Marx at the Margins Marx at the Margins On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies Kevin B. Anderson The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London Kevin B. Anderson is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California–Santa Barbara. He has edited four books and is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study and, with Janet Afary, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01982-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01983-3 (paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-01982-9 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-01983-7 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson Kevin, 1948– Marx at the margins : on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western societies / Kevin B. Anderson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01982-6 (cloth : alk.paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-01982-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01983-3 (pbk : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-01983-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883— Political and social views. 2. Nationalism. 3. Ethnicity. I. Title JC233.M299A544 2010 320.54—dc22 2009034187 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1992 C o n t e n t s Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1 Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China 9 2 Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution 42 3 Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution 79 4 Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement 115 5 From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes 154 6 Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies 196 Conclusion 237 Appendix. The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to Today 247 Notes 253 References 285 Index 299 Acknowledgments During the decade and more I have worked on this project, I have received generous assistance in numerous ways from scholars in Marxist studies and other fields. Through these years, my understanding of the issues at stake in this book has benefited immensely from my association with theMarx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, in particular from interactions with Jürgen Rojahn, David Norman Smith, Charles Reitz, Lars Lih, Georgi Bagaturia, the late Norair Ter- Akopian, and Rolf Hecker, as well as Jürgen Herres, Malcolm Sylvers, Gerald Hubmann, Gerd Callesen, Regina Roth, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf. I also ben- efited from an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1996–97), a travel grant from the American Philosophical Society (1996), and a Center for Humanistic Studies Fellowship at Purdue University (2004). Bert Rockman of the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and Verta Taylor of the Department of Sociology at University of California–Santa Barbara also allowed some release time from teaching, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. Douglas Kellner, Bertell Ollman, and Frieda Afary each read and com- mented in important ways upon the entire manuscript. So did my partner, Janet Afary, who provided immense support and encouragement, both per- sonal and intellectual, as she followed and encouraged this project at every step of the way. Over the years, I have also discussed this project frequently—and always fruitfully—with Peter Hudis. Louis Dupré, Donald N. Levine, and Wil- liam McBride offered encouragement and suggestions at crucial junctures. The following people read and gave good suggestions on significant parts of the manuscript: David Black, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Richard Hogan, Lars Lih, viii Acknowledgments Albert Resis, Arthur Rolston, Jack Rhoads, David Roediger, Jürgen Rojahn, and Eamonn Slater. Others offered comments in response to papers on it pre- sented at various conferences or in other settings, especially Robert Antonio, Colin Barker, Franklin Bell, Roslyn Bologh, Jordan Camp, Norman Fischer, Chris Ford, Andrew Kliman, Lauren Langman, David Mayer, Ted McGlone, David McNally, Hal Orbach, Michael Perelman, Annette Rubinstein, Law- rence Scaff, and Suzi Weissman. I would also like to thank Heather Brown, Alexander Hanna, Lisa Lubow, C. J. Pereira di Salvo, Michelle Sierzega, Re- bekah Sterling, and Mir Yarfitz for research assistance. At Purdue University, Michelle Conwell provided lots of technical and secretarial support. Over the years I worked at the following libraries, where I received par- ticular help from several individuals: Northern Illinois University (Robert Ridinger), University of Chicago (Frank Conaway), and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam (Mieke Ijzermans). I also re- ceived other help with source material from Vinay Bahl, David Black, Se- bastian Budgen, Paul Buhle, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Rolf Dlubek, Carl Estabrook, Eric Foner, Urszula Frydman, Rolf Hecker, Robert Hill, William McBride, Jim Obst, David Roediger, Jürgen Rojahn, David Norman Smith, and Danga Vileisis. Earlier versions of parts this book have been presented to meetings of numerous scholarly associations, including the American Sociological Asso- ciation, the Historical Materialism conferences (London and Toronto), the Socialist Scholars conferences (New York), the Left Forum conferences (New York), the Rethinking Marxism conferences (Amherst), and the Midwest Soci- ological Association. In addition, I would like to single out four occasions that were particularly important in the thinking through of this book in response to serious interlocutors: a colloquium at the Department of Sociology of Univer- sity of Illinois at the invitation of John Lie in 1996; a talk at the Brecht Forum in New York at the invitation of Liz Mestres and Eli Messinger in 2000; a stint as a visiting scholar at the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at University of California–Los Angeles at the invitation of Robert Brenner and Thomas Mertes in the winter and spring of 2007; and a stint as a visiting scholar at Wuhan University at the invitation of He Ping in fall 2007. I would also like to thank John Tryneski and Rodney Powell, as well as Mary Gehl and Kristi McGuire, at the University of Chicago Press for their hard work and support through the process of publication. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of two outstand- ing thinkers who paved the way: my intellectual mentor Raya Dunayevskaya Acknowledgments ix (1910–1987), a Marxist humanist philosopher who developed original in- sights into Marx’s writings on non-Western and precapitalist societies in her Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982); and Lawrence Krader (1919–1998), the indefatigable Marx scholar who brought Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks to light in 1972. Abbreviations Capital I Karl Marx, Capital, volume I, translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin edition ([1890] 1976) Capital III Karl Marx, Capital, volume III, translated by David Fernbach, Penguin edition ([1894] 1981) Grundrisse Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), translated by Martin Nicolaus ([1857–58] 1973) KML 1 Karl Marx Library, volume 1, edited and translated by Saul K. Padover (1971–77) MECW 12 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Collected Works, volume 12 (1975–2004) MEGA2 II/10 Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, section II, volume 10 (1975–) MEW 1 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Werke, volume 1 (1956–68) Oeuvres 4 Karl Marx, Oeuvres, volume 4, edited with notes by Maximilien Rubel (1963–94) Introduction In 1849, Marx was forced to move to London, where he was to dwell as a po- litical exile until his death in 1883. Having experienced the defeat of the 1848 revolutions on the Continent, he sensed that a period of retrogression was at hand. This was confirmed by the December 1851 Bonapartist coup in France, which signaled the end of the revolutionary wave of 1848–49. If these political setbacks narrowed his horizons somewhat, his relocation to London widened them in other ways. It placed Marx at the center of the world’s only truly in- dustrial capitalist economy as he labored in the British Museum on what was to become his masterwork, Capital. The move to London also put him at the center of the world’s largest empire, which led him to take greater account of non-Western societies and colonialism. The deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida captures well Marx’s marginality as a political refugee in Victorian London, linking it to his equally marginal position within the Western intellectual tradition: “Marx remains an immigrant among us, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still clandestine immi- grant as he was all his life” (1994, 174). In Britain, one of his main sources of income was his work as the chief European correspondent of the New York Tribune. Another was the financial support he received from his friend Frie- drich Engels, also a veteran of 1848, who became a partner in his family’s very successful manufacturing firm in Manchester. Frequently writing in English and French as well as his native German, Marx was a trilingual, cosmopolitan intellectual. This book brings together two sets of writings from Marx’s vast corpus, al- most all of them written in London. (1) It examines his theorization of a number Introduction of non-Western societies of his day—from India to Russia and from Algeria to China—and their relation to capitalism and colonialism. (2) It also takes up his writings on movements for national emancipation, especially in Poland and Ireland, and their relation to the democratic and socialist movements of the time.