more social origin for inequality, property and the state, Rousseau addressed himself to the classically republican, solidaristic project of realizing the “general will”. Though perhaps achievable in small republics of petty proprietors, the simultaneous enjoyment of liberty, equality, and sociality seemed to him regrettably beyond the grasp of large and complex national states like France. The radical Jacobins in the French Revolution, of course, embraced just such a project. From the wealthiest aristocrats to the most modest bourgeois lawyers and officials, the bearers of politically constituted property in the ancien régime arrayed themselves across a continuum of political positions, from the staunchest defence of privilege in state and society to democratic republicanism.46 The radical bourgeoisie did not seek to create a capitalist form of state—they were not capitalists and there was no capitalism—but rather a “republic of virtue” which they would serve as

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administrators, educators, and politicians. The enduring opposition of the causes of Aristocracy and the Nation, however, opened an avenue of social revolution for an autonomous popular movement. Tutored in the rhetoric of the Third Estate, the people of Paris rose up in July 1789 to save the Nation, then provided a succession of increasingly radical bourgeois leaders with a means to push the Revolution to the left. In the process, the people not only supported the radical bourgeois ideal of a republican Nation, but also increasingly articulated their own interests in terms of direct—not representative—democracy, and social—not merely political— equality.47 Ultimately, these aspirations proved unacceptable even to the incorruptible Robespierre, whose subsequent fall from power met with popular apathy. The development of the popular movement reached an apotheosis in Gracchus Babeuf’s socialist Conspiracy of Equals, yet it was easily crushed in the Revolution’s lurch back to the right. Writing in the wake of the Revolution, in a Prussia that profited hugely from its defeat, but at a time when there was a growing awareness of England’s Industrial Revolution, Hegel sought to produce a total philosophy, comprehending human society not only as it existed in his own time, but through the whole of its (European) historical development. His goal was to subsume the whole of Western philosophy, from Aristotle to Adam Smith, in a developmental moral philosophy of individual, state, and society. Yet, what is striking in considering Hegel’s work in context is—notwithstanding his familiarity with Smith—how much his ideas were grounded in the precapitalist social realities of early nineteenth-century Germany.48 The most obvious and significant expression of this lies in Hegel’s casting of the state as agent of the universal, bringing order and the realization of Spirit to the diverse egoistic manifestations of civil society. It is not, as is sometimes supposed, that Hegel has proposed something akin to a social democratic corrective to the inherent “irrationality” of capitalist society. Hegel never appreciated Smith’s principle that it was the market that brought order to seeming chaos. He may have read Smith and married British ideas to French ideas in developing the concept of Bürgerliche gesellschaft—but he never actually encountered capitalist society and never grasped the crucial point that it inherently, and necessarily, lacked any principle of planning and regulation superior to the market. Indeed, even below his universalizing state, Hegel’s conception of civil society remains thoroughly structured by guilds and corporate bodies. In short, Hegel’s philosophy depicts a complex society, with a large and important commercial sector, but one that remains fundamentally precapitalist.

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It is, of course, precisely with a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that Marx began his development as a social and political theorist in 1843. In confronting this precapitalist work, Marx’s ideas were strongly influenced by two other equally precapitalist sources: the ideas of the Left Hegelians, and the radical democratic and socialist ideas that had emanated from the French Revolution and since grown in opposition to the established order across Europe. The efforts of the Left Hegelians to turn Hegel’s conceptions against the Prussian monarchy, rather than to apologize for it, are readily seen to be rooted in the issues and institutions of precapitalist society once Hegel himself is viewed in this light. They were, after all, preoccupied with religion as a mystifying alienation of human social life and particularly sought to challenge the official establishment and general regulation of religion by the state. Their moral philosophy was radical and secular, but no less precapitalist for that.

Early-Nineteenth-Century Socialist Ideas The growth of socialist ideas and movements in early nineteenth-century Europe, however, has usually been understood as a response to the growth of capitalism. Upon closer examination, not only is it clear there was very little development of truly capitalist industry on the continent before the middle of the century, but the political movements of the time instead had roots in the precapitalist politics of the French Revolution. Frederick Engels (who unlike Marx had become familiar with capitalist society by 1843, working at his father’s cotton mill in Manchester) first drew attention to the relative priority of German developments in philosophy, French developments in politics, and English developments in the economy.49 The political priority of the French had nothing to do with capitalist development and everything to do with the Revolution. French industrial workers in the 1840s were overwhelmingly artisanal, and the organization of their labour, political participation, and social life continued to be mediated in an entirely precapitalist way by the compagnonnages they created as a substitute for the guilds of the past and a host of similar practices. The huge silk industry of Lyons in the 1840s differed little from a hundred years before. Throughout France, as new forms of capitalist production came to be introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century, they developed alongside highly traditional production that only slowly began to change.50 Indeed, the development of labour law in France was conditioned by the Revolution’s principle of individual

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liberty and equality. In consequence, the rights of workers to control their own labour were enshrined in local and regional labour regulations, which developed in conscious opposition to the British legal principle of the “master/servant” relationship.51 Although the legal principles were transformed and the pace of social change accelerated later in the century— driven by industrial market competition emanating from Britain and by geopolitical pressure to emulate the growing capitalist adoption of innovations in technology, especially evident in Prussia—1840s France was as yet only slightly affected by the development of capitalist industry and, at the time, Germany still less so. And yet, early on Marat had declared that the Revolution itself raised the question of the loi agraire, long before the Jacobin introduction of price controls in the maximum, let alone the Conspiracy of Equals.52 The idea of republican action to counter poverty and at least partially restore social equality through limiting and redistributing property dates back to the demand for an “agrarian law” in ancient Rome, as Marat’s usage suggests and Babeuf’s choice of name reinforces. The origin of a socialist political movement in the French Revolution, then, had at the time no more to do with capitalism than did the origin of the Revolution itself. The whole of the politics of the Revolution, which continued to define politics well into the nineteenth century, was grounded in the material social interests of a precapitalist France. If the reconfiguration of the English state as a result of capitalism involved a growing liberal subordination of a specifically royal prerogative to representatives of the propertied class, the liberalism of the French bourgeoisie was instead characterized by direct and specific opposition to the political privileges of aristocracy. (Indeed, it had been nobles who ­challenged royal prerogative in the “pre-revolution” of 1787–8, not the bourgeoisie.53) Radical Jacobin demands for a representative republic, public education, and effective national administration, meanwhile, were directly traceable to precapitalist interests of the lesser bourgeoisie in securing meritocratic access to the growing public sector—law and state office being the most characteristic bourgeois careers. Finally, as even their great Marxist historians maintained, the radical, popular, sans-culottes of the Revolution were never a capitalist working class.54 The fundamental preoccupation of the popular movement throughout the Revolution lay in securing an affordable food supply. Increasingly, this was recognized to require not merely the preservation of the Nation, but direct democratic popular political participation against

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“aristocrats”—eventually including all those who, regardless of birth, put the interests of wealth ahead of the well-being of the people. In seeking to carry this popular political project further, there was nothing in Babeuf’s politics to link it to capitalism. Nor was the resurrection of babouvism in the nineteenth century and development of other socialist ideas and movements, any more connected to capitalism than the revival of Jacobinism during the restored Bourbon monarchy and the Orleanist regime.

The Context for Marx’s Initial Political Ideas and Critique of Political Economy This, then, was the social context for the development of Marx’s thought in 1843. While a detailed consideration of its key points would deserve a major work in its own right, even a cursory examination reveals that his 1843 works are preoccupied with the politics emanating from the French Revolution. Only with his 1844 Paris manuscripts did Marx first engage in the critique of political economy that constituted the grounding for historical materialism, and his primary contribution to social thought.55 The central problem addressed in the earlier works remained that of the state, consonant with precapitalist political thought from Rousseau, through the French Revolution and Hegel, down to the Left Hegelians. It was specifically in his 1843 critique of both Hegel’s and French Revolutionary conceptions of the state that Marx was able to carry the idea of human emancipation beyond the terms established by Rousseau, making a significant contribution to the development of political theory in its own right. First, in his unpublished critique of The Philosophy of Right, Marx challenged Hegel’s claim that state officials provided the essential “universal” or “general” element that was lacking in the particularism of civil society. He argued that neither they nor the “middle class”, from which they were drawn, could be a universal class because of the particular interest they held in protecting private property.56 Beyond this—already a trenchant point in the context of politically constituted property (figuring as much in Prussian as in French absolutism)—Marx challenged the state itself as inherently a kind of alienation. Where the Left Hegelians were primarily preoccupied with alienation in the form of religion—which attributed human social and moral capacities to the Divine—Marx recognized in the state the crucial concentration of human collective power, creating an alien force acting back upon us. Where Rousseau removed the sting of state power by presupposing a general will (even if it might not always be

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realizable, as was the problem with large national states), Marx could not accept this resolution of the contradiction between the universal and the particular. He instead described democracy as “the genus Constitution … the solved riddle of all constitutions”, for what it fundamentally expressed was human collective power and social capacity.57 But so long as the state continued to take concrete form as a separate and alien power over against us as individuals, it remained, itself, a barrier to human emancipation. Far from being able to resolve the conflicting propertied interests of civil society, the state preserved all those interests, adding to them its own subjection of the individual. With his two articles written for the Deutsch-Französische Jarhbücher between October 1843 and January 1844, Marx carried forward this analysis to transcend the entire framework of French Revolutionary politics. In “On The Jewish Question”, he argued against the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer that the project of simply secularizing the state—granting political rights to all, including the Jews, by abolishing every official recognition of religion—was wholly insufficient for the purposes of true human emancipation. In his preoccupation with religion, Marx argued, Bauer could conceive only of a political form of emancipation. The “political” form of state implied by the French Revolution, however—meritocratic, rather than founded on privilege—continues to take civil society (or, as the German can also be read, bourgeois society) as its precondition. Therefore, its political power necessarily ensures the separation of human social capacities from humanity as a whole. True emancipation must, therefore, depend on ending this separation, and so necessarily the political form of the state.58 Ridiculing Bauer for proposing “the free state” in place of the emancipation of humanity, Marx exposed the basic failing of even the most radically democratic precapitalist republican politics: they left unchanged both the social power of private property in civil society and the constitution of political power in the form of the state.59 With this, Marx issued a fundamental emancipatory challenge to the whole framework of political thought that had been articulated by dominant classes since ancient times. For Marx, then, not even radical Jacobinism could turn state personnel into a “universal class”—nor would even direct democracy bring emancipation as long as it remained merely political, leaving the structure of power in civil society unchallenged. Already inclined towards socialism, his critique of both liberal and radical expressions of German political philosophy led Marx to put paid to the whole bourgeois (non-capitalist)

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project of the French Revolution. Instead, Marx turned Hegel’s conception (an adaptation of the sort of class agency already prevalent in liberal accounts of history) into a very different idea of the “universal class”—a class having “radical chains”, capable of achieving real emancipation.60 Marx’s subsequent turn to embrace the critique of political economy created a body of social thought that transcended the limits imposed by precapitalist society altogether, recognizing in capitalism a specific source of historical dynamism with the potential to emancipate humanity from all forms of alienation and exploitation, and not merely to achieve classical republican ideals. The key moment was his exposure to Engels’s “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, which was submitted to Marx in November 1843 for publication in the Jarhbücher. In this work, it was Engels who first suggested that the capitalist working class would be responsible for a social revolution, in a passage prefiguring a key argument of the Manifesto of Communist Party: as long as you continue to produce in the present unconscious, thoughtless manner, at the mercy of chance—for just so long trade crises will remain; and each successive crisis is bound to become more universal and therefore worse than the preceding one; is bound to impoverish a larger body of small capitalists, and to augment in increasing proportion the numbers of the class who live by labour alone, thus considerably enlarging the mass of labour to be employed (the major problem of our economists) and finally causing a social revolution such as has never been dreamt of in the philosophy of the economists.61

It was only after reading this that Marx, in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction”, argued that the proletariat constituted the class with requisitely “radical chains”. Immediately after completing this article and his editorial work on the Jarhbücher, Marx turned his attention to reading each of the political economists Engels had cited. Never before having confronted these ideas, Marx powerfully brought his powers of critique to bear on political economy in the spring of 1844, in his Paris manuscripts.62 It was at this turning point that Marx truly undertook his life work. At once, he raised two crucial questions, defining first the historical materialist project of understanding the history of class society (“What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of [the] reduction of the greater part of

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mankind to abstract labour?”), and then the project of emancipation through working class struggle that would end it (“What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages… or regard equality of wages … as the goal of social revolution?”).63 What is astounding is the immediacy of what Marx achieved with his critique, literally in the first few pages of his manuscript, as he confronted the political-­ economic account of the “Wages of Labour”. Like a stranger in a strange land, Marx instantly saw capitalism for what it really was, an inherently exploitative system of social reproduction based on class relations of property embodying the alienation of labour. Marx’s historical materialist critique of political economy remains a uniquely powerful framework for understanding the nature of capitalist society, as it since has come to transform the world. Yet at the moment of this first great insight into the system, he literally had yet to set foot in a capitalist society. Instead, inspired by a Hegelian appreciation for the integral historical unity of human social life, he looked deep into the nexus of the specifically capitalist relationship of wage labour—solely based on the accounts in political economy—and found the ultimate expression of human alienation. Much remains to be said about the development of Marx’s thought in confronting capitalism as a social system, but excellent guides to this work already exist.64 What has yet to be appreciated is that the astounding acuity of Marx’s insights may result from his having approached capitalism without the blinkers that would likely have been imposed growing up in a context that took its peculiar social relationships for granted. Marx instead began as a thinker in precapitalist Europe, disturbed by social inequality and oppression, but unfamiliar with specifically capitalist social forms. His initial forays into political theory significantly advanced upon Rousseau’s thought, offering an understanding of the need to transcend both the conflicting particularities of private property and the alienating form of the political state, as such, in order to realize human emancipation. Although he grasped the essential nature of the project, he as yet saw no means to achieve it other than through philosophy,65 bound as he was by precapitalist frames of reference. Then, stepping across the bounds of precapitalist social experience to confront the character of a qualitatively different universe of capitalist social relations, he opened an entirely new avenue for social and political thought.

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Notes 1. The introductory chapter, “A Question of Method”, to Neal Wood’s John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984) offers an illuminating discussion of the historical approach to political theory. Ellen M.  Wood addressed the issue in more detail in her volumes conceived as the social history of political theory, From Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London: Verso, 2008) and Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment (London: Verso, 2012). 2. Wood, Liberty and Property, 147–69. 3. On the face of it, “precapitalist” would appear to be a problematically teleological term. The point, however, is that capitalism truly is unique as a social form, qualitatively different from all the forms of society that preceded it, however different those various forms may have been from each other. Thus, “precapitalist” is not a teleological usage, but a historical one: it was only possible to identify what all precapitalist societies had in common relative to capitalism after the latter actually developed as a novel social form. 4. Max Weber, “Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe”, in Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W.  G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 333–4. 5. As Karl Polanyi pointed out, however, use of the market mechanism for regulating exchange did not long predate the classical age of ancient Greece; it was not a feature of earlier civilizations in Egypt or Mesopotamia or in Minoan Crete. See “Aristotle Discovers the Economy”, in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W.  Pearson (Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, 1957), 64–94. Ellen M. Wood considers some of the implications of the social change between the entirely “marketless society” of Bronze Age Greece and that of classical Attica in Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988), 81ff. 6. Weber, “Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe”, 336–7. 7. It may, of course, be the case that in a broad social context in which workers generally are subjected to the control of capital over their labour, there remain pockets of production in which control rests with the workers. One might then reasonably conceive the society to be generally capitalist in character, with the artisanal workers an exception, and one likely constrained in various ways by the largely capitalist whole. It would not, however, be reasonable to find that capitalism existed (in Marx’s sense) where few if any wageworkers were subjected to the control of capital over production.

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8. Surplus value is the difference between the value produced by a worker and the value of the living wage required for her employment. The wage is determined socially, historically, and through struggle, but will always be less than the value a worker will typically produce or there would be no basis for profitable employment. Relative surplus value refers to the potential for an innovating owner of capital to have commodities produced more efficiently than the average in the market, and thus to have an advantage over less productive enterprises. Typically, this advantage would translate into being able to sell at a somewhat lower price while still making at least average profit, and thus to gain market share at the expense of the least productive enterprises. Innovation in production therefore produces a market advantage that exists until all remaining owners of capital in that market can match it. In a normal market, the price of a commodity over time (discounting inflation) will therefore decline as capitals joust with each other for advantage. 9. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 272. 10. Ibid., 279. 11. Ibid., 247. 12. Ibid., 291. 13. Ibid., 293. 14. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 511. There is an enormous body of literature on this issue, drawing particularly on a chapter in Marx’s original manuscript analysing the formal and real “subsumption” of labour to capital, which was not included in Capital. I take account of the published text alone here simply because it is entirely sufficient to the point. 15. I am indebted for much of what follows on France to the analysis of Xavier Lafrance in his as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation, Citizens and Wage-Labourers: Capitalism and the Formation of a Working Class in France (York University, 2013). 16. See Ellen M.  Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002), George C. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000), and Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 17. The work of E. P. Thompson is especially enlightening on the long struggle by capitalists to impose their control over labour upon the workers they employed, who, for centuries, resisted the notion that their labouring capacities were not theirs to control even when working for wages. This theme runs throughout Thompson’s work, but see particularly “Time, Work-­Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, in Custom, Law and Common Right (New York: The New Press, 1991) and The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

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18. Alain Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail: une évolution contrastée entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne au XIXe siècle”, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 33, no. 2 (2006): 101–20 (published in English as “Industrial tribunals and the establishment of a kind of common law of labour in nineteenth-century France”, Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)). 19. Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail”, 103, 113–4. 20. Ibid., 105–9. 21. Ibid., 109 [my translation]. 22. Ibid., 112. 23. Ibid., 116. 24. See my analysis in Rethinking the French Revolution, 200–3. 25. For a classic typology of the forms of working-class organization in France, see Louis Levine, Syndicalism in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 26–33. On the compagnonnages, and particularly their political role after the Revolution, see William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 26. There were 14,000 prosecutions between 1825 and 1864, and 9,000 strikers were imprisoned (Robert J.  Goldstein, Political Repression in 19th Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010), 58. 27. Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914”, in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 49. Magraw offers an excellent overview of the role of syndicalism in French politics. 28. Ellen M. Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s ‘General Will’”, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University, 1989), 117–39. 29. Ellen M. Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism”, in Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19–48. 30. In his original formulation, Brenner termed this “private property in the political sphere” in “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, in The Brenner Debate, ed. T.  H. Aston and C.  P. E.  Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 290. 31. See particularly William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-­ Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Also, see my discussion of the politics of class interests in the ancien régime, in Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987).

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32. As Wood argues, notably in Liberty and Property, the “absolute” power of the monarchy was not so much a reality as an objective relative to the genuine local and regional power of the formerly feudal nobility. The centralized power of the state in England far exceeded that of France throughout the early modern period. 33. Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 156–66. 34. There is an extensive theoretical and empirical analysis in Rethinking the French Revolution, arguing that there was no capitalism in the ancien régime. This argument is based on the ground-breaking work of Robert Brenner, who first emphasized the divergent paths of England and France in 1976 in “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe”, reprinted with a series of responses prompted by the article and Brenner’s lengthy reply to critics in The Brenner Debate. I have pursued the origin and development of these divergent paths more deeply into history, buttressing the case that there was no emergence of capitalism in France before the nineteenth century, in “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies XXVII (2000). 35. See Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), Foundations of Political Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Ellen M. Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), Liberty and Property; Ellen M. Wood and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition (London: Pluto Press, 1997). 36. This historical materialist analysis of the origin of capitalism and the divergence of France and England clearly is at odds with conventional Marxist accounts. The reasons for this discrepancy, and the extent to which the present analysis is in accord with the core of Marx’s own work, have been taken up at some length in Rethinking the French Revolution, and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, as well as in Robert Brenner, “On the Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-­Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (1977), and “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in The First Modern Society, ed. A.  L. Beier et  al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Ellen M. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002). 37. This is to exclude the idiosyncratic “national political economy” of Friedrich List, and the elements of Adam Smith’s work incorporated into Hegel’s conception of “civil society”.

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38. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1179a33–1181b23. 39. Aristotle, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 1256b40– 1259b36; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1980), 117–22. 40. Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism. 41. Ellen Wood and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition; Ellen Wood, Pristine Culture of Capitalism; Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution. Today read primarily for his liberal political theory, Mill also produced Principles of Political Economy, which was the standard text on the subject for a generation. 42. Ronald Syme’s classic account of this political dynamic, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), remains unsurpassed. 43. For a brief synopsis, see Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: N.L.B., 1974), 98–103, citing particularly the definitive work of A. H. M. Jones, especially The Later Roman Empire, 282–602, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 44. Niccolò Macchiavelli, “Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius”. In The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Modern Library, 1950), Bk. I, Chap. lv. 45. Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994), 63–74. 46. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 107–13, 180–202. 47. Comninel, “The Political Context of the Popular Movement in the French Revolution”, in History from Below, ed. Frederick Krantz, 143–62; “Quatre-Vingt-Neuf Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the French Revolution”, Historical Papers/Communications historique, 1989. 48. Ellen M.  Wood discusses Hegel in this light in Pristine Culture of Capitalism. 49. Frederick Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, The New Moral World 19, no. 4 (November 1843), MECW, vol. 3, 392–3. 50. For the role of artisanal labour in nineteenth-century France and the links between politics and artisanal workers’ organizations, see Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, Ronald Aminzade, Class, Politics, and Early Industrial Capitalism: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Toulouse, France (Albany NY: State University of New  York Pres, 1981) and “Capitalist Industrialization and Patterns of Industrial Protest: A Comparative Urban Study of Nineteenth-Century France”, American Sociological Review IL (1984): 437–53. 51. Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail”, 101–20.

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52. Shirley Gruner, “Le concept de classe dans la révolution française: une mise à jour’, Histoire Sociale/Social History” IX, no. 18 (1976): 412–5. 53. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 199. 54. Albert Soboul, Understanding the French Revolution (London: Merlin Press, 1988), 99–101. This point is emphasized throughout the work of Soboul and George Rudé, who both argued that the identity of sansculottes, comprising small proprietors, artisans, and day labourers alike, derived primarily from their position as consumers of bread. 55. See Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 121–31. 56. Karl Marx “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, MECW, vol. 3, 44–54. 57. Ibid., 29. 58. Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 168. 59. Ibid., 152ff. 60. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Introduction”, 186. For the liberal conception of class in history, see Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 54–74. 61. Frederick Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, MECW, vol. 3, 434. 62. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers), 229–346. 63. Ibid., 241. 64. On the nature and meaning of Marx’s critique of political economy as a historical materialist approach to the class society of capitalism: Ellen M. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism; E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory”, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 1978); Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (New York, London: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, London: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 4 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976–87). 65. See Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 1: 147–8.

CHAPTER 3

Emancipation in Marx’s Early Work

The Modern Problem of Emancipation One does not often hear serious discussion of human emancipation these days, and yet the idea is at the core of critical thinking about the human condition and remains the ultimate goal of truly transformative politics. Although a range of issues concerning political liberty emerged earlier in the modern age, and some can be traced back still earlier through the history of popular struggles and the history of political thought, it really was in the era of the French Revolution and its aftermath that the question of human emancipation as such came to the fore. While other thinkers contributed to understanding the issues, it remains particularly the theoretical achievements of the young Karl Marx in this period that help to illuminate what human emancipation entails, and how it is to be achieved. Marx grew up in Trier, an ancient and formerly free Rhineland city. It had embraced the progressive principles emerging from the French Revolution, but, as definitively sealed by the defeat of Bonaparte shortly before his birth, it became subject to the reactionary rule of Prussia. Marx’s father had been compelled to set aside his Enlightenment principles and deist beliefs and to abandon his inherited Jewish identity and formally become a Lutheran in order to maintain his legal career. While, on the one hand, it mattered little whether the details of theology from which he stood apart were those of Judaism or Lutheranism, on the other hand, this undoubtedly rankled, as indeed was the case for many © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_3

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in the city of Trier. Karl was a brilliant and philosophical young man, sufficiently so as a youth to have taken part in long walks with the Prussian Baron von Westphalen. The latter was relatively liberal and thus sent to oversee this possibly fractious new territory, and it was his daughter Jenny who was the love of Marx’s life. It is clear that from an early age Marx was deeply committed to a radical realization of human freedom, and to atheism proper. Frustrating his father by turning towards philosophy and away from a career in law, then abandoning even the pretence of legal studies after his father died,1 Marx devoted himself as student, journalist, and activist to clarifying the meaning of human emancipation and how it was to be achieved. As also was the case for virtually every other thinker and activist of the time, the immediate and inescapable starting point for Marx’s ideas required coming to terms with the politics, objectives, and limitations of the French Revolution. In its opposition first to aristocratic privilege, and then to monarchy, the politics of the Revolution revolved about issues of liberty, equality, and sociality.2 The radical Jacobins had conceived the Revolution in terms of fundamentally political emancipation, and the lawyers, office holders, and professionals who constituted their majority came to understand this almost entirely in terms of building a democratically representative republican “Nation”. They saw their mission as—and increasingly they became— functionaries of the state serving as a revolutionary instrument devoted to instilling democratic republican citizenship. This project of realizing a republic in accord with Rousseau’s ideas, embodying the General Will of the people as the nation—however much Rousseau himself may have been doubtful of such a possibility—went far beyond the relatively mild forms of earlier and more obviously liberal politics, from the most tentative of original revolutionaries through the moderate Girondins.3 Yet, from the perspective of the even more radical popular movement within the Revolution, which embraced not only direct democracy but increasingly also ideas of social equality—political tendencies that culminated in Gracchus Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals”—even the most radical Jacobins fell far short of advocating true human emancipation. Babeuf’s ideas, in turn, constituted a key contribution of the French Revolution to the development of “socialism” in the first half of the nineteenth century, notably in the emergence of babouvism as a movement among workers in the 1840s. Indeed, it was in reference to the raising of “the social question” that a distinctive radical politics emerged within what otherwise was a broad “left”—comprising democratic, republican, and even merely

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liberal-­constitutionalist ideologies—defined by shared opposition to absolute monarchy following the Revolution. It was in this context that, by early 1844, it had become clear to Marx that both the social question and the “political notion of power” had to be urgently addressed. The latter phrase is how Jean Bruhat described the focus of Marx’s interest during the first half of 1844, a period he characterized as one of “preoccupation” with the radically Jacobin Convention of 1792–4.4 Simultaneously, with his close study of the radical politics of the French Revolution, Marx in this period undertook his first efforts at the critique of political economy. At this time, Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge of his plan to write a history of the French Revolutionary Convention, and he urged the publication in Vorwärts of excerpts from the memoirs of the Jacobin revolutionary René Levasseur, which he had studied. Yet, while it is important to take note of this interest in the radical politics of revolution at the time, his most significant work in this period was undoubtedly the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in which he first developed his critique of political economy.5 It was also in this period, after completing his articles for the Deutsch-­ Französische Jahrbücher that he had edited with Arnold Ruge, that Marx definitively abandoned the idea that human emancipation was either a project of philosophy or a collaboration between philosophy and the proletariat. From the spring of 1844 onwards, Marx was clear that the emancipation of humanity belonged to a historical process grounded in the development of social relations (the material history of social humanity), and that the processes of class struggle that drove and informed the realization of real emancipation emerged from the interests of the working class in their immediate character as “common humanity”, and not from philosophy. Indeed, in examining Marx’s manuscripts and texts from 1843 through mid-1844, we can discern—in language that is sometimes daunting in its dense philosophical analysis, if also at times poignant, scathing, or breathtaking in its vision—the process through which his immanent critique of both Hegel and the philosophy of the Left Hegelians culminated in his transcending the idea that philosophy was action. This new stance was most famously articulated in Marx’s eleventh “Thesis on Feuerbach” the following year: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”6 What, then, we are led to ask, is the form of change that is necessary— what is the nature of the emancipation that must be achieved?

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That even the most conservative forms of liberalism can be recognized still to have embodied genuine elements of emancipation was due to the oppressive legacy of feudalism. At the core of the “feudal revolution” that swept the territories of Charlemagne’s empire in the middle of the middle ages (circa 1000 CE), and which spread from there through territories acquired through colonization in the later middle ages (notably in Eastern Europe), was the reduction of virtually all previously free persons to a status of unfreedom. This followed from the sudden appropriation of all sovereign powers of state authority by great landlords, who constituted themselves in a directly political sense as lords over not only tenants of their own properties, but also over all who lived nearby.7 This transformation wiped out the surviving traces of a public sphere, first established in the ancient world, in which free men (if only men) enjoyed political rights, and were protected in their freedom. In the early modern period, after the demise of feudalism proper in the mid-fifteenth century, re-establishment of a meaningful public sphere—accompanied by much debate over constitutional forms, legal rights, and the proper limits of sovereign power— emerged as the most fundamental and enduring issue of politics within the dominant classes. The circumscribed limits of this project of minimal political emancipation were, however, blown open by the experience of the Revolution. In light of this historical contextualization, emancipation in its broadest sense can be seen to be a particular political project of the modern age. The politics of the ancient world had been characterized in fundamental ways by the possession of liberty (though, of course, many were excluded from it). With the introduction of feudalism proper, however, citizenship and liberty were extinguished for the great majority of even the formerly free male population relative to lordly bearers of sovereign power. The republics and republicanism of late medieval Italy were neither simply ancient survivals, nor prematurely modern political forms, but historically specific developments within the middle ages that integrally connected both surviving and new (e.g., Venice) urban, commercial and industrial societies in Italy with the feudal societies of the north.8 Indeed, it is telling that in the wake of the Renaissance after the feudal era, Italian cities generally lost their ascendency and republican autonomy even within the peninsula, and slipped into a long political somnolence. Early in the modern era, few other than the Swiss had won back anything like the essentially republican form of liberty characteristic of the ancient world,9 liberty that was thereafter jealously preserved in their cantons. It is because of the general imposition of unfreedom in the feudal societies of the later

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middle ages, and the limited extent to which emancipation had since been realized, that the Genevan Rousseau was prompted to confront the conundrum that men were born free, yet everywhere were in chains. Subsequently, there emerged at the level of culture, in “the Enlightenment”, a growing rejection of superstition and revealed faith as the basis for public discourse and the regulation of public activity. The feudalism of the Middle Ages had devolved upon the Church virtually complete control over culture—regulation of morality, the forms of social intercourse, artistic expression, and acceptable knowledge and legitimate ideas, while the lords enjoyed almost untrammelled political power as bearers of the sword. As issues of public rights and freedom re-emerged in the modern era, so also did challenge to the power of the Church. Contrary to much recent opinion, this cannot be reduced to a single dimension of modern discourse, such as liberalism—neither Voltaire nor de Sade can in any way be said to have been liberals, nor is it easy even to reconcile Rousseau with liberal ideas. The emancipation of thought and cultural production that constituted the “Enlightenment” in the course of the modern era took many and varied forms, framed within a broad rejection of authorized received knowledge, leading to the profound displacement of religion as guardian of ideas, values, and legitimacy. Nor can the modern era be associated with a single form of social and economic development. As Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood have demonstrated, capitalism did not develop across Europe, but uniquely in England; and not in the context of town life, but in agriculture.10 In France, by contrast, the social property relations of the modern era increasingly took the form of politically constituted property within the monarchy, centred upon increasingly formal property rights in personally owned, heritable, and saleable “public” offices, supplanting the immediately political property form of territorial sovereignty characteristic of the feudal era. This led to a society characterized by intense bureaucratism and statism— in contrast with both feudal society and modern England—with intense and frequent struggles over interests that were simultaneously “political” and “economic”.

States and Property After the French Revolution It is in this light that we must interpret the “nation building” that the Jacobins undertook as professional administrators of the French Republic. With every major political development between the calling of the Estates General in 1788 and the consolidation of Bonaparte’s Empire, the number

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of state officials grew. Much like the absolutist monarchy of the old régime, this burgeoning apparatus of power both played a vital role in the social and economic life of France, and provided income and career to the already rich and powerful, the talented and ambitious, and the merely comfortable bourgeois.11 This development is evident in Marx’s commentary on the state at the founding of the Second Empire by Louis Bonaparte: the executive power commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million individuals and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals; where through the most extraordinary centralization this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility, and an elasticity which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, the loose shapelessness of the actual body politic… But it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications that the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents, and honorariums.12

It is striking to what extent, not only in this passage but throughout the work, Marx identifies the material interests of the French dominant classes in terms of finance, state incomes, and rents, and at the same time the slight extent to which any industrial bourgeoisie is even noted, let alone credited with having a significant role. Moreover, Marx clearly identified the peasantry as bearing the burden of supporting the dominant classes through their astounding level of mortgage indebtedness, together with the heavy taxes that were the “life source” of the apparatuses of state.13 The French state, through its successive absolutist, Republican, constitutionally monarchical, and Bonapartist forms, erected an ever more stupendous edifice of administration, rule, and war—nominally for the good of the people, or the glory and General Will of the Nation, but always on the backs of impoverished peasant masses, and to the great benefit of its architects and overseers. There were, then, different paths of social and political development in the modern era, each emerging from the middle ages in accord with the historical specificities of the societies of the era. In Italy, robust industry

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and commercial dominance, together with strong republican institutions, subsided into undistinguished centuries of aristocratic dominance over sharecropping peasant tenants, aside from a few surviving enclaves of commerce. France and England, meanwhile, increasingly diverged as a result of having had fundamentally different feudal forms.14 In France, the central state developed as means for politically constituted property to appropriate peasant surplus. England, however, became the unique locus for the development of agrarian capitalism, from which its generalized industrial form subsequently developed, with considerable direct assistance from the state.15 Not only, then, were the forms of state different in different European societies, but the differences directly related to structures of social property relations through which class exploitation was realized. In 1843, it was Frederick Engels who first delineated between England, having priority in the sphere of the economic; France, with priority in the political; and Germany, first in the sphere of philosophy. He drew out this idea specifically in relation to how the doctrine of communism emerged in each country.16 This focus on ideas is telling: socialists in England were driven to communist ideas “practically, by the rapid increase of misery, demoralisation, and pauperism in their own country”, with little awareness of the ideas and movements on the Continent. French socialists instead came to the same conclusion “politically, by first asking for political liberty and equality; and, finding this insufficient, joining social liberty, and social equality to their political claims”. Since, however, “the Germans became Communists philosophically, by reasoning upon first principles”, it is not hard to appreciate that this development was not grounded in the economic or political experiences of working people. This German priority in philosophy was associated by both Engels and Marx with its priority in the development of modern religious theology.17 Not only did Germany produce the Reformation, but almost immediately, the ideas of religious reform were appropriated by German peasants, with the radically communist preacher Thomas Münzer as their leader, to justify demands for social equality, elimination of private property, and an end to the right of ­political power over others.18 Luther exploded in vituperation against this presumption that a return to original Christian values might thus be applied to social life outside the ecclesiastical structure, and exhorted those in power to “kill them like dogs!” The role of religion as a specific form of inequality and oppression in addition to those of property and political power was particularly clear in Germany. The Holy Alliance of 1815 brought together the Christian states of Orthodox Russia, Catholic Austria, and Lutheran Prussia—with

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tacit support from Anglican-dominated Britain—to suppress the liberal, democratic, and socialist ideas that emerged during the French Revolution. Then, in pursuit of a more complete Christian union, Frederick William III forced a merger of Lutheran and Calvinist faiths in Prussia, generating not only resistance from “Old Lutherans” who rejected the apparent incorporation of Calvinist doctrine, but a profound awareness of the politicization of religious belief. Whereas the French state, both during the Revolution and after the overthrow of the restored Legitimist Bourbon monarchy in July 1830, stood opposed to the claims of the Church—and the established Church was becoming ever less significant to the increasingly liberal form of state in Britain—the absolutism of the Prussian state was grounded in a reconfirmation of faith. It is this confluence of religious oppression, political oppression, and the oppression of all “socialist” ideas challenging inequality and immiseration in the wake of the defeat of the French Revolution, that provided the immediate context for the development of Marx’s ideas with respect to the meaning of human emancipation in 1843 and 1844. Since his youth, he had become increasingly critical of oppression in each of these forms. Forced by state censorship from his position as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he returned in 1843 to a critical reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to clarify his thought.19

Marx’s Critique of Hegelian Philosophy in 1843 One of the crucial issues with respect to the development of Marx’s ideas is their relationship to the thought of G. W. F. Hegel. Whole books have been written on this, of course, yet there nonetheless has been a tendency to mystify the relationship, while at the same time reducing the ideas of each thinker to a few oft-repeated tropes. Normally, what is stressed is the dialectical character of their thought, with the materialist Marx turning the upside-down idealism of Hegel, right side up. The meaning of “the dialectic” itself is in turn too often conveyed simply by reference to the succession of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It is not that these formulations are, when properly interpreted, fundamentally wrong, but rather that they do not do a very good job of explaining the nature of these ideas to persons not already familiar with them. The result is that many readers have come away with a somewhat mechanical conception of “the dialectic”, and little real understanding of the philosophical genius of Hegel and the way it influenced Marx’s own ideas.

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Given the difficulty of Hegel’s texts, it is actually then more likely that a non-specialist reader will come to appreciate some of their depth through familiarity with Marx’s ideas than to glean insights from Hegel with which to illuminate Marx. To facilitate understanding of the thought of each, one may begin by emphasizing fundamental elements that their philosophical perspectives shared. At their core, the ideas of Hegel and Marx had in common a recognition that human existence takes form in and through a systemic social unity, or totality; that the historical development of human activity, ideas, and institutions proceeds from early, and simpler, forms to more complex forms through continuous interactive processes within the social totality; and that this history of social development constitutes the realization of our collective human potential as a meaningful and integral whole. To shed light on these common elements, it may help to relate briefly the ideas of both thinkers to the ideas of Aristotle. For Aristotle, the elements of both the natural world and the social world of humans in each case possessed a fundamental form that reflected their essential purpose, nature, or position within the whole: what might be said to be their telos, or “end”. In the classic example, the telos of an acorn is realized in the form of the mature oak tree. Rarely will this telos be realized perfectly, but even if the acorn grows into a stunted tree, or is devoured by squirrels, its end remains that of the towering oak. In opposition to Plato’s conception of purely ideal forms, Aristotle conceived these ends to be rooted in nature. This can be interpreted as merely a different variety of idealism, given the presupposition of an essential telos, but the difference from Plato is real. In Aristotle’s view: it is evident that the polis belongs to the class of things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis [zoon politikon]. He who is without a polis, by reason of his own nature and not of some accident, is either a poor sort of being, or a being higher than man…20

We humans, then, are inherently social animals, and only gods and monsters naturally exist outside society. Without further elaborating Aristotle’s ideas, what is most striking is that his conception of the nature of humans is fundamentally ahistorical. Although Barbarians and the “slavish” peoples of the east are conceived to fall short of the telos of humanity, there is nothing in Aristotle to suggest the superiority of the Greeks is the result of any historical process of human development. In his thought, the telos of a thing is fundamentally timeless.

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Hegel conceived himself to be taking up the mantle of Aristotle, and the real extent to which he achieved this ambition is a mark of his undoubted genius. For Hegel, however, human social existence—and the telos of humanity—was not timeless. Instead, humanity had for Hegel an inherently historical dimension of development. Human social capacities, institutions, and ideas change over time, and in his far more complex philosophical understanding, Hegel embraced the pervasive liberal conception of history as progress. Through the historical processes of change, humanity has been approaching its ultimate end, the record of our development evident in the progress of societal forms and institutions, the growth of reason and human capacities, and the sphere of our ideas. Humanity has developed both as the individuals who constitute the social totality and in that totality, as such. Ideas, for example, do not exist only in individuals, but are shared among humans in our collectivity, creating a sphere of knowledge transcending that which any individual could achieve. Human ideas being the only form of rational consciousness that is known to exist in the universe, our development as humanity corresponds to the development of consciousness itself. It is in this sense that it is said that Hegel’s philosophy of history and history of philosophy were the same. Our telos is the historical realization of fully rational and ethical life in our social collectivity, while at the same time our ideas will achieve comprehension of the universal. In Hegel’s thought—roughly corresponding again to liberal views on historical progress—the social forms, institutions, and ideas that exist at any given time fit with the development of the totality to that point in time. Throughout history, the ensemble of social forms constitutes a whole, realizing the best social life possible at each time, while continuing to develop, individually and together, in conjunction with consciousness and human activity. In his notable expression of this idea, “The life of the ever present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments”.21 It is this conception of integral and systemic historical development that was attractive to Marx, though his own ideas veered towards materialist foundations for the processes of history, where Hegel focused upon ideas. Marx had initially rejected the philosophy of Hegel—the comfortable academic who provided an apologia for the Prussian monarchy—but subsequently found himself drawn to the “Left” or “Young” Hegelians, who pursued an atheist and materialist re-grounding of Hegel’s historical conception of social totality. Recognizing humanity in its collectivity as the real embodiment of consciousness in the universe, Hegel brought together

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philosophy, religion, and history to conceive the development of humanity as the realization of the divine in the world over historical time. Its key contribution was the way in which he incorporated the already pervasive liberal conception of history as progress into formal philosophy. Where the philosophy of Aristotle conceived the world in fundamentally fixed terms and the telos of a thing was simply the end towards which it developed within this ahistorical frame, Hegel powerfully advanced the idea that the social whole—indeed, the whole of humanity—realized its development, both as a totality and in its integral parts, through history. Through discernible stages of growing consciousness and increasing complexity, humanity was seen to be in development towards a final form of fully realized human potential. Whereas the political economy of England conceived progress largely in terms of economic development, and the political ideology of France conceived progress in terms of historical class struggles, progress found its expression in Germany primarily in philosophical terms, and notably in terms that made peace with the Prussian theocratic monarchy. It was then, in opposition to Hegel’s accommodation with this monarchy,22 that the Left Hegelians sought to turn his ideas against the reactionary state. It was this combination of theoretical depth and sophistication with a left political agenda that attracted Marx, despite his initial distaste for Hegel. Within his work, Hegel elaborated upon the longstanding philosophical (and theological) concept of alienation, particularly pursuing the integration of its sense of the sale of property with a more profound sense that involved personal identity, informed by the idea of being a “stranger” to God.23 The Left Hegelians turned this conception back against Hegel’s concessions to Prussian official religion, articulating the view that religious belief constituted alienation from our own humanity. In this critical conception of alienation, putting faith in an imaginary divinity was a denial of our own responsibility, through our individual and especially collective human capacities, for the forms of life and achievements we realize in and through the social whole. In worshipping God, then, “religion alienates our own nature from us”,24 we project the potency of our own collective existence as something apart, a divine “other” to which we are subject—a subjection made palpable in subordination to religious authorities, and particularly to the “holy” form of the monarchy. Rejecting the conservative view that human freedom and rationality, as conceived by Hegel, had already been realized in the Prussian state (however explicit his texts seemed on that point), they sought through their own approach to philosophy to make reason and emancipation real.

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For the most part, as is especially evident in Bruno Bauer’s book The Jewish Question, Left Hegelians conceived the emancipation of humanity in terms of its release from religious alienation. The authority of the Prussian state was said to be grounded in religion, and it directed much of its attention towards religious issues. The philosophical freedom of humanity from the alienation of religion, embodied in the freedom of the state from religion, would result in the realization of freedom in the republic, or Freistaat. It was this reduction of human emancipation to nothing more than achieving the merely political objective of the French Revolution—the “free state” rather than free humanity—to which Marx directed his caustic criticism of Bauer in the first part of “On The Jewish Question”.25 He concluded this critique by demanding a great deal more: All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to man himself. Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person. Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “forces propres” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.26

In his first published work of theory, then, Marx declared the need to go beyond the “merely political” politics of the French Revolution— human emancipation required the transformation of our “own powers” into a truly social form. Among the Young Hegelians, however, Moses Hess had already begun to take the idea of alienation an important step further, in ideas best known from The Essence of Money, published in 1845. He had first broached this approach in a Swiss publication of 1843 that contained pieces by several Left Hegelians, as well as Frederick Engels, and Marx’s critique was directed towards Bauer’s piece in this collection as well as The Jewish Question.27 Hess’s contribution clearly made a significant theoretical advance. As Hess articulated his ideas in 1845, he conceived “the human essence” to be “the collaboration of individuals of the human species” in

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the social whole of life activity, and he saw in money the alienation (estrangement) of humans from that essence in terms drawn from the critique of religion: in the old mutual estrangement of men, an external symbol had to be invented to represent the spiritual and material exchange of products. Through this abstraction from real, spiritual and living intercourse the capacity, the creative force of men was increased during their estrangement; in other words, they found in this abstract means of intercourse a mediating essence for their own estrangement; they had to seek the unifying essence outside of themselves, i.e., an inhuman, super-human essence, since they were not men, i.e., were not united. Without this inhuman means of intercourse they would never have entered into intercourse. But as soon as men unite, as soon as a direct intercourse between them can take place the inhuman, external, dead means of intercourse must necessarily be abolished.28

In the second part of “On The Jewish Question”, referring specifically to Bauer’s piece in the Swiss collection, Marx developed a critique of money as alienation in conjunction with his critique of merely political emancipation. In passages that are too often misread (because their subject is not the question of Jews, as such, but rather the preoccupation with money that Christianity created and imposed as the day-to-day meaning of being “Jewish”), Marx’s point is that this preoccupation with money has finally reached its highest development in bourgeois society “under the dominance of Christianity”.29 In this sense, he argues, Christians have themselves become “Jews” (as, he notes ironically, it was Jews who first became Christians). The real object of emancipation, therefore, is not the merely political freedom of the secular state—which is insufficient even to end the religious form of alienation—but achievement of social life without the alienation from ourselves that is embodied in the pursuit of money. In this first of his published “early works”, therefore, Marx advanced a philosophical position that went beyond the Jacobinism of the French Revolution and explicitly incorporated “the social question”. He had, however, already developed an even more far-reaching contribution to the idea of emancipation than that contained in “On The Jewish Question”, marking, indeed, a remarkably original and profound contribution to political theory. Through his earlier return to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx had already come to appreciate that the very form of the state, as such, was inherently a form of human alienation.

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This point emerges through his point-by-point critique of Hegel’s ideas in relation to their fawning embrace of the Prussian monarchy. In these terms, the final stage of human existence saw the achievement of individual and collective ethical life in full, through which humans subsumed themselves to harmonious order, under regulation by the highest realization of right. This was the state, specifically in the form of constitutional monarchy, with judicial and representative legislative institutions united with the power of the executive, in the person of the sovereign and through the agency of his administrators. At one level, Hegel’s claims do go beyond merely legitimizing or apologizing for that monarchy, but in their toadying, they are immediately open to the most cutting criticism, which Marx did his best to provide. In taking these ideas seriously, however, Marx moves from Hegel’s assertion that “the general interest” is the purpose of the state, to its implications for the nature of the constitution. Here, where Hegel abases himself to assert that without a monarchy the state “is no longer a state”, Marx focuses upon the meaning of the constitution in relation to the people, and observes that the constitution is always grounded in the people: Democracy is the genus Constitution. Monarchy is one species, and a poor one at that… Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions. Here, not merely implicitly and in essence but existing in reality, the constitution is constantly brought back to its actual basis, the actual human being, the actual people, and established as the people’s own work.30

From this point on, as he increasingly loses patience with Hegel’s dodges, Marx has in mind that the real social collectivity of the people— not comprised even by the democratic form of the political state—stands in opposition to the state as such. The political form of the state, in other words, is itself inherently a form of alienation. It is for this reason, in all of the work that follows in 1843, and still more in the life-work that he truly takes up from 1844, that Marx’s conception of emancipation always requires transcending the state as such. “It is not the radical revolution, not the general human emancipation which is a utopian dream for Germany, but rather the partial, the merely political revolution,” he asserted in his published critique of Hegel, identifying the agents for this emancipation as the proletariat, whose lack of particular interest compelled

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them to realize the interests of humanity as a whole.31 He still, however, at the time conceived this in relation to philosophy, as such, “which finds its material weapons in the proletariat”.32 In these writings of 1843, Marx advanced the concept of emancipation beyond that of any previous political theorist.33 Alienation constituted the projection of forms of material human sociality—the social relations through which we realize our collective existence, the necessary condition for human existence—into artificial conceptions of institutions and ideas treated as real; not merely alien to us as individual human beings, but having power over us. Emancipation was overcoming alienation, in all of its forms, to return the human world to real human beings, themselves. Alienation existed in the form of religion, as the Left Hegelians first claimed. It also existed in the form of money (and so property), by which the social intercourse of humanity became a means to exercise power over others, reducing them to mere things. Then, in identifying the very form of the state as a form of alienation, Marx found the solution to the “riddle of all constitutions”, as well as to Rousseau’s conundrum. So long as the state existed in its political form, as an alienated social power that acted back upon us as individual humans, we could never be free. For humanity to live without chains, the General Will had to be realized freely, without alienation.

The Alienation of Labour and True Human Emancipation Yet, the achievement that Marx realized in his Paris manuscripts of 1844, upon which he built throughout the rest of his life, primarily through means of the critique of political economy, dwarfs even these profound contributions of 1843. Having been alerted to the real import of the ideas of the political economists by Engels’s “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”—submitted for the Deutsch-Französische Jarhbücher—Marx subsequently read each of the authors cited in it, and undertook a detailed critique of his own.34 He began his manuscript by dividing the pages into columns under the headings of the three basic classes and corresponding forms of income identified by the political economists: Wages of Labour, Profit of Capital, and Rent of Land. Initially writing down the columns of “Wages of Labour”, he drew out what the political economist asserts, and what it actually means for workers:

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He tells us that originally and in theory the whole product of labour belongs to the worker. But at the same time he tells us that in actual fact what the worker gets is the smallest and utterly indispensable part of the product – as much, only, as is necessary for his existence, not as a human being, but as a worker, and for the propagation, not of humanity, but of the slave class of workers.35

From this, Marx rises above the point of view of political economy, and in subsequent passages known on the basis of their content as “Estranged Labour”, he conceives of the alienation of labour. The alienation of labour is not a product of property or monetary wealth—rather, property is itself the concrete form of alienation of labour.36 This realization had the most profound impact upon Marx’s thought, and posed the problem of human emancipation for him in entirely new terms. This is evident in the two questions that are posited at the end of his original analysis of what political economy had to say with respect to workers, under “Wages of Labour”: 1) What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour? 2) What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages … or regard equality of wages … as the goal of social revolution?37 The first question takes Hegel’s conception of human society developing through the course of history and reconceives it in relation to the development of the alienation of labour. It is this reconception that then leads Marx to assert in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This follows from the fact that the differences of wealth between classes are the product of the alienation of labour. As he noted in the opening words of “Wages of Labour”, this basic social relationship between worker and capitalist involves antagonistic struggle. Where other forms of alienation may have predominantly negative effects upon those who labour, they are not directly constituted antagonistically in the way that the alienation of labour is. The worker can use the form of money to meet needs of his or her own, and even the capitalist may fall victim to money. The alienation of labour is profoundly different in making the life-activity of some humans alien to themselves in the immediate form of benefit to others. It is for this reason that, in conceiving a general

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relationship of antagonism between classes at the start of the Manifesto, Marx summarized it as “in a word, oppressor and oppressed”. This historical conception of human society developing through particular forms of the alienation of labour is not developed to any great extent in the 1844 manuscripts, yet already it is present. Marx asserts that labour and capital in their opposition “constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction”, and refers to earlier social forms (“ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.”) as having an “antithesis between lack of property and property” that is as yet undeveloped relative to it.38 He conceives “the entire movement of history” in relation to “Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man… the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.”39 And communism, in this conception, is a movement of real, historical struggle against the alienation of labour—it is not the weapon of philosophy, but the movement of humanity recovering itself, by itself. This movement is a material historical social process grounded in the development of social production: The entire movement of history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.40

That is, rather than following the dictates of philosophy, or seeking historical verification in “disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property”, communism as a mature movement “finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely in that of the economy”. This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, ie., the realisation or the reality of man.41

It is for these reasons that the revolution of proletarian workers is the basis for the general emancipation of humanity. To transcend the “reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour” is to redeem humanity as a whole by and for humans.42 The long, historical, one-sided

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development of human social capacities through forms of the alienation of labour culminates in those who have nothing to lose but their chains transforming social existence for all humanity into a form that will have no chains on anyone. This, then, is a complete resolution of Rousseau’s conundrum. It is for this reason that the paltry aspirations of “piecemeal reformers” always remain inadequate. What is at issue is not “better wages for the slave”, but the complete emancipation of all humankind. This requires, first and above all, an end to the alienation of labour; but the general emancipation of humanity requires an end to alienation in all of its forms. Alienation in the form of the state exists primarily to ensure that alienation in the form of private property—the alienation of labour—is maintained.43 Thus the political form of the state must itself be transcended. There is, however, necessarily a dialectical character to this. Unless the state’s defence of property is overcome, there can be no overcoming the alienation of labour. At the same time, without overcoming the alienation of labour, there can be no transcendence of the political form of the state. Mere anarchists appreciate that both the state and private property must be superseded, but offer no solution beyond ending both at the same time. There are substantial reasons for recognizing that human emancipation cannot, however, be so simply realized. One significant issue, of course, is that the forces defeated in any revolutionary transformation will not simply disappear, even if there is simultaneous revolution across the globe. This is, however, far less profound a problem than the fact that social production in all its forms—including the institutions and patterns of daily social life, and the built-form that the infrastructure of our social existence has taken—has been realized over long generations of fundamental social inequality and political power. Who will live where, how people will travel to work, what jobs will continue to exist, how needs will continue to be met where current production relations are inherently ­abusive, how environmentally destructive production upon which entire communities depend should be dealt with—these are not questions that can be resolved through simple social consensus on the morrow of the revolution. Alienation in all of its forms will bequeath to any social process of human emancipation an enormous range of challenges; problems that are not without solution, but which will vex persons of reason and goodwill for a considerable period of time.

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Emancipation and Revolution In his later political writing, especially his “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Marx briefly sketched an approach to these problems. Asserting both the need for revolution to make possible an end to capitalist social relations of production and the need not only to change the state in its immediate form but to eliminate the state as such as a condition of full emancipation, Marx nonetheless accepted the need for a political form of the state to continue for some time (and one might well expect not a short time). Here—using the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” in one of a very few places in the whole of his writing—he explicitly (if briefly) explored the implications of it not being possible to transform social life completely all at once. He recognized that a process of transformation in social life was required to make possible a move from the principles of what he described as “bourgeois right”. In a capitalist society, “bourgeois right” does not apply to workers, in that their returns from production are not proportional to the labour that they contributed.44 The first stage of revolutionary transformation must necessarily end the alienation of labour by which workers inherently produce wealth for their capitalist employers, but cannot immediately go very far beyond that. Only after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual; and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly45

is it possible to move to a form of society in which it is not necessary to maintain the principles of “bourgeois right” in distributing the proceeds of collective social labour. And only then, therefore, would no state be required. Thus, the most tangible and immediate forms of state must be defeated in revolution to make possible the end of the alienation in its most immediately manifested expressions, as well as the most oppressive and undemocratic characteristics of the state itself. Yet, only after transcendence of the alienation of labour—and in its other forms—has been made real to a far more profound extent, and the real social landscape reconfigured to allow free human interaction on the basis of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, can the state truly wither away.

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On the one hand, human emancipation requires that the state itself must truly be transcended, in time. On the other hand, the political form of the state cannot simply be dispensed with on the morrow of the revolution. It is, therefore, essential to recognize the ways in which the alienation inherent in the state has been partially constrained through the construction of human rights during the modern era. States long ago generally ceased to be embodiments of relatively simple communities of like-­ minded persons among whom a General Will might be said to exist at the political level. Notwithstanding the revolutionary conception of liberty, equality, and sociality that informed the Jacobin project of building a Rousseauan republic, such a state cannot achieve true human emancipation. Relative to the alienation inherent in state power, however, the establishment of individual and collective rights has been a profound political achievement. The state’s alien potency has not been replaced by benign, freely determined, self-governance, but it is potentially held in check relative to ourselves as individuals. There is no certainty that rights will be respected, of course, and they can never simply be taken for granted, but instead must be preserved and extended through struggle. It is, indeed, not least because rights are limited and uncertain that the state as such must, in the end, be transcended. It is, therefore, profoundly important to recognize the potential for what Bakunin—in diatribes to which Marx provided criticism that on the whole was both apt and scathing—called “dictatorship over the proletariat”, a form of alienation that is not to be trivially dismissed.

Moving On The struggles for human emancipation must have, at their core, class struggle to end the alienation of labour. This is not, however, the only form of alienation through which humanity has been, and continues to be, oppressed. Ultimately, the realization of full human freedom requires the elimination of our collective subordination to any form of sovereign power—we must not be subjected to some “other” that is constituted as more than “us”. Since this transcendence cannot be realized all at once, however, we must recognize and preserve that partial recovery of liberty relative to the state that has been one of the signal achievements of the modern age. As part of an ongoing struggle for the realization of emancipation—necessarily dialectical in pursuing real ends through real

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contradictions—we must hold on to the rights that we have constructed, without holding them to be either above criticism, or the essence of freedom. In this regard, it is equally important to recognize that, even if it can be said that the structures of power—not only in the form of the state but in other forms of oppression—have roots in the systemic reproduction of fundamental inequality through the alienation of labour, it is not only class from which humanity must be emancipated. Religion is potentially a relatively benign form of alienation—“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”.46 Other forms of alienation—the objectification of some humans for the benefit of others—are far less benign, and these include not only the form of the state, but also the reduction of women to subjects of men’s will, as well as the reduction of persons of colour to subordinate means of satisfying needs (or worse still, to threats to security)—in short, of all forms of objectifying the autonomy of persons that reduces one human to mere means to an end (or obstacle) of another. The emancipation of humanity requires the “reduction of the human world and relationships to [humanity itself]”.47 This “reduction” is not a form of alienation, but of realization—humans in their relations with each other must recognize themselves in others, and so realize their species-­ being. Through the lifework of his critique of political economy, Marx identified and focused upon the fundamental challenge of the alienation of labour, through which the historical development of society consistently has been bent towards the interests of the already wealthy and powerful. Yet, from his earliest exploration of the forms of alienation to his mature observations on the need and the capacity to achieve a society founded on the principle of “from each according to ability to each according to need”, nothing less than the complete emancipation of humanity ever would suffice for Marx.

