By Bernard E. Harcourt
What makes the final texts of Karl Marx so utterly fascinating and important is that they encapsulate Marx’s post-economic political thought: his political thinking after he had fully articulated his mature political-economic theories.
Let’s just stop to think about that for a minute.
These political texts of the Late Marx—by contrast to the Communist Manifesto (1848), the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), or the earlier articles on the thefts of wood (1842)—formulate political views from within the framework of Marx’s mature economic thinking. By the time Marx is writings his marginal notes on the Gotha program in 1875, his conspectus and critique of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy in 1874, or his letters to Vera Zasulich in 1881, Marx has fully fleshed out his economic theory. He understands it perfectly. He is wedded to it and can rattle it off in his sleep. He has written all the thousand-page manuscripts that make up the published first volume of Capital and will serve to constitute the three additional posthumous volumes. He has developed his theories of surplus labor, of commodity fetishism, of production, distribution, circulation, primitive accumulation. He has articulated his economic theory, which he had spent his whole adult life developing, since at least 1842 with those first articles in the Rhenish Gazette that gave him “the first impulse to take up the study of economic questions.”[1] And in the wake of that Herculean effort, we get these political texts. Not primarily philosophical, not by any means anthropological, nor chiefly economic (that has been done), no, political texts: texts about how to bring about, in his words, the “abolition of class distinctions,” “a proletarian revolution in the West,” and “a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”[2]
What we have, in effect here, is the unwritten final political volume of Capital. So it is important for us, in this political moment especially, to linger on these political writings in our last seminar of Marx 13/13. And I cannot think of a better person to think with than the philosopher Étienne Balibar, with whom we began this seminar eight months ago and who has been a constant companion on this journey—since at least the early 1960s.
Now, many scholars of the Late Marx, today, claim that Marx changed his views at the end of his life, radically. To many, Marx became anti-productivist and ecological in his outlook; he became a global thinker, rather than Eurocentric; some even say he changed his economic views to the point of embracing or prefiguring ecosocialism or even degrowth communism. On these readings, Marx realized there was something inadequate with Volume 1 of Capital once he had published it, which explains why he never completed writing the next volumes (leaving it to Engels, posthumously, to cobble together Volumes 2 and 3 and the Theories of Surplus Value). He was dissatisfied. He had doubts, perhaps about the ecological dimensions or the excessive focus on Western Europe. And this impeded his completion of the volumes, sending him instead to read and study new areas of research—on political developments in India, Russia, and Algeria, on the anthropology of pre-capitalist societies, on chemistry and natural science, Justus von Liebig’s Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1840) and Karl Fraas, Climate and Plantlife throughout the Ages (1847), on legal history and communal property among early Germanic peoples, etc., resulting in all his copious notes published in his Ethnological Notebooks and now being collected in the MEGA2 edition of his complete works.[3] And on the basis of all that reading and annotating, Marx began to shift his economic views and the political implications. As we saw at Marx 11/13, these new insights are rich and important. They provide timely reframings and possible revisions, and can help guide us in important ways today. And I do not intend to diminish them in any way. I think they are particularly promising, as we saw and discussed with Kohei Saito at Marx 11/13.
Other scholars, such as Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, and Sandra Mezzadra—as we discussed with them at Marx 9/13—argue that the real political dimension of Marx can be located in the Grundrisse manuscripts and that Marx deliberately failed to develop those in Volume 1 of Capital. Therefore, in order to really mine the political dimensions of Marx, we need to return to the Grundrisse. Again, this too is extremely important and promising.
But, what these final texts of Marx reveal, on my reading at least, is that Marx did not distance himself or reject or rescind his mature economic theory from Volume I of Capital at the end of his life or in the period that we call the Late Marx. To the contrary, I would say, Marx remained wedded to Volume I of Capital, and especially it’s French translation. That, to me, is what stands out from these last writings—and suggests, to me, that their great importance is not in revisiting or revising Volume I, but rather in extending that work into the political domain. The final texts represent the political legacy of Capital.
