Capital and Historical Materialism

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MARXISM 21 Article

George C. Comninel*23)

Many argue that Marx’s political project of working class revolution to realize socialism has proved a dead end. His critique of capitalism’s inherent economic dysfunctionality and profound inequalities, however, has been acknowledged even by the mainstream during the current global crisis. This disconnect reflects the belief that proletarian socialist revolution might reasonably have been expected in 1848, when Marx and Engels called for it in The Manifesto. Extending Marx’s method of historical materialist analysis to the history of class society−historical analysis that Marx did not himself pursue, relying instead on liberal historical accounts of classes−reveals that even in Western Europe capitalism was far from sufficiently developed for proletarian revolution even at the turn of the 20th century. Using the analysis provided in Capital, however, it can be seen that the society Marx understood to be the foundation for a profound revolutionary transformation does finally exist today.

Keywords: modes of production; history of class societies; Political Marxism; proletarian revolution; historical materialism.

* Department of Political Science, York University, [email protected].

316 2012년 제9권 제4호 1. Marx’s critique of capitalism vs. his revolutionary project

It is obvious that at least some significant problems must be acknowledged with respect to the ideas expressed by Karl Marx. Most obviously, more than 150 years after The Communist Manifesto there still has been no working class revolution in any developed capitalist society, while−whatever one makes of Russia’s 1917 revolution−the Soviet Union existed for less than seventy-five years.1) Yet, at the same time, although the collapse of the USSR led many to trumpet the death of Marxism in the 1990s, the global crisis of capitalism that began in 2007 has brought even mainstream economists to declare that ‘Marx was right.’2) This juxtaposition raises the question of the relationship between the ideas Marx articulated specifically about capitalism, primarily in the three volumes of Capital and its related manuscripts, and his overarching conception of history as the history of class struggles, culminating in a revolutionary transformation that finally brings to an end the long line of societies founded on the exploitation of labouring people for the benefit of a tiny minority. One approach to understanding Marx’s work−so-called Political Marxis m3)−attributes many of the problems to be found in his work (and that of most later Marxists) to the uncriticised incorporation of ideas originally ad- vanced by earlier liberal historical thinkers(See Kaye, 1995; Wood, 1995).4)

1) None of the successful revolutions of the 20th century have ever been argued to have occurred in developed capitalist societies; the few potentially- or quasi-revolutionary episodes (as in 1919) never came close to success. For more, see Comninel(2000c). 2) See for example these Internet videos: Roubini(2011); Magnus(2011). 3) The term originated in a critique of the work of Robert Brenner by Guy Bois, but has since been accepted by most working within the approach. Another term, preferred by Charles Post (2011), is ‘Capital-centric Marxism,’ resonating with the argument here. 4) For a critical account, see Blackledge(2009).

Capital and Historical Materialism 317 The influence of conceptions drawn from liberal historians of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century is especially manifested in the perva- sive idea−within mainstream social theory as well as Marxism−of inevitable and unilinear historical progress, most often explained in terms of an underlying economic, demographic, technological, and/or climatological determinism. Far from being in any way original to Marx, such ideas were common long before he was born(See Comninel,1987; Wood, 1988; Brenner,1977, 1989). In contrast to such progressivist, deterministic and unilinear forms of analysis, Political Marxism stresses specific historical tra- jectories of social development, often differing even between neighbouring nations, based upon the particular historical forms through which social property relations developed and the concrete balance of forces and out- comes in particular histories of class struggle. Indeed, the approach stresses not only that there is no general historical form of social development appli- cable across the continents, but that even the major societies of Western Europe diverged profoundly during their historical development. Only in the era of spreading industrial capitalism−dating back barely more than 150 years−has there been significant convergence in national forms of economy and society for the first time since the heyday of European feudalism(See Comninel, 2000a, 2012). This approach, challenging not only centuries of mainstream liberal thought but many supposedly orthodox historical conceptions within Marxism, has certainly been controversial. It is, however, directly grounded upon that analysis of the capitalist mode of production articulated by Marx through his critique of political economy, and the insistence that this conception not be conflated with such earlier historical forms as the widespread merchant capitalism of the early modern era. In this it challenges the conception of capitalism as originally mere commercial profit-making, over time taking on industrial production as if this were natural and inevitable−a

