‘The Poverty of Theory’ could not avoid being, in part at least, an exercise in Marxology. The Althusserians that EP Thompson was criticising in his essay had usually wrapped their arguments in close readings of key texts by Marx. Althusser’s claim to have discovered the true path of Marx’s career, and to have differentiated the ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ aspects of his thought, was perhaps the most inflammatory of the many inflammatory arguments that the Parisian philosopher made famous.
In the 1960s and 1970s Marx’s oeuvre seemed to be growing. A new generation was giving the 1844 Manuscripts the attention they deserved, and the Grundrisse was finally being widely translated and interpreted. Althusser’s curt dismissal of the 1844 Manuscripts and the rest of Marx’s early work, and his claim that not even Capital, let alone the Grundrisse, was ‘fully’ Marxist, struck many scholars and activists as a renewal of the attempts that the leaderships of ‘official’ Communist Parties had made to limit the reading and discussion of Marx in the bad old days when ‘comrade Stalin’ had set the parameters for Marxology. Even if he used intellectual rather than bureaucratic methods, Althusser seemed to many of his detractors to be determined to impose a single, inflexible interpretation of Marx on a new generation which had little time for the orthodoxies of the past, and to proscribe those parts of Marx’s oeuvre which did not fit with his interpretation.
Of course, EP Thompson makes it abundantly clear throughout ‘The Poverty of Theory’ that he does not accept Althusser and his followers’ claims to be ‘completing’ Marx’s thought. It would be difficult for him to maintain such a stance without at least sketching an alternative view of the meaning of Marx’s life and work. Thompson provides such a view in sections nine and fifteen of ‘The Poverty of Theory’. These two sustained excursions into Marxology take up thirty-four pages, or about a sixth of the total text, and are complemented by remarks scattered through most of the other fifteen sections of ‘The Poverty of Theory’.1
A pattern emerges when we examine the responses reviewers made to the Marxological sections of ‘The Poverty of Theory’. Critics of Thompson’s text have tended to make the interpretations of Marx a focus of their attacks. Supporters of Thompson, by contrast, have tended to pass over the Marxology, and discuss other aspects of ‘The Poverty of Theory’, like its eloquent defence of the art and craft of history, or the elaborate and occasionally amusing lampoons of Althusser and his theoretical progeny. Both defenders and critics of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ have made many references to the supposed unorthodoxy of Thompson’s interpretation of Marx. More than a few commentators from both camps have decided that the essay is the work of an ex-Marxist.2
Perry Anderson’s Arguments within English Marxism includes a chapter on the Marxological arguments in ‘The Poverty of Theory’.3 Like the book to which it belongs, Anderson’s chapter is a careful mixture of sympathy and firm criticism. Because Anderson’s discussion does a generally good job of summarising Thompson’s dispersed and lengthy interpretation of Marx, and because his response to that interpretation mirrors the responses of many commentators, we will make it the basis for our own discussion of the Marxology of ‘The Poverty of Theory’.
Anderson begins by suggesting that ‘The Poverty of Theory’ ‘proposes a complete new account of Marx and of Marxism’.4 As Anderson notes, Thompson believes that Marx was the inventor of historical materialism, and that the goal of historical materialism is a ‘unitary knowledge of society’.5 The ‘charter’ for historical materialism was set out in the 1840s, in texts like The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy and The Communist Manifesto. Those works were tremendously promising, but in the 1850s Marx wandered off the trail they had opened up. He had become ‘hypnotised’ by bourgeois political economy, and the result was the Grundrisse, a text that substitutes arid economic categories for the real world, and (mis)understands history as the faux-Hegelian self-unfolding of these categories, rather than as the product of the ideas and actions of real men and women. In the 1860s Marx partially ‘corrected himself’, in Thompson’s words, as the influence of the First International, the British labour movement, and Darwin’s Origin of Species made him think in less economistic and less teleological terms.
Despite the advances of the 1860s and the fact that it is considered Marx’s magnum opus, Capital is for Thompson a ‘mountainous inconsistency’.6 Tour de forces like the chapter on primitive accumulation are juxtaposed with the sort of arid, reductionist abstractions that filled the Grundrisse. Anderson puts it well when he says that Marx was guilty, in Thompson’s eyes, of the ‘extrapolation of the purely economic categories of capital from the full social process’.7 In other words, Thompson believes that Marx sometimes confuses capital with capitalism. The metaphor of base and superstructure contributes to this error, because it encourages the tendency to reduce the intricate ideological, cultural, political, and legal ‘superstructures’ of a society to mere epiphenomena of a simplified model of that society’s economic system.
Anderson notes Thompson’s argument that the elderly Engels became aware of the weakness in Capital and tried, in his famous Letters on Historical Materialism, to rectify the dogmatic schematism it was helping create in a generation of self-proclaimed Marxists.8 Unfortunately, the warnings in Engels’ letters were not always heeded. In the twentieth century, according to Thompson, Marxist historians have resumed the quest for a ‘unitary knowledge of society’ that Marx began so brilliantly in the 1840s.9 In the process, they have discovered a crucial lacuna in Marx’s ideas. Without an explanation for how the conceptual modes of production Marx discovered and the real ‘historical process’ actually correspond, Marxists have struggled to avoid either economic determinism, which reduces diverse societies to a few simple economic formulae, or a sort of hopeless particularism, which treats every society as unique, and struggles to make useful generalisations across time and space.
