The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction [1st ed.] 9783030523503, 9783030523510

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
The Education of a Young Hegelian (Stefano Petrucciani)....Pages 1-26
The Critique of Liberalism (Stefano Petrucciani)....Pages 27-53
The Discovery of Economics (Stefano Petrucciani)....Pages 55-79
A New Conception of History (Stefano Petrucciani)....Pages 81-110
A Time for Revolution: Marx and 1848 (Stefano Petrucciani)....Pages 111-143
The Critique of Political Economy (Stefano Petrucciani)....Pages 145-189
The International, the Paris Commune, Social Democracy (Stefano Petrucciani)....Pages 191-205
Back Matter ....Pages 207-222

Citation preview

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

The Ideas of Karl Marx A Critical Introduction

Stefano Petrucciani Translated by Guido Parietti

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto York University Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver University of Bristol Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812

Stefano Petrucciani

The Ideas of Karl Marx A Critical Introduction

Stefano Petrucciani Sapienza University of Rome Rome, Italy Translated by Guido Parietti James Madison College Michigan State University East Lansing, MI, USA

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-52350-3 ISBN 978-3-030-52351-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0 Original Italian edition published by Marx, Carocci Editore, Roma 2010 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Nick Hewetson/Getty Image This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert Ware, Marx on Emancipation and the Socialist Transition: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. v

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TITLES PUBLISHED

12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020.

Titles Forthcoming

Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina

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TITLES FORTHCOMING

Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno. Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital after Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Note” V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Atila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics

TITLES FORTHCOMING

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Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism

Contents

Education of a Young Hegelian Marx’s First Steps as a Student From “Liberal” Battles to Social Questions Critique of Hegel’s Theory of the State

1 1 6 12

1

The 1.1 1.2 1.3

2

The Critique of Liberalism 2.1 The Question of Critique and the Coming of Communism 2.2 Limits of the Rights of Man and Citizen 2.3 Philosophy, Revolution, Proletariat 2.4 A First Appraisal

27 30 42 51

3

The 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Discovery of Economics Alienated Labor Reformism and Communism Yet Another Engagement with Hegel The Holy Family

55 55 65 70 74

4

A New Conception of History 4.1 The Limits of Old Materialism 4.2 Toward the Science of History 4.3 Stirner, Communism, and Individualism

81 81 87 103

27

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xii

CONTENTS

4.4

5

6

7

Concluding Remarks on the Theory of Historical Materialism

106

A Time for Revolution: Marx and 1848 5.1 The Polemics Against Proudhon and Ricardo’s Value Theory 5.2 The Communists’ Manifesto 5.3 1848 in Germany 5.4 The London Exile: A Time to Take Stock

111

The 6.1 6.2 6.3

145 145 148

Critique of Political Economy Marx as a Journalist Toward Political Economy: The Grundrisse The Fundamental Concepts of Critique: Commodity and Value, Money and Capital, Labor-Power and Surplus Value 6.4 Value and Exploitation: Two Theories and Many Problems 6.5 The Tendencies of Capitalist Economy The International, the Paris Commune, Social Democracy 7.1 The Founding of the International 7.2 The Franco-Prussian War and the Commune 7.3 The Birth of Social Democracy

111 119 130 135

160 172 181

191 191 193 200

Chronology of Life and Works

207

Bibliography

211

Index

219

CHAPTER 1

The Education of a Young Hegelian

1.1

Marx’s First Steps as a Student

Karl Marx’s position in the development of modern thought is not easily defined; his intellectual stance, in fact, hardly fits within usual disciplinary divisions. Especially at the time of his education and earliest works, Marx is a philosopher of the Hegelian left, even if a peculiar one. Already with The German Ideology, however, Marx is moving toward the transformation of philosophy into a theory of society and history, and with that he qualifies as one of the founding fathers of modern social science. In the period culminating with the European revolution of 1848 (when Marx publishes, with Engels, the Manifesto of the Communist Party) Marx is first and foremost a political thinker; but the greatest work of his life, Capital (first volume published in 1867) bears the subtitle “Critique of Political Economy,” placing Marx among the classics of modern economics. Marx, thus, cannot be slotted into a single discipline: through philosophy and social theory, politics and economics, his work appears as a unique occurrence in the history of thought; this is true both for its distinctively multi-disciplinary character and for its extraordinary influence on culture and, most importantly, European and world history. Marx’s unique character, which made him the most influential thinkers of the last two centuries, may be comprehended only by understanding his work, irreducible to any specific discipline as it is, through its own peculiarity. And this peculiarity lies precisely in the fact that Marx has been the © The Author(s) 2020 S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0_1

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first thinker in Western history to articulate a radical critique of society, at once as a science and as a political-organizational perspective. In this way, Marx created something previously unheard of, a radical innovation the like of which the history of the West had never known. Naturally, before Marx there had been attempts, more or less moralistic, to criticize society, property, and inequality. Likewise, instances of radical revolutionary politics were not unknown—for example in the most extreme factions of the French Revolution, such as Babeuf’s “conspiracy of the equals.” Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind, had developed a deep philosophical critique of an inegalitarian society. But only with Marx, a century later, the critique makes that extraordinary leap which brings together scientific, historical, and economic knowledge of society while connecting the theory to a political-practical perspective, itself grounded on social analysis and real class conflicts. What are, then, the steps through which Marx develops his radically new critical perspective? Here we shall go through these steps, reconstructing their essential argumentative turns. Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, from a family of the Jewish bourgeoisie which had converted to Lutheranism. His father—Heinrich, an esteemed lawyer of liberal and Francophile proclivities—nudged the son toward the study of law, and so Marx enrolled at the university of Bonn in 1838, at the tender age of seventeen. Only a year later, though, Marx left Bonn for the university of Berlin where, Hegel having taught until his death in 1831, Hegelian philosophy was still very influential. Thus, Marx’s intellectual education happens under the aegis of Hegel’s philosophy, to which he promptly converts, abandoning earlier sympathies for Kant and Fichte.1 A letter to his father documents this first essential turning point in Marx’s biography. The letter is a broad reflection on Marx’s philosophical convictions as they then stood. There Marx writes he had read Hegel “from beginning to end,”2 and that he was eventually swayed by a philosophy he had initially rejected (its “grotesque and rocky melody had never been to my taste”).3 Crucially, and differently from Kant and Fichte, Hegel did not place the ideal above the real, but rather 1 Concerning these very early moments of Marx’ thought, see: M. Duichin, Il primo Marx. Momenti di un itinerario intellettuale, 1835–1841 (Roma: Cadmo, 1982). 2 Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to His Father,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). The quoted text is from p. 19. 3 Ibid., 18.

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sought “the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.”4 Having thus arrived at Hegelian dialectic despite himself, Marx resolved to abandon legal studies and turn toward philosophy. En route to an expedite graduation Marx submitted his dissertation at the university of Jena, where on April 15, 1841 (without being present) he was declared doctor in philosophy, with a thesis on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. The dissertation is an erudite and accurate work which, for its methodology and form, fits perfectly within the Hegelian school of philosophical historiography. As noted by various scholars,5 though, Marx’s conclusions are almost opposite to Hegel’s appraisal of the two Greek thinkers in his lecture on the history of philosophy, because Marx emphasized the theoretical value of Epicurus above Democritus. Marx’s reasons to inquire this moment of the history of thought, however, were hardly academic or historicalphilosophical; what he rather wanted was to employ the reflection on post-Aristotelian philosophies (Stoicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism) in the context of his contemporary intellectual environment. And thus the basic question: What is left for those who (like Marx) find themselves thinking after the completion of a great systematic philosophy (then Aristotle, now Hegel), that is to say after a “conclusive” theory which seems to have expressed and exhausted in itself all potentialities of human reason? Hegel’s philosophy is indeed conclusive in many respects. First because, logically, it develops a concept of truth as a result of the whole process of the history of thought (conceptually reconstructed). The Hegelian summa does not leave anything out of itself, it recognizes to every past philosophy the merit of having developed one category of logic (which is to say, of reality), and it takes on itself the task of drawing the final implications of a thought process which arrives at full and definitive self-awareness in Hegelian philosophy itself. Hegel interprets history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom; a freedom which in the modern age is finally universalized, organizing a reality which makes itself 4 Ibid. 5 See the excellent work of Roberto Finelli, Un parricidio mancato. Hegel e il giovane Marx (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004), 53–63. On Marx and atomism, see: George E. McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990).

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into reason. But if that is so, what role can an intellectual, such as Marx, perform within the horizon of a Hegelian system understood as the “conclusive” and “ultimate” philosophy? Overcoming Hegel from a new point of view is impossible, for in his philosophy all points of view are already included, with their limits and merits properly recognized; what can one do, then? For the group of critical intellectuals usually labeled as young Hegelians (Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess)—some of whom were personal friend and intellectual companions of Marx in Berlin—the problem was understood primarily on two levels: politics and theory of religion. The critical task appears to be that of completing the work that Hegel could not, or would not, complete. If it is true that in modernity reason made itself into a reality, affirming the universal principle of freedom, then one needs to develop the concrete implications of this principle into action, criticizing whatever residual irrationality persists in empirical existence: the authoritarian institutions of the Prussian State and the masses’ dependency on religious faith. Philosophy, Marx writes in the Preface to his dissertation, chooses Prometheus as its hero, and with him it stands «against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity».6 It appears, then, that post-Hegelian philosophers have to translate the philosophical principle into critical-practical activity, so as to purify the existing world from the irrational remnants which have already been overcome in thought— which, at once, means to criticize Hegel, not for his principles, but for his accommodations to extant political and religious institutions. Marx is, in a sense, part of this general context and mood, but he also seems to find in it problems and contradictions which leave him unsatisfied. It is not enough, Marx wrote in a note of his dissertation, for the disciples to criticize Hegel’s compromises with the bad that still exists in reality; this moralistic approach must rather be abandoned in favor of a scientific one. In other words, one needs to ask whether the “accommodations” might not be rooted in some intrinsic defect of Hegel’s philosophical framework, «in an inadequacy or in an inadequate formulation of his principle itself».7 But asides from Hegel himself, there are more 6 Karl Marx, “Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 30. 7 Ibid., 84.

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problems with his disciples and the spiritual situation of the Hegelian “left.” If philosophy was completed in Hegel, it seems all is left is to make the world adequate to it: «philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance».8 This attitude is indeed understandable and has its own good reasons: It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy empire of Amenthes [the dwelling place of the souls of the dead, according to Egyptians] as will turns itself against the reality of the world existing without it.

The transformation of philosophy into action (from the perspective proposed in 1838 by another young Hegelian, August von Cieszkowski),9 seems incongruous to Marx, who argues: But the practice of philosophy is itself theoretical. It is the critique that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea. But this immediate realisation of philosophy is in its deepest essence afflicted with contradictions, and this its essence takes form in the appearance and imprints its seal upon it.10

Why, then, is this “critical” attitude of the Hegelian left (e.g., of Bruno Bauer, and in part of Marx himself), also contradictory? The answer is that: «When philosophy turns itself as will against the world of appearance, then the system is lowered to an abstract totality, that is, it has become one aspect of the world which opposes another one».11 Philosophy, which in Hegel was supposed to be a totality, is reduced to a part to which another is opposed: the not (yet) rational existing world. From a Hegelian point of view, this position is absurd, for it replicates the division between reason and reality which Hegel wanted to overcome (and in such 8 Karl Marx, “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 491. 9 August von Cieszkowski, “Prolegomena to Historiosophie,” in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 10 Marx, “Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,”

85. 11 Ibid.

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overcoming Marx saw the greatness of the Stuttgart’s philosopher). Thus, either one assumes that reason and reality coincide—as in the Hegelian right, from which Marx is very distant—or one risks to fall back into preHegelian positions, where reason is the enlightening moment, opposed to an irrational and recalcitrant reality. Unsatisfied with both horns of the dilemma, Marx seeks a third solution which still eludes him,12 a need he expresses metaphorically in a page of the Notebooks, where he returns to reflect on his problem, by asking whether «men can live at all after a total philosophy», or rather they have to resign to a squalid mediocrity. At such times half-hearted minds have opposite views to those of wholeminded generals. They believe that they can compensate losses by cutting the armed forces, by splitting them up, by a peace treaty with the real needs, whereas Themistocles, when Athens was threatened with destruction, tried to persuade the Athenians to abandon the city entirely and found a new Athens at sea, in another element.13

The new Athens adumbrated by Marx would be a new philosophy, capable of a critical attitude toward the world, but without reinstating that division between reason and reality so effectively criticized by Hegel. Marx, which in this way will be a better Hegelian than the young Hegelians, shall thus conceive of critique not as a point of view external to reality, but as a self -critique of reality, a movement immanent to reality itself.

1.2

From “Liberal” Battles to Social Questions

Since the path toward an academic appointment was foreclosed—the space for critical and radical ideas in Prussian universities was shrinking by the day—Marx turned to journalism, through which the young Hegelians thought they could undermine the sclerotic authoritarian institutions of Prussia. In 1838, Arnold Ruge had founded the “Annals of Halle,” the young Hegelians’ main journal which in 1841, unable to continue publication in Prussia, morphed into “German Annals,” published from

12 Concerning this complex phase of Marx’s reflection, see both the already cited book by Finelli and the useful essay: Emmanuel Renault, Marx et l’idée de critique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995). 13 Marx, “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” 492.

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Dresden. Marx wrote his first article in 1842: a polemical attack against the recently promulgated dispositions regarding censorship. An article which, of course, was not approved by the censorship (then preemptively applied to publications) and thus could only be published in Switzerland in 1843, within a collection of censored articles edited by Ruge. Already in 1842, however, Marx’s journalistic activity could be vigorously exercised in a brand-new daily newspaper, the “Rheinische Zeitung,” edited in Cologne. Rhineland, a border territory, had been annexed by France between 1795 and 1814 and was the economically most developed region of Prussia. The newspaper, financed by members of the local bourgeoisie, was the counterpart of the conservative “Kölnische Zeitung,” and it supported modernizing and liberalizing policies (defense of the Napoleonic Civil Code, juridical equality of all citizens) within the perspective of German unification. Marx published his first article there in May 1842, and in October of the same year he became chief editor of the newspaper. Under Marx’s direction, the newspaper enjoyed a moderate success, but a short life: on January 21, 1843, in fact, the authorities decreed the newspaper had to cease operations, effective April 1 of the same year. On March 17 Marx resigned. Through the many articles he wrote in these months, Marx intensively and polemically developed a defense of the “liberal” cause, undertaken especially by commenting on the debates of the Rhineland Diet (a sort of regional parliament, without much power, whose composition was based on estates). The main themes were the defense of press freedom against censorship, the battle for the autonomy of the State from religion, but also questions who were inciting problems and social tensions, such as the law against timber theft and the protests of the Mosel’s winemakers. Marx exercised his considerable polemical strength to support freedom, even while his “liberalism,” rooted in Hegelian and young Hegelian philosophy, still conceived the State as a moment that ought to be above the private egoistic interests so as to realize the freedom of all citizens, including the poorest ones. Even when, later, his positions will become more radical and he will abandon the liberal camp, Marx remained a theorist of freedom, albeit with an interpretation of freedom less and less connected to the liberal tradition. Freedom, writes Marx in one of his

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anti-censorship articles, coincides with the essence of mankind.14 Just as liberalism teaches us, freedom can only be guaranteed by the rule of law: Laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom […] Laws are rather the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness15

Freedom is instead denied by censorship, which arbitrarily judges the tone and “tendencies” expressed by an article and which, therefore and contrarily to every legal principle, condemns someone merely for their intentions, not for what they explicitly do.16 Freedom of the press is crucial for the defense of all other freedoms, because a free press: is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a people’s faith in itself, the eloquent link that connects the individual with the state and the world, the embodied culture that transforms material struggles into intellectual struggles and idealises their crude material form. […] It is the ideal world which always wells up out of the real world and flows back into it with ever greater spiritual riches and renews its soul.17

All freedoms stand and fall together: One form of freedom governs another just as one limb of the body does another. Whenever a particular freedom is put in question, freedom in general is put in question.18

And there is no freedom without the separation between Church and State, without abandoning that idea of a “Christian State,” which sharply contradicts the principles of modern political citizenship (here Marx’s writings about divorce law are also relevant). A State declaring itself Christian is intrinsically discriminatory, even when it tolerates different denominations. Indeed, Marx reminds us, the «conversion of the concept

14 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 155. 15 Ibid., 162. 16 Ibid., 120. 17 Ibid., 165. 18 Ibid., 180.

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of the state into an independent concept» is not a recent innovation, being rather intrinsic to the whole tradition of rational political thought, from Machiavelli and Hobbes up to Rousseau, Fichte, and Hegel. However, while the early theorists of public law meant to derive the State from individual reason (through the fiction of a contract), the more ideal and profound view of recent philosophy proceeds from the idea of the whole. It looks on the state as the great organism, in which legal, moral, and political freedom must be realised, and in which the individual citizen in obeying the laws of the state only obeys the natural laws of his own reason, of human reason.19

What Marx is here defending, thus, is a rational and ethical understanding of freedom, very different from the individualistic and atomistic liberalism he criticizes. The State, ultimately, cannot come from the aggregation of private interests; it must transcend them to reach the rational horizon of actual universal freedom. The State, according to its own concept, is “the realisation of rational freedom.”20 Existing State institutions, however, do not necessarily correspond to the rational concept of the State. For example, estate representation— like in the Rhineland Diet—is thoroughly unacceptable, because it allows State’s actions to be conditioned by the particularized interests of the various classes. Estate-based representation allows private interests to assert their particular limits against the state. They are therefore a legitimised self-constituted body of non-state elements in the state. Hence by their very essence they are hostile towards the state, for the particular in its isolated activity is always the enemy of the whole […]21

With these reflections, Marx seems to get close to a critique of representation as such: to be represented is something passive; only what is material, spiritless, unable to rely on itself, imperilled, requires to be represented; but no element of the state should be material, spiritless, unable to rely on itself,

19 Ibid., 202. 20 Ibid., 200. 21 Ibid., 305.

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imperilled. Representation must not be conceived as the representation of something that is not the people itself. It must be conceived only as the people’s self -representation […]22

A scheme of representation where the representatives’ privilege overtakes the defense of universal rights is unacceptable. «Privileges of the estates are in no way rights of the province. On the contrary, the rights of the province cease when they become privileges of the estates».23 The principle of interest-based representation denies precisely that universalism which is intrinsic to the concept of the State: In a true state there is no landed property, no industry, no material thing, which as a crude element of this kind could make a bargain with the state: in it there are only spiritual forces, and only in their state form of resurrection, in their political rebirth, are these natural forces entitled to a voice in the state! The state pervades the whole of nature with spiritual nerves […]24

What should predominate within the State is not nature but spirit, «not the unfree object, but the free human being ».25 In these articles, as it has rightly been observed,26 Marx is still faithful to a Hegelian interpretation of the State: as the guarantor of the common good and as the immanent realization of reason and freedom. With equal force, though, Marx emphasizes the inadequacies of existing institutions vis-à-vis the rational concept of the State. In drawing implications, thus, Marx goes well beyond the Hegelian thought that he still accepts in principle. Hegel’s inadequacy becomes all the more evident when Marx begins to confront problems directly connected to material interests and social inequalities—as in the debate about the law on the theft of timber. This law would have suppressed ancient customary rights of wood harvesting; that is to say the gathering, within privately owned woodlands, of fallen branches for firewood. Against the supporters of the law, which guaranteed the exclusive right of proprietors against old customs benefiting the 22 Ibid., 306. 23 Ibid., 145–46. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Cf. Maurice Barbier, La pensée politique de Karl Marx (Paris: Harmattan, 1992), 26.

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poor, Marx asserts that the State cannot degrade itself to an instrument of private interests, because by its own concept it should aim to generality. The law against wood thieves expresses a form of proprietary egoism, which should not condition the State. Each and every citizen ought to be sacred for the State, independently from the property they may or may not own: «the state will regard even an infringer of forest regulations as a human being, a living member of the state, one in whom its heart’s blood flows […]».27 In this text, a first contact with the social question, Marx unabashedly takes the side of «the poor, politically and socially propertyless», advocating for a customary right which they need in order to survive.28 And to those who would object that appealing to a customary right means abandoning the claim to universality and rationality, privileging instead a historically determined custom, Marx responds that the objection is invalid, because what is not rational to begin with is the fact that there is a poor class within the State: «the existence of the poor class itself has been a mere custom of civil society, a custom which has not found an appropriate place in the conscious organisation of the state».29 The theme of poverty returns in the articles Marx writes about the condition of Mosel regions’ winegrowers: the State’s task is to take care of general welfare, and certainly not to accept, as if it was a natural fact, the crisis which brings ruin to the poorest winegrowers. Precisely because social questions are becoming pressing and dramatic, Marx cannot avoid to encounter the theme of “communism.” When his newspaper is accused, by the “Augsburgische Zeitung,” to harbor communist sympathies (due to the publication of an article by the proto-communist Weitling, concerning housing issues in Berlin), Marx responds30 that the “Rheinische Zeitung” «does not admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical realisation, or even consider it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism». It cannot be denied, writes Marx, that communism is an important contemporary issue, and so are the ideas expressed in the book Qu’est-ce que la

27 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1, 236. 28 Ibid., 230. 29 Ibid., 234. 30 Ibid., 220.

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propriété (1840) by Pierre Joseph Proudhon (whom Marx shall mercilessly demolish later on). In October 1842, then, Marx is still far from communist ideas «in their present form» (a qualification that should perhaps be emphasized), but already intentioned to examine them seriously. We might also suppose that, as the director of a liberal newspaper continuously subject to censorship, Marx had to exercise some caution in his writing, and that he was chafing at these limits. In fact, after the government decided to close his newspaper, Marx wrote, in a letter to Arnold Ruge, that he was almost rejoicing at the government giving him back his freedom: It is a bad thing to have to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words […] I can do nothing more in Germany. Here one makes a counterfeit of oneself.31

As we can see from these complaints, Marx is developing thoughts too radical to be expressed in a German newspaper. Before leaving the country, however, Marx had something else to do: marrying Jenny von Westphalen, the noble young woman with whom he had been engaged for seven years (they married at Kreuznach, on June 19, 1843). Marx used the Summer of 1843, spent in Kreuznach at the house of his mother-inlaw, to dive deep into a critical study of Hegel’s theory of the State.

1.3

Critique of Hegel’s Theory of the State

To attack the proprietary egoism and backwardness of Prussia, the polemicist Marx of the “Rheinische Zeitung” would just employ the Hegelian idea of the State as a guarantor of general interest and rational freedom. But this was not enough for Marx as a philosopher and radical social critic. Already in March 1842, as attested by a letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx had in his mind to write

31 Ibid., 397–98.

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a criticism of Hegelian natural law, insofar as it concerns the internal political system. The central point is the struggle against constitutional monarchy as a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and abolishes itself.32

Marx’s critique of Hegel, though, did not take the form of an article, but was rather realized in a voluminous manuscript—written, we can presume, during the stay at Kreuznach in the Spring–Summer of 1843—commenting on sections 261–313 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Certainly, this work was heavily influenced by Marx’s enthusiastic reading of Feuerbach’s works, and especially the Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy, first published in 1843 by Ruge in Switzerland (within a collection33 that also included Marx’s first article, which could not be published in Prussia, Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction). Feuerbach’s materialistic critique of Hegel’s speculative idealism furnished the philosophical ground for Marx’s own work of critical deconstruction of Hegel’s theory of the State. In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (published only in 1927, edited by Rjazanov), Marx analyzes Hegel’s theory on different levels, which we should keep distinct for clarity. Firstly, Marx’s general theoretical objections are concerned with Hegel’s method to develop a theory of the State within his philosophical framework. Secondly, Marx criticizes Hegel’s social ontology, which is to say the way in which he conceived the relation between the State and the other social spheres (family and civil society). Thirdly, there is the critique of political theory properly socalled, that is to say of the way in which Hegel articulates the State and the institutions through which sovereignty is organized. Concerning the general philosophical level, Marx’s critique boldly follows Feuerbach’s reading according to which idealistic philosophy, just like theology, inverts the real relation between subject and predicate. Like God does not create man, but rather man creates God, so in philosophy the true subject is not thought, or the Hegelian Idea, but the man that actually exists, of whom thought is just a predicate: «thinking comes from being but being does not come from thinking». Thus, according to Feuerbach, «the Hegelian philosophy is the last place of refuge and the 32 Ibid., 382–83. 33 Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (Zurich-Winterthur:

Verlag des Literarischen Comptoirs, 1843).

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last rational support of theology». «The Hegelian doctrine, that nature or reality is posited by the idea, is merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God, that the material essence is created by an immaterial, i.e., abstract, essence».34 Speculative philosophy, just like theology, first separates the predicate from the subject and posits the former as an autonomous being (God or the Idea). Then, the real subject is degraded as a predicated, that is to say as a creation, or production, of the hypostatized predicate. This is indeed what happens in Hegel’s system, according to both Feuerbach and Marx. Here, we shall try to synthetically reconstruct this interpretation, and the consequent critiques; but it is important to remember that this is only one interpretation, and that Hegel’s philosophy may also be read in different ways, without reducing it to a negative “idealism,”35 as Marx and Feuerbach did. In Hegel’s thought, according to Marx, the totality of reality is understood as the process of the Idea’s self-development. The Idea is initially within itself in logic, then outside of itself through its exteriorization in the natural world, finally to return in itself through the world of spirit. This world of spirit is human reality in its dimensions of subjective and then objective spirit (in society and history), and finally of absolute spirit (in art’s forms, religion, and philosophy, this last being the moment where reality arrives at its own self-consciousness as self-development of the Idea). But if this is the case, Marx says, then the concrete political institutions, historical and contingent as they are (such as Prussian monarchy, feudal rights of primogeniture), which Hegel deduces as moments of his philosophy of right, are no longer the product of concrete historical actions, performed by men in specific circumstances. They are rather the fruit of the Idea’s self-development and are therefore justified and sanctified as such. This would be a distortion of the real historical process, deriving from «Hegel’s wanting to write the biography of abstract substance, of the idea, man’s activity, etc., thus having to appear as the activity and result of something else». According to Marx,

34 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy,” in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The quoted passages are from p. 167. 35 For example, Bodei gives a very different interpretation in his beautiful book: Remo Bodei, Sistema ed epoca in Hegel (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975).

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«The inevitable outcome of this is that an empirical existent is uncritically accepted as the actual truth of the idea», producing a «necessary transforming of empirical fact into speculation and of speculation into empirical fact».36 But why does Marx, and Feuerbach before him, think that Hegel’s philosophy unwittingly produces that conceptual monster which Feuerbach calls «rational empiricism»37 and which Marx defines as the inversion of empirics into speculation and vice versa? The reasons for this critique are not hard to understand. Within a materialistic and sensualistic perspective like Feuerbach’s, only sensory experience provides access to substantive knowledge, while the concept without experience is an empty tautology. Therefore, those who pretend, like Hegel, to develop the entire system of reality starting from a pure dialectic of concepts are compelled to surreptitiously fill these empty concepts with empirical materials. But in this way empirical elements are injected into the system, covertly and therefore uncritically, because empirical reality is not enquired and studied as such, but as if it was the mere product of the concepts’ self-movement. The distortion of the correct (according to Feuerbach and Marx) relation between experience and concept (i.e., first we have experienced, then we systematize them into concepts) produces the paradoxical result that, on the one hand, speculation is inverted into empiricism (for there is nothing else from which to draw contents) and, on the other hand, empiricism becomes speculation. Concrete historical institutions, with all their contingent irrationality, become moments in the self-development of the concept, and as such they are, so to speak, divinized into what Marx deems Hegel’s «logical, pantheistic mysticism».38 The specificity of Marx’s critique of idealism, or apriorism, would then be that (as argued by Gaetano della Volpe, who most emphasized this aspect of Marx’s thought)39 Marx does not just note, as Kant already had, that concepts without intuitions are “empty” (i.e., concepts require a content that cannot but come from experience), but also adds that 36 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 39. 37 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy,” in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 110. 38 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 7. 39 Cf. Gaetano Della Volpe, Opere (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1973), vol. 5, 322.

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such concepts are surreptitiously filled. The philosopher who, like Hegel, pretends to remain at the level of pure concepts necessarily has to make an underhanded use of empirics, if said concepts are to have any content whatsoever. This Marxian critique of idealism has been lauded for its importance and novelty, but it is not without problems, which exceedingly enthusiastic interpretations tend to miss. Firstly, as we observed, it is not an entirely original critique, since the reading of Hegel in terms of speculative empiricism is merely reprising an argument from Feuerbach.40 Secondly, this critique makes sense only if we accept a materialistic and sensualistic framework, postulating a clear primacy of experience over concept and of being over thought. But with this we lose what had been Kant’s great theoretical discovery: that there is no experience without conceptual mediation. In other words, as shown by Adorno (a careful reader of Marx, and inimical to every naiveté), even conceding the interpretation of Hegel as asserting the primacy of thought over being, we are not yet overcoming his position if we just dogmatically invert the assumption, positing the primacy of being over thought. One should, instead, try to develop the dialectic intertwinement of these two poles, which neither Feuerbach nor the Marx of 1843 managed to do. The importance of this Marxian text, thus, is not to be sought in its critique of idealism, which is its methodological ground, but rather in its concrete contents, in the way in which Marx confront Hegel’s conception of the State, society, and their connections. From this point of view, a fundamental aspect emerges in the first part of Marx’s manuscript. Just as he criticizes the primacy of the Idea over empirics, Marx also intends to invert the way in which Hegel conceives the relations between family, civil society, and State (the three moments that, all-together, comprise Hegel’s ethical sphere). For Hegel, which on this point is especially Aristotelian, the State is last in the order of exposition but first in reality, because it is only in the State that family and civil society are possible. But, here too, Marx wants to restore to their 40 Roberto Finelli insisted on this point, against della Volpe’s position, both in his two books on Marx and in the edition of the Critique he edited together with Francesco Saverio Trincia. Cesare Luporini, in his ample and important introduction to The German Ideology, had already observed how Marx, in his critique of Hegel’s political philosophy was merely «applying an aspect of the critical-antispeculative method which may already be found in Feuerbach»: Cesare Luporini, “Introduzione,” in L’ideologia tedesca (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1967), XXXI.

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rightful configuration the subject–predicate relations: the truth is that «there can be no political state without the natural basis of the family and the artificial basis of civil society; they are for it a conditio sine qua non». In Hegel, instead, «the condition is postulated as the conditioned, the determinant as the determined, the producing factor as the product of its product».41 In his social ontology, just as in theoretical philosophy, Marx wants to invert Hegel’s hierarchy: society grounds and explains the State, not vice versa. It is not by chance that in 1859, in the famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx will trace (with some self-misrepresentation) the general lines of his historical materialism back to his first confrontation with Hegel. Marx will say that here already he had understood how the forms of the State are explicable starting from civil society’s relationships rather than vice versa.42 Here too, Marx opposes a primacy to another primacy, without substantiating this inversion with real argumentations. Whether the inversion is fecund shall be assessed later, that is to say when Marx will develop this first intuition into the attempt to construct a materialistic theory of history. However, to understand the development of Marx’s thought beyond social ontology, the most significant pages of the Kritik are those which thematize the relation between civil society and State, reflecting on its configuration in Hegel as well as in the reality of the time. Here Marx, who is ferociously anti-Hegelian regarding methodology, indeed takes Hegel very seriously as a profound interlocutor, who shed light on a decisive question of modern politics. The fundamental point for both Hegel and Marx is that in modernity there is a separation between political State and civil society. Hegel «takes as his starting point the separation of “civil society” and the “political state” as two fixed opposites, two really different spheres», but this is not to be criticized. In fact, Marx continues, «This separation does indeed really exist in the modern state».43 «Hegel is not to be blamed for depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but for presenting that which is as the nature of the state».44 Hegel, thus, would correctly understand where the political problem of modernity lies: in the

41 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 9. 42 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Part One,” in

Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). 43 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 72. 44 Ibid., 63.

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fact that political State and civil society are not only separated but, most importantly, are also in a reciprocal contradiction (in a way which will have to be better determined). The greatest recognition Marx affords to Hegel is in fact this: «Hegel’s profundity [is] that he feels the separation of civil from political society as a contradiction».45 Thus, by reflecting on the modern relation between State and civil society, Marx sees in Hegel both a fundamental merit and some serious limitations. The merit, as we just saw, is that Hegel captured how, in modernity, the relation between civil society and political State constitutes a contradiction—we shall now see how and in what sense. The limits, instead, are basically two: on the one hand, according to Marx, Hegel does not reflect enough on the historical quality of this separation between State and civil society, which is a modern determination unknown to other ages. On the other hand, while Hegel sees the contradiction between State and civil society, he then removes this contradiction (reneging the deepest thread of his own thought), with the use of very questionable theoretical expedients. It is now time, then, to consider more closely the different aspects of Marx’s assessment of Hegel, in the order we have just introduced them. Concerning Hegel’s merit, how should we understand the individuation of the contradiction between civil society and State? Why are civil life and political life “opposites”46 ? The answer is quite clear: civil society is, in Hegel’s words as cited by Marx, «the battlefield of the individual private interests of all against all», and thus it is the realm of the «bellum omnium contra omnes » and of the conflict between private egoisms,47 whereas the State has the general interest as its end. The latter’s principle, then, is directly opposite to the former’s, even though in the State as conceived by Hegel private interests are not erased, but rather preserved and reconciled. Marx, in any case, emphasizes the truth he takes Hegel to see only faintly: that is to say that the two spheres are in mutual contradiction and opposition. Marx assumes, with Hegel, that the State is, at least according to its concept, the realm of the general interest. From this Marx then deduces, radicalizing Hegel, that the State is necessarily in contradiction with civil society and the realm of private interest.

45 Ibid., 75. 46 Ibid., 76. 47 Ibid., 41–42.

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This contradiction, which Marx sees as characteristic of modern society, reverberates within the individual itself, who is at once a member of civil society and a citizen of the State. The individual, in this sense, is inhabited by two contradictory identities: as a private person he only aims at his egoistic interest, but as a citizen he takes the general interest as his own end. The separation of civil society and political state necessarily appears as a separation of the political citizen, the citizen of the state, from civil society, from his own, actual, empirical reality, for as an idealist of the state he is quite another being, a different, distinct, opposed being.48

Marx’s analysis, however, does not stop there. If the individual is divided in two contradictory figures, if he is self-separated, how can he operate and act concretely? That is possible only insofar as one of the two identities asserts itself at the other’s expenses. And according to Marx this is precisely what happens, because the real life of civil society cannot but prevail on the State’s life, which is comparatively formal, abstract, and illusionary—ultimately reduced to a sort of idealistic appendix, hiding the true materialistic reality, that is to say the dominance of private egoism. We shall get back to this point when we will illustrate the positive proposal advanced by Marx in the Kritik. First, though, we have to look more closely at the two critiques Marx advances against Hegel, which as we said concern the de-historicization of the separation between State and civil society and the illusionary way in which Hegel attempts to overcome it. As for the first aspect, in the Kritik Marx notes a point he will later develop in the Jewish Question: that is to say how the division between State and civil society is generated in modernity, while it was unknown to feudal society. In the Middle Ages, the civil and political conditions of the individual were not separated, they rather constituted a unitary, self-consistent, reality. One can express the spirit of the Middle Ages in this way: The estates of civil society and the estates in the political sense were identical, because civil society was political society – because the organic principle of civil society was the principle of the state.49 48 Ibid., 77–78. 49 Ibid., 72.

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The abstraction of the political State was therefore unknown to the Middle Ages: In the Middle Ages there were serfs, feudal estates, merchant and trade guilds, corporations of scholars, etc.: that is to say, in the Middle Ages property, trade, society, man are political; the material content of the state is given by its form; every private sphere has a political character or is a political sphere; that is, politics is a characteristic of the private spheres too. […] In the Middle Ages the life of the nation and the life of the state are identical. Man is the actual principle of the state – but unfree man.50

The landowner is at once a lord in the political sense, and the serf is at once deprived of political rights: in sum, social and political hierarchy coincides in what Marx calls «democracy of unfreedom».51 That is a condition of serfdom, but of univocal serfdom, not mystified by the double status of the individual as a man and as a citizen. This unity of social and political, instead, is precisely what passes away with the coming of the bourgeois world: Only the French Revolution completed the transformation of the political into social estates, or changed the differences of estate of civil society into mere social differences, into differences of civil life which are without significance in political life.52

The neutralization of the political value of social differences, according to Marx, makes it so that «just as the Christians are equal in heaven, but unequal on earth, so the individual members of the nation are equal in the heaven of their political world, but unequal in the earthly existence of society».53 The contradiction between civil society and State, thus, is a characteristic of modern times only. The other critique, as we mentioned, is that Hegel sees the contradiction but then tries to sweep it under the rug, with expedients such as proposing the re-introduction of bygone institutions, contradicting the logic of modern politics, such as class-based 50 Ibid., 32. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 80. 53 Ibid., 79.

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representation. This is an important and delicate point, since here both the proximity and the distance between Marx and Hegel become evident. Hegel claims that if political representation is understood as representing abstract individuals, citizens atomized in their equality, then political life is severed from civil society and placed “up in the air,” thus becoming an abstraction, devoid of truth. Precisely for this reason Hegel believes that political representation should be organically connected to the different spheres or classes in which civil society is articulated. Marx shares the idea that abstract political equality is devoid of truth, but against Hegel he asserts that such abstraction is itself the principle of modern society (conclusively affirmed by the French Revolution), and therefore, it cannot be overcome by bringing back institutions from a bygone era. Hegel, thus, contradictorily thinks politics according to two irreconcilable principles: «Hegel wants the medieval-estates system, but in the modern sense of the legislature, and he wants the modern legislature, but in the body of the medieval-estates system! This is the worst kind of syncretism».54 But Hegel’s vision is not just contradictory and historically unrealistic; it is also unacceptable in its implications, for example, when it assumes the rationality of primogeniture rights, so as to guarantee the stability of the landowning class as it participates to the legislative power. According to Marx, the consequence is that, in the allegedly rational Hegelian State, one becomes a legislator by birthright, which is to say that «political spiritualism» is inverted into «the crassest materialism».55 «In its supreme functions the state acquires the reality of an animal ».56 Within the theoretical coordinates we have here introduced, Marx also develops a series of critiques against central points of Hegel’s institutional architecture, such as monarchy, the role of bureaucracy, and the relation between constitution and legislative power. We cannot follow all the aspects of Marx’s argument here, but what we are most interested in is the endpoint of his line of critique. Modern society is not the organic whole Hegel contradictorily tries to conceive, but is rather characterized by a division between the sphere of real life—where private interest and unchecked individualism reign—and a political dimension where the general interest should be manifest, but

54 Ibid., 95. 55 Ibid., 105. 56 Ibid.

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is indeed actualized only abstractly and fictitiously. The modern State, the «constitutional state is the state in which the state interest as the actual interest of the nation exists only formally but, at the same time, as a determinate form alongside the actual state».57 It is the state in which «matters of general concern» become a monopoly of the bureaucracy while, on the other hand, «monopolies are the real matters of general concern».58 If politics is a limited and separate sphere—which does not concretely touch the daily life of citizens, nor does include them as its protagonists—then it remains a “formality,” a “ritual.” In this void of effective sovereignty, the power of those who dominate civil society (large proprietors and monopolists) is then reconfirmed. The only way for the universal to have any reality, thus, is to overcome the abstraction of the political State; and this can only happen in democracy, which here Marx presents as the truth of all previous constitutions. Democracy is the truth of all constitutions because, while the preceding ones (such as monarchy) express the life of the people only in itself , in democracy this relation becomes for itself , that is to say explicit and self-aware. The constitution is always a product of the life of the people, but in democracy it is so in a fully developed awareness: here the people itself create its constitution. Finally, then, the political constitution appears what it truly is: «a free product of man».59 Only democracy, thus, is coherent with the true state of things: «Just as it is not religion which creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution which creates the people but the people which creates the constitution».60 Democracy, however, is not just «the solved riddle of all constitutions»,61 but at the same time their overcoming, because true democracy is something more and different from a mere political constitution. It is crucial to understand the point: In all states other than democratic ones the state, the law, the constitution is what rules, without really ruling – i.e., without materially permeating the content of the remaining, non-political spheres. In democracy the constitution, the law, the state itself, insofar as it is a political constitution, is

57 Ibid., 65. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 29. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid.

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only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the people.62

In other words, in all abstract political forms, even in the republic as a merely particular form of state, political man has his particular mode of being alongside unpolitical man, man as a private individual. Property, contract, marriage, civil society all appear here […] as particular modes of existence alongside the political state, as the content to which the political state is related as organising form […]63

In Marx’s democracy—the concrete organization of the people—the exact opposite is true: politics is no longer a formal universal, seemingly floating above the concrete particulars of the people’s life, which it only appears to dominate without dominating them in reality. On the contrary, politics becomes a particular modality, among others, of the people’s existence; it loses its fictitious superior universality and acquires a less ambitious but more concrete dimension. In Marx’s own words: In democracy the political state, which stands alongside this content and distinguishes itself from it, is itself merely a particular content and particular form of existence of the people […] In democracy the state as particular is merely particular; as general, it is the truly general, i.e., not something determinate in distinction from the other content. The French have recently interpreted this as meaning that in true democracy the political state is annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state qua political state, as constitution, no longer passes for the whole.64

Even in their complexity, these formulations already express an original intuition, which will remain central throughout the development of Marx’s political thought: that is to say the conviction that true democracy, as the people’s self-determination, requires the overcoming of the separation between politics and other social domains (family, work, property, etc.). Marx’s thesis is that, for individuals to be self-determining, politics has to come back from heaven to earth. Politics must merge with the concrete articulation of life and work, rather than constitute 62 Ibid., 30–31. 63 Ibid., 30. 64 Ibid.