318 2012년 제9권 제4호 profoundly ahistorical conception that not only pervades liberal historical social theory but ironically also underpins most Marxist accounts. This regrettable failure to apply Marx’s ideas in Marxist historical analysis follows from Marx’s own deference to the liberal historians, whose ideas he never subjected to a searing critique comparable to that of liberal political economy, to which he devoted so much effort. This is often compounded by misunderstanding the possibility−indeed, necessity−of analysing capitalist society through abstract theoretical modelling of its economic structure as a general approach to historical social analysis. It is, however, central to Marx’s analysis that the capitalist mode of production is unique in this regard. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments in the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse when Marx was compelled to contrast the capitalist mode of production with pre-capitalist forms of class society that he came the fur- thest in articulating principles of historical materialist analysis, and developing original alternatives to the concepts of liberal history and the social theo- ries informing them. By systematically differentiating Marx’s analysis of capitalist social relations from those that were precapitalist, and recognizing both that many established historical ideas with which he was familiar were ideologically informed, and that we have more and better historical knowl- edge today than was available to Marx and his antecedents, we can not only correct the historical errors and dubious judgments in his work, but clarify the integral unity between his analysis of capitalism and historical materialist analysis of the history of societies. The problems with Marx and much later Marxist work largely result from not being consistently Marxist.

Capital and Historical Materialism 319 2. Capital and the commodified form of class society

Marx was too kind by far to liberal thinkers such as Locke, Ferguson, Smith, Turgot, and Guizot. Their conceptions of class had nothing to do with the exploitation of labouring direct producers by the owners of property, but rather the existence of ranks within society. It was through his critique of liberal political economy that Marx originally and uniquely exposed the social relations of class exploitation, beginning at the end of the story, the capitalist mode of production. The final form of this theoretical critique (to the extent he articulated it in at least manuscript form) was an extraordinary achievement, realized through decades of empirical study and intense critical reflection. The magnitude of his achievement is best captured in the recognition that, in contrast with all prior forms of class society, capitalism alone is founded upon a formal separation of political and economic spheres in society, the fundamental processes of social reproduction structured through operation of the Law of Value. Capitalism concretely realizes the social form of abstract labour within society through its commodification of labour-power, by which means it constitutes a general system of class exploitation despite its ostensible basis in the enjoyment of political, civil, and economic freedoms by social individuals. Whereas other forms of society are characterized by inherently normative social relationships throughout production, as well as governance and culture, the individual and autonomous economic actors on which capitalist production is based are in principle guided only by the “invisible hand” of the market. How it is even possible for a society to be organized in this way can only be understood through conceiving it in terms of a totality (as acknowledged even by mainstream macro-economics). There is a well-known quote by Lenin on the relation between Capital and Hegel’s thought: ‘It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s ‘Capital’,

320 2012년 제9권 제4호 and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!’5) There is certainly something important to this point, though it is easy to exaggerate the importance of Hegel. Indeed, one might well argue that one can better appreciate the nature of Hegel’s method by reading and understanding Capital. Without descending into a line by line analysis of the work of either, what must be recognized is that Marx, like Hegel, conceived both history and society in terms of totality. Totality is in fact simultaneously at the core of both Marx’s historical materialism and his critique of political economy. It is, however, crucial that it is a diachronic totality that underlies his conception of history, whereas his conception of the capitalist mode of production is instead fundamentally synchronic. Even more to the point, it is not only history as a whole that is diachronic, but the history of class societies, none of which−prior to the specifically capitalist mode of production−can be characterized by a synchronic structure of fundamentally abstract social relations. As is generally recognized, Marx began Capital with the commodity, presented as the central fact and concept of the capitalist mode of production: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity.’(Marx, 1997: 45) It is first of all striking that this conception of ‘the wealth of nations’ directly posits a transitive equivalence of commodities. They exist as individual elements, but they can and intrinsically must be accumulated into a collectivity possessing concrete magnitude, a sum that constitutes the total wealth of any capitalist society. Inherent in this transitive equivalence of commodities is that they can be

5) This much cited ‘aphorism’ is from Lenin’s ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic’(Lenin, 1976: 180).

Capital and Historical Materialism 321 compared with, and thus exchanged against, each other. This is the tangible meaning of the commodity. It may, we hope, actually prove to have a use-value; and certainly it may analytically be discovered to have an undis- closed but profound significance as a bearer of human social relations. But in its most immediate incarnation, it is something that we can take to market to exchange for something else. It is crucial that, by beginning with the commodity as a part of a totality in a specifically capitalist mode of production, Marx manages to evade the na- ive, timeless, ahistorical, and ultimately anachronistic implications of view- ing it as liberal social theory always has−from before Locke, throughout the era of classical political economy, then again through the Marshallian revolution, and all the way down to Friedman and Samuelson. While Locke acknowledged that it was labour that put the ‘difference of value upon every thing,’ and the classical political economists recognized that behind the fact of normal or average prices there had to be some comparability of the labour expended in production, the implications of these assertions were never taken to the extent of a truly total social conception of production. Thereafter, in the wake of the shift to marginal utility theory and the emphasis upon arbitrary individual desire establishing value, liberal thought has consistently de- nied that there can be any intrinsic basis for the equivalence of commodities. Yet, where the capitalist mode of production exists, commodities do not first exist as individual entities and then come into relation through the subjective will of their possessors. Rather, they exist in relation to each other as elements in a social totality from the start. Marx acknowledged that the immediate appearance of exchange was as a form of arbitrary agreement between free individuals: ‘Exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.’(Marx, 1997: 46)

322 2012년 제9권 제4호 But, he went on to observe, the fact that they can be related in regular pro- portions under normal conditions, within a systemic whole, means that they must have something in common that can explain such a consistent quantita- tive relationship. His embrace of the labour theory of value was therefore not simply a re- statement of the view held by Locke and Smith. It was instead grounded in the idea that within capitalist society there exists a social totality of commodities that is the true summation of the production of wealth. Since within this totality, any and every commodity necessarily must be able to be related to any and every other, all that they can possibly be said to have in common is that they are in some measure the product of human labour: ‘there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.’(Marx, 1997: 48) Marx again writes: ‘The total labour-power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units.’(Marx, 1997: 49) This holistic conception of the commodity, and of the capitalist mode of production as inherently a social totality, is fundamental to Marx’s thought. At the same time, as he was quick to point out, this abstract totality cannot be presumed to be characteristic of all societies. Indeed also within the first section of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, Marx noted that production of wealth in the form of use-values in feudal society was not predicated on the production of commodities: The medieval peasant product quit-rent corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent corn not the tithe-corn be- came commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange(Marx, 1997: 51).

Capital and Historical Materialism 323 And so, within the first six of more than 2000 pages of Capital, we are presented with a qualitative difference between the capitalist mode of production and what, by reference to both his prior and subsequent analyses, can ultimately be said to be all previous forms of human society. It is the capitalist mode of production alone that is structured around the production of commodities: use-values embodying the most abstract possible form of human labour as the basis for exchange, through which social production in its totality is regulated. Other forms of society have also involved the production of use-values not only for enjoyment by the individual producer but by exploitive others. They have not, however, in any comparable way been predicated upon the abstraction inherent in the specifically capitalist commodity form as both an expression of and means to realize the social totality of production. After Marx himself, perhaps the best known exponent of this recognition that capitalism differs qualitatively from all pre-capitalist societies with respect to the role of the commodity has been Karl Polanyi. Polanyi is an important figure, but his ideas are not without serious problems in numbers of ways. What is most significant in his work is precisely that he fundamentally distinguishes pre-capitalist from capitalist societies on the basis of the commodity (or market) becoming the very basis for social organization in the lat- ter(Polanyi, 1957a: 43). Polanyi acknowledged that human societies have generally been characterized by forms of organization predicated upon basic principles of social unity. Early human societies were fundamentally characterized by some combination of two basic principles of collective in- tegration: redistribution and reciprocity(Polanyi, 1957a: 47). These forms of organizing what might from a capitalist perspective be described as economic interaction generally are integrated with other forms of social relationship, such as kinship. Whereas the simplest forms of human society, hunting/gathering bands,

324 2012년 제9권 제4호 have primarily been characterized by a prevalence of immediately redis- tributive social relations, among tribal societies there typically exist more complex rules and obligations of reciprocity tied to kinship. Polanyi noted the Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific, who famously grew more yams than they could ever need, taking great pride in their bounty yet delivering them to kin, receiving yams from other kin in turn. Similarly, they would travel hundreds of kilometres across open seas by canoe to make gifts of at- tractive shells and the like, which then were passed on in the same way. Eventually these gifts would return to the giver, after a long circuit of annual gifts over great distances, only to be given yet again. In exchanging like for like, compounded by unnecessarily great effort and a goal of giving more than is received, such forms of trade clearly do not embody market rationality. Instead, they reveal what Polanyi characterized as the social relations of an ‘embedded economy’−transfers of non-commodified social products, or use values, on other than market principles. Far from being universal to human societies, often asserted as a point of de- parture for the discipline of economics, market exchanges of commodities can be seen to be atypical, appearing in the Mediterranean basin only after several thousand years of civilization, and as many as twenty thousand years of settled agricultural societies, following a hundred thousand or more years of hunting and gathering(See Diamond, 1997). As Polanyi noted, it was Aristotle who first attempted to describe the function of the market, only a few centuries after market relations of commodity exchange came to be common in the ancient world(See Polanyi, 1957b). Marx himself noted in Capital that it was Aristotle who first ana- lysed the form of value(Marx, 1997: 69), deducing its inherently commuta- tive character, expressed in terms of the equivalence of specific quantities of unlike objects, such as beds and houses. Marx then observed that Aristotle here comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value.

Capital and Historical Materialism 325 ‘It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commen- surable’−ie., qualitatively equal. Such an equalization can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only ‘a makeshift for practical purposes’(Marx, 1997: 69-70). Marx attributes this apparent blockage in Aristotle’s thought to the role of slavery in Greek society, asserting that, having as its ‘natural basis, the in- equality of men and of their labour-powers,’ it could not comprehend value as an expression of a generalized equality of labour. This is an instance of Marx adopting mistaken and ideologically con- structed views, however, and there is more behind what Aristotle had to say about human labour than what Marx notes. Ellen Wood has written ex- tensively on the erroneous view that the society of ancient Athens was based upon the labour of slaves, demonstrating that there is little evidence to sup- port the idea that slaves significantly engaged in the agricultural labour central to its social production. Instead it is abundantly clear that the great majority of Athenian citizens were peasants who worked the land with their own hands, while a significant minority were artisans. Slaves were above all household servants and agents, generally with positions at most in the inter- stices of production(Wood, 1988: 82). Indeed, Aristotle himself asserted that slaves are servants whose primary function is to assist the head of household in living and that other subordinates−which is how he also characterizes free artisans−are responsible for production(Aristotle, 1980: 10). All subordinates, both slaves and artisans, are mere conditions for social life, exist- ing solely to make life possible for the true parts of the polis, freemen of property who are by nature unsuited for menial labour(Aristotle, 1980: 13, 108). For this reason, he argued, artisans ought never to be citizens. Wood shows that it was modern European thinkers who developed the myth of an idle mob of Athenian citizens, supported by slavery as they engaged in the increasingly self-destructive democratic politics of the

326 2012년 제9권 제4호 assembly. This ideological conception played a significant role, even before the French Revolution, in a two-pronged assault against both democracy and the supposed ‘idleness’ of the poor. The preponderance of such ideas among even liberal thinkers, as opposed to defenders of aristocratic privilege and the ancien regime, contributed to Marx’s acceptance of them as part of the supposed discovery of the role of class in history. As Wood reveals, however, the real class antagonism in ancient Athens was between the majority of citizens−comprising labouring peasants and artisans−and a minority of aristocratic landed proprietors who generally despised democracy even more than Aristotle. Seen in these terms, Aristotle’s failure to follow through and complete the analysis of value as a form cannot be attributed to slavery. Rather, he could not acknowledge the legitimacy of a real equivalence between commodities because to do so would have undermined the idea that the polis naturally existed to be the locus for social life dominated by landed proprietors. The inherently unnatural potential to secure unlimited wealth through trade and manufacture(Aristotle, 1980: 22ff)−the absence of limits being unnatural in itself−was compounded for Aristotle to the extent that the material form of a commodity might be incompatible with honour. Among the most egregious examples of this was tanning, the disgusting trade of pickled animal skins, to which Cleon, the legendary populist leader of the Athenian Assembly despised by aristocrats, owed his wealth. It is in this context that he could not countenance any merely “arithmetic” relationship between an ignoble commodity like shoes and something so intrinsically important as a house(Aristotle,1980: 118-119). In Aristotle’s view, it was essential that the market remain embedded in broader and more fundamental social relations, holding in check its potential threat to the natural hierarchy in society. Therefore, notwithstanding the importance of the commodity in Athenian society, it was downplayed and misrepresented by its most empirically-ori-

Capital and Historical Materialism 327 ented philosopher. Yet, while Aristotle recognized and was appalled by the potential for commerce to subvert the natural forms of wealth and hierarchy, the capitalist mode of production did not itself exist in Athens. This is not because of a (non-existent) slave mode of production, but because even the systematic exchange of commodities for profit does not in itself constitute capitalism. Marx directly observed that in ancient societies ‘the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place.’(Marx, 1997: 90) Indeed, not even wage labour−which existed in the ancient world and throughout European history, including the middle ages−is in itself sufficient to constitute capitalism. On the basis of Marx’s account in Capital, only when the human capacity to labour has been transformed into the abstract commodity of labour-power, and subsumed to capital not only formally, but increasingly in real subordination of the worker through active control over the labour process, can it be said that capitalist production truly exists. If the capitalist mode of production is predicated upon the commodity, this specifically and necessarily is realized in the regulation of production by the market as ef- fected by the owners of capital. Where the direct producers enjoy ownership of the means of production, or by direct possession or some other means they remain able to control the labour process, there can be no basis for the relentless self-expansion of capital through the form of relative surplus-value. Recognizing this to be the standard for determining whether or not capitalist social relations of production existed, it becomes clear from a close reading of history that nowhere did the capitalist mode of production serve as the general basis for social reproduction until after the industrial revolution had largely transformed English society in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of commodity exchange prior to that time can no more be taken to be a sign of incipient capitalist development in

328 2012년 제9권 제4호 modern Europe than in ancient Greece in the absence of historical processes that clearly conduced to the transformation of labour into the commodity of labour-power, and the subordination of labour processes to owners of the means of production rather than direct producers. It was the unique transformation of agrarian production in England by means of the social property relations of enclosure−realized through a profound defeat of peasant producers in class struggle−that led to a specifically agrarian form of capitalist development there(See Wood, 2002; Brenner, 1987). This transformation of the basic form of social production from self-reproducing peasant households to market-dependent tenant-farmers, employing labourers deprived of access to the means of production, on large farms owned by a landlord class−which began in the late 15th century and culminated in the society described by Adam Smith−occurred nowhere but in England. This process is precisely what Marx described in Capital as ‘the secret of primitive accumulation.’(Marx, 1997: 704ff)

3. An inherently exploitative system of social reproduction

While there always were wage workers in European pre-capitalist class societies, their labour−as Marx noted−was never systematically organized and controlled by those who employed them, nor did markets regulate the processes of production in which they were employed. Workers instead were hired to do work of a well-defined sort, in labour processes that they themselves understood and directly controlled. Even in such pre-capitalist factories as occasionally existed, labour processes were controlled by guilds, laws, tradition and the workers themselves, not by owners of capital. There were significant factories in pre-Revolutionary France, but the workers in them wandered about more or less as they pleased, taking im-

Capital and Historical Materialism 329 promptu breaks and the like(See Zmolek, 2008). One can exaggerate the extent of this autonomous control over production by direct producers, but it was nonetheless very real, especially in contrast to the development of capitalist factories in England in the period after 1780. Indeed, in France the primary exponent of control over commodity production was the state, which increasingly licensed and regulated producers and closely dictated standards. In Normandy, the cottage industry of woolen weavers through which merchants had sought to escape the guild environment of towns, continued to be subject to royal inspectors down to the Revolution: stamps of approval were required before sale, and inferior bolts of cloth were destroyed(See Goubert, 1960). If there was no sign of the capitalist mode of production in the manufacturing of France−whose commercial and manufacturing economy was pre-eminent on the Continent−still less was there any transformation of agrarian production from the open-field peasant systems that had survived the feudal era (and continued to persist long after the Revolution). In short, while in first agriculture, and then increasingly in industry, England witnessed the indigenous development of capitalism from the late fifteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century, in the societies of Continental Europe there was instead only a growth in trade and manu- factures constituted within the parameters of non-capitalist production. There was no introduction of even the most rudimentary elements of specifically capitalist production in France or Germany until after the Napoleonic Wars, following which English industrial technology−often spurred by geo-political priorities of the state, especially in the form of railroads−came increasingly to the fore. Prior to the introduction of capitalist industrial production from Britain the primary class relations of Europe, though for the most part no longer strictly feudal, remained based on appropriating peasant surpluses through private ownership of land and ‘politically constituted’ property (primarily in the form of state offices)(Brenner, 1993: 652ff). The

330 2012년 제9권 제4호 bourgeoisie who pursued the Revolution in France were not in any way capitalist, nor anticipating the development of capitalism.6) Rather, they were primarily lawyers, professionals and non-noble officers of the state (with a significant minority of rentiers), who came increasingly to identify with op- portunities in the ever-expanding civil service of the Republic, Empire, and restored monarchy after the proprietary state offices of the ancien regime were abolished. Returning to Hegel, who wrote in the wake of the French Revolution in a Prussia that profited hugely from its defeat, it is striking to what extent−notwithstanding his familiarity with Adam Smith−his ideas were grounded in the similar pre-capitalist social realities of early nineteenth-century Prussia. The most obvious and significant expression of this lies in Hegel’s casting of the state as agent of the universal, bringing order and the realization of Spirit to the diverse egoistic manifestations of civil society(Hegel, 1952). It is not, as is sometimes supposed, that he proposed something akin to a social democratic corrective to the inherent ‘irrationality’ of capitalist society. Hegel never comprehended Smith’s principle that it was the market that brought order to seeming chaos. He may have read Smith, and married British ideas to French ideas in developing the concept of Bürgerliche gesell- schaft−but he never actually encountered capitalist society and never grasp- ed the crucial point that it inherently, and necessarily, lacked any principle of planning and regulation superior to the market. Indeed, even below his uni- versalizing state, Hegel’s conception of civil society continued to be structured by guilds and corporate bodies. In short, Hegel’s philosophy depicted a complex society, with a large and important commercial sector, but one that remained fundamentally pre-capitalist.7)

6) This is a central point of Comninel(1987); see also Brenner(1989). 7) I briefly discuss this in both Comninel(2000c and 2012).

Capital and Historical Materialism 331 It is, of course, precisely with a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that Marx began his development as a social and political theorist in 1843. Although a detailed analysis is beyond the scope of the present contribution, even a cursory examination of his 1843 works reveals that they are pre- occupied with the politics emanating from the French Revolution(See Comninel, 2000b). Only with his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts did Marx first engage in the critique of political economy that constituted the grounding for historical materialism, and his primary contribution to social thought. While there is enormous development in his analysis between these manuscripts and Capital, it is continuous development without fundamental ‘rupture’.8) After publishing Engels’s ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’ in the Deutsch Französische Jarhbücher, Marx turned his attention to reading the political economists Engels cited. Never before having confronted these ideas, Marx brought his powers of critique to bear on political economy for the first time in his Paris manuscripts. He began by considering ‘Wages of Labour’ and with his first lines distinguished his critical analysis from any- thing that had hitherto appeared in the literature of political economy: ‘Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker. Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist.’(Marx, 1975: 235) His immediate yet incisive critical analysis, occupying only the first column of the first six pages of the manuscripts, indicts political economy: Let us put ourselves now wholly at the standpoint of the political economist, and follow him in comparing the theoretical and practical claims of the workers. He tells us that originally and in theory the whole product of labour be- longs to the worker. But at the same time he tells us that in actual fact what

8) In addition to my works cited above, see Musto(2010, 2011).

332 2012년 제9권 제4호 the worker gets is the smallest and utterly indispensable part of the product −as much, only, as is necessary for his existence, not as a human being, but as a worker, and for the propagation, not of humanity, but of the slave class of workers. The political economist tells us that everything is bought with labour and that capital is nothing but accumulated labour; but at the same time he tells us that the worker, far from being able to buy everything, must sell himself and his humanity. Whilst the rent of the idle landowner usually amounts to a third of the product of the soil, and the profit of the busy capitalist to as much as twice the interest on money, the ‘something more’ which the worker himself earns at the best of times amounts to so little that of four children of his, two must starve and die(Marx, 1975: 239-240). At this point, turning to the seventh page of the manuscript, Marx ignores the vertical columns he has drawn and writes across the whole page. After this page he breaks off his original contributions under ‘Wages of Labour,’ filling that column in the rest of the manuscript with quotations from the political economists, with a few notations. His analyses under ‘Profit of Capital’ and ‘Rent of Land’ skip over page seven, confirming the order of composition, while his original critique of the relationship between worker and capitalist continues in the subsequent section ‘Estranged Labour’. Just before breaking off, in the middle of page seven Marx, tellingly reveals the inherent unity of the historical materialist analysis he would con- tinue to develop primarily through the critique of political: Let us now rise above the level of political economy and examine the ideas developed above, taken almost word for word from the political economists, for the answers to these two questions:

(1) What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of

Capital and Historical Materialism 333 the greater part of mankind to abstract labour? (2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or−like Proudhon−see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?(Marx, 1975: 241)

What is astounding is the immediacy of Marx’s achievement, literally in the first several pages of his confrontation with political economy. He in- stantly saw capitalism for what it was, an inherently exploitative system of social reproduction based on class relations of property embodying the alienation of labour. His reaction was two-fold: to conceive of this alienation of labour in relation to the development of humanity as a whole, and to recog- nize the necessity−and possibility−for social revolution to put an end to it.9) The historical materialist critique of political economy eventually realized in Capital remains a uniquely powerful instrument for understanding the nature of capitalist society as it has come to transform the world. Beyond this, however, from his first moment of insight into the system, Marx recognized in the specifically capitalist relationship of wage labour the ultimate expression of human alienation, and he understood it to be central to the historical evolution of human societies in a way that took Hegelian idealism and turned it right-side up. It is clear, therefore, not only that there is inherent unity between his early writings and Capital, but between his analysis of the capitalist economy, his conception of the history of class societies, and his political project of revolution to bring about human emancipation. Marx, however, was neither a historian nor an academic philosopher, and he never devoted his efforts to an original, critical examination of the history

9) For a more detailed analysis, see Comninel(2000b).

334 2012년 제9권 제4호 of class societies and their processes of social change. During his life he devoted much energy to building the International Workingmen’s Association, to analysing major historical turning points such as the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune, to commenting upon political strategies and movements, to wide-ranging journalism, and (particularly later in life) to studying histories and social forms outside the Western European experience. Yet the greatest part of his work, occupying much of his attention through the whole of his life, remained the critique of political economy. Although this commitment to what the historian E. P. Thompson called his ‘Grundrisse-face’(Thompson, 1978: 74) has been a disappointment to those (like Thompson) who have wished for more historical analysis, Marx had good reason for his priorities. It is not only that capitalism had already become the prevailing form of class society in his time, and ever since increasingly the context for class struggle. More than this, from 1844 on Marx saw that the capitalist mode of production necessarily would be the final form of class society, since−in its formal separation of the political from the economic, its apparently free economic relations, and its inherent drive towards greater productivity and technological progress−it constituted the most complete possible realization of the alienation of labour through property relations(Wood, 1995: 35-37). At the same time, however, Marx’s systematic development of the critique of political economy periodically brought him to confront, as has been seen above, essential differences between capitalist and pre-capitalist social relations. This was, moreover, something of which he was conscious. Indeed, as he wrote in one of the most important of his passages on the method of his analysis, precisely in the ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse: Bourgeois society is the most developed and many-faceted historical or- ganisation of production. The categories which express its relations, an understanding of its structure, therefore, provide, at the same time, an insight

Capital and Historical Materialism 335 into the structure and the relations of production of all previous forms of society the ruins and components of which were used in the creation of bourgeois society. Some of these remains are still dragged along within bourgeois society unassimilated, while elements which previously were barely in- dicated have developed and attained their full significance, etc. The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the higher forms themselves are already known. Bourgeois economy thus provides a key to that of antiquity, etc(Marx,1986: 42; see Comninel, 2010: 104-115). In contrast with how in 1844 he initially conceived the development of the alienation of labour merely in terms of the development of property(Marx, 1986: 293ff), Marx came to appreciate that pre-capitalist class societies had existed with different specific forms of class relations. Although this idea is certainly best known from the bare sketch offered in the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy−‘In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society’(Marx, 1987: 263)−it has long been recognized that there is no single authoritative account of the historical modes of production in Marx’s work, nor one that can be said to be without problems(See Hobsbawm, 1965). There is, however, one more important place in Capital where Marx was compelled to confront the differences between capitalist and pre-capitalist social relations. In Volume III−dealing with the concrete movements of capital as a whole after the analysis of the process of production in Volume I and the process of circulation in Volume II−Marx was brought to address mer- cantile profits, interest, credit, and rent as each existed both in pre-capitalist forms and in a form specific to capitalism. At several points his analysis not only underscores the difference between the earlier and later forms, but that

336 2012년 제9권 제4호 the one cannot be taken simply to develop into the other. With respect to merchant capital, for example, he asserted that despite its historical importance it ‘is incapable by itself of promoting and explaining the transition from one mode of production to another.’(Marx, 1998: 325) It is particularly in Chapter 47, ‘The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent’, when addressing the difference between the role of rent as the fundamental form of class exploitation in pre-capitalist societies and its role in capitalism, that Marx’s analysis amounts directly to a statement of historical materialist method. As Marx remarked, the challenge in analysing capitalist rent lay in explaining the general ‘excess of surplus-value characteristic of this sphere of production.’(Marx, 1998: 769) The question of rent in capitalist society is exceedingly complex, with two forms of inherently capitalist differential rent, a form of genuinely monopoly rent (fortunately a minor consideration) and absolute rent(Marx, 1998: 734ff). Without going into the complexities, the point is that absolute rent, the main anomalous expression of excess surplus-value realized in agriculture, cannot be explained on the basis of purely capitalist social relations. It is, instead, a form that specifically derives from the existence of a landlord class, which is in no way required by the logic of capitalist social relations but is instead a legacy of pre-capitalist class society. In order to trace the concrete development of rent, therefore, Marx de- votes a section to Labour Rent, noting of the pre-capitalist peasant-based class societies of which it is characteristic that ‘Rent, not profit, is the form here through which unpaid surplus labour expresses itself.’(Marx, 1998: 776) He observes immediately that in feudal society, the labour rent owed by peasants to lords ‘is not only directly unpaid surplus labour, but also appears as such.’ He continues with a famous observation about the necessarily extra-economic character of the pre-capitalist appropriation of surplus: It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer re-

Capital and Historical Materialism 337 mains the ‘possessor’ of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and ser- vitude, so that the direct producer is not free; a lack of freedom which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a mere tributary relationship.... Under such conditions the surplus-labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be(Marx, 1998: 776-777). This extra-economic character of pre-capitalist class relations of exploitation is, of course, one of the most crucial and fundamental ways in which they differ from those of the capitalist mode of production. Marx then addresses forms of society where no private landowners exist to appropriate rent, but only the state:

then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no stron- ger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. But, on the other hand, no private ownership of land exists, although there is both private and common possession and use of land(Marx, 1998: 777).

He continues:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby

338 2012년 제9권 제4호 simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers−a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity−which reveals the inner- most secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state(Marx, 1998: 777-778).

No single statement should ever be taken to encapsulate the whole of Marx’s method for analysing modes of production, but this certainly provides a clear guide to a most fundamental consideration. At the same time, this statement is directly associated with Marx’s class analysis of two different modes of production having the same foundation in terms of the forces of production or material conditions of social reproduction: self-reproducing peasant households. Marx does nothing here to freight his conception of the first, so-called Asiatic, mode of production− which may not reflect the social realities of any Asian society in the modern era, but certainly corresponds to societies in Bronze Age Greece, the ancient Near East and Asia, and pre-colonial America−with any supposition of hy- draulic agriculture, nor does he in any other way distinguish its production from the second, feudal, case. For this reason, his reference to ‘a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour’ cannot be taken to mean that any deterministic relationship exists between forms of production and social relations of class exploitation. It must, instead, be taken simply to express a limitation on the forms that such relations can take relative to social productive capacities.

Capital and Historical Materialism 339 4. We still have our chains to lose

Virtually the whole of the history of class societies−even in Western Europe, but especially elsewhere across the globe−remains to be written in historical materialist terms(Anderson, 1974: 403-448). Although Marx devoted his life primarily to confronting the abstract system of social property relations that constitute the capitalist mode of production, and among the greatest mistakes a Marxist can make is to think that such an abstract form of analysis should be applied to any pre-capitalist form of class society, his critique of political economy does offer certain instructive guideposts for a broader historical materialist method. What is required is in the first place to abandon reliance upon what Marx said about any given non-capitalist society, and to begin−as he did−with the actual ways in which direct producers of social surplus were exploited. This cannot be conceived primarily in terms of the material basis of production, but must focus on the specific, fundamentally extra-economic social relations through which the product of unpaid labour was systematically appropriated. It is history−the history for which Marx himself did not and could not have had the time−that is required. Yet it also can be seen that there are, indeed, grounds for confirming the overarching frame of Marx’s conception of the history of class societies, culminating in the capitalist mode of production. Simply because capitalism embodies the most logically complete form of the alienation of labour cannot mean in itself there is no alternative but to move on to communism, any more than Marx’s analysis of the inherently crisis-ridden nature of the capitalist system means it will simply come crashing down someday. Both his prescient critique of political economy−anticipating developments in capitalism on the basis of its structure and internal dynamics−and his conception of historical social change conditioned by social relations of exploitation and

340 2012년 제9권 제4호 concrete forms of struggle against them, do however provide reason to believe a future of human freedom and humane rationality are possible.10) It is not only because of global economic crisis that we have much to learn from a return to Marx. When he wrote in 1848 that ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’, he was mistaken in the belief that this then was the spectre of communism. It was, instead, still the spectre of the French Revolution and its unresolved political issues, in a Europe that still was profoundly pre-capitalist(See Comninel, 2000b, 2000c). Yet while the timing of his prediction was certainly wrong, there is no reason to believe its substance was not correct. The link between his critique of capitalist exploitation and irrationality, and the possibility of realizing a better world for all through transcending it, is strong. And we still have our chains to lose.

(Received 2012-09-24, Revised 2012-10-22, Accepted 2012-10-29)

10) See the argument and conclusion in Wood(1995).

Capital and Historical Materialism 341 ❒ 국문초록

󰡔자본론󰡕과 역사적 유물론

조지 콤니넬

많은 논자들이 사회주의 실현을 위한 노동자계급 혁명이라는 마르크스의 정 치적 프로젝트가 실패했음이 입증되었다고 주장해왔다. 그러나 글로벌 경제 위 기 이후, 자본주의에 내재한 경제적 결함과 뿌리 깊은 불평등에 대한 마르크스 의 비판을 주류학계도 인정하고 있다. 이러한 불일치는 노동자계급의 사회주의 혁명이 마르크스와 엥겔스가 󰡔공산당 선언󰡕을 발표했던 1848년에나 일어났을 법했다는 믿음이 반영된 것이다. 계급 사회의 역사에 마르크스의 역사적 유물 론 방법론(마르크스 자신은 이러한 역사적 분석을 추구하지 않았고, 대신 계급 에 대한 자유주의적 역사 서술에 의지했다)을 확장해 적용해본다면, 서유럽 자 본주의에서 심지어 20세기에 들어서까지도 프롤레타리아 혁명을 위한 조건이 무르익은 것과는 거리가 멀었다는 것이 분명해진다. 그렇지만 󰡔자본론󰡕의 분석 을 적용해볼 때 사회가 완전히 혁명적으로 전환할 토대가 오늘날에서야 마침내 존재하게 되었다고 볼 수 있다.

주요 용어: 생산양식, 계급 사회의 역사, 정치적 마르크스주의, 프롤레타 리아 혁명, 역사적 유물론.

342 2012년 제9권 제4호 ❒ References

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