Marx’s Theory on the Dialectical Function of Capitalism

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Marx’s conviction that the expansion of the capitalist mode of production was a basic prerequisite for the birth of communist society. It overviews this idea through the whole of Marx’s oeuvre, from his early political writings to the studies of the last decade. Particular relevance is given to the analysis of Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, where Marx highlighted in depth the fundamental relationship between the productive growth generated by the capitalist mode of production and the preconditions for the communist society for which the workers’ movement must struggle. Finally, the article shows that in the end of his life—for example when he studied the possible developments of the rural commune (obshchina) in Russia—Marx did not change his basic ideas about the profile of future communist society, as he sketched it from the Grundrisse on. Guided by hostility to schematism he thought it might be possible that the revolution would break out in forms and conditions that had never been considered before.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• communism
• modes of production
• orientalism
• Russia

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the studies conducted by Marx in this period see Musto (2010).

2 See also “Marx’s letter to Engels of 14 June 1853,” in which, though maintaining that “the whole administration of India by the British was detestable and remains so today,” he told his friend that in a press article he had described “England’s destruction of native industries” as “revolutionary.” The New York Tribune article in question prompted Edward Said not only to argue that “Marx’s economic analyses are perfectly fitted [. . .] to a standard Orientalist undertaking,” but also to insinuate that they depended on the “age-old distinction between Orient and Occident” (Said 1995, 154). In reality, Said’s reading of Marx’s work was one-sided and superficial. The first to bring out the flaws in his interpretation was Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (1934–2016), who, in an article “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse” wrote: “This account of Marx’s views and analyses of highly complex historical processes and situations is a travesty. [. . .] There is nothing specific to either Asia or the Orient in Marx’s” body of work (al-Azm 1980, 14–15). With regard to “productive capacities, social organization, historical ascendancy, military might and technological development, [. . .] Marx, like anyone else, knew of the superiority of modern Europe over the Orient. But to accuse him [. . . ] of turning this contingent fact into a necessary reality for all time is simply absurd” (al-Azm 1980, 15–16). Similarly, Aijaz Ahmad in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, well demonstrated how Said “decontextualized quotations” from Marx’s work, with little sense for what the passage in question represented, simply in order to slot them into his “Orientalist archive” (Ahmad 1992, 231, 223). Against the idea of Marx’s supposed Eurocentrism, see also Irfan Habib, “Marx’s Perception of India” (2006). At any event, Marx’s articles of 1853 offer a still very partial and simplistic vision of colonialism, when compared with the reflections that he subsequently developed on the matter.

3 Marx was referring to Armand Barbès (1809–1870), François Raspail (1794–1878) and Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881).

4 See John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes (1835, 122–132), where he asserts that “the division of employment saves time” (Wade 1835, 123). Marx copied extracts from Wade’s work as early as 1845, see Marx (1988b, 288–301; 1988c, 303–308). The most striking lines are those such as the following: “An employment reduced to its minimum of simplicity must leave the mind at leisure for reflection and conversation; and these are the effects known to be produced in many manufactories” (Marx 1988b, 288).

5 According to Ranajit Guha,

this eloquent passage, taken in isolation from the great body of its author’s critique of capital, would make him indistinguishable from any of the myriad nineteenth-century liberals who saw nothing but the positive side of capital. [. . .] Read in its proper context, however, [it] is to be understood as nothing but the initial movement of a developed critique. (Guha 1997, 15–16)

The founder of the journal Subaltern Studies here targeted a misguided and superficial position which, paradoxically, was adopted by many of Marx’s epigones: “Some of Marx’s writings—certain passages from his well-known articles on India, for instance—have indeed been read in isolation and distorted to the point of reducing his evaluation of the historic possibilities of capital into the adulation of a technomaniac.” In Guha’s view, Marx’s critique “distinguished itself unequivocally from liberalism,” and appears all the more forceful if we consider that it was developed in an “ascendant and optimistic phase,” when capital “was growing from strength to strength and there seemed to be no limit to its expansion and capacity to transform society” (Guha 1997, 15–16).

6 On the making of Capital, see Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Musto 2018, 137–168). On Marx’s magnum opus, see also Musto’s recent Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism (2019).

