Capital and Social Difference in Gramsci and Luxemburg

Abstract

Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks are widely celebrated for their theorization of the political and of hegemony in capitalist society. We may also read the notebooks as works analyzing conditions where capitalist social relations are prevalent, but where pre- and noncapitalist social relations have only partially decomposed. This opens the way for situating them alongside Rosa Luxemburg’s less well-known writings, including her unpublished prison manuscript “Introduction to Political Economy.” Her analysis of the political and imperial dynamics of capitalist societies centers upon the question of the origins and formation of capitalist social relations. Although his prison notebooks suggest a capacious interest in global dynamics, Gramsci's focus is generally Italy, and the complexities of transition are thereby narrowed. By contrast Luxemburg’s writings on political economy—like Gramsci’s, left incomplete by her imprisonment and subsequent murder by fascists—consistently emphasize the historical evolution of distinct social formations, their geographical diversity, and the importance of the specific emergence of capitalist social relations from precapitalist societies.

Key Words:

• Capitalism
• Noncapital
• Antonio Gramsci
• Rosa Luxemburg

Acknowledgments

For comments and criticisms on earlier drafts, I thank Vinay Gidwani, Marcus Green, Peter Hudis, Bob Jessop, Will Jones, Geoff Mann, and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 On Marx’s conception of “primitive accumulation,” see Capital (1977, section VIII). On “double freedom” of labor under capital, see Marx (1977, ch. 6). A laborer is free in the double sense when they may sell their labor power as their commodity and have no other commodity for sale. On the capital/noncapital distinction among Marxists and its relation to forms of social difference, see Spivak (1985), Negri (1991), Federici (2004), Gibson-Graham (2006), Sanyal (2007), Gidwani (2008), Gidwani and Wainwright (2014), Karatani (2014), Fraser (2014), Anderson (2016) and Walker (2011, 2016). This list by no means exhaustive. It is noteworthy that while most of these sources cite and engage Gramsci, Luxemburg has been all but ignored in this literature (but see Fraser 2014). Of course, the myriad forms of social difference are not reducible to noncapitalism.

2 See Agamben (1993), Gibson-Graham (2006), Graeber (2014), and Negri (1991).

3 Though less well known, Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–87) is also a key figure in this intellectual and political genealogy. Given the breadth of her involvements—author of important works on Luxemburg, Marxist humanist feminism (Dunayevskaya 1991, 2002), one-time secretary to Leon Trotsky, political colleague of C. L. R. James, and so on—Dunayevskaya has received relatively little attention. For an introduction to her Marxism, see Hudis and Anderson (2002).

4 The complete notebooks (Gramsci 1975) are not yet available in English.

5 On Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, see Thomas (2009); on subalternity, Green (2011, 2013).

6 There is no complete, critical, English translation of Gramsci’s notes on economics (“traditional economy”) and political economy (“critical economy”); fortunately, most of his notes on these themes are included in sections of two popular collections of Gramsci’s prison notebooks (1971, §II.3; 1995a, §III and §IV), albeit in a different order than they appear in his prison notebooks. Some of these notes also appear in the first three volumes of Buttigieg’s critical edition of the notebooks (Gramsci 1992, 1996, 2007). For commentaries on Gramsci’s approach to economics, see Thomas (2009), Wainwright (2010b), Krätke (2011), Glassman (2012), and Mann (2012).

7 For references to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, I follow the international standard of citing the notebook number (Q#), note number (§#), then by the year and page number of the specific translation.

8 Gramsci addresses this theme in another essay (3 January 1920) with the same title (“Workers and Peasants”), where his analysis is closer to that of “Aspects of the Southern Question” (though he does not use the expression “Southern Question”; the phrase appears in his letters after 1923).

9 C.f. Gramsci (1978, 441–62; 2000, 171–85).

10 On Gramsci’s conception of space, see Jessop (2006); on Gramsci and the international, see Ives and Short (2013); on his conception of spatial unevenness, see Morton (2013); on Gramsci’s conception of territory, see Lee, Wainwright, and Glassman (2017).

11 On Luxemburg’s supposed “spontaneism,” see Levant (2012) and Geras (2015).

12 The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung is an international project of the German Left Party (“Die Linke”).

13 See Luxemburg (2004, chapter 9), Raya Dunayevskaya (1991), and Evans (2015). Although Marxists often emphasize Luxemburg’s gender—and there is no question that she was a feminist with important insights for our times—sex and gender are not the central theme of her writings.

14 This list is not exhaustive and is limited only to works published since 1975.

15 On the same theme, see Caloz-Tschopp, Antoine, and Romain (2018), published after this paper was completed.

16 While both clearly endorse Marx’s theory of value, there are gaps in their writings on this question. Luxemburg’s chapter on value theory from her Introduction to Political Economy is missing (see 2013, xv–xvi). Gramsci’s prison notebooks indicate that to elaborate his theory of critical economy would require carefully revisiting Ricardo on value and Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value (Wainwright 2010b).

17 Gramsci was familiar with some of Luxemburg’s economic writings, but not her “Introduction to Political Economy” (Hudis 2010; Krätke 2011).

18 Luxemburg: born 1871, imprisoned 1916–18, killed 1919; Gramsci: born 1891, imprisoned 1927–36, died 1937. Luxemburg therefore belongs to the generation that, with Lenin, found their hopes realized in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and died before its complete debasement. Gramsci lived through the failure of the revolution in the West, the rise of fascism, and—though kept unaware of its full consequences—the triumph of Stalinism.

19 For example, Luxemburg was more inclined to historical determinism: “As the common program of political action of the international proletariat, socialism is a historical necessity, since it is a fruit of the economic developmental tendencies of capitalism” (2013, 144).

20 Ives and Short’s (2013) philological study of Gramsci’s use of “international” destroys the argument (advanced, among others, by Germain and Kenny 1998) that Gramsci paid little attention to international politics. Lee, Wainwright, and Glassman (2017) contend that Gramsci’s conception of territory anticipates much recent work in critical political geography.

21 For her writings on nationalism, see Luxemburg (1976). Her position anticipated the postcolonial critique of nationalism by Partha Chatterjee (1986). Chatterjee’s critique, however, is advanced through concepts drawn from Gramsci and Althusser.

22 See also the critical English edition (Luxemburg 2015a).

23 C.f. Luxemburg (2015a, 286–303).

24 Luxemburg (2013, 89–300). A fraction of this text was published earlier (Luxemburg 2004).

25 I acknowledge my debt to Peter Hudis, general editor of the The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg—of which only the first three of fourteen anticipated volumes have been published by Verso (2013, 2015, 2018)—and author of several excellent studies of Luxemburg (Hudis 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014).

26 Note by Hudis in Luxemburg (2013, 234).

27 The sections that follow discuss “pre-capitalist forms of economic life” (Luxemburg 2013, 146–62), “the agrarian question [and] colonization” (226–34), and “transition to capitalism” (248–57). Space does not permit analysis of these sections here.

28 Lukács refers here to Luxemburg’s Anti-Critique (1972; 2015b), a response to the critics of her Accumulation of Capital (2015a).