For the rest, the book will ‘speak for itself.
Part 1
Late Marx
The first part of the book begins with an article which sets out the line of argument the book is to pursue: an historiography of Marx’s thought which differs from that usually adopted, the place of Russian social data and revolution experience in it, the way it indicates Marx’s developing insights into ‘the peripheries’ of the capitalism he was exploring in Volume I of Capital. The subsequent article by Wada offers a systematic textual analysis – an intellectual history – of the changes which occurred in Marx’s writings since 1867 and considers their relation to the Russian scene and their direct relevance to Marx’s growing awareness of the ‘structure of backward capitalism’. Wada’s work reflects also the very important achievement of the Japanese scholars, which was seldom given the attention and credit it deserves. The last item within Part One is a section of a larger article by Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan which offered an early critical response to Shanin and Wada’s views concerning the continuity and the change in Marx’s thought. Their line of criticism is presented without being endorsed, in the spirit of the book’s motto. The part of the article devoted to changes in Marx’s understanding of the state, linking the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 to his consideration of the Russian peasant commune in 1881, is presented in full as an interesting extension of the theme to which this book is devoted.
Late Marx: gods and craftsmen
Teodor Shanin
Das ist der Weisheit letzer Schluß:
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben
Der täglich sie erobern muß!
This is the final wisdom, ever true:
He only earns his freedom and his life
who daily conquers them anew!
Goethe, Faust II
Ordering change
Volume I of Marx’s Capital was both the peak of Classical Political Economy and its most radical reinterpretation. It offered a fundamental model, built on the classical ‘theory of value’, of the most industrially advanced social economies of its time. It developed and placed at the centre of analysis a theory of accumulation through exploitation, and thereby of structurally determined class conflict and social transformation – the theory of ‘surplus value’. It is indeed, therefore, ‘the self-consciousness of the capitalist society … primarily a theory of bourgeois society and its economic structure’,1 but for realism’s sake one must date it and place it, territorially and politically. The date is that of the pre-1870 blossoming of industrial ‘private’ capitalism. The place is Western Europe and its focus Great Britain. The political context is that of the socialist challenge to the status quo, a demand to turn the material goods and potential that industrial capitalism had produced into a base for a just society – ‘to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’.2 In the Hegelian language Marx favoured, the theoretical structure of Capital would be, therefore, the dialectical negation of Political Economy, a self-consciousness of capitalism turning at its highest level of accomplishment into criticism of its very root, its unmasking, and thereby its subversion and transformation.
To date and place Capital is also to open up a major set of questions concerning the development of Marx’s thought in the period which followed. Central to it is the 1872-82 decade of Marx’s life in which there was growing interdependence between Marx’s analysis, the realities of Russia, and the Russian revolutionary movement – an uncanny forerunner of what was to come in 1917. The questions concern Marx’s theory of social transformation – of ordering change not only within capitalism. To understand this one may well begin with Capital but cannot stop at that.
The strength of Capital lay in its systematic, comprehensive, critical, historically sophisticated and empirically substantiated presentation of the way a newly created type of economy – the contemporary capitalist economy of Great Britain – had worked on a societal level. Of paramount significance has been the more general use this model offered for other societies in which capitalism has been in manifest and rapid ascent ever since. Its limitations as well as its points of strength are ‘children of their time’ – the times of the breakthrough and rush forward of the ‘Industrial Revolution’, the rise and increasing application of science and the spread of the French Revolution’s political philosophies of evolution and progress. Central to it was evolutionism – the intellectual arch-model of those times, as prominent in the works of Darwin as in the philosophy of Spencer, in Comte’s positivism and in the socialism of Fourier and Saint Simon. Evolutionism is, essentially, a combined solution to the problems of heterogeneity and change. The diversity of forms, physical, biological and social, is ordered and explained by the assumption of a structurally necessary development through stages which the scientific method is to uncover. Diversity of stages explains the essential diversity of forms. The strength of that explanation lay in the acceptance of change as a necessary part of reality. Its main weakness was the optimistic and unilinear determinism usually built into it: the progress through stages meant also the universal and necessary ascent to a world more agreeable to the human or even to the ‘absolute spirit’ or God himself. The materialist epistemology of Capital, the dialectical acceptance of structural contradictions and of possible temporary retrogressions within capitalism, the objection to teleology, did not jettison the kernel of evolutionism. ‘The country that is more developed industrially’ was still destined ‘only [to] show, to the less developed, the image of its own future’. Indeed it was a matter of ‘natural laws working themselves out with iron necessity’.3
Yet Marx’s mind was evidently far from happy with the unilinear simplicities of the evolutionist scheme. The richness of the evidence he studied militated against it and so did his own dialectical training and preferred epistemology. Also, the reason why it was the north-west corner of Europe that bred the first edition of the capitalist mode of production was still to be discovered. An admission of simple accident would be far from Marx’s requirement for a science of society. In consequence and already by 1853 Marx had worked out and put to use the concepts of Oriental Despotism and of the Asiatic Mode of Production, its close synonym, as a major theoretical supplement and alternative to unilinear explanations.4
Marx’s new societal map has assumed the global co-existence of potentially progressive social formations and of essentially static ‘a-historical’ ones. The nature of such static societies, of Oriental Despotism, was defined by a combination of environmental and social characteristics: extensive arid lands and hydraulic agriculture necessitating major irrigation schemes, a powerful state, and state monopoly over land and labour, multitudes of self-contained rural communities tributary to the state. Following Hegel’s turn of phrase, Marx saw such societies as ‘perpetuating natural vegetative existence’,5 i.e. showing cyclical and quantitative changes while lacking an inbuilt mechanism of necessary social transformation. Marx’s case-list included China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Turkey, Persia, India, Java, parts of Central Asia and pre-Columbian America, Moorish Spain etc., and also, less definitely, Russia, defined as semi-Asiatic.6 The heterogeneity of global society, the differential histories of its parts, could be easier placed and explained by a heuristically richer scheme – a combination of evolutionary stages of the progressing societies