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ABSTRACT
Marxism involves a much darker and more complex philosophy of progress than is often thought. According to it, historical development is a contradictory process that takes place through the action of negative as well positive forces. These ideas are traced in accounts by Marx and Engels of the development of capitalism, and discussed critically with particular focus on Marx’s descriptions of the British rule in India. The charges that Marx’s concept of progress ignores environmental issues, that it is eurocentric, and that it implies a unilinear theory of history are discussed.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper from many people, particularly from members of the Marx Reading Group in Canterbury, including Shapan Adnan, David Gonzalez, Linda Keen, Stephen Perkins, and Veronika Stoyanova, and to the anonymous reviewers for International Critical Thought.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Sean Sayers is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Peking University. He has written extensively on many areas of philosophy from a Hegelian-Marxist perspective. His books include Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes (2011), Plato’s Republic: An Introduction (1999), Marxism and Human Nature (1998), Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge (1985), and Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (with Richard Norman, 1980). He was one of the founders of Radical Philosophy (1972), and he is the founder of the online Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (2010).
Notes
1 Cohen (Citation1988, 189n186) says that Marx and Engels later break with this “idealized conception of pre-industrial life,” but he is mistaken on that point in what is otherwise a very instructive article on these themes: Engels repeats very similar views later in his pamphlet on “The Housing Question” (Engels [Citation1872] Citation2010) as we shall see below.
2 There has been much dispute about this. For a recent account of the arguments, see Griffin (Citation2010, chapter 9).
3 Cf. Kant’s insistence that the idea of historical progress applies not to individuals but to the “species” as a whole (Kant Citation1970, 44).
4 I remember visiting peasant farms in China, and seeing how horizons barely stretched to the local city, let alone further afield. In 1985, I visited Guangzhou near the start of China’s industrial revolution, just as the impact of Deng Xiaoping’s policies were beginning to be felt. The main slogan at the time was “enrich yourself!” With a party of foreign visitors, I was taken on a tour to a village on the outskirts of the city that was rapidly being engulfed by it. We were introduced to a farmer who had proudly added an extra storey to his house as a mark of his success. One of our party asked if he had ever been abroad (a naïve question, foreign travel was all but impossible for Chinese at the time, even to Hong Kong which was only a couple of hours away). The farmer thought a bit and replied that he had once been to Guangzhou, which was barely over the horizon.
5 This is what Marx ([Citation1844] Citation2010, 332) refers to approvingly as Hegel’s “dialectic of negativity.” There are similar interpretations of Marx’s account of progress in Cohen (Citation1988) and Chattopadhyay (Citation2006).
6 Or in “Hindostan,” as he sometimes calls it, i.e., the whole sub-continent before Partition.
7 Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of production is widely criticised. See Anderson (Citation1979, 462–550), for a full discussion of these controversies. However, the precise nature of traditional Indian society and Marx’s account of it is not relevant to the larger themes on which I am focusing so I will not discuss it here.
8 Marx has been criticised for not recognising that there might be systematic obstacles to economic development (Amin Citation1976; Alavi and Shanin Citation1989), but discussion of this controversy is beyond my present scope.
9 The way in which Marx contrasts East and West in these articles has contributed to the charge of “orientalism” which I discuss below.
10 In this respect he is following Hegel (Citation1975, 140–145).
11 That is to say, like Hegel, Marx values progress for what Hegel calls the “spiritual” rather than for the purely material development that it brings.
12 There is a more extended discussion of these issues in Sayers (Citation2007).
13 Such charges have been made even by writers sympathetic to Marxism, such as Benton (Citation1989) and Gorz (Citation1994).
14 Of course, this is not peculiar to socialism, the same is true of capitalism.
15 I recognise that a great deal more needs to be said about this crucial issue.
16 E.g., in Marx’s ethnological notes (Citation1972), and Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State ([Citation1884] Citation2010), which is based on them. See also Anderson (Citation2010).
17 A phrase with what may appear to be questionable teleological implications.
18
19 “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked” (Marx [Citation1853] Citation2010b, 221).