Thompson compares the absence in Marx’s thinking to Darwin’s inability to explain how mutations are transmitted during the process of evolution. Just as Mendelian genetics filled the absence in Darwin’s thinking, so the Marxist historian’s concept of ‘human experience’ has filled the gap in Marx’s thinking. It is human experience which relates the conceptual models Marx created to the real world and its history. To understand human experience, though, it is necessary to go beyond the writings of Marx and Engels, and encounter the ethical, utopian socialism of William Morris. Morris’ emphasis on the importance of culture, ideas and ethics to the lives of individual humans and the movement of history is taken up, according to Thompson, in the work of twentieth-century Marxist historians. The result is the crucial concept of human experience, which becomes a sort of mediation between the ‘objective’ world of economics and the ‘subjective’ life of the individual. In one of the more famous passages of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ Thompson explains that:
Experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve: their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they meditate in new ways about the law.10
Thompson insists that the shortcomings of Marx and Engels mean that Marxism as a science or ‘high theory’ must be rejected. Nor can the notion of a single Marxist tradition, which Thompson advanced in the ‘An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski’, be sustained. Althusser and his cohorts comprise one of many strains of a ‘theological’ and ‘irrational’ Marxism which is locked in mortal combat with the ‘reasoning’ Marxism that Thompson identifies with. Thompson’s tradition is marked by ‘open, empirical inquiry, originating in the work of Marx, and employing, developing, and revising his concepts’.11 Both tendencies, or traditions, can be traced back to Marx and his inconsistencies.
Perry Anderson thinks that the Marxological sections of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ represent the ‘most novel’ part of the whole essay. Thompson has produced ‘a quite new reading of Marx’s intellectual trajectory’ because he privileges ‘neither the early philosophical writings nor the late economic works, but instead accords central importance to the polemical texts of the mid-1940s’. It is hard not to take Anderson’s talk of the originality of Thompson’s Marxology as a rather backhanded compliment. ‘Novel’ seems a proxy for ‘eccentric’, because Anderson’s praise is followed by a series of attacks on the credibility of two key points in Thompson’s argument.
Anderson argues that the ‘unitary knowledge of society’ that Thompson expects from Marx was simply not possible in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the human sciences were in their infancy and much of the world of political economy remained a mystery even to Marx and Engels. Had Marx tried to write the encyclopedic text that Anderson associates with the goal of a ‘unitary knowledge of society’, then he would have ended up with something like Kautsky’s, rambling, speculative, pretentious The Materialist Conception of History, rather than the rigorous work of science that is Capital. Marx had to launch the project of historical materialism somewhere, and he chose the field of political economy, because historical materialism asserted that the economy played the ultimately decisive role in any society. The intense studies in political economy recorded rather artlessly in the Grundrisse were the foundation stone of the house of historical materialism:
To establish a secure notion of the ‘economic structure’ of society is not thereafter to preclude or compromise historical study of its cultural or political ‘superstructures’, but to facilitate it. Without the construction of a theory of the mode of production in the first instance, any attempt to produce a ‘unitary knowledge of society’ could only have yielded an eclectic interactionism.12
Anderson also upbraids Thompson for his objections to the base-superstructure metaphor and the use of the concept of mode of production, unmediated by the concept of ‘human experience’, outside the discipline of political economy. Anderson feels that Thompson’s objections are irrational, given that he (supposedly) accepts the ‘determinate nature of the base of modes of production’.13 Anderson perceives that Thompson is afraid of the prospect of economic reductionism, but he insists that this is not a necessary consequence of using the concept of mode of production or the base-superstructure metaphor in a field like history. (In one of the best passages in Arguments within English Marxism, Anderson goes on to show that Althusser’s notion of mode of production is compatible with Thompson’s own work as a historian in Whigs and Hunters.14)
We have noted that Anderson gives a reasonable summary of Thompson’s arguments about Marx, and that he outlines reservations that seem common amongst both admirers and critics of ‘The Poverty of Theory’. But Anderson’s case against Thompson’s reading of Marx is redundant, because it rests on a misinterpretation of Thompson’s concept of ‘unitary knowledge of society’. Anderson takes ‘unitary’ to mean something like ‘total’ or ‘comprehensive’, and assumes that Thompson wanted Marx to follow The Communist Manifesto up with some sort of communist encyclopedia. (Anderson is quite correct, of course, when he says that such an undertaking would be quixotic; he is also justified in ridiculing The Materialist Conception of History, which nowadays reads less like a history and description of the world than a catalogue of the prejudices of Second International Marxism.)
What Thompson actually means by a ‘unitary knowledge of society’ is a knowledge that takes into account the diverse levels – ideological, political, cultural, economic – on which any society exists. Thompson has nothing against detailed investigations of a particular aspect of a society, but he insists that the subject under investigation should not be isolated in the sort of conceptual pigeonholes that the base–superstructure metaphor encourages. Thompson rejects the base–superstructure metaphor not because he rejects political economy in toto, but because he denies that the economy can be usefully analysed for long in isolation from ‘superstructural’ phenomena like culture and the law. When Thompson talks of a ‘unitary knowledge of society’ he is not naively expecting the impossible of Marx, but rather making an argument against the abstractions that Marx often chose to employ in the Grundrisse and in Capital.
