Abstract
This chapter argues that, contrary to the idea that there was an “epistemological break” in Marx’s ideas around the time of the 1845 manuscripts put together as The German Ideology, there was instead fundamental continuity in the ongoing development of his thought by means of the critique of political economy, from 1844 down through Capital. Although retaining a thoroughly holistic conception of human social existence, and of its processes of development over the course of history, Marx increasingly turned away from the language of philosophy, and the pretensions and preoccupations of philosophers. It was primarily through the extension and deepening of his critique of political economy that Marx continued to develop his historical materialist conception of modern capitalist society, as well as its relationship to prior forms of class society. It must, however, be recognized that while his analysis of capitalist class society was entirely original, based upon the alienation of labour as the crucial determinant in historical social development, much of what he had to say about precapitalist history was taken directly from the work of liberal historians. Regrettably, their liberal conception of class differed fundamentally from his own, introducing problems in Marx’s accounts of precapitalist class societies.
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Notes
- 1.
Not that this argument ever was convincing. Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Vintage, 1970), 36–6, 61.
- 2.
Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and below.
- 3.
Also involved in the manuscripts was Joseph Weydemeyer, Carver, and Blank, A Political History, 38. Weydemeyer was one of the earliest and truest converts to Marx’s ideas until his untimely death in the United States.
- 4.
The issue of the youthful Marx’s ideas on revolution are explored at length in Draper’s multivolume work, but see his analysis of Marx’s writings in 1842–3, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press: New York, 1977), 1: 39–76, 61ff.
- 5.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 150, 160–2, 470, 488, 509, 515.
- 6.
See his analysis of “the exchange of objectified labour as exchange value for living labour as use value”, explicitly articulated in terms of “the alienation of labour”, Marx, Grundrisse, 515.
- 7.
“On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 168.
- 8.
Indeed, as he famously noted, it provided comfort, much like the relief from bodily aches obtained by taking the opiate concoctions available at pharmacies.
- 9.
In fairness to Hegel, it might be noted that for both thinkers, concepts and their concrete manifestations alike develop through the web of the social, that the level of experience at which concrete forms of behaviour are shaped by and in turn shape ideas. Hegel’s idealism lay primarily in his acceptance of a telos for human social experience. While—much as for Aristotle—not the denial of material reality, still, though there perhaps might have been some teleology in Marx’s early thought, it faded over time. He always believed in the “necessity” of communism, but generally not in the “hard” philosophical sense of a telos. More to the point, Hegel’s conception of human development stopped far short of the full realization of emancipation, even going so far as to express the idea that it was the Prussian monarchy that was the means for the realization of the universal.
- 10.
In a letter to Eduard Bernstein of November 2–3, 1882, Engels wrote that, in 1880, Marx had said to Paul Lafarge, with respect to what was called “Marxism” in France, regarding the programme of the French Workers’ Party, “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist” (MECW, vol. 46), 356. Engels repeated this in a letter to Conrad Schmidt, October 27, 1890.
- 11.
The extent to which this was realized in the form of construction of a book, “The German Ideology”, will be taken up in Chap. 5.
- 12.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 14.
- 13.
See below, and Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 196ff.
- 14.
Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, MECW, vol. 39, 62–6. Both this and the following reference were importantly flagged by Raphael Samuel many years ago: Raphael Samuel, “British Marxist Historians, 1880–1980: Part One”, New Left Review 120, (1980): 21–96.
- 15.
Frederick Engels to H. Starkenberg, January 25, 1894, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895, trans. Dona Torr (London: M. Lawrence ltd, 1934), 518 [preferred translation]. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1953), 550.
- 16.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 235. Marx began these manuscripts with the section “Wages of Labour”, not the “Preface”, which was written later.
- 17.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6, 482.
- 18.
While the history of class relations of property, as known in Europe, is far from the only way in which human social experience has unfolded across the globe, over hundreds of millennia, it remains true that, particularly through the development and spread of capitalism, European class society has transformed the world.
- 19.
Most notably with respect to Ancient Greece and the French Revolution. See Ellen M. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988), and George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987).
- 20.
This has particularly been stressed by Anderson, Marx at the Margins. Also see the contextual account of these late studies in Marcello Musto, Another Marx (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).
- 21.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’sPhilosophy of Law. Introduction”, MECW, vol. 3, 187.
- 22.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 297.
- 23.
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, MECW, vol. 5, 5.
- 24.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 298.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid., 304–6.
- 27.
While there are those who argue against the term “historical materialism” to describe Marx’s historical social theory, there is not only long usage behind it, but a clear theoretical foundation for it, provided its specific grounding in the social history of exploitation is always kept in mind.
- 28.
In 1888, Engels noted that in 1847 the pre-history of human societies, before the written history of civilizations, was “all but unknown” [Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 482f]. Still less had Marx begun to consider that there were other courses of history than that of Europe. It is, however, the history of class societies, founded on exploitation, that Marx has in mind here.
- 29.
The issues of development in non-Western societies will be taken up in a later chapter.
- 30.
This is not to preclude the possibility of multiple dominant classes, with further competition between them. The point is that even where there is a single ruling class there is bound to be competition within it.
- 31.
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon, MECW, vol. 6, 176.
- 32.
It should go without saying that in precapitalist societies, characterized by extra-economic class relations, intra-ruling class competition will generally not take the form of market competition.
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Comninel, G.C. (2019). The Developing Conception of Historical Materialism. 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_4
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