7 In a similar earlier passage in volume one of Capital, Marx listed in almost the same way five of the six questions mentioned here:

how the development of the social productivity of labour presupposes cooperation on a large scale; how the division and combination of labour can only be organized on that basis, and the means of production economized by concentration on a vast scale; how instruments of labour which, by their very nature, can only be used in common, such as systems of machinery, can be called into existence; how gigantic natural forces can be pressed into the service of production; and how the production process can be transformed into a process of the technological application of scientific knowledge. (Marx 1992a, 775)

On the theme of the global dimension of the capitalist mode of production, see Marx’s letter to Engels of October 8, 1858, in which he stated that “the proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of production based on that market” (Marx and Engels 1983, 347).

8 In In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), Ahmad correctly observed that “Marx’s denunciation of pre-colonial society in India is no more strident than his denunciations of Europe’s own feudal past” (Ahmad 1992, 224). For Marx, he continues, the idea of a progressive role for colonialism was linked to the idea of a progressive role for capitalism in relation to what existed before it, “within Europe as much as outside it” (225–226); “the destruction of the European peasantry in the course of primitive accumulation” is “described in similar tones to the changes that took place in India” (227).

9 See Marx’s letter to Engels of December 7, 1867, in which he listed for his friend (who was preparing a review of Capital) the main arguments in his work that he would like to see mentioned. He also saw Capital as useful in demonstrating that “present society, economically considered, is pregnant with a new, higher form.” Following what today may appear a far-fetched comparison of his discoveries to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Marx claimed that his work showed there was “hidden progress even where modern economic relations are accompanied by frightening direct consequences.” Owing to his “critical approach” and “perhaps in spite of himself,” he had “sounded the death-knell to all socialism by the book, i.e., to utopianism, for evermore.” In the end, what stands out most from the phrases that he suggested to Engels is the conviction he had developed of the importance of capitalism, as if it was something absolutely evident: “whereas Mr. Lassalle hurled abuse at the capitalists and flattered the backwoods Prussian squirearchy, Mr Marx, on the contrary, shows the historical ‘necessity’ of capitalist production” (Marx and Engels 1987, 494).

10 On the life of the so-called “First International” and on the political role of Marx in this organization, see Musto (2014).

11 In a letter of 29 July 1879 to Carlo Cafiero, Marx complimented the Italian revolutionary on his compendium of extracts from volume one of Capital. However, he also noted that his preface contained “an apparent gap”: “there is no proof that the material conditions indispensable to the emancipation of the proletariat are engendered in spontaneous fashion by the progress of capitalist production” (Marx and Engels 1991, 366).

12 We should not forget that the Grundrisse, which was not intended for publication, was written in the special climate of 1857–1858, when the first global economic crisis in history was under way. See Marcello Musto, “History, Production and Method in the ‘1857 Introduction’” (2008, 3–32).

13 On Marx’s response to Mikhailovsky, see Musto (2020b, 59–65).

14 The text was reworked a couple of times, but in the end it was left as a draft, with signs of a number of deletions. The letter was never actually sent, but it contained interesting foretastes of the arguments that Marx would later use.

15 See also Le Capital (Marx 1989h, 634). This addition to the original 1867 edition, which Marx introduced when revising the French translation of his book, was not included by Engels in the fourth German edition of 1890, which later became the standard version for translations of Capital. Maximilien Rubel called this “one of the most important additions to this chapter” of Capital: see Œuvres. Économie I (Marx 1963, 1701). The edition published by Engels states: the history of primitive accumulation “assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form.” (Marx 1992a, 876).

16 “Letter to Otechestvennye Zapiski” (Marx 1989a, 200). On the completion of the second section of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²), see Musto (2020c).

17 In the French edition, Marx slightly restricted the scope of this phrase: “Le pays le plus développé industriellement ne fait que montrer à ceux qui le suivent sur l’échelle industrielle de leur propre avenir” (Marx 1989h, 12). In his Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Dipesh Chakrabarty misinterprets this passage as a typical example of historicism that follows the principle of “first in Europe, then elsewhere” (Chakrabarty 2000, 7). He further presents the “ambiguities in Marx’s prose” as characteristic of those who regard “history as a waiting room, a period that is needed for the transition to capitalism at any particular time and place. This is the period to which [. . .] the third world is often consigned” (Chakrabarty 2000, 65). At any event, Neil Lazarus has rightly pointed out that “not all historical narrativization is teleological or ‘historicist”’ (Lazarus 2002, 63).