We can grasp the last point more firmly if we remind ourselves of the nature of Marx’s dialectical method of analysing and presenting his material. As Bertell Ollman has explained, this method is based upon the abstracting of discrete elements of the very complex reality which surrounds human beings:
[T]he role Marx gives to abstraction is simple recognition of the fact that all thinking about reality begins by breaking it down into manageable parts … Our minds can no more swallow the world whole at one sitting than can our stomachs … ‘Abstract’ comes from the Latin, abstractere, which means ‘to pull from’. In effect, a piece has been pulled from or taken out of the whole and is temporarily perceived as standing apart … a focus is established and a kind of boundary set.15
Anderson, of course, is suggesting that Thompson did not understand the sort of point Ollman makes here. According to Anderson, Thompson did not understand that Marx could not study ‘everything at once’, and had to abstract certain features of capitalism and its pre-history to write Capital.16 Other commentators on ‘The Poverty of Theory’ have levelled the same charge. In a long, angry essay called ‘The Necessity of Theory’, Paul Q Hirst accused Thompson of believing that ‘Capital is doomed’ because ‘its method of analysis of economic relations through categories in abstraction contradicts the nature of historical research’.17 In his generally more positive response to ‘The Poverty of Theory’, Bill Schwartz convicts Thompson of the same mistake:
[N]o-one can deny that problems exist in Capital, but what Thompson does is reject the text itself, in its totality … for the reason that it is built up out of abstractions … Abstraction itself is ahistorical [according to Thompson], as it disrupts the real historical process and is thus inherently reductionist.18
Charges like these are not upheld by a careful reading of ‘The Poverty of Theory’. Thompson does not reject Capital ‘in its totality’, and he does not convict Marx of failing to write an encyclopedia. Near the end of the Marxological discussion in section nine of his essay, he explains that Capital, while ‘immensely fruitful as hypothesis’, requires ‘supercession’ at the hands of contemporary historical materialism:
How could it be otherwise? To suppose differently would be to suppose, not only that everything can be said at once, but that immanent Theory (or Knowledge) found its miraculous embodiment in Marx, not fully mature to be sure (it had yet to develop to Althusser’s full stature), but already perfectly formed and perfectly proportioned in its parts. This is a fairy story, recited to children in Soviet primary classes, and not even believed by them.19
Thompson’s ridicule of the idea that ‘everything can be said at once’ makes it clear that, to him at least, ‘unitary knowledge’ does not mean complete knowledge. And, far from dismissing dialectics and the method of abstraction at its heart, Thompson criticises his opponents for being insufficiently dialectical:
The eviction of dialectics from the Althusserian system is deplorable … in my own work as a historian I have … come to bring dialectics, not as this or that ‘law’ but as a habit of thinking … into my own analysis.20
Insisting that ‘the dialectic was not Hegel’s private property’, Thompson points to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and to a related tradition of poetic and mystical writing, arguing that they influenced Marx, and should be read today by scholars of Marx. For Thompson, the static, ultra-structural quality of Althusserian thought is partly the consequence of a forgetfulness about dialectics.
What Thompson is questioning in ‘The Poverty of Theory’ is not Marx’s dialectical method, but rather the restricted range of the dialectical abstractions Marx employs in parts of Capital and in the Grundrisse. He believes that too many of these abstractions suffer from ‘stasis’ and ‘closure’, because they have separated economics from the rest of human activity.
Thompson is quite correct when he writes that different parts of Capital employ quite different levels of abstraction. He appreciated the chapters of the book which understood aspects of political economy by abstracting them as part of historical processes involving non-economic forces. Many commentators on Capital have noted the sudden and dramatic entrances that history makes into the text. Discussing the chapter on the length of the working day that occurs about halfway through the first volume of Capital, Anthony Brewer notes that:
A much larger and more dramatic canvas emerges [here] … the concepts here have not been given the same rigorous theoretical foundations as the strictly economic concepts used so far. The argument is much looser.21
The chapter on primitive accumulation that closes volume one of Capital was admired by Thompson for its fusion of political economy and history. By bringing together the concept of capital accumulation and the actual history of the enclosures in one abstraction, Marx provides a foundation for concrete historical investigations into the transition from feudalism to capitalism, modernisation, and urbanism. The moral outrage present in Marx’s discussion of primitive accumulation would also have delighted Thompson. Yet there is, for Thompson, a tension present in even the best parts of Capital:
[T]he history in Capital … is immensely fruitful as hypothesis; and yet as hypothesis which calls into question, again and again, the adequacy of the categories of Political Economy.22
It should be obvious that Thompson’s objections to the base-superstructure model are intimately connected to his objections to the categories of ‘stasis’ and ‘closure’ that mar the Grundrisse and parts of Capital. Thompson opposes the model not because he is an idealist who thinks that the ‘superstructure’ fell from the sky, or because he resists the necessity to abstract discrete aspects of reality, but because he contests the possibility of usefully thinking about ‘basis’ and the ‘superstructure’ in isolation from one another. In ‘History and Anthropology’, an essay based on a lecture he gave in Emergency India on the last day of 1976, Thompson outlined the case against the basis-superstructure model:
However much the notion is sophisticated, however subtly it has on many occasions been employed, the analogy of basis and superstructure is radically defective. It cannot be repaired. It has an in-built tendency to lead the mind toward reductionism or a vulgar economic determinism, by sorting out human activities and attributes and placing some (as law, the Arts, Religion, ‘Morality’) in a superstructure, others (as technology, economics, the applied sciences) in a basis, and leaving yet others (as linguistics, work-discipline) to float unhappily in-between.23
In ‘The Poverty of Theory’ the same argument is levelled at much greater length; Anderson does not grasp its terms, because he does not understand that Thompson objects not to abstraction per se, but to a certain type of abstraction.