I get a sense of this—and of how wedded Marx was to his book Capital—from Marx’s letter to Wilhelm Bracke (who led the Lassallean faction in 1869) in which Marx transmits his marginal notes critiquing the Gotha program of the German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. (Incidentally, that letter was written 150 years ago this month, in May 1875, so we are actually celebrating this evening the 150th anniversary of the writing of the Critique of the Gothic Program). Now in that letter, addressed to a rival with whom he is about to spar and distance himself, you will note, at the end, that Marx specifically tells his correspondent that “In the near future, I shall be sending you the final installment of the French edition of Capital. The rest of the printing was held up for a long while by the French government’s ban. It should be all settled by this week or the beginning of next. Did you get the earlier six instalments?”[4] And then he adds, “Please also send me Bernard Becker’s address, for I have to send him the final instalment as well.”[5]
Marx is not pulling back from his Capital by any means—nor from his productivist theories of capitalism. He is proudly sending the book to everyone as his major oeuvre and then essentially references it throughout his marginal notes on the program of the German Workers Party. He returns over and over to his own understanding of labor, of surplus labor, of cooperation, and of production and distribution. He is not backing off from that work. To the contrary, he is anchoring every political thing he says in his economic theory from Capital. His nemesis, the late Ferdinand Lassalle, the Prussian socialist thinker and founder of the General Association of German Workers (ADAV) in 1863, whom Marx treats as an opportunist, practically a traitor, had passed away in 1864, three years before Marx would publish Capital Volume I. Marx’s critique of the Lassallean traces in the Gotha program rests in his own productivist theories of economic progress as set forth in Capital. This comes through clearly in the marginal notes:
Since Lassalle’s death the scientific insight has made headway in our party that wages are not what they appear to be, namely the value or price of labor, but only a disguised form of the value or price of labour power. Thereby the whole of the former bourgeois conception of wages was thrown overboard once and for all, as well as all criticisms of it, and it became clear that the wage laborer is only allowed to work for his own livelihood, i.e. to live, if he works a certain amount of time without pay for the capitalists (and thus also for the latter’s fellow consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on the prolongation of this free labour through the extension of the working day and through the development of productivity, the increasing intensification of labour power, etc.; and that the system of wage labour is consequently a system of slavery, increasing in severity commensurately with the development of the social productive forces of labor, irrespective of whether the worker is then better or worse paid.[6]
Those are Marx’s scientific insights from Capital. That is his economic theory. Marx is rehearsing Volume I.[7]
My point is that Marx is by no means rescinding his economic theories when he develops his political thought on proletariat revolution in these late works. Instead, he is developing his political positions on the basis of his work in Capital.
He does the same in his exchange with Bakunin and in his letter and drafts to Zasulich. In the letter to Zasulich, in fact, Marx quotes page and verse from the French edition of Capital. A fourth of the letter is Marx quoting himself on capitalist production from 1867, with approval, to emphasize that his analysis was limited to, but remains correct as regards to Western European countries only. Marx ultimately distinguishes the analysis in Capital, stressing that it does not address the case of Russian communal property—but in no way is he making revisions to the economic theory he developed for industrialized Europe.[8]
Now, there are thinkers who rescind, revisit, or reject their earlier work and then go on to write new texts that go in different directions. Michel Foucault is one such thinker, always questioning himself and his method, pushing it in a different direction. After Discipline and Punish, Foucault felt that, despite his best efforts, he had still remained too wedded to state punishment and coercion, so he pushed his work in the direction of pastoral power and then biopower and critiques of neoliberalism. He was not satisfied with the archaeological method that he developed in the 1960s, so he invented a genealogical approach in the 1970s. There are thinkers like that who keep evolving, revisiting, revising, pushing in different directions. It is a peculiar sensibility. I often am like that myself. And to be sure, Marx certainly was reading new works and exploring new fields in the fifteen years following the publication of Capital in 1867—as we discussed with Kohei Saito at Marx 11/13.
But despite the many new fields Marx explored in his last decade, Marx does not revise—or at least not in any significant way—his mature economic thought from Capital in these final texts, at least on my reading. Marx is drawing on them—at times citing page and verse—to stake out his political position vis-à-vis Lassalle’s supporters, Bakunin’s writings, and the Russian Marxists who are citing his work to Vera Zasulich.