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a separate and posterior dimension, operating on the ground of pregiven contents—which actually dominate and condition politics even while politics abstractly and illusorily pretends to condition and dominate them. Thus, already in this early work, Marx formulates the thesis of the overcoming or extinction of the political State. This thesis shall invite many debates and diverse interpretations amongst Marxist. It is a thesis, nonetheless, with a very clear nucleus: if politics has to be the selfdetermination of society, then it has to be organized from the bottom-up, internally to the social realm, rather than be a separate sphere pretending to dominate the social without controlling it at all. This perspective does not imply that properly political activities shall disappear, if by politics we understand the making of general rules of social cooperation, or the resolution of coordination problems. Politics, though, becomes an activity on the same level as all others, geared to solve certain specific problems of social life. For example, as Marx writes the significance of the legislative power as a representative power completely disappears. The legislative power is representation here in the sense in which every function is representative—in the sense in which, e.g., the shoemaker, insofar as he satisfies a social need […]65

We also have to note how, even while conceiving the legislative power in these radically “demystified” terms, Marx still insists that the legislator might be subordinated to a constitution but, insofar as it is «the representative of the people, of the will of the species»,66 it always has the right to change the constitution. If legislative power represents the people, then to the question of whether the people keeps the right to give itself a new constitution, «the answer must be an unqualified “Yes”».67 There have been many discussions about the sources—which Marx mentions only elliptically as «the French»—for Marx’s idea of reuniting the social and political spheres. Many interpreters emphasized how Marx was influenced by Saint-Simon’s socialism and Proudhon’s anarchism— which in 1843 Marx still appreciates and takes very seriously—but we

65 Ibid., 119. 66 Ibid., 57. 67 Ibid.

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must also not forget how the theoretical framework that Marx is elaborating in this phase of his thought does not have much in common with that of the aforementioned authors.68 The effective conquest of “true democracy,” in any case, is for Marx tightly connected to the universal recognition not just of the active right to vote, but also of the passive right to be elected, that is to say the possibility of occupying positions of political power. Marx, as one can see from the aforementioned references to legislation, does not doubt that there are problems of social coordination, which the citizens have to confront through their representatives. The problem, Marx writes, is not to decide whether the legislative power has to be exercised directly or indirectly, but rather that of generalizing both the right to vote and to be elected: «This is the real point of dispute concerning political reform, in France as in England».69 Objectively, in the mid-nineteenth century, the extension of voting rights to the lower classes is a focal point of political and social conflicts. Marx, however, thinks that this extension could be the opening through which his idea of true democracy would come through: only in elections unlimited both in respect of the franchise and the right to be elected. But the completion of this abstraction is at the same time the transcendence of the abstraction. In actually positing its political existence as its true existence, civil society has simultaneously posited its civil existence, in distinction from its political existence, as inessential; and the fall of one side of the division carries with it the fall of the other side, its opposite. Electoral reform within the abstract political state is therefore the demand for its dissolution, but also for the dissolution of civil society.70

The fight for the suffrage, from Marx’s point of view, is not only relevant in itself, but also because its victory would consequently lead to abolishing the separation between politics and civil society. The two poles—separated by the modern age, generating a mystification which was extraneous to the explicit domination of feudalism—would thus be

68 Regarding this issue, we can still profitably read the well-researched: Danilo Zolo, La teoria comunista dell’estinzione dello Stato (Bari: De Donato, 1974), especially pp. 91–116 and footnote 55, pp. 92–93. 69 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 120. 70 Ibid., 121.

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re-composed, opening the way to overcome political alienation and to realize that “true democracy” which Marx, here, sees as the endgame. This is only an intermediary but still important point because, even within a still-developing thought, Marx uncovers what remains to this day the deepest problem of democracy: that is to say the unavoidable relation between the regulative forms of law and the substantive contents of social emancipation and equality.71

71 Cfr. G. Cacciatore, Il Marx “democratico,” in AA.VV., Sulle tracce di un fantasma, a cura di M. Musto, Manifestolibri, Roma 2005, pp. 145–57; the quote is from p. 151.

CHAPTER 2

The Critique of Liberalism

2.1 The Question of Critique and the Coming of Communism The unpublished notes on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right became the basis upon which, in the second half of 1843, Marx will elaborate two texts, published in February 1844 on the only number of “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.” The journal was edited by Marx and Ruge and published in Paris, where Marx and his wife Jenny moved in October 1843. The first article is titled On the Jewish Question and the second one Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction (an introduction, incidentally, to no book, for the announced work was never to be written). Together with these writings from Marx, on which we shall say more shortly, the “German-French Annals” issue includes an exchange (edited for publication) between some of the protagonist of this theoreticalpolitical endeavor: Marx himself, Ruge, Bakunin, as well as a letter of solidarity and encouragement from Feuerbach. The last letter of this brief collection (from Marx to Ruge, Kreuznach, September 1843) contains a sort of programmatic address, which allows us to capture how Marx understood the status and main task of critique, at this time so crucial for the development of his thought.1 Essentially, Marx’s point is that 1 For a provoking reflection on this point, see: Emmanuel Renault, Marx et l’idée de critique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995), esp. Ch. 2.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0_2

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the duty of his generation is to develop Feuerbach’s critique of religion, broadening its scope to include politics and the main social institutions. The aim of a «mundane» philosophy is to advance the «ruthless criticism of all that exists ».2 But how is this critique to be understood? In perfect coherence with his basic Hegelian framework, Marx explains that the critique cannot begin from an arbitrarily chosen principle, external to the criticized object. To the contrary, true critique is immanent critique, developed from principles which are already inherent to the criticized object: «we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one».3 And, later, Marx further clarifies: Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal. As far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state – in all its modern forms – which, even where it is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, contains the demands of reason. And the political state does not stop there. Everywhere it assumes that reason has been realised. But precisely because of that it everywhere becomes involved in the contradiction between its ideal function and its real prerequisites. From this conflict of the political state with itself, therefore, it is possible everywhere to develop the social truth.4

The critique, thus, is historical and immanent, neither abstract nor grounded on a-temporal principles. It develops and brings to explicit consciousness a dynamic that is intrinsic to reality itself. This way of conceiving the critique is one of the most characteristic peculiarities of Marx, and it will stay steady, despite all the changes in the contents and concrete articulations of the critique itself. We shall not, Marx insists, propose to the world:

2 Karl Marx, “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische, Jahrbücher” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 142. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 143.

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a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. […] We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.5

This framework, according to Marx, is the appropriate starting point to confront the socialist and communist doctrines that are already spreading, especially in France but in some measure also in Germany. Coherently with his refusal of abstract principles or ideals, Marx is theoretically far from the authors of communist “systems,” like Cabet’s Travels in Icaria (1840, II ed. 1842) or Weitling’s Guarantees of harmony and freedom (1842); Marx deems the «actually existing communism» a «dogmatic abstraction». Marx, moreover, asserts that communism is not identified with the suppression of private property (perhaps that means that it has a broader and richer content), and adds that communism is «a special expression of the humanistic principle» or also «a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle» (Fourier and Proudhon are the socialists Marx had in mind). And the socialist principle itself «is only one aspect that concerns the reality of the true human being»6 (distinct from theoretical aspects, like religion or science, which deserve just as much critical attention). From these passages, it emerges very clearly what Marx rejects: communist systems as pre-made social utopias. Not equally obvious is Marx’s own position: it is unclear whether he thought of himself as a communist, and his writing might lead us to think he did not. It is nevertheless evident that Marx was then already strongly leaning toward a philosophical-political communism, grounded on a certain idea of the true human essence; and it is a fact that some contemporaries already considered him a communist. For example, in an article from November 18, 1843, Engels talks of “Dr. Marx” as a communist,7 although the writer here is a young Engels, enthusiastic neophyte of communism, not yet connected to Marx, and who improperly also considers Ruge as a communist. The reality, in any case, is that Marx’s political evolution is very fast in this period: from his 1842’s liberalism, he switches 5 Ibid., 144. 6 Ibid., 143. 7 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 416.

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to radical democracy in the critique of Hegelian philosophy of 1843. Then, in the aforementioned epistolary exchange, Marx hints toward communism, as we saw, and even to “revolution.” Marx will definitively arrive at communism in the Spring–Summer of 1844, with the so-called Paris Manuscripts, going through the steps we shall now explore: the critique of political democracy, in the name of social emancipation, in On the Jewish Question, and the connection between philosophy, proletariat, and revolution in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

2.2

Limits of the Rights of Man and Citizen

The essay On the Jewish Question is composed of two parts, presented as two long reviews of the texts that Bruno Bauer had dedicated to the problem of Jewish emancipation: the problem, that is, of the Jews’ right to be considered as fully equal citizens. Marx, however, begins from the discussion of this issue only to develop much broader and more general considerations, involving the fundamental structures of the modern liberal State. According to Bauer, the conquest of full juridical and political equality presupposes a process of emancipation from religion, which has to develop both on the side of the citizens (who must free themselves from religious and Church obedience) and of the State (which must no longer be a Christian or confessional State). But for Marx this approach does not capture the way in which the relation between politics and religion actually works in the modern State; not, at least, if we conceptualize the State based on its most advanced examples, such as the United States of America. For Bauer (at least according to Marx’s reading),8 political emancipation—the conquest of juridical and political equality between all citizens—is somehow in contradiction with religious belonging. For Marx, instead, political emancipation is not so demanding and, while it obviously cannot coexist with a State-sanctioned religion (which would negate equality between citizen), it can well coexist with strong religious identities on the citizens’ part. This is in fact demonstrated by the United

8 For a more careful assessment of Bauer’s position, cf. the introduction to: Massimiliano Tomba, ed. La questione ebraica (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2004). See also: Massimiliano Tomba, Crisi e critica in Bruno Bauer. Il principio di esclusione come fondamento del politico (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2002).

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States, where the absence of State religion corresponds to an intense religious life for the citizens in civil society. Thus, for Marx political emancipation is not at all human emancipation, and not even the emancipation of mankind from religion. It is instead necessary to clarify the proper logic of political emancipation, as Marx is about to do, leaving behind the polemics with Bauer. Why, then, political emancipation not only does not free men from religion, but rather can well coexist with it? Answering this question means to enquire the nature of political emancipation and its limits. The starting point of this reflection had been already expounded by Marx in his critical notes on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In feudal society, rights and duties are not equal for all individuals, but rather distributed based on their belonging to castes and orders within society: the lord of the land is at once economically dominant and endowed with a political role, whereas the servant is dominated in his labor and politically dependent on his lord. In the liberal-bourgeois State, instead, caste differences and special juridical statuses are overcome. Individuals are freed from ascribed groups and considered purely as individuals, all equal before the law; social and economic differences (so that one is a landowner and another a daily laborer) no longer entail differences in civil and political rights. This is of course a long and contradictory process, which here Marx observes from its endpoint, when social differences are wholly disconnected from any legal privilege. Political emancipation can be called complete when there is no longer any property qualification needed for voting or being elected, that is to say when everyone is equally entitled to full political rights—as according to Marx was already happening in «many states of North America».9 It is not particularly relevant that Marx overestimated the NorthAmerican States’ liberalism, overlooking, for example, the exclusion of Blacks from all rights. What Marx is trying to accomplish in this text, in fact, is not a historical analysis, which might shed light on how little liberalism has been coherent with its own theoretical assumptions.10 Marx rather wants to emphasize the logic of liberalism to show how, even considering it in its most completed and ideal figure, the liberal State 9 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 153. 10 Domenico Losurdo, instead, focused on the faults of actually existing liberalism, see, for example: Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011).

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does not achieve that emancipation of mankind from any form of subjection, which would instead be the proper objective of a true critique. In the liberal-bourgeois State, to summarize, individuals are socially unequal but politically equal: this neutralization of the juridical-political value of social differences goes together with the atomization of individuals, who possess rights only as individuals and no longer, as in pre-modern social orders, due to their belonging to a caste, estate, or corporation. But why, then, the political emancipation which swept away feudal privileges, and which is paradigmatically expressed in the Declarations of Rights of the French Revolution, even while constituting «a big step forward […] is not the final form of human emancipation»?11 Why, that is to say, this emancipation does not concretely free men from subjection? Why are the conquests of civil and political right, and even democracy, insufficient to ensure human emancipation?12 Marx’s answer to this question is very clear. First of all, precisely insofar as it neutralizes the political value of social inequalities, political emancipation does not consider how to overcome them; it rather leaves them as they are: «the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it». True, the State declares that all are equally citizens and participants to popular sovereignty, despite all differences of birth, status, wealth, Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way, i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence […].13

But there is more: the modern liberal State presupposes the differences and social inequalities not just by leaving them free to exist and develop, but above all because it grounds and guarantees them insofar as, in its juridical architecture, poses the rights of the private individual, of 11 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 155. 12 An interesting discussion of Marx’s critique of human rights is developed by: Allen

E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (London: Methuen, 1982). 13 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 153.

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the property-owner, and of the subject of exchange on the same level (if not a superior one) as the political rights of the citizen, who would be the subject of popular sovereignty. To demonstrate this thesis, Marx moves to examine the different versions of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, elaborated through the shifting and contradictory phases of the French Revolution. It is enough to read the most well-known, the Declaration of 1789, to see how the rights of man (i.e., to say the private individual, the member of civil society) are distinct from those of the citizen, who is the subject of popular sovereignty (as a member of the Nation) and the author of the laws, and how the latter are subordinated to the former. In fact, as underscored by Marx, the Declaration explicitly stated that «the aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man»,14 and that implies precisely that the rights of citizen are subordinated to those of man, and instrumental to their safeguard. This is equivalent to saying that the citizens’ political sovereignty is meant to guarantee their condition as members of civil society and, thus, private property-owners: «political life declares itself to be a mere means, whose purpose is the life of civil society».15 To clarify this point, Marx emphasizes the way in which the Declarations define the «natural and imprescriptible rights of man». The text of 1789 lists among them «liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression»; and even for the most radical constitution—that of 1793, during the Jacobin period—these rights are «equality, liberty, security, property». After having shown that the Declarations subordinate political rights to the rights of man, that is to say to the guarantees of private liberties, Marx analyzes more closely this latter class of rights. The aim here is to showcase the conception of man presupposed by these private rights, as well as the reason why said conception is unacceptable, from Marx’s point of view. The first and fundamental point concerns the conception of freedom16 : the right of liberty is defined as the right to «do everything which injures 14 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789. 15 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 164. 16 Concerning freedom in Marx, a necessary read is: George G. Brenkers, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). See also the important essay: Aldo Zanardo, “La teoria della libertà nel pensiero giovanile di Marx,” Studi Storici VII, no. 1 (1966).

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no one else».17 This means, Marx notes, that freedom is thought as a structure of reciprocal limitations, where what matters is that everyone respects their bounds while at once being guaranteed against others’ intrusions. Hegel already considered this conception of liberty extremely limited, but Marx critique is even sharper and, while not being systematically developed, implies two themes that will have to be confronted by any subsequent reflection on “liberal” freedom. These themes are, in a more contemporary language: the critique of the “negative” idea of freedom and the rejection of atomistic individualism. The first aspect can be perfectly clarified by referring to the concept of freedom which Marx will explicitly elaborate in subsequent writings, such as The Holy Family and The German Ideology. In the first of these texts, Marx will say that freedom, in its materialistic meaning, has to be understood, for the individual, as the «positive power to assert his true individuality». Such freedom, Marx will write in The German Ideology, is not the right to «the undisturbed enjoyment, within certain conditions, of fortuity and chance», but to the contrary must be understood as «power, as domination over the circumstances and conditions in which an individual lives».18 According to Marx, then, freedom is not the possibility of enjoying a protected space in which to move without interferences; it rather requires that individuals can effectively control the circumstances of their life. And in order to do this, they have to dwell within contexts where they can develop their human capacities and peculiar individual attitudes. For Marx, in sum, negative liberty, as “non-interference,” is too little to be truly freedom, which is rather to be thought as positive freedom and self-realization (which are excluded by the privileged status conferred to “negative” freedom). This critique of “negative” freedom is tightly linked to the second aspect, which is to say the rejection of an atomistic conception of the individual. From a liberal perspective, the freedom of everyone is seen as a limit imposed on the freedom of others, a boundary which protects the individual from others’ intrusions. Freedom is akin to a private property, which can be extended only to the detriment of neighboring properties. 17 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789. 18 Cf. Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “The Holy Family,” in Marx and Engels

Collected Works, Volume 4 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 131; Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 81, 301.

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The law establishes the right boundaries of everyone’s freedom—writes Marx—just like «the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post».19 Like one’s freedom is a limitation on the freedom of another, so every individual, in the very development of his being and activity, is a limit to the development of others, a threat or potential harm to them. Marx’s critique is clear and sharp: the idea of inter-human relationship on which this conception of freedom is based is far from obvious, and rather very partial, limited, and problematic: «But the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself».20 Thus understood, liberal freedom finds its most concrete actualization in the right to private property, with its corollaries of equality (purely juridical, not material) and security, which Marx ironically label as «the highest social concept of civil society».21 Isolation and egoism reach their apex in the right of private property: «The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion (à son gré), without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of selfinterest».22 The right to private property, thus, is the most evident and paradigmatic concretization of that civil society which «makes every man see in other men not the realisation of his own freedom, but the barrier to it».23 Freedom and property, equality and security, go together insofar as they express the structure of social relations based on the competition of all against all and on the ideology of self-sufficiency, which denies the intersubjective conditions of being human, considering each man like «a self-sufficient monad».24 And here is Marx’s conclusion: None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is

19 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 162. 20 Ibid., 162–63. 21 Ibid., 163. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid.

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far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.25

The individual protected by the rights of man, thus, is the egoistic man, the member of civil/bourgeois society who is devoted to his own private interest. But, next to the rights of man, the political revolution posits the rights of the citizen, who is entitled to participate in public debate and to exercise his sovereignty, making the laws through which the general will should be expressed. What, then, prevents the sovereign citizens from making laws that, as Rousseau had it, guarantee true equality and the public good? What prevents them from modifying or correcting the economic structure of civil society and its property relations, from using, that is, political rights to fundamentally change the bourgeois/liberal society? In other words: Why does Marx shifts from the idea that political democracy has to be completed and radicalized (as in the Kritik of 1843), which would still have led to overcome the separation between political and civil societies, to the idea that this overcoming has to be achieved through the critique of political democracy itself? Why does political democracy now appear no longer as something to be completed, but as illusory and insufficient? Evidently, this passage is essential to the formation of Marx’s political theory; we shall then examine it with some special care. Firstly, the limit of political democracy lies, as we saw, in what we may define its “constitutional framing”: if political rights have the function of guaranteeing the rights of civil society, they therefore cannot be used to subvert them. Democracy is thus inherently limited, so long as it is conceived within the liberal constitutional architecture. But how could the revolutionaries, even the Jacobins—asks Marx—continue to think political rights as subordinate to the rights of man, conceived as «natural and imprescriptible»? How is it possible that, while in revolutionary practice politics was supreme, subordinating to itself even the rights of individuals, this practice continued to be conceived as the exception, rather than as the truth of the relation between the two moments?26 25 Ibid., 164. 26 Ibid., 164–65.

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According to Marx, «the puzzle is easily solved».27 In fact, political emancipation, that is to say the conquest of political equality between citizens, is tightly connected to the emancipation of the member of civil society from relations of dependence and community, to his affirmation as an independent individual, tied to others only by contractual relations created within the market. By freeing the individual from feudal relations (which are at once economical-political, that is to say prior to the separation of the two spheres), the bourgeois revolution at once creates the free independent individual and the free citizen; the one would not be thinkable without the other. «The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals […] is accomplished by one and the same act ».28 «Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person».29 The egoistic independent individual in the civil sphere and the sovereign citizen in the political sphere are two indivisible aspects of the same reality: one cannot be had without the other, and thus is not surprising how democracy, within the liberal framework, is conceived as a guarantee of imprescriptible natural rights of the private individual. However, the relation between private individual and sovereign citizen is more complex. In fact, these two figures are, we might say, co-original and complementary: each needs the other. To reprise this Marxian idea in the language of a contemporary neo-Marxist author, Jacques Bidet, we might say that the members of civil society, connected by contractual inter-individual relations, constitute the other face of the citizens united by their political contract. The two dimensions, however, are not just complementary, but also tied in a reciprocal tension and contradiction: as citizens, individuals are equal, but as property-owners and participants in the market they are so unequal that some may enjoy enormous wealth while other suffer misery. Political equality and civil inequality in a sense correspond to each other, but are at once mutually contradictory: Is it not a mockery to be

27 Ibid., 165. 28 Ibid., 167. 29 Ibid., 168.

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declared a sovereign citizen for those who lack even basic life necessities? Would not equal sovereignty also require equality in economic and cultural resources? The contradiction between these two spheres can also be shown from another point of view. The independent individual of civil society, precisely insofar as he is freed from ties to others and must rely on himself alone, is structurally egoistic: he must seek his own benefit (even if, morally, he might be the most altruistic person). The logic of civil society is individual utility, that is to say what Marx calls “egoism.” The logic of politics, instead, is the opposite: as a citizen the individual should— as in Rousseau or Hegel—turn toward the general will, toward universal good. Political emancipation divides society into autonomous spheres and at once divides the individual internally: in politics he is a member of a community, while in civil life he considers other people as mere means to his private goals. We have thus a double contradiction between the political and civil spheres: the former is the realm of equality, the latter of its negation; the former is the realm of the universal (or at least, it is legitimate only if it is, as taught by Rousseau and Hegel), the latter is the domain of unbridled particularism. Thus, it is not surprising how, in the most intense phases of the French revolutionary drama, this contradiction explodes: «At times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society and the elements composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real species-life of man devoid of contradictions». But this «violent contradiction with its own conditions of life» (that is to say with its real basis, which is civil society) cannot last, and «the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace».30 If, according to Marx, this is the necessary result, then the contradiction is revealed as merely apparent, even though it can sometimes take on stark configurations (finding its apex in the guillotine).31 This is so because the two terms of the contradiction are not on the same level of 30 Ibid., 156. 31 This point has been insightfully captured by Domenico Losurdo, who thusly summa-

rized Marx’s position, «there is no real contradiction, but rather reciprocal affirmation, between political State and civil society: the public sphere is merely the political consecration of an inviolable private sphere»: Domenico Losurdo, “Stato e ideologia nel giovane Marx,” Studi urbinati XLIV, no. 1–2, 180.

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reality: the level of civil society, of inequality, of the particular, is ontologically heavier, the truly real one, while according to Marx the other level is, ultimately, mere appearance. The political sphere is a heaven of spiritualistic equality, very similar to the religious heaven, where disincarnated souls float, while human individuals stay on the ground with their suffering and inequality. «The relation of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relation of heaven to earth».32 Politics, thus, is certainly a sphere of reality, but an illusory and ideological reality, because it is dominated by the illusion of sovereignty or universality. In sum, with modern atomism individuals are forcibly separated from the community of humanity, they are deprived of their «species-life» (Gattungsleben), which they can regain only in the Sunday of politics after having lost it in the materiality of every other day: «in the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality».33 Marx’s critique of the State as illusory universality, thus, is precisely and explicitly posited as a descendant of Feuerbach’s critique of religion. Firstly, it is from Feuerbach that Marx draws the concept of humanity, which is central to the development of a critique of political alienation. In The Essence of Christianity, published in 1841, Feuerbach had argued that the defining characteristic of the human species, distinguishing it from other animal species, is the fact of having a consciousness. But, Feuerbach was quick to specify, consciousness in a rigorous sense is not the simple feeling of self and external things (which superior animals share with us), but rather the awareness of belonging to humanity, and making this essence the object of one’s own reflection.34 The peculiarity of man lies in the fact that he relates to himself not just as an individual, but as a member of the human species; this implies that, if man as an individual is limited, as a member of the species he is part of a much larger reality, which allows him to transcend those limitations. Feuerbach’s thesis, then, is that in religion, particularly in Christianity, man gains conscience of his essence, that is to say of the potentialities of humanity; but these potentialities are

32 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 154. 33 Ibid. 34 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989),

1–2.

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represented as belonging not to humanity but to another being, to the God into which man alienates himself. In the divinity and its attributes (knowledge, love, power), men for the first time become conscious of their own essence (and this is, for Feuerbach, the truth of religion), but the object of this consciousness (and this is the false moment) is projected in a reality distinct from, and even opposed to, mankind itself. Marx’s critique of political alienation is in many ways a continuation of, and a variation on, this Feuerbachian argument: the modern man, a member of atomistic civil society, does not recognize as his own essence the connection with the human species, but only finds it by rising above his daily material reality to take one the functions of a citizen. Just as in the divinity, so in the State the universality and the conscious relation to humanity are separated from, and opposed to, the individual’s real life. Subjects, which bourgeois atomism separated from their «originally communitarian nature», «recover their unitarian and mutually supportive equality only in their imagination: projected, just like religious alienation, beyond their material and concrete existence, in the superior institutional spheres of the political community».35 Political equality, thus, is not just complementary to social inequality, nor just in contradiction with it; it is also, in the third and last movement of this Marxian reflection, the illusionary dimension, juxtaposed to the real one. Even leaving aside Feuerbachian complications, one could not fail to see how the differences in money and culture immediately unmask the alleged equality between citizens. In the second and last part of On the Jewish Question, the critique of economic alienation, which shall become ever more central in Marx’s subsequent thought, joins the critique of political alienation we have just examined. In modern civil society, the exertion of men’s labor and the satisfaction of their needs are taken from them, taken from their direct sociality and given to the lordship of a superior and omnipotent mediator: money. Once again, like in religion, what man created now towers above him as an extraneous and domineering force: «Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien

35 The young Marx’s position is thus precisely stated by: Roberto Finelli, Un parricidio mancato. Hegel e il giovane Marx (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004), 236. Finelli, incidentally, is harshly critical of this Marx who dreams of an originary communitarian humanity; but we shall return on this point later.

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essence dominates him, and he worships it».36 The comparison with religion is expounded by Marx with extraordinary clarity: Selling is the practical aspect of alienation. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity – money – on them.37

Let us then try to sum up Marx’s reasoning up to this point. With bourgeois emancipation, society is divided into the “civil” sphere of atomistic individuals and in the political one of equal citizens. This is not, however, a true emancipation, because within civil society those who possess property and culture dominate over those who do not, and above all the domination of money, as an autonomized medium, lords. Political equality, on the other hand, misses its own emancipatory end, because it must take heed of civil society as it stands, defend and preserve it as such. If politics overcome civil society, it can do so only in an illusory and apparent way, or else in exceptional “foundational” circumstances, doomed to soon fall back in order. It is thus necessary to recognize the limits of political emancipation, of the bourgeois emancipation from feudal servitude, so as to comprehend that true emancipation, human and social emancipation, must move in a different direction. Men must repossess their sociality, their “specific” nature (as members of the human species), and not let it be expropriated by extraneous entities, rebelling against their creator, such as the State and money. And this is, then, the clear conclusion: Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognised and organised his “forces propres ” as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.38 36 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 172. 37 Ibid., 174. 38 Ibid., 168.

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2.3

Philosophy, Revolution, Proletariat

But which social and historical forces can be counted upon for human emancipation? Marx begins to answer this question in the other article published in the “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Written after the move to Paris, the text results also from the contacts Marx there develops not just with radical, socialist, and communist intellectuals (from Heine to Proudhon, from Bakunin to Cieskowski), but also with the associations and circles of workers, especially with the numerous German emigrates who gathered in a secret society named League of the Just. It is also through these experiences that a new protagonist, destined to remain central for a long time, takes its place in Marx’s text: the proletariat. But let us proceed in order. In the Introduction, Marx restarts from Feuerbach’s basic point: the first step is the critique of religion and this, in Germany, can by this point be considered completed. We have now to move to the next step. If from a religious perspective reality is inverted (God appears as the creator of man, and not man as the creator of gods), then we must ask why this inversion occurs. And the answer cannot be but one: «This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world». The religious inversion must not just be unveiled, but also explained on the basis of the inverted character of the real world. In other words, we might say that religious representation is not only to be demystified, but also understood according to the necessity of its own production. If human essence needs to find a «fantastic realisation», Marx explains, it is because it «has no true reality». In short, Marx delineates his way of confronting the religious question with stark and rhetorically effective formulas: Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that

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man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower.39

The point, then, is not just to reject religion as an illusion, but from this to begin the critique of a world that needs illusions and necessarily produces them and, especially, to achieve that united and communitarian humanity foreshadowed in religious discourse. In this way, Marxist critique of religion is starkly distinct from the skeptic or enlightenment one: it is not a matter of stoically accepting the human condition as it is, but rather to realize within it (insofar as possible, of course) those contents that religion reaches only in illusions. But, to do so, the critique of religion must be transfigured into a critique of society: «the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics ».40 The pages we are commenting are presented by Marx as the introduction to a critique of Hegelian political philosophy, which he would have composed also by reworking his previous studies but which, in reality, Marx shall never write. The critique of politics, thus, is first and foremost a critique of Hegel’s theory of law and State. Here, though, we have a problem: the critique of Hegel cannot be separated from the reflection on the German political and economic situation, but such situation is peculiar in a way that must first be examined. Compared to the most advanced front of liberal and bourgeois modernity (France and England)—compared, that is to say, with the properly contemporary world—Germany is anachronistic, out of date with his own time: it has not yet reached 1789. Looking closer, the situation is even worse: we Germans, says Marx, «shared the restorations of the modern nations although we had not shared their revolutions».41 Or even, we had to suffer them twice, firstly in preventive form, because German lords were afraid of revolution, and a second time as a conclusion, when German counterrevolution went together with that of other peoples. Germany, thus, has yet to overcome the Ancien régime; but while in France the 39 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 175–76. 40 Ibid., 176. 41 Ibid.

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sunset of the ancient order occurred as tragedy, in Germany, where the regime is an anachronistic relic, its demise will more closely resemble a farce. But, then, how can Germans take part to present political conflicts? Are they perhaps condemned again to fight, and maybe lose, the battles other peoples have already won? For Marx, this is not exactly how things stand. We Germans, Marx asserts, «are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries». This means that Germany completed the experience of modernity at the level of philosophy, just as France did in politics and England in economy: «German philosophy of law and state is the only German history which is al pari with the official modern reality».42 «In politics the Germans thought what other nations did».43 Thus, the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law and State is not at all anachronistic; it is rather perfectly adequate to the battles that have been fought by other peoples. The critique, however, must consequently be developed into action and praxis, lest it remained useless and vain. As Marx said in an oft-repeated passage: «The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses».44 Philosophical critique, then, must be transformed into practical critique: philosophy cannot be superseded without being realized and cannot be realized without being superseded.45 The guiding thread of this process cannot but be the intent of radical emancipation, which here Marx dare to formulate in Kantian language: «the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being».46 Even after having determined this orientation, though, the German problem comes back with all its peculiarities: the critique implies revolution in the holistic sense of human emancipation; but what does this mean for Germany, which has not yet completed the political emancipation characterizing what Marx calls the «official level»47 of the present, 42 Ibid., 180. 43 Ibid., 181. 44 Ibid., 182. 45 Ibid., 181. 46 Ibid., 182. 47 Ibid.

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that is to say of modern people? If it is true that political emancipation must be overcome into human emancipation, and if it is true that this overcoming requires a revolution, how can such revolution be conceived in Germany, vis-à-vis the anachronism and non-contemporaneity48 of German historical time? Shall Germany first complete political revolution (getting up to speed with its own time) and only later the human and social one? Of course, this is not Marx’s opinion; he does not conceive of a development along forced steps and gradual linearities. Marx rather thinks that Germany needs a revolution, raising it not just «to the official level of the modern nations but to the height of humanity which will be the near future of those nations».49 At once, he also sees how this is, in a way, paradoxical: Germany did not go through the intermediary stages of political emancipation at the same time as the modern nations. It has not even reached in practice the stages which it has overtaken in theory. How can it do a somersault, not only over its own limitations, but at the same time over the limitations of the modern nations, over limitations which in reality it must feel and strive for as bringing emancipation from its real limitations?50

The problem Marx here encounters with regard to Germany is similar to the one that, much later, will be presented by Russia (the possibility of moving to socialism skipping the capitalist phase): Can a country go directly to social revolution, skipping political revolution, or performing in a single process, at once or in rapid succession? It is already clear to Marx, at this early moment of his thought, that the idea of emancipation is vain if not connected with real problems and conflicts. Theoretical needs must become practical needs: «it is not enough for thought to strive for realisation, reality must itself strive towards thought».51 Critique is

48 Non-contemporaneity, a decisive theme for Marx’s historical reflection, has been particularly emphasized by Ernst Bloch. Recently, the same theme has been reprised by: Massimiliano Tomba, “Il materialista storico al lavoro. La storiografia politica del ‘Diciotto Brumaio’,” in Pensare con Marx. Ripensare Marx, ed. Cinzia Arruzza (Roma: Edizoni Alegre, 2008). 49 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,”

182. 50 Ibid., 183. 51 Ibid.

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meaningful only if it meets with the self-critique of reality as such. But then, how shall the German situation be judged from this perspective? Marx’s persuasion is that the gradualist line (first political, only later social emancipation) is, in Germany, even more utopian than the one which apparently goes farther and attempts the historical somersault. An exclusively political revolution, one that «leaves the pillars of the house standing», can only succeed if a class within civil society becomes the representative and emancipator of society as a whole (Marx obviously thinks of the “bourgeoisie” and the “Third Estate”). But this is possible, Marx continues, only if this class clashes against an adversary representing all the negativity of subjection and oppression. The French clergy and nobility were such concentrates of nefariousness, and thus in the fight against them, the «emancipation of a particular class » could coincide with the «revolution of a nation», even if only those with money and culture (or at least the means to access them) were actually being emancipated.52 But in Germany there is not a strong bourgeoisie like the French one, which might dare to say, with Sieyès: «I am nothing and I should be everything ».53 There is instead a very different, and perhaps more generalizable, situation, characterized by a sort of impasse. The bourgeoisie cannot achieve political emancipation if not by eliciting the general enthusiasm of society, mobilizing for its own ends even the proletariat. But when this happens, the bourgeoisie is soon tempted to retreat in fear, taking the side of the feudal reaction, because the mobilization of the poor endangers the system of property desired by the bourgeoisie for the new society. Here, we see a peculiar historical asymmetry, which is valid in general, not just for Germany (we shall return on this with regard to 1848 in France): while conceptually the political and social emancipations are distinct, with clearly different contents, this sharp distinction is not present in actual history. It is not easy to stop the revolution of the Third Estate before it morphs into a social and egalitarian revolution, endangering the distribution of property. Thus, in a country where the bourgeoisie is weak, like in Germany, this class is not able to promote political emancipation. The consequence, according to Marx, is that in Germany emancipation will either be universal or not be at all: «In Germany universal emancipation is the

52 Ibid., 184–85. 53 Ibid., 185.

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conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation».54 «In Germany no kind of bondage can be broken without breaking every kind of bondage […] The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of the human being ».55 But universal human emancipation cannot be the work of the bourgeoisie, because it is not its goal. Which class, then, will be the active subject of this emancipation? We shall have true human emancipation, says Marx, only starting from: the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetuated against it […].56

A class which experiences itself «the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat ».57 But what is the proletariat? It is not generically the poor class, says Marx, but rather the class produced by the irruption of industrial development, the class which results from the dissolution of previous social bounds and conditions. In this sense, the proletariat is the product of a deprivation, it is the individual deprived from access to the land, from social bounds that are still strong in the agrarian world, the man who has been robbed of the chance to self-reproduce his own life. The proletariat is the class that lives through the most complete negation and which therefore becomes itself the subject able to deny all existing relations. The proletariat is the protagonist, to say it with Hegel, of a negation of the negation. Spoiled of everything, the proletariat rejects all the institutions of society on which its spoliation rests, starting with private property. It becomes thus the only possible subject of human emancipation, that is to say of the realization of what philosophy has until now only been able to think: «As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy».58 Philosophy 54 Ibid., 186. 55 Ibid., 187. 56 Ibid., 186. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 187.

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is the head of emancipation just as the proletariat is its heart: «Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality».59 Besides the emphasis and rhetoric flowing through these pages, Marx had a keen sense of the situation; he well saw how revolution was incubating in European society (it would have erupted four years later, in 1848) and he understood the importance of the early workers’ protests and revolts. It is one of these conflicts—the revolt of Silesian textile workers who, in June 1844, has destroyed the machines they deemed responsible for their poverty—which offer Marx the occasion to better clarify his point of view, definitively abandoning his ex-ally Arnold Ruge, who had written an article devaluing the social revolt, accusing it of lacking political consciousness. Marx responds to Ruge with a text published in August 1844 on “Vorwärts!” (a biweekly German journal published in Paris, which was becoming radically democratic): Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian.”60 The focus of Marx’s text is the reflection on pauperism (which was on the agenda of European, and especially English, political debate) and on the relation between social issues and politics’ possibility to intervene on them. Social or workers’ revolts, caused by a condition of impoverishment, pose to political authorities the problem of how to intervene to contrast or eliminate pauperism. England, where industrial development and pauperism had been well known for a long time, tried to confront the problem in various ways: first with charity and the tax for the poor, then with workhouses, where the poor are imprisoned and forced to work. But notwithstanding the many parliamentary debates, laws, and administrative interventions, pauperism has not been overcome. To the contrary, writes Marx anticipating Foucault, «pauperism has become a national institution and has therefore inevitably become the object of a ramified and widely extended administration, but an administration which no longer

59 Ibid. 60 In: Marx, and Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 189–206.

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has the task of abolishing pauperism but of disciplining it, of perpetuating it».61 Both in the search for remedies and the enquiry for causes, English politics fails; but it fails in the same way in which French politics did at the time of the Convention, and Prussian politics does in Marx’s times. Following Malthus, «England sees the cause of poverty in the law of nature by which the population must always be in excess of the means of subsistence»; the king of Prussia explains poverty with the lacking of Christian sentiment in the wealthy, like the Convention explained it with the counterrevolutionary conspiracy of property-owners. Thus, in the attempt to contain poverty, «England punishes the poor, the King of Prussia admonishes the rich, and the Convention cuts off the heads of the property owners».62 The uselessness of these therapies, as well as the modesty of the diagnoses, should however teach us something, according to Marx, precisely regarding that relation between civil society and political State which was already the focus of On the Jewish Question. Politics and the State cannot comprehend the cause of social pathologies, much the less cure them, because the modern political State and civil society (with the pathologies it necessarily generates) are two inseparable sides of a single historical nexus. The State’s incapacity to cure pauperism does not depend on correctible defects in its administration, but rather from its very nature. The State is grounded on an egoistic civil society, therefore have to administer it as it stands and cannot deeply change it. The State «is based on the contradiction between public and private life», between general and particular interests.63 Hence the administration has to confine itself to a formal and negative activity, for where civil life and its labour begin, there the power of the administration ends. Indeed, confronted by the consequences which arise from the unsocial nature of this civil life […] impotence is the law of nature of the administration.

The «slavery of civil society», in fact, «is the natural foundation on which the modern state rests», just like the ancient State was grounded 61 Karl Marx, “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 195. 62 Ibid., 197–98. 63 Ibid., 198.

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on slavery properly so-called. Thus, reasoning rigorously along this line, Marx draws the implication that «If the modern state wanted to abolish the impotence of its administration, it would have to abolish the private life of today». But, if it wanted to eliminate current private life (that is to say egoistic civil society with its pathologies), «it would have to abolish itself, for it exists only in the contradiction to private life».64 But this would be entirely contradictory, a sort of suicide, going against the nature and impulses of the political State, just like any other living being. Let us summarize: being the other face of egoistic civil society, the modern political State cannot cure the pathologies deriving from the nature of that civil society; because to do so it would have to destroy civil society, that is to say its living ground, ultimately destroying itself. Confronted with social dynamics, then, politics only deploys negative and formal activities. It is an illusion to think that politics would be capable of effective reforms; social pathologies will be overcome only by eliminating, through revolutionary means, their true root cause, that is to say the atomistic egoism of modern civil society. Anything else would be nothing but a palliative. On the other hand, as Marx himself recognizes, this is not how the political mind thinks. The radical supporters of democracy, like the Jacobins during the French Revolution, insist on the contradiction between the equality of citizens and the inequality of civil society, trying to combat the latter through political interventions: «Robespierre [as already Rousseau in the Social Contract, we would add] saw in great poverty and great wealth only an obstacle to pure democracy. Therefore he wished to establish a universal Spartan frugality».65 Radical democrats see the contradiction between universalism and particularism, and try to intervene with the instruments of political will. According to Marx, instead, while the contradiction is certainly real, it also characterizes the essence of the modern State as such: it is therefore illusory to think of overcoming it with the instrument of political will or social reform. The only meaningful way is the revolutionary one, which is already emerging in the revolt of the Silesian textile workers, who destroy the machines (an odd concession from Marx to the basest luddism) together with ledgers and title deeds, and who attack at once the visible enemy,

64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 199.

