Marx at the
Margins is an important summary of Marx’s thought concerning the relationship
between the capitalist and non-capitalist world, colonialism and social
development, as well as nationalism and internationalism. The book provides a
general overview of Marx’s thinking about these issues, especially as Anderson
draws together and gives some narrative form to an extremely wide-ranging
number of Marx’s writings. However, Anderson doesn’t always step back to
consider this material from a more conceptual standpoint. Therefore these notes
try and synthesize Anderson’s reading in order to lay the groundwork for a more
schematic understanding of the issues raised in the book.
The overall
argument of Marx at the Margins is that Marx develops from a position
relatively uncritical of colonialism to one that is far more complex and
oppositional. Specifically, Anderson shows how Marx’s early work on the
non-western world and the peasantry tended to be undialectical, reflecting a
unilinear conception of history. Marx was inclined, Anderson argues, to
conceive of historical development in non-western societies as inevitably
mirroring that of Western Europe. Furthermore, the peasantry was to gradually
wither away into the proletariat. The problem with such thinking is that it
lends itself to a stagist understanding of the historical process, one that has
had profound political consequences. Anderson contends that it was not until
the Grundrisse that Marx began to arrive at an alternative view, one that was more
dialectical and global perspective. Anderson characterizes Marx’s developing
theory of history as multilinear, rather than unilinear. These ideas are
outlined in chapters one, five and six in the book. Chapters 2-4 focus on
Marx’s understanding of nationalism and capitalist development. Those issues
are not covered here.
A “never
changing natural destiny”
Anderson
notes that Marx’s early writing on non-western societies was “clearly
influenced by Hegel.” For instance, examining his “harsh critique” of Indian
society, Anderson quotes Hegel’s racist disregard of “India as a society that
‘has remained stationary and fixed’.” Therefore, “as a society where no real
change or development had occurred, India had no real history,” Anderson
concludes. Hegel accepted “colonialism as the product of historical necessity”;
that is, the inevitable outcome of the absence of historical dynamism. India,
like most of the non-Western world, was for Hegel characterized by a
fundamental inertia, a lack of antagonism which “undergirded internal
despotism.” Nevertheless, citing anthropologist Lawrence Krader, Anderson holds
that, all things considered, Hegel could be distinguished from his
contemporaries by his “concrete and historical” approach—something Marx was to
later develop in more liberating directions (14).
Anderson
highlights The Communist Manifesto as the most representative example of the
tendency in Marx’s early writing on non-western societies to view colonialism
uncritically. The Manifesto marveled at how the revolutionary power of
capitalism “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than
have all preceding generations together” and “by the rapid improvement of all
instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.” However, it has
done so by “pitilessly [tearing] asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man
to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man
and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment,” replacing it
with nothing but “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” Anderson
notes that the Manifesto indicates the dialectical opposition between the
expanding productive powers of social labor, its impoverishment and the subject
in the form of the proletariat that is its negation. And yet, as Anderson comments,
this dialectic seems limited to the Western context. In terms of the colonial
world, the emphasis remains only on the incorporation of “even the most
barbarian, nations into civilisation.” The Manifesto, Anderson seems to be
saying, lends itself to a stagist reading, one where we await the creation of a
proletariat at which point the struggle for communism can really begin in such
non-Western societies.
Such views
found their way into his first articles on India of 1853. Marx could write that
British colonialism created “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”
Marx pointed to how British trade and eventual political subordination of South
Asia destroyed the foundations of its textile industry through the flooding of
its market with goods manufactured in England (15). For British capitalism,
through the auspices of the powerful corporate syndicate the British East India
Company, India was to become another cotton exporting country providing raw
material for the English textile industry and a captive market for British
trade. Part of the social revolution introduced by British colonialism,
according to Marx, was the seizure of nominally public land and its
distribution to a new class of landowners. The zemindars, “a semihereditary
class of local officials” who collected taxes from the peasantry, thereby
gained private hold of the means of subsistence of the peasantry. Such
primitive accumulation meant that the recipocal rights of Indian feudalism were
therefore displaced by the potentially unlimited exploitation of a newly
created class of landlords (21). Losing any traditional right to the land for
their own sustenance, many Indian peasants experienced a qualitative decline of
social life and deepening poverty with devastating consequences—including the
periodic cholera outbreaks that devastated 19th century India resulting in tens
of millions of lost lives.
While Marx
was clearly aware of the real qualitative regression involved in these social
developments and catastrophes, Anderson contends there remained unresolved
contradictions in his thought, in particular in his concept of “Oriental
despotism.” For example, Marx contended that the immense geographic spaces of
Asia gave rise to the “centralizing power of Government,” which was the only effective
means to successfully establish large-scale irrigation and other public works.
