#karl marx theory of economic development

[rightnewshindi]

दुनिया में मार्क्सवादी विधारधारा के जनक थे कार्ल मार्क्स, आज के दिन हुआ था उनका निधन

दुनिया में मार्क्सवादी विधारधारा के जनक थे कार्ल मार्क्स, आज के दिन हुआ था उनका निधन

Karl Marx: आज ही के दिन यानी की 14 मार्च को दुनिया को एक नई दिशा दिखाने वाले कार्ल मार्क्स का निधन हो गया था। कार्ल मार्क्स जर्मनी के एक महान विचारक होने के साथ ही इतिहासकार, राजनीतिक सिद्धांतकार, अर्थशास्त्री, समाजशास्त्री, पत्रकार और क्रांतिकारी की उपाधि से जाना जाता है। उन्होंने आधुनिक इतिहास पर गहरा प्रभाव डाला था। 20वीं शताब्दी में उनके माजवाद, कम्युनिज्म और विचारों ने राजनीतिक दृष्टिकोण को…

[probablyasocialecologist]

Saito has made a career of teasing out an eco-theory from the late, unpublished writings of Karl Marx. He earned his doctorate at Humboldt University, in Berlin, and now teaches philosophy at the University of Tokyo. His first book was an English version of his dissertation, titled “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism” (2017), which tracked Marx’s study of the physical world and communal agricultural practices. (Saito is fluent in Japanese, German, and English.) In a second academic book, “Marx in the Anthropocene” (2022), Saito drew on an expanded repertoire of Marx’s unpublished notebooks to argue for a theory of “degrowth communism.” He gained a following, not only in philosophical circles but among a Japanese public facing the contradictions of tsunamis, billionaires, and same-day shipping. “Slow Down” has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and launched Saito into a rare academic celebrity. He appears regularly on Japanese television and aspires to the public-intellectual status of Thomas Piketty, the French economist who had a surprise hit in his 2013 doorstop, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century.”

The key insight, or provocation, of “Slow Down” is to give the lie to we-can-have-it-all green capitalism. Saito highlights the Netherlands Fallacy, named for that country’s illusory attainment of both high living standards and low levels of pollution—a reality achieved by displacing externalities. It’s foolish to believe that “the Global North has solved its environmental problems simply through technological advancements and economic growth,” Saito writes. What the North actually did was off-load the “negative by-products of economic development—resource extraction, waste disposal, and the like” onto the Global South.

If we’re serious about surviving our planetary crisis, Saito argues, then we must abandon capitalism, with its insatiable appetites. We must reject the ever-upward logic of gross domestic product, or G.D.P. (a combination of government spending, imports and exports, investments, and personal consumption). We will not be saved by a “green” economy of electric cars or geo-engineered skies. Slowing down—to a carbon footprint on the level of Europe and the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies—would mean less work and less clutter, he writes. Our kids may not make it, otherwise.

[hellsitegenetics]

Marxism, Ideology and socioeconomic theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The fundamental ideology of communism, it holds that all people are entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labour but are prevented from doing so in a capitalist economic system, which divides society into two classes: nonowning workers and nonworking owners. Marx called the resulting situation “alienation,” and he said that when the workers repossessed the fruits of their labour, alienation would be overcome and class divisions would cease. The Marxist theory of history posits class struggle as history’s driving force, and it sees capitalism as the most recent and most critical historical stage—most critical because at this stage the proletariat will at last arise united.

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Closest match: Thelaira solivaga genome assembly, chromosome: 2 Common name: Fly

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Karl Marx! (May 5, 1818)

One of the most significant philosophers of all time, Karl Marx is considered the founder of modern sociology, and his ideas comprise the foundation of the modern socialist movement, with his body of work laying the foundations for the Marxist school of philosophy and economics. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx became the subject of observation by German authorities due to his political activities from a young age. Gravitating towards left-wing politics and philosophy, and formed a close friendship and partnership with fellow German socialist Friedrich Engels, who would support and collaborate with Marx on some of his most important works, including the Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology. Marx's works and activities resulted in him becoming stateless, and he moved around Europe while continuing to write and involve himself in socialist organizing. Marx's magnum opus was Capital, a comprehensive critique of political economy intended to be published in three volumes. However, Marx died in 1883 before it could be finished, with only the first volume published within his lifetime; Engels prepared the remaining volumes based on Marx's notes. Marx's contributions to philosophy, sociology, and economics are incalculable, and continue to influence socialists and philosophers today. Marxist theory comprises a distinct philosophical school of its own, and later theorists, including Lenin, Mao, De Leon, and Luxemburg, have continued to develop and adapt Marxist thought.

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

[marxandmore]

Can you explain like I'm five years old exactly what Marxism is and how it works? What would a Marxist world look like for you?

I know Karl Marx was a guy like 200 years ago and he had certain ideas about how the world should run.

I just can't understand the original sources and like i tend to think in more practical every day person terms and less...society planning. If that makes sense.

I'm anarchist myself, but like at the end of the day we all want human rights I think so idc. Your thing is just as valid as mine. :)

What Is Marxism?

Marxism is a deep philosophy with a rich intellectual history, which, without even taking into consideration the philosophy that came before it, has developed over the course of more than 180 years. 

It was first outlined by Marx and Engels over the course of more than four decades, and by Marx’s own admission should be called Marxism-Engelism (Bertsch et al 1976, 15). After the death of Marx, and later Engels, it was then developed by novelists, theoreticians, philosophers, economists, and many others up to the present point. Prominent examples are Lenin, Mao Zedong, Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, and Franz Fanon. The relevance of Marx’s philosophy has never been greater. The economic system that Marx and Engels originally set out to critique still exists. More than that, it has spread to almost every corner of the globe and has developed significantly, and thanks to advances in education, the possibility of comprehending the system that shapes our daily lives, from work, to friendships, to familial relations, to culture and religion, and even politics, has become ever greater. Yet many people do not understand the work of Marx and others like him. This is due to a variety of factors. Technical and outdated language, lengthy texts, complicated economic formulas, lack of time to study or read, these are all commonly heard reasons and complaints as to why people presently do not comprehend Marx’s work and thus fail to grasp its significance. Although the best way to learn Marxist philosophy is to read and critically engage with the original texts, this series of essays aims to promote Marxist philosophy, past and present, and help newcomers understand its basic premises and claims. This first essay in the series aims to outline the basic components that are necessary to comprehend all later works. Later essays will focus on each individual component and provide a more complete overview. The two basic components that Marxism bases itself on are philosophy and political economy. More specifically, Marxism synthesizes the philosophical theories of dialectics and materialism, and most completely analyzes economic processes in capitalist society, and based on its discoveries, promotes a new economic form and a new society. These components will be further outlined and explored in a little more detail in the upcoming paragraphs. The first essential philosophical concept that Marxism builds upon is the dialectic. Dialectics are essentially a way of viewing all sorts of processes. A form of reasoning already practiced by the ancient Greeks (Engels 1880). Dialectical thinking has two primary aspects. First of all, a dialectical way of thinking acknowledges that everything constantly moves and changes, that everything is interconnected, that things do not exist in a vacuum (Engels 1880). Regarding this, Engels wrote: “[...] we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected.” (Engels 1880), as opposed to “[...] observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life.” (Engels 1880), like a so-called metaphysician or idealist would do. The second main aspect is the aspect of contradiction, the idea that things and processes, both natural and within societies carry within them contradictory aspects. It is impossible to see everything as binary, for example, in the case of life and death. Death is a protracted process that does not happen instantaneously, from a physiological point of view at least (Engels 1880). We can thus speak of a time period in which a human or animal is not quite dead, yet also not quite alive, two contradictory aspects that exist momentarily together, until one process turns into the next. In the aforementioned example, that would be the process of living being completely finished, and then starting the process of decomposition. Within economics we see the principle of two economic classes that depend on each other for their existence within a particular economic system, and as soon as one of these classes abolishes the other, a new economic system is created.

