"Marx's Context"

MARX’S CONTEXT

George C. Comninel1

Abstract: The method of interpreting political theory in relation to its specific historical contexts offers particular insight into the work of Karl Marx. When pre-capitalist societies are understood in relation to Marx’s rigorously conceived capitalist mode of production, it is apparent that the context in which Marx produced his very earliest work was itself pre-capitalist. It can then be recognized that Marx began by making a significant contribution to an existing framework of critical political theory but also that, following a critical confrontation with English political economy in 1844, he opened new avenues of thought in relation to a new context: capitalism.

Neal Wood has demonstrated that when considering historical works of political theory, there is much to be gained from situating them in the specific social and political contexts in which they were written.2 Despite certain philosophi- cal stances that flatly reject such a view, it seems, on the face of it at least, to be uncontroversial. Still, much hinges on what is meant by ‘context’. Many scholars of the history of political thought lavish attention on the ‘discursive context’ of an author’s work, situating the text in the bodies of literature that provided, or helped to shape, particular themes or arguments. But while this approach can be very helpful in comprehending a text as it was intended to be (and was in fact) understood by contemporaries, it sheds little light on the social and political concerns that underpinned the purposive arguments advanced in historical works on political theory. For example, while it is evident that Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la République owes much to a variety of discursive sources, ranging from Aris- totle to the Renaissance humanists, to debates both within and against the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, Bodin’s rejoinders to the Huguenot resistance theorists cannot be understood adequately by exclusive reference to them. It is also necessary for scholars of his work to take account of Bodin’s political purposes in articulating the position of the politiques in support of absolute monarchy during the Wars of Religion. There is nothing exceptional about this case in the history of political thought. From the Socratics’ princi- pled opposition to the policies and practices of democratic Athens; to Machiavelli’s consideration of what was possible, and to be preferred, as the Medicis brought the Florentine republic to an end; to the raging debates engendered by (very different) revolutions in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France, the history of political thought has been 1 Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3. Email: [email protected] 2 The introductory chapter, ‘A Question of Method’, to Neal Wood’s John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984) offers a particularly illuminating discussion of the historical approach to political theory. HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXI. No. 3. Autumn 2000

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 468 G.C. COMNINEL dominated by purposive interventions issued in contexts of social and political conflict. It should be recognized, however, that political confrontations must themselves be considered in relation to the distinctive features of historically specific social forms. This means that when studying early modern and modern political thought it is important to take account of the distinctive character of pre-capitalist3 and capitalist societies, particularly with respect to their different relations between economic and political spheres. In these terms, there are very different paths of development to be found among Western European societies. An appreciation of this point requires some clarification of the meaning of ‘capitalism’. Though the term may be given many different and arbitrary meanings, the key point for our purposes is to distinguish between societies in which market exchanges and commercial profit-making undoubtedly existed, and those ‘capitalist’ societies in which basic social production is market- dependent and market-regulated. Societies of this kind have patterns of social property relations and give rise to relationships between state and society that differ fundamentally from those found in pre-capitalist societies. These dif- ferences mean that while early modern historical texts must be understood in relation to particular political purposes, these must in turn be related to under- lying social objectives that differ from those associated with capitalist society. The social and political context for Bodin’s work is one case in point. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has observed, the political thought of early modern France was profoundly influenced by a very different relationship between state and society than that characteristic of capitalism.4 Fundamental to the structure of capitalist social relations is an apparent separation of the political and the economic, forming seemingly distinct spheres of state and civil society — a separation that is absent even in principle from pre-capitalist societies.5 Indeed, a crucial ‘economic’ fact of early modern France was what

3 On the face of it, ‘pre-capitalist’ would appear to be a problematically teleological term. The point, however, is that capitalism truly is unique as a social form, qualitatively different from all the forms of society that preceded it, however different those various forms may have been from each other. Thus, ‘pre-capitalist’ is not a teleological usage, but a historical one: it was only possible to identify what all pre-capitalist societies had in common relative to capitalism after the latter actually developed as a novel social form. 4 Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s “General Will” ’, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. F. Krantz (Montreal, 1985), pp. 117–39. 5 Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Separation of the “Economic” and the “Political” in Capitalism’, in Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 19–48.