This was in contrast to Europe where such needs instead “drove private
enterprise to voluntary association” (16).
Setting
aside for now the historical accuracy of such an assessment it is the structure
of Marx’s argument that is of immediate concern. Marx at the Margins is
interested in the reproduction of the trope of “Asiatic despotism” in Marx’s
thought and how his views, according to Anderson, subsequently change. As
Anderson suggests, Marx still considered in a one-sided fashion the
relationship between peasant struggles to retain the communal character of the
land and the development of private property relations. Maintaining that in
India the “idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had
always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism,” because such spaces
contained no internally generated antagonisms, rendering human beings
“transformed” from “a self-developing social state into never changing natural
destiny” and fundamentally reflecting a “stagnatory, and vegetative life” (16).
An enclosed and self-sufficient village world propelled by simple craft and
agricultural production corresponded to a changeless mode of social existence
that gave rise to, or underpinned unchanging “despotic” societies of Asia.
Despite drawing attention to the regressions set in motion by colonialism, Marx
continued to situate the development of private property as the negation of the
so-called “Asiatic mode of production.”
Not only did
the possibilities of historical change in India remain located in the
antagonisms introduced by British colonialism. Those very antagonisms seemed to
abstractly lead to the duplication of a particular historical development as a
universal expression of all historical change: “England has to fulfill a double
mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of
old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society
in Asia” (22). Thus the incorporation of Britain and India into an expanding
world capitalism continued to be conceived one-sidedly. If Marx remained
embedded within a racist European historiographic tradition concerning
non-Western societies that traversed the likes of Adam Smith and Hegel among
others, Marx’s ability to make any empirical advances in the concrete study of
non-Western societies was limited by inaccurate histories written by colonial
officials.
It “supports
communist tendencies in people’s minds”
According to
Anderson, Marx’s somewhat deterministic views of historical change in
non-Western societies were significantly modified beginning with the
Grundrisse, remained an important theme in Capital, which culminated in his
Ethnological Notebooks and late writings on the Russian peasant commune.
Anderson devotes chapters five and six to the conceptual changes in Marx’s
thinking about the possibilities of historical development within communal,
“precapitalist” forms of labor and land, and their relationship to the struggle
of the proletariat. Anderson argues that instead of treating non-Western
societies as an undifferentiated whole conditioned by a few key features, Marx
begins to consider more seriously how these societies change through internal
contradiction, develop various permutations, and in the process become sites of
potential communist revolution. Such changes in Marx’s thinking have profound
implications for his theory of history.
Typical of
this change, Anderson tells us, is the growing realization by Marx that
communal land need not necessarily be expropriated as private property in order
to develop its productive power. As an example Anderson contrasts Marx’s
extensive notes on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and Engel’s The Origins
of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The comparison is significant
because Engels based much of his own book on Marx’s notes. As Anderson writes,
“Engels, who concentrated on the rise of private property, missed the
possibility that collectivist forms of domination that minimized private
property could also create very pronounced social hierarchies” (204, his
emphasis). If such forms of social organization could develop within communal
societies, for instance caste-type systems of social hierarchy, then so too
could their alternatives. There was therefore the potential for what Marx
called “ a more despotic or a more democratic form” of communally based society
(157). Marx no longer saw communal societies as an undifferentiated and
unchanging whole—as he had with India in the early 1850s—and began to give
attention, writes Anderson, to the “broad changes in India’s communal forms,”
suggesting that he no longer saw it as an “‘unchanging’ society without any
real history, as in 1853” (209).
No longer
seeing the capitalist privatization and modernization of communal land and
labor as a necessary step toward the conditions for communist revolution,
Anderson argues that Marx now saw in a positive sense that “communal social
forms in Russia and Asia represented an obstacle and a challenge to bourgeois
property relations” (205). With this in mind, Marx approvingly quotes from
Russian sociologist Maskim Kovalevsky on the policy of the French National
Assembly towards Algeria in the early 1870s. As representatives of the
bourgeoisie, their goal was “[t]he formation of private landownership [ ] as
the necessary condition of all progress in the political and social sphere. The
further maintenance of communal property, ‘as a form that supports communist
tendencies in people’s minds’ is dangerous both for the colony and for the
homeland” (219-220).
