An Anthropology of Marxism

Cedric J. Robinson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469649924
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

An Anthropology of Marxism offers Cedric Robinson's analysis of the history of communalism that has been claimed by Marx and Marxists. Suggesting that the socialist ideal was embedded both in Western and non-Western civilizations and cultures long before the opening of the modern era and did not begin with or depend on the existence of capitalism, Robinson interrogates the social, cultural, institutional, and historical materials that were the seedbeds for communal modes of living and reimagining society. Ultimately, it pushes back against Marx's vision of a better society as rooted in a Eurocentric society, and cut off from its own precursors. Accompanied by a new foreword by H.L.T. Quan and a preface by Avery Gordon, this invaluable text reimagines the communal ideal from a broader perspective that transcends modernity, industrialization, and capitalism.

1

Coming to Terms with Marxian Taxonomy

An army I have muster’d in my thought,
Wherewith already France is overrun.

—King Henry VI, part 1, act 1

According to legend, the modern proletariat, the army which Marx envisioned as the “material weapon” of philosophy, had appeared first during the French Revolution.¹ Historically, whether it was just such a class which stormed against power, wealth, and exploitation in revolutionary France (in concert with a “revolutionary bourgeoisie”), early industrial Britain and Germany, or even Czarist Russia is dubious. In nineteenth-century England, for one example, William Reddy gleaned from the research of E. P. Thompson that “the majority of those who engaged in protest or resistance were clearly from artisanal trades, often independent craftsmen … wheelwrights, stockingers, saddlers, shoemakers, and tailors.”² In contemporary France, Reddy reports that the rebellious crowds consisted of “variegated groupings of shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, laborers, and their middle-class leaders.”³ And in the next century, in revolutionary Russia, the proletariat was barely a fraction of the laboring classes. Notwithstanding Marx’s misrepresentation (and narrowing) of the social agencies opposing exploitation in modern Europe, the ultimate Marxian objective, the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degradation, retains its urgency. And one must presume that despite any previous historical omissions and slights it is still possible to distill from human experience a comprehension of just what is to be done. Part of that project may lie in the critique of Marxism itself. Since it is essential to accept the fact that the struggle for freedom began long before Max and his companion Engels constructed a “science” of historical change, we must entertain the possibility that they were informed by such events, but only poorly and perhaps in an entirely or fundamentally mistaken way. To determine whether this occurred it is necessary to approach Marxism independent of its presuppositions. The results could prove invaluable.

It may seem surprising that an anthropology is required to understand the emergence of the socialist movement in Western Europe in the eighteenth century and the mature articulation of historical materialism by Marx and Engels a generation later. Anthropologists, after all, normally study the existential selectivity of human groups as arranged by cultures and civilizations and the mundane social practices and fabulist and technical habits which sustain them. Their investigative and analytical routines generally stop short of disruptive collective action and revolutionary regiments, that is, transformative practices. Despite these and related exclusionary customs, anthropology inscribes the appropriate vantage point.

In this study I shall demonstrate that both Western socialism and historical materialism were each an expression of the ferment of a civilization, rather than the simple products of a particular event (say the French Revolution), a specific era (industrial capitalism), or a select intellectual cohort (the Hegelians). More particularly, Western socialism and historical materialism were two elements of a general discourse which resulted from the clash and ruptures of beliefs, structures, and previous discourses fashioned in the culture and historical societies comprising Western civilization. The possibilities for each were consequently prescribed by a civilization and not some universal human desire. It is curious, then, that much of the literature on socialism and Marxism indicates otherwise. Both socialism and Marxism have come to be understood as natural histories. Socialism, we are instructed, was an inevitable reaction to absolutism, while the advent of Marxism is presented in the scientific narrative of discovery. Such presumptions are less than explanatory—indeed, they themselves require explanation.