Robert Brenner has characterized as ‘politically constituted property’.6 This comprised claims to residual benefits from possession of formerly feudal parcellized political jurisdictions, outright ownership of venal offices in an expanding monarchical state apparatus and various other calls upon state-centred income and power. These claims were the subject of endless negotiation and struggle between the architects of the ‘absolute’ monarchy and the national and regional aristocracies of the nobility.7 In this social context, the polemical opposition between the Huguenot resistance to central authority and the absolutist political project of the politiques necessarily takes on a social and economic significance that is wholly absent from any comparable debate over constitutional authority in a capitalist society. In articulating the rights of ‘lesser magistrates’, i.e. seigneurs, against claims that the monarchy enjoyed the ‘absolute’ power of undivided sovereignty, Huguenot tracts transparently expressed the interests of regional nobles who were being excluded from the processes of co-optation, reallocation and elevation by which a new ‘absolutist’ structure of politically constituted property was constructed in early modern France. This structure became firmly entrenched in the eighteenth century, following the Fronde’s last spasm of de-centralizing resistance. By 1787, when aristocrats pressed their own interests against those of the king, they articulated their opposition to the ‘absolute’ monarchy wholly in terms of rights which they claimed within the central state, no longer in basic opposition to it. The prevailing form of politically constituted property had by then been defini- tively transformed into claims upon the centralized power and centrally collected revenues of the monarchical state. This new constellation of aristocratic political interests was promoted by Montesquieu. In striking contrast to the Huguenots’ position, Montesquieu defended the rights of noble magistrates such as himself (a President of the parlement of Bordeaux) to counter royal prerogative through the ‘separation of powers’ within the state.8 It is essential to recognize that the historical context for French political ideas continued to be defined by pre-capitalist social interests, based primarily upon the role of the state as a locus for careers and a principal source of income. Capitalism did not emerge in France until well into the nineteenth century and, as shown elsewhere, this point is of great significance in understanding the French Revolution and political thought in the revolutionary and

6 In his original formulation, Brenner termed this ‘private property in the political sphere’ in ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, reprinted in The Brenner Debate, ed. T.H. Aston and C.P.E. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985), p. 290. 7 See particularly William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1985). Also, see my discussion of the politics of class interests in the ancien régime, in G.C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London, 1987). 8 Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 156–66.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 470 G.C. COMNINEL post-revolutionary periods.9 The same consideration applies to political thinking in other parts of continental Europe. By contrast, the context for early modern political thought in England was very different. In England — and in England alone — a unique system of social relationships developed during the early modern period. This system provided the basis for capitalism as a distinctive mode of production, progres- sively transforming both English society and its state. As Neal Wood and Ellen Meiksins Wood have argued, this particular historical context is crucial to understanding the history of English political thought from Sir Thomas Smith, through Hobbes and Locke, to Mill and beyond.10 This approach to the historical social contextualization of French and English political thought — emphasizing first a profound social divergence due to the rise of English capitalism; then a gradual convergence, as capitalist social relations of production spread in the wake of the Industrial Revolu- tion — has been underpinned by a historical materialist understanding of the development of state and society.11 It is therefore especially appropriate for this method also to be extended to the development of the political thought of Karl Marx. In this case it is important to recognize that although most of Marx’s writings were written in England, in a society shaped by the origins of capitalism, his early works were the products of studies undertaken in pre-capitalist continental Europe. Nevertheless, it was in Marx’s earliest 9 There is an extensive theoretical and empirical analysis in Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, arguing that there was no capitalism in the ancien régime. This argument is based on the ground-breaking work of Robert Brenner, who first emphasized the divergent paths of England and France in 1976 in ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, reprinted with a series of responses prompted by the article and Brenner’s lengthy reply to critics in The Brenner Debate, ed. Aston and Philpin. I have pursued the origin and development of these divergent paths more deeply into history, buttressing the case that there was no emergence of capitalism in France before the nineteenth century, in G.C. Comninel, ‘English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism’, Journal of Peasant Studies, XXVII (1999–2000), pp. 1–53. 10 See Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism; The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983); Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994); Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London, 1991); Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition (London, 1997). 11 This historical materialist analysis of the origin of capitalism and the divergence of France and England clearly is at odds with conventional Marxist accounts. The reasons for this discrepancy, and the extent to which the present analysis is in accord with the core of Marx’s own work, have been taken up at some length in Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, and Comninel, ‘English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism’, as well as in Robert Brenner, ‘On the Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, 104 (1977), pp. 25–92; Robert Brenner, ‘Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism’, in The First Modern Society, ed. A.L. Beier, et al. (Cambridge, 1989); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism; and Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (New York, 1999).

