James D. White
Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins ofDialectical Materialism 
Macmillan 1996, London, 416 pp.
ISBN0-333-66857-X (pbk) £20.99
Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution
Palgrave 2001, Basingstoke and New York, 262 pp. 
ISBN 0-333-72157-8 (pbk) £14.99

reviewed byChris Arthur

White’s little book on Leninpacks in a great deal of original research, and fresh thinking, about itssubject: Lenin as a revolutionary. In the process he corrects thedistortions of the record perpetrated by those, beginning with Leninhimself, with political axes to grind (a final chapter surveys theliterature of ‘the Lenin legend’). Close attention to the realhistory of the revolutionary movement in Russia, and the course of therevolution itself, shows that Lenin was much less in control of events, andmuch less prescient theoretically, than is usually supposed.Incidentally, White has a low opinion of Lenin as a polemicist, arguingthat he distorts the views of opponents, and makes selective use of thefacts. He provides a wealth of information about Lenin’s relations withother interesting figures such as Bogdanov.
 White, in his grasp of the theoretical issues, issuperior to those such as Shub and Service whose biographies lack anyunderstanding of the ‘big picture’. He is especially original andinteresting on the early Lenin, and, more broadly, on the Russianrevolutionary movements of the time. But sometimes I feel heoverstates the case. It may well be true that the influence on Lenin’sideas of his brother Alexander, who was hanged for participating in anassassination attempt in 1887, was more profound than has hithertobeen thought. But it is surely too simple to say ‘Lenin became arevolutionary through loyalty to his brother’. (Lenin, p.39)
 The Introductiondetails the way in which Marx’s ideas were received in Russia. This is avery complex story which White investigates thoroughly in his previoussubstantial work Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins ofDialectical Materialism. Indeed, it is impossible to make a fairassessment of this Introduction without a study of the earlier book,especially where White’s explanation of Marx’s failure to completeCapital is concerned (I shall discuss this shortly).
The usual story that Russianrevolutionaries divided into Narodniks and Marxists is nonsense, since theNarodniks had just as much right to call themselves followers of Marx asPlekhanov and Lenin. According to White:
‘Marx’s ideas entered Russia in not one, but twoforms. One was Marx’s original scheme that capitalism was necessarily aworld-wide phenomenon and that every country would be brought within itsambit. The other form derived from Marx’s later conception of capitalism based on empirical evidence. This was of a system that didnot necessarily expand into all countries, or eveninto all areas of a given country. It was not necessarily a purely economicphenomenon and might require political intervention to initiate and even toperpetuate its  operations. It might function, moreover, in a verycrude fashion wasteful of human life. The first variant of Marx’s ideascame to be known in Russia as “Marxism”, while the second was giventhe designation “Narodism” by Plekhanov.’ (Lenin, p.7)
As White stressesin both his books, Marx’s ideas changed precisely because of the Russiancase, which he began to study subsequent to the publication of the firstedition of Capital in 1867, and which he continued todo for the rest of his life, in personal and literary contact with theRussians, notably Danielson and Kovalevsky. Moreover he lent cautioussupport to the Narodnik hope that Russia could avoid a capitalist phase ofits development. This is documented in two letters that becamewell-known in Russia (Marx-Engels Collected Works,Vol. 24, p. 196, p. 370). In both, he stressed that his Capital pertained solely to Western Europe, and that it should notbe taken, as it had been in Russia, as a ‘historico-philosophical theoryof general development, imposed by fate on all peoples’ (MECW Vol. 24,p. 200). But it has to be said that Marx played a little trickhere, in citing in both letters this passage from the chapter on‘primitive accumulation’: ‘The basis of this whole development isthe expropriation of the agricultural producer. To date this has not beenaccomplished in a radical fashion anywhere except in England...but all the other countries of Western Europe are undergoing the sameprocess’ (MECW Vol. 24, pp. 199-200). He underlined to his recipientsthe restriction to Western Europe. What he did not say in referring  thequotation to the French edition of the first volume of Capital was that Western Europe is notmentioned in any German edition! (Hence, also, it is not in the Russiantranslation of the first edition.) There the passage ends: ‘The historyof this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, andruns through its various phases in different orders of succession,and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we thereforetake as our example, has it the classic form.’ (B. Fowkes translation,Penguin, p.876)
So why did Marxchange it for the French edition? Undoubtedly under the influence of thenew Russian literature with which he had now become acquainted. Thisepisode fits well into the theory put forward by White, that originallyMarx did hope to show that capitalism would impose itself on allpeoples, but that he was forced to abandon this view, springing from hisattempt to model economic categories on Hegelian logic, as the empiricalevidence told against it. In Karl Marx and the IntellectualOrigins of Dialectical Materialism White situates Marx’s workin the context of the ambtions of the German Romantics, culminating in thespeculative philosophy of Schelling and Hegel. In particular Marx took overthe idea of a totalising system that subsumed all available content, and hetransferred it to the concept of capital. According to White,cutting back on explicit Hegelian jargon in successive versions of his‘Critique of Political Economy’ could not get rid of the originalstructure of Marx’s argument; hence he was unable to finishCapital, not because of age or illness, but because ayawning gap in its theoretical premises had opened. On White’s account,when Marx started limiting his story to the West, and when he claimed onlyto ‘flirt’ with Hegelian terms, he was stating how he wantedhis work now to be read rather than acknowledging its originalinspiration. Moreover the fact that Marx spent the last dozen years of hislife immersing himself in the literature on the land question in Russiafits this picture. This was a crucial case that defeated theoriginal thesis that capital would ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ toits expansion. Hence the need to sift it carefully, especially the role ofthe State in helping or hindering the proletarianisation of thepeasantry.
