http://isj.org.uk/marx-deflated/
Marx deflated
Issue: 152
Posted on 27th September 2016
Alex Callinicos
A review of Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
(Penguin, 2016), £35
In 1972 the Cambridge historian Gareth Stedman Jones wrote a foreword to
the English edition of Werner Blumenberg’s useful biography of Karl
Marx. Here he criticised Blumenberg’s “Social Democratic
interpretation”, complaining that for Blumenberg “Marx’s importance
today stems not from his creation of a new revolutionary theory, but the
grandeur of his humanism and the wealth of insights scattered throughout
his works”.1
Yet, nearly 45 years later, Stedman Jones, in his own massive and
already highly praised biography of Marx, argues that “Karl” (as he
rather shy-makingly insists on calling Marx) was at his most politically
effective when he forged a “new social-democratic language in the
mid-1860s” through his role in the First International, and supposedly
distanced himself from his revolutionary communist youth.2 Whereas in
1972 Stedman Jones criticised Blumenberg for accusing Marx of
mythologising the Paris Commune of 1871, now he agrees that The Civil
War in France was “in part an imaginary projection” and regrets the
political isolation from British progressive opinion to which his
defence of the Commune condemned Marx.3
These differences are easy enough to explain. In 1972 Stedman Jones was
a revolutionary Marxist and one of the more intellectually interesting
members of the editorial committee of New Left Review (NLR). But in the
1980s he broke with NLR and embraced poststructuralism. He made a splash
in 1983 with a book, Languages of Class, that argued that class was not
an objective social relation but a construct of the discourses
prevailing in particular social and political movements.4 Stedman Jones
repeats this conception of class in Karl Marx, perhaps not realising
that the idea that class is just talk must seem quaint to a generation
for whom the Occupy slogan of the 1 percent vs the 99 percent captures
the stark economic inequalities forged in the neoliberal era.
Happily Stedman Jones now spares us the fancy philosophy used to justify
poststructuralist reductions of everything to discourse. His approach in
Karl Marx is indistinguishable from the so-called “Cambridge school” in
the history of political thought inspired by the work of scholars such
as Quentin Skinner and John Dunn, who treat theoretical texts as (in
Stedman Jones’s own words) “the interventions of an author within
particular political and philosophical contexts that the historian must
carefully reconstruct”.5 He is himself a distinguished intellectual
historian, and he makes a thorough and competent job of showing the
contexts—the relatively liberal Rhineland, the counter-revolutionary
Prussian regime of the 1830s and 1840s and the break up of Hegel’s
philosophy—in which Marx’s own ideas germinated. We get good, detailed
accounts of, for example, Paris in the lead-up to 1848, the revolutions
of that year and the developments in the British working class movement
and in European radical politics that made the First International possible.
There is, however, something a bit lifeless about the book. Maybe
because of his past Stedman Jones has conflicted feelings about Marx,
despite his insistence on getting on first name terms with him. He
assiduously cites Marx’s immediate relations’ complaints about his lack
of family feeling and, without any substantiation, accuses him of
getting deported from France in 1845 thanks to his own “arrogance or
incompetence”.6 Elsewhere he suggests Marx suffered in the late 1850s
from “mood changes ranging from real euphoria through uncontrolled
paranoia to fantasies of revenge”.7 More seriously, Stedman Jones cites
Marx’s 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question” as an example of “socialist
anti-Semitism”, ignoring the extensive (and by no means uncritical)
discussions of this text by Hal Draper and David Leopold.8 Stedman Jones
demonstrates considerable sympathy for Marx’s target in “On the Jewish
Question”, the left Hegelian philosopher Bruno Bauer, but somehow omits
to mention the latter’s subsequent evolution into a virulent anti-Semite.
I would recommend anyone looking for an up to date academic biography of
Marx to try Jonathan Sperber’s 2013 book instead. Although Sperber is
much weaker theoretically than Stedman Jones, he doesn’t suffer from the
latter’s mixed feelings about Marx. Moreover, as a historian of 19th
century German radicalism he is very good on Marx’s German context and
also gets him as a person, warts and all, much better than Stedman Jones
does.9
Stedman Jones’s book is more ambitious than Sperber’s, as its subtitle
indicates. He argues that the real Marx has got lost behind the mythical
figure of the founder of a science of history allegedly constructed by
Friedrich Engels and the Second International after his death in 1883.