In previous
moments Marx’s stagist conception of historical development would put his
theory—at least nominally—on the side of the French bourgeoisie and
colonialists. After all, both saw the conversion of communal forms of land
holding and labor as “progress.” Now Marx suggested the opposite. While the
French capitalists and colonialists called their plans “progress,” in fact the
bourgeoisie wanted to separate, as Marx again quotes Kovalevsky, “the Arabs
from their natural bond to the soil to break the last strength of the clan
unions thus being dissolved, and thereby, any danger of rebellion.” The
breaking of the social basis of Algerian society was key to the transfer of
land to the colonists and the creation of a labor force to work those
landholdings. In the Algerian fight against French colonialism Marx saw a
corresponding struggle to that of the Paris Commune. Anderson comments that
Marx was making “a connection between those who suppressed a modern ‘commune’
set up by the workers of Paris and those who were seizing indigenous communal
landholdings in Algeria” (220).
At the same
time, Marx continued to contrast communally based societies, which remained
“confined” to a “restricted level of economic and social development,” to
capitalist society. Marx continues with the idea that the social relations and
productive power of capitalism established the conditions to realize a
“universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces”
that was not possible in previous modes of production. As Anderson writes,
quoting the Grundrisse, the revolutionary potential unleashed by capitalist
society “stood in contrast to the ‘predetermined yardstick’ of precapitalist societies,
with their fixed absolutes focused upon the past. Instead, the future-oriented
modern human being, he writes, is engaged in ‘the absolute movement of
becoming’” (159). Precapitalist modes of production and social relations, Marx
says, inevitably produce local and closed societies that repeatedly reproduce
themselves with little change. Universality, in terms of the potential of
individual and social development, is not possible.
Marx does
not abandon the idea that capitalist social relations lay the foundation for a
communist society. He continued to compare capitalist to non-capitalist social
relations in order to present a picture of what Anderson calls the former’s
“perverse uniqueness” (181). Capitalism created a new class that was radically
separated from the means of labor. Because of their closed off condition,
isolated individual workers compete to sell their ability to labor to
capitalists. Only through this act of exchange in the receipt of wages can
these workers meet their needs. The proletariat is, then, alienated from all
needs. It cannot realize any need except through reproducing its alienation as
a means to obtain money in search of those needs.
Conversely,
as Anderson reminds us, Marx writes that in precapitalist society “the
individual does not become independent vis à vis the commune” (159). Here the
individual is not completely shut off from the means of production and, as a
consequence, Marx holds, “direct relations of dominance and servitude” prevail
(183). What is the connection? The person is not separated from the means of
labor and therefore the product of labor is not alienated from their activity.
Further, because the means of production are considered communal property, a
direct relationship to the means of production, for example a peasant to the
land, means that the person’s existence is self-identical to a social role—such
as caste, guild or any clearly defined community such as a clan. In these
circumstances, according to Marx, there is no standpoint from which the person
experiences this role external to oneself. Exploitation appears directly in the
form of a “natural” domination.
In
capitalism, exploitation is experienced indirectly because, while nominally
free, the working class is profoundly dispossessed of the means of labor. The
working class is “free” to sell its ability to labor, or die, clearly no choice
at all. However, the appearance of freedom underlies these relations because
they are mediated indirectly through things, i.e. commodities, the most
important, “universal” commodity being money. Unlike in precapitalist
societies, according to Marx, here the means of production and the product of
labor appear as external and dominate the person. There can be no
self-identification on the part of the proletarian with the means of production
and the product of labor, which conditions her struggle for freedom in unique
ways.
Dispossessed
of all direct ties, the proletarian is radically individual and, nevertheless,
interdependent and conditioned by cooperative labor. Therefore, given its state
of complete separation from the object of labor, the proletariat as individual
and as a class conducts a relentless struggle to appropriate the means of
production. While for Marx communal labor served as a basis for communistic
struggle it was also true that there remained certain limitations in the
development of these social relations. Communal forms of labor provided an
obstacle to “the labor of an individual from becoming private labor and his
product a private product, it causes individual labor to appear rather as the
unmediated function of a member of the social organism” (161).
The
revolutionary character of capitalism overturns all social bonds and anything
fixed. It frees the individual only to reduce her to an automaton. Capitalism
frees the means of production only to turn it into an apparatus of virtually
unlimited domination. Such a condition is a terrible prospect, which for Marx
makes capitalism the most exploitative and socially devastating society ever
known. In precapitalist societies the extraction of surplus by the ruling class
was consumed as a use-value. Despite their exploitation and oppressiveness,
these societies continued to have the human being as the purpose of production.
Conversely, the capitalist above all seeks unlimited surplus as its own end.
The reproduction of human beings is incidental to his logic. For Marx, there is
a universality and expansiveness about capitalism that precapitalist societies
lack.
