Abstract
This chapter argues that through his development of historical materialism, Marx put forward a conception of working class politics that offered the potential to realize the project of true human emancipation while articulating an understanding of history as a process of social evolution through the social relations of class exploitation. In his work, Marx both took up the ideas of historical social theory, as primarily developed by liberal theorists from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and developed in opposition to these ideas his own approach to human social development. On the one hand, liberal social theorists in England and France put forward a conception of history as “progress”: both unilinear, and impelled by fundamentally natural processes such as the division of labour. On the other, Hegel’s philosophical embrace of liberal ideas articulated an idealist process of realizing the human telos through the dialectical development of property relations, individualism, and state mediation. This was, on the whole, a more nuanced and comprehensive conception of human history, though it was explicitly Eurocentric as well as idealist. Against both such formulations, Marx sought to conceive historical development through the social property relations of class exploitation: materialist without being naturalistic, and dialectical without being idealist.
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Notes
- 1.
Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6, 482.
- 2.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, MECW, vol. 37, 776–7.
- 3.
Marx’s own works remain unparalleled as accounts of how it is that workers who enjoy full civil rights equal to those of their employers are nonetheless exploited by the very employment contracts, based on the principle of exchange of equivalents, into which they enter voluntarily. Though his arguments are presented clearly and systematically in Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, and in a somewhat incomplete but very short and simple form in “Value, Price and Profit”, MECW, vol. 20, 101–49, they remain widely misunderstood and debated even among those who consider themselves Marxists. Still, in comparison with the issues of the historical dimensions of his thought, the nature of his critique of political economy in respect of capitalism is well established. Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970) is one of many guides. For particular insight into the enduring relevance of Marx’s essential analysis for workers in all sectors of advanced capitalist society (though with a few unorthodox elements related to monopoly capitalism), see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). Ellen M. Wood has primarily been concerned with exploring the relationship between Marx’s critique of political economy and his socialist class politics, on the one hand, and his conception of the history of class society on the other, making her work of central relevance to the arguments put forward in the present essay. At the same time, much of what she has written is very helpful in clarifying Marx’s ideas on the nature of capitalism. See especially the first part of Democracy Against Capitalism: Rethinking Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
- 4.
The meaning of the term capitalism is the subject of great debate as has been discussed previously in Chaps. 2, 7 and 9. All forms of modern social theory recognize some qualitative difference between modern industrial capitalist society and earlier forms of society (as between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft), but they do not all associate this difference with capitalism as such. Weber is particularly noted for having identified capitalism in the ancient world, and so on, defining it simply in terms systematic profit-making through exchange. Yet Weber acknowledged that “in the modern West, there exists a completely different form of capitalism, which has developed nowhere else in the world: the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labour”, in “The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe”, Max Weber: selections in translation, ed. W. G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 336. This roughly corresponds to what Marx had in mind in conceiving of capitalism as a system of social reproduction through generalized production of market commodities by formally free labourers who have commodified their labour-power. It is this qualitatively different industrial form of capitalism, defined not with reference to technology but (as even Weber noted) by the organization of labour that is intended by the term throughout this essay.
- 5.
See Harvey Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), and Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 76–107.
- 6.
Central to the emergence of Political Marxism has been the work of Robert Brenner, particularly his seminal Past and Present articles “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” and “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, collected together with critical interventions from a range of economic historians in T. H. Ashton, and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). In addition to other works cited below, see also Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), particularly its lengthy Postscript.
- 7.
Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 118–40.
- 8.
Ibid., 19.
- 9.
Besides the references to Marx’s work on this score cited below, see the work of Karl Polanyi on the radical difference between all earlier societies, in which economic relations are embedded in other non-economic social relations (kinship, lordship, political organization), and capitalism: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957), 43–76, as well as “Aristotle Discovers the Economy” and “The Place of Economies in Societies” (with Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson), in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, eds. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 64–94, 239–42.
- 10.
There is an enormous literature on the idea of progress, liberal historiography and social theory, the Enlightenment, and the origins of Marxist and sociological conceptions of social development. One especially insightful and suggestive work is Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). For a discussion of Meek’s ideas, and the light they shed on the relationship between liberal social theory and Marx’s thought, see George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1987).
- 11.