What this suggests, to me, is that these final works of Marx, which are primarily political in nature, give us a remarkable purchase on how his economic theories cashes out politically—by contrast to the Communist Manifesto, the Eighteenth Brumaire, and the articles on the thefts of wood, which all predated the mature economic work. Those earlier texts are certainly essential points of reference for us today. I do not mean to minimize them in any way. But by contrast to those texts, what we have now in these final texts is a fully fleshed out political and strategic view that takes into account and builds on the mature economic theories. What we have here is Marx’s political testament. And this is true as well for Marx’s address on the Paris Commune, Civil War in France (1871), which we discussed at our last seminar with Bruno Bosteels, Marx 12/13.
Marx’s Mature Political Views
Now then, the question is: What are the politics that emerge from the mature economic work? That, of course, is our main question for today. Let me begin to sketch out an answer.
In these late works, Marx takes the position that there are going to be phases of transformation necessary to achieve his vision of a communist society and that the early phases are still going to bear what he calls “the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it has emerged.”[9] He repeats this point twice, emphasizing the genealogical metaphor: “Such defects, however, are inevitable in the first phase of communist society, given the specific form in which it has emerged after prolonged birth-pangs from capitalist society.”[10] Marx emphasizes the concept of emergence and the birthing metaphor, as opposed to the idea of an independent political development. That genealogical metaphor—pregnantly related to Foucault, later—suggests, to me at least, that there is going to be a subsequent maturation of communism, like a child, adolescent, young adult and adult coming to fruition.
Now, at least for European societies that have gone through industrialization, the transition to communism, on Marx’s view, must pass through revolution by the working class, and not reforms. As he writes in the Critique of the Gotha Program, “Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”[11] That cannot happen, on Marx’s view, through vague demands for reform. And so he excoriates the Gotha platform for its vagueness in demanding a normal working day, prohibiting child labor, regulating prison labor, and imposing an effective liability law. All those terms, “normal,” “child” “effective,” are far too generic and politically impotent.
The passage on child labor is particularly striking on the question of whether Marx rescinds on the “productivism” of his economic theories, the dimension that has been so problematic to many scholars of the Late Marx. The answer is a clear no. Marx is pretty brutal here, in fact. He writes:
The general prohibition of child labour is incompatible with the existence of large-scale industry. It is thus only an empty, pious wish.
Its implementation—if possible—would be a reactionary step. With strict regulation of working hours according to age and with other precautionary measures to protect the children, the early combination of productive labor with education is one of the most powerful means for the transformation of present society.[12]
Children should continue to labor, Marx tells us in 1875. Child productive labor is one of the most important engines of political transformation because, if combined with a political education, it can lead to forms of self-governance that anticipate the transformation of the conditions of production.
And that is the key. Political transformation will happen, according to Marx, by revolutionizing the conditions of production. In the Critique and the Conspectus, Marx argues, this transformation will happen in Western Europe by means of trade unions, worker cooperatives, and a workers’ party—by means of workers beginning to govern themselves—at least at that political conjuncture. That cannot be done, Marx emphasizes, with the help of the state. It cannot be accomplished through national workshops as in 1848. Marx is adamant in the Critique that there should not be “state aid” to create worker cooperatives or trade unions. The workers’ “desire to create the conditions for cooperative production,” he says, reflects their effort “to revolutionize the present conditions of production; it has nothing in common with the creation of cooperative societies with state aid! As far as the present cooperative societies are concerned, they are onlyvaluable if they are independent creations of the workers, and not the protégés either of governments or of the bourgeoisie.”[13]
The same themes appear in the Conspectus on Bakunin’s book, Statism and Anarchy, a year earlier in 1874. As Marx argues there, the Western workers will emerge as an organized class when, he writes, “the proletariat, instead of struggling sectionally against the economically privileged class, has attained a sufficient strength and organization to employ general means of coercion in this struggle. It can however only use such economic means as abolish its own character as salariat, hence as class. With its complete victory its own rule thus also ends, as its class character has disappeared.”[14]
What makes the Conspectus particularly interesting is that Marx is addressing Bakunin, an anarchist, so the complete opposite political pole from the Lassallean Gotha program, which if anything veered too much toward Bismarck. One can imagine, in this dual conversation, that the Lasalleans are the statists, while Bakunin is the anarchist—so we see exactly where Marx positions himself against both of the polar extremes.