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the owner of the factory, and the hidden one, the bankers. In this radical and total opposition, the German proletariat does not lack political consciousness, as Ruge thought; it is rather even more advanced than the French and English ones. German proletariat is the theoretician of European proletariat (here Marx valorizes Weitling’s «brilliant», Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit?, which often is «superior even to […] Proudhon»),66 just like the English one is the economist and the French one the politician. Precisely because its bourgeoisie is weak and uncertain, Germany does not have, like France, a vocation for political revolution (which for Marx is the bourgeois revolution par excellence), but it possesses, as a philosophical people, a vocation for “socialism” and social revolution. Thus, to Ruge’s thesis according to which it would be impossible to have «a social revolution without a political soul »67 (an ominous prophecy for German revolution, which would lack precisely this political soul), Marx responds by clarifying his own point of view. Certainly, the social revolution he has in mind, insofar as it must subvert both society and the correlative political power, «is a political act » which implies «the overthrow of the existing power». It is clear that without revolution «socialism cannot be realised». However, since it goes beyond the modern separation between civil society and political State, socialism is a political revolution but also, in the long term, an overcoming of the political dimension as such. «But where its organising activity begins, where its proper object, its soul, comes to the fore — there socialism throws off the political cloak».68

2.4

A First Appraisal

With the writings we have here examined (the last, Critical Marginal Notes, published in August 1844), Marx’s thought reaches results which will later be clarified and deepened, but never contradicted. At the basis we have the thesis, already developed in the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right in 1843, according to which modern society is characterized by the contradiction between civil society and political State: the former is the realm of egoism and inequality between privates, the latter the realm

66 Ibid., 201. 67 Ibid., 205. 68 Ibid., 206.

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of the abstract universal and of political equality between citizens. In my view, however, we should individuate three different aspects of Marx’s discourse. Firstly, civil society and political State are two complementary moments of the same reality. Secondly, they are in reciprocal contradiction insofar as they embody opposite principles. Thirdly, their relation is similar to that between appearance and reality: the State’s dimension is abstract and illusory, and therefore subordinate to the more real one, that of civil society. If we follow this third point of view, it is clear how Marx’s critique of State and money remains strongly connected to Feuerbach’s critique of religion. Just as in religion men find their common humanity by conceiving themselves as sons of God, so in bourgeois society men seemingly lose their sociality, becoming egoistic individuals, only to find it back, mediated by two figures, then made into autonomous objects: money and the political State. The difference with Feuerbach, however, is that while the divinity has only an imaginary existence (at least according to Marx), money and the State actually exist; they result therefore in a sort of alienation that is not only more real than the religious one, but perhaps constitutes its very foundation. In Marx’s early writings, thus, there are two fundamental theoretical themes, connected but distinguishable: the critique of the contradiction between civil society and State and the critique of alienation of man in God, money, and in the State. Both these lines of thought, this much is already clear to Marx, demands a revolutionary solution. The contradiction between civil society and State requires to be overcome through the dissolution of both terms, that is to say through the re-absorption of politics into concrete material life, no longer de-politicized. Alienation must be overcome (the movement, as we can see, is the same) through the re-appropriation of direct sociality by the human community. Such reappropriation would suppress that sociality that had become extraneous and alienated into a separate medium: be it money (mediating exchanges, and therefore the reproduction of material life) or the State which mediates coordination through the obedience to common rules (the laws, that is). The overcoming of contradiction and alienation obviously implies a revolution (because existing society must be radically transformed, down to its foundations), and the revolutionary agent cannot but be that class which experiences in its living body the bourgeois negation of human sociality, i.e., the proletariat. In the subsequent development of Marx’s thought this scheme will be made more precise, reformulated, and filled

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with contents but, it seems to me, never abandoned. For this reason, we are not persuaded by those interpreters who, like Louis Althusser, see radical breaks and ruptures in the development of Marx’s theory. Already by reading these first writings, thus, we can see what I deem to be one of the most important problematic issues within Marx’s thought. Marx uncovers fundamental contradictions of modernity, determining its dynamics, but confronted with them he does not see any other solution but a dialectic overcoming, where all separations are reconciled into a higher unity. So it is for the contradiction between social inequality and political equality: Marx is interested in the perspective of recomposition, not so much in seeing how this contradiction persists, develops, characterizes, and determines the conflictual events of modernity. The same is true with regard to the aforementioned media, money, and the political representative State: what interests Marx is the overcoming of those media and the re-appropriation of a direct sociality. But the problem could be posed in a very different way: one could ask (and this is Habermas’ line of reasoning) whether these media might not be indispensable to coordinate individual actions in modern complex societies. At the same time, we should also ask, keeping alive Marx’s criticism, which mechanisms make these media into vehicles of domination, and how their coordinating functions can be preserved, insofar as possible, while neutralizing their alienating and dominating effects. Clearly, at this stage Marx has already reached some fundamental certainties, even if he has not yet developed their scientific articulation. He is about, then, to substantiate these certainties by beginning a study he will never abandon, that of political economy, which is to say the science which examines the anatomy of civil society.

CHAPTER 3

The Discovery of Economics

3.1

Alienated Labor

Being in Paris allowed the twenty-six years old Marx to make two encounters, both decisive for future developments of his thought: with the workers’ political circles (the first instances of a political practice informed by the perspective of a social revolution) and with political economy, the science that Marx will continue to cultivate for the rest of his life. In Paris, between the Spring and August of 1844, Marx makes a choice that shall decisively affect his path: that of grounding the critique of society on that new science of economics—which had chiefly been developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo—rather than on philosophical, juridical, political, and historical reflections (on this ground, incidentally, Engels had anticipated him, with the essay Outline of a Critique of Political Economy, published on “German-French Annals” and much appreciated by Marx). Marx’s journey to arrive at this choice is quite linear: after having sought the truth and real ground of the State in civil society, he now seeks to understand the anatomy of civil society through the study of economics. In agreement with socialists and communists, Marx criticizes the inequality rooted in private property; his next step is then rigorous and well understandable, endeavoring not to moralistically criticize private property and its privileges, nor just to propose the overcoming of property in a communist and fraternal society (as many pre-Marxian socialists

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and communists had done), but rather to understand private property in its genesis and its dynamics. The works which, in 1844, Marx dedicates to political economy are traditionally divided into two categories. On the one hand, we have extracts and comments that Marx elaborates by reading (in French, or French translation) texts from economists (Jean-Baptiste Say, Smith, Ricardo, James Mill) and from those who criticize political economy from a social point of view. On the other hand, there are the so-called Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which we usually read almost as if they were a book, albeit unfinished and fragmentary. In reality, these Manuscripts, upon which Marxist exegesis exerted itself for decades, were collected and published only in 1932, by two different editors in non-coincident editions: one edited by Landshut and Mayer (two socialdemocrat scholars), and the other in the corresponding volume of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. However, as demonstrated by more recent research,1 it would be incorrect to draw a sharp distinction between Marx’s reading notes and the Manuscripts: they are all materials belonging to the same line of research, and as such, they exhibit similar characteristics. In the extracts and reading notes, when he gets deeper into the argument, Marx writes entirely original pages (e.g., in the observations on James Mill); while on the other hand many pages from the Manuscripts are virtually indistinguishable from fragments and notes. Multiple threads intertwine in Marx’s early reflections on political economy; here, the opinions of the future author of Capital take shape, at times in a provisional form that Marx will later reject. This is clearly visible, for example, in what is probably the most significant note, Comments on James Mill, Élémens D’économie Politique.2 Approaching the work of Ricardo and his school (to which Marx ascribes Mill), Marx begins by rejecting the thesis which shall later become a cornerstone of his reflection: the labor theory of value. Marx observes that this theory, whit its pretense of a rigorous and exact rationality, underestimates the concreteness of economic processes, where values and prices

1 Cf. Jürgen Rojahn, “Il caso dei cosiddetti ‘Manoscritti economico-filosofici dell’anno 1844’,” Passato e presente 3 (1983). See also the more recent: Marcello Musto, “Marx in Paris: Manuscripts and Notebooks of 1844,” Science & Society 73, no. 3 (2009). 2 Marx, and Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 211–28.

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are determined by the variable and chaotic movement of supply and demand.3 But the most interesting aspect of the comments on Mill is the reflection on money. Mill perfectly captures the issue, according to Marx, when he defines money as the «medium of exchange».4 For Marx too, in fact, the problem of modern production derives from the fact that this mediating instrument is inserted between persons. Let’s try to synthetically go through Marx’s reasoning, which is very important because it already contains the kernel of themes which will remain central throughout the development of his theory. The starting point is that man is a social being, belonging to the «human species», a being developing its life in a relation of exchange with others belonging to the same species. The work of others contributes to satisfy one’s needs just as one’s work contributes to satisfy the needs of others. The fact that humans detach themselves from mere natural existence through work already implies that they cannot have a self-sufficient existence (in other words: work entails a certain division of labor) and that, therefore, they have to reproduce their life through interaction and exchange with other members of the human species. But this exchange can occur, essentially, according to two alternative modalities: in an intentionally agreed/organized way, or through the non-intentional mediation of money.5 In the first case, people agree on what contribution everyone shall provide to the life of others (like in a hypothetical primitive society, where some devote themselves to hunting, other to gathering the fruits of the earth). In the second case, everyone produces and sells in order to be able to buy what they need to live. Anticipating themes we will reencounter later, we might say that this second case has two main variants (we are still talking about ideal-types, or theoretical constructions): the one in which the independent producers/exchangers are individuals (or maybe, more

3 Concerning this issue cf. Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx: 1843 to Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), Ch. 3: from Rejection to Acceptance of the Labor Theory of Value. 4 Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill, Élémens D’économie Politique,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). 5 Concerning the market/organization polarity, and on its significance for the interpretation of Marx, the works of Jacques Bidet are fundamental, especially: Jacques Bidet, Théorie générale: théorie du droit, de l’économie et de la politique (Paris: PUF, 1999); Jacques Bidet, Explication et reconstruction du Capital (Paris: PUF, 2004).

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concretely, families), and the one where they are enterprises or corporations. In this second variant, there are people who do not make their living by autonomously producing and selling products, but who rather sell their labor to businesses (which then produce commodities for the market), buying the commodities they need through their salary. The most developed form of social cooperation mediated by money (on which Marx’s attention is chiefly focused) is the one where even human labor has become a commodity, sold on the market like any other. Having gone through these premises, necessary to contextualize and understand Marx’s reasoning, let us see which consequences follow. First of all, the money-relation (let’s say, for brevity’s sake) presupposes private property: it is indeed one and the same with it. In order to sell something, I must own it, therefore: no money-relations without private property. But the fundamental point, for Marx, is that in money-relations people suffer a process of emptying, subtraction, or, to use Marx’s word, of «alienation». In money-relations, humans are deprived of their sociality; they do not consciously interact with others any longer, they rather just sell what they own (their products, or labor) and buy what they need. Humans thus delegate to an extraneous power (money) their relation to other humans; the result is a reified and de-humanized social relation. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them.6 The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty […] By the other side it would be regarded as impudence or lunacy and rejected as such.7

Upon closer inspection, money-relations create a situation where the dependence of humans from other humans (i.e., the truth of their condition as social beings) is hidden behind the appearance of independence. This is so because, unlike in explicitly agreed coordination, everyone is 6 Marx, “Comments on James Mill, Élémens D’économie Politique,” 212. 7 Ibid., 227.

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an independent property-owner, who (theoretically) could also choose to avoid any relation with others. The «essential bond linking him with other men» appears as inessential, rather «separation from his fellow men, on the other hand, [appears] as his true mode of existence»8 —and here, we should reflect on the tight connection between money-relations and individualistic liberalism. Thus, as Marx will explain at length in the manuscript on «Estranged labour», when money-relations rule, individuals are alienated not only from the human species and from other people, but also from their own activity (now wage labor) and its product. Other people become just a source to draw maximum profit from, through a self-interested exchange («the intention of plundering, of deception, is necessarily present in the background»9 ). Labor activity, far from being an external realization of human vitality, becomes a burden or a «torment»,10 which one would gladly avoid if it were not necessary to survive. Marx’s thesis is thus very clear: wherever there is a money-relation, there we have alienated cooperation—precisely the opposite of the true human cooperation, which Marx sketches out in the last pages of the Comments on Mill. Producing «as human beings»11 means that in our products we objectify our peculiar individualities and experience the pleasure of seeing our personalities translated into an objective reality. Since I produce for others (as we have seen, there is no self-sufficiency), I experience the pleasure of satisfying your need, «I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love». And moreover, in my activity I would realize «my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature».12

8 Ibid., 217. 9 Ibid., 226. 10 Ibid., 228. 11 Ibid., 227. 12 Ibid., 228.

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These themes are central in the most well-known and celebrated pages of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, those devoted to «estranged labor». Marx emphasizes a contradiction which we may thus summarize: labor as a transformation of nature, self-transformation, and relation with other people, is the true essence of humanity; therefore, when labor becomes a commodity, humanity is deprived of its own essence, which is now controlled by a reified entity, the medium of money. This perverts the people’s relation with the product of their labor, with their own productive activity, with their essence of species-being (Gattungswesen), with other people, and even with nature. Let us briefly examine the facets of this alienation, which characterizes humanity from the moment labor becomes a commodity. First of all, the product does not belong to the producer anymore: objectification becomes the loss of the object; workers may produce every marvel, but with their wage they will barely be able to buy enough to survive. Workers, secondly, are alienated from their activity. Since labor is not a free activity, endeavored creatively and with pleasure, the worker «does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind». Labor becomes forced, no longer «the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it»; when they work, workers do not really belong to themselves but to another. The paradoxical consequence is that the worker only feels himself freely active in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.13

Humans’ peculiarity, moreover—here Marx follows Feuerbach’s lesson—is that of relating to the world as species-beings, characterized by labor and by the conscious activity of transforming nature. Where labor becomes a commodity, people do not live their species-life anymore; rather the life of the species becomes only a means for their physical existence.14 The same is true for the relation with others: «the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential 13 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 274–75. 14 Ibid., 277.

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nature».15 There is evidently a connection, as already observed, between alienated labor and private property. According to Marx, however, this link must be understood in a precise sense: it is not private property that generates alienated labor but, to the contrary, alienated labor generates private property, the latter finds its ground in the former. Private property is produced by the break of the unity between individual humans, their labor, and the human species. Private property is therefore to be understood through its historical determination, and not simply as a given (which would be political economy’s error, according to Marx). The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (first published only in 1932) have received very different, if not opposite, evaluations from the numerous interpreters of Marx’s thought. Some—like Herbert Marcuse who commented on them soon after their publication—have seen in the Manuscripts an opportunity to renew and regenerate historical materialism16 ; others have instead considered them as the testament to a naive philosophical anthropology, still informed by Feuerbach, which Marx would, luckily, soon abandon. Among Marx’s texts, the Manuscripts have perhaps elicited the widest interpretative divergences, largely due to the importance of “alienation” for certain moments of twentieth-century philosophy. My opinion is that the Manuscripts have to be assessed soberly, without exalting nor damning them. They represent the first step, certainly interesting but still in need of maturation, of Marx’s research on political economy. The critical point on which Marx most insists in the Manuscripts and other coeval texts, is that social cooperation between people (or their unity as belonging to the species) is unnaturally upended by the rule of money-relations—especially when such relations develop to the point that even labor becomes a commodity. This is so because money-relations result in a non-conscious cooperation, hidden behind the alleged primacy of the isolated individual who, arbitrarily, can choose to have, or not to have, connections with others. Humans, thus, are separated from their properly human life (productive cooperation with other members of the species) and placed in a contradiction with their essentially

15 Ibid. 16 Herbert Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism,” in Heideggerian Marxism, ed. Richard Wolin, and John Abromeit (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

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communal nature. Feuerbach had laid a strong emphasis on this “communitarian” human nature, and to him Marx recognizes great merits, as in the laudatory letter of August 11, 1844: In these writings [Principles of the Philosophy of the Future and The Essence of Religion] you have provided […] a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!17

In the Manuscripts, thus, the most radical critique against modern society is that of having upended the original and essential human sociality, producing a process of alienation—a process, that is, where individuals exist only for themselves, producing an alterity they do not recognize as their own, and which instead becomes alien to them, extraneous and inimical. However, the exchange process characterizing modern society is not just a process of alienation, but also of domination—as it is especially apparent in the sections of the first manuscript devoted to “wages.” In fact, within money-mediated cooperation, that is to say alienated cooperation, human activity is subject to the power of this medium. But, through money, the power of those who control this medium is affirmed, i.e., the power of the property-owner or the capitalist. As soon as the money medium is interposed between people, the conditions for a relation of domination are created, based on the fact that some have a privileged access to this medium (the capitalists) and others do not (the proletarians). Thus, proletarians are not just alienated from their human essence (as the capitalist is as well), but also subject to domination. In fact, when labor becomes a commodity, and when workers do not own the means to independently produce for themselves (e.g., the land), they will only be able to survive by finding a capitalist willing to buy their labor. Workers will not survive, or only with extreme difficulty, if their commodity remains unsold, as it may easily happen during economic recessions. The relation between sellers and buyers of labor, thus, is not at all like that of two “exchangers” interacting on an equal level. Capitalists surely need to buy labor to realize a profit through it; but they can live 17 Marx, and Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, 354.

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pretty well without the worker, whereas the worker cannot live without the capitalist. The capitalist can wait for workers to reduce their demands, but workers need a job right away in order to eat. Therefore, in establishing the conditions of the contract, the capitalist part (which has also the advantage of coordinating more easily) prevails on the laboring one. Thus, we may say that the former exercise domination over the latter: «In order to live, then, the non-owners are obliged to place themselves, directly or indirectly, at the service of the owners – to put themselves, that is to say, into a position of dependence upon them».18 «Capital is thus the governing power over labour and its products. The capitalist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human qualities, but inasmuch as he is an owner of capital».19 Capitalist society is thus characterized, according to the Manuscripts, by alienation and class domination. Moreover, and this is the Marxian thesis we shall soon explain, the wounds this society inflicts on the proletarian classes cannot be healed by any reformist means. But, if these are the thesis of the Manuscripts, it seems evident to me that they should be considered as a step in the evolution of Marx’s thought, neither to be exalted as if it reached exceptional depths nor rejected as if abysmally far from his more mature theories. In fact, Marx will never abandon the critique of capitalist society, as the realm of alienation and domination, nor the rejection of every “reformist” perspective—even if both shall be re-thought and deepened, to the point of assuming an entirely different shape from that of the Manuscripts. In particular, the critique of money-relations as alienated relations will be expounded, through the development of Marx’s thought, quite differently than in the Manuscripts. This critique will no longer be based on the concept of a communitarian essence of humankind, which would be perverted and upended in money-relations. Marx shall abandon this Feuerbachian “essentialism” already in the following year, when he will write (in the sixth of the Theses on Feuerbach) that «the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual» but, in his reality, it is «the ensemble of the social relations». From this point on, Marx undoubtedly leaves behind

18 Constantin Pecquer, Théorie nouvelle d’économie sociale et politique (1842). As cited in: Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 243. 19 Ibid., 247.

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the kind of “essentialist” critique developed in the Manuscripts; effectively, however, his point of view will be modified and deepened but not upended. What matters most, in fact, is that Marx will still considers voluntary and conscious cooperation (not mediated by money-relations) as the natural and rational form of cooperation, even if he will no longer say that it corresponds to human essence (because there is no static human essence outside of socio-historical transformations); Marx will also continue to consider money-mediated cooperation as inverted or alienated cooperation. The real problem (pace Althusser and the interpreters he influenced) is not to establish a clear break between the Manuscripts and subsequent writings, because the former is simply the first step (the “discovery of economics”) of a research which will develop and deepen, at once maintaining a high degree of internal coherence. Thus, it seems difficult to disagree with the sober assessment of the Manuscripts offered by a serious Marxian scholar, David McLellan: Seen in their proper perspective, these Manuscripts were in fact no more than a starting-point for Marx – an initial, exuberant outpouring of ideas to be taken up and developed in subsequent economic writings, particularly in the Grundrisse and in Capital. In these later works the themes of the ‘1844 Manuscripts’ would certainly be pursued more systematically, in greater detail, and against a much more solid economic and historical background; but the central inspiration or vision was to remain unaltered: man’s alienation in capitalist society, and the possibility of his emancipation – of his controlling his own destiny through communism.20

The problem, thus, is not that of exalting or rejecting the Manuscripts; both options are essentially incorrect and anti-historical. The interesting issue would rather be that of understanding the deeper meaning and value of Marx’s critique of money-relations: In what sense can they be judged as the perversion of more original human relations, mediated by language and conscious coordination? We shall return on this point, since it will also be central in the first sections of Capital. The reflection on money-relations, however, also raises a problem that Marx does not see or discuss, but which is equally important as the one just mentioned. Even if Marx does not draw our attention on this point, 20 David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1973), 128.

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in reality money-relations cannot be the only medium of social relations, which rather always needs spaces for voluntary cooperation (more or less democratic or authoritative) outside of the market. Hegel knew this very well when he posited the spheres of the family and of the State, respectively, before and after civil society as the realm of (not only) commodity exchanges. This means that the issue of money-relations, differently from what would appear in Marx, implies two aspects, both of which we have to keep in mind: on the one hand, money-relations characterize a mode of cooperation, the non-intentional one, opposed to another mode of cooperation, the conscious one. But, on the other hand (and Marx has much less to say about this), in real societies the non-intentional mode of cooperation informs certain contexts and not others. This means that market and organization21 (conscious cooperation) are not just two opposite kinds of coordination; they are also intertwined and present at once, in variable measures and forms across different societies. Sure, this is true starting from the moment the market comes to life, not before. And this means that theoretically we could do without the market (which in fact has, theoretically, a birthdate) but not without organization, the latter being, so to speak, almost synonymous with cooperation. The relation between market and organization would thus appear asymmetrical. But, from this asymmetry, are we allowed to draw the implication that voluntary cooperation is natural, and the market is an inversion or perversion, as Marx claims? This is a point on which we should reason more deeply, to better understand both Marx’s greatness and his limits as a thinker of modernity.

3.2

Reformism and Communism

The other important issue discussed in the Manuscript is that of “reformism.” Marx’s argument against the supporters of social reform might be summarized by the statement that improvement is impossible. In other words, Marx thinks that relevant changes in workers’ conditions will be impossible without a full-fledged revolution; so long as capital and land remain in private property, and so long as labor remains a commodity, workers will be doomed to poverty and subordination. 21 Here, I reprise the terminology and theoretical framework of Jacques Bidet, whose “thinking” and “reconstructive” reading of Marx seems to me much more useful than many more strictly faithful interpretations.

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To really improve the situation of workers, thus, it is necessary to just end private property of capital and commodification of labor; any other measure could only achieve limited and temporary results. In contemporary society, the worker’s condition is one of material poverty and submission, which according to Marx is not destined to improve simply with economic progress. In moments of economic crisis, in fact, workers are obviously those who suffer most22 : they can lose their job, suffer wage reductions, etc. But, even in times of growing wealth, things are not much better for workers: if the demand of labor increases, they might obtain a higher salary, but will also be forced to an excess of labor, which will destroy their life and imperil their health. Therefore, Marx concludes, even in the condition of society most favourable to the worker, the inevitable result for the worker is overwork and premature death, decline to a mere machine, a bond servant of capital, which piles up dangerously over and against him, more competition, and starvation or beggary for a section of the workers.23

Workers, thus, cannot expect any substantial improvement from the progress of capitalist society; even if this progress produced an increase of the absolute level of wages, capital’s wealth would increase even faster, and thus, the worker would still suffer a relative impoverishment.24 But could the condition of workers be improved by some socialist reform project? Even in this case, Marx’s answer is negative. Indeed, his research aims to answer the following question: What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of the working class, or regard equality of wages (as Proudhon does) as the goal of social revolution?25

22 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 237. 23 Ibid., 238. 24 Ibid., 242. 25 Ibid., 241.

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The answer is given, albeit in a very synthetic and rushed way, in a page of the manuscript on «estranged labor»: an increase of wages, if at all possible, or if it could be imposed by political coercion, «would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity». As for Proudhon’s equality of wages, it «only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist».26 For Marx, then, the point is not to transform the wage system, nor to extend it to the whole society on an egalitarian basis, but rather to abolish it. With the end of wage labor, private property and alienated labor shall also end. This suppression of private property (the overcoming of man’s self-alienation) is, indeed, communism. Except that even communism, according to Marx, can appear in two forms: one limited and crude, one truly satisfactory. Or rather, to be more precise, in the Manuscripts Marx distinguishes even three forms of communism—and it is not always clear which are their differentiating characteristics. In any case, the first and third forms of communism are clearly distinguished, on the ground of the relation that communism establishes with its antithesis, private property. The first level is what Marx himself defines as crude communism. It would be a sort of collectivism where, in lieu of private property-owners, we have the collective as a single proprietor and employer: «The category of the worker is not done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things».27 For example, this communism is so crude that, while in patriarchal society the woman is owned by the husband, here this property is in common, in the sense that all women are owned by the community (of males). And since, as Marx writes a few lines after, from the organization of the relation between the sexes we can «judge man’s whole level of development»,28 the level of civilization of this crude communism seems really low. Essentially, as Marx clearly shows, this first type of communism equalizes envy, it is a barrack-like communism, transforming everyone into an employee and leaving no space to individual

26 Ibid., 280. 27 Ibid., 294. 28 Ibid., 296.

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talents. Private property is not really eliminated, but simply generalized, in that everything becomes the property of the community, with individuals depending on it just as they used to depend on an employer. Marx’s assessment of this type of communism is totally negative: How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it.29

It is not easy to escape the spell cast by these pages: Could Marx have already foreseen the misery of pseudo-egalitarian collectivism, which would later have been experienced by some twentieth-century communist societies? Besides these speculations, however, we would still need to understand what Marx had in mind when attacking this type of communism. McLellan suggests,30 plausibly, that Marx was referring of those egalitarian communists inspired by Babeuf (the Travailleurs égalitaires and the Humanitaires ), active in France in the thirties, which Engels had discussed in his 1843 article Progress of Social Reform on the Continent. Engels indeed underlined the crudeness of these communists, stating that their program consisted in «making the world a working-man’s community, putting down every refinement of civilisation, science, the fine arts, etc., as useless, dangerous, and aristocratic luxuries».31 With the second type of communism, Marx seems to allude to the most advanced French theorists: Cabet could be the example of a democratic communism and Dézamy of the one which advocates the abolition of the State.32 But only the third type is the communism Marx subscribes to, the one in which the abolition of private property coincides with the

29 Ibid., 295. 30 David McLellan, Marx Before Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1970), 183. On the

same topic of “crude communism,” identified as a form of “Babouvism,” see also: Paul Kägi, Biografia intellettuale di Marx (Torino: Vallecchi, 1968), 196–200. 31 Friedrich Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 397. 32 Cf. Kägi, Biografia intellettuale di Marx, 210; McLellan, Marx Before Marxism, 183.

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real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development

This communism, Marx continues, is at once humanism and naturalism; and most than anything it is the resolution of all antagonisms and contradictions that have marked the path of human history. This communism overcomes the antagonism between man and man, existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, individuals and species. And thus Marx can emphatically say that «communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution».33 Communism, thus, seems to be understood by Marx as the rediscovery of man’s social and communitarian essence, and as the overcoming of all alienations which represent an inversion of such social essence: religion, family, money, and the State. Communism represents the true elimination of all these estrangements and the return to the true «human, i.e., social, existence».34 The communist man finds his wealth not in the possession of things, but in his relations with other men and with nature. Whereas «private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it»,35 communism overcomes this exclusivity, allowing everyone to enjoy everything that human progress can provide. While under a regime of private property men only cultivate their sense of possession, the elimination of private property frees all human attributes: «need or enjoyment has consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use».36 This communist sociality is already anticipated in the forms of organization workers have begun to adopt: such forms are important not just for their political goal, but also for the simple experience of being together, which expresses a new need for authentic socialization, for friendly and fraternal relations.37 Just like communism is the elimination of private property, so the communist man is the post-egoistic man,

33 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 296–97. 34 Ibid., 297. 35 Ibid., 300. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 313.

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who prefers to enjoy a good in common with others rather than owning it privately, who finds his pleasure in activities producing for others, just as others produce something for him. Within the dialectic movement of estrangement and re-appropriation, communism represents the re-appropriation, by humans as social beings, of all the wealth they have developed, which until now has been against them in the form of private property, resulting in mutual antagonism. By eliminating private property, communism obviously removes money-relations, because money is indeed «men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind».38 Humans, who have developed their essential forces in the modes of alienation, privatism, and money, are now ready to re-appropriate them through the communitarian suppression of all these limits. This Marxian reflection on the social human (who should supplant the egoistic human of “prehistory”), however, completely lacks a critical examination of the kind of social connections which would characterize the new society. Money and the State are, in fact, also media (the former unintentional, the latter intentional and authoritative) through which interactions are coordinated: I produce what you need, because I know you will pay me, and with those money I will be able to satisfy my needs; you keep your end of the deal because you know that otherwise the State would coerce you to do so. But how would interactions be coordinated in a society knowing neither the State nor money? Obviously, there are forms of coordination, for example in the family or between friends, that are simply based (as Habermas would say) on discursive interaction; but how could this form of “micro” coordination be translated on the macroscopic social scale? These problems mark, I believe, a blind spot of Marx’s reflection. And this is a limit which, once more, does not concern only the Manuscripts (even if it is more evident there), but Marx’s thought more generally.

3.3

Yet Another Engagement with Hegel

While most of the Manuscripts are dedicated to Marx’s first engagement with economics, one free-standing fragment is devoted to Hegel, which is to say, according to the title chosen by the editors, to the Critique

38 Ibid., 325.

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of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole. Alienation is the thread connecting these pages with the other reflections developed in the Manuscripts. But before getting to this topic, Marx considers how important members of the Hegelian left—David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach—have engaged with the master. Whereas the first two, according to Marx, have not been able to develop a true critique of Hegel, Feuerbach managed to clarify some essential points: he showed how «philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man».39 With Feuerbach, the critique of theologizing philosophy opens the way to «true materialism», according to which the social relation between man and man becomes «the basic principle of the theory».40 However, while recognizing Feuerbach’s importance as «the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field», Marx certainly does not merely repeat the Feuerbachian critique of Hegel’s idealism or spiritualism. Undoubtedly, Marx agrees with the argument, but he wishes to go further, confronting Hegel’s conception of history, emphasizing at once its greatness and its limits. Let us begin with the greatness. Hegel’s fundamental merit—which can be better appreciated in the Phenomenology of Spirit (which contains «secret of the Hegelian philosophy»41 )—lies not just in the understanding of history as the process of man’s self-creation, but also and especially in having recognized the dialectic structure of this process—a process which does not occur as a linear growth, but rather through dialectical contradictions: alienation and suppression of alienation, negation and negation of negation. In Marx’s words: The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and

39 Ibid., 328. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 329.

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comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour.42

This page from Marx may be read together with this one from Adorno, reprising and clarifying its thesis: in the Phenomenology, argues Adorno, Hegel «recognized the spontaneous spirit as labor, if not in theory at least in his language […] The relationship of spirit to what is given manifests itself on the model of a social process, a process of labor».43 The «labor of the concept», thus, is much more than a metaphor; it is a formula indicating how well Hegel had understood that spiritual work is not separable from material one. This process of self-constitution of mankind does not happen linearly. Rather (and this is the dialectic, as understood by Marx), mankind exists from itself, objectifies itself, finds the now extraneous object before itself, and then re-appropriates it by recognizing it as man’s own product. The dialectic movement is an exiting from itself to return in itself, or, in a less neoplatonic jargon, is the consciousness that the development of man occurs through its negation, the appropriation through expropriation. This is Hegel’s critical greatness: his philosophy depicts man’s estrangement, even though man appears only as mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint.44

The difference between Marx and Hegel, however, lies in the way in which this conceptual figure is employed and interpreted. The Phenomenology sums up in a single movement (if at all possible) the process of mankind self-constitution and the process through which Spirit gradually overcomes all objectivities (initially appearing estranged from him) up to the point in which substance and subject coincide, which is the achievement of absolute knowledge. Marx wants to preserve only the first aspect, getting rid of the idealism which, from his point of view, characterizes the second. Two aspects of Hegel’s thought are thus rejected by Marx. Firstly, he does not accept the thesis that the overcoming of

42 Ibid., 332–33. 43 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 21. 44 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 332.

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estrangement would consist in the spirit recognizing itself in every objectivity which initially appeared extraneous. From Marx’s naturalistic point of view, what is to be overcome is estranged objectivity, not objectivity as such45 (as, according to Marx, would happen in Hegel). Hegel’s logos is the totality, because at the end, through the strenuous labor of dialectic, it removes every estrangement to the point of not having anything outside itself. Marx’s man, in contrast, is characterized precisely by always having something outside of himself: «a being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being»; «a non-objective being is a non-being ».46 Man, as a natural being, sensuous and passive, will always be confronted with an external object; but this object shall not be any longer an extraneous power which dominates and oppresses men. And thus we get to the second dimension of Marx’s anti-Hegelian critique, which does not concern the antithesis between naturalism and spiritualism (for which Feuerbach would have sufficed), but rather the one between the conceptual overcoming of alienation and the actualhistorical one. In Hegel, every figure in which Spirit alienates itself by exiting from himself (e.g., the family, the State, or religion) shows itself, through its internal contradiction, as a station of this peculiar via crucis, which has to be overcome by moving into another, up until all are re-comprehended (despoiled of their pretense to subsist autonomously) as moments of concept’s circular movement. In this way, however, the figures of man’s self-alienation are eliminated only spiritually, while being empirically preserved: In the actual world civil law, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc., remain in existence, only they have become moments – modes of the existence and being of man – which have no validity in isolation, but dissolve and engender one another, etc. They have become moments of motion.47

45 It is worth noting that the Manuscripts ’ distinction between objectification and estrangement is remembered by Lukács as the philosophical thesis that, when he read it in 1930, completely clarified the limits of his 1923 work, History and Class Consciousness, which did not heed to that distinction. Cf. the self-critical Preface to the new edition in: Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). 46 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 337. 47 Ibid., 340.

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For Marx, this is paradoxical: Hegel’s figures sink, one after the other, in the process of thought, but remain well planted and uncontested in the prosaic empirical reality. The young revolutionary, instead, wants the exact opposite: if it is true that humanity has alienated itself in the family, the State, and in religion, what follows is that, if it wants to re-appropriate itself, mankind will have to find the strength to eliminate these figures, of denying their empirical existence so as to institute new forms of sociality in their stead.

3.4

The Holy Family

At the end of August 1844, Marx, having just completed the work which will become the Manuscripts, has one of the fundamental encounters of his life: on August 28, at the Café de la Régence in Paris, he meets Friedrich Engels, then traveling through the French capital. While he had previously been quite reserved, now Marx (having in the meantime read and admired Engels’ essay on political economy on the “German-French Annals”) finds himself in complete agreement with the brilliant young communist. Engels was born in 1820, sons of industrialists and expert of England, since his family had opened a factory in Manchester after the one in Barmen in the Ruhr region. Between August and September 1844, Marx and Engels spent ten days discussing and planning works together, and at this time, they decided to write a polemical essay against the «critical criticism» (so they ironically call it) of Bruno Bauer, who had been publishing a new journal the “Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung.” Marx had been urged to attack Bauer from Georg Jung—a young member of the Hegelian left, connected to Moses Hess, another young Hegelian socialist whose texts Marx appreciated. The book, composed by parts independently written by the two authors, was finished already about the end of November, and it is a rather disjointed collection of polemical arguments against articles published on Bauer’s journal. The title should have been Critique of Critical Criticism, Against Bruno Bauer and Company, but the publisher desired a more incisive moniker, and so The Holy Family was born—the title is anyway apropos, since the polemics’ object is not just Bruno Bauer, but also his brother Edgar.

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In broad strokes, Marx’s polemics with Bauer48 reflects a deep chasm that had developed within the young Hegelian left. While Bauer stood by the point of view of critical self-consciousness, opposed to the bad positivity of religion and State but also to the passivity and complicity of the “masses,” Marx was precisely attempting to leave this horizon, deemed exceedingly philosophical, individualistic, and abstract. Against Bauer’s valorization of the category of self-consciousness Marx, following Feuerbach, opposes the real man, who is defined also by sensuousness, passion, love. Against the philosophy which handles supreme abstraction like history and progress, Marx opposes a decidedly nominalistic empiricism. To Bauer’s contempt for the «masses», Marx opposes the hope that radical theory could become a revolutionary force precisely by meeting the dispossessed masses. On the one hand, thus, we have Bauer’s intellectual radicalism, within which revolutionary ideals and practical immobilism coexist; on the other, there is Marx’s communism, in which Feuerbach’s naturalism/materialism is conjoined to a strongly social and communitarian conception of man. With regard to more specific themes, we should first note how here Marx starts by accepting Feuerbach’s critique of the theologizing character of Hegel’s speculation (which upends real relations, inverting subject and predicate). According to speculative thought, the “fruit” is the true substance, whereas apples, pears, and almonds are just modes of its existence; but for Feuerbach’s empiricism, which Marx appropriates, only the individuals are real, and the universal is nothing but an abstraction from them49 (nominalism, according to Marx, is «the first form of materialism»50 ). Bauer remains entangled in the speculative framework insofar as «it transforms “the Spirit”, “Progress ”, on the one hand, and “the Mass ”, on the other, into fixed entities, into concepts, and then relates them to one another as such given rigid extremes».51

48 Concerning this polemics, cf. the extensive introduction, by Aldo Zanardo, to: Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, La sacra famiglia (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1967), XI–LXIX. 49 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 4 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 59–60. 50 Ibid., 127. 51 Ibid., 83.

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Even progress, says Marx, is a «completely empty and abstract» category, compared to a reality which is instead characterized by «continual retrogressions and circular movements ».52 To the hypercritical Hegelians like Bauer (but something similar will apply to Stirner later on), Marx reproaches that their opposition to speculation is just verbal, while they actually continue to interpret the world and history based on categories that are no less abstract than Hegel’s one (nay, they are even more abstract), and which are new only in name. In Bauer’s case, the new characters of the conceptual gigantomachy are “critique” on the one hand and “masses” on the other. Instead, Marx asks rhetorically, Who annihilated the dialectics of concepts, the war of the gods that was known to the philosophers alone? Feuerbach. Who substituted for the old lumber and for “infinite self-consciousness” if not, indeed, “the significance of man” […] at any rate “Man”? Feuerbach, and only Feuerbach.53

The categories employed by “critical critics” are still theological hypostases, such as that of “history.” History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.54

It is not enough, then, to change the names of Hegel’s concepts, placing new protagonists on the dramatic scene. It is rather necessary to stop philosophizing about history, and instead to look at it empirically, starting from the conflicts fought by actual individuals. Confronting, then, another level of polemics, concerning the interpretation of modern philosophy’s history, Marx specifies his conception of materialism, opposing it to Bauer’s who, following Hegel, saw French materialism largely as the heir of Spinoza. That is not the case, Marx objects, because Enlightenment’s materialism did not just fight against 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 93. 54 Ibid.

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existing political institutions, religion, and theology, but «it was just as much an open, clearly expressed struggle against the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, and against all metaphysics, in particular that of Descartes , Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz». Defeated by the attack of French materialism, however, metaphysics had a comeback in the nineteenth century’s German speculative philosophy, and especially in Hegel. Now, therefore, the Feuerbachian critique of speculative metaphysics has to repeat the battle fought by the Enlightenment’s materialism against the rationalist metaphysics of the sixteenth century. In this way, the materialist and humanist point of view can be re-affirmed, not only theoretically but also socially and practically: «just as Feuerbach is the representative of materialism coinciding with humanism, in the theoretical domain, French and English socialism and communism represent materialism coinciding with humanism in the practical domain».55 Actually, Marx clarifies, materialist antispeculative philosophy has two souls within: one mechanistic-scientific (e.g., in Hobbes’ materialism), the other social. The early socialist and communist theories, according to Marx, derived in fact from the materialism of Helvéthius, Holbach, and Bentham. This can be seen in Owen, who build upon Bentham’s system, and in French authors like Dézamy and Gay who «Like Owen […] developed the teaching of materialism as the teaching of real humanism and the logical basis of communism».56 Marx sees a «necessary connection» between materialism and socialism/communism (incidentally, here Marx does not distinguish between socialism and communism). In fact, socialism is based on materialistic premises, such as the rejection of any morality not coinciding with a well-understood human interest (which is to say, the rejection of every transcendent and sacrificial morality), the principle of the “right to enjoy”, the idea of the original goodness of men and of their equal intellectual capacities, the belief in the omnipotence of experience and education, and more generally the emphasis on the social character of man. To use Holbach’s incisive words, as quoted by Marx: «in his own interest man must love other men, because they are necessary to his welfare […] Morality proves to him that of all beings the most necessary to man is man».57

55 Ibid., 125. 56 Ibid., 131. 57 Ibid., 133.

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After having mentioned some of the basic tenets of materialism, Marx is careful to specify that what he is doing is to establish a historicalconceptual connection, rather than passing a theoretical judgment: «this is not the place to assess [these propositions]».58 This means that Marx certainly admires French materialism and feels close to it no less than to Feuerbach’s, but he also intends to return on the question for a more detailed exam. This deeper critical engagement will soon arrive, with the Theses on Feuerbach. Besides the aforementioned reflections on materialism, The Holy Family is interesting for the reprisal of themes already developed, in polemics with Bauer, in On the Jewish Question, and also for the reflections about Proudhon who, according to Marx, is utterly misunderstood by Bauer. Marx, therefore, endeavor to summarize and expound Proudhon’s thought. Marx’s assessment, in this text, is very positive, even though he discretely notes some limitations in Proudhon, as he had already done in the Manuscripts. The praise, however, is forceful: «Proudhon’s treatise Qu’est-ce que la propriété? is as important for modern political economy as Sieyès’ work Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? for modern politics».59 In fact, while political economy assumes property as a given, unquestioned and unexplained, Proudhon has the merit subjecting it, for the first time, to a critical exam, «ruthless, and at the same time scientific».60 Even more: Proudhon’s merit is of having «proved in detail how the movement of capital produces poverty».61 But then, what are Proudhon’s limitations? The problem, according to Marx, is that Proudhon develops a critique of political economy from the point of view of political economy itself62 ; that is to say that Proudhon performs an immanent critique of political economy, which does not lead him outside of it, even while posing all the necessary conditions to do so. Proudhon wishes to abolish.