Yet such
universality also contains tremendous potential. The proletariat struggles to
appropriate this potential by realizing it in new social forms through the
establishment of new society. The productive power unleashed by capitalism
potentially frees human beings from the problems of scarcity, but, equally
important, lays the foundation for the means to collectively and individual
expand, develop and realize human powers and needs in a way not seen in history.
“A higher
form of an ‘archaic’ type”
Anderson
speaks of a multi-linear theory of history emerging in Marx’s work, which
gradually displaces the unilinear concept that had characterized his earlier
thinking. Anderson argues that this new line of thought begins to fully take
shape in the Grundrisse. He quotes Raya Dunayevskaya, who notes that the
“historic sweep” of the Grundrisse “allows Marx, during the discussion of the
relationship of ‘free’ labor as alienated labor to capital, to pose the question
of, and excursion into, pre-capitalist societies” (155). Similarly, Anderson
contends, the “subtext” of Capital implicitly suggested “how the very existence
of these noncapitalist societies implied the possibility of alternative ways of
organizing social and economic life,” allowing Marx “to elaborate modern,
progressive alternatives to capitalism” (181).
By raising
the idea of a multi-linear theory of history, Anderson infers that Marx’s
“excursion” is about far more than distinguishing the particular form of labor
in capitalist society. Instead, as Dunayevskaya’s insight suggests, Marx was
searching for a total conception of human history, where the successive
alienated forms of social existence made up a single arc from so-called called
primitive communism, an original egalitarian society with little social
division of labor, to communism in its “higher phase”—a post-capitalist
society.
Placing
capitalism in relation to other modes of life that exist contemporaneously and
in the past allowed Marx to historicize capitalism. Bourgeois thought
naturalizes capitalist social relations, making their existence given,
pre-determined and eternal. For this reasons bourgeois thought has a unilinear
conception of history that sees the destruction of other types of society as
progressive development. By historicizing capitalism, Marx is able to show how
it is a transitional society, subject to historical development, generating the
subjects whose activity constantly revolts against it and thereby brings it to
an end. Humanity exists and has existed, Marx argues, in other social forms
besides capitalist relations. Those modes of life serve as “alternatives to
capitalism,” as Anderson puts it, precisely because they are social forms in
which the relation between the creation of uses and their appropriation is not
severed. There is a direct link between labor and the means of production. In
many ways, therefore, for Marx this represents a qualitatively higher moment of
realization of human existence than capitalist society, which destroys the
connection to the production of uses and their direct appropriation by the
producers.
For this
reason Marx often drew attention to the retrogression of capitalism, nowhere
more emphatically than the course of primitive accumulation. Anderson contends
that when looking at colonialism in India in the early 1860s there is no longer
any sense in Marx, as he was to note of the condition of Ireland, that “truly
capitalist relations were beginning to develop in India, or that however painfully,
some sort of progressive modernization was taking place; rather, there is a
sense of reaching an historical impasse, as the old forms disintegrated without
progressive new ones being able to form and develop” (165). This impasse is not
limited to primitive accumulation. Capital not only periodically destroys the
conditions of labor, ever increasing the level of exploitation of existing
workers, but creates a massive surplus of laborers, separated from the land or
other means or production yet who can never be regularly employed.
As an
example of the relationship different forms of labor, Anderson cites a passage
from Capital where Marx examines the kinds of expression found in the work of
an Indian artisan as compared to that of the English proletarian. Anderson
comments:
Thus, the
Indian village system was on one level extremely conservative and restrictive,
but on another level, it offered a type of freedom lost to workers under
capitalism: autonomy in the actual conduct of their work. This existed because
there was as yet no separation of the workers from the objective conditions of
production. In this sense, the Indian craft workers—and their medieval European
counterparts—exercised an important right indeed, one at the heart of the
notion of what is lost when labor becomes alienated. (186)
The village
artisan experiences modes of life and, therefore, freedoms unknown to the
proletarian. At the same time, of course, the proletariat exists in certain
ways far more free than the artisan or the peasant. Although the proletarian is
cut off from any means of labor, she is also more free from constraints upon
her social personality. Given capitalism’s constant revolutionizing character
the proletarian realizes any number of newly created needs and, potentially,
appropriate many new uses thereby significantly expanding the personality. As a
result, for Marx proletarian existence is potentially far more many-sided than
that of previous classes. As Marx suggested, the proletariat is the first truly
global class, neither tied to a particular locality nor bound by particular
traditions.
There is a
dialectical movement between the complete separation of labor from the means of
labor, the increasing social wealth of society and, therefore, the
appropriation of that wealth as the realization of an expanding human
personality. In contrast, the village craftsman creates a limited number of
uses in a mode of production that produces for immediate use. However, in
capitalism, capital deploys labor in order to produce surplus and not uses.
