CHAPTER 3
Afterlife
A century after its publication, the British prime minister Harold Wilson boasted that he had never read Das Kapital. ‘I only got as far as page two – that’s where the footnote is nearly a page long. I felt that two sentences of main text and a page of footnotes were too much.’ A glance at the first volume of Das Kapital exposes this as a wild exaggeration: there are indeed several footnotes in the opening pages, but none of more than a few sentences. Nevertheless, Wilson probably spoke for many other readers who have been put off by the perceived or actual ‘difficulty’ of the book.
Marx anticipated this reaction in his preface. ‘The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will… present the greatest difficulty. I have popularized the passages concerning the substance of value and the magnitude of value as much as possible.’ The value-form, he claimed, was simplicity itself. ‘Nevertheless, the human mind has laboured for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it… With the exception of the section on the form of value, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.’
Even Engels was unconvinced. While the book was being typeset he warned Marx that it was a serious mistake not to clarify the theoretical arguments by splitting them into shorter sections with separate headings. ‘The thing would have looked somewhat like a school textbook, but a very large class of readers would have found it considerably easier to understand. The populus, even the scholars, just are no longer at all accustomed to this way of thinking, and one has to make it as easy for them as one possibly can.’ Marx did make some changes to the proof sheets, but they were no more than marginal tinkerings. ‘How could you leave the outward structure of the book in its present form!’ Engels asked despairingly after seeing the final proofs. ‘The fourth chapter is almost 200 pages long and only has four sub-sections… Furthermore, the train of thought is constantly interrupted by illustrations, and the point to be illustrated is never summarized after the illustration, so that one is forever plunging straight from the illustration of one point into the exposition of another point. It is dreadfully tiring, and confusing, too.’
Other admirers also found their eyes glazing over as they wrestled with the obscure early chapters. ‘Please be so good as to tell your wife,’ Marx wrote to Ludwig Kugelmann, the friend in Hanover, ‘that the chapters on “The Working Day”, “Co-operation, Division of Labour and Machinery” and finally on “Primitive Accumulation” are the most immediately readable. You will have to explain any incomprehensible terminology to her. If there are any other doubtful points, I shall be glad to help.’ When the great English socialist William Morris read Das Kapital, he ‘thoroughly enjoyed the historical part’ but confessed to suffering ‘agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the pure economics of that great work. Anyway, I read what I could, and will hope that some information stuck to me from my reading.’ (It proved a good investment in every sense: Morris’s copy of the first volume, in a gorgeously ornate leather binding, was sold at auction for $50,000 in May 1989.)
Sheer incomprehension, rather than political enmity, may explain the muted reaction to Das Kapital on its first publication. ‘The silence about my book makes me fidgety,’ Marx fretted. Engels tried to stir up publicity by submitting hostile pseudonymous reviews to German newspapers and urged Marx’s other friends to do likewise. ‘The main thing is that the book should be discussed over and over again, in any way whatsoever,’ he told Kugelmann. ‘In the words of our old friend Jesus Christ, we must be as innocent as doves and wise as serpents.’ Kugelmann did his best, placing articles in a couple of Hanover papers, but since he barely understood the book himself they were none too illuminating. ‘Kugelmann becomes more simple-minded every day,’ Engels fumed.
It took four years for the 1,000 copies of the first edition to sell out. Although Marx claimed in his afterword to the second edition (1872) that ‘the appreciation which Das Kapital rapidly gained in wide circles of the German working class is the best reward for my labours’, it seems unlikely that the volume reached many workers – though they were introduced to its main themes in a series of articles by Joseph Dietzgen for the socialist Demokratisches Wochenblatt. ‘There can be few books that have been written in more difficult circumstances,’ Jenny Marx wrote. ‘If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes, to be completed, they would perhaps show a little more interest.’ But how could they, given its length and density and unfamiliar subject? As Marx himself pointed out, ‘political economy remains a foreign science in Germany’.
Elsewhere, however, there were stirrings of interest. As early as January 1868, two months after publication, the London Saturday Review included Das Kapital in a round-up of recent German books. ‘The author’s views may be as pernicious as we conceive them to be,’ it concluded, ‘but there can be no question as to the plausibility of his logic, the vigour of his rhetoric, and the charm with which he invests the driest problems of political economy.’ A notice in the Contemporary Review five months later, while patriotically scornful of German economics (‘we do not suspect that Karl Marx has much to teach us’), complimented the author on not forgetting ‘the human interest – the “hunger and thirst interest” which underlies the science’.
A Russian translation of Das Kapital appeared in the spring of 1872, passed by the Tsar’s censors on the grounds that it had no application to Russia and therefore couldn’t be subversive (though they did remove a picture of the author, fearing that it might inspire a personality cult). They judged the text so impenetrable that ‘few would read it and still fewer understand it’, but most of the 3,000 print run was sold within a year. While his book was unobtainable and unknown in most capitalist countries of the West, newspapers and journals in pre-capitalist Russia were running favourable reviews. ‘Isn’t it an irony of fate,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘that the Russians, whom I have fought for twenty-five years, always want to be my patrons? They run after the most extreme ideas the West has to offer, out of pure gluttony.’ He was specially gratified by a notice in the St Petersburg Journal, praising the ‘unusual liveliness’ of his prose. ‘In this respect,’ it added, ‘the author in no way resembles… the majority of German scholars, who… write their books in a language so dry and obscure that the heads of ordinary mortals are cracked by it.’
The production of a French edition was more problematic. Although work began in 1867, immediately after German publication, over the next four years no fewer than five translators were tried and rejected. Eventually Marx gave his blessing to a Bordeaux schoolteacher, Joseph Roy. After inspecting the early chapters, however, he decided that although they were ‘well done on the whole’, Roy had often translated too literally. ‘I have therefore found myself compelled to rewrite whole passages in French, to make them palatable.’ With Marx’s approval, the publisher decided to issue the book in instalments (‘more easily accessible to the working class’), the first of which appeared in May 1875.
