Marx's Relevance in Today's World: A Reflection on His 200th Birthday
Saturday, May 05, 2018
By Jean Batou, Translated by Robert James Parsons, Le Courrier , Truthout |
Op-Ed
Monument to Karl Marx in Moscow city center. (Photo: Shutterstock)
This article originally appeared in French at Le Courrier.
Several months before his death, Karl Marx is said to have declared: "All I
know is that I am not a Marxist." Friedrich Engels gave his interpretation
of this in a letter to Conrad Schmidt on August 2, 1890. Whereas Engels
called for "restudying all history," an "imminently vast domain," he
deplored that "the empty sentences about historic materialism . serve only
to produce . relatively thin historical knowledge . an artificial systematic
construction, and to allow people to believe themselves endowed with great
minds."
Out of deference toward his deceased companion, in a letter on August 27 to
Paul Lafargue, Engels returned to the surprising disdain of the elderly Marx
for "Marxism," recalling the disabused remark of the German writer Heinrich
Heine: "I sowed dragons and reaped fleas." Why this frayed legacy? Because
declassed middle-class youth were hustling to obtain paid and rewarding
positions at the head of the Social-Democrat newspapers that were
proliferating in Germany, forming a sort of emerging intellectual
bureaucracy.
All-Encompassing Doubt
Marx's questioning, on the contrary, was in constant expansion, in
particular during the last years of his life, a period that found him at
odds with the emerging Marxism. In 1892, Engels emphasized his insatiable
curiosity:
In a man who examined every thing by searching for its historic origin and
the conditions of its development, a series of new questions naturally
emerged from every question formulated. Prehistory, agronomy, real estate
configurations in Russia and in America, geology etc., everything was grist
for his mill. . Besides the Germanic and Latin-based languages that he read
with ease, he undertook to study Old Church Slavonic, Russian and Serbian.
Marx's thought constantly raised objections to which he proposed provisional
responses. To grasp the scope of them, one must move beyond his early drafts
and work plans. For example, the second edition of the Complete Works of
Marx-Engels contains the preparatory work, the outlines and the successive
versions of Capital: they fill 15 volumes comprising some 24,000 pages!
Volume I represents only a small fraction of this corpus. On this basis, can
one consider it, with its companion Volumes II and III, published by Engels
on the basis of unfinished manuscripts, a final work?
When David Riazanov (arrested by Stalin in 1931 and executed in 1938) was
entrusted by the Soviet authorities at the beginning of the 1920s to prepare
a first edition of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels, and he obtained
copies of the unpublished writing held by the German Social-Democrats, his
plan comprised three parts: 1. miscellaneous writings; 2. the manuscripts
relative to Capital; 3. the Marx-Engels correspondence. At the time, he
excluded from consideration more than 200 notebooks dealing with the most
varied questions. On the other hand, the second edition of the Complete
Works of Marx-Engels now under way devotes a final section to these
notebooks of extracts, notes and marginal annotations. This mass should make
it possible to reread this work "as archaeology," an approach that has
prompted the liberation theologian Enrique Dussel to declare that "Marx is
still in the future."
The Laboratory of Latter-Day Marx
Several little known aspects of Marx's latter-day research program clash
with the image bequeathed by tradition.
1. The examination of capitalist production from the perspective of its
antagonism with natural cycles: Marx described the ever greater shortfall of
forestry; soil exhaustion linked to urbanization and the resulting rupture
of the nutrient cycle; the limits of energy and mineral ore reserves.
Regarding the distinction between renewable and nonrenewable energy, on
December 9, 1882, Engels wrote to him: "The individual worker is not only a
stabilizer of present solar heat, but also a waster of past solar heat. As
for what we have done to waste our energy reserves, our coal, our ore, our
forests etc. you are better informed than I."
2. The study of geology led Marx to transpose the concept of "geologic
formations" to the study of societies, speaking already in 1852 of "social
formations," a term that tended to replace "means of production," which had
appeared in the 1844 economic and philosophic manuscripts and was no doubt
inspired by Adam Smith's "means of subsistence." In a preliminary version of
Volume I of Capital, he thus noted: "Just as, when considering the
succession different geological formations, one must not think in terms of
sudden changes nor clearly delimited periods, it is the same in the creation
of different economic formations of society."