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction MARX’S CONTEXT 471 writings, specifically through the development of his ideas between the sum- mer of 1843 and the spring of 1844, that pre-capitalist Europe first confronted the profoundly new reality of capitalist social relations. One lesson we may learn for a contextually specific consideration of these works is the paradoxi- cal one that Marx’s critical insights into the nature of capitalist society may well have been facilitated by the very absence of capitalist presuppositions in his intellectual formation. A second lesson is that, considered in relation to the development of political thought in pre-capitalist Europe from Machiavelli to Hegel, the contributions made by Marx in his earliest works, before the aston- ishing insights achieved through his critique of political economy, were significant in their own right. This line of argument clearly runs counter to the usually accepted conceptions of historical development, by which it is generally assumed that all of Western Europe (at least) took part in a broad, uniform and systemically inte- grated evolution of modern society — including capitalism — from the common experience of medieval feudalism. As I have argued elsewhere, that conception not only underpins the major nineteenth-century contributions to historical social theory, as well as virtually all of their extensions into twentieth- century thought, but is particularly central to the idea of historical progress expressed in liberal (and subsequently Marxist) discourse since the mid-eighteenth century. The case against this general conception depends upon careful delineation of the particular attributes that distinguish capitalist society from the societies that preceded it, in terms coinciding with Marx’s critique of political economy. This account necessitates a clarification of the relationship between capitalism and pre-capitalist markets, and of the ways in which the market has been dealt with in the history of political thought. The most common meaning of ‘capitalism’ (one that corresponds roughly to Max Weber’s widely recognized definition)12 is simply systematic buying and selling in the market for profit. For Weber, capitalists played a role in ancient Greece and Rome, but were marginalized at the fall of the Roman Empire. They subsequently figured centrally in the emergence of the modern world: first through a snowballing of trading activity that began in the later Middle Ages; then most dramatically through the Industrial Revolution and the growing social impact of applied technology. This conception of capitalism, however, conflates simple profit-making in the market, which has occurred throughout Western history,13 with a very specific set of production 12 Max Weber, ‘Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe’, in Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W.G. Runciman (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 333–4. 13 As Karl Polanyi has pointed out, however, use of the market mechanism for regulating exchange did not long predate the classical age of ancient Greece; it was not a feature of earlier civilizations in Egypt or Mesopotamia or in Minoan Crete. See K. Polanyi, ‘Aristotle Discovers the Economy’, in K. Polani, C.M. Arensberg and H.W. Pearson, Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Chicago, 1971), pp. 64–94. Ellen Meiksins Wood considers some of the implications of the social change between the

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 472 G.C. COMNINEL relations centred on the market, but differing markedly from those found in earlier forms of production for the market. Still, even Weber recognized the distinction between mere profit-making in trade (though he took this to con- stitute ‘capitalism’) and the crucial modern development of what he termed the ‘capitalist organisation of labour’.14 In our usage however, capitalism is a system of production — as distinct from mere commerce — that signifies more than merely production for the market. Specifically, it is the intrinsically market-dependent and market-regulated production of goods for exchange — the production of commodities regulated by relations between commodities — based on social relations in which what economists describe as the ‘factors of production’ have been thoroughly commodified. Such commodified means of production include not only land, raw material and equipment, but the money-form of capital itself, and — above all — the very labouring capacity of workers, purchased through wages. Only those owning sufficient capital can get market access to the material means of production, which must then be carefully organized and systematically improved in competition with other owners of capital supplying similar goods to the same market. Failure to be competitive in production, a standard constantly driven higher through the application of ingenuity and capital resources to create new technology — a distinctive capitalist dynamic of productivity — ultimately means failure in the market. When understood in these terms, capitalism was found only in Britain prior to the defeat of Napoleon, having developed first in English agriculture, then spread into manufactures there to engender a general system of capitalist production.15 There have usually been wage workers in pre-capitalist societies, but their labour 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 were instead hired to do work of a well-defined sort, in the way they themselves understood how to do it. Even in the occasional pre-capitalist factories, labour processes were controlled by guilds, laws, tradition and the workers themselves — not by owners of capital.16 Only after English capitalism, emerging from agriculture, transformed entirely marketless society of Bronze Age Greece and that of classical Attica in Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London, 1988), pp. 81 ff. 14 Weber, ‘Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe’, pp. 336–7. 15 See E.M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism; and Comninel, ‘English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism’. 16 The work of E.P. Thompson is especially enlightening on the long struggle by capitalists to impose their control over labour upon the workers they employed, who for centuries resisted the notion that their labouring capacities were not theirs to control even when working for wages. This theme runs throughout Thompson’s work, but see particularly ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, in Custom, Law and Common Right (New York, 1991) and The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968).

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction MARX’S CONTEXT 473 the practices of industrial production, with capitalists imposing discipline and multiplying productivity through mechanical innovations in market- dependent and market-regulated production, did capitalism begin to spread to the rest of Europe, transforming it over the course of the next century and more. Classical political economists and contemporary economists have understood the technical operation of capitalism in essentially the same terms, focused upon the market as an inherent mechanism of self-regulation in production. But aside from their different judgment as to whether capitalism is exploitative, practitioners of the dismal science have generally failed to acknowledge that not all societies have operated on such capitalist economic principles. Instead, they tend anachronistically to project the principles of market-dependent and market-regulated production into every society where markets merely existed, even going so far as to conceive market relations to be a universal of human society, projecting them where they never existed. Sepa- rately or in combination, these errors — conflating simple exchange with a market-based system of production, and projecting capitalist economic principles universally — have hopelessly confused most discussions of capitalism and its origins. The economies of pre-capitalist European societies remained ‘embedded’ (to use Karl Polanyi’s phrase) in larger systems of collective social regulation. The questions of who would produce what and how, were in principle subject to determination by custom, law, collective bodies and state regulation, in various combinations. They were not determined by the operation of market principles upon ‘factors of production’, even when (as for example in medieval and Renaissance Florence) a good deal of what was produced was intended for market. What seem to us from a capitalist perspective to have been ‘economic’ issues were previously subjected to normative moral, political and customary regulation by society, in much the same way as socially-relevant practices that might instead be characterized as religious, familial, associative or political. All such issues of collective social life were simultaneously moral, legal and political. Throughout the history of political thought, from ancient Greece into the nineteenth century, they were understood to be subject to social regulation. Taken together, these comprised the substance of moral philosophy. The integration of these various social elements can be seen, for example, in the way Aristotle considers education, household management and the regulation of trade, among other things, in his Politics, itself directly linked to his Nicomachean Ethics.17 Pre-capitalist moral regulation acknowledges no supremacy of the market. According to Aristotle, exchange should be governed by ‘proportionate equality’ — based on the inherent relative merits of different forms of activity — and