Marx makes clear, in that dual confrontation, that there will be forms of organization within what he calls “the dictatorship of the proletariat”—which we can understand as worker self-governance. So he writes, for instance, that “If Mr. Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to the devil. He should have asked himself, what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.”[15] Of course, Marx does not want to call it that—a “workers’ state”—but instead something like “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” which once it is achieved will no longer be a question of class rule because there will be no classes left.
That is Marx’s core idea of the abolition of class distinctions. It is important in the Critique that he speaks about capitalism as a form of slavery and draws that analogy because his economic vision is an abolitionist vision, like those of abolitionists in America. Abolition, as a radical, revolutionary form, is the political goal. As he writes, what the Gotha program should have closed with—or at least the section he is there discussing—should have been the following: “it should have been said that with the abolition of class distinctions all forms of social and political inequality will disappear of their own accord.”[16]
Marx emphasizes throughout these texts that there will continue to be forms of administration and organization, even though they are not attached to the state. We saw this as well in Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, which we discussed at length in our last session with Bruno Bosteels, Marx 12/13. I will not belabor that again, but refer you back to my introduction. And note, again, that what is so fascinating about The Civil War in France as well is the fact that it is Marx’s historico-political writings post his mature economic theory.
Recall that Marx attributes to the Paris Commune a new form of governance, complete novelty, what he calls “a completely new historical creation.”[17] This is remarkable because Marx’s critique of history often took the form of saying that there is nothing new, that everything is a replica, and a bad replica at that—first as tragedy, then as farce. Elsewhere, Marx spoke of recurrence, a constant turning back to earlier symbols. And yet, in the case of the Commune, Marx tells us that we face complete novelty. So this must be important.
Now, Bruno Bosteels took Marx to task—and us, readers, as well—for indulging in that fiction and for not recognizing the forms of communal living and governance that preceded the Commune, centuries earlier, in Mexico and in the Global South. Bosteels excavated the bias that would lead us to accept, so quickly, that the Paris Commune could be an original form. And we had a good discussion of that—recall that I argued that its novelty was tied to the birth of the proletariat in nineteenth century Europe, such that there could not have been a working-class Commune before the emergence of the industrialized proletariat. But setting that aside, and even guilty as charged, Marx develops in The Civil War in France a political model that he believes can serve as a path forward after he has completed Volume I of Capital.
And there, he details, as we discussed at our last seminar, all the different facets of the Commune: suppression of the standing army and substitution of an armed people; the use of municipal councilors who are selected by universal suffrage and are, for the most part, members of the working class; paying the councilors workers’ wages; ensuring that they are a working body, not just a parliamentary body; that they exercise both executive and legislative functions; the abolition of the police, and of churches and pastors; free education accessible to all; electing judges and magistrates and public servants so that they are responsible and revocable; abolishing private property; creating true cooperative production.[18]
This is Marx’s political vision post Volume I of Capital, and it takes up the central notion, core to Volume I and also articulated in the Communist Manifesto, of the importance of negating the negation. “Yes, gentlemen,” Marx declares in The Civil War in France, “the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labour.”[19] What Marx saw reflected in the Commune was his ideal of communism, his ideal of “‘impossible’ communism.”[20] And Marx believed that, as a result of its crushing, as a result of the negation of the Commune, as a result of the brutal, violent, murderous repression of the Commune, the likelihood of its resurgence only increased: “After Whit Sunday 1871,” he writes, “there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce. The iron hand of a mercenary soldiery may keep for a time both classes tied down in common oppression. But the battle must break out again and again in ever-growing dimensions, and there can be no doubt as to who will be the victor in the end—the appropriating few, or the immense working majority. And the French working class is only the advanced guard of the modern proletariat.”[21]
The core idea of revolutionizing the conditions of production, which is grounded on his economic analysis, is reflected as well in the various other miscellaneous writings that are collected from the end of Marx’s life. Take for instance his introduction to the program of the French Workers’ Party, the Parti Ouvrier, founded in Marseille in 1879, for which Marx helped draft the introduction to their platform in 1880. The short introduction rests solidly on his economic theories. It corrects for the errors of the Gotha presentation and points to the political action necessary to achieve the transformation of the conditions of production. Marx writes there—or rather, he dictates to Jules Guesde: “collective appropriation can only proceed from the revolutionary action of the class of producers—the proletariat—organized in an independent political party; that such an organization must be pursued by all means that are available to the proletariat, especially including universal suffrage, which will thus be transformed from the instrument of fraud that it has been till now into an instrument of emancipation.”[22]
In the introduction to that program, Marx explains that “the French Socialist Workers [] have set themselves in the economic arena the goal of the return of all means of production to collective ownership.”[23] What follows in the actual program, or minimum program of the party, drafted by the party itself and not Marx, is less revolutionary—it includes the general arming of the people, also economic reforms such as the eight hour day, progressive income taxes, and equal pay for men and women.[24] What is clear from Marx’s contribution, though, is the emphasis on revolutionizing the conditions of production.