(Stedman Jones is not a fan of Engels and indeed suggests, without any
evidence, that Marx and his family concealed disagreements between the
two because of their financial dependence on him.) There is nothing
especially original about this idea, which has been expressed in
different ways by Marxist and non-Marxist scholars for many decades. How
interesting the divergence is between the official “Marxism”10
fabricated after Marx’s death and his own thought depends on the content
one finds in the latter.
It is here that Stedman Jones claims the distinctiveness of his book
lies, in correcting the posthumous “inflation in Marx’s reputation”.11
The real Marx’s lifework, the critique of political economy culminating
in the three volumes of Capital, was of course incomplete, with only
Volume I appearing in his lifetime. Stedman Jones argues that Marx in
his last years abandoned the project out of a sense of intellectual
impasse. He claims the much-awaited publication of Volume III by Engels
shortly before his death in 1895 was greeted with disappointment because
the book offered no proof that capitalism would inevitably break down
economically. As for Marx himself, Stedman Jones contends that in his
last years his main interest was in anthropological and historical
studies of communal social forms, whose survivals—notably the peasant
mir in Tsarist Russia—could provide the basis for a transition to
socialism that bypassed capitalism. But these speculations were ignored
even by Marx’s own followers in Russia. This is how Stedman Jones
finishes the book. He avoids any discussion of the contemporary
relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism, presumably to underline the
gap between what he regards as the illusory political hopes placed in
Marx and the intellectual failure of his actual project.
But if Stedman Jones seeks to offer an original intellectual biography,
his treatment of Marx’s critique of political economy does not meet the
standards of contemporary scholarship. This has developed considerably
in recent decades thanks to the much greater availability of his notes
and drafts through the giant Marx-Engels Completed Works (MEGA). Stedman
Jones largely ignores this research. Marx’s critique developed first
through periods of intensive study of political economy in Paris and
Brussels in the mid-1840s and in London in the early 1850s, and then
through a succession of manuscripts written mainly, though not
exclusively, between 1857 and 1867. Stedman Jones focuses on the first
of these manuscripts, the Grundrisse (1857-8), and devotes little
attention to two subsequent ones, the vast and in many ways crucial
1861-63 Manuscript, and the 1864-65 Manuscript from which Engels edited
Capital, Volume III. This is a critical mistake because it means he
fails to grasp the intensive process of conceptual refinement,
reformulation and development that takes place across successive
manuscripts.12
Thus Stedman Jones makes a great song and dance over the fact that Marx
in the mid-1840s read the French translation of the first (1817) edition
of David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
and therefore failed in his Paris writings to address the doubts Ricardo
expressed about the labour theory of value in the third edition (1821).
In fact, the problem—the apparent contradiction between the labour
theory of value and the existence of a general rate of profit—was
already posed by Ricardo in the first edition.13 In any case this would
not have interested Marx when he first read Ricardo, because in his
Paris writings he rejected the labour theory of value. But the problem
is central to the 1861-63 Manuscript, as Enrique Dussel shows in his
superb commentary.14 It is here that, while seeking to overcome
Ricardo’s theory of rent, Marx formulates his solution to the problem,
showing how the (labour) values of commodities are transformed into
prices of production that govern the fluctuations of market prices (for
more detail, see Michael Roberts’s article elsewhere in this issue). But
Stedman Jones ignores both this manuscript and Dussel’s work on Capital
and its drafts, merely repeating the old saw that there is a
contradiction between Volume I and Volume III.
Stedman Jones argues Marx abandoned his critique of political economy
because “he had not been able to sustain his original depiction of
capital as an organism whose continuous and unstoppable spiral of growth
from inconspicuous beginnings in antiquity to global supremacy would
soon encounter world-wide collapse”.15 But nowhere in Marx’s writings of
the critical period 1857-67 does he claim that capitalism is heading
towards economic breakdown. His initial six-book plan of the Critique of
Political Economy culminated in a volume on “World Market and
Crises”—crises are not the same as collapse. Marx actually wrote:
“Permanent crises do not exist”.16 His fullest discussion, in Capital,
Volume III (dismissed in a sentence by Stedman Jones), portrays a spiral
movement in which the tendency of the rate of profit to fall interacts
with financial busts and economic slumps thanks to which capital is
destroyed and exploitation increased sufficiently to allow the engine of
accumulation to resume. Marx’s discussion of the tendency of the rate of
profit to fall concludes in the original manuscript with the sentence,
cut by Engels: “Hence crises”. The “vicious circle” of boom and bust
will continue as long as capitalism exists.17
One of Stedman Jones’s oddest suggestions is that Marx supposedly
abandoned his economic studies after the publication of Capital, Volume
I, in 1867 because he was unable to address the development of
capitalism as a global system. Recent research (naturally ignored by
Stedman Jones) has shown that from the 1840s onwards Marx analysed
bourgeois society as a transnational nexus of relationships.18 One of
his main preoccupations in the 1870s was to ensure that Capital was not
simply a study of Victorian Britain. In the French edition of Volume I
he included more material on colonialism and the world market. He also
sought to extend the analysis of crises and financial markets to cover
developments in the United States, which Marx was quick to recognise as
a new centre of global capitalism.