18 In the final text that he sent to Zasulich, Marx’s considerations were decidedly more concise, and his tone more cautious, than in the preliminary drafts. This probably indicates that he thought his treatment of such a complex question was still too superficial, and that some theoretical uncertainties continued to hound him. In reality, the multiple drafts indicate how much time he had devoted to the matter, without resolving it in a way that satisfied him. See Musto (2020b, 65–74).

19 See also Lewis Morgan: “It will be a revival in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes,” extracted and copied by Marx in The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Krader 1972, 159).

20 See the argument in Late Marx and the Russian Road (Shanin 1983, 60) that the drafts showed a “significant change” since the publication of Capital in 1867. Similarly, Enrique Dussel speaks of a “break” in El último Marx (1863–1882) y la liberación latinoamericana (1990, 230, 237). Other authors have suggested a “third-worldist” reading of the last Marx, in which the revolutionary subject is no longer factory workers but the masses in the countryside and the periphery.

21 See Marian Sawer’s excellent work Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production:

What happened, in the 1870s in particular, was not that Marx changed his mind on the character of the village communities, or decided that they could the basis of socialism as they were; rather, he came to consider the possibility that the communities could be revolutionized not by capitalism but by socialism. [. . .] He does seem to have entertained seriously the hope that with the intensification of social communication and the modernization of production methods the village system could be incorporated into a socialist society. In 1882 this still appeared to Marx to be a genuine alternative to the complete disintegration of the obshchina under the impact of capitalism. (Sawer 1977, 67)

22 For a further discussion of this topic, see also “the letter from Marx to Danielson on 19 February 1881” (Marx and Engels 1992).

23 Marx is therefore very different from most of his followers on this. Partha Chatterjee described this well in his book The Politics of the Governed: Popular Politics in Most of the World: “Marxists have, in general, believed that the sway of capital over traditional community was the inevitable sign of historical progress” (Chatterjee 2004, 30).

24 In Marx and Latin America, José Arico observes that Marx contemplated the possibility of a revolution in the colonial world that, unlike the one that he had hypothesized before 1848, would not now depend on the revolutionary political action of the popular classes of the metropolis, but rather would itself decisively condition both capitalist development in the central countries and the outbreak of proletarian revolution in Europe (Arico 2014, 18–19). Sawer observed that Marx was also interested in the non-Western world from the point of view of its role in prolonging the life of European capitalism. This argument became particularly important to Marx and Engels in and after 1850, with the disappointment of their early revolutionary hopes (Sawer 1977, 42).

25 Arico in Marx and Latin America puts too much emphasis on his own arguments when he suggests that the “Irish case” had represented a “strategic turn” for Marx. If it were true that Ireland “led Marx to pay ever-greater attention to the peripheral countries” (Arico 2014, 25), this attention only led Marx to develop a more “open mind towards the new phenomena in the world driven by the universalization of capitalism” (20). His views on the socialist revolution continued to recognize the centrality of the struggle of the workers.

26 Lawrence Krader argues that Marx’s divisions of human history, which were the subject of extensive theoretical elaboration over his lifetime, at the end opted for a “multilinear and not unlinear” movement through time, composed of “historical lines among different peoples. While these were set forth in a tentative way in the works composed in the period 1857–1867, they were set forth more definitively, although still not finally, by him in the period 1879–1881” (Krader 1975, 139).

27 See also Musto’s chapter “Communism” in The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (2020a, 24–50).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Partnership Development Grant [Grant Number 890-2020-0091].

Notes on contributors

Marcello Musto

Marcello Musto is Professor of Sociology at York University (Toronto, Canada). Among his authored books there are Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford University Press, 2020), and Travels of Karl Marx: Destinations, Encounters and Reflections (Europa Editions, forthcoming 2022). Among his edited volumes there are Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (Routledge, 2008), Marx for Today (Routledge, 2012), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury, 2014), Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism (Routledge, 2019), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary (Palgrave, 2019), The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation (Palgrave, 2021), and Rethinking Alternatives with Marx: Economy, Ecology and Migration (Palgrave, 2021). His writings are available at www.marcellomusto.org, published worldwide in twenty-five languages.