Let me make a few more specific, detailed comments about each work.
The Conspectus on Bakunin
In the “Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy,” drafted in 1874, Marx is clear that the workers must govern, and do so by using forcible means. In the first stages of transition, when, for instance, other classes still exist (such as the capitalist class and land-owning peasants), the working class must act as a government. So, for instance, Marx writes that the proletariat “must as government take measures through which the peasant finds his condition immediately improved, so as to win him for the revolution.”[25] The working class should not simply abolish the private property of the peasant, but instead find ways to give them a shared interest. Marx notes that this is easier, where, in his words, “the capitalist tenant farmer has forced out the peasants,” so that the peasants have become effectively agricultural wage-laborers.[26] At that point, they would have the same interests as the working class.
Marx is acutely aware of the need to bring the “peasants” on board with the working class, that is, with the governing proletariat. Marx consistently emphasizes the historical and economic contexts that precondition any radical social revolution. He is acutely aware of the different historical trajectories that separate a highly industrialized Western European country (where the industrial proletariat plays an important role among the mass of people) from the situation in Russia or among the Slavic people.
Marx makes clear that political strategy will differ radically depending on the historical and political conjuncture in different countries—and that there will therefore be different pathways for transformation. He is writing in 1874 but this is similar to his letters to Vera Zasulich in 1881. Marx insists that were the proletariat to govern, they would do so through forms of organization such as the executive committee of a trade union or the managing members of a workers’ cooperative. Marx is prefiguring forms of organization that could serve the functions of state power—but without the state, with workers instead. Marx also shares the idea that these forms of organization, including elections, would become devoid of domination and of their political character once they become a purely economic matter of organization based on different conditions of production.[27]
The Critique of the Gotha Program
One question that arises from the Critique of the Gotha Program is whether Marx proposes two stages of transition to communism (a first and then a second stage) or three (a transitional phase, followed by the first and then second or higher stage of communism) or, as I would propose, multiple transitional phases that should be conceived less rigidly.
As Kevin B. Anderson suggests, Lenin only identified two stages, and because there is mention of the state in the first, inserted the idea of a state into communist society; however, Anderson argues for three, or what he refers to as “three postcapitalist processes, the transitional period, the first phase of communism, and the second phase of communism” in the new 2022 edition of the Critique of the Gotha Program, translated by Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff, with an introduction by Peter Hudis and a foreword by Peter Linebaugh.[28] Anderson notes that these three stages should be understood “more as a concept than a schema, let alone an exact prediction of future events. Still, it could be considered a rough outline of the process of arriving at communism and its full development.”[29]
Anderson argues that, after the initial transitional phase in which there remains a state, there is no conception of the state in either the first or second phases of communism according to Marx. Anderson argues that there has been a mistranslation in English-language editions that has mistakenly given the impression that Marx imagined a state even in communism. Anderson draws our attention to the following passage that is usually translated as:
The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in a communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain that are analogous to present functions of the state?[30]
Anderson maintains that the word that is conventionally translated as “state,” namely Staatswesen, should be understood instead as “the body politic.” (I would translate it as “the nature of the state” or “the essence of the state”). He proposes, instead, the following translation:
What transformation will the body politic [Staatswesen] undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions analogous to present state functions [Staatsfunktionen] will remain at that juncture? (CGP, p. 68).