Marx’s interest in the Russian commune was connected in that he also
sought to deepen his analysis of rent and landed property in Volume III
by studying American and Russian agriculture. It was the unending
pursuit of these studies, amid the distractions of politics and illness,
combined with Marx’s perfectionism, what he called in a letter to
Ferdinand Lassalle of 28 April 1862 “that quirk I have of finding fault
with anything I have written and not looked at for a month, so that I
have to revise it completely”, that explains why he left Capital
unfinished.19 But closer acquaintance with Marx’s drafts leaves one with
a strong sense of the grandeur and the contemporaneity of his project.
This doesn’t mean he was always right. He argues that the overthrow of
capitalism will occur, not through economic breakdown, but by the
political action of the working class, stimulated by the cumulative
effects of economic crises and class polarisation. What is genuinely
problematic here is that he sees this movement developing “with the
inexorability of a natural process”.20 Stedman Jones doesn’t pay much
attention to this, perhaps because it doesn’t fit his portrayal of a
Marx ignored and misrepresented by the Second International: the
inevitability of socialist revolution was an idea eagerly embraced by
theorists such as Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov.
But it was an idea that, under the inspiration of the Russian Revolution
and of the experience of the Bolsheviks, much more creative figures such
as Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci rejected in the 1920s. This
generation of revolutionary Marxists were encouraged by Lenin to return
to Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune and the vision they offered of
socialist revolution as an active process of self-emancipation directed
at the destruction of the capitalist state. The Stedman Jones of 1972
also shared this vision. Maybe the unsuccessful efforts of the Stedman
Jones of 2016 to cut Marx down to size reveal him at war with this past
self.
Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King’s College
London and editor of International Socialism
Notes
1 Blumenberg, 1972, ppviii, x.
2 Stedman Jones, 2016, p466.
3 Stedman Jones, 2016, p502.
4 Stedman Jones is one of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s main targets in her
critique of the intellectual retreat from Marxism—Wood, 1986.
5 Stedman Jones, 2016, pxv.
6 Stedman Jones, 2016, p165.
7 Stedman Jones, 2016, p405.
8 Stedman Jones, 2016, p626-627, note 74.
9 Sperber, 2013.
10 Or “Marxisms”—for example, German Social Democracy’s version is
different from the Stalinist variant.
11 Stedman Jones, 2016, p3.
12 See Callinicos, 2014.
13 Oddly Stedman Jones’s relatively scant citations of secondary
literature seem to come mainly from the works of his colleagues
published by Cambridge University Press. But he ignores one great piece
of Cambridge scholarship, Piero Sraffa’s edition of Ricardo’s Works and
Correspondence (1951-2), which shows why Ricardo never abandoned the
labour theory of value.
14 Dussel, 2001. See also Callinicos, 2014, chapters 2 and 3.
15 Stedman Jones, 2016, p430.
16 Marx and Engels, 1975-2005, volume 32, p128n*.
17 Marx, 2016, pp375, 364. For more discussion of Marx’s theory of
crises, see Callinicos, 2014, chapter 6.
18 Pradella, 2014.
19 Marx and Engels, 1975-2005, volume 41, p357.
20 Marx, 1976, p929.
References
Blumenberg, Werner, 1972 [1962], Karl Marx: An Illustrated Biography (NLB).
Callinicos, Alex, 2014, Deciphering Capital: Marx’s Capital and Its
Destiny (Bookmarks).
Dussel, Enrique, 2001, Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on The
Manuscript of 1861-63 (Routledge).
Marx, Karl, 1976, Capital, Volume I (Penguin).
