Marxism

With and Beyond Marx

Amiya Bagchi, Amita Chatterjee

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317561767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book offers a unique re-conceptualization of Marxism in bringing together leading scholars across disciplines — history, philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, and literary and culture studies — into one comprehensive corpus. It demonstrates the engaging relevance of the perspectives and techniques of the analyses adopted by Karl Marx, Frederich Engels and contemporary Marxists, and will be immensely useful to scholars and researchers across social sciences as well as general readers interested in Marxism.

1	Alienation and Freedom Marx’s Ontology of Social Being

AIJAZ AHMAD

Roughly half a century ago, in his book-length introduction to Critique of Dialectical Reason, published in English separately as The Question of Method (French edition 1957), Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that Marxism constitutes the unsurpassable horizon for thought in our age. Then, at the end of the twentieth century, Eric Hobsbawm, the pre-eminent historian of modern Europe (and much else, besides), declared, almost casually, that if we set aside the founders of the great religions, no secular thinker has ever had as large an influence on human history as Karl Marx has had. Hobsbawm, of course, had in mind matters of history, politics and society. We could add that there is no modern thinker — neither Nietzsche nor Freud, neither Max Weber nor Keynes — who has left so large an imprint on all the human sciences as Marx has done. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading philosophers of the age, such as Derrida and Badiou, yet again posed the question to philosophy itself: where does it stand now, in the post-Soviet era, in relation to Marx — to the ‘spectres of Marx’, in Derrida’s telling phrase. It has always been necessary, in other words, to undertake two parallel readings of Marx: in relation to his own time and in relation to ours.

It is very much worth repeating that Marx began his intellectual journey as a philosopher; that he came to the study of political economy as the way out of a philosophical impasse; that it was in his confrontation with Hegel that he first formulated a theory of the state from which he never deviated and which he only developed very much further in later writings; that his passage from philosophy to political economy was a consequence of his attempt to re-think — and to give entirely new kind of historically concrete content to — the fundamental categories of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Indeed, even the dispute with Hegel over the dialectic was a matter not only of form and method but, crucially, over the content of the dialectic as Marx re-conceived it historically and sociologically. Marx had a precocious mind and he was still in his early 20s when he first began formulating his own distinctive ideas, in relation to the Enlightenment, assorted materialisms and German Idealism. Philosophical riddles took him into political economy, history, anthropology, sociology and all the rest in the human sciences, but it is important to remember that philosophy was the primary form of intellectual music in his youth. I might add that the origins of Marx’s intellectual formation were philosophically so diverse that we have witnessed a (not entirely fruitful) debate among philosophers of Marxist persuasions whether his thought is closer to Hegel, or to Kant, or to Spinoza.

A fact worth pondering is that his emphasis on labour as the constitutive basis of human social existence as such, his insistence on the centrality of class struggle in human history, his conception of the proletariat as the unique revolutionary class that liberates society as a whole, and all such ideas had been worked out precisely in the course of those philosophical disputes, a decade before he embarked on a systematic study of political economy which led to the discoveries contained in Capital and which, in turn, laid a much more comprehensive theoretical basis for the revolutionary theory he had formulated already.

It is, of course, true that what makes Marx the ‘unsurpassable’ thinker in the entire epoch of capitalism is primarily the great ‘Economics’, the three volumes of Capital in short, as well as the associated writings. No single account of what has been central to the making of the modern world, and what remains central to it, has been comparable. The price of that achievement, however, is that he is frequently read, even among some of his best interpreters, as a very superior kind of economist, better than Ricardo, Keynes or whatever. Additionally, of course, he is the principal author of Communist Manifesto, by far the most consequential single document in the whole history of political thought. It is notable, though, that, beyond formulating some very general principles, Marx wrote rather little on the strategy and tactics of the communist revolution, or on what a socialist society might look like, etc; in this respect, ‘Leninism’ is the dominant part of what is called ‘Marxism–Leninism’. As for philosophy, virtually all of what officially passes for ‘Marxist philosophy’ was first composed by Friedrich Engels and was then codified by thinkers of the Second International, such as Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov, before getting narrowed down into an official ideology during the Stalin period well before the writings of what was then quickly dismissed as ‘Early Marx’ — the writings of Marx’s own philosophical encounters — were available.