As Anderson, Ludenhoff and Hudis emphasize in a translators’ note to his passage:
All previous English translations have rendered this word as “state” here and in the next sentence. However, the actual word Marx uses, Staatswesen (not Staat), refers to something far less definite, to the “body politic” (the political body of society) as we have rendered it here. Staatswesen could also be translated as “state functions” or very literally as “essence/underlying nature” of the state. In any case, it is something less definite or specific than “state.”[31]
Anderson then argues that Marx thus excluded the state from both stages of communism. He proposes that Marx delineated three stages to the (extremely demanding) transition from capitalism to communism:
- A transitional phase during which the state continues to exist. Anderson argues that this stage is captured in only one sentence of the Critique, namely where Marx writes: “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”[32] According to Anderson, Marx placed the Paris Commune in this transitional phase, even though it sought to eradicate the state. The Paris Commune, according to Anderson, had not reached the first phase of communism.
- The first phase of communism: it is only when there is the actual emancipation of labor that a society enters the first stage of communism, Anderson argues (which is why the Paris Commune had not reached that phase). In this stage, Anderson writes, “the state would have disappeared and people were working together cooperatively in a non-hierarchical fashion.”[33] Marx fleshes this out in the seven paragraphs starting with his discussion of “the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production.”[34] At this first stage, workers receive compensation tied to their amount of work, classes no longer exist because everyone is working, and work is not alienated or oppressive but desired.[35]
- The second or highest phase of communism: This is captured by the famous sentence-paragraph that ends with the celebrated motto “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs!” Anderson emphasizes the productivism in this passage—the clause “after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual.”[36] (Of course, you will recall, as I explained in the introduction to Marx 11/13, that this famous sentence-paragraph also contains the passage “when all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly”[37] that Kohei Saito focuses on to support his argument that Marx was shifting his economic views to favor the communal social organization of ancient Germanic peoples as a way forward politically; in other words, that Marx was rescinding his productivism and embracing instead degrowth communes as a way forward in Europe, as well as in Russia via his letter to Vera Zasulich).
Anderson emphasizes that the second stage—the first phase of communism—resembles what Marx prefigured in Capital. Anderson writes:
Marx’s first phase of communism in the Critique of the Gotha Program exhibits strong similarities to the new society as outlined in the fetishism section of chapter one of Capital, where he writes, emphasizing the collective ownership of the means of production by a free association: “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free human beings, working with the means of production held in common” (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: NLB, 1976, p. 171, trans. slightly altered to remove gendered pronouns not found in the original). At the level of production too, which runs deeper than common ownership, ultimately a merely juridical relation, society is based upon “production by freely associated human beings and stands under their conscious and planned control” (Capital, p. 173). This seems to be a form of communism, though Marx does not use the term here. Importantly, as in the second phase of communism in the Critique of the Gotha Program, he adds concerning remuneration that [, for] each worker in the free association, “the share of each producer [worker] in the means of subsistence is determined by his labor time” (Capital, p. 172).[38]
Notice that we are in agreement: the political implications in the Late Marx are imbricated in the mature economictheories of Capital.
I am, of course, painting with broad brush strokes, for pedagogical reasons. The truth is, naturally, that these late texts are a bit more equivocal than I am making them out to be, especially because they are written in an often ironic or caustic dialogue with Bakunin, on the one hand, and the Gotha program, on the other, and these are two polar opposite political targets.
Étienne Balibar—and he will surely develop this in his presentation at Marx 13/13—actually sees more of an aporia in Marx’s conflicting relationship with Lassalle and Bakunin.[39] On his view, Marx is unable to reconcile the opposition between the statist and the anarchist—and in the end, does not. Balibar writes:
in the end Marx has no other solution than to resurrect the utopian ideological catchphrases (“from each according to his abilities;” etc.) that constitute the common ground of antistatism (including anarchism), while trying to give them enough of a twist to reconcile them with his affirmation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In doing so, Marx finds himself “trapped” in the mirror relation (statism/anarchy) from which he needs to escape.[40]
According to Balibar, Marx “short-circuited” the tension between Lassalle and Bakunin. He could not fully articulate or posit his politics within the discourse of the time. Balibar leaves us with a far less structured schema than Kevin Anderson.
I’m prepared to cut the baby in half. On my reading, there is enough clarity in these late texts to hold that Marx aimed politically for the workers “to revolutionize the present conditions of production” by means of a revolutionary workers’ party, trade unions, and workers cooperatives, and that this would lead to the abolition of class distinctions and ultimately a radically new society where everyone’s needs would be satisfied.[41]
Letter(s) to Vera Zasulich
Finally, let me come back the letter and drafts to Vera Zasulich, which I already discussed at length in my introduction to Marx 11/13.
