Marx for the 21st Century

Hiroshi Uchida

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415547697
• eBook ISBN: 9781134405619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

This groundbreaking collection surveys current research on Marx and Marxism from a variety of perspectives. Setting forward an unconventional range of questions for discussion, the book develops key ideas, such as the theory of history, controversies about justice and the latest textual scholarship on The German Ideology. Written by Japanese scholars, the volume affords western readers a glimpse for the first time, of the results of many years' debates and discussion.

Following the long tradition of Japanese interest in Marx, the book draws on the relationship between that and radical changes in local political context, as well as the economic and political development represented by Japan. Over the course of the chapters, Marx is rescued from 'orientalism', evaluated as a socialist thinker, revisited as a theorist of capitalist development and heralded as a necessary corrective to modern economics. Of particular interest are the major scholarly revisions to the 'standard' historical accounts of Marx's work on the Communist Manifesto, his relationship to the contemporary theories of Louis Blanc and P.J. Proudhon, and new information about how he and Engels worked together.

This landmark work opens up a world of Japanese critical engagement and lively scholarship that will appeal to anyone interested in Marx and Marxism.

Part I

Marx for the 21st century

1	Marx and modernity
	Kunihiko Uemura

Introduction

Everyone knows that Marx was a critic of capitalism, but what did he think about ‘modernity’? Was he the successor to ‘an incomplete project of modernity’, or a critic of it?

The shaping of modernity coincided with the genesis of the Eurocentric capitalist world system. The idea of modernity is obviously Eurocentric, though it also promulgates universality. It relates very directly to the capitalist world system; however, it should not be identified with the capitalist superstructure. The idea of modernity has three aspects.

The first is the ‘civil society’ model, consisting of free and equal individuals. This was established by social contract theories based on methodological individualism. It declared the emancipation of the individual from the restraints of older communities, and motivated individuals to participate voluntarily in social formations. However, it was an ideology that made social and economical inequality a matter of individual self-responsibility as well as social responsibility.

The second is the idea of ‘world history’ based on twin dualisms of ‘civilised/savage’ and ‘progressive/stagnant’. It put peoples and cultures into a chronological order and evaluated them by those dualisms. Therefore it justified ideologically the colonisation of ‘stagnant and savage’ areas by ‘progressive and civilised’ countries.

The third is nationalism, imagining the ‘nation’ as the highest form of being in the global inter-state system. In this way national identity generated a powerful, emotional fellowship based on the imagined sharing of language and blood, and it mobilised people to engage in warfare for ‘us as a nation’.

These three aspects are related closely to one another. ‘World history’ tried to prove European predominance over other societies by considering European ‘civil society’ as the latest stage of historical progress. At first it took the form of ‘the history of civil society’, for example, by Adam Ferguson. Then, in the age of nationalism, it metamorphosed into ‘the stages of national economic growth’, for example, in works by W.W. Rostow.

The aim of this chapter is to explore how Marx responded to these ideas. It is well-known that his life-work is a criticism of the capitalist theory of civil society found in Adam Smith as well as laying bare ‘the anatomy of bourgeois society’ itself (Marx 1996: 159). My goal is to make clear how Marx examines Eurocentric ‘world history’ and ‘nationalism’.

Is Marx an orientalist?

Was Marx a representative of Eurocentric ‘world history’, or a critic of it? Since Edward W. Said counted Marx among the ‘orientalists’, some have argued that Marx’s view of world history was obviously Eurocentric. Said pointed out that ‘Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient … can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx’ (Said 1979: 3). As proof that Marx was an orientalist, Said pointed to his notorious article on ‘the British rule in India’ in the New York Daily Tribune (25 June 1853):

We must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies … We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow … England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

(Marx and Engels 1979: 132)

There seems to be no room for defence. Said referred to this as ‘a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism’, and used Marx ‘as the case by which a non-Orientalist’s human engagements were first dissolved, then usurped by Orientalist generalizations’ (Said 1979: 154, 156). As a European of the 19th century, Marx could not have escaped a Eurocentric stereotype: ‘progressive or enlightened’ Europe versus ‘stagnant or superstitious’ Asia. Facing such criticism, we could hardly expect to get something new from a reconsideration of Marx’s view of world history. However, was Marx really an ‘orientalist’ in the first place?