I start with these synoptic remarks for a reason. The basic premise of the present essay is that there is a fundamental continuity in Marx’s thought, from his doctoral dissertation, through the critically important writings of his intellectual formation and political formulations of the 1840s, his great ‘Economics’, as well as his ‘Politics’ that extends from his unfinished treatise on Hegel’s theory of the state in the early 1840s right up to his reflections in the very last years of his life, some 40 years later, on issues of transition in non-capitalist societies. When Marx’s writings of the early 1840s, and then the Grundrisse of the late 1850s, became available during the 1930s, this work proved to be an embarrassment for the official doctrine of ‘Historical and Dialectical Materialism’. So, a fictional distance and even opposition between ‘Early Marx’ (immature) and ‘Mature’ Marx had to be confected, to downgrade those writings. In the 1950s and early 1960s, all this took even a more bizarre turn, as the relative merits of Stalin and Khrushchev came to be debated all across the world communist movement. Defenders of Stalin came forward to defend a Marx who was ‘scientific’, ‘rationalist’, ‘progressivist’, a believer in the inexorable laws of history, etc; and, by the same token, anyone who spoke of ‘humanism’ and human nature, ‘naturalism’ and humanity’s debt to external nature and its preservation, ontology, limits to fetishization of technology, etc., was, ipso facto, a partisan of Khrushchevites. At that point, the Soviet Communist Party itself took to describing Khrushchev (before his fall from grace) as the greatest of all ‘humanists’. This esoteric and intellectually arcane debate, so politically charged in its own time, is what was re-staged in Paris by Louis Althusser most famously, perhaps as an adjunct to his own Maoist sympathies and perhaps to refurbish his flagging position within the French Communist Party (PCF), whereby he discovered an ‘Epistemological Break’ between the ‘Early’ and ‘Mature’ Marx — somewhere between The German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, it seems.

This issue has involved writings by some of the most eminent Marxist philosophers. Some have addressed the issue directly: Lukacs, Colletti, Marcuse, Althusser and others. It is also arguable that Critical Theory in the broadest sense — Horkheimer to Derrida, so to speak — has also been engaged with this question. This essay will not address those intricate debates. Rather, it is addressed to anyone who has had a good undergraduate education and is interested in reading Marx closely, starting with the texts through which he found the premises of his own thought. This reading is then directed toward some of the pressing issues of our own time, in this post-Soviet world, beset by religious frenzies, and in the midst of a perhaps irreparable damage to our shared planet: issues of the secular/religious divide, ecologically responsive socialism, state and ‘civil society’, etc. A reading of Marx cannot offer us readymade answers to any of this, but it may infuse and ignite an imagination. It might be useful to know that for Marx nature was a single continuum at work inside, as well as outside, human beings: a unity of being with the incontestable conditions of its own being. To injure, exploit, deplete the inner nature (the human being; the labouring body) for capitalist accumulation would necessarily involve exploitation/depletion of that external nature (ecology) that Marx describes as an ‘extension’ of the human body — meaning that without that external nature, the inner has neither history, nor society, nor future. Or, to take another example, what Marx offers is not so much a critique of religion (‘opium’ of the people and all that) but a critique of the kind of critiques of religion that were available in his time, not to speak of ours (Religion as Un-Reason, clerical/class conspiracy, etc.), and an alternative reading of religious consciousness. And, it may be interesting for social movements of our time to know that the alternative to the capitalist state, so far as Marx is concerned, is not a ‘proletarian state’, or a ‘state of the whole people’ (as the Soviet Union called itself after the late 1930s) but a ‘withering away of the state’ (a rather complex matter, to which we shall return). Many ‘spirits of Marx’, so to speak!

