from popular Resistance
MARX DIDNT INVENT SOCIALISM, NOR DID HE DISCOVER IT
By Steve Lalla, MR Online.
December 16, 2020 | EDUCATE!
Revered as the Father of Socialism, in popular conception Karl Marx
(18181883) is the originator of socialist theory, the creator of a plan
implemented thereafter by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other
socialist nations. He remains one of the most cited authors of all time, and
his writings are endlessly scrutinized and analyzed. Was he standing on the
shoulders of giants?
Without aiming to tear down the legacy of Marx or to minimize his
contributions to economics and historya hopeless task that we can leave up
to capitalistswe can examine the historical context in which he arose.
Theres no debate that Marx didnt invent socialism. As co-editor of a
French-German radical newspaper by 1843, a young Marx would have read the
term socialism used by French author Pierre Leroux (17971871)generally
credited with coining the termor the German Lorenz von Stein (18151890).
Englands Robert Owen (17711858) had bandied the word about as early as
1835. French philosopher Victor dHupay (17461818) called himself a
communist author around 1785, thirty-three years before Marxs birth, and
his colleague Nicolas-Edme Rétif (17341806) even used the term to describe
a form of government.(1)
In Engels Socialism: Utopian and Scientific he celebrates the founders of
socialism Saint-Simon (17601825), Owen, and Charles Fourier (17721837),
and refers to the actual communistic theories of Étienne-Gabriel Morelly
and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably.(2)
Gerrard Winstanley, in the 17th century, and Thomas More, who wrote Utopia
in 1515, were two other notable Britons who wrote about societies where
community came before profit, private property was unknown, and in which
workers controlled the means of production.
Incidentally, Marx did not draw a strong distinction between socialism and
communism. He implied that communism was a stage beyond that of socialism in
The Critique of the Gotha Program, published posthumously in 1891. Lenin and
others drew out this distinction in greater detail. In general Marx and
Engels used the two terms interchangeably.
Indigenous Ways
American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan had formed the Order of the Iroquois
by 1841. The impact of Morgans League of the Iroquois (1851) on Marx has
been recorded. Engels praised the communistic Iroquois Constitution in The
Origin of the Family (1884), although Marx and Engels persisted in referring
to Indigenous society as primitive communism.(3) Long before their time,
the political system of the Iroquois Confederacy was borrowed by the union
of the Thirteen Colonies.
It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should
be capable of forming a scheme for such a union, wrote Benjamin Franklin in
1751, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted
ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be
impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.(4)
The new Americans gave little credit to the ignorant savages from who
they learned, wrote Ronald Wright in Stolen Continents.
They adorned Washington
with the icons of Greece and Rome and put Latine
pluribus unumin the eagles mouth. Their historians have even tried to deny
or diminish the Iroquois precedent, but the truth is that the settler
republic took Indian ideas as well as Indian land.(5)
Lets cut to the heart of the matter: Columbus didnt discover America, nor
did Amerigo Vespucci even though its named after him. America was already
there, and just because its inhabitants werent called Indians yet, they
werent invented when Europeans first beheld them. Nor was it a coincidence
that Thomas More set Utopia in the so-called New World, and wrote it just a
few years after the first Indigenous Americans were being dragged back to
Europe and put on display.
Socialism: Another Colonial Expropriation?
The laws of gravity are called Newtons laws, in America, Kwame Ture
succinctly explained, but you cant think that Newton invented that a body
falls at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squaredNewton cannot invent
that. The best we can say about Newton is that he was an astute observer,
thats all. If Im in Timbuktu, doing any experiment with the laws of
gravity, Id come to the exact same conclusion that Newton came to
Karl Marx cannot invent socialism, continues Ture.
Its a universal truth. The best we can give him is an astute observer.
Because any man, any womanif Im sitting in the desert of Libya, in North
Africa, looking at the relationship between capital and labour, I will come
to the exact same conclusion as Karl Marx: that wherever capital tries to
dominate labour, there will be a ruthless struggle against capital, by
labour, until labour comes to smash capital, and dominate it!(6)
Ture points out that the Tunisian economist and historian Ibn Khaldun wrote
Muqaddimah in 1377, laying out the principles of modern economics and using
many of the same terms as Marx including surplus labour, the origin of
the state, or the origin of private property.(7)
When all is said and done its not difficult to demonstrate that Europeans
took the idea of socialism from what they observed in traditional and
Indigenous cultures. They named these ideas and elaborated on them in print,
transferring centuriesor millenniaof knowledge to a popular new medium,
just like filmmakers did in the 20th century or podcasts and audiobooks do
today. Indigenous ways were not protected by copyright. Marx was at the
forefront of this observation, elaboration, and analysis.
Socialism: An Ancient History
I cant see or think of a system that is more counter to Nishnaabeg thought
than capitalism, wrote Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and over the past two
decades I have heard elders and land users from many different Indigenous
nations reiterate this, and it is part of the elders analysis and thinking
we ignore
There is an assumption that socialism and communism are white and
that Indigenous peoples dont have this kind of thinking.
To me, the opposite is true, Simpson elaborates.