Political Marxists have particularly focused attention on problems of Marxist historical theory. On the Marxist adoption of the originally liberal concept of bourgeois revolution, see Robert Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 271–304, as well as Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution. On broader problems of Marxist theory incorporating liberal historical perspectives, see Brenner, “On the Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (1977): 25–92; Wood, The Origin of Capitalism; and Comninel, “Historical Materialist Sociology and Revolutions”, in Handbook of Historical Sociology, eds. Gerard Delanty and Engin Isin (London: Sage, 2003), 85–95. On problems with Marxist theories of ancient and medieval European societies, see Ellen M. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988) and Democracy Against Capitalism, and Comninel, “Feudalism”, in Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, eds. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012), 131–7. On problems with conceiving modes of production, and with economic and technological determinism, see below.
- 12.
It must of course be acknowledged that many of the most important of Marx’s texts in this regard were unknown or generally unavailable until relatively recently.
- 13.
Karl Marx, “Preface”, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW, vol. 29, 261–5; Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 81–111.
- 14.
Marx, Grundrisse, 102.
- 15.
Ibid., 105.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid., 106 [original emphasis].
- 19.
Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress: History and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 151.
- 20.
For a comprehensive and sympathetic overview of this development, see Pollard, Idea of Progress.
- 21.
See Comninel, “Feudalism”, and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 27, no. 4, (2000): 1–53.
- 22.
This is not to say that these ideas about economic progress actually reflected the essential characteristics of capitalist development, only that these were the terms with which the rise of capitalism was depicted.
- 23.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301.
- 24.
Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 75. See Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 64–74.
- 25.
Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 91.
- 26.
Pollard, Idea of Progress, 77. The literature on modernization is simply too enormous and too familiar for discussion here.
- 27.
The works of André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein are of course central to this perspective, which has its own enormous literature. For a specifically historical materialist critique of these ideas, see Brenner, “On the Origins of Capitalist Development”.
- 28.
Clear Marxist statements of this view can be found in G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), 248, and E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1962), xv. Weber also took this approach, of course, as articulated in “The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe” (n3). Another non-Marxist approach, which offers a critical discussion of the liberal, Marxist, and sociological conceptions of history very different from my own, and an original attempt to synthesize them, is that of John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
- 29.
Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
- 30.
Ibid., 6–7.
- 31.
Ibid., ix, citing Daniel Rossides, The History and Nature of Sociological Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).
- 32.
Seidman, 11–8; see 299 fn. 2, referring to Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). See also Giddens “Liberalism and Sociology”, review of From Philosophy to Sociology. The Evolution of French Liberalism, 1870–1914, by William Logue, and Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory, by Steven Seidman, Contemporary Sociology 14, no. 3 (1985): 320–2. I use the term “bourgeois” in this context reluctantly, adopting conventional usage for the purposes of this work. Marxists and their critics alike have generally understood the term as virtually synonymous with “capitalist”, with implications of broadly “liberal” values, relations, and ideology. I have argued in Rethinking the French Revolution, 34–5 and 180ff, that this conflation of “bourgeois” and “capitalist” is quite mistaken. It is symptomatic of the very conceptual paradigm that the present essay seeks to confront. My use of the term here does not imply acceptance of the view that the French bourgeoisie of the ancienrégime had specifically capitalist characteristics, even remotely, or tendentiously.
- 33.
Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory, 10.
- 34.
Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 68.
- 35.
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964), 39–41.
- 36.
On capitalism and labour, see note 2 above. On the technical division of labour as part of the specific process of capitalist development, see Kristine Bruland, “The Transformation of Work in European Industrialization”, in The First Industrial Revolutions, eds. Peter Mathias and John A. Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 154–69.
- 37.
Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 905.
- 38.
Ibid., 927.
- 39.
Ibid. On Weber’s commitment to marginal utility theory as a basic principle of social analysis, see his essay “Marginal Utility Theory and the ‘Fundamental Law of Psychophysics’”, Social Science Quarterly 56 (1975): 21–36.
- 40.
Weber, Economy and Society, 930–1.
- 41.
See Weber, “The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe” (note 3), and the insightful discussion by Giddens in Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, 169–84.
- 42.
On Marxist conceptions of mode of production and division of labour, see Chap. 6 above, Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, and Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”.
- 43.
Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense.
- 44.
Ellen M. Wood, “Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism”, New Left Review 127 (1981): 73.
- 45.
Even Anthony Giddens, who proposed rescuing from Marx “snippets” of “the more abstract elements of a theory of human Praxis” (A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 1–2), understands Marxism, and the bulk of Marx’s writing, in economic determinist terms. Melvin Rader’s Marx’s Interpretation of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) stands out among non-Marxist approaches for asserting that Marx’s use of the base and superstructure metaphor was subsidiary to a more fundamental social paradigm of “organic totality”.
- 46.