In his adopted country, those promising early reviews were followed by a long silence. ‘Though Marx has lived much in England,’ the barrister Sir John MacDonnell wrote in the Fortnightly Review in March 1875, ‘he is here almost the shadow of a name. People may do him the honour of abusing him; read him they do not.’ Marx believed that ‘the peculiar gift of stolid blockheadedness’ was every Briton’s birthright, and the fact that no English edition was available in his lifetime confirmed his prejudice. ‘We are much obliged by your letter,’ Messrs Macmillan & Co. wrote to Engels’s friend Carl Schorlemmer, the professor of organic chemistry at Manchester University, ‘but we are not disposed to entertain the publication of a translation of Das Kapital.’ Those few Britons who wanted to study it had to struggle as best they could with the German, Russian or French versions. The radical English journalist Peter Fox, publisher of the National Reformer, said after being presented with the German edition that he felt like a man who had acquired an elephant and didn’t know what to do with it. A working-class Scotsman, Robert Banner, sent Marx this anguished appeal for help:
Is there no hope of it being translated? There is no work to be had in English advocating the cause of the toiling masses, every book we young Socialists put our hands on is work in the interest of Capital, hence the backwardness of our cause in this country. With a work dealing with economics from the standpoint of Socialism, you would soon see a movement in this country that would put the nightcap on this bastard thing.
Those most in need of the book were the least able to understand it, while the educated elite who could read it had no wish to do so. As the English socialist Henry Hyndman wrote: ‘Accustomed as we are nowadays, especially in England, to fence always with big soft buttons on the point of our rapiers, Marx’s terrible onslaught with naked steel upon his adversaries appeared so improper that it was impossible for our gentlemanly sham-fighters and mental gymnasium men to believe that this unsparing controversialist and furious assailant of capital and capitalism was really the deepest thinker of our times.’
Hyndman himself was an exception to the rule. Early in 1880, after reading the French translation of Das Kapital, he bombarded the author with so many extravagant tributes that Marx felt obliged to meet him. But although Hyndman professed himself ‘eager to learn’, it was he who did most of the talking: Marx came to dread the visits from this ‘complacent chatterbox’. Their inevitable rupture occurred in June 1881, when Hyndman’s socialist manifesto England for All included two chapters largely plagiarized from Das Kapital without permission or even acknowledgement – save for a note in the preface admitting that ‘for the ideas and much of the matter contained in Chapters II and III, I am indebted to the work of a great thinker and original writer, which will, I trust, shortly be made accessible to the majority of my countrymen’. Marx thought this shamefully inadequate: why not mention Das Kapital or its author by name? Hyndman’s limp excuse was that the English had ‘a horror of socialism’ and ‘a dread of being taught by a foreigner’. As Marx pointed out, however, the book was unlikely to assuage that horror by evoking ‘the dream of socialism’ here, and any half-intelligent reader would surely guess from the preface that the anonymous ‘great thinker’ must be foreign. It was larceny, pure and simple – compounded by the insertion of imbecilic errors in the few paragraphs that were not lifted verbatim from Das Kapital.
No sooner had Marx fallen out with one English disciple than he acquired another – though this time he took the precaution of never meeting the man. Ernest Belfort Bax, born in 1854, had been radicalized by the Paris Commune while still a schoolboy, and in 1879 began a long series of articles for the highbrow monthly Modern Thought on the intellectual titans of the age, including Schopenhauer, Wagner and (in 1881) Karl Marx. Having studied Hegelian philosophy in Germany, Bax was probably the only English socialist of his generation to accept the dialectic as the inner dynamic of life. He described Das Kapital as a book ‘that embodies the working out of a doctrine in economy comparable in its revolutionary character and wide-reaching importance to the Copernican system in astronomy, or the law of gravitation in Mechanics’. Marx was understandably delighted, hailing Bax’s article as ‘the first publication of that kind which is pervaded by a real enthusiasm for the new ideas themselves and boldly stands up against British philistinism’.
For all his faults, however, the despised Hyndman did more than Bax or anyone else to spread Marx’s ideas in this philistine nation. He remained a fervent disciple, quoting Marx at length – and by name this time – in his 1883 book, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England. He even founded an explicitly Marxist political party, the Democratic Federation (later the Social Democratic Federation), whose leading members included Bax, William Morris, Walter Crane, Marx’s own daughter, Eleanor, and her lover, Edward Aveling. Hyndman’s enthusiastic advocacy of Das Kapital at meetings of the Federation prompted the young Irish writer George Bernard Shaw to spend the autumn of 1883 studying the French edition in the British Museum reading room, where Marx himself had quarried much of the raw material. ‘That was the turning point in my career,’ Shaw recalled. ‘Marx was a revelation… He opened my eyes to the facts of history and civilization, gave me an entirely fresh conception of the universe, provided me with a purpose and a mission in life.’ Das Kapital, he wrote, ‘achieved the greatest feat of which a book is capable – that of changing the minds of the people who read it’.
Shaw’s passion for Das Kapital never dimmed, as he proved with this characteristically extravagant tribute on the very first page of Everybody’s Political What’s What, written more than sixty years later:
Not until the nineteenth century, when Karl Marx tore the reports of our factory inspectors from our unread Blue Books and revealed capitalism in all its atrocity, did Pessimism and Cynicism reach their blackest depth. He proved up to the hilt that capital in its pursuit of what he called Mehrwerth, which we translate as Surplus Value (it includes rent, interest and commercial profit), is ruthless, and will stop at nothing, not even at mutilation and massacre, white and black slavery, drugging and drinking, if they promise a shilling per cent more than the dividends of philanthropy. Before Marx there had been plenty of Pessimism. The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is full of it. Shakespeare in King Lear, in Timon of Athens, in Coriolanus, got to it and stuck there. So did Swift and Goldsmith. But none of them could document the case from official sources as Marx did. He thereby created that demand for ‘a new world’ which not only inspires modern Communism and Socialism but in 1941 became the platform catchword of zealous Conservatives and Churchmen.