In spite of the immensescholarship White deploys to buttress this thesis in his KarlMarx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism I amnot convinced by it. There are a number of complex issues to deal withhere: what is Capital supposed to achieve; what is therole Hegelian dialectic might have in this; just where, precisely, doesthis logic fail, if it does; and finally, why did Marx become so obsessedwith the Russian question? 
Ientirely agree with White that Marx’s logic of economic categories ismodelled on Hegel’s logic (Lenin, pp. 2-3). ButHegel’s work is not all of a piece; at risk of simplification, it ispossible to separate its systematic character from itsphilosophy of history. The books which develop in themost rigorous style are those such as the Logic andthe Philosophy of Right that do not pertain to historybut to a given system, for example, the system ofthought, or the system of right. It follows that the transitions in theargument cannot be identified with any real change but are solely internalto the project of exhibiting perspicuously the network of categorialdependencies concerned. (See my ‘Systematic Dialectic’ inScience & Society, Fall 1998, for the method to befollowed.) Hegel’s historical works are much looser, acknowledging therole of contingency in the real process of change and development, even ifthe touted identity of thought and being is supposed to ensure that historyhas a telos.
On my reading of it, Marx’s Capital wasalways intended to be a work of the first sort. Its dialectic is aimed atgrasping the system of categories as they are embodied in fully developedcapitalism. This is clear from the ‘Introduction’ Marx sketched in1857. In Capital the historical excursions, such asthe description of the struggle over the working day, are illustrative oftendencies inherent to that given structure.
The bulk of Capital isconcerned with depicting its logical genesis; thesection on ‘original accumulation’ tacked on to the end of VolumeOne, dealing with its historical genesis, could beomitted without loss to the argument of the work as a whole. Moreover thereis no sign whatever within the last part of any dialectic, Hegelian orotherwise. This is only to be expected since the logic of capital comesinto its own and rigorously imposes itself on the material onlyonce all its presuppositions are in place; thereafterit ‘posits its presuppositions’, but this power cannot be projectedback into its own historical origins. The same lessonapplies to the spread of the capitalist system. There is no ‘logic’here, only a tendency to create a world market thatmay or may not be realised according to circumstances.
I entirely agree with White that Marx initially hadgreat confidence in capital’s power to subvert non-capitalist forms intowhich it penetrated, and that he became more cautious about this later.What I contest is that this could create a theoretical crisissufficient to prevent the completion of Capital. Thedepiction of the logic of the system as it obtains is separable fromhistorical questions of its origins and spread. Take as an example theissue central to much of the debate, free labour. Marx introducesdoubly-free labour as a necessary pole of the capital relation,and he shows how the logic of that relation reproduces itself, withoutconcerning himself with anything more at that point. Only in the historicalpart at the end is the  issue of the origins of free labour in Englandsketched. Moreover in the very final chapter he demonstrates thatcapitalism spreads to the colonies only insofar as some functionalequivalent of that separation from the land is set up. Logical andhistorical genesis are separable, and are indeed separated in Capital. In 1859 Marx had already made clear that ‘thedialectical form of presentation is right only when it knows its ownlimits’, stressing that ‘the general concept of capital’ is not‘an incarnation of some eternal idea’ and that it therefore requires‘a lengthy historical process’ to establish its premises.(MECW, Vol. 29, p. 505.)
Before moving tothe concrete issues, it is important to take note also of the differencebetween Marx and Hegel on the identity of thought and being. It isinteresting in this connection that White draws our attention to Marx’sdeployment of the category of ‘subsumption’. This is not anHegelian category, and White believes Marx took it from Schelling. Be thatas it may, it is perfectly suited to conceptualising a relation betweenideal forms and the content regulated by them that is not ‘identical’with this ideality. Hegel could proceed with perfect confidence toshow that logic is embodied in the real world and its historicaldevelopment, because his metaphysics guaranteed their unity in advance. Fora materialist theory such as Marx’s, no matter how powerful theinherent logic of the form of capital, it must always have to impose itself on a material realm that is other than it, and even, in the case of labour, recalcitrant toit. The content is not produced by the form but subsumed by it.