Notes 1. On this period of Marx’s life, see especially Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 21–30. 2. Fraternité might be translated as “fraternity” or “brotherhood”, but its implications went beyond the sense generally conveyed by those terms in the context of Anglo-American liberal ideology. Inherent in early modern French political thought was a robust idea of the centrality of society in

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human experience, both informing and informed by the ideas of JeanJacques Rousseau. See Ellen M. Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s ‘General Will’”, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University, 1989). 3. See George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1987). 4. Jean Bruhat, “La Révolution française et la formation de la pensée de Marx”, Annales historique de la Révolution française 38, no. 2 (1966): 141. 5. Marx not only completed and published the first volume of Capital, but left lengthy, uncompleted manuscripts of the critique of political economy. His brief notes on Levasseur, however, were his only writings on the French Revolution as such, apart from passages in other primarily political works such as the Manifesto of the Communist Party and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In moving ever more decisively beyond the politics of the French Revolution, he also moved beyond studying it as such. 6. R. C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton & Co., 1978), 145. This is my preferred translation from the German, but there are many alternatives. 7. See J.  P. Poly and E.  Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation: 900–1200 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991); G. C. Comninel, “Feudalism”, in The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, eds. Ben Fine, A. Saad Filho, and M.  Boffo (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2012), and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53. As I note in these latter works, England had a unique form of “feudalism” in which sovereignty was not truly parcelled among lords, unlike the experience on the Continent, and in which as many as one quarter of the peasantry remained legally free, and protected (as freeholders) in the public courts. 8. See Justin Rosenberg, “Secret Origins of the State”, in The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994). 9. Even in the period of the Empire, both in theory and generally in practice, Roman citizens enjoyed protection of their liberty under law, and the state in principle remained “the public thing”—the literal meaning of res publica. 10. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe”, Past & Present 70 (1976), 60–9 (reprinted in T. H. Aston, and C. H. E. Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)); “On the Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (1977), 25–92; “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, Past

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& Present 97 (1982): 16–113 (reprinted in Aston and Philpin); “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in The First Modern Society, ed. A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Ellen M.  Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism”, New Left Review 127 (1981): 66–95 (also in her Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)). See also Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”. 11. See Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution. 12. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, MECW, vol. 11, 137–63. 13. Ibid., 181–97. 14. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”. 15. See Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism in England (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 16. Frederick Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, MECW, vol. 3, 392. 17. Ibid., 400; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 182, 290. 18. Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, 400. 19. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One, ‘Preface’”, MECW, vol. 21, 262. 20. Aristotle, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), Book I, Chap. 2, §8–9. 21. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), 79. 22. This is not to say that there were not, implicit in Hegel’s work, significant points that looked beyond the existing absolutist state. What he did not do, however, was elaborate such points in explicit criticism of the existing state. 23. István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970). 24. Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, Chap. 25, Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/ essence/ec25.htm). 25. Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 146–68. 26. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity. 27. Moses Hess, Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, pt. 1 (Zurich: Verlagsort, 1843), 329. I am greatly indebted to Marcello Musto for bringing this point to my attention.

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28. Moses Hess, The Essence of Money, Chap. 14, Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/hess/1845/essence-money.htm. 29. Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 173. 30. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, MECW, vol. 3, 29. 31. Ibid., 186. 32. Ibid., 187. 33. The German communist theologian Thomas Müntzer, and the English “Digger” Gerrard Winstanley, had both produced writings that argued human freedom required abolition of both the state and private property, but their works are not accepted as part of the “canon” of political thought. 34. See Chap. 2, this volume. 35. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 239. 36. Ibid., 271–3. 37. Ibid., 241. 38. Ibid., 293–4. 39. Ibid., 296. 40. Ibid., 297. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 241. 43. This point is apparent in much of anthropology and sociology, and figures centrally in the history of political thought. See, for example, Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1967) or Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997). 44. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme, Section I”, MECW, vol. 24, 81–90. 45. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, MECW, vol. 24, 87. 46. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, MCEW, vol. 3, 175–6. I prefer the translation “opiate” to “opium”, recognizing that at the time opiates were readily available at pharmacies to alleviate the pains incurred through exhausting labour. Religion was not so much a means of exhilaration as of escape from the physical and mental pain of overwork with inadequate compensation or rest. 47. Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 168.

CHAPTER 4

The Developing Conception of Historical Materialism

Marx’s Ideas After 1844 There is a profound continuity between the ideas that Marx first developed in 1844 and those that he expressed in his maturity and into his final years. Throughout his life, his priorities remained, on the one hand, to understand the potential for emancipating humanity from all forms of alienation and, on the other hand, to work actively towards achieving that end. Fundamentally, the various forms of alienation amount to the realization and institutionalization of social oppression and exploitation (combined with, generally at a lower level of injury to human freedom and self-realization, varieties of self-delusion, especially in the form religion). From the start, Marx conceived that the forms of alienation existed in conjunction with the development of historical societies. It is in this regard that—particularly in consideration of recent textual scholarship—the claim by Louis Althusser that there was an “epistemological break” in Marx’s thought during 1845, coinciding with the writing of “The German Ideology” manuscripts, must be rejected.1 It has now become apparent, as will be discussed in the following chapters, that the texts that came to be published as “The German Ideology”, in the form of a coherent book, originally had a quite different and very fragmentary character. Their seeming coherence must now be recognized as entirely the result of a politically motivated editorial reconstruction of unrelated and disjointed manuscripts in the twentieth century.2 © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_4

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Indeed, strikingly, a part of the 1845 “The German Ideology” manuscripts (not, of course, included in the book of that name) actually was written by Moses Hess.3 Hess was a critically minded Left Hegelian, a committed socialist, and a friend of Marx and Engels until the late 1840s, when they broke with him. Even after that point, however, he continued broadly to identify with Marx’s ideas and collaborated with him in the First International against Bakunin’s anarchism. He never, however, embraced the class analysis and critique of political economy that Marx and Engels advanced, and was critically characterized by them as a “true socialist” by the time of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Since a part of the manuscripts of “The German Ideology” is in Hess’s hand and embodies his ideas, it is hard to see how Marx’s contributions to the same texts can be said to have followed an “epistemological break” between early humanist ideas and mature “scientific” ideas. Hess’s ideas in 1845 in many ways corresponded to ideas previously found among those of Marx and Engels. That such ideas figured within these manuscripts should be sufficient in itself to argue against the idea of an epistemological break. More importantly, however, Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, with which “The German Ideology” is supposedly to be contrasted as a more developed and “scientific” expression of his materialist conception of history, are far from constituting a fundamentally “humanist” philosophical discourse (not that there necessarily would be anything wrong with that). In fact, those Paris manuscripts were above all the first fruits of Marx’s engagement with the critique of political economy, the key works of which he had just read for the first time. Recognized in terms of the critique of political economy, the continuities are unmistakable from 1844 down to the final manuscripts of Capital, and there is no break to be identified at the time of the 1845–6 “The German Ideology” manuscripts. Where there is an unmistakable difference within Marx’s work is between the works of 1843, before he encountered political economy, and the bulk of his life work that followed. Still, notwithstanding the profound role played by the critique of political economy in the development of his ideas after 1843, there remain significant points of continuity with his even earlier thought. Marx’s commitment to exposing alienation and ending it through human emancipation certainly began before his engagement with the critique of political economy. Indeed, Hal Draper, focussing on the development of Marx’s ideas about revolution, traced their fundamental continuity back to observations he had made as a radical journalist even before his 1843 works.4 It is clear that, though his writings in 1843

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were not yet informed by familiarity with either political economic thought or the social realities of specifically capitalist society, Marx’s primary concerns at that time can be seen to be the same as those that remained central to his thought for the rest of his life: the profound reality of alienation in daily human life, on the one hand, and the potential for true human emancipation, on the other. Although he tended to move away from the term “alienation” as excessively philosophical, he did continue to use it as late as the 1857 manuscripts of the Grundrisse,5 and his conception of exploitation—the appropriation of surplus from direct producers, backed by the potential use of force—was entirely consonant with that of the alienation of labour.6 The times of Marx’s youth had been profoundly marked by the political aftermath of the French Revolution, the democratic, republican, and even merely liberal gains of which had almost entirely been rolled back everywhere. Yet—while important—these merely political revolutionary objectives were never sufficient for Marx. Far from being merely political, his 1843 writings clearly focus on the multiple forms in which alienation existed in society, with growing appreciation of their extent and implications. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx recognized that alienation existed in the very form of the state, as such, regardless of whether it was democratic, republican, or under some other form of constitution. In his critique of Bruno Bauer’s merely republican though staunchly atheist politics, he identified the pervasive problem of social alienation as existing not merely in the form of money—as Moses Hess already had argued—but even more generally in the form of private property. As Marx began systematically to address the problem of human alienation, he observed that only when man has recognised and organised his “forces propres” [own powers] as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.7

Human emancipation therefore requires putting an end to the separation of the social elements of civil society from the political realm of the state, in the process of which alienation must be brought to an end in both the political and social spheres. Although this observation from 1843 pre-­dates his identification and focus upon of the alienation of

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labour, nothing that Marx expressed during the rest of his life supersedes it. Any merely political emancipation that did not address this artificial separation of the social from the political—therefore allowing substantive social inequality to be maintained under conditions of formal political equality—could never be the basis of true human emancipation. At the same time, notwithstanding his critique of Bauer, Marx, of course, accepted the Left Hegelian view that alienation also existed (though not with so profoundly deleterious effect8) in religion, which venerated human social capacities as divine. Marx never backed away from these early insights. Once, however, he identified the alienation of labour to be the underlying basis for the other forms of alienation, as realized in property, money, the state, and even religion, it was this more profound and fundamentally exploitive form of alienation—the foundation for the history of class society—that took precedence in his thought. At the same time, he brought these ideas—conceiving that alienation, the state, and property relations constituted elements of human social totality in a very Hegelian way (though of course not following Hegel)—into an equally Hegelian understanding that their social manifestations developed through the course of history. What is crucial in this regard is that Marx was not simply following Hegel. Rather, Hegel’s far from revolutionary efforts to make sense of the complex historical development of human society and its institutions provided Marx with an example—perhaps even a guide—for how one might conceive processes of social development over time. It was in this way, focussing on the actual ongoing consequences of the development of material social relationships, rather than just the development of ideas in which they were expressed, that Marx believed he had turned Hegel’s upside-down history right side up.9 Thus, the “movement of property” through history—which is to say the concrete realization of the alienation of labour, or exploitation, through the long course of its historical development—increasingly clearly became for Marx the basis for comprehending the history of class societies. Only through the elimination of alienation in its full range of historically developed forms could humanity achieve generalized emancipation, which now could be discerned both as an objective towards which the politics of the French Revolution had been (imperfectly) tending, as well as a proper philosophical “end” for human social development. It was in this way that Marx’s project of revolutionary freedom always was deeply connected to his conception of the processes of history.

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There remained considerable theoretical development to be realized in each of the related areas of Marx’s most profound analysis, broadly corresponding to those two epochal questions with which he had concluded “Wages of Labour” in 1844: what was the meaning of the development of alienation with respect to the history of humanity; and how were the consequences of such alienation to be eliminated? This theoretical development continued to be grounded within a conceptual framework predicated upon the theoretical pursuit of his ongoing critique of political economy, wholly absent before 1844. It is in this way that the development of the materialist conception of history—or historical materialism— emerged in Marx’s thought in close conjunction with his critique of political economy. Yet, at the same time, beyond discerning the lines of this underlying and integral theoretical development, it is necessary to recognize and come to terms with a range of points that Marx problematically incorporated into his texts along the way. These points were not original but expressed ideas—widely accepted in his time—that had been articulated by progressive liberal historians, who rejected radical ideas yet adamantly opposed the reactionary views put forward on behalf of the Church and aristocracy. It is with this in mind that we must navigate the meaning of Marx’s writings. This critical task has a double character. On the one hand, it is necessary to identify those ideas that were original to Marx and truly belong to his integral historical-social analysis. On the other hand, ideas that not only were not original but which may even be discerned to stand at odds with those ideas Marx advanced throughout his ongoing critique of political economy, must be exposed and underscored in relation to the merely liberal ideological conceptions from which they were drawn. If, as he recognized later in life, ideas that were far from his own could be characterized by others as being “Marxism”,10 it also was the case that Marx’s own work incorporated at certain points ideas that were inconsistent with his truly original conceptions.

Liberal Ideas in Marx’s Writings That Marx might have incorporated into the development of his thought ideas that not only were not original but were indeed highly problematic is hardly a new suggestion. Althusser, after all, required the intrusion of an “epistemological break” in order for Marx to leave behind earlier flawed

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points of view. Numerous others have argued in one way or another that Marx only reached his profound insights after moving beyond previously accepted conceptions—or that, instead, his early insights into human alienation were undermined by later “economistic” preoccupations. There are few indeed who have taken the position that Marx never in his life put a foot wrong—and, outside of hagiography, one should not be surprised that even the most brilliant of thinkers might have been misled at certain points, particularly insofar as some of the problematic ideas maintained alongside his own were drawn from the prevailing conceptions of the age. Once one is open to looking at the ideas Marx expressed in his work in relation to such potentially opposed categories, it becomes strikingly clear that there are indeed two lines of thought to be discerned in his writings. His truly original ideas were those driven by criticism, and above all were immediately associated with his critique of political economy. It is essential to recognize, however, that there were in his day a broad range of ideas that self-identified with the concept of historical progress, and which stood opposed to the hide-bound reactionary conceptions that rejected every aspect of the French Revolution. Indeed, the prevailing reactionary ideas of the day were more antithetical to liberty and progress than even the ideas that had prevailed during the ancien régime; now, moreover, they were consciously grounded in religion and tied to fundamental, sometimes racial, claims to inherent social privilege. Even the ideas central to liberal political economy, though they could unblushingly justify the most profound degrees of substantive social inequality, stood in stark opposition to such deeply reactionary ideas. Marx did critically discern the fundamentally liberal ideological content of political economy and turned his ideas to confront that. The ideas of liberal history, however—dealing with the past and, being liberal, opposed to legal recognition of arbitrary class privileges—were not on the face of it points with which Marx needed to take issue. Indeed, to the extent that they articulated conceptions of “class struggle” and historical progress, they expressed ideas that it is not hard to see Marx embracing.

Historicization in the Critique of Political Economy Marx was only 25 years old when he first took up the critique of political economy. He died at the tragically young age of 64—almost certainly in part due to the hardships of his daily life, including the toll they had taken on his family. Still, he accomplished great things in those 39 years, if only

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a fraction of what he indicated that he had in mind. Although his actual publications were relatively few, he left thousands of unpublished large manuscript pages filled with his ideas. Frederick Engels, his trusted friend, ally, and co-author, edited from these unfinished texts the second and third volumes of Capital. Karl Kautsky—in whom Engels, who died nearly 20 years before the dramatic turn in Kautsky’s politics coinciding with the First World War and Russian Revolution, had placed great trust—edited and published the manuscripts of the three volumes of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value. Other manuscripts were known to exist, but they were not published for many more years. Some, indeed, are only now being published for the first time as part of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (often referred to as MEGA2, the successor project to the original MEGA collected works published shortly after the end of the Stalin era), which will be the definitive critical edition of Marx and Engels’s writings. A number of claims have been made with respect to the significance—especially in political terms—of several of the previously unpublished manuscripts when they appeared for the first time. This has given rise to debates, and a range of misunderstandings, which together bear upon understanding Marx’s ideas with respect to alienation and emancipation as they developed in the course of his life. Any summary or analysis of these complex and sometimes difficult issues will understandably become subject to criticism and further debate, but one cannot come to terms with the whole of Marx’s thought without in the process negotiating this minefield of ideas. In doing so, one often must begin with the terms of “official” Marxism—the “war-horse” Marxism of the USSR and national Communist Parties during the first half of the twentieth century and into the Cold War. Some of these ideas did have a bona fide intellectual foundation independent of the political demands of the period, but the rigid political conformity demanded at the time had an enduring impact on the formulation and understanding of what was understood to be “Marxism”.11 Although there have been a number of debates within Marxist circles and among scholars of Marxist thought with respect to the terms of Capital’s critique of political economy, the most significant issues debated with respect to his ideas have had to do with historical social theory (or philosophy of history, for those so inclined). This has been complicated by the fact that, even under the Second International, but especially under the Third International—and above all in the period of Stalin’s dominance—questions of historical development within Marxist thought were

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broadly subordinated to immediate political considerations. In most national contexts, political histories have been associated with particular narratives that not only could be taken to be relevant to what was understood to be “Marxist” historical thought but even tied to specific political positions of the present day. On the whole, this tended to recognize certain historical conceptions not merely as being consistent with, but actually conducing towards, a political position understood as having validity in relation to the current state of “class struggle”. None of the historical positions, of course, were actually related to historical reality other than as they might have bearing on the politically salient issues of the time. No question of “semi-­feudalism” in the era of the Comintern or Cominform could ever be separated from current political implications with respect to India, Latin America, or elsewhere. To a great extent, historical interpretation corresponded to contemporary political need. On the one hand, the issues of history were understood to have been once and forever established in texts of Marx (most notably in the compressed terms of a scant few sentences in the “Preface” to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy). Yet, on the other hand, these supposedly “scientific” ideas were subordinated and adapted as necessary to the (primarily Soviet) politics of the day. As a result, the analysis of historical social development was rendered arbitrary, imprecise, and theoretically incoherent. While it was trumpeted that Marx had “scientifically” identified the historical modes of production, there was nowhere any clear agreement as to what those modes, and the sequence of their succession, actually were. This was not, however, merely a problem of twentieth-century political practice. There had never, in fact, been any definitive account of the historical succession, or even number, of the historical modes of production in Marx’s work. As Eric Hobsbawm put it more than 50 years ago (introducing the first English translation of sections of the Grundrisse dealing with precapitalist societies), Marx was primarily concerned with the conception of an overview of historical development: Though particular social-economic formations, expressing particular phases of this evolution, are very relevant, it is the entire process, spanning centuries and continents, which he has in mind. Hence his framework is chronological only in the broadest sense, and problems of, let us say, the transition from one phase to another, are not his primary concern, except in so far as they throw light on the long-term transformation.12

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Moreover, although Marx did an enormous amount of original research in the British Museum Library, the bulk of that research was oriented towards developing his critique of political economy. He never undertook any serious, sustained, and independent investigation of the histories of even Western European societies, although later in life, he not only continued to be interested in ethnographic work on hunting-gathering and simple agricultural societies—notably that of Lewis Henry Morgan—but also undertook extensive historical study of both India and Russia.13 With respect to the main currents of European social development, however, Marx broadly adopted the widely disseminated and generally accepted work of the leading liberal or Whig historians. This was something about which he and Engels were always clear. In a well-known letter of March 5, 1852, to Joseph Weydemeyer, in New York, Marx addressed issues of class struggle and history with respect to the relatively “undeveloped” class relations in the United States. Marx suggested that his friend advise the “democratic gents” who were taking issue with class analysis to “study the historical works of Thierry, Guizot, John Wade and so forth, in order to enlighten themselves as to the past ‘history of the classes’”. He noted that the bourgeois economist Ricardo referred to the classes of capitalist society on the first page of his magnum opus. He then went on in an excessively modest way to characterize his own contribution: Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the ­proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.14

That this letter not only addresses the concept of class in both history and political economy but does so with one of Marx’s rare references to “the dictatorship of the proletariat” has ensured that it has received considerable attention over many years. Its implications with respect to Marx’s ideas about history, however, have received very little attention. More than 40 years later, in the year before his death, Engels also wrote about this in a letter to H. Starkenberg:

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While Marx discovered the materialist conception of history, Thierry, Mignet, Guizot and all the English historians up to 1850 are evidence that it was being striven for, and the discovery of the same conception by Morgan proves that the time was ripe for it and that it simply had to be discovered.15

There is, then, little doubt that both Marx and Engels attributed to the liberal historians a fundamental recognition of the role of class in history (as well as, to the political economists, recognition of the role of classes within the capitalist economy). In this regard, they each appear to conceive the role of class—both in history and within capitalism—as a “scientific” fact with which even bourgeois scholars were compelled to come to terms. There is, however, a profound and fundamental difference between liberal and Marxian conceptions of class. In liberal history, the idea of class is simply associated with that of relative ranks within society; while in liberal political economy it is associated with sources of revenue. Although liberal history is capable of recognizing that oppression and exploitation existed in past societies—as in the cases of slavery in the ancient world and serfdom in the Middle Ages—it is fundamental to the liberal conception of capitalist society that it is grounded in a generalized realization of personal freedom, and this makes class a difficult idea to incorporate. In liberal historiography, class as a matter of fundamental inequality was acknowledged to have constituted a regrettable fact of the past but understood to have been wholly superseded by the liberal norms of capitalist social relations. Classical political economy recognized different classes to exist as social expressions of different forms of income: capitalists, landlords, and workers. Liberal discourse, however, has been resistant to recognizing the existence of fundamentally unequal classes in contemporary capitalist society. When it has deigned to recognize them, it has primarily been in relation to a structure of simple social stratification brought about by differentials in levels of income.

Marx’s Conception of Class For Marx, however, the idea of class was instead tied to inherently conflictual relations that continued into the capitalist era. Indeed, as the first words of the 1844 manuscripts had it, “Wages are determined through the

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antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker.”16 This notion of fundamental antagonism was perhaps most notably articulated in the crucial opening passages of the Manifesto of the Communist Party: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another17

These ideas were grounded in Marx’s conception of the alienation of labour as the movement of property through history, as he had articulated in the 1844 manuscripts. The paired oppositions do not specifically correspond to distinct historical periods (indeed, the periods overlap, leaving aside entirely questions as to the historical validity of the individual pairings). What they express above all is the idea of direct relationships of oppression and exploitation—together with the struggles they engender—as the concrete underpinnings for historical social classes. In these terms, classes are far from being mere expressions of stratification in society. There is nothing that might suggest different social strata having a common, but variously graduated, relationship with some shared measure—whether income, wealth, income, status, or anything else—as classical political economy and mainstream sociology might put forward. Instead, classes are paired off as immediately engaged in antagonistic binary relationships. From this perspective, the history of human social development corresponds to the realization and dynamics of successive relationships between “oppressor and oppressed”, immediate relationships of class exploitation. What is involved in this formulation has nothing to do with the details or sequence of systems of production, but rather the historical development of what Marx conceived as “the alienation of labour”. Hobsbawm’s observation, therefore, can be seen to have been very much to the point: it is Marx’s overview of the history of class society, his overview of the dynamic historical developments in antagonistic class relations, that is central to his materialist conception of history, or historical materialism. The 1844 manuscripts offer Marx’s first statement that there is such a dynamic and that it corresponds to the “movement of private property”, or, more precisely, the historical development of the antithesis

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between lack of property and property. In so preliminary a statement, of course, the full implications could not be realized at once. Yet the germ of a conceptual framework was articulated within these manuscripts, and it is this line of thought that continued to be developed uninterruptedly through Marx’s works. Marx, however, never pursued the historical dynamics of precapitalist class societies in the serious and sustained manner of his critique of capitalist political economy. As a consequence, much of the little he did have to say about precapitalist class society is problematic. Indeed, in the manuscripts published as “The German Ideology”, as will be seen, the continuity of his thought was substantially deflected by a broad re-infusion of the terms of materialist ideology derived from liberal thinkers, the effects of which regrettably continue to bedevil Marxist thought to this day. Still, Marx’s early insight into the historically fundamental character of class exploitation would endure, ultimately finding its mature expression in the achievements of Capital.

Historical Materialism and Class Struggles This, then, is the central concept of historical materialism: that the realization of human social existence over the course of history has corresponded to developments in the social relations of private property, as increasingly significant expressions of the alienation of labour, predicated upon a fundamental and growing antithesis between the propertied and the propertyless. This is the meaning behind the thundering assertion that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. It is, on one hand, the history of struggle because this has been the history of alienated labour—of exploitation—through the course of its ­development; it is, on the other hand, the history of hitherto existing societies, for these historical processes correspond to the actual history of human social development.18 Marx as yet had very little to say about the details of this development prior to the period of bourgeois society. He would never have very much to say about such details, and much of that would prove to be historically inaccurate.19 He was not an academic or a historian, and the task of comprehending history as such never rivalled in significance the cause of revolutionary human emancipation to which he was so fundamentally committed. He was, of course, well versed in European history, which

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Western historiography, philosophy, and emerging social science had long generally understood to be coincident with the main expression of human history. (Marx’s own study of non-European histories in later life corresponded to a growing, conscious, rethinking of Eurocentric presuppositions—raising the possibility that other historical trajectories might equally lead to socialism—even as it remained clear that the development of capitalism, as well as the colonial dominance of European states in the modern period, increasingly had imposed themselves upon the whole of the world.)20 As he focused upon the historical development of Western European societies, it was not, in his analysis, in the course of earlier forms of society but only in modern capitalist society that the primary historical antithesis between property and propertylessness came to be fully realized. Responding critically not only to Hegel but to the increasingly mainstream liberal conceptions of social development, he conceived that it was the full realization of the growing antithesis between owners of property and the rest of humanity that made the transcendence of human alienation both possible and necessary. Though earlier development in class societies had led to this point, it was, therefore, the specific character of capitalist society that required analysis. His primary commitment always remained the politics of revolutionary transformation that would end alienation or estrangement—which he consciously came to describe, in non-philosophical terms, simply as exploitation. In addition, recognizing the extent to which philosophy, in particular, could deflect consciousness away from the implications of concrete social reality, Marx increasingly developed his ideas against philosophy. At the end of 1843, he had conceived that, specifically in relation to revolutionary emancipation in Germany: The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality.21

Beginning with his first critical confrontation with political economic thought in 1844, however, Marx undertook a profound re-evaluation of philosophy relative to class struggle, concluding that the process of self-­ emancipation by the proletariat would realize communism for the whole of humanity. Philosophers were relegated to the position of confronting the world in intellectual terms, while the proletariat now was specifically conceived as the agents for changing it.

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For these reasons, as he sought a means to understand communist society’s “process of becoming”,22 and a guide to working-class revolutionary objectives within capitalist society, it would continue to be the critique of political economy that commanded Marx’s attention, and not history or philosophy. On the one hand, the history of the French Revolution’s radical Convention that he had planned to undertake was put aside forever after 1844. On the other, his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach in the spring of 1845 explicitly held that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.23 Moreover, between 1845 and 1847 he and Engels together wrote The Holy Family as a critique of the philosophy of Bruno Bauer and other Left Hegelians, and Marx also wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, his critique of Proudhon. It is the significance of this context of polemics against philosophy, as such, that will be explored in the following chapters in relation to the manuscripts published as “The German Ideology”. Partly in response to Hegelian philosophy, and partly in response to liberal political economy—but through criticizing both—Marx had come to recognize a line of historical development from a past that neither of these forms of ideology would acknowledge, to a future that neither could accept. In making this conceptual leap, Marx did not attribute the evolution of mankind either to the development of an idea or to a spurious unfolding of inherent human nature. Instead, he proposed a fully materialist conception of history that was rooted in the profound social contradictions embodied in relations of property, rather than ideological preconceptions as to the meaning and ends of human life. It was not merely “material” factors that had bearing upon social development that mattered, but rather the specific consequences of class exploitation and reactions against it, including concrete struggles engendered by it. He developed this idea in a number of pages of the 1844 manuscripts devoted to the specifically social character of production—and particularly the social production of consciousness—arguing from a critical appropriation of social reality against speculative history. It is this social character of his thought that underlies the materialist conception of history that he developed. He repudiated those expressions of liberal ideology that would treat history as a merely a form of “natural” development. With respect to the “movement of property” that he conceived to constitute the foundation for history, Marx argued that

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both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity of private property).24

Which is to say that social development requires human subjective existence. This stood in striking opposition to the dominant liberal forms of materialism, which evacuated history of human subjective existence— active social consciousness—in favour of such “objective” determinants as population growth, technology, climate, or mere density of human interactions. It is because the historical development of humanity follows the history of the movement of property, that property is a “historical necessity”. The point of departure is not, therefore, production: it is the alienation of labour, exploitation. Thus the social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man … Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of nature – the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature.25

These passages may still seem to be excessively philosophical, their terminology perhaps obscure, with their resort to formal oppositions more stylistic than substantive. It is, of course, this “philosophical” early Marx that has so often been opposed to a hard economic determinism taken to constitute the truly orthodox materialism of mature Marxism. Yet, there is no doubt that this is an expression of a social materialism, and it is, in fact, the social materialism expressed here that will remain at the core of Marx’s work over the next four decades, increasingly clearly realized through the critique of political economy. The social materialism with which Marx proposes to start does not begin with the unity of humanity and nature in the hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering bands, or with the accumulation over time of innovations in tools and material culture. Marx’s social materialism starts with property, not tools; with social relations that develop in and through the inherent inequality and exploitation of the alienation of labour. By contrast, the “hard” materialist determin-

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ism that is particularly evident in the manuscripts published as “The German Ideology” drew upon the mainstream political economy, social theory, and historiography of European liberalism—for reasons to be seen below—expressing ideas that would largely fall to the wayside in the further development of Marx’s thought. In this regard, it is notable that Marx asserts in these early pages that there can be no speculative abstraction of “original” humanity from humanity as it now exists; that the “genesis” of humanity must be sought in the process of human development, through social reproduction, not with some raising in imagination of “original man”.26 It is this unrelenting emphasis on the genuinely social, as it takes the form of the history of class societies, that is truly at the core of Marx’s ideas., and is the foundation of historical materialism.27

Preliminary Considerations of Class Struggle in Historical Materialism The central idea of historical materialism, then, is that antagonistic class relations have provided the fundamental dynamic of human historical development.28 It is not in any way Eurocentric to recognize the particular salience of this conception to the historical processes of the development of Western societies that rose to world ascendancy.29 Such inherently antagonistic relations centre on direct confrontation between the class of exploiters and the producing class—which are also, as noted in the Manifesto, “oppressor and oppressed”. This antagonistic opposition exists both as routinized in regular contention over the production and distribution of surplus within the “normal” relations of class society, and as it occasionally erupts in open conflict over the very existence of exploitation. It is, however, important to recognize that the antagonistic class relations of social development are not limited to the class struggles between the ruling class and the exploited majority. For, in class relations specifically predicated upon private property—as has been the case in all historical Western societies—surplus is appropriated by the individual members of a class of exploiters. All individual ruling class members enjoy formal equality with respect to the fundamental relations of surplus extraction (essentially proportional to their possession of property). At the same time, however, they compete with other members of the ruling class: both in careers of acquiring power, on the one hand; and in applying such power to magnify the appropriation of surplus, on the other (in forms specific to each society).

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It is such competition within the ruling class30 that, for example, constitutes the main substance of conventional political history, with the material interests of individuals, families, or factions figuring centrally. This competition, of course, is also an essential expression of the form of class exploitation/struggle that underwrites it. That is, in precapitalist class societies, where class exploitation takes directly extra-economic and political forms, politics and/or conquest are the definitive ruling class careers, in which differential access to surplus through the state, social domination, or plunder, can be gained, maintained, or squandered by the individuals and families of the ruling class. Intra-ruling class conflicts may also become directly associated with, or emerge as a response to, the conflict between the opposed fundamental classes over exploitation: all of the French revolutions between 1789 and 1871 can be offered as examples of ruling class struggles that became associated with popular movements that were, at least in some sense, rooted in exploitation and its social effects. Where struggle within the ruling class reaches the point of civil war, rather than merely individual competition, it might well be expected that one side—generally that which has closer connections to the exploited, if the intra-class division takes such a form—will be able to attract the support of a popular movement. Yet, while the potential for intra-ruling class conflict is created in the first place by the existence of exploitation/fundamental class struggle, it has a specific, characteristic identity of its own—witness feudal warfare. It also may have a contradictory bearing on the struggle of exploiter and exploited— as when capitalists facing a shortage of workers bid up wages, or when, post-population collapse, medieval lords lured surviving peasants by offering advantageous terms that brought an end to their status of unfreedom. The specific form of intra-ruling class competition must, therefore, be taken into account alongside the particulars of inter-class antagonism. These aspects of class struggle are generally neglected as a systemic issue in formulating a Marxist theory. Marx, however, had explicitly recognized this form of ruling class competition in relation to capitalism— beyond what was implied in the 1844 manuscripts—as early as The Poverty of Philosophy: On the other hand, if all the members of the modern bourgeoisie have the same interests inasmuch as they form a class as against another class, they have opposite, antagonistic interests inasmuch as they stand face to face with one another.31

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Competition is certainly recognized as integral to capitalism, yet it is too rarely treated as real competition among the members of the ruling class, by which some may be ruined. It is even more rarely if ever, acknowledged that competition is a general feature of other class societies, in a form specific to each society.32 Simply considering the role it played in the increasing instability of the Roman Republic, the endemic warfare of feudal society, and the business cycles of industrial capitalism, however, reveals the enduring centrality of competition within the ruling class. On the one hand, such competition has importantly contributed to the dynamism of historical processes of social change, and the realization and development of material social contradictions. On the other hand, by necessitating a balancing of collective class interests against the acquisitive interests of individual class members, intra-ruling class competition has contributed to shaping the form of the state within each specific class society. These preliminary considerations with respect to the “history of class struggles” follow directly from the terms by which Marx (and Engels) first came to formulate them between 1844 and 1848. In these early works lay the basis for the developed terms of analysis that would appear through the profound achievements of Marx’s critique of political economy between the late 1850s and the 1867 publication of Capital, plus subsequent tweaks. These issues will be taken up again in a later chapter, in relation to the further development of Marx’s ideas. First, however, it is necessary to come to terms with what might appear to be a major misstep, in the form of “The German Ideology”.

Notes 1. Not that this argument ever was convincing. Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Vintage, 1970), 36–6, 61. 2. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and below. 3. Also involved in the manuscripts was Joseph Weydemeyer, Carver, and Blank, A Political History, 38. Weydemeyer was one of the earliest and truest converts to Marx’s ideas until his untimely death in the United States.

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4. The issue of the youthful Marx’s ideas on revolution are explored at length in Draper’s multivolume work, but see his analysis of Marx’s writings in 1842–3, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press: New York, 1977), 1: 39–76, 61ff. 5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 150, 160–2, 470, 488, 509, 515. 6. See his analysis of “the exchange of objectified labour as exchange value for living labour as use value”, explicitly articulated in terms of “the alienation of labour”, Marx, Grundrisse, 515. 7. “On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 168. 8. Indeed, as he famously noted, it provided comfort, much like the relief from bodily aches obtained by taking the opiate concoctions available at pharmacies. 9. In fairness to Hegel, it might be noted that for both thinkers, concepts and their concrete manifestations alike develop through the web of the social, that the level of experience at which concrete forms of behaviour are shaped by and in turn shape ideas. Hegel’s idealism lay primarily in his acceptance of a telos for human social experience. While—much as for Aristotle—not the denial of material reality, still, though there perhaps might have been some teleology in Marx’s early thought, it faded over time. He always believed in the “necessity” of communism, but generally not in the “hard” philosophical sense of a telos. More to the point, Hegel’s conception of human development stopped far short of the full realization of emancipation, even going so far as to express the idea that it was the Prussian monarchy that was the means for the realization of the universal. 10. In a letter to Eduard Bernstein of November 2–3, 1882, Engels wrote that, in 1880, Marx had said to Paul Lafarge, with respect to what was called “Marxism” in France, regarding the programme of the French Workers’ Party, “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist” (MECW, vol. 46), 356. Engels repeated this in a letter to Conrad Schmidt, October 27, 1890. 11. The extent to which this was realized in the form of construction of a book, “The German Ideology”, will be taken up in Chap. 5. 12. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 14. 13. See below, and Kevin B.  Anderson, Marx at the Margins (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 196ff. 14. Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, MECW, vol. 39, 62–6. Both this and the following reference were importantly flagged by Raphael Samuel many years ago: Raphael Samuel, “British Marxist Historians, 1880–1980: Part One”, New Left Review 120, (1980): 21–96.

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15. Frederick Engels to H. Starkenberg, January 25, 1894, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895, trans. Dona Torr (London: M. Lawrence ltd, 1934), 518 [preferred translation]. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1953), 550. 16. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 235. Marx began these manuscripts with the section “Wages of Labour”, not the “Preface”, which was written later. 17. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6, 482. 18. While the history of class relations of property, as known in Europe, is far from the only way in which human social experience has unfolded across the globe, over hundreds of millennia, it remains true that, particularly through the development and spread of capitalism, European class society has transformed the world. 19. Most notably with respect to Ancient Greece and the French Revolution. See Ellen M.  Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988), and George C.  Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987). 20. This has particularly been stressed by Anderson, Marx at the Margins. Also see the contextual account of these late studies in Marcello Musto, Another Marx (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018). 21. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, MECW, vol. 3, 187. 22. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 297. 23. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, MECW, vol. 5, 5. 24. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 298. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 304–6. 27. While there are those who argue against the term “historical materialism” to describe Marx’s historical social theory, there is not only long usage behind it, but a clear theoretical foundation for it, provided its specific grounding in the social history of exploitation is always kept in mind. 28. In 1888, Engels noted that in 1847 the pre-history of human societies, before the written history of civilizations, was “all but unknown” [Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 482f]. Still less had Marx begun to consider that there were other courses of history than that of Europe. It is, however, the history of class societies, founded on exploitation, that Marx has in mind here. 29. The issues of development in non-Western societies will be taken up in a later chapter.

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30. This is not to preclude the possibility of multiple dominant classes, with further competition between them. The point is that even where there is a single ruling class there is bound to be competition within it. 31. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon, MECW, vol. 6, 176. 32. It should go without saying that in precapitalist societies, characterized by extra-economic class relations, intra-ruling class competition will generally not take the form of market competition.

CHAPTER 5

Problems of The German Ideology

The Misconstrued Manuscripts of 1845–6 A tremendously rapid intellectual transformation was crystallized in the pages of Marx’s 1844 “Economic and Philosophic” manuscripts. In a matter of months, Marx had gone from his first glimpse of the proletariat as universal class in alliance with philosophy, to a materialist conception of history, while carrying the critique of political economy far beyond Engels’s initial efforts. Marx at this point did still seem to accept the proposition put forward by Engels that communism would proceed from “self-­consciousness” in Germany, whereas from “politics” in France and “practical” need in England. Yet, already in the Paris manuscripts Marx had made a substantial movement away from philosophy, as such: In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process.1

This understanding was underscored in his devastatingly critical reply to Ruge on the Silesian weavers’ movement of the day, written during the weeks he worked on these pages, which stressed the importance of the self-directed struggle of the proletariat. © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_5

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Just after completing the Paris manuscripts in August 1844, Marx met Engels for the second time.2 Together, they outlined The Holy Family, in which, as Hal Draper noted years ago, they not only dispensed with Left Hegelian philosophy but clearly asserted that communism will be the self-­ emancipation of the proletariat through class struggle. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at this moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.3

Finally, in 1845–6, after their collaboration on The Holy Family, the now close friends sat together, side by side, producing manuscripts that have come to be known primarily in the form of a book—as they first were published—“The German Ideology”. This joint work has often been taken to be the first genuinely Marxist text, and sections of it have often been used as an introduction to Marx’s method.4 This supposed book, however, is deeply problematic in both form and content, and while it undoubtedly includes much that is of value from the thought of Marx and Engels, its text requires careful critical evaluation. To begin with, as noted in the previous chapter, recent research has left no doubt that the manuscripts collectively known as “The German Ideology” were never, in fact, written with the intent of constituting a single work. It is, then, not simply that these writings were left by Marx and Engels to “the gnawing criticism of the mice”, but even more that what they put aside was never in the first place intended to be a book. There is, of course, no doubt that most of the text was written by Marx and Engels (though, as noted previously, a part was contributed by Moses Hess). The texts, therefore, cannot simply be dismissed; nor should they be. What is essential, however, is to understand why these texts were written, so as to more clearly locate them in relation to the development of the ideas of Marx and Engels. This is especially necessary since, as will, in turn, be seen in what follows, a good deal of what they contain does not directly reflect the ideas of Marx and Engels themselves, but rather a range of primarily British and French mainstream liberal ideas, marshalled in critique of the peculiarly German ideology of philosophical “True Socialism”.

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In the first place, then, it is necessary to recognize that, as Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank have so clearly demonstrated, the publication of the manuscripts identified as “The German Ideology” has had—and indeed continues to have—a fundamentally political history.5 The manuscripts were not “lost”, but were known to exist by the leading Marxists of the Second International. In their view, however, there did not appear to be any great reason to publish them. This changed in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 30s, when they first were assembled as a book that was construed to constitute a fundamental statement of Marx’s materialist conception of history. At the core of this deeply political history of editing and publication, therefore, have been issues relating to the conception of historical processes as they have been understood to be meaningful to class politics in the twentieth century (and after). The story behind the publication of these manuscripts is far too complicated to summarize neatly. As Carver and Blank have observed, this history contains “solidarity, hope, and revolutionary spirit, but also murder, betrayal, and political intrigue. It is almost like a crime thriller”.6 At the same time, “The German Ideology”—as published—has been a particularly influential text, playing an enormous role in framing understandings of Marx’s conception of history, particularly in the United States, and especially within the discipline of sociology (where Marx’s ideas have had perhaps their greatest resonance as social theory). The range of political controversies regarding these manuscripts is truly enormous.7 There are numbers of cross-cutting issues, each of which has two or more politically informed interpretations. In the first place, the manuscripts clearly were left in a jumble: as works of Marxist thought, should their lack of coherence be given the detailed scholarly attention of philology; or should instead thematic threads of potential political significance be more clearly framed and drawn out in order to inform working class politics? In short, should the unpublished work be made available with the minimum of editorial work that would be required for specialists to comprehend them, or should it be massaged into a more comprehensible form for a broader audience that, in the view of the editors, expressed their theoretical implications (whatever those might be determined by the editors to be). Whereas the scholarly approach may be hoped to shed valuable light on Marx’s ideas and developing politics, editorial reconstruction must instead be premised on the presumption that his thought is already sufficiently known. Such editorial intervention would necessarily embody

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a specific conception of Marxist politics and theory, whatever relationship may exist—if any—between that approach and Marx’s own views. The difficulty with freighting these texts with too great a theoretical burden is well illustrated with reference to one well-known and often cherished passage. In the course of their critical discussion of the social division of labour, they contrast it with life in communist society where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, 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, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.8

This evocative statement is one of a very few in which Marx or Engels actually offers a description of communist society and its attractive, even Romantic, embrace of absolute creative freedom in social production makes it one of the most utopian formulations in the whole of their work. The importance attributed to “The German Ideology” as a work of theory lends considerable weight to the passage by Marx and Engels, making it a beacon for the visionary conception of communism. The text of the original manuscript presented in the definitive Marx-­ Engels-­Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), including all of the emendations by each author, is, however, very revealing with respect to this passage. Marx and Engels appear to have playfully passed the page back and forth, adding and crossing out a number of occupations, including “actor”, before settling on hunter, fisherman, shepherd, and critic. It also is noteworthy that the first three of these occupations coincide with the hunter-gatherers and pastoralists that characterized the first two stages of the classic liberal sequential stages of modes of subsistence. Does the overall playfulness and indecision mean the statement is less of a definitive theoretical assertion? Is the resonance of the final occupations with the historical “modes of subsistence” of Adam Smith and others significant? What then is one to make of the occupation of “critic”? Although much of what is known to us of Marx’s work was never published in his lifetime, and there are certainly questions with respect to other manuscripts and their emendations, nothing quite like these textual issues arise with respect to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 or Grundrisse. In a variety of ways, the manuscripts assembled as “The German Ideology” are uniquely problematic.

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Beyond the question of the selection and ordering of the texts (and what editorial notes might be appropriate), a second and closely related issue has to do with how the underlying conception of human historical development in the texts should be presented. Should this be presented as having a structure that directly conforms to the historical developments in material forces of production (and/or the division of labour)? Should it instead be represented in terms of the evolving human experience of alienation/exploitation and its social consequences? Might it rather be taken to be a realization of human essence, in a manner that seems to be more Hegelian than Marxist? These different views were very much in play during the early decades of the twentieth century with respect to not only determining the implications of the manuscripts but also providing a purpose to their publication. The first editor of the manuscripts as a whole was David Ryazanov, in the USSR. While he was undoubtedly a Marxist, he made it clear that he was not a Leninist. The conception established for the Marx-Engels Institute that he directed was to focus exclusively on the period up to the outbreak of the First World War (thus avoiding the Russian Revolution entirely). He nonetheless was readily recognized to be one of the Soviet opponents to Stalin, and he was arrested in 1931. At the same time, however, one of Ryazanov’s main targets of criticism was the other great advocate for publication of “The German Ideology” in the 1920s: Gustav Mayer, a member of the German Social Democratic Party. That party’s fundamental opposition to Soviet developments in the wake of the Russian Revolution—and their permanent turn away from revolutionary socialism—was by then clear. This opposition between a Menshevik Soviet Marxist and a Social Democratic German Marxist, both advocating for the significance of these texts, is only a small part of the convoluted political story of the manuscripts. It is, however, undoubtedly significant that, as respectively Menshevik and Social Democrat, both of their points of view would have had much in common with more mainstream—and less revolutionary—currents of social thought. Ryanazov explicitly described Mayer as a “bourgeois writer”,9 but it is open to question to what extent either of these antagonists really embraced the essential idea Marx had put forward that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”. There are, therefore, many subtle political as well as merely textual issues to be negotiated with respect to the publication of “The German Ideology” as a book. Indeed, to follow the intrigues and political turns of

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publication of these manuscripts through the Stalin period, the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, is something of a daunting task. Fortunately, it is not wholly necessary for present purposes. The central conclusion to be recognized is that these texts were far more fragmented, on the one hand, yet more nuanced in meaning, on the other, than ever has been made evident in their published versions, especially in English. The texts were clearly the work of Marx and Engels, even though the editing might be suspect, so the published editions cannot simply be disregarded. There remain, however, issues with respect to the intentions of Marx and Engels that have important bearing on how the texts should be read. The central issues with respect to the importance of these manuscripts clearly revolve about their conception of history. While Marx did not actually use the term, the significance of these texts since the 1920s has been stressed to be in relation to what they revealed about “the materialist conception of history”.10 Certainly, it is for its passages on history and materialism, rather than its use of Feuerbach to critique the other Left Hegelians, that this work has become so widely read and referenced. For this reason, it becomes important that the real purpose behind the text produced by Marx and Engels was not an articulation of the materialist conception of history. It is not simply that they were not writing a specific book, nor even that the texts were something of a pastiche, their editors having given them whatever textual integrity and organization they might be said to possess as a whole. Rather, it is crucial that the original purpose of the texts was very different from the purposes that the editors had in mind in publishing them. There are, in fact, very good reasons for recognizing the perspective articulated in these texts to be different from most of the rest of the canon of Marx and Engels, and, more to the point, to be at odds with much of the ideas they—and particularly Marx—articulated elsewhere. With respect to the ideas actually expressed within “The German Ideology”, the grounds for such claims long predate the current issues of the political history of the texts and were in fact identified in a doctoral dissertation as early as 1983.11 The history of these texts—both how they were written, for which Carver and Blank have provided unique insight into the working relationship between Marx and Engels, and how they were published, which reveals much about what Marxists have sought to find in their work—certainly may shed light upon the interpretation of their meaning. Even a simple reading of their supposedly final form, however, leads one to recognize significant issues that need to be addressed

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relative to the line of development in Marx and Engels’s work from 1843–4 to the end of their lives. As Carver and Blank have pointed out, there actually was very little gnawing by mice on these texts, critical or otherwise. It would certainly have been better if along the line had they been subjected to more serious criticism—by rodents or humans—than in fact was the case.

An Overview of “The German Ideology” From 1844 onwards, Marx, with increasing clarity, based his thought on the central idea that history was the history of class society—and that history in this sense would come to an end through revolutionary human emancipation. The fundamental “movement” of history (grounded in the “movement of property”) had been revealed to follow that of the development of social relations of production in class society. These were from the start conceived not in terms of merely material processes of production, but rather inherently in terms of property relations, in the broad historical sense that corresponded to the development of “alienated labor”: in other words, exploitive class relations. Despite the historical frame of their thinking, however, Engels’s The Peasants’ War in Germany, was the only truly historical work ever written by either of the two and at its heart was really the question of revolution in modern Germany. Their accounts of the history of class societies before capitalism were never more than broad sketches. Indeed, these often amounted to summarizing the whole of Western history in a few sentences, as in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Prior to the substantial manuscripts that Marx later devoted to the critique of political economy, it was only in the various and partial texts known to us as “The German Ideology”—and primarily in that part which has erroneously been known as the chapter on Feuerbach—that Marx and Engels made an attempt to describe in explicit and detailed terms the historical dynamic of social development, and even then in broad strokes. The deeply flawed result must be contrasted with the development that their thought (and especially that of Marx) can be seen to have otherwise followed. As noted previously, “The German Ideology” has enjoyed something of a special place among the texts of Marx and Engels: it was characterized by Althusser as the text coinciding with Marx’s “epistemological break”, and its theoretical passages often take pride of place among the Marxist texts assigned to undergraduate students, particularly in sociology.

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To claim that it is instead unreliable and in many ways doubtful as a work of Marx’s historical materialism will surely be contentious, though the work of Carver and Blank no doubt goes a long way towards making this pill easier to swallow. There is no intention here to repudiate the entire content of “The German Ideology”, and certainly there are many passages that are consistent with the historical materialism that Marx continued afterwards to develop, and which contribute to areas of conception that are otherwise little considered in his thought. What needs to be stressed, however, as Carver and Blank repeatedly emphasize, is that this set of unfinished and discontinuous texts expound a profoundly political polemic against the Left Hegelians and that it never had the character of a fundamentally philosophical or theoretical text.12 In their view, these manuscripts did not so much advance materialism against philosophical ideology but rather embodied and built upon the views recently put forward by Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach. As posited in the first Thesis: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice”. Most pointedly, as Thesis 11 holds, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.13 By this reading, Marx and Engels intended to leave theorizing to the ideologists, and here they were engaged in polemical efforts to describe an understanding of humanity and our social world in practical terms, advancing the goal of actual—not philosophical—emancipation. Indeed, as Carver and Blank observe, Marx added forceful underscoring to complete Engels’s point that “for the practical materialists, i.e. the communists, it is a matter of revolutionising the existing world”.14 They assert that the arguments of Marx and Engels should be read not as fundamentally philosophical in nature—even as regards their critique of Bauer and Stirner as would-be Feuerbachians—“but rather that Marx and Engels’s substantive theses on humanity, history, modernity, and a communist future develop in these fragments as political points through and through”.15 In Carver and Blank’s cogent formulation: The nub of the matter was not so much that these philosophers were thinking the wrong things because they were thinking the wrong way, but that they were doing politics the wrong way (hence thinking the wrong way) and were thus merely encouraging others to be just as wrongheaded and (so Marx and Engels were arguing) ineffectual.16

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These texts were a critique of German “socialist” philosophy in entirely political terms, with Marx and Engels definitively rejecting the idea of philosophy being in any way itself inherently “political”. The philosophy of the German Left Hegelians led to potentially endless interpretations of the world, with nothing actually being done to change it. What is crucial in this view is the implication that, as Carver and Blank put it, to understand these texts as fundamental expositions of theory “would be a regression to the very position – excoriated as both ‘ideological’ and typically ‘German’ – that they were at such pains to attack in their sustained critique of the ‘critical critics’”.17 It must, in this regard, be stressed that the critique of Marx and Engels was directed at ideas that they understood to be both ideological and German. Their point—consistent with ideas each had previously articulated—was that Germany was not merely behind Britain and France in the historical development of capitalism and the class of the proletariat, but that this “backwardness” directly contributed to the ideological priority of philosophy there. The perspective that Carver and Blank have brought to these manuscripts helps to clarify the ways in which they constituted some of the first true collective expressions of Marx and Engels’s thought, as they undertook to develop together a shared perspective, cement their working relationship, and deepen the great friendship of their lifetimes. The partial, fragmented and incomplete character of the texts make it difficult to say much more. Nonetheless, it must be recognized that this early attempt to provide a historically and socially grounded materialism for political action had unforeseen and regrettable consequences, particularly after the texts were taken out of their (consciously abandoned) original contexts and reconceived to constitute a “true guide” to the materialist conception of history. Some of the “materialism” that Marx and Engels incorporated into these texts—drawn from fundamentally liberal historiographical and political economic sources—must be criticized as inherently flawed relative to their own, original insights. The great bulk of it can be seen to have been not only endowed with undue weight by the editors but selectively ­constructed into a seemingly coherent text conveying what subsequent Marxists strived to comprehend and advance as the “materialist conception of history”. The fact that, beginning a year after Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, the two friends drew extensively upon ideas formulated by liberal historians and political economists should not be shocking. In the Paris manuscripts,

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after all, Marx had discovered the foundation for his own critique in the words of the political economists themselves. While he “rose above” their perspective in order to frame those critical insights for his own purposes—to advance communism and to put paid to Hegelian philosophy—this did not involve arguing that the liberal political economists were “wrong”. Only after many years of developing his increasingly original critique of political economy did Marx have a fuller comprehension of the nature and extent of ideological conceptions within political economy, as well as the errors and theoretical flaws of its proponents. Marx was never merely “a political economist”, but in 1845, his critique was still at an early stage. Even more strikingly, Marx never brought his critical faculties to bear against the historiography of the liberals. As previously noted, he and Engels always attributed to the liberal historians the original recognition of the role that class played in history. Marx certainly acknowledged the political failings of the great historian Guizot, but did so in terms that contrasted his political defence of the Orleanist monarchy that he had served with the earlier insights of his historical analysis.18 In contrast to his continued development of the critique of liberal political economy, the major project of his life, Marx unfortunately never undertook a critical engagement with liberal historiography, perhaps the most significant lacuna in the whole of his work. In 1845, as Marx and Engels engaged in their political critique of the Left Hegelians, part of their point continued to be the lack of German social, political, and intellectually practical development relative to France and England. Both friends had already contrasted Germany with these more economically and politically developed societies, identifying in Germany a preoccupation with—and undoubted excellence in—philosophy as opposed to politics or political economy. In Germany, history similarly was freighted with a philosophical cast—most evident in Hegel, but also in the Left Hegelians—with no sign of those striking social, political, and economic dimensions tied to terms of class that historians elsewhere had discerned. The great problem with the Left Hegelians like Bauer and Stirner was that they had not got beyond mere philosophy; they continued to ­understand such essential issues as alienation and emancipation exclusively in philosophical terms. In this regard, they trailed even the mundane liberals in France and England, to say nothing of the practical criticism advanced by the communists.

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The observation of crucial cultural-political differences between Germany, and France and England, dated to 1843 in the work of both Marx and Engels.19 In 1843, however, they had both seen themselves to be in common struggle with the German philosophers, who were in turn seen to be in alliance with—if not at one with—the communists. Marx concluded his second article for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, with the view that the consequence of Germany being behind France and England in social development was that liberation in Germany necessarily had to be more radical: In Germany no kind of bondage can be broken without breaking every kind of bondage … The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of the human being. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality.20

By 1845, Marx and Engels had gone far beyond this perspective in many ways, and had now in fact trained their sights on those very same German philosophers, as ideologists who did not advance, but indeed even obstructed, the practical task of the communist self-emancipation of the proletariat. It is in this light that the manuscripts of “The German Ideology” must be addressed.21 Never either complete or coherent, they were early texts by Marx and Engels addressing the failings of German philosophy in political terms. The German philosophers, they argue, did not confront practical reality even when they declared themselves to be materialists. They produced only “ideology”, ideas about ideas, which had no practical, emancipatory value. It was through their profoundly polemical criticism of this form of German radical and socialist thought that Marx and Engels sought to establish their own position and practice: that of the practical criticism of communism, which would lead to actual revolution and real emancipation. Throughout their writing they drew upon the concrete and practical, often inspired directly by mainstream writers of the “more advanced” societies of Britain and France, posing their relatively practical ideas in contrast to the mere ideology emanating from the “sainted” Left Hegelian atheists (already taken to task in The Holy Family).

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Notes 1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 313. 2. A first meeting in 1842 had been cool, Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto MaenchenHelfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), 90. 3. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, MECW, vol. 4, 37. 4. As noted previously, for Althusser it marked an “epistemological break in Marx’s work”, and it has for generations figured in undergraduate courses on social theory. 5. Terrell Carver, and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 6. Carver and Blank, A Political History, 2. 7. This analysis is deeply indebted to and closely follows that of Carver and Blank. 8. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, vol. 5, 47. 9. Ibid., 17. 10. Ibid., 33, 37. 11. George C.  Comninel, Historical Materialism and Bourgeois Revolution: Ideology and Interpretation of the French Revolution (Toronto: York University, 1984). 12. Terrell Carver, and Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 7. 13. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, MECW, vol. 5, 4, 5. 14. Carver and Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts”, 7–8. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, “Guizot, Pourquoi la révolution d’Angleterre a-telle réussi? Discours sur l’histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre, Paris, 1850”, MECW, vol. 10. 19. Frederick Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, MECW, vol. 3, 392–3; Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, MECW, vol. 3, 179. 20. Ibid., 187. 21. Carver and Blank’s presentation of an English text includes only parts of the unfinished polemics against Bauer and Stirner which Marx and Engels had laid aside but which were later assembled by Ryazanov into the “main manuscript” of a supposed “Chap. 1. Feuerbach”. In what follows, citations will therefore be made to the MECW edition, despite the problems of heavy-handed editorial intervention that Carver and Blank (Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts”, 68–70) detail.