Shaw had little success in spreading the gospel to fellow members of the Fabian Society, which he joined in 1884. His friend H. G. Wells dismissed Marx as ‘a stuffy, ego-centred and malicious theorist’ who ‘offered to the cheapest and basest of human impulses the poses of a pretentious philosophy’. Under the influence of their chief theorist, Sidney Webb, the Fabians guided British socialism away from notions of class war and revolution into the belief that, with universal suffrage, the existing British state could enact social legislation to improve the welfare of the working class and the efficiency of the economic system. This also became the dominant credo of the Labour Party, formed in 1900. The old quip that Labour owed more to Methodism than to Marx may be an exaggeration: its supporters, and its Members of Parliament, have included many socialists who might call themselves Marxians if not Marxists; in 1947 the party even issued a reprint of the Communist Manifesto to ‘acknowledge its indebtedness to Marx and Engels as two men who have been the inspiration of the whole working-class movement’. But Labour leaders have consistently upheld Harold Wilson’s view that Marx’s legacy is irrelevant, perhaps actually inimical, to a constitutional party of the centre-left.
In Germany, Marx’s homeland, his ideas became the ruling ideology of the Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) at its 1891 congress in Erfurt. But the Erfurt programme had two distinct halves, presaging a long struggle between revolutionaries and revisionists. The first section, drafted by Marx’s disciple Karl Kautsky, restated theories familiar from Das Kapital, such as the tendency to monopoly and the immiseration of the proletariat; the second half, written by Eduard Bernstein, dealt with more immediate political objectives – universal suffrage, free education, a progressive income tax. Bernstein had lived in London during the 1880s and fallen under the influence of the early Fabians: Rosa Luxemburg complained that he ‘sees the world through English spectacles’.
Bernstein openly repudiated much of Marx’s legacy in the decade after the Erfurt congress, dismissing his theory of value as ‘a purely abstract concept’ which failed to explain the relationship between supply and demand. Kautsky was at first reluctant to criticize his old comrade, sometimes seeming even to encourage him: ‘You have overthrown our tactics, our theory of value, our philosophy; now all depends on what is the new that you are thinking of putting in place of the old.’ By the end of the century, Bernstein’s intentions were all too apparent. Capitalism, far from being overthrown by an inevitable and imminent crisis, would probably endure and bring increased prosperity to the masses. If properly regulated, it might actually prove to be the engine of social progress:
It is thus quite wrong to assume that the present development of society shows a relative or indeed absolute diminution of the number of the members of the possessing classes. Their number increases both relatively and absolutely… The prospects of socialism depend not on the decrease but on the increase of social wealth.
Although the SPD continued to define itself as a revolutionary proletarian organization, in practice it became an increasingly successful parliamentary party led by gradualists and technocrats.
As a connoisseur of irony, even Marx might have been obliged to smile (or at least grimace) at his fate: a prophet without much honour in his own land, still less in his adopted home of Britain, he became the inspiration for a cataclysmic upheaval in the place where he least expected it – Russia, a nation scarcely mentioned in Das Kapital. Yet by the end of his life he had already begun to regret the omission: the success of the Russian edition of Das Kapital set him wondering if perhaps there was some revolutionary potential there after all.
His translator in St Petersburg, Nikolai Danielson, was also the leader of the Narodnik movement, which believed that Russia could go straight from feudalism to socialism. Marx’s portrait of capitalism’s soul-destroying effects convinced them that this stage of economic evolution should be avoided if at all possible, and since Russia already had an embryonic form of common land ownership in the countryside it would be perverse to break up peasant communes and hand them over to private landlords merely for the sake of obeying some allegedly ineluctable historical law. For more orthodox Marxists such as Georgy Plekhanov, who maintained that conditions for socialism would not ripen until Russia had industrialized, this was self-deluding folly – and for a decade or so after Das Kapital’s appearance Marx seemed to think so too. Replying in 1877 to a Narodnik who protested at his determinist view of history, he wrote that if Russia was to become a capitalist nation after the example of Western European countries ‘she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples’.
Yet Marx continued to brood on developments in Russia, which threatened to disprove his theories. The insurrectionary movement might be small but it was awesomely determined and effective: between 1879 and 1881 a breakaway faction of Narodniks, The People’s Will, staged seven attempts on the life of Tsar Alexander II, the last of which succeeded. (Six years later The People’s Will also tried to assassinate Tsar Alexander III; one of those hanged for his part in the plot was Alexander Ulyanov, whose teenage brother Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov would become better known as V. I. Lenin.) The ensuing spate of arrests and executions drove many Russian revolutionaries into exile. Plekhanov moved to Switzerland with several comrades including Vera Zasulich, who in 1876 had shot the governor-general of St Petersburg and then given such a virtuoso courtroom performance that a jury acquitted her of attempted murder. Despite her record, she disapproved of the increasingly violent, regicidal trend in Russian socialism, which seemed to have lost sight of the economic imperatives laid down in Das Kapital. But the question of peasants and proletarians continued to trouble Zasulich and her fellow exiles on the shores of Lake Geneva. In February 1881 she appealed to Marx for an authoritative opinion. ‘You are not unaware that your Kapital is enjoying great popularity in Russia,’ she wrote. ‘But what you probably do not know is the role which your Kapital plays in our discussion of the agrarian question.’ Could he please settle the dispute ‘by conveying your ideas on the possible future of our rural commune and the theory of the historical inevitability for all countries of the world to pass through all phases of capitalist production’?