Now let us take upthe matter of how the origin and spread of capitalism was debated inRussia. It is true that Capital was received initiallyas a demonstration that capitalism is the historical destiny of allpeoples. In Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins ofDialectical Materialism White examines the mediating role ofEngels, Plekhanov, and Struve in this matter. But I hold this is anincorrect reading even of the very Hegelian first edition, for the reasonsjust given. Moreover the weak point in this reading was spottedimmediately in Russia itself. In 1877 Yu. G. Zhukovsky complainedthat Marx’s account of the origins of capitalism, the expropriation ofthe peasants, and the formation of the proletariat, had a fortuitous andanecdotal quality about it (cited in White Origins, p.235). Precisely; it does; but this is only to be expected since the logicof capital’s circulation and reproduction kicks in only when all thenecessary presuppositions are in place; but the ‘story’ (not‘logic’) of their original emergence has a differenttheoretical status.
White appears toconcede this point (Origins p. 236), and rests hisclaims on the implications of Marx’s category of ‘circulation’.This topic is that of Book II of Capital which was notavailable to the first generation of Marx’s Russian readers but wasstudied by Lenin’s generation, in a version edited by Engels fromMarx’s unfinished manuscripts. —Necessarilyunfinished according to White. This is his thesis about Marx:
‘He would show that “the tendency tocreate the world market is directly given in the concept of capitalitself” [Grundrisse p. 408]....Having reached thispoint of culmination the capitalist system, having nowhere further to go,would then give way to a higher form of economic and socialorganisation....It was when he came to make a full version of the secondsection, on the circulation of capital, that Marx ran into seriousdifficulties with his project, which prevented its ever beingcompleted....He believed that as capital circulated it “reproduced”itself, so that its circuits were perpetuated. He also thought that as itcirculated capital broadened its sphere of operation, giving riseto “expanded reproduction”. This would cause it eventually topenetrate throughout the world...removing more and more obstacles in itsway. These obstacles were the remains of any earlier economic orsocial systems....The reason which sent Marx back to the drawing-board wasthe realization that in the real world the circulation of capital did notact in this way. It did not necessarily expand into new areas, nor did itinevitably destroy earlier forms of social and economicorganization.’ (Lenin p. 3; see also p. 115)
This is an original and challenging thesis.It deserves scrutiny at the broad level, and, also specifically, withrespect to the claim made about ‘expanded reproduction’. The firstproblem about this latter is that the term ‘expanded’ is ambiguous;but in the passage above White gives the wrong gloss on it. Theambiguity was noted in the Russian discussion itself. In an early work,Lenin cites the following from a discussion paper by H. B. Krasin(theoretician of a group in St. Petersburg Lenin joined in 1893):‘[There are] two essentially different features in the accumulation ofcapital: 1) the development of capitalist production in breadth, when ittakes hold of already existing fields of labour, ousting natural economyand expanding at the latter’s expense; and 2) the developmentof capitalist production in depth, if one may so express it, when itexpands independently of natural economy, i.e. under the general andexclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production.’ (cited in V.I. Lenin ‘On the So-called Market Question’ Collected Works Vol. 1, p. 89)
Now although Lenin gave a careful account of Marx’s chapter on‘Expanded Reproduction’, he understood that this pertained solely to the second issue, that is to say, it showed howcapital could expand intensively, not extensively (‘Market Question’ Works Vol. 1, p 89). There is nothing whatever in Volume Two of Capital, as published by Engels, on if and how capital mightextend itself geographically. (There is only one significant reference tothe transformation of pre-capitalist forms by world trade. It is clearly adigression and relates solely to the transition of commodityproduction to capitalist commodity production. It is not relevant to theRussian case  which has to do with the survival of communal production. D.Fernbach translation, Penguin, pp. 119-20) Furthermore there is nothing init on how capital originally developed; it is solely concernedwith how capital accumulates once it is fullydeveloped and self-enclosed. Unfortunately then, it was useless to theRussians in assessing their conditions.
Contrary to White’s imputation (Lenin, p.34) Lenin did not even try to base himself on Volume Two. His arguments onif and how capitalism could develop in Russia are independent of it.