17 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1179a33–1181b23.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 474 G.C. COMNINEL not the crass equality dictated by the market.18 It was not that Aristotle did not understand the market, but that he rejected its implications for social organization. Yet, though the market disturbed the moral order of Athens more than Aristotle liked, it continued to be hemmed in by custom and law. In medieval society, Aquinas likewise warned of the dangers of the market, and outrightly rejected usury. Still later, so closely was economic life regulated in ancien régime France that inspectors destroyed bolts of cloth that did not meet royal standards. Such interference with what economists see as the ‘natural’ regulation of the economy by market forces is wholly inconsistent with the premises of capitalist society. It is, however, perfectly normal to the theory and practice of pre-capitalist societies. The classic argument against ‘interfering’ with market principles, and for a laissez-faire approach to the economy, was taken from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith articulated a sustained critique of what he saw in the contemporary ‘continental system’ of regulating trade and production through laws, intermediary corporate bodies and the state. Smith was himself a moral philosopher. Yet, writing in capitalist Britain, he clearly distinguished between the overt forms of normative regulation appropriate to law, custom, ethics and religion, and the providential efficiency realized through the ‘un- seen hand’ of the market. The morality of the market principle lay not in com- plying with norms, but in securing a greater good for a greater number. Whether in the grim calculations of Reverend Malthus or in the Benthamites’ optimistic calculus of utility, the English development of capitalism led to the idea of an autonomous sphere of the economy, taken to be subject to a qualitatively distinct order of social rationality — and increasingly conceived to be eternal, immutable and knowable through ‘natural’ laws. As Neal Wood has argued, the specifically capitalist character of English society, and its emerging political economic conceptions, were profoundly important determinants of John Locke’s thought.19 Indeed, in the course of the period during which agrarian capitalism took form and transformed English society, roughly from the first of the Tudors to the last of the Hanoverians, a distinctive body of social thought — comprising both political theory and political economy — reflected these developments, coming together ultimately in the classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill.20 Elsewhere in Europe, however, social and political thought remained tied to the very different par- ticularities of pre-capitalist societies, as we have seen in the controversies of the French Religious Wars. 18 Aristotle, Politics, 1256b40–1259b36; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1132b32– 1133b23. 19 N. Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism. 20 Neal Wood and Ellen Meiksins Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition; Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. Today read primarily for his liberal political theory, Mill also produced Principles of Political Economy, which was the standard text on the subject for a generation.

The absolutist and constitutionalist thought that emerged in both early modern France and England differed fundamentally. Both societies were marked by the political dominance of propertied classes, but these classes and their interests inherently differed, based on very different forms and legal regimes of social property. Throughout the histories of Western class societies, dominant classes have been plagued by the contradictions flowing from their dual social interests in maintaining, on the one hand, the political power of the state and, on the other, the forms of social power directly manifested in their property. Because pre-capitalist forms of class relations have all been characterized by extra-economic coercion — the foundation for Brenner’s ‘politically constituted property’ — there is an unresolvable tension between the twin ruling-class interests of maintaining a strong state and preserving individual property. As the Roman Republic grew, it faced the recurrent threat of leaders like Sulla or Caesar achieving pre-eminent power, which resulted in the transition from Republic to Empire.21 Subsequently, however, the ability of great senatorial families in the West to evade taxes on their property, widely extended through patronage, undermined the capacity of the Imperial state to maintain itself.22 From Aristotle and Cicero, through the medieval counciliar debates, to the ancien régime, a central enduring problem for Western political thought has been ‘Who rules, and how is that rule to be constituted?’ — a problem largely absent from the social thought of China and Islam, for example — because of the contradictions generated by politically constituted property. Only in capitalist society, with its formal separation of political and economic power, con- fining class relations to the nominally non-political sphere of the economy, has it proved possible to resolve the recurrent contradictions in constituting power through the novel form of the liberal state. In the ancient world the contradictions of ruling-class power revolved about the political constitution of society as an inherently solidaristic moral, legal and economic community, whether Greek polis or Roman res publica. The contradiction was given a somewhat different form by the medieval development of feudalism, in which the basic property form became the seigeurie, literally a local jurisdiction of parcellized sovereign power. In place of the typically republican self-government of free property owners — expanded in Athens to include all free men as citizens or narrowed in Rome to the circles of the senatorial nobility — the feudal state took the form of village-sized parcels of jurisdiction, grouped in constantly shifting hierar- chies of feudal rank. In this context, the inherent contradictions between state