Marx agonized over the problem for several weeks, writing no fewer than five drafts of his reply. Eventually he sent her a brief letter saying that his ‘so-called theory’ had been misunderstood: the historical inevitability of the bourgeois phase ‘is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe’. The Western transition from feudalism to capitalism represented the transformation of one type of private property into another, whereas in the case of the Russian peasants ‘their communal property would, on the contrary, have to be transformed into private property. Hence the analysis provided in Das Kapital does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune.’ This was more encouraging than his comments of only four years earlier – but far more cautious than the first draft of his letter to Zasulich, which explained why and how the Russian peasantry could escape the fate of its Western European counterparts:
In Russia, thanks to a unique combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still established on a nationwide scale, may gradually detach itself from its primitive features and develop directly as an element of collective production on a nationwide scale… To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed. For that matter, the government and the ‘new pillars of society’ are doing their best to prepare the masses for just such a disaster. If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it concentrates all its forces so as to allow the rural commune full scope, the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.
Five days after Marx sent his final version, a small group from The People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg by throwing a bomb at his coach.
With his long-held conviction that revolution could be achieved only through collective action by the working class, rather than by individual stunts or acts of terrorism, Marx might have been expected to side with Zasulich and Plekhanov rather than the death-or-glory bombers. In a letter to his daughter Jenny, however, he confided that the Swiss exiles were ‘mere doctrinaires, muddle-headed anarcho-socialists, and their influence on the Russian “theatre of war” is zero’. The St Petersburg assassins, by contrast, ‘are sterling chaps through and through, without melodramatic posturing, simple, matter-of-fact, heroic… They are at pains to teach Europe that their modus operandi is a specifically Russian and historically inevitable mode of action which no more lends itself to moralizing – for or against – than does the earthquake in Chios.’
It is inconceivable that a younger Karl Marx would have taken such an attitude: he had spent many years denouncing socialists who put their trust in coups, attentats and clandestine conspiracies. By 1881, however, he was ill and exhausted. Having waited so long for a proper proletarian revolution he now seemed wearily impatient for an uprising of any kind. Following the birth of a grandson that spring, he mused that children ‘born at this turning point of history… have before them the most revolutionary period men had ever to pass through. The bad thing now is to be “old” so as to be only able to foresee instead of seeing.’
The architects of the 1917 revolution all cited Marx, and Das Kapital in particular, as the divine authority for the correctness of their views. Trotsky had studied the book in 1900 while exiled to a ghastly insect-infested village in Siberia – ‘brushing the cockroaches off the pages’, as he recalled. Lenin claimed to have read it in 1888, at the precocious age of eighteen, sitting on an old stove in the kitchen at his grandfather’s apartment. Thereafter he used Das Kapital – or those parts that suited his purposes – as a blade with which to slash his rivals. (Maxim Gorky said of Lenin’s speeches that they had ‘the cold glitter of steel shavings’.) Although his first major work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, was presented as a sort of supplement to Marx, it had none of Das Kapital’s irony and indignation. As Edmund Wilson remarked, ‘All the writing of Lenin is functional; it is all aimed at accomplishing an immediate purpose… He is simply a man who wants to convince.’ The immediate purpose of The Development of Capitalism in Russia was to persuade his comrades that their country had already emerged from feudalism thanks to the rapid spread of railways, coal mines, steel mills and textile factories in the 1880s and 1890s. True, an industrial proletariat existed only in Moscow and St Petersburg, but this strengthened its duty to act as a vanguard class expressing the grievances of peasants and artisans elsewhere. In the new factories, he wrote, ‘exploitation is fully developed and emerges in its pure form, without any confusing details. The worker cannot fail to see that he is oppressed by capital… That is why the factory worker is none other than the foremost representative of the entire exploited population.’ But in his later tract What Is To Be Done? he added that the workers were too preoccupied with their own economic struggle to develop a true revolutionary consciousness:
There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence our task, the task of Social Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.
Mass campaigns for better conditions and shorter working weeks, advocated by Marx in Das Kapital, were dismissed by Lenin as a waste of time. Instead, the workers should place themselves at the disposal of professional revolutionaries such as himself: ‘The contemporary socialist movement can come into being only on the basis of a profound scientific knowledge… The bearer of this science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia.’ In these sentences one can see in embryonic form what eventually became a monstrous tyranny.
As the self-appointed bearer of the Ten Commandments, Lenin liked to remind comrades of their lowlier intellectual status. ‘It is impossible to understand Marx’s Das Kapital and especially its first chapters without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic,’ he wrote in his Philosophical Notebooks. ‘Consequently, half a century later, none of the Marxists understands Marx.’ Except him, of course. Yet for all his reading and writing, Lenin’s own ‘scientific knowledge’ was no more profound than it needed to be. Here is an acute assessment by Trotsky, who observed him as closely as anyone:
The whole of Marx appears in the Communist Manifesto, in the Critique of Political Economy, in Das Kapital. Even if he had never been destined to become the founder of the First International, he would still remain for all times the figure which we know today. The whole of Lenin on the other hand appears in revolutionary action. His scientific works are only a preliminary for activity.