However a certain misreading of the schemes of reproduction, made famous by RosaLuxemburg, did have some relevance. If one can believe Lenin’s account,Krasin anticipated Luxemburg (herself influenced by the Russian caseaccording to White: Lenin, p. 115) in arguing that therestricted purchasing  power  of its own workers forced capital to searchout external markets; these could either  be foreign markets or rooted inthe non-capitalist sector of a given country. Krasin drew up a two-sectormodel of Russia in this spirit (‘Market Question’ p.90). Thecorollary that suggests itself is that, if and whencapital conquered the world so that there were no external markets, it mustcollapse. The Luxemburg theory is a kind of inversion of the thesis thatcapitalism must expand geographically; for it appearscapitalism must not expand or it cuts away a crucialpresupposition of its reproduction. Although White also reads Marx in thisway, it is a wrong-headed view. As Lenin observed, in his paper on ‘TheMarket Question’, this view neglects the strength of the internal market for capital goods, which powers the economynicely, at least during upswings. The real problem for capital is thus not‘under-consumption’ but ‘over-accumulation’; the limit ofcapital is really internal not external. At all events the empiricalquestion of the scope of the internal market in Russia was a focusfor lively  debate amongst the intellectuals.
To return from these technicalities, for White thecrucial problem for Marx was the impossibility of realising  the originalconcept of the chapter on expanded reproduction  at the end of VolumeTwo. But in the light of both the possibility of a purely systematic, i.e. non-historical, logic of exposition of capital,and the possibility of focusing that chapter on intensive reproduction, Iam not convinced. Moreover there is little wrong (except for the muddledarithmetical examples) with the said chapter as Engels gave it tous. There is no trace of ‘expanded reproduction’ in the‘broadening’ sense, nor, if I am right about Marx’s method, needthere be. White concedes the chapter as published has no reference tocapital’s geographical extension; his evidence of Marx’s‘original intentions’ comes therefore from earlier manuscriptmaterial, such as the Grundrisse, and ‘Mss. 1’of Volume Two, written in 1865, and discarded by Engels in his editoriallabours.
Even if somethingis conceded to White’s account, the fact remains that there was nological obstacle to completing Capital as an accountof how the system worked, while leaving aside questions of its origin andspread.
Another worry I have is thatWhite’s reading of Marx is too economistic. He assumes that if it can beshown that the State supports, or even initiates, capitalist development,this tells against Marx. He even cites the case of colonisation. Yet in thevery last chapter of Capital Volume One Marxhimself stressed the role of government policies in this connection.Moreover this was not in conflict with his original views, because in theGrundrisse, the high point of his Hegelian ambition,he says Wakefield’s theory of colonisation is ‘infinitelyimportant’ for understanding the difficulty capital has in spreadinginto areas where its presuppositions do not yet exist. The point, again, isthat the pure logic of the economy begins its movement only whenthese presuppositions have been secured, whether fortuitously ordeliberately.
Finally, why didMarx delve deeply into the Russian question rather than finishing Capital? Marx had originally planned to complement Capital with books on Landed Property andWage Labour. At first sight the Russian material seemsappropriate to one of the other books. Yet whenever Marx mentioned his workon Russian landed property he always assigned it to the continuation ofCapital itself (to Danielson 12 Dec. 1872; to Lavrov11 Feb. 1875). But where in Capital? Engels naturally assumed it was meant for Book III, wherethere is a substantial discussion on rent (CapitalVolume Three, Fernbach trans. Penguin, p. 96). White, however, insists itwas meant for Book II on circulation, refuting Engels by saying: ‘InMarx’s presentation, ground-rent was one of the various forms of surplusvalue. To class his studies of Russia under this head was toreduce their significance immeasurably.’ (Origins,p. 282) It is vexing  that this cannot be settled by reference to Marx’sletters. They always refer to ‘Volume Two’, but, after thepublication of Book I as Volume One, he planned to publish Books II and IIIin one volume (See Capital I, Penguin, p.93). SoEngels could yet be right. Moreover the following footnote on the Irishcase Marx inserted into the second edition of Capitalmight support this: ‘The famine and its consequences have beendeliberately exploited both by individual landlords and by the EnglishParliament through legislation so as to accomplish the agriculturalrevolution by force and to thin down the population of Ireland tothe proportions satisfactory to the landlords. I shall show more fullyin Volume [Book] 3 of this work, in the section on landed property, howthis has been done.’ (Capital I p. 869;incidentally it is deplorable that - as here - translators often confuse‘volumes’ and ‘books’. Marx distinguished them: ‘Books’is the term he used to articulate the content of the work; ‘Volumes’referred to the format of publication.)
However, contrary to White’s general thesis, there is no sign inMarx’s letters on Russian land ownership that any theoretical crisiscentred on it. But - still - why did Marx pay so much attention to Russia?I believe he was deeply disappointed by the failure of Volume Oneto make any impact. The only people who were interested in his work werethe Russians, who promptly translated it, and besieged  him with questionsspringing from their own peculiar situation. It was natural for Marx too,therefore, to get involved in their problem, whatever itstheoretical significance.
Both ofWhite’s books are recommended as valuable studies in their own right;but Lenin is also a useful sequel to KarlMarx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism.