I’ve finished the last installment of notes on Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins for now. The other parts are here and here.
Anderson speaks of a multi-linear theory of history emerging in Marx’s work, which gradually displaces the unilinear concept that had characterized his earlier thinking. Anderson argues that this new line of thought begins to fully take shape in the Grundrisse. He quotes Raya Dunayevskaya, who notes that the “historic sweep” of the Grundrisse “allows Marx, during the discussion of the relationship of ‘free’ labor as alienated labor to capital, to pose the question of, and excursion into, pre-capitalist societies” (155). Similarly, Anderson contends, the “subtext” of Capital implicitly suggested “how the very existence of these noncapitalist societies implied the possibility of alternative ways of organizing social and economic life,” allowing Marx “to elaborate modern, progressive alternatives to capitalism” (181).
By raising the idea of a multi-linear theory of history, Anderson infers that Marx’s “excursion” is about far more than distinguishing the particular form of labor in capitalist society. Instead, as Dunayevskaya’s insight suggests, Marx was searching for a total conception of human history, where the successive alienated forms of social existence made up a single arc from so-called called primitive communism, an original egalitarian society with little social division of labor, to communism in its “higher phase”—a post-capitalist society.
Placing capitalism in relation to other modes of life that exist contemporaneously and in the past allowed Marx to historicize capitalism. Bourgeois thought naturalizes capitalist social relations, making their existence given, pre-determined and eternal. For this reasons bourgeois thought has a unilinear conception of history that sees the destruction of other types of society as progressive development. By historicizing capitalism, Marx is able to show how it is a transitional society, subject to historical development, generating the subjects whose activity constantly revolts against it and thereby brings it to an end. Humanity exists and has existed, Marx argues, in other social forms besides capitalist relations. Those modes of life serve as “alternatives to capitalism,” as Anderson puts it, precisely because they are social forms in which the relation between the creation of uses and their appropriation is not severed. There is a direct link between labor and the means of production. In many ways, therefore, for Marx this represents a qualitatively higher moment of realization of human existence than capitalist society, which destroys the connection to the production of uses and their direct appropriation by the producers.
For this reason Marx often drew attention to the retrogression of capitalism, nowhere more emphatically than the course of primitive accumulation. Anderson contends that when looking at colonialism in India in the early 1860s there is no longer any sense in Marx, as he was to note of the condition of Ireland, that “truly capitalist relations were beginning to develop in India, or that however painfully, some sort of progressive modernization was taking place; rather, there is a sense of reaching an historical impasse, as the old forms disintegrated without progressive new ones being able to form and develop” (165). This impasse is not limited to primitive accumulation. Capital not only periodically destroys the conditions of labor, ever increasing the level of exploitation of existing workers, but creates a massive surplus of laborers, separated from the land or other means or production yet who can never be regularly employed.
As an example of the relationship different forms of labor, Anderson cites a passage from Capital where Marx examines the kinds of expression found in the work of an Indian artisan as compared to that of the English proletarian. Anderson comments:
Thus, the Indian village system was on one level extremely conservative and restrictive, but on another level, it offered a type of freedom lost to workers under capitalism: autonomy in the actual conduct of their work. This existed because there was as yet no separation of the workers from the objective conditions of production. In this sense, the Indian craft workers—and their medieval European counterparts—exercised an important right indeed, one at the heart of the notion of what is lost when labor becomes alienated. (186)
The village artisan experiences modes of life and, therefore, freedoms unknown to the proletarian. At the same time, of course, the proletariat exists in certain ways far more free than the artisan or the peasant. Although the proletarian is cut off from any means of labor, she is also more free from constraints upon her social personality. Given capitalism’s constant revolutionizing character the proletarian realizes any number of newly created needs and, potentially, appropriate many new uses thereby significantly expanding the personality. As a result, for Marx proletarian existence is potentially far more many-sided than that of previous classes. As Marx suggested, the proletariat is the first truly global class, neither tied to a particular locality nor bound by particular traditions.
There is a dialectical movement between the complete separation of labor from the means of labor, the increasing social wealth of society and, therefore, the appropriation of that wealth as the realization of an expanding human personality. In contrast, the village craftsman creates a limited number of uses in a mode of production that produces for immediate use. However, in capitalism, capital deploys labor in order to produce surplus and not uses. There are no limits to the exploitation of the proletariat by capital in its necessary quest to achieve ever more surplus. This is the meaning of socially necessary labor time. There is an inverse relation between the separation of the proletariat from the means of production and its necessary struggle to appropriate the social wealth of humanity.
