I’m continuing my notes on Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins.
According to Anderson, Marx’s somewhat deterministic views of historical change in non-Western societies were significantly modified beginning with the Grundrisse, remained an important theme in Capital, which culminated in his Ethnological Notebooks and late writings on the Russian peasant commune. Anderson devotes chapters five and six to the conceptual changes in Marx’s thinking about the possibilities of historical development within communal, “precapitalist” forms of labor and land, and their relationship to the struggle of the proletariat. Anderson argues that instead of treating non-Western societies as an undifferentiated whole conditioned by a few key features, Marx begins to consider more seriously how these societies change through internal contradiction, develop various permutations, and in the process become sites of potential communist revolution. Such changes in Marx’s thinking have profound implications for his theory of history.
Typical of this change, Anderson tells us, is the growing realization by Marx that communal land need not necessarily be expropriated as private property in order to develop its productive power. As an example Anderson contrasts Marx’s extensive notes on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and Engel’s The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The comparison is significant because Engels based much of his own book on Marx’s notes. As Anderson writes, “Engels, who concentrated on the rise of private property, missed the possibility that collectivist forms of domination that minimized private property could also create very pronounced social hierarchies” (204, his emphasis). If such forms of social organization could develop within communal societies, for instance caste-type systems of social hierarchy, then so too could their alternatives. There was therefore the potential for what Marx called “ a more despotic or a more democratic form” of communally based society (157). Marx no longer saw communal societies as an undifferentiated and unchanging whole—as he had with India in the early 1850s—and began to give attention, writes Anderson, to the “broad changes in India’s communal forms,” suggesting that he no longer saw it as an “‘unchanging’ society without any real history, as in 1853” (209).
No longer seeing the capitalist privatization and modernization of communal land and labor as a necessary step toward the conditions for communist revolution, Anderson argues that Marx now saw in a positive sense that “communal social forms in Russia and Asia represented an obstacle and a challenge to bourgeois property relations” (205). With this in mind, Marx approvingly quotes from Russian sociologist Maskim Kovalevsky on the policy of the French National Assembly towards Algeria in the early 1870s. As representatives of the bourgeoisie, their goal was “[t]he formation of private landownership [ ] as the necessary condition of all progress in the political and social sphere. The further maintenance of communal property, ‘as a form that supports communist tendencies in people’s minds’ is dangerous both for the colony and for the homeland” (219-220).
In previous moments Marx’s stagist conception of historical development would put his theory—at least nominally—on the side of the French bourgeoisie and colonialists. After all, both saw the conversion of communal forms of land holding and labor as “progress.” Now Marx suggested the opposite. While the French capitalists and colonialists called their plans “progress,” in fact the bourgeoisie wanted to separate, as Marx again quotes Kovalevsky, “the Arabs from their natural bond to the soil to break the last strength of the clan unions thus being dissolved, and thereby, any danger of rebellion.” The breaking of the social basis of Algerian society was key to the transfer of land to the colonists and the creation of a labor force to work those landholdings. In the Algerian fight against French colonialism Marx saw a corresponding struggle to that of the Paris Commune. Anderson comments that Marx was making “a connection between those who suppressed a modern ‘commune’ set up by the workers of Paris and those who were seizing indigenous communal landholdings in Algeria” (220).
At the same time, Marx continued to contrast communally based societies, which remained “confined” to a “restricted level of economic and social development,” to capitalist society. Marx continues with the idea that the social relations and productive power of capitalism established the conditions to realize a “universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces” that was not possible in previous modes of production. As Anderson writes, quoting the Grundrisse, the revolutionary potential unleashed by capitalist society “stood in contrast to the ‘predetermined yardstick’ of precapitalist societies, with their fixed absolutes focused upon the past. Instead, the future-oriented modern human being, he writes, is engaged in ‘the absolute movement of becoming’” (159). Pre-capitalist modes of production and social relations, Marx says, inevitably produce local and closed societies that repeatedly reproduce themselves with little change. Universality, in terms of the potential of individual and social development, is not possible.
Marx does not abandon the idea that capitalist social relations lay the foundation for a communist society. He continued to compare capitalist to non-capitalist social relations in order to present a picture of what Anderson calls the former’s “perverse uniqueness” (181). Capitalism created a new class that was radically separated from the means of labor. Because of their closed off condition, isolated individual workers compete to sell their ability to labor to capitalists. Only through this act of exchange in the receipt of wages can these workers meet their needs. The proletariat is, then, alienated from all needs. It cannot realize any need except through reproducing its alienation as a means to obtain money in search of those needs.
Conversely, as Anderson reminds us, Marx writes that in precapitalist society “the individual does not become independent vis à vis the commune” (159). Here the individual is not completely shut off from the means of production and, as a consequence, Marx holds, “direct relations of dominance and servitude” prevail (183). What is the connection? The person is not separated from the means of labor and therefore the product of labor is not alienated from their activity. Further, because the means of production are considered communal property, a direct relationship to the means of production, for example a peasant to the land, means that the person’s existence is self-identical to a social role, for example a caste, or any clearly defined community such as a clan. In these circumstances, according to Marx, there is no standpoint from which the person experiences this role external to oneself. Exploitation appears directly in the form of a “natural” domination.
In capitalism, exploitation is experienced indirectly because, while nominally free, the working class is profoundly dispossessed of the means of labor. The working class is “free” to sell its ability to labor, or die, clearly no choice at all. However, the appearance of freedom underlies these relations because they are mediated indirectly through things, i.e. commodities, the most important, “universal” commodity being money. Unlike in precapitalist societies, according to Marx, here the means of production and the product of labor appear as external and dominate the person. There can be no self-identification on the part of the proletarian with the means of production and the product of labor, which conditions her struggle for freedom in unique ways.
Dispossessed of all direct ties, the proletarian is radically individual and, nevertheless, interdependent and conditioned by cooperative labor. Therefore, given its state of complete separation from the object of labor, the proletariat as individual and as a class conducts a relentless struggle to appropriate the means of production. While for Marx communal labor served as a basis for communistic struggle it was also true that there remained certain limitations in the development of these social relations. Communal forms of labor provided an obstacle to “the labor of an individual from becoming private labor and his product a private product, it causes individual labor to appear rather as the unmediated function of a member of the social organism” (161).
The revolutionary character of capitalism overturns all social bonds and anything fixed. It frees the individual only to reduce her to an automaton. Capitalism frees the means of production only to turn it into an apparatus of virtually unlimited domination. Such a condition is a terrible prospect, which for Marx makes capitalism the most exploitative and socially devastating society ever known. In precapitalist societies the extraction of surplus by the ruling class was consumed as a use-value. Despite their exploitation and oppressiveness, these societies continued to have the human being as the purpose of production. Conversely, the capitalist above all seeks unlimited surplus as its own end. The reproduction of human beings is incidental to his logic. For Marx, there is a universality and expansiveness about capitalism that precapitalist societies lack.
Yet such universality also contains tremendous potential that the proletariat, because it is cut off from it, is in struggle to appropriate that potential by realizing it in new social forms through a revolution. The productive power unleashed by capitalism potentially frees human beings from the problems of scarcity, but, importantly, lays the foundation for the means to collectively and individual expand, develop and realize human powers and needs in a way not seen in history.
Concluding notes on Marx at the Margins are here.