From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Sep 11 2006 - 15:27:59 EDT
Rakesh, Brief comment as I am running out of time - as I see it, the younger Marx in his late 30s originally conceived a very ambitious project - it would start with the production and circulation of capital and surplus-value, and the laws emerging out of their intertwining, and then go on to analyse wage-labour in depth, the position of social classes, joint-stock companies and capital finance, the state and civil society, and the world market. But when he actually got down to writing - under terribly impoverished circumstances with constant distractions where he was continually haggling for money to survive - he realized at a certain point that realistically and humanly he would not be able to complete any six large books in terms of writing and researching. In a sense, he was under pressure to write and publish - after all, if you publish Vol. 1 then people - especially the publisher - expect further volumes. But as Francis Wheen notes, not only was Marx's writing method often messy and laborious (he often drafted the same type of thing painstakingly over and over by hand, from a slightly different point of view, or re-edited it, or fretted about the composition of the text) but eventually he also grew weary of what he called one time the "economic crap" [oekonomische Scheisse]. Once you've reached your scientific conclusions, writing all that up and flaunting your erudition can seem terribly tedious and a bore, you'd rather get on with the next thing. And while he was alive he did not get a very enthusiastic reception of Vol. 1, anymore than with the "Contribution", - Das Kapital became influential in Russia, of all places. That being the case, he probably scaled down his ambition, sometimes suggesting that with the four books he had drafted, the work would be complete. Probably he was well aware that there were problems with the details of the argument of Vol. 3, but he was content to sketch out the basic storyline - possibly also he thought that making the basic argument about the origin of economic value and the meaning of capital was sufficient and radical enough, and that other scholars would be easily able to complete the argument, or develop the analysis further, once they understood it. Indeed Engels suggested a scholarly competition to iron out some problems in Cap. Vol. 3. It is quite likely that, seeking to grasp the totality of the new society emerging at the highest summits of abstraction, Marx as a creative thinker wasn't even fully aware of the full implications of his own thought and method, and strained to keep any reasonable relationship between means and goals. He left the manuscripts of various parts of Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 without any precise order, thinking that Engels would be able to stitch them together into a coherent whole, which Engels heroically tried to do, adding a chapter himself where necessary. The substantive point however is that, whatever interpretation one takes, Marx did not analyse the whole of bourgeois society in his magnum opus, only important aspects of its "deep structure". In that sense, the work was necessarily incomplete, more a sort of "Streitschrift", and it was difficult to develop it further. Specifically, a complication was the dialectical method of presentation adopted - you couldn't simply do chapter one, chapter two etc. with different themes as Adam Smith did, rather the whole story had to develop integrally out of successively resolved dialectical contradictions (what Geert Reuten calls "systematic dialectic"), constantly incorporating new material - and even there Marx did not fully succeed, you don't have to be Kozo Uno to see that. He chose a particularly difficult and intellectually challenging method to tell a story, no doubt to impress and persuade with his rigour of argument. The presentation of it as a "completed system" however was more a latter-day phenomenon that had to do with the birth of "Marxism" as a distinctive doctrine, in which men like Kautsky and Lenin played an influential role. I think it is often difficult to appreciate nowadays how far ahead Marx was in the subtlety and breadth of his critique of the classics. The reality was that even in the 1920s, the majority of self-proclaimed "Marxists" based their beliefs on popularisations of Marx's thought by Engels, Bernstein, Kautsky and Bukharin etc., and had at most read Vol. 1. (never mind reading the classics to which Marx himself referred). Marx certainly succeeded in vesting his authority as an intellectual giant, but ironically this was not very conducive to a critical and self-critical development of his theories. By the end of the 1920s, of course, Marxism had become a veritable new religion, promulgated officially by a new government. People were inventing a "Marxist approach" to all manner of things, often without rhyme or reason, i.e. without much profound thought about the meaning of social progress and human development. In their desire to be orthodox or fear of being unorthodox, they made new thinking impossible. I think that Marx considered that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production already implied what the role of the state would be, in the sense of securing the general conditions for the accumulation of private capital and the reproduction of society as a whole, which competing capitalists and the commercial process itself could not produce, Arrow-Debreu equations notwithstanding. I think Hal Draper has sketched out fairly well the ideas Marx himself had about the state, in his "State and Bureaucracy". Engels's comments are also helpful. Most probably Marx would have written about the essence of the state (referring to the origins of the bourgeois state and its class nature), its operations, and its forms, both in terms of taxation, the rule of law, democratic procedure or the lack of it, and social/economic policy. An important consideration in this, as Mandel emphasized and Marx well knew, is that capitalism did not originally produce the state, rather the European bourgeoisies took over and modified an existing state power through lengthy struggles against the appropriation of taxes, social and religious oppression, strictures on trade and confiscations of capital - a highly contradictory development, since the bourgeoisie both sought to free its own activity from state interference and yet needed the state power to protect private property relations, regulate competition, and ward off foreign or domestic threats. As Engels already noted, the essential polarity that runs like a red thread through the whole history of the bourgeoisie is the polarity of free trade and protectionism (or what we now call deregulation and regulation, which is becoming a veritable bipolar disorder): at once the desire to trade and behave freely, and the need to constrain/mediate/control that freedom (mainly for the benefit of the bourgeois classes of course). The attempt to deduce the essence and forms of the state directly from the logic of the accumulation process (or to derive the rule of law directly from the relations of commodity trade) is therefore unlikely to generate a credible analysis. If there is a "logic", it is that the evolution of state forms and the accumulation process were bound up with each other, so that not just anything could happen, and some things were more likely to happen than others: the state mediated social conflicts under given economic conditions, and was changed in its form by those conflicts, yet in essence it remained the same, in that it continued to perform the same kinds of social functions. "Essence" can be specified in terms of a relationship (or interaction) between the real-general and the real-particular (the boundaries identifying what something really is positively, and what it cannot be) - there are the general conditions for the reproduction of human society as such, the general conditions of maintaining a society divided into social classes with conflicting interests, the general conditions of maintaining capitalist society, and finally the specific conditions applying to a specific society with its own unique historical origins and biological/geographic features. Most likely, Marx would have based his critique on a discussion of the English state and possibly the German state, the French state or the American state, because those were the ones he had experience of or read about. The American state of course originated in very different conditions from Europe, in part from a conflict between rival bourgeois forces, which strongly shaped its identity - e.g. the fact that the American state denies its imperialism is rooted in its own origins in a revolution against British and French colonial rule. Yet in essential respects the English state and the American state have been much the same in their operation, and that has to do with the "general conditions for the existence of capitalist society", of class society and human society as such. The American state did not abandon English law altogether, but modified it, and added new norms to it. I think that if we see Marx not as deity but as a fallible human being who pioneered new vistas of thought, and if we are less concerned with problems of metaphysical orthodoxy, we will arrive at better analyses. A pioneer is not necessarily always correct - rather he creates a breach through which others can follow, using their own brains. Thus the most fruitful insights have come from thinkers who actually did study the known facts and studied real historical experience (or tried to "make history" themselves) using theory as a guide to inquiry, rather than as an ideological constraint... outside of which lay only hell and sin. The advantage you have, if you do an empirical inquiry is that you have a real object to explain which provides theory with a real use, and can improve and develop the theory - whereas with an Althusserian "theoretical object" or a "Marxist philosophy" we just end up rearranging or repeating things that we knew already! I read a great article as a student once by David Selbourne - I think in the journal Critique - who convinced me of that. As far as I know, he's still writing great stuff. Jurriaan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Sep 30 2006 - 00:00:06 EDT