Again, Marx does not have a unilinear conception of the uniqueness of capitalist society. Its social relations are one form in historical succession of many others, which also exists along side these forms contemporaneously. It is capitalism that universalizes itself by looking back to precapitalist social relations as well as their continuing presence and finding there its own shadow. Therefore the connection between living labor in the value form and in the precapitalist forms is continually erased and obscured by capital and its interlocutor political economy.
Precapitalist societies are centered around the creation of use-values, which capital interrupts. Communism is the return of the production of use-values. Marx wrote that capital was “in conflict with the working masses, with science, and with the very productive forces it engenders—in short, in a crisis that will end through its own elimination, through the return of modern societies to a higher form of an ‘archaic’ type of collective ownership and production” (234). Thus for Marx the arc of human history is not a straight line but a spiral, which involves a return to the past, but at a qualitatively higher level where the variant historical and contemporary social permutations in the forms of labor that express specific sides of the human personality are now grasped as a totality and, finally, pregnant with the potential for expanded powers. Communism is a return of the past but without the limitations of that past.
In the last chapter of Marx at the Margins, Anderson primarily focuses on Marx’s “ethnological notebooks,” written from 1880-1882 toward the end of his life. What is significant about these writings, Anderson argues, is that they are “concerned not so much with the origins of social hierarchy in the distant past, as with the social relations within contemporary societies under the impact of capitalist globalization” (201).
A central part of these late writings by Marx was the careful study of the Russian peasant commune. Anderson shows how for Marx In concert with a proletarian revolution in Western Europe it was possible that “communal villages could be a starting point for a socialist transformation, one that might avoid the brutal process of the primitive accumulation of capital.” However, “to achieve a successful socialism, Russia would need connections to Western technology and above all, reciprocal relations with the Western labor movement” (196-197). Nevertheless, as the preface to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto put it, a revolution in Russia may not only serve as “the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other,” echoing his writings on Poland and Ireland, so “Russia’s peasant communal landownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development” (235). As Anderson concludes, Marx asserts the “possibility that noncapitalist societies might move directly to socialism on the basis of their indigenous communal fomrs, without first passing through the stage of capitalism” (224).
In response to the Russian communists who, in the name of Marx, interpreted Capital in abstract ways. Marx complained that they insisted on transforming his “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed” (228). The Russian marxists held that Russia had to pass through distinct stages of social develop along the lines of England, which was the central “case study” in Capital. The root of the notion of a deterministic historical development in Marx is summarized in the well-known line in Capital—which Anderson cites—that “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future” (177). Anderson argues it was exactly because of these kind of readings that Marx chose to alter this line. In the French edition of Capital from 1872, Marx alters the sentence in question to read: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it on the industrial path, the image of its own future” (178). Although, given the extent of primitive accumulation, the countries of Western Europe were following the general path of England, this was not so for other regions, still relatively untouched by the violent introduction of capitalist social relations.
The abstract reading of Capital ironcially turns historical materialism into a speculative science, creating a theory of history that unfolded deterministically as form empty of any content. As Anderson implies, in contrast Marx is far more historically concrete here, placing a specific kind of labor as developing on its own foundations. Marx argues that it is capitalism that lays the foundations for the peasant commune to leap into communism and, therefore, the commune need not be replaced by capitalist social relations as the precondition of communism.
In the case of the Russian peasant commune, Marx posits the emergence of communism as a synthesis between the Western proletariat and the rural commune. Anderson writes that for Marx “it might be possible to combine Russia’s ancient communal forms with modern technology, this in a less exploitative manner than under capitalism…a new synthesis of the archaic and the modern, one that took advantage of the highest achievements of capitalist modernity” (230). In Marx’s words it is “Precisely because it is contemporaneous with capitalist production, the rural commune may appropriate for itself all the positive achievements and this without undergoing its frightful vicissitudes” (230). In short, the negation of the value-form at the center of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is not the realization of a universal simply derived from the proletarian experience, but one arrived at by a qualitative leap of all the forms of labor, past and present.