CHAPTER 6

The German Ideology versus Historical Materialism

Marx and the Liberal Historians As discussed in the previous chapter, Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank have made a powerful case that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did not intend to put forward an account of the “materialist conception of history” in systematic theoretical terms in the primarily polemical manuscripts subsequently selected and assembled by others, and published as “The German Ideology”. In confronting the “ideology” by which the Left Hegelians confused mere philosophy with actual politics, Marx and Engels found themselves opposing their inherent idealism with the broadly materialist social theory that had become characteristic of England and France. The determinedly practical cast of these texts, therefore, involves contrasting conceptions of historical development grounded in social, political, and economic terms as they prevailed in France and England with the “ideological” forms of idealist conception characteristic in Germany. It is not merely that the German Left Hegelians were committed to woefully inadequate politics (as already articulated in “On The Jewish Question” and The Holy Family), but that the fundamental flaw in their politics lay in the embrace of mere philosophy (and an implicitly idealist philosophy, despite their Fueurbachian claims to be materialists), rather than the “practical materialism” of communism. It is, therefore, not merely philosophical materialism, but practical materialism—the politics of working-class communism1—with which Marx and Engels are concerned. Their opponents, however, are so © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_6

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ensconced in “ideology” that mere ideas are taken to be sufficient to transform the world. In opposition to this ideological historical social theory—grounded in Hegelian idealism notwithstanding the Left Hegelians’ belief that they were materialists—Marx and Engels brought to the fore well-­established ideas from English and French materialism. Indeed, they go so far as to ground an account of history in biological materiality, beginning with individual human animals, sexual reproduction, and the acquisition of food. The brief and speculative account of human social development that they adduce immediately calls to mind the stages theory of history developed in the previous century. Nor is this a superficial similarity: Marx and Engels specifically address stages of historical development in terms of “the means of subsistence”, and the classic liberal theory of four stages of history directly informs their account. The published text2 of “The German Ideology” in fact begins with the concept of producing the means of subsistence: [Men] begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.3

It is important to keep in mind that this was not intended by Marx and Engels to be the beginning of a text on the materialist conception of history. It was instead chosen to be the opening passages for a constructed “book” by editors who believed that they could discern a fundamental Marxist text on historical materialism in otherwise disconnected manuscript fragments. As noted previously, the passages of this “chapter” have resonated very widely as articulations of Marx and Engels’s materialist thought. What is most striking, then, is how conventional these ideas were at the time; how consistent they were with mainstream social scientific ideas about history and social development that were broadly disseminated in the nineteenth century.

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The idea that human society had progressed through a series of clearly demarcated stages of modes of subsistence had been established in conventional liberal social and historical theory more than half a century before Marx was born. Indeed, the liberal historiography of stages of modes of subsistence was fully developed long before the French Revolution. In his Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, Ronald Meek provided a profoundly insightful account of the development of this liberal conception of historical progress proceeding through distinct stages of modes subsistence.4 As previously noted, the political economists Adam Smith and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot first conceived the idea of four fundamental and sequential stages of modes of subsistence—hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce—in the middle of the eighteenth century. Meek noted that as early as 1758, Lord Kames had produced a history of law and public governance based upon these progressive stages of the classic modes of subsistence.5 Kames’s description of the modes of subsistence then made reference to the simultaneous development of a growing “intimacy of union” in the course of these successive stages of historical progress. In these terms, he explicitly recognized both the growth of the social division of labour in society (with concomitant mutual dependence) and a necessity for the development of forms of government that could provide an adequate legal structure to accommodate the new social relations associated with this growth of complexity. By the time of Marx’s childhood, this story of progressive stages of history founded upon successive modes of subsistence not only was broadly accepted (at least within liberal perspectives) but had been specifically articulated in terms of the civilizing role of a rising commercial bourgeoisie. The idea that this specifically modern class, the inherent embodiment of historical progress, had been compelled to contest for political ascendancy with an increasingly outmoded aristocratic agrarian ruling class, desperately clinging to power, had by this time become an integral element in the widely disseminated liberal historiography of “bourgeois revolution” put forward by Augustin Thierry, François Mignet, and François Guizot.6 Meek observed that the concept of mode of subsistence can be distinguished from Marx’s conception of mode of production on the grounds that the latter “embraces not only the kind of living that men get but also the relations they enter into with one another in order to get it”.7 Given Kames’s account of the developing social division of labour, however, this position demands drawing a careful distinction. In Meek’s view, it would

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seem, the mere increase in division of labour among persons in society cannot in itself constitute a sufficient change in “the relations they enter into with one another” to mark a different mode of production. This view would seem to be consistent with the emphasis in Marx’s 1844 manuscripts on the role of alienation of labour in fundamental historical development, later reinforced in the Manifesto’s 1848 emphasis on the successive class oppositions of “oppressors and oppressed”. In the 1845–6 manuscripts of “The German Ideology”, however, Marx and Engels extensively draw upon implications of the idea of division of labour in historical analysis—with scarce reference to the previous identification of alienation of labour—to a degree that would never again be matched in any of their works. It can be argued that in some places Marx and Engels go beyond the merely liberal conception of “mode of subsistence” in offering the idea of a mode of production that is more than simply technique: it is social existence, a “mode of life”, through production. Still, this seems scarcely more than what Kames argued so many years before, and quite far from the idea that the historical development of the alienation of labour—the movement of property through history—was the key to historical social development. Relative to the insightful analysis of property as the consequence of the alienation of labour in the 1844 manuscripts—pointedly opposed to the standard liberal resort to supposedly primordial conditions—the texts of “The German Ideology” seem to reproduce the conventional materialist ideas of French and British liberals as a means to confront the hopelessly idealist character of even the most radical expressions of German philosophy. This is not the articulation of Marx’s materialist conception of history, but a polemical sidebar. Although the emphasis on the “practical” nature of French and British thought can be seen to have relevance to Marx and Engels’s polemic against the German “ideologists”, it substitutes a merely liberal materialism for the profound foundation of historical materialism upon the alienation of labour—the exploitation/oppression of one class by another. Indeed, the conception of mode of production articulated in “The German Ideology” does not even refer to class, let alone the alienation of labour. When the idea of class does enter these texts, it is almost exclusively in the terms that had long been used in liberal historiography and political economy. The emphasis on production throughout these texts is entirely ­consistent with the terms of analysis of the British and French liberals who were primarily responsible for developing materialist ideas within the mainstream social science of the day.

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In arguing against the ideology of the German philosophers, Marx and Engels held that even the ideas of bourgeois liberals—who were perforce grounded in practical reality—were more advanced, and especially more materialist, than the positions of Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer, and, ultimately, even Ludwig Feuerbach. There is no doubt something to be said for this view, but it falls far short of conveying the ideas articulated in Marx’s 1844 manuscripts. It is, indeed, little more than a critique of the Hegelian idealism that still underpinned German forms of “radical” philosophy, grounded in a broadly materialist perspective that was shared by most British and French liberal theorists. This critique of otherwise absent materialism, was not, however, itself conceived to be philosophical in character, as Carver and Blank take pains to emphasize. Far from being a theoretical “chapter on Feuerbach”, as the texts have been presented from their first publication, Marx and Engels were in fact engaged in political polemics throughout. This was a relentless critique of political posing and posturing, of self-­ deceiving fantasies of potency belied by evident social realities and predictable economic developments.8

Specifically, in critique of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels wrote: in reality and for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence. When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have much too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as anything but embryos capable of development.9

Against the German Philosophers Carver and Blank carefully follow the developments in the manuscript passages that follow, noting how the additions and corrections of both Marx and Engels increasingly focus upon and sharpen their political critique of the merely philosophical.10 They note that Marx and Engels are “criticizing Feuerbach for merely hinting at what they themselves are stating directly  – as opposed to more egregious ‘ideologists’ who have not advanced even to the point that Feuerbach had reached with his hints”.11

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This critique of Feuerbach’s limited materialism leads to a direct appreciation of more practical social thought in general. As Carver and Blank argue, the text gives “[d]ue credit to the political economists for offering influential clues about history – which for Marx and Engels are producing a new politics”.12 In their critique not merely of the ideologists, but of Germans generally, Marx and Engels start with the “first premise of all human existence”, taking account of the essential fact that for there to be any history at all, there first must be the production of the necessities of human life: “the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and consequently never a historian.” The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, especially since they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write of civil society, of commerce and of industry.13

This historical appreciation was indeed already more extensive than what the political economists had suggested. By the 1840s, the fundamentally liberal perspective grounded in progress through the successive modes of production informed the whole of mainstream French and English historiography.14 Only the most reactionary—or at the very least deeply conservative thinkers—who rejected not only the ideas and values of the French Revolution in their entirety but also the idea that there was a tendency towards social progress in history, had not come to see history in these fundamental terms. For the rest, as Guizot had maintained at the Sorbonne before entering government, the rise of European civilization was grounded in the rise of bourgeois commerce. Even those who were reluctant to embrace directly the idea of “class”, or who saw great danger in opening politics to “the mob”, tended to see history broadly in these terms so long as they did not actively embrace the social and political privilege of aristocracy associated with the old regime.15 In this, the passages that articulate materialist approaches to history in “The German Ideology” contrast starkly with the developing conception of the capitalist mode of production that—both previously and subsequently—emerged through Marx’s critique of political economy. This will especially be clear with respect to Marx’s ideas on precapitalist modes of production, particularly as developed in Volume III of Capital, as will be

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seen below, and in his later work. What is clear, however, is that there is great continuity in Marx’s thought from 1844 through the three volumes of Capital, and into his later studies, and that the ideas incorporated in “The German Ideology” diverge from these profoundly. “The German Ideology” remains fundamentally flawed in its reliance upon ideas that were drawn from non-Marxist sources; that articulated uncritical views on the historical character of production, as such; and that gave precedence to simple productive technique over property relations in the development of history. Marx’s earlier, profoundly original insight that it is alienation of labour that is the essential moment of production in the course of human history was therefore undercut by a broad infusion of a fundamentally liberal materialism. It is clear that in the course of pursuing the political polemical purposes of rejecting the ideology of the German “True Socialists”, the focus of Marx and Engels shifted from property relations and alienation of labour to forms of production, as such. There is nothing in this project that would have been necessary in any country other than Germany, and even with respect to Germany, there is little doubt that the main reason for this polemic against the Left Hegelian philosophers is that Marx and Engels had previously been associated with them. The ideologists had, in fact, negligible impact on the development of actual radical politics in Germany, and even within philosophy, their impact shrank profoundly within a few years. In these polemical writings, Marx and Engels did not explicitly abandon their earlier insights. Their analysis seems, however, to have lost sight of them, perhaps as a consequence of the scope, specific polemical purpose, and relative immaturity of “The German Ideology” texts. In confronting the Left Hegelians, Marx and Engels were compelled to articulate their ideas in relation to the historical scope and embrace of social totality that was characteristic of Hegel’s own ideas. It was not, of course, Hegel himself but the “critical” Left Hegelians whom they sought to confront. Yet, notwithstanding their supposedly “materialist” critique of Hegel, the Left Hegelians were entirely dependent on Hegel’s system,16 which forced Marx and Engels to confront the latter’s far more profound reach (corresponding to his greater genius) even while criticizing the former’s more limited arguments. Marx and Engels, therefore, were drawn into an extended polemic against German idealism, in which they sought to ­counterpose to the Hegelian idealist philosophy of history (even as the Left Hegelians claimed to be materialist) a truly materialist and social conception of history that was at the same time comparably broad and deep.

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But their purposes were not—as Carver and Blank remind us—fundamentally philosophical (or theoretical), so much as a critical rejection of the idea that the advancement of philosophical insights (however valid) constituted real politics. Marx and Engels’s intent was a fundamentally political polemic against Left Hegelian philosophers who not only claimed to have the only correct approach but rejected the self-organized struggle of working people. While compelled to confront the inherent Hegelianism of their opponents, their actual purpose was to reject entirely the supposition that philosophy was politics. As Carver and Blank have argued, they were not trying to counterpose one philosophy with another, were not seeking to establish a correct philosophical or theoretical approach against one that was incorrect. The point was fundamentally that philosophy could never change the world in the way that was required, and that therefore the necessary political task was instead to develop concrete communist action among the working class: practical politics leading to practical change. Finally, it is important to recognize that this profound engagement with the Hegelianism and flawed materialism of the German “True Socialists” was undertaken when Marx’s critique of political economy had not yet been carried very far. Many issues that would have been germane to addressing the weaknesses of the Left Hegelians had as yet to be taken up, little more than a year after completion of the 1844 manuscripts. In the development of his ideas, Hegel (following the example of Aristotle) began with the individual, followed by the family, and in turn the social form of life. Marx and Engels also began, therefore, with the very origins of human society, their point of departure being a social conception of humanity defined by human self-creation through production. They sought to challenge the idealist framework of Hegelian thinking insofar as it remained integral to the Left Hegelians, even where the latter sought to style themselves as materialists. In so doing, Marx and Engels generalized upon Marx’s earlier recognition that social institutions and modes of consciousness are founded upon the social relations of production. Indeed, they pushed this crucial framework for historical analysis back beyond the initial threshold of social property relations, with which Marx’s original observations had begun in 1844. As a consequence, “The German Ideology” begins with the role of social production as providing the basis for the structure of society in general, even before the existence of exploitive forms of class society.

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While not without validity, this shift from a focus upon social production that inherently embodies the alienation of labour, to a more general appreciation of the materialist significance of social production in all of its forms, articulates a far less critical social insight. This perspective, indeed, is one congenial to many liberal perspectives, not least that of the progress of stages of subsistence. This shift in attention from the alienation of labour as the essential foundation for exploitive class-based production, to a broad consideration of the social implications following upon any systemic form of production, obviously may divert analysis from “the movement of property through history”, to the no doubt real—but far less telling—implications of material social reproduction in any form of human society. There no doubt remains an important relationship to consider between the material forms of social reproduction—in general—and social institutions at the legal, political, and cultural level. This is, however, little more than what Lord Kames observed in 1758. It may perhaps be argued that with this exposition, Marx and Engels had improved on the long-standing liberal view that historical social forms corresponded directly to the “means of subsistence”, narrowly conceived. Nonetheless, there remains an essential difference between this broad and general materialist conception of the fundamental social role of production, and Marx’s prior (and subsequent) recognition that history—the history of class society—begins with and is founded upon the development of specifically exploitive relations of production. The general materialist conception of a relationship between “social life”—broadly grounded in social production—and social institutions and ideas are not at all a problem for mainstream liberal thinkers. In Marx’s earlier insight, however, it is explicitly social relations of exploitation—the alienation of labour realized as human estrangement in the form of property—that is socially determinant, not production in any merely material terms. That original conception specifically addressed the world-historical development of class society, culminating in industrial capitalism. It was in relation to this specific context, indeed, that Marx first observed that “religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc.” fell under the “general law” of the “movement of property” (which was the historical realization of the alienation of labour). In other words, the social forms of class society correspond to the development of class exploitation and not to the development of production as such.

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In “The German Ideology”, by contrast, this focus was to a real extent displaced in an effort to contrast the social-material understanding of human existence to Hegelian idealism. There is no doubt that such a social-materialist conception of human society is important in its own right, providing insight into all forms of social organization. In broad theoretical terms, it is clear that the social science of human development can and should be grounded in relation to the material conditions of human existence, whether or not such existence is predicated upon social exploitation (e.g., with respect to the many forms and long duration of societies based upon hunting and gathering). There is, however, fundamental significance to the question of whether or not a form of systematic social exploitation does in fact exist, and what might follow from that. There is, in these terms, a profound difference between the advance of social complexity within society, and the development of social exploitation. While in the growth of division of labour, most notably, the two may be found to coincide, it is also clear that instead, they may not. In terms of the historical development of the social relations of production, therefore, no simple development of the social division of labour can be taken to imply an introduction of the alienation of labour or systematic social relations of exploitation. Locating the issues of actual historical development within the framework of “The German Ideology”, therefore requires establishing an effective link between the forms of social production in general—with which it begins—and the actual historical emergence of exploitive relations of production that are characteristic of class society. Beginning with the distant origins of human society, for so long characterized in relation to forms of hunting and gathering, one must account for the subsequent emergence of class in terms of the alienation of labour, or social exploitation. This cannot be finessed merely by reference to increased social complexity. Hunting and gathering does not provide a ready foundation for the “alienation of labour”. It is hard to oppress a hunter/gatherer, who must go out into the world on his/her own to acquire food from nature, and who in the face of potential exploitation might simply keep on going. It is difficult to conceive how a society of free hunters and gatherers could end up in class relations of exploitation merely through the evolution of their social relations, without some concrete change in the form of production, which was accompanied by some specific introduction of relations of oppression. Once the existence of oppressive and exploitive class relationships is given, of course, it is not difficult to consider their ongoing

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evolution as the result of a range of internal contradictions. There is, however, much evidence that humans consistently tend to resist both the enduring social inequalities and subordination to bearers of power.17 Within the texts of “The German Ideology”, however, history is not depicted as the history of class struggles, but merely in terms of a succession of materially determined social forms. Therefore, some social bridge between free and egalitarian human bands and established class society must be conceived without taking for granted a priori the existence of oppressive social power and/or the existence of the state. It is one thing to suggest that the evolution of the division of labour leads to development within existing relations of property. It is quite another to understand how and why truly free human beings would in the first place accept property relations that made them less free, and which burdened them with obligations. Yet, nowhere in the texts of “The German Ideology” is there the suggestion that some introduction of oppression is required to transform a simple increase in social complexity into the origin of class society. In order to confront the essentially timeless “materialism” claimed for the German philosophers—not only Bauer, Stirner, and the rest of “the Holy Family”, but also Feuerbach—Marx and Engels brought to bear the far more genuinely materialist bourgeois liberal accounts of French and English historians and political economists. Marx and Engels retained greater respect for Feuerbach than the lesser “sainted” ideologists, but in comparison to all such German philosophers, the “more advanced” liberal theorists of France and Britain had undoubtedly engaged at a more practical level with concrete issues of material existence, in broadly historical terms. These mainstream liberal perspectives of France and England combined recognition of historical change in the forms of class societies—in their terms, the stages of modes of subsistence, which might seem to correspond to what Marx had characterized in terms of the “movement of property”—with a general materialism of explanation (further drawing upon geography, climate, demography, etc.) that stood in opposition to the German ideologists. To the extent that the object was to contrast the absence of real engagement with the material basis of daily social existence in German philosophy, in even its supposedly most critical forms, with the immediate, practical materialism of even bourgeois liberals in France and Britain, there was indeed something to be said for this approach. Regrettably, having not yet developed the terms of their own critical analysis very far, Marx and Engels appear to have gone too far in embracing the liberal materialism of mainstream French and British thought.

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Where in the 1844 manuscripts Marx had identified the alienation of labour as the origin of property, foundation for enduring social inequality, and the form of the realization of an exploitive class in society, none of this is to be found in “The German Ideology”. In place of recognizing the alienation of labour as foundational to both property and class society, Marx and Engels introduced a new causal link between production in general and the exploitive form of production in class society—one that, however, was derived directly from the historical logic of liberal ideology. Immediately following the idea of a distinct social mode of production, they assert, “This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population.”18 In ways that are fully consistent with mainstream liberal social science, Marx and Engels here associate the fundamental introduction of property—and so exploitive class relations between oppressor and oppressed—with the merely mechanical effects of population growth. This opens their discussion of division of labour, in which the technical aspects of materialism seem substantially to outweigh the social aspects, and the links to liberal stages theory are most clearly revealed. Indeed, the most regrettable feature of the texts of “The German Ideology” from the standpoint of historical materialism is precisely the emphasis they place upon the primary social role of division of labour, conceived in the terms of political economy and explicitly related to the observations of Adam Smith: The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognized. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force, in so far as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already known … brings about a further development of the division of labour. The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour … At the same time, through the division of labour there develop further, inside these branches, various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes)…

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The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership; i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.19

What is distinctive and new in the version of the stages theory here presented by Marx and Engels is the history of the development of property. They transform the liberal conception, by arguing that property is simply an aspect of division of labour. Their purpose is to demystify and “historicize” property, in contrast to the economists who regard it as “natural”. In making property an aspect of the division of labour, they make it into a specifically social relation, derived from that division of labour by which the reproductive life of individuals is socially organized. Their intent is clear—to bring to the materialist conception of historical development the critical insight that the basis of all social progress has at the same time been the basis for the development of exploitive human alienation. This insight is a rebuke to the simple-minded liberal ideology of progress, and particularly to the German ideologists who believe they have discovered the “resolution” to problems of modern misery, without experiencing, understanding, or even acknowledging the historical development of capitalism, of which these problems are an expression. Yet, in theorizing the social origins of property (and hence exploitation) by deriving it from the division of labour—instead of taking oppressive exploitation to mark the definitive point of departure—Marx and Engels have in fact embraced the scheme of the four stages theory, and so incorporated its mechanical and “naturalistic” conception of social development. They present the history of social development in terms that are strikingly similar to the ideas of Turgot (whose work they comment on in passing). The first form of ownership is tribal ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture.20

This significantly modifies the “modes of subsistence” model by recognizing in all of the prehistoric stages of development—the stages ­preceding private property and commerce—an epoch of “communal property”. It is suggestive in allowing for the identification of specifically private property as the basis for real historical development. However, telescoping the early

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epochs of human society into the “undeveloped” stages of property also suggests an anachronistic conception of property as a single, timeless and natural category of human experience, and it obscures the critical point that private property is a consequence of exploitation and not the reverse. In “The German Ideology”, “class” is something very different from the fundamentally opposed pairs of classes which Marx and Engels would offer in The Communist Manifesto. “Class” is treated as a product of the division of labour, precisely as the political economists would have it— developing within the various branches of labour “among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour”, the “relative position of these individual groups … determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes)”. Class, then, is simply one more “economic” category of labour. The sociologist T. B. Bottomore observed this difference in Marx’s use of class between “The German Ideology” and The Manifesto, but since he himself took class to be narrowly “economic” in character, he suggested that the earlier concept of class was the “scientific” one while the more general concept of The Manifesto was problematic.21 The truth of the matter is just the reverse. It is the use of class found in The Manifesto which belongs to historical materialism, which studies the supposedly economic category of class only to criticize it, to reveal that class is not merely an “economic” category of “income” but rather a politico-economic category of exploitation and conflict. The historical sufficiency and accuracy of the pairs of classes actually offered in The Manifesto are open to question, but their sense of opposition, of exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed, is central to historical materialism. The resort to anachronistic and liberal ideological meanings for important terms at this early point in their thought can also be seen in their use of Bürgerliche Gesellschaft. This term was at the time used to signify both “civil society” and “bourgeois society” (as it does to this day). In “The German Ideology”, “civil society” is described as “the true source and theatre of all history”, which finally comes into its own as “bourgeois society”: Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of this stage … The word “civil society” emerged in the eighteenth century, when property relationships had

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already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organization evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name.22

This discussion of civil society, and all the discussions of property as such, still carry the same flaws as the account of the “movement of private property” in the 1844 manuscripts: they are “historicized” only in the abstract-formal manner of political economy. From the perspective of the critique of political economy, which Marx had yet to develop very far, it is not civil society which knows stages, but class society.

The Division of Labour It is, however, undoubtedly the role of the “division of labour” as such that is most problematic. In the texts of “The German Ideology”, this concept is utilized to an extent unmatched in any of Marx’s other writings. The term may be used to signify either the technical division of tasks in production—as in the breakdown of tasks in the production of pins within the workshop famously described by Adam Smith—or, instead, the social division of labour, the development of enduring, separate and distinctive occupational roles within the larger whole of social production. In the technical or workshop division of labour, some general labourers may draw pins from lengths of wire all day, while others form heads for the pins—tasks that in themselves require little by way of skill, and which readily allow a worker to move from one task to the other. Such workshop division of labour, however, is not characteristic of non-capitalist societies, whereas in capitalist relations of production it plays a central role. The increase in “relative surplus value” that follows from increasing output per worker, per hour, through technical innovations expressing the real subsumption of wage labour to capital, realized through management’s active control over production processes, is unique to the capitalist mode of production. The growth and maintenance of distinct social identities tied to the specialized skills of different occupations—butcher, baker, brewer—is by contrast fundamentally characteristic of precapitalist societies. Each ­occupation carries with it a range of social expectations as to normal prac-

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tices in production, and in many social contexts, the occupations are strictly regulated with respect to all or most issues of production and exchange. Such regulations—whether by custom, guild, or state—generally reinforce the social identity of producers. This enduring context of social regulation imparts a strong significance to socially normative occupations. The social division of labour, therefore, tends to multiply concrete social identities in production and exchange, while increasing social interdependence and complexity at the level of individuals. In the capitalist factory or workshop, by contrast, the specific skills of distinct occupations tend increasingly to be dissolved in favour of the employment of general labour closely controlled by the capitalist. Undoubtedly, there is in this some growth in social “complexity”, but it is not realized primarily at the level of individuals. The division of labour is less frequently expressed in terms of a range of distinctive productive occupations, and more generally takes the form of a workshop division of labour across numerous limited actions within closely controlled processes of production. There may be many more discrete steps of production within a capitalist factory, but there generally are fewer distinct occupational identities. In its usual capitalist realization, then, the workshop division of labour has very nearly the opposite effect of the social division of labour. That both are usually described in terms of “the division of labour” clearly is a potential source of enormous confusion. That such fundamentally different social processes are known by the same term and subject to being confused with each other, is a direct consequence of political economy. As Ellen Meiksins Wood noted, following Marx’s account in the Introduction to The Grundrisse, political economy systematically reads back into even the earliest stages of human existence the categories of capitalist society.23 What is thus inscribed in the past subsequently is taken to explain historical development into the starting point of the present. In Adam Smith’s view, stated at the very beginning of The Wealth of Nations: The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.24

He then outlines the efficiencies of the pin workshop, after which he observes:

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The separation of different trades and employments from one another, seems to have taken place, in consequence of this advantage.25

Smith thus projects the advantages of the workshop division of labour into the past as explanation for the social division of labour between different trades, which of course appeared millennia earlier. For Smith, there is no distinction to be made between these two forms, but rather a continuum of development. The development of the division of labour is then attributed to yet another characteristic of modern society projected not merely into the distant past, but as part of human nature: This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom …. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.26

For liberal classical political economy, the division of labour took the form of a natural force, the inevitable consequence of the supposedly inherent tendency of humans to trade. It is the inherent tendency of humans to trade that explains the specialized occupational structures of the social division of labour (which strikingly do not follow from “human wisdom”). Having postulated that it is the detailed impact of division of labour in the workshop that underpins the social division of labour, Smith has attributed to human nature an inherently natural process for increasing productivity at the most basic level. This, in turn, provides the ideological rationale by which social complexity, structures of class, and the “natural” organization of the workshop, all was to be explained, in a world that led inexorably from first principles to capitalist production. Given their political polemic against the “ideology” of German philosophers, Marx and Engels appear to be prepared to travel a long way down the road alongside the “practical” political economists. In his later critique of political economy—in The Grundrisse and Capital—Marx would offer scathing rebuttals of the political economists’ bourgeois essentialism. At this point, however, he had yet to develop his critique very far, and the contrast between Anglo-French materialism and German idealism (even the “ideology” of the supposedly materialist Young Hegelians) was too tempting to ignore. Regrettably, taking on board such fundamentally liberal materialist conceptions as the division of labour as a primary driver of

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history introduced a range of ideas that were in fact fundamentally at odds with the direction of historical materialist thought that already was inscribed in Marx’s work. One consequence within the texts of “The German Ideology” is the tendency to conflate entirely the technical and social senses of division of labour, not merely emphasizing the forces of production, but attributing to them directly even the social division of labour. This is particularly evident in Marx and Engels’s discussion of the development of the division of labour leading to the feudal separation of town and country: [N]ot only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance, the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labour.27

There could hardly be a more complete statement of technological determinism. Neither in this passage, nor those that follow, is there any pussyfooting around, any tempering, for example, of the role of forces of production with the “relations of production”. In the first place, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the extent of division of labour and the development of productive forces, with the latter bearing the whole of causal responsibility. Second, in consequence, the extent of division of labour can in itself be taken as a reliable indicator of the development of productive forces. Third, and most significantly, “the whole internal structure of the nation” follows from the “stage of development reached by its production” and trade. It is just at this point that Marx and Engels introduce “tribal ownership” as the form of property that coincides with hunting/gathering, pastoralism, and even agriculture. They are, therefore, both emphasizing the fundamentally liberal conception of modes of subsistence, and yet going beyond even that in a more or less mechanical materialism by attributing a far more profound and extensive development of the division of labour— and hence productive forces—to the later eras of agriculture (“ancient and feudal”) and the development of commerce and industry. If this represents the considered and developed opinion of Marx and Engels, then they

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would, in fact, have been technological determinists, pure and simple. Indeed, this account is more technologically determinist than the classic stages theory had been. What is especially telling is their emphasis on the division among agricultural, commercial and industrial labour, with the division between the former and the latter two forms of labour coinciding with the separation of town and country. It was, of course, a hallmark of liberal materialism that the two modes of subsistence most consistent with civilized society were agriculture and commerce. Adam Smith had himself made much of the separation of town and country. It, therefore, becomes clear that Marx’s earlier insights are here being integrated into an overview taken over from the prevailing liberal conceptions of history. Without his actually abandoning the idea of the alienation of labour, it is clear that labour has now been fitted into a historical process quite different from the one suggested in 1844. The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of property, i.e., the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.28

Even on the face of it, this is a very different conception of property from that offered in the 1844 manuscripts. It is not presented as the consequence of the alienation of labour, but rather as the expression of the division of labour. Where Marx had previously objected to returning to “a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does”,29 here he and Engels, in fact, conceive that “primordial” relations of production produce “primordial” relations of property. They begin with “tribal property”, corresponding to “the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by cattle-raising or, at most, by agriculture”.30 This once again clearly references the standard liberal stages theory, with a bit of a twist in allowing for the possibility that agriculture might still be an “undeveloped” stage (where it “presupposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land”31). While this is in one sense an improvement over the standard liberal view (recognizing the possibility of agriculture in the Americas, for example, without civilization being necessary), it imposes upon the idea of the development of property a “natural” foundation that has nothing in common with the alienation of labour. Instead, there is a projection of familial division of labour associated with the “slavery latent in the family”.32

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Only under the conditions of the second form of property—the “communal and state property” of the ancient world—does the private form of property begin to develop. Coincident with this, there is “for the first time the same relations which we shall find again, only on a more extensive scale, with modern private property”.33 The subsequent feudal form of property is then characterized as following from the country, in contrast to the ancient form associated with the rise of towns. They then consider the development of feudal property relations in terms of inherent conflict with the surviving (and emerging) towns. They conclude that in the era of feudalism “there was little division of labour”, aside from that between town and country.34 All of this analysis is far more consistent with the liberal materialist accounts than with Marx’s earlier insights, although it undoubtedly improves upon those liberal accounts. Still, their focus remained unmistakably upon the social division of labour: they emphasize the social character of production, the social character of property, and indeed the social character of all aspects of human existence, beginning with language and consciousness itself. The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship … It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force.”35

This observation—that social relationships may themselves be forces of production and have a material existence—is extremely important, yet it depends entirely upon how the social relationships are themselves conceived. If social relationships are no more than reflections of fundamentally natural forces, then this is simply a wrinkle upon a wholly naturalistic materialism, not an expression of a truly social materiality. If there is to be any real meaning to Marx’s earlier insight that “both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result” of human history, then there must be a human reality which is material but more than simply “natural”. Not to belabour the philosophical point, it is apparent that such a reality is precisely that which is created by consciousness and human intention. A book is composed of natural materials and produced through human labours that, in both muscle and machine, are material processes. Yet, the

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material reality of the book as a human artefact must include its meaning as a product of consciousness, a reality which is entirely natural in its content, yet which cannot be comprehended in purely “natural scientific” terms that would exclude the processes of conscious existence. Only consciousness can produce a book. In appropriating the liberal materialism of the stages theory—notwithstanding their critical amendments and Marx’s prior recognition of the social character of human material existence—Marx and Engels unfortunately succumbed in “The German Ideology” texts to liberal “technical” and “naturalistic” conceptions, especially with regard to the social relations of division of labour. Much as in the purely liberal conception, the material basis of social development is said to be “increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population”:36 With these there develops the division of labour, which was originally nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or “naturally” by virtue of natural disposition (e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc., etc.

It is, perhaps, notable that Marx and Engels move away from the Smithian emphasis on a natural proclivity to trade as the foundation for division of labour, and instead turn towards a quite different natural foundation in the form of the sexual act. This approach maintains an emphasis on natural developmental processes but shifts this away from the political-economic presumption of the primordial nature of trade relations. This seems, on the one hand, to challenge political economy in terms that resonate with the 1844 manuscripts: it is prone to push explanation into the “grey nebulous distance” of primordial conditions while failing utterly to illuminate the origin of divisions between classes.37 In contrast to the emphasis upon alienation of labour in the Paris manuscripts, however, the resort to natural explanations for the development of divisions within society—beginning with reproduction and the biological foundations for differentiation in family life—substitutes for the original political economic natural propensity to trade a different but comparable naturalism. Marx and Engels have replaced naturally trading humans who learn from this to differentiate socially, with humans who are naturally differentiated in their social relations, and who learn from this to trade. It does not require a profound

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conversion for those influenced by liberal thought to accept this account. Indeed, in linking the division of labour in society to natural-scientific accounts of biological development, this interpretation of materialism shifts the focus from the arguable terrain of “natural” social behaviour to differentiation grounded in biologically recognized science. These seemingly more “scientific” bases go a long way towards explaining the attractiveness of “The German Ideology” as a foundational Marxist text. In this account within “The German Ideology” text, the process of division continues, leading to the differentiation of mental and physical labour. Here, finally, the issue of exploitation is rejoined, since “enjoyment and labour, production and consumption … devolve on different individuals, and … the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour”.27 Yet, while Marx and Engels label this to be the level of “true” division of labour, they merely continue to elaborate a single, natural process of differentiation and development, from the act of procreation to the machine shops of Europe. Indeed, whereas political economy merely obscured the difference between the social and technical division of labour, Marx and Engels here appear to have systematized the social division of labour as being itself a technical process. While they have criticized the non-conflictual content of liberal ideology, they have not yet come to criticize its anachronisms and especially its tendency towards a technologically deterministic materialism. Significant as these failings are within “The Germany Ideology” texts—which Marx and Engels withheld from publication—none of these errors is reproduced within their later works, and most particularly not within Marx’s further development of the critique of political economy.

The Historical Materialist and Liberal Conceptions of Class There are many passages from “The German Ideology”—including some of those cited above—which could just as well be taken to demonstrate Marx and Engels’s ongoing development of historical materialism. The texts of “The German Ideology” are, after all, a part of the continuous line of their work from 1844 until their deaths, work which, as a whole, does embody the development of historical materialism. For this very reason, however, it is not the presence of historical materialist concepts in this work which must be emphasized, but the persistence of fundamentally

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liberal concepts: liberal political economy, which would increasingly be criticized; liberal history, which would not; and a liberal natural-­ economistic materialism which was criticized, but not completely. Ironically, however—although perhaps not surprisingly—the elements of liberal ideology which can be found in Marx’s work have not only generally been accepted as integral, but even, in vulgar Marxism, as central to his thought. It is precisely because of this enduring confusion that it is particularly important to contrast clearly these two lines of thought in Marx’s early work. Historical materialism, on the one hand, is based upon the criticism of political economy; is fundamentally rooted in a social conception of human existence; is historically specific in its analytical categories, and takes exploitive relations of production as its starting point. Liberal materialism, on the other hand, takes a natural-technical approach to human existence, is prone to analytical anachronisms, and begins with “production in general”. Before finally elaborating upon historical materialism as a method of analysis, it is important to demonstrate the extent to which Marx did and did not criticize the liberal materialism which he had incorporated into his early work. Those elements of liberal ideology which have been magnified by subsequent Marxists as a foundational economic determinism must particularly be confronted and criticized, and the extent to which some of these ideas persisted in Marx’s own thought must be accounted for. Aside from its apparent similarity to the stages theory of development, the two most significant specific instances of liberal conceptions incorporated into “The German Ideology”, and persisting with lasting effect upon Marxism, are the conflation of the liberal conception of class with Marx’s own—a conflation which is at the core of the Marxist theory of bourgeois revolution—and the subordination of the history of class society to the technical development of the division of labour—which continues to underwrite the economic determinism that still dogs Marxism to this day. In the course of his works, Marx used “class” in quite a number of senses. It is the sense of opposed classes, classes which come into being through the systematic antagonisms of social relations of surplus extraction (alienated labour), that is inherent to historical materialism as a social theory grounded on recognition of the exploitation of the productive majority in society. The specific instance of opposed classes which is peculiar to capitalism is the opposition of the capitalist and working classes. These take the appearance of merely economic categories in political economy, because of the uniquely economic character of exploitation

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through the commodification of labour-power. Hence, Marx’s “economic” use of the term, indicating the modern economic classes, is really a specific and critical instance of the general exploitive sense. Marx also used “class” in a variety of other instances to describe social groups demarcated by particular social interests within the dynamic workings of capitalist society—these included the classical political economic “class” of the landlords (which he recognized to be a part of the capitalist class, in capitalism), the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and so on. In the earlier works in particular, however, one can detect not only uncriticized political economic uses of the term, but also the use of “class” to mean social rank: precisely as in liberal history, the history of the “lower”, “middle”, and aristocratic “upper” classes. Marx took over whole the liberal history of civilization as the progress of the bourgeois “golden mean”. He criticized it only partially, by insisting that bourgeois society was itself still a form of class society. As such, it continued to be marked by what he characterized as an enduring pattern of classes rising to ascendancy. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society … The class making a revolution appears from the very start, merely because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes … Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, in return for which the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly.38

That there is an important insight in this well-known passage will not be denied. Yet, it is perplexing that its sequential ranking of classes—in so general a form as to suggest many classes, though the usual stack is only of three—should generally remain unremarked. It is clearly at odds with the conception of two fundamental classes locked in struggle over e­ xploitation; classes here come into opposition not through exploitive relations, but because a “rising” class confronts the class at the top. Rather than the dyadic classes of “oppressor and oppressed”, classes here seem merely to sit one atop another, like the candies in a Pez dispenser.

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Notwithstanding his earlier analysis of the alienation of labour, even Marx’s conception of the proletariat as the revolutionary universal class in “The German Ideology” carried a sense of it being the last in a series of ranked classes. It would rise up in its turn and, in so doing, bring an end to class society. In this context, however, its historic mission followed from its position as the last class. For this reason, possessed of nothing but its common humanity, it, therefore, had no particular interest to pursue. Indeed, it is hard to see how any sense can be made of bourgeois revolution, in its usual form, from the perspective of class exploitation. For the peasantry, who might be expected to be opposed to the feudal aristocracy, are not usually included at all—even in Lefebvre’s history, the episode of “peasant revolution” is little more than the work of few weeks in the summer of 1789. The enduring struggle is that of the bourgeoisie and the urban people against the aristocracy. Where do relations of exploitation figure among these classes—particularly since it is always emphasized that the sans-culottes were not proletarians? And if the bourgeoisie were to be taken as capitalists, whom do they exploit? If no one (or so few as not to count) on what grounds do they become a ruling class? What internal dynamic of class society can have led to this peculiar constellation of classes, and to a class struggle with no apparent basis in exploitation? It is little wonder that the French Marxists have had such difficulty in finding a satisfactory response to the revisionists, once Cobban showed the right questions to ask. The inherent problem is that the liberal conception of class which originally gave rise to the theory of bourgeois revolution cannot be reconciled to the historical materialist conception of exploitive class society. The impact of this contradiction can be seen not only in Marxist confusion over the French Revolution, but also in the Sweezy-Dobb transition debate.39 Sweezy’s position can be seen as a reluctance to allow a bourgeois class to emerge between feudal lords and serfs, preferring to accept its emergence only through a process external to feudalism altogether—the growth of trade. Dobb instead insisted upon identifying an inherent connection between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, whatever the problems, in order to retain the sense of an internal dynamic in class history. Sweezy, however, did approve of Dobb’s assertion that feudalism, per se, was dead long before genuine capitalism emerged, and he argued for an intervening period of “pre-capitalist commodity production” under the mediation of the Absolutist state.40 Though there are problems with this

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aspect of Sweezy’s analysis—particularly with his separation of the question of the ruling classes (he sees at least two) from the question of specific relations of class exploitation—the idea is not dependent upon his very problematic reliance on the external growth of trade. There is indeed a great deal to be said for an intervening period between feudalism and capitalism, as will ultimately be seen. What is perhaps most striking about the transition debate is that all of the contributors offered significant insights, without any being able to make complete sense out of Marx’s analysis. Their positions must be recognized as competing attempts at resolving a very real contradiction, one that is inherent in Marx’s conflation of the liberal and the historical materialist meanings of class in describing the origins of bourgeois society. Since the contradiction is really in Marx’s work, each attempt at resolution can offer a measure of plausibility, but in its turn will reveal an aspect of fundamental incoherence. The partial insights can only be brought together and made sense of by abandoning the orthodoxy of “what Marx said” about precapitalist society, and striking out anew solely on the basis of the historical materialist method. In making this criticism of Marx’s conceptions of precapitalist society— and particularly his account of bourgeois revolution—it is perhaps necessary to emphasize again how much Marx got right, given his purposes. Aside from his uniquely perceptive and fundamental critique of political economy—in which most, if not quite all, of the purposes of historical materialism were achieved with regard to capitalist society—and his overall conception of dynamic human social development through the history of class society, there remains the fact that Marx’s interpretation of the French Revolution was essentially correct with respect to the purpose it was meant to serve. For the point of Marx’s interpretation was the critique of liberal and purely radical-democratic politics. That is to say, the essential point was that the politics of the French Revolution offered the proletariat nothing more than liberal democracy in class society. Still, that was something. Alliance with the bourgeoisie for democratic ends had been and would continue to be appropriate where it offered the real prospect of democracy. As Hal Draper points out, for several years the question of whether or not a German bourgeois revolution in alliance with the proletariat was possible was a central issue for Marx.41 After many twists and turns, he decided that, no, in Germany a proletarian revolution, as part of the European revolution, was on the agenda. Because Marx’s conception of the dynamics of proletarian revolution was so intimately

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connected to his understanding of bourgeois revolution, much of his analysis of the coming of proletarian revolution must also be critically reconsidered. Most of Marx’s thought on revolution, however, had to do with what it must be, what socialist revolution must accomplish, not when or how it will arrive. And this thought, derived from his understanding of the structure of capitalist society achieved by the critique of political economy, is not called into question by these criticisms.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, vol. 5, 38. 2. It must be kept in mind that, though the words are those of Marx and Engels, the texts were assembled after the fact by others having their own priorities, purposes, and interpretations. For this reason, references in the text will be made to “The German Ideology” to avoid perpetuating the idea that this was a book by Marx and Engels. 3. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 7. 4. Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 5. Ibid., 103–4, citing L. Kames, Historical Law-Tracts (Edinburgh, 1758), 1: fn, 77–80. 6. George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987), 53–61. 7. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble savage, 229n. 8. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 7. 9. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 38–9. 10. Carver and Blank, A Political History, 8–12. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. Ibid., 12. 13. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 42. 14. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 63–74. 15. Ibid., 61–3. 16. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 29–30. 17. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997); Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1967). 18. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 32. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 32–3.

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21. Thomas B.  Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society (New York: Vintage, 1966), 22. 22. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 89. 23. Ellen M. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22; Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 87. 24. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk 1, Chap. 1, first sentence. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., Bk 1, Chap. 2. 27. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 32. 28. Ibid. 29. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 271. 30. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 32, 33. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 35. 35. Ibid., 43. 36. Ibid., 44. 37. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 271. 38. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 60–61. 39. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1964); R. Hilton, P. Sweezy, M. Dobb, et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1976). 40. Hilton, et al., Transition, 49–50, 107–108. 41. Draper, Hal. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. II (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978) Chapters 7–10.

CHAPTER 7

The Puzzle of the Manifesto of the Communist Party

The Purpose of the Manifesto of the Communist Party The great, inescapable fact about The Manifesto of the Communist Party1 (hereafter, Manifesto) is that, more than a century and a half after its publication, the call to arms issued by Marx and Engels has never been taken up by even one working-class revolution in a developed capitalist society. The International Communist movement that grew out of the Russian Revolution—which claimed the Manifesto for its own and shaped world politics for most of a century—is essentially defunct, its once tangible successes crushed, beaten back, or called into question. It is generally accepted that the Cold War was won by the capitalists and that the game is over. Yet, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the USSR, it had long been hard to reconcile the Manifesto’s striking imagery—European powers haunted by the spectre of workers bringing communist social emancipation—with the increasingly dissolute social life, enervated politics, and marginalized labour movements of modern capitalist societies. From a communist perspective, the dispiriting political realities of capitalist society were matched by all too grim social realities in the Soviet Bloc. While Marx and Engels’s brilliant evocation of the cause of radical change might still stir readers, they were far more likely to be idealistic university

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students than the workers for whom it was originally intended. Over time, even those who most credited and abided by its message had come increasingly to view the Manifesto as a document belonging to history. It is simply a fact that no working class in the advanced capitalist world has managed more than ephemeral moments or minuscule movements of revolution. This fundamental failure of class politics to meet the expectations of the Manifesto has posed an enduring challenge to Marxist thought, from the Second International to the second New Left of the 1970s, and beyond. Repeatedly, Marxists have found themselves hard-pressed to rethink the Manifesto’s fundamental call for proletarian revolution. On the one hand, reformists have always jumped at the chance to abandon the politics of class struggle as “unrealistic” and “divisive”; on the other hand, revolutionary socialists have been confronted by the eternal question of “what is to be done” in the face of the working class’s failure to develop revolutionary politics. By the twenty-first century—the all too imperfect achievements of revolutionary socialism succumbing on every side to seemingly triumphant capitalism, and most surviving parties of the left rushing to embrace the agenda of capital—even those convinced by Marx’s call for socialist class politics have found it hard not to see the Manifesto as a historical document of the nineteenth century with sadly little to say to the present. It is obvious, therefore, that something is in fact fundamentally wrong with the Manifesto. It will be argued here, however, that this does not include either its fundamental class analysis of capitalist society or its call for revolutionary transformation through the struggle of the working class. There is, therefore, no reason to abandon the ideas of the Manifesto. Yet, the problems that exist in this great text are sufficiently critical—and so much at the centre of what has been taken to constitute Marxism (even if not truly belonging to the core of Marx’s own thought)—that there will undoubtedly be resistance to recognizing them. The revolutionary project of the Manifesto can and must be revindicated. To do so, however, demands a new historical materialist understanding of the development of capitalist society, and of socialism as a movement within it. The most obvious error in the Manifesto lies in the historical position it claimed for itself in its call for revolution relative to capitalist society. In only 1848—when barely half the GDP of Britain itself was industrial in origin2—it trumpeted not only the need for an end to the era of industrial capitalism across Europe but that the very hour of that end had come. For all the insight Marx (and Engels) brought to bear on the historical

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moment, their polemic must be recognized to have been no more than a harbinger of prolonged class struggle still to come, in a capitalist epoch that was only then beginning to emerge. The proletarian revolution was not in fact delayed by the consequences of working-class economism, ruling class hegemony, or some combination of conjunctural factors in 1848, nor in the decades following, as has been argued since Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?3 It must be accepted that its hour simply was not then at hand. There is no doubt that, through his critical insights into the implications to be drawn from political economy as to the character of capitalist society, Marx was profoundly ahead of his time. The mistake in his historical judgment, however, was not simply one of timing. His misplaced expectations can in part be attributed to the astonishing acuity of his insight into the nature of capitalism and the dynamics of its development at a time when the thing itself had yet to achieve full expression even in its homeland. At the same time, a more immediate and consequential cause of error lay in the fundamental misunderstanding that Marx shared with his contemporaries as to the causes and significance of the French Revolution, and the politics to which it gave rise. The French Revolution is in no way tangential to the Manifesto. The text provides a substantial and heroic account of it as bourgeois revolution: the forging of a unified national state and a historically decisive clearing away of archaic social, political, and economic impediments to capitalist society by a class rising to ascendancy. This historical interpretation of 1789 clearly was integral to the message that a comparable proletarian class revolution was at hand in 1848. Yet, as previously noted, this conception of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution was not, in fact, a product of Marx’s own historical materialist analysis. Instead, it belongs to a current of liberal historical thought which Marx incorporated alongside—though in implicit contradiction with—his truly original historical materialist ideas, as they were derived from his critique of the liberal ideology of political economy. As Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner have argued, the contradiction between Marx’s historical materialist critique of political economy, and his acceptance of prevailing liberal views on the role of classes in historical progress, has had a profound and enduring effect, distorting Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism and the history of precapitalist societies.4 Such a claim poses an obvious challenge to much of what has long been accepted as orthodox Marxist thought, which in some quarters continues to be fiercely defended today. But the advocacy of class struggle

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to end capitalist society does not require—and ultimately does not ­permit—the defence of every aspect of Marx’s work, as if it all had the same degree of validity as his sustained critique of capitalist social relations. Marx made the mistake of accepting contemporary bourgeois accounts of historical class relations as if they were consistent with his own. This in no way undermines the validity of his distinct and entirely original analysis of class relations in capitalist society, but the mistake must nonetheless be admitted and confronted. Arguments about precapitalist class society and the origins of the French Revolution in the twenty-first century may seem remote, excessively academic, and perhaps too “narrow” in construction, reinforcing a disinclination on the part of many to call Marx’s own judgements into question. Yet, as has been previously noted in detail, the French Revolution was the crucial fact of Marx’s youth and the dominant historical issue of the age. It is not, however, simply a question of the French Revolution. Once the incorporation of a liberal ideological conception of the French Revolution into Marx’s historical ideas is recognized to have been responsible for misconstruing not only the timing but even the nature of proletarian revolution, this mistaken conception in the Manifesto can be seen to have had a far more than merely academic impact on strategies for class struggle. A careful rethinking is necessary, therefore, not only for understanding the French Revolution in its own terms but especially in its relation to the revolutionary socialist project of the Manifesto.

Ideas of the French Revolution in the Early Nineteenth Century The issues of the French Revolution resonate throughout the letters and articles that Marx wrote during the 1840s. Long after the defeat of Napoleon—which marked the defeat by united forces of reaction of revolutionary Jacobinism, in particular, and political liberalism in general—the politics of the Revolution continued to define the basic political issues of the nineteenth century. Following, respectively, the July Revolution of 1830 and the Reform Bill of 1832, France and England had each clearly embraced moderate sorts of liberalism. Although both were now constitutional monarchies, each also strove to keep the popular forces of democracy at bay. Even under the Restoration, the French state had preserved many elements of Jacobin nation-building, described by Tocqueville as largely constituting the continuation of processes already evident in the

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Old Regime.5 Though the development of a “rational” state bureaucracy was far less advanced in Britain—as would remain the case through the greater part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries6—both states attended in broadly liberal terms to the needs and claims of resurgent trade and emergent industrialization after the devastating Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Orleanist monarchy was, in this regard, emblematic. Its chief minister in the 1840s was the liberal historian Guizot, who long had trumpeted from the Sorbonne the cause of the bourgeoisie as the fount of historical progress in Europe, which he identified first in the growth of town life and urban economy during the middle ages, then successively in the English Civil War, the revolution of 1789, and of course in the new regime of France.7 Most of Europe in 1848, however, remained under the rule of reactionary states, for which even the most anaemic liberalism remained subversive and revolutionary. At the same time, however, decades after defeat of the Revolution’s call for liberté, egalité, fraternité, opposition was widespread. As previously discussed, the generally liberal Rhineland of Marx’s birth particularly chafed under the Prussian monarchy imposed by conquest and confirmed by the Holy Alliance, but throughout Europe, there were many who at least concurred with Guizot’s view of what 1789 had meant. A good number went further. Disdaining the moderate liberalism of Guizot were those who looked beyond the modest ambitions of the early days of the French revolution. Some embraced the radical and democratic republicanism of the Jacobins; some went further, to be inspired by the egalitarian and participatory popular democracy of the even more radical and proudly labouring (though heterogeneous and non-proletarian8) sans-culottes; and, in the extreme, there were growing numbers who identified with the explicitly egalitarian socialism of Gracchus Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals. While there was no shortage of adherents to the reactionary party of order, everywhere there were liberals, republicans, democrats, socialists, and communists—all of whom were inclined to measure each nation’s historical progress relative to a high water mark reached during the French Revolution. In most of Europe, therefore, another revolution on at least the terms of 1789 seemed possible, and more radical revolutionary ideas abounded. There was, therefore, nothing remotely novel about the account of the French Revolution in the Manifesto. As discussed in earlier chapters, throughout his writing before the Manifesto Marx had taken for granted that his audience shared his understanding that the Revolution had been

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made by a historically progressive bourgeois class against the reactionary forces of aristocracy and absolute monarchy.9 This was a long-established view. He expected his audience to recognize that the German burghers of his day were of a type with, if relatively less developed and more timid than, the French bourgeois of 1789. A distinguished line of historians, of whom Guizot was only the most notorious, had for decades described historical progress in terms of the class agency of the bourgeoisie, and Marx and Engels presumed that their readers were familiar with such ideas, and they always credited these as the principal achievements of liberal historiography.10 It had been this liberal conception of the historical project of bourgeois revolution that provided Marx with his initial context in 1843 for confronting the inadequacies of contemporary political ideas based on even radical rereadings of Hegel’s synthesis of liberalism and Prussian absolutism, as advanced by Bruno Bauer and others. Before his exposure to political economy at the end of 1843, there is no sign in Marx’s thought of a specifically capitalist working class. As a journalist, Marx had been concerned with social and political struggles, yet his concern with the “backwardness” of Prussia contrasted it particularly with the liberal societies of France and England, a contrast focussed primarily on achievements credited to the French Revolution. As a radical—certainly among the most radical thinkers and activists of the day—Marx had been preoccupied with both the political movements and the developments in radical philosophy that were directly traceable to the politics of the French Revolution. Then, as seen in previous chapters, the texts published as “The German Ideology” were written by Marx and Engels in polemic against the muddled and “backward” politics of the German “left” philosophers in comparison with even the thoroughly bourgeois thinkers of France and England. It was, however, through the critique of political economy that Marx came to acquire a completely new foundation for the communist project, one grounded firmly in the specific character of capitalist society (initially revealed to him through Engels’s citing of the ideas of political economy). As has been seen, the nature of capitalism as an exploitive system of class relations was immediately clear to Marx from his first reading of the political economists. Over the next two decades, he would continue to develop this critique, resulting in the towering achievement of Capital. It is not that critique, but the presumption that its critical analysis was germane to the social conditions actually existing in the Continental Europe of the day, that must be challenged.

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Throughout Europe in the 1840s, there was, of course, the production and sale of commodities, often on a large scale. Further, in many of these contexts there existed the regular payment of wages for labour. Virtually everywhere there was growing dependence upon the market for acquiring normal daily requirements. None of these circumstances, however, was unique to this period. All of them, indeed, could be found in the ancient and even medieval forms of European society. It is not difficult to see how these forms of social relations might be taken to correspond to those of capitalist society. If, however, the production of commodities in ancient Athens, or thirteenthcentury Europe, is not simplistically to be characterized as “capitalist”, clear criteria are required to distinguish between the mere production of commodities (either with, or without, the payment of wages), and truly capitalist production. As argued in Chap. 2, Marx’s critique of political economy does provide a clear conception of the unique character of capitalist social relations. What is required is actually to apply these criteria to Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Notwithstanding Marx’s immediate and brilliant analysis of the social property relations of capitalist class society in 1844, he did not bring these to bear in any systematic examination of European society as it existed in 1848. In writing the Manifesto, Marx and Engels had undertaken a call to arms, not an academic work of history or a philosophical work of theory. In political terms, applying the emancipatory insights of 1844 to the conjuncture of the day required conflating Marx’s critique of political economy—as it bore in the abstract upon the largely future potential of capitalist society—with extant forms of society, political movements, and political philosophies that were still fundamentally noncapitalist. The Manifesto is very problematically built upon such a conflation, and as a result, it misinterprets struggles that were coincident with the inception of capitalist society in Europe as signs of the imminent demise of that society.