21 Ronald Syme’s classic account of this political dynamic, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939), remains unsurpassed. 22 For a brief synopsis, see Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974), pp. 98–103, citing particularly the definitive work of A.H.M. Jones, especially The Later Roman Empire, 282–602 (2 vols., Oxford, 1964).

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 476 G.C. COMNINEL power and private property took the form of a dynamic tension between the centralization of authority through the reassertion of monarchical power, and the resistance by individual nobles seeking to preserve more decentralized autonomy. It was of course through this dynamic that France, with spasms of civil war each century, developed its ‘absolutist’ monarchy down to the great crisis of the Revolution. Other European societies (with England exceptional in its development of capitalism from a peculiar variant of feudalism) each followed their own historically specific trajectory of national organization — or disorganization — of the state. Notwithstanding the feudal/monarchical dynamic generated in the after- math of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the ideal of liberty in a solidaristic self-governing republic did not disappear entirely. No longer rep- resenting the interests of wealthy aristocrats, as it did for Aristotle or Cicero, the republican ideal stood as a challenge to prevailing forms of constituted power. Aided by geography, the smallholders of the Swiss cantons actually achieved a measure of republican liberty, and were an inspiration to Machiavelli, the great theorist of republicanism.23 Unfortunately for Machiavelli, the very success of feudalism in northern Europe, and its trans- formation into national ‘absolutist’ states, undermined the conditions that had produced the Italian flowering of republican city-states between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.24 Brushing aside Machiavelli’s idea that good and fru- gal government — such as a republic might provide — was the best course for preserving power, the Medicis, like rulers throughout northern Italy, transformed a once vibrant republic into a sleepy principality, extinguishing the hopes for republican renewal. While Europe had a variety of specific contexts of class society, including the unique society emerging in England, European thinkers continued to read each other, together with theorists from the past, as they formulated ideas in each particular context. Rousseau, for example, rejected the radically asocial conceptions of the state of nature put forward by Hobbes and Locke, which gave the former an atomistically individualist defence of absolute sovereignty, and the latter an atomistic foundation for liberalism. Conceiving a far more social origin for inequality, property and the state, Rousseau addressed himself to the classically republican, solidaristic project of realizing the ‘general will’. Regrettably, though perhaps achievable in small republics of petty proprietors, it seemed that the simultaneous enjoyment of liberty, equality and sociality was largely beyond the grasp of huge and complex national states like France.

23 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, ed. L.J. Walker (London, 1950), Bk. I, ch. lv, pp. 333–7. 24 Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London, 1994), pp. 63–74; Chris Wickham, Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400–1200 (London, 1994).

The radical Jacobins in the French Revolution, of course, embraced just such a project. From the wealthiest aristocrats to the most modest bourgeois lawyers and officials, the bearers of politically constituted property in the ancien régime arrayed themselves across a continuum of political positions, from the staunchest defence of privilege in state and society to democratic republicanism.25 The radical bourgeoisie did not seek to create a capitalist form of state — they were not capitalists and there was no capitalism — but rather a ‘republic of virtue’ which they would serve as administrators, educa- tors and politicians. The enduring opposition of the causes of Aristocracy and the Nation, however, opened an avenue of social revolution for an autonomous popular movement. Tutored in the rhetoric of the Third Estate, the people of Paris rose up in July 1789 to save the Nation, then provided a succession of increasingly radical bourgeois leaders with a means to push the Revolution to the left. In the process, the people not only supported the radical bourgeois ideal of a republican Nation, but also increasingly articulated their own interests in terms of direct — not representative — democracy, and social — not merely political — equality.26 Ultimately, these aspirations proved unaccep- table even to the incorruptible Robespierre, whose subsequent fall from power met with popular apathy. The development of the popular movement reached an apotheosis in Gracchus Babeuf’s socialist Conspiracy of Equals, yet it was easily crushed in the Revolution’s lurch back to the right. Writing in the wake of the Revolution, in a Prussia that profited hugely from its defeat, but at a time when there was growing awareness of England’s Industrial Revolution, Hegel sought to produce a total philosophy, comprehending human society not only as it existed in his own time, but through the whole of its (European) historical development. His goal was to subsume the whole of Western philosophy, from Aristotle to Adam Smith, in a develop- mental moral philosophy of individual, state and society. Yet, what is striking in considering Hegel’s work in context is — notwithstanding his familiarity with Smith — how much his ideas were grounded in the pre-capitalist social realities of early nineteenth-century Germany.27 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. It is not, as is sometimes supposed, that Hegel has proposed something akin to a social democratic corrective to the inherent ‘irrationality’ of capitalist society. Hegel never appreciated 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 25 Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, pp. 107–13, 180–202. 26 G.C. Comninel, ‘The Political Context of the Popular Movement in the French Revolution’, in Krantz, History from Below, pp. 143–62; G.C. Comninel, ‘Quatre-Vingt- Neuf Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the French Revolution’, Historical Papers/ Communications historique (1989), pp. 36–52. 27 Ellen Wood discusses Hegel in this light in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism.

