Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism

Alex Callinicos, Stathis Kouvelakis, Lucia Pradella, Alex Callinicos, Stathis Kouvelakis, Lucia Pradella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351370011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the past two decades, Marxism has enjoyed a revitalization as a research program and a growth in its audience. This renaissance is connected to the revival of anti-capitalist contestation since the Seattle protests in 1999 and the impact of the global economic and financial crisis in 2007–8. It intersects with the emergence of Post-Marxism since the 1980s represented by thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, Ranajit Guha and Alain Badiou.

This handbook explores the development of Marxism and Post-Marxism, setting them in dialogue against a truly global backdrop. Transcending the disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, economics, politics and history, an international range of expert contributors guide the reader through the main varieties and preoccupations of Marxism and Post-Marxism. Through a series of framing and illustrative essays, readers will explore these traditions, starting from Marx and Engels themselves, through the thinkers of the Second and Third Internationals (Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, among others), the Tricontinental, and Subaltern and Post-Colonial Studies, to more contemporary figures such as Huey Newton, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin.

The Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism will be of interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, cultural studies and theory, sociology, political economics and several areas of political science, including political theory, Marxism, political ideologies and critical theory.

PART I
Foundation

1
FOUNDATION: KARL MARX (1818–83)

Lucia Pradella

Introduction

The history of Marxism is studded with attempts to go back to its foundations. Since Marx sees capital as a system that constantly recreates its own foundation, it is no wonder that his critique of political economy has become an inexhaustible source of answers to what seem to be the new questions of the present.

One of such questions concerns the idea of “globality.” Did Marx develop a critique of capitalism as a global system? And does he provide us with tools for opposing imperialism, racism and gender oppression today? The prevalent answer within contemporary Marxist and Post-Marxist debates is that, despite its global potential, Marx’s critique of political economy did not ascend to the level of the world market, and thus failed to overcome Eurocentrism and fully to recognize the agency of non-Western people (Chaturvedi 2010). While postcolonial scholars like Edward Said (1985), Gayatri Spivak (1999) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) recognize emancipatory elements in Marx’s work – his intuition of globality (see Spivak in this Handbook) – Marxist historical sociologists like the late Giovanni Arrighi (2007) and Andre Gunder Frank (1998) were more dismissive, up to the point of the latter denouncing Marx as a complicit supporter of Western imperialism.

If we read some passages from the Manifesto we could think that these criticisms are correct. How else can we judge Marx and Engels praising the role of the bourgeoisie drawing even the most “barbarian” nations into civilization, or Engels’s view of Slavic peoples as “people without history”? A new body of Marxist scholarship seeks to differentiate this early Marx from a non-Eurocentric “late Marx” (e.g., Anderson 2010). Especially from the late 1850s, they argue, Marx broke away from the Eurocentrism of The German Ideology and The Manifesto, and supported anti-colonial movements in India and Ireland, and the emancipation of the slaves in the United States and Russia. This interpretation draws on writings that have been largely overlooked in many postcolonial and Marxist debates, including Marx’s and Engels’s notebooks published in the new historical-critical edition of their complete writings (the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, MEGA²). But it raises two main questions, concerning, respectively, the status of historical materialism and the critique of political economy. Are the founding texts of the Marxist tradition irremediably Eurocentric? And did Marx break with Eurocentrism only in his late political writings or in his overall critique of political economy?

These questions are linked to a second area of debate between Marxist, postcolonial and feminist scholars, concerning the relevance of Marx for conceptualizing gender relations. It is widely assumed that women’s work is the blind spot of Marx’s critique of political economy (Werlhof 1988; Mies 1998). Marx’s Capital would not address the antagonism between capital and reproductive labor but would be mainly concerned with abstract labor, labor-power in the form in which it is useful to capital. This narrow focus on exploitation would close off the analysis of spaces of resistance (Bhattacharya 2017; Lebowitz 2003). We would thus need to expand our understanding of anti-capitalist struggles beyond the “traditional Marxist” canon. “Not just struggles between labor and capital at the point of production – for Nancy Fraser (2014, 71) – but also boundary struggles over gender domination, ecology, imperialism and democracy.” This view resonates with David Harvey’s (2017, 48) recent argument that we need to shift our focus from struggles at the point of valorization to those at the point of realization, which “trigger fights against predatory practices and accumulation by dispossession in the market place (e.g. against gentrification and foreclosures).” But what if it is the “traditional” struggle between wage labor and capital that has been insufficiently theorized or even understood?