And perhaps not even a preliminary. ‘The seizure of power,’ Lenin wrote in 1917, ‘is the point of the uprising. Its political task will be clarified after the seizure.’ As the historian Bertram Wolfe points out, this turns Marx on his head: the Marxist belief that ultimately economics determines politics ‘becomes the Leninist view that, with enough determination, power itself, naked political power, might succeed wholly in determining economics’. No wonder the prevailing creed of the Soviet Union acquired the name Marxism-Leninism, rather than simple Marxism. Marx’s favourite motto was de omnibus dubitandum (‘everything should be questioned’), but no one who tried to practise this in Communist Russia survived for long. Marxism as practised by Marx himself was not so much an ideology as a critical process, a continuous dialectical argument; Lenin and then Stalin froze it into dogma. (As, of course, had other socialists before them. ‘The Social Democratic Federation here shares with your German-American Socialists the distinction of being the only parties who have contrived to reduce the Marxist theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy,’ Engels complained to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, a German émigré in New York, in May 1894. ‘This theory is to be forced down the throats of the workers at once and without development as articles of faith, instead of making the workers raise themselves to its level by dint of their own class instinct. That is why both remain mere sects and, as Hegel says, come from nothing through nothing to nothing.’) One could even argue that the most truly Marxist achievement of the Soviet Union was its collapse: a centralized, secretive and bureaucratic command economy proved incompatible with new forces of production, thus precipitating a change in the relations of production. Mikhail Gorbachev admitted as much in his 1987 book, Perestroika:
The management system which took shape in the thirties and forties began gradually to contradict the demands and conditions of economic progress. Its positive potential was exhausted. It became more and more of a hindrance, and gave rise to the braking mechanism which did us so much harm later…
It was in these conditions that a prejudiced attitude to the role of commodity-monetary relations and the law of value under socialism developed, and the claim was often made that they were opposite and alien to socialism. All this was combined with an underestimation of profit-and-loss accounting, and produced disarray in pricing, and a disregard for the circulation of money… Ever increasing signs appeared of man’s alienation from the property of the whole people, of lack of coordination between public interest and the personal interests of the working person.
After Russia, the next major country to proclaim itself Communist was China, which became a ‘People’s Republic’ in 1949. Whereas Marx and Lenin had focused on the urban proletariat, Mao Zedong argued that rural peasants could be a revolutionary force if guided by ‘correct’ leaders such as himself. Shunning the Soviet model of urgent industrialization, he made rural development the top priority, thus inspiring many Marxists in Third-World countries which had no industry worth the name. But the Maoist programme was a disaster for the Chinese peasantry: the Great Leap Forward, a scheme to collectivize agriculture and promote small-scale rural industries, brought mass starvation in its wake and was abandoned in 1960 only two years after its inception. This coincided with a rupture between China and the Soviet Union, as Nikita Khrushchev ridiculed the Great Leap and Mao retaliated by denouncing him as a ‘capitalist roader’. Since the Great Helmsman’s death in 1976, however, China has itself set off down the capitalist route, becoming the world’s most rapidly growing industrial economy while still maintaining that it has in fact now reached ‘the primary stage of socialism’. Despite having abandoned all Mao’s precepts, the government in Beijing continues to define itself as Marxist-Leninist, though ‘Market-Leninist’ would be rather more apt.
Like Christianity with its countless rival sects, Marxism has appeared in many strikingly different and apparently incongruous guises – Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Spartacists and revisionists, Stalinists and Trotskyists, Maoists and Castroites, Eurocommunists and existentialists. Marx himself had foreseen, with grim resignation, that his name would be taken in vain by ‘Marxists’ long after he was dead and in no position to protest. His most famous expression of despair at deluded disciples was a rebuke to French socialists in the 1870s: if they were Marxists, he sighed, ‘all I know is that I am not a Marxist’. And perhaps he wasn’t. The history of the twentieth century revealed that Marxist revolution was most likely in countries which did not have an advanced industrial economy, a capitalist class or a large army of wage-earning proletarians. Hence the paradox noted by the Marxian scholar David McLellan in 1983, when almost half the world was still ruled by regimes claiming to be Marx’s heirs:
The very fact that Marxism has not triumphed in the West means that it has not been turned into an official ideology and is thus the object of serious study unimpeded by government controls. It is precisely in Western Europe and America – the capitalist countries – that Marx is studied most carefully. Indeed, it is fair to say that there are more real Marxists in the West than in many of the so-called ‘Marxist’ countries.
In Communist states from Albania to Zimbabwe, the local definition of Marxism was laid down by the government and no further discussion was required (or indeed permitted). In the West, however, its meaning became the object of both strident argument and subtle reassessment. The work of the so-called Frankfurt school in the 1930s – including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse – gave rise to a new breed of Marxist philosophy known as ‘critical theory’, which rejected the economic determinism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The Frankfurt school, and other thinkers of the period such as Antonio Gramsci, also questioned traditional Marxist attitudes to proletarian class consciousness. Capitalism, according to Gramsci, maintained its hegemony by deluding or bullying the working class into an acceptance of bourgeois culture as the norm, empowering certain values and practices while excluding others. To challenge this consensus and explode its pretensions, the workers must develop a ‘counter-hegemonic’ culture of their own through new systems of popular education.
Western Marxists therefore placed far greater emphasis on the importance of what Marx called superstructure – culture, institutions, language – in the political process, so much so that consideration of the economic base sometimes disappeared altogether. Unable to change the world, they concentrated on interpreting it through what became known as ‘cultural studies’ – which established its own hegemony on many university campuses in the final decades of the twentieth century, transforming the study of history, geography, sociology, anthropology and literature. Even the libido was subjected to Marxist scrutiny. The psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich tried to reconcile Marx and Freud by proposing that the workers couldn’t be truly free until they were liberated from sexual repression and the tyranny of traditional family structures (though Marx himself had dismissed free love as a ‘bestial’ prospect, tantamount to ‘general prostitution’). ‘Sex is integrated into work and public relations and thus is made more susceptible to (controlled) satisfaction,’ wrote Herbert Marcuse, a guru of the New Left, in One-Dimensional Man (1964). ‘Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange.’