58 Ibid., 131. 59 Ibid., 32. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 35. 62 Ibid., 32.

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objective essence and the economic expression of human self-estrangement. But since his criticism of political economy is still captive to the premises of political economy, the re-appropriation of the objective world itself is still conceived in the economic form of possession.63

But, so long as it is conceived in the framework of «equal possession», the overcoming of alienation remains internal to alienation itself. Marx well clarifies how, from his point of view, under the regime of private property alienation applies to the owners just as much as to the propertyless: The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.64

The proletariat, insofar as it suffers on its own flesh the dehumanization caused by private property, is thus the only force which, almost compelled by necessity, can remove this de-humanization, and with it «all the inhuman conditions of life of society today». For Marx, the critique of society has very clearly two intertwined aspects: on the one hand, it is a critique of the alienation to which property-owners are subject just as much as proletarians; on the other hand, it is a critique of the domination and exploitation the former class exercises on the latter. Comprehensibly, these ideas were not well tolerated by the powers that be. In January 1845, Marx, together with Heine and Ruge, was expelled from France, by order of the minister of interior Guizot. Marx thus went toward a new stage of his exiled life, in Bruxelles.

63 Ibid., 42. 64 Ibid., 36.

CHAPTER 4

A New Conception of History

4.1

The Limits of Old Materialism

In the Spring of 1845, Marx and Engels once again feel the necessity to confront the Hegelian left. This confrontation, however, is written from a very different perspective compared to the first text the two friends wrote together, The Holy Family. In fact, Engels tells that, when he arrived in Bruxelles at the beginning of April 1845, Marx already had in mind the ideas that would have then flowed into the work dedicated to The German Ideology. In a short note—published by Engels only in 1888, five years after Marx’s death, and which will later be entitled Theses on Feuerbach—we may find a first, very dense, definition of the new point of view Marx was developing; that is to say, essentially, the overcoming of that naturalistic materialism he still seemed to completely accept in The Holy Family. The fundamental turn in Marx’s thought here lies in the understanding that the new theoretical conception he wants to elaborate cannot do without either of the two aspects he had until now encountered separately. The new theory needs the materialistic (Feuerbachian) critique of speculative (Hegelian) idealism, but it also needs Hegel’s thesis (valorized and discussed in the last part of the Manuscripts ) according to which man is not only a natural sensuous being, but that specific being which self-produces itself through historical labor, and through the dialectic

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of estrangement and re-appropriation that characterizes it. This selfproduction is to be enquired (and here materialism is right, against Hegel) from the point of view of the objective confrontation of men with nature, which they transform through labor. On the other hand, alienation is to be understood as a historical process with its own necessity, and not as an illusion (and here Hegel sees better than Feuerbach). Most than anything, alienation is to be overcome through a material re-appropriation of the conditions of production; this is the point which cannot be found neither in Hegel, where overcoming is given only by rediscovering the estranged as one’s own, nor in Feuerbach, where it is given as dissolution of the religious, mystic and speculative, illusion. Marx, essentially, shapes his own conception by bringing together (to say it simply) Hegel’s focus on history and Feuerbach’s focus on materialism, intertwining them in a mutual critique and thus developing a new thought. This position of Marx between the two poles has been precisely captured by Bedeschi: While idealists do not see that the man-man relation is also a man-nature relation in the material production of life, and thus they reduce history to a purely ideal or conceptual becoming; Feuerbach, not seeing that the man-nature relation is also a man-man relation in the material production of life, fails to open his point of view to history, he remains still in the abstraction of “man” as “sensuous object” rather than conceiving him as “sensuous activity”, as the whole of social relations.1

It is in this crossing of different thoughts that what will be known as “historical materialism” is born. Whereas the critique to Hegel had already been endeavored—especially with the last section of the Manuscripts, in the Theses, and in The German Ideology—the critique to Feuerbach is now the one at the forefront. Feuerbach’s fundamental limit, which he however shared with «all previous materialism», lies in his unilateral conception of man. While Feuerbach understood man correctly—as depending from nature in his passive, corporeal and sensuous, reality (and this was all good, against the long-standing spiritualist tradition)—he utterly ignored the other aspect, «the active side» through which man transforms nature and creates his own world. An active side which Marx in general calls «sensuous human activity, practice», and under which we may include both the domain 1 Giuseppe Bedeschi, Introduzione a Marx (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005), 78–79.

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of labor and that of “revolutionary” and “practical-critical” activity. This active side, Marx notes, «was set forth abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such».2 Therefore, Feuerbach has an inadequate conception of man: human essence does not exist in a static form, for it is nothing but «the ensemble of the social relations». Feuerbach thus errs in conceiving the essence «only as “species”, as an inner, mute, general character which unites the many individuals in a natural way».3 Sure enough, this is also a self-critique in relation to the role that Marx himself, until 1844, had conferred to the concept of Gattungswesen (species-being, generic being, or however we wish to translate it). Moreover, Feuerbach’s way of confronting the issue of alienation, decisive for him as it was for Hegel, is also inadequate: Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionised in practice.4

Obviously, the same limits can be found in that French materialism Marx was so appreciative of in the Holy Family; the idea there recalled, that men are products of circumstances and education «forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated», in a process which is rather of «self-change» and which could become, at least in Marx’s hopes, «revolutionary practice».5 In this sense, we should read the last Thesis, the eleventh, which is one of the most wellknown Marxian aphorisms: «The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it».6 Perhaps this eleventh thesis is better understandable if read together with the second, where 2 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 3. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 5.

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the possibility of affecting the world becomes (almost an ante litteram pragmatism) the touchstone for the truth of thought or theory: The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.7

Starting from the intuitions consigned to the Theses, Marx and Engels now aim to expound, with The German Ideology, a wide-ranging critique of the intellectual tendencies developed in Germany within the Hegelian left (especially Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner), with a second part of the work being devoted to the critique of the so-called “true” socialism. In the summer of 1846, the text was largely completed, although Marx and Engels continued to work on the first part in the second half of the year. Their efforts to find a publisher, however, were unsuccessful. As Marx will write later, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: «We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification»; which is to say «to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience».8 Within the sprawling text of The German Ideology (published only in 1932), the most interesting section is the first which, nominally devoted to the critique of Feuerbach, encompasses much more than that: the first full-blown definition of the doctrine that will be called «materialist conception of history». But before the positive building task, Marx and Engels reprise here the reflection on the limits of Feuerbach’s thought. Using the language of dialectic, we might say (once more) that Feuerbach’s limit lies in not understanding how the relation of man with his own sensory world is historically mediated:

7 Ibid., 4. 8 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29 (London: Lawrence &

Wishart, 2010), 264.

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He does not see that the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed [a product] in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations […] Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse.9

Even the pure science of nature, so dear to Feuerbach, is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men […] Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca; but this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach either.10

The difference between the new and old materialism, then, is at least prima facie very clear: knowledge does not just mirror a preexisting nature, but rather builds it, because its characteristics and the way we learn them depend on human work, labor, and industry. This practical activity makes it possible, conditions, and modifies, the theoretical knowledge of natural sciences, their development and their contents. But if that is the case, the new materialism cannot evade this question: if knowledge develops together with practical work, if it cannot be conceived any longer as a mirror of nature, how are we, then, to understand its truth conditions? As we saw, in the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx coherently gives a quasi-pragmatist answer. The truth of human thought does not lie in its capacity to mirror reality; this would not make sense anyway, because the work and even the thought of man continuously change the reality on which they are exercised. Thus, the criterion must be changed: a thought

9 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 39. 10 Ibid., 40.

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is all the more true the more is able to modify reality in the desired direction, the more “power” it has to affect reality. The issue might then seem solved, and the new materialism to have found its theory of knowledge, clearly different from the one of traditional materialism. But, actually, the issue is immediately re-presented in all its starkness: even assuming (for the sake of the argument) that the validity of scientific knowledge can be measured with a pragmatist criterion (true = effective), how would we measure the validity of Marx’s materialistic theory, to which the criterion of effectivity does not seem to apply? Here, we encounter the difficult problem of what is historical materialism’s theory of knowledge. Which is to say, not the theory of science (which is clear enough, linking truth to success and “industry”), but the reflection on the validity of historical materialism itself. Marx’s discourse, however, stops right where it should have begun. On the one hand, in fact, Marx formulates a new philosophical theory, an “active” materialism opposed to the traditional one (but we could also say a sort of hybrid materialism/idealism11 ); on the other hand, he claims that we should leave the old «philosophical consciousness» to pursue a different kind of knowledge, the science of history. However, since this last is itself a philosophical thesis, the problem of which philosophy, which theory of knowledge, is still with us; and we are back to the question: What is the truth criterion of historical materialism? Let assume for a moment that even this problem can be solved in a pragmatistic sense; historical materialism would be true, we shall say, if and only if it is effective. But what does it mean to be effective for a general philosophical vision like this? Perhaps that revolutionary theory is true only if it wins? The absurdity of such implication is evident enough. Another way of tackling the issue could be by saying that, precisely because the world we know is always the product of our activity (Marx’s fundamental criticism against Feuerbach), our own knowledge is not separable from said activity. From this, however, one could equally draw an anti-pragmatic implication, which is to say that we are always immersed in the process of mediations, and therefore, we cannot achieve anything but a fallible and revisable knowledge. Even the most effective knowledge could turn out to be false, thus we should swap pragmatism for a sort of hypothetical and fallibilist constructivism, aware that our knowledge of 11 Corrado Ocone aptly talks of «ideal-realism» in his precise and brief: Corrado Ocone, Karl Marx (Roma: LUISS University Press, 2008).

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real processes starts from a point of view situated within the process itself, and thus cannot claim to encompass it and possessing its truth as if it had a «perspective from nowhere». The point we have to keep in mind is that, I believe, Marx cannot clarify (or does not even try, because he is not interested) the philosophical status of his new materialism. Marx thus ends up understanding his own theory more like an injunction to leave philosophical discourse and rather move toward a science of history. But since even the exhortation not to philosophize is philosophical, Marx’s evasion does not work.12 This is well demonstrated by the fact that, in the history of Marxian interpretations, his conception of truth has been understood in the most diverse ways: as a theory of mirroring by Lenin or by the late Lukács, as identity of truth and praxis by Gentile and by the early Lukács, as a theory of reciprocal mediation of subject and object (and thus of the limited possibility for the concept to capture the object) by Adorno, who seems to me to be the most insightful interpreter. In any case, this conflict of interpretations is born precisely from the fact that Marx leaves the question of (materialist) philosophy largely open. Quite paradoxically, this has been ignored by those interpreters who, in their own efforts to reconstruct a philosophy of historical materialism, were most clearly demonstrating the existence of a gap in the theory.

4.2

Toward the Science of History

We should consider, however, that one cannot ask to an author what he had no intention to give. Marx’s interest in writing The German Ideology, and even more so in later works, is not to elaborate a new philosophy, to construct a new system to be added to the series up to that point. What Marx intends to do is to abandon the terrain of philosophy to endeavor, instead, a “scientific” understanding of historical processes. “Scientific understanding,” in this case, means two things: firstly, that Marx rejects the philosophical understanding of history, most highly developed by Hegel and his epigones. For sure, Hegel commendably placed history at the center of philosophical investigation (and here Marx follows him), but he conceived history as a sequence of conceptual figures. Hegel himself confesses at the end of the Geschichtsphilosophie [philosophy of history] that he “has considered the progress of the concept only” and 12 As correctly noted by: Paolo Vinci, La forma filosofia in Marx: commento all’Ideologia tedesca (Roma: Cadmo, 1981).

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has represented in history the “true theodicy”».13 The same defect can be found in Hegel’s epigones and critics, such as Stirner, where the sequence of figures, without Hegel’s profound intellect, degrades into aprioristic caricatures. The scientific understanding of history, therefore, is the one which breaks free from the assumptions of philosophical apriorism. Secondly, however, this scientific understanding is equally opposed to pure empiricism, because understanding history scientifically means to conceive its synchronies and diachronies within a systematic framework, not too far from the conceptual apparatuses of natural sciences. In The German Ideology, Marx tries to do precisely that; it is thus understandable why scholars like Althusser have emphasized the “break” implied by this new science.14 A break of which, incidentally, Marx himself is well aware since he knows that, in distancing himself from the Hegelian left, he is also performing a self-critique (even though he minimizes its importance). In fact, while Marx reclaims the continuity with his past work, he also notes how it was insufficient, because it still used the «philosophical phraseology», slipping in traditional philosophical expressions like «human essence» and «species»15 (which could be used as excuses by those who wished to ignore the novelty of Marx’s positions). The new science of history, unlike philosophy, does not pretend to be assumption-less; to the contrary, it begins by assuming those «real premises» which are the existence of men, their living in a natural environment, and the necessity to reproduce their own and their children’s life.16 These are, for Marx, obvious data, needing no demonstration or philosophical «deduction». The interesting question, however, is this: Why men, unlike other animals, have a «history»? Why, in general, there is such a thing as «history», as distinct, for example, from «nature»? Marx’s answer is very clear: men have a history because, and since, they «begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their

13 Marx, and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 61. 14 In my opinion, however, The German Ideology represents only one step, if surely

relevant, among the many that characterize Marx’s continuous process of critical thinking. On the other hand, the harsh assessment of The German Ideology by Finelli seems unwarranted: Roberto Finelli, Astrazione e dialettica dal romanticismo al capitalismo (Roma: Bulzoni, 1987). 15 Marx, and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 236. 16 Concerning these “real premises” see: Ibid., 31, 37, 434.

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physical organisation»17 ; «Men have history because they must produce their life, and because they must produce it moreover in a certain way: this is determined by their physical organisation; their consciousness is determined in just the same way».18 Marx does not explain why men began to produce their means of sustenance: it might depend on changes in their physical constitution, which are studied by the natural science of human evolution. Marx, however, tells us that men are historical being insofar they produce, and ever since they started producing. Humans as producers are born out of natural history, but with them «history» itself is born. But what does this term “history” (which Marx, incidentally, never defines) mean? “History” means, we might say, that men live in a world which is (in some measure) intentionally molded by them, which changes with them, and where the part they created or transformed increases relatively to what is still “natural.” Why then, according to Marx, do men enter into history only with the act of producing? To answer the question, we have first to clarify the concept of production. At this stage, Marx does not define it, but we can say without doubts that “producing” means the same as “laboring.” Labor can then be defined first of all as a mediated relation between man and what he will use to satisfy a need: mediated essentially by a design/project and by a tool (such as the chipped stone—itself produced according to a plan— which one uses to hunt). Truly, in the Manuscripts Marx admits that animals produce as well, but he then clarifies all the differences between animal and human production. In Capital, Marx writes that what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bee is that the former actualizes something that already exists as a design in his mind,19 and with that Marx clarifies that “labor” is to be understood as an activity characterized by a project, by the use of means, and by a material on which to act.20 Labor is thus what characterizes man as distinct from animal or, which is the same, as a being having a history. We know how a long 17 Ibid., 31. 18 Ibid., 43n. 19 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 188. Concerning labor, in Marx and more generally, cf. the: Georg Lukács, Ontology of Social Being, Volume 3: Labour (London: Merlin Press, 1980). 20 Fineschi clarifies that «the labor process is characterized by four elements: labor, the means of labor, the object of labor, and its purpose»: Roberto Fineschi, Ripartire da Marx (Napoli: La Città del Sole, 2001), 35.

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philosophical tradition followed Aristotle, in defining man as the being endowed with language (zoon logon echon). Marx, even while emphasizing the importance of labor, is not opposed to such understanding; in fact, he asserts how consciousness does not exist without language and that «language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men». Language (i.e., having relations with other men) thus distinguishes man from animal because «the animal does not “relate” itself to anything, it does not “relate” itself at all. For the animal its relation to others does not exist as a relation».21 We can thus say that, for Marx too, man is an animal with language, which is to say that there is no man without language. In this sense, thus, language and labor would be the co-original moments defining men as such and distinguishing them from animals. In noting how there is no consciousness without language (obviously an enormous theme, developed up to the present day), Marx, en passant, deals a blow to idealism, which posits the primacy of spirit over nature. In fact, if there is no thought without language, then there is no thought without material support (signs, sounds), and thus, the claim of a primacy of spirit over nature is overturned. This point is developed by Adorno in his theory of materialism as «the object’s preponderance»: the relation between subject (thought) and object (material) is asymmetric, because while the subject is in itself also an object (thought is sign, or material sound), the object is not thinkable without subject (because thought determines it as an object), but it is not in itself subject. In other words: the subject depends on the object ontologically; the object depends on the subject epistemologically but not ontologically.22 This reflection deserves to be noted, because it develops the Marxian one contributing to clarify how a non-vulgar materialism could be conceived. But let us return on the question of history: Marx’s man is defined by labor and language, but if he has a history it is because he labors, not because he speaks. Laboring means satisfying a need in a mediated way, with the interposition of an instrument (whereas animals hunt their prey and eat it immediately, without interposing a medium). But if the first cycle of needs satisfaction implies first the tool’s production and then its use to obtain or produce something, in the second cycle one finds the

21 Marx, and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 44. 22 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), 183–86.

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tool already made, thus can produce a little more, and has already left the mere repetition of previous circumstances. Marx, indeed, does not present the issue in this way, which seems to me the simplest and most rational; he says instead that the satisfied need, the action of satisfying it, and the acquired tool, lead to new needs, «and this creation of new needs is the first historical act».23 On the other hand, human society, to maintain itself, must not only ensure, through labor, the subsistence of its members, but also its own reproduction through time, which occurs through procreation and the child-rearing. This is the function of the family, which initially is the only social relation, but which then transforms into a «subordinate relation», as other types of social relations, through historical development, occupy spaces previously belonging to it. Subsistence and reproduction are thus two fundamental functions in the sense that, without them, human society simply ceases to exist. They are thus «a fundamental condition of all history». But these two functions are performed through a double-sided process: on the one hand, the man–nature relation and, on the other, the relation between men, a cooperation which is functional to achieving those necessary objectives. In this regard, Marx asserts that: a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force”. Further, that the aggregate of productive forces accessible to men determines the condition of society, hence, the “history of humanity” must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange.24

A few pages earlier Marx confronted the same theme from a slightly different point of view, saying that the form of the relations between men is «conditioned by production»,25 that the growth of productive forces implies an ever-increasing division of labor and that, moreover, the different developmental stages of the division of labor implies different forms of property: «i.e., the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to 23 Marx, and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 42. 24 Ibid., 43. 25 Ibid., 32.

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the material, instrument and product of labour».26 Later on, Marx will say that every historical stage is characterized by a certain form of intercourse, which is itself «determined by the existing productive forces», and without forgetting that it «in its turn determin[es] these».27 Still reflecting on the relation between productive forces and forms of relation, Marx writes that «slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture».28 And he further adds that: The conditions under which definite productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the rule of a definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its property, has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the form of the state and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is directed against a class which till then has been in power.29

In my opinion, the beauty of these pages of The German Ideology is that, because they are the birthplace of a new conceptual framework (the productive forces/forms of relation or relations of production), they represent it with all its uncertainties and ambiguities, rather than in the canonical (we might say dogmatic) form that Marx will offer later, in the Preface of 1859 to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Let us see, then, what are the tenets of historical materialism, which emerge here and that will be definitely fixed in 1859.30 The basic point is that history must emancipate itself from mere empirical narration and must be scientifically structured: the form a society takes, as well as the processes transforming it into a different society, is no longer assumed as empirical data, but must be explained. To explain them one begins from the fundamental materialistic thesis (no society can exist without producing its own subsistence and reproducing new generations) and then tries to draw explanations by introducing the conceptual couplet 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 50. 28 Ibid., 38. 29 Ibid., 52. 30 For an accurate and “analytic” reconstruction of Marx’s thesis, see: Gerald A. Cohen,

Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). See also the important: G. Cazzaniga, Funzione e conflitto: forme e classi nella teoria marxista dello sviluppo (Napoli: Liguori, 1981).

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productive forces/relations of production. Every society must reproduce itself within a given environment, and to do that it has certain «productive forces» available: the labor power of its members, the accumulated tools of labor, the knowledge of techniques, procedures, ways of working and cooperating. To be used, these forces must be put to work organizing specific forms of relation between men («relations of production»): establishing who executes which work, who commands or possess said work, who owns the material (land, in the beginning) on which labor is exercised, who is entitled to the products of labor. Marx’s thesis is that, given a certain environment and level of productive forces, there are forms of relations allowing an effective use of available productive forces, as well as their further development, while other forms of relations would be ineffective or even impossible (in the sense that, if a society adopted then, it would perish). Productive forces, says Marx, condition the forms of relations, which themselves act on productive forces in a sort of feedback loop. But what is the exact meaning of this relation of conditioning, correspondence, or determination, between productive forces and forms of relation? I believe that, according to Marx’s logic, the answer would be this: given a certain environment and availability of productive forces, only some forms of relations are possible. For example, relations implying stark class divisions are not possible when society can merely produce what is necessary to feed its members; if there is no surplus to be appropriated, then there cannot be class relations. But there is more: Marx’s thesis is that any given society tends to develop those relations of production allowing the most effective exploitation and development of the available productive forces; and when certain relations of production become an obstacle to the development of productive forces, then they are substituted by more functional one. But why would this be the case? We may easily answer by applying an evolutionary logic: let us assume that there are societies adopting forms of relations stimulating the development of productive forces, and other societies that do not. The latter will then be subject to many pressures pushing them to change their organization (their «relations of production»): the most productive societies, having better weapons and more products, will be able to conquer or assimilate the other ones; from within the less productive societies there will be individuals whose needs or desires push to adopt different relations of production, or to move toward those societies already adopting them. Thus, in the end only those societies in which the relations of production

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are functional to the development of productive forces will survive, others will succumb. Ironically, the end of socialism in Eastern Europe—with the citizens of East Germany trying to move to the West, or pressuring for a change in the “collectivist” relations of production—could be considered an empirical confirmation of this Marxian theory. The “good” side of the relations of production existing at any given time, thus, is that they survive because they are capable of “hosting” the development of productive forces; the “bad” side, instead, is that these relations of production, in all their historical manifestations, seem to imply inequalities between men, and domination of some over other. The division of labour […] simultaneously implies the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first form of property, but even at this stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists, who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others.31

Thus, even before the birth of class society (where some appropriate the labor of others in the forms of slavery, serfdom, or wage labor), we already have a relation, patriarchy, according to which some dominates the work of others and appropriates its fruits. This is far from a secondary point: it means that, for Marx, all known forms of relation, which have had their own specific rationality, have also been forms of domination. Relations of production are relations of social power, thus the power of some over other appears to be demanded by material and productive conditions in the same way in which forms of relation are. In the words of Adorno, who himself intended to cast doubt on this aspect of Marx’s theory: Marx, of course, suspects all anthropology and carefully refrains from locating antagonism in human nature or in primitive times […] but this makes him only more stubborn in his insistence on the historical necessity of antagonism […] The economic process, we hear, produces the

31 Marx, and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 46.

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conditions of political rule and keeps overturning them until the inevitable deliverance from the compulsion of economics.32

To sum up, according to Marx every relation of production is also a relation of domination, the historical rationality of which lies in its favoring the development of social productive forces. As Marx will say very clearly in The Poverty of Philosophy, The very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and immediate labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonisms33

Every relation of production is thus at once the affirmation of a universal moment (the development of productive forces) and of a particular one, the domination of the class which, in that specific relation, controls the decisive resources. This will cease to be true, according to Marx, only with the sunset of the last relation of domination, the bourgeois one. As he will write in the aforementioned Preface of 1859, «bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production», because «the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation».34 Just like the material conditions made domination necessary during the “prehistory” of man, so they will end up making it superfluous. But why have the relations of production always been relations of domination and, beginning with a certain level of development, class relations more specifically? Marx’s answer to this question is not entirely clear. It seems we ought to say, according to the logic of his discourse, that, up to a certain point, domination structures are necessary to effectively organize and increase production; but luckily, once

32 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 321–22. 33 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” in Marx and Engels

Collected Works, Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 132. 34 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29, 263–64.

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a certain level of social wealth had been reached, domination will just become superfluous! Incidentally, when Marx writes «relations of production», he means something very specific: essentially forms of organization of property (of labor, of the material on which one labors, of the tools and products) which can be historically typified according to four or five broad categories, forming a coherent historical series. In The German Ideology, Marx distinguishes, already in the first pages,35 four forms of property: the tribal, that of «the ancient communal and state property», the feudal, and the bourgeois one. He then claims that in the historical development it is possible to observe a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, is replaced by a new one corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals – a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another.36

The conjunction between certain productive forces and relations of production or property, thus, represents a mode of production. In history up to this point, according to Marx, there have been four subsequent modes of production: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalistic. But later, to account for developments outside Western history, Marx introduces a new category, the «Asiatic mode of production».37 Lastly, the socialist or communist mode of production will be the one supplanting class society. The materialistic conception first developed in The German Ideology is then summarized and systematized in a very famous passage of the Preface of 1859 to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which we should read in its entirety. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production

35 Marx, and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 32–34. 36 Ibid., 82, emphasis added. 37 On topic, cf. Gianni Sofri, Il modo di produzione asiatico. Storia di una controversia marxista (Torino: Einaudi, 1969).

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constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.38

Almost all main theses of historical materialism are condensed here, as we can see. Let us then continue to reason on them, keeping in mind their original formulation in The German Ideology. First of all, we ought to underscore a basic point: in the passage we just cited, Marx refers to the possibility of studying social changes with the «precision of natural 38 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29, 263.

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science». This means that, after historical materialism’s paradigmatic revolution, society and history can be studied with a previously unthinkable precision. Society is now considered as a system (to use a more modern language, which is anyway heavily indebted to Marx), which must ensure its own reproduction, confronting an environment external to it (essentially nature and the other societies), and that is therefore subject to bounds born out of these necessities. Social structures are subjects to bounds no less rigid than those fixed in natural laws (Engels wrote that the materialistic conception was «This proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology»39 ). An additional consequence of this approach is that the different sub-systems (as we might say today) that compose society must be understood in their reciprocal functionality and in the contribution they provide to the reproduction of the whole system. With the proviso, however, that the Marxian social system does not resemble either Hegel’s totality or the systems later conceived by structural-functionalist sociology (e.g., that of Talcott Parsons). This is so because, for Marx, the relation between different spheres is not purely reciprocal, but rather characterized by relationship of asymmetrical conditioning. First of all, the productive forces condition relations of production more than the reverse. Secondly, what Marx in The German Ideology still calls «civil society» (that is to say the economic structure of society, the productive forces/relations of production nexus), conditions the other dimensions of the social (that is to say the juridical, political, religious, artistic, philosophical, and generically cultural ones) much more than they condition the economic basis. Already here we see that this civil society is the true focus and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relations and confines itself to spectacular historical events.40

39 Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the 1888 English Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 26 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 517. 40 Marx, and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 50.

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As for the ideal and cultural dimensions, we may look at what Marx writes about religion, but with an obviously general validity: «definite relations of industry and intercourse are necessarily connected with a definite form of society, hence, with a definite form of state and hence with a definite form of religious consciousness».41 Let us focus now on this second conditioning relation, between the structure or economic basis on one side, and the juridical, political, and ideological superstructure on the other; how are we to understand this relation? Banally, we might say that Marx subscribes to the old adage “first live, then philosophize”; in the sense that the material reproduction of social life represents, within social totality, that aspect which: 1. Must necessarily be present, while politics, philosophy, and religion may also not be. 2. Is subject to more rigid bounds, because any society needs to produce a given amount of subsistence means, whereas spiritual needs may be satisfied in much more variable and differentiated ways. 3. Insofar as it is more rigid, the economic basis is also the stratum to which the other ones must adapt, and not vice versa. 4. Finally, the economic basis is that “fundamental” social stratum, which includes an endogenous transformative dynamics: if it changes, all the other ones must as well—i.e., the other social dimensions do not change by themselves, but only insofar as the basis on which they rest also changes. Thus, we may say that society’s economic structure enjoys, in Marx’s perspective, a double primacy: synchronic and diachronic. Synchronic because, if we consider society in a static way, the economic structure is the primary and fundamental stratum to which the other ones must adapt. But the primacy is diachronic as well, since great social changes are triggered only by changes in the economic basis, upon which the transformations of other dimensions depend. Thus, according to Marx, the writing history must change completely: conflicts and transformations

41 Ibid., 154.

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occurring at the superstructural level must be explained and understood starting from structural contradictions and transformations. Ideas do not have an autonomous history, and when the protagonists of historical conflicts interpret their own actions as moved by political, ideal, religious, national, or other similar motives, we cannot take this self-understanding at face value. We cannot «share the illusion of that epoch»,42 but we must study the economical-social reasons from which conflicts are unwittingly caused. Thus, we should no longer privilege (as historiography had largely done up to that point) the actions of heads of State, or the military and national fights. Saying that a nation conquers another, or that «barbarians take the Roman Empire»,43 is an observation without content if it is not integrated with a reflection on the respective forms of economic organization, their intertwinements and comminglings. Superstructural dimensions, thus, must correspond to the economic structure. This means, more concretely, that current relations of production are codified by law as property relations, that to these relations different forms of State organization correspond in turn, and that these latter are themselves connected with specific ideologies and religions. The bourgeois mode of production, for example, implies a certain juridical codification of property and exchanges (the possibility of privately appropriating resources, or the fact that every individual is the owner of his own work and free subject of exchange), a given form of State (based on the juridical equality of citizens, and thus tending to political democracy), and a given ideology (liberalism and the ideas of freedom and equality).44 Does this mode of production also imply a specific religious consciousness? Here, the issue becomes more complex, but we will discuss it soon. For the moment, let us see the ulterior implication Marx draws from these reflections: since a society is not just a structured nexus, but also a relation of domination, this relation determines the superstructure as well. Thus,

42 Ibid., 55. 43 Ibid., 84. 44 Ibid., 60.

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The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas […]45

More precisely, Marx says, within the dominant class there is a part devoted to ideological production and a part active on the practical level; and while the intellectual part of the dominant class may be in conflict with the practical part, at critical moments the two fractions stick together, and the apparent autonomy of the ideological/intellectual side disappears.46 As we already observed, though, Marx’s theory of society is not just a theory of domination, but also of alienation: class domination occurs in the context of the submission of all individuals (dominant and dominated) to alienated social relations. This «estrangement» («to use – says Marx – a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers»47 ) is produced when the coordination of social activities is not the fruit of a commonly designed plan, but rather results from non-intentional, and thus quasi-natural, processes. So long as human activity «is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him».48 On one side, thus, there is the «natural» (naturwüchsig ) society, where the division of labor is organized unintentionally, without a conscious plan; on the other, there is communist society which «regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow […] without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic». This is the opposite of what happened throughout previous history, when labor was naturally divided, men were limited to a determinate role, and the social force they created was opposed to them as an extraneous power. 45 Ibid., 59. 46 Ibid., 60. 47 Ibid., 48. 48 Ibid., 47.

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The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is caused by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant […]49

A power, Marx continues a couple of pages later, «which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market ».50 «Natural» society, therefore, as an estranged society, brings in itself the contradiction according to which what is produced by men (their institutions and social dynamics) is presented to them as something objective and extraneous. Estrangement, thus, coincides with the birth of a «socially necessary appearance», according to which men do not recognize their society as a result of their own activity (because it is not an activity planned in common, but rather developed randomly and unintentionally, like the price movements on the world market); that is to say, men do not think of their activity as something they authored, they «naturalize» it instead. The issue of alienation is in turn connected to those of the State and of ideology. The former comes into play insofar as the general interests of society, not being objects of conscious activity, are taken on by an autonomous and separate figure—the State, that is—where they are, however, satisfied only insofar as they can be melded with the interests of the dominant class. The State is the moment of the general interest projected outside of individuals, which thus upends itself into particular interests. Ideology, rooted in the aforementioned «socially necessary appearance», is the phenomenon according to which the society existing at a given moment is passed off as something willed by God, commanded by nature, unmodifiable, «best of all possible worlds», and so on. Thus, we may say that ideology is the de-historicization and transfiguration of existing society, but we have to add that different ideologies are developed through history, coherently with the changes in the modes of production. «Ideologues» are those who, upending the real relation, imagine instead a primacy of ideas, as if those could be engines of historical processes. They will therefore say that «during the time the aristocracy was dominant, 49 Ibid., 48. 50 Ibid., 51.

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the concepts honour, loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc.»51 An essential aspect of ideological thought, thus, is imagining history as dominated by ideas, rather than by processes of material production: this is the error, in general, of idealistic philosophy, which Marx properly imputes to Hegel, who saw history as the development of the concept.52 The ideological error, thus, is to endow spiritual creations with an autonomous existence, free from the conditioning of material production; from this point of view, we can surely say that ideology and idealism are one and the same. But the condition of possibility of this error, according to Marx, is that the division of labor within society is a «real» division, so as to include the division between manual and intellectual labor. Ever since, within society, there have been roles devoted to purely spiritual activities (priests, leaders, intellectuals), consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc.53

The illusion of the autonomy or primacy of the spiritual is grounded on the real autonomy conquered by intellectual roles within the division of social labor. It is not, thus, a matter of pure deception, it rather remains true that ideology is «socially necessary appearance», insofar as it is, so to speak, aroused by the “upside down” structures of reality itself. The upending of real relations produced by ideology is the faithful transcription of an “upside down” reality.

4.3

Stirner, Communism, and Individualism

Marx, demonstrating scarce sense of proportion, devotes almost four hundred pages of The German Ideology to polemics against Max Stirner (pseudonym of Johann Caspar Schmidt), who at the end of 1844 (but dated 1845) had published his most famous text The Unique and His 51 Ibid., 60. 52 Ibid., 61–62. 53 Ibid., 45.

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Property, with the publisher Wiegand of Leipzig. As an advocate of an anarchic and radical individualism, Stirner is viciously attacked and mocked by Marx. This does not mean, however, that Marx did not take seriously Stirner’s provocative work. If, in fact, Stirner set himself up as the champion of the individual (more precisely, of the unique), in The German Ideology Marx, to avoid being attacked from this side, presents a strongly individualistic version of communism. Let us try to understand the meaning of this assertion, which might seem paradoxical, given that usually communism is rather identified with collectivism. Communism, which in The German Ideology Marx defines as «the real movement which abolishes the present state of things»,54 differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all naturally evolved premises as the creations of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals.55

Communism, thus, is an «essentially economic»56 organization, insofar as it is the process by which the productive forces developed through the world market are appropriated by the proletariat, and therefore controlled by all individuals: «in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all».57 Whereas in class societies individuals were subject to the division of labor, assigning them a role, in communism the division of labor is rather subjected to individuals. Therefore, laboring activity can become a manifestation of individual personality, and no longer a function assigned by contingencies. In this sense, for Marx communism is the passage from the accidental to the personal individual.58 As universal appropriation, communism presupposes two conditions: on the one hand, a high level of development of productive forces (because there can be no communism so long as there is scarcity and conflict to obtain necessities); on the other hand, it presupposes the existence of propertyless 54 Ibid., 49. 55 Ibid., 81. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 88. 58 Ibid., 81.

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masses, excluded from this now fully developed wealth.59 Communism becomes a concrete possibility, from a historical-materialist point of view, only because private appropriation, which first arouses the development of productive forces, becomes a limit for them. This is manifest in commercial crises and mass unemployment, which show how a society governed by private appropriation can no longer generate all the wealth which would be allowed by its productive forces. Communism, moreover, is possible only on a worldwide scale, because otherwise, Marx says, «each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism».60 By opposing Stirner, thus, Marx intends to show that communism is the true, effective, individualism, because only in communism individuals dominate their relations rather than being dominated by them. On the contrary, Stirner, still the ideologue, thinks that individuals must be freed simply by banishing from their heads the ideas, or rather ghosts, that make them slaves. Individuals, in sum, should free themselves from every sacralized idea or value, so as to finally return to themselves. In Stirner’s perspective, thus, communism is also a sort of heteronomous sacrality. He thinks that «communists want to “make sacrifices” for “society”»61 rather than free themselves from sacrifice, he believes they are champions of abnegation against egoism,62 but with that Stirner falls in a gigantic misunderstanding, according to Marx. Communists, in fact, «do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism»; «do not preach morality at all», nor they support moral imperatives such as «love one another» or «do not be egoists». Communists rather think that such antitheses and dilemmas (altruism or egoism) are generated by social relations placing individuals in reciprocal competition, and therefore that the issues can be confronted only by transforming the underlying social relations. There are some human passions, says Marx, which «change their form and direction under different social relations»63 and which, therefore, in a communist society will not exist anymore.

59 Ibid., 48–49. 60 Ibid., 49. 61 Ibid., 213. 62 Ibid., 225–27. On this topic, it is important to read: Ferruccio Andolfi, L’egoismo

e l’abnegazione. L’itinerario etico della sinistra hegeliana e il socialismo (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1983). 63 Marx, and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 256.

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Thus, a fully developed scientific critique of bourgeois social relations, shatters «the basis of all morality, whether the morality of asceticism or of enjoyment».64

4.4

Concluding Remarks on the Theory of Historical Materialism

Insofar as it contains the basic outlines of a materialistic conception of history, The German Ideology undoubtedly constitutes one of the most important passages in the development of Marx’s thought. However, it is not easy to understand how to interpret the materialistic conception therein affirmed, nor to assess the difficulties it will ultimately encounter. The fundamental theses are as follow: 1. Productive forces condition relations of production, and these elements together, which is to say the economic structure of society, condition the other domains (juridical, political, cultural, religious). Obviously, the conditioned levels produce feedbacks on the conditioning ones (Engels will talk of «the interaction of all these factors» and of determination «in the final analysis»65 ), but the relation is asymmetrical, going in the former direction more than in the latter. 2. Every determined relation of production (up until communism) is also a relation of domination of one class over another, and thus, domination has its own rationality or historical necessity. 3. A relation of production is substituted by another when the instrument for the development of productive forces becomes an obstacle to it, and with this substitution, a new dominant class also emerges. 4. Within historical development there cannot be a great variety, but only a very limited number, of modes of production, broadly identified with the epochal partitions of Western history (antiquity = slave-based mode of production; middle ages = feudal mode of production; modern age = capitalistic mode of production), to 64 Ibid., 419. Concerning Marx’s assessment of morality, see the beautiful: Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). For an overview of the debate on the topic, see: Stefano Petrucciani, and Francesco Saverio Trincia, eds. Marx in America. Individui, etica, scelte razionali (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1992). 65 Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Joseph Bloch. 21–22 September 1890,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 49 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010).

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which it must be added, to account for non-Western history, a tribal (or primitive) mode of production and an asiatic one. Marx’s historical materialism, as it is well known, has invited infinite discussions and critiques. The fundamental problems raised by it can, in my opinion, be summarized as follows. (a) Firstly, the way in which we should understand the double relation of conditioning (see point 1 above) remains profoundly ambiguous. It seems to me that such relation cannot be understood in the sense that from the lower level we could deduce the attributes of the superior one (even though, for example, Engels supported this reading).66 Many formulations from Marx himself betray, on this point, a wholly unsustainable determinism. For example, in the Poverty of Philosophy he writes: «The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist»67 ; «Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations».68 And in the letter to Annenkov, in which he expresses his disagreement with Proudhon, Marx reiterates: If you assume a given state of development of man’s productive faculties, you will have a corresponding form of commerce and consumption. If you assume given stages of development in production, commerce or consumption, you will have a corresponding form of social constitution, a corresponding organisation, whether of the family, of the estates or of the classes – in a word, a corresponding civil society. If you assume this or that civil society, you will have this or that political system, which is but the official expression of civil society.69

66 Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Conrad Schmidt. 5 August 1890,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 49 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). 67 Marx, and Engels, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” 166. 68 Ibid., 147. 69 Karl Marx, “Letter to Annenkov. 28 December 1846,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 38 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 96.

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If we wish to preserve some validity for this idea, we have to give a more cautious interpretation (as already suggested by Habermas),70 saying that the lower level, precisely because more rigid, poses some limits to the way in which the upper level can be structured. That is to say the former assigns to the latter a field of possibilities. This field is more restricted in some cases and broader in others because, for example, capitalist economy demands certain juridical forms (thus there is little, but still some, leeway here), but it is also compatible with a great variety of philosophies and religions. The juridical and political dimensions are much more strictly intertwined with the relation of production than the philosophical or religious ones. Thus, if we let go of excessive or even meaningless claims, Marx’s conception of history is coherent with (and it is indeed a large part of) the later development of a scientific sociology, often with a functionalist or systemic orientation. (b) Secondly, the changes in the relations of production may be interpreted in a way similar to Darwin’s theory of natural selection: new relations of production prevail and supplant the old ones, if they are able to set off a development of productive forces, making the societies that adopt them wealthier and more powerful. (c) Thirdly, and here is no longer a matter of interpretation but of critique, Marx’s conception of history appears to be modeled, so to speak, on a specific phase of social transformation: the passage from the feudal to the bourgeois world. In this case, it seems true that a certain relation of production (feudal) became an obstacle to the development of productive forces, and thus was abandoned. But can this dynamic be generalized to other epochal changes, both backward (e.g., the passage from antiquity to the feudal world) and forward (the passage from capitalism to communism)? (d) Finally, and this is the thorniest problem, Marx claims that the economic basis conditions cultural production, to the point that in every epoch the dominant ideas are the ideas of the dominant class. Marx, however, does not consider another aspect of the issue, which is to say the fact that the historical materialism he elaborated not only is not an idea of the dominant class, but it also claims to be

70 Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 143.