English Capitalism and the Continent The importance of the specific and unique character of capitalist social property relations, and the need to take these seriously in historical analysis, is a recurring theme of this book. It has already been explored in Chap. 2 and will come up again in Chap. 9. It is the failure to take up and apply Marx’s critique of political economy rigorously and in detail that is largely

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responsible for the mess that has been made of “Marxist” approaches to history. However pervasive the idea may be that capitalism was well developed in the Europe of 1848, and despite the fact that Marx himself undoubtedly held that to be true at the time, this idea must be repudiated on the grounds of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This should not be terribly surprising with respect to Germany, which was so frequently described as “backward”. Hegel was familiar enough with political economy to give his conception of civil society a superficially Smithian character. Yet it is striking that where Smith’s Wealth of Nations consistently argued against the “Continental system” of corporatist regulation, and in favour of self-regulation by the market, Hegel took for granted that the persistence of corporate regulating bodies was essential to the functioning of civil society. His political theory conceived the state to rise above the antagonism of the particular interests within civil society, not least through direct, non-market regulation.11 It is not, as some have supposed, that Hegel transcended the particularism of capitalist society, anticipating something like the twentieth-century conception of social democracy. Nor did he have in mind simply the normal capitalist state meeting social needs unmet by the market. Rather, Hegel’s take on civil society is firmly grounded in a precapitalist perspective, most evident in his description of the “corporations”; it is a perspective that accords a central place to exchange, yet which still presupposes the necessity of normative social regulation by corporate bodies and the state. This fundamentally normative and corporatist approach to social and economic regulation is, in fact, characteristic of precapitalist states—and it is precisely this sort of regulation that in principle capitalism does without, and against which Smith argued. The strikingly anti-normative, unregulated, and indeed “anarchic” character of capitalism is central to the perspective of political economy, and to Marx’s critique of it. As Karl Polanyi also recognized, the principle of social regulation exclusively through means of the market was the unique, and largely disastrous, distinguishing feature of the profound social change of the transition to industrial capitalism.12 Yet it is clear in reading Hegel that he simply did not “get it” when it came to the ideas expressed in capitalist political economy. The same is true of Saint-Simon, whose Catechism of the Industrialists proposed to provide a new normative framework of regulation to replace the old moral order that appeared to have been rendered obsolete by the social order articulated by the political economists.13 With perhaps rare exception,

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social thinkers on the Continent at the time of the French Revolution and in the decades that followed simply did not “get” capitalism as conceived in political economy (the works of which they certainly read) because their social experience of market relations was very different. The social relations of capitalism had not developed there indigenously, and only began to spread there after the Revolution—often very slowly—from the increasingly industrial capitalist society developing in England.14 Marx, therefore, had no direct experience of capitalist social relations, nor did he have any basis for identifying the specific character of the capitalist working class, prior to his encounter with Engels’s critique of political economy. Notwithstanding the many popular struggles, strikes, and even organized socialist movements that came to the fore following 1789, neither a capitalist form of society nor a capitalist working class yet existed in France or Germany (nor anywhere outside England). Indeed, as noted in Chap. 2, the development of labour law in France following the Revolution had been diametrically opposed to that in Britain, and actually stood as a barrier to industrial capitalism. Marx’s ideas on human emancipation and transcending alienation in the form of the state, which down through 1843 were his primary focus, were not initially grounded in the class politics of capitalist society. Nor did the broad Continental “bourgeoisie” which he opposed as yet have a capitalist character more than 50 years after they had taken to the political stage in the French Revolution. Specifically, capitalist society did not figure in Marx’s thought until after he was introduced to it by the work of Engels in 1843. Engels was deeply immersed in capitalist social relations working at his father’s mill in Manchester, and he both read the works of political economy and attended to the unprecedented misery of the workers. It was through Engels’s lead that Marx came to confront the character of specifically capitalist social relations. Though neither he nor Engels recognized the point, these English social relations of capitalist production did not, in fact, exist on the Continent. Perhaps understandably, this has been an especially difficult point for some Marxists to accept, given the emphasis in the Manifesto on the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. Still, the crucial fact about the French Revolution from a historical materialist perspective is that neither it nor its whole range of politics—Liberal, Jacobin, or even Socialist— had anything to do with capitalism as such. It certainly was grounded on issues of class struggle, but it did not involve any classes that had a capitalist character; above all, the French bourgeoisie was not in any way a

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c­ apitalist class, was not in the process of becoming one, nor was there any development of capitalist social relations underway anywhere in France.15 Beyond the fact that there was no tendency towards the development of capitalist social relations anywhere in France, neither did the existence of powerful agrarian capitalism and the beginnings of industrial capitalism in England provide some geopolitical impetus for the actual development of capitalism in France. The French certainly were aware of England’s economic advantage but found themselves utterly unable to emulate the social changes (such as enclosure) that underpinned this advantage. French society not only was not capitalist, it was inherently structured in ways that were inimical to capitalism. Not only did the French Revolution not have the effect of fostering capitalist development, or even clear obstacles for it, the Revolution actually entrenched precapitalist socialist relations in France, causing it to fall behind even “backward” Germany in its industrial development by the later nineteenth century. A substantial body of Marxist scholarship now argues, following Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood, that contrary to prevailing social, economic, and historical theories grounded in liberal ideas, capitalism did not develop across Europe as a whole, but uniquely in the society of England.16 Most evidently, and significantly, the specifically capitalist and socially transformative industrial revolution followed through historical processes that were unique to England, and which played out over at least 450 years of distinctive social and economic development.17 In England, and England alone, a peculiar historical dynamic emerged through the development of the common law under Norman royal auspices following the Conquest, in the context of a legal system of national courts previously established under the centralized Anglo-Saxon monarchy.18 The existence of a separate system of effective law—providing the crown with an important counter-balance to arbitrary lordly power in the countryside, while at the same time securing the inheritance and other property interests for lords otherwise subject to the vagaries of feudal law—proved to be enormously important, allowing for the truly unique English experience of enclosures.19 This unique historical development was directly responsible for the emergence of agrarian capitalism in England. Nothing like the early modern transformation of English rural property relations through enclosure, and with it the whole structure of agrarian society, occurred anywhere else.20 During the early modern period, trade everywhere grew to unprecedented levels. But simply making a profit in trade is not capitalism.21

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About 80 to 90% of all social production beneath Western Europe’s burgeoning commercial sector, and at least a comparable proportion of the surplus appropriated by owners of property, remained agrarian in origin. Throughout France and Germany at the time of the Revolution, the whole of this agriculture remained characterized by the social relations of traditional peasant production. Peasant families worked the land according to centuries-old customs that specified every detail of agrarian production, and which locally had the force of law, reproducing themselves on the land while producing surpluses that were appropriated in the form of both rents and taxes. These were collected on the one hand by owners of land, and on the other hand by holders of what Robert Brenner has called “politically constituted property”, in the form of income accruing to state offices and a variety of residual feudal jurisdictional obligations. England, by contrast, had even before the nineteenth century acquired substantial geopolitical power based primarily on the wealth produced by “improved” agriculture on large tenant-farms. Enclosure had removed these farms from the restrictions of custom, allowing them to be engrossed, and turned into autonomous units of production that could benefit from improved circuits of production, economies of scale, and eventually the application of technical innovations.22 Through enclosure, the peasantry was over time almost entirely removed from occupation of productive land and reduced to a local casual labour pool of cottagers or relocated to towns or the newly growing districts of manufacturing (not yet capitalist) cottagers. Only a few agrarian smallholders—primarily in areas of dairy production—persisted in the face of the new economy. Capitalist tenant-farming brought an astonishing growth in agricultural productivity by means of characteristically capitalist processes, as access to the means of production was made ever more market-dependent. This was notably realized in the early eighteenth-century Agricultural Revolution, which for the first time saw the application of (modest) technological advances directly in agrarian production. Such innovation in production progressively reduced the need for labour, while increasing output. The owner of capital, rather than the collective rural community, increasingly determined what would be produced, and how, through enclosure and the extension of private property rights—at first over the use of land, and then over the commodified labour-power of wageworkers. English agrarian capitalism provided more and better food, more cheaply, and using fewer workers than the traditional agriculture that it replaced. This came, of course, at the cost of lost security in the land and

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wrenching dislocation for much of the population; lost control over work by those who laboured; and the plain and simple immiseration of a growing mass of people.23 In the process of this dramatic social transformation, roughly from 1450 through the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the English gentry remade themselves into a capitalist landlord class, transforming their manors and adopting tenant-farmers as junior partners responsible for production. It was these tenant-farmers who were the actual agrarian capitalists, gaining access to the land only through the market in leases, and as and when necessary hiring the dispossessed as labourers. This was the foundation of the “trinity formula” of classical political economy—the three fundamental classes of landlords, capitalists, and workers, each with their distinctive form of income. Finally, with the rapid growth of industrial forms of production based on an extension of the same capitalist principles during the first half of the nineteenth century, the landlord and capitalist classes, at first recognized to be distinct, began to merge into one.24 There are three crucial claims that emerge from Brenner’s analysis. First, that capitalism developed in, and through the transformation of, agriculture, not in the growth of urban-based trade or workshops. Second, that capitalism developed through a specific historical process connected with the unique English experience of enclosures (a complex phenomenon having more to do with the suppression of common rights and collective control over land use than with hedging fields, consolidating holdings, or even dividing common woodland and pasture). Third, that capitalism led to the radical transformation of non-agricultural sectors in the Industrial Revolution only after the radical transformation of agriculture, which included an Agricultural Revolution. As Ellen Wood pointed out, these positions correspond precisely with Marx’s account of “so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital.25 If the Brenner-Wood analysis is correct, indigenous developments of trade or industry on the Continent prior to the spread of novel and distinctive forms of capitalist production following the Industrial Revolution simply cannot be taken as a sign of actual, nascent, or even latent capitalist development. Capitalist development cannot be taken for granted, but its presence must instead be demonstrated and explained. The growth of precapitalist forms of trade and industry can never explain their transformation into capitalism. Only if the Brenner-Wood account is proved wrong can anything to do with the bourgeoisie, trade, workshops,

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cottage industry, or even commercial agriculture—in France, Germany, or anywhere in Europe—be said to reflect any development of truly capitalist society, prior to whatever point at which production in those societies underwent transformation through the direct influence of English capitalist relations. Already in the eighteenth century, there were those in Europe who recognized that something significant was happening in England. Yet, even if they had been able to understand precisely what (and, it is clear from the cases of Hegel and Saint-Simon, as also the French Physiocrats before them, that generally they did not), it would have been no simple thing to set in motion a transformation of the very basis of wealth and power in class society. Given the non-capitalist agrarian production on which class society throughout Europe was based (notwithstanding the important role of trade in distributing surplus), it is hardly surprising that it was not agrarian capitalism that spread from England to transform the world. Rather, it was only the industrial form of capitalist production, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and gathered force in the early nineteenth, that began to spread abroad. Where the prevailing “bourgeois paradigm”, as Ellen Wood has called it, would have it that capitalism developed in cities across Europe, forming a basis for the rising bourgeoisie to challenge the landed aristocracy, this was simply never the case.26 Recognizing the origins of capitalism in the transformation of English agriculture through a unique historical process, and contrasting the form of legal and economic relations that emerged there with those found elsewhere, one must conclude there is not the slightest hint of specifically capitalist social relations anywhere in the agrarian, commercial, or industrial sectors of the Continent in 1789.27 The English people resisted the imposition of capitalist property rights and the tyranny of the market as well as they could and managed to preserve certain customary rights through the whole of the eighteenth century, and into the nineteenth.28 Still, it clearly cannot be said that in 1800 England was a peasant society—whereas equally clearly France, Germany, Italy, and Spain still were. Where, as Marx observed, England eliminated its peasantry in the process through which capitalism came into being, the “peasant problem” was everywhere else a mark of the introduction of capitalist production through industry. Over the course of more than a century—after World War II peasants still constituted a huge proportion of

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the population in both Italy and France—Europe would continue to be transformed by industrial capitalist development, only clearly becoming entirely capitalist by the 1970s. There were no more than the early beginnings of a capitalist working class in Continental Europe during the 1840s. Only slowly were competition and the logic of capital accumulation, conveyed through international trade, bringing about dramatic social change through the introduction of new, capitalist forms of industrial production. Even slower was the extension of capitalist social relations over existing sectors of manufactures and trade. From the work of E. P. Thompson, we know how long and difficult the transformation of traditional forms of industry was, even in England where laws, market structures and other social relations had long been given a capitalist stamp through the prior development of agrarian capitalism. There had, of course, been urban artisanal workers and day labourers, as well as mine and foundry workers and those engaged in cottage industry, long before the social relations of production began to be transformed by English capitalism. In precapitalist European societies, however, such labour was structured in the traditional forms of corporatist organization that Hegel still favoured, such as guilds. Even after the Revolution abolished guilds along with the other forms of “privilege”, in the first half of the nineteenth century French industrial workers characteristically organized themselves through such informal but well-defined corporate forms as the compagnonnages. As William Sewell has shown, from 1789 through 1830, and on past 1848, most French workers engaged not only in their daily life and labour, but also in confrontations with their employers, and even in revolutionary politics, through such corporatist bodies.29 What has tended to distort our understanding of workers in this period (outside of England, though even there we have had much to learn from Thompson), has been the presumption that the context for their struggles should be understood to have been that of established capitalist society. Once we recognize that capitalism had not developed on the Continent, that 1789 was not about the ascendancy to power of a capitalist bourgeoisie, but had been a struggle over the form of the state in a society characterized by “politically constituted property”, we also can accept that the popular struggle for democracy, social justice, and even social equality that emerged in the course of the French Revolution, and persisted afterwards, likewise belonged to a context of precapitalist class relations.

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Liberalism and Revolution in Precapitalist Europe The typical Marxist view associates both liberalism, as an ideology, and socialism, as oppositional class struggle, directly with capitalism. The European Continent during the French Revolution and long afterwards, however, remained fundamentally precapitalist. Far from being the ascendant moment of a rising capitalist bourgeoisie overturning the domination of a declining and reactionary feudal aristocracy, the French Revolution began as a kind of civil war within an entirely non-capitalist ruling class comprising nobles and bourgeois alike. The class relations of the absolutist ancien régime were based upon extraction of both rent and taxes from the peasantry, through varying combinations of ownership of land, possession of privileged monopolies and rights of jurisdiction, and ownership of venal offices in the state. While no longer truly feudal in character, there is otherwise much to be said for Perry Anderson’s description of the absolutist state as a sort of “redeployed and recharged” system of precapitalist class exploitation.30 The French bourgeoisie, however, belonged in its entirety to this dominant class of proprietors, with no more than a small minority of perhaps 10% also engaged in trade. Nowhere in all the commercial relations of those relatively few merchants, even in the handful of large industrial concerns (some of which were owned by nobles), was there to be found the slightest evidence of the transformation of production based on capitalist relations of commodified labour-power and the subordination of the labour process to the logic of capital accumulation. Far from being opposed classes, the French noblesse and bourgeoisie both depended upon ownership of entirely non-capitalist forms of property, and differed fundamentally only with respect to the possession of noble status, as such. Indeed, those bourgeois who acquired sufficient wealth—mostly through the general eighteenth-century expansion of trade, especially with the colonies—almost invariably then acquired nobility through purchasing venal state offices that conferred it. Most of the high-ranking nobles of the Paris parlement, in fact, were from recently ennobled families.31 Only after the aristocracy—the leading ranks of the office-holding nobility—finally compelled the monarchy to acknowledge their role and power within the state by calling the Estates General, did conflict emerge between nobles and bourgeois over whether noble status itself should be ensconced in a still to be determined constitution.32 State offices and the practice of law were the major sources of income for a

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majority of the bourgeoisie, and there was an immediate outcry on behalf of the Third Estate against the pretensions to privileged political power of the First and Second Estates, setting in train a polarizing political dynamic which eventually led to the people of Paris rising up, in the name of the Nation, to defend the rebellious bourgeois deputies. Capitalism, then, played no role in the origin or politics of the French Revolution. Liberalism, however, did: the political mobilization of the bourgeoisie, against the monopolization of state power (and potentially state offices) by those possessing aristocratic privilege, was accomplished precisely by articulating liberal political principles. Liberal conceptions such as civic equality, representative government, and the rule of law, coincided neatly with the bourgeoisie’s direct social interest in limiting, and ultimately abolishing, the role of privileged personal status in connection with the state. Such liberal ideas had first clearly emerged in England in the previous century, where a civil war had instead pitted two sections of a wholly capitalist ruling class against each other over the extent to which it was permissible and safe to limit royal authority while asserting the individual rights and freedoms of the propertied.33 Those, like Locke, who then advocated liberal government by and for the propertied in the belief it need not (as the royalists feared) fall prey to the democratic aspirations of the people, have been well vindicated. Only late in the nineteenth century would anything like democratic government, still limited to men and effectively constrained by its representative character, become established in England—and not even then would the state’s support for and furtherance of the rights of property be seriously threatened. As Ralph Miliband argued in The State in Capitalist Society, there is still every reason to recommend the Manifesto’s view that “[t]he executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”.34 Yet it is only the modern capitalist state that actually has the character of serving the whole of the propertied class, with seeming disinterest to other than their common affairs. States in precapitalist societies were directly implicated in the extra-economic surplus appropriation that distinguishes these societies from capitalism, as Marx explicitly recognized in the Grundrisse and Capital.35 Marx and Engels’s use of the word “bourgeoisie” in the Manifesto and elsewhere, therefore, begs the question. Taken as a synonym for “capitalist ruling class”, the term serves them well in the critique of political economy. Likewise, in their political writing, the term is meaningful in referring to the owners of commercial, financial and

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industrial—but also landed—property. When, however, can these two meanings actually be said to coincide? In England, there never really was a “bourgeoisie”: the gentry became capitalist landlords and eventually merged with the industrial capitalists made rich by the transformation of the non-agricultural economy. The nobility and bourgeoisie in France, by contrast, fought over the constitution of the state in 1789 because of its crucial role in surplus appropriation, which made it far more than merely a committee for managing the affairs of the propertied. The state itself had become constituted as a form of property. Because, however, the term entered political parlance through liberal accounts of the French Revolution, its usage ignored the real social grounding of the bourgeoisie in owning politically constituted property, and gave to them an ideologically-constructed connection to commerce as the source of historical progress. This emphasis on the link between a minority of the bourgeoisie and what was taken to be the historically progressive role of trade provided a justification for their struggle with the nobility. The real difference between bourgeoisie and nobility lay simply in noble status itself (so long as state offices remained open to both, there was, in fact, no class difference between these groups). Members of the nobility, however, derogated their privileged status if they engaged in demeaning commerce or labour (other than in the exalted form of goldsmithing). Already, long before the Revolution, in England and France alike, the prevailing liberal conception of historical progress was conceived in terms of a sequence of distinct stages based on particular modes of subsistence— first hunting, then pastoralism, next agriculture, and finally “commerce”.36 Only by adapting this widely accepted liberal historical conception to portray the bourgeoisie as a heroic and progressive force for social development, driven to revolution by a declining but fiercely reactionary aristocracy seeking to protect an outmoded social order, did they become particularly associated with trade. Already during the course of the Revolution, the idea emerged that the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy marked a passage from the dominant class in agriculture, to the dominant class of the era of commerce. Barnave wrote an account in these terms while awaiting execution, in 1795.37 While it was not itself published until the 1840s, the key elements in the idea of bourgeois revolution enjoyed wide currency by the end of the Napoleonic period.38 This liberal conception of bourgeois revolution, justifying the political struggle against entrenched political privilege, built upon a variety of ideas

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that emerged through the cross-fertilization of political, historical and economic concepts between England and France (and Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, etc.) throughout the early modern centuries, a period when their societies were actually diverging. This might seem paradoxical, but there is a solid foundation for such cross-fertilization in the remarkable continuity of the issues addressed by political theory in different forms of class society, characterized as they all are by the dominance of private property, but immediately in conjunction with the organization of political power in the form of the state. The central problem for ruling classes over the whole of Western history since ancient Greece has been the problem of “who rules”: what balance in the constitution of the state is required both to protect free men of property from tyranny, and to ensure that the state can preserve enough “good public order” that they may continue to enjoy their property at the expense of others. The issues of absolute royal power versus constitutional rule emerged in both France and England during the early modern period, but the differences between the class relations of politically constituted property, and agrarian capitalist class relations, led to significant corresponding differences in conception.39 In a similar vein, both capitalist and non-capitalist forms of class society have considered which policies of the state are most conducive to public well-being, conceived primarily in relation to the rights and enjoyment of property. It is not so surprising, then, to find that the term “political economy” seems first to have emerged in France, associated with the principle of harnessing private greed to the furtherance of the supposed public good, since such a principle is not specifically capitalist in character.40 In England, however, it was proposed as early as 1547 that free trade in grain would lead to higher profits, with the effect of stimulating both increased agrarian production and demand for manufactured goods; and that this in turn might solve the problem of unemployment for those dispossessed of their land through enclosure—a sort of “import substitution strategy” that already seems to reflect a specifically capitalist form of political economy, advocating the growth of the “Trinity” of landlord, capitalist, and worker, in place of the peasant village.41 While their societies continued to diverge over the course of the early modern period, English and French authors could thus still read each other with varying degrees of comprehension, sharing many of the same political issues, and the disposition to promote trade, yet failing to comprehend the different logic behind the other’s system of social production.

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Liberal political principles of civic equality among the propertied, then, had a cogency in France in 1789 that had nothing to do with the capitalist context that had produced their classic formulation in the work of Locke. At the same time, a variety of French theorists could read the work of English political economists approvingly, even if they more had in mind circumventing the impediments that traditional privilege posed to trade, rather than a truly revolutionary reorganization of production based exclusively on the market-driven imperatives of capital. England and France had truly different social systems. Yet the ascendancy of private property; the ambiguous relationship between members of the dominant propertied class and centralized state power; and the increasing salience of trade (whatever the underlying system of production)—these made for striking points of congruence between at least some of the liberal ideology developed on each side of the Channel. When Marx and Engels wrote of the modern state managing the common affairs of the “bourgeoisie”, then, they conflated the very different states and societies of England and France. In doing so, they followed the lead of liberal historians who championed the bourgeoisie as a class for historical progress. Together with the liberals, Marx and Engels excluded the states in Germany, Italy, and Iberia from the ranks of modern states, for they had not yet experienced “bourgeois revolution”. While a few lesser states like the Netherlands could be fit to it, the established model for historical progress was obviously based upon a conflation of France and England. Through the liberal association of strikingly similar political struggles in fundamentally different social contexts, “bourgeois” became a synonym for “capitalist”, when in virtually every respect the French bourgeoisie of 1789 were almost the antithesis of a truly capitalist class. From the start, Marx’s critique of Hegel affirmed the reappropriation of power by the people directly, as had been demanded and practised by the sans-culottes at their most revolutionary, when they challenged even the Jacobins who sought to wield the instrument of the state. More than this, however, it affirmed the socialist objective that had only begun to achieve coherent expression during the years of the Revolution. Again and again, the positions and practice of even the most revolutionary bourgeois revealed that the preservation of private property remained the foundation of the state, even to the extent that the people were robbed in substance of the very liberty, equality and sociality for which the Revolution stood for in purely political terms. Marx realized, therefore, that we were alienated from our collectivity not only in the form of the state, but also within

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civil society, based on different relationships to the forms of property, and propertylessness. Thus, though even the political goals of the French Revolution still remained unmet in Germany, Marx was from the outset committed to socialist goals that went far beyond merely political revolution, and he clarified the foundations for these goals against the claims not only of Hegel’s demure liberalism, but also the more radical philosophical Jacobinism of Bruno Bauer. This much, then—a fundamental critique of liberal and Jacobin politics and political philosophy—Marx already had achieved by the autumn of 1843. These earliest works of Marx, indeed, made a significant contribution to the understanding of emancipation within the critical political philosophy of precapitalist Europe. Yet by the time Marx had identified the proletariat as the key to the whole social revolutionary project of human emancipation, at the turn of 1844, he had not only gone beyond the politics of the French Revolution, but—through his exposure by Engels to a new line of critical thought that in turn revealed the “innermost secret” of an emerging, radically different form of class society—he had embarked upon a fundamentally new approach to the emancipatory project that would become the basis of his life’s work. Earlier, he had expressed to Arnold Ruge his intention of writing a history of the Convention during the French Revolution, and his notebooks reveal that during 1843 he had begun work to that end.42 After Marx turned to the critique of political economy, however, that project dropped from his agenda. In its place, he eventually produced Capital. Marx never acknowledged a rupture in this move from the problematic of the politics of the French Revolution, to the problematic of class struggle in capitalist society. Yet both politics and political philosophy on the Continent had continued to be rooted in the dynamics and conditions of precapitalist class society. The Enlightenment had not been defined by liberalism as such—Voltaire was certainly no liberal—but by a looser rejection of revealed knowledge, hoary superstition, and the pretended sanctity of too-human institutions and mores. The ideas of the English liberals certainly influenced Continental thinkers, but Montesquieu’s conception of the separation of powers, for example, corresponded more to the interests of the noblesse de robe in relation to the absolutist monarchy rather than to any social or political interest discernible in England.43 Rousseau subsequently rejected both the claims and theoretical foundations of liberalism, as well as absolute monarchy, to conceive of the “general will” in terms that were solidly grounded in precapitalist normative sociality.44

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It was significant social inequality, and the inherently abusive power of the state that preserved it, to which Rousseau objected—not anything specific to capitalism or its development, with which he reveals no familiarity. Nor, in attempting to justify the absolutist state as having something akin to this “general will”, was Hegel any more concerned than Rousseau with specifically capitalist society. In neither the context of Continental political philosophy, nor that of the political movements which he covered as a journalist, did Marx have occasion to confront capitalism before the end of 1843. Like Rousseau, but enriched by the experiences of the popular movement in the Revolution, Marx conceived of human emancipation from the chains imposed by property and the state. No more than Rousseau, however, had he yet conceived of a process or agency, beyond philosophy, by which this emancipation could be achieved. Through the critique of political economy, however, Marx did more than just identify the agency of the proletariat in 1844. Far more importantly, the proletariat was transformed in his thought from being simply the “propertyless”, as they had been in precapitalist social and political thought, to take the specific form of the capitalist working class. Their struggle was not simply the struggle of the dispossessed and disenfranchised everywhere, but specifically located in the structured social relationships of capital accumulation and its crises, founded on the commodification of labour-power and the continual revolutionizing of production. Though social justice would demand equality and human emancipation in any form of class society, it was Marx’s particular claim, arrived at through the critique of political economy, that the same revolutionary transformation of society which brought about capitalism, in turn, established a dynamic contradiction between ever-expanding human productive capacities and the reduction of actual humans to a means for achieving that growth. In the history of hitherto existing class societies there had been what Marx called in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 the “movement of property”: “Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation.”45 As he argued in the Manifesto, “modern bourgeois property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few”.46 It is specifically in and through these fully

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developed property relations—the particular social relations of capitalist production which he came to understand through the critique of political economy—that the contradiction between human capacities and human needs is itself fully developed. This contradiction takes form both in periodic economic crises, which capitalism cannot escape, and in the forging of a capitalist working class, whose interests ultimately can only be met by ending the system of capitalist production, exchange, and property.47 While it is yet to be proven that Marx and Engels were right in believing that the contradictions of capitalism would lead through these developments to a social revolution, which in turn would lead to the development of communism, this process of historical transformation was explicitly predicated on the logic of capitalist social relations which Marx discerned through the critique of political economy. It was through reading the political economists and drawing out the real implications of the system they described—eventually through the massive project of Capital—that Marx came to understand the specific possibility of achieving communist society through working-class struggle that is associated with his name. Classical political economy articulated a principle of social and economic organization that had, however, yet to be fully realized even in England. It was Marx’s genius to identify through his critique the contradictions and potentialities inherent in the logic of this yet to be realized system, allowing him to describe both the basic character of capitalism, and the process by which it would be superseded, at a time when it was still only taking form. Given the historical presumptions he shared with the proponents of the capitalist system, but also the unprecedented magnitude of social and economic transformation that it actually embodied, it is hardly surprising that Marx misjudged the extent to which capitalism had actually developed by the 1840s. Indeed, notwithstanding the brilliance of his insights into the implications of capitalist social relations as early as 1844, it was only in the late 1850s that he clarified even for himself the crucial differences between capitalist and precapitalist modes of production. Had he seen fit, a decade earlier, to ask whether capitalist relations were actually manifest in the “bourgeois” property relations prevalent on the Continent, it is not clear that he would yet have had the tools to answer the question. He did not ask. In England, France and Germany alike, liberals had long presumed that freedom included the right to free enjoyment of property in at least some sense. The untrammelled economic freedom of

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­roperty specific to capital, meanwhile, was articulated in terms of p “freedom of trade” even in England. Indeed, though Marx emphasized in Capital the difference between capitalist production and mere exchange, he also revealed that the truly unique character of capitalist production rests upon extension of the commodity form to the heart of the production process through the commodification of labour-power. Though capitalism is really about production by the market, it is commonly thought of even by Marxists as production for the market. Liberals already understood historical progress in terms of the growth of commerce. Everywhere, as a result, the undeniably important growth of trade in modern Europe was mistaken to coincide with capitalist development in the terms of political economy. “Civil society” had originally signalled to the English the establishment of the state as a bulwark to property and the natural relations of exchange based upon it. “Bourgeois society” had subsequently signalled to the French the emergence of freedom from privilege, and the principles of freedom and equality in trade and political life, realized through the rise of the bourgeoisie. In Germany, these terms found a happy confluence of meaning in the term bürgerliche Gesellschaft. With Hegel, drawing on Smith, attaching much significance to bürgerliche Gesellschaft as the sphere for development of the economic individual, every authority was in agreement that whatever was true of English society applied equally to the rest of Europe, allowing for differences in the form of state. Marx never doubted that the liberals who went before him, in describing the bourgeoisie as agents of historical progress for advancing their interests as a class, had accurately depicted both the class and their interests. In this regard, however, he gave the liberals far too much credit, and too little considered the ideological underpinnings of their histories. Not only did this error cause Marx and Engels to miss the fact that capitalism was only beginning to spread from England (where at the time it remained far from fully developed in its generalized, industrial form), but it suggested a spurious model of revolutionary class agency.

Socialism and Proletarian Revolution The idea of revolution, in the wake of 1789, was indelibly marked by the idea, first propagated by liberal apologists ready to accept the bloody mantle of class war as the necessary price of progress, that, characteristically, an ascending class would rise up to cast aside a previously dominant class

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whose time had passed. It was generally recognized that to prevail against the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie had had to involve the people. Yet, if on the one hand there was much to unify the Third Estate, as “the Nation”, against the aristocracy, who were opposed to the Nation, it was clear on the other hand that there was a crucial division between the interests of the propertied bourgeoisie, and those of the poor. As early as 1791 a fierce debate arose, in deciding whether there should be a property qualification for elections, over the difference in interests between the bourgeoisie and the people (or as the apologists for the bourgeoisie then put it, between “the Nation” and “the brigands”).48 Through the involvement of the people, the bourgeois political revolution of 1789 became a truly social revolution.49 The tension between the bourgeois political project, which even in its most radical Jacobin form always took the preservation of private property to be a precondition of the state, and the social interests of the propertyless, for whom democracy could never be a merely “civic” right without social implications, was an enduring feature of the Revolution’s political dynamic. Though Robespierre was a truly incorruptible advocate for the people as citizens, and he accepted the need to limit the negative effects of property (at least temporarily, during the war), he would not cross the line to advance the people’s interests by making a fundamental challenge to property itself.50 This helps to explain why the sans-culottes did not rally to his defence in 1794, while at the same time a movement (admittedly small) began to distinguish itself from the merely political tasks of building and defending the Nation, specifically advocating radical measures to redress social inequality. As Marat had recognized from the start, the very fact of the Revolution would eventually raise the issue of whether a loi agraire should affect the distribution of property; and so, quite independently of the development of capitalism in England, it was the Revolution of 1789 that put the idea of socialism on the European political agenda. The autonomous political activism of the sans-culottes was decisively crushed by the Thermidorean regime after their final insurrection on 1 prairial, and the Conspiracy of Equals was later dispatched with little difficulty. But babouvism survived Babeuf, and one of the legacies of the Revolution was the small but growing socialist movement of the early nineteenth century. Still, as their Marxist historians always recognized, the sans-culottes never themselves constituted a capitalist working class, and their common social interest lay in the provision of affordable bread rather than the sale of commodified labour-power.51 By the early 1840s, French

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workers were already highly conscious of what was now called “the social question”, and increasingly identified with one or another of the approaches to “socialism” articulated by Cabet, Blanc, Proudhon, and others—even as they continued to maintain their compagnonnages.52 In its origin, then, French socialism was no more specifically an indication of the development of capitalist society than were the liberal politics of the bourgeoisie in 1789. However, much as the common characteristics of liberalism in England and France tended to blur the crucial differences in their societies, so did the idea of socialism tend to blur the differences in their workers’ movements. In both England and France, workers fought for traditional rights, as well as against novel inequities. In England, however, one enduring form of struggle in the first half of the century, much emphasized by E. P. Thompson, was resistance to the capitalist demolition of precapitalist rights of labour, and for retention of “honourable” control over the labour process by the workers themselves. At the same time, workers fought to maintain their rate of pay in the face of competition from “dishonourable” trades, and argued for preservation of the Speenhamland system of poor relief for the unemployed and underemployed, even if it had been initially imposed by justices of the peace in the interest of maintaining public order. From early in the modern period, indeed, the English maintained a system of poor relief based on taxes that differed from all other European approaches to poverty, which can be seen to be part of the long process of adaptation by an increasingly capitalist form of state to the pressures attendant on the continuing development of capitalism.53 In trying to preserve what they came to see as their right to relief, workers were not, in fact, fighting to hold on to a part of “the old order”, but were engaged in continuing struggle over the responsibility of the state for social welfare in a capitalist society. In France, during the first half of the century, struggle was characterized instead by essentially traditional artisans—reinforced in that status by post-Revolutionary labour law—confronting what had become a chronic condition of underemployment. Where English workers in the 1830s sought to keep the state from eliminating poor relief, the last refuge from the naked effects of “the labour market”, in France the demand instead emerged for the state to address the chronic problem of underemployment through establishing workshops to create jobs. Only in the course of the latter half of the century did the French workers’ movement slowly come to include the struggles of workers in proletarianized industries; but

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these newer, more capitalist struggles often took place at the same time that artisanal workers continued to press for traditional demands. This tension played a pivotal role in the development of socialism in France, particularly insofar as anarcho-syndicalism came to constitute a significant challenge to the socialist organizational project of the French Section of the Workers’ International (as French socialists insisted on calling themselves until a decade after the establishment of the Fifth Republic). The syndicalist emphasis on direct action and organization by workers in the workplace resonated powerfully with the traditional corporatist organization and struggles of the artisans. The contrast with the development of the trades unions in Britain, and eventually the emergence of Labourism from a Liberal-Labour alliance, is telling. The greater political radicalism and relatively lesser development of effective unions among French workers, throughout the nineteenth, and well into the twentieth century, was not, in fact, a hallmark of the advanced proletarian character often imputed to them, but rather of the later and less intensive development of industrial capitalism in France. In England, a working-class had made itself through struggle over the establishment of capitalist property rights, capitalist forms of production, and the capitalist laissez-faire state. In France, traditionally precapitalist artisans and labourers had been radically politicized by the protracted struggles among the propertied over the constitution of the state. Traditional forms of economic organization, such as the guilds, might be abolished for immediately political purposes, as when, on the night of August 4, 1789, most of the forms of “privilege” recognized by the old social order were thrown on the bonfire of revolutionary civic zeal.54 Such political manifestations of liberalism were dictated by struggle against the aristocracy itself, and not by an underlying agenda of capitalist economic reforms. This is clear in the case of the guilds, as also with the abolition of legal impediments to enclosure in the countryside, since, in both cases, during and after the Revolution the same essential structure of precapitalist economic organization survived.

The Future Potential of the Manifesto It is not, then, socialism as conceived by Marx that has failed to live up to expectations. In the terms with which Marx conceived it, as the emancipatory successor to capitalism, socialism was never really on the agenda in the nineteenth century. The expectation that it was then on the agenda (as

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even Marx thought) derived from a historical misunderstanding, based on an inherently ideological misrepresentation of the politics and society of late eighteenth-century France. The great fear in the first half of the nineteenth century was that of social revolution, in which the people—or at least a mobilized part of them—would thrust themselves onto the political stage, handing control over public policy to those who spoke on behalf of popular interests. But the “socialist” character of the spectre then haunting Europe was derived from the political legacy of the French Revolution and was no manifestation of the barely emerging class struggles specific to capitalist society. The class struggles of ancien régime France were struggles in a non-­ capitalist society, and it was these that gave rise to the politics of the French Revolution. As capitalist relations of production were gradually introduced to the Continent in the course of the nineteenth century, the development of specifically capitalist forms of class struggle came to be marked by this prior precapitalist political legacy. This is particularly evident in the contrast between the highly politicized and consciously revolutionary workers’ movements that took form on the Continent, and the largely “economistic” trade unionism that prevailed in Britain after the final, glorious manifestation of Chartism in 1848. From the perspective of more than 150 years on, it is evident that it was not, in fact, the Continent that was in the van of capitalist class struggle. It was the peculiarity of English history that its people endured capitalist social relations long before anyone else, and that its society was peculiarly shaped by that capitalism.55 As European societies became increasingly capitalist, especially in the course of the second half of the twentieth century, it is striking to what degree they, in fact, have become more like the English.56 This is, of course, why the question of whether there is any validity at all to the Manifesto arises today. The spectre that was haunting Europe in the 1840s has certainly passed from the scene, whatever the future may hold. The fervent hope of socialists from Marx to the New Left that English trade unionists would learn to act more like Continental revolutionaries has never been realized. Instead, most of what remains of the organized European left seems to have embraced policies more akin to those of the pro-capitalist parties.57 What, then, are we to make of the Manifesto today? The historical trajectory sketched in the Manifesto is that of the development of capitalism as the ultimate form of exploitive class society. It is this line of analysis that is at the heart of Marx’s historical materialism,

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expressed through his critique of political economy: first adduced in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, theoretically deepened in long passages of the Grundrisse, and presented in virtually complete form in the three volumes of Capital. Aside from the signal error of projecting this development onto the liberal account of European history as the rise of the bourgeoisie, everything Marx had to say about the nature of capitalist society still holds. Through his critique of Hegel and the merely radical politics of the French Revolution, and his embrace of popular struggles for social justice, Marx had been a “socialist” even before he began the critique of political economy. But the socialist transformation which he conceived through his confrontation with the guiding principles of capitalism had a dramatically different character than anything that had been conceived before. This socialism was conceived as the product of class struggles specific to capitalist society, where ultimately there would no choice but to bring an end to the whole history of class societies in order to secure the interests which the working-class majority have in putting an end to exploitation through the commodification of labour-power. We can recognize today the errors of the view that the ascendancy of capitalist society was achieved through bourgeois revolution, a historical conception rooted in the ideology of European liberalism. Nowhere was a feudal landlord class overthrown by a capitalist bourgeois class. Instead, the dominant class of English feudalism became the dominant class of English agrarian capitalism, and progenitors of the capitalist class in modern industrial capitalism. As industrial capitalist production spread through the mechanisms of the market and geopolitical competition, the dominant classes of precapitalist societies generally were transformed in their turn. The history of the origin and development of capitalism, then, can be seen to have depended largely on the unintended consequences of actors in other forms of class society pursuing interests grounded and understood in terms of the class relations of those societies. Just as capitalism had its origins in the dynamics of precapitalist class societies, Marx argued that the classless society of socialism would have its origins in the dynamics of capitalism and its own class struggles. This is not to assert that the achievement of socialism must be as historically unconscious as the development of capitalism may have been. However, it points to an ultimate potential for fundamental social change in actions taken in pursuit of perceived class interests within an existing context of class exploitation. By 1844, Marx had abandoned his initial idea that it would be the philosophers who

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would lead the way to human emancipation, arguing instead that the very structure and contradictions of capitalist class society would lead the working-­ class majority to end class society as such through its self-­ emancipation. The politics of class interest, not disinterested philosophy, held the key to the transcendence of class society. And so the Manifesto was issued as a call for class struggle. The known history of societies may indeed be the history of class struggles, but the Manifesto makes it clear that these societies have had different specific forms, with differing forms of class struggle. Capitalism, moreover, is unique in that its class relations take an apparently purely economic form, in contrast to the extra-economic coercion that is characteristic in every precapitalist form. It is essential, therefore, not to confuse the class struggle which is specific to capitalist society with the sorts of struggles found in earlier times. With this in mind, it is significant that the idea of redistributing wealth in the interest of social justice can be traced back to the ancient world, finding notable expression in the Agrarian Law championed by the brothers Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus in the second century BC (leading to their successive murders at the hands of the thugs of Roman Senators). When similar ideas surfaced during the French Revolution, the links to the past were again obvious, in the references made to a loi agraire as early as 1789, and subsequently in the name adopted by Gracchus Babeuf, as well as the goals he espoused. The ideas of babouvism made an important contribution to the politics of the nineteenth century, along with other socialist conceptions and schemes for the redistribution of wealth. Yet all had far more in common with the social issues of dispossessed peasants and urban plebeians than with solutions to the problems of capitalist society, and they were no more indicative of the development of capitalism than the radical republicanism of the Jacobins. The legacy of such socialist ideas and movements played an important role in the later development of specifically capitalist workers’ movements, of course, as did the ideal of a democratic citizens’ republic. They constituted an important lineage of radical thought and action which—whatever their defects—were often an asset in organizing struggles within and against capitalism. However, particularly because it was Marx and Engels in the Manifesto who first distinguished the communist project of the capitalist working class from all the utopian socialist ideas of the past, it is crucial to recognize that (especially on the Continent) this radical legacy had its origin in social struggles within fundamentally non-capitalist societies.

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In the terms of the day, then, Marx was certainly a socialist in 1843. He had a highly developed socialist critique of merely Jacobin radicalism and embraced the struggles of working people and the dispossessed in his journalism. But this sort of socialism, even when pushed by Marx to conceive of the potential for human emancipation through the transcendence of alienation in society, was still very different from the specific conception of socialism that he developed through the critique of political economy, beginning in 1844. The difference lies not so much in the goal of emancipation, as in the conception of a historical process of class struggle that would lead to it. Through the critique of political economy, Marx conceived of the emancipation of humanity through the self-emancipation of the capitalist working class. Exploitation had achieved its most perfectly realizable form in capitalism, and with no further capacity to develop alienation, class society would come to an end with it through its own inescapable contradictions and the class struggle generated by them. This is the key to the project outlined in the Manifesto. The conflation of this process with the social conflicts of precapitalist Europe was an error, as was Marx’s acceptance of the liberal accounts of 1789 as a bourgeois class revolution. But these errors take nothing away from the core of the ideas put forward in the Manifesto, which Marx went on to develop with great clarity through the more rigorous critique carried out in the Grundrisse and Capital. However inspiring the socialism of Babeuf and the others, it is the project of ending the commodification of labour-power and the tyranny of market forces over social life which remains relevant to us today, and it is this which is the legacy of the Manifesto. The weaknesses of the Manifesto have everything to do with looking back to 1789, while its strengths involve looking forward to the role of class struggle within capitalist society, and its capacity to bring about an end to the history of class society as such. The confusion of the issues of capitalism with the issues of the aftermath of the French Revolution was virtually universal at the time, and Marx’s failure to recognize it can be attributed to the fact that, after turning from the issues of the Revolution to those of capitalist society, he never had occasion to re-examine his initial presumptions about the nature of the historical conjuncture. Marx, in fact, proved amazingly perceptive in the Manifesto. He claimed that Europe in 1848 was on the verge of revolution, and a great wave of revolution in fact coincided with its publication. He recognized fundamental truths about the nature of capitalist society—truths widely acknowledged by a range of commentators looking back from the present—at a time that it had still barely taken form even in England.

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If the European politics of the day were not in fact yet the politics of capitalist class society, and the politics that have developed since have been very different from what was anticipated on the model of the French Revolution, this takes nothing away from the essential message put forward in the Manifesto. Clearing away its historical errors, we are left with the understanding that the history of hitherto existing society has been the history of class struggles; that, in capitalism, class society has realized its ultimate form; that it is crisis-ridden as well as incapable of delivering social justice; and since, if capitalism is not to last forever, the only way forward is through socialism (the alternative being a relapse into more manifest forms of social injustice), the pursuit of the class interests of the majority in ending insecurity and want has the potential to liberate humanity from the indignity of class exploitation. In these terms, it is as true today as it was in 1848: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Notes 1. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6, 477–519. 2. D.C.  Coleman, The Economy of England 1450–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 3. Vladimir Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” in V.  I. Lenin: Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), 5. 4. See George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1987); Robert Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in The First Modern Society, ed. A.  L. Beier et  al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and the postscript to Merchants and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 638–716; Ellen M. Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); “The History of the Market”, Monthly Review 46 (July/August 1994): 14–40; Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1955). 6. Ellen Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. 7. See François Guizot, Historical Essays and Lectures, ed. Stanley Mellon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

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8. On this point, the great Marxist historians of the sans-culottes are clear: Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sansculottes and the French Revolution, 1793– 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1959). 9. This understanding of the French Revolution is central to the arguments of Marx’s contributions to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher—see MECW, vol. 3, 133–87. See also Marx’s argument against the politics of his former friend Ruge in “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’”, MECW, vol. 3, 189–206, specifically citing Michel Chevalier on the bourgeois nature of the French Revolution, and his later polemic against Karl Heinzen, “Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality”, MECW, vol. 6, 312–40, which first appeared in the Deutsche-­Brüsseler Zeitung in 1847. 10. I discuss this historiography in some detail in Rethinking the French Revolution, dealing with the works of Guizot, Mignet, Thierry, and Barnave, among others. 11. G.  W. F.  Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 147, 161, 189. 12. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957); Ellen M.  Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), 21–6. 13. Henri de Saint-Simon, “The Catechism of the Industrialists”, in The Political Thought of Saint-Simon, ed. G.  Ionescu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 182–203. 14. Michael Zmolek. Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 15. This is the central argument of Rethinking the French Revolution. 16. See T. H. Ashton and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Gwyn Williams, “Twenty Years After”, in Artisans and Sans-Culottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain During the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (London: Libris, 1989), xiii–xlii. 17. As detailed in Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution. 18. See Brenner’s two articles in The Brenner Debate, as well as Wood, Pristine Culture, and Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution. 19. I have pursued in some detail the unique character of the legal social property relations that developed in England following the Norman Conquest in “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (July 2000), 1–53.

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20. While important changes did take place in agriculture in the Netherlands and Flanders, these changes did not lead to development of the classic “trinity formula” of landlords, capitalist tenant-farmers, and workers. The Low Countries introduced many agrarian innovations that proved important—not least when adopted in England—but they did not produce agrarian capitalism. There was, however, no transformation to speak of in the agriculture of France, Germany or Spain. 21. Marx’s insistence upon the difference between the capacity for merchants to make profits in trading commodities and the specifically capitalist production of surplus value is central to the approach I share with Wood and Brenner. On the failure, even of many Marxists to recognize this distinction in the development of capitalism, see Robert Brenner, “On the Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (1977): 25–92. For a clear exposition of Marx’s conception of capitalism and of the nature of work in capitalist society, see the first few chapters of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). These chapters stand on their own, notwithstanding the “monopoly capital” approach that figures later in the book. 22. Wood, Origin of Capitalism; Comninel, “English Feudalism”. 23. E. P. Thompson was chiefly responsible for documenting this transformation and the resistance to it by the people of England, notably in The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) and Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1991). A powerful overview, however, was provided by Marx himself in the section on “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation” which closes Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol.35, 704ff. The classic account of the impact of enclosures is that of R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Franklin, 1912). I discuss Tawney’s account and offer a critique of the revisionist historians that have challenged it in “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”. 24. It was Engels who offered the first intimation of this merger, identifying the “struggle of capital and land against labour” in “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, in MECW, vol. 3, 434. Throughout Capital, Marx deals with the two classes of workers and capitalists. In the final, unpublished chapter of Volume 3 entitled “Classes” (Capital, Volume III, MECW, vol. 37, 870–1), he returns to consider the trinity of landlord, capitalist, and worker that appear in classical political economy, the very classes with which he had first begun his critique in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. 25. Wood, Origin of Capitalism, pp. 35–7.

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26. Wood, Pristine Culture, 3–19. 27. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 182–93. 28. See Thompson, Customs in Common, especially the chapter, “Custom, Law, and Common Right”. 29. William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 30. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), 18. 31. François Bluche, Les magistrats du parlement de Paris au xviiie siècle (1715– 1771) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960). 32. All of this is discussed in the concluding chapter of Rethinking the French Revolution. 33. See particularly Wood, Pristine Culture, and Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution”. Also see Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), as well as Ellen M. Wood and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688 (London: Pluto Press, 1997). 34. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 486; Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969). Miliband uses this quote to frame his whole enquiry. 35. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Capital, Volume III, MECW, vol. 37, 777–8. 36. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 64–74. For a brilliant analysis of the origins and implications of the classical liberal stages theory, see Ronald Meek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 37. A. P. J. M. Barnave, Introduction à la Révolution française, translated and edited by Emanuel Chill as Power, Property, and History (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 38. The Whig view of history as progress realized through the rise of the middle class was already well established in England, and moderate French liberal historians sought to appropriate this perspective to legitimate the early stages of the Revolution. Thierry, for example, published an account of the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution, and in these terms a major historical advance, just two years after the final defeat of Napoleon, during the deeply reactionary days of the Restoration. See Augustin Thierry, “Vue des révolutions d’Angleterre”, in Dix ans d’Études historiques, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1851), 6. Thierry relied on his French audience to read between the lines of this history of England, an indication that the liberal interpretation already was familiar to them as well. See also Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study Social Science and the Ignoble Savage of Historians in the French Restoration (Stanford: University Press, 1958).

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39. Wood, Pristine Culture, and “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s ‘General Will,’” in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University, 1989). 40. Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought”. 41. Sir Thomas Smith, A Discourse of the Commonwealth of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969). For further discussion, see Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 42. MECW, vol. 3, n117, 606, and Marx’s notebook excerpts from the Mémoires de R. Levasseur, to which the note refers. 43. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 198–9. 44. Wood, “Popular Sovereignty”. 45. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 280. 46. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 498. 47. Ibid., 490. 48. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 108–9. 49. For a discussion of the French Revolution as a social revolution, and a vindication of Georges Lefebvre’s views, shorn of the conventional gloss of “bourgeois revolution” that he applied to them, see George Comninel, “Quatre-vingt-neuf Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the French Revolution”, Historical Papers—Communications historiques (1989): 36–52. 50. George Rudé, Robespierre: Portrait of a Revolutionary Democrat (London: Collins, 1975). 51. Soboul, The Parisian Sansculottes; Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution. 52. Sewell, Work and Revolution, 219–22. 53. For a thorough exploration of this unique historical experience, see Larry Patriquin, Agrarian Capitalism and Poor Relief in England, 1500– 1860: Rethinking the Origins of the Welfare State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 54. See the discussion of the night of August 4, 1789, in “Quatre-vingt-neuf Revisited”. 55. For a brilliant exploration of this theme, see Wood, Pristine Culture. 56. This is not, of course, to deny that crucial national differences continue to exist, reflecting the specific historical experiences of capitalist development in different precapitalist social contexts. Notwithstanding centuries of cultural, religious, political, and economic interactions, the histories of Italy,

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Germany, France, and Spain have been very different. The persistence of significant national differences is far easier to understand if capitalist development is recognized to have been late, and external in origin, rather than all of Western Europe presumed to have developed along a common path for more than a millennium. Though greater homogeneity may lie in the future of Europe, the historical legacies of national difference are unlikely to fade any time soon. 57. The hopeful radical turns of left parties in Greece, Spain, and even Britain, will have to be evaluated over the course of time.

CHAPTER 8

Debating Marx’s Conception of Class in History

Historical Materialism Versus Economic Determinism The purpose behind Marx’s historical materialism, including both the critique of political economy and his political works, was exposure of the specific class character of capitalist society, against liberal ideological claims to the contrary. His works were to serve as a guide and a complement to the development of socialist revolutionary class struggle. Except for the texts published as “The German Ideology”, Marx’s work always had as its central focus the nature of capitalist society, only occasionally glancing retrospectively at precapitalist social relations (as in The Grundrisse). His comments on precapitalist social forms belong, for the most part, to the critique of political economy, and their point was to describe the specific form such relations take under capitalism. Such comments were intended to distinguish what the relations had become from what they had been, always from the point of view of the evolution of capitalism and without serious regard for their actual roles in precapitalist class societies. This was a conscious approach. It was for Marx’s purposes sufficient to assert that the history of human social development has been the dynamic history of exploitive class society. The historical details might be interesting, they might in some ways be suggestive, but they were not essential in the way that the detailed critique of political economy and close political analysis of contemporary class society were; a rough overview of history © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_8

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was adequate, the rest could be presumed. For this reason, the one aspect of liberal ideology which remained largely uncriticized by Marx was history. The consequent failure of Marx’s “historical” formulations to describe the conditions and processes of precapitalist class societies really has no bearing on his lifework. It is the misguided efforts of Marxists to construct a history of precapitalist modes of production from his paltry sketches and retrospective analyses that are problematic; the errors in his own published works do not significantly affect the purposes for which they were intended. If Marx’s failure to criticize liberal historical conceptions can be attributed to the fact that history lay outside his focus of study, the same cannot fairly be said of those suggestions of economic or technological determinism which can be found in his work. Correcting the impression that historical materialism is economic determinism has been a major theme of Marxist thought in recent years.1 Yet while it has been argued that economic determinism contradicts Marx’s historical materialism, and runs directly counter to the critique of political economy, it must be admitted that support for such determinism can genuinely be found in a number of the brief statements of their work that were made by Marx and Engels, qualifications notwithstanding. An inclination towards economic determinism—and at times the straightforward embrace of it—has therefore persisted within Marxism. The economic determinist argument—which may imply or even be frankly stated in terms of a technological determinism, as in G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense—is rooted in the metaphor of “base and superstructure”, as undeniably utilized by Marx and Engels, most notably in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.2 An exhaustive treatment of the subject of base and superstructure is not possible here, but from the foregoing discussion of the origins and character of historical materialism, it should be clear that the point of departure and continual focus of Marx’s central work was not “the economic base” but class exploitation. It was with relations of exploitive production—alienated labour—that Marx began, not the idea of the determination of social behaviour by the structured activities of production. Indeed, it was only in “The German Ideology” that Marx came to state his basic historical conception of social development in terms of determination by stages in the process of production—terms which are strongly redolent of the liberal mode of subsistence theory. All subsequent Marxist formulations of economic/technical

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determinism clearly are derived from that account. Yet, by attributing the development of both class and property forms—and so, by his analysis, the whole line of human social development—to the effects of the “division of labour”, in a conception rooted in natural/technical processes, Marx was engaging in the sort of abstract-formal and anachronistic analysis which he soon came to criticize.

Marx and the Division of Labour Marx would never again attribute so central a role to the concept of the division of labour. Indeed, in the course of his critique of political economy—in which one might expect the category to loom large, judging from Adam Smith’s heavy emphasis upon it—the role of the division of labour is remarkably limited. In his important introductory essay in the Grundrisse,3 in which he clarifies his analysis of “production in general”, the “general relation between production, distribution, exchange and consumption”, and “the method of political economy”, he barely mentions the division of labour. The entire point of his analysis is to situate the subject of political economy in the context of global and historical human production. Yet, precisely because Marx rejects the idea of “production in general”, which the bourgeois economists present as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable laws on which society in the abstract is founded,4

he has no room for an abstracted conception of the division of labour as some universal driving force of production. Instead, he indicates only that exchange, a category in which he is very much interested as an aspect of the production of commodities, requires the division of labour, and that division of labour is numbered among the “determinant, abstract, general relations” which the political economists first analyse, in order to reconstruct the operation of the economic system as a whole.5 This penetration of the abstract operation of “the economy”, however, is predicated upon first recognizing the specificity of its subject: capitalist production. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, a redraft of one of the chapters of the Grundrisse, Marx again makes limited reference to the division of labour: he observes that the social division of labour might be developed without commercial exchange, but since he is concerned with

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political economy and capitalism, he simply notes its necessary underpinning of the production of commodities.6 Finally, in Capital, Marx devotes one chapter to the division of labour, out of the thirty-three contained in Volume I. Here, he not only settles accounts with the difference between social and technical division of labour, but he makes the point that the role of the division of labour with which the political economists were preoccupied is unique to capitalism. In the first place—and crucially, given the earlier points of confusion— in spite of the numerous analogies and links connecting them, division of labour in the interior of society, and that in the interior of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in kind.7

The social division of labour is found in all societies, “whether such division be brought about or not by exchange of commodities”.8 The production of commodities—which is the essential focus of Capital—is, of course, predicated upon the social division of labour. This, however, does not mean that the production of commodities is itself in any way a “natural” necessity: on the contrary, the organization of social production based on quite elaborate division of labour, without internal commodity exchange, has existed in a number of societies, such as ancient Egypt. Moreover, not only is there a basic difference between the production of commodities, as such, and social division of labour in the production of articles for use, but there is an even more profound difference between the social production of commodities and the technical division of labour in the workshop. The latter “is a special creation of the capitalist mode of production alone”.9 Whereas the social division of labour is a means of organizing social production as a whole, the division of labour in the workshop is a specific means of maximizing the production of surplus value for the capitalist. The “natural” drive to increase productivity, the very association with the progress of technique, is specifically historical in character: By decomposition of handicrafts, by specialisation of the instruments of labour, by the formation of detail labourers, and by grouping and combining the latter into a single mechanism, division of labour in manufacture creates a qualitative gradation, and a quantitative proportion in the social process of production; it consequently creates a definite organisation of the labour of society, and thereby develops at the same time new productive

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forces in the society. In its specific capitalist form … manufacture is but a particular method of begetting relative surplus-value, or of augmenting at the expense of the labourer the self-expansion of capital … It creates new conditions for the lordship of capital over labour. If, therefore, on the one hand, it presents itself historically as a progress and as a necessary phase in the economic development of society, on the other hand, it is a refined and civilised method of exploitation.10

To underscore the distinctive quality of this division of labour, Marx points to the fact that political economy conceives of the division of labour exclusively in terms of “the means of producing more commodities with a given quantity of labour”, whereas the authors of classical antiquity entirely ignored any quantitative implications of division of labour, and instead saw in it the means to improve the quality of the product, and the talent of the producer.11 From the perspective of his fully mature work, then, it is clear that the conception presented in “The German Ideology” of a natural and strongly technical impetus behind the division of labour as the fundamental source of social development could no longer be sustained. For, that conception attributes the specific and peculiarly economic character of the division of labour found in the capitalist workshop to the social division of labour in the abstract. Such an application of economic concepts to societies, in general, is an anachronism of the first order: Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form – as labour as such – is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, “labour” is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction.12

It is this line of critical thought, grounded in the critique of political economy, that was central to Marx’s work, emphasizing the social determination of relations of production in contrast to their supposedly “natural” character, and revealing the class exploitation disguised by this ideology. The relatively uncritical use of political economic ideas in “The German Ideology”, in conjunction with the general schema of the stages theory of development, permitted the excessively philosophical and abstract-formal conception of point-by-point correlation between technological development, division of labour, forms of property, and class structure. Marx and Engels had arrived at the view that production is

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“social”; but both production and society were still conceived by them in the terms of political economy, and were not yet historicized by any criticism of abstract-formal materialism. Yet no more than a year passed before, in his next important work, The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx explicitly criticized Proudhon precisely for his anachronistic and technical conception of division of labour: The division of labour is, according to M.  Proudhon, an eternal law, a simple, abstract category. Therefore the abstraction, the idea, the word must suffice for him to explain the division of labour at different historical epochs. Castes, corporations, manufacture, large-scale industry must be explained by the single word divide. First study carefully the meaning of “divide”, and you will have no need to study the numerous influences which give the division of labour a definite character in each epoch.13

Here, Marx argued that it was not the natural unfolding of the division of labour that gave rise to Adam Smith’s workshop, but rather the imposition of new social relations by the exercise of capital, which made possible the workshop and made necessary the further increase in division of labour.14 This analysis clearly belongs to the line of the critique of political economy. Marx had already abandoned the problematic terminology of “The German Ideology” and its tendency towards a natural-deterministic conception of social development, and once again emphasized the role of class relations instead.