The second essential philosophical concept that Marxism builds upon is materialism. Materialism too, has a lengthy philosophical history, which will be covered in later essays in this series. Materialism is the opposite of idealism. Idealism is the notion that the real world reflects ideas. An example of this would be objective morality or human rights. The idea that there is some sort of objective morality that is true regardless of time and place, or that human rights are an inherent thing that we are all born with, instead of morals and views on human rights being informed by the kind of society we live in, like we see when we analyze history, or even just contemporary societies. Materialism then, is the notion that our ideas, actions, and desires, are shaped by the physical world around us. Marxism aims to not only apply this materialist view to the natural sciences, but also to human society and its history. Regarding this, Engels wrote the following: “The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.” (Engels 1880) 

Now with the philosophical aspects out of the way, let us look at the second basic component of Marxism: economics. An economic system can be defined as “The institutions that organize the production and distribution of goods and services in an entire economy.” (The CORE Team 2017 ,22). As far as defining an economic system goes, this is an acceptable definition, but of course this is an incomplete definition if we want to look at what the economy itself is. It suggests that the economy is merely about production and distribution, and implicitly consumption. However, ultimately, as Engels has pointed out, as humans we produce and consume to support human life. The economy as a whole then, can be defined as the way in which we as humans organize production, distribution, and consumption, in order to sustain human life. Studying economics then, is about studying the ways in which we produce, distribute, and consume, and expressing this in laws, tendencies, formulas, and mathematical models.

The economic system that we currently live under is called capitalism. In order to understand what capitalism is, it is useful to compare it with what came before it: feudalism. Under feudalism, land and bureaucratic positions were held and passed down on a hereditary basis, people generally had their own tools with which they produced products. Sometimes they required the help of others, but the vast majority of the labor necessary to produce a product was put in by the individual producer, with their individual tools (Engels 1880). After they produced a product, the product was then generally theirs to do with what they pleased. Eventually feudalism collapsed as a result of its own unique set of contradictions, which then resulted in various political revolutions in the UK, France, the USA, etc, around the end of the 18th century. After these revolutions, hereditary positions and hereditary property were largely abolished in favor of all sorts of rights, as well as private property and free competition on a more or less free market. 

Capitalism is the result of a long historical process, and developed gradually out of feudalism, but it did not fully develop until these aforementioned political revolutions completely broke the old feudalistic order. Unlike under feudalism, under capitalism, production no longer happens by individual producers with their individual tools (Engels 1880). Under capitalism production is concentrated (Engels 1880). People, in general, no longer work on an individual basis or together with their close family, but instead, they work in workplaces that employ tens, hundreds, even thousands of people, all in the same place. Under capitalism, production has also been socialized (Engels 1880). Whereas before, people produced products using primarily their own labor, under capitalism, workers are only responsible for a small part in the production of the final product. Now nobody can truly say that they produced a product (Engels 1880). This process was made possible by the rise of large industry, which can produce commodities of the same quality as before, on a much larger and more efficient scale, and against far lower cost (in terms of labor), utilizing mechanical machines.We can clearly see that under capitalism, production has become concentrated instead of loosely organized, socialized instead of individual, yet there are still only few owners of the tools with which the commodities are created, henceforth called the means of production, and on the basis of this ownership over the means of production, they claim the products, and thus by extension the labor of others (the labor of many others is now necessary in the production process). This is one of the great contradictions in capitalistic production.

This new form of industrial production has made old forms of production superfluous because of its more efficient nature, and has consequently forced the owners of older, now obsolete tools, to purchase industrial equipment and continue producing in that way, or in most instances, due to a lack of money, become reliant on the sale of their labor to those who own these new means of production. In this way, capitalism has created two main economic classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The former sells their labor on an, often hourly, basis to be able to purchase the basic commodities necessary to maintain life. The latter appropriates the labor of others, by virtue of owning the means of production, and by that virtue alone, gets to keep the difference between the price at which a commodity is sold, which is determined by the laws of supply and demand, and the costs of production, including labor costs. In other words, they get to keep the profits. The interests of these two classes are completely opposite and irreconcilable. The proletariat seeks to receive the full worth of what their labor contributed to the finished commodity, while the bourgeoisie seeks to enlarge their profits as much as possible, and utilize these profits to expand their means of production, or capital (hence the name capitalist, and capitalism). This is the main contradiction, along class lines, within capitalism.

The capitalistic way of organizing production and exchange also leads to countless other contradictions that this essay will not go into. Things like the crisis of overproduction, of free competition leading to monopolies, etc.

More important is the way in which Marxism wants to solve these contradictions. Marxism wants to solve these contradictions using communism. As Engels wrote: “Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.” (Engels 1847) Now what exactly is communism? Communism is the next logical step in the development of the economy. Production has already been concentrated, made incredibly efficient, and socialized, all that remains is to also socialize the ownership over the means of production. Or as Engels wrote:

“Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.

It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.” (Engels 1847)

In doing so, the contradiction between socialized production and individual appropriation of labor will be solved, and the bourgeoisie, which relies upon the individual appropriation of labor, will be abolished, thus solving the contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie. In its most developed form, it will make money completely unnecessary, as we will no longer need to exchange meager wages for basic commodities, but instead communally produce and consume. It will also abolish the state, which Marxism defines as the oppression of one economic class by another, but that will be topic for a future essay in this series. 

In conclusion, Marxism aims to bring together dialectical thinking and materialist philosophy, and apply this, in a scientific way, to analyze societies past and present. Its analysis, which largely revolves around economic classes, incorporates and developed many economic theories, and has formulated and applied many economic laws and formulas. Its conclusion is simple: capitalism is contradictory and will bring about its own demise. From the contradiction in socialized production versus individual appropriation, the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie, to the repeated crises of overproduction, and the tendency of free competition to lead to monopoly, and thus unfree competition. These are all inherent to the capitalist economic system. History has shown us that contradictions can only exist side by side in one system for so long. Sooner or later, it will have to make place for a new economic system that completely negates the old one. Workers of the world, unite! Revolutionary regards, MarxAndMore Bibliography:

Bertsch, Gary K, and Thomas W Ganschow. Comparative Communism : The Soviet, Chinese, and Yugoslav Models. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976.

Engels, Frederick. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” Marxists.org, 1880. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm.

Engels, Frederick. “The Principles of Communism.” marxists.org, 1847. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm.

The CORE Team. “The Economy.” www.core-econ.org. Oxford University Press, 2017. https://core-econ.org/the-economy/v1/en/.

V.I. Lenin. “Lenin: The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism.” Marxists.org, 1913. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm.

[gildy-locks]

COMMUNISM☭

Well you see, communism is a theory of perfectionism. Where it would only work if everyone had motivation to work. But since we don’t, it would never work. People are powered by greed, and if you give them the chance to do anything and they get paid no matter what, it would never work.

In theory it would be amazing, where everyone gets a fair chance. It would work against feminism however, against rights, against a lot of things people enjoy.

America (+other countries) feared this spread, as shown in the Cold War. The title for that fear, is the dominio effect. Where they believed if one country fell to communism, all countries would.

Sure, communism encounters several practical challenges that make its implementation difficult. One of the central tenets of communism is the establishment of a classless society where wealth and resources are shared equally among all members. However, achieving this ideal has proven elusive in practice.

One significant challenge is the issue of power concentration within the ruling party or government apparatus. In many historical instances, communist regimes have resulted in authoritarian rule, with power becoming concentrated in the hands of a select few. This concentration of power often leads to corruption, abuse of authority, and the suppression of dissenting voices, ultimately undermining the goal of equality.

Moreover, the lack of incentives for individual initiative and innovation poses a fundamental obstacle to economic progress under communism. In a system where private property and entrepreneurship are discouraged or abolished, individuals may lack the motivation to work hard or take risks to improve their lives or contribute to societal advancement. Without the competitive drive and innovation fostered by capitalism, economies may struggle to grow and adapt to changing circumstances.

Another challenge is the issue of resource allocation. In a centrally planned economy characteristic of many communist systems, decisions regarding production, distribution, and consumption are made by government authorities rather than by market forces. However, such centralized planning often proves inefficient and prone to miscalculations, leading to shortages, surpluses, and misallocation of resources.

If you read all of this, wow. I literally just copied it from chatgpt. Didn’t even read it all. Respect man.