Cohen’s ideas have played an important role in “rational choice” formulations of Marxism, especially as put forward by John Roemer. For a critical account of the relationship between this approach and Cohen’s version of Marxist historical theory, see Ellen M. Wood, “Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?”, New Left Review 177 (1989), 41–88, and her analysis in Democracy Against Capitalism.
- 47.
Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978); Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978). For critical accounts of, respectively, Althusser’s and Poulantzas’s approaches to Marxism, see E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory”, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978), and Wood, The Retreat From Class (London: Verso, 1986).
- 48.
I have dealt with this issue in relation to both “orthodox” and structuralist versions of Marxism in Rethinking the French Revolution, 77ff.
- 49.
For a fuller elaboration of the nature and context of these two paradigms than is possible in these pages, see Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 133–76; Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, 272–95; and Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 1–11.
- 50.
Although this is a theme of all of the early chapters of this book, from several perspectives, it is central to Chap. 3.
- 51.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction”; “On The Jewish Question” MECW, vol. 3.
- 52.
Frederick Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, MECW, vol. 3, 418–43.
- 53.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 241, 281.
- 54.
Ibid., 270–1.
- 55.
Ibid., 279.
- 56.
Ibid., 281.
- 57.
Ibid., 241.
- 58.
Ibid., 297.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Ibid., 293–4.
- 61.
Ibid., 280.
- 62.
Ibid., 271.
- 63.
Ibid., 278–9.
- 64.
One key issue to be addressed in this regard is fact that many societies have developed exploitive relations of production based solely on the state as appropriator of surplus, whereas at least Western class societies have been based upon the private possession of property. On the one hand, all such societies are exploitive, and have involved the reduction of the majority of the population to producers of surplus. On the other hand, there are profound historical implications that follow from the rights to appropriate surplus belonging to a class of individuals, who may compete with each other under the umbrella of (and even in efforts to acquire) state power.
- 65.
Ibid., 298.
- 66.
Ibid., 328, 329.
- 67.
Karl Marx, “From the Mémoires de R. Levasseur (De La Sarthe). Paris, 1829”, MECW, vol. 3, 361–74, especially fn. 117.
- 68.
Marx and Engels, Manifestoof the Communist Party, 477–519. It is Marx’s profound error in this regard, failing to carry through a critique of liberal historiography to match his critique of political economy, which is the subject of Rethinking the French Revolution.
- 69.
Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, 272.
- 70.
Ibid., 273.
- 71.
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 482.
- 72.
Marx, Capital, Volume IIII, 791.
- 73.
Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 34–7; Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974), 462–549; Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 124ff.
- 74.
Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 35, and Peasant-Citizen and Slave, 81–98.
- 75.
On “pristine” states as the first enduring societies characterized by systematic structures of socio-economic inequality, see Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967).
- 76.
Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 33.
- 77.
Ibid., 36–7.
- 78.
See Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 108–45.
- 79.
Brenner, “Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, 213–15.
- 80.
See Brenner’s articles in The Brenner Debate and Wood’s The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. Also see my Rethinking the French Revolution and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53.
- 81.
Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution; “Quatre-Vingt-Neuf Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the French Revolution”, Historical Papers – Communications Historiques (1989): 36–52; “The Political Context of the Popular Movement in the French Revolution”, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University Press, 1985), 143–62.
- 82.
Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave.
- 83.
Ibid., 115–20; Democracy Against Capitalism, 264–83.
- 84.
Wood, The Retreat From Class.
- 85.
The “bourgeois” dual revolution—the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution—was a staple of classical liberal accounts of progress, and of orthodox Marxism. Perhaps its best-known expression—and in many ways one of the most admirable—is Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution.
- 86.
Quentin Skinner, The foundations of modern political thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
- 87.
An entire essay could be devoted to such issues as a comparison of the way conservative and radical utopians have dealt with property and the state; the positions of non-socialist critics of existing society, such as Machiavelli and Rousseau; the peculiarly “modern” emphasis on property in Cicero; and the necessity for John Locke to provide a conception of the origin of property and its relationship to the state which differed fundamentally from the ideas of both Hobbes and Filmer.
- 88.
See Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism.
- 89.
See Ellen M. Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s ‘General Will’”, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University Press, 1985), 117–39.
- 90.
A. R. J. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth, in Ronald Meek, ed., Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), 123ff, 153; Rethinking the French Revolution, 195.
- 91.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 124–5, 154–6, 161, 188–9.
- 92.
Durkheim, The Division of Labor, 353ff, 374ff.
- 93.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason (London: Constable, 1905), 1: 284.
- 94.
Karl Marx, Theses on Feurerbach, MECW, vol. 5, 5.
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Comninel, G.C. (2019). Marx and Social Theory. In: Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_13
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