The final letter that Marx sends to Vera Zasulich on 8 March 1881 is bare bones, and corresponds tightly to the preface he and Engels publish for the second Russian edition of Capital in 1882. In both, Marx essentially states that the analysis in Volume 1 of Capital is limited to Western European countries in which the worker is expropriated of the means of production, and therefore tells us nothing about the situation in Russia regarding communal property arrangements. In both texts, Marx contends that the Russian system of agrarian communes is a promising pathway to revolutionize the conditions of production. In both cases, Marx states this in a single sentence. In the letter to Zasulich, he writes:
The special study that I have conducted of the Russian rural commune, based on original sources, convinced me that this communal form is the fulcrum (le point d’appui) of social regeneration in Russia, but, for it to function as such, it would be necessary first to eliminate the deleterious influences that attack it from all sides and then ensure for it the normal conditions for a spontaneous development.[42]
In the Preface to the Russian edition, Marx and Engels write:
If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.[43]
Note that Marx essentially says the same thing in an unsent and unpublished letter to the Russian sociologist Nicolai Mikhaïlovski in November 1877, where he writes:
If Russia continues down the path followed since 1861 [the emancipation of serfs], she will lose the best chance [the peasant commune] that history has ever offered a people, to suffer all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.[44]
Marx is being very parsimonious, if not stingy, with his words. He evidently does not want to say too much, but to give encouragement. This is what makes the four draft letters he wrote before so intriguing to readers, because he says a lot more there.
The question, naturally, is whether we can keep him to his word in any of the drafts. The fact that he did not send those drafts, but instead a succinct statement, could indicate that he was just not sure of himself. It is all very tricky as a matter of interpretation.
There is one passage in particular that Kohei Saito draws our attention to where Marx writes of the “return of modern societies to the ‘archaic’ type of communal property”[45]—which Saito interprets as the argument that “the Markgenossenschaft [communal property] of the Germanic peoples and the mirs in Russia hold within them elements to which the modern societies in Western Europe must return.”[46] (The passage is citing Lewis Henry Morgan).[47] On the basis of these draft letters, Saito argues that Marx changed the way he thought about the path to communism in Western Europe.[48]
There are other passages that are less sanguine. Describing the parceling of the Russian communes, Marx writes that “the arrangements currently perpetuated by the Russian commune are, needless to say, resistant to agronomic demands.”[49] Later, Marx notes that “the economic facts, the analysis of which would lead me too far, have unveiled the secret that the actual state of the commune is no longer tenable.”[50] Unless there is a “powerful reaction,” a “Russian revolution,” Marx writes, “the deleterious influences will naturally spell the death of the rural commune.”[51] The situation, Marx underscores, is dire.
I remain somewhat cautious interpreting these draft letters, although I think they are consistent with the terse public statements (to Zasulich and in the preface) that a Russian revolution is necessary and urgent to create the conditions of possibility for the rural communes to develop and regenerate Russian society. “Pour sauver la commune russe, il faut une Révolution russe,” Marx writes near the end of one of his drafts. He finishes it off as follows:
Si la révolution se fait en temps opportun, si elle concentre toutes ses forces pour assurer l’essor libre de la commune rurale, celle-ci se développera bientôt comme élément régénérateur de la société russe et comme élément de supériorité sur les pays asservis par le régime capitaliste.[52]
If the revolution is timely, if it concentrates all its forces to ensure the unfettered flourishing of the rural commune, the latter will soon develop as the regenerative element of Russian society and as a superior element over the countries enslaved by the capitalist regime.
I may be overly cautious, but on my reading, this applies only to the specific and unique historical context of Russia, and not to Western European countries. Marx is adamant, in his letter to Mikhaïlovski for instance, that the differences between the Roman proletariat, “poor whites” in the American South, European workers, and Russian “peasants” will lead to “completely different results” at different historical junctures.[53]
In the end, I do not believe that there are substantial contradictions or political inconsistencies in the late works—in the Critique of the Gotha Program, in his comments on Bakunin, in his letter to Vera Zasulich. What may be true about child labor in Germany in 1875 need not correspond to what is right about a peasant revolution in Russia in 1881-82. His political views are—as they had always been—deeply historical and contextual, shaped by the conditions of production at any particular conjuncture.