Additionally, the suppression of individual freedoms and stifling of creativity and diversity under communist regimes can result in a lack of social and cultural dynamism. Restrictions on freedom of expression, association, and religion can hinder intellectual and artistic development, stifling innovation and cultural vibrancy.

It originated as a response to the inequalities and exploitation arising from the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the 19th century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their seminal work "The Communist Manifesto," published in 1848, laid out the principles of communism. They argued that capitalism inevitably leads to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few capitalists, while the majority of the population, the proletariat, are exploited and alienated from the fruits of their labor. Marx and Engels proposed the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of a classless society where the means of production are owned collectively and wealth is distributed according to need. The ideas of communism were further developed by subsequent thinkers and leaders, leading to various interpretations and implementations of communist ideology around the world.

Despite the theoretical appeal of communism's vision of equality and social justice, these practical challenges have led many to question its feasibility as a viable socioeconomic system. While elements of socialist principles can be found in various mixed economies around the world, the pure implementation of communism as envisioned by its proponents has yet to be achieved successfully on a large scale.

Communism is often criticized for several reasons, primarily due to its historical implementations which frequently resulted in authoritarian regimes. These regimes curtailed individual freedoms, suppressed dissent, and violated human rights through censorship, surveillance, and political repression. Economically, centrally planned communist systems were deemed inefficient, marked by shortages, surpluses, and a lack of innovation. This inefficiency stemmed from the absence of market mechanisms, hindering economic growth and development. Furthermore, communist governments were associated with widespread human rights abuses, including forced labor camps, political purges, and mass executions. The lack of political pluralism under communist rule led to one-party dominance, stifling democracy and concentrating power in the hands of a ruling elite. Social upheaval, caused by policies such as expropriation of property and collectivization, further contributed to instability and resistance. The collapse of several communist states in the late 20th century reinforced communism's perception as a failed and unsustainable system, characterized by economic stagnation, political repression, and societal unrest. These factors collectively contribute to the negative view of communism held by many.

[1966jpg]

Critical Theory Recommended Reading List:

Principles of Communism (Friedrich Engels)

Wage-Labour and Capital Value, Price and Profit (Karl Marx)

Das Kapital (Karl Marx)

The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx)

On Practice & On Contradiction (Mao Zedong)

The Motorcycle Diaries (Che Guevara)

Latin America Diaries (Che Guevara)

Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (Che Guevara)

Guerilla Warfare (Che Guevara)

Che (Jon Lee Anderson)

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Friedrich Engels)

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Friedrich Engels)

Orientalism (Edward W. Said)

The Unwomanly Face of War (Svetlana Alexievich)

The Wretched of The Earth (Frantz Fanon)

A Dying Colonialism (Frantz Fanon)

Black Skin White Masks (Frantz Fanon)

Inglorious Empire (Shashi Tharoor)

Remembering Che (Aleida March)

Against Empire (Michael Parenti)

Blackshirts & Reds (Michael Parenti)

Revolutionary Suicide (Huey P. Newton)

Confessions of an Economic Hitman (John Perkins)

The Mismeasure of Man (Stephen Jay Gould)

The State and the Revolution (V.I. Lenin)

Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (V.I. Lenin)

Imperialism in The 21st Century (V.I. Lenin)

Liberalism A Counter History (Domenico Losurdo)

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (Ha-Joon Chang)

October (China Miéville)

Kill Anything That Moves (Nick Turse)

Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (Norman Ohler)

Late Victorian Holocausts (Mike Davis)

Ten Myths About Israel (Ilan Pappe)

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Walter Rooney)

Reform or Revolution (Rosa Luxemburg)

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (J. Sakai)

Killing Hope (William Blum)

Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism (Arghiri Emmanuel)

Unequal Exchange: A Study of Imperialism and Trade (Arghiri Emmanuel)

The Wealth of Some Nations (Zak Cope)

Divided World Divided Class (Zak Cope)

The Law of Worldwide Value (Samir Amin)

Unequal Development (Samir Amin)

An Economic History of the U.S.S.R (Alec Nove)

Human Rights in the Soviet Union (Albert Szymanski)

Is the Red Flag Flying? (Albert Szymanski)

Soviet Democracy (Pat Sloan)

The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia: The Socialist Offensive (R.W. Davies)

Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation (Sidney and Beatrice Webb)

Socialism in the Soviet Union (Jonathan Aurthur)

The Soviet Form of Popular Government (The U.S.S.R Academy of Sciences)

Workers Participation in the Soviet Union (Mick Costello)

The Great Conspiracy (Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn)

The Soviets and Ourselves: Two Commonwealths (K.E. Holme)

The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Hanna Baratu)

South Yemen A Marxist Republic in Arabia (Robert W. Stookey)

The Arab Left (Tareq Y. Ismael)

Post-Marxism and The Middle East (Feleh A. Jabar)

The Unmaking of Arab Socialism (Ali Kodri)

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (Rashid Khalidi)

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Ilan Pape)

A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine (The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine)

Roadside Picnic (Arkady and Boris Strugatsky)

Blood in My Eye (George Jackson)

Why You Should Be a Trade Unionist (Len McCluskey)

The Pitfalls of Liberalism (Kwame Ture)

[dailyanarchistposts]

F.8 What role did the state take in the creation of capitalism?

If the “anarcho”-capitalist is to claim with any plausibility that “real” capitalism is non-statist or that it can exist without a state, it must be shown that capitalism evolved naturally, in opposition to state intervention. In reality, the opposite is the case. Capitalism was born from state intervention. In the words of Kropotkin, “the State .. . and capitalism … developed side by side, mutually supporting and re-enforcing each other.” [Anarchism, p. 181]

Numerous writers have made this point. For example, in Karl Polanyi’s flawed masterpiece The Great Transformation we read that “the road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organised and controlled interventionism” by the state. [p. 140] This intervention took many forms — for example, state support during “mercantilism,” which allowed the “manufactures” (i.e. industry) to survive and develop, enclosures of common land, and so forth. In addition, the slave trade, the invasion and brutal conquest of the Americas and other “primitive” nations, and the looting of gold, slaves, and raw materials from abroad also enriched the European economy, giving the development of capitalism an added boost. Thus Kropotkin:

“The history of the genesis of capital has already been told by socialists many times. They have described how it was born of war and pillage, of slavery and serfdom, of modern fraud and exploitation. They have shown how it is nourished by the blood of the worker, and how little by little it has conquered the whole world … Law … has followed the same phases as capital … they have advanced hand in hand, sustaining one another with the suffering of mankind.” [Op. Cit., p. 207]

This process is what Karl Marx termed “primitive accumulation” and was marked by extensive state violence. Capitalism, as he memorably put it, “comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” and the “starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker.” [Capital, vol. 1, p. 926 and p. 875] Or, if Kropotkin and Marx seem too committed to be fair, we have John Stuart Mill’s summary that the “social arrangements of modern Europe commenced from a distribution of property which was the result, not of just partition, or acquisition by industry, but of conquest and violence.” [Principles of Political Economy, p. 15]

The same can be said of all countries. As such, when supporters of “libertarian” capitalism say they are against the “initiation of force,” they mean only new initiations of force: for the system they support was born from numerous initiations of force in the past (moreover, it also requires state intervention to keep it going — section D.1 addresses this point in some detail). Indeed, many thinkers have argued that it was precisely this state support and coercion (particularly the separation of people from the land) that played the key role in allowing capitalism to develop rather than the theory that “previous savings” did so. As left-wing German thinker Franz Oppenheimer (whom Murray Rothbard selectively quoted) argued, “the concept of a ‘primitive accumulation,’ or an original store of wealth, in land and in movable property, brought about by means of purely economic forces” while “seem[ing] quite plausible” is in fact “utterly mistaken; it is a ‘fairly tale,’ or it is a class theory used to justify the privileges of the upper classes.” [The State, pp. 5–6] As Individualist anarchist Kevin Carson summarised as part of his excellent overview of this historic process:

“Capitalism has never been established by means of the free market. It has always been established by a revolution from above, imposed by a ruling class with its origins in the Old Regime … by a pre-capitalist ruling class that had been transformed in a capitalist manner. In England, it was the landed aristocracy; in France, Napoleon III’s bureaucracy; in Germany, the Junkers; in Japan, the Meiji. In America, the closest approach to a ‘natural’ bourgeois evolution, industrialisation was carried out by a mercantilist aristocracy of Federalist shipping magnates and landlords.” [“Primitive Accumulation and the Rise of Capitalism,” Studies in Mutualist Political Economy]

This, the actual history of capitalism, will be discussed in the following sections. So it is ironic to hear right-“libertarians” sing the praises of a capitalism that never existed and urge its adoption by all nations, in spite of the historical evidence suggesting that only state intervention made capitalist economies viable — even in that Mecca of “free enterprise,” the United States. As Noam Chomsky argues, “who but a lunatic could have opposed the development of a textile industry in New England in the early nineteenth century, when British textile production was so much more efficient that half the New England industrial sector would have gone bankrupt without very high protective tariffs, thus terminating industrial development in the United States? Or the high tariffs that radically undermined economic efficiency to allow the United States to develop steel and other manufacturing capacities? Or the gross distortions of the market that created modern electronics?” [World Orders, Old and New, p. 168] Such state interference in the economy is often denounced and dismissed by right-“libertarians” as mercantilism. However, to claim that “mercantilism” is not capitalism makes little sense. Without mercantilism, “proper” capitalism would never have developed, and any attempt to divorce a social system from its roots is ahistoric and makes a mockery of critical thought (particularly as “proper” capitalism turns to mercantilism regularly).

Similarly, it is somewhat ironic when “anarcho”-capitalists and other right “libertarians” claim that they support the freedom of individuals to choose how to live. After all, the working class was not given that particular choice when capitalism was developing. Instead, their right to choose their own way of life was constantly violated and denied — and justified by the leading capitalist economists of the time. To achieve this, state violence had one overall aim, to dispossess the labouring people from access to the means of life (particularly the land) and make them dependent on landlords and capitalists to earn a living. The state coercion “which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” [Marx, Op. Cit., pp. 874–5] So to claim that now (after capitalism has been created) we get the chance to try and live as we like is insulting in the extreme. The available options we have are not independent of the society we live in and are decisively shaped by the past. To claim we are “free” to live as we like (within the laws of capitalism, of course) is basically to argue that we are able (in theory) to “buy” the freedom that every individual is due from those who have stolen it from us in the first place. It ignores the centuries of state violence required to produce the “free” worker who makes a “voluntary” agreement which is compelled by the social conditions that this created.

The history of state coercion and intervention is inseparable from the history of capitalism: it is contradictory to celebrate the latter while claiming to condemn the former. In practice capitalism has always meant intervention in markets to aid business and the rich. That is, what has been called by supporters of capitalism “laissez-faire” was nothing of the kind and represented the political-economic program of a specific fraction of the capitalist class rather than a set of principles of “hands off the market.” As individualist anarchist Kevin Carson summaries, “what is nostalgically called ‘laissez-faire’ was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidise accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.” [The Iron Fist behind the Invisible Hand] Moreover, there is the apparent unwillingness by such “free market” advocates (i.e. supporters of “free market” capitalism) to distinguish between historically and currently unfree capitalism and the other truly free market economy that they claim to desire. It is common to hear “anarcho”-capitalists point to the state-based capitalist system as vindication of their views (and even more surreal to see them point to pre-capitalist systems as examples of their ideology). It should be obvious that they cannot have it both ways.

In other words, Rothbard and other “anarcho”-capitalists treat capitalism as if it were the natural order of things rather than being the product of centuries of capitalist capture and use of state power to further their own interests. The fact that past uses of state power have allowed capitalist norms and assumptions to become the default system by their codification in property law and justified by bourgeois economic does not make it natural. The role of the state in the construction of a capitalist economy cannot be ignored or downplayed as government has always been an instrument in creating and developing such a system. As one critic of right-“libertarian” ideas put it, Rothbard “completely overlooks the role of the state in building and maintaining a capitalist economy in the West. Privileged to live in the twentieth century, long after the battles to establish capitalism have been fought and won, Rothbard sees the state solely as a burden on the market and a vehicle for imposing the still greater burden of socialism. He manifests a kind of historical nearsightedness that allows him to collapse many centuries of human experience into one long night of tyranny that ended only with the invention of the free market and its ‘spontaneous’ triumph over the past. It is pointless to argue, as Rothbard seems ready to do, that capitalism would have succeeded without the bourgeois state; the fact is that all capitalist nations have relied on the machinery of government to create and preserve the political and legal environments required by their economic system.” That, of course, has not stopped him “critis[ing] others for being unhistorical.” [Stephen L. Newman, Liberalism at Wit’s End, pp. 77–8 and p. 79]

Thus we have a key contradiction within “anarcho”-capitalism. While they bemoan state intervention in the market, their underlying assumption is that it had no real effect on how society has evolved over the centuries. By a remarkable coincidence, the net effect of all this state intervention was to produce a capitalist economy identical in all features as one which would have been produced if society had been left alone to evolve naturally. It does seem strange that state violence would happen to produce the same economic system as that produced by right-“libertarians” and Austrian economists logically deducing concepts from a few basic axioms and assumptions. Even more of a coincidence, these conclusions also happen to be almost exactly the same as what those who have benefited from previous state coercion want to hear — namely, the private property is good, trade unions and strikes are bad, that the state should not interfere with the power of the bosses and should not even think about helping the working class (employed or unemployed). As such, while their advice and rhetoric may have changed, the social role of economists has not. State action was required to dispossess the direct producers from the means of life (particularly the land) and to reduce the real wage of workers so that they have to provide regular work in a obedient manner. In this, it and the capitalists received much advice from the earliest economists as Marxist economic historian Michael Perelman documents in great detail. As he summarises, “classical political economy was concerned with promoting primitive accumulation in order to foster capitalist development, even though the logic of primitive accumulation was in direct conflict with the classical political economists’ purported adherence to the values of laissez-faire.” [The Invention of Capitalism, p. 12] The turn to “laissez-faire” was possible because direct state power could be mostly replaced by economic power to ensure the dependency of the working class.

Needless to say, some right-“libertarians” recognise that the state played some role in economic life in the rise and development of capitalism. So they contrast “bad” business people (who took state aid) and “good” ones (who did not). Thus Rothbard’s comment that Marxists have “made no particular distinction between ‘bourgeoisie’ who made use of the state, and bourgeoisie who acted on the free market.” [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 72] But such an argument is nonsense as it ignores the fact that the “free market” is a network (and defined by the state by the property rights it enforces). This means that state intervention in one part of the economy will have ramifications in other parts, particularly if the state action in question is the expropriation and/or protection of productive resources (land and workplaces) or the skewing of the labour market in favour of the bosses. In other words, the individualistic perspective of “anarcho”-capitalism blinds its proponents to the obvious collective nature of working class exploitation and oppression which flows from the collective and interconnected nature of production and investment in any real economy. State action supported by sectors of the capitalist class has, to use economic jargon, positive externalities for the rest. They, in general, benefit from it as a class just as working class people suffers from it collectively as it limits their available choices to those desired by their economic and political masters (usually the same people). As such, the right-“libertarian” fails to understand the class basis of state intervention.

For example, the owners of the American steel and other companies who grew rich and their companies big behind protectionist walls were obviously “bad” bourgeoisie. But were the bourgeoisie who supplied the steel companies with coal, machinery, food, “defence” and so on not also benefiting from state action? And the suppliers of the luxury goods to the wealthy steel company owners, did they not benefit from state action? Or the suppliers of commodities to the workers that laboured in the steel factories that the tariffs made possible, did they not benefit? And the suppliers to these suppliers? And the suppliers to these suppliers? Did not the users of technology first introduced into industry by companies protected by state orders also not benefit? Did not the capitalists who had a large pool of landless working class people to select from benefit from the “land monopoly” even though they may not have, unlike other capitalists, directly advocated it? It increased the pool of wage labour for all capitalists and increased their bargaining position/power in the labour market at the expense of the working class. In other words, such a policy helped maintain capitalist market power, irrespective of whether individual capitalists encouraged politicians to vote to create/maintain it. And, similarly, all American capitalists benefited from the changes in common law to recognise and protect capitalist private property and rights that the state enforced during the 19th century (see section B.2.5).