In a letter dated 14 June 1853 Marx tells Engels that he has read a new book The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: Why it exists, and How it may be extinguished (London 1853) by Henry Charles Carey, an American economist. According to Marx’s summary, Carey insists that:

all ills are blamed on the centralising effect of big industry … But this centralising effect is in turn blamed on England, who has made herself the workshop of the world and has forced all other countries to revert to brutish agriculture divorced from manufacturing.

Regarding Carey’s characterisation of ‘England’s sins’ as ‘Sismondianphilanthropic-socialist anti-industrialism’, Marx continues:

Your article on Switzerland was, of course, a direct swipe at the Tribune’s ‘leaders’ (anti-centralisation, etc) and their man Carey. I continued this clandestine campaign in my first article on India, in which England’s destruction of native industries is described as revolutionary. This they will find very shocking. Incidentally the whole administration of India by the British was detestable and still remains so today.

(Marx and Engels 1983: 345–6)

Engels’s article on Switzerland appeared in the same Tribune (17 May 1853) about a month earlier than Marx’s first article on India. Engels argues there that the pastoral society of Switzerland, based on ‘a petty and sporadic sort of manufactures mixed up with agricultural pursuits’, is politically reactionary, because it is ‘among the least civilized populations of Europe’ and ‘stationary’ (Marx and Engels 1979: 87–8). Marx says in his letter that Engels’s article was a deadly blow to Carey and the Tribune’s leaders, who try ‘to counter centralisation with localisation and the union – a union scattered throughout the land – of factory and farm’ (Marx and Engels 1983: 346), and his own article was also an intentional criticism of them, rather like shock therapy.

Marx’s seemingly ‘orientalist’ side is therefore intentional and concerned with his revolutionary strategy, which insists that ‘philanthropic-socialist and anti-industrialist’ criticism of British imperialism is wrong. Marx criticises Carey again in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy of 1857–58. In the fragment ‘Bastiat and Carey’ he criticizes Carey’s ‘naiveté’ in mentioning ‘the destructive influence of England, with its striving for industrial monopoly’ and asserting ‘the harmonious cooperation of town and countryside, industry and agriculture’. Marx continues:

This naiveté apart, with Carey the harmony of the bourgeois relations of production ends with the most complete disharmony of these relations on the grandest terrain where they appear, the world market, and in their grandest development, as the relations of producing nations … If patriarchal gives way to industrial production within a country, this is harmonious, and the process of dissolution that accompanies this development is conceived in its positive aspect alone. But it becomes disharmonious when large-scale English industry dissolves the patriarchal or petty bourgeois or other lower stages of production in a foreign country … What Carey has not grasped is that these world-market disharmonies are merely the ultimate adequate expressions of the disharmonies which have become fixed as abstract relations within the economic categories or which have a local existence on the smallest scale.

(Marx 1973: 886–7)

Marx’s thinking is now clear for us. Carey is contradictory because he blames the British for their colonisation in India, though at the same time he is in favour of industrialisation and civilisation in England. In other words, the British colonisation of India represents a part of the worldwide violent dissolution of ‘pastoral’ rural societies (the primary accumulation of the capital), which had already occurred in England. Therefore, on the one hand, Marx appreciates that ‘Carey sees the contradictions in economic relations as soon as they appear on the world market as English relations’, but on the other hand, he blamed him for other faults:

As a genuine Yankee, Carey absorbs from all directions the massive material furnished him by the old world, not so as to recognize the inherent soul of this material, and thus to concede to it the right to its peculiar life … Hence both [Carey and Frédéric Bastiat, a French economist] are equally unhistorical and anti-historical.