There are no limits to the exploitation of the proletariat by capital in its
necessary quest to achieve ever more surplus. This is the meaning of socially
necessary labor time. There is an inverse relation between the separation of
the proletariat from the means of production and its necessary struggle to
appropriate the social wealth of humanity.
Again, Marx
does not have a unilinear conception of the uniqueness of capitalist society.
Its social relations are one form in historical succession of many others,
which also exists along side these forms contemporaneously. It is capitalism
that universalizes itself by looking back to precapitalist social relations as
well as their continuing presence and finding there its own shadow. Therefore the
connection between living labor in the value form and in the precapitalist
forms is continually erased and obscured by capital and its interlocutor
political economy.
Precapitalist
societies are centered around the creation of use-values, which capital
interrupts. Communism is the return of the production of use-values. Marx wrote
that capital was “in conflict with the working masses, with science, and with
the very productive forces it engenders—in short, in a crisis that will end
through its own elimination, through the return of modern societies to a higher
form of an ‘archaic’ type of collective ownership and production” (234). Thus
for Marx the arc of human history is not a straight line but a spiral, which
involves a return to the past, but at a qualitatively higher level where the
variant historical and contemporary social permutations in the forms of labor
that express specific sides of the human personality are now grasped as a
totality and, finally, pregnant with the potential for expanded powers.
Communism is a return of the past but without the limitations of that past.
In the last
chapter of Marx at the Margins, Anderson primarily focuses on Marx’s “ethnological
notebooks,” written from 1880-1882 toward the end of his life. What is
significant about these writings, Anderson argues, is that they are “concerned
not so much with the origins of social hierarchy in the distant past, as with
the social relations within contemporary societies under the impact of
capitalist globalization” (201).
A central
part of these late writings by Marx was the careful study of the Russian
peasant commune. Anderson shows how for Marx In concert with a proletarian
revolution in Western Europe it was possible that “communal villages could be a
starting point for a socialist transformation, one that might avoid the brutal
process of the primitive accumulation of capital.” However, “to achieve a
successful socialism, Russia would need connections to Western technology and
above all, reciprocal relations with the Western labor movement” (196-197).
Nevertheless, as the preface to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto
put it, a revolution in Russia may not only serve as “the signal for a
proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other,”
echoing his writings on Poland and Ireland, so “Russia’s peasant communal
landownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development”
(235). As Anderson concludes, Marx asserts the “possibility that noncapitalist
societies might move directly to socialism on the basis of their indigenous
communal forms, without first passing through the stage of capitalism” (224).
In response
to the Russian communists who, in the name of Marx, interpreted Capital in
abstract ways. Marx complained that they insisted on transforming his
“historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a
historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all
peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves
placed” (228). The Russian marxists held that Russia had to pass through
distinct stages of social develop along the lines of England, which was the
central “case study” in Capital. The root of the notion of a deterministic
historical development in Marx is summarized in the well-known line in
Capital—which Anderson cites—that “The country that is more developed
industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”
(177). Anderson argues it was exactly because of these kind of readings that
Marx chose to alter this line. In the French edition of Capital from 1872, Marx
alters the sentence in question to read: “The country that is more developed
industrially only shows, to those that follow it on the industrial path, the
image of its own future” (178). Although, given the extent of primitive
accumulation, the countries of Western Europe were following the general path
of England, this was not so for other regions, still relatively untouched by
the violent introduction of capitalist social relations.
The abstract
reading of Capital ironically turns historical materialism into a speculative
science, creating a theory of history that unfolded deterministically as form
empty of any content. As Anderson implies, in contrast Marx is far more
historically concrete here, placing a specific kind of labor as developing on
its own foundations. Marx argues that it is capitalism that lays the
foundations for the peasant commune to leap into communism and, therefore, the
commune need not be replaced by capitalist social relations as the precondition
of communism.
In the case
of the Russian peasant commune, Marx posits the emergence of communism as a
synthesis between the Western proletariat and the rural commune. Anderson
writes that for Marx “it might be possible to combine Russia’s ancient communal
forms with modern technology, this in a less exploitative manner than under
capitalism…a new synthesis of the archaic and the modern, one that took
advantage of the highest achievements of capitalist modernity” (230). In Marx’s
words it is “Precisely because it is contemporaneous with capitalist
production, the rural commune may appropriate for itself all the positive achievements
and this without undergoing its frightful vicissitudes” (230). In short, the
negation of the value-form at the center of the revolutionary overthrow of
capitalism is not the realization of a universal simply derived from the
proletarian experience, but one arrived at by a qualitative leap of all the
forms of labor, past and present.