Rothbard, in other words, ignores class theft and the accumulative effect of stealing both productive property and the products of the workers who use it. He considered the “moral indignation” of socialism arose from the argument “that the capitalists have stolen the rightful property of the workers, and therefore that existing titles to accumulated capital are unjust.” He argued that given “this hypothesis, the remainder of the impetus for both Marxism and anarchosyndicalism follow quite logically.” However, Rothbard’s “solution” to the problem of past force seems to be (essentially) a justification of existing property titles and not a serious attempt to understand or correct past initiations of force that have shaped society into a capitalist one and still shape it today. This is because he is simply concerned with returning property which has been obviously stolen and can be returned to those who have been directly dispossessed or their descendants (for example, giving land back to peasants or tenant farmers). If this cannot be done then the “title to that property, belongs properly, justly and ethically to its current possessors.” [Op. Cit., p. 52 and p. 57] At best, he allows nationalised property and any corporation which has the bulk of its income coming from the state to be “homesteaded” by their workers (which, according to Rothbard’s arguments for the end of Stalinism, means they will get shares in the company). The end result of his theory is to leave things pretty much as they are. This is because he could not understand that the exploitation of the working class was/is collective in nature and, as such, is simply impossible to redress it in his individualistic term of reference.

To take an obvious example, if the profits of slavery in the Southern states of America were used to invest in factories in the Northern states (as they were), does giving the land to the freed slaves in 1865 really signify the end of the injustice that situation produced? Surely the products of the slaves work were stolen property just as much as the land was and, as a result, so is any investment made from it? After all, investment elsewhere was based on the profits extracted from slave labour and “much of the profits earned in the northern states were derived from the surplus originating on the southern plantations.” [Perelman, Op. Cit., p. 246] In terms of the wage workers in the North, they have been indirectly exploited by the existence of slavery as the investment this allowed reduced their bargaining power on the market as it reduced their ability to set up business for themselves by increasing the fixed costs of so doing. And what of the investment generated by the exploitation of these wage workers? As Mark Leier points out, the capitalists and landlords “may have purchased the land and machinery, but this money represented nothing more than the expropriated labour of others.” [Bakunin, p. 111] If the land should be returned to those who worked it as Rothbard suggests, why not the industrial empires that were created on the backs of the generations of slaves who worked it? And what of the profits made from the generations of wage slaves who worked on these investments? And what of the investments which these profits allowed? Surely if the land should be given to those who worked it then so must any investments it generated? And assuming that those currently employed can rightly seize their workplaces, what about those previously employed and their descendants? Why should they be excluded from the riches their ancestors helped create?

To talk in terms of individuals misses all this and the net result is to ensure that the results of centuries of coercion and theft are undisturbed. This is because it is the working class as a whole who have been expropriated and whose labour has been exploited. The actual individuals involved and their descendants would be impossible to identify nor would it be possible to track down how the stolen fruits of their labour were invested. In this way, the class theft of our planet and liberty as well as the products of generations of working class people will continue safely.

Needless to say, some governments interfere in the economy more than others. Corporations do not invest in or buy from suppliers based in authoritarian regimes by accident. They do not just happen to be here, passively benefiting from statism and authoritarianism. Rather they choose between states to locate in based precisely on the cheapness of the labour supply. In other words, they prefer to locate in dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in Central America and Southeast Asia because those regimes interfere in the labour market the most — while, of course, talking about the very “free market” and “economic liberty” those regimes deny to their subjects. For Rothbard, this seems to be just a coincidence or a correlation rather than systematic for the collusion between state and business is the fault, not of capitalism, but simply of particular capitalists. The system, in other words, is pure; only individuals are corrupt. But, for anarchists, the origins of the modern capitalist system lies not in the individual qualities of capitalists as such but in the dynamic and evolution of capitalism itself — a complex interaction of class interest, class struggle, social defence against the destructive actions of the market, individual qualities and so forth. In other words, Rothbard’s claims are flawed — they fail to understand capitalism as a system, its dynamic nature and the authoritarian social relationships it produces and the need for state intervention these produce and require.

So, when the right suggests that “we” be “left alone,” what they mean by “we” comes into clear focus when we consider how capitalism developed. Artisans and peasants were only “left alone” to starve (sometimes not even that, as the workhouse was invented to bring vagabonds to the joy of work), and the working classes of industrial capitalism were only “left alone” outside work and for only as long as they respected the rules of their “betters.” As Marx memorably put it, the “newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” [Op. Cit., p. 875] As for the other side of the class divide, they desired to be “left alone” to exercise their power over others as we will see. That modern “capitalism” is, in effect, a kind of “corporate mercantilism,” with states providing the conditions that allow corporations to flourish (e.g. tax breaks, subsidies, bailouts, anti-labour laws, etc.) says more about the statist roots of capitalism than the ideologically correct definition of capitalism used by its supporters.

In fact, if we look at the role of the state in creating capitalism we could be tempted to rename “anarcho”-capitalism “marxian-capitalism”. This is because, given the historical evidence, a political theory can be developed by which the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” is created and that this capitalist state “withers away” into “anarchy”. That this means replacing the economic and social ideas of Marxism and their replacement by their direct opposite should not mean that we should reject the idea (after all, that is what “anarcho”-capitalism has done to Individualist Anarchism!). But we doubt that many “anarcho”-capitalists will accept such a name change (even though this would reflect their politics far better; after all they do not object to past initiations of force, just current ones and many do seem to think that the modern state will wither away due to market forces).

This is suggested by the fact that Rothbard did not advocate change from below as the means of creating “anarchy.” He helped found the so-called Libertarian Party in 1971 which, like Marxists, stands for political office. With the fall of Stalinism in 1989, Rothbard faced whole economies which could be “homesteaded” and he argued that “desocialisation” (i.e., de-nationalisation as, like Leninists, he confused socialisation with nationalisation) “necessarily involves the action of that government surrendering its property to its private subjects … In a deep sense, getting rid of the socialist state requires that state to perform one final, swift, glorious act of self-immolation, after which it vanishes from the scene.” (compare to Engels’ comment that “the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society” is the state’s “last independent act as a state.” [Selected Works, p. 424]). He considered the “capital goods built by the State” as being “philosophically unowned” yet failed to note whose labour was exploited and taxed to build them in the first place (needless to say, he rejected the ideas of shares to all as this would be “egalitarian handouts … to undeserving citizens,” presumably the ill, the unemployed, retirees, mothers, children, and future generations). [The Logic of Action II, p. 213, p. 212 and p. 209]

Industrial plants would be transferred to workers currently employed there, but not by their own direct action and direct expropriation. Rather, the state would do so. This is understandable as, left to themselves, the workers may not act quite as he desired. Thus we see him advocating the transfer of industry from the state bureaucracy to workers by means of “private, negotiable shares” as ownership was “not to be granted to collectives or co-operatives or workers or peasants holistically, which would only bring back the ills of socialism in a decentralised and chaotic syndicalist form.” His “homesteading” was not to be done by the workers themselves rather it was a case of “granting shares to workers” by the state. He also notes that it should be a “priority” for the government “to return all stolen, confiscated property to its original owners, or to their heirs.” This would involve “finding original landowners” — i.e., the landlord class whose wealth was based on exploiting the serfs and peasants. [Op. Cit., p. 210 and pp. 211–2] Thus expropriated peasants would have their land returned but not, apparently, any peasants working land which had been taken from their feudal and aristocratic overlords by the state. Thus those who had just been freed from Stalinist rule would have been subjected to “libertarian” rule to ensure that the transition was done in the economically correct way. As it was, the neo-classical economists who did oversee the transition ensured that ownership and control transferred directly to a new ruling class rather than waste time issuing “shares” which would eventually end up in a few hands due to market forces (the actual way it was done could be considered a modern form of “primitive accumulation” as it ensured that capital goods did not end up in the hands of the workers).