The Confusion of Liberal and Historical Materialism Still, some Marxists have persevered in treating the base and superstructure metaphor, which Marx occasionally used, as the essence of his historical materialist method. Against this form of economic or technological determinism—specifically G.  A. Cohen’s conception of the “social” as determined by the “material”—Ellen Meiksins Wood argued that it ignores or misinterprets the whole thrust of the Grundrisse and Capital: Marx’s object is to criticize the mystifications of political economy which are achieved precisely by beginning with “material production in general” and then proceeding to treat the process of producing capital abstractly as if it were the process of production as such.15

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Any conception of historical development which is rooted in “nature” or “material existence” reveals an underlying liberal ideological orientation which displaces class exploitation as the central fact of history. Materialism in the abstract is not enough, and it is not Marxist. Wood states the matter clearly: the essence of historical materialism, “in contrast, say, to the materialism of the political economists  – is precisely that it socializes and historicizes the material base”.16 Any conception of the “social” or “social production” which does not begin its analysis of a historical (Western) society with the fact of its class character ultimately must reproduce liberal ideology by deriving “class” from some presumed “natural” social relations of humanity, in just the manner that political economy itself derives “classes” and “property” from relations of “exchange” and the division of labour, taken in the abstract. Classes do not emerge in a given society through the operation of pre-­ existing social processes. Instead, class is the initial and fundamental determinant of social relations in exploitive class societies—a defining characteristic of those societies. This is the cardinal point of historical materialism, the point Marx recognized in 1844, and which forms the historicizing context for his critique of political economy. It may be objected that this conception of historical materialism is not generally applicable to all human societies, in the way that determination by relations of production, as such, claims to be—that it could not, for example, be meaningfully applied to Trobriand Islanders in the social formation which preceded their engagement with the commercial circuits of the modern capitalist world. Indeed, it must be acknowledged that it remains a general principle that every society can be fruitfully examined in terms of its relations of production, and particularly the production and appropriation of surplus, known to every human society beyond pure hunting and gathering. The structure of these relations may be egalitarian in some non-class societies and hierarchical in others. Marx, however, was specifically concerned with those societies in which production and surplus appropriation are organized in class ways; and the historical dynamism he describes is that of class society. This is not to suggest that there is a mystical separation of Western class society from other types of society, or that the origins of class society cannot be considered by historical materialism. On the contrary. There is, however, an all-­important qualitative difference between recognizing that class relations of production have been the specific basis of Western social reproduction, on the one hand; and on the other, merely recognizing in production a general

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social character, without acknowledgement of the fundamental impact of exploitive social relations. The latter approach has been the tendency in both liberal political economy (and economic history) and liberal materialist history (including demographic “social” history). Unfortunately, as Robert Brenner, in particular, has argued, this is also characteristic of a tendency towards “neo-­ Smithian” Marxism, which approaches the origins of capitalist development from the perspective of “economic growth”, or the rise of trade, in order to account for underdevelopment as an aspect of world capitalism.17 Brenner’s series of articles rank among the most important efforts to apply historical materialism to precapitalist societies, and at their core is a return to the history of class struggle which is exemplary. While it is clear that staunch economic determinists have failed entirely to recognize the meaning of the critique of political economy, it must again be admitted that the ambiguity and contradictions in Marx and Engels’s work are real. The persistence of certain liberal concepts and perspectives in their thought is a matter that must be accounted for. After Marx’s initial criticism of Hegel and liberal politics, his development of historical materialism remained for a time associated with both philosophy and political economy. Only after the development of a more complete critique of political economy did Marx produce an analysis, specifically limited to capitalist society, which was inherently free of liberal ideology. There still remained, however, three main contradictory areas of Marx’s thought, in which—for a variety of reasons—liberal conceptions were taken to be consistent with historical materialism, and therefore were never properly criticized as ideological. In the first place, liberal materialist history had already recognized classes, seen struggle between them as central to political history, and asserted that economic progress was the key to bourgeois class strength— so much is clear from Hume, Mignet, Guizot. It was not Marx who claimed that the bourgeoisie was triumphant, but the bourgeois themselves. The French Revolution was their own—within limits, and save for the subversive, radical democracy of the popular movement, whose raising of the “social question” called for stern measures. Since Marx’s essential political point was precisely that the politics of the French Revolution served only the bourgeois class, and his primary concern thereafter was with bourgeois class rule in capitalist society, he simply had no cause to doubt the bourgeoisie’s own claim to a class revolution.

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Marx also had no reason to call into question the pervasively held general historical interpretations of progress, which recast in class terms seemed only to support his overall conception of history. He could not have had reason to question them, unless he were to investigate precapitalist society seriously, on its own terms. Not only was the theory of bourgeois revolution standard history, dramatically turned to serve Marx’s purposes, but it recommended a historical precedent for proletarian class revolution and evoked the memories of earlier popular action. Remembering that Marx’s thought began with the class politics of the French Revolution, it is not surprising that he never criticized liberal history as a whole. In the second place, while a criticism of liberal materialism was implicit in the developed critique of political economy, the liberal materialist presumption that social development followed from economic development did appear to provide an adequate account for the dynamic of liberal class history. The contradiction was not immediately apparent, and without creating an entire alternative history, it would have been difficult to specify any different dynamic. After “The German Ideology”, of course, Marx did not attempt actually and specifically to describe the dynamic of class history (and he never published that work). Instead, a simple correlation of the stages of social relations of production with stages of the forces of production continued to offer a convenient framework for history and an apparent explanation for the emergence of classes. The ambiguity created by endowing the “forces of production” with a broadly social definition appeared to raise the argument above the level of determination by the division of labour, per se—without actually contradicting it. This ambiguity can only be resolved in favour of either the economic determinism of base/superstructure or the dynamism of class exploitation in the social relations of production. Historical materialism clearly, if implicitly, requires the latter. A similar approach to explaining this ambiguity in Marx’s overall conception of historical development is offered by Melvin Rader in his somewhat problematic Marx’s Interpretation of History. Rader asserts that Marx’s mature insights are most faithfully expressed in the metaphor of organic structure—which implies that the political and the economic are inseparable, and that “production in its organic totality is internally related to ‘moments’ that are not usually thought of as economic”; in short, that society as an organic whole is characterized by class.18 Yet, he argues, there remained a need for the base/superstructure metaphor also, in order to emphasize the priority of production within this structure, as opposed to the role of consciousness.

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There were, in fact, two different senses of “priority of production” for Marx to convey. With regard to development within class societies, on the one hand, the fundamental priority of “production” can be taken to mean the priority of “alienated labour”—the extraction of social surplus—in class relations. Class is not a function of ideology, status, and so on— though it takes those forms as well—but a manifestation of the exploitation of producers of social surplus that is inherent to certain, historically specific social relations of production. The organic totality of class society is a function of these class relations of production; and however imperfectly, the metaphor of base and superstructure helped to convey that “at bottom” real issues of the creation, possession, and enjoyment of surplus product were at stake in such relations. With regard to social existence generally, on the other hand, it is the materiality of social reproduction, the fundamental reality of human self-­ creation, which must be stressed—a reaffirmation of the broad materialist perspective argued in “The German Ideology”. Insofar as the base/superstructure underscores the priority of material reproduction in social existence, it serves this purpose. To the degree, however, that the metaphor implies the determination of social development uniquely, or even predominantly, at the level of productive technique, it comes into contradiction with historical materialism. Because the only developmental link which Marx ever offered between the generally fundamental character of social production and the specific dynamic of exploitive class relations was that of progress in the division of labour, and because he never entirely repudiated the association of level of technique with stage of society, Marx’s use of the metaphor must be recognized to involve real contradictions. Finally, the liberal conception of the French Revolution had a lasting impact on Marx’s political thought and his expectations for proletarian revolution. Marx began as a radical-democratic critic of both absolutism and liberalism, in the wake of the French Revolution. He had decided on the “necessity” of revolution by a universal class and had seen this class in the proletariat before he developed historical materialism through the critique of political economy. His further studies—and exposure to proletarian movements—confirmed his belief that such revolution was needed, and led him to announce its inevitability. Together with Engels, Marx became an active communist—in the main, a journalist and propagandist for proletarian and democratic revolution, against utopian, “feudal”, and petty bourgeois socialism. Then, with the passing of 1848, and a return to capitalist prosperity for another cycle, Marx accepted that the immediate prospect of revolution was gone, but not its inevitability.19

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Marx’s Conflation of Historical Necessities The issue of “necessity” in Marx’s writings is problematic and is essential to a full understanding of the persistence of liberal materialism in Marxist thought. Marx’s critique of political economy as historical materialism is not being challenged here. The many arguments which have been raised over Capital, and the supposed necessity of revising its analysis claimed by many Marxists, all relate to the prognosis for capitalism and its ability to sustain growth—in other words, these arguments ultimately concern the prospect of proletarian revolution. In hindsight, it can be seen that Marx and Engels leapt forward a whole era in their understanding of capitalism’s class dynamics, mistaking the struggles of early capitalist society for its death throes. To what extent this misperception, the erroneous conception of bourgeois class revolution, and philosophical tinges of determinism which were never fully repudiated, may have combined to produce misleading conclusions about the specific processes to be expected in proletarian revolution is an issue which must still be taken up by historical materialists. What becomes apparent from a consideration of the history of Marxism is not that the belief in the “necessity” of proletarian revolution is wrong, but that the various meanings of this necessity have been confused. Historical materialism, recognizing exploitation in the very fabric of history, is inherently value-laden as well as “scientific”—and this is no less true of the critique of political economy, as Lucio Colletti, in particular, often argued.20 Colletti’s perspective is a corrective to E. P. Thompson’s evaluation of the critique of political economy. Thompson goes too far in criticizing Marx’s “Grundrisse face” precisely because he recognizes the tendency among many Marxists to “disinfect” Capital of its essential value judgements. Marx does not only lay bare the economic processes of exploitation, but he also expresses (or presents his material so as to evoke) indignation at suffering, poverty, child labour, waste of human potentialities, and contempt for intellectual mystifications and apologetics.21 This “moral” attitude is not, however, simply an addition to Marx’s argument, as Thompson seems to suggest. It is rather the impetus for the critique of political economy, on the one hand, and the very substance of that critique, on the other: capitalism is revealed to be only one system of exploitation among many, while also the most dehumanizing. Thompson criticizes Capital on the grounds that if the “moralistic” elements are removed,

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a very considerable part of that work – the major part – could be taken just as “what the English call ‘the principles of Political Economy’”: an analytic critique of the existing “science”, and an exposition of an alternative “science”, of economic functions, relations, and laws. That is, if we did not (for exterior “reasons” of value) disapprove of exploitation, waste and suffering, then we would find ourselves presented with an alternative lawed structure of economic relations.22

Certainly, many Marxists do attempt to disinfect Capital. Yet Marx did not intend it to be disinfected; it was consciously written as both critical exposition of the Law of Value, and the critical analysis of capitalism as class society. In revealing capitalism to be an exploitive class society, in challenging bourgeois ideological conceptions of human existence, in exposing the full measure of dehumanization and its sources, and in pointing up the just, heroic, and purposeful character of class struggle, writ large and small—in all this, Capital accomplishes no less than that which the best historical studies of class society hope to do. It is not a history, and at this late date, a history of capitalist society is indeed overdue. Still, capitalism cannot be understood as class society unless the hidden operation of the extraction and distribution of surplus value—and the attendant contradictions of development—are revealed. This, in both abstract-analytical and concrete terms, is what Capital does. The dialectical character of Marxism, as science and ideology, was a special concern of Colletti’s. He considered the impact of this quality— particularly the extent to which Marxism has been falsified by refusals to accept this union—and the implications it ought to have. Of particular importance is his argument that there is a real dialectic in the combination of science and ideology, grounded in a real opposition. Many Marxists have mistakenly attempted to “resolve” this through the theory of the crash: the theory that capitalism must crash because it cannot grow infinitely, and that the crash necessitates revolution. As Colletti argued, there are grounds in the critique of political economy for recognizing the impossibility of infinite capitalist expansion, but this cannot be stated in the purely formal and structural terms of a capitalist “law”, whatever else the implications of the “laws” of capitalism. Instead, “necessity” must be based on the historical prospect of class struggle:

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The system is not destined to an inevitable “crash” through a mechanical impasse. The only factor that can destroy it is the clash of classes, a clash in which, besides objective material conditions, all the subjective factors like “class consciousness”, the degree of class unity and organization, and the efficacy of each class’ “political instrument” participate.23

This once again emphasizes the dynamic centrality of class exploitation and class struggle in historical materialism: the reproduction of society and the creation of history, by human subjects, bound by class relations. No mechanical, structural determinism can replace the process of history. The necessity of communism can only be the historical necessity of real human action, a revolutionary necessity—comprising moral, scientific, philosophical, political necessities, and so on—not an “objective”, “natural”, unilinear necessity. Yet it is true that Marx and Engels did reveal a tendency to conflate these necessities, to confound the logically distinct forms of “necessity” in their revolutionary perspective. All of these necessities are implied by historical materialism and the critique of political economy, but they have varying senses, and rest on different grounds. Marx argued the necessity of humans realizing their emancipation and full potential in classless society; the necessity of capitalist economic relations being limited by the contradictions of their growth; the necessity of working-class struggle in its own interests; the necessity of replacing irrational and atomized production for profit with conscious production for social needs. These are all “necessities” for socialist revolution, but they are so in logically quite distinct ways. In their different senses, they each make a contribution towards the determination of socialist revolution. One of the most regrettable consequences of the persistence of liberal materialism, and the inclination towards a natural-scientific determinism of the “base” is that all of these differences become dissolved together in a single overriding economic necessity. Clearly, in expressing their belief in a revolutionary future, Marx and Engels were sometimes tempted by the certainty suggested by this sort of materialism; most of their followers have insisted upon it. Yet historical materialism cannot impose a false logical identity on such differing “necessities”; it cannot make socialism more necessary than it really is by confounding different logics. The task of historical materialism remains to bring together science and ideology, to integrate these differing necessities in a concrete analysis of the ongoing dynamic of class history.

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The Practice of Historical Materialism Such an abstract exposition of the analytic method of historical materialism cannot really be satisfactory. Its high level of abstraction is almost a denial of real historical class analysis; it is at most an indication of what must be accomplished through historical practice. In fact, the foregoing exposition is not truly a methodology, but an anticipation of what is to be learned—a partial systematization of what historical materialist analysis can yield. The methodological injunction of historical materialism is to locate in actual history the dynamism of class exploitation and struggle and to reveal the source of historical social change and human self-­development in the dialectical determination of social structure by relations of class. It is Thompson, again, who has put it best: We have often been told that Marx had a “method”, that this method lies somewhere in the region of dialectical reason, and that this constitutes the essence of Marxism. It is therefore strange that, despite many allusions, and several expressions of intent, Marx never wrote this essence down … If he had found the clue to the universe, he would have set a day or two aside to put it down. We may conclude from this that it was not written because it could not be written, any more than Shakespeare or Stendahl could have reduced their art to a clue. For it was not a method but a practice, and a practice learned through practicing.24

The history of class society itself provides the structure of knowledge, not any methodology of analysis. Of course, the initial decision must be made to structure historical knowledge in terms of class; nothing can be understood without conceptual structures. This is exactly the point of Marx’s critique of liberal ideology: to provide a critical basis of knowledge against the contrary assertion that class is an accidental by-product of human nature and natural development. This, however, provides only the point of entry, without guarantees, into historical knowledge. With his somewhat too critical evaluation of Marx’s “Grundrisse face”, Thompson, unfortunately, sees in Capital a work entrapped by the system of political economy, and not a work of historical materialism: “Marx’s hope of himself developing historical materialism in practice remains, very largely, unfulfilled.”25 Thompson does not sufficiently credit the necessity of practising the critique of political economy in capitalist society—a society in which the effects of class exploitation may be apparent in the lives of workers, but not

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the form of exploitation, nor its pervasive penetration of the whole fabric of society. Yet it remains true that even Marx’s historical materialist analysis of capitalism was never completed, or even advanced in properly historical terms. The analysis of precapitalist societies—including the history of the transition to capitalism—was never even attempted. The task of historical materialism still lies ahead: to improve and extend the analysis of capitalist society, and to make a comparable analysis for the rest of class history. On the whole, this history will have little to do with Marx’s retrospective glances at the antecedents to the political economic categories with which he was primarily concerned. In general, Marx’s specific suppositions can be expected to be proved wrong. Yet it is not hard to perceive that his overall conception of history will be vindicated. There is much that can be recovered from the histories that have already been written. And already in Thompson’s and Brenner’s works can be found that focus on the concrete history of class relations and the balance of class struggle which is essential to historical materialism. Particularly in the contributions they have made to the history of the transition to capitalism, the leading edge of historical materialism can be seen emerging from the heavy fog of “Marxist theory”. While a historical materialist interpretation of the French Revolution can only truly follow from a great deal more work upon the society that lay behind it—and not the society that lay ahead—the present work would not be complete without some effort to anticipate how the method outlined here might reveal a structure of exploitive class relations in the ancien régime and relate it to the political conflict of “bourgeois” and ­“aristocrats”. The conclusion which follows will, therefore, offer a preliminary historical synthesis, incorporating most of the data the revisionists have used to criticize the social interpretation. The evidence clearly suggests that the Revolution was indeed the direct result of the conflicts and contradictions generated by class relations of exploitation in the ancien régime, though in a fundamentally different way than is usually associated with “bourgeois revolution”.

Notes 1. The work of Lucio Colletti can be cited, particularly his essays “Marxism as Sociology” and “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International”, both in Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (New York, London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 3–108; and “The Theory of the Crash”, Telos 13 (1972): 34–46, reprinted in Bart Grahl, and Paul Piccone, Towards a New Marxism (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973). Raymond Williams’ critical

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discussion of the major categories of Marxist analysis in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) is particularly good. For an excellent discussion from a perspective that is more philosophical than Marxist, see Melvin Rader’s Marx’s Interpretation of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). For a direct confrontation of contemporary economic determinism, see Ellen M. Wood, “The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism”, in Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One, ‘Preface’, MECW, vol. 29. 3. As noted previously, the text was written as an introduction for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy but not published with it, and has been included as part of the Grundrisse, written in the same period. 4. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 87. 5. Ibid., 99–100. 6. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW, vol. 29, 299–300, Marx, Grundrisse, 104; Marx, Contribution, 292, 328–9. 7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 359. 8. Ibid., 364. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 369–70. 11. Ibid. 12. Marx, Grundrisse, 103. 13. Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, MECW, vol. 6, 179. 14. Ibid., 186. 15. Wood, “Separation”, 71. 16. Ibid., 74. 17. Robert Brenner, “On the Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (1977). 18. Rader, Marx’s Interpretation, 59. 19. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (New York, London: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 2: 250. 20. See works cited in endnote 1. 21. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 250. 22. Ibid. 23. Colletti, “Theory of the Crash”, 44. 24. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 306. 25. Ibid., 258.

CHAPTER 9

Historical Materialism and the Specificity of Capitalism

Social Categories and Historical Social Formations As is recounted and explored in the contributions to Marcello Musto’s edited book Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy 150 years later, the dissemination of Marx’s 1857 manuscript of the critique of political economy—the Grundrisse had a major impact upon understanding the development of Marx’s thought and the nature of his method. One particularly well-known passage appears in the Introduction to the manuscript: Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known.1

My work has much in common with Ellen Meiksins Wood, whose contribution to Musto’s book, “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms which p ­ recede Capitalist Production’”,2 considers both the historical problems in Marx’s © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_9

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specific formulations in the Grundrisse and the extent to which his overall historical materialist analysis is nonetheless vindicated. My intention here is to approach some of the same ideas from a somewhat different angle. Marx does not begin his analysis in the Grundrisse historically and does not start with an account of the “Forms which precede Capitalist Production”. Instead, setting out to address “Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange” as general categories of economic analysis, he begins with “material production”. From the very start, however, he contrasts his critical approach with that of the political economists: Individuals producing in Society − hence socially determined individual production − is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades.3 The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole.4 The human being is in the most literal sense a ζωον πολιτικóν [zoonpolitikon, social animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.5

This conception of the individual in relation to society derives from, and in these pages expresses, Marx’s understanding of the social whole as an organic, developmental totality. This social totality comprises the entire range of socially determined individual human activity, from the most personal and private, to the most collective and public, encompassing all material and cultural manifestations of social life and its ongoing reproduction. This idea of social totality is one of the most significant and enduring elements of Marx’s method, traceable to Hegel’s conception of the historical development of society. Indeed, in these pages, Marx can be seen to be more clearly drawn back to Hegel’s methods of analysis than at any time since the mid-1840s. I believe that this is precisely because of his growing understanding of the specific character of capitalist social relations. On the one hand, a society structured by capitalist social relations not only, like every society, exists as a social totality, but it also is driven by a totalizing logic as it reproduces itself. Leaping forward to the terms with which Marx develops this ­concept of a totalizing logic in Capital, the Law of Value not only governs all economic decisions within existing capitalist social reproduction, but compels the growth and extension of the capitalist economy through processes of

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increasingly incorporating previously non-capitalist forms and sectors of production, establishing new forms of production, and transforming other forms of society which it increasingly draws into its circuits of exchange. On the other hand, as Marx increasingly appreciated in writing the Grundrisse, this abstract, totalizing logic that governs capitalism is unique, setting it apart from all earlier forms of social reproduction. It is unique not merely in the particular details of its logic, but in the very fact that abstract principles, rather than concrete rules, regulations, and traditions, informs the processes of production. As expressed by the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi,6 whereas in all previous forms of social reproduction the economy was embedded within broader forms of social organization—kinship, custom, religion, collective decision-making, the state—the market economy of capitalist social reproduction is disembedded and normally operates subject only to its own internal principles. This self-­regulation of the economy by the market is fundamental to the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, this totalizing logic, which Norman Levine has aptly described as the essence of capitalism precisely as that term is conceived in Hegel’s Logic,7 provides an abstract systemic character to the capitalist mode of production for which there is nothing comparable in any other form of social production. As Adam Smith first clearly articulated, capitalist production—and with it, capitalist society as a whole—is organized through the “invisible hand” of the market. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued, this market principle of capitalist society is a form of compulsion, imposing upon capitalist producers the obligation to compete through ceaseless efforts to increase productivity, as well as to innovate in other ways. Only in specifically capitalist society, internally driven by the Law of Value and its totalizing logic, does the market impose such a compulsion on the processes of social production. In other forms of societies in which market exchange has existed—and, of course, contrary to the presuppositions of the political economists, market exchange has not existed in all societies— markets operate after the fact of production, and are not at all central to their logic. Marx noted this in the Grundrisse with respect not only to simple communal societies, but also at least some “very developed but nevertheless historically less mature forms of society, in which the highest forms of economy, e.g. cooperation, a developed division of labour, etc., are found”.8 The absence of the compulsion of general market regulation makes an enormous difference in the processes of social reproduction, even where market exchange may exist. In a society characterized by peasant households producing in the first instance for their own subsistence,

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for example, peasants are not compelled to sell any surplus that they may retain after meeting their obligations to the owners of the land and/or the state. If market prices are high, they may indeed put effort into producing more to take advantage of this opportunity. When prices are low, however, they will instead be inclined to produce less, because it is not worth the effort to produce the maximum, and by this means they may reduce supply to an extent that will restore prices to what is understood to be a normal level. They are, in any event, in control of the means of production—even if they do not own them—and in possessing the means to produce their own subsistence, the market remains for them only an opportunity, not a means of compulsion.

Confronting the Specificity of Capitalism It is precisely in the Grundrisse, as a work of self-clarification, that Marx first began to discern such fundamental distinctions. As he brought to bear tools of critical analysis that already were informed by a conception of the social totality as a developmental whole, Marx increasingly came to appreciate the extent to which his project of representing the systemic structure of capitalist social relations—and exposing not only their essence but their implications for workers—required a method of articulating concepts that drew upon Hegel’s method. The crucial difference, of course, is that Marx’s conception of the development of the social whole rejects Hegel’s conception of the Idea unfolding through history to arrive at the Universal. Instead, of course, for Marx history was made by living human agents acting in their own capacity through the social relations that they have collectively constructed and changed over time, though not under conditions of their choosing. It was in considering consciously the difference between the political economists’ assertion of “timeless” economic categories, and his own understanding that the categories of analysis must capture the historical and social determination of the forms of social life, that Marx was increasingly brought to contrast the social forms of the present with those of the past. It is in the passages of the Introduction to the Grundrisse9 entitled “The Method of Political Economy” that he first begins to undertake a comparative analysis of precapitalist and capitalist forms of society, a method of comparative analysis that he continued to extend and deepen in subsequent work, especially Capital. What must again be emphasized is that this developing method of historical-comparative analysis did not

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emerge from nor was grounded in any historical narrative. It did not even follow from recounting history as context for theoretical analysis. Instead, it emerged immediately from the critique of political economy, and was pursued in the systematic terms of his method of critique. Within the articulation of his critique of political economy, his insights into precapitalist forms of society are integral to the development of his analysis of the capitalist mode of production. In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject − here, modern bourgeois society − is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject, and that therefore this society by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such;… For example, nothing seems more natural than to begin with ground rent, with landed property, since this is bound up with the earth, the source of all production and of all being, and with the first form of production of all more or less settled societies − agriculture. But nothing would be more erroneous. In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it … Among peoples with a settled agriculture … as in antiquity and in the feudal order, even industry, together with its organization and the forms of property corresponding to it, has a more or less landed-proprietary character … In bourgeois society it is the opposite. Agriculture more and more becomes merely a branch of industry, and is entirely dominated by capital.10

This grounding of his understanding of precapitalist social formations directly through contrasting them with the specifically capitalist mode of production is very different from other places in Marx’s work in which he offers details with respect to historical societies on the basis of the work of earlier, liberal historians. As Ellen Wood argues in her chapter in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, Marx’s more detailed discussion of the “Forms which precede Capitalist Production” contains a number of historical assertions that subsequent research has challenged. Historical knowledge has advanced enormously over the past century: much of what once was universally accepted has been shown to be wrong, and much that historians have discovered was completely unexpected. Today, the

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societies of ancient and medieval Europe are known in greater detail, and with greater certainty, than at any previous time in the modern era. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Marx’s directly historical accounts contain suppositions that have since been disproved. But what is perhaps even more significant is that Marx explicitly gave credit to “the liberal historians” for uncovering of the role of class in history,11 without distinguishing between their liberal ideas about classes and his own historical materialist conception of classes engaged in antagonistic relationships of exploitation. In many cases, as Ellen Wood, Robert Brenner, and I have argued, those liberal accounts were constructed in directly ideological terms. Marx never undertook a critique of historical ideas comparable to his critique of political economy, so their liberal ideology, prejudices, and presuppositions escaped serious scrutiny. As a result, not only much of the detail but even basic historical concepts that Marx incorporated into the historical accounts within his work are neither accurate nor really Marxist. Those places in his critique of liberal political economy where Marx found himself compelled to differentiate that which was specific to capitalism from that which was precapitalist are strikingly different from this broad and relatively uncritical appropriation of historical ideas grounded upon liberal ideological formulations. His recognition of the development through history of the social forms and relations between labour and capital already was evident in his 1844 manuscripts. At that time, he had as yet only an inkling of the relationship between earlier forms of the alienation of labour and fully developed capitalist society, but he conceived of the development of relations of surplus appropriation as “the movement of property” through history. While he did not at this point recognize that there were qualitatively different forms of society along the way, he already conceived historical development in these terms: Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely that on the one hand it is the product of ­alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.12

This clearly intimates that capital is distinct as the most fully developed form of property relationship, though it does not yet distinguish between that which is capitalist and that which is precapitalist. The methodological assertion of just such a distinction in the Introduction to the Grundrisse marks a huge advance in historical materialist analysis. In drawing attention to the difference between the anatomy

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of the ape and that of the human, Marx articulated the existence of qualitatively different social contexts, in which apparently identical social forms of property and economic interaction may have very different characteristics and implications. Then, on this basis, recognizing that capitalist society contains the most fully developed social property relations, he pointed to the analytical potential for learning about earlier forms precisely in comparison with the later ones. It goes without saying that, as a dialectical thinker, Marx also recognized that this use of the developed form to illuminate the earlier also offers the potential of shedding light on the processes of development themselves. One particular example that Marx pursues in these terms is labour, which “seems a quite simple category”, and which “in this general form— labour as such—is also immeasurably old”.13 “Nevertheless,” he continues, “when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction.” Marx had already, in his 1844 manuscripts, come to recognize that the most fundamental capitalist social relations had a profoundly abstract character, which he articulated in terms of the alienation of labour. Indeed, as noted in Chap. 3, at the end of the first section of his manuscript, “Wages of Labour”—beginning with the stark assertion that “Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker”14—he posed a question that both summed up what the political economists had themselves revealed about the antagonistic relations between labour and capital, and his appreciation of its significance for the whole of history: “What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?” This abstract character is precisely a manifestation of the alienation of labour that he analyses in detail in the subsequent section, “Estranged Labour”. This alienation of labour is at the very heart of the capitalist system and is the fundamental form of class exploitation, and as such, the origin of property rather than its consequence. While, as is well known, Marx does not use the terminology of alienation in Capital, it is telling that he does use it in the Grundrisse, in the chapter on Capital: Production based on exchange value, on whose surface this free and equal exchange of equivalents proceeds, is at its base the exchange of objectified labour as exchange value for living labour as use value, or, to express this in another way, the relating of labour to its objective conditions – and hence to the objectivity created by itself – as alien property: alienation [Entäusserung] of labour.15

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Through these terms of analysis, then, Marx has come to understand that the apparently simple category of labour, conceived as an abstract generality, in fact results from a historical process of realizing the alienation of labour in its most complete form. Thus, “the relation of labour to capital, or to the objective conditions of labour as capital, presupposes a process of history which dissolves the various forms in which the worker is a proprietor, or in which the proprietor works”.16 The “original formation of capital” is not the accumulation of means of subsistence, instruments of labour, and raw materials; so-called primitive accumulation is not literally the amassing of capital, but is instead a dissolution of the prior mode of production that creates the ability to exchange money against “the living labour of the workers who have been set free”.17

The Anatomy of the Ape Through the articulation of such fully developed characteristics of capitalist social relations in his critique of political economy, Marx identified key aspects of precapitalist social formations. The qualitative difference between capitalist and precapitalist societies—already established in the Grundrisse— was subsequently more fully elaborated in crucial passages in the third volume of Capital. In chapter 47 of Volume III, on “The Genesis of Capitalist Ground-rent”, Marx was compelled to return to the specific character of precapitalist societies in order to account for the peculiar nature of rent in the capitalist mode of production: “The whole difficulty in analysing rent, therefore, consists in explaining the excess of agricultural profit over the average profit, not the surplus-value, but the excess of surplus-­value characteristic of this sphere of production.”18 Ultimately, indeed, Marx is led to the conclusion that while differential rent in c­ apitalist agricultural production is a consequence of the market effects of differences in soil fertility, absolute rent—the irreducible minimum that must be paid with respect to even the most minimally productive land—can only be understood with reference to the legacy of precapitalist landed property. The section on “Labour Rent” in this chapter includes one of the most significant accounts of the historical materialist approach to the analysis of class societies to be found in the whole of Marx’s work. He begins by noting that in feudal society “ground-rent … is not only directly unpaid surplus-­labour, but also appears as such”. He continues with a famous observation about the necessarily extra-economic character of the precapitalist appropriation of surplus:

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It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer remains the “possessor” of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude, so that the direct producer is not free … Under such conditions the surpluslabour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be.19

This essential character of immediate extra-economic coercion is fundamentally different from the way in which the appropriation of surplus in capitalist society, through the production of surplus value based upon the commodification of labour-power, operates through exclusively economic relations. Marx then goes on to address forms of society in which no private landowners exist to appropriate rent, but only the state: then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. But, on the other hand, no private ownership of land exists, although there is both private and common possession and use of land.20

This observation builds upon his earlier identification in the Grundrisse of peasant-based agricultural production as the general foundation for precapitalist class societies. Here, in the context of his fully developed critique of political economy, Marx identifies two different forms of precapitalist society that are equally based upon the exploitation of self-subsisting peasant households. This stands as a fundamental challenge to those who would associate the idea of different historical modes of production directly with the development of forces of production. In the case of these two forms of peasantbased exploitive society, it is not at all through production that we can distinguish them, but only through differences in social property relations. Marx continues: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic

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community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.21

No single statement could ever be freighted with the burden of encapsulating the whole of Marx’s method of analysing modes of production, but this statement in its forceful clarity comes as close as any passage in the whole of his work to providing a means to approach historical class societies. All forms of class society prior to the capitalist mode of production are in the first place based upon extra-economic coercion, which is ultimately in some way political, in contrast to the specifically economic form of surplus appropriation through the system of free wage labour in capitalism. In the second place, while Marx acknowledges that a different form of non-capitalist surplus appropriation may exist in a “slave or plantation economy”, not only is this noted to be different—“in that the slave works under alien conditions of production and not independently”—it is significant that he does not even raise the possibility of a specifically “slave mode of production”.

Property and Exploitation in History As previously argued, “The German Ideology” presents significant problems with respect to understanding Marx’s theoretical framework—most particularly regarding the articulation of materialist principles as they apply to history. Much of what was put forward in these originally unpublished manuscripts seems fundamentally at odds with the highly original terms of historical social analysis that Marx developed in the course of his critique of political economy, beginning in 1844 and continuing through the manuscripts of the later volumes of Capital. Instead, mainstream European ideas of liberal materialist history were broadly accepted by Marx and Engels, given their polemical purposes at the time. Nowhere were liberal conceptions challenged in the way that Marx challenged political economic concepts, both previously and subsequently. The implications of this early conflation of historical materialism

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with liberal materialism have long endured within the body of Marxist theory. Marx’s own work, however, was thereafter primarily focused on specifically capitalist society, and with ever-increasing acuity he came to criticize the quintessential liberal ideology of political economy. This development by Marx of a consistent and thorough critique of political economy, over the whole course of his work from 1844 to the posthumously published volumes of Capital, coincides with the real development of historical materialism, and particularly its increasing realization by Marx in practice. The key to this development was Marx’s growing appreciation of the historical specificity of the categories of political economy. For, at the same time that his critique exposed the specific class character of political economic categories in capitalism, it also laid the basis for criticizing the ideological conceptions of previous class societies. It has already been noted that the very concept of “the economy”, or even “the economic”, is necessarily specific to capitalist society, with its uniquely economic form of exploitive surplus extraction. A major point of this work is that Marx’s study of this unique form of class exploitation, through his critique of political economy, provides a guide for understanding the necessarily quite different terms of analysis of extra-economic surplus extraction in precapitalist societies. Perhaps the clearest discussion by Marx of the historically specific economic categories of capitalist society—such fundamental concepts as property, labour, and exchange—occurs in the section on the method of political economy in the Grundrisse. Although it is true, therefore, that the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all forms of society, this is to be taken only with a grain of salt. They can contain them in a developed, or stunted, or caricatured form etc., but always with an essential difference. The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and since it is only rarely … able to criticize itself … it always conceives them one-sidedly.22

Marx’s work is full of the presentation of previous forms “as steps leading up to” the forms of capitalism—but there is no unintentional irony in this statement. For Marx’s extensive retrospective use of history in Capital was conscious, informed precisely by these insights of the Grundrisse, and intended to reveal the class character of these supposedly timeless forms. It is only subsequent Marxists who have taken this “history” written retrospectively from the point of view of capitalism to represent history, per se.

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This conscious historical specificity in Marx’s critique of political economy was not confined to the Grundrisse, but first appeared in The Poverty of Philosophy, a year after the texts taken to constitute “The German Ideology”. In attacking Proudhon’s spurious “synthesis” of political economy and communism, Marx observed that the economists treat the laws of capitalism as eternal, despite the fact that they also attempt to counterpose these laws to the restricted economic life of feudal society: Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.23

Here the link is quite apparent between Marx’s critique of political economy and his historical conception of specific social modes of production (in which it is not the historical detail that is important, but the contrast which reveals development). The point is that historical development proceeds through successive epochs of equally specific exploitive relations of property (whatever they might be). In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations. Thus to define bourgeois property is nothing else than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production. To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence.24

The continuity between the critical thought in this passage and that in the Grundrisse a decade later is striking. Whereas “property” was in 1844 treated as a simple category—though one which had history—already by 1847, before the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx conceived property relations to be historically specific expressions of the antagonistic relations of production fundamental to each particular epoch. Marx had, then, already substantially arrived at the conceptual foundations of historical materialism. Its development followed from his perception that the central dynamic of “historical movement” lay in the evolution of alienated social production—that history was the history of class exploitation and struggle. The essential accomplishment of historical materialist

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thought to this point had been to grasp the historical specificity of capitalist social relations as one stage in the development of exploitive social production. This overview of historical development did, of course, imply some actual succession of equally specific class epochs—each social mode of production being developmentally linked with those preceding and following. The essential point was that capitalism, too, was such an epoch of class society and that it too would be superseded. It has already been suggested that the historical details which Marx attached to this overview were drawn from ideologically liberal historical conceptions of ancient slavery, feudal agriculture, and bourgeois progress. The extent to which his conception of the succession of epochs, particularly in “The German Ideology”, was influenced by the century-old theory of stages of subsistence must of course be considered carefully. Yet with regard to the overview itself, Marx’s central critical perception remains: in capitalism, the social development of relations of alienated labour and class relations have reached a logical terminus—the condition of universal commodification, encompassing even living human labour-power, as he came to express it. The essential concepts of historical materialism—the historical overview, the fundamental role of class exploitation, the specificity of relations of production in each epoch—were, then, developed through the critique of political economy. The original formulation was suggested by Marx’s critical treatment of “private property”, as an expression—not the cause— of alienated labour. By this, he attributed to property a process of origination and a history of development. This leap beyond the merely economic conception of property as a “natural” category was embodied in his critical recognition of the simultaneously exploitive and historical character of property relations. Through all of Marx’s work, the two essential strategies of historical materialist analysis in criticizing liberal ideology were to reveal its class content, and to identify the historical specificity of its concepts. The only systematic application of this critical historical materialist approach was to be in Marx’s lifelong study of capitalist class society. Although he never completed the major project of analysing world capitalist society that he set for himself—which, according to the Grundrisse, was to have included “[c]oncentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state”25—the fundamental class analysis provided by Capital can be adequately supplemented by inferences from the major works of Marx’s contemporary political analysis. Together, these form a consistent and integral picture of capitalist class society as it existed in Marx’s lifetime, a genuinely historical materialist analysis, rooted in the critique of political economy.

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This critique had commenced with Engels’s criticism of the “separation” of capital and labour, sanctioned by political economy, but seen by Engels to be the source of working-class impoverishment.26 Here was the initial theoretical recognition of exploitation and class struggle in capitalism. In carrying this critique further, Marx located capitalism within the whole course of the history of class exploitation—if only in overview— establishing the basis for historical materialism. Most of the real work of historicization, however, would remain no more than prospective, since the primary concern of Marx and Engels always remained the revolutionary transformation of capitalist class society. Liberal ideology, on the one hand, claimed that the social relations of capitalism were natural and eternal, and on the other hand, construed the generalized commodity market, into which human labour was dissolved, as a true and just circulation of equivalents. The critique of political economy revealed the specific, historically imposed character of these relations, and exposed a system of class exploitation in the regular exchange of labour-power for subsistence. The historical dimension is fundamental to this criticism, just as this critical conception of capitalism is essential to an understanding of the history of class society as a whole. One of the real weaknesses of E. P. Thompson’s “The Poverty of Theory” is its somewhat dismissive treatment of Marx’s critique of political economy.27 Far from having created a blind alley as Thompson argued, Marx’s “Grundrisse face” was the key to his achievement in developing historical materialism (although it is of course true that an enormous proportion of his energies were expended in systematic analysis of the structure of capitalist class relations, the social and exploitive character of which are realized only through the entire circuit of capital).

Precapitalist Modes of Production: An Open Question of Historical Materialist Analysis A substantial section from the Grundrisse’s chapter on “Capital”—precisely the “Forms which precede capitalist production”—was, as previously noted, published in English before the 1973 publication of the whole manuscript. Hobsbawm’s Introduction to this edition of Pre-­ capitalist Economic Formations was particularly notable for the serious doubt it raised concerning the possibility of identifying any of several lists of precapitalist modes of production in Marx’s work as definitive. Rather than seeing this open question as to the number and nature of precapitalist modes of production as deeply problematic, Hobsbawm argued that

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The general theory of historical materialism requires only that there should be a succession of modes of production, though not necessarily any particular modes, and perhaps not in any particular predetermined order.28

At the same time, Hobsbawm noted that the proliferation of societies described in terms of “semi-feudal” class relations had made the term meaningless. It was for these reasons that he found the publication Marx’s analyses from the Grundrisse to be theoretically significant. Given the very real challenges to many of the assertions that Marx made with respect to historical class societies based upon the works of liberal historians—such as the idea that appears in some places that there was a slave mode of production in the classical ancient world—it is long past time for Marxists to carry out the independent analysis of precapitalist societies on the basis of Marx’s method and a rigorous critique of liberal ideological conceptions. Marxists have done little to advance our understanding of historically specific patterns of social development in attempting to locate precapitalist forms of society—both historical and as they have stood in relation to capitalism—within the terms of narrowly conceived variations on one or another list of stages of social development. It is instead incumbent upon us to learn from his practice in the critique of political economy and to begin to apply his method to original analyses of the forms of class societies other than capitalism.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 105. 2. Ellen M. Wood, “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms which precede Capitalist Production’”, in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, ed. Marcello Musto (London: Routledge, 2008), 79–92. 3. Ibid., 83. 4. Ibid., 84. 5. Ibid. 6. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson, “The Place of Economies in Societies” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, eds. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). 7. Norman Levine, Divergent Paths: Hegel in Marxism and Engelsism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 214. 8. Marx, Grundrisse, 102.

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9. As previously noted, this Introduction actually was written for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but not published with it. The rest of the Grundrisse, begun immediately afterwards, similarly is not historical in structure, but starts with fully developed social forms. 10. Ibid., 106–7. 11. As discussed in Chaps. 4 and 6; Raphael Samuel, “British Marxist Historians, 1880–1980, Part One”. New Left Review 120 (1980): 35. 12. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 280. 13. Marx, Grundrisse, 103. 14. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 282. 15. Marx, Grundrisse, 514–5. 16. Ibid., 497. 17. Ibid., 507. 18. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, MECW, vol. 37, 763. 19. Ibid., 776–7. 20. Ibid., 777. 21. Ibid., 777–8. 22. Marx, Grundrisse, 106. 23. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, MECW, vol. 6, 174. 24. Ibid., 197. 25. Marx, Grundrisse, 108. 26. Frederick Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, MECW, vol. 3, 430. 27. E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory”, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 169. 28. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 14.

CHAPTER 10

Capital as a Social Relation

Theory and History The relationship between theory and history has long been a problem for Marxists.1 Although the general form of Karl Marx’s critical analysis of class societies can rightly be characterized as “historical materialism”, there is an obvious imbalance between his extensive study of class relations in contemporary capitalist society and limited observations on precapitalist class relations. Having considered the historical materialist analysis of precapitalist societies, we must now consider how Marx’s critique of political economy relates to history. As mentioned in previous chapters, Marx devoted decades of study and thousands of pages of manuscripts to the capitalist mode of production. Unfortunately, as we have seen, he did not provide a comparably comprehensive and historically accurate account of any precapitalist form of class society, let alone all of them. Indeed, he produced no canonical statement even of what precapitalist modes of production he supposed had existed. His various statements are mostly off-hand, and sometimes contradictory.2 Even more to the point, Marx and Engels uncritically credited the “bourgeois historians” with having discovered the existence of classes and historical development of class struggles,3 despite the fact that liberal historical ideas about class never included the idea of exploitation, to say nothing of its being defined by specific, antagonistic relations between classes that—as

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“oppressor and oppressed—stood in constant opposition to one another”, as powerfully put forward in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Not only has historical knowledge grown enormously relative to what Marx could have known, but a great deal of the liberal historical writing upon which he depended (as well as much produced since then) was constructed in fundamentally ideological terms.4 It is necessary, therefore, for the history of class societies to be subjected to the same sort of critique that Marx so powerfully brought to bear on capitalist social relations. To do so, however, requires recognizing the profound difference between precapitalist and capitalist forms of society, and that the model of rigorous abstract analysis that he developed in Capital is fundamentally inappropriate for earlier forms of class relations. This unique and historically specific nature of capitalist class relations was captured by Perry Anderson, building upon points articulated in the Sweezy/Dobb debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and crucial passages of Volume III of Capital: All modes of production in class societies prior to capitalism extract surplus labour from the immediate producers by means of extra-economic coercion. Capitalism is the first mode of production in history in which the means whereby the surplus is pumped out of the direct producers is “purely” economic in form – the wage contract: the equal exchange between free agents which reproduces, hourly and daily, inequality and oppression. All other previous modes of exploitation operate through extra-economic sanctions – kin, customary, religious, legal or political.5

The implications of this qualitative distinction between capitalism and all previous forms of class society are profound. It particularly requires us to recognize that such a fundamental social transformation must be explained, not taken for granted.

Capitalism and Commodities At the heart of prevailing conceptions of capitalism is the market exchange of things. Of course, beyond the substantial commodities of agriculture and industry, commodified services became important during the twentieth century, though they certainly existed earlier. The growing importance of information commodities, especially in digital form, is a cliché of contemporary commentary. What truly is significant, however, is less the

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existence of non-material capitalist products than that capitalist social relations involve far more than just the exchange of material goods. Indeed, in Capital, Marx describes the commodity as “a mysterious thing”. What are, in fact, complex social relationships—numbers of living humans, each having a part in meeting the needs of others through highly integrated social processes, extending over time and, often, great distances—are manifested in what appear to be relations between things: commodities and money. Purchasing a cotton shirt contributes to the viability of cotton growers and a particular network of shippers and producers linking their raw material to the finished product, engaging many paid workers and generating profits in certain locales. Purchasing instead a polyester shirt casts one’s money, like a vote, in favour of a different network, and—with a big enough shift in spending—unseen lives may be ruined. Commodities, like fetish objects in “the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world”—“endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race”—become bearers of unseeable qualities with profound importance to people.6 This is what Marx called the “Fetishism of Commodities”. It is not a worship of material possessions, but the seeming power of mundane goods and services to determine crucial aspects of the lives of people, ostensibly beyond human control, through “the market”. The discipline of economics strives to present market exchange as basic to human nature, presenting the global networks of capitalist production as merely their natural extension, differing only in scale. In reality, of course, that this nearly infinite complexity among interrelated producers and consumers exists at all, and functions with some reliability—though certainly not without problems and contradictions—is every bit as mysterious and astounding as Marx suggested. In all prior forms of human social organization almost all important questions of who will do what, when, and how, are known in advance, established through explicit rules of kinship, custom, or law. The organization of capitalist society through the “invisible hand” of the market, by contrast, is known only through abstract principles, the effects of which economists try to codify and understand like farmers watching the skies and behaviour of animals to predict the weather. Even more mysterious, for those who look beyond the pervasive capitalist social relations that are now second nature to us, is how such a system came to be. In the “Introduction” Marx drafted in 1857 for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he famously concluded that it was wrong to

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present economic categories according to the sequence and forms in which they historically appeared.7 For this reason, Capital begins neither with the historical forms of production, nor with money, but with the commodity as basis for market exchange. Yet what Marx sought to describe in Capital was not at all reducible to simple profit-making through systematic market exchange. Marx recognized from the start—despite beginning Capital with the commodity—that capitalism was far more than just making profit through trade. As explored in the first few chapters of this book, from his earliest thoughts on the subject, Marx saw capitalism to be an integral system of production that was inherently exploitive, conceiving this initially in terms of “alienated labour”. He arrived at this understanding in only the first seven pages of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.8 Not only did he see the inherently exploitive character of capitalist production, he recognized this to be of the greatest historical importance. As previously noted, after drawing out from the words of the political economists themselves the abject misery to which workers were condemned, he proposed, “Let us now rise above the level of political economy,” and then put forward perhaps the most fundamental question of historical materialism as social theory: “What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?”9 Of course, much still remained to be developed in his critique of political economy—from the distinction between labour and labour-power with which to explain surplus value, to the averaging of profit across sectors of production. This early insight into the exploitive character of capitalist production, however, was foundational, and immediately informed his conception of property.

Exploitation and Property As noted in Chap. 2, Marx first addressed the question of property in the section of the 1844 manuscripts known as “Estranged Labour”. The analysis is unlike anything that had previously been argued in social or political theory, though Marx accepted (and later greatly improved) the labour theory of value articulated by the political economists. He pointed out that “[p]olitical economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us”, and against this asserted, “Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain.” He then declared that “[w]e proceed from an actual economic fact.”

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The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces  – labour’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realisation of labour appears as loss of realisation for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.10

“Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.”11 Marx achieves two crucial objectives in this analysis. First, he establishes that it is through the seemingly simple production of commodities under the capitalist system of wage labour that workers are immediately exploited. Private property in the means of production is a social relationship—not a thing—and the means by which the fruits of previously achieved exploitation are brought to bear, through antagonistic relations of wage labour, to increase the property of the employer without regard to the well-being of the worker. Second, this exploitation realized in the private property of means of production—capital—is the underlying power controlling the processes of social reproduction, a totalizing system grounded in the relentless logic of that property’s self-expansion. Capital is thus the governing power over labour and its products. The capitalist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human qualities, but inasmuch as he is an owner of capital. His power is the purchasing power of his capital, which nothing can withstand. Later we shall see first how the capitalist, by means of capital, exercises his governing power over labour, then, however, we shall see the governing power of capital over the capitalist himself.12

What Marx at first called “the movement of property”, its historical development, has culminated in its most generalized form, going beyond

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its previous limitation of being grounded in land, thus “dealing the death-­ blow to rent – that last, individual, natural mode of private property and source of wealth existing independently of the movement of labour, that expression of feudal property”.13 All wealth has become industrial wealth, the wealth of labour; and industry is accomplished labour, just as the factory system is the perfected essence of industry, that is of labour, and just as industrial capital is the accomplished objective form of private property. We can now see how it is only at this point that private property can complete its dominion over man and become, in its most general form, a world-historical power.14

Here, indeed, is the most complete realization of the “reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour”, and the basis for Marx’s answer to the question he had posed. It is communism that is the positive expression of the abolition of private property, ending the realization of human exploitation, and establishing human emancipation at a more highly developed level of social existence.15 Hegel had earlier conceived human historical progress in terms of the developing dialectical relationship between the individual and the social whole, private property and personal action constituting civil society, in turn mediated by law and the state. Though conceived in idealist terms, and inherently limited by the liberal values to which it adhered, this conception of historical development was nonetheless far richer and more profound than the conventional liberal conception of historical stages defined by economic-technological means of subsistence and social organization. What Marx achieved as early as 1844, however, towered over both these alternatives. His analysis was wholly original, informed by a novel perspective. It had philosophical depth equal to Hegel’s conception of historical development, but was accompanied by an inherent critique of social inequality and the reduction of the majority of humanity to service to the few. It rejected idealism, yet was grounded in a materialism that took off from the fundamental sociality of human existence, rather than extrinsic economic conditions and anachronistic presumptions about how people acted. This was a theoretical breakthrough of undeniable genius. There is profound and obvious continuity between this first work of Marx’s critique of political economy and his mature works. Aside from important developments within his deeper analysis of capitalist social relations, however, Marx also quickly came to conceive the capitalist system of

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production not simply to be the historical realization of a fully developed form of private property, but as a distinct form of class society, differing fundamentally from preceding forms of “the alienation of labour”. Throughout Capital and his unpublished manuscripts, Marx was clear that the social relations of capitalist production were not timeless, but historically bound; not only different but uniquely different. For those conceiving capitalism to be no more than the systematic pursuit of profit through commerce, leaving production unexamined and subordinate in importance to trade, this understanding is scarcely possible. Without a clear conception of capitalism as the market-determined production of commodities through commodities—above all the commodified form of human labour-power—the self-expansion of capital driven by compulsion of market competition to innovate systematically in the processes of production seeking higher rates of relative surplus value, it is not possible to understand the specific character of modern “industrial” society. This is not, however, an understanding that can be adopted only when convenient. Marx’s conception of capitalist social relations is not a refinement required only in specialized contexts, nor can it be toyed with or trivialized without consequences. One may, of course, hold up these ideas for critical examination of their internal consistency and external validity, as Marx would himself insist. One may not, however, casually slip from conceiving capitalism as an integral system of production realized in the fetishism of commodities, to conceiving it simply as profit making in trade.

The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism Although there is little that is directly reliable in Marx’s work with respect to precapitalist class societies, he did at times—necessarily—attend closely to differences between specifically capitalist social relations and earlier social forms, and to processes of historical change. As he also wrote in his 1857 “Introduction”, “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.”16 Marx’s point, however, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has observed, “is exactly antithetical to the kind of teleology sometimes read into this aphorism”.17 His “objective is to free political economy from the habit of reading capitalist principles back throughout history”. He grounds his critique of political economy in historicizing the capitalist mode of production, against ideologically informed tendencies to universalize its categories and identify seeming historical antecedents as but early realizations of capitalism to come.

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His purpose is instead “to reveal their differences and, in so doing, inescapably to raise the question of how capitalism, as a specific and unprecedented social form, came into being—not simply as a maturation of earlier forms but as a transformation”. As Wood concludes, Marx’s method both stresses the specificity of each economic formation and compels us to locate the “principles of motion from one to another” not in universal historical forces, but within the dynamics of each social form itself.18 This conception of social transformation through internal development, reaching a point of rupture that results in a fundamentally new social formation, with different principles of motion—a transformation necessarily unintended from the perspective of the prior social forms—is at the heart of the historicization of capitalism in Marx’s critique of political economy, and the materialist approach to history realized through it. In addition to the 1857 “Introduction”, there are points in Capital where Marx finds it necessary to clarify the distinctiveness of capitalist social relations by means of contrast with precapitalist social forms.19 His chapter on “Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent” in Volume III offers notable insights into precapitalist class relations, and how modes of production should be conceived; but Section VIII of Volume I, “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation”, particularly focusses on the transition to the capitalist mode of production. Close consideration of this transition yields a better understanding of capital as the fundamental social relation of our epoch, and motive force behind the fetishism of commodities. This is particularly valuable for distinguishing between social formations in which capitalist relations of production genuinely are present, and those in which the circulation of commodities must be judged to occur in a precapitalist context. There has, unfortunately, been profound and widespread misunderstanding among non-specialists about feudal social relations, and endless, largely pointless debate about the meaning of feudalism.20 Marxist theorists have for the most part failed even to recognize what Marx himself had to say on the subject, and have focussed on entirely wrong aspects of medieval society. In consequence, they have had enormous difficulty making sense of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.21 A significant advance in Marxist historical understanding, however, came with historian Robert Brenner’s argument that the primary transformation of social relations of production in the transition from feudalism to capitalism occurred in agriculture, not manufactures.22 Ellen Wood, particularly, has drawn out the implications of Brenner’s work with respect to the agrarian origin of capitalism, providing crucial perspective with which to approach Marx’s analysis.23

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Not only have Marxist theorists had inadequate understanding of the nature of feudalism, but also—with far less reason—too often they have failed to take Marx’s analysis seriously, falling back upon a conception of capitalism as merely commercial profit-making and making the transition little more than growth in trade.24 As Wood has emphasized, such an approach shares with the defenders of capitalism an underlying view of the market as fundamentally an “opportunity”, rather than an imperative, a determining social force that imposes decisions and outcomes.25 It is precisely this role of the market as ineluctable social determinant that led Marx to begin Capital with the commodity and its role as fetish-like bearer of social relationships. In looking for the origin of capitalism, therefore, it is necessary to keep in mind that the development of a new form of subordination was involved. As Wood argues, this is just the point of Marx’s account of “so-called primitive accumulation”: The “primitive accumulation” of classical political economy is “so-called” because capital, as Marx defines it, is a social relation and not just any kind of wealth or profit, and accumulation as such is not what brings about capitalism... What transformed wealth into capital was a transformation of social property relations.26

While it is not uncommon for private property to be described as a social relation even in mainstream sociology, the pervasiveness of the commodity form in capitalist society tends to suggest property as being in the first instance a “thing”, which certainly is consistent with prevailing economic conceptions. If one instead considers that most historically significant form of the means of production, the land, it is easier to recognize the real nature of the social relationship. If a certain portion of our common planet is said to be mine, it is not because I can carry it away, destroy, or otherwise dispose of it. To own land is to have the right to determine what other persons may or may not do in relation to it. It is so with all forms of property: fundamentally, the right of property is a socially enforceable capacity to circumscribe the actions of other people. In the first instance, the transition to capitalism required that the means of production, initially and most crucially the land—upon which so many generations of peasant families had laboured for their own subsistence, but also the wealth of their lords—had to become property in a form that excluded them fundamentally. As Marx wrote:

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The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the laborer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-laborers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.27

As Marx also observed, “In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form.” The history of agrarian social relations was indeed very different in other societies, both European and non-­European, as Wood and Brenner emphasize in their work. While, therefore, the analysis set out in Capital is both historically accurate and extraordinarily revealing with respect to the processes of social transformation, one cannot generalize from this to developments elsewhere. It is, however, by recognizing in detail the historically specific form of this radical transformation that we can truly come to understand the unique character of capitalist society.