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a true theory (that is to say, superior to the ideological conceptions of history, adopted by the dominant class, which it contests and refutes). Marx, in the end, does not reflect on what he is himself doing, nor on how his theoretical work can be squared with his own theory of history. If we do not want to hide this problem, which is indeed absolutely central (much more than other questions within the debates around historical materialism), we have to focus on two points which in The German Ideology (first draft of that science of history Marx intended to build) are not at all foregrounded: first, the fact that in an antagonistic society there is also a conflict between dominant ideas and those that criticize, or attack, the existing system (as Marx himself does). Thus, as Gramsci will clarify in the twentieth century, the intellectual sphere does not just mirror relations of domination within production, but contains instead an ongoing conflict for hegemony. Secondly, against what Marx or Marxists have at times claimed, we have to maintain that the social conditioning of ideas cannot be absolutized up to the point of wholly removing issues concerning truth, which is to say that the problem of the ideas’ genesis cannot subsume that of their validity. If historical materialism is a true theory, or at least better than its competitors (and, for Marx, it cannot but be), then it follows that men are not just conditioned, in their thought, by the modes of production, but are also capable of truth; or, to say it more modestly, they are capable of belaboring valid knowledge, in some way transcending its underlying social conditions. The only alternative would be to claim that historical materialism is simply the ideology of the proletariat, and that there is no truth but only conflicting viewpoints. But this was certainly not Marx’s position, and it would in any case be a self-contradictory thesis, for it asserts itself as true while at once denying that there is any truth. The idea that men are not just producers of their own life through labor, but also capable of truth (a necessary implication, if historical materialism is true), should necessarily retroact on the theory of history, modifying or broadening its framework. This means, essentially, that the human subjects of history must be thematized not only as bearers of material needs, but also of truth or validity claims. These claims must be recognized as historically operative factors (unless they are relativistically erased, which would dissolve historical materialism itself), themselves

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conditioning and bounding the fields of possibilities available in any given situation. On the other hand, we should consider—and this is a point on which post-Marx debates have amply insisted—that the actors of historical events, in addition to bearing material needs and validity claims, are also inhabited by complex, and partly obscure, psychical needs and deep interior dynamics. These psychic forces—as studied by Sigmund Freud or, through a sophisticated re-elaboration of psychoanalysis, by Cornelius Castoriadis—also condition the arrangements of society, and they might be necessary to understand social phenomena such as religion, or the acquiescence of the oppressed to iniquitous forms of domination. In the words of Castoriadis: «A society can exist only if a series of functions are constantly performed (production, child-bearing and education, administration of the collectivity, resolving disputes and so forth), but it is not reduced to this, nor are its ways of dealing with its problems dictated to it once and for all by its ‘nature’».71

71 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 116–17.

CHAPTER 5

A Time for Revolution: Marx and 1848

5.1

The Polemics Against Proudhon and Ricardo’s Value Theory

From Bruxelles Marx, always harboring transnational aspirations for the workers’ movement, organized a committee of correspondence, so as to create contacts and elaborate common strategies between German socialists/communists and the French and English ones. These contacts, however, mostly resulted in furious polemics. Marx believed that political proposals should be based on a scientific understanding of capitalist society and economy, and therefore he despised the utopianism and moralism circulating in the socialist and communist groups of the time. Marx thus starkly clashed with Weitling (whose work he had highly appreciated a few years earlier) and especially with Proudhon, an author Marx previously esteemed and to whom he had proposed to be the Parisian correspondent for his committee (understandably, because Proudhon was one of the most visible personalities in French socialist and anarchist circles). Proudhon himself was not particularly willing to cooperate, and after he published, in 1846, his The System of Economic Contradictions or, The Philosophy of Poverty, the relations between the two soured completely. Marx, in fact, responded with a text (written between December 1846 and April 1847, and published in July) which refuted and ridiculed Proudhon’s theories: The Poverty of Philosophy (subtitle: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon). © The Author(s) 2020 S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0_5

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In this polemical libel, Marx is, as usual, quite prolix and pedantic but, also as usual, ferocious in castigating the errors, ignorances, and plagiarisms of his target. The most interesting part of the work is the portion devoted to the problems of the theory of labor and value, which shows how much Marx had progressed in his knowledge of political economy since 1844. Many years later, in 1859, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx will recognize The Poverty of Philosophy as the text in which «the salient points of our [his and Engels’] conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, form».1 The confrontation with Proudhon is divided in two parts: the first concerning contents, the second about methodology. In the first part, the most significant theme is Marx’s now clear and explicit reference to David Ricardo’s economic theory, as the one expressing bourgeois relations in the most scientific and rigorous way, clear and unsentimental (even, at times, cynical), but in any case capable of illuminating and explaining real social dynamics. In The Poverty of Philosophy, thus, we have a “Ricardian” Marx,2 who is especially keen to the labor theory of value expounded in The Principles of Political Economy. As is well known, the theory of value of the founder of classical political economy, Adam Smith, was still formulated in uncertain terms. Smith, in fact, claimed that the value of a commodity depended on the labor it could “command,” or purchase; he thus established an equation between value and commanded labor. Labor, according to Smith’s peculiar theory, was the first form of money: you give me these goods, and I give you this many hours of my labor. But how much labor can a commodity purchase or command? Why does one good command a hundred hours of labor, and another only fifty? To answer this question let us imagine to be in a primitive stage of social development, where there are no capitalists and landowners, but only people living out of their labor, that is to say as independent producers. And let us further imagine that someone produced a table and would like to give it to another in exchange for something they need. How much labor will the table’s producer request? Obviously they will give the table either for a labor equal to what they 1 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 264. 2 As aptly noted by Finelli in his: Roberto Finelli, Astrazione e dialettica dal romanticismo al capitalismo (Roma: Bulzoni, 1987), 109–27.

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employed to produce it, or for other things which required an equal amount of labor (e.g., two chairs). Without this equivalence, one of the two parts would lose out and therefore would reject the exchange. Thus, in a society of independent producers, laboring to satisfy their needs and sometimes exchanging between them, the labor commanded by a good is equal to the labor it contains. One might say that the value of a good is given by the labor time it contains, which is the time necessary for its production. However, says Smith, the equivalence between commanded labor and contained labor is no longer valid when the landowner and the capitalist appear on the stage—which is to say when there are individuals who do not directly produce, but rather acquire other men’s labor, the instruments of production, and the raw materials, in order to combine them together to produce goods to be sold on the market. A good produced in this way, according to Smith, commands more labor than it contains, because when one sells it on the market, the price must include not just the payment for labor, but also profit and rent. Smith’s conclusion, therefore, was that labor determines the exchange-value of goods in a rudimentary economy (independent producers, who regulate the exchange of their goods based on the labor they had to perform to produce them), but it cannot do so in a capitalist economy.3 What Ricardo, and later Marx, will try to do is to upend this conclusion, claiming general validity for the labor theory of value.4 Ricardo’s merit, says Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy, is that of overcoming Smith’s ambiguities concerning commanded and contained labor, and of defending the general validity of the principles according to which goods, their utility being presupposed, derive their exchange-value from the labor necessary to produce them (with the exception of rare and non-multipliable objects, a case which becomes more and more residual with the growth of human productive powers). The problem for the defenders of this principle, as we saw, arises when we leave a society of independent producers for an economy where labor itself is a commodity, bought by some, the capitalists, to be employed together with raw materials and tools within a productive process which generates goods to be sold on the market. In this context, how does it

3 Cf. Claudio Napoleoni, Smith Ricardo Marx (Torino: Boringhieri, 1973), 59. 4 Concerning the relation between Marx and Ricardo, see: Riccardo Faucci, Marx

interprete degli economisti classici (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1979).

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make sense to say that the goods’ exchange-values depend on the labor they contain? Most importantly, even conceding that exchange-values depend on the labor contained in the goods, how would we calculate the exchange-value of human labor, which has itself become a commodity purchased on the market by capitalists? Ricardo, and Marx with him, gives an answer that attempts to be coherent with the general theory of value; in Marx’s words: If the relative value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour required to produce it, it follows naturally that the relative value of labour, or wages, is likewise determined by the quantity of labour needed to produce the wages. Wages, that is, the relative value or the price of labour, are thus determined by the labour time needed to produce all that is necessary for the maintenance of the worker.5

The value of labor is thus given by the labor time which is necessary to produce the means of subsistence without which the worker would not reproduce (either as a person or as a class). Wages thus tend to settle (aside from oscillations due to the supply and demand of labor) around the minimum necessary to survive: But the minimum wage is nonetheless the centre towards which the current rates of wages gravitate. Thus relative value, measured by labour time, is inevitably the formula of the present enslavement of the worker, instead of being, as M. Proudhon would have it, the “revolutionary theory” of the emancipation of the proletariat.6

But why is there such a divergence between Marx’s and Proudhon’s interpretation of the theory of value? According to Marx, as we saw, given the labor theory of value, and given that labor has become a commodity, it follows that labor is normally paid the minimum that is necessary to survive. Thus, labor is “enslaved,” without violating the theory of value, but rather precisely as a consequence of its general validity. Nothing has been taken from the worker, but the reduction of labor to a commodity intrinsically condemns workers

5 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 124. 6 Ibid., 125.

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to poverty. Not so according to Proudhon, who gives a different answer to the question “how much is labor worth?”. Starting from the same labor theory of value, but going in the opposite direction than RicardoMarx, one might say that if the relative value of goods derives from the labor time necessary to their production, then reciprocally a day of labor must be worth as much as the goods produced in that day. Proudhon follows precisely this logic: «A certain quantity of labour is equivalent to the product created by this same quantity of labour».7 From Marx’s and Ricardo’s point of view, this thesis is erroneous, because Proudhon «confounds the value of commodities measured by the quantity of labour embodied in them with the value of commodities measured by “the value of labour”». According to Marx, as we saw, these are two absolutely different quantities, because the value of a day of labor is not equal to the value of what labor produces in a day, but rather to the sustenance of the worker for a day. Proudhon rejects this difference (Marx accuses him of confusing two different things in one) and thus from his point of view … it could be said indifferently that the relative value of any commodity is measured by the quantity of labour embodied in it; or that it is measured by the quantity of labour it can buy; or again that it is measured by the quantity of labour which can acquire it.8

From Marx’s point of view, thus, Proudhon’s error is worse than Smith, because while the latter based value on either commanded or contained labor, Proudhon conflates the two things that Smith had merely juxtaposed.9 Proudhon thus ends up using the labor theory of value not just descriptively, like Ricardo and Marx, but also normatively: according to Proudhon’s version of the theory workers ought to receive a wage equivalent to the goods they produced in a day, minus the costs of tools and raw materials, leaving nothing for the capitalist’s profit or for the owner’s rent. If, instead, there is a profit, it must be a misappropriation, not something resulting from the normal validity of the labor theory of value. This is how Proudhon thinks, and for this reason he can consider the labor 7 Ibid., 124. 8 Ibid., 127. 9 Ibid., 128.

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theory of value as a revolutionary theory, which is not valid in the present but which ought to regulate exchanges in the future egalitarian society. In truth, Marx’s and Ricardo’s theory according to which the value of labor is equal to subsistence wage is not at all well supported, and the critique against Proudhon on this point is weak. Proudhon’s thesis does not lack in coherence; the issue is rather one of intentions: his theory of value is oriented toward realizing an egalitarian socialist society, whereas Marx stays firmly on the ground of a scientific understanding of economic dynamics. Marx’s critique is cogent, instead, against Proudhon’s project of a utopian society. According to the French socialist, capitalists should be abolished and, in a society made only of laborers, everyone ought to receive a payment exactly equal to the hours of labor they performed. This much you produced, this much you shall be able to purchase with the money or notes you will be paid with. The idea that the laborer ought to receive all the fruits of his labor is not just Proudhon’s; it had been elaborated by left-wings Ricardians already in the 1820s and 1830s—much more clearly and rigorously, Marx adds, than by Proudhon himself. However, as acutely observed by Marx, this idea implies a difficult problem: Who shall establish how many hours everyone must work, and how should social labor be apportioned between the various branches of production? If the laborers possessing labor-notes act like individual exchangers on the market, autonomously deciding how many hours to work, then nothing guarantees they will find on the market the goods they want to purchase, and thus that they will have in exchange the exact equivalent of their labor. The alternative is for production and needs to be planned ahead of time (as proposed by Bray, a Ricardian) by general and local boards of trade.10 But then, individual notes are useless, and a collectivist system would overtake the one based on equal individual exchangers (which according to Marx corresponds to the petty bourgeois system loved by Proudhon). In sum, says Marx, the system can function «only on condition that the number of hours to be spent on material production is agreed on beforehand. But such an agreement negates individual exchange».11 Therefore, Proudhon is incoherent, as he wants a system based on individual exchanges (petty bourgeois), but at once egalitarian, whereas Marx

10 Ibid., 141–42. 11 Ibid., 143.

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objects that the system can function only through collectivistic planning, which Proudhon does not want. To conclude, we should distinguish two aspects, connected but not identical, within Marx’s polemics here. The first is the uneasy defense of the thesis (against both Smith and Proudhon) according to which the law of labor value is valid in capitalist societies, the existence of profit notwithstanding. The second is the critique (to which Marx will return many times) of social utopias based on labor-notes, or on the other various systems supposed to guarantee equal exchange, which according to Marx were all vain and contradictory excogitations. Marx reflects again on the themes of wage and labor value in the conferences he holds in 1847 at the Educational Society of German Workingmen of Bruxelles. From these conferences, it will come the text Wage Labour and Capital will emerge, composed of five articles published in April 1849 on the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung.” Concerning the nature of wages, Marx reiterates here what he had already claimed in The Poverty of Philosophy. «Wages are, therefore, not the worker’s share in the commodity produced by him»: if that was the case, we would fall back into the framework of Proudhon or the left-Ricardians, who ask why wages only get a part and not the whole. «Wages are the part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys for himself a definite amount of productive labour».12 Wages are nothing but the price of a commodity, even if a particular commodity like human labor, and this price corresponds, essentially, to the costs of sustaining and reproduce the worker. Thus, from the perspective of the working class as a whole, wages will settle on the minimum necessary for subsistence. Single workers or sectors may receive more or less, may enjoy some advantage, or lack even basic necessities, but overall wages pay for the survival of the worker class and its reproduction through time (making children, raising them, and condemning them to become workers as well). Wage labor and capital, incidentally, are two realities that reciprocally presuppose each other. «Thus capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other».13 The worker, not possessing the means of production, is forced to sell his labor to a member of

12 Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 9 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 202. 13 Ibid., 214.

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the capitalist class, he «cannot leave the whole class of purchasers, that is, the capitalist class, without renouncing his existence».14 Capital, on the other hand, needs the worker. What is in fact a capital? Marx is very clear: «Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence of all kinds» that are employed for a new production.15 Capital is thus made of the products of labor, it is «accumulated labor». Nevertheless, not every accumulated labor is capital, but only that which is exchanged with living labor in order to increase its own value. Buying labor, in fact, the capitalist gives to the worker (the money equivalent to) the means of subsistence, but acquires in exchange «the creative power whereby the worker not only replaces what he consumes but gives to the accumulated labour a greater value than it previously possessed».16 This is possible because once it has been sold to the capitalist at its fair price (i.e., subsistence wage), the creative power of labor is employed (in combination with raw materials and instruments of production) to produce goods which can have a higher value than what the capitalist paid for labor, raw materials, and instruments of production. Here we have for the first time a clear presentation of a fundamental theme for Marx’s theory: exploitation. The reason why accumulated labor increases its value by means of exchange with living labor is that what it pays is the price of labor, which is to say subsistence, whereas what it acquires is the creative power of the worker which can produce much more than what is necessary for subsistence. We have to emphasize the modal verb can, because the production of a surplus (though Marx does not say this) is not a given: unproductive workers could even produce less than subsistence, and the capitalist would then lose on his investment, as it often happens. But what is important is to highlight how what workers receive as subsistence and what they produce are two different quantities, and how capitalists start the production process only because they expect the latter to be larger than the former. Thus capital, to go back to Marx’s definition, is accumulated labor that valorizes (which is to say increases) itself only by exchanging itself with living labor.17 But what is then the relation between the interests of

14 Ibid., 203. 15 Ibid., 211. 16 Ibid., 213. 17 Ibid., 214.

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capital and labor? Is there any truth in the claim of bourgeois economists, which is to say that ultimately the interests of the capitalist and the worker coincide, because the more the latter is productive, and thus valorizes capital, the more his salary can increase? Certainly, Marx concedes, an indispensable condition for workers to have a decent life is «the fastest possible growth of productive capital »,18 which implies a rapid increase «of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments», and thus of «the enjoyments of the worker» as well. But these needs and pleasures increase, proportionally, much less than the capitalists’. Therefore, what is prima facie an improvement may become a worsening, because needs and social enjoyments «are of a relative nature» and thus cannot be measured «by the objects which serve for their satisfaction», but only on the metrics of social evaluation.19 Even in the best-case scenario, profit and wages are still, according to Marx, inversely proportional, the one increases when the other decreases and vice versa. Thus, it cannot be denied that, in capitalist society, the interests of capital and those of labor are «diametrically opposed».20

5.2

The Communists’ Manifesto

As should already be clear by now, Marx’s peculiarity, compared to other revolutionaries and conspirators of his time, was that he meant to ground the politics of workers’ emancipation upon a rigorous scientific knowledge of bourgeois society’s economic laws of development. Consequently, Marx rejected both the visions based on justice or moral criterions, and those trying to construct utopian models of a just or fraternal society. Fraternity and justice were in broad circulation among proto-socialist and proto-communist circles, but they represented precisely the kind of approach Marx intended to distance himself from. In 1836, some exiled German artisans had founded in Paris the League of the Just. After the failure of Blanqui’s insurrection in 1839, many of the members fled to London, where they also created a public organization (since the League 18 Ibid., 215. 19 Ibid., 216. This argument, incidentally, is an apt objection to all those liberals, from

Locke to Rawls, who claimed it would be rational for the poor to accept social inequality if it can improve their own situation. Marx instead thinks that what matters most in social life is not the absolute availability of goods, but one’s relative position. 20 Ibid., 220.

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was more like a secret association), the Educational Society of German Workingmen. Throughout his Bruxelles years, Marx kept in touch with the German communists in London, particularly because they felt the need of a solid theoretical ground for their politics, which they did not find in the communism of Cabet or Weitling. At the beginning of 1847, thus, the exiled Germans invited Marx to join the League which, in its London congress of July 1847 (to which Marx was unable to participate), decided to change its name to Communist League, and its motto from “All men are brothers” to «Proletarians of all countries, unite!».21 Marx participated in the organization’s second congress, also held in London (and also in secret) in November 1847, and there he and Engels were commissioned «to draw up for publication a detailed theoretical and practical programme».22 This was the birth of one of the most widely circulated texts of modern history, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, written in German between December 1847 and January 1848, published in London the following month. Before the Manifesto Engels had already written two texts, in 1847, in the form of a catechism composed of questions and answers (e.g., «What is communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat»): Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith and Principles of Communism.23 With an extraordinary coincidence between theoretical elaboration and historical action, the Manifesto saw the light in London almost the same day in which the February revolution—which jumpstarted the revolutionary movements of 1848 throughout Europe—began in Paris. The Manifesto was published around February 24,24 while the Paris revolution started on the 22, following the prohibition by the authorities of a demonstration organized by the opposition. While Marx and Engels were writing the Manifesto, the revolution was in the air: in

21 I draw these notes on Marx’s political activity from: David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1973). 22 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the 1872 German Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 23 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 174. 23 See, respectively: Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 95–103; Friedrich Engels, “Principles of Communism,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). 24 Cf. Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 124.

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Europe, after the restoration of 1815, the memory of the great French Revolution was still alive, as demonstrated by the two revolutionary waves of 1820-21 and 1830, when the people of Paris ended the reign of Charles X of Bourbon, to whom Louis Philippe of Orléans succeeded, only to be himself deposed in 1848. The revolutionary movement that swept Europe (with the exceptions of Russia and England) in 1848 was fueled by many ideas, distinct and even in mutual conflict: the liberal one, wishing for constitutional monarchy, civil freedom, and bourgeois development; the democratic one, believing in popular sovereignty, republicanism, universal suffrage; the national or nationalistic one, demanding independence and unification for those peoples which were still fractured in multiple political unities (like Italians and Germans), or subject to the Habsburg empire (like Hungarians and Czechs); and finally the most radical component, socialist or communist, to which the program of Marx’s and Engels’ Manifesto belonged. We cannot say that the Manifesto, written just before the 1848 revolution, predicted its explosion; but it certainly could feel it coming, which contributes to confer to the text its particular tone and atmosphere. Before delving into the work, we have to spend a few more words concerning its title. The short book, which in the second German edition was entitled simply Communist Manifesto, constitutes the program of a party that does not exist or, better said, of a «party» which has nothing to do with what parties will become between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Here «party» denotes an orientation or a tendency, and the communists are essentially a group with its own organizational structure (the Communist League, that is), but acting within broader workers’ and democratic organizations.25 As for the «communist» label, in the Preface to the English edition of 1888, Engels writes that, in the meantime, the Manifesto had become «the most wide-spread, the most international production of all Socialist Literature»; yet it would have been impossible, in 1848, to call it a «socialist manifesto», because socialism at the time was a utopian and moralistic movement, supported by the petty bourgeoisie or middle class, while communism was the name of the movement of workers, and more generally of those who, like

25 For a deeper enquiry into this theme, see: Jacques Texier, “La nozione di “partito” e di “partito comunista” nel 1847–1848,” in Il Manifesto del Partito Comunista 150 anni dopo, ed. Rossana Rossanda (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2000).

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Marx and Engels, believed that the working class’ emancipation should be achieved by the working class itself.26 The Manifesto’s incipit is one of the most famous passages of all world literature: A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.27

Actually, the revolution of 1848 will dispose of Metternich and Guizot, the reactionary guardians of Europe. But in the meantime, waiting for this to happen, Marx and Engels (but the text was written by the former) endeavor to dissolve the fogs enveloping the ghost and to clearly explain what are the views of communists, their goals and objectives. The first of the four chapters composing the Manifesto (Bourgeoises and proletarians ) also begins with a very famous assertion: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.28

We can, however, individuate two problems already in this initial statement. The first concerns the aptness of the term “class” to designate status distinctions between freemen and slaves, or between patricians and plebeians; here Marx generalizes the concept of class with a rhetoricalpolitical move, but from a scientific point of view one should use a more precise terminology. The second problem concerns the way in which historical change is explained by the contradiction between production relations and productive forces, and yet at once the revolutionary 26 Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the 1888 English Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 26 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 517. 27 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 481. 28 Ibid., 482.

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transformation of society is supposed to come from class struggle. Further complicating the picture, Marx seems to want a paradigm valid for all historical transitions, and not just for a specific one (e.g., from feudalism to capitalism, or from capitalism to communism), even though his model is clearly one specific transition (the one from feudalism to capitalism). Truly, in the passage from feudal to bourgeois society we find that feudal relations had become a limit for the development of productive forces, and also that these new productive forces sprang from a class (the bourgeoisie) which is indeed the protagonist of the revolutionary transformation of the old society. But this model cannot be generalized because, as written by Guy Debord in an insightful critical reflection on historical materialism, «the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won», and «also the only class for which the development of the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of society». Criticizing the linear conception of subsequent modes of production as well as his intertwinement with the theory of class struggle, Debord writes that The plain facts of history, however, are that the “Asiatic mode of production” (as Marx himself acknowledged elsewhere) maintained its immobility despite all its class conflicts; that no serf uprising ever overthrew the feudal lords; and that none of the slave revolts in the ancient world ended the rule of freemen.29

According to Marx, however, the passage from capitalism to communist society shall happen according to his theorized mechanism, which is to say through a class struggle which is itself necessitated, insofar as the productive forces developed by the bourgeoisie are no longer containable by bourgeois relations of production. In the first pages of the Manifesto, Marx shows what the bourgeoisie has been capable of achieving: revolutionizing the entire world, developing human productivity to a previously unthinkable extent, and unifying the globe in a single market: It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

29 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 2005), 44.

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But, most importantly, The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.30

According to Marx, therefore, the modern State cannot be anything more than the organ of bourgeois power: The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.31

The bourgeois system, however, reaches its limit when the continuous development of productive forces becomes incompatible with an economic process geared toward the accumulation of private capital. And this tendency is revealed by economic crises, in which «there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production»; «the conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them». Crises can be overcome only by destroying a large quantity of productive forces or by conquering new markets; and thus, Marx concludes, by paving the way to even larger and more serious crises in the future.32 In the same way, as it generates productive forces incompatible with private valorization, so the bourgeoisie produces its own antagonist, the class destined to eliminate it: the proletariat. The proletarians’ force lies not in the means they have available, but in their unity (in fact, the manifesto ends with the slogan «Proletarians of all countries, unite!»). Therefore, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, intrinsic to the very existence of the latter class and to its antagonism to bourgeois interests, has the primary function of educating the proletariat as a self-conscious class, unified and capable of pursuing common goals. 30 Marx, and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 487. 31 Ibid., 486. 32 Ibid., 490.

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This unity is never achieved once and for all, for it has to constantly overcome the centrifugal force of competition between laborers. The strengthening of the working class is made possible not just by the incredible growth of communication in the bourgeois world, but also by the fact that, according to Marx, middle classes increasingly tend to wither with the development of capitalism, producing a growing polarization between bourgeoisie and proletariat. «The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority»,33 and its goal is to seize social productive forces from their private monopolization. This can happen only through a revolution, just like the bourgeoisie shook the chains of nobility and clergy with its own revolution. Thus, the «violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie»34 is the test the proletarian movement has to pass in order to establish its predominance. On the other hand, according to Marx, the violent character of the proletarian revolution does not contradict its being a revolution for democracy: to the contrary, the first step of this revolution will precisely be «to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy».35 This point is expressed very clearly also in Engels’ Principles of Communism, which is the most direct predecessor of the Manifesto. To the question «What will be the course of this revolution?», Engels answers: In the first place it will inaugurate a democratic constitution and thereby, directly or indirectly, the political rule of the proletariat. Directly in England, where the proletariat already constitutes the majority of the people. Indirectly in France and in Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians but also of small peasants and urban petty bourgeois […]

These latter, Engels continued, «will have to conform to the demands of the proletariat», and this «will perhaps involve a second fight». On the other hand,

33 Ibid., 495. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 504.

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Democracy would be quite useless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means of carrying through further measures directly attacking private ownership and securing the means of subsistence of the proletariat.36

The text then continues, just like the Manifesto will, with a list of policies to be adopted. Thus, in 1848 Marx’s and Engels’ position was that only a violent revolution could lead to the conquest of democracy and to the political predominance of the proletariat. But this thesis was to be qualified in the subsequent development of their thought. In the sixties and seventies, Marx will repeatedly express his approval of the idea that—in continental Europe, but also in more democratically advanced countries like the United States, England, and the Netherlands—the workers’ goals can be achieved peacefully, harnessing the opportunities offered by universal suffrage. We may refer the reader to the speech Marx gave in Amsterdam on September 8, 1872.37 As for Engels, he distanced himself very clearly from the revolutionary method advocated in the Manifesto, especially in the last period of his life. In 1895, writing an Introduction to the new edition of The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, Engels remembers how the anticipation of the imminent transformation of democratic revolution into proletarian revolution was to be disappointed: «History has proved us wrong, and all who thought like us».38 Most importantly, Engels historicized the revolutionary and “violent” pathos of the Manifesto, contextualizing it within the illusions of its epoch. When the February revolution erupted in Paris, Engels wrote, «all of us, as far as our conceptions of the conditions and

36 Engels, “Principles of Communism,” 350. Concerning this passage, and more generally the issue of the relation between revolution and democracy, cf. Jacques Texier, Révolution et démocratie chez Marx et Engels (Paris: PUF, 1998). 37 Karl Marx, “On the Hague Congress,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 23 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). This facet of Marx’s reflection is studied and valorized in the already cited works by Texier as well as in: Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 215–20. 38 Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 27 (London: Lawrence

& Wishart, 2010), 512.

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the course of revolutionary movements were concerned, were under the spell of previous historical experience, particularly that of France»39 ; in other words, they still conceived the revolution as a coup. But «the mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete in every respect»40 ; «rebellion in the old style, street fighting, with barricades, which decided the issue everywhere up to 1848, had become largely outdated».41 Keen as he was on military issues, Engels goes on to explain why, at the end of the nineteenth century, putting up barricades in the streets is no longer a good strategy. But the basic point is evidently political: in the meantime it has become possible, in Germany and elsewhere, to fight legally rather than violently. Votes for the Social Democratic Party increase at every election and, according to Engels, it would therefore be folly, playing to their enemies’ wishes, for the workers to fall back on illegal tactics. But, while methods vary with the circumstances, the goals defined by the Manifesto do not age as quickly. The fundamental point is that the transformation of society will occur through the conquest of political power by the proletariat (democracy) and, therefore, the centralization of «all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class».42 It is through the conquest of State power, thus, that proletarians will go on to transform society. This is a much different path from that of the “bourgeois” revolution, where we might say that the State structures are made adequate (even if violently, in the French case) to a society that has already been transformed (or is in the process of transforming). Communist revolution should proceed in the opposite direction, from the State toward society (which, in my opinion, creates some problems for historical materialism’s theory of subsequent modes of production). Through State policies, including “despotic” ones, landed estates are to be expropriated, inheritance rights abolished, strongly progressive taxation instituted, credit and transportation nationalized, public factories built, and «equal liability to work for all members of society» imposed together with «education of all children […] in national institutions and at the expense of the nation».43 39 Ibid., 509. 40 Ibid., 510. 41 Ibid., 517. 42 Marx, and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 504. 43 Engels, “Principles of Communism,” 351.

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It bears noting how many of the “revolutionary” measures proposed by the Manifesto have in the meantime become “normal” institutions of advanced capitalist States, like public education or progressive taxation; in many cases, even the nationalization of credit and transportation has been realized within a capitalist society, although those have been targeted by the neoliberal offensive at the end of the twentieth century. We should also note how, in the list proposed by Marx as well as in its antecedent by Engels in his Principles of Communism, there is no direct mention of expropriating capitalist factories (whereas the expropriation of landowners is explicit). To the contrary Engels—who sometimes trivializes but also, differently from Marx, always tries to be clear—explicitly says that, thanks to the jobs offered by the State in the agricultural and industrial sectors, the problems of unemployment and competition between workers will be solved, thus «compelling the factory owners, as long as they still exist, to pay the same increased wages as the State».44 Essentially, the right to work and to a good wage guaranteed by the State would lift even private employees from the condition of subservience to factory owners—as long as they still exist, says Engels. This would seem to imply, thus, a gradual overcoming of private capitalist enterprise. Another noteworthy aspect is that, in Marx’s description of the revolutionary process, there is no mention of the party as an organization, but rather only of the proletariat making itself the dominant class—what Jacques Texier defined as the «party-class».45 Marx’s conclusion on this point is that When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.

Thus, when the classes will cease to exist—after the transitory phase in which the proletariat will exercise its domination, destroying «by

44 Marx, and Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, 350. 45 Texier, “La nozione di “partito” e di “partito comunista” nel 1847–1848.”

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force the old conditions of production»—political power will also disappear,46 substituted by something much closer to an administrative power collectively exercised (certainly not by a specialized caste of bureaucrats). Quite peculiarly, almost contradicting the title of the Manifesto, Marx is keen to clarify that «Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties». They are rather, Marx continues, «the most advanced and resolute section which pushes forward all others». Most importantly, communists defend the interest of the proletarian movement as a whole, beyond national borders: «they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality». Communists, thus, are like an organized group operating within the broader frame of proletarian parties and movements, and they are a transnational group, because they believe the revolution cannot win in just one country, even if the most immediate battles will be fought at the national level. Ideologically, however, there are stark differences between communists and the various socialist tendencies examined by Marx in the third chapter of his pamphlet. His critiques hit the «feudal» socialism, which criticizes bourgeois society from a nostalgic and reactionary perspective; the «petty bourgeois» socialism represented by the economist Simonde de Sismondi, which is critically insightful but weak on the proposal, since it would defend artisanal manufactory and small agriculture, both doomed to disappear; the so-called «true socialism», mainly represented by Karl Grün, which is the German dilution of French socialism into a generic philosophical humanism (and also expresses the interests of the petty bourgeoisie). Finally, Marx again criticizes Proudhon’s socialism (seen as a «bourgeois socialism», wishing it could have the bourgeoisie without the proletariat) and what he defines as «critical-utopian socialism», represented by Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. To these latter socialists Marx recognizes the merit of being «full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class», even though their limits become evident as the class struggle gets more concrete, revealing their elaborations as mere reveries. The critical-utopian socialists, however, share many ideas with Marx, as for example

46 Marx, and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 505–6.

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the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production […]47

Concerning political strategy, Marx explains which alliances communists shall seek in the different countries they operate. The case of Germany is especially important since there, not having had a bourgeois revolution yet, «they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie». In this unitary struggle, however, proletarians must maintain awareness of the antagonism between their interests and the bourgeoisie’s since, once absolutist reactions will have been vanquished, the bourgeoisie will be the next target. If it is true that Germany «is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution», then—since this revolution will occur in more advanced conditions, and with a more developed proletariat, compared to the English and French ones—it cannot but be «the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution». Marx hopes that the proletarian revolution will not happen at a later time, but it will rather be the continuation of a bourgeois revolution which, precisely because it arrived late, can be directly followed by the next one.

5.3

1848 in Germany

The 1848 revolutionary moment poses a complex problem for Marx’s theoretical reflection and political practice. From the point of view of a linear conception of historical materialism, the feudal, capitalist, and socialist/communist modes of production correspond to three successive historical epochs; the future victory of communism is framed by this teleologically oriented philosophy of history. From the point of view of concrete political history (which Marx, already in the Manifesto, has well present), the problem is much more complex. The European revolution of 1848, in fact, have primarily “bourgeois” goals. They demand constitutions, freedom, universal suffrage, democratic republics, the modern unity of the national State where it does not yet exist (like in Italy and Germany) or is subject to the domination of a multi-national empire, like 47 Ibid., 516.

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in the Habsburg monarchy. What role, then, should “proletarian” forces play in this moment, if one believes, with Marx, that the development of bourgeois society is intrinsically linked to the exploitation of proletarians, and therefore, the two classes’ interests are antagonistic? Essentially, Marx’s answer is that, precisely because, according to historical materialism, the role of the proletariat is to “succeed” the bourgeoisie (not as a new dominant class, but rather as the class that abolishes all classes), the proletariat must first favor the emergence of modern bourgeois society, against aristocracy and residual feudalism, and only later engage in the struggle against it. This is a point of view that other socialists (labeled «feudal» by Marx) do not share, and they have their reasons, since it is incomprehensible why the proletariat should fight to create the conditions of its own modern exploitation. Marx himself correctly claims that, to win its fight, the bourgeoisie needs to mobilize the workers’ strength, and thus must ally with them. This is however a very strange alliance (based on the logic of class struggle), because the proletariat supports the bourgeoisie while preparing to attack it as soon as it wins, all while the bourgeoisie uses the proletariat, but must at once be wary to prevent the attack that it will certainly receive from that side. This is the general way in which Marx represents the situation; but such a way of thinking has many problematic implications. Firstly, in fact, this thinking implies a theory of “permanent revolution,” which seems incompatible with historical materialism: according to this theory, historical development should be shortened and accelerated, with the proletarian revolution immediately following the bourgeois one. Clearly Marx needs to hold this thesis, for pragmaticpropagandistic reasons, for otherwise the proletarians would have no motivation to fight. But the thesis remains theoretically weak and shall be harshly rebuked by history itself. Nevertheless, Marx’s argument is not only a strategic indication for the proletarian army (sustained by the optimism of the will); it is also a scientific diagnosis, so to speak, of the current situation. As such, it is indeed very profound, as it captures a basic contradiction of the 1848 historical moment: the liberal and democratic bourgeoises must lead the people, but cautiously, because they must at once prevent the rebellion of the people against them. Therefore, the bourgeoisie may find it safer to proceed by small steps, compromising with the aristocratic and feudal forces. In other words, the bourgeois revolution does not go all the way, it moves two steps forward and one step back, because going too far would

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be dangerous. It seems that Marx, as an analyst, well captures the difficulties and contradictions of the historical moment: a bourgeois society which is not yet there, and a proletariat which already questions its existence. As an author of political programs, however, Marx is caught in the very same contradiction he diagnosed, and thus oscillates between considering the proletariat simply as the left wing of the democratic movement, and instead forcefully reclaiming its autonomy and anti-bourgeois goals. A revolutionary time, then, but not of victorious revolution, rather, a time of a revolution defeated largely because of its internal contradiction. Having defined these interpretive coordinates, let us see how Marx’s activity develops in 1848–49 and in the following years, in which he will reflect on the defeat of the revolutions. As soon as the February revolution starts in Paris, turmoil occurs in Belgium as well. And so it happens that Marx, then residing in Bruxelles, received almost at once the order to abandon Belgium and the revocation of his expulsion from France, where the new republican government allows him to return. Marx thus moves to Paris but, as a good German communist, closely follows the events in Germany. When things start moving on that side too (with the March rebellions in Berlin and Vienna), Marx decides to go and contribute, together with the other exiled members of the Communist League—but not without first writing and printing a political program, signed by the leading exponents of the League: Demands of the Communist Party in Germany. This text reprises many points from the Manifesto, tailoring them to the specific German situation: it demands the proclamation of a unitary and indivisible German republic, with a democratically elected parliament and a people’s army; the abolition of all feudal obligations and dues, and the expropriation of feudal and princely estates; the transferral to the State of all mortgages and rents on agricultural lands; that a State bank substitute all private ones; that transports be nationalized, progressive taxation introduced, national workshops instituted, public education granted, and that the State be separate from the Church. The text also demands that the administration of justice be free from charges or fees, that civil servants receive equal pay (save differences for family support), and that «Representatives of the people shall receive payment so that workers, too, shall be able to become members of the German parliament».48 48 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 7 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 3.

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Arrived in Germany, Marx founds a newspaper in Cologne—a more liberal city, where the Napoleonic code had remained in force—the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung,” meant to be the instrument of his political battle. The newspaper defines itself as the «Organ of democracy», and it represents Marx’s attempt to pursue the unity of the proletariat with the most advanced bourgeois forces, as he advocated at the beginning of the 1848 revolution, which will also lead him to effectively disband the Communist League. Recalling this time, in an article of 1884, Engels will write that Marx’s intention was to create a major newspaper espousing the democratic cause (rather than «to preach communism in a little provincial sheet»): «Thus, the German proletariat at first appeared on the political stage as the extreme democratic party».49 In this first phase, Marx’s thesis was precisely that the proletariat ought to constitute the most radical and committed part of the «great democratic army», but avoid to push too much forward, risking to leave the bulk of “troops” behind, up until absolutism had been defeated and the work of bourgeois revolution completed.50 The “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” publishes its first issue in June 1848, just as the works of the German constituent assembly, which was meant to write the constitution of the new Germany, had begun in Frankfurt. Marx’s newspaper, however, soon observes the timidity and fears of the National Assembly and of the bourgeoisie it represents. Memorable is the article, in the June 29 issue, dedicated to the insurrection of Parisian workers, with which the unity of bourgeoisie and proletariat is broken, while the antagonism between the two classes comes to the forefront. In Germany and Austria, the revolution flares back up in the Fall of 1848, but is soon smothered by repression. In September the Frankfurt insurrection (protesting against the armistice concluded by Prussia with Denmark, seen as hindering German aspirations to national unity) is quashed, while martial law is proclaimed in Cologne, forcing Marx’s newspaper to suspend publication. In Vienna, an insurrection starts on October 6, to protest against anti-Hungarian repression, only to be suppressed by the end of the month, after ferocious fights. In the article of November 7, 1848, The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna, Marx bitterly

49 Friedrich Engels, “Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848–1849),” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 26 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 122. 50 McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, 201.

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writes that while in France the bourgeoisie leads the counter-revolution, but only «after it had broken down all obstacles to the rule of its own class», The bourgeoisie in Germany meekly joins the retinue of the absolute monarchy and of feudalism before securing even the first conditions of existence necessary for its own civic freedom and its rule. […] In France it won its victory in order to humble the people. In Germany it humbled itself to prevent the victory of the people. History presents no more shameful and pitiful spectacle than that of the German bourgeoisie.51

The idea that the proletariat could fight together with the bourgeoisie against old feudal society is thus harshly disproven by facts, at least in Germany, and Marx’s conclusion is accordingly drastic, in the article of December 31, 1848 (The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution): The history of the Prussian bourgeois class, like that of the German bourgeois class in general between March and December, shows that a purely bourgeois revolution and the establishment of bourgeois rule in the form of a constitutional monarchy is impossible in Germany, and that only a feudal absolutist counter-revolution or a social republican revolution is possible.52

The definitive abandonment of the unity between proletarians and bourgeois democratic forces will be sealed by the declaration that Marx and other Rhineland democrats will publish on April 15, 1849: We consider that the present organisation of the Democratic Associations includes too many heterogeneous elements for any possibility of successful activity in furtherance of the cause. We are of the opinion, on the other hand, that a closer union of the Workers’ Associations is to be preferred since they consist of homogeneous elements, and therefore we hereby from today withdraw from the Rhenish District Committee of Democratic Associations.53

51 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 7 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 504. 52 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 8 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 178. 53 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 9 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 282.