(Marx 1973: 888)

The words ‘unhistorical and anti-historical’ here mean that Carey does not consider present ‘world-market relations’ in connection with the ‘real historic transitions’ that have already occurred in Europe. On the contrary, the word ‘historical’ for Marx means understanding actually existing relations genealogically. ‘In real history’, that is, with the genesis of capitalism in England, ‘wage labour arises … out of the decline and fall of the guild economy, of the system of Estates, of labour and income in kind, of industry carried on as rural subsidiary occupation, of small-scale feudal agriculture etc’ (Marx 1973: 891). At present, this same ‘history’ is repeated globally as the ‘dissolution of the patriarchal or petty bourgeois or other lower stages of production in a foreign country’ by English industry. Why is this so? Because, according to Marx, ‘the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself’ (Marx 1973: 408):

Hence, the great civilizing influence of capital … In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and national forces.

(Marx 1973: 409–10)

It is capital that destroys all the old modes of life and traditions and brings a revolution. Now we can easily understand that Marx’s first article on India was an application of this ‘universal tendency of capital’ theory. Marx is not an ‘orientalist’ as judged by his recognition of the capitalist world market. His paradigm is not ‘Occident versus Orient,’ nor ‘progressive Europe versus stagnant Asia’. It is not ‘us versus them’ in the first place, but ‘capital’ versus ‘modes of production preceding capital’. And from this standpoint, India is equivalent to present-day Switzerland and to England itself in former days.

World history as a structure

The ‘domestic combination of agriculture and industry’, which Marx sees as a general economic form in India and China, is not for him a typical Asiatic characteristic, but is rather observed generally in pre-modern societies. Marx himself says:

History shows that agriculture never appears in pure form in the modes of production preceding capital, or which correspond to its own underdeveloped stages. A rural secondary industry, such as spinning, weaving etc. must make up for the limit on the employment of labour time posited here.

(Marx 1973: 669)

The question for Marx is not a so-called ‘Asiatic peculiarity’ compared with Europe. India and China are dominated by the British, not because they are typical ‘Asiatic’ societies quite different from Europe, but because of their pre-capitalist modes of production, ‘whether in Hindustan or in England’ (Marx 1973: 885). On that point, Marx’s view of Asia is decisively different from the contemporary European view of Asia, for example, Hegel’s.

In The Philosophy of History, published in 1837 and then exerting a great influence on German intellectuals, Hegel says that in the Orient, especially in China and India, ‘every change is excluded, and the fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually, takes the place of what we should call the truly historical’ (Hegel 1900: 116). As for the political system, the imagined ‘Oriental despotism’, under which all people seem to be the emperor’s slaves, is compared with an ideal of Germanic freedom. ‘Stagnation’ and ‘despotism’ as a fate are the substance of ‘the Asiatic’ for Hegel. Thus he justifies the European colonisation of Asia in the name of historical necessity:

The English, or rather the East India Company, are the lords of the land; for it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans; and China will, some day or other, be obliged to submit to this fate.

(Hegel 1900: 142–3)

This amounts to a prophecy of the Opium War of 1839–42.

The object of Hegel’s description is ‘One Individuality as the Spirit of a People’ (Hegel 1900: 53), so he presumes the eternal nature of ‘the Indian’. Hegel’s thinking represents what Said calls ‘essentialization’ or ‘Orientalizing the Oriental for an indefinite time and with no alternative’ (Said 1993: 311). On the contrary, the issue for Marx is not the eternal nature or peculiarity of ‘the Indian’, but the village community system in India. Indeed, in his second article on India (8 August 1853) Marx insists:

The Hindoos are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labour, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery.

And then he also points out the possibility that ‘the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether’ (Marx and Engels 1979: 220–1).

If Hegel’s view of ‘the Oriental’ is a typical case of orientalism, Marx’s view of Asian societies is obviously different from it. Therefore, we can say that Marx’s view of world history itself is also different from Hegel’s. But how?

‘The so-called historical presentation of development’, says Marx in the introduction to the Grundrisse, ‘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’ (Marx 1973: 106). He insists that the theory of linear historical development is an ideology through which ‘the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to it’.

We can understand Marx’s intention most easily if we remember, for example, Adam Smith’s model of historical development. ‘There are four distinct states’, says Smith in his Lecture on Jurisprudence at Glasgow University of 1762–63, ‘which mankind pass thro’; 1st, the Age of Hunters; 2ndly, the Age of Shepherds; 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age of Commerce’. According to him, the age of hunters shifts to the age of shepherds ‘in process of time’, and then:

we find accordingly that in almos...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Index