The Origin of Capital: Enclosure Versus Socially Regulated Production The capitalist fetishism of commodities is a system regulating production through the market, not merely exchange. Historically, prior to capitalism, direct producers themselves had immediate control over use of the means of production and, broadly, over what would be produced and how. This immediate control, however, was in turn subject to social regulation, in such forms as custom, community decisions, religious prescription, artisanal guilds, law, and state administration. In both manufactures and ­agriculture, what was produced, and how, was determined primarily by societal norms. Such social regulation of production was perhaps never so strong as in feudal Europe.28 While manufactures were closely regulated by guilds in towns, even tighter was the social control over production in the open-­field systems of agriculture. Virtually everywhere, seigneuries imposed feudal exactions and juridical encumbrances on production and economic activity. In thinly settled regions (or for local topographic or historical reasons) agriculture might be relatively less regulated, with greater room for individual discretion. In densely populated northern France and central England, however, the

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dominant two- and three-field systems of arable production left almost nothing to individual decision. In these areas, individual occupiers of the soil held numbers of selions (furrows) widely distributed and interspersed among the fields. Perhaps a few small fields had been enclosed in extending production at the height of population, but almost all peasants—and generally the lord—held all or most of their land (village crofts aside) within large subdivided fields. Outside closes and crofts, all agricultural production—winter grain and spring crop (where there was one); field rotation, including fallow; pasturing animals on fallow and after harvest; using permanent pasture, meadow, woods, and other “waste” held in common; timing and responsibility for all agrarian activities, including maintenance—was regulated. Because fields were subdivided, coordination in production was inescapable; but bylaws regulated far beyond the minimum. In open-field agriculture, increasing profit through innovation was both impossible and illegal. Throughout Continental Europe, no legal foundation for landed property outside the seigneurial framework of feudal social relations existed. In England, however, the Normans imposed feudal social relations of production where a strong state existed, claimed by William the Conqueror as legitimately his own. The legal system of English royal courts persisted— in striking contrast to the collapse of central legal authority, and emergent parcellized feudal jurisdictions, in Carolingian territories. This preservation of royal courts in England led to a significant fraction of peasant proprietors being recognized as free, and protected by law. This strong and effective Common Law system was then adopted by feudal lords themselves as a means to protect their own interests—far better to trust a disinterested royal judge to ensure a minor heir inherited the family holdings than one’s overlord. This duality in the law of property was unique to England. Feudal lords in England had little choice but to accept that real sovereignty resided in the Crown, yet used its principles of law not only in protection from each other but against the king as well—witness Magna Carta. By contrast, under Continental feudalism, sovereignty had decisively devolved to regional magnates, and then to individual seigneuries. Seigneurial jurisdiction on the Continent was real, and no “common” law existed. English manors had courts, but jurisdiction was largely restricted to unfree tenants and bylaws regulating common land and open fields. Free men had recourse to royal courts, where manorial customary law was viewed as just an encumbrance on freehold property. While customary

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tenures persisted alongside freehold, and freehold might lie either within open fields or outside their regulation, in principle, the entire structure of customary feudal holdings and manorial regulation of production could be eliminated, leaving a fully developed property system in place. Where freehold proprietors agreed—or “unity of possession” existed—the system of customary tenures and open-field regulation could simply be extinguished. This was the real meaning of enclosure; fencing or hedging was merely a consequence, where it occurred at all. This explains why the process of enclosure—the single most dramatic transformation in law and social relations of production in early modern Europe—was unique to England. When enclosures began in the late fifteenth century, relatively few customary tenants actually were evicted because population had fallen so dramatically over the previous hundred years, and peasants often exercised newly won freedom to move to more advantageous land. Much less arable land was required for a population one-third or less of that in 1300. Living standards were high, inflation underway, and prices rose more quickly for livestock products than for grain. Despite mistaken ideas of a “natural economy” persisting under feudalism, the many charges levied in money by seigneurs, pervasive re-coinage under seigneurial jurisdiction, and the enormous growth of trade coinciding with unprecedented population growth between 1050 and 1250, all speak to the familiarity with markets of lords and peasants alike before enclosures. In England’s west midlands, in villages outside zones of strict open-field production—where less intensive regulation and prior enclosures readily accommodated pastoral production—population levels were sustained, in contrast to the depopulation and many deserted villages of open-field zones.29 Peasants voted with their feet to engage in more remunerative types of production. The truly significant transformation, however, occurred where open-­ field regulation had been intensive, and feudal-era closed fields were rare. When proprietors in these areas enclosed their fields—especially landlords completely replacing open-field peasant production with sheep runs leased to graziers—they were not taking advantage of existing flexibility. Instead, they exercised freehold property rights against the whole framework of established agrarian society. Even where few, if any, tenants were evicted— perhaps a depopulated hilltop village, surrounded by less-exposed villages with better soil—the fact that centuries-old messuages might be pulled down, and the ancient rotation of fields replaced by large flocks and a few shepherds, supported the view expressed in Thomas More’s Utopia: sheep had become man-eating beasts.30

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Of greater significance was that the obliteration of customary law ended the role of custom or community in regulating production. Although the Tudor monarchy acquired a guarded view of enclosure—issuing acts to limit it; establishing commissions to study its effects; suppressing regional uprisings opposed to it—freehold rights of property were maintained by its own courts. The great landowners and even lesser freeholders were represented in the two houses of Parliament, and the royal power to ruin wealthy individuals necessarily was tempered in relation to landlords as a class. The real impact of enclosure was revealed after a rebound in population shifted prices back towards grain. Had only existing flexibility in agrarian production (including modest flexibility in the regulation of open fields) been employed in response to the lure of profit in pastoral production—a market “opportunity”—the same flexibility might have brought a shift back towards arable production within the same underlying system. Such flexibility was evident elsewhere in Europe as production responded to population collapse and reflux. Where there had been general enclosure, however, there was no going back. Such enclosures had occurred in less remote areas, suited to arable farming. Tenants who leased this land might still make a profit with livestock alone, but greater profit could be realized by combining sheep with grain, as Cistercian granges had demonstrated in the feudal era. After 1550, sheep-corn farming offered the greatest potential for profit in much of England, and knowing farmers were willing to offer higher rents for large enclosed farms. With rents rising on enclosed land, the market imposed its compulsion—land suitable for the “improved” husbandry of sheep-corn farming could no longer profitably be rented for pasture alone. And with the general increase of rent for enclosed arable land, the pressure to enclose also increased. It is in this way that land became capital. Social relations of production no longer were established by custom, law, and mere opportunity. Means of production were stripped of their role as the immediate foundation for social existence. It was not just that production changed. Where production had been the basis for community life, in a variety of forms, it existed now only to create commodities. Niches of specialized agrarian production had previously existed alongside peasant communities in which market production was subordinated to self-reproduction; now even basic agrarian production was separated from community life. How land was used to produce commodities no longer depended on how villages were

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sustained, and land itself became just another commodity. For the first time anywhere, production of exchange values became so divorced from use values that peasant society itself—the norm since agriculture developed, and basis for “civilisation” itself—became expendable and began to disappear. By the nineteenth century, though pockets of smallholding farming survived (mostly in dairy), and people still lived in the country, peasant society was gone. In place of control by direct producers and the community, enclosure put determination of what was produced and how solely in the hands of the owners of the means of production. After centuries of strict customary regulation, custom was debarred in law. No immediate community rationale existed (though political economy would develop a defence of market-­ oriented self-interest as public policy). Production increasingly was conceived in terms of the self-expansion of wealth in commodities, and even before this logic was carried into manufactures, the wealth of England’s landlords and capitalist tenant-farmers rose to world-historic levels. This agrarian transformation “freed” most labouring people from the land their ancestors worked, making them available to work for wages in expanded cottage industry, and then capitalist factories. While enclosure did not result in the immediate subsumption of labour to capital, that essential condition for increasing relative surplus value would not have been possible had control over the social relations of production not been wrested from producers and their communities. As Marx observed in 1844, capital is power over labour and its products, power by which alienated labour is appropriated. This globally transforming social relation, without which the capitalist mode of production could not exist, was first forged in the so-called primitive accumulation of English enclosures.

Notes 1. Ellen M.  Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, Precapitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965). 3. Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, MECW, vol. 39, 62–5; Frederick Engels to Walter Borgius, January 25, 1894, MECW, vol. 50, 264–7. 4. In addition to the above, see Ellen M.  Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002). 5. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974), 403.

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6. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 83. 7. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 25–51. 8. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3. 9. Ibid., 241. 10. Ibid., 272. 11. Ibid., 279. 12. Ibid., 247. 13. Ibid., 291. 14. Ibid., 293. 15. Ibid., 294ff. 16. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 105. 17. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 150. 18. Ibid., 151. 19. For more on this as it relates to Marx’s method, and historical materialism as a contribution to social theory, see Chaps. 11 and 13 below. 20. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 2; F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). 21. See Paul Sweezy, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978). On feudal class relations, see George C.  Comninel, “Feudalism”, in Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, eds. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012), 131–7, and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, 4 (July 2000): 1–53. 22. T. H. Aston, and C. H. E. Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 23. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism. 24. Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (July/August 1977): 25–92; Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 34ff. 25. Ibid., 6–7. 26. Ibid., 36. 27. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 705–6. 28. Much of what follows draws on Comninel, “English Feudalism”, which has an extensive bibliography of relevant works. 29. Christopher Dyer, “Deserted Medieval Villages in the West Midlands”, in Everyday Life in Medieval England (London: Continuum International, 2000), 27–45. 30. Thomas More, Utopia (New York: Norton, 1991), 14.

CHAPTER 11

Capital and Historical Materialism

Marx’s Critique of Capitalism Versus His Revolutionary Project It is obvious that at least some significant problems must be acknowledged with respect to the ideas expressed by Karl Marx. Most obviously, 170 years after the Manifesto of the Communist Party, there still has been no working-class revolution in any developed capitalist society, while—whatever one makes of Russia’s 1917 revolution—the Soviet Union existed for less than 75 years.1 Yet, at the same time, although the collapse of the USSR led many to trumpet the death of Marxism in the 1990s, the global crisis of capitalism that began in 2007 has brought even mainstream economists to declare that “Marx was right”.2 This juxtaposition raises the question of the relationship between the ideas Marx articulated specifically about capitalism, primarily in the three volumes of Capital and its related manuscripts, and his overarching conception of history as the history of class struggles, culminating in a revolutionary transformation that finally brings to an end the long line of societies founded on the exploitation of labouring people for the benefit of a tiny minority. One approach to understanding Marx’s work—so-called Political Marxism3—attributes many of the problems to be found in his work (and that of most later Marxists) to the uncriticized incorporation of ideas originally advanced by earlier liberal historical thinkers.4 The influence of ­conceptions drawn from liberal historians of the eighteenth century and © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_11

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early nineteenth century is especially manifested in the pervasive idea— within mainstream social theory as well as Marxism—of inevitable and unilinear historical progress, most often explained in terms of an underlying economic, demographic, technological, and/or climatological determinism. Far from being in any way original to Marx, such ideas were common long before he was born.5 In contrast to such progressivist, deterministic, and unilinear forms of analysis, Political Marxism stresses specific historical trajectories of social development, often differing even between neighbouring nations, based upon the particular historical forms through which social property relations developed and the concrete balance of forces and outcomes in particular histories of class struggle. Indeed, the approach stresses not only that there is no general historical form of social development applicable across the continents, but that even the major societies of Western Europe diverged profoundly during their historical development. Only in the era of spreading industrial capitalism— dating back less than two centuries—has there been significant convergence in national forms of economy and society for the first time since the heyday of European feudalism.6 This approach, challenging not only centuries of mainstream liberal thought but many supposedly “orthodox” historical conceptions within Marxism, has certainly been controversial. It is, however, directly grounded upon that analysis of the capitalist mode of production articulated by Marx through his critique of political economy, and the insistence that this conception not be conflated with such earlier historical forms as the widespread “merchant capitalism” of the early modern era. In this, it challenges the conception of capitalism as originally mere commercial profit-making, over time taking on industrial production as if this were natural and inevitable—a profoundly ahistorical conception that not only pervades liberal historical social theory but ironically also underpins most Marxist accounts. This regrettable failure to apply Marx’s ideas in Marxist historical analysis follows from Marx’s own deference to the liberal historians, whose ideas he never subjected to a searing critique comparable to that of liberal political economy, to which he devoted so much effort. This is often compounded by misunderstanding the possibility—indeed, necessity—of analysing capitalist society through abstract theoretical modelling of its economic structure as a general approach to historical social analysis. It is, however, central to Marx’s analysis that the capitalist mode of production is unique in this regard.

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Indeed, it is precisely at those moments in the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse when Marx was compelled to contrast the capitalist mode of production with precapitalist forms of class society that he came the furthest in articulating principles of historical materialist analysis, and developing original alternatives to the concepts of liberal history and the social theories informing them. By systematically differentiating Marx’s analysis of capitalist social relations from those that were precapitalist, and recognizing that, on the one hand, many established historical ideas with which he was familiar were ideologically informed, and, on the other, that we have more and better historical knowledge today than was available to Marx and his antecedents, we can not only correct the historical errors and dubious judgements in his work, but clarify the integral unity between his analysis of capitalism and historical materialist analysis of the history of societies. The problems with Marx and, much later, Marxist work largely result from not being consistently Marxist.

Capital and the Commodified Form of Class Society Marx was too kind by far to liberal thinkers such as Locke, Ferguson, Smith, Turgot, and Guizot. Their conceptions of class had nothing to do with the exploitation of labouring direct producers by the owners of property, but instead the existence of ranks within society. It was through his critique of liberal political economy that Marx originally and uniquely exposed the social relations of class exploitation, beginning at the end of the story, the capitalist mode of production. The final form of this theoretical critique (to the extent he articulated it in at least manuscript form) was an extraordinary achievement, realized through decades of empirical study and intense critical reflection. The magnitude of his achievement is best captured in the recognition that, in contrast with all prior forms of class society, capitalism alone is founded upon a formal separation of political and economic spheres in society, the fundamental processes of social reproduction structured through operation of the Law of Value. Capitalism concretely realizes the social form of abstract labour within society through its commodification of labour-power, by which means it constitutes a general system of class exploitation despite its ostensible basis in the enjoyment of political, civil, and economic freedoms by social individuals. Whereas other forms of society are characterized by inherently normative social relationships ­ throughout the sphere of production, as well as overall governance and

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culture, the individual and autonomous economic actors on which capitalist production is based are in principle guided only by the “invisible hand” of the market. How it is even possible for a society to be organized in this way can only be understood through conceiving it in terms of a totality (as acknowledged even by mainstream macroeconomics). Totality is in fact simultaneously at the core of both Marx’s historical materialism and his critique of political economy. It is, however, crucial that a diachronic totality underlies his conception of history, whereas his conception of the capitalist mode of production is instead fundamentally synchronic. Even more to the point, it is not only history as a whole that is diachronic, but the history of class societies, none of which—prior to the specifically capitalist mode of production—can be characterized by a synchronic structure of fundamentally abstract social relations. That the capitalist mode of production is uniquely structured in a way that makes a synchronic approach to the passage of time necessary to its understanding is essential to comprehending Marx’s analysis. As is generally recognized, Marx began Capital with the commodity, presented as the central fact and concept of the capitalist mode of production: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’, its unit being a single commodity”.7 It is first of all striking that this conception of “the wealth of nations” directly posits a transitive equivalence of commodities. They exist as individual elements, but they can and intrinsically must be accumulated into a collectivity possessing concrete magnitude, a sum that constitutes the total wealth of any capitalist society. Inherent in this transitive equivalence of commodities is that they can be compared with, and thus exchanged against, each other. This is the tangible meaning of the commodity. It may, we hope, actually prove to have a use value; and certainly, it may analytically be discovered to have an undisclosed but profound significance as a bearer of human social relations. But in its most immediate incarnation, it is something that we can confidently take to market to exchange for something else. It is crucial that, by beginning with the commodity as a part of a totality in a specifically capitalist mode of production, Marx manages to evade the naïve, timeless, ahistorical, and ultimately anachronistic implications of viewing it as liberal social theory always has—from before Locke, ­throughout the era of classical political economy, and then again through the Marshallian revolution, all the way down to Friedman and Samuelson.

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While Locke acknowledged that it was labour that put the “difference of value upon every thing”, and the classical political economists recognized that behind the fact of normal or average prices there had to be some comparability of the labour expended in production, the implications of these assertions were never taken to the extent of a truly total social conception of production. Thereafter, in the wake of the shift to marginal utility theory and the emphasis upon arbitrary individual desire as establishing value, liberal thought has consistently denied that there can be any intrinsic basis for the equivalence of commodities. Yet, where the capitalist mode of production exists, commodities do not first exist as individually constituted entities and then come into relation through the subjective will of their possessors. Rather, from the start, they exist in relation to each other as elements in a social totality. Marx acknowledged that the immediate appearance of exchange was as a form of arbitrary agreement between free individuals: “Exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.”8 But, he went on to observe, the fact that they can be related in regular proportions under normal conditions, within a systemic whole, means that they must have something in common that can explain such a consistent quantitative relationship. His embrace of the labour theory of value was therefore not simply a restatement of the view held by Locke and Smith. It was instead grounded in the idea that within capitalist society there exists a social totality of commodities that is the true summation of the social production of wealth. Since within this totality, any and every commodity necessarily must be able to be related to any and every other, all that they can possibly be said to have in common is that they are in some measure the product of human labour: “there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract”.9 This conception is based upon the broadest possible conception of labour as the basis of total social production. Marx again writes, “The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units.”10 This holistic conception of the commodity, and of the capitalist mode of production as inherently a social totality, is fundamental to Marx’s thought.

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At the same time, as he was quick to point out, such an abstract totality cannot be presumed to be characteristic of all societies. Indeed, also within the first section of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, Marx noted that production of wealth in the form of use values in feudal society was not predicated on the production of commodities: The medieval peasant produced quit-rent corn for his feudal lord and tithe-­ corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent corn not the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange.11

And so, within the first six of more than 2000 pages of Capital, we are presented with a qualitative difference between the capitalist mode of production and what, by reference to both his prior and subsequent analyses, can ultimately be said to be all previous forms of human society. It is the capitalist mode of production alone that is structured around the production of commodities: use values embodying the most abstract possible form of human labour as the basis for exchange, through which social production in its totality is regulated. Other forms of society have also involved the production of use values for enjoyment not only by the individual producer but by exploitive others. They have not, however, in any comparable way been predicated upon the abstraction inherent in the specifically capitalist commodity form as both an expression of and means to realize the social totality of production. After Marx himself, perhaps the best-known exponent of this recognition that capitalism differs qualitatively from all precapitalist societies with respect to the role of the commodity has been Karl Polanyi. Polanyi is an important figure, but his ideas are not without serious problems in several ways. What is most significant in his work is precisely that he fundamentally distinguishes precapitalist from capitalist societies on the basis of the commodity (or market) becoming the very basis for social organization in the latter.12 Polanyi acknowledged that human societies have generally been characterized by forms of organization predicated upon basic principles of social unity. Early human societies were fundamentally characterized by some combination of two basic principles of collective integration: redistribution and reciprocity.13 These forms of organizing what might from a capitalist perspective be described as economic interaction generally are integrated with other forms of social relationship, such as kinship.

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Whereas the simplest forms of human society, hunting/gathering bands, have primarily been characterized by a prevalence of immediately redistributive social relations, among tribal societies there typically exist more complex rules and obligations of reciprocity tied to kinship. Polanyi noted the Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific, who famously grew more yams than they could ever need, taking great pride in their bounty yet delivering them to kin, receiving yams from other kin in turn. Similarly, they would travel hundreds of kilometres across open seas by canoe to make gifts of attractive shells and the like, which then were passed on in the same way. Eventually, these gifts would return to the giver, after a long circuit of annual gifts over great distances, only to be given yet again. In exchanging like for like, compounded by unnecessarily great effort and a goal of giving more than is received, such forms of trade clearly do not embody market rationality. Instead, they reveal what Polanyi characterized as the social relations of an “embedded economy”—transfers of non-commodified social products, or use values, on other than market principles. Far from being universal to human societies, often asserted as a point of departure for the discipline of economics, market exchanges of commodities can be seen to be atypical, appearing in the Mediterranean basin only after several thousand years of civilization, and as many as twenty thousand years of settled agricultural societies, following a hundred thousand or more years of hunting and gathering.14 As Polanyi noted, it was Aristotle who first attempted to describe the function of the market, only a few centuries after market relations of commodity exchange came to be common in the ancient world.15 Marx himself noted in Capital that it was Aristotle who first analysed the form of value,16 deducing its inherently commutative character, expressed in terms of the equivalence of specific quantities of unlike objects, such as beds and houses. Marx then observed that Aristotle here comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value. “It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurable”—ie., qualitatively equal. Such an equalization can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only “a makeshift for practical purposes”.17

Marx attributes this apparent blockage in Aristotle’s thought to the role of slavery in Greek society, asserting that, having as its “natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour-powers”, it could not comprehend value as an expression of a generalized equality of labour.

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This is an instance of Marx adopting mistaken and ideologically constructed views, however, and there is more behind what Aristotle had to say about human labour than what Marx notes. Ellen Wood has written extensively on the erroneous view that the society of ancient Athens was based upon the labour of slaves, demonstrating that there is little evidence to support the idea that slaves significantly engaged in the agricultural labour central to its social production. Instead, it is abundantly clear that the great majority of Athenian citizens were peasants who worked the land with their own hands, while a significant minority were artisans. Slaves were above all household servants and agents, generally with positions at most in the interstices of production.18 Indeed, Aristotle himself asserted that slaves are servants whose primary function is to assist the head of household in living and that other subordinates—which is how he also characterizes free artisans—are responsible for production.19 All subordinates, both slaves and artisans, are mere conditions for social life, existing solely to make life possible for the true parts of the polis, freemen of property who are by nature unsuited for menial labour.20 For this reason, he argued, artisans ought never to be citizens. Wood shows that it was modern European thinkers who developed the myth of an idle mob of Athenian citizens, supported by slavery as they engaged in the increasingly self-destructive democratic politics of the assembly. This ideological conception played a significant role, even before the French Revolution, in a two-pronged assault against both democracy and the supposed “idleness” of the poor. The preponderance of such ideas among even liberal thinkers, as opposed to defenders of aristocratic privilege and the ancien régime, contributed to Marx’s acceptance of them as part of the supposed discovery of the role of class in history. As Wood reveals, however, the real class antagonism in ancient Athens was between the majority of citizens—comprising labouring peasants and artisans—and a minority of aristocratic landed proprietors who generally despised democracy even more than Aristotle. Seen in these terms, Aristotle’s failure to follow through and complete the analysis of value as a form cannot be attributed to slavery. Rather, he could not acknowledge the legitimacy of a real equivalence between commodities because to do so would have undermined the idea that the polis naturally existed to be the locus for social life dominated by landed proprietors. The inherently unnatural potential to secure unlimited wealth through trade and manufacture21—the absence of limits being unnatural in itself—was compounded for Aristotle to the extent that the material

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form of a commodity might be incompatible with honour. Among the most egregious examples of this was tanning, the disgusting trade of pickled animal skins, to which Cleon, the legendary populist leader of the Athenian Assembly despised by aristocrats, owed his wealth. It is in this context that he could not countenance any merely “arithmetic” relationship between an ignoble commodity like shoes and something so intrinsically important as a house.22 In Aristotle’s view, it was essential that the market remains embedded in broader and more fundamental social relations, holding in check its potential threat to the natural hierarchy in society. Therefore, notwithstanding the importance of the commodity in Athenian society, it was downplayed and misrepresented by its most empirically oriented philosopher. Yet, while Aristotle recognized and was appalled by the potential for commerce to subvert the natural forms of wealth and hierarchy, the capitalist mode of production did not itself exist in Athens. This is not because of a (non-existent) slave mode of production, but because even the systematic exchange of commodities for profit does not in itself constitute capitalism. Marx directly observed that in ancient societies “the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place”.23 Indeed, not even wage labour—which existed in the ancient world and throughout European history, including the middle ages—is in itself sufficient to constitute capitalism. On the basis of Marx’s account in Capital, only when the human capacity to labour has been transformed into the abstract commodity of labour-power, and subsumed to capital not only formally, but increasingly in real subordination of the worker through active control over the labour process, can it be said that capitalist production truly exists. If the capitalist mode of production is predicated upon the commodity, this specifically and necessarily is realized in the regulation of production by the market as effected by the owners of capital. Where the direct producers enjoy ownership of the means of production, or by direct possession or some other means they remain able to control the labour process, there can be no basis for the relentless self-­ expansion of capital through the form of relative surplus-value. Recognizing this to be the standard for determining whether or not capitalist social relations of production existed, it becomes clear from a close reading of history that nowhere did the capitalist mode of production serve as the general basis for social reproduction until after the industrial revolution had largely transformed English society in the course of

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the first half of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of commodity exchange prior to that time can no more be taken to be a sign of incipient capitalist development in modern Europe than in ancient Greece, in the absence of historical processes that clearly conduced to the transformation of labour into the commodity of labour-power, and the subordination of labour processes to owners of the means of production rather than direct producers. It was the unique transformation of agrarian production in England by means of the social property relations of enclosure—realized through a profound defeat of peasant producers in class struggle—that led to a specifically agrarian form of capitalist development there.24 This transformation of the basic form of social production from self-reproducing peasant households to market-dependent tenant-farmers, employing labourers deprived of access to the means of production, on large farms owned by a landlord class—which began in the late fifteenth century and culminated in the society described by Adam Smith—occurred nowhere but in England. This process is precisely what Marx described in Capital as “the secret of primitive accumulation”.25

An Inherently Exploitative System of Social Reproduction While there always were wage workers in European precapitalist class societies, their labour—as Marx noted—was never systematically organized and controlled by those who employed them, nor did markets regulate the processes of production in which they were employed. Workers instead were hired to do work of a well-defined sort, in labour processes that they themselves understood and directly controlled. Even in such precapitalist factories as occasionally existed, labour processes were controlled by guilds, laws, tradition, and the workers themselves, not by owners of capital. There were significant factories in pre-Revolutionary France, but the workers in them wandered about more or less as they pleased, taking impromptu breaks and the like.26 One can exaggerate the extent of this autonomous control over production by direct producers, but it was nonetheless very real, especially in contrast to the development of capitalist factories in England in the period after 1780. Indeed, in France, the primary exponent of control over commodity production was the state, which increasingly licensed and regulated producers and closely dictated standards. In Normandy, the cottage industry of woollen weavers, through

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which merchants had sought to escape the guild environment of towns, continued to be subject to royal inspectors until the Revolution: stamps of approval were required before sale, and inferior bolts of cloth were destroyed.27 If there was no sign of the capitalist mode of production in the manufacturing of France—whose commercial and manufacturing economy was pre-eminent on the Continent—still less was there any transformation of agrarian production from the open-field peasant systems that had survived the feudal era (and continued to persist long after the Revolution). In short, while at first in agriculture, and then increasingly in industry, England witnessed the indigenous development of capitalism from the late fifteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century, in the societies of Continental Europe there was instead only a growth in trade and manufactures constituted within the parameters of non-capitalist production. There was no introduction of even the most rudimentary elements of specifically capitalist production in France or Germany until after the Napoleonic Wars, following which English industrial technology— often spurred by geopolitical priorities of the state, especially in the form of railroads—came increasingly to the fore. Prior to the introduction of capitalist industrial production from Britain the primary class relations of Europe, though for the most part no longer strictly feudal, remained based on appropriating peasant surpluses through private ownership of land and “politically constituted” property (primarily in the form of state offices).28 The bourgeoisie who pursued the Revolution in France was not in any way capitalist, nor anticipating the development of capitalism.29 Rather, they were primarily lawyers, professionals, and non-noble officers of the state (with a significant minority of pure rentiers), who came increasingly to identify with opportunities in the ever-expanding civil service of the Republic, Empire, and restored monarchy, after the proprietary state offices of the ancien régime were abolished. Returning to Hegel, who wrote in the wake of the French Revolution in a Prussia that profited hugely from its defeat, it is striking to what extent—notwithstanding his familiarity with Adam Smith—his ideas were grounded in the similar precapitalist social realities of early nineteenth-century Prussia. The most obvious and significant expression of this lies in Hegel’s casting of the state as agent of the universal, bringing order and the realization of Spirit to the diverse egoistic manifestations of civil society.30 Though it is sometimes supposed that he proposed something akin to a social democratic corrective to the inherent “irrationality” of capitalist society, this

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presumes that he had familiarity with capitalism. It is clear, however, that Hegel never comprehended Smith’s principle that it was the market that brought order to seeming chaos. He may have read Smith, and married British ideas to French ideas in developing the concept of Bürgerliche gesellschaft, but he never actually encountered capitalist society and never grasped the crucial point that it inherently, and necessarily, lacked any principle of planning and regulation superior to the market. Indeed, even below his universalizing state, Hegel’s conception of civil society continued to be structured by guilds and corporate bodies. In short, Hegel’s philosophy depicted a complex society, with a large and important commercial sector, but one that remained fundamentally precapitalist.31 It is, of course, precisely with a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that Marx began his development as a social and political theorist in 1843. As previously discussed, particularly in Chap. 3, even a cursory examination of his 1843 works reveals that they are preoccupied with the politics emanating from the French Revolution.32 It was only with his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that Marx first begin to engage in the critique of political economy that constituted the grounding for historical materialism, and his primary contribution to social thought. While there is enormous development in his analysis between these manuscripts and Capital, it is, as stressed above, continuous development without fundamental “rupture”.33 It is stunning to see how quickly Marx came to the insights that informed his historical materialism, in just the first few pages of his initial critique of political economy. His comments throughout these first pages are telling, from the opening line—“Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker”34—to the recognition that “the proletarian, the same as any horse, must get as much as will enable him to work”.35 It is, however, the questions that he poses immediately after this that reveal the theoretical depth of his analysis: Let us now rise above the level of political economy and examine the ideas developed above, taken almost word for word from the political economists, for the answers to these two questions:

(1) What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour? (2) What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of the working class or regard equality of wages (as Proudhon does) as the goal of social revolution?36

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What is astounding is the immediacy of Marx’s achievement. He instantly saw capitalism for what it was, an inherently exploitative system of social reproduction based on class relations of property embodying the alienation of labour. His reaction was twofold: to conceive of this alienation of labour in relation to the development of humanity as a whole, and to recognize the necessity—and possibility—for social revolution to put an end to it. This historical materialist critique of political economy, fully realized in Capital, remains a uniquely powerful instrument for understanding the nature of capitalist society as it has come to transform the world. Beyond this, however, from his first moment of insight into the system, Marx recognized in the specifically capitalist relationship of wage labour the ultimate expression of human alienation, and he understood it to be central to the historical evolution of human societies in a way that took Hegelian idealism and turned it right side up. It is clear, therefore, not only that there is inherent unity between his early writings and Capital, but between his analysis of the capitalist economy, his conception of the history of class societies, and his political project of revolution to bring about human emancipation. Marx, however, was neither a historian nor an academic philosopher, and he never devoted his efforts to an original, critical examination of the history of class societies and their processes of social change. During his life, he devoted much energy to building the International Workingmen’s Association, to analysing major historical turning points such as the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune, to commenting upon political strategies and movements, to wide-ranging journalism, and (particularly later in life) to studying histories and social forms outside the Western European experience. Yet, the greatest part of his work, occupying much of his attention through the whole of his life, remained the critique of political economy. Although this commitment to what the historian E.  P. Thompson called his “Grundrisse face”37 has been a disappointment to those (like Thompson) who have wished for more historical analysis, Marx had a good reason for his priorities. It is not only that capitalism already was emerging to be the increasingly prevalent form of class society in his time and ever since, increasingly, the context for global class struggles. More than this, from 1844 onwards, Marx saw that the capitalist mode of production necessarily would be the final form of class society, since—in its formal separation of the political from the economic, its apparently free economic relations, and its inherent drive towards greater productivity and technological progress—it constituted the most complete possible

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realization of the alienation of labour through property relations.38 Capitalism is not “the end of history”, but there is good reason to see in it the end of “the history of class struggles”. At the same time, however, Marx’s systematic development of the critique of political economy periodically brought him to confront, as has been seen above, essential differences between capitalist and precapitalist social relations. This was, moreover, something of which he was conscious. Indeed, as he wrote in one of the most important of his passages on the method of his analysis, precisely in the “Introduction” written in the late 1850s and noted frequently above: Bourgeois society is the most developed and many-faceted historical organisation of production. The categories which express its relations, an understanding of its structure, therefore, provide, at the same time, an insight into the structure and the relations of production of all previous forms of society the ruins and components of which were used in the creation of bourgeois society. Some of these remains are still dragged along within bourgeois society unassimilated, while elements which previously were barely indicated have developed and attained their full significance, etc. The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the higher forms themselves are already known. Bourgeois economy thus provides a key to that of antiquity, etc.39

In contrast with how in 1844 he initially conceived the development of the alienation of labour merely in terms of the development of property,40 Marx came to appreciate that precapitalist class societies had existed with different specific forms of class relations. Although this idea is certainly best known from the bare sketch offered in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—“In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society”41—it has long been recognized that there is no single authoritative account of the historical modes of production in Marx’s work, nor can it be said that there is any without problems.42 There is, however, one important place in Capital where Marx was compelled to confront the differences between capitalist and precapitalist social relations, as noted in Chap. 9 of this volume. In Volume III—when dealing with the concrete movements of capital as a whole after the analysis of the process of production in Volume I and the process of circulation

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in Volume II—Marx was brought to address mercantile profits, interest, credit, and rent as each existed both in precapitalist forms and in a form specific to capitalism. At several points, his analysis underscores not only the difference between the earlier and later forms but that the one cannot be taken simply to have developed into the other. With respect to merchant capital, for example, he asserted that despite its historical importance, it “is incapable by itself of promoting and explaining the transition from one mode of production to another”.43 It is particularly in Chapter 47, “The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent”, when addressing the difference between the role of rent as the fundamental form of class exploitation in precapitalist societies and its role in capitalism, that Marx’s analysis amounts directly to a statement of historical materialist method. As Marx remarked, the challenge in analysing capitalist rent lay in explaining the general “excess of surplus-value characteristic of this sphere of production”.44 The question of rent in capitalist society is exceedingly complex, with two forms of inherently capitalist differential rent, a form of genuinely monopoly rent (fortunately a minor consideration) and absolute rent.45 Setting aside the complexities, the point is that absolute rent, the main anomalous expression of excess surplus value realized in agriculture, cannot be explained on the basis of purely capitalist social relations. It is, instead, a form that specifically derives from the historical existence of a landlord class, which is in no way required by the logic of capitalist social relations but is instead a legacy of precapitalist class society. In order to trace the concrete development of rent, therefore, Marx devotes a section to Labour Rent, noting of the precapitalist peasant-based class societies of which it is characteristic that “[r]ent, not profit, is the form here through which unpaid surplus labour expresses itself.”46 He observes immediately that in feudal society, the labour rent owed by peasants to lords “is not only directly unpaid surplus labour, but also appears as such”. He continues with a famous observation, previously taken up in Chap. 8, about the necessarily extra-economic character of the precapitalist appropriation of surplus: It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer remains the “possessor” of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude, so that the direct producer is not free; a lack of freedom which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a mere tributary relationship. Under such conditions, the surplus labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be.47

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This extra-economic character of precapitalist class relations of exploitation is, as has been stressed by Perry Anderson, one of the most crucial and fundamental ways in which they differ from those of the capitalist mode of production. Marx importantly then went on to address forms of peasant society where no private landowners exist to appropriate rent, but only the state: then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. But, on the other hand, no private ownership of land exists, although there is both private and common possession and use of land.48

He continues, as previously emphasized: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.49

There is, as noted several times above, no single statement that should ever be taken to encapsulate the whole of Marx’s method for analysing modes of production, but this certainly provides a clear guide to a most fundamental consideration. At the same time, this statement is directly associated with Marx’s class analysis of two different modes of production having the same foundation in terms of the forces of production or material conditions of social reproduction: self-reproducing peasant households. Marx does nothing here to freight his conception of the first, so-called Asiatic mode of production— which may not reflect the social realities of any Asian society in the modern era, but certainly corresponds to societies in Bronze Age Greece, the

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ancient Near East and Asia, and precolonial America—with any supposition of hydraulic agriculture, nor does he in any other way distinguish its production from the second, feudal, case. For this reason, his reference to “a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour” cannot be taken to mean that any deterministic relationship exists between forms of production and social relations of class exploitation. It must, instead, be taken simply to express a limitation on the forms that such relations can take relative to social productive capacities. The significance of Marx having conceived two different “modes of production” with identical grounding in terms of both technological forces of production and social relations of production—evident in the form of villages of peasant households—cannot be overemphasized. Perry Anderson recognized this to the extent that he insisted on including the conception of hydraulic society in the (so-called) Asiatic mode of production, though there is nothing in Marx’s work to sustain this point.50 Clearly, there can be no immediate correlation between forces and relations of production and modes of production if two separate modes of production are based on the same forces and relations—as Marx seems clearly to have intended here.

We Still Have Our Chains to Lose Virtually the whole of the history of class societies—even in Western Europe, but especially elsewhere across the globe—remains to be written in historical materialist terms.51 Although Marx devoted his life primarily to confronting the abstract system of social property relations that constitute the capitalist mode of production—and among the greatest mistakes a Marxist can make is to think that such an abstract form of analysis should be applied to any precapitalist form of class society—his critique of political economy does offer certain instructive guideposts for a broader historical materialist method. What is required is in the first place to abandon reliance upon what Marx said about any given non-capitalist society, and to begin—as he did—with the actual ways in which direct producers of social surplus were exploited. This cannot be conceived primarily in terms of the material basis of production but must focus on the specific, fundamentally extra-economic social relations through which the product of unpaid labour was systematically appropriated. It is history—the history for which Marx himself did not and could not have had the time—that is required. Yet, it also can be seen that there are, indeed, grounds for confirming the overarching frame of Marx’s conception of the history of class societies, culminating in the capitalist mode of production. Simply because

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c­ apitalism embodies the most logically complete form of the alienation of labour cannot mean in itself there is no alternative but to move on to communism, any more than Marx’s analysis of the inherently crisis-ridden nature of the capitalist system means it will simply come crashing down some day. Both his prescient critique of political economy—anticipating developments in capitalism on the basis of its structure and internal dynamics—and his conception of historical social change conditioned by social relations of exploitation and concrete forms of struggle against them, do however provide reason to believe a future of human freedom and humane rationality are possible.52 It is not only because of global economic crisis that we have much to learn from a return to Marx. When he wrote in 1848 that “A spectre is haunting Europe”, he was mistaken in the belief that this then was the spectre of communism. It was, instead, still the spectre of the French Revolution and its unresolved political issues, in a Europe that still was profoundly precapitalist.53 Yet, while the timing of his prediction was certainly wrong, there is no reason to believe its substance was not correct. The link between his critique of capitalist exploitation and irrationality, and the possibility of realizing a better world for all through transcending it is strong. And, we still have our chains to lose.

Notes 1. None of the successful revolutions of the twentieth century have ever been argued to have occurred in developed capitalist societies; the few potentiallyor quasi-revolutionary episodes (as in 1919) never came close to success. 2. See, for example, these Internet videos: George Magnus, “Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy: George Magnus”, Bloomberg View (August 29, 2011). Nouriel Roubini, Karl Marx Was Right (August 16, 2011). http://www.wsj.com/video/nouriel-roubini-karl-marx-was-right/ 68EE8F89-EC24-42F8-9B9D-47B510E473B0.html. 3. The term originated in a critique of the work of Robert Brenner by Guy Bois, but has since been accepted by most working within the approach. Another term, preferred by Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), is “Capital-centric Marxism”, resonating with the argument here. 4. See Harvey Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); Ellen M. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a critical account, see Paul Blackledge, “Political Marxism”, in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009).

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5. In addition to analyses above, see George C.  Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987); Ellen M.  Wood, PeasantCitizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988); Robert Brenner, “On the Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (1970); Robert Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in The First Modern Society, eds. A. L. Beier and et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 6. See George C.  Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53; George C. Comninel, “Feudalism”, in The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, eds. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012). 7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 45. 8. Ibid., 46. 9. Ibid., 48. 10. Ibid., 49. 11. Ibid., 51. 12. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957), 40–1. 13. Ibid., 45. 14. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997). 15. See Karl Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy”, in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, eds. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, 1957), 64–94. 16. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 69. 17. Ibid., 69–70. 18. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, 82. 19. Aristotle, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 10. 20. Ibid., 13, 108. 21. Ibid., 22ff. 22. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 118–9. 23. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 90. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid, 704ff. 26. See Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 27. See Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et Le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730: Contribution à L’ Histoire Sociale de La France Du XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1960). 28. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 625ff. 29. This is a central point of Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution; see also Brenner, “Bourgeois revolution and transition to capitalism”.

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30. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 31. I briefly discuss this in both Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, and “Feudalism”. 32. See Comninel, “Revolution in History”. 33. In addition to my works cited above, see Marcello Musto, “The Formation of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. From the Studies of 1843 to the Grundrisse”, Socialism and Democracy 24, no. 2 (2010): 66–100; Marcello Musto, “Marx En París: Los Manuscritos Económico-­ Filosóficos de 1844”, in Tras Las Huellas de Un Fantasma. La Actualidad de Karl Marx (Mexico: D.F.: SIGLO XXI, 2011). 34. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 235. 35. Ibid., 241. 36. Ibid. 37. E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory”, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1984), 74. 38. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 35–7. 39. Karl Marx, “Introduction”, MECW, vol. 28, 42; George C.  Comninel, “Die Anatomie Des Affen Verstehen: Historischer Materialismus Und Die Spezifik Des Kapitalismus”, Z.  Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung 84 (2010): 104–15. 40. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 293ff. 41. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW, vol. 29, 263. 42. See Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965). 43. K. Marx, Capital, Volume III, MECW, vol. 37, 325. 44. Ibid., 769. 45. Ibid., 734ff. 46. Ibid., 776. 47. Ibid., 776–7. 48. Ibid., 777. 49. Ibid., 777–8. 50. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: N.L.B., 1974), “B. ‘The Asiatic Mode of Production’”, 462–549. Anderson argues that such a mode of production—following the terms of his definition—never existed. 51. Ibid., 403–48. 52. Ibid. 53. See especially Chaps. 2 and 7 above.

CHAPTER 12

Marx and the Politics of the First International

The Founding of the First International In 1859, Karl Marx published A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in Berlin.1 This constituted only the first part of the first book of the six books he planned on the subject and included only a small part of the material already written.2 In the following year, he was distracted by a variety of issues and problems, including lawsuits and polemics following libellous charges made by Karl Vogt (whom he already knew to be, as was subsequently proved, a paid agent of Louis Bonaparte).3 When he returned to seriously pursue his critique of political economy in mid-1861, he soon transcended the project of completing the second part of the book, as such. Over the next two years, he produced an enormous manuscript—1472 large pages in 23 notebooks—that comprised the first drafts of what would become the three volumes of Capital plus the further three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value.4 Whereas Marx wrote the first (1857–8) manuscript, comprising the Contribution and Grundrisse, at a time of deepening economic crisis— writing to Frederick Engels that he was “working like mad all night and every night” to get it at least in rough shape before “the déluge”5—the 1860s were on the whole a relatively prosperous period. The next significant crisis, in fact, did not occur until 1873 (the onset of “the Long Depression”, lasting until 1896). Much of the attention of the working class in the 1860s was directed towards issues of international politics, © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_12

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such as the American Civil War, the conflicts attending unification in Italy and Germany, the Polish uprising, and the Irish struggle for independence. Then, with the end of the decade came the Franco-Prussian War— the last major European war before 1914—and the Paris Commune. It was, in fact, out of efforts to forge international working-class political solidarity that the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) came into being on September 28, 1864.6 What is striking is the extent to which it was the International, born entirely from a working-class initiative, that seized and imposed itself on Marx. Not only did he have nothing to do with the idea in the first place, but his correspondence in the years before this historic turning point suggests that, if anything, he might have been expected to have been sceptical, and to have kept aloof from it. Only six months earlier, Engels had remarked with respect to the possibility of reissuing his The Condition of the Working Class in England that “this is not a suitable moment in any case, now that the English proletariat’s revolutionary energy has all but completely evaporated and the English proletarian has declared himself in full agreement with the dominancy of the bourgeoisie”.7 Writing back the following day, Marx mentioned that he had attended the large meeting called by the London Trades Union Council on March 26 to support the Northern states in their struggle to end slavery and oppose possible British intervention on the side of the South. “The working men themselves spoke very well indeed”, he noted, “without a trace of bourgeois rhetoric or the faintest attempt to conceal their opposition to the capitalists.” Yet he continued, “How soon the English workers will throw off what seems to be a bourgeois contagion remains to be seen.”8 Beyond scepticism as to the readiness of the working class, he was now deeply committed to completing his theoretical critique of political economy and the capitalist system. In the period of his responding to Vogt, he had good reason to emphasize that the Communist League belonged to history, that it was he himself who had moved to dissolve it years before, and even that he had belonged to no organization since. Still, writing to Ferdinand Freiligrath (another Red 48er) in connection with the Vogt affair, Marx went significantly further: since 1852 I had not been associated with any association and was firmly convinced that my theoretical studies were of greater use to the working class than my meddling with associations which had now had their day on the Continent… Whereas you are a poet, I am a critic and for me the experiences of 1849–52 were quite enough.9

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One would hardly anticipate based on this, or anything else he expressed since entering into serious economic study, that from virtually the day of its founding the International would become the constant focus of Marx’s efforts and attention for eight years and more. Indeed, he would need to steal time from it to complete Capital (occasionally even claiming to be out of town so he could write undisturbed by the press of its business). Yet, he did not withdraw from it. The International became the most significant historical development in working-class unity and collective action to this day, and the potential that he perceived in it from its inception made it impossible for him to stand apart. When the Communist League was formed in 1847 through a merger of the League of the Just and the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels (of which Marx and Engels were founding members), it was a secret organization committed to a revolution that would end existing class society and usher in a new age of equality and true human freedom. Marx induced the League to set aside the traditional trappings of secret societies as previously established by revolutionary groups and workers in trades. Secrecy was, of course, still necessary for a group dedicated to revolution. With its reorganization, the League commissioned Marx and Engels to write its statement of purpose, and The Manifesto of the Communist Party could hardly have been more explicit in its call for revolution. What is so striking in contrast is the extent to which the IWA did not take the form of an explicitly revolutionary organization, but instead engaged in what might be called class politics in ordinary times. This is not merely a matter of its rhetoric. To be sure, when Marx wrote to Engels about the founding meeting and its aftermath, which included composing the Association’s “Inaugural Address”, he noted the real limits as to what could be expected: It was very difficult to frame the thing so that our view should appear in a form that would make it acceptable to the present outlook of the workers’ movement… It will take time before the revival of the movement allows the old boldness of language to be used.10

If the workers were not ready for bold language, they certainly did not found their Association to undertake revolution. Yet, that this clearly was no rebirth of the old revolutionary politics did not prevent Marx from interpreting the fact that the meeting was “chock-full” as a sign that “there is now evidently a revival of the working classes taking place”. Moreover,

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far from holding back from the Association, to the founding of which he was invited as a non-speaking presence on the platform, he accepted membership not only on the provisional organizing committee but also on the subcommittee charged with drafting a statement of rules and principles. The difference is also not simply a matter of stated objectives. In the Manifesto, for example, the stated goals include a “graduated income tax” and “Free education for all children in public schools”.11 The Communist League was nonetheless seriously and immediately committed to revolution. Within the IWA, Marx not only did not hide his ultimately revolutionary goals, but included them from the start in the Inaugural Address and Rules of the Association. The Address began not with the spectre of revolution haunting Europe, but with the “fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864”.12 After rehearsing both the facts of that misery and the crushing political defeat after 1848, Marx pointed only to two “compensating features”: the Ten Hours Bill and the growth of the cooperative movement. Still, his conclusion was that “[t]o conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes.”13 The Rules—unanimously adopted and published by the Association together with the Address—were even less ambiguous. They stated that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”, called for “the abolition of all class rule”, and asserted that “the economical emancipation of the working classes” was the ultimate goal.14 The concluding words of the Address even echoed those of the Manifesto: “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!” Yet, where the Manifesto was directly a call for revolution, the founding documents of the International, the policies adopted at its Congresses, and the organizational undertakings over the course of its existence all focussed on precisely the task of building and uniting—in the open—a mass political instrument for the working class. It is not that Marx was ever in any way less committed to revolution, let alone converted to reform. Nor were he and his closest associates alone among IWA members in advocating for revolution. As profoundly different as they were in their politics, Mikhail Bakunin and his supporters—who eventually ­outnumbered those who stood with Marx—were no less committed to the idea of revolutionary change rather than reform. The key difference between Marx and Bakunin, indeed, lay precisely in the former’s recognition that a revolutionary transformation presupposed a political process, that in the first instance a political revolution was necessary, and that this required the real and substantial

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development of working-class political agency. It was to this end, from the beginning, that Marx devoted his energies to the International. This purpose fits with the whole impetus behind the founding of the IWA. Although the development of capitalist economic relations and of national workers’ organizations varied enormously across Europe,15 there was a great deal shared at the level of progressive political positions, particularly in the international arena, as well as with respect to basic rights and social policies. The founding meeting was called in the wake of a confluence of international issues—Italian unification, American Civil War, and Polish Uprising—that had brought British workers together with visiting French workers and resident workers from other countries.16 In addition to the issues of peace, freedom and an end to slavery, and causes of national self-determination, the leading issues on which workers virtually everywhere agreed involved political rights and electoral democracy, the right to organize with respect to their labour, preventing recourse to foreign strike-breakers, the reduction of working hours, and (still) progressive taxation and free public education. Aside from the many issues that were directly international, the value of international cooperation could be seen in the fact that, as Marx observed in his Address, continental governments had been obliged to follow the example of English factory legislation after that victory had been won. Even reformist workers embraced the gains to be made on these issues, while for Marx their achievement embodied the real substance of “the political reorganisation of the working men’s party” for which he had called in the Address.

Divergences in Economic Development, Working-­ Class Organization, and Politics Across Europe, the situation of the working class was different in each country. There existed profound national differences in the form and extent of capitalist production, hugely disparate historical experiences and ideological tendencies, a range of nationally specific characteristic forms of workers’ organization, and enormous divergences with respect to political situations and forms of state. In the first place, the capitalist mode of production was not old, but very recent; and it had not developed originally throughout Western Europe, but only in England. These claims remain controversial for many, despite a growing body of evidence that supports them.17 However, it is virtually universally recognized that industrial development on the European continent

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lagged significantly behind that in Britain. Belgium was the first continental nation to undergo significant capitalist development; France grew relatively slowly at least until the 1870s; and Germany came from far behind but then rapidly surpassed France.18 Marx himself weighed in on the unique status of Britain in 1870: Although the revolutionary initiative will probably start from France, only England can act as a lever in any seriously economic revolution. It is the only country where there are no longer any peasants, and where land ownership is concentrated in very few hands. It is the only country where almost all production has been taken over by the capitalist form, in other words with work combined on a vast scale under capitalist bosses. It is the only country where the large majority of the population consists of wage-labourers. It is the only country where the class struggle and the organization of the working class into trade unions have actually reached a considerable degree of maturity and universality. Because of its domination of the world market, it is the only country where any revolution in the economic system will have immediate repercussions on the rest of the world.19

He concluded, “England cannot be treated simply as a country along with other countries. It must be treated as the metropolis of capital.”20 The extent to which France truly differed from England has rarely been accorded proper recognition, since it was not simply a matter of degree. An essential condition of the capitalist mode of production is that capital controls the process of production through management, which is referred to as the subordination (or subsumption) of labour to capital. Marx, in addition, recognized that there was not only the formal subordination of labour to capital, but also its real subordination, through which capital not only has the inherent right to control production but actively intervenes to do so.21 As discussed in Chap. 2, however, French workers—in legal principle and in practice within the workplace—largely retained the right to control production themselves.22 In labour law, there had long existed a fundamental difference between louage d’ouvrage (contract for work) and louage de service (contract of service).23 This distinction continues to this day: someone working under louage d’ouvrage is essentially a “contractor”, recognized in law as not being a subordinate of the person contracting for service, and retaining rights with respect to the work. The louage de service, by contrast, was originally the characteristic contract for a subordinate person, such as in domestic service, and has in the twentieth century become the basis for the standard capitalist contract of employment.24

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Whereas for much of the nineteenth-century British labour law built upon and strengthened the common law relationship of “master and servant”, labour law in France from 1789 to the latter part of the nineteenth century instead built upon the liberty of the worker. Legal oversight of labour contracts was transformed from a police matter of public order into a civil issue of mutual contractual obligations, overseen by local labour tribunals.25 In this regard, “the contrast between France and England between 1789 and 1875 was therefore complete”.26 On the English side, “a logic of industrial subordination” took the employers’ good faith for granted; on the French side, “a concern for fairness” instead actively compensated for inequality in economic status, holding employers to account for the consequences of their management.27 In France there was a formal recognition of the difference between “workers” (ouvriers) and “day labourers” (journaliers, who were under louage de service) with the latter comprising only 10% of industrial employees, and enduring real subordination to the commands of the employer—unlike the “workers”, who continued to enjoy louage d’ouvrage. Indeed, there is a “perfect pattern of inverse symmetry” between France and England with respect to collective bargaining versus face-to-face negotiations by individual workers.28 In France, collective bargaining was banned, but workers benefited from the legal recognition of their rights as individuals relative to their employer; in England, workers were personally subject to their employer as “master”, but increasingly, the law made room for the “voluntary” choice of collective representation. As a result of the French Revolution—buttressed locally by workers’ demands, and seemingly without concern at higher levels of the state— legal practice insisted on recognizing contractual equality in social terms, not just in formal economic terms. This was grounded upon the liberty of the individual worker, with local labour tribunals acting as conciliators seeking to balance interests and achieve peace and fairness in the workplace. It is clear, therefore, based upon a large and growing body of evidence, that the basic capitalist social relationship of the subordination of labour to capital in industry was very far from fully realizable—if perhaps not actually illegal—down to the last decades of the nineteenth century. Just as the French Revolution had the effect of buttressing the rights and customs of peasants, preventing any development of capitalist production on the land, so also it not merely reinforced but greatly increased the rights of workers in industry. This provided a profoundly different context for labour.

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It was not, of course, as if the French state took away all rights of property owners; but it had a predisposition towards benefiting great property holders in relation to the state itself and large-scale trade and industry, while generally neglecting the position of small-scale proprietors in relation to production. This state-centric form of class relations had been characteristic of the old regime, and while important institutional changes certainly followed as a result of the Revolution, the continuity is striking.29 This entrenchment of precapitalist economic patterns goes a long way towards explaining the slow rate of industrialization in France, and sheds light on the historically distinctive development of its labour organizations. It has long been recognized that, after the Revolution abolished guilds as holdovers from the feudal past, the workers continued to rely upon their compagnonnages, journeymen’s societies that equally had roots in the middle ages.30 In addition, workers increasingly developed various forms of mutual-aid society. Together with the legal regime of louage d’ouvrage, these forms both expressed and reinforced a corporatist character in workers’ organizations. The form of workers’ associations stood in integral, yet ironic, connection with the recognition of the rights of workers relative to employers: workers in a given trade developed a collective identity with respect to social needs and political participation, in part on the basis of their relative security and strongly held identity as individual members of that trade. This relative strength of French workers as individuals contrasted greatly with the characteristic form of capitalist social relations of wage labour, above all as realized in England, and provided a powerful historical foundation for the development of syndicalism in France. Of course, workers’ interests were not always met through the conciliation of the labour tribunals, and strikes did occur. In keeping with the strong legal recognition of their rights as individuals, as well as the role of the state in preserving “public order”, strikes were entirely illegal until 1864, and strikers were frequently prosecuted.31 In the absence of collective bargaining, with most terms of employment recognized with respect to the trade as a whole in each locality, there were no trade unions as such. When, therefore, workers did resort to strikes, they organized ad hoc, secret, sociétés de resistance solely for that purpose—yet another development that underpinned French syndicalism. All of these tendencies were profoundly reinforced by the small-scale and artisanal production typical of French industry—as late as 1896, 36% of industrial workers were employed in workshops of 5 or fewer, and 64% in workplaces of less than 50.32

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These syndicalist tendencies were expressed not only in the strength of various anarchist movements but also in the difficulty of forging a socialist political organization. In 1880, Jules Guesde met with Marx to draft the program for the French Workers’ Party. Marx dictated its preamble and collaborated on the sections of minimum political and economic demands.33 Ironically, however, it was after Guesde (with Marx’s own son-­ in-­law Paul Lafargue and other leaders of the party) demonstrated that the minimum demands were to be little more than a lure to attract workers— as opposed to means both to develop class organization and ameliorate social conditions—that Marx made the famous assertion that if this was Marxism, then “[i]f anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”34 Far from being a potent political force, this party was challenged by several other socialist parties, to say nothing of the anarchists. With the heavy repression of the left after the Paris Commune, and unions only given real status in 1884, the strong syndicalist currents and relatively weak formal economic organization of the working class continued long after the end of the nineteenth century. While, unlike Britain, France remained a largely rural society in the period of the International—indeed, even in 1914, 60% of the population was rural35—there was nonetheless a good deal of industrial production, albeit mostly on a small scale and with limited subordination of workers to capital. Germany, by contrast, had seen much less development of industry in any form prior to the mid-nineteenth century, but rapid growth from that point led its manufacturing to surpass even that of Britain before the First World War.36 Yet, at the time of the founding of the International, Germany was the only country in which a real socialist party existed, the General German Workers’ Association established by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863. Not only did Lassalle support German unification even under the reactionary Prussian monarchy, but he met with and sought to work with its chief minister, Bismarck.37 This seemingly strange political cooperation, however, made sense on both sides. On the one hand, unification of Germany was long a goal of the left (though Marx, as well as like-minded socialists and radical democrats, rejected the idea of doing so through the Prussian monarchy). On the other, Bismarck was not afraid to work with working-class leaders who would contribute to his nationalist project (witness his appointment of Lothar Bucher—a radical democrat of 1848 and intimate of Lassalle—as an aide).38 Bismarck’s willingness to co-opt even socialist revolutionaries, and to introduce extensive measures of state welfare—while also wielding the

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power of the state in the Anti-Socialist Laws—combined with the state-­ centric legacy of Lassalle’s politics, gave a peculiar stamp to the development of the labour movement in Germany. What is most striking is the extent of working-class political development relative to that of trade unions. Not only did Germany have the first working-class socialist political organization, but it had the second as well: the “Eisenach” Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, founded in 1869. Under the leadership of Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, the Eisenachers declared themselves from their founding to be a branch of the International and lent important support to Marx in its last years. After these parties merged into the Social Democratic Party in 1875 (adopting a statement of principles that was, however, importantly criticized by Marx),39 it rapidly developed into a powerful political force and the largest socialist party in the world.40 While it is famously recognized that the labour unions associated with the Social Democratic Party became strongly reformist, notwithstanding the party’s formal commitment to Marx’s ideas and the cause of socialist revolution, it is the prior development of significant socialist political organizations that is truly distinctive in Germany, and it shaped the working-class movement there as a whole. The working-class movement in England differed from those of both France and Germany in profoundly important ways. As noted above, Marx recognized it to be capitalist to a unique degree even in the 1870s. It was England that held priority in developing the form of industrial production that characterized capitalist social relations proper. The long battle through which capitalists established their subordination of workers in production was fought here first, and in response, the working-class trade union movement developed early.41 Despite heavy legal suppression in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, there was a long history of workers’ economic organization, and effective mobilization to achieve gains such as the Ten Hours Bill, prior to the formal legalization of unions in 1871. Although important political organization existed in the era of Chartism, no political party ensued from this, and English workers through their unions mostly collaborated with the Liberal party through the end of the nineteenth century. It had been British trade unionists who were instrumental in founding the IWA, and despite the founding of such parties as the Social Democratic Federation in 1881 and (more significantly) the Independent Labour Party a decade later, the workers’ movement remained dominated by the unions until they themselves finally established the Labour Party in 1900.42

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At the founding of the International, therefore, it is clear that even considering only the three major countries of European industrial capitalism,43 there was enormous variation in the development of the capitalist mode of production, and correspondingly great differences in the forms of workers’ organization, both economic and political. This is evident even apart from the profound differences in the forms of state across Europe. Britain had its liberal parliamentary regime, yet even after the Second Reform Act less than 60% of urban male workers—and far fewer in the countryside—had the vote.44 Although France had adult male suffrage, and Prussia the three-class franchise,45 elections had little meaning in either, and Prussia had yet to unify Germany. These variations in the form of state were enormously significant. While Marx’s reasons for dedicating himself to building a working-class political movement internationally may be readily understood, the challenges of doing so under such varied conditions can hardly be overstated.