That realm was defined far more broadly than Marx ever imagined. It encompassed any and every sort of cultural commodity – a pair of winklepicker shoes, a newspaper photograph, a pop record and a packet of breakfast cereal were all ‘texts’ that could be ‘read’. The critique of mass culture from early theorists influenced by the Frankfurt school was gradually supplanted by a study of the different ways in which people receive and interpret these everyday texts. As cultural studies took a ‘linguistic turn’ – evolving through structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and then postmodernism – it often seemed a way of evading politics altogether, even though many of its practitioners continued to call themselves Marxists. The logic of their playful insistence that there were no certainties or realities led ultimately to a free-floating, value-free relativism which could celebrate both American pop culture and medieval superstition without a qualm. Despite their scorn for grand historical narratives and general laws of nature, many seemed to accept the enduring success of capitalism as an immutable fact of life. Their subversive impulses sought refuge in marginal spaces where the victors’ dominance seemed less secure: hence their enthusiasm for the exotic and unincorporable, from UFO conspiracy theories to sado-masochistic fetishes. A fascination with the pleasures of consumption (TV soap operas, shopping malls, mass-market kitsch) displaced the traditional Marxist focus on the conditions of material production. The consequence was, in the words of the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, ‘an immense linguistic inflation, as what appeared no longer conceivable in political reality was still just about possible in the areas of discourse or signs or textuality. The freedom of text or language would come to compensate for the unfreedom of the system as a whole.’ The new enemy, Eagleton writes, was ‘coherent belief systems of any kind – in particular all forms of political theory and organization which sought to analyse, and act upon, the structures of society as a whole. For it was precisely such politics which seemed to have failed.’ No systematic critique of monopoly capitalism could be achieved since capitalism was itself a fiction, like truth, justice, law and all other ‘linguistic constructs’.
Where, one might wonder, did this leave Karl Marx, who had striven to produce just such a systematic critique? While happily deconstructing TV commercials or sweet-wrappers, theorists seemed curiously reluctant to take their scalpels to the text of Das Kapital, perhaps for fear of committing literary parricide. The postmodernist historian Dominick LaCapra says it is ‘probably the most crying case of a canonical text in need of rereading rather than straightforward, literal reading geared to a purely unitary authorial voice’.
The most notable reassessment in this vein is Reading ‘Capital’ (1965), a collection of essays by Louis Althusser and some of his students, which begins with this statement of intent:
Of course, we have all read, and all do read ‘Capital’. For almost a century, we have been able to read it every day, transparently, in the dramas and dreams of our history, in its disputes and conflicts, in the defeats and victories of the workers’ movement which is our only hope and our destiny. Since we ‘came into the world’, we have read ‘Capital’ constantly in the writings and speeches of those who have read it for us, well or ill, both the dead and the living, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, Gramsci, the leaders of the workers’ organizations, their supporters and opponents: philosophers, economists, politicians. We have read bits of it, the ‘fragments’ which the conjuncture had ‘selected’ for us. We have even all, more or less, read Volume One, from ‘commodities’ to the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’.
But some day it is essential to read ‘Capital’ to the letter. To read the text itself…
Althusser, like any reader, comes to this assignment wearing a pair of spectacles that conform to his own prescription. It was he who first insisted that there was an unbridgeable gulf – an ‘epistemological break’ – between the Marx of the 1840s and the man who wrote Das Kapital twenty years later. In contrast to Jean-Paul Sartre, who found rich inspiration in the early philosophical writings for his formulation of Marxism as a history of human self-emancipation, Althusser deplored the younger Marx’s interest in ethics, alienation and ‘human agency’. To Althusser, history was a ‘process without a subject’ and therefore unworthy of study or analysis: individuals, even collectively, could never escape or challenge the impersonal forces of the Ideological State Apparatus – education, religion, the family – which produce and maintain the dominant belief system.
Althusser rescued Marx from the narrow economic determinism imposed by Lenin and his heirs only to confine him in an equally restrictive straitjacket. In Reading ‘Capital’ he reduced Marx’s magnum opus to a purely scientific work, unsullied by Hegelian influence – despite the author’s own cheerful acknowledgement of the debt, particularly in the opening chapter on commodities. Marxism became nothing more than a theory of structural practices, divorced from politics, history and experience.
The logic of Althusser’s anti-humanism was that people could not be held responsible for their actions – a contention he himself exploited years later to absolve himself from any guilt after murdering his wife. On a grander scale, it served to exculpate the Communist Party (of which he was a longstanding member): mass murder in the Soviet Union was not a crime, merely a theoretical error – or, in Althusser’s hideous euphemism for Stalinism, ‘that new form of “non-rational existence of reason”’. As the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson wrote in his spirited polemic The Poverty of Theory (1979): ‘We can see the emergence of Althusserianism as a manifestation of a general police action within ideology, as the attempt to reconstruct Stalinism at the level of theory.’ He added that Althusser’s insistence on a wholly conceptual Marxism, uncontaminated by history or experience, exposed him as a man ‘who has only a casual acquaintance with historical practice’ – for in the real world, time and again, ‘experience walks in without knocking at the door and announces deaths and crises of substance’. This was more accurate than Thompson realized. The full extent of Althusser’s ignorance was laid bare in his posthumous memoir, The Future Lasts Forever (1994), where he confessed to being ‘a trickster and a deceiver’ who sometimes invented quotations to suit his purposes. ‘In fact, my philosophical knowledge of texts was rather limited. I… knew a little Spinoza, nothing about Aristotle, the Sophists and the Stoics, quite a lot about Plato and Pascal, nothing about Kant, a bit about Hegel, and finally a few passages of Marx.’
How did he get away with it? His explanation of the conjuring trick is startlingly candid:
I had another particular ability. Starting from a simple turn of phrase, I thought I could work out (what an illusion!), if not the specific ideas of an author or a book I had not read, at least their general drift or direction. I obviously had certain intuitive powers as well as a definite ability for seeing connections, or a capacity for establishing theoretical oppositions, which enabled me to reconstruct what I took to be an author’s ideas on the basis of the authors to whom he was opposed. I proceeded spontaneously by drawing contrasts and distinctions, subsequently elaborating a theory to support this.