Bürgerliche gesellschaft — but he never actually encountered capitalist society and never grasped the crucial point that it inherently, and necessarily, lacked any principle of planning and regulation superior to the market. Indeed, even below his universalizing state, Hegel’s conception of civil society remains thoroughly structured by guilds and corporate bodies. In short, Hegel’s philosophy depicts a complex society with a large and important commercial sector, but one that remains fundamentally pre-capitalist. 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. In con- fronting this pre-capitalist work, Marx’s ideas were strongly influenced by two other equally pre-capitalist sources: the ideas of the Young Hegelians, and the radical democratic and socialist ideas that had emanated from the French Revolution and since grown in opposition to the established order across Europe. The efforts of the Young Hegelians to turn Hegel’s conceptions against the Prussian monarchy, rather than to apologize for it, are readily seen to be rooted in the issues and institutions of pre-capitalist society once Hegel himself is viewed in this light. They were, after all, preoccupied with religion as a mystifying alienation of human social life and particularly sought to challenge the official establishment and general regulation of religion by the state. Their moral philosophy was radical and secular, but no less pre-capitalist for that. The growth of socialist ideas and movements in early nineteenth-century Europe, however, has usually been understood as a response to the growth of capitalism. Upon closer examination, not only is it evident that there was very little development of truly capitalist industry on the continent before the middle of the century, but the political movements of the time clearly had roots in the pre-capitalist politics of the French Revolution. It was Engels (who unlike Marx had become familiar with capitalist society by 1843, working at his father’s cotton mill in Manchester) who first drew attention to the relative priority of German developments in philosophy, French developments in politics and English developments in the economy.28 This political priority of the French had nothing to do with capitalist development and everything to do with the Revolution. French industrial workers in the 1840s were overwhelmingly artisanal, and the organization of their labour, political participation and social life continued to be mediated in an entirely pre-capitalist way by the compagnonnages they created as a substitute for the guilds of the past, and a host of similar practices. The huge silk industry of Lyons in the 1840s differed little from a hundred years before. Throughout France, as new forms of capitalist production came to be introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century,

28 Frederick Engels, ‘Progress of Social Reform on the Continent’, The New Moral World, No. 19, 4 November 1843, in Marx–Engels, Collected Works (London, 1975– 98), Vol. III, pp. 392–3.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction MARX’S CONTEXT 479 they developed alongside highly traditional production that only slowly began to change.29 Although the pace of social change accelerated during the century — driven by industrial market competition emanating from Britain and by geo-political pressure to emulate innovations in technology — 1840s France was as yet only slightly affected by the development of capitalist industry and Germany still less so. Yet early on Marat had declared that the Revolution itself raised the question of the loi agraire, long before the Jacobin introduction of the maximum, let alone the Conspiracy of Equals.30 The idea of republican action to counter poverty and at least partially restore social equality through limiting and redistributing property dates back to the demand for an ‘agrarian law’ in ancient Rome, as Marat’s usage suggests and Babeuf’s choice of name rein- forces. The origin of a socialist political movement in the French Revolution, then, had no more to do with capitalism than did the origin of the Revolution itself. The whole of the politics of the Revolution, which continued to define politics well into the nineteenth century, was grounded in the material social interests of a pre-capitalist France. If the reconfiguration of the English state as a result of capitalism involved a growing liberal subordination of specifically royal prerogative to represen- tatives of the propertied class, the liberalism of the French bourgeoisie was instead characterized by direct opposition to the political privileges of aristocracy. (Indeed, it had been nobles who challenged royal prerogative in the ‘pre-revolution’ of 1787–8, not the bourgeoisie.)31 Radical Jacobin demands for a representative republic, public education and effective national adminis- tration, meanwhile, were directly traceable to pre-capitalist interests of the lesser bourgeoisie in securing meritocratic access to the growing public sector — law and state office being the most characteristic bourgeois careers. Finally, as even their great Marxist historians maintained, the sans-culottes of the Revolution were never a capitalist working class.32 The fundamental preoccupation of the popular movement throughout the Revolution lay in securing an affordable food supply. Increasingly, this was recognized to