The canon for the study of classical Marxism, or the “science of socialism,” as Engels termed it, was inscribed in his published review of Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and in his quasipolemic Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring, 1877–78) more than one hundred years ago. Marxism, Engels insisted, was a synthesis of specific intellectual traditions which had been brought to material maturity in England, France, and Germany by the early nineteenth century.⁴ But where his predecessors had failed, Marx had succeeded: “Two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus value, we owe to Marx.”⁵ And as George Lichtheim cynically observed: “Marxism came to mean what Engels, in his writings between 1875 and 1895, said it meant.”⁶ Karl Kautsky, Engels’s most illustrious apprentice, tried to make it otherwise, advancing Darwinism (in the form of technological determinism) as a brace to historical materialism in his bid for pride of place.⁷ But for the most part, among Marxian and non-Marxian intellectuals, Engels’s revelation has been adhered to—either as a matter of historical convention or of doctrine.

Though the broader construction was originally Engels’s, it was Lenin’s authority as a successful revolutionist which made that particular interpretation into a theoretical and doctrinal regimen. Eclipsing the reformist luminaries of the Second International—Kautsky, Plekhanov, and Bernstein—Lenin’s supremacy of the triumphal tradition of revolutionary Marxism in the present century granted him a unique eminence among Marxists. And according to Lenin, the most influential figure among the second generation of Marxists, the intellectual, ideational, and philosophical bases for Marxism consisted of three elements. He put it this way: “The genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.”⁸ And elsewhere, Lenin further identified these approaches specifically with national European intellectual currents: “Marx … continued and consummated the three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century, as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general.”⁹

For Engels, as Lenin interpreted him, English political economy, German philosophy and French socialism were the three pillars of Marxism. Following the determinist tracing in the historical theory found in both Marx and Engels (“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”¹⁰), Lenin fashioned a geopolitical narrative of intellectual development. And even more than his predecessors, whose historical writings did lead them often beyond the constraints of their theory, Lenin seemed captivated by an image of the state, and more particularly the possibility of a state consciousness. This becomes evident when we examine his foundations of Marxism in the rough historical sequence of their appearances.

English Political Economy

Lenin somewhat overstated the importance of the English economists by ignoring a rather remarkable company of other contributors: the French mathematicians and economists Pierre Le Peasant de Boisguillebert, François Quesnay, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Antoine Cournot, the “American” economist Benjamin Franklin, and the Swiss Jean Charles Sismondi.¹¹ But he was correct in drawing attention to Marx’s British (English and Scot) predecessors. Summarizing their contributions, A. V. Anikin suggested:

The classics of bourgeois political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were the first to develop the theory of the economy as a system in which objective laws operate, independently of human will, but are accessible to human understanding. They believed that the economic policy of the state should not go against these laws, but rest upon them. William Petty, François Quesnay and other scholars laid the foundations for the quantitative analysis of economic processes. They sought to examine these processes as a kind of metabolism and to define its directions and scope.¹²

In the narrowest sense, British political economics began with William Petty’s Political Arithmetick in the mid-seventeenth century and proceeded through the treatises of Franklin, Smith, and Ricardo. Petty, credited as one of the “discoverers” (along with Franklin, Smith, and Ricardo) of the labor theory of value, also pioneered (in the company of the Italian Francesco Sansovino, d’Avity in France and de Linda in Holland) the use of statistics (a science which matured and earned its name in the eighteenth century) and the notion of national income (an analytical procedure which fully matured in the nineteenth century).

Marx and Engels believed William Petty was the most critical of the early English economists.¹³ Again, Anikin observes: “Petty’s striking and unusual personality greatly attracted Marx and Engels. ‘Petty regards himself as the founder of a new science,’ ‘Even this error has genius’ [from Engels, Anti-Dühring 1969, p. 275], ‘In content and form it is a little masterpiece’—these comments in various works by Marx give an idea of his attitude to ‘the most brilliant and original of economic investigators.’”¹⁴

In a sense, however, the construction we find in Lenin reflects a conceptual idiosyncrasy to be found throughout the writings of his predecessors, Marx and Engels: the presumption that a field of knowledge, a science, could be an expression of a particular national culture. A more careful historical reconstruction does not confirm their assertions about an “English” political economy. The “English” science, we see, was British and European, and even assisted by a New World “creole” such as Franklin. Long-distance trade, banking, state budgeting, and increasingly expensive warfare spawned economists and economic theorists in several locales.