Thanks to these intuitive powers, Reading ‘Capital’ is illuminated by occasional flashes of insight even though Althusser had studied only a few passages of Marx. He proposes that Das Kapital should be seen as ‘an important answer to a question that is nowhere posed, an answer which Marx only succeeds in formulating on condition of multiplying the images required to render it… The age Marx lived in did not provide him, and he could not acquire in his lifetime, an adequate concept with which to think what he produced: the concept of the effectivity of a structure on its elements.’
Marx, in other words, had fashioned a delayed-action booby-trap, waiting for someone to ask the question which he had already answered. This is borne out by a letter he sent to Engels soon after the completion of the first volume in 1867, predicting the objections of ‘vulgar economists’ to Das Kapital: ‘If I wished to refute all such objections in advance, I should spoil the whole dialectical method of exposition. On the contrary, the good thing about this method is that it is constantly setting traps for those fellows which will provoke them into an untimely display of their idiocy.’ Again, one cannot help recalling the ironic sting of Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece: the only failing of the painter’s blotchy, formless and seemingly disastrous masterwork was that he executed it a hundred years too soon, since it was in fact a piece of twentieth-century abstract art. As Edmund Wilson wrote, by championing the dispossessed classes and laying siege to the fortress of bourgeois self-satisfaction, Marx brought into economics a point of view ‘which was of value to his time precisely in proportion as it was alien to it’.
For half a century after Das Kapital’s publication, however, vulgar economists showed little interest in refuting Marx, preferring to ignore him. They saw the capitalist system as a permanent necessity, rather than a passing historical phase which contained within it the germs of its own terminal illness. Whereas Marx treated interest and profit and rent as unpaid labour, academic economists described the interest obtained by capital-owners as ‘the reward of abstinence’. For Alfred Marshall, the dominant figure in British economics during the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras, those who accumulate capital rather than spending it are performing a ‘sacrifice of waiting’, and therefore deserve compensation for their virtuous restraint.
Orthodox economics held that over-production, which Marx regarded as an essential feature of capitalism, simply could not occur. According to Say’s Law of Markets, supply created its own demand: earnings from the production and sale of certain commodities provided the purchasing power to buy others. This same self-righting mechanism ensured that unemployment could never be more than a brief, accidental blemish. Unemployed people would be willing to work for lower pay; the consequent fall in wages would lower the price of the commodities they produced, which in turn would raise demand for the goods and increase their sales, thus enabling full employment to resume.
The economic turbulence and heavy unemployment between the two World Wars forced a reconsideration, and a belated acknowledgement that capitalism might have systematic defects after all. Some economists even began to question if it really was eternal and immutable. In his 1939 study, Value and Capital, Professor John Hicks doubted that ‘one could count upon the long survival of anything like a capitalist system’ in the absence of new inventions strong enough to maintain investment. ‘One cannot repress the thought,’ he added, ‘that perhaps the whole Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years has been nothing but a vast secular boom.’ J. M. Keynes, born in the year of Marx’s death, wrote in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936): ‘I see the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work.’
Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, challenged the notion that laissez-faire capitalism had a natural tendency to self-equilibrium. The idea that unemployment forced down wages and thereby restored full employment might be true in individual companies or industries. But if all wages were cut, then all incomes would fall and demand would stagnate, giving employers no incentive to hire more labour. In the words of the Keynesian economist Joan Robinson, ‘In a crowd, anyone can get a better view of the procession if he stands on a chair. But if they all get up on chairs no one has a better view.’
Before Keynes, most economists treated capitalism’s occasional crises as negligible aberrations. He saw them as the inescapable rhythm of an unstable system – just as Marx had. Yet Keynes dismissed Marx as a crank from ‘the underworld of economic thought’, whose theories were ‘illogical, obsolete, scientifically erroneous, and without interest or application to the modern world’. The vehemence of his denunciation is surprising, given the resemblance between Marx’s critique of classical economists and Keynes’s own criticism of their neo-classical successors. As Joan Robinson wrote in 1948:
In both, unemployment plays an essential part. In both, capitalism is seen as carrying within itself the seeds of its own decay. On the negative side, as against the orthodox equilibrium theory, the systems of Keynes and Marx stand together, and there is now, for the first time, enough common ground between Marxist and academic economists to make discussion possible. In spite of this there has still been very little serious study of Marx by English academic economists.
Some, no doubt, were deterred by his stylistic opacity. Although Robinson herself thought that Marx’s theory of crises in Volume II of Das Kapital had close affinities with Keynes, she confessed that ‘I may have overemphasized the resemblance. The last two volumes of Capital… are excessively obscure and have been subjected to many interpretations. The waters are dark and it may be that whoever peers into them sees his own face.’
But the principal reason for ignoring the link between Marx and Keynes – indeed for neglecting Marx altogether – was probably political. Keynes himself was a Liberal rather than a socialist, who proudly declared that ‘the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie’, and Keynesianism became the new orthodoxy for Western economists and politicians in the mid-twentieth century – at precisely the time when the Cold War made Marx’s name synonymous with the enemy. Few non-Marxists wished to be tainted by association.