29 For the the role of artisanal labour in nineteenth-century France and the links between politics and artisanal workers’ organizations, see William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge, 1980); Ronald Aminzade, Class, Politics, and Early Industrial Capitalism (Albany NY, 1981); and Ronald Aminzade, ‘Capitalist Industrialization and Patterns of Industrial Protest: A Comparative Urban Study of Nineteenth-Century France’, American Sociological Review, IL (1984), pp. 437–53. 30 Shirley Gruner, ‘Le concept de classe dans la révolution française: une mise à jour’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, IX (1976), pp. 412–15. 31 Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, p. 199. 32 Albert Soboul, Understanding the French Revolution (London, 1988), pp. 99–101. This point is emphasized throughout the work of Soboul and George Rudé, who both argue that the identity of sans-culottes, comprising small proprietors, artisans and day labourers alike, derived primarily from their position as consumers of bread.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 480 G.C. COMNINEL require not merely the preservation of the Nation, but direct democratic popular political participation against ‘aristocrats’ — eventually including all those who, regardless of birth, put the interests of wealth ahead of the well-being of the people. In seeking to carry this popular political project fur- ther, there was nothing in Babeuf’s politics to link it to capitalism. Nor was the resurrection of babouvism in the nineteenth century, and development of other socialist ideas and movements, any more connected to capitalism than the revival of Jacobinism during the restored Bourbon monarchy and the Orleanist regime. This, then, was the social context for the development of Marx’s thought in 1843. While a detailed consideration of its key points would necessarily require a much larger work than the present one, even a cursory examination reveals that his 1843 works are preoccupied with the politics issuing from the French Revolution. Only with his 1844 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.33 The central problem addressed in the earlier works remained that of the state, consonant with pre-capitalist political thought from Rousseau, through the French Revo- lution and Hegel, down to the Young Hegelians. As Jean Bruhat noted of Marx’s ‘preoccupation’ with the Revolution at this time, ‘it was the notion of power which then interested Marx’.34 It was specifically in his simultaneous critique of Hegelian and French Revolutionary conceptions of the state in 1843 that Marx carried the idea of human emancipation beyond the terms established by Rousseau, a significant contribution to the development of political theory in its own right. First, in unpublished notes towards a critique of The Philosophy of Right, Marx challenged Hegel’s claim that state officials provided the essential ‘universal’ or ‘general’ element that was lacking in the particularism of civil society. He argued that neither they nor the ‘middle class’, from which they were drawn, could be a universal class because of the particular interest they held in protecting private property.35 Beyond this — already a trenchant point in the context of politically constituted property (figuring as much in Prussian as in French absolutism) — Marx challenged the state itself as a kind of alienation. Where the Young Hegelians were preoccupied with alienation in religion, attributing human social and moral capacities to the Divine, Marx recognized in the state the crucial concentration of our collective power, creating an alien force acting back upon us. Where Rousseau removed the sting of state power by presupposing a general will (even if it was not always realizable), Marx

33 See Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, pp. 121–31. 34 Jean Bruhat, ‘La Révolution française et la formation de la pensée de Marx’, Annales historique de la Révolution française, XXXVIII (2) (1966), p. 141. 35 Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, Marx– Engels, Collected Works, Vol. III, pp. 44–54.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction MARX’S CONTEXT 481 could not accept that resolution of the contradiction between the universal and the particular. He described democracy as ‘the genus Constitution...the solved riddle of all constitutions’, for what it fundamentally expressed was our collective social capacity.36 But so long as the state took concrete form as an alien power over us as individuals, it was itself a barrier to human emancipation. Far from being able to resolve the conflicting propertied interests of civil society, the state preserved those interests, adding to them its own sub- jection of the individual. With his two articles written for the Deutsch-Französische Jarhbücher between October 1843 and January 1844, Marx carried forward this analysis to transcend the entire framework of French Revolutionary politics. In ‘On the Jewish Question’, he argued against the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer that the project of secularizing the state — granting political rights to all, including the Jews, by abolishing every official recognition of religion — was wholly insuf- ficient to the purposes of human emancipation. In his preoccupation with religion, Marx argued, Bauer could conceive only of a political emancipation. The ‘political’ form of state implied by the French Revolution, however — meritocratic, rather than founded on privilege — takes civil society as its pre- condition. Therefore, its political power necessarily ensures the separation of human social capacities from humanity as a whole. True emancipation must therefore depend on ending this separation, and so necessarily the political form of the state.37 Ridiculing Bauer for proposing ‘the free state’ in place of the emancipation of humanity, Marx exposed the basic failing of even the most radically democratic versions of pre-capitalist republican politics: they left unchanged both the social power of private property in civil society, and the constitution of political power in the form of the state.38 With this, Marx issued a fundamental emancipatory challenge to the whole framework of political thought that had been articulated by dominant classes since ancient times. For Marx, then, not even radical Jacobinism could turn state personnel into a ‘universal class’ — nor would even direct democracy bring emancipation as long as it remained merely political, leaving the structure of power in civil society unchallenged. Already inclined towards socialism, his critique of both liberal and radical expressions of German political philosophy led Marx to put paid to the whole bourgeois (though non-capitalist) project of the French Rev- olution. Instead, in his second article, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’, Marx turned the Hegelian conception (an adaptation of the sort of class agency already prevalent in liberal accounts of