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While Germany was going through a last insurrectional wave, between May and June 1849, Marx was expelled from Prussia and therefore the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” was forced to end its publications with the May 19 issue, which advised Cologne’s workers against attempting a rebellion which would have been soon defeated, and concluded repeating the slogan: «emancipation of the working class!».54 Commenting on his expulsion, Marx now openly advocated the revolutionary stance that his newspaper had always held (or so he claimed), asserting that there was nothing surprising in the measures taken against him: «We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror».55

5.4

The London Exile: A Time to Take Stock

Forced to leave Cologne, Marx stayed in Paris between June and July but, expelled from the French capital as well, on August 24, 1849, he crossed the Channel to reach London. England was the country Marx had deemed to be, together with Russia, the most stubborn defender of reaction, a country against which (he wrote on January 1, 1849) a world war was to be brought, after the victory of the proletarians in France56 (just like, in Marx’s visions, after its own revolution Germany was to bring war to Russia). With a bitter historical irony, this same country was going to host Marx’s exile, until to the end of his life. In London, Marx collaborates to the reorganization of the Communist League and especially of its German activities. To this end, in March 1850, he writes with Engels an Address of the Central Authority to the League, drawing a first balance of the 1848–49 revolutions, sketching a much different political strategy from the one of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung.” Up until this point, Marx still thinks that the revolutionary wave has only momentarily ebbed, and that it will soon resume even stronger. Thus, Marx preoccupation is to define a political strategy through which the proletariat can avoid being, once more, the stooge of democrats who abandon it as soon as they have achieved their own goals. Reneging on his previous

54 Ibid., 467. 55 Ibid., 453. 56 Karl Marx, “The Revolutionary Movement,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 8 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010).

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strategy, Marx now asserts that the proletariat cannot remain within the movement «under the domination and leadership of the petty bourgeois democrats. An end must be put to this state of affairs, the independence of the workers must be restored».57 Instead of once again stooping to serve as the applauding chorus of the bourgeois democrats, the workers, and above all the League, must exert themselves to establish an independent secret and public organisation of the workers’ party […]58

The proletarians will thus ally with the democratic petty bourgeoisie in the shared battles, but they will keep in mind the antagonism dividing the two classes: workers do not ask for better wages, but rather the abolition of wage labor; not a transformation of private property, but its abolition; not a federal State, but a strongly centralized one. Burned by the defeats of 1848–49, and by the failure of the attempted unity with democratic forces, in this Address Marx sketches a very harsh program, an extremist one we might say (what is necessary, according to Marx, is precisely to «carry to the extreme the proposals of the democrats»,59 always asking for more). The central point, however, remains the idea of «revolution in permanence»,60 which is to say of the continuity of a revolutionary process that starts with petty bourgeois goals and then turns against the bourgeoisie, radicalizing itself as it goes (as had happened in France from 1789 to 1793). Not for nothing some interpreters have read this Address as a sort of Jacobin-Blanquist parenthesis in Marx’s thought, colored by the anticipation, which he would have soon abandoned, for an imminent new revolution.61 57 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 10 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 277–78. 58 Ibid., 281–82. 59 Ibid., 286. Marx writes also that workers must «compel the democrats to carry out

their present terrorist phrases», and not oppose «so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are associated only with hateful recollections», but rather «the lead in them must be taken»: Ibid., 282. 60 Ibid., 287. 61 Cf. George Lichtheim, Marxism. An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Fred-

erick A. Praeger, 1961). Lichtheim’s reading is criticized by Michael Löwy, who deems wrong to talk about “Jacobinism,” for that would overlook Marx’s emphasis on the self emancipation of the working class (which is the guiding thread of Löwy’s work). Löwy

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Also in early 1850, Marx resumes publishing the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” in London, as a monthly political-economical journal, and here he will print the articles about 1848–49, published by Engels in 1895 under the title The Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850.62 According to Marx, the origin of the 1848 revolution lies in the economic crisis of 1846–47; the February revolution overthrew the Orléanist monarchy, which was dominated by the aristocracy and the financial bourgeoisie, while industrial and petty bourgeois were in the opposition. But the bourgeois republic created by the February revolution, having been conquered with the decisive help of workers, was, in Marx words, «a republic surrounded by social institutions ».63 At first, thus, the republic created National workshops, their name inspired by the Ateliers sociaux, proposed by the socialist Louis Blanc, which not only provided works for the unemployed, but were also perfectly suited to inflame the petty bourgeois resentment against socialism («A state pension for sham labour, so that’s socialism!»).64 The petty bourgeoisie was itself strangled by the economic crisis and thus cursed against the «parasites» fed by the State. On May 4, 1848, the National Assembly elected by universal suffrage congregated in Paris; Republican bourgeoises had won a majority and were soon at work cutting down to size the workers’ demands. On June 21, unmarried workers were expelled from the national workshops, or forcibly recruited in the army; in response, on the following day, the Parisian proletariat was forced, according to Marx, to stage an insurrection which was bloodily repressed. However, through the “accursed” June 1848, proletarians became aware that even

also notes that the Address is a brilliant anticipation of twentieth century’s revolutions, starting with the Russian one, since Marx foresee a socialist revolution developing in backward countries, starting with a democratic-bourgeois revolution which is immediately radicalized into a social one: Michael Löwy, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Book, 2005). 62 On these themes, it is interesting to read the article: Bernard H. Moss, “Marx and Engels on French Social Democracy: Historians or Revolutionaries?” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, no. 4 (1985). 63 Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 10 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 55. 64 Ibid., 63.

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a modest improvement of their conditions was utopian within the bourgeois republic, and thus accepted the revolutionary cry «Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!».65 Starting with the carnage of June, however, the French revolutionary process begins to move backwards. In the February revolution, the various bourgeois factions and the proletariat were cooperating; in June the bourgeois republicans of the National and the democratic-social republicans of the Réforme, together liquidate the proletariat; then the democratic-social republicans are themselves excluded, and from June to December 1848 the bourgeois republicans dominate. Finally, with the election of Louis Napoleon as president, the bourgeois republicans are also cut down to size. Differently from the 1789 revolution, the 1848 one becomes less and less radical at every step. Marx goes through the revolutionary moments and contradictions, seizing the occasion to develop a reflection on universal suffrage: the contradiction of the 1848 French Constitution is that, through universal suffrage, it takes political power from the bourgeoisie (of which it wants to maintain the social power) and gives it to the classes it would rather keep socially enslaved (proletariat, peasants, petty bourgeois). It forces the political rule of the bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the hostile classes […] From the ones it demands that they should not go forward from political to social emancipation; from the others that they should not go back from social to political restoration.66

The contradiction was in some way solved by the presidential election of December 10, 1848, won in a landslide by Louis Napoleon. Workers and peasants voted neither for the candidate representing the bourgeois order (general Cavaignac, who had led the repression, 1,500,000 votes) nor for the democratic and social bourgeoisie of Ledru-Rollin (370,000 votes), but rather repudiated both the bourgeoisie and the republic, by which they had been betrayed, giving to Napoleon “Le Petit” a grand total of 5.5 million votes. The French Constitution, however, had a dualism between the president, who headed the government, and the

65 Ibid., 69. 66 Ibid., 79.

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legislative Assembly, both elected by universal suffrage. After the election, Marx recounts, the contrast between these two poles develops while, within parliament, the party of order and monarchical restoration (Orleanists and legitimists) is opposed to the democratic petty bourgeoisie. In February 1849, the petty bourgeois and socialists unite into the Social Democratic Party; in June 1849 the foremost exponent of this party, Ledru-Rollin, presents to the Assembly an act of indictment against Bonaparte for violating the Constitution—since the president had intervened to help the pope against the Roman republic. The indictment is however rejected by parliament, and the montagnard party, lacking the courage to attempt the insurrection which the proletarians would have wanted, only stages a pacific protest, proving its cowardice and thus being defeated and weakened as a result. From June 1849 to May 1850, thus, the party of order prevails in parliament; and when, with the election of May 1850, the mountain party recovers and obtains important victories, the order party manages to impose, with a law approved on May 31, the abolition of universal suffrage. Marx, in his comment, does not mourn the events: Universal suffrage had fulfilled its mission. The majority of the people had passed through the school of development, which is all that universal suffrage can serve for in a revolutionary period. It had to be set aside by a revolution or by the reaction.67

In a revolutionary age, Marx emphasizes, politics essentially becomes a class war, fought with all available weapons; the defenders of order had not hesitated in slaughtering the proletarians in June 1848, nor in taking away universal suffrage in May 1850. The lesson was very clear: the uncertain and reluctant politics of petty bourgeois democracy, even if self-labeled “red” and socialist, was not useful to win (because it succumbed to more decisive and unscrupulous adversaries), and much the less to emancipate the proletariat (a goal renounced from the beginning, by accepting the regime of private property). To win in a time of revolution or, as Gramsci would have said, of «war of maneuver», the proletariat has to seize power and establish its «class dictatorship»68 (thus abolishing universal suffrage, as Marx wrote). Lacking this clarity, the 67 Ibid., 137. 68 Ibid., 127.

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proletariat would end helping other classes, used and then unceremoniously thrown away—as it had happened in that «woeful June» of 1848, which represented a watershed in Marx’s analysis. The continuation of this story is told by Marx in the particularly felicitous text entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, composed on Engels’ solicitation between December 1851 and March 1852. Here Marx comments the paradoxical, but not entirely surprising, end of the French 1848: the coup with which Bonaparte, soon to become emperor Napoleon III, destroyed the second republic. The title of Marx’s works refers (following Engels’ suggestion) to the 18 Brumaire (November 9) of 1799, when the first Napoleon fell the Directoire regime, laying the ground for his empire. This is so because history’s great facts and personages, here is Marx’s famous opening, always occur twice (as Hegel remarked); only, Marx adds, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.69 In this work, Marx first synthetically recounts the various phases following the revolution of February 1848; he recounts again the June insurrection («More than 3,000 insurgents were butchered after the victory, and 15,000 were deported without trial»70 ), the various moments of this backward-going revolution, «in a descending line»: «each party kicks back at the one behind, which presses upon it, and leans against the one in front, which pushes backwards», until the successive defeats of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, of the purely liberal bourgeoisie, and even of the party of order, leave the field open for the dictator. There is, however, a precise reason why things went this way, and such reason is the focus of these writings of Marx, insofar as they are an epochal diagnosis (the other aspect, as we partly already saw, is that of using the events of 1848 to draw lessons about the strategy of the proletarian movement ). Marx’s diagnosis is simple: even if in theory the democratic republic is at this time the proper form of bourgeoisie domination, in practice that may be true for a special case (like the United States), but it may not be in France since here, as soon as the bourgeois republic tries to impose itself, 69 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 11 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 103. 70 Ibid., 110.

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it creates at once the condition for the development of a proletariat which will turn against such republic. The bourgeoisie, here, has to establish its ideal-typical regime (so to speak) while facing an already highly developed proletariat, numerous and self-aware—nor it can be otherwise, because the existence of this proletariat is presupposed by the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the bourgeoisie cannot complete its revolution without risking it to transform into a proletarian one. This risk the bourgeoisie is not willing to accept, and thus we have the retrograde movement through which, fearful of socialist outcomes, the bourgeoisie ends up in the grip of a caricatural emperor. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education which it had produced rebelled against its own civilisation, that all the gods which it had created had fallen away from it […] What the bourgeoisie did not grasp, however, was […] that its own parliamentary regime, that is political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic.71

Therefore, the bourgeoisie could not even maintain its own parliamentary regime (a «regime of unrest») if it did not want (as it did not) such unrest to extend to all society. There is only a small step from the oratorial fight in parliament to that of citizens in the street, and if one does not want to take such step, the former fight must be restrained as well. Marx’s thesis is thus that, in those specific circumstances, the bourgeoisie has a choice (however obvious and necessary): it must choose whether to maintain its political power (accepting the socialist consequences deriving from it), or renounce it in order to maintain its social primacy. «In order to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken» , which is exactly what happens with Napoleon III: «in order to save its purse, it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles». The aporia of a bourgeois power which fails even to be born, because it must immediately fight the proletarian antagonist, is solved in favor of a third party, which will guarantee the bourgeoisie’s social enrichment, but at the price of erasing its right to self-government.72 On the one 71 Ibid., 141–42. 72 Ibid., 143.

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hand, thus, Napoleon seems to rise above all classes; but on the other hand he guarantees bourgeois interests. Nevertheless, according to Marx, the emperor represents more directly a specific class (in addition to the support from the army), the one who voted for him since the beginning, the most numerous class in France, «the small-holding peasants».73 In certain respects, Marx reading of Bonapartism can also be seen as the archetype of modern dictatorships; like them, it draws critical support from an unsightly world of businessmen and grifters, while recruiting its manpower from the Lumpenproletariat.74 Like modern dictatorships, Bonapartism makes ample use of scenographic apparatuses and symbolisms (in this case the glorious memory of Napoleon I); it generously employs the circences (Bonaparte creates the Gold Bars Lottery,75 drawing great profits from it); it avails itself of a State machine which, according to Marx, has consolidated its position so thoroughly that the chief of the Society of December 10 suffices for its head, a casual adventurer from abroad, raised up as leader by a drunken soldiery, which he has bought with liquor and sausages, and which he must continually ply with more sausage.76

Overall, Marx’s reflection on the social battles of 1848–50 leaves us with two unresolved issues. The first is that, if even the bourgeois revolution is so difficult, and encounters so many obstacles, how could the times to be ripe for a proletarian revolution? From Marx’s point of view, one has to bet on this possibility, even though objectively it seems very unlikely. The second issue concerns, instead, the more general framework. In Marx’s teleological conception of history (where socialism comes “after” capitalism), the relation between bourgeois and proletarian forces is intricate and contradictory: they have to proceed together, and yet they cannot but clash. One could ask, however, if the problem may not 73 Ibid., 187. 74 Ibid., 148–49. 75 Ibid., 156. 76 Ibid., 186.

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lie in the framework itself: which is to say whether it would have been heuristically more productive to leave teleology and linear history aside, considering instead the liberal-capitalist and the proletarian-socialist as two interpretations, synchronic but mutually opposed, of the modern dyad of equality and liberty. The liberal interpretation has been hegemonic, the socialist counter-hegemonic, but both were already clashing in the French Revolution and during the following decades, and to this day they struggle to find a reconciliation. Taking this stance would mean reasoning not about two modes of production, which hypothetically (or perhaps even necessarily) should succeed each other, but about two ways of conceiving modernity,77 belonging to the same historical time and diametrically opposed within it.

77 On this point, Jacques Bidet’s neo-Marxist perspective (or, better, the re-foundation of Marxism) seems decisive to me. The issue of how to conceive modernity runs through the author’s many works, but see especially: Jacques Bidet, Théorie de la modernité (Paris: PUF, 1990).

CHAPTER 6

The Critique of Political Economy

6.1

Marx as a Journalist

The early years of exile in London are very difficult for Marx. Hopes for a renewed revolutionary impetus are soon extinguished, his economic condition is absolutely miserable, while the few remaining members of the Communist League are beset by polemics and harsh contrasts. The communist movement was not even born yet, but divisions and reciprocal excommunications were already widespread. This is understandable, in a way: to such small groups, operating in very difficult conditions, it must have seemed that just one wrong plan, or theoretical stance, could undermine the whole cause. Certainly, fallibilism and openness to critical dialogue were not common currency in these minuscule groups, reduced as they were to a conspiratorial status. In 1850, Marx’s faction clashes with another component of the League, the followers of Willich, who do not understand how future proletarian political power shall mature through «15, 20, 50 years of civil war».1 In Germany, Cologne’s communists are put on trial (about this Marx will write a pamphlet, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne), and the League, divided and weakened, ends up disbanding, as proposed by Marx himself.2 1 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 10 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 626. 2 Ibid., 630.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0_6

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Marx hopes that the revolutionary process will restart with the next economic crisis—which he always feels imminent: in 1852, 1853, and so on—but, while politics is at a standstill, he returns passionately to his studies of economics, which occupy him intensely in 1851. His Economy, already foreseen by Marx as a three volumes work, should have been ready soon. The need to procure money to survive, however, leads Marx to work as a journalist; starting in August 1851, he is the correspondent of a radical American newspaper, the New York Daily Tribune, a daily with a circulation of 200,000 copies which had also a weekly edition. This intense journalistic activity, which lasted for about ten years with variable fortunes, was burdensome for Marx, a distraction from his studies, forcing him to constantly delay the publication of what was to be his decisive work, highly anticipated by friends and comrades. Luckily, Engels was always ready to help, not just financially but also by taking on part of Marx’s work, writing many of the articles which would have been published under the friend’s name (or translating into English those Marx wrote in German). What mattered was that the «Moor» (Marx’s nickname among close friends) had enough time to work at his Economy, which everyone had great expectations about. As a London correspondent, Marx mainly treated British politics and international matters: banks, finance, world markets,3 nationalist struggles, and conflict between European powers (which Marx always viewed with a strongly anti-Russian perspective4 ), the development of British domination in India, and the conflict with China resulting in the Opium Wars. Marx’s assessment of the historical significance of English imperialism in India is crucial to understand an important aspect of his philosophy of history. The problem, Marx writes in a famous article in July 1853, is not to ask «whether the English had a right to conquer India», but rather if English domination is different and preferable compared to other dominations India was, or could have been, subject to (Turks, Persians, Russians). If the question is realistically asked in these terms, then Marx’s answer is that, terrible as it was, English domination should be evaluated positively from a long-term historical perspective. Terrible it certainly was; Marx in fact writes that as long as one’s gaze shifts from the 3 Cf. the essay: Michael Krätke, “Journalisme et science. L’importance des travaux journalistiques de Marx pour la critique de l’économie politique,” Actuel Marxa 42 (2007). 4 Cf. Miklós Molnar, Marx, Engels et la politique internationale (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

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metropole to the colonies, the «inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization», masked by respectability at home, is visible in its stark nakedness. Those who, at home, pose as defenders «Property, Order, Family, and Religion», are the same who confiscate and steal in the colonies, even daring to prohibit the spread of Christianity, when it may be inconvenient to their profit, fostering drugs and prostitution instead. None of this, however, erase the fact that, being subject to the British empire, India develops the necessary conditions for its own emancipation: «England has to fulfil 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».5 Marx, thus, is unabashedly “Occidentalist”: thanks to British domination, India acquired modern means of communication (telegraph and railroads), which are necessary conditions for economic development, but also for a free press and a more advanced culture. The imperialist bourgeoisie, thus, by «dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation», creates the basis for an improvement of the dominated people’s conditions, although, ultimately, the latter shall conquer this improvement by force. The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.

In sum, «the bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world», that is to say the interchange between all men and the technical-scientific domination of nature; but the new world will arrive only when these material conquests are subjected to «the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain».6

5 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 12 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). On these topics see also the anthology: Bruno Maffi, ed. India Russia Cina (Milano: il Saggiatore, 1970). 6 Marx, and Engels, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” 221–22.

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Toward Political Economy: The Grundrisse

In the 1850s, Marx’s work on economics is discontinuous but, with the arrival of the long-awaited economic crisis of 1857, he dives back into his studies. In August Marx writes an Introduction, mostly devoted to methodological issues; in the following months, up until March 1858, he fills a series of notebooks constituting the first systematic draft of his economic work. Here, however, Marx oddly starts with the second and third chapters of his system (Money and Capital ), while leaving an empty space for the first, which should have been devoted to value. These notebooks, published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of Moscow in 1939–41 with the title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, represent only the first of Marx’s many attempts (filling thousands of pages) to give a complete and satisfactory form to his economy. Ten years and numerous intermediate drafts shall be necessary to get from the Grundrisse’s first sketch to the, partial, end result, which is to say the first volume of Capital, published in 1867 (the second and third books will be published by Engels, after Marx’s death and based on his notes). It is not easy to summarize a work of such vastness and complexity in a few pages; since we cannot expound all the details of the various versions preceding Capital, we will just briefly note the steps in the development of Marx’s magnum opus and then move on to present the fundamental theoretical points, following their exposition in Capital. The Introduction to Marx’s economic work—written in August 1857, and which Marx will decide not to publish in 1859, when the first part of his theory will go to the presses with the title A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—offers an important sketch of what he considers the correct scientific methodology to treat economic questions. The most relevant points in the introduction are the following. Firstly, Marx reflects on production in general; he shows that, contrarily to what atomistic bourgeois liberalism thinks, individuals only exist within the context of social production: production without society is a «Robinsonade», and no less absurd is the idea of a «language without individuals who live together and speak to one another».7 The isolated hunters and fishermen posited by Smith and Ricardo do not exist as economic subjects, and likewise the isolated individuals, whose pact should allegedly 7 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 28 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 18.

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create society (Rousseau), do not exist as political subjects. To the contrary, the farther back in history we go, the more we find individuals as non-autonomous parts of a larger whole; only when social relations are most developed the individual can differentiate itself (and thus be mistaken for an ever-present reality). It is certainly important to expound the characteristics of production in general (its social character, the fact that it mediates men’s relations with nature, etc.), but this is no more than a premise to what really matters, which is to say the study of the different, historically determined, forms of production. The error of bourgeois economists lies instead in obscuring this historicity—so as to demonstrate the eternal goodness of existing relations of production—treating specific categories of the capitalist mode of production as if they were intrinsic to production in general. Thus, since every production uses tools, these are defined as the capital which would be present in every productive activity; in this way, the specific difference of capitalism is lost, and with it what Marx most cares for, its historicity. A second error which should be avoided, according to Marx, is that of thinking that production, distribution, exchange, and consumption could be treated as largely independent domains—as done, for example, by John Stuart Mill when, in his Principles of Political Economy, he claimed that production was governed by immutable natural laws, while distribution could be regulated by social will. According to Marx, instead, production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are all «elements of a totality, differences within a unity»; «here is an interaction between the different moments», as it «is the case with any organic unity»,8 and yet Marx, congruently with his historical materialist framework, emphasizes that, even in this reciprocal interaction, production is the hegemonic moment, because the others depend from it more than it depends from them. If, however, we consider distribution not as distribution of products (which is obviously conditioned by production), but rather as distribution of the means of production between social actors, and as distribution of individuals between different kinds of production, then this distribution (which seemingly precedes production) should be considered a facet of production itself. In this broader sense, it remains true that production determines the distribution of products among individuals. Precisely

8 Ibid., 36–37.

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because of this primacy of production, attempts to reform social conditions by intervening on the domain of distribution are deemed futile by Marx: nothing substantial will change, up until the productive structure is modified. Having laid down these premises, Marx confronts directly the problem of political economy’s method. One might think to begin from large observable aggregates (population, total production), but Marx disagrees, for in that way one would start from a confused multiplicity, which would then have to be analyzed in its constitutive elements, and then reconstructed from them. Thus, Marx (well remembering Hegel’s lesson) intends to start from simpler and more abstract categories (value, labor, need) in order to build a concrete totality through their development. For Marx, as it was for Hegel (who began his Logic with the simplest and most abstract category, that of indeterminate being), the concrete can only be a final result: The concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse. In thinking, it therefore appears as a process of summing-up, as a result, not as the starting point, although it is the real starting point, and thus also the starting point of perception and conception.

Science must thus ascend from abstract to concrete, remaining however aware that the conceptual reconstruction of the concrete is not the same as its actual historical development. Here, according to Marx, Hegel equivocated, because he conceived the real as the result of thinking synthesising itself within itself, delving ever deeper into itself and moving by its inner motivation [whereas] the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete […]. This is, however, by no means the process by which the concrete itself originates […]. The real subject remains outside the mind and independent of it.9

The method of scientific exposition, thus, remains essentially the same as Hegel’s, but with a strong emphasis on the distinction between conceptual representation of the object and its real existence outside of the

9 Ibid., 38.

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concept. The additional problem, however, is that of understanding the relation between conceptual categories (from the simplest to the more complex and articulated ones) and actual historical development. In Hegel the issue is complex, since at times there seems to be a parallel between the two (e.g., the first category, being, correspond to the most ancient philosophy, that of Parmenides), but not always. Marx, having analyzed the various aspects of the issue, concludes that economic categories should not be laid out in the order of their historical appearance, but rather according to «their mutual relation in modern bourgeois society—which, Marx adds—is quite the reverse of what appears to be their natural relation or corresponds to the sequence of historical development».10 As it is already clear from this Introduction, the exposition of economic categories in the Grundrisse is, among Marx’s many works, the closest to Hegel in both method and style.11 Marx himself, on January 16, 1858, wrote to Engels that, while occupied in this work, he almost randomly reread Hegel’s Logic, which he found very useful to inform the method of this new study. And he added: If ever the time comes when such work is again possible, I should very much like to write—2 or 3 sheets making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified.12

Nevertheless, throughout the exposition, Marx at times seems to regret having written an exceedingly Hegelian text. In a page where he discusses exchange-value, for example, Marx writes: It will later be necessary, before leaving this question, to correct the idealist manner of presentation which makes it appear as if it were merely a matter of the definitions of concepts and the dialectic of these concepts.13

10 Ibid., 44. 11 A Marx, so to speak, thorn between Hegel and Ricardo, the first prevailing in the

Grundrisse, the second in Capital, is the one described by: Henri Denis, L’Economie de Marx. Histoire d’un échec (Paris: PUF, 1980). 12 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 40 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 249. 13 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 28, 89.

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It seems to me, however, that this is not just a matter of “impressions,” but rather an important substantive issue: if one follows Hegel’s method, then every new category can only spring from the contradictions of the previous ones, which it finally overcomes (e.g., money comes from the contradiction, intrinsic to commodities, between use-value and exchangevalue). A category has its own necessity only because and insofar as it is generated by this process, rather than arbitrarily posited. Arbitrariness can be completely avoided only when science explains the dialectic connection between all categories as a perfect circle. Marx, however, in a way adopts this method (thence the continuous belaboring on his exposition, to make it dialectically perspicuous); but on the other hand he does not fully commit to it, since he sees that certain categories (e.g., the «free» labor that has become commodity) cannot be derived from an immanent logical development, but rather need to be explained through “extrinsic” historical data (e.g., the forcible separation of workers from their primary means of production—land—in the processes of «primitive accumulation»). The «dialectical form of presentation», as Marx shall write in the Urtext of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, is valid «only when it knows its own limits».14 In sum, on the one hand Marx wishes to endow his exposition with conceptual necessity; but on the other hand he also wants to avoid the impression of producing a dialectic of pure concepts. This ambivalence, I believe, introduces incoherencies in Marx’s method, and yet he does not renounce it because he wants to remain faithful to Hegel, deemed to have best developed the scientific (i.e., to say necessary, rather than arbitrary) method of exposition. Many interpreters have insisted on the relation between Marx, as a critic of political economy, and the Hegelian method, some to emphasize it, others to minimize it. Fewer, however, noticed that, from within a Hegelian perspective, there are two problems concerning Marx’s appropriation of this method. The first is that, according to Hegel, what unfolds in scientific exposition is nothing but totality: the whole, and only the whole, is the truth. Marx’s analysis, instead, seems confined to one totality15 (if talking of one totality could even make sense), that 14 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 505. This passage is quoted and commented upon in: Denis, L’Economie de Marx. Histoire d’un échec, 135. 15 Marx speaks of «totality» in the Grundrisse, see e.g.: Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 28, 207–8.

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of the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s exposition begins from the simplest concept within a specific domain (commodity); the totality of society and history (of which the capitalist mode of production is only a part) is not subject to dialectic exposition. Thus, Marx uses Hegel, but is epistemologically very far from the master. Moreover, from a Hegelian point of view there can be no separation between the (so-called) method and the object to which it is supposed to apply; this would be an entirely unacceptable dualism from a dialectic point of view. Dialectic interpreters16 (those who “Hegelianize” Marx) are well aware of this; in fact they draw the consequence that dialectic is not the logic of truth (i.e., for Hegel, of totality) but, much more modestly, the logic of capitalist society. In other words, to say it with Helmut Reichelt, «there is a structural identity between the Marxian concept of capital and the Hegelian concept of Spirit».17 Conflating Hegel and Marx in this way, however, does not do justice to either. Hegel’s speculative dialectic cannot be “sociologized” in this way, and what would we say, then, of Platonic dialectic, which has so many points in common with Hegel’s? As for Marx, he uses Hegel, yes, but from within a different philosophical horizon, so that he could say (in the postscript to Capital ’s second edition) to have «even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him».18 Moreover, hyper-Hegelian interpreters of Marx are also forced to privilege the Grundrisse (a first draft, parts of which are almost shapeless) over Capital, which is the fruit of ten more years of labor. The Grundrisse, writes Reichelt, would be the only work «which, precisely through its form, allows us access to the authentic contents of Marx’s critique of political economy and therefore to the logical structure of Capital».19 In sum, the question of the more or less Hegelian character of Marx’s political economy can be summarized as follows. Undoubtedly, Marx “dialecticize” the categories of political economy, making ample use of Hegel’s conceptual tools (and here the Hegelian interpreters are clearly 16 See for example: Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970). 17 Ibid., 76. 18 Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition,” in Marx and Engels Collected

Works, Volume 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 19. 19 Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx, 76.

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and meritoriously correct). But this historical and philological fact about the text is less important than dialectic interpreters would like, because it does not imply anything about the validity of Marx’s socioeconomic theory, nor about the quality and peculiarity of his “philosophy.” Marx, in fact, uses Hegel to construct a dialectic critique of economics, but without a real connection with dialectic as a speculative theory of truth and reality, simply because that is not Marx’s interest. Dialectic interpreters, thus, are wrong if they ascribe to Marx a Hegelian “philosophy,” if they believe that said philosophy somehow guarantees the correctness of Marx’s result, or if they think to fill, with the help of the Stuttgart philosopher, the gap of that “philosophy” or “dialectic” that Marx never wrote (Engels did, with less than stellar results). So, to conclude, the dialectic character of Marx’s critique is obvious (here dialectic interpreters are certainly right, against the structuralists, positivists, etc.) but, having noted it, all the problems within Marx’s theory remain as open as they were before. But let us go back to the Grundrisse. Marx’s expository method in this first extensive draft is, as we saw, much more Hegelian than that of later texts. Concerning content, the Grundrisse present the first systematic unfolding of the essential elements of Marx’s theory: how money develops from commodities and capital from money. The treatment of capital is itself divided in three large sections: capital’s production process, its circulation, and lastly interest-bearing capital and the transformation of surplus value into profit. The categories corresponding to Marx’s decisive innovations, especially those of labor-power and surplus value, are first developed in this extraordinary sketch of 1857–58. We shall get to the more detailed exposition of the theory, in Capital, soon enough, but first we should observe certain peculiarities in the way Marx presents the critique of economics in the Grundrisse. First of all, in the chapter on money ample space is given, once again, to Proudhonian theories, proposing to overcome exploitation by introducing a sort of money-labor: everybody’s work would be paid with a note attesting how many hours they had labored, and prices would correspondingly be expressed by the hours of labor contained in a given good. With this reform, everyone would be able to acquire exactly as many commodities as the hours they had labored. Marx, for most of his life engaged in a lengthy polemics against Proudhonian socialists (strong in France, and later well represented in the First International as well), brings various arguments to show the absurdity of such proposals. Marx’s thesis, essentially, is that the sphere of circulation, or distribution, cannot be

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reformed without first changing that of production.20 And the demonstration given is quite clear. For the labor-notes system to work—which is to say for nobody to be able to exploit others and for everyone to be able to purchase the needed goods—it would be necessary that the central bank (which emits the notes) established a priori how much labor is socially necessary to produce a certain commodity (otherwise some could free-ride, working many hours, and gaining the corresponding notes, but producing little). Moreover, and most importantly, the central bank should decide how many work-hours should be allocated in each branch of production, so as to make the commodities that the labornotes’ owners will demand on the market. Without these constraints, it could happen that all the owners of notes wanted a commodity produced in a quantity inferior to the demand, which would make it impossible to keep its price, expressed in labor-notes, stable. «To make its money really convertible, production in general would have to be secured, and in such proportions that the needs of the partners in exchange were satisfied»21 ; but this would ultimately mean, according to Marx, that an all-encompassing system of collectivist production should be established, which is exactly what Proudhon would like to avoid by keeping money, albeit reformed as labor-notes, and the system of individual exchanges. For Marx, these ideas, socially, express the petty-bourgeoisie’s individualism; theoretically, moreover, they are self-contradictory because, in order to resolve the «contradictions inherent in the money relationship»,22 it is not sufficient to reform this latter, but rather necessary to thoroughly transform the production from private to collective. Money-relations, in fact, are essentially estranged, because through it individuals’ reciprocal actions become «an alien social power standing above them»23 ; the intrinsic logic of these relations pushes them to become capitalist relations, for their universal nature contradicts any quantitative limit.24 Thus, money becomes capital, in the form of value which valorizes itself. But how does this valorization happen? Not by buying and selling commodities because, if they are exchanged at their 20 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 28, 60. 21 Ibid., 92. 22 Ibid., 61. 23 Ibid., 132. 24 Ibid., 200.

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fair value, there is no space for increase, and we are back at square one. Valorization occurs only through the exchange with that particular commodity which can itself produce new value, which is to say laborpower. «Labour is the yeast thrown into capital, bringing it now into fermentation»25 ; it is the active and fertilizing power which generates new value by its intercourse with the passive power of capital. Marx’s canonical thesis is that, in the productive process, capital only reconstitutes its own value, while only labor-power creates a surplus. In these pages from the Grundrisse,26 however, Marx almost seems to be saying that value is created not by labor alone, but rather from the reciprocal fertilization of labor and capital. While the Grundrisse discuss categories which shall later be developed in Capital (labor-power, absolute and relative surplus value, accumulation, overproduction crises), it also includes issue that will not reappear in subsequent texts. Firstly, there is the broad treatment devoted to the Forms Preceding Capitalist Production,27 and, moreover, the reflections about machines and technical-scientific progress, which allegedly undermine the very bases of bourgeois production. These pages have been much appreciated and commented, in Italy, by “operaist ” groups (beginning with Raniero Panzieri, the first to publish them, on “Quaderni rossi,” with the title Fragment on machines 28 ), but they seem to express opinions Marx briefly experimented with, without reprising them in his subsequent, ample, re-elaborations. Essentially Marx’s thesis (very well taken as a historical prediction) is that, with the development of science and technology, production will occur through vast automatized systems and the worker will become an «overseer and regulator». This means, according to Marx, that the wealth produced will depend more and more «upon the general level of development of science and the progress of technology», rather than by the work-hours employed to govern the machinery or to make and put it to work (because it will obviously be

25 Ibid., 224. 26 Cf. especially: Ibid., 236–37. Concerning these pages see also: Denis, L’Economie de

Marx. Histoire d’un échec, 81 ff. (Le problème de la productivité du capital). 27 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 28, 399–439. 28 More recently, these pages from Grundrisse have been commented by: Antonio Negri,

Marx Beyond Marx (New York: Autonomedia, 1991).

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a production of machines by other machines).29 We will thus end up in a situation where «labour in its immediate form has ceased to be the great source of wealth», and thus where «labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure». «The theft of alien labour time» becomes, visà-vis the newfound possibilities, a miserable anachronism and therefore, Marx concludes unexpectedly, «production based upon exchange value collapses», poverty and antagonism are substituted by «free development of individualities» and «the reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, to which then corresponds the artistic, scientific, etc., development of individuals, made possible by the time thus set free and the means produced for all of them».30 This is undoubtedly an impressive and extraordinary page from Marx; we ought to ask, though, whether it is coherent, both internally and with the other Marxian arguments. The underlying problem is that if we assume—as Marx always claimed, before and after—that labor is the sole source of value, then it does not matter if its contribution is minimal, relative to that of the machinery; valuebased production can continue even in these changed conditions. Marx, incidentally, does not say that science becomes the source of value, but rather of «wealth». What, then, do we have to understand by this? If by wealth we mean exchange-value, then Marx is simply denying what he has always claimed elsewhere. If, instead, we mean use-values, the assertion is true enough, but it does not have the revolutionary implications implied by Marx. Should we conclude, then, that the famous Fragment on Machines is not only an extraordinary anticipatory text but also, in a sense, a theoretical garble? Concluding this part of his reasoning, Marx reiterates that The development of fixed capital shows the degree to which society’s general science, knowledge, has become an immediate productive force, and hence the degree to which the conditions of the social life process itself have been brought under the control of the general intellect and remoulded according to it.

In any case, besides the interest they elicited, what are these reflections actually about? If Marx means to say that productive power is no longer the labor directly provided by one or another worker, but the 29 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29, 90–91. 30 Ibid., 91.

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general social knowledge, the general intellect, the whole scientific intelligence available to society, then the thesis is surely interesting but, again, highly ambiguous. Does general social knowledge produce use-value or exchange-value? Depending on the chosen answer, very different consequences follow. Actually, Marx’s motivation for these reflections seems to be a simple consideration: If we get to a point of fully, or almost fully, automated production, what would it mean to measure value by labor? In the end, the meaning of this pages can be thusly summarized: if and when labor were no longer necessary, it would not be machines or science to create value, but rather the very concept of value would lose meaning, for it is connected to a world in which goods are produced through physical or mental effort. Thus, different principles would govern the distribution of goods. In this form, the argument is faultless, but of relatively little interest, since it represents a purely mental experiment about what might happen in a world without labor, which does not seem forthcoming. In the Spring of 1858, Marx interrupts the work on the Grundrisse and begins looking for a publisher; thanks to Lassalle’s help, he reaches an agreement with the Berliner publisher Franz Duncker, but much more work will be needed to achieve a publishable text. In August 1858, thus, Marx goes back to work and produces a new and much shorter text (less than a hundred pages), which shall be published only in 1941 as the “first version” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Having abandoned this text as well, between the last part of 1858 and January 1859, Marx concludes the work that will be published in June with the aforementioned title. Here, however, Marx must settle for a much less ambitious work than the one he was planning. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in fact, is composed of only two chapters, respectively, devoted to commodity and money («I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff»,31 Marx writes to Engels), while the third and most important, about capital, should have been separately published later. Differently from the Grundrisse, however, the Critique of Political Economy already presents, in its two chapters, an exposition much closer to the definitive one Marx will provide in Capital. The preface of Marx’s magnum opus, in fact, will present the work as the continuation of the Critique of Political Economy, the contents of which are reprised in the first section of Capital (with the exception of the parts

31 Marx and Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 40, 369.

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devoted to the history of theories). So, a third chapter, treating capital, should have soon been published, but despite working tirelessly in 1861 and 1862, Marx failed to produce anything publishable. Deprived of its decisive part, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy did not elicit any particular reaction (except disappointment, as in the case of Liebknecht) and was mostly ignored (or, in the loving words of Jenny, it was boycotted by the conspiracy of silence).32 Marx’s difficulties in expounding the nucleus of his theory were evidently great, and we also have to consider the many adversities of a life plagued not only by continuous polemics and bitter disputes (like those against Karl Vogt),33 but also by recurring problems with money and health. The elaboration of his “system” was for Marx an exhausting work, the steps of which we may summarize in the following way.34 In 1857–58, Marx outlines, with the Grundrisse, a first comprehensive but rough sketch; in 1859, with A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he publishes a finished version of the first two chapters only, concerning commodities and money. In 1861–63, Marx produces a whole second draft, of which we have 21 notebooks; the first ones continue the work of Critique of Political Economy, treating the passage from money to capital and surplus value; those from 6 to 15 include a very extensive discussion of the history of political economy, which will be published by Karl Kautsky (in three volumes, between 1905 and 1910) with the title Theories of Surplus Value.35 Between 1863 and 1865, Marx elaborates a new long manuscript, constituting the third draft of his system. Finally, in January 1866, Marx begins the fourth rewriting of his critique of economics; in the Spring of 1867 he finishes the first volume of Capital (the only completed part of this fourth version) and personally brings it from London to Hamburg, to Meissner, who publishes it in a thousand copies in September 1867.36 32 David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1973), 310. 33 Ibid., 311 ff. 34 On this topic cf. Enrique Dussel, “The Four Drafts of Capital: Toward a New Interpretation of the Dialectical Thought of Marx,” Rethinking Marxism 13, no. 1 (2001). 35 The manuscripts of 1861–63 and 1863–65 are published in the second edition of the MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe), volumes 3.1–3.6 and 4.1–4.3. In English, the 1861–63 manuscripts can be found in volumes 30–34 of the Marx & Engels Collected Works. 36 Cf. McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, 339 ff.

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6.3 The Fundamental Concepts of Critique: Commodity and Value, Money and Capital, Labor-Power and Surplus Value Just like the Critique of Political Economy, Capital also opens with an analysis of commodities. In a society dominated by the capitalist mode of production, wealth appears first of all as «immense accumulation of commodities». But this is not the reason for Marx choosing commodities as his starting point. Rather, we begin with commodities because, being the elemental economic particles of capitalist society, they represent the contradictory unity (use and exchange-value) from which the whole system of capitalist categories can unfold.37 The analysis of commodities and of the exchange process was one of the most tormented parts of Capital, which Marx deeply modified between the first German edition of 1867 and the second of 1873,38 and which he further corrected while revising the French translation by Roy (published in installments between 1872 and 1875). Let us then try to clarify the main points of the argument, which Marx himself found so difficult to formulate. If asked what is a commodity, today we would answer that it is a more or less useful or desirable item which is put on sale at a certain price. But Marx does not give this answer, which might seem obvious, but takes instead a much longer and circuitous route, only at the end of it saying that commodities have a price. This way of proceeding is quite curious, for it would seem to us that something is a commodity precisely insofar as it has a price. Why, then, is Marx’s exposition so different from what would seem simpler and more immediate to us? The answer is simple: if Marx started from “commodity” as “something having a price,” he would presuppose from the beginning the concept of price and therefore money; these could then appear as quasi-natural categories, not properly explained in their genetic process. What interests Marx, differentiating him from bourgeois economists (and also from classical ones, even though he highly appreciates them), is first of all the understanding of the reasons why there are value relations, money, and 37 Cf. Roberto Fineschi, Ripartire da Marx (Napoli: La Città del Sole, 2001), 44–45. 38 On this issue, cf. Cristina Pennavaja, ed. L’analisi della forma valore (Roma-Bari:

Laterza, 1976). The book translates and comments upon the 1867 version of the chapter Commodities and money and the appendix The form of value, which Marx had added to the first edition, later merging the two texts in the second German edition of 1873.