But this is beside the point. The fact remains that state action was required to create and maintain capitalism. Without state support it is doubtful that capitalism would have developed at all. So the only “capitalism” that has existed is a product of state support and intervention, and it has been characterised by markets that are considerably less than free. Thus, serious supporters of truly free markets (like the American Individualist Anarchists) have not been satisfied with “capitalism” — have, in fact, quite rightly and explicitly opposed it. Their vision of a free society has always been at odds with the standard capitalist one, a fact which “anarcho”-capitalists bemoan and dismiss as “mistakes” and/or the product of “bad economics.” Apparently the net effect of all this state coercion has been, essentially, null. It has not, as the critics of capitalism have argued, fundamentally shaped the development of the economy as capitalism would have developed naturally by itself. Thus an economy marked by inequalities of wealth and power, where the bulk of the population are landless and resourceless and where interest, rent and profits are extracted from the labour of working people would have developed anyway regardless of the state coercion which marked the rise of capitalism and the need for a subservient and dependent working class by the landlords and capitalists which drove these policies simply accelerated the process towards “economic liberty.” However, it is more than mere coincidence that capitalism and state coercion are so intertwined both in history and in current practice.

In summary, like other apologists for capitalism, right-wing “libertarians” advocate that system without acknowledging the means that were necessary to create it. They tend to equate it with any market system, failing to understand that it is a specific kind of market system where labour itself is a commodity. It is ironic, of course, that most defenders of capitalism stress the importance of markets (which have pre-dated capitalism) while downplaying the importance of wage labour (which defines it) along with the violence which created it. Yet as both anarchists and Marxists have stressed, money and commodities do not define capitalism any more than private ownership of the means of production. So it is important to remember that from a socialist perspective capitalism is not identical to the market. As we stressed in section C.2, both anarchists and Marxists argue that where people produce for themselves, is not capitalist production, i.e. when a worker sells commodities this is not capitalist production. Thus the supporters of capitalism fail to understand that a great deal of state coercion was required to transform pre-capitalist societies of artisans and peasant farmers selling the produce of their labour into a capitalist society of wage workers selling themselves to bosses, bankers and landlords.

Lastly, it should be stressed that this process of primitive accumulation is not limited to private capitalism. State capitalism has also had recourse to such techniques. Stalin’s forced collectivisation of the peasantry and the brutal industrialisation involved in five-year plans in the 1930s are the most obvious example). What took centuries in Britain was condensed into decades in the Soviet Union and other state capitalist regimes, with a corresponding impact on its human toil. However, we will not discuss these acts of state coercion here as we are concerned primarily with the actions required to create the conditions required for private capitalism.

Needless to say, this section cannot hope to go into all the forms of state intervention across the globe which were used to create or impose capitalism onto an unwilling population. All we can do is provide a glimpse into the brutal history of capitalism and provide enough references for those interested to pursue the issue further. The first starting point should be Part VIII (“So-Called Primitive Accumulation”) of volume 1 of Marx’s Capital. This classic account of the origins of capitalism should be supplemented by more recent accounts, but its basic analysis is correct. Marxist writers have expanded on Marx’s analysis, with Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism and David McNally’s Against the Market are worth consulting, as is Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid has a short summary of state action in destroying communal institutions and common ownership of land, as does his The State: It’s Historic Role. Rudolf Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture is also essential reading. Individualist Anarchist Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy provides an excellent summary (see part 2, “Capitalism and the State: Past, Present and Future”) as does his essay The Iron Fist behind the Invisible Hand.

[edwad]

What's the best secondary literature on the Grundrisse?

i'm not necessarily a grundrisse-doer by any means so i don't go out of my way to leaf through all the secondary literature on it, but rosdolsky's the making of marx's capital is the classic text which set discussions about the grundrisse in motion. it has been somewhat outmoded by later scholarship (even the title of the work itself is based on a misunderstanding of marx's changing plans for the critique of political economy), but all serious grundrisse-ing since is in some way indebted to this work.

otherwise, i think the relevant part of oakley's marx's critique of political economy is probably the best study of marx's source material and what he was doing with it. he has his flaws, but i consider oakley a must-read for anyone really trying to grapple with marx's economic work. his earlier book, the making of marx's critical theory (an obvious nod to rosdolsky), is much less ambitious than his 2-volume work, but has plenty of overlap and works well as a brief but scholarly overview of marxs development as an economic thinker in a way which dovetails nicely with the framing offered by mandel in his similar work on the formation of the economic thought of karl marx, but without nearly as much stupidity. mandel's work is worth reading if you can get to it, because he has a certain sensitivity to the development of marx's theory of wages in a way which puts the problem neatly to the reader, but oakley's work is undoubtedly superior.

there are also a zillion or so edited volumes out there which are more or less useful (in marxs laboratory ed. bellofiore et al, karl marx's grundrisse ed. musto, etc) and they're worth perusing on topics of interest, but -- like most scholarly volumes of that sort -- they are probably best digested after achieving a certain degree of familiarity. i don't know where you stand in relation to the grundrisse or marx generally, but these volumes tend to involve a lot of specialists wading into long-running debates that not even rosdolsky can fully prepare you for, so they don't necessarily work well as a handy guide to the text, if that's the kind of thing you're looking for (although obviously some pieces are better suited for this than others). that being said, musto's original work in particular (found in his edited volume but also freely available on his website) is quite useful for situating marxs grundrisse in the context of his life/intellectual development.

the last thing i might throw out there as a suggestion is sixel's understanding marx. this is a thin companion to marx's introduction of 1857, which is typically included in published editions of the grundrisse even though it doesn't really belong to that project and, in some ways, can complicate the reading by making it seem as if the grundrisse is supposed to somehow fit into the shape or develop the case for the conclusions of this introduction. this isn't really the function of the introduction, and the grundrisse wasn't written as a book-draft which ought to be introduced to an audience of readers. that being said, it's an important piece and is usually read by people picking up the grundrisse, so sixel's little book is handy for anyone interested in thinking through its implications. his approach is rooted in a philosophical reading of marx as navigating the terrain of german idealism with a notion of critique in mind which implicitly nods toward kant and hegel, so no one can complain that ive neglected these elements.

[wojakgallery]

Title/Name: Karl Marx, (1818–1883). Bio: German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic, and political history. Country: Germany Wojak Series: Chad (Variant) Image by: Unknown Main Tag: Marx Wojak

[amphibiousmercurial]

Marx in the Margins: Spotting Economic Theories in Victorian Texts

Ah, Karl Marx! While most people today might toss his name around in discussions about economics or politics, did you know that his theories had a pretty fascinating impact on literature during the Victorian era? That's right, the ripple effects of Marx's ideas reached beyond economics textbooks and into the very essence of Victorian storytelling.

So, let's understand more about how Marx, with his critical views on capitalism and class struggle, influenced the literary landscape of that time. It wasn't just about factories and workers; it was about how these economic changes were altering the very fabric of society, and Victorian authors were all over it.

Marx's Materialist Conception of History

Marx introduced what he called the "materialist conception of history," which suggests that the economic foundations of a society influence every aspect of life, including its culture and literature. This theory proposes that it's not the human consciousness that shapes society, but rather the other way around: the economic system shapes the societal structure and thus the cultural outputs, like literature.

This perspective was a game-changer for literary analysis. Suddenly, critics and writers could use this lens to dissect texts, looking at how Victorian novels reflected or critiqued the economic conditions and class structures of their time. It offered a new depth to literary criticism that went beyond just looking at a text for its artistic value.

Influence on Victorian Novelists

Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were particularly adept at weaving social commentary about class and capitalism into their narratives. Their novels often spotlighted the plights, struggles, and resilience of the working class—a direct mirror to Marx’s critique of how capitalism exploits labor.

For instance, Dickens’ novels frequently delve into themes of poverty, social inequality, and the grim realities of industrialization. These weren't just background settings; they were integral to his plots and character developments, showcasing how deeply intertwined personal fortunes were with the socio-economic forces of capitalism.

Marxist Criticism in Literary Circles

Marxist literary criticism emerged as a powerful tool during and after the Victorian era, analyzing texts based on the socio-economic forces at play in them. This approach examines how literary works reflect, challenge, or stay silent on the issues of their times, particularly in terms of class struggles and economic disparities. It's like putting on a pair of glasses that helps you see the underlying economic influences on the narratives and characters.