This entry seeks to answer these questions by going back, again, to the foundations. It investigates what Engels deemed to be Marx’s two main discoveries: the materialist conception of history and the theory of surplus value. As is well-known, the first inaugurated a new way of looking at history that shifted the focus from politics, religion, science and art onto the relations of production and reproduction of social life. Despite the limited results of Marx’s and Engels’s concrete application of this approach in the mid-1840s, in the next section I argue that the lifelong research program they inaugurated then laid the basis for overcoming the problem of Eurocentrism. This point is relevant fully to grasp the scope of Marx’s theory of surplus value. By explaining how the exploitation of labor works within capitalism, for Marx, the theory of surplus value was the “pivot” of his critique of political economy (C I: 132), the Cartesian point that revolutionizes our understanding of capitalism as a global system. In the third section, I challenge narrow interpretations of the antagonism between wage labor and capital, and argue that, for Marx, this antagonism shapes the overall relationship between humankind and nature. His analysis of capitalist reproduction, I argue in the fifth and sixth sections, provides us with tools for conceptualizing the imperialist and gendered nature of processes of capital accumulation on a global scale. These aspects of Marx’s work, I conclude, are crucial to thinking about the class struggle, both yesterday and today.

Historical Materialism

In the collection of manuscripts that then became the founding text of historical materialism, The German Ideology, Marx and Engels sought to “settle accounts with [their] former philosophical conscience” (MECW 29: 264). Through different paths, they came to recognize both the centrality of production relations and the validity of the labor theory of value. Marx’s and Engels’s personal trajectories reflect broader historical and intellectual developments. As Ronald Meek (1976) highlighted, the materialistic approach to history was elaborated within the Scottish Enlightenment alongside the labor theory of value. The revolution in production relations from the late 18th century onwards pushed the theorists of the French and Scottish Enlightenment to understand the impact of different “modes of subsistence” on human societies. By looking at capitalism (or commercial society) as a specific mode of subsistence among others, classical political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were able to conceptualize its historical specificity. They thus grasped the role of labor in determining the value of commodities and the importance of class antagonisms in history. Because of their own class interests, however, classical economists did not push this analysis further and ended up naturalizing bourgeois relations, smuggling them in “as the inviolable natural laws” of society in the abstract (G: 87). Europe appeared as the telos and endpoint of historical progress, in a teleological framework that deeply informs also Hegel’s philosophy of history (Pradella 2015).

Even when Marx embraced Ludwig Feuerbach’s attempt to “put Hegel on his feet,” he did so in a way that was deeply influenced by Hegel’s critique of immediacy. Marx did not take as his starting point the human essence as revealed in sense-experience, as Feuerbach suggested: such human essence, Marx believed, is created through labor and our sense-experience is mediated by the totality of social relations. While Marx initially grounded his analysis of capitalist social relations in his critique of the alienation of workers from their activity and species being (MECW 3: 270–71), The German Ideology shifted the focus onto the spheres of production and reproduction of social life. It is “the mode of production of material life,” a given society’s “forms of intercourse” (Verkehrsform) – Marx and Engels there proclaimed – that “conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life,” not vice versa (MECW 29: 263).¹ Different “forms of intercourse,” in their view, give rise to different “forms of ownership.” This new approach marked a real turning point. By historicizing private property, in fact, Marx and Engels undermined the naturalization of capitalism by the classical political economists and reclaimed society as an object of study transcending capitalism and the state, bringing back class antagonisms into the picture (MECW 5: 46, 89; Levine 1987, 433, 436).