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prices—with the assumption, historically well grounded, that “value” is only one among the possible principles to organize social production and division of labor. Marx, thus, wants to do what other economists did not even attempt: deducing money and price (or rather, the money-form and the price-form) starting from a situation that does not presuppose them yet; he wants to show, that is, the categorial, not historical, conditions of their genesis. Therefore, even if Marx avowedly begins with commodities, it seems more apt for us to start from the considerations he devotes to the general ways of structuring social production. The point is, in sum, to reason back toward the premises, to see why the product of labor becomes a commodity, and then how money develops from commodities, and capital from money (again, keeping in mind we are expounding a logical development, not a historical-empirical one). The truly fundamental starting point (the true starting point, we might say, regardless of the explicit title of this first section) is that, according to Marx, human production is always also social production: even within the smallest unit (e.g., in a patriarchal self-sufficient family of peasants) it is necessary that the available labor time (i.e., the sum of the labor time of all members of the family) be divided among the various activities (farming, animal husbandry, hunting, domestic labor, etc.) and that the products are apportioned among the members of the family, each needing to eat, clothe themselves, etc. But production, which again is always social, can be organized according to two fundamental modalities: either, as in the aforementioned example, with a partition of available labor time among various activities (in our example, dictated by the pater familias; but in an association of free men it would be democratically established by all); or rather through an a posteriori coordination, where individuals independently produce one or more kinds of goods, and then exchange them so as to achieve satisfaction of their own and others’ needs. Where this is the case, i.e., when goods are produced by private labors without a common plan, everyone’s needs can be satisfied only through exchange; only in this condition, thus, labor’s products become commodities. Therefore, in Marx’s reasoning, commodities are not a starting point, but rather a first conclusion, derived from the social character of production. To satisfy their needs, independent producers must exchange their products with others; but for this to be possible the product, now understood as a commodity, must have not only a use-value (for nobody would accept to exchange with a useless thing), but also an exchange-value,

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which is to say it must be commensurable with other items according to some determinate proportion—for example: 1 pair of shoes = 20 wooden planks). Just like the value of a pair of shoes can be expressed in wooden planks, so it can be expressed by any other commodity (1 pair of shoes = 20 wooden planks, or 50 liters of milk, or 1/2 leather coat, or 1 chair, etc.); and likewise, any commodity can be the measure or all the others. Through subsequent exchanges, some commodities better suited to perform this function will be selected; these end up being precious metals, due to their physical characteristics, and thus gold and silver become measures of every other value and, once transformed into minted coins, they become money, expressing the price of all commodities. Marx’s analysis, thus, has two aspects, one qualitative and the other quantitative. As for the former, Marx underlines that value is not an attribute of things; the value-form taken by commodities depends on their being produced according to a specific social modality—which is to say that commodities are the fruits of private labors, independently performed by producers, without planning in advance. Value and commodities exist insofar as production is socially structured in an ex post way or, as we might say somewhat paradoxically, in a condition of uncoordinated coordination. Fetishism would be that attitude according to which commodities are endowed with value as if it belonged to them by nature, rather than because of the specific modality of their production. Commodity fetishism, thus, considers a specific modality of social production (based on ex post coordination) as if it were natural, or the only possible one. In this coordination modality, products must take on a value-form, because an exchange must be possible (otherwise needs could not be satisfied). The products’ value-form expresses the fact that the various individual labors (producing exchangeable commodities) are made comparable and commensurable, they are reduced to the common quality they all share, which is to say to be the expenditure of human labor-power, abstract human labor. Commodities can be exchanged because they are comparable as products of abstract human labor, measured by a value which is itself expressed through money. In Marx’s words: Where labour is communal, the relations of men in their social production do not manifest themselves as “values” of “things”. Exchange of products as commodities is a certain method of exchanging labour, and [the form]

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of the dependence of the labour of each upon the labour of the others, a certain mode of social labour or social production.39

Men, insofar as they produce socially but without an ex ante coordination, coordinate their labors after the fact, by exchanging commodities with a value; thus their labors must be made equal as simple manifestations of abstract human labor. But (and with this we get to the quantitative aspect), how do we establish the relative values according to which commodities are exchanged? Why is a pair of shoes worth 50 liters of milk rather than 30? Marx’s answer is clear although, as we shall see, not without problems: to be commensurable commodities must have something in common; and if we abstract from their different use-values (which differentiate one commodity from another), their only common quality is to be products of labor, or rather abstract human labor. Commodities’ relative values, thus, will be determined by the quantity of labor necessary to their production, and since the quantity of labor is measured in time, values shall be determined by the labor time that is socially necessary for each commodity’s production. Why socially necessary? Because, empirically, it can happen that a slow or incapable producer takes more time than a skilled and quick one to make the same object, say a chair. It would make no sense to say that an inefficiently produced chair is worth more, and thus Marx makes value equal to the average labor time which is needed to produce a given good, with the average capacities and techniques available in a given society at a given time. «The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other».40 Abstract human labor, thus, is both substance and measure of exchange-value; the various concrete human labors, instead, are the source of use-values, of wealth understood not as value and money but as the possibility to satisfy human needs. Labor, however, is not the only source of use-values or material wealth, which is produced by both labor and nature. Concerning wealth Marx writes, quoting William Petty, that «labour is its father and the earth

39 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 32 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 316–17. 40 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 49–50.

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its mother».41 Labor is thus, together with nature, the source of every material wealth; on its own, as abstract human labor, it is the source of exchange-value. Some things may have great use-value but no exchangevalue, like clean air or spring water; but there cannot be exchange-values without use-value (for if something had no use, no one would want it and it would not be worth anything). The value of a commodity is thus given by the socially necessary labor it contains; but «socially necessary» does not just mean labor of average efficiency. There is another aspect too, that some interpreters have deemed, perhaps with some exaggeration, equally important. Just like the extra labor time expended by inefficient producers does not add any value, in the same way the overall labor spent to produce a commodity in excess of the socially needed quantity does not create value.42 For this reason, a recent interpret claimed that value is determined by: 1. the working-time which it is necessary to employ in the normal technical conditions of a given productive sector; 2. the working time which proves socially necessary for the satisfaction of the demand that this commodity finds in the market.43 Summarizing the argument, Marx writes: It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour time.44

41 Ibid., 53. 42 Ibid., 117. 43 Guido Carandini, Un altro Marx: lo scienziato liberato dall’utopia (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005), 107. From the same author see also: Guido Carandini, Lavoro e capitale nella teoria di Marx (Milano: Mondadori, 1979). Fineschi also insists on the «socially necessary» labor, since he, like Carandini, deems it crucial to confront the question of transforming values into prices, about which we shall say more later; cf. Fineschi, Ripartire da Marx, 59, 275 ff. 44 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 104.

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With this, we have gone from the general concept of social production to the concepts of exchange and commodities, observing that, since a commodity unifies use-value and exchange-value, it does thereby split itself into commodity and money. Money, in turn, presents a series of successive determinations: firstly, it measures values and therefore represents the yardstick of prices (although as Marx is quick to precise, since price is distinct from value, there can be a «quantitative incongruity»45 between the two, which can thus diverge). But commodities have a price in order to be exchanged; an exchange that is necessary for the satisfaction of social needs. Money becomes thus a medium of circulation: it allows individuals to sell their commodities and to purchase what they need with the money gained—this is the Commodity-Money-Commodity (c-m-c) movement—rather than rely on barter which directly exchanges product with product. Money is a medium of circulation because it allows commodities to pass from one to another indirectly, through its mediation: first commodities are transformed into money, and the money is then transformed into a different commodity. This is what Marx calls the process of the circulation of commodities. Money, however, can also perform other functions: it can leave circulation and be accumulated as a reserve, a treasure (a function of precious metals since time immemorial), and insofar as it becomes an object of accumulation, money is characterized by its limitlessness. Since the quantity of money has no intrinsic bound, there may be hoarders who just wish to always have more. But how can the money-treasury be increased? Perhaps only through avarice, trying to sell much without buying anything? Actually, next to the c-m-c movement we just examined, we can also see, from another perspective, a different movement m-c-m. Money is used to acquire a commodity, which is then resold and with that transformed back into money. Now, obviously this movement would make no sense if, at the end, the owner had the same money as before; therefore, it is necessary that instead of m-c-m we have m-c-m’, were m’ is an amount of money larger than m. In the m-c-m’ movement, money is not used as a means to obtain the commodity one needs, but rather exchanged in order to be increased; money, thus, becomes value that valorizes itself, which is to say capital. And this is how, from the category of money, we get to that of capital. The one who puts this valorization

45 Ibid., 112.

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process in motion is the capitalist, which is to say that economic actor whose goal is not to achieve the satisfaction of needs or a certain level of wealth, but rather the «appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract». The capitalist’s end is neither use-value nor an isolated gain, rather: «the restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at»46 ; […] The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.47

The same attitude which appeared manic in the hoarder becomes ironclad rationality in the capitalist. The capitalist incarnates an insatiable desire for gain, the auri sacra fames, accumulation as an unstoppable process or, as Hegel would have said, a bad infinity, for it is always restless and never satisfied. Defining capital in this way, however, poses two problems which Marx has to provide an answer to. (1) How is it possible that the exchange process results in an increase of value, if it is true that the exchange is always between equivalent quantities? (2) Why there should be a social actor (the capitalist) who, rather than aiming to a determinate result, must always try to conquer a greater abstract wealth? How can this form of unlimited economy—which the ancients conceived as pathological, calling it chrematistics—become the normal form of economic activity in modern society? The answer to the first question is the focal center of Marx’s theory, which we shall now summarize in its essential points. With regard to the second issue, the answer is provided, for example, in a notable passage of volume I: Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he [the capitalist] ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable.

46 Ibid., 164. 47 Ibid., 163.

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As such, the capitalist is forced to accumulate more and more because the development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.48

Marx’s answer, however, is not entirely univocal because while unlimited accumulation seems inscribed in the logic of capital, it also appears to derive from market competition, which places the capitalist into the stark alternative between growing and perishing.49 But let us now go back to the central problem, already much belabored by classical economics, which is to say how the exchange process (again, by definition occurring between equivalent quantities) can generate a surplus value. Marx’s path toward the answer is quite circuitous. Historically, in fact, capital appears first in what Marx calls «antediluvian» forms of commercial and usury capital.50 Here capital valorizes itself through commerce (consider, for example, the great commercial expeditions toward Indies and the New World)51 and through money-lending (think of the development of banks in Italian comuni). But Marx’s thesis is that these “antediluvian” forms must be put aside, to focus instead on the valorization mechanism of fully developed modern capitalism. There we would see that surplus value cannot derive from exchanges. In fact, if the exchanged quantities are equal, as they normally are, there can

48 Ibid., 588. 49 Jon Elster also emphasizes how Marx has two possible explanations of the capitalistic

impulse to invest and accumulate, both however fat from the Weberian one, based on the inner-worldly asceticism of Protestant ethics. According to Elster, the best explanation is that «Capitalists are forced to invest by competition»: Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 72. 50 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 174. 51 These accumulation processes, based largely on transoceanic commerce and colonial

violence, are treated by Marx in the last chapters of the first volume: Ibid., 737 ff. These processes, however, are for Marx just an initial springboard for the true capitalism, which is the industrial one. A different position on this point had been developed, in history and social theory, by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein.

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be no added value; but even if non-equivalent goods are exchanged—as claimed by those who equate commerce with fraud52 —the values change hands, but their sum total remains the same, and thus again there is no surplus at the level of the whole society (there can only be individuals becoming wealthier, counterbalanced by others becoming poorer, but no system-wide increase in value). How, then, is the m-c-m’ movement possible? It is possible, Marx answers, only on the condition that the owner of money, who desire to increment it, is «so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity, whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value»,53 which is to say a commodity the consumption of which would at once create value. This commodity does in fact exist, according to Marx, and it is nothing but labor-power, the human capacity to labor, or according to Marx’s definition, «the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use value of any description».54 Labor-power is unique among commodities, for it is the only one which produces value (which, as we just saw, is nothing but embodied labor). But what are the conditions allowing the capitalist to find this peculiar commodity on the market? First we have juridical conditions: the institution of the employment contract, freely agreed between a buyer, who has capital, and a seller, who has laborpower, must be codified. This juridical construct must supplant older forms of controlling labor, like slavery and serfdom, which may survive in the capitalist age, but only in diminishing and residual form. Secondly, it is necessary for a social figure to correspond to the juridical one, which is to say that a mass of individuals, ready to sell their labor capacity as a commodity, must present itself on the stage of society. It is not obvious that this would happen, because in pre-capitalist societies, with a primarily agrarian economy, there are autonomous peasants producing for their own subsistence, serfs producing for themselves and for the landlord, artisans who sell their products, but no great masses selling their labor. These masses are generated when the members of laborious classes

52 Here Marx cites Benjamin Franklin, «war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating»: Ibid., 174. 53 Ibid., 177. 54 Ibid.

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lose their capacity to produce autonomously, due to historical processes Marx illustrates in the penultimate part of the first volume (devoted to the «so-called primitive accumulation»), which include both the breakage of ancient serfdom55 and the separation of peasants from land through enclosures, privatization, and expropriation. The free laborers going on the market, according to Marx, are free in a double sense: firstly because they are not, like the slave or serf, property of someone else; secondly because they are separated from the means of production, thus must sell their labor to ensure their subsistence. This is thus a freedom which is at once constriction. If, in modern society, the majority of individuals is separated from the means of production (a separation which, according to Marx, is continuously increasing with capitalist development56 ), and if it is not in the position to exercise an autonomous profession, then we can say that this majority is forced to sell their labor-power, for that is its only way to survive. The proletarian is «obliged»57 to sell in order to survive, while capitalists are forced to buy if they want to valorize their capital, but their survival is not at stake. Thus, a stark asymmetry divides the subjects, juridically equal as they are, agreeing to the free contract regulating the buying and selling of labor-power. The capitalist acquires labor-power, raw materials, and the tools of production and then combines them in the productive process to create a commodity to be sold on the market. From this sale, capitalists must obtain a higher value than what they had put up in advance; otherwise, the whole process would be meaningless. But how is this possible, if we assume that commodities are sold at their proper value, and thus all exchanges are between equivalent quantities? Marx answers with the theory of surplus value, which is one of the most original aspects of his thought. The value of commodities is given by the quantity of socially necessary labor they contain—which is thus the sum total of all the hours labored by the worker and of those of past labor, used to produce raw materials and tools of production (in proportion to what is consumed to produce each item). The output’s value is thus given by the present and past labor it contains; but what is the value of the input? Concerning raw materials and tools of production, the value is always the same: the

55 Ibid., 707. 56 Ibid., 705. 57 Ibid., 179.

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labor they contain. There is no difference between input and output, and thus this cannot be the source of surplus value. But things are different, according to Marx, with regard to labor-power: the product’s value is given by the hours of labor it contains, but what is instead the value of the labor-power bought by the capitalist? The answer is that, as for other commodities, the value of labor-power is given by the labor which is socially necessary for its production. It is not entirely clear what this means for the case of labor-power; but Marx makes the point explicit by stating that the necessary labor in this case is simply that which is contained in the means of subsistence that labor-power utilizes and consumes to reproduce itself (not just the reproduction of current workers, but also that of their children, the future laborers). In this case, thus, input and output «are two totally different things»58 : the product’s value is given by the labor time it contains, while the value of labor-power depends not on the labor time it provides, but only on the costs of its reproduction. Once, historically, labor’s productivity reaches a certain level, it can happen that the labor contained in the goods that are necessary to reproduce labor-power is lower than the labor-hours the worker can provide in an equivalent amount of time. Precisely this difference is the source of all surplus value, which is to say the added value obtained at the end of the production process. If a person’s working day was barely sufficient to produce their subsistence, there could be no surplus value nor capitalism—nor, more generally, dominant classes living of the labor of others. Surplus and capitalism become possible once labor’s productivity surpasses this minimum. Then the value of labor-power becomes lower than the value generated by its productive use, and thus the capitalist’s gain is possible without violating the assumption of equal exchanges. Every commodity is exchanged at its value, but the capitalist is still able to reap a surplus. This means that even though workers are paid the value of their labor-power, they furnish the capitalist a certain quantity of unpaid labor (surplus labor); a quantity which is precisely the difference between the labor time necessary to produce a day’s worth of subsistence and the labor time workers provide in the same day. Marx calls the relation between necessary and surplus labor “rate of surplus value,” or “rate of exploitation” (so that, if subsistence means

58 Ibid., 203.

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contains 4 hours of labor, and the worker works 8, the surplus labor is 4 hours and the rate of surplus value is 100%). Capitalists, who do not know Marx’s theory (and would not accept it if they did), focus instead on the rate of profit; thus, if a capitalist invested 60 unit of constant capital (raw materials and tools), 40 in variable capital (acquiring labor-power), and ended up with a product worth 140, the rate of exploitation is 100% while the rate of profit would be 40%. Capitalists calculate their profit on the whole invested capital, but for Marx the only part producing the gain is variable capital, because the other inputs do nothing but transfer their value to the final product, with no increase (e.g., if raw materials cost X numbers of labor-hours, these will be included in the final product’s value). In this way, according to Marx, a paradoxical consequence occurs: equal exchange coexists with the appropriation of unpaid labor, and thus this situation may be defined as «exploitation»,59 even though there is no direct coercion to work for free, as it instead occurs in slavery and serfdom. The worker works for free, but under the form of an equal exchange, where every commodity is paid at its exact value. For this reasoning to work, on the other hand, it is essential to clearly establish what the exchanged object is: the capitalist does not generically buy labor, much the less a determined quantity of labor, but rather the labor capacity of the worker. Buying it, the capitalist acquires the right to use it, and the use-value of productive capacity is to produce value, exchange-value. But what are the limits of this use, given that this particular commodity is attached to a human being, and it cannot be subject to the ius utendi et abutendi (right to use and dispose of) applied to other commodities? Certainly, the use of labor-power must be compatible with the survival and reproduction of the worker, but it knows no other limit than this. The capitalist, according to Marx, bought the use of the workers, thus their working day, but how to establish the length of this day? In itself, the working day is not a constant but a variable quantity60 ; the capitalist has the right to demand longer hours just like the worker has the right to affirm certain limits. Thus, Marx concludes, between equal rights force shall decide, and in fact the fight about the maximum length of the working day, to be established by law, is one of the main fronts in the class struggle.

59 Ibid., 226. 60 Ibid., 240.

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This length, thus, is politically established; capitalists try to lengthen the working day, so as to increase surplus labor (the time workers labor after having produced the equivalent of their means of subsistence; this is the process Marx calls extraction of absolute surplus value), workers try to reduce it, for their lives are at stake. But, for Marx’s argument, it is essential that this length is economically indeterminate. In fact, if the capitalist did not buy labor-power, but rather a certain number of labor-hours, Marx could no longer explain the difference between the value of the inputs and outputs of the production process. This difference is possible only insofar as labor-power is paid at its value (i.e., its cost of production/maintenance) while the produced commodity’s value is measured in the hours of labor it contains.

6.4 Value and Exploitation: Two Theories and Many Problems Brilliant as it was, and despite being the fruit of very ample studies and a notable theoretical effort, Marx’s theory of value and exploitation includes many unresolved problems, which should be observed from a wider perspective than the strictly mathematical one taken up by most scholars discussing the transformation of values into prices. In my opinion, even if this specific question did not exist, Marx’s theory would still have many problems. Some concern the quantitative theory, according to which commodities’ relative values depend on the labor socially necessary for their production. Marx’s justification for this thesis is weak, for he merely asserts that commodities are commensurable and that their commensurability is due to the only quality they have in common, which is to say being products of abstract human labor. Therefore, the exchange ratio between commodities can only derive from the quantity of labor they contain. But Marx’s argument has been aptly criticized, classically by Böhm Bawerk, because commodities also have another quality in common: their utility. On the other hand, we might think, Marx was not especially interested in “demonstrating” his labor theory of value, because it seemed to him already established by the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo. Be as it may, when Marx tries to defend the theory, he does not do it very well. An example is the well-known letter to Kugelmann, where Marx asserts that only fools can «chatter about the need to prove the concept of value», because even a child would understand

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that, if a nation stopped working, it would soon starve.61 But this argument is even weaker than the previous one, because it only shows that labor (together with nature, as Marx always reminds us) produces material wealth, the use-values enjoyed by people, but this does not imply that labor is also the only source of exchange-value. On the other hand, however, Böhm Bawerk is himself wrong when he asserts, in the famous Karl Marx and the Close of His System (devoted to criticize the posthumous third volume of Capital ) that even in Smith and Ricardo one can find «no shadow of proof» for the labor theory of value.62 To the contrary, Smith and then Ricardo both claim that, assuming a situation in which independent producers exchange the products of their labor, «the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects, seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another»63 ; in sum, if the hypothetical producer, to create a wicker basket, used 4 hours of work, they will never exchange it for a clay bowl that only takes 2, because otherwise they would be better off producing it by themselves. Exchange relations between rational actors, therefore, will originally be regulated by the labor cost; with the necessary adjustments, Smith notes, due to the fact that some labors require more skill, or effort, and thus will be valued more than the average labor. But why are products valued based on the labor used to make them? Smith is ready to answer: one wants to be paid based on the labor provided because laboring is a sacrifice64 (of rest, freedom, or happiness), a sacrifice one would not endeavor without an appropriate reward. The argument is flawless, provided of course labor is considered a disutility, that workers suffer only in order to procure what they need; abstracting, that is, from creative labors whose execution brings pleasure, the fruits of which might then be given away for free. In these terms, the labor theory of value is very rational, if perhaps not equally generalizable.

61 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 43 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 68. 62 Eugene von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and The Close of His System (New York: Prism Key Press, 2011), 47. 63 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Petersfield: Harriman House, 2007), 31. 64 Ibid., 22.

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Smith thus provides an excellent argument to explain why relative values are regulated by contained labor. Smith’s explanation is however unacceptable for Marx. First of all, according to Marx Smith’s arguments, and unfortunately those of Ricardo as well,65 fall into the usual bourgeois anachronism, in that Robinsonade which projects the category of value backwards, as if it belonged to natural or primitive humanity (this is a weak objection, because in this context the backward projection is clearly a mental experiment). Secondly, Marx rejects, with equal hostility, Smith’s theory of labor creating value insofar as it represents the real price of making things, which is to say the sacrifice they cost.66 This argument, in fact, could pave the way for the claim that capitalists also perform a sacrifice, by investing their capital and abstaining from consumption, and therefore, they would be equally deserving of a reward.67 By refusing Smith’s and Ricardo’s “Robinsonades,” however, Marx renounces a good argument in support of the labor theory of value, and most importantly the argument according to which the theory is not merely an external description, but explains the consciousness of the involved actors, who would be aware of exchanging on the basis of the contained labor. Marx rejects this line of reasoning because it could lead to an undesired result. That would be Smith’s conclusion according to which the law of value is valid only in an imaginary Paradise Lost,68 where «the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer»,69 but not when labor becomes a commodity and capitalists insert themselves between the producer and the final consumer, pretending (more or less legitimately) to gain a profit from having risked their capital. Within Smith’s framework, the problem is the following: if commodities are exchanged at their values, and if we have lost paradise, and labor itself has become a commodity,

65 Cf. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 300; Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 87. 66 Marco Lippi claims that in Marx «labor as a real cost is liberated from the subjective element it has in Smith»: Marco Lippi, Marx. Il valore come costo sociale reale (Milano: Etas Libri, 1976), 10. We ought to ask, however, whether this “liberation” might not be the same as a weakening of Smith’s labor theory of value, which thus ends up losing its persuasiveness. 67 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 28, 529–33. 68 Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One,” 299. 69 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 31.

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how can the capitalist’s profit be explained? Are the labor theory of value and profit perhaps mutually incompatible?70 There may be various ways to explain profit compatibly with the labor theory of value: one can say that profit is itself the reward for a labor (organizing and directing), but this solution is discarded by Smith because profit is proportional to the invested capital, not to the activity performed by its owner.71 Otherwise, again following Smith, one may claim that there is profit either because part of its product is not paid to labor, or because capital is also a productive factor, different from labor and worthy of reward. Accepting Claudio Napoleoni’s interpretation, we can say that Smith holds, contradictorily, both positions: the one deriving profit from underpayment and the one seeing profit as the reward of capital, understood as an autonomous source of exchange-value.72 In both cases, the labor theory of value is disproven, because either labor has not been paid at its value, or capital is an autonomous source of value. Marx, instead, solves the problem by explaining that the value of labor-power (= labor contained in the means of subsistence), paid by the capitalist to the worker, is one thing and another the value of the product, given by the labor-hours provided to produce it. The difference between the two quantities is the capitalist’s profit. But to achieve this result Marx introduces the concept of «the value of labour power»,73 which invites new problems. The first is that this value (differently from those of other commodities, resulting from the contained labor) is not determinable with certainty, not before knowing the price, because what is necessary to subsistence is contingently established and it contains, Marx says,

70 As well explained by Dobb, «the problem for Marx was not to prove the existence of

surplus value and exploitation by means of a theory of value: it was, indeed, to reconcile the existence of surplus value with the reign of market competition and of exchange of value equivalents»: Maurice Dobb, “Introduction,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 12. 71 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 31–32. Approved by Marx: Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 30 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 387. 72 Claudio Napoleoni, Il valore (Milano: ISEDI, 1976), 27–28. From the same authors see also: Claudio Napoleoni, Smith Ricardo Marx (Torino: Boringhieri, 1973). 73 Consequently, Marx consider the concept of «value of labour» as «an irrational expression for the value of labour power», always trying to demolish it and showcase its incoherence: Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 539.

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«a historical and moral element».74 This means that first we observe what normal subsistence means in a given historical time, and then we proclaim that to be the value of labor-power.75 But this implies that, actually, value is derived from price, not vice versa; it is therefore evident that the notion of the labor-power’s value is largely undone (whereas wages, above the lower bound of survival, shall perhaps be explained by the power relations contingently existing between social classes). Another problem concerns the concept of the labor time necessary to produce labor-power. Evidently, to produce labor-power, the labor expended to produce the means of subsistence (food, clothes, housing, heating, etc.) is not sufficient; we also need the labor directly employed to obtain and prepare food, clean clothes, perform other activities linked to reproduction and child-rearing (about all this, feminist thought has had much to say). To produce laboring capacity, thus, all this labor is necessary, which is more than, and different from, the labor used to produce the goods consumed by workers. But then, why only the latter should count in determining the labor-power’s value?76 Truly, Marx partially confronts this problem by claiming, in the reply to Bailey’s objections against Ricardo, that the reproduction of labor-power can be compared to that of animals (where the main cost is in the food consumed), and that just like animals are not laboring when they feed, so humans acts of consumption are not labor either. There still remain the labor of education, Marx says, but it «hardly arises in relation to unskilled labour»,77 and therefore, everything can ultimately be reduced to the means of subsistence. For sure, this is one of Marx’s least convincing passages,78 but not even this is the real problem. 74 Ibid., 181. 75 As it has been correctly observed, in fact, «if the value of labour power is defined in

terms of the level of real wages», then Marx’s theory would «degenerate into a tautology»: Michael Charles Howard, and John Edward King, The Political Economy of Marx (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 120–21. 76 This problem is clearly raised by: Denis, L’Economie de Marx. Histoire d’un échec, 167, 182. More broadly, the issue is developed in the extremely well documented: Tran Hai-Hac, Relire “Le Capital” (Lausanne: Page deux, 2003), 221–38. The author arrives to the conclusion that labor-power cannot be considered a commodity with its own value, but can only be a fictitious commodity in the sense of Karl Polanyi. 77 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 32, 335. 78 An additional difficulty is noted by Sweezy, following Oskar Lange: commodities

are sold at their value if their production can be increased when demand increases, or

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The fundamental issue, in my opinion, lies in the fact that if labor is the measure of value, then evidently an hour of labor is worth as much as the product of an hour of labor; it is therefore incomprehensible (here Bailey’s critique79 hits not just Ricardo, but Marx as well) why we should convolutedly assert that the value of labor (rechristened labor-power’s value) is equal to the labor employed to produce the means of subsistence. The sticking point is the same one Marx had mentioned in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pondering the following self-objection: «If the exchange value of a product equals the labour time contained in the product, then the exchange value of a working day is equal to the product it yields, in other words, wages must be equal to the product of labour.». To this way of reasoning, belonging to Proudhonians and leftRicardians, Marx simply replies that «the opposite is true», which is to say that wages are not equal to the product of labor, and the explanation of the apparent paradox is in the theory of surplus value.80 However, this is far from solving the problem, because Marx’s theory of labor-power’s value rearranges the difficulties of classical economics but, in my opinion, fails to persuasively reject the (obvious) thesis according to which, if we accept the labor theory of value, then the value of an hour of labor is equal to the value of the goods produced in an hour. The problems of Marx’s theory, thus, are not confined to the question of transforming values into production prices. We may say in brief (given the many texts already devoted to this topic) that the issue comes from the fact that capitals with different compositions offer different profit rates, even while operating with the same rate of surplus value (i.e., the same rate of exploitation of labor). For example, if the rate of surplus value is 100%, and invested capital is 100, someone investing 20 in labor and 80 in constant capital will end up with a final value of 120, whereas someone investing 50 and 50 will obtain a final value of 150. In the first case, the rate of profit is 20%, in the second 50% (coherently with Marx’s thesis according to which only labor creates new value, while constant capital just transfers its value to the final product). In an economy characterized by competition, however, this equilibrium will not be stable, because vice versa, but this does not obtain for labor-power, which cannot be produced at will: Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (London: Dobson Books, 1946), 84–85. 79 Noted by Marx in: Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 32, 335. 80 Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One,” 301.

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capitals will tend to move toward the more remunerative sector, up until the rates of profit will converge. Continuing with our example, we would end with an average profit of 35%, but this means that the first capitalist will sell commodities above their value, the second below. Commodities, thus, will not be sold at their values, but rather at the prices of production, calculated by adding together invested capital and average profit. It might seem that production prices, even while diverging from values, could still be determined by them, and could be so derived by averaging the different rates of profit. But things are otherwise, because we have to consider that the two capitalists of our example also paid the inputs at their production prices, rather than values, and this changes the composition of invested capitals and therefore the rate of profit as well (keeping constant the rate of surplus value). Thus, the profit rates we used to calculate the average profit (and from this the production prices) are no longer constant. We are seemingly caught in a vicious circle: we have to begin from the profit rates to determine the average profit, and therefore the production prices, but we have to know production prices in order to determine the profit rate. Marx was aware of the issue,81 but he did not adequately develop it. In the twentieth century’s discussion of the transformation problem, started in 1907 by Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, we can see how the only way to avoid the vicious circle between production prices and profit rates is to determine both quantities simultaneously. This is possible through a system of equations structured as follows. In an economy with 10 commodities, we wish to know the relative prices and the rate of profit. If we assign a price of 1 to one of the commodities, we are left with the other nine commodities and the rate of profit (10 unknown factors, then), which can be derived with a system of 10 equations. For each of the commodities we construct an equation where the price is equal to inputs’ prices plus profit. To construct these equations we need to know the so-called «technical coefficients», which is to say the physical relations between inputs and outputs, or what quantities of what commodities are necessary to produce another commodity. In these equations, labor enters as a wage-commodity, in the sense that, to determine the commodities’ relative prices and the rate of profit we must know what inputs, as physical goods and wages, are needed to produce certain output-goods. 81 As can be seen in the last pages of his critique to Bailey: Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 32, 350–52.

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Through these passages, it is thus possible to escape the vicious circle and to determine at once the profit rate and the commodities’ prices. But the problem is that this result is achieved not by considering values, but rather through the input-output relations; it is thus no longer a transformation of values into prices, but a determination of prices with no consideration of values whatsoever. For a more technical treatment of this issue, we have to refer the reader back to other texts,82 but here we may agree with the conclusion reached by Claudio Napoleoni, among the keener scholars of this issue: the transformation problem, developed according to Marx’s own suggestion, does self-destruct, for the scheme we arrive at is not a transformation of values into prices, but rather a determination of prices independently from values.83

It seems to me that Napoleoni is also correct when affirming that, once we get to Pietro Sraffa’s theory of prices, which is in a sense the final point of the transformation problem’s “classical” discussion, «there is nothing left of Marx’s theory of value, nor of the consequences that may be drawn from this theory».84 Or rather, we can still hear a sort of Marxian eco in the inverse relation between wages and profits (for the latter increase when the former fall, and vice versa), but there is no longer any reason to proclaim labor as the only source of new value. In fact, we know only that the output is greater than the input, but we cannot say whether this surplus is originated in labor or capital, or if it even makes sense to ask what the “source” of value is. Moreover, there is no space for the Marxian concept of the value of labor-power either, because there is no criterion left to establish the level wages would gravitate toward; they instead end up depending on the power relations between classes.

82 In addition to the already cited works by Claudio Napoleoni, we may usefully read: Lippi, Marx. Il valore come costo sociale reale; Claudio Napoleoni, Lezioni sul “Capitolo sesto inedito” di Marx (Torino: Boringhieri, 1972), 153 ff.; Valori e prezzi nella teoria di Marx (Torino: Einaudi, 1981). 83 Napoleoni, Il valore, 96. 84 Ibid., 175.

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The transformation problem, incidentally, still elicits contributions and attempted solutions.85 Recently some scholars, precisely to avoid the aporias of transformation, have emphasized the second meaning of socially necessary labor we mentioned above: if the labor spent in a certain branch of production is socially necessary only insofar as it is verified in market exchanges, it follows that values «can be determined only after the exchanges. Because it is precisely through such acts of exchange that the socially necessary labor time can manifest itself […]».86 Clearly, in this way the transformation problem is dissolved, because values are, effectively, derived from prices rather than vice versa, but the meaning of Marx’s theory of value is again lost. The labor theory of value’s failure, on the other hand, does not necessarily imply an abandonment of the concept of exploitation; it does, however, force those who still want to employ it to come up with a new definition. In the attempt to do so by John Roemer,87 for example, exploitation is redefined as the advantage enjoyed, in terms of lower labor and greater income, by that part of society which owns the means of production; an advantage they would not enjoy if the means of production’s ownership was equally shared by every member of society, or if there were no exchanges between the two parts of society (owners and non-owners). From this point of view, for exploitation to occur, it is not necessary for owners to buy the labor-power of those who don’t own the means of production. Indeed, exploitation could just as well occur through the mere exchange of products, or if owners rented their means of production to the non-owners, obtaining a part of the product in return. Exploitation thus becomes an entitlement to appropriate part of social wealth in virtue of one’s property; or instead, in another possible version, it becomes the right to control the social surplus which some enjoys, to the exclusion of others, insofar as they own the means of production.88 85 For a brief illustration of the so-called New Solution and its supporters, cf. Cristina Corradi, Storia dei marxismi in Italia (Roma: manifestolibri, 2005), 353–60. 86 Carandini, Un altro Marx, 133. See also: Fineschi, Ripartire da Marx, 275 ff. 87 Cf. John E. Roemer, “Property Relations vs. Surplus Value in Marxian Exploitation,”

Philosophy & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (1982); John E. Roemer, “What Is Exploitation? Reply to Jeffrey Reiman,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 18, no. 1 (1989). 88 Cf. Silvano Vicarelli, “Valori, prezzi e capitalismo,” in Valori e prezzi nella teoria di Marx, ed. Roberto Panizza, and Silvano Vicarelli (Torino: Einaudi, 1981).

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The Tendencies of Capitalist Economy

To some extent, the validity of Marx’s analyses of capitalism’s developmental tendencies is independent from the correctness of the labor theory of value. Let us then try to summarize these analyses. First, the competition between various capitalists forces each one to trying to increase workers’ exploitation. This can happen with a lengthening of the workday, implying the reduction of the ratio of necessary labor, and therefore the increase of the rate of surplus value and profit. The lengthening of labor time, however, has limits, not just physical but also legal, as the struggle for workers’ rights gradually develops within States. To these limits on the extraction of absolute surplus value, the capitalist responds by trying another route; the one generating relative surplus value; which is to say the reduction of the necessary labor time (and thus the increase of surplus labor), keeping constant the workday’s length. The process is described by Marx in the following way. Firstly the capitalist, pushed by competition, introduces technical and organizational innovations in the production process, so as to increase labor’s productivity, which is to say to produce a greater quantity of goods with the same expenditure of labor. Since commodities’ values depend on the socially necessary labor, an innovating capitalist can sell their commodities (which contains less labor than the social average) «above their individual but under their social value».89 This achieves two goals for the innovators: it eliminates the competition (because their commodities cost less) and realizes an extraordinary surplus value, for they can sell commodities at a higher price than it would result from the labor they contain. Consequently, over time, competing enterprises are also «forced to introduce the new method of production, on pain of being eliminated from the market».90 Once innovations spread, no capitalist can profit from extraordinary surplus value, and the value of produced commodities decreases in proportion to the increase of labor’s productivity («The value of commodities is in inverse ratio to the productiveness of labour»91 ). Thus, insofar as innovation processes affect the sectors producing the means of 89 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 322. 90 I am quoting from Sylos Labini’s limpid reconstruction of Marx’s theory of economic

development: Paolo Sylos Labini, “Il problema dello sviluppo economico in Marx ed in Schumpeter,” in Problemi dello sviluppo economico (Bari: Laterza, 1970), 24. 91 Ibid., 324.

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subsistence (consumer goods bought by the worker’s salary), it follows that a shorter labor time becomes necessary to produce what the worker receives and therefore that, keeping constant the workday’s length, the ratio between necessary labor and surplus labor changes in favor of the latter. In Marx’s language, this means that absolute surplus value did not increase, but the relative one did. Within a non-monopolistic economy, as assumed by Marx, innovations fostered by competition translate into better organizational methods (e.g., the scientific organization of labor theorized by Taylor) and in the introduction of new machines enhancing labor’s productivity (from simple tools up to large systems of automated machinery, which require many less workers for the same production, up to the point that the only work left is that of surveillance). Marx, having well understood the essential character of innovation, writes: Modern industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative.92

The problem, however, is that such unceasing revolutionizing implies the paradox according to which the increase of labor’s productivity (which in a different society could be used to shorten the workday) becomes, thanks to «machinery in the hands of capital»,93 an instrument to increase workers’ exploitation. The issue is of course multifaceted: on the one hand, machines contribute to free up workers, that is to say to create an excess of workforce, and as such they are fought by movements like the Luddites, which want to destroy the machine because they fail to «distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital».94 On the other hand, machines perform, so to speak, a political and disciplinary function, insofar as they subject workers to seemingly technical constraints, making them instruments of the machine itself; «capital, with the aid of science taken into its pay, always reduces the refractory hand of labour to docility».95 Here it is not Marx speaking, but Ure, the

92 Ibid., 489. 93 Ibid., 412, Marx insists repeatedly on this point, see also p. 447. 94 Ibid., 432. 95 Ibid., 440.

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author of The Philosophy of Manufactures, who cannot be suspected of a pro-worker bias, and whom Marx amply reference in Capital. So, for the analysis of the tendencies of capitalist accumulation, the question is very simple: if it is true that capitalism’s development coincides with the introduction of ever more perfect machineries, does it follow that, in the long term, there will be a structural and growing excess of available workforce? This issue, as Marx reminds us in Capital, has been discussed by many economists, often to claim that the equation «more machines = more unemployment» is false (as for example in the two Mill, McCulloch, Torrens, and Senior). To better understand the question, it may be useful to connect it to the study of capital reproduction, which Marx treats mostly in the second volume. At the end of every productive cycle (which is always a variation of m-c-m’), the capitalist has a profit, which theoretically can be employed in various ways. It is possible, and this is the case of simple reproduction, for the capitalist to start a new productive cycle identical to the previous one: the same sum is reinvested in constant and variable capital, while the profit is spent in consumer goods; this leads to the cyclical repetition of an economic process of the same size. Evidently this is not how things work in the actual capitalist economy: here the profit is at least partially reinvested, increasing the investment in constant and variable capital at every cycle, leading to what Marx calls expanded reproduction. So long as the process works smoothly, accumulated capital grows with every investment cycle, and this growth can either increase production (more machines, raw materials, and workers are added to a given production process) or revolutionize it with the introduction of new and more efficient machinery (increasing the constant part of capital in proportion to the variable one). We can distinguish the two cases by the labels of extensive and intensive accumulation.96 If accumulation occurred only extensively (i.e., keeping the same ratio between constant and variable capital) the number of necessary workers would increase, rapidly leading to full employment (barred a great population growth), this is to say scarcity of workforce and therefore an upward pressure on wages and a decrease of profits. Thus, capitalists tend toward intensive accumulation, where productive processes are constantly revolutionized, and thus the proportion of fixed capital increases. Concretely, this means that every new accumulation

96 Cf. Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx, 71.

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cycle will invest a larger capital, which would require more workers, except that since the fraction of variable capital is decreasing it can happen that a lower number of workers are employed despite the expansion. Essentially, we have two opposite and contrasting tendencies; but which one shall prevail? Marx’s answer can be summarized as follows: the second tendency (toward the increase of excess workforce) will certainly prevail, but this will not occur linearly; there will instead be a cyclical process of concentration and expansion of excess workforce (the reserve army of labor, in Marx’s jargon). Marx reaches these conclusions for various reasons; firstly, he assumes the tendency toward a relative decrease of the variable portion of capital, and a corresponding increase of what he calls the organic composition of capital (relation between the value of constant and variable capital). This increase depends on the technical composition of capital itself: «the mass of raw material, instruments, of labour, &c, that a certain quantity of spinning labour consumes productively to-day, is many hundred times greater than at the beginning of the eighteenth century».97 Moreover, according to Marx, the increase in the organic composition of capital tends to be lower than that of its technical composition, because the increase of labor’s productive force constantly reduces the value of machineries and raw materials. Having thus assumed the increase of organic composition, what will happen to the demand for labor-power? Its growing or diminishing will depend on the relation between the two aforementioned contrasting tendencies. If the increase of the organic component prevails, demand for labor decreases; if instead the rapid accumulation neutralizes this effect, then demand rises. This, however, will occur only within certain bounds because, when demand reaches the point of pushing wages up profits will diminish, and thus the cycle will enter a descending phase, characterized by reduced accumulation and reconstitution of the reserve army of labor—which itself will lead to a new cycle based on technological restructuring and wage reductions, due to high unemployment during the recessive phase. «The periodical variation of unemployment—thus comments Sylos Labini—is an essential aspect of the economic cycle».98

97 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 618. 98 Sylos Labini, “Il problema dello sviluppo economico in Marx ed in Schumpeter,” 29.

