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Capital and Historical Materialism MARXISM 21 Article Capital and Historical Materialism 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 acknowl- edged 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−what- ever 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 econo- mists to declare that ‘Marx was right.’2) This juxtaposition raises the ques- tion of the relationship between the ideas Marx articulated specifically about capitalism, primarily in the three volumes of Capital and its related manu- scripts, 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 in- evitable 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 uni- linear 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 con- ception not be conflated with such earlier historical forms as the widespread merchant capitalism of the early modern era. In this it challenges the con- ception 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 so- cial 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 develop- ing 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 lib- eral 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 achieve- ment, 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 or- ganized 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 under- stood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently,
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