36 Ibid., p 29. 37 Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx–Engels, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 168. 38 Ibid., pp. 152 ff.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 482 G.C. COMNINEL history) into a very different idea of the ‘universal class’ — a class having ‘radical chains’, capable of achieving real emancipation.39 Marx’s subsequent turn to the critique of political economy, however, created a body of social thought that transcended the limits imposed by pre-capitalist society altogether, recognizing in capitalism a specific source of historical dynamism with the potential to emancipate humanity from all forms of alienation and exploitation, and not merely to achieve classical republican ideals. The key moment was his exposure to Engels’ ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, submitted to Marx in November 1843 for publication in the Jarhbücher. In this work, Engels seems first to have suggested that the capitalist working class would be responsible for a social revolution, in a pas- sage prefiguring a key argument of The Communist Manifesto: as long as you continue to produce in the present unconscious, thoughtless manner, at the mercy of chance — for just so long trade crises will remain; and each successive crisis is bound to become more universal and therefore worse than the preceding one; is bound to impoverish a larger body of small capitalists, and to augment in increasing proportion the numbers of the class who live by labour alone, thus considerably enlarging the mass of labour to be employed (the major problem of our economists) and finally causing a social revolution such as has never been dreamt of in the philosophy of the economists.40 It was only after reading this that Marx first argued that the proletariat constituted the class with ‘radical chains’. Immediately after completing his two articles for the Jarhbücher, Marx turned his attention to reading the political economists Engels had cited. Never before having confronted these ideas, Marx first brought his powers of critique to bear on political economy in the spring of 1844, in his Paris manuscripts.41 It was with this turning point that Marx truly undertook his life work. At once he raised two crucial questions, defining the historical materialist project of understanding the history of class society (‘What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of [the] reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?’), and the project of emancipation through working-class struggle that would end it (‘What are the mistakes committed by the piece- meal reformers, who either want to raise wages ...orregard equality of wages...asthegoal of social revolution?’).42 What is astounding is the immediacy of what Marx achieved with this critique, literally in the first few 39 Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, Marx–Engels, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 186. For the liberal conception of class in history, see Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, pp. 54–74. 40 Frederick Engels, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, Marx–Engels, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 434. 41 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx–Engels, Collected Works, Vol. III, pp. 229–346. 42 Ibid., p. 241.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction MARX’S CONTEXT 483 pages of his manuscript, as he confronted political economy’s account of the ‘Wages of Labour’. Like a stranger in a strange land, Marx instantly saw capitalism for what it really was, an inherently exploitative system of social reproduction based on class relations of property embodying the alienation of labour. Marx’s historical materialist critique of political economy remains a uniquely powerful framework for understanding the nature of capitalist society, as it since has come to transform the world. Yet at the moment of this first great insight into the system, he literally had yet to set foot in a capitalist society. Instead, inspired by a Hegelian appreciation for the integral historical unity of human social life, he looked deep into the nexus of the specifically capitalist relationship of wage labour — solely based on the accounts offered by political economy — and found the ultimate expression of human alienation. Much remains to be said about the development of Marx’s thought in con- fronting capitalism as a social system, but excellent guides to this work already exist.43 What has yet to be appreciated is that the astounding acuity of Marx’s insights may have resulted from his having approached capitalism without the blinkers that would have been imposed had he grown up in a context that took its peculiar social relationships for granted. Marx instead began as a thinker in pre-capitalist Europe, disturbed by social inequality and oppression, but unfamiliar with specifically capitalist social forms. His initial forays into political theory significantly advanced upon Rousseau’s thought, offering an understanding of the need to transcend both the conflicting partic- ularities of private property and the alienating form of the political state, as such, in order to realize human emancipation. Although he grasped the essential nature of the project, he as yet saw no means to achieve it other than through philosophy,44 bound as he was by pre-capitalist frames of reference. Then, stepping across the bounds of pre-capitalist social experience to con- front the character of a qualitatively different universe of capitalist social relations, he discovered a context whose internal contradictions offered the potential for that very emancipation he sought, opening a new avenue for social and political thought.

George C. Comninel YORK UNIVERSITY,TORONTO

43 On the nature and meaning of Marx’s critique of political economy as a historical materialist approach to the class society of capitalism: Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism; E.P. Thompson, ‘The Poverty of Theory’, in E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978); Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (London, 1971); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974); Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (4 vols., New York, 1976–87). 44 See Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 147–8.