The Broader Impact

The influence of Marx's theories extended beyond just the analysis of literature. It spurred a broader reflection on the role of the author in society. Were Victorian writers merely entertainers, or were they social commentators? This led to a richer understanding of literature as a potent tool for societal critique and change, pushing writers and readers alike to question the status quo and imagine new possibilities for society.

In sum, Marx might not have penned novels, but his theories offered Victorian writers and critics a new vocabulary and framework to explore and critique their rapidly changing world. The economic realities of capitalism, so central to Marx's work, became the landscapes upon which many Victorian novels were set, and understanding this backdrop can deeply enrich our reading of these texts today. So next time you pick up a Victorian novel, remember that there might just be a bit of Marx between the lines, influencing how we interpret the struggles and dreams of those long-ago characters.

[eleemosynecdoche]

what is the historical stages stuff? im not trying to be confrontational, im just curious.

So Karl Marx, working with the data he had in the middle of the 19th century, theorized about the evolution of political economy as passing through several phases- "primitive communism" prior to the developed state, then economic relations based on slavery, then feudalistic ones, and finally, capitalism, where each phase produces a characteristic struggle between economic classes defined by their relationship to the "means of production".

To use Marxian feudalism as an example, it comes to an end because the means of production it relied on were land, and so it produced a class system where aristocrats held control over the majority of land and extracted production from peasants who worked it as serfs or tenants, and urban burghers, the bourgeoisie, were shut out from any relationship to the means of primary production, through land being controlled by customs and inheritance laws and unable to be alienated freely, thereby not being a commodity that could be sold on the market, though they held a substantial proportion of cash wealth because they were outside primary production. As a consequence, the development of capital-intensive means of production in the countryside and in the cities leads to bourgeois enterprises that snap up displaced peasants, who become impoverished urban workers that contribute to a growing slice of production. And then as this system develops, it leads eventually to bourgeois revolutions, where the burghers organize to overthrow the aristocrats and claim the power they believe they deserve.

This is Marxian feudalism, which is to say the vision that was roughly available to Marx. More recent research has complicated this and shifted it significantly.

So Marx concludes that capitalism, his contemporaneous mode of production, where the economic base lies in labor arrangements where capital goods used for production are functionally rented out by their owners to the workers who use them for production, has a class tension between these urban workers and the burghers, and that when capitalism ends, as he assumed it would, because for him history would keep moving on, that would be through a class struggle in which the urban proletarians (drawing a term from Roman history) overthrow the bourgeoisie and claim the power they believe they deserve, followed by a further point at which class distinctions vanish, because production has developed to the degree there is no way to control production and lock it off from other people.

Marx's analysis was necessarily tentative- his "Asiatic mode of production" is an acknowledgement that, even with his limited dataset, his analysis couldn't really account for China and India and so on.

Later in Marx's life and after his death, his students and collaborators end up calcifying this into a theory of historical stages and a grand narrative of progress through these stages, and with it the formalized belief that socialism/proletarian revolution could only emerge in the developed industrial economies of (at the time) Western Europe and the United States of America.

Then in 1917 and 1918, there's a revolution in Russia followed by a coup. By the end of the next three bloody years, the Bolshevik Party has established itself firmly as the government of what is now called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Marxist orthodoxy, and frankly, mainstream economists as well, understood Russia as a pre-capitalist society, with serfdom having been abolished only recently and extremely limited capital industrial development.

This means that, within the existing theory of Marxism, the Bolsheviks are incapable of a socialist revolution, but only a bourgeois one by which capitalism could be instituted and developed. The Bolsheviks were also not particularly popular in the Russian socialist left and broader Marxist circles prior to their victory, and so they were vulnerable to this kind of critique. They had made this even worse by, during the civil war, solving many problems with other socialist parties, the anarchists, and armed peasant groups through the application of force for expediency. (And like most leftist political parties then and now, their leadership had a number of people from families and situations well-off enough to produce intellectuals.)

Thus, Leninism emerges in order to explain why the use of force wasn't just another Reign of Terror falling on the sans-culottes and how the USSR can be socialist, but to do so, it must reify the historical stages even further to make the actions of the Bolsheviks necessary to "skip" the bourgeois stage, or at least speedrun it.

But the older Marxist orthodoxy doesn't go away. This is why the communists in Guatemala who advised Jacobo Arbenz urged him to establish a capitalist land market by breaking up plantations, why the Japan Socialist Party and Japan Communist Party cooperate with American occupation force economists to push through similar land reform bills in the late 1940s, and it's why Frantz Fanon has a long section in The Wretched of the Earth laying out that the problem for postcolonial societies is that their bourgeoisie have been warped into established relationships with the colonial metropole, and so an interventionist state must build proper capitalism independently.

Now, I am personally skeptical of the specifics, because more recent economic histories have shown a more complex economic environment everywhere we look, and we have examples like Andean gift economies which are somewhat outside of the structure of phases and stages. I think a meaningful political economy that accommodates this data is yet to be assembled, (no, I don't accept David Graeber as doing anything meaningful). And much of Marxist orthodoxy is simplified, and hasn't incorporated Marx's more powerful theorization of the base and superstructure relationship.

Does that help?

[dohaalomari]

In society, the artist is considered an individual who feels and dreams and is considered a part of this society, and art has always been linked to literature.

“Sociological theory” aims to explain the relationship between literature, art, and society.

Tin defined his scientific approach to literature and art through the angles of (race/environment/time), as Karl Marx subjected art and literature to a study in economics.

There are researchers in the field of aesthetics who have transformed Marx's theory into a theory that analyzes the relationship of art and literature to society. Art, like literature, is considered a relationship indicative of the category of intellectuals.

The problem of the relationships between literature, art, and society is not posed consciously. It has branched out into specialized fields. Practical and technical works have moved away from pure literature. Literature has tended toward the purpose of entertainment and enjoyment, while new literature and art have taken to establishing organic relationships between itself and the community.

Paying attention to the content and message of art is called committed literature or committed art.

The concept that strong literature does not create a need for the consuming community has been confirmed thanks to the art of printing, development in the book industry, and applications of audio-visual media.

The book “Literature in its Relations to Social Institutions” by Madame Dostal was a reason for the growth of the artistic consciousness that shaped the state of social awareness, as it corresponded to “Montesquieu” in terms of applying the methods he adopted from the concepts of (modern) and (national) in the time in which it developed. The "spirit of the times" and "national spirit" tendencies.

These are the same concepts as “Tin”, except that he needed to understand the concept of “human science”, but Karl Marx’s theory of economics as a human science is considered more effective.

Since he interpreted the history of society using materialist theory, he published a book with a friend trying to explain creative science and its impact on society.

A truly Marxist theory of literature and art began to form with Plekhanov. Art and literature were considered essentially social, shaping the class consciousness of popular groups in their struggle with the bourgeois class by highlighting the role of literature and art.

Ivanov showed that literature and art should be viewed in relation to the life of society, and the truth should be perceived and analyzed.

Art and literature are social phenomena - according to Kant's theory, art is defined as a sensory perception of truth through creative images. The principle of the historical method is the basis of research.

Both Lukacs and Goldman criticized the Soviet sociological approach of the formal school, relying on Marxist theory and criticism of it. The first obstacle facing a true literary sociology is the science of literature.