Watching hunters and ricers harvest and live is the epitome of not just
anti-capitalism but [of] societies where consent, empathy, caring, sharing,
and individual self-determination are centered. My Ancestors didnt
accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid,
intimate collective and individual relationships of trust. In times of
hardship, we did not rely to any great degree on accumulated capital or
individualism but on the strength of our relationships with others.(8)
When Adam Smith proclaimed the benefits of capitalism, he argued that
economic transactions are most beneficial when participants act in their own
self-interest. He thereby gave currency to the widespread myth that
throughout history humans have acted primarily out of concern for their own
well-being. This falsehood persists, whereas socialism is weakened by the
widespread assumption that its only one or two hundred years old at most.
In his influential work The Great Transformation (1944) Karl Polanyi
attacked Smiths myth of self-interest. To start with, wrote Polanyi, we
must discard some 19th century prejudices that underlay Adam Smiths
hypothesis about primitive mans alleged predilection for gainful
occupation
We cannot continue today on these lines. The habit of looking at
the past ten thousand years as well as the array of early societies as a
mere prelude to the true history of our civilization which started
approximately with the publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, is, to
say the least, out of date.(9)
When anthropologists and economic historians pointed out the importance of
gifting in past societies (e.g. the potlatch), or showed that many
civilizations, past and present, had built-in cultural codes that forbade
avarice and disdained profit, capitalists changed their line of reasoning
and argued that these peoples must have been savages or barbarians.
The tradition of the classical economists, summarized Polanyi, who
attempted to base the law of the market on the alleged propensities of man
in the state of nature, was replaced by an abandonment of all interest in
the cultures of uncivilized man as irrelevant to an understanding of the
problems of our age. Such an attitude of subjectivism in regard to earlier
civilizations should make no appeal to the scientific mind.(10) Seemingly
Polanyis observations havent pierced the mainstream of Western thought.
Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
Twentieth-century socialist revolutions contradicted some of Marxs
assumptions. Marx imagined that a proletarian revolution would follow the
most developed stages of capitalism. Instead, Russia and China leapt almost
immediately from feudalism to socialism. Socialist revolutions in other
nations that were not prototypical advanced capitalist societies, such as
Algeria, Ethiopia, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Yemen,
Tanzania, or Vietnamto name a fewcast further doubt on this aspect of
Marxs thinking.
Marxs representation of socialism as a post-capitalist phenomenon may have
been appropriate to his day, but perhaps its time to breathe some fresh air
into the relationship between socialism and pre-capitalist society.
Environmental crisis demands our ability to envision a socialist future that
meets humanitys needs without endless industrialization and the continuing
extraction of natural resources, and spoliation of land, that this implies.
Another popular misconception of Marx is that his vision of socialism didnt
give ample weight to ecological concerns, clearly disproven by contemporary
ecological socialists including Paul Burkett, John Foster Bellamy, or Kohei
Saito, who demonstrated that Marx came to regard ecological crises as the
fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production.(11)
The past is our only source of scientific knowledge. Just as the fossil
fuels that we extract from the earth and burn for energy are composed of
living beings who preceded us, so our concepts of social organization,
politics and economics rest on analyses of past societies. In this sense we
all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.
Marx venerated Indigenous political systems and was acutely aware of slavery
and colonialism.
José Carlos Mariátegui (18941930) is the best known of countless theorists
committed to linking Indigenous ways with socialism in Latin America.
Bolivias Movement for Socialism (MAS) provides just one example of how this
project continues today. Arab thinkers like Michel Aflaq wrenched socialism
from its supposed European moorings. Sadly, these texts and many others are
rarely translated into English, and their perspective is silenced from
popular conversation and absent in much revolutionary discourse in Europe
and North America.
Socialism: A Universal Concept
Kwame Ture described Pan-African socialism as a universal concept, an
objective that was stopped by capitalism. Ture argued that the the very
values of socialism come from communalism, practiced everywhere for
centuries.
We dont need to read Karl Marx or Adam Smith to find out that neither the
land nor the hoe actually produces wealth, wrote Julius Nyerere, and we
dont need to take degrees in Economics to know that neither the worker nor
the landlord produces land
We must, as I have said, regain our former
attitude of mindour traditional African socialismand apply it to the new
societies we are building today
The European socialist cannot think of his
socialism without its fathercapitalism! Brought up in tribal socialism, I
must say I find this contradiction quite intolerable
We, in Africa, have no
more need of being converted to socialism than we have of being taught
democracy. Both are rooted in our own pastin the traditional society which
produced us.(12)
Or, in the words of Felipe Coronel ,
I think that we have to acknowledge something: our peoples revolution
doesnt begin somewhere in the early to mid-1800s, after Marx and the rest
of them came out with this ideology, that other people then came and either
endorsed or added their own particular stamp to
We didnt need a European
guy to come to us, to the dark jungles of Latin America and Africa, and
explain to us the complex concept of sharing. We knew what collectivism
was for thousands of years. Its the way that all of us stayed alive.(13)
Marxs critique of capitalism is integral to creating an emancipatory
socialist future and remains more pertinent today than ever. Our task is to
strip away any vestiges of settler colonialism from the socialist project
and empower all who struggle against imperialism and exploitation around the
world, no matter their color of skin or culture. The battle for human
dignity, for freedom from iniquity, whether in Zimbabwe or Palestine, Syria
or India, or on Turtle Island or Cuba, isnt fought in the name of a White
European invention, but for a universal ideal.
Lets avoid descending into polemics, and instead encourage fruitful
discussion of these critical questions. Why ask what Indigenous movements
can learn from socialists, instead of the opposite: What can socialists
learn from Indigenous movements, from Indigenous culture, from Indigenous
politics, and from Indigenous ways of being?