Marx for Today

Marcello Musto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135700478
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the onset of global crisis in recent years, academics and economic theorists from various political and cultural backgrounds have been drawn to Marx's analysis of the inherent instability of capitalism. The rediscovery of Marx is based on his continuing capacity to explain the present. In the context of what some commentators have described as a "Marx renaissance", the aim of this book is to make a close study of Marx's principal writings in relation to the major problems of our own society, and to show why and how some of his theories constitute a precious tool for the understanding and critique of the world in the early twenty-first century.

The book brings together varied reflections on the Marxian oeuvre, drawing on different perspectives and fields, and argues its case in two different parts. The first will encompass such diverse areas and themes as political thought, economics, nationalism, ethnicity, post-capitalist society, freedom, democracy, emancipation, and alienation, showing in each case how Marx has still today an invaluable contribution to make. The second presents a complete and rigorous account of the dissemination and the reception of Marx's work throughout the world in the last decade. Both parts make a significant contribution to the current research on Marx and Marxisms.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Socialism and Democracy.

Introduction

Marcello Musto

I. Dominant Marxisms of the nineteenth and twentieth century

Few men have shaken the world as Karl Marx did. His death, almost unnoticed in the mainstream press, was followed by echoes of fame in such a short period of time that few comparisons can be found in history. His name was soon on the lips of the workers in Detroit and Chicago, as on those of the first Indian socialists in Calcutta. His banner image formed the backdrop at the first Bolshevik congress in Moscow after the revolution. His thought inspired the programmes and statutes of all the political and union organizations of the workers' movement, from continental Europe to Shanghai. His ideas changed philosophy, history and economics – irreversibly.

Yet it was not long before attempts were made to turn his theories into a rigid ideology. Marx's thought, indisputably critical and open, even if sometimes tempted by determinism, fell foul of the cultural climate in late nineteenth-century Europe. It was a culture pervaded by systematic conceptions – above all by Darwinism. In order to respond to it, the ‘orthodox Marxism’ newly born in the pages of Karl Kautsky's review Die neue Zeit, rapidly conformed to this model.

A decisive factor that helped to consolidate this transformation of Marx's œuvre was the forms in which it reached the reading public. Abridgements, summaries and truncated compendia were given priority, as we can see from the small print of his major works. Some bore marks of ideological instrumentalization, and some texts were recast by those to whose care they had been entrusted. This practice, encouraged by the incomplete state of many manuscripts at the time of Marx's death, was in some cases compounded by a kind of censorship. The form of the manual, although certainly an effective means of worldwide diffusion, also led to considerable distortions of his complex thought; the influence of positivism, in particular, translated it into a theoretically impoverished version of the original.¹

These processes gave rise to a schematic doctrine, an elementary evolutionist interpretation soaked in economic determinism: the Marxism of the Second International (1889–1914). Guided by a firm though naive belief in the automatic forward march of history, and therefore in the inevitable replacement of capitalism by socialism, it proved incapable of comprehending actual developments, and, breaking the necessary link with revolutionary praxis, it produced a sort of fatalistic passivity that contributed to the stabilization of the existing order.²

The theory of the impending collapse of bourgeois-capitalist society [Zusammenbruchstheorie], which found fertile soil in the great twenty-year depression after 1873, was proclaimed to be the fundamental essence of ‘scientific socialism’. Marx's analyses, which had aimed to delineate the dynamic principles of capitalism and to describe its general tendencies of development,³ were transformed into universally valid historical laws from which it was possible to deduce the course of events, even particular details.

The idea of a capitalism in its death agony, destined to founder on its own contradictions, was also present in the theoretical framework of the first entirely Marxist platform of a political party, The Erfurt Programme of 1891 of German Social Democracy. According to Kautsky's expository commentary on it, “inexorable economic development leads to the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production with the necessity of a law of nature. The creation of a new form of society in place of the current one is no longer something merely desirable but has become inevitable.”⁴ This clearly demonstrated the limits of the prevailing conceptions, as well as their vast distance from the man who had inspired them.