Political Currents Within the International One of the greatest challenges lay in the profusion of cross-cutting political movements. As is clear from the forgoing, there were many different political tendencies among the European working classes. All the major currents, moreover, co-existed within the IWA. Among them were several with which Marx had to deal. British workers were above all committed to their trade unionism, though there were numbers of individuals—especially former Chartists and émigrés from the aftermath of 1848—who adhered to developed political perspectives. The London Trades Council was particularly active politically, having organized meetings such as those supporting the struggle against slavery and the Polish Uprising, to say nothing of the founding of the International itself. Outside the circle of those immediately involved in the IWA, however, support for progressive causes did not much ­translate into active politics. While it may well be a mistake to attribute inherent “trade union consciousness” to those primarily committed to the economic organization of the working class, it is certainly the case that the British membership of the International was overwhelmingly reformist in orientation. The French workers who had joined in the founding meeting of the International were greatly influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His emphasis on the right of the individual to the proceeds of labour; his opposition to

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political organization, but also to strikes; the great role that “mutualism”46 played in his thought: all these resonated powerfully with the largely artisanal French workers.47 A case can be made that Proudhonism was the primary current against which Marx had to struggle down to 1867, when the beginning of a wave of strikes—in which active support by the IWA played an important role—signalled an important shift away from Proudhon.48 Mikhail Bakunin was a very different anarchist thinker (though that term was no more common at that time than was “Marxist”). The relationship between Marx and Bakunin changed tremendously over time. At the time of the International’s founding, Marx wrote to Engels that he had seen him for the first time since 1848, and liked him very much, “more so than previously”, adding, “On the whole, he is one of the few people whom after 16 years I find to have moved forwards and not backwards.”49 Yet, the history of the second half of the brief life of the International revolved around the growing opposition between Marx and his supporters, and Bakunin and his own.50 Another French current was represented by Louis Auguste Blanqui, revolutionist par excellence, who had taken part in numerous conspiracies and every uprising and revolution, from joining the Carbonari in the 1820s to being elected president of the Paris Commune in 1871 (though already under arrest by the Versailles government). While he was undoubtedly a socialist in at least the broad sense of the term, his primary commitment was to making political revolution, from which change would be introduced. As Engels characterized the man and his movement: Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionary, a socialist only in sentiment, because of his sympathy for the sufferings of the people, but he has neither socialist theory nor definite practical proposals for social reforms. In his political activities he was essentially a “man of action”, believing that, if a small well-organised minority should attempt to effect a revolutionary ­uprising at the right moment, it might, after scoring a few initial successes, carry the mass of the people and thus accomplish a victorious revolution.51

If perhaps many socialists would not meet the stringent criteria of Engels, it is still true that for Blanqui the revolution itself came first. Blanquism, however, was not a significant force in the International before 1870. But after the bloody suppression of the Commune, many surviving Blanquists fled to London, where they immediately made an impact and were a force in the IWA’s last year.52 They opposed moving the General

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Council of the International to New York, and officially split to create a specifically Blanquist organization in opposition.53 The last significant political current of the period reflected the ideas of Lassalle. To a great extent, Lassalle’s nationalism and founding of a specifically German socialist party—to say nothing of his death immediately before the founding of the International—limited the influence of his ideas within the IWA. Marx and Engels had been in regular communication with him, and despite growing differences, they mourned his passing. Although in many ways the primary influence of Lassalleanism was as an absence from, and even barrier to, the IWA, the doctrine of “the Iron Law of Wages” that Lassalle espoused did figure among the ideas to which members of the International adhered. That there was a limited “wages fund” in the economy, as a result of which efforts by trade unions to increase wages must be frustrated, was an idea that predated Lassalle; but the name he gave to the doctrine lent unwarranted “scientific” credibility to it and helped make it a force to be reckoned with. Many of the Germans who did belong to the International were influenced by Lassalle.

Marx’s Politics and Interventions in the International Marx’s contributions to the International can be seen to correspond broadly to the course of its history. This was not, however, because he dominated it, however great his influence. The members of the International were never afraid to express their opinion or stand their ground, and eventually the tide turned against Marx and towards Bakunin. His success, particularly in the early years, followed in the first place from his deep and energetic commitment and constant attention to maintaining the vision he had for it. Again and again, Marx undertook obligations for day-to-day matters as well as grand statements of purpose and policy (which, of course, always had to be voted upon). At the same time, he revealed real talent in political organization, strategy, and manoeuvring, which became particularly important in the later years.54 Marx’s role was especially important in relation to international issues. Soon after the Inaugural Address and Rules were adopted, the Central Council sent a message of congratulations written by Marx to Abraham Lincoln—“the single-minded son of the working class”—on his re-election:

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The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes.55

He wrote in a similar vein on behalf of the International to President Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination, and subsequently (citing the letter to Lincoln) to the National Labor Union of the United States, urging them to work for peace and to allow the working class to advance, at a time when “their would-be masters shout war”.56 Among his other interventions in relation to international issues were the well-known addresses on the Franco-Prussian War. Marx also drafted a number of resolutions that were among those adopted at the Congresses of the International in 1866 and 1868.57 These covered such issues as limitation of the working day to 8 hours, abolition of child labour (other than in connection with education), elimination of indirect taxes, replacement of standing armies with armed citizens, and general strikes as a means to prevent war.58 In 1869, he advocated a policy of free and compulsory public education, using the example of US states but arguing for nationally regulated systems to ensure equal quality regardless of local conditions.59 At the London Conference of 1871, Marx himself moved that “The Conference recommends the formation of female branches among the working class”.60 At the same conference, he also moved that reports be prepared on “the means of securing the adhesion of the agricultural producers to the movement of the industrial proletariat”.61 By 1871, however, the struggle with the Bakuninists had already begun in earnest. Although much of what he wrote reflected the progressive stances with which the International was founded, pressing for stronger but widely accepted policies of social justice, it was in putting forward positions ­dealing directly with the economic and political struggles of the working class that Marx was increasingly compelled to contend with opposing views within the IWA. In June 1865, he addressed two consecutive meetings of the General Council in London in order to refute the idea of a fixed wages fund in the economy (the “Iron Law of Wages”).62 This followed a series of speeches by the former Owenite and Chartist John Weston that maintained this view and argued that trade union efforts to raise wages would therefore necessarily have negative consequences. Marx’s intervention—virtually a short course in what he would publish as

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Capital—opened into weeks of debate on the subject, involving other members as well, until his view generally carried the day. Subsequently, Marx defended trade unions in a resolution for the Geneva Congress of 1866: in the first instance, as necessary to workers’ struggle around “questions of wages and time of labour”; but, further, as “unconsciously… forming centres of organization of the working class” and having a crucial role “as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour and capital rule”. Then, as a result of the growing wave of successful strikes organized with support from the International, his resolution to the 1868 Brussels Congress went further to assert that while “strikes are not a means to the complete emancipation of the working classes” they “are frequently a necessity in the actual situation of the struggle between labour and capital”, as well as to call for the organization of unions in trades where they did not exist, and for their joining together both locally and internationally. Through tireless efforts of this kind, Marx won growing support for his views, and increasingly displaced the influence of Lassalle and Proudhon on economic and labour issues. The politics of Blanquism did not present such a great problem. It was neither nationalist, as Lassalle had been, nor anti-political, like Proudhon. Although, given their insurrectionary orientation, the Blanquists were not inclined to see the International in the same terms as Marx, their strong support for political organization and action meant they were not infrequently on the same side as Marx. The real issues were more deeply strategic: the difference between (a) building a workers’ movement that in the end would not only represent the whole of the class, but even be able to mobilize them as a class, and (b) organizing revolutionary insurrection in essentially the classic form of taking to the barricades. Few Blanquists had been drawn to the International initially, because of the dominant role of Proudhonists among its French membership. However, as the International’s success and recognition grew, and with the decline of Proudhonism after 1868, some Blanquists joined even before the Commune. Although Marx worked with the Blanquists, particularly against Bakunin, the basis for his politics was never similar, as became evident with the move of the General Council to New  York. Marx’s interpretation of the Commune underscores the extent to which he saw revolutionary struggle in terms that differed greatly from theirs. Already in early August 1870, a month before the stunning French defeat at Sedan, Marx wrote to Engels that

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If a revolution breaks out in Paris, it is questionable whether they will have the means and the leaders capable of offering serious resistance to the Prussians. One cannot remain blind to the fact that the 20-year-long Bonapartist farce has brought tremendous demoralisation in its wake. One would hardly be justified to rely on revolutionary heroism.63

This was not so much a question of whether a “Commune” might be formed, given the history of both 1789 and 1848. The question was whether a revolutionary insurrection in the 1870s—with France defeated, the Prussian army on the doorstep of Paris, and a National Assembly of all the old parties sitting at Versailles—could succeed. There was, of course, no doubt, once the Commune was established, that Marx would support it. As he wrote to Ludwig Kugelmann, If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand to another, but to break it, and that is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting.64

Notwithstanding his frustration at their wasting time with trivia, failing to seize opportunities, and neglecting even to prepare adequately for the onslaught that was coming, it is clear not only in his published writing but also his letters that his admiration for the Communards in “storming the heavens” knew no bounds.65 Yet, despite Marx’s several suggestions that success might have been possible, it is not only their many mistakes but the objective situation that seem to argue otherwise. Revolutionary heroism, as he had predicted, was not enough. At least ten thousand were left dead in the street, tens of thousands more transported, and the militant working class of Paris was depleted for a generation. As Marx well knew, a revolution requires more than heroic insurrection. The greatest conflict Marx faced in the International was of course that with Bakunin, culminating in the removal of the General Council to New York. Skirmishes were fought on several issues of policy, though the major battles were mainly organizational. Bakunin and his associates joined the IWA in 1868. The following year, the subject of inheritance— the abolition of which was a central tenet for Bakunin, and one of the few

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goals that might precede revolutionary abolition of the state—figured importantly as a policy issue. Marx produced a report, adopted by the General Council, that stressed that inheritance was only a problem because of the social power inherent in capital, and that in the struggle against capital, “[t]o proclaim the abolition of the right of inheritance as the starting point of the social revolution would only tend to lead the working class away from the true point of attack against present society.”66 After Bakunin spoke against the position, however, this report became the first from the General Council that failed to be adopted at an IWA Congress. The most pointed policy struggle directly focussed upon the issue of political organization and action, against which the Bakunists were solidly arrayed. In this regard, Marx had the great advantage of having included the centrality of political struggle in both the Inaugural Address and Rules of the Association, though this was challenged (partly on the basis of bad translation). There were, therefore, several motions confirming the importance of workers’ political liberties and active political engagement in the last years of the International, and it is testimony to Marx’s own political skill that they passed. In offsetting the influence of Bakuninists, he drew support particularly from German delegates (whose increased involvement broadly corresponded to his own growing stature in Germany following the publication of Capital) and from the Blanquists. At the London Conference of 1871, it was the leading Blanquist (and Communard) Édouard Vaillant who moved: In the presence of an unbridled and momentarily victorious reaction, which stifles any claims of socialist democracy and intends to maintain by force the distinction between classes, the Conference reminds members of the Association that the political and social questions are indissolubly linked, that they are two sides of the same question meant to be resolved by the International: the abolition of class. Workers must recognize no less than the economic solidarity that unites them and join their forces, on the political terrain as much as on the economic terrain, for the triumph of their cause.67

In response, the London Conference commissioned a resolution—subsequently drafted by Marx and Engels—for submission to the next Congress to supplement the revised Rules already adopted at the Conference in order to clarify the importance of political organization. This new Section 7a of the Rules, adopted by the 1872 Congress at The Hague, began

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In its struggle against the collective power of the propertied classes, the working class cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to all old parties formed by the propertied classes.68

This was, of course, a major political achievement for Marx. With, however, German socialists focussing primarily on their two national parties and on the newly established Reich, the Blanquists committed to a fundamentally different conception of what the International should be, and the Bakuninists growing in strength, Marx recognized that the Association had reached a limit to what it might at the time achieve in terms of the politics to which he was committed. Indeed, there was a real possibility of its becoming either a Bakuninist association opposed to political organization or a Blanquist association that largely ignored economic organization and struggle in favour of fomenting insurrection. In either case, the potential of the IWA to build a working-class political force and its capacity to advance progressive social policies in meaningful ways would be profoundly compromised. He therefore adroitly undertook to frustrate both political tendencies at the Hague Congress: on the one hand, through a report that led to Bakunin being expelled (though the Congress balked at expelling all members of Bakunin’s secret organization within the IWA) and, on the other, largely responding to the looming presence of Blanquist émigrés in London, by relocating the General Council to New York. In consequence, these fractious internal forces took their separate paths, leaving few behind with Marx and Engels. It really was this fact of fundamental political fragmentation and opposition, rather than the move to New York as such, that spelled the end of the International. The idea of a broad international movement, working together despite national differences and comprising a wide range of political ideas, with the common objective of building the capacity of the working class for revolutionary transformation of society while ameliorating their condition in the present, was—not for the last time—undone.

Marx Was Not a Leninist Of course, Marx was not a Leninist. When Marx died, Lenin had not yet turned 13. Yet issues of Marx’s politics have been approached from Lenin’s perspective for more than one hundred years now, often even by non-­ Leninists. This is not the place to take up a serious critique of Lenin,69 and

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one must be careful not to trivialize or reduce his ideas to simplistic caricatures. It is instructive, however, to locate Marx’s politics concretely in relation to those proposed by Lenin, and to contrast the two. If the emancipation of the working class—and with it, the whole of humanity—was to be the task of the workers themselves, then the first requirement was development of the capacity of that class to act in their own interests. It is precisely in this regard that Marx’s conception of class politics comes to the fore, and can be seen to be inherently different from the politics of reformists, insurrectionists, anarchists, and Leninists alike. Marx was prepared to make great sacrifices to help the working class advance in its struggle. It always remained, however, the self-organization of the workers that was central. Workers had to make themselves collectively into agents who would end the state’s role as instrument of class rule, and remake their lifetime of labour from a means of enriching the few into a collective realization and enjoyment of human potential. No single institution, leader, or ideological conception was either sufficient or irreplaceable for that to be achieved. It is this commitment to development of the working class, as such, into a social and political force that is most clearly revealed by Marx’s participation in the International. Marx never became a reformist—contrary to the views of Eduard Bernstein, most notably70—despite his efforts to ameliorate conditions of workers, engage in politics within existing states, and resist irresponsible calls to provocative action. By the same token, despite his abiding commitment to revolution and genuine support for the Commune, he was never an insurrectionist, and he certainly could conceive revolutionary change being achieved without taking to barricades. Marx also was never an anarchist, as such, though as early as 1843 he became the first political theorist ever to view the state—in itself, and regardless of how democratic it might be—as inherently a form of human alienation that needed to be transcended in achieving human emancipation.71 In this regard, he was so profoundly anti-statist to the end of his life that it might be said that his disagreement with anarchism72 was not with its end, but over the feasibility of its means. Finally, beyond all this, he was never a Leninist, and if anything more clearly not in his maturity than in his youth. Fifty-four years passed between the Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, with the transfer of the International to New York not quite halfway between the two. As noted above, the International was very different from the Communist League and had a different purpose. Moreover, the IWA clearly never had any of the characteristics that Lenin

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called for, either in a party as such, or subsequently in the Third International, founded directly on the Bolshevik party model.73 Most importantly, Marx never made any effort to introduce such characteristics. To begin with, when Marx stressed that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” (as the first rule of the Association had it) he meant exactly that. In Marx’s resolutions submitted to and adopted at the Geneva Congress, the call for workers themselves to undertake “a statistical inquiry into the situation of the working classes of all countries” was posited not only to be able to know what needed to be done, but to demonstrate “their ability to take their own fate into their own hands”. His resolution on cooperative labour went on to hold that [i]t is the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever.74

The extent to which the democratic practice of the IWA was real—and anything but a form of “democratic centralism”—can be seen in the difficulty Marx continuously had in dealing with the various other political currents. Yet, despite the growing battle with Bakunin, he made no effort to limit membership, a basic principle of the Bolshevik model. Indeed, the revised Rules of 1871 made the openness of membership even more explicit than the original Rules, stating that “Everybody who acknowledges and defends the principles of the International Working Men’s Association is eligible to become a member.”75 When Marx’s participation in the International is viewed in full, and without the filter of one or another expression of Leninism, the vivacity, openness, and democracy of the politics that can be discerned is not merely a revelation, but an inspiration. It is an inspiration that is desperately needed today. The situation of the working class internationally has (in relative terms) worsened even more in recent decades than it had when Marx wrote the Inaugural Address. The gains that workers achieved following the decisive global defeat of fascism more than two generations ago—a defeat won by working-class men and women determined to end not only rapacious and horrific oppression, but also economic vulnerability and immiseration—have been rolled back dramatically. Yet, as Marx noted then, there are compensating factors.

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On the one hand, globalization and the extension of genuinely capitalist social relations of production have brought about a far greater economic commonality than existed in the era of the First International. National historical and cultural differences are, of course, still very real, even within the confines of Europe, let alone globally. Yet, with Chinese capitalists now opening sweatshops in Italy, and with urbanization and digital communications bridging—if far from eliminating—many cultural divides, the capacity for international cooperation among labour movements is greater than ever. At the same time, on the other hand, despite the enormous oppressive power of states, and intimidating anti-labour practices of multinational giants and small-scale employers alike, significant advances have been achieved with respect to the rights of workers. These rights certainly are abused on a daily basis, but they exist in ways that they did not 150 years ago. If, therefore, the situation then called for workers to come together—and to find means to overcome not only profound social differences, but political differences as well—how much greater is both the need and the potential today! An important first step would be to recognize the value Marx himself saw in a movement like the International.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW, vol. 29, 257–419. 2. Ibid., 540–2, n57. 3. Marx’s letters of 1860 are preoccupied with Vogt’s calumnies, widely reported in Germany, including the astonishing claim that Marx had run a racket during the 1848 Revolution, extorting money from vulnerable communists in Germany (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1860–64, ­ Letters, MECW, vol. 41, 43). The whole matter is documented in Marx’s Herr Vogt, MECW, vol. 17, 21–329. 4. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, MECW, vol. 30, 455, n1. 5. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, December 8, 1861, MECW, vol. 40, 217. 6. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, November 4, 1857, MECW, vol. 42, 15–8, n18, n19. For a brief history of the International, and a selection of its most important documents (including those that are cited here), see Marcello Musto, Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 7. Frederick Engels to Karl Marx, April 8, 1863, MECW, vol. 41, 465. 8. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, April 9, 1863, MECW, vol. 41, 468.

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9. Karl Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath, February 29, 1860, MECW, vol. 41, 81–2. 10. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, November 4, 1864, MECW, vol. 42, spells out his view of the meeting and his intentions in what followed. 11. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6, 505. 12. Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association”, MECW, vol. 20, 5. 13. Ibid., 12. 14. Karl Marx, “Provisional Rules of the Association”, MECW, vol. 20, 14. 15. The original Rules of the Association referred specifically to Europe, which only was changed in the revised rules written by Marx and Engels in 1871. 16. David Fernbach, “Introduction”, in The First International and After (London: Penguin/NLR, 1974), 10–3. 17. I have discussed this in virtually all my previous work, and throughout this book, and will cite here only George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987) and “Critical Thinking and Class Analysis: Historical Materialism and Social Theory”, Socialism and Democracy 27, no. 1 (March 2013): 19–56. The foundation for this historical conception lies in the work of Robert Brenner, most notably two articles collected (with rejoinders) in T.  H. Aston, and C.  H. E.  Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Ellen M. Wood has contributed importantly to these ideas in Democracy Against Capitalism: Rethinking Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002). Michael Zmolek’s book, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013) provides a lengthy historical analysis of the long development and late realization of industrial capitalism in England. 18. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London: Sphere, 1977), 56; François Crouzet, “The Historiography of French Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century”, Economic History Review 56, 2 (2003): 223. 19. Karl Marx, “The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland,” MECW, vol. 21, 86. 20. Ibid., 87. 21. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 511. There is an enormous literature on this issue, drawing particularly on a chapter in Marx’s original manuscript analysing the formal and real “subsumption” of labour to capital, which was not included in Capital. I take account of the published text alone here simply because it is entirely sufficient to the point.

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22. I am indebted for much of what follows on France to the analysis of Xavier Lafrance in his as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation, Citizens and Wage-Labourers: Capitalism and the Formation of a Working Class in France (York University, 2013). 23. Alain Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail: une évolution contrastée entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne au XIXe siècle”, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 33, no. 2 (2006): 101–20 (published in English as “Industrial tribunals and the establishment of a kind of common law of labour in nineteenth-century France”, in Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 24. Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail”, 103, 113–4. 25. Ibid., 105–9. 26. Ibid., 109 [my translation]. 27. Ibid., 112. 28. Ibid., 116. 29. See my analysis in Rethinking the French Revolution, 200–3. 30. For a classic typology of the forms of working-class organization in France, see Louis Levine, Syndicalism in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 26–33. On the compagnonnages, and particularly their political role after the Revolution, see William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 31. There were 14,000 prosecutions between 1825 and 1864, and 9,000 strikers were imprisoned; Robert J.  Goldstein, Political Repression in 19th Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010), 58. 32. Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914”, Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 49. Magraw offers an excellent overview of the role of syndicalism in French politics. 33. Karl Marx, “Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party”, MECW, vol. 24, 340; Karl Marx and Jules Guesde, “The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/ parti-ouvrier.htm. See also Frederick Engels to Eduard Bernstein, October 25, 1881, MECW, vol. 46, 144–51. 34. A remark to Paul Lafargue that Engels reported to Bernstein, MECW, vol. 46, 356. 35. Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914”. 36. Dick Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914”, in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 102–3. 37. Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 199ff.

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38. Ibid., 206–7. 39. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, MECW, vol. 24, 75–99. 40. Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914”, 101. 41. Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution, provides an excellent history of this struggle over control of production. There are many histories of English unions and working-class organizations, but one would be hard pressed to recommend any work ahead of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). 42. See Gordon Phillips, “The British Labour Movement Before 1914”, in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1989). 43. Though Belgium was far more developed in industry on a per capita basis than either France or Germany, and its workers played a crucial role in the International, its small size undercut the impact it might otherwise have had. 44. Phillips, “The British Labour Movement Before 1914”, 39. 45. Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914”, 125. 46. Proudhon anticipated the transformation of society largely through the formation of producer cooperatives, and it was largely to the end of realizing this that he strongly advocated the idea of “the People’s Bank”. 47. Albert S. Lindemann, A History of European Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 106. 48. Fernbach does see the history of the IWA in these terms, “Introduction”, 16–9. 49. Marx to Engels, November 4, 1864, 18–9. 50. In 1874–5, Marx commented importantly on the text of Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy, throughout which Bakunin criticized Marx explicitly (Karl Marx, “Notes on Bakunin’s book Statehood and Anarchy”, MECW, vol. 24, 485–526). Bakunin died in 1876. The literature on Marx and Bakunin is enormous. 51. Frederick Engels, “Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees”, MECW, vol. 24, 13. 52. For more on Blanquism as a political force, see Patrick H.  Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 53. Engels, “Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees”, 13. 54. This was, however, evident as early as in his first letter to Engels on the founding of the IWA, in which he related finessing a dreadful statement of principles through his unanticipated preparation of the Inaugural Address, which was then met with unanimous approval in its stead. 55. Karl Marx, “To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America”, MECW, vol. 20, 20.

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56. Karl Marx, “Address to the National Labour Union of the United States”, MECW, vol. 21, 53–5. The threat of war loomed in 1869 as the US pressed claims against Britain for damages resulting from the Alabama, a ship built in Britain and delivered to the Confederacy, and other violations of neutrality. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sought the enormous sum of $2 billion, with the possible alternative of annexation of British Columbia, the Red River Colony, and Nova Scotia. The claims ultimately were resolved through arbitration. 57. Marx did not himself attend any of the Congresses until the last, at The Hague, in 1872, but he submitted resolutions through the General Council. There were, of course, other resolutions as well. 58. Office of General Council, International Working Men’s Association, Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva, 1866, and the Congress of Brussels, 1868 (London: IWMA, 1868). 59. Karl Marx, Synopses of Speeches on Education (August 10 and 17, 1869), in General Council, International Workingmen’s Association, The General Council of the First International, Minutes, 1868–1870 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 140–1, 146–7. 60. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Resolutions of the Conference of Delegates of the International Working Men’s Association”, MECW, vol. 22, 424. 61. Karl Marx, “The London Conference of The International Working Men’s Association September 17–23, 1871”, MECW, vol. 22, 246. 62. Karl Marx, “Value, Price and Profit” [sometimes published as Wages, Price and Profit], MECW, vol. 20, 102–59. 63. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, August 8, 1870, MECW, vol. 44, 39. 64. Karl Marx to Louis Kugelmann, April 12, 1871, MECW, vol. 44, 131. 65. Aside from The Civil War in France, MECW, vol. 22, 307–59, see Marx’s letters of April 12, 17, and 26, May 13, and June 12, 1871, MECW, vol. 44. 66. Karl Marx, “Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance”, in General Council of the First International, Minutes, 1868–1870 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 322–4. 67. Jacques Freymond et  al., La Première Internationale (Geneva: E.  Droz, 1962), 2: 191–3. 68. International Workingmen’s Association, 5th Congress, The Hague Congress of the First International: September 2–7, 1872, Vol. 1, Minutes and Documents (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 282. 69. Which in any case would also have to take account of Lenin as a Marxist— an entirely different matter—as well as the unique historical context created by the Bolshevik Revolution. 70. Bernstein did not deny that Marx was a revolutionary, especially originally, but saw a second, reformist current in his ideas, which he sought particularly

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to develop; Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1912). 71. On the state as a form of human alienation, see above, Chap. 3, 77f f. 72. That is, socialist or communist—not “libertarian”—anarchism. 73. On Lenin’s conception of the party, see V.  I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1961), 5: 347–530. On the organization of the Third International, see H. Helmut Gruber, International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967) and Fernando Claudin, The Communist movement: from Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). 74. General Council, Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva, n57 [original emphasis]. 75. Karl Marx, “General Rules of the International Working Men’s Association”, MECW, vol. 23, 7.

CHAPTER 13

Marx and Social Theory

Class, History, and Historical Materialism Marx’s central contribution to historical social theory, bearing upon both politics and our understanding of the world, is the recognition that the capitalist form of society is only one in a succession of exploitative class societies: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. … in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.”1 It is a crucial point of Marx’s analysis, however, that the capitalist form of society is not only different from earlier forms of class society but truly unique. Because capitalist social relations are qualitatively different from other historical forms of social organization—as different from all other forms of class society as class society is from non-­ class society—they mark a terminal point to the development of class exploitation. Unless warfare or unsustainable technologies thrust humanity back into non-industrial savagery, we could persist in the capitalist mode of production forever if we fail to bring about a transition to socialism. Within the structural logic of class relations, capitalism constitutes an apex that cannot be transcended. All precapitalist forms of class exploitation are founded on undisguised relationships of formal inequality, fundamentally backed by forms of extra-­ economic coercion.2 Capitalist social relationships, by contrast, are grounded in the formal equality of economic actors engaged in commodity exchange. A central point of Marx’s critique of political economy was © The Author(s) 2019 G. C. Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_13

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that despite the political freedoms characteristic of modern capitalist society, and despite any extensions of formal equality within it, it remains a form of exploitative class society. The inherent logic of capitalist economic relations has made it more difficult to justify and maintain formal inequality in other social relations. Of course, many formal inequalities persisted long after capitalist relations of production developed, not least in the extreme form of slavery. Yet, although there are countries in which capitalist production continues to coexist with a substantial range of formal inequalities among persons (and while real and substantial limitations on rights and liberties remain widespread elsewhere), the dramatic reduction in formal and legal inequality in advanced capitalist nations over the past 70 years marks an epochal turning point in human social development. As recently as 1970, women were denied the right to vote in some western European countries. Today, same-sex marriage is recognized in a growing number of jurisdictions. Unfortunately, far from being understood as an integral element of historical materialist social theory, the qualitative difference between capitalist and precapitalist class relationships stressed by Marx is not even incorporated into most approaches to class analysis. There have, of course, been many good accounts of the critical analysis Marx offered with respect to specifically capitalist class society.3 Yet, consciously or not, such accounts can only exist in connection with some particular conception of historical social change leading to modern capitalist society.4 It is Marx’s understanding of the processes of social change during the history of class societies, culminating in capitalism, that is the foundation for historical materialism. Ironically, however, Marxists, on the whole, have probably paid less attention to the nature of Marx’s historical materialism than have non-Marxist social theorists, and very few of either have recognized in its fundamentally critical character his most original contribution to social theory. It has certainly always been understood that Marxism included a theory of history. Most Marxists, however, have been almost exclusively concerned with the political and economic issues of capitalist society, and with the problem of socialist revolution. Very few have given serious consideration to the central importance of a truly historical conception of social development—one not rooted anachronistically in the presuppositions of contemporary social life—to Marx’s critical theoretical project. A signal exception has emerged from the line of inquiry into the role of class struggle in history among British Marxist historians, from Maurice Dobb to

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E. P. Thompson.5 This inquiry has given rise to a conception of historical materialism, often dubbed Political Marxism, which radically challenges the economic determinism so widely associated with Marxist thought.6 Otherwise, however, the predominant expressions of Marxist theory remain bound by concepts drawn from specifically capitalist society. These theoretical elements have been incorporated both at the level of concrete social categories and in the central paradigm of what is taken to constitute Marxist historical social theory. Ideas rooted in the social reality of capitalist class society are anachronistically projected into the past, forming the basis for what is then construed to be a historical dimension of analysis. This allegedly historical theory is inherently unable to depict the social forms and relationships of capitalist society as anything other than natural and inevitable products of social evolution, based on seemingly timeless principles drawn from capitalist social experience in the first place. It is entirely appropriate, of course, that the conceptual categories with which capitalist society is described and theoretically analysed should reflect the particularities of capitalism. Indeed, it is essential to the analysis within Capital that Marx opens with the form of the commodity, not with history. But it is an entirely different matter when such categories are applied to historical societies that differed from capitalism, or to the processes of historical transformation that led to the emergence of capitalism. The latter approach precludes drawing meaningful distinctions between historical and contemporary forms. Within the capitalist system of production, for example, competition compels capitalists to seek market advantage through technological innovation in the production process (in Marx’s terms, increasing the rate of relative surplus value). As Ellen Meiksins Wood stressed, this characteristic compulsion of the capitalist market does not exist where markets merely offer producers an opportunity to sell surplus product. It is thus wrong to project into history a type of pressure towards technological innovation that is specific to capitalism.7 Neither can the generalized economic rationality of capitalist societies be projected historically—not because the peoples of precapitalist societies were ignorant, slothful, or ideologically blinkered, but because non-market aspects of social life held greater material import. Nobles in ancien régime France did not irrationally “squander” fortunes on conspicuous displays at Court—they played to the expectations of a King who dispensed the munificence of enormous state revenue.

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When such distinctions are ignored, no methodological basis exists for conceiving a process of development through qualitative social transformation. Fundamental categories become timeless, and social change is limited to variations on a theme. Consider the state. If the very concept of the state is premised on fundamental separation between a sphere of strictly political social action and an opposed sphere of economic social action, then a distinction between feudal and modern forms of state makes no sense. If the underlying premise of such separation does not hold with respect to the feudal period—and it does not—the theoretical category of the state must be opened up, and the opposition between political and economic spheres must be conceived as specific to the capitalist state. It is in fact precisely this question of separation between political and economic spheres that reveals the extent to which Marxist analyses have incorporated a specifically liberal theoretical paradigm grounded in capitalist social experiences. That Marxists have understood class to be an economic category has been based on just this separation of the political and the economic. In most formulations of Marxist thought, class is conceived to be an integral aspect of the economic base, which supports and (in one or another sense of the term) determines a social superstructure that includes the state. The problem with this whole economic determinist framework is not that there is no basis in modern capitalist society for distinguishing between economic and political spheres, but that Marxists have failed to rise above the prevailing liberal paradigm, which takes for granted the separation of politics and the economy as natural, inevitable, and essentially timeless, very much as it conceives capitalism. The work of Ellen Wood has been particularly important in clearing the ground for a historical materialist methodology based on Marx’s thought. Wood asserted that the prevailing conceptions of Marxism have essentially lost sight of Marx’s critical theoretical project: In particular, this is so to the extent that Marxists have, in various forms, perpetuated the rigid conceptual separation of the economic and the political which has served capitalist ideology so well ever since the classical economists discovered the economy in the abstract and began emptying capitalism of its social and political content. These conceptual devices do reflect, if only in a distorting mirror, a historical reality specific to capitalism, a real differentiation of the “economy”; and it may be possible to reformulate them so that they illuminate more than they obscure, by re-examining the historical conditions that made such conceptions possible and plausible.8

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The method of historical materialism is grounded in critical confrontation with social thought that takes for granted the world as it is. As Wood suggested, in order to understand historical materialism, one must first recognize that the prevailing conceptions of economic categories and processes of social development leading to capitalism are fundamentally ideological, even while based upon real and unique characteristics of capitalist society.

The Development of Capitalism and the Idea of Progress It is, in fact, only the historically specific and peculiar context created by capitalist social relationships that makes it possible even to conceive of society in terms of separate economic and political spheres.9 Liberal social thought emerged to give novel articulation and intellectual systematization to these new capitalist relationships, and at the same time constructed a new conception of history as progress to conform with them.10 In the context of this new form of social structure, and the new forms of social theory based upon it, the foundation of Marx’s social theory must be recognized to lie not merely in a critique of the legitimation of contemporary capitalist social relations by liberal social theory, but in a more basic critique of the ways in which modern social thought adopts from liberalism a conception of the economy and of social progress through processes of economic development. Indeed, far from being historical materialist, economic determinism is a quintessential expression of the incorporation of liberal social thought into Marxist theory. The failure of Marxism to develop and sustain a truly historical materialist methodology has had far more significant effects than those narrowly interested in the study of capitalist society might suppose. The deeply flawed theories of historical social development that have been accepted as Marxism have created profound distortions not only with respect to European history but also in conceptions of the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world.11 They also undermine the critical foundations of Marx’s account of capitalism as a class society. For in not only building upon categories drawn from capitalist society but doing so in terms derived directly from liberal social theory, these theoretical approaches stand in stark contrast to the critique of liberal ideology in the form of political economy that is the basis of Marx’s approach to capitalism. Indeed, without a self-conscious methodological commitment to ongoing critique of the liberal categories and concepts of development integral

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to the predominant modern paradigm of social theory, Marxist thought can only remain bound by the ahistorical constraints of liberal ideology. Social concepts are necessarily grounded in a particular cultural framework, imparting a bias even where they are not associated with ideology, per se. Much like the cultural predispositions of an anthropological fieldworker, this intrinsic bias and concomitant blindness to whole varieties of social experience cannot be eliminated, only confronted. In the case of modern social theory, however, the formation of the prevailing concepts of history and society is widely recognized as connected to the rise of liberalism as political, economic, and social ideology. A critical approach in social theory is therefore even more necessary. It is in this regard particularly ironic that Marxists, too, have failed to attend to the theoretical injunction to criticize, since few social theorists have been as explicit or categorical on this point as Marx.12 It is a further irony that while the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is usually cited as evidence of economic determinism in Marx’s work, it is the general introduction that he wrote for but omitted from this work and since published as part of the Grundrisse (previously discussed in several chapters) that offers the clearest refutation of this idea.13 What Marx has to say in this introduction is so crucial to understanding the critical nature of his method, and yet so strikingly absent from both Marxist and non-Marxist accounts of his thought, that substantial reference to its key passages is warranted. Marx begins with the question of theoretical method and asserts that in social theory the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.14 The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society.15

Taking the example of “abstract labour”, as it might be said to exist both for barbarians and in the capitalist United States, Marx continues: This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.

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Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure of and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it has built itself up…16

It is at this point that Marx observes that “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape”—and likewise that the forms of capitalism can retrospectively shed light on earlier social forms, “but not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society”. As stressed in Chap. 9, the critical awareness of difference is absolutely necessary. Although it is true, therefore, that the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society, this is to be taken only with a grain of salt. They can contain them in a developed, or stunted, or caricatured form, etc., but always with an essential difference. The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself… it always conceives them one-sidedly.17

Marx’s admonition against anachronism deserves repeating: In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject  – here, modern bourgeois society – is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject, and that therefore this society by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such; this holds for science as well.18

The danger in historical social science is that we cannot avoid knowing the outcome of the past in the form of the present—and the present necessarily colours our conceptions. Aspects of earlier historical social experience have been carried over into the present, but not necessarily with anything like the same character. Prevailing social forms and institutions of the present in some way had their origin in the past, but not necessarily through simple and direct development from superficially similar elements of the past. Yet Marxists have consistently put forward precisely the sort of “historical presentation of development” that Marx warned against—conceptions of social

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evolution as “progress”, taking familiar forms of social categories in the present to be historically ubiquitous and even natural, rather than peculiar to capitalism. In consequence, specific contemporary social relationships— such as the way in which capitalist wageworkers are managed by the representatives of capital in active pursuit of increased relative surplus value—are anachronistically projected into past societies on the basis of an apparent similarity, for example, working for wages. The economic determinism expressed in the idea of “base and superstructure” is for many Marxists essentially synchronic, having to do with a relationship existing between economic and political spheres in capitalist society. There is no synchronic conception of economic determinism, however, that does not draw upon a historical conception of progress which is in the end equally economically determined. This idea of progress has unquestionably been a central fact of Marxist theories of history. Intrinsic to the idea of progress is an inexorable law of motion, leading from the conditions of the past, to those of the present.19 As a concept of history, the idea of progress emerged uniquely in modern Europe, clearly bound up with the spread of political, economic and social liberalism in thought and practice—though it was never restricted to liberals.20 The idea of progress self-consciously developed in conjunction with the centrality of the growth of trade in the modern era, after roughly 1500, in turn grounded in the earlier revival of commerce following the specifically feudal transformation of Western European societies that occurred around the year 1000.21 After the emergence of political economic thought, progress became consciously associated with the extension of markets, increased division of labour, and a tendency toward “economic rationality” and growth in conjunction with both, and these particularly were connected to the developing awareness of a specifically capitalist form of society.22 When John Locke asserted in his Second Treatise of Government in 1690 that “In the beginning, all the world was America”,23 the idea of progress entered the core of political and social theory. One crucial and very influential expression of the idea of progress was the stages theory of history—the natural sequence of hunting and gathering, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial stages of society—first put ­forward by A. R. J. Turgot and Adam Smith, following the lead of Locke. Ronald Meek has brilliantly analysed this first fully articulated theory of progress, which combined specifically liberal social and economic conceptions with Montesquieu’s less specifically liberal assertion of a connection between the patterns of laws and mores and the ways societies acquire

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subsistence, to become the dominant Enlightenment view of historical development. As Meek argues, the idea put forward by Turgot and Smith “that ‘progress’ normally took the form of the unconscious but law-­ governed development of society through four successive stages based on four different modes of subsistence”—hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce—established a crucial point of reference for all subsequent social theory.24 Turgot and Smith became recognized as two of the greatest specifically economic thinkers of the eighteenth century, and it was accepted implicitly that hunting and gathering on the one hand, and commercial exchange on the other, were “economic” social forms in the same sense, by association with gaining subsistence—notwithstanding the fact that commerce is not a form of production, nor was agriculture superseded, as hunting and pastoralism were. European thinkers from the start took this economically conceived progress to express a natural and universal law of human social development. Locke associated the original state of nature with America, while a comparative approach to the nature of non-Western societies was central to Montesquieu’s work. Through the four stages theory, Europeans came to assert simultaneously a general law of progress, and their own pre-­eminence within it. As Meek notes with particular reference to the development of Rousseau’s thought, there is a movement which is observable over a period of time in the social thought of the Enlightenment taken as a whole: a movement from the simple idea that “in the beginning all the world was America” to the broader and more sophisticated idea that while “in the beginning” the world may indeed have been America, it was not long before it became Arabia and Tartary, and then Palestine.25 The rapid development of industrial capitalism, and with it the rise of European states to world domination by the end of the nineteenth century, greatly exacerbated both the real and the theoretical problem of the relationship between the historical development of European society and the rest of world. The central theoretical problem has been reconciling the fact of Europe’s unrivalled internal development, and resultant world domination, with the idea that progress itself is natural and universal. There are basically three theoretical alternatives. The first is to sidestep the profound differences between Western history and that of other peoples and to conceive of the precedence of the West as little more than a matter of timing. While this has not been compelling as a theory of world historical development, it is, however, easily assimilated with the view that no qualitative process of historical social development existed to begin with. Since the

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political economy of Smith’s subsequent Wealth of Nations, liberal social theory has inclined strongly away from the original historical concept of progress as a process of qualitative social transformation. If the forms of social organization (including, of course, the economy) are taken to be timeless, there is no real issue of comparative historical development, simply the problem of “modernization”. Yet, at the same time, “progress” has remained an intrinsic element of economic liberalism and other varieties of liberal social theory, in the form of a constant tendency for competitive market relations—conceived as essentially timeless—to generate economic and social improvements.26 A second alternative asserts that progress itself, in the development of modern capitalism, necessarily generates differentials in social development, to the disadvantage of the world’s “periphery”.27 In the much-­ debated views of theorists of “dependency” or “world systems”, progress is, therefore, both decried, and yet affirmed. The third alternative is to assert that, while there is in some sense a natural and universal character to progress as it occurred in the West, it is based upon some advantageous preliminary condition which the West enjoyed uniquely, or to a peculiar degree. This view, found in both Marxist and non-Marxist forms, relativizes progress to some extent. Yet, in maintaining the idea of the whole of the West as the social, cultural, and/or geographic basis of development, it cannot avoid the implication that there was at least relatively a “lack of progress” in the rest of the world.28 In its origins, therefore, the concept of progress, which became a central feature of the Enlightenment, was fundamentally a liberal economic determinist approach to history. While liberalism, as such, came generally to abandon its original stages theory of history, it has never entirely escaped the underlying economic determinist tendencies of the idea of progress. Yet it is also clear that liberalism is not the only form of modern social theory that has incorporated the concept of “progress” into its paradigm of historical social development, though the idea has often come to be conceived in less frankly economic determinist terms.

Varieties of Modern Social Theory A prevalent approach to the development of modern social theory holds that there are in fact three distinct traditions that must be recognized within it: liberalism, Marxism, and sociology. The three are conceived to be fundamentally linked—Marxism is taken to have emerged from a critical

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confrontation with liberalism, and sociological thought in response to Marxism. Not surprisingly, it has been sociological theorists in particular who have tended to see liberalism and Marxism in this light, as foils for the further development of social theory. In the first place, notwithstanding the enduring influence of liberalism in capitalist society, a good many social theorists have had difficulty with the individualism that lies at the core of liberal concepts and methodology. Yet, equally, while Marx has himself been accorded substantial recognition as a social thinker, most theorists have been reluctant to embrace any of the frameworks presented as Marxism, for a variety of reasons that have usually included the rejection of economic determinism quite as much as opposition to class politics and the project of socialist revolution. The prevailing view of the development of social theory, therefore, starts with the Enlightenment, and the ascendance of optimistic liberalism. It then conceives that, in opposition to liberalism, Marx united scientific rationalism with the critical/revolutionary elements of eighteenth-century thought. Sociology, finally, is thought to have adopted both scientific and liberal values from the Enlightenment, but to have fused them with a preoccupation with moral order derived from the conservative counter-Enlightenment. In Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory, Steven Seidman took up and summarized this conception in order to challenge it.29 In Seidman’s view, there is one real divergence between theoretical traditions in modern thought—that between Anglo-American liberalism and European social theory, the recognition of which he traces to Talcott Parsons. Parsons maintained that in the Anglo-American tradition, from Hobbes and Locke to the classical economists, utilitarians, and social evolutionism, the controlling analytical disposition was individualistic…, instrumentalist, and rationalist, and tended toward ahistorical conflict models of society. By contrast, the European tradition, influenced by the powerful counter-­ Enlightenment, was characterized by collectivist, idealist, and historicist assumptions and inclined toward organic models of society. In addition, historians have frequently observed parallel ideological differences between the two traditions.30

It is, then, specifically with respect to the relationship between Marxism and sociology within European social thought that Seidman objects to the prevailing view.

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Taking account of the work of Alvin Gouldner, Irving Zeitlin, and a number of other contemporary theorists, Seidman outlines the “conventional wisdom” of a fundamental divergence between sociology and Marxism in European theory, citing Daniel Rossides’s assertion of the key point: “Despite the similarity between Marxism and sociological thought, Marx worked outside the main assumptions and methods of both liberalism/capitalism and sociology.” A consistent historical articulation of this thesis maintains that sociology, from Comte through Durkheim and Weber to functionalism, developed as a reaction against the revolutionary tradition as that was elaborated from the philosophes through utopian socialism to Marxism.31

In the prevailing view, then, the three main streams of modern social thought stand in clear distinction from each other. Seidman’s work, with obvious affinity for the views of Anthony Giddens, challenges this conventional wisdom of opposing Marxism to “bourgeois” sociology.32 In pursuit of a non-Marxist reconciliation of Marx and sociology, Seidman rejects the view that Marxism and European sociological thought diverged fundamentally in their descent from the Enlightenment.33 He thus brings together Marxism and sociology in “a common analytical program”. But by grounding the origin of both in “the critique and reconstruction of liberalism”, he reiterates that a confrontation of theoretical perspectives is at the heart of the formation of modern social theory. The development of modern social theory is thus consistently conceived in terms of one or another framework of fundamental theoretical opposition. In the first place, Marxism may be recognized to stand in critical opposition to all forms of “bourgeois ideology” (or alternatively, the varieties of social science may be taken to oppose “Marxist ideology”). In the second place, following the prevailing conception of the history of sociological thought, the three traditions of liberalism, Marxism, and sociology may be juxtaposed to each other. Finally, as Seidman (and Giddens) would have it, Marxism and sociology may together be held to stand in opposition to liberalism.

The Common Paradigm of Modern Social Theory There is, in fact, some validity to each of these views. Certainly, there are real differences among the liberal, Marxist and “bourgeois” sociological expressions of social theory. And the basis for opposition between Marxism

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and liberalism is apparent to all. Yet it is equally clear that affinities exist between the main currents of sociological thought and both Marxist and liberal social theory, in turn. What is most fundamental in this regard is precisely that liberalism, Marxism, and sociology have very similar conceptions of historical social development, based upon variations of the underlying idea of progress. Each of these approaches incorporates elements that are specifically derived from modern capitalist society, making them an integral part of the historical process of development. Liberal theory projects into the past, as a timeless “universal”, that relationship which exists between production and markets in capitalism. Against this, as the non-Marxist economic historian and anthropologist Karl Polanyi argued decades ago, it must be recognized that the “market economy”—which he characterized as “an economic system controlled, regulated, and directed by markets alone; order in the production and distribution of goods are entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism”—is not only not “universal”, it is an absolutely novel feature of modern capitalism.34 This was also Marx’s position in the Grundrisse. There are a number of varieties of sociological theory, but the general reliance upon specifically capitalist phenomena in formulating conceptions of development is evident from the seminal work of Durkheim and Weber. Durkheim’s concept of the effects of the division of labour in history, for example, conflates the division of labour in the workshop with the social division of labour, associating the two with a biological metaphor to create a continuous, universal principle of progress. We need have no further illusions about the tendencies of modern industry; it advances steadily toward powerful machines, toward great concentrations of forces and capital, and consequently to the extreme division of labor… But the division of labor is not peculiar to the economic world; we can observe its growing influence in the most varied fields of society… The recent speculation in the philosophy of biology has ended by making us see in the division of labor a fact of a very general nature, which the economists, who first proposed it, never suspected… This discovery has had the effect of immeasurably extending the scope of the division of labor, placing its origins in an infinitely distant past, since it becomes almost contemporaneous with the coming of life into the world.35

But the development of technical division of labour in industry—the sort Adam Smith described in pin making—is not at all a “general” characteristic of production. It is a specific aspect of the peculiar organization

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of labour that becomes a defining characteristic of capitalism.36 The technical division of labour has the character of eliminating the need for skill and specialized knowledge, breaking down tasks into routine patterns that can be repeated quickly by anyone, with little training. The “social” division of labour, however, has no direct bearing on the technical processes of production at all, referring instead to the differentiation of specialized roles in society. Indeed, in contrast to the division of labour in a capitalist workshop or factory, the social division of labour will, if anything, tend to increase the extent of specialized knowledge and skills. An ineluctable general principle of division of labour only appears to lead naturally to capitalist production because a specifically capitalist character was built into the conception from the start, following the lead of Adam Smith. In turning to Max Weber, it is obvious that his use of ideal types creates the opportunity for drawing on the experience of specifically capitalist social forms in the conception of historical development. For example, in the section on “Stages in the Formation of Political Association” in Economy and Society, Weber insists that the state is “a product of evolution”, yet he then immediately—and anachronistically—turns to the capitalist state in defining his subject.37 Weber also precisely defines the historical social category of “class situation” in terms of attributes clearly drawn from capitalist society—“economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income… under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets.”38 He identifies “property” and “lack of property” as the “basic categories of all class situations”, on the grounds that “in accord with the law of marginal utility”, life chances are different for people with and without property “meeting competitively in the market for the purposes of exchange”.39 He then discusses class situations from ancient times to the present, offering in summary the view that “the struggle in which class situations are effective has progressively shifted from consumption credit toward, first competitive struggles in the commodity market and then toward wage disputes on the labor market”.40 In these regards, Weber’s approach is virtually indistinguishable from economic liberalism. Where a different conception of historical development appears to come into play, of course, is in relation to his ideas on rationalization and “disenchantment”, focused on the different contexts for historical development associated with the major religions.41 Yet in attributing the process of Western social development, culminating in the rational capitalist organization of production, to an association between a particular form of religious mentality, a particular form of jurisprudence, and a particular form of state organization, from which emerged a particular form of calculating

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rationality, it is quite evident that the conception informing each of these particular forms is drawn from the example of modern capitalist society. Finally, it has already been noted that Marxists, in their historical conception of base and superstructure, have in general failed—quite as much as Weber—to distinguish between “economic class” in its capitalist sense, and the basis for classes in precapitalist societies. Indeed, Marxists have generally applied the base/superstructure concept to history through a sequence of modes of production that do little more than combine the liberal modes of subsistence identified by Turgot and Smith with the liberal principle of division of labour.42 This concept of base and superstructure has even been construed to imply a wholly technological determinism based on productive forces, as in the work of G. A. Cohen.43 Yet, as Ellen Wood has argued, what Cohen’s technological determinism does is to repeat the error of the political economists: he generalizes the particular historical experience of capitalism by abstracting the laws of capitalist production from their specific social determinations.44

Thus, though ubiquitous in orthodox Marxist theory, the idea of “progress” has not been distinguished in any fundamental way from the forms of its expression in liberal and sociological thought. Notwithstanding other genuine differences, a common “modern paradigm” can be seen to inform the three main traditions of social theory. Both Marxist theory, as it has developed since Marx, and sociology share with liberalism its essentially “bourgeois” paradigm. The liberal framework of historical economic determinism became central to Marxism, while a broader Enlightenment model of integral economic, political, social, and cultural progress was incorporated into classical sociological thought. This common paradigm of modern social thought was in the first place ideologically constructed, traceable to the origins of liberal thought in polemical confrontations with absolutist politics, cultural intolerance, and state regulation. Its pervasive acceptance has meant that virtually all modern social theories have viewed the historical processes of the development of capitalist society, as well as the processes of their own ideational formation, through the same distorting prism. However significant the differences in these varieties of social theory, they simply reinforce each other with respect to the underlying idea of progress. This should in itself give pause to those Marxists who have embraced economic determinism.

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Historical Materialism Versus Economic Determinism One of the most significant distinguishing features of the various conceptions of Marxism under debate in recent decades has been the position that each takes with respect to economic determinism. Non-Marxists have not, as a rule, questioned the association of Marxism with economic determinism.45 Frankly economic determinist positions have been common among Marxists from the start, and G. A. Cohen’s defence of not merely “economic”, but indeed productive, force, or technological, determinism, has enjoyed substantial influence.46 Yet there have also been many efforts by Marxists to qualify or temper the economic determinist implications of texts such as the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. A key attraction of Althusserian structuralism to many Marxists, for example, was precisely that it relegated “determination by the economic” to “the last instance”, an approach which became central to Nicos Poulantzas’s theorization of the “relative autonomy” of the state.47 Yet in the absence of any clearly developed alternative conception of the historical processes of social change, Marxists have continued to resort to the idea of progress, generally in terms of a sequence of “modes of production”. The result has inevitably been that that which is most in need of explanation—the origin of specifically capitalist society—is taken for granted from the start.48 Before considering the main lessons to be taken from Marx’s critical method, it remains necessary to account for the fact that so fundamental an error was so universally accepted, across such a broad range of Marxist thought, for so long. The grounds for this error have been raised throughout previous chapters. There are in fact two different, ultimately contradictory, paradigms of historical social development that can be identified in Marx’s work. One of these paradigms is grounded in the same critique of liberal ideology that informs Capital, though it can be traced back to its origins in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. The other paradigm—which regrettably became dominant in Marxist thought—was adopted more or less uncritically from its liberal original: the stages theory of historical progress, through successive modes of subsistence, driven primarily by the division of labour.49 As emphasized from the start of this book, Marx began his intellectual development as a radical democrat, concerned to explore the limits of the French Revolution with respect to the task of human emancipation.50 His

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earliest works were critiques of both Hegelian and Left-Hegelian political philosophy, from which he derived the necessity of fundamental social revolution, as opposed to merely political revolution of the sort that had occurred in France.51 After coming in contact with Frederick Engels’s critical views on capitalism, and the prospect of social revolution as the result of working-class struggle, Marx moved to Paris, a hotbed of socialist ideas and workers’ activism.52 There, as he further developed his thought by entering into a critique of British political economy, Marx put forward an analysis in which the critique of liberal historical conceptions played an equally important role. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx was concerned with the alienation of labour. Yet he was not concerned with it only as a phenomenon of capitalist society. Rather, this concept—which refers primarily to appropriation of the products of labour, or exploitation, although Marx also acknowledged its significance as an existential condition—was recognized to be the key to “the evolution of mankind”, the entire historical process of human social development.53 Liberal thinkers, Marx saw, attributed the existence of poverty to the effects of property, and relegated the origins of property to a “fictitious primordial condition”.54 Rejecting this approach, Marx argued that property was “the product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labour”—it was not property that caused poverty, but the existence of forcible impoverishment that was the basis for property.55 How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity’s development.56

Marx had in fact raised this issue of the role of exploitation in the history of human social development at the outset, in criticizing political economy for reducing human beings to the condition of mere factors of production, no different from “any horse”: “What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?”.57 Based on his analysis that property arises from the alienation of labour (i.e., from class exploitation), Marx went on to assert that “the entire movement of history” is the process of human social development,

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through “the movement of private property”, to “the transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement” in communism (and simultaneously the process of developing consciousness by which this social development becomes known).58 This movement of property, “the material perceptible expression of estranged human life”, is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, i.e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property, as the appropriation of human life is, therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence.59

Addressing the place of modern European society in a historical process of social development, Marx saw history as he knew it—the history of the development of Western societies—to have the character of movement through human estrangement to a point where estrangement itself could be transcended. However much Marx may have actually been concerned with exploitation in contemporary society, his conception of historical process is not rooted in specificities derived from capitalist social experience. Although the fully developed form of the alienation of labour is found in specifically capitalist relations and revealed through the critique of political economy, this is the result of a long process of development: The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal relation, not yet grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this first form even without the advanced development of private property (as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction – hence a dynamic relationship driving toward resolution.60

It is not the historically specific form of the alienation of labour by which commodified labour-power is employed by capital in the production of surplus value that has existed throughout history, but the more general

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appropriation of the surplus produced by direct producers, through one or another claim to it as property (whether private, or as a right of the state). Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand, it is the product of alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation.61

The alienation of labour is thus not specifically a form of capitalist class exploitation. It is rather the general form of class exploitation through social property relations. Previous historical forms of the alienation of labour—forms of opposition between the propertied and the labouring propertyless—developed, through the movement of property, into the confrontation of capital and wage-labourers, the most complete expression of this fundamental antithesis. In contrast to political economy, as also to Weber’s concept of “class situation”, this basic social opposition of propertied and propertyless is not intrinsically tied to market exchange. Indeed, Marx criticized the economist who “assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce – namely, the necessary relations between two things – between, for example, division of labour and exchange”.62 Marx began with a contemporary fact, with the production of commodities. In this, however, he recognized the existence of a relationship of labour, and not simply of the market—of labour as “an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man”.63 Historical materialism is rooted in the existence of a relationship by which the majority of humanity labour to create for the propertied their wealth. There was, of course, still a tendency for Marx to think like a philosopher in 1844. He claimed, for example, that [t]he relations of private property contain latent within them the relation of private property as labour, the relation of private property as capital, and the mutual relation of these two to one another.

It is in one sense profoundly true that private property has latent within it the ultimate potential of the capitalist labour relationship. Yet this potential is in no way obvious from the forms of actual property relations in precapitalist societies. It can only be known after the fact, given the capitalist point of view.

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Marx, however, did still tend to attribute to the “perfected” character of the property relations of capitalism a teleological inner necessity as the endpoint of development of alienated labour. This philosophical teleology did not persist in his later historical materialist thinking, and it must, in any case, be rejected. The fact that capitalist relations can be described as the logically most perfect, fully abstract forms of property relations does not mean that their emergence in history was in any real sense “necessary”. In fact, one of the central claims of the historical materialist critique of “progress”, directly challenging liberalism, sociology, and conventional expressions of Marxism, is precisely that capitalism did not emerge from some universal, necessary, or even typical pattern of development—not even in respect to Western European society—but that it originated in England alone, on the basis of historically specific social relationships that emerged there. The key point remains, however, that Marx did not incorporate any uniquely capitalist characteristics into his conception of the process of development leading to capitalism. Capitalism is instead, as he explicitly recognizes throughout his subsequent work, one specific form of class society, all forms of which—in distinction from other types of non-class society—have the character of being founded on exploitative labour.64 The history of social development leading to capitalist society is the history of class societies, driven by the inner development of relations of class exploitation (“the movement of private property”). The point of departure for historical materialism is, therefore, the specifically critical recognition of the alienation of labour—appropriation of the fruits of the labour of others realized through relations of property— which has existed historically and continues to exist. Much as Marx refused to return to some “fictitious primordial condition” in order to explain property, but began with the “fact” of the alienation of labour, so too his conception of historical social development does not begin with “production”, “the market”, or “the economy”. Instead, it begins with the development of the alienation of labour in the relations of property. The alienation of labour is not in any way a natural or necessary condition of production. On the contrary, “the historical necessity of private property” is only the fact that the history of humanity has actually been realized in this way.65 History—Western history as Marx knows it—has emerged as the history of class societies. The process of historical social development that leads to capitalism, therefore, must be seen in terms of the history of the development of class exploitation, and not the history of “economic development”.