The two false moves in Anderson’s argument are connected to a small but telling omission from his summary of Thompson’s account of Marx’s career. Anderson gives a great deal of attention to Thompson’s praise for some of Marx’s 1840s texts and criticisms of the ‘classic’ works of political economy, but he ignores Thompson’s suggestion that in his last decade Marx reconsidered some of the Grundrisse and Capital, and retreated from the ‘whirlpool’ of political economy that had threatened to swallow him. Thompson writes that:
I have argued that Marx himself was, for a time, trapped within the circuits of capital – an immanence manifesting itself in ‘forms’ – and that he only partly sprung that trap in Capital … How far Marx himself ever became fully aware of his imprisonment is a complex question … we should note that Marx, in his increasing preoccupation in his last years with anthropology, was resuming the projects of his Paris youth.24
These sentences are intended to draw attention to the vast amount of energy that Marx expended studying pre-capitalist and semi-capitalist societies during the last decade of his life. Thompson’s reference to these late and still relatively obscure labours plays a crucial part in the account he offers in ‘The Poverty of Theory’ of the development of Marx’s thought.
Without the reference to the late work, Thompson might easily seem to be taking a quite negative view of the course of Marx’s career. If Capital is the endpoint of that career, then Thompson’s unfavourable comparisons of Capital to some of the works of the 1840s might suggest that Marx’s was a story of a promise lost in the ‘whirlpool’ of political economy. When the reference to the late Marx is considered, though, then Thompson seems to be saying that Marx reached a sort of nadir in the 1850s with the Grundrisse, then recovered some of his balance and scope with Capital, and then, his detour into political economy over, resumed the quest for the ‘unitary knowledge of society’ that the 1840s had promised. If his career took this shape, then Marx made an implicit but profound self-criticism, and perhaps even took a view of the Grundrisse and Capital not entirely dissimilar to the one Thompson advances.
By ignoring Thompson’s reference to Marx’s post-Capital work, Anderson misrepresents Thompson’s entire account of Marx’s career. It is no surprise that commentators who have deemed ‘The Poverty of Theory’ an exercise in post-or anti-Marxism have also ignored the reference to Marx’s late work.
If a reference to the late work of Marx plays such an important role in ‘The Poverty of Theory’, then it is necessary to discuss this late work carefully. Since EP Thompson was a historian, preoccupied with the causes and consequences of historical change, we will focus our discussion on the view of history found in the late Marx. In his entertainingly unsympathetic biography of Marx, Robert Payne notes that one of his subject’s favourite works of literature was Goethe’s Faust. Marx could talk about the play endlessly, and when he was drunk he liked to disturb the other patrons of London bars by loudly chanting its lines in his ‘rough, guttural, unlovely German’.25 It is easy to see how Marx might have been fascinated by the character of Faust, who makes a deal with the Devil in an effort to attain knowledge and power and change the world to his liking. For Marx – the pre-1871 Marx especially – capitalism was a Devil with which a deal might be made.
The contradictions in Marx’s attitude to capitalism are perhaps most clearly evident in The Communist Manifesto, a work whose structure was modelled on Goethe’s Faust.26 The Manifesto has often been remembered only for the rousing call to revolution in its final sentence, but its first few pages are devoted to a paean to capitalism. Marx and Engels see capitalism as an engine for progressive change – for drawing ‘even the most barbarous of nations into civilisation’ and abolishing ‘the idiocy of rural life’ – yet they also believe that, once established, it became an obstacle to historical progress. For the Marx of 1848, capitalism had strong positive as well as negative qualities. The view of history as a series of ‘stages’ triggered by changes in the economic ‘base’ of one society after another has its most confident expression in the famous 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.27
Even before the time these solemn and dogmatic words were penned, there were counter currents flowing through Marx’s writing about history. In 1853, as a commentator for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx discussed China’s Taiping rebellion in a series of articles.28 Researching his subject in the London press and the reading room of the British Museum, Marx was forced toward a partial reconsideration of the sanguine view of European incursions into the peripheries of capital that had been such a feature of The Communist Manifesto’s famous first section. Four years later, Marx’s response to the Indian Mutiny showed how far he had already come from the Manifesto’s rhetoric about the role of capital in ‘civilising’ the ‘barbarian nations’ outside Western Europe:
However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India … There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.29
Thompson may have seen the Grundrisse as the nadir of Marx’s career, but the introduction to that massive work included a subtle discussion of pre-capitalist societies, during which Marx speculated that there were at least three or four different ‘routes’ out of primitive communist society into class society. By sketching these alternate paths, Marx was clearly rejecting a unilinear, ‘stagist’ history of pre-capitalist, if not capitalist, history.