Russian Marxism, which in the course of the twentieth century played a fundamental role in the popularization of Marx's thought, followed this trajectory of systematization and vulgarization with even greater rigidity. Indeed, for its most important pioneer, Georgii Plekhanov, “Marxism is an integral world outlook”,⁵ imbued with a simplistic monism according to which the super-structural transformations of society proceed simultaneously with economic modifications. Despite the harsh ideological conflicts of these years, many of the theoretical elements characteristic of the Second International were carried over into those that would mark the cultural matrix of the Third International. This continuity was clearly manifest in the Theory of Historical Materialism, published in 1921 by Nikolai Bukharin, according to which “in nature and society there is a definite regularity, a fixed natural law. The determination of this natural law is the first task of science.”⁶ The outcome of this social determinism, completely focused on the development of the productive forces, generated a doctrine in which “the multiplicity of causes that make their action felt in society does not contradict in the least the existence of a single law of social evolution”.⁷

The degradation of Marx's thought reached its climax in the construal of Marxism-Leninism, given definitive form in Soviet-style “Diamat” (dialekticheskii materializm), “the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party”.⁸ Deprived of its function as a guide to action, theory here became its a posteriori justification. J.V. Stalin's booklet of 1938, On Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, which had a wide distribution, fixed the essential elements of this doctrine: the phenomena of collective life are regulated by “necessary laws of social development” that are “perfectly recognisable”, and “the history of society appears as a necessary development of society, and the study of the history of society becomes a science”. This “means that the science of the history of society, despite all the complexity of the phenomena of social life, can become a science just as exact as, for example, biology, capable of utilising the laws of development of society in order to make use of them in practice”;⁹ consequently, the task of the party of the proletariat is to base its activity on these laws. The concepts of “scientific” and “science” here involve an evident misunderstanding. The scientific character of Marx's method, grounded on scrupulous and coherent theoretical criteria, is replaced with a methodology in which there is no room for contradiction and objective historical laws are supposed to operate like laws of nature independently of human will.

The most rigid and stringent dogmatism was able to find ample space alongside this ideological catechism. Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy imposed an inflexible monism that also produced perverse effects in the interpretation of Marx's writings. Unquestionably, with the Soviet revolution Marxism enjoyed a significant moment of expansion and circulation in geographical zones and social classes from which it had, until then, been excluded. Nevertheless, this process of dissemination consisted far more of Party manuals, handbooks and specific anthologies than of complete texts by Marx himself.

The crystallization of a dogmatic corpus preceded an identification of the texts that it would have been necessary to read in order to understand the formation and evolution of Marx's thought.¹⁰ The early writings, in fact, were published in the MEGA only in 1927 (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) and 1932 (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology), in editions which – as already in the case of the second and third volumes of Capital – made them appear as completed works; the choice would be the source of many false interpretative paths.¹¹ Later still, some of the important preparatory works for Capital (in 1933 the draft Chapter 6 of Capital on the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, and between 1939 and 1941 the Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, better known as the Grundrisse) were published in print runs that secured only a very limited circulation.¹² Moreover, when they were not concealed for fear that they might erode the dominant ideological canon, these and other previously unpublished texts were subject to politically motivated exegesis along lines that were largely laid down in advance; they never resulted in a serious comprehensive revaluation of M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1.Introduction
• 2. Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity
• 3. The Myth of Twentieth-Century Socialism and the Continuing Relevance of Karl Marx
• 4. Change the System, Not Its Barriers
• 5. Emancipation in Marx's Early Work
• 6. Revisiting Marx's Concept of Alienation
• 7. Marx and the Politics of Sarcasm
• 8. The “Lesser Evil” as Argument and Tactic, from Marx to the Present
• 9. In Capitalist Crisis, Rediscovering Marx
• 10. Universal capitalism
• 11. Marx in Hispanic America
• 12. Marx in Brazil
• 13. Marx in the Anglophone World
• 14. Marx in France
• 15. Marx in Germany
• 16. Marx in Italy
• 17. Marx in Russia
• 18. Marx in China
• 19. Marx in South Korea
• 20. Marx in Japan
• Index