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels already traced a relationship between class antagonisms and gender oppression. “Civil society,” in their view, stemmed out of the family, in its simple and more complex forms, the so-called tribal order. “The latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first form of property” (MECW 5: 51–52), followed by the ancient (Greek–Roman) “communal and state property,” the “feudal and estate property” and the capitalist one (MECW 5: 32–35). Although in their further studies Marx and Engels questioned the idea of the patriarchal origin of the family and a “natural” division of labor between the sexes, it is remarkable that The German Ideology already established a link between relations of production and reproduction (Brown 2012, 43). Even if their sequence of “forms of ownership” is focused on Europe, moreover, this does not imply a Eurocentric approach (see, for example, John Hobson’s critique in Hobson 2013). As Eric Hobsbawm (1964, 28) argued, in fact, Marx and Engels do not suggest any logical connection between Roman and tribal (German) institutions and the feudal form, but only note a relation of succession, whereby “feudalism appears to be an alternative evolution out of primitive communalism.” The German Ideology rather contains an embryonic attempt to contextualize the emergence of capitalism in Europe within a unified process of human development in ways that anticipate studies of global and connected histories (e.g., Subrahmanyam 1997; Washbrook 1997; Williams 1944).

Marx and Engels were so convinced of the necessity of adopting a global perspective that they understood historical materialism itself as an approach to world history made possible by the development of global interconnections. “The more the original isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the advanced mode of production, by intercourse and by the natural division of labor between various nations arising as a result,” they argued, “the more history becomes world history” (MECW 5: 50–51). It is thus no surprise that the development of the class struggle would push this global approach further. Already in the mid-1840s Marx paid great attention to the relationship between capitalism and colonialism, situating the industrial revolution in Britain within a global context. He investigated the role of Atlantic slavery and the Triangular Trade in financing the European commercial presence in the Indian Ocean between the 16th and the 19th centuries, when protective measures were crucial to defending British manufacturing from Asian competition (MECW 12: 148–56; C I: 921–22). Marx not only considered the importance of Indian and Chinese markets to the development of capitalism in Europe. He also paid great attention to the global consequences of the industrial revolution, tracing the social effects of deindustrialization from America to Africa, the Middle East to Asia (Marx 1983, 99, 318, 326–27, 477).

In these notebooks, however, Marx mainly studied the capitalist mode of production, only looking at how pre-capitalist societies were affected by its development. This focus depended, in my view, on Marx’s and Engels’s belief at the time that industrial development inevitably depressed the wages of the industrial working class (Lapides 1998). Since trade union mobilization could not do anything against this “iron law of wages,” workers’ economic struggles were bound to radicalize and aim at overthrowing the system. If capitalism was impoverishing workers worldwide and subordinating entire nations under its system of division of labor, the same system had laid the conditions for its supersession. The industrial proletariat was a revolutionary class not mainly because of its negative position within the system, but because of the power deriving from its role in production. By concentrating workers in large-scale industries and urban centers, the bourgeoisie was producing its own “grave-diggers”: the men and women who were to put an end to class society, emancipating the entire humankind, including the colonies. Marx and Engels now saw the revolutionary process as the result of the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the social relations in which such development takes place. This does not mean that social revolution was seen as the necessary outcome of these contradictions but that it is against this crisis-ridden backdrop that the class struggle, and the role of the communist party, need to be understood (Callinicos 2004, 106).

Things changed after 1848. The economic boom that followed the 1847 economic crisis in Europe and the defeat of the 1848 revolutions put in question Marx’s and Engels’s economic pessimism. At the same time, the growth of anti-colonial movements throughout Asia undermined their passive view of non-European peoples, pushing them to widen their gaze beyond Europe. In their Neue Rheinische Zeitung Review at the beginning of 1850 Marx and Engels welcomed the prospect of social upheaval in China (MECW 10: 266–67). In his 1853 articles for the New York Tribune, Marx for the first time supported popular struggles in Asia against colonial domination, and enthusiastically welcomed the “formidable revolution” of the Taiping (1850–64). In the London Notebooks (1850–53), moreover, he developed the materialistic method and applied it to the study of pre-capitalist societies (Rein 1988, 9). He investigated communal property relations and forms of resistance to colonial expansion, and studied the history of the family, women’s condition and culture. This shows that Marx’s materialist approach did not disregard culture and gender relations (Pradella 2015). Thanks to his investigations into the structure and politics of the Indian communities, moreover, Marx challenged the dualistic conception of a despotic “East” and a democratic “West” that prevailed at the time in Europe. Questioning the view, which he had himself entertained, that in the “East” the sovereign was the absolute owner of the land, Marx came to the conclusion that the Asiatic mode of production was based on a kind of common ownership more resistant to the evolution of private property than the Greek, Roman and Germanic forms (Marx’s letter to Engels of 14 June 1853 in MECW ...