When it was first published in 1867, Capital seemed decided about the universality of the model of capitalism it presented. In the original preface to his book, Marx argued that ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its future’. In one of Capital’s more notorious footnotes, Marx mocked the communes of the recently emancipated Russian peasants, suggesting that they would be broken up as capitalism inevitably spread to Russia. In a tone that recalled the references to the ‘idiocy of rural life’ in The Communist Manifesto, Marx argued that the destruction of the communes could not come too soon. (Marx would quietly remove his comments from the 1875 French edition of Capital, the last edition of the book he would revise and see through the press.)30
Marx’s decisive move away from a unilinear model of history came after the momentous year of 1871. The Paris Commune established and then destroyed in that year was both a triumph and a disaster. The Commune showed that the working class could make a revolution, but it also indicated that the final victory of the ‘gravediggers of capitalism’ was far from inevitable. The violence that the bourgeois French state inflicted upon the Communards naturally horrified Marx, and made him think hard about the significance of the state to the maintenance of capitalism. The failure of the international working class, and the British working class in particular, to rise up in support of the Communards also greatly perturbed Marx, who had sometimes imagined the radicalisation of that class to be the near-automatic result of capitalist development.
Marx paid great attention to the failure of the Communards and the French peasantry to build a workable alliance against the French and Prussian bourgeoisies. The workers of Paris could begin a revolution, but they could not hold onto power without the assistance of the class that still made up the vast majority of France’s population.
When he meditated upon what the Commune had achieved during its brief existence, Marx was struck by the gap between its negligible economic programme and the grassroots democracy and alternate structures of power it established across Paris. Marx maintained that it was these innovations which entitled the Commune to be considered revolutionary:
The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, could only be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town.31
In this passage, Marx announces a much more ‘subjective’ turn in his thinking about socialist revolution. Political forms and mass consciousness were as important, if not more important, than economic reorganisation to the establishment of socialism.
Marx’s new anti-statism, his more ‘subjective’ vision of socialism, his partial disillusionment with the notion that capitalism automatically lays the foundation for socialism, and his new awareness of the importance of the peasantry to revolution are all reflected in the massive, unfinished researches into pre-capitalist societies that he began in earnest in the early 1870s.
Marx became particularly fascinated by Russia during the last decade of his life. After teaching himself Russian and making contacts amongst both the Populist and Marxist wings of the movement against Tsarism, he wrote two letters which gave his views not only on Russian development but on the scope and limits of Capital. In an 1877 letter intended for the Russian journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, Marx denied that his book had proposed a universal model of historical progress that the non-Western world must pass through.32 The Russian Marxists who were already turning the book into a template for universal history were the target of a carefully crafted letter Marx sent to the exiled Russian activist Vera Zasulich in 1881. In his message, which took four drafts and several weeks to write, Marx excoriated Georgi Plekhanov and the other ‘defenders of capitalism’ who claimed that the destruction of pre-capitalist economic forms like the peasant communes was necessarily progressive. Marx insisted that:
The analysis in Capital … provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian Commune. But the special study l have mode of it, including a search for original source-material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.33
In this passage and others like it from the 1880s, the innovations of the introduction to the Grundrisse have been extended, so that Marx now perceives a number of possible routes from class society to socialism. History has become multilinear, and the negative comparison of pre-capitalist to capitalist societies which is such a feature of texts like The Communist Manifesto has been abandoned.
Marx’s work on Russia is developed in his Ethnological Notebooks, which document his readings, in the early 1880s, in the work of Lawrence Henry Morgan and other exponents of the young discipline of anthropology. A torrent of quotation and impassioned interpolation, the Notebooks move from language to language and continent to continent with disconcerting speed, so that they sometimes read more like Finnegans Wake than Capital.34 Stanley Rosemont has explained the significance of this unfinished work:
At the very moment that his Russian ‘disciples’ – those ‘admirers of capitalism’, as he ironically tagged them – were loudly proclaiming that the laws of historical development set forth in the first volume of Capital were universally mandatory, Marx himself was diving headlong into the study of (for him) new experiences of resistance and revolt against oppression – by North American Indians, Australian aborigines, Egyptians and Russian peasants.35
We have noted that Thompson’s invocation of Marx’s late work has an important place in his account of Marx’s career. It might be reasonably asked, though, why Thompson didn’t spend more time discussing Marx’s late work in ‘The Poverty of Theory’. Two answers to this question can be ventured. Thompson disliked Althusser’s claim to be the ‘true’ interpreter of Marx, and the arbiter of what was essential and inessential in the Marxist canon. He was wary of countering Althusser by indulging in his own claims of unique insights into Marx. He even warns, in a sentence adjacent to his discussion of Marx’s late work, that he is interested ‘in the understanding of history, and not in Marxology’.36 Thompson’s account of Marx’s career is careful and insightful, but it is painted with a fairly broad brush.
In any case, the resources necessary to paint a detailed picture of the last part of Marx’s career were not easily available to scholars in 1978. It would have been difficult to expand upon the brief reference to the late work without a good deal of the special pleading and speculative reading that Thompson had found Althusser guilty of committing. In 1978, it was a mere four years since Lawrence Krader had published the Ethnological Notebooks for the first time. Raya Dunyaveskaya would not publish her pioneering study of the Notebooks until 1982.37 At the end of the 1980s her work would be supplemented by Stanley Rosemont’s long, impassioned essay ‘Marx and the Iroquois’, which urged the relevance of the Notebooks to fin-de-siecle struggles against globalisation and primitive accumulation in the Third World.