I

Let us first clarify a few things, though, about the initial intellectual formation of Marx and the fate of the writings representing that formation.

Kant had died barely 14 years before Marx was born, and he submitted his doctoral thesis, at the age of 23, barely ten years after Hegel’s death. He had walked among ghosts of thinkers such as these while still a teenager. His dissertation was, predictably, in philosophy: ‘The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurian Philosophy of Nature’ (1841).

Various strands of materialist philosophy and the philosophies of nature were to remain his abiding interests. And, so would remain the preference for materialist philosophy over religious belief, as his dissection of what he at the time called the ‘general falsity’ of Plutarch’s theological attack on Epicurus demonstrates. In the ‘Draft of New Preface’ to the dissertation, he offers a fine quotation from Epicurus as philosophy’s own proclamation:

Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is truly impious.

Please notice a slight philosophical complication here. For Epicurus, what is truly impious is not a belief in the gods as such but the reasons generally given for believing in them. This particular distinction — which leaves religion alone but engages with the reasons why people believe in it; not the theological core of the belief as such but the material matrix of the acts of believing, so to speak — shall be useful for us when we come to Marx’s reflections on the religion and the usual rationalist critique of it.

As Marx launches his post-doctoral theorization, basically during the two-year period of roughly 1843–44, as a young man of 25 or so, four texts are of absolutely seminal importance: two rather short, and the other two much lengthier but still fragmentary, incomplete and very much in the nature of self-clarification. The shorter ones, ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844b) and ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’ (1843a), are short and best remembered for Marx’s views on religion. His ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the Right’ (1843b) and the famous ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844a, 1844c) are very much longer but still very sketchy and unfinished, unpublished in Marx’s own lifetime, and among the most difficult texts that Marx ever wrote. In this essay, I dispense with the longer titles and referring to these, respectively as ‘Contribution’, ‘Critique’ and ‘1844 Manuscripts’.¹

Marx’s ‘Critique’ was most likely composed in the summer of 1843 and is, in my view, the text in which Marx first comes into his own, engages with Hegel on his own terms without the crutch of lesser philosophers like Feuerbach, takes up a para-by-para dissection of a major text of Hegel’s theory of the state and develops a critique not only of Hegel’s doctrine but also of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and hence of the enduring premises of the liberal state in general. This is the foundational text for his political theory, but I exclude a discussion of it from the present essay, saving it for another day, for a fuller discussion of his distinctive theory of the state. I pay more attention to the legendary ‘1844 Manuscripts’ which are quite different in the very structure of their composition, more ambitious and more ambiguous.

The unfinished and fragmentary ‘Critique’ was engaged mainly, and in exact detail, with much of the third section, ‘The State’, of the third part, ‘Ethical Life’, of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. The ‘1844 Manuscripts’, by contrast, engage with Phenomenology of the Mind, not in the form of textual dissection, as in the earlier ‘Critique’ but as an engagement with the conceptual universe of so many categories of Hegel’s thought: labour, property, objectification, alienation, supersession, etc. And, it is in thinking through these categories, which are categories at once of philosophy and of political economy, already so in Hegel but in what Marx takes to be a mystified form, that he begins to formulates what Herbert Marcuse (1932) quite correctly calls ‘a philosophical critique of political economy and its foundations as a theory of revolution’.²

Aside from some other lesser texts of that time, Marx’s engagement with Hegel was more or less complete between the ‘Critique’ and the ‘1844 Manuscripts’; refinements and repetitions were to follow but the substance had been worked out already. These earlier works throw as much light on the philosophical meaning of his later works as the later works illuminate the categories in their formative phase. The German Ideology, completed in 1846, which Marx co-authored with Engels and which, too, remained unpublished in Marx’s own lifetime, also belongs to the early phase, but the complication here is that the first part of The German Ideology, which is all that anyone ever reads, seems to have been drafted primarily or even exclusively by Engels; Marx seems to have drafted only the later part, on Stirner, etc., which is philosophically not very interesting but was important for polemical purpose in his own time. I believe that the excruciatingly difficult text of the ‘1844 Manuscripts’ are in the long run richer and more nuanced than the far clearer and less complex formulations of The German Ideology.