3. His interest in the mass struggles of the Sepoys of India (1857) and the
peasants of Russia (1858) as well as in the Irish national question (in the
latter half of the 1860s) pushed him also to consider with greater interest
the resistance to "globalization" by pre-capitalist societies, first in the
Russian Empire (whose language he learned at the beginning of the 1870s),
then in Latin America, in Asia and in North Africa. In his discussions with
Russian populists, he even imagined that the rural village, whose communal
property regime was still extant, could serve as a departure point for a
peasant revolution, a prelude to the socialist revolution in Western Europe.
4. In his notes on L. H. Morgan's book, Archaic Society, he hesitates,
contrary to Engels, to link the origin of male domination to the birth of
private property. Putting in perspective male-female equality among the
Iroquois, along with the "historic defeat of the feminine sex" in the wake
of the appearance of classes, he comes across rather as attuned to
inequality and forms of emerging male domination in "classless" societies.
Marx Beyond Marxism
When the elderly Marx expressed his reservations regarding emerging
"Marxism," Engels attributed them to the limits of Marx's immediate
successors. It may be that the reason was deeper and that it is to be found
in the transition from Marx bearing witness as the "prophet" whose
questioning never ceases to grow, to "Marxism" as a school of thought aiming
to systematize a doctrine for the education of new enthusiasts. Enrique
Dussel has pointed out the numerous biblical metaphors that characterize
Marx's work. For example, several month before his death, convalescing in
Algeria, he confides to Engels: "I have gotten rid of my prophet's beard .
before sacrificing my full head of hair on the altar of the Algerian
barber." The last known photo of him attests to this symbolic
transformation.
In what way do prophets distinguish themselves from other men? Since the
third millennium before the Christian era, they have been trying to respond
to new social questions posed by trade and the urban revolution. They have
been seeking a response to the social injustice and the violence thus
generated. For Spinoza, it is the "vigor of the imagination" that makes it
possible for prophets to accede to knowledge of what may be obscure for
their contemporaries, even if they cannot be ahead of their times. Marx
formulated this idea in his own way: "Humanity never poses problems that it
cannot resolve" because "the problem itself comes only from where the
material conditions for resolving it already exist or at least are in the
process of emerging." But in turn, its solution can be validated only by the
practical-critical activity of men and women.
Since the 1980s, social antagonisms have revolved around a diversity of
issues -- gender, race, environment, sexual orientation, national identity,
etc. As David Harvey points out: "The labor force is more geographically
dispersed, culturally heterogeneous, diversified as regards ethnicity and
religion, racially stratified and linguistically fragmented," making the
formation of an anticapitalist block more complex. The perspective of the
socialist alternative poses new problems that can incite us to reconnect
with the questions of the elderly Marx. At the same time, the collapse of
two major traditions -- Social-Democracy and Stalinism -- which (abusively)
claimed to be inspired by Marx, and the inability of the movements of the
1960s to change the game, have deeply marked the regressive framework of our
times, in which it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than
the end of capitalism.
This context requires that we distinguish more than ever the two
inconciliable well springs of socialism, as defined by Hal Draper -- "from
above" and "from below." Marx, of course, envisaged the second, speaking of
"self-change" (1845) and self-emancipation (1862). Nourished by the
resistances to the exploitation of wage earners' work and the accumulation
by dispossession that punctuate the capitalist globalization that is under
way, its future can ultimately be measured only by its practical results,
which remain, when all is said and done, the only test of truth and of the
power of ideas.
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Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Jean Batou, Translated by Robert James Parsons, Le Courrier
Jean Batou, Ph.D., is professor of modern international history at the
University of Lausanne. He has published extensively on globalization,
inequitable development and social movements in a historical perspective
including, One Hundred Years of Resistance to Underdevelopment and Uneven
Development in Europe (1918-1939).
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