Teodor Shanin and Haruki Wada’s acclaimed presentation of Marx’s late researches into Russia would not be published until 1983. In 1996, three years after Thompson’s death, James D White took late Marx studies another step forward, by publishing a careful reading of Marx’s mostly unpublished notes and draft articles on Russian agriculture.38
‘The Poverty of Theory’ has not been ignored by those interpreting Marx’s late work. In an essay that dissented from the claim that a very distinctive late stage existed in Marx’s thought, Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan linked Shanin and Wada’s ideas to Thompson’s account of Marx. Rosemont’s essay included a frank acknowledgement of the significance of the reference to Marx’s late work in ‘The Poverty of Theory’.39
The tribute Rosemont paid is well deserved. With the benefit of a quarter century of scholarship by a succession of advocates of Marx’s late work, we can see the full meaning of the account of Marx’s career that Thompson gave in ‘The Poverty of Theory’. Most importantly, we can see the relationship between Thompson’s criticisms of Capital and his endorsement of Marx’s late work. Thompson’s view that the concepts in much of the Grundrisse and parts of Capital needed to be broadened to take in history and the ‘superstructure’, his insistence on the necessity of investigating the uniqueness of individual societies and events, and not subordinating them to the prescriptions of some universal history, and his inveterate opposition to economic reductionism have all been echoed in the work of a series of Marxologists. The reading of Marx that Perry Anderson and many others considered eccentric and obviously mistaken has proved remarkably resilient.
Scholars of Marx’s late work have been divided on the question of its relation to the rest of his oeuvre. David Ryazanov, the great Soviet archivist, believed that the Ethnological Notebooks and the letter to Zasulich were signs of the decay of Marx’s mental powers, after the triumph represented by the first volume of Capital.40 Stanley Rosemont takes the opposite view, contrasting the late work favourably with Capital. Raya Dunayevskaya rejects both these views, and insists on seeing the late work as a development, albeit a radical development, of Marx’s canonical text. She argues that the Notebooks and the late writings on Russia fill out rather than contradict the writing on political economy, and that, if he had only had the time, Marx would have incorporated them in some way into volumes two and three of Capital, or into some supplement to Capital.41
It is tempting to see a similarity between Dunayevskaya’s perspective and Thompson’s argument that the concepts in Capital need to placed inside dialectical abstractions that partake of larger slices of the world and its history and thus help to create a ‘unitary knowledge of society’. Dunyaveskaya was, though, frustratingly vague about how exactly Marx would, or indeed could, have incorporated the material gathered in his late manuscripts into Capital.42
It was not until 1996, when James D White published Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, that English language readers, at least, got a good hint of how Marx’s late work might have entered volumes two and three of Capital, had illness, death and Engels not intervened. In the course of a long, meticulous chapter on ‘Marx and the Russians’, White guides his readers’ attention towards an unfinished text Marx wrote in 1881, around the same time he was wrestling with his letter to Vera Zasulich.43
In ‘Notes on the 1861 Reform and Russia’s Post-Reform Development’, Marx struggled to relate his studies of Russian economic development since the emancipation of the peasantry to the schemas laid out in the drafts of volumes two and three of Capital. Marx was particularly preoccupied with the relation of events in Russia to the ‘circuits of capital’ he had sketched in volume two. By 1881, he had long since abandoned his old view of the inevitability of the break-up of the peasant commune and its supercession by capitalism; the data he had accumulated showed that, far from occurring automatically, as a part of some sort of faux-Hegelian ‘destiny’ of capital, the destruction of pre-capitalist economic forms in Russia was taking place due to heavy and sustained government intervention in the economy. The levying of massive taxes on landowners was a far greater contributor to the break-up of the commune than the ‘natural’ processes of capital accumulation which had been announced in volume one of Capital and elaborated in volume two. The state had been only a ghostly presence in those texts, but it could not be excluded, even at a preliminary stage of abstraction, from accounts of the growth of capitalism in Russia.
In ‘Notes on the 1861 Reform and Russia’s Post-Reform Development’, Marx sketched a new schema for the circulation of capital that included pre-capitalist as well as capitalist economic forms, and pictured the activity of the state as an indispensable part of the process. White notes that:
The account of the circulation of capital in ‘Notes on the 1861 Reform and Russia’s Post-Reform Development’ represented a significant departure … For here the circulation was not simply that of one capital among many, but of the whole national economy. By taking the nation as his unit, Marx seemed to indicate that the circuit of capital by which the peasantry was increasingly expropriated and which expanded the capitalist class was one which was completed only on a national scale, and which involved the agency of the government … This position was of course consistent with Marx’s failure to discover any instance of original accumulation that did not involve state intervention.44
By making state intervention a necessary condition for the accumulation of capital, Marx’s new circuit of capital brought ‘superstructural’ elements like ideology and politics into the heart of his economics. Capitalism did not develop automatically, according to strictly economic laws: it had to be constantly supported by state action. In a country like nineteenth-century Russia, which was overwhelmingly pre-capitalist, the use of the state to build up capitalism was dictated by pro-capitalist ideology, not the inherent logic of capital. Capitalism was a political creation, not the inevitable working out of economic laws.