Now, a very well-known problem is that among all these texts, only the two short ones were published in Marx’s own lifetime, and none of the longer seminal ones from this period were published until the 1930s, about half a century after his death. A further complication is that Grundrisse which serves as the pivot for the great ‘Economics’ of the following years and which is, in my view, the indispensable bridge between the so-called ‘Early’ and the so-called ‘Late’ Marx, was itself not published until 1939, on the eve of World War II. With the exception of some specialists who knew these texts already in the 1930s, it is only from the 1950s onwards that most readers of Marx began to have easy access to them; the full text of Grundrisse appeared in English translation only in 1973. This is a matter of some significance, for what it means is that not only the first generation of Marxist thinkers — Plekhanov, Kautsky, Labriola, and others — who formulated the Marxist doctrine for the Second International but also the great thinkers of the period of Bolshevik Revolution — Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Bukharin — were largely unaware of the philosophical labour that Marx had endured in the process of arriving at his revolutionary theory.

It is not as if those early positions, once arrived at, were abandoned in the later works. They were further refined and woven into the later writings in various ways, so much so that Lukacs was able to formulate, most famously, a very formidable theory of reification as a central category of Marxist thought as early as 1923. Yet, he, too, was to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that his great classic was based on an error, insofar as it was only after reading the ‘1844 Manuscripts’ that he fully understood the difference between objectification and alienation. One could also suggest that Lukacs was perhaps equally unclear about the categorical difference between reification and alienation.

Why is all this important for our present discussion? The point is that with the honourable exception of some notable intellectuals of Indian origin, the Marxist doctrine that most of us have inherited in India is, by and large, the doctrine first formulated by the Second International and then simplified and codified by Soviet Marxism, with minor modifications, during the Stalin period. The fact that those other texts got published during the 1930s, the high noon of Stalin’s orthodoxy, did not help matters much, as our earlier comments suggest. The emphatic claim to ‘science’ was difficult to reconcile with Marx’s own designation of the revolutionary theory of communism as both a ‘humanism’ and a ‘naturalism’. The question to be asked was a different one: how is it that Marx himself describes his theory as ‘scientific’ in some places, and ‘humanist’ in other places? One simplistic answer is that ‘scientific’ refers to the method, while ‘humanist’ refers to the content. However, even that distinction is more or less tenable only if one does not confuse the claims of ‘science’ in this regard with the claim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Alienation and Freedom: Marx’s Ontology of Social Being
• 2. Beyond the Binaries: Notes on Karl Marx’s and Rabindranath Tagore’s Ideas on Human Capacities and Alienation
• 3. The Subject as a Philosophical Problem: Reading the Prison Manuscripts of Antonio Gramsci and Nikolai Bukharin
• 4. Marx and Engels’ Geopolitical Economy
• 5. What Causes Booms?
• 6. Economic Turbulence in Capitalism: Twentieth Century and Beyond
• 7. Empire and Nation Today
• 8. Has Imperialism Become an Obsolete Concept?
• 9. Major Historical Problems in the Light of Marxism: A Note
• 10. Marx and the Materialist Tradition in Indian Philosophy
• 11. Revolutionary Movements in a Post-Marxian Era
• 12. Class, Community and Identity Politics of the Adivasi in Contemporary India
• 13. Beyond Armed Struggle
• 14. Rosa Luxemburg as Literary Critic and Literary Theorist
• 15. The Folk Artist as ‘Traditional Intellectual’ and the Culture of Resistance
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Index