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Therefore, even when the positive tendency prevails—which is to say accumulation grows rapidly enough to absorb the workers made superfluous by the increase of organic composition—the long-term trend is still toward a decrease of labor demand. Marx can thus conclude by claiming that the «absolute general law of capitalist accumulation»99 is to constantly produce, «in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent»,100 an excess of workers, a reserve army whose poverty increases as the power of wealth grows. These conclusions are of course very bleak, appropriately so because Marx aims to show (among other things) how capitalism is socially unsustainable; the arguments are nevertheless to be seriously considered. In this sense a particularly fruitful thesis is that «the process of capitalist accumulation is powered by innovations and has a cyclical character»101 (as commented by Sylos Labini, following Schumpeter, even though from the point of view of the latter, the surplus value would always be the relative one, never the absolute102 ). As it is evident from these considerations, Marx sees cycles and crises not as contingent phenomena, but rather essential characters of capitalist economic dynamics. The potentiality for crisis is always already present in market economy because, production being unregulated, it can always happen that certain products will find no consumer demand; if products remain unsold, the producers themselves cannot buy as much as before, thus generating a chain reaction that leads to economic crisis. Marx is thus a bitter critic of the optimistic law formulated by Jean-Baptiste Say, according to which demand and offer must always meet on the market, because to every sale a purchase corresponds. But if the potentiality for crisis is intrinsic to market economy, how and why, concretely, capitalistic crises occur? Firstly there are, as we mentioned, the cyclical crises which follow an expansionary phase, when the growing demand of labor leads to increasing wages, decreasing profits, and thus to the capitalists renouncing to invest their capital. Depression then, «through filling

99 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 63. 100 Ibid., 624. 101 Paolo Sylos Labini, Carlo Marx: è tempo di un bilancio (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1994),

9. 102 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London, New York: Routledge, 2008), 27–28.

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up the reserve army and depreciating capital values, restores the profitability of production and thereby sets the stage for a re-sumption of accumulation».103 While this is an outline of Marx’s theory of cyclical crises, we still have to ask whether this is all there is, or rather other types of crisis are possible, and moreover what is the relation between crises and the desired (by Marx) collapse of capitalism. Concerning the types of crises, Marx’s interpreters focused mostly on two possibilities: disproportion crisis and underconsumption crisis. The first kind may occur because there is no guarantee that, with every new cycle, more means of production and consumer goods will be available in the proportion required by the ever-growing productive process. The second type would instead be due to an essential contradiction of capitalism, which on the one hand tends to compress workers’ consumption (with an ever-increasing rate of exploitation), while on the other hand produces more and more commodities which someone will have to buy and consume. This was one of the most debated points among Marxists. Some, like the Russian Tugan-Baranowsky, claimed that capitalism could have developed just by increasing the means of production, without a corresponding growth of consumption. Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, argued that, insofar as it compresses internal consumption, capitalism needs a colonial expansion to procure new foreign markets, and thus would collapse once no more “exterior” is available.104 Despite the many interpretations, however, Marx’s reflection on these themes remains quite sketchy, seemingly resisting univocal conclusions. Marx’s outline of the general trends, derived from his theory of capitalist accumulation, is instead very clear. Firstly, there is a tendency toward the centralization of capitals, which is to say toward the elimination of smaller capitals to the benefit of larger ones. Competition, Marx explains, leads to reduce commodities’ prices, which is possible thanks to the increase of labor productivity fostered by economies of scale: «therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary

103 Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, 153. 104 For a more in-depth discussion of the debates on the crisis of capitalism cf. Ibid.,

chs. VIII–XII.

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to carry on a business under its normal conditions».105 Thus, Marx continues, «the centralisation of capitals or the process of their attraction becomes more intense, in proportion as the specifically capitalist mode of production develops along with accumulation».106 Centralization— also connected to the development of the stock market, which becomes necessary due to the amount of capitals required by modern enterprises—«shortens and quickens the transformation of separate processes of production into processes socially combined and carried out on a large scale» with the result that «the additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its magnitude».107 Joint-stock companies, made possible by the growing development of credit, also produce the paradox that capitalas-private-property is effectively eliminated «within the framework of the capitalist mode of production itself», so that the capitalist is no longer a property-owner but rather a «mere manager, administrator of other people’s capital».108 Thus, Marx observes in a passage that could have been written today, we have a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.109

We cannot complete the treatment of Marx as an extraordinary observer of accumulation dynamics without mentioning two of his most characteristic and discussed theses: the tendency of the profit rate to fall and the increasing impoverishment of the proletariat. The first thesis derives directly from the increase in the organic composition of capital; since from Marx’s perspective variable capital, the living labor, is the sole 105 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 621. 106 Ibid., 622. 107 Ibid., 622–23. 108 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 37 (London: Lawrence &

Wishart, 2010), 434. This is the same phenomenon discussed, many years later, by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means in their famous: Adolf A. Berle, and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1932). 109 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 37 , 436.

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source of surplus value, its relative decrease implies (keeping constant the rate of exploitation) the fall of profit rates. Profits should fall more and more as the contribution of living labor decreases, because constant capital, let us remember, merely transmits its value to the final product, without adding anything new. The fall of the profit rate—which other economists, like Adam Smith, had also prefigured, albeit with different explanations—is seen by Marx as a process countervailed by antagonistic causes, without which it would be inexplicable why the phenomenon had not yet destroyed capitalism. These antagonistic causes are, essentially, the devaluation of constant capital, due to the increase in labor’s productivity, and the increase of exploitation, due to the decrease of the portion of necessary labor within the workday. Between causes and countervailing tendencies, therefore, the law of falling profit rates cannot be interpreted as a theory of capitalism’s fall; it rather acts, according to Marx himself, «only as a tendency. And it is only under certain circumstances and only after long periods that its effects become strikingly pronounced».110 Another dubious prediction is the one concerning not only society’s polarization between two classes (which is blind to the possibility and relevance of intermediate classes), but most importantly the famous «impoverishment of the proletariat». With this thesis, Marx the revolutionary seems to supplant the scientist. The argument is that even if the employed worker may be well paid, capitalist processes still generate a reserve army of labor, which is doomed to poverty, while the employed laborer is more and more intensely exploited. The result, Marx peremptorily concludes, is that «the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse».111 The contradiction which, according to Marx, sooner or later will lead to the end of capitalism can thus be observed from two points of view: on the one hand, capitalism leads to deprivation, misery, and consequently to «the revolt of the working class»,112 which is all the stronger since the material conditions to overcome poverty are now available. On the other hand, capitalism pushed the socialization of production to such heights, overcoming every restriction based on property and individual labor, that

110 Ibid., 237. 111 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, 639. 112 Ibid., 750.

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only one last step is left: the re-appropriation of production by the collective laborer, which the very discipline of capitalist factories contributes to unify and organize. Just like capitalist property has been the «first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor», so now it is time to accept that the socialization of modern production contradicts its capitalist shell, and that therefore times are ripe for the «negation of negation»—not the restoration of private property but, on the contrary, «individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production».113 Marx concludes the first volume of Capital, but also his enquiry into the economic structure of modern society which had absorbed so many years of his life, with a battle cry: «the knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated».

113 Ibid., 751.

CHAPTER 7

The International, the Paris Commune, Social Democracy

7.1

The Founding of the International

Marx’s 1860s were not only occupied by working on the various drafts of Capital, they also saw a return to political activity. Since the beginning of the decade, in fact, the international scenario shows unrest and new conflicts: in the United States, the civil war starts in 1861, and in 1863 Lincoln proclaims the abolition of slavery; in England, trade unions develop, and in 1860 the Trade Council is created in London; Garibaldi and Mazzini gather sympathies for Italian unification; in Germany, Ferdinand Lassalle (a friend of Marx, albeit not without conflicts) begins to reorganize the workers movement into a party, even though he will die in a duel in 1864, prematurely interrupting his work; in France, Napoleon III’s authoritarianism begins to ease. Within this newly dynamic context, in 1863 Poland’s insurrection against Russian domination will elicit solidarity demonstration in London, to which delegations from French workers will also participate. The need for coordination and mutual support between workers’ struggles lead, in 1864, to the constitution of the International Workingmen’s Association, later known as the First International. Marx is invited to participate, representing German workers, to the foundational meeting, convened by British trade unionists in 1864 at St. Martin’s Hall. Effectively, Marx will write the International’s platform, in the form of the Inaugural Address and of the Provisional Statutes of the association. As a leader and © The Author(s) 2020 S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0_7

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chief intellectual of the International, Marx fights against the ideas of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Mazzini, contrasting then widespread moralistic and rhetoric tendencies (even though he is forced to include in the Address a reference, which he cannot stomach, to the «simple laws of morals and justice»1 ). Marx asserts his revolutionary vision, trying to make it acceptable to all members of the organization: «Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo», as he wrote to Engels on November 4, 1864. The points Marx insists on are, first, that «the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves»2 (not, therefore, by philanthropes and social reformers acting in its stead); secondly, that the workers’ economic subjection to the means of production’s owners has to be abolished, and in order to do that the working class must organize itself into an autonomous political party, with the ultimate goal of conquering political power.3 In the First International, however, these ideas are far from uncontroversial, because the various components of the association have very different views on social emancipation. Synthetically, we may say that French Proudhonians think of a society where everyone owns their means of production (as individuals or cooperatives) and can access free credit from a non-State popular bank; Proudhonians are thus against a full socialization of land and of the means of production, and they favor cooperatives while being strongly against statism and centralism. As for the Germans, the members of Lassalle’s association favor emancipation through cooperatives, but they believe these need the support of the State to be viable; thus, the workers’ movement founded by Lassalle—who himself was in dialogue with Bismarck—is strongly statist, hostile to bourgeois liberalism and especially committed to universal suffrage, through which the State could be captured by the workers’ interests. Concerning the English trade unionists, they were also focused on the goal of male universal suffrage (which was not as central for Marx), and essentially did not share Marx’s revolutionary perspective. Given this context, Marx was trying to contribute to develop an organization which was inevitably very pluralistic, while at once affirming his ideological hegemony. Marx’s main 1 Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 20 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 13. 2 Karl Marx, “Provisional Rules of the Association,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 20 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 14. 3 Ibid., 16.

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thesis was that the working class’ struggle had to be oriented toward the conquest of power and the socialization of the means of production; to the contrary, neither emancipation through cooperatives and mutualism, nor a reformist process were realistic options, for both would have been futile without a decisive change in the system of property, which was the real cornerstone of social oppression. The International’s annual congresses (those were actually small meetings, to which no more than a hundred delegates participated, ideally representing workers from European countries and the United States) were characterized by ideological debates between the various component groups. At Geneva in 1866, Lausanne in 1867, and Bruxelles in 1868, the main contrast was between Marxist and Proudhonian ideas, even though Marx did not personally participate (nor could Proudhon, who had died in January 1865). Starting in 1868, with the ebb of Proudhon’s influence, the main fights were between Marx and Bakunin, with the latter supporting the abolition of the State and considering communism as an authoritarian doctrine which, by centralizing all property in the State’s hands, would have resulted in just another form of domination. In any case, by the second half of the 1860s the International’s prestige and influence had grown, while conflicts and strikes were multiplying in many European countries; but the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the Paris Commune were to decisively change the situation.

7.2

The Franco-Prussian War and the Commune

War between nations threatens to dissolve the international solidarity among workers’ organizations. In Germany, where the conflict was seen as a defensive war against Napoleon III’s expansionism, the followers of Lassalle voted in favor of war credits; the new, pro-Marxist, Social Democratic Party, instead, abstained (the SPD had been founded in 1869, by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, who would later have been tried for high treason, precisely due to this abstention from the vote). Marx prepared a first Address for the International, concerning the Franco-Prussian war (voted by the Council on July 23, 1870),4 in which the organization commended the rejection of war and the defense 4 Karl Marx, “First Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 22 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010).

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of proletarian solidarity by French workers and German social democrats, asserting that the war should have remained defensive on the German side, even while expressing hope for the fall of Napoleon III’s second empire (toward which Marx’s sarcastic criticism had always been plentiful). Actually, Marx’s and even more Engels’ assessment of the situation was not entirely univocal. On the one hand, Marx appreciated Liebknecht and Bebel anti-war position, which was faithful to the principles of proletarian internationalism (even too faithful, according to Engels); on the other hand, however, Marx also understood the more uncertain positions within the Social Democratic Party, which disapproved of the two deputies. Marx in fact believed that a German victory would have had very positive consequences, leading to the fall of Bonapartism, favoring the unification of Germany and therefore the unity of German proletarians, and, finally, it would also have determined the ascent of German (i.e., Marxist) ideas within the workers’ movement against the French ones (i.e., Proudhonian).5 After the defeat of Sedan and the fall of Napoleon III, France formed a provisional government; in February 1871, a National Assembly was elected, which turned out very reactionary, and nominated Thiers as head of the government for the purpose of making peace with Bismarck. Among the peace conditions, in addition to the transfer of AlsaceLorraine, the Prussians also imposed a military occupation of Paris. Parisians, however, could not accept the betrayal from their ruling classes which, rather than arming the people, were willing to leave the capital in Prussian hands, while they refuged in Versailles. Thus Paris, abandoned to its own devices and furious for the government’s betrayal, proclaimed the Commune. In the second address concerning the Franco-Prussian war, approved by the Council of the International on September 9, 1870, Marx had advised the French against attempting a revolution which would have been doomed to fail.

5 Concerning the Marx’s and Engels’ multifaceted attitudes toward the Franco-Prussian

war cf. Luigi Cortesi, Storia del Comunismo (Roma: manifestolibri, 2009).

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The French working class moves, therefore, under circumstances of extreme difficulty. Any attempt at upsetting the new Government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly.6

Marx was thus very pessimistic on the chances of a Parisian revolution; but when such revolution began, doubts gave way to strong solidarity. Writing to his friend Kugelmann on April 17, 1871, Marx noted, without hiding his pessimism, that «world history would indeed be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances», and he concluded writing that «The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained».7 Naturally, we have to carefully distinguish between the reality of the Paris Commune and Marx’s interpretation of it. The Commune certainly was not a proletarian revolution; it was a proclamation of self-government by the Parisian people which, after the capitulating government had fled, trusted the only remaining authorities: the central committee of the National Guard (which refused to surrender its artillery, as demanded by Thiers), and some local administrators. The social basis of the Commune was made not just of workers, but also artisans and petty bourgeoises; politically, the leaders were very diverse, as demonstrated by the elections of March 28, 1871, from which the Commune originated. There were radical bourgeoises, Blanquists, Jacobins, and for sure also some militants of the International. The Commune was short-lived; by the end of May the troops gathered by Thiers, with Prussian aid, recaptured Paris by fire and sword, leading to a terrifying repression with tortures, executions, and mass deportations. Thus, the Address Marx was writing since April (a laborious one, since Marx discarded two drafts and it was difficult to intervene on events which were rapidly developing) was published in London only after the defeat of the revolution, on June 13, 1871.

6 Karl Marx, “Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 22 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 269. 7 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 44 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 136–37.

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Marx’s judgment on the Commune is articulated. Firstly, while he admires the heroism of Parisians, Marx believes they have been misled by an excessive sense of honor (with the correlative «conscientious scruples») and by a lack of political realism; if they had decisively started their civil war, attacking Versailles before Thiers could reorganize, things might have gone differently. Moreover, the Central Committee of the National Guard, according to Marx, erred in abdicating its power, by calling the elections, too early. Nevertheless, the Paris insurrection «is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June Insurrection in Paris».8 Besides these evaluations, what is most interesting for us is that, reflecting on the Commune, Marx uses its experience to outline the characters of a non-parliamentary and non-bourgeois democracy, which is to say a true «government of the people by the people».9 In the Commune, thus, Marx celebrates not just the revolutionary heroism, but above all «the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour».10 The fundamental point in Marx’s reflections on the Commune is that, when it conquers power, «the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes»11 : it must instead transform it from its foundations. The State can no longer be a parasitic body weighing down on society, which effectively insured the continuation of capital’s domination over labor (through police forces, laws, and ideology). The State must instead become an instrument of society, devoted to perform certain specific and necessary functions, and no more than that. This means first of all that the permanent army must be abolished, and that the people should be armed instead. As for political power, it must be exercised, like in the Paris Commune, by elected representatives (not, thus, a direct democracy), but elections must shed their political-parliamentary character. Universal suffrage shall no longer serve to choose which member of the dominant

8 Ibid., 132. 9 Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the Inter-

national Working Men’s Association,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 22 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 339. 10 Ibid., 334. 11 Ibid., 328. This point seems so important to Marx and Engels that they reprise it

also in the preface to the Manifesto’s German edition (1872), because it represents a theoretical innovation compared to what they had written in 1848.

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class will (mis)represent the people in parliament, but rather to individuate the people’s agents, in the same way private entrepreneurs choose the managers of their businesses.12 The Commune is not a parliament but a working organism, «executive and legislative at the same time»; thus there is not an executive power, separated and without popular control. Deputies and functionaries are subject to be recalled, and their wages are at the same level as the workers’. Even «magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable» like all other public servants. The organization of the whole nation would have been based, if the Commune could develop, on a web of self-governed Communes, which would have managed common affairs through district assemblies, which in turn would have send their delegates to Paris. Imperative mandate, with formal instructions which the delegates would have had to obey, would have been the central principle of the system. «Few but important functions»13 would have remained to the central government, since the Commune did not intend, as some falsely claimed, to abolish national unity, but rather recreate it on a new ground. Concerning «parson-power», the Commune expropriated all church’s properties, and in this way (Marx writes ironically) it gave priests back the chance to «feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the Apostles». Education would have been publicly funded and free from interference from both State and Church.14 The Commune, thus, offers Marx the change to delineate a nonparliamentary and non-liberal democracy, literally understood as government of the people exercised by the people themselves. Alongside the political form, however, Marx also examines the Commune’s social policies, because «the political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery».15 In this domain, the Commune was not able to do much (also because, in reality, it was not and did not want to be a socialist government). Only those factories whose owners had fled were assigned to the workers, and with a proviso for indemnities. Some measure in favor of workers were taken, like the abolition of bakers’ night shift, or the prohibition of fines inflicted by employers to

12 Ibid., 332–33. 13 Ibid., 332. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 334.

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their employees. Marx seizes the occasion also to reiterate his position regarding cooperatives, so beloved by Proudhonians. Marx’s thesis is that the introduction of cooperatives in a still capitalist framework has very limited value, while the real goal should be to change the entire economic structure, as it would happen if cooperatives regulated the whole national production according to a plan; «what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, “possible” Communism?».16 After the fall of the Commune, the International begun to decline. English trade unionists resigned from the General Council, protesting the unconditioned support of the Parisian revolution: «the Paris Commune was much too strong meat for them».17 In the meantime, the polemics between Marx and Bakunin became ever more virulent (also because the latter had obtained the job to translate the Capital into Russian, but had not made any progress on the work). Thus, at the congress of The Hague in 1872, Marx and Engels (for the first time attending in person) obtained the transferral of the General Council to New York. From their point of view, the International would thus have been avoided the risk of falling in Anarchists’ hands; but in practice this decision meant the impossibility of continuing the organizations’ activities. The International was already dead when, at the congress of Philadelphia in 1876, it was formally disbanded. A most interesting fruit, for us today, of the violent polemics between Marx and Bakunin are the notes that the former wrote, in 1875, concerning the latter’s work Statism and Anarchy, which had been published in 1873. While Bakunin accuses Marxists of being authoritarian, wanting to impose the rule of a small group of leaders over the proletariat, Marx claims that, after the abolition of class domination, «there [will] be no state in the present political sense», and that therefore the election of leaders will have a completely different meaning in a context where: 1) government functions no longer exist; 2) the distribution of general functions has become a routine matter which entails no domination; 3) elections lose their present political character.

16 Ibid., 335. 17 George D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought: Volume 2 (New York: Macmillan,

1954), 162.

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And Marx continues: If Mr. Bakunin were familiar even with the position of a manager in a workers’ co-operative factory, all his fantasies about domination would go to the devil.18

Actually, twentieth century’s history demonstrated that, even if Bakunin might have been theoretically weak (as claimed by Marx), the problem of the dictatorship of a small leading group on the proletariat was not an idle fantasy, but rather one of the most serious issues the communist movement would have had to confront. Marx, completely persuaded by his own theory of power as class domination, believed that the abolition of classes directly implied the end of domination; he did not have a conceptual framework within which different forms of power and domination could find any space. Through the ideological conflicts of the International, in which he funnels his theoretical superiority after decades of study of economic and social dynamics, Marx tries to mold the workers movement into certain basic frameworks, which were then to be the bases of class movements in the following decades (especially in continental Europe). Let us try to briefly summarize the main points. First of all, the working class’ emancipation must be achieved by the workers themselves (not by utopians or enlightened reformers, and neither by Jacobin or Blanquist vanguards); this emancipation essentially happens through class struggle, which is both the economic fight to improve working condition, and the political fight for which an autonomous party of the working class is necessary (against the thesis of those who wished for a “cooperativist” alternative, Proudhonians or Lassallians, as well as of anarchists who refused the party as a centralized organization). The long-term goal must be the socialization of the means of production and the abolition of classes. In Marx’s own words, when he wished to mark the difference with anarchism: The political movement of the working class naturally has as its final object the conquest of political power for this class, and this requires, of course, a 18 Karl Marx, “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 24 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 519–20.

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previous organisation of the working class developed up to a certain point, which arises from the economic struggles themselves.

This means, Marx explains, that political organization must develop from economic struggles, like, for example, the conflict against one capitalist for a shorter working day becomes the political struggle for the eight-hour law.19 These are the broad strategic coordinates of modern socialism, which Marx contributed to determine, contrasting many opposing tendencies. It is also worth noting that Marx does not think the struggle for socialism should employ identical means everywhere; as he said in the already mentioned discourse of September 1872 in Amsterdam: We know that the institutions, customs and traditions in the different countries must be taken into account; and we do not deny the existence of countries like America, England, and if I knew your institutions better I might add Holland, where the workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means. That being true We must also admit that in most countries on the Continent it is force which must be the lever of our revolution; it is force which will have to be resorted to for a time in order to establish the rule of the workers.20

Marx’s position is thus clear: the main strategic lines (which we saw above) are theoretically defined and must be asserted without compromises; means and tactics, instead, must be adapted to concrete situations. There is no principled choice in favor of force or revolutionary violence; there is instead the awareness (quite irrefutable, historically speaking) that Europe’s dominant classes of the late nineteenth century would never have ceded their social power without fighting, as continuously demonstrated by the repressive policing tactics which were then pervasive.

7.3

The Birth of Social Democracy

The end of the First International coincides with the time in which modern socialist and social democratic parties—mass organizations ready

19 Marx, and Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 44, 258. 20 Karl Marx, “On the Hague Congress,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume

23 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 255.

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to participate to parliamentary elections—begin to form, with more or less direct connections to Marx’s theories. Germany is first, as the two pre-existing parties—Lassalle’s Workingmen Association and the Social Democratic Party led by the aforementioned Liebknecht and Bebel— unify at the Gotha congress of May 1875. When he reads the Gotha program, which is to say the platform for the unification, Marx is furious, because the text is replete with (what he deems) the worst Lassallian idiocies. Writing to Wilhelm Bracke, Marx reminds him that, although that is not really true, he is generally considered a sort of secret leader of the Social Democratic Party and therefore cannot accept a program like the one proposed at Gotha. Unless the program is retracted, Marx threatens, he and Engels will have to make their dissent explicit after the congress. In the meantime, Marx sends a list of critical observations, hoping that the party leaders will take them into account. In his critique, Marx ferociously demolishes all Lassallian slogans which, to his disappointment, pollute the program of the first great workers’ party of Europe. Labor is not «source of all wealth», because nature is equally important; the dominant class is made not just of capitalists, but also of landowners, unmentioned by the program due to Lassalle’s affairs with them. Advocating the «fair distribution of the proceeds of labour» means nothing, because what is fair depends on economic relations and not vice versa. Demanding the «undiminished proceeds of labour» is equally absurd, because if the whole proceeds of labor went to workers, then nothing would remain to finance many basic social expenses: from the investments to increase production to the expenses of management and administration, from social insurances to the support for the disabled. Nor we should forget that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society and it grows in proportion as the new society develops.21

There is no shortage of Lassallian errors in the program: we have the «iron law of wages»; the incorrect idea that, besides the proletariat, all the other classes constitute «only one reactionary mass» (a thesis Lassalle needed to justify his alliance with landed aristocrats against the 21 Karl Marx, “Marginal Notes on the Programme of the German Workers’ Party,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 24 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 85.

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bourgeoisie); there is a narrow national conception of the party, which essentially renounce internationalism. There is the absurd claim, implied by the idea that society could be transformed through the creation of State-supported cooperatives, «that with state loans one can build a new society».22 Moreover, the program includes the «old democratic litany familiar to all: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, a people’s militia, etc.». All fair things, says Marx, but only within the context of a democratic republic; it makes no sense to reclaim them if, for good prudential reasons, the party does not want to declare a fight for a democratic republic against the Prussian Reich, «a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture». After all, Marx continues, the democratic republic is nothing but the «last form of state of bourgeois society», within which «the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion».23 The harsh critique of Prussian-style socialism offers Marx the occasion to say something more on future communist society, an argument he is usually very spare about. Politically, there will be a transition period «in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat ».24 Concerning economic organization, in the «collective society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products»,25 because as we know social needs are planned in advance. The category of “value” ceases to make sense: exchange is regulated by the principle that every producer, after the aforementioned necessary expenses have been taken care of, receives a portion of social production proportional to the labor they have provided. In this first phase of communist society, thus, the principle of equal exchange and equal right are still valid, even though «nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption».26 But this equal right, according to which everyone receives in proportion to their labor, is still structured like an unequal bourgeois right: those who are less able to work, for example, will receive less even though they have the same needs as others. Legal rights have the intrinsic 22 Ibid., 93. 23 Ibid., 96. 24 Ibid., 95. 25 Ibid., 85. 26 Ibid., 86.

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vice of applying equal measures to unequal individuals. Therefore, this principle shall be overcome in the subsequent phase of communist society, when social wealth will be most developed and labor will no longer be an effort but rather «life’s prime want». At that point, society will be able to adopt a much more advanced principle, which is also truly egalitarian, to distribute labor and produced goods27 : from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The utopian anticipations of a communist land of milk and honey surely represent one of the weakest aspects of Marx’s theory (as he was perhaps aware, for he generally tried to avoid spelling out any detail). On the one hand, this is almost unavoidable: the defects of economic collectivism, as well as the difficulties of performing market functions without a market, will become known only much later. In other ways, however, Marx is less excusable. It is true that in The Civil War in France Marx outlined suggestive hypotheses about a non-parliamentarian and non-liberal democracy; yet the entire reflection about the rule of law, the limits of power and legal guarantees, remains essentially absent from Marx’s horizon. This does not mean, obviously, that Marx rejected liberal freedoms, insofar as they were not linked to property, like the freedom of science or of conscience. In this regard, in the critique of the Gotha program Marx claims that, if one desired at this time of the Kulturkampf to remind liberalism of its old catchwords, it surely could have been done only in the following form: Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in.

But immediately thereafter he clarifies that the workers’ party ought at any rate in this connection to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois “freedom of conscience” is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious unfreedom of conscience, and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion.28

27 Ibid., 87. 28 Ibid., 97–98.

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After Gotha, Marx did not act on his threat and did not denounce the party (his observations remained confidential, and will be published by Engels only in 1891); he will, however, continue his polemics, especially against the reformist tendencies which were growing within the party. One of the most conflictual moment occurred in 1879, when three social democratic members of the so-called Zurich group (the most important of which was the future revisionist Eduard Bernstein), published an article which was a veritable summa of reformist commonplaces: the party should be open to all men of goodwill, with no class discrimination; it should decisively take a reformist attitude, focusing on immediate goals rather than on the revolution. From Marx’s point of view, this meant trying to patch up capitalist society rather than change it. Here too Marx’s and Engels’ reaction was harsh: we cannot accept (they wrote to Bebel, Liebknecht and others) a renounce to class struggle, which from our point of view is «the great lever of modern social revolution»; nor they could accept any dithering concerning the working class’ self-emancipation, falling back on the old idea that workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes. If the new party organ is to adopt a policy that corresponds to the opinions of these gentlemen, if it is bourgeois and not proletarian, then all we could do – much though we might regret it – would be publicly to declare ourselves opposed to it and abandon the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German party abroad.29

In this case too, the conflict was defused, but this time Bebel and Bernstein had to go through their “road to Canossa.” Social democracy had just been born, and the dispute that would have long characterized it, between reformists and revolutionaries, was already beginning. In the meantime, however, Marx-inspired socialism was taking roots in Europe: the French socialist party of Guesde, who in 1880 had gone to London to meet Marx and discuss an electoral program, developed during the eighties. But among Marx’s last interventions, the most significant are perhaps those devoted to Russia, where the revolutionary 29 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 45 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 408. This late Marxian polemics is emphasized and valorized by: Michael Löwy, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Book, 2005), 159ff.

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populist movement was growing, and where in 1881 the Czar Alexander II is assassinated. One of the main issues was whether Russia had to go through the same path of older capitalist nations (primitive accumulation, expropriation of peasants and their transformation into proletarians), or rather it was possible to go directly from ancient forms of common property to the more advanced model of communist property. Marx studies and reflects on the argument, confronting it in the letter to Vera Zasulich of March 8, 1881,30 and reprising it again in the 1882 preface to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto where he asks: can the Russian obshchina, a form of primeval common ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West?

It is not impossible, Marx and Engels say, to move directly from ancient communitarianism to modern communism, a passage that would be eased if the Russian revolution became the «signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other».31 The Russian revolution would indeed come, but much later and without managing to achieve neither unity with Western revolution nor the reign of freedom dreamed by millions of workers. For Marx, the reflections on Russia were a sort of conclusion; he died in London on March 13, 1883, where to this day it is possible to visit his grave in the Highgate cemetery.

30 On this topic, cf. Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (London, New York: Verso, 2007), 80 ff. 31 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 24 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 526.

Chronology of Life and Works

1818 Karl Marx is born on May 5 in Trier, in Rhenish Prussia, from a Jewish family. His father Heinrich was a brilliant lawyer, of liberal ideas, later to become attorney general, converted to Protestantism for political reasons. 1835 Marx obtains his high school diploma in Trier and enrolls in the faculty of Jurisprudence at the University of Bonn. 1836 Marx transfers to the University of Berlin, where he continues to study law and becomes passionate about philosophy. He comes in contact with the “young Hegelians” (Bruno Bauer and others) and studies Hegel’s philosophy thoroughly. 1838 Marx’s father dies. 1841 Marx obtains a degree in philosophy from the University of Jena, with a dissertation about The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0

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1842 Marx abandons his designs toward an academic career (not practicable in an ever more reactionary Prussia) and devotes himself to political journalism, collaborating with the “Rheinische Zeitung”, of which he becomes chief editor. In the journal’s office, Marx meets Engels for the first time. 1843 The “Rheinische Zeitung” is closed by the Prussian government, and it publishes its last issue on March 31. On June 19, Marx marries Jenny von Westphalen, and at the end of the year, they both move to Paris. 1844 In Paris, together with Arnold Ruge, Marx founds the “DeutschFranzösische Jahrbücher” (French-German Annals), which will manage to publish just one issue, containing two essays by Marx: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and On the Jewish Question. The journal includes writings by Heine, Herweg, Hess, and the essay by Engels, much appreciated by Marx, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy. Throughout the year, Marx begins the systematic study of political economy, writing the so-called Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. 1845 Together with Engels, Marx publishes The Holy Family. He is expelled from France and moves to Bruxelles, where Engels reaches him. 1846 Marx and Engels write The German Ideology, a critique of the Hegelian left destined to remain unpublished, which is also the first formulation of the basic tenets of historical materialism. 1847 Marx publishes The Poverty of Philosophy, an harsh refutation of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty. Marx and Engels join the League of the Just, soon to be re-named Communist League. In the second congress of the League, held in London from November 28 to December 8, Marx and Engels are given the task of writing the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

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1848 In February, the Manifesto of the Communist Party is published in London. In Paris, the February revolution starts; Marx reaches the French capital. In April, after revolution erupts in Germany, Marx goes to Cologne, where he founds the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, a daily democratic newspaper, which begins publications on June 10. 1849 The “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” is forced to cease publication after just a year. Marx is expelled by Germany and moves to Paris and from there to London, where he arrives in August. In September, he is joined there by his family. 1850 Marx resumes the publication of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, as a periodic journal, where he publishes his essay devoted to an examination of the 1848 revolution in France, later collected in the book The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850. 1851 Marx withdraws from active politics and, to support his family perennially struggling with poverty, he begins to collaborate with a radical American newspaper, the New York Daily Tribune. 1852 Continuing his reflection on the class struggles in France, Marx writes The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, in which he analyzes the Bonapartist coup of December 1851. 1853 Marx publishes Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne, defending the German communists persecuted by the law. 1857–1858 Marx writes the Outline of the Critique of Political Economy, a first draft of his economic system, which will remain unpublished. 1859 Marx publishes A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

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1861–1863 Marx works on Capital and to what will later become the Theories of Surplus Value (the fourth book of Capital, devoted to the history of economic doctrines). 1863–1865 Marx writes a new draft of his economic work. 1864 The International Workingmen’s Association is founded. Marx writes its Provisional Statutes and Inaugural Address. 1866 Marx writes the last version of the first book of Capital, which will be published in Hamburg in 1867. 1870 Speaking for the General Council of the International, Marx writes two Addresses concerning the French-Prussian war. 1871 Marx writes the third address, The Civil War in France, in which he examines the brief revolutionary experience of the Paris Commune. 1872 Marx clashes with Bakunin. To protect the International from Anarchic influences, at the Hague congress Marx proposes to move its General Council to New York. As a result, the activities of the organization wane, until the International disbands in 1876. 1875 Marx writes critical notes to Bakunin’s book State and Anarchy, and the Critique of the Gotha Program. 1881 Marx’s wife, Jenny, dies. 1883 Marx dies in London on March 14, and on the 17, he is buried in the Highgate cemetery.

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Index

A Abromeit, J., 61 Adorno, T.W., 16, 72, 87, 90, 94, 95 Alessandro II di Russia, 205 Althusser, L., 53, 64, 88 Annenkov, P.V., 107 Aristotle, 3, 90 Arruzza, C., 45 Avineri, S., 126

B Babeuf, F.N., 2, 68 Bailey, S., 176, 177 Bakunin, M.A., 27, 42, 192, 193, 198, 199 Balibar, E., 205 Barbier, M., 10 Bauer, B., 4, 5, 30, 71, 74, 84 Bebel, A., 193, 194, 201, 204 Bedeschi, G., 82 Bentham, J., 77 Berle, A., 187

Bernstein, E., 204 Bidet, J., 37, 57, 65, 143 Blanc, L., 137 Blanqui, A., 119 Bloch, E., 45 Bloch, J., 106 Bodei, R., 14 Böhm Bawerk, E., 172, 173 Bracke, W., 201 Braudel, F., 167 Bray, J.F., 116 Buchanan, A., 32

C Cabet, É., 29, 68, 120 Cacciatore, G., 26 Carandini, G., 164, 180 Castoriadis, C., 110 Cavaignac, L.E., 138 Cazzaniga, G.M., 92 Charles X Bourbon, 121 Cohen, G.A., 92

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0

219

220

INDEX

Cole, G.D.H., 198 Corradi, C., 180 Cortesi, L., 194

D Darwin, C., 98, 108 Debord, G., 123 della Volpe, G., 15 Denis, H., 151, 152, 156, 176 de Saint-Simon, C.-H., 24, 129 Descartes, R., 77 de Sismondi, S., 129 Dézamy, T., 68, 77 Dobb, M., 175 Duichin, M., 2 Duncker, F., 158 Dussel, E., 159

E Elster, J., 167 Engels, F., 1, 29, 34, 48, 55, 56, 62, 68, 74, 75, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 94–96, 98, 105–107, 114, 120–122, 124–129, 132–137, 140, 145–148, 151, 154, 158, 173, 192, 194–196, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205

F Faucci, R., 113 Feuerbach, L., 13–16, 27, 39, 40, 42, 52, 60–62, 71, 73, 75, 78, 82–86 Fichte, J.G., 2, 9 Finelli, R., 3, 6, 16, 40, 88, 112 Fineschi, R., 89, 160, 164, 180 Fourier, C., 29, 129 Franklin, B., 168 Freud, S., 110

G Garibaldi, G., 191 Gay, J., 77 Gentile, G., 87 Gramsci, A., 109, 139 Grün, K., 129 Guesde, J., 204 Guizot, F.P., 79, 122

H Habermas, J., 53, 70, 108 Hai-Hac, T., 176 Hegel, G.W.F., 2–6, 9, 10, 13–21, 27, 31, 34, 38, 43, 44, 47, 51, 65, 70–77, 81–83, 87, 88, 98, 103, 140, 150–154, 166 Heine, H., 42, 79 Helvéthius, C.A., 77 Hess, M., 4, 74 Hobbes, T., 9, 77 Holbach, P.H.D., 77 Howard, M.C., 176

J Jung, C.G., 74

K Kägi, P., 68 Kant, I., 2, 15, 16 Kautsky, K., 159 King, J.E., 176 Krätke, M., 146 Kugelmann, L., 172, 195

L Landshut, S., 56 Lange, O., 176 Lassalle, F., 158, 191–193, 201 Ledru-Rollin, A., 138, 139

INDEX

Leibniz, G., 77 Lenin, V.J., 87 Lichtheim, G., 136 Liebknecht, W., 159, 193, 194, 201, 204 Lippi, M., 174 Locke, J., 119 Losurdo, D., 31, 38 Löwy, M., 136, 204 Luigi Filippo d’Orléans, 121 Lukács, G., 73, 87, 89 Lukes, S., 106 Luporini, C., 16 Luxemburg, R., 186

M Machiavelli, N., 9 Malebranche, N., 77 Malthus, T.R., 49 Mandel, E., 57 Marcuse, H., 61 Marx, H., 2, 207 Mayer, J.P., 56 Mazzini, G., 191, 192 McCarthy, G.E., 3 McCulloch, J.R., 183 McLellan, D., 64, 68, 133, 159 Means, G., 187 Meissner, O., 159 Mill, J., 56, 57 Mill, J.S., 149 Molnar, M., 146 Moss, B.H., 137 Musto, M., 26

N Napoleon I, 140, 142 Napoleon III, 140, 141, 191, 194 Napoleoni, C., 113, 175, 179 Negri, A., 156

221

O Ocone, C., 86 Owen, R., 77, 129 P Panizza, R., 180 Panzieri, R., 156 Parmenide, 151 Parsons, T., 98 Pennavaja, C., 160 Petrucciani, S., 106 Petty, W., 163 Polanyi, K., 176 Proudhon, P.J., 12, 24, 29, 42, 67, 78, 107, 111, 112, 114–117, 155, 192, 193 R Rawls, J., 119 Reichelt, H., 153 Renault, E., 6, 27 Ricardo, D., 55, 56, 112–116, 148, 151, 172–174, 176, 177 Rjazanov, D.B., 13 Robespierre, M., 50 Roemer, J., 180 Rojahn, J., 56 Rossanda, R., 121 Rousseau, J.J., 2, 9, 36, 38, 50, 149 Roy, M.J., 160 Ruge, A., 4, 6, 7, 12, 13, 27, 29, 48, 51, 79 S Say, J.-B., 185 Schmidt, C., 103, 107 Schumpeter, J.A., 181, 184, 185 Senior, N., 183 Sieyès, E.J., 46, 78 Smith, A., 55, 56, 112, 113, 115, 117, 148, 172–175, 188

222

INDEX

Sofri, G., 96 Spinoza, B., 76 Sraffa, P., 179 Stepelevich, L.S., 5, 14, 15 Stirner, M., 76, 84, 88, 103–105 Strauss, D., 71 Sweezy, P.M., 176, 177, 186 Sylos Labini, P., 181, 184, 185 T Taylor, F.W., 182 Texier, J., 121, 126, 128 Thiers, A., 194–196 Tomba, M., 30, 45 Torrens, R., 183 Trincia, F.S., 16, 106 Tugan-Baranowsky, M., 186 U Ure, A., 182

V Vicarelli, S., 180 Vinci, P., 87 Vogt, K., 159 von Bismarck, O., 192, 194 von Bortkiewicz, L., 178 von Cieszkowski, A., 5 von Metternich, K., 122 von Westphalen, J., 12 von Willich, A., 145 W Wallerstein, I., 167 Weitling, W., 11, 29, 51, 111, 120 Wheen, F., 120 Wolin, R., 61 Z Zanardo, A., 33, 75 Zasulich, V., 205