Although it is a half-finished work which examines capitalism in Russia, rather than capitalism in general, ‘Notes on the 1861 Reform and Russia’s Post-Reform Development’ shows how the insights of the late Marx might have tempered some of the excesses that EP Thompson criticised in Capital. It shows Marx enlarging the rather hermetic abstractions of the second volume’s circuit of capital so that they include the ‘superstructural’ features Thompson considered essential to any understanding, no matter how preliminary, of capitalism.
We have seen that, far from being the work of an eccentric outcast who misunderstood some of Marx’s most basic concepts, ‘The Poverty of Theory’ contains a profound and prescient contribution to Marxology.
It must be acknowledged that the influence of the Marxological sections of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ on Thompson’s own wider thinking, and on his practice as a historian, was very limited. As we will see in part IV, Thompson’s late political thought and historical work would be notable for a steady withdrawal from the territory ‘The Poverty of Theory’ fights so hard to win from Althusser.
Even within ‘The Poverty of Theory’, Thompson’s careful, nuanced discussions of Marx’s life and work were somewhat isolated, amidst long passages of knockabout satire and impassioned defences of a very traditional conception of the historical method. The qualities of sections nine and fifteen of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ were also lacking from ‘The Politics of Theory’, the ill-tempered talk Thompson gave at St Paul’s. The Marxological sections of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ are in fact without parallel in the whole of the rest of EP Thompson’s known oeuvre. Their isolation calls for explanation.
We have discussed in earlier chapters how Thompson rejected many Marxist ideas, even during his time as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Before ‘The Poverty of Theory’ he had tended to avoid Marxological discussions, and even in ‘The Poverty of Theory’ he several times apologises for mentioning the subject. The crisis in Thompson’s thinking – in what we have called the ‘research programme’ of radical liberalism – in the 1970s has been described and discussed in several earlier chapters. This crisis both prompted and curtailed Thompson’s excursion into Marxology. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, Thompson could not avoid offering his interpretation of Marx’s career and thought, if he wanted to polemicise against Althusser, Althusserianism, and other false claimants to Marx’s mantle like the Communist Party of India.
Yet the core ideas that Thompson had adopted during the ‘decade of heroes’ from 1936 to 1946 differed in important places from any tolerably faithful interpretation of Marx. In order to defend Marx from the claims of the Althusserians and Stalinists, Thompson was forced to lay aside quietly some of his most cherished notions. When he invoked his own work in history and his own political positions to support his interpretation of Marx, Thompson was careful to pick out examples that were consistent with that interpretation. He ignored parts of his scholarly work and historical writing that obviously contradicted Marx’s views. Often in the past Thompson had ‘cherry picked’ useful parts of Marx and the Marxist tradition and incorporated them into his own historical and political writing; in the Marxological sections of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ he cherry picks parts of his own work according to their compatibility with Marx.
Consider, for example, Thompson’s invocation of his book Whigs and Hunters during his discussion of Marx. In Whigs and Hunters Thompson had exposed how the ‘Black Act’ that countered foraging and hunting in royal woods was used as a tool by a corrupt circle of politicians associated with Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister. After exposing the class nature of the Act, and explaining how it was related to the drive by the English ruling classes to counter the claims of peasants and small freehold farmers to lands that had were widely considered ‘commons’, Thompson concludes Whigs and Hunters by climbing out onto a ‘precarious ledge’ and defending the rule of law ‘as a basic good’ in any society.45
The ambivalence in Whigs and Hunters about the role and value of the law reflects a wider ambivalence in Thompson’s thought about the status of Britain’s traditional legal and political institutions. While Thompson was always well aware of the ways that institutions like parliament and the courts have been used to serve the interests of one class over another, he also valued them as defences, albeit weak and sometimes malfunctioning ones, against tyranny and anarchy. Thompson’s conflicted attitude to the law reflects his often-contradictory ‘hardcore’ beliefs in the nobility of British history and democratic institutions, on the one hand, and his voluntarist vision of the revolutionary transformation of society by ‘the people’, on the other. How could the democratic inheritance of past popular struggles be defended and transcended?
When he invokes Whigs and Hunters in ‘The Poverty of Theory’, Thompson mentions only the book’s discussion about how the law was used to serve the interest of a part of the ruling classes. He is able to show, without too much difficulty, the inextricable connection that the supposedly ‘superstructural’ feature of the law had with economic interests rooted in the ‘base’ of eighteenth century English society. By doing so, he is able to boost his argument about the futility of separating ‘basis’ from ‘superstructure’ in Marxist analysis.46
Thompson makes no reference, though, to the paean to law and order as a universal good that ends Whigs and Hunters. This part of his book not only flatly contradicted Marx’s views about the role of law in a society, but also equally contradicted Thompson’s argument against separating ‘superstructure’ and ‘basis’. How, after all, can we decide that a ‘superstructural’ feature of society like the law is always something positive, no matter what society it occurs in, unless we assume that the law can be understood in isolation from the ‘basis’ of any society in which it is found?47
By laying aside contradictory ‘hardcore’ beliefs and taking on some Marxist assumptions he had usually rejected, Thompson ensured that the Marxological sections of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ would be exceptions in his writings. It would be a mistake, then, to try to read Thompson’s interpretation of Marx as a sort of ‘key’ to his historical work, or to his political career. It is, instead, a glimpse of a body of thought that other scholars would bring into being, in the decades after the publication of ‘The Poverty of Theory’.