Even more stunning, this reconstruction of a science completely erases the phenomenal development of “reckoning schools” (botteghe) for the commercial mathematical arts in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy.¹⁵ Statistics had one precedent in the fractional computations taught in the fifteenth-century practica Trevisio Arithmetic (1478); just as elements of national income and a labor theory of value were anticipated by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century treatments of partnerships like colleganza (“a merchant would contribute his skill and labor and his partner would be the financial backer”) and compagnie (shared financial investments).¹⁶ Flourishing where medieval urban merchant centers and trade fairs were established, commercial arithmetic was founded on the appearance (or reappearances) of money economies in medieval Europe beginning most likely in Florence and Venice in the twelfth century.¹⁷ It is not too harsh, then, to suggest that Lenin’s sparse conceptualization of political economy was marked by the historical imaginary of the modern bourgeoisie. But before we turn to the implications of his seduction by the notion of national culture as a basis for intellectual development, let us proceed with our present task.

German Philosophy

The second pillar of historical materialism, according to Lenin, was German philosophy or what historians of philosophy refer to as that period of “German idealism.” Here, too, a number of figures appear. But they are not confined to the nineteenth century and just where one begins is somewhat arbitrary. Of the major figures whose work reappears in Marxian discourse, the first is Immanuel Kant. Then come G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. What is at issue in German idealism’s relationship to historical materialism is the modern West’s notion of history, a construct formulated as late as the eighteenth century.

Throughout much of the human past, what we now take as the natural linear construction of history would have been taken as an aberration. Among some people, for instance, we are told that until recently there were not even words in their languages for the past, the present, and the future, the critical integuments of our linear conception of history.¹⁸ Instead, time was measured by phases of the moon (among the Babylonians), the appearances of stars (Egyptians), climatic seasons, the reigns of monarchs and emperors (in Europe through the High Middle Ages), and other recurrent spectacles which confirmed the cyclical structure of life. And history, most frequently discontinuous fragments from the past, adhered to these diverse chronological parameters. The linear notion of history is consequently rather unique in human consciousness.¹⁹ And for some of the earliest of Christian thinkers like Augustine, as Robert Nisbet suggests, it was also rather urgent: “An infinite success of Falls, Nativities, and Redemptions? … The mere thought of the cycle of Christian genesis and decay repeating itself was an abhorrent one.”²⁰ Not surprisingly, less than two centuries later, Christian chronology was established by a monk, Dionysius Exiguus, in the early sixth century. Thus in the West, religious expectations and prophecy became the template of history.

This peculiarity is barely disguised in the Western eschatological ordering of history. Modern Western civilization derives from its cultural predecessor, Judeo-Christianity, a notion of secular history which is not merely linear but encompasses moral drama as well. The narratives of providential history are sufficiently familiar to most of us as to not require repeating. But there are some nuances which are not entirely apparent. As C. K. Barrett commented on the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts,

While both prophecy and apocalyptic were concerned with the future they conceived it in different ways. Prophets and apocalyptists alike believed that the future lay entirely within the prevision and control of God; but whereas the former saw the future developing continuously out of the present, good and evil bearing their own fruit and reaping their own reward, the latter saw the future as essentially discontinuous with the present. … The apocalyptists “foreshortened” history even more radically than the prophets, and for them the last days are almost always at hand.²¹

Even secular historical conceptions like historical materialism reflect the “good news” presumption of the Judeo-Christian gospel: the end of human history fulfills a promise of deliverance, the messianic myth. When Marx and Engels maintained in The Communist Manifesto that human history has been the record of class struggle and then proffer the socialist society as one without classes, it is implied that history will then come to an end. Socialist society—a social order which displays no classes, no class struggle, and therefore no history—reflects a kind of apocalyptic messianism.²² Marxism thusly contained remnants of the thing to which Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach were responding successively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the attempt to construct human experience and consciousness without a God, without a Divine Order, without a Divine plan or promise.

Kant asked the basic question which was a precondition for thinking in these t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Coming to Terms with Marxian Taxonomy
• 2. The Social Origins of Materialism and Socialism
• 3. German Critical Philosophy and Marx
• 4. The Discourse on Economics
• 5. Reality and Its Representation
• Notes
• Index