The great exception was the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter. Capitalism has had no more zealous champion than Schumpeter, who remains a hero for many American entrepreneurs, yet his famous work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) begins with a 54-page assessment of Marx’s achievements which is as unexpectedly generous as Marx’s own tributes to the bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto. As a prophet, he admits, Marx suffered from ‘wrong vision and faulty analysis’, particularly in his prediction of increasing misery for the workers. Nevertheless, ‘Marx saw [the] process of industrial change more clearly and he realized its pivotal importance more fully than any other economist of his time’, thus becoming ‘the first economist of top rank to see and to teach systematically how economic theory may be turned into historical analysis and how the historical narrative may be turned into histoire raisonnée’. A few pages later he poses the question ‘Can capitalism survive?’ and replies: ‘No. I do not think it can.’ This may seem a bizarre comment in a book designed as a robust defence of the entrepreneurial spirit, and certainly Schumpeter – unlike Marx – took no pleasure in it. (‘If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently, this does not mean that he desires it.’) His point was that capitalist innovation – new products, new methods of producing them – was a force of ‘creative destruction’ which might ultimately become too successful, and therefore too destructive, for its own good.
By the last decade of the twentieth century the sibylline warnings of both Schumpeter and Marx seemed to have been confounded. With Communism in its death throes, liberal American-style capitalism could now reign unchallenged – perhaps for ever. ‘What we are witnessing,’ Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in 1989, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.’ But history soon returned with a vengeance. By August 1998, economic meltdown in Russia, currency collapses in Asia and market panic around the world prompted the Financial Times to wonder if we had moved ‘from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade’. The article was headlined ‘Das Kapital Revisited’.
Even those who gained most from the system began to question its viability. George Soros, the billionaire speculator who had been blamed for both the Asian and the Russian debacles, warned in The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (1998) that the herd instinct of capital-owners must be controlled before they trampled everyone else underfoot:
The capitalist system by itself shows no tendency toward equilibrium. The owners of capital seek to maximize their profits. Left to their own devices, they would continue to accumulate capital until the situation became unbalanced. Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics… The main reason why their dire predictions did not come true was because of countervailing political interventions in democratic countries. Unfortunately we are once again in danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from the lessons of history. This time the danger comes not from communism but from market fundamentalism.
During the Cold War, when the Communist states venerated Marx’s work as holy writ – complete and infallible – those on the other side of the struggle reviled him as an agent of the devil. With the toppling of the Berlin Wall, however, he acquired new admirers in the unlikeliest places. ‘We should not be too quick to congratulate ourselves on the defeat of Marx, along with Marxism,’ the right-wing economist Jude Wanniski wrote in 1994. ‘Our world society is much more fluid than it was in his day, but the process of renewal is not guaranteed. The forces of reaction that he correctly identified have to be conquered by each succeeding generation, a monumental task that now faces ours.’ Wanniski, who coined the phrase ‘supply-side economics’, cited Das Kapital as the main inspiration for his theory that production rather than demand was the key to prosperity. As a supporter of free trade and the gold standard, an enemy of bureaucracy and an admirer of the Klondike spirit, Marx was ‘one of the titans of classical theory and practice’ – and a seer of genius as well. He came ‘extremely close to the truth’ in his suggestion that capitalism sowed the seeds of its own destruction: ‘That is, if capitalism requires relentless competition, yet capitalists are doing everything they can do to destroy competition, we have a system that is inherently unsustainable – as with animals who devour their young.’
In October 1997 the economics correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported a conversation with a British investment banker working in New York. ‘The longer I spend on Wall Street,’ the banker said, ‘the more convinced I am that Marx was right. There is a Nobel Prize out there for an economist who resurrects Marx and puts it into a coherent theory. I am absolutely convinced that Marx’s approach is the best way to look at capitalism.’ His curiosity aroused, Cassidy read Marx for the first time and decided that his friend was right. He found ‘riveting passages about globalization, inequality, political corruption, monopolization, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence – issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realizing that they are walking in Marx’s footsteps’. Quoting the famous slogan coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 (‘It’s the economy, stupid’), Cassidy pointed out that ‘Marx’s own term for this theory was “the materialist conception of history”, and it is now so widely accepted that analysts of all political views use it, like Carville, without any attribution. When conservatives argue that the welfare state is doomed because it stifles private enterprise, or that the Soviet Union collapsed because it could not match the efficiency of Western capitalism, they are adopting Marx’s argument that economics is the driving force of human development.’
Like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, who discovered to his amazement that for more than forty years he had been speaking prose without knowing it, much of the Western bourgeoisie had absorbed Marx’s ideas without ever noticing. It was a belated reading of Marx in the 1990s that inspired the financial journalist James Buchan to write his brilliant study, Frozen Desire: an inquiry into the meaning of money (1997). As Buchan explained:
Marx is so embedded in our Western cast of thought that few people are even aware of their debt to him. Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances – ‘that, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness’, as Marx wrote – and that changes in the ways things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory.
It is largely through Marx, rather than political economy, that those notions have come down to us. Equally, everybody I know has a feeling that history is not just one damn thing after another… but is a sort of process in which something human – Liberty? Happiness? Human Potential? Something nice, anyway – becomes progressively actual. Marx didn’t originate the feeling, but he made it current.
Even the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, eager cheerleaders for turbo-capitalism, acknowledged the debt. ‘As a prophet of socialism Marx may be kaput,’ they wrote in A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (2000), ‘but as a prophet of the “universal interdependence of nations” as he called globalization, he can still seem startlingly relevant… his description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.’ Their greatest fear was that ‘the more successful globalization becomes the more it seems to whip up its own backlash’ – that, in other words, Marx might have been right to suggest that ‘the development of modern industry… cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers.’ For all their triumphalism, Micklethwait and Wooldridge had an uneasy suspicion that the creative destruction wrought by global capitalism ‘may have a natural stall point, a moment when people can take no more’.
The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat have not come to pass. But Marx’s errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. While all that is solid still melts into air, Das Kapital’s vivid portrayal of the forces that govern our lives – and of the instability, alienation and exploitation they produce – will never lose its resonance, or its power to bring the world into focus. As that New Yorker article concluded in 1997: ‘His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.’ Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, Marx may only now be emerging in his true significance. He could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century.