1 For section nine of ‘The Poverty of Theory’, see pp. 247–262; section fifteen can be read on pp. 354–373 (The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, 1978).
2 Later in the chapter we will discuss the arguments to this effect from Paul Q Hirst, who is hostile to Thompson’s whole essay, and Bill Schwarz, who is much more sympathetic towards ‘The Poverty of Theory’. Other Thompson supporters who questioned the fidelity of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ to Marx included David Montgomery, who claimed that Thompson questions ‘some of the master’s most famous concepts’ (David Montgomery, ‘History as Human Agency’, Monthly Review, October 1981, p. 43).
3 Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, New Left Books, London, 1980, pp. 59–99.
4 Ibid., p. 59.
5 Ibid.
6 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, p. 257.
7 Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, p. 60.
8 Friedrich Engels, Letters on Historical Materialism 1890–94, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980.
9 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, p. 257.
10 Ibid., pp. 200–201.
11 Ibid., p. 384.
12 Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, p. 66–67.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., pp. 71–77.
15 Bertell Ollman, Dialectical Investigations, Routledge, New York and London, 1993, p. 24. See also Ollman’s Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2003, online at www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/books/dd.php, accessed 13/01/08.
16 Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, p. 62.
17 Paul Q Hirst, Marxism and Historical Writing, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston, 1985, p. 63.
18 Bill Schwarz, Sociology, 13, 1979, p. 546.
19 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, p. 258.
20 Ibid., p. 306.
21 Anthony Brewer, Guide to Marx’s Capital, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1984, p. 44.
22 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, p. 258.
23 EP Thompson, Persons and Polemics, Merlin, London, 1994, p. 222.
24 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, pp. 219–220.
25 Robert Payne, Marx, WH Allen, London, 1968, pp. 286–287 and 317.
26 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967.
27 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977.
28 Marx’s articles on China have been translated and collected online at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/china/index.htm, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed 13/01/08.
29 Karl Marx, ‘The Indian Revolt’, New York Daily Tribune, 16/9/1857.
30 I am indebted here to Teodor Shanin and Haruki Wada’s fine presentation Late Marx and the Russian Road (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1983), which includes an account of the changes that Marx made to both Capital and The Communist Manifesto as his views evolved in the last decade of his life.
31 Karl Marx, from ‘The Civil War in France’, in Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Collected Works, volume 22, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1986, p. 339.
32 Marx’s letter is reproduced in translation in Late Marx and the Russian Road, pp. 134–138.
33 The letter(s) to Zasulich is the centrepiece of Late Marx and the Russian Road. See pp. 97–123.
34 Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, translated and edited by Lawrence Krader, Assen, Netherlands, 1974.
35 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Karl Marx and the Iroquois’, online on the Class Against Class website at www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/marx_iroquois.html, accessed 13/01/08.
36 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, p. 220.
37 Raya Dunyaveskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Harvester Press and Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1982.
38 James D White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, Macmillan, London, 1996.
39 Rosemont, ‘Karl Marx and the Iroquois’.
40 Ryazanov’s account of his discovery of the drafts can be found on pp. 127–134 of Late Marx and the Russian Road. Kevin Anderson discusses Ryazanov’s opinion in his interesting essay ‘Uncovering Marx’s Yet Unpublished Writings’ (Critique, 30–31, 1998, pp. 179–187). Dunayevskaya criticises Ryazanov’s reading of the late Marx on pp. 177–178 of Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution.
41 Dunyaveskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, pp. 175–197.
42 Engels, of course, claimed that Marx had wanted to incorporate his reading on Russia into Capital’s chapter on ground rent. James D White has correctly argued that this claim trivialises the importance of the Russian studies to Marx (Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, p. 282). The publication in the mid-1990s of Marx’s drafts of Capital’s second and third volumes confirmed many scholars’ suspicions that Engels had played down the very important role he had in shaping the published texts, and exaggerated the coherence of what Marx had left (see Michael Heinrich, ‘Engels’ Edition of Capital and Marx’s Original Manuscript’, Science and Society, 60, 4, 1996–97, pp. 452–466). Engels’ reluctance to admit the importance of the Russian studies seems to be related to his desire to present Capital’s second and third volumes as essentially complete works.
43 Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, Macmillan, London, 1996, pp. 255–256. White read Marx’s text, which was written in Russian and has never been fully translated, in the Marx archive at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.
44 White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, p. 256.
45 EP Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975.
46 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, pp. 288–290.
47 Perry Anderson makes a similar point, when he complains that: ‘[S]ome of the most sweeping despotisms in history have promulgated and enforced comprehensive legal systems. A tyranny can perfectly well rule by law: its own laws. The Mongol Empire is a famous case in point. The great Yasa of Genghis Khan stipulated juridical equality of all before provisions of its code. ‘Law’ never rules – to imagine that it could is to reify social relations in a classic formalist fallacy’ (Arguments within English Marxism, p. 71).