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The 1844 Manuscripts conclude with a lengthy critique of Hegel’s Phenomenology. While deeply philosophical in character, it starts from the inadequacies of Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel with respect to “the whole process of history”, and from the fact that Hegel’s conception of the negation of the negation, “has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history”.66 Through the whole of this seminal work, therefore, Marx has laid at least the foundation for a historical materialist project of understanding the processes of historical social development in class societies which are founded on exploitative systems of property relations. And the point of departure for this social theory has been a thoroughgoing and self-­ conscious critique of British, French, and German liberal ideology—from political economy to political philosophy, to the philosophy of history. It is precisely this sort of critical perspective to which Marx would once again return in the Grundrisse. Unfortunately, much of his work in the intervening period, including the texts of “The German Ideology”, The Poverty of Philosophy, and even The Communist Manifesto, saw Marx put forward ideas on historical development that owed very little to his original critique, and a great deal to the standard liberal histories of progress. In light of the conclusions he drew from the critique of political economy, Marx abandoned his original plan to undertake a critical history of the French Revolution, to turn definitively instead to the study of capitalist society.67 As a result, however, whereas he continued to sustain a conscious critique of liberal political economy throughout his life’s work on capitalist society, he never seriously undertook an original historical analysis of class societies, or offered a critique of liberal historiography. Indeed, far from carrying the implications of his criticism of liberal historical conceptions into a developed critique of liberal historiography, Marx went so far as to give credit to the liberals for discovering the role of class in history. Concerned above all with capitalist society and the transition to socialism—just as Marxists since have been—Marx simply accepted the judgment of liberals with respect to the class character of the French Revolution as a “bourgeois revolution”, driven by contradictions between the development of productive forces and the relations of property, taking it to be a model for class revolution by the proletariat.68 As he made clear in the Grundrisse, Marx also consciously examined the “history” of some of the central social forms of capitalist society—money, for example—from the point of view of capitalism, in order to clarify the nature of the form in

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contemporary society, and not as a means to understanding any actual historical process of social development. These observations necessarily focused on the commercial relations with strongest formal affinity to the capitalist market economy, however, and therefore tended, if anything, to lend credence to the standard liberal conception of economic progress. If Marx himself, therefore, failed to be completely clear and consistent in his critique of the pervasive social concepts of liberalism, it is hardly surprising that his followers have systematically preferred the familiarity—even the comforting “scientific” certitude—of the historical conceptions rooted in progress. This has tended to be reinforced by the fact that the Marxist version of the essentially liberal paradigm of historical development has often found some favour among non-Marxist theorists, especially in comparison with the more triumphant of the straightforwardly liberal accounts. The sweeping interpretation in “The German Ideology” and the Manifesto has generally been taken, along with the short summary in the Preface to the Contribution, to articulate Marx’s historical thought. “Nevertheless”, as Robert Brenner has written with respect to this conception, its real originator was Adam Smith, upon whom Marx was profoundly dependent for his own formulation, and it bears all the characteristic marks of Smith’s theory of history. The central explanatory notion at the core of this theory is the self-developing division of labour.69

The regrettable, lasting consequences of Marx’s failure to maintain and extend his original critical thought in these early works are indeed nowhere more evident than in the central role that the concept of “bourgeois revolution”—once generally accepted, but now thoroughly discredited by serious historians—has long played in Marxist theory, even though it was adopted in its entirety from the standard liberal texts of the early nineteenth century. Yet while Marx never offered any adequate history of the development of class society, his later work does consider in theoretical terms the process by which capitalism emerged from precapitalist society. As Brenner has observed, this theoretical framework was presented in Grundrisse, Capital, and other later works of Marx, but was never fully worked out by him. Its master principle is the mode of production, conceived as a system of social-property relations which make possible, and thereby structure, societal reproduction  – in particular, the maintenance of society’s individual families and constituent social classes.70

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This later conception of “mode of production” is profoundly different from that appearing in “The German Ideology”, which articulated little more than the liberal mode of subsistence. This approach returns in fact to Marx’s original insight into the centrality of the social relationship between the producer, and the owner of the means of production, who—through the social relations of property—appropriates from the labour of the producer. Theorists must, therefore, choose between contradictory theoretical approaches within Marx’s own work in deciding what they will take as the basis of “Marxist” theory. It is not as if there was nothing of value in Marx’s problematic works, of course. “The German Ideology” contains a great deal that is insightful on the relationship of consciousness to social existence, and The Communist Manifesto not only remains a stirring polemic, but it contains a famous, key formulation of precisely the sort of analysis that is central to historical materialism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”71 Rather than being the story of economic progress, history is a record of the oppressive alienation of labour for the majority, over many centuries, and of their struggles against it. Yet the clarity of this conception is easily lost once one enters upon the muddled terrain of predetermined modes of production, based upon the necessary development of productive forces, through the natural dynamic of division of labour. To the extent that Marxists fail to recognize the ways in which the critique of liberal social thought provides a foundation for historical materialism, they are doomed to conceive of a Marxism that combines the critical rejection of political economy’s view of capitalism with an account of how and why capitalism came about that is drawn directly from the liberal conceptual framework which underlies political economy. It is in the very nature of this profound misconception of historical materialism that it contributes to the preservation of the dominant ideological paradigm. Instead, Marxists must direct attention to how Western history actually reveals specific processes of social development, realized through a succession of characteristic forms of oppressive and exploitative social relationships—the history of class society. This requires systematic critical analysis, including constant awareness of the tendency to project contemporary expectations upon the past. Even Marxists preoccupied with the capitalist present and socialist future have an obligation to understand the forms of class exploitation in the past. Only from such a critical historical understanding is it possible to imagine what Marx’s project of human emancipation might really mean.

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The Historical Specificities of Class Societies In previous work and earlier chapters, I have discussed the essential methodological principles of historical materialism, so I will offer in what follows only a few key points, and some preliminary historical conclusions. I will then briefly return to consider how these points, particularly with respect to the immediate historical origins of capitalism, bear directly on our understanding of the origins of modern social theory. It will be seen not only that the claims of this sort of historical materialist analysis can—at least in principle—be tested against evidence, but also that this approach best accounts for the divergence between Anglo-American liberal and European sociological traditions of social theory. The most crucial statement of Marx’s historical materialist conception appears, as noted above, in Volume III of Capital, in a chapter that ­considers the transformation of rent from its role as the essential form of class exploitation in feudal society, to its particular and subsidiary role within capitalism. It is, he asserts, the direct relationship of exploitation— embodying both domination and appropriation through property relations, as he originally conceived the alienation of labour—that is the key to social structure. This is worth repeating. Rather than economic “base” determining political “superstructure”, the structures of economic and political relations are together based upon the fundamental relationship of exploitation: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of production to the direct producers… which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.72

It is precisely in this context that Marx offers an instructive observation on the “Asiatic mode of production”, a concept that has been much debated in Marxism.73 From the point of view of historical materialism, there is no natural, necessary, or even “typical” ladder of modes of production for the history of

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class society to ascend, and much of what has been said by Marxist theorists about precapitalist societies must simply be rejected. Marx’s own observations on the concept of Asiatic mode of production, however, remain significant, though the term itself is misleading. Ellen Wood, for example, has identified a society that fits the concept in Bronze Age Greece.74 It might well also be said to apply to the earliest of the hierarchically organized ancient states of both Old World and New, perhaps to “pristine” states in general, as well as to a number of Asian and other empires or kingdoms.75 It is particularly significant, however, that the concept does not apply to classical Greece or ancient Rome, for in Marx’s conception this term refers to agrarian societies in which it is the state itself that appropriates the surplus labour of the direct producers—in which, that is, there is no private ownership of land as the basis of exploitation. There is exploitation through the exaction of rent—identical in this case to “taxes”, but the ultimate control over land as means of production that we understand as “ownership” is vested directly in the coercive apparatus of the state. In the difference between the Western line of societies descended from Greece, and especially Rome, and these state-centric systems of exploitation, there appears to lie the explanation for the remarkable historical dynamism of class society. Western class societies have been characterized by a fundamental duality in the relations of exploitation, since the appropriation of surplus has been based throughout Western history on the private ownership of property in the context of a state structure of political power. It is in this regard that the history of Western class societies can be conceived as a whole, in contrast with other historical experiences. As Ellen Wood has written, The long historical process which ultimately issued in capitalism should be seen as an increasing – and uniquely well-developed – differentiation of class power as something distinct from state power, a power of surplus-extraction not directly grounded in the coercive apparatus of the state.76

This perspective, which does not generalize from capitalism, but emphasizes its specificity, sheds important light on the nature of capitalist social relations and the historical process of their development. The capitalist organization of production can be viewed as the outcome of a long process in which certain political powers were gradually transformed into economic powers and transferred to a separate “sphere”… The supremacy of absolute private property appears to have established itself to a significant

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extent by means of political devolution, the assumption by private proprietors of functions originally invested in a public or communal authority. Again, the opposition of the “Asiatic” mode of production at one extreme and the capitalist mode at the other helps to place this devolutionary process in perspective.77

While the “logic” of this line of development can be recognized retrospectively, from the point of view of capitalism—the “perfection” of capitalism as a system of private property as Marx recognized it in 1844—historical materialism does not claim a deterministic “necessity” either for the emergence of capitalism, or for its transcendence in socialism.78 Rather, d ­ ifferent specific historical conditions have created different possibilities for structured processes of social development, which must always take form through the interaction of people who are shaped by history and society, but who make history and society in turn.79 It was indeed precisely in the claim that the social development of capitalism was not necessary, natural, and universal—even within the confines of the history of Western Europe—but peculiar and historically specific to England, that Robert Brenner helped lay the foundation for recovering the historical materialism of Marx’s thought in opposition to the economic determinism of Marxist theory in what has been described as “Political Marxism”. As Brenner, Wood, and I have argued, industrial capitalist social relations—the employment of workers through the commodification of labour-power, by capitalists using their property rights to establish control over the labour process, through which they strive to increase productivity, driven by market-price competition with other capitalists—developed indigenously only in England. Industrial capitalism emerged from the unique social system of agrarian capitalism, characterized by relations between three fundamental classes—capitalists, labourers, and landlords— which must be distinguished from the various forms of “capitalist agriculture” that have followed the spread of capitalism through industrial production. Only in England did agrarian capitalism emerge from the historical process of enclosures by which, over a span of several hundred years, English society completely lost its peasant character prior to the introduction of industrial capitalism.80 Commercial relationships expanded impressively throughout Europe during the modern period and dating back to the Dark Ages. But it is our claim that only in England was the underlying system of social reproduction itself fundamentally transformed into a market system: first in agriculture,

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dissolving the normative structures of social reproduction in traditional peasant communities; and then in industry, through the extension of new social relationships, and through the effects of productivity increases in agriculture and the social dislocation of the rural population. Industrial capitalism—significantly, never agrarian capitalism or the English pattern of enclosures—was then able to spread to other European societies, and beyond, through the market networks of commodity exchange that long antedated specifically capitalist relations of production. It is held by virtually every other modern social theory that Western European societies developed historically through fundamentally parallel social processes. Whether conceived in conventional liberal economic terms, in properly economic determinist terms, or in any of the sociological versions of the idea of progress, it is virtually an article of faith that Western Europe as a whole—above all, England and France—developed in parallel, with perhaps slight recognition of differences in timing. Against this, it is the claim of the “Political Marxists” that the societies of England and France differed from the eleventh century in important aspects of their feudal social relations, as a result of which they diverged increasingly over time, never being more dissimilar than in 1789. At that point, England was just beginning a transformation from agrarian to industrial capitalism, its landed ruling class having long since become a class of agrarian capitalist landlords. France, however, showed no signs of the development of capitalism in either agriculture or industry. Instead, it entered into a social revolution based upon political conflict among the members of an entirely non-capitalist ruling class, comprising nobles and bourgeois alike, who struggled for control of the state, the privately owned offices of which played a central role in surplus appropriation.81 This claim is based on a critical historical materialist re-examination of the evidence of social, economic, and political history. It is informed by theory, but it does not depend on acceptance of any article of faith. The claims of historical materialism must be supported by history, or else discarded. In theoretical terms, for example, a distinction must be drawn between capitalism as a specific organizational form of social reproduction, and Weber’s sense of it as profit making through commerce. This is not, however, an argument over two versions of the “fact” of capitalism, but, in the first place, a careful specification of subject and, in the second place, an assertion of discernible difference between two possible senses of the term, with which Weber himself agreed.

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Through such careful attention to specificities in meaning, the questioning of long unquestioned presumptions, and fresh appraisal of evidence, historical materialist analyses offer the potential for a very different understanding of the past, with profound implications for the present. Ellen Wood, for example, undertook an original examination of slavery and democracy in ancient Greece.82 Not only has this once again meant challenging a paradigm common to Marxist and “bourgeois” analyses—in this case, the view that Athenian democracy depended upon the existence of slavery, a view revealed to have a profoundly anti-democratic basis—but the insights that Wood offers with respect to the real connection between democracy and labour, and the culture of democracy, bear important lessons for contemporary democratic theory. Moreover, Wood has shown that understanding the genuinely admirable features of Athenian democracy in relation to its specific social foundation in a regime of smallholding peasants under pressure from a propertied aristocracy also has important implications for how we understand the oppression of women, both in Greece particularly and in precapitalist class societies generally.83 Beyond this, of course, Wood may perhaps be best known in many circles for her championing of class politics, against the tide of post-structuralist and “post-Marxist” criticism.84 At the core of her work of contemporary political theory lies recognition of the enduring significance of class and class struggle in history in precisely the historical materialist terms of “Political Marxism”. To the extent that virtually all narrowly feminist, post-structuralist, and/or post-Marxist theorists of the “politics of identity” rely on criticism of the supposed characteristics of “Marxism” which are rejected by historical materialism, and to the extent that, ironically, virtually all of these theories resort, consciously or unconsciously, to the same modern paradigm of historical development, it is clear that historical materialist class analysis can, in fact, have enormous implications for contemporary political theory and practice.

Historical Materialism and Modern Social Theory Finally, historical materialist class analysis has something to say about the very question of the origins of modern social theory. Once the divergence in historical social development between England and France has been recognized, it is clear that there can have been no “dual revolution” at the end of the eighteenth century, driven by common underlying processes of progress.85 Only as a result of the subsequent spread of industrial capitalism, as

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it developed in England, did France (slowly) and the rest of Western Europe (often more quickly) come to converge in the familiar capitalist social forms of “modern society”. France entered the second half of the twentieth century with an enormous peasantry, and a real “peasant problem”, more than two centuries after it was reasonable even to speak of an English peasantry. Yet this profound social difference no longer holds, however great the sectoral differences in their economies remain. Given this social convergence under capitalism, it would not be surprising to find increasing similarities in contemporary patterns of politics and culture. But what of the past? On the one hand, England and France both belong to the line of Western class societies descended from Rome. A central issue throughout the history of specifically class societies has been the relationship between class power and state power. The history of the West has been characterized by continuous tension between the individual interests of propertied members of the ruling class, and their collective interest in a strong central state. This can be seen from the rise of the senatorial aristocracy in Republican Rome to the civil wars that ushered in the Empire; from the withdrawal of ever greater resources from the ambit of Imperial taxation in the Later Empire, under protection of the senatorial nobility, to the reconsolidation of political power under Germanic kings after the “fall” of the Western Empire. Again and again in Western history—in France the examples can be mounted almost century by century from Charlemagne to the Second Empire—there has been flux and reflux in the balance between class and state power. This tension, with its recurrent political crises, has been an important factor in the development of Western political theory. Quentin Skinner, in fact, has written a very influential account of political theory from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, focusing primarily on the development of claims made for and against central political power.86 A further theme, though very much less an issue of debate among those theorists who have accepted the social order as it is, has been that of the relationship between the state and private property.87 Since these and other important themes of social and political thought have related to experiences common to all of the societies in the Western line of development, it is only to be expected that writers on these issues have drawn upon, and responded to, each other’s ideas across not only time, but national social boundaries as well. Yet, on the other hand, there have been crucial specificities in national historical social development, perhaps nowhere so striking as in the divergence of French and English societies from the late middle ages, through

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the whole of the early modern era. This divergence meant that even though French and English social and political theorists continued to exchange ideas, they did so from increasingly distinct contexts of social reference. Seventeenth-century English thinkers read the works of sixteenth-­century French theorists debating constitutionalism and absolutism, but the new formulations of political ideas put forward by both Hobbes and Locke did not simply build upon these. Rather, they created new conceptions—in the first case absolutist, and in the second liberal— that drew upon the novel English social context produced by enclosures, a context of economic individualism that was qualitatively different from anything known in French society.88 Similarly, Rousseau’s conception of “the general will” must be understood in light of the norms of corporative social organization and collective regulation that existed in France.89 It makes an enormous difference, when judging whether or not Rousseau is “totalitarian”, if one recognizes that French norms of social relationship had not been transformed through any process like enclosure and that a natural, organic community of interest was generally still presumed to exist, in a way that was no longer the case in the liberal, and increasingly capitalist, England of the eighteenth century. It is equally clear that however much the French Physiocrats absorbed from English liberalism and the early development of political economy, they added to it a peculiar insistence upon agriculture as the unique source of social wealth, lumping the entrepreneurs and labourers of industrial production together as a “stipendiary Class”.90 It is not that Adam Smith later improved on the Physiocrats, to generalize the source of all wealth as labour in any form—this was already present in Locke’s conception of value in the Second Treatise of Government. From the point of view of historical materialism, it is obvious—not only from the works of the Physiocrats, but also from Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, and others—that truly capitalist social relationships were not properly understood on the Continent, even into the early nineteenth century. They simply had had no experience of capitalist society. In English liberal political theory, “civil society” referred to the condition of living in a state, as agreed by mutual consent. Hegel, drawing on Adam Smith’s political economy, gave the concept of bürgerliche gesellschaft—which means bourgeois society as well as civil society—the meaning of a sphere of individuals engaging in egoistic social and economic relations, in contrast to the institution of the state, in which social unity is realized.91 Yet for Hegel—certainly one of the most profound of the

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Continental theorists—the point was precisely that society required the “universal” principle of the state as true capstone to its inherent organic unity. This concept is clearly at odds with the classic English liberal conception of the “invisible hand” of the market, with its protean capacity to serve social needs while leaving no more than a minimal role to the state. It is from this point of view evident that the concern of European social thinkers with the issues of moral order is not so much a reflection of a conservative questioning of the wisdom of liberal optimism as it is an ­indication of the extent to which Continental society came only belatedly to the social transformations associated with capitalism. Not only did the European thinkers have a harder time understanding what capitalism was all about, but they had to deal with capitalism as it was introduced—fully formed—into fundamentally non-liberal social contexts, as a result of market competition. This was very different from England, where agrarian capitalism arose through a long, difficult process of social transformation in the countryside, laying the foundations for rapid transformation into industrial capitalism. As a result, it is hardly surprising to find that Emile Durkheim, as late as the 1890s, rejected the injustice and moral incoherence that he discerned in capitalist relationships, but without rejecting capitalism itself.92 English thinkers—and the English people—had long since come to accept the individualist framework of liberalism, which had also been introduced from the very beginning in what would become the United States. There is indeed, as Seidman argued, a fundamental divergence between European and Anglo-American social thought, which reflects the very real fact that capitalism was English in its origins, and was intrinsically connected to the development of liberal social conceptions. There were no truly liberal thinkers anywhere else until after liberalism was established in England. From this perspective, then, it is apparent that European social theory did not emerge from a project to reconstruct liberalism, because it had critically transcended naive liberal optimism. On the contrary, the initial response of European thinkers to liberalism reflected real ignorance of its capitalist social context and ambivalence as to its possibilities. The European preoccupation with endorsing normative and essentially anti-capitalist proposals for completing or improving capitalist society really expressed the fact that capitalist liberal individualism, which was fully established by the nineteenth century in England, was completely without precedent, and largely incomprehensible to Continental theorists. The elements of liberal thought that had been ingested by Continentals

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since the early eighteenth century had never amounted to a capitalist perspective. The French Revolution was fought over specifically political liberal principles, which bore upon the question of distribution of power within a ruling class for whom the state was a central “economic” locus. The Revolution neither reflected, nor did very much to advance, the social basis for specifically capitalist production. Throughout the eighteenth century, English liberal thought had been accepted, or—as in the case of Rousseau— criticized, entirely on the basis of what it had to say for Continental societies that were not capitalist. As it increasingly became apparent that some profound change was afoot by means of capitalist industrialization, and as capitalism itself began to spread through the networks of trade, it was no longer enough to confront English ideas. It was necessary to come to terms with capitalism itself. Social theory on the Continent began to reflect more than longstanding liberal self-satisfaction with the effects of the rise of trade. Some more fundamental understanding of qualitative social change was required. European social theory approached capitalism as an alien phenomenon, impressed by its power, increasingly recognizing its potential as a force not only for material change but for social change, dissolving Gemeinschaft (community) and introducing Gesellschaft (association), for better or worse. Hegel still did not even see how there might be a problem with the bürgerliche gesellschaft of English political economy coexisting with the “universalizing” functions of the Prussian state’s bureaucracy. Durkheim was troubled by the alienation of labour—both as existential anomie and as forced division of labour—yet his proposals for amelioration combined the very corporatism that capitalism tends systematically to corrode, with the fantastic suggestion that capitalist society might abolish inherited wealth. With Weber, the principles and premises of capitalism proper are fully understood and embraced—he even accepts marginal utility theory as his basic tool of social analysis. What he is offering is not even critical of capitalism, but, from a European point of view shaped by the absence of liberal social traditions, he is merely pessimistic with respect to the social and political claims made for liberalism. None of the European social theorists ever challenged the liberal capitalist view of how and why capitalist society came into being. Building upon essentially liberal theoretical premises, their hesitations, qualifications, and reformulations in approaching liberal social and political ideology are all beside the point with respect to a critical apprehension of the history of class societies. Torn between the European experience of the

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past and the capitalist experience of the present, these social thinkers were willing and able to give more consideration to Marxist criticisms of liberal capitalist society than to liberals proper. Yet, ultimately, they accepted capitalism and they accepted its conception of the economic processes of social life in past and present. Their tendency to reinforce the modern “bourgeois” paradigm of history had implications not only for liberals but regrettably for Marxists too. Forced to choose between two points of view in Marx’s work, Marxists, on the whole, have not even recognized those ideas that were original and critical. History is not only the past that humankind has experienced but also the future that we will forge. George Santayana’s famous aphorism, so often quoted in relation to history, was specifically directed at progress: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness… Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.93

This, however, is not at all akin to why Marx looked to the past. When he proposed that we can learn about the anatomy of apes from the anatomy of humans, the goal was above all to learn what made each distinct. Only by understanding how the past truly was different can we understand the world of today, and only then can we hope to understand how our future can be truly different again. It is long past time, therefore, for the theoretical unity that has been presumed to encompass historical “progress” to be challenged, and for truly critical alternatives grounded in the original analysis of the long and varied history of class societies to be heard. True human emancipation can itself only follow from the struggle of oppressed peoples. This struggle needs to be informed by history, and yet it must be freed from the dead weight of the past. From the very beginning, Karl Marx was preoccupied with the experience of alienation, and the need for human emancipation. Through his incredibly insightful critique of political economy, starting in 1844, he realized two great advances in social theory. These advances built upon the basic questions first articulated in the Paris manuscripts. On the one hand, he put forward a foundation for historical theory that emphasized the inherently social character of our species, and the way that we came to bind ourselves in forms of social existence based upon relations of exploitation that became determinants of historical development. On the other

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hand, he was never satisfied with merely understanding the world in all its complex history but, as he put it in his Eleventh Thesis on Fuererbach,94 he sought to change it. It is this world historic task that still remains for humanity to achieve through the organization of the oppressed in common struggle against their oppressors.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6, 482. 2. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, MECW, vol. 37, 776–7. 3. Marx’s own works remain unparalleled as accounts of how it is that workers who enjoy full civil rights equal to those of their employers are nonetheless exploited by the very employment contracts, based on the principle of exchange of equivalents, into which they enter voluntarily. Though his arguments are presented clearly and systematically in Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, and in a somewhat incomplete but very short and simple form in “Value, Price and Profit”, MECW, vol. 20, 101–49, they remain widely misunderstood and debated even among those who consider themselves Marxists. Still, in comparison with the issues of the historical dimensions of his thought, the nature of his critique of political economy in respect of capitalism is well established. Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970) is one of many guides. For particular insight into the enduring relevance of Marx’s essential analysis for workers in all sectors of advanced capitalist society (though with a few unorthodox elements related to monopoly capitalism), see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). Ellen M. Wood has primarily been concerned with exploring the relationship between Marx’s critique of political economy and his socialist class politics, on the one hand, and his conception of the history of class society on the other, making her work of central relevance to the arguments put forward in the present essay. At the same time, much of what she has written is very helpful in clarifying Marx’s ideas on the nature of capitalism. See especially the first part of Democracy Against Capitalism: Rethinking Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002). 4. The meaning of the term capitalism is the subject of great debate as has been discussed previously in Chaps. 2, 7 and 9. All forms of modern social theory recognize some qualitative difference between modern industrial capitalist society and earlier forms of society (as between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft), but they do not all associate this difference with capitalism

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as such. Weber is particularly noted for having identified capitalism in the ancient world, and so on, defining it simply in terms systematic profitmaking through exchange. Yet Weber acknowledged that “in the modern West, there exists a completely different form of capitalism, which has developed nowhere else in the world: the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labour”, in “The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe”, Max Weber: selections in translation, ed. W.  G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 336. This roughly corresponds to what Marx had in mind in conceiving of capitalism as a system of social reproduction through generalized production of market commodities by formally free labourers who have commodified their labourpower. It is this qualitatively different industrial form of capitalism, defined not with reference to technology but (as even Weber noted) by the organization of labour that is intended by the term throughout this essay. 5. See Harvey Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), and Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 76–107. 6. Central to the emergence of Political Marxism has been the work of Robert Brenner, particularly his seminal Past and Present articles “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” and “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, collected together with critical interventions from a range of economic historians in T. H. Ashton, and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). In addition to other works cited below, see also Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), particularly its lengthy Postscript. 7. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 118–40. 8. Ibid., 19. 9. Besides the references to Marx’s work on this score cited below, see the work of Karl Polanyi on the radical difference between all earlier societies, in which economic relations are embedded in other non-economic social relations (kinship, lordship, political organization), and capitalism: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957), 43–76, as well as “Aristotle Discovers the Economy” and “The Place of Economies in Societies” (with Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson), in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, eds. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 64–94, 239–42. 10. There is an enormous literature on the idea of progress, liberal historiography and social theory, the Enlightenment, and the origins of Marxist and sociological conceptions of social development. One especially insightful and suggestive work is Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). For a discussion of Meek’s ideas, and the light they shed on the relationship between liberal social theory and Marx’s thought, see George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1987). 11. Political Marxists have particularly focused attention on problems of Marxist historical theory. On the Marxist adoption of the originally liberal concept of bourgeois revolution, see Robert Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J.  M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 271–304, as well as Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution. On broader problems of Marxist theory incorporating liberal historical perspectives, see Brenner, “On the Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (1977): 25–92; Wood, The Origin of Capitalism; and Comninel, “Historical Materialist Sociology and Revolutions”, in Handbook of Historical Sociology, eds. Gerard Delanty and Engin Isin (London: Sage, 2003), 85–95. On problems with Marxist theories of ancient and medieval European societies, see Ellen M.  Wood, PeasantCitizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988) and Democracy Against Capitalism, and Comninel, “Feudalism”, in Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, eds. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012), 131–7. On problems with conceiving modes of production, and with economic and technological determinism, see below. 12. It must of course be acknowledged that many of the most important of Marx’s texts in this regard were unknown or generally unavailable until relatively recently. 13. Karl Marx, “Preface”, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW, vol. 29, 261–5; Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 81–111. 14. Marx, Grundrisse, 102. 15. Ibid., 105. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 106 [original emphasis]. 19. Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress: History and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 151. 20. For a comprehensive and sympathetic overview of this development, see Pollard, Idea of Progress. 21. See Comninel, “Feudalism”, and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 27, no. 4, (2000): 1–53. 22. This is not to say that these ideas about economic progress actually reflected the essential characteristics of capitalist development, only that these were the terms with which the rise of capitalism was depicted.

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23. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301. 24. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 75. See Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 64–74. 25. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 91. 26. Pollard, Idea of Progress, 77. The literature on modernization is simply too enormous and too familiar for discussion here. 27. The works of André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein are of course central to this perspective, which has its own enormous literature. For a specifically historical materialist critique of these ideas, see Brenner, “On the Origins of Capitalist Development”. 28. Clear Marxist statements of this view can be found in G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), 248, and E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1962), xv. Weber also took this approach, of course, as articulated in “The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe” (n3). Another non-­ Marxist approach, which offers a critical discussion of the liberal, Marxist, and sociological conceptions of history very different from my own, and an original attempt to synthesize them, is that of John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 29. Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 30. Ibid., 6–7. 31. Ibid., ix, citing Daniel Rossides, The History and Nature of Sociological Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978). 32. Seidman, 11–8; see 299 fn. 2, referring to Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). See also Giddens “Liberalism and Sociology”, review of From Philosophy to Sociology. The Evolution of French Liberalism, 1870–1914, by William Logue, and Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory, by Steven Seidman, Contemporary Sociology 14, no. 3 (1985): 320–2. I use the term “bourgeois” in this context reluctantly, adopting conventional usage for the purposes of this work. Marxists and their critics alike have generally understood the term as virtually synonymous with “capitalist”, with implications of broadly “liberal” values, relations, and ideology. I have argued in Rethinking the French Revolution, 34–5 and 180ff, that this conflation of “bourgeois” and “capitalist” is quite mistaken. It is symptomatic of the very conceptual paradigm that the present essay seeks to confront. My use of the term here does not imply acceptance of the view that the French bourgeoisie of the ancien régime had specifically capitalist characteristics, even remotely, or tendentiously. 33. Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory, 10.

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34. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 68. 35. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964), 39–41. 36. On capitalism and labour, see note 2 above. On the technical division of labour as part of the specific process of capitalist development, see Kristine Bruland, “The Transformation of Work in European Industrialization”, in The First Industrial Revolutions, eds. Peter Mathias and John A.  Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 154–69. 37. Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 905. 38. Ibid., 927. 39. Ibid. On Weber’s commitment to marginal utility theory as a basic principle of social analysis, see his essay “Marginal Utility Theory and the ‘Fundamental Law of Psychophysics’”, Social Science Quarterly 56 (1975): 21–36. 40. Weber, Economy and Society, 930–1. 41. See Weber, “The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe” (note 3), and the insightful discussion by Giddens in Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, 169–84. 42. On Marxist conceptions of mode of production and division of labour, see Chap. 6 above, Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, and Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”. 43. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. 44. Ellen M.  Wood, “Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism”, New Left Review 127 (1981): 73. 45. Even Anthony Giddens, who proposed rescuing from Marx “snippets” of “the more abstract elements of a theory of human Praxis” (A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 1–2), understands Marxism, and the bulk of Marx’s writing, in economic determinist terms. Melvin Rader’s Marx’s Interpretation of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) stands out among non-Marxist approaches for asserting that Marx’s use of the base and superstructure metaphor was subsidiary to a more fundamental social paradigm of “organic totality”. 46. Cohen’s ideas have played an important role in “rational choice” formulations of Marxism, especially as put forward by John Roemer. For a critical account of the relationship between this approach and Cohen’s version of Marxist historical theory, see Ellen M. Wood, “Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?”, New Left Review 177 (1989), 41–88, and her analysis in Democracy Against Capitalism. 47. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978); Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978). For critical accounts of, respectively, Althusser’s and Poulantzas’s approaches

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to Marxism, see E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory”, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978), and Wood, The Retreat From Class (London: Verso, 1986). 48. I have dealt with this issue in relation to both “orthodox” and structuralist versions of Marxism in Rethinking the French Revolution, 77ff. 49. For a fuller elaboration of the nature and context of these two paradigms than is possible in these pages, see Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 133–76; Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, 272–95; and Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 1–11. 50. Although this is a theme of all of the early chapters of this book, from several perspectives, it is central to Chap. 3. 51. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction”; “On The Jewish Question” MECW, vol. 3. 52. Frederick Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, MECW, vol. 3, 418–43. 53. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 241, 281. 54. Ibid., 270–1. 55. Ibid., 279. 56. Ibid., 281. 57. Ibid., 241. 58. Ibid., 297. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 293–4. 61. Ibid., 280. 62. Ibid., 271. 63. Ibid., 278–9. 64. One key issue to be addressed in this regard is fact that many societies have developed exploitive relations of production based solely on the state as appropriator of surplus, whereas at least Western class societies have been based upon the private possession of property. On the one hand, all such societies are exploitive, and have involved the reduction of the majority of the population to producers of surplus. On the other hand, there are profound historical implications that follow from the rights to appropriate surplus belonging to a class of individuals, who may compete with each other under the umbrella of (and even in efforts to acquire) state power. 65. Ibid., 298. 66. Ibid., 328, 329. 67. Karl Marx, “From the Mémoires de R.  Levasseur (De La Sarthe). Paris, 1829”, MECW, vol. 3, 361–74, especially fn. 117.

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68. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 477–519. It is Marx’s profound error in this regard, failing to carry through a critique of liberal historiography to match his critique of political economy, which is the subject of Rethinking the French Revolution. 69. Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, 272. 70. Ibid., 273. 71. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 482. 72. Marx, Capital, Volume IIII, 791. 73. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 34–7; Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974), 462–549; Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 124ff. 74. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 35, and Peasant-Citizen and Slave, 81–98. 75. On “pristine” states as the first enduring societies characterized by systematic structures of socio-economic inequality, see Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967). 76. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 33. 77. Ibid., 36–7. 78. See Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 108–45. 79. Brenner, “Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, 213–15. 80. See Brenner’s articles in The Brenner Debate and Wood’s The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. Also see my Rethinking the French Revolution and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53. 81. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution; “Quatre-Vingt-Neuf Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the French Revolution”, Historical Papers  – Communications Historiques (1989): 36–52; “The Political Context of the Popular Movement in the French Revolution”, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University Press, 1985), 143–62. 82. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave. 83. Ibid., 115–20; Democracy Against Capitalism, 264–83. 84. Wood, The Retreat From Class. 85. The “bourgeois” dual revolution—the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution—was a staple of classical liberal accounts of progress, and of orthodox Marxism. Perhaps its best-known expression—and in many ways one of the most admirable—is Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution. 86. Quentin Skinner, The foundations of modern political thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

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87. An entire essay could be devoted to such issues as a comparison of the way conservative and radical utopians have dealt with property and the state; the positions of non-socialist critics of existing society, such as Machiavelli and Rousseau; the peculiarly “modern” emphasis on property in Cicero; and the necessity for John Locke to provide a conception of the origin of property and its relationship to the state which differed fundamentally from the ideas of both Hobbes and Filmer. 88. See Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. 89. See Ellen M. Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s ‘General Will’”, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University Press, 1985), 117–39. 90. A. R. J. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth, in Ronald Meek, ed., Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), 123ff, 153; Rethinking the French Revolution, 195. 91. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 124–5, 154–6, 161, 188–9. 92. Durkheim, The Division of Labor, 353ff, 374ff. 93. George Santayana, The Life of Reason (London: Constable, 1905), 1: 284. 94. Karl Marx, Theses on Feurerbach, MECW, vol. 5, 5.

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———. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. ———. “The History of the Market.” Monthly Review 46 (July/August 1994): 14–40. ———. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. The Origin of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999. ———. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso, 2002. ———. Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. London: Verso, 2008. ———. “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production’.” In Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of Political Economy 150 Years Later, edited by Marcello Musto, 70–92. London, New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment. London: Verso, 2012. Wood, Neal. The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ———. “A Question of Method.” In John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism, 1–14. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. ———. John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. ———. Foundations of Political Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Wood, Neal, and Ellen M. Wood. A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688. London: Pluto Press, 1997. Zmolek, Michael. Rethinking the Industrial Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Index1

A Absolutist (monarchy/state), xvii, 4, 7, 34, 44–50, 61n32, 67, 70, 87n22, 147–148, 156, 165, 170–171, 295, 310 Agrarian capitalism, 18, 48, 71, 160–164, 178, 183n20, 306–307, 311 Alienation, xvi, xvii, 2, 11–15, 23, 25, 29n56, 38, 52–57, 75–80, 82–85, 89–95, 101, 115, 120, 135, 159, 171, 180, 209, 223, 247, 273, 299, 313 Alienation of labour, 2, 13–15, 22–25, 29n56, 38–40, 57, 79–85, 91–92, 99–103, 126, 129, 131–134, 141–143, 147, 208–210, 225, 247, 248, 252, 297–304, 312 Althusser, Louis (Althusserian), 89, 93, 117, 296, 318n47 Anatomy of the ape, 17, 203, 209–210, 225, 248, 287

Ancien régime, xvii, xx, 17, 44–47, 49, 50, 60n31, 61n34, 94, 165, 177, 201, 203, 209–210, 225, 242, 245, 248, 283, 287, 317n32 Anderson, Perry, 20, 30n73, 165, 220, 250–251 Aristotle, 8, 10, 33–34, 47, 49, 51, 73–75, 107n9, 130, 241–243 B Babeuf, Gracchus, 51, 53–54, 66, 155, 174, 179–180 Bakunin, Mikhail (Bakuninists), 84, 90, 258, 266–272, 274, 278n50 Bauer, Bruno, 1, 2, 12, 26n4, 55, 76, 77, 91, 92, 102, 118, 120, 127, 133, 156, 170 Blanqui, Louis Auguste/Blanquism, 266–267, 269, 271–272 Bodin, Jean, 33–34, 44 Bonaparte, Louis, 70, 255

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INDEX

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 4, 5, 26n11, 65, 69 Bourgeois/bourgeoisie, xiii–xiv, 4–10, 16–20, 27n18, 27n19, 28n32, 50–55, 70, 77, 83, 97–100, 105, 112–115, 125–128, 133–139, 146–149, 154–178, 182n9, 189, 194–195, 198–203, 207, 213–215, 219, 245, 248, 256, 287, 292, 307–313, 317n32 Bourgeois revolution, xiii–xv, xviii, 21, 27n19, 125, 145–149, 153–159, 167, 169, 178, 180, 184n38, 185n49, 195–201, 301, 302, 308, 316n11, 320n85 Brenner, Robert, xvii, xviii, 44, 48, 60n30, 61n34, 61n36, 69, 153, 160–162, 183n21, 194, 201, 208, 226, 228, 252n3, 276n17, 302, 306, 315n6 C Capital, xvii–xx, 2, 16–24, 37–40, 59n14, 86n5, 90–100, 106, 128, 129, 139, 156, 162, 166, 170–173, 178, 180, 183n23, 183n24, 190, 192, 197–200, 204–215, 220–228, 235–257, 271, 276n21, 283, 296, 302, 304, 314n3 Capitalism, xiv, xvii–xxi, 16–18, 23, 24, 26n10, 31n87, 35–57, 58n3, 58n7, 61n34, 61n36, 69, 71, 98–106, 108n18, 117, 119, 131, 135, 145–148, 152–166, 171–181, 183n20, 183n21, 187, 190–228, 235–252, 265, 281–290, 292–295, 297, 300–309, 311–313, 314n3, 314–315n4, 315n9, 316n22, 318n36

Capitalist social relations, xviii–xx, 2, 12–18, 20–25, 34–46, 57, 80, 83, 98, 100, 145, 154–164, 172, 177, 192, 204–210, 214–226, 231–232, 237–238, 243, 248–249, 261–264, 275, 281–285, 288, 300–306, 310 Carver, Terrell, 113, 116–119, 122n21, 123, 127–128, 130 Civil society, 10–11, 44, 51–55, 61, 70, 76, 91, 128, 136–137, 158, 170, 173, 224, 245–246, 310 Civil War in France, The, 279n65 Class antagonism, 14–15, 81, 99, 105, 145, 171, 242 Class exploitation, xix, 2–3, 13, 15, 23–25, 39, 56, 71, 89–92, 98–105, 108n27, 115, 126, 131–136, 144–148, 165, 171, 178–181, 188–201, 208–224, 235, 237, 249–252, 281, 297–305, 313 Class politics, 21, 113, 152, 159, 195, 256–259, 264–265, 272–273, 291, 308, 314n3 Class (propertied/landlord), 48, 53, 162, 166, 169, 178, 244, 249, 272 Class relations, 4, 13, 15, 43, 48–49, 57, 97, 99, 104, 108n18, 109n32, 117, 132, 134, 154, 156, 164–168, 178–179, 192–201, 215–220, 226, 245–250, 262, 281–282 Class (ruling/dominant), 48–49, 55, 68, 70, 104–106, 109n30, 109n32, 125, 146–148, 153, 165–168, 178, 307–312 Class society, xv, xvii, 12, 18, 24–25, 50, 56, 63, 92, 99–106, 108n18, 117, 130–137, 145–148, 154, 157, 163, 168–171, 177–181, 187, 193–200, 212–220, 225, 237, 247–251, 257, 281–285, 300–305, 314n3

 INDEX    

Class struggle, xiii–xv, xx, 7, 14–23, 28n32, 57, 67, 75, 80, 84, 94–106, 112, 115, 133, 147, 152–154, 159, 165, 170, 172, 177–181, 187, 194, 198–201, 216, 219, 235, 236, 244–248, 260, 281, 282, 297, 303, 308 Class Struggles in France, 15 Commodities, 13, 35–40, 59n8, 157, 183n21, 189–191, 220–232, 238–243, 299, 315n4 Communism, 3, 14, 25, 71, 81, 101, 107n9, 111–114, 120–123, 172, 199, 214, 224, 252, 298 “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 11, 52–55, 77–79, 85, 91, 246 “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” 12, 56, 101, 121 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 96, 188–189, 202n3, 218n9, 221–222, 248, 255, 286, 296 “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” 83 D Democracy, 4, 6, 11, 51, 55, 66, 78, 148, 154–158, 164, 174, 194, 242, 259, 271, 274, 308 Deutsch-Franzöische Jahrbücher, 2, 12 Division of labour, 9, 114–115, 125–126, 132–145, 189–196, 205, 288, 293–303, 312 Draper, Hal, 90, 107n4, 112, 148 E Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844 Manuscripts), 2, 12–14, 29n45, 38, 54–57, 67, 79–82, 90, 98–106, 108n16,

337

111–114, 119–120, 126–130, 134, 137, 141, 143, 146, 171, 178, 183n24, 208, 209, 214, 216, 222–224, 246, 296–301, 313 Economic determinism, 103, 145, 188–195, 236, 283–291, 295, 296, 306, 316n11 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The, 21, 86n5, 270 Emancipation, xvi–xvii, 1–3, 12–14, 21, 54–57, 65–85, 90–92, 95, 100–101, 107n9, 112, 117–121, 151, 159, 170–171, 179–180, 199, 224, 247, 258, 269, 273–274, 296, 303, 313 Enclosure, xx, 18, 160–162, 168, 176, 230–232, 244, 306–310 Engels, Frederick (Friedrich), 2, 12, 22, 27n19, 52, 56, 71, 76, 79, 90, 95, 97, 98, 102, 106, 107n10, 108n28, 111–144, 149n2, 151–159, 166, 169–173, 179, 183n24, 188, 191–199, 212, 216, 219, 255–257, 266–269, 271, 272, 278n54, 297 England, xx, 8, 18, 20, 24, 26n10, 34, 41–43, 45, 46, 48–51, 53, 61n32, 61n34, 61n36, 69, 71, 75, 86n7, 111, 120–123, 133, 154–176, 180, 182n19, 183n20, 183n23, 184n38, 228–232, 243–245, 256, 259–262, 264, 276n17, 300, 306–311 Europe/European, xx, 4, 6–10, 19–23, 26n10, 27n18, 27n21, 34, 41, 45–52, 57, 68–71, 97–101, 108n18, 108n28, 128, 144–165, 170–181, 186n56, 208, 212, 228–231, 242–252, 256–259, 265, 268, 275, 276n15, 282–289, 291–292, 298, 300, 304–312

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INDEX

Exchange-value, 15, 209, 232, 239 Extra-economic coercion, xvii, xix, 20–25, 48, 179, 211–212, 220, 281 F Feudalism/feudal, xx, 4, 8, 17–19, 27–28n21, 40–50, 61n32, 68, 69, 71, 86n7, 96, 105, 106, 140, 142, 147, 148, 160, 161, 165, 178, 196, 207, 210, 214, 215, 220, 224–231, 233n21, 236, 240, 245, 248–251, 253n6, 262, 284, 288, 304, 307, 316n11 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1, 2, 87n24, 87n26, 102, 116–118, 127, 128, 133, 301 First International, see International Workingmen’s Association(IWA) France, xiv, xvi, xvii, xx, 4–10, 20, 21, 27n18, 27n19, 29n42, 34, 41–53, 59n15, 60n18, 60n25, 61n32, 61n34, 61n36, 62n50, 69–75, 107n10, 111, 119–123, 133, 154–177, 183n20, 186n56, 228, 244–245, 260–265, 270, 277n22, 277n23, 277n30, 278n43, 283, 297, 307–310 Freehold, 86n7, 229–231 French Revolution, xiii–xvi, 1, 4–11, 27n18, 27n19, 41–45, 50, 52–56, 65–67, 69–72, 76–77, 86n5, 91–94, 102, 105, 108n19, 125, 128, 147–148, 153–160, 164–170, 177–181, 182n9, 185, 185n49, 194–196, 201, 242, 245, 246, 252, 253n5, 261, 270, 276n17, 296, 301, 312, 316n10, 316n11, 317n32, 320n68, 320n80, 320n81, 320n85

G German Ideology, The, 15, 89–90, 100–106, 112–147, 156, 187–196, 212–215, 301–303 Greece, xviii, 7, 10, 35, 47, 58n5, 168, 244, 250, 305, 308 Grundrisse, xvii–xviii, 15–17, 29n56, 30n62, 91, 96, 114, 138–139, 166, 178, 180, 187–192, 202n3, 203–217, 225, 237, 247, 255, 286–287, 293, 301–302 Guizot, François, 10, 20, 27n18, 27n19, 28n32, 30n74, 97–98, 120, 122n18, 125, 128, 155–156, 181n7, 182n10, 194, 237 H Hegel, G. W. F., 1–3, 10–13, 15, 23, 26n2, 28n32, 28n33, 28–29n34, 29n37, 29n38, 29n44, 46, 51–52, 54, 56, 61n37, 62n48, 63n56, 63n60, 67, 72–75, 77–78, 80, 87n21, 87n22, 91–92, 101, 107n9, 108n21, 120, 129–130, 156, 158, 163–164, 169–171, 173, 178, 182n11, 194, 204–206, 224–246, 254n30, 301, 310, 312, 319n51, 321n91 Hegelians, Left/Young, 1–2, 11, 15, 23, 26n1, 52, 54–57, 67, 74–76, 79, 90, 92, 102, 112, 116, 118–124, 129–130, 139, 297 Hess, Moses, 1, 2, 76, 90–91, 112 Historians, xiii–xv, 7, 9–10, 27, 53, 93, 97–98, 119–120, 133, 156, 169, 174, 184n38, 207–208, 217, 219, 235–236, 282, 291

 INDEX    

339

Historical materialism, v, xvii, 12–17, 54, 89, 93, 99–100, 104, 108n27, 118, 124, 126, 134, 136, 144–148, 177, 187–188, 193–203, 212–222, 238, 246, 282–285, 299–310 Historical specificity, 213–215 Historiography, xiii–xiv, 3, 7, 8, 98–104, 120, 125–128, 156, 301, 315n10, 320n68 Holy Family, The, 102, 112, 121, 123, 133 Hobsbawm, Eric, 16, 19, 24, 96, 99, 216, 217

Left Hegelians, 1, 2, 11, 15, 23, 52, 54, 67, 75, 76, 79, 90, 92, 102, 112, 116, 118–121, 123, 124, 129, 130, 297 Lenin, V.I. (Leninism), 153, 272–274, 279n69 Liberalism/liberals, 4, 7–11, 21, 27n19, 28n32, 48–53, 68–69, 104, 120, 126–127, 133, 154–156, 165–178, 196, 285–295, 300–302, 310–313 Lord/lordship, 14, 19, 28n32, 68–69, 86n7, 99, 105, 147, 160, 191, 211, 227–230, 249–250, 315n9

I International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), 21, 90, 247, 256–259, 264–268, 270–275, 278n54

M Machiavelli, Niccolo, 7, 8, 34, 46, 50, 321n87 Manifesto/Manifesto of the Communist Party (Communist Manifesto), xvi, 3, 14–15, 20–21, 27n19, 56, 80–81, 86n5, 90, 99, 104, 117, 126, 136, 151–181, 214, 220, 235, 257–258, 273, 281, 301–303, 320n68 Market compulsion/dependency/ imperative/regulation, xix, 36–40, 51, 158, 169, 205–206, 225–232, 243, 246, 283 Market imperative, 37 Market regulation, 36, 205 Marx, Karl, ix–xi, xiii, xv–xxi, 1–6, 10–25, 26n3, 26n4, 26n5, 26n6, 26n13, 26n14, 26n15, 26n16, 27n18, 27n19, 29n34, 29n35, 29n36, 29n38, 29n43, 29n44, 29n45, 29n54, 29n55, 29n56, 30n57, 30n58, 30n61, 30n64, 30n67, 30n74, 30n76, 30n77, 31n78, 31n79, 31n80, 31n83, 33–57, 65–85, 89–106, 106n3, 107n4, 107n5, 107n10, 107n12,

J Jacobins/Jacobinism, 4–9, 50–55, 66–69, 77, 84, 154–155, 159, 169–170, 174, 179–180 L Labour law, xx, 42, 52, 159, 175, 260–261 Labour-power, xviii, 146, 161, 165, 171–174, 178, 180, 211–216, 222, 225, 237–244, 298, 306, 315n4 Labour theory of value, 222, 239 Landlord, xix, 19–20, 68, 98, 146, 162, 167–168, 178, 183n20, 183n24, 230–232, 244, 249, 306–307 Lassalle, Ferdinand (Lassalleanism), 263–264, 267, 269

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INDEX

Marx, Karl (cont.) 107n14, 108n15, 108n16, 108n17, 108n21, 108n22, 108n23, 108n24, 108n27, 108n28, 109n31, 111–121, 122n3, 122n8, 122n13, 122n18, 122n19, 123–131, 133–149, 149n1, 149n2, 149n3, 149n9, 149n13, 149n16, 149n18, 150n27, 150n29, 150n30, 150n37, 151–159, 162, 163, 166, 169–173, 176–180, 181n1, 182n9, 183n21, 183n23, 184n34, 184n35, 185n42, 185n45, 185n46, 187–201, 203–217, 217n1, 218n12, 218n13, 218n14, 218n15, 218n18, 218n28, 219–228, 232, 232n3, 233n6, 233n7, 233n8, 233n16, 233n27, 235–244, 246–252, 252n2, 253n7, 253n16, 253n23, 254n33, 254n34, 254n39, 254n40, 255–275, 281–314 Marx, Heinrich/Herschel, 1, 5–6, 65–66 Marxism/Marxist, xiii–xx, 16– 24, 48, 53, 61n36, 93–96, 100–105, 107n10, 112–119, 124, 129, 144–147, 152–153, 158–160, 165, 173–174, 182n8, 183n21, 188, 192–201, 201n1, 208, 213–219, 226–227, 235–237, 251, 263, 266, 279n69, 282–313, 314n3, 315n10, 316n11, 317n28, 317n32, 318n45, 318–319n46, 320n85 Materialism/materialist, 9–13, 28–29n34, 72, 74, 90–103, 116–135, 139–145, 192–199, 213, 224 Meek, Ronald, 125, 288, 289, 316n10

Mode of production, 3, 16–25, 30n73, 41, 45, 96, 124–128, 134, 137, 142, 172, 188, 190, 205–220, 225–226, 232, 236–251, 259–260, 265, 281, 295–306 O “On The Jewish Question,” 2, 12, 55, 76, 77, 123 Open-field, 228–231, 245 “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” 12, 56, 79, 138–139 P Paris Commune of 1871, 247, 256, 263–273 Peasant/peasantry, xvii, 17–23, 43, 70–71, 86n7, 105, 146–147, 161–165, 168, 179, 205–206, 211, 227–232, 240–245, 249–251, 260–261, 306–309 Philosophy of Right, 2, 11–12, 29n37, 52–56, 72, 77, 91, 245–246, 310 Polanyi, Karl, 31n87, 46, 58n5, 158, 205, 240–241, 293, 315n9 Political economists/economy, vii–xix, 1–23, 35–39, 46, 48, 55–57, 67, 75, 79–80, 85, 86n5, 90–106, 111, 117–120, 125–149, 153–159, 162, 166–173, 178, 180, 183n24, 187–188, 192–227, 232–239, 246–256, 281, 285–290, 295–303, 310–313, 314n3, 320n68 Political Marxism, xvi–xvii, 235–236, 283, 306, 308, 315n6 Poverty of Philosophy, 102, 105, 192, 214, 301

 INDEX    

Precapitalist, xv, xvii–xviii, xxiin7, 17–24, 34, 41–57, 58n3, 96, 100, 105, 109n32, 128, 137, 147–148, 153–180, 185n56, 187–188, 194–195, 201, 206–220, 225–226, 237, 240, 244–246, 248–252, 262, 281–283, 295, 299, 302–308 Pre-capitalist modes of production, 128, 216–217, 219 Primitive accumulation, xvii, xix–xx, 17, 162, 183n23, 210, 226–228, 232, 244 Private property, 2–3, 11, 14, 19, 23, 25, 38–40, 48–49, 54–57, 71, 81–82, 88n33, 91, 100, 103–104, 111, 135–137, 142, 161, 168–174, 208, 215, 222–227, 297–300, 305–309 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 102, 175, 192, 214, 246, 265–266, 269, 278n46 Prussia/Prussian, 1–10, 29n42, 51–55, 65–66, 71–78, 107n9, 155–156, 182n9, 245, 263, 265, 270, 312 R Religion, 2, 4, 5, 11–12, 48–55, 69, 71, 75–79, 85, 88n45, 88n46, 89, 92, 94, 131, 205, 294, 298 Religious alienation, 75–77 Rent, 18–19, 30n68, 40, 70, 161, 165, 207–211, 224, 231, 240, 245, 249–251, 304–305 Republic/republicanism, 4–6, 49–56, 66–71, 76, 84, 91, 155, 179, 245 Rome/Roman Empire, xx, 2–7, 35, 49–53, 81, 298, 305, 309 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 23, 50, 54–57, 66, 69, 79, 82, 84, 86n2, 170–171, 289, 310, 312, 321n87

341

Ruge, Arnold, xvi, 1, 67, 111, 170, 182n9 Russia, 3, 22–23, 71, 97, 235 Russian Revolution, 95, 115, 151, 235 S Seigneurie/seigneurialism, 228–230 Slave/slavery/slave mode of production, 14, 80, 82, 98–99, 134, 136, 141, 212–217, 241–243, 256, 259, 265, 268, 282, 308 Smith, Adam, 9, 16, 39, 47–51, 114, 125, 134–141, 158, 173, 189, 192, 204–205, 237, 239, 244–246, 288–295, 302, 310 Socialist, 21, 51–54, 71–72, 90, 119, 121, 129–130, 149, 152–155, 159–160, 169–170, 174, 176–180, 187, 199, 263–272, 282, 291, 297, 303, 314n3 Social theory, xvi–xvii, 1, 3, 8–15, 21, 33, 46, 95, 104, 108n27, 113, 122n4, 123–124, 145, 222, 236, 238, 281–295, 301–313, 314n4, 315–316n10 State, xvii, 2–3, 10–13, 19–24, 27n18, 29n42, 34, 42–57, 66–85, 86n9, 87n22, 88n33, 91–92, 105–106, 133, 137–138, 153, 158–176, 188, 206, 211–215, 224–229, 244–246, 250, 259–265, 271–273, 283–284, 294–299, 304–312, 319n64, 321n87 Subsumption of labour to capital, xx, 36, 40–41, 59n14, 137, 232, 260, 276n21 Surplus-value, xix–xx, 16, 18, 24, 37, 41, 59n8, 95, 137, 183n21, 190–191, 198, 210–211, 222, 225, 232, 243, 249, 255, 283, 288, 298

342  

INDEX

T Tenant-farmer/tenant-farming, xix, 68, 71, 161–162, 183n20, 299, 230, 231–232, 244 Thompson, E. P., xx, 41, 59n17, 63n64, 164, 175, 183n23, 197–201, 216, 247, 283 Transition from feudalism to capitalism, 4, 17–18, 147–148, 201, 220, 226–227 V Volume III (of Capital), 18, 24, 95, 128, 166, 183n24, 210, 220, 226, 248–249, 281, 304 von Westphalen, Baron, 5, 66 W Wages, xix–xx, 12–18, 36–37, 57, 59n8, 59n17, 80, 82, 98, 105, 137, 157, 209, 220, 232, 246–247, 267–269, 288, 294 Weber, Max, xx–xxi, 35, 292–295, 299, 307, 312, 315n4, 317n28 Whig, 8–9, 97, 184n38

Wood, Ellen (Meiksins), xv–xix, 17, 24, 33, 37, 39, 44–45, 58n5, 61n32, 69, 138, 153, 160, 162–163, 183n21, 192–193, 203, 205, 207–208, 225–228, 242, 283–285, 295, 305–306, 308, 314n3 Worker(s), xviii–xx, 2, 6, 12–19, 36–44, 52–53, 58n7, 59n8, 59n17, 62n50, 66, 79–80, 83, 96, 99, 105, 137, 151–152, 159, 161–164, 168, 175–177, 183n20, 183n24, 200, 206, 209–210, 221–223, 243–246, 256–275, 278n43, 286, 288, 297, 306, 314n3 Working class, 13, 53–57, 67, 102, 113, 123, 130, 145, 151–159, 164, 171–180, 199, 216, 235, 246, 255–274, 297 Y Young Hegelians, 26n1, 55, 74, 76, 139 Z Zmolek, Michael, 276n17, 278n41