Marx, Karl, 2016, The Economic Manuscript of 1864-1865: Capital Book
Three: Forms of the Process as a Whole (Brill).
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels, 1975-2005, Collected Works, 50 vols
(Progress).
Pradella, Lucia, 2014, Globalisation and the Critique of Political
Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings (Routledge).
Sperber, Jonathan, 2013, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (Liveright).
Stedman Jones, Gareth, 2016, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Penguin).
Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 1986, The Retreat from Class: The New “True”
Socialism (Verso).
Uncategorised
..
Post navigation
Real capitalism: turbulent and antagonistic, but not imperfect
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
"Widening Fractures" our analysis of politics in Britain after Corbyn
and Brexit is now online
Michael Roberts's review of Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition,
Conflict, Crises from our forthcoming issue (152) is now online
Now online: "Marx Deflated" Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness
and Illusion reviewed by Alex Callinicos
Day school: Marxism and Nature
Our next one day conference on Marxism and Nature will take place on
Saturday 15 October 2016
Sessions on:
•Marxism and ecology
•Biodiversity and species conservation
•Scientists and socialism
•The Anthropocene
Speakers include Ian Angus, Ted Benton, Martin Empson and Suzanne Jeffery
Go to http://isj.org.uk/day-school-marxism-and-nature/ for tickets and
more information
New Resources
For more click on the 'Resources' tab above
Online only "How to stop the tanks" by Ron Margulies on the attempted
coup in Turkey
"A historic turning point in Brazil" by Eduardo Albuquerque from issue
151 is now online
"Intimations of mortality" Alex Callinicos's analysis from issue 150 is
now online
Jane Pritchard on the sex work debate from issue 125 is now available in
German. Thanks to Rosemarie Nuenning
25 January 2016 is the 5th anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution-
International Socialism has covered events in Egypt from the strike
waves that led up to the revolution, the events of 2011 themselves and
the situation since: here is a timeline of key articles
Now online, Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016) writing in International
Socialism in 1987
Suzanne Jeffery's article "Up against the Clock: Climate, social
movements and Marxism" translated into Turkish
Anne Alexander on "ISIS and counter-revolution: A Marxist analysis" is
available in Turkish here
Black history, police racism, Islamophobia and contemporary debates on
oppression- Articles and book reviews for black history month
Videos and transcript of the International Socialism debate on Syriza
and Socialist Strategy with Stathis Kouvelakis and Alex Callinicos
Online only: Vincent Sung analyses the roots of Hong Kong’s umbrella
movement protests here
“Nemesis in Iraq” from issue 143 has been translated into Persian- read
the translation here (thanks to Babak PashaJavid)
Online only: Bob Light remembers the 1974-5 Portuguese revolution
Videos from the International Socialism event on ‘Work, Class and
Resistance’ with Jane Hardy, Kevin Doogan, Lucia Pradella and Jim Wolfreys
Videos from the International Socialism event on ‘Marxism and Revolution
Today’ with Alex Callinicos, Claire Ceruti, Neil Davidson and others
Videos from a discussion of the crisis and the left in Europe with
Charlie Kimber and Giorgos Pittas
Videos from the International Socialism conference on ‘Crisis, Class and
Resistance’ with Robin Blackburn, Alex Callinicos, Guy Standing and others
Why the Earth Summit Failed by David Treece – originally published in
International Socialism 56
Video: International Socialism seminar on “Egypt, Tunisia and revolution
in the 21st century” with Gilbert Achcar and Anne Alexander
“The sex work debate: a response to Jess Edwards” by Thierry Schaffauser
Video: Seminar on ‘Racism in Britain today’ with Richard Seymour”
Audio: Alex Callinicos on the International Socialist tradition in
political economy
Continuing crisis in Thailand
A report on the presidential election in Cyprus
Audio: full recordings from the recent International Socialism
conference Marxism and Political Economy
Audio: Harman, Brenner and Itoh discuss the world economy today at
Historical Materialism’s annual conference
From our archives
The roots of gay oppression (Norah Carlin 1989)
The ‘workers’ government (Chris Harman 1977)
A critique of Nicos Poulantzas (Colin Barker 1979)
Theories of Patriarchy (Lindsey German 1981)
Mike Kidron on Marxist political economy (1974)
The State and Capital (Chris Harman 1991)
Gramsci versus Eurocommunism (Chris Harman 1977)
.
© 2016 International Socialism. (unless otherwise stated). You may
republish if you include an active link to the original.