@uob-funoon

[maaarine]

Bibliography: books posted on this blog in 2023

Mariana ALESSANDRI (2023): Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods

Pierre BOURDIEU (1998): Masculine Domination

Michael CUNNINGHAM (1998): The Hours

Simone DE BEAUVOIR (1949): The Second Sex

Andrea DWORKIN (1981): Pornography: Men Possessing Women

Andrea DWORKIN (1983): Right-Wing Women

Silvia FEDERICI (2012): Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

Antony FREDRIKSSON (2022): A Phenomenology of Attention and the Unfamiliar: Encounters with the Unknown

Manon GARCIA (2021): We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives 

Sarah HENDRICKX (2015): Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Understanding Life Experiences from Early Childhood to Old Age

Walter ISAACSON (2023): Elon Musk

John KAAG (2020): Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

Naomi KLEIN (2023): Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Ferenc KÖTELES (2021): Body Sensations: The Conscious Aspects of Interoception

Diane LAMOUREUX et Francis DUPUIS-DERI (2015): Les antiféminismes : analyse d'un discours réactionnaire

Michael GRAZIANO (2019): Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience

Kati MARTON (2021): The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel

Karl MARX (1932): Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Greer KIRSHENBAUM (2023): The Nurture Revolution: Grow Your Baby's Brain and Transform Their Mental Health through the Art of Nurtured Parenting

Kate MANNE (2017): Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

Gabor MATE (2022): The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Susan MATTER (2019): The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause

Kevin MITCHELL (2023): Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

Siddhartha MUKHERJEE (2022): The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

Emily NAGOSKI (2015): Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

Carole PATEMAN (1988): The Sexual Contract

Annie Murphy PAUL (2021): The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

Matthew PERRY (2022): Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir

Devon PRICE (2022): Unmasking Autism

Hartmut ROSA (2018): Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World

Martin SELIGMAN (1975): Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death

Miguel A. SEPULVEDA-PEDRO (2023): Enactive Cognition in Place

Mary Ann SIEGHART (2021): The Authority Gap: Why Women are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and what We Can Do about it

Timothy SNYDER (2018): The Road to Unfreedom

Gloria STEINEM (1992): Revolution from Within

John STOLTENBERG (1993): The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience

Liv STRÖMQUIST (2014): Fruit of Knowledge

Michael TOMASELLO (2022): The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans

Yanis VAROUFAKIS (2023): Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

Peter VERMEULEN (2009): Autism as Context Blindness

Peter VERMEULEN (2022): Autism and The Predictive Brain: Absolute Thinking in a Relative World

Jane WARD (2015): Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men

Jane WARD (2020): The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

Niobe WAY (2011): Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

[orangerosebush]

I want to pull out these passages from the section on Adorno and Horkheimer in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001, Ed. Leitch et al). Adorno and Horkheimer were part of the handful of theorists who were the intellectual powerhouses of the Frankfurt School, a philosophical/social movement in the 20th century. This philosophical movement was marked by a desire to develop certain cultural and artistic analyses within the guiding framework of Karl Marx’s economic analyses, as WWII and the rise of fascism in Europe prompted a revisitation of the economic class struggle such that it accounted for other key, powerful historical forces of organizing violence, particularly antisemitism.

Horkheimer and Adorno were both Jewish, and their relationship to the concept of mass art in a post-WWII world was profoundly affected by this -- Adorno made it explicit in much of his writing that he saw a direct relationship between the production of consumable, stylized mass art and a widespread social miasma of apathy and incuriosity that helped facilitate a society-wide "consent" to a descent into fascism. Considering that Adorno's life was marked by the fact he was a Jewish man in pre-war Germany, who was first stripped of his right to teach and then of his citizenship before being sent into 15 years of exile, his conviction on the subject of the culture industry moves me, even if I do not wholly agree with all aspects of the analysis.

I'm also fascinated by the way in which Walter Benjamin is invoked in the Norton reader next to Adorno and Horkheimer. Below I have attached one of Benjamin's most famous pieces of writing, which is his description of the "angel of history" in Illuminations (ed. and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn).

I think that this idea of history being an unfolding catastrophe that piles its wreckage at the feet of an impotent angel that can only watch is so profoundly striking, particularly when you situate Benjamin's angel in its context. His angel of history, Angelus Novus, was pictured on a Klee painting that Benjamin purchased before the war to support his friend, hanging the piece of art up in his office like a paralyzed guardian angel -- and tragically, in 1940, Benjamin was to take his own life fleeing the Nazi regime.

[infantisimo]

It was in the early 20th century that Punjabis studying in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and California began to interact with Western thought. The poet Puran Singh (1881-1931) engaged Nietzsche in Punjabi; the great lexicographer Kahan Singh (1861-1938) collaborated with Macauliffe (1837-1913) on the English translation of the Sikh scriptures for his 6-volume magnum opus The Sikh Religion; the Greek and Sanskrit scholar Dharam Anant [Singh] worked on Plato while Santokh Singh (1892-1927) introduced Marx to Punjab.

Bhai Santokh Singh, a Ghadar activist and one of the founders of the communist movement in Punjab, was tried with 29 other Ghadarites in the Indo-German or San Francisco Hindu Conspiracy Case and sentenced to 21 months rigorous imprisonment. In the McNeil’s Island prison, he came in contact with other political inmates, many of them Russian communist exiles, and began to read leftist books, including the three volumes of Capital. After his release, he travelled to the Soviet Union, where he enrolled in the KUTV – University of the Toilers of the East. After returning to Punjab, he started Kirti (The Worker) in 1926, a Punjabi magazine.

In its first issue, dated February 1926, he published a short introductory article on Dialectical and Historical Materialism. The essay was also an important milestone in the development of Punjabi literary and political prose. Prior to this, historical and political texts – even the traditional medicine formulae – were written in poetry. Given the lack of an established Punjabi tradition of economic and philosophical discourse, Santokh Singh relied on Sanskrit for introducing new philosophical terms into Punjabi.

Dwarka Das Library, which shifted from Lahore to Delhi to Chandigarh after Partition, has in its collection the first English edition of Capital (1887). It is a fair conjecture that Bhagat Singh would have accessed it. In his memoir, Yash ki Dharohar (Heritage of Honour, 1988), Bhagwan Das Mahaur, an accomplice of Bhagat Singh, writes that he had read Capital on the suggestion of Bhagat Singh, but could not comprehend it. Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebooks include quotes from the writings of Marx and Engels.

Makhan Singh (1913-1973) a whole-timer of the CPI during 1939-1947, spent his time in translating some parts of Marx’s Das Kapital into Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script. In 1942, Jagjit Singh Anand, an editor of Jang-e-Azadi, the CPI organ, received Makhan Singh’s Punjabi translation of ‘Dialectical Materialism’, a chapter in Das Kapital. In his memoir, Anand recalled his deep impression of Makhan Singh’s nuanced grasp of Marxist theory as well as his mastery of the Punjabi language. The two men worked on the editorial board of Jang-e-Azadi until 1947, when Makhan Singh left Punjab for Kenya.

The editorial board of Jang-e-Azadi consisted of communist activists and pioneer Punjabi translators of Marxian literature, including Bhag Singh, a PhD in political science from Berkeley University, Teja Singh Sutantar, a legendary political leader and graduate of the University of the Toilers of the East Moscow, Sohan Singh Josh, Makhan Singh, Jagjit Singh Anand, and Randhir Singh.

In May 1937 a collection of articles on capitalism, imperialism and socialism published in Kirti was compiled by Harkishan Singh Surjeet. This 100-page book was titled ‘Purani te Navi Duniya’ (Old & the New World) by Sathi (Comrade) Karl Marx. It was the first Marxian text in Punjabi that was laden with the new terminology of economics and philosophy, not familiar to most Punjabi readers at the time. Most of the newly-coined terms stuck. But a hundred years later, there is still no consensus about certain words and concepts. For instance, the word ‘Capital’ can be translated both as ‘Poonji’ (origin Sanskrit) and ‘Sarmaya’ (origin Persian).

The first authentic Punjabi translation of Capital was published in 1975 by Navyug publishers, Delhi. The three volumes were translated by a team of fulltime employees of the Soviet Embassy’s Information Department. No other book by Marx except The Poverty of Philosophy was translated into Punjabi.

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels was first translated into Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script by Randhir Singh and published in Lahore in 1946. It took over 70 years for its Punjabi version to appear in the Farsi script in Lahore translated by Mushtaq Soofi (Sanjh publications, 2022). A booklet about contemporary Marxism, titled Nirvar (The Analysis) was published by Rashid Uz Zaman in the Farsi script in Lahore in 1970. Unlike the East Punjabi translation, which largely relies on Sanskrit, Zaman’s translation borrows heavily from Arabic and Farsi. This duality of one language with two scripts and two dictions has been a serious bone of contention between academics, linguists and writers on both sides of the divided land of Punjab.