This allows us then to end here with the political sentiments that Marx expressed shortly after the fall of the Paris Commune, that still hold, in my opinion, and reflect Marx’s political views post his mature economic work:
Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”[54]
Conclusion
We will take the opportunity of this seminar with Étienne Balibar to also interrogate the contemporary relevance of the late works. At first blush, I see both a dark side but some promise as well.
The dark side first. There are several points in these late works at which Marx speaks about the United States as having realized universal suffrage and some democratic reforms that he and his comrades associate with the kind of future they envisage.
In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx argues that the United States and Switzerland already satisfy familiar democratic goals, such as universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular justice, etc, that bourgeois parties like the League of Peace and Freedom advocate for.[55] And there’s a way in which the United States of the early 2020s would seem to satisfy some of the demands of the socialist parties in 1880. So, for instance, regarding universal compulsory school attendance and free tuition, Marx notes that free tuition in the case of elementary schools already exists in the United States and in Switzerland.[56]
Similarly, when you look at the list of demands of the French Workers’ Party from 1880, you might think that some of them have been achieved or are still ongoing aspirations of American democracy. The “general arming of the people,”[57] well, we have that in the United States. The people are armed. The Second Amendment guarantees that. Economic reforms, such as the eight-hour working day, those too we have in the U.S. with OSHA regulations and maximum working hours and overtime and a minimum wage—$ 16.50 per hour in New York City. We even have, at least for the moment, a progressive income tax in the United States, even if Congress is increasing loopholes for the wealthy and tax breaks, but it remains (mostly, or for those who comply) a progressive income tax. Equal pay for men and women, well, we haven’t achieved that, but surely, for many of us, it is something for which we have been fighting and striving for decades. There are programs like Medicaid and Medicare—which are, to be sure, under attack, but that still exist—and universal health care in certain countries in Western Europe, South America, Africa, and Australia.
Today, in the United States—and in other countries—we are experiencing a backlash against many of these policies from the extreme right, especially as the policies apply to foreigners, even more to undocumented workers. Part of the reaction is coming from the working class and rural voters, many of whom are farmers and agricultural workers (or what Marx and others used to call “peasants”). Marx had spoken about the danger of reactionary forces in the working class and also of the deeply conservative politics of the French “peasantry.” Is the current maelstrom we are experiencing in the United States the product of the reactionary forces inherent in universal suffrage? If so, that poses significant obstacles to the political recommendations of the late Marx. How does one impose a revolution in conditions of production on people who do not seem to want it? What happens when these political views turn out to be such minority views? The idea of a vanguard or workers’ party assumed that the general population would follow. But what happens when the formal mechanisms of universal suffrage and some of the policy demands have been met, and the general population does not seem interested?
On the brighter side, one of the take-aways from these late works is the importance of workers and ordinary people taking it upon themselves to revolutionize the conditions of production, through party politics, worker cooperatives, and trade syndicates. This might suggest a path forward even during bleak times. It is what I call elsewhere coöperism: people turning to forms of self-government in every aspect of their lives through worker cooperatives, mutuals, and food coops, at a time when broader collective action seems stymied.
I am being far too brief, but I have gone on already far too long. So let me end here, anticipating that we will address the contemporary politics as well at the seminar, and wishing you…
Welcome to Marx 13/13!
Watch the seminar with Étienne Balibar here
Notes
[1] Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
[2] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (Verso, 2010), p. 353; Marx and Engels, “Preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto,” in Marx, The First International and After, at 67; Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” at p. 355.
[3] Karl Marx, The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx: Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock, ed. Lawrence Krader (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1972).
[4] Marx, “Marx to Bracke,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 340.
[5] Marx, “Marx to Bracke,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 340.
[6] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 352 (my emphasis).
[7] As David Fernbach underscores, “Marx is referring to his own scientific results, as presented in Volume 1 of Capital, first published in 1867.” David Fernbach, editor’s note at page 352, n.13, to Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 352.
[8] Karl Marx, “Réponse de Marx à Vera Zassoulitch,” 8 mars 1881, in Michael Löwy, Pier Paolo Poggio, and Maximilien Rubel, Le dernier Marx, communisme en devenir (Etérotopia, 2018), at 59-60, also available online at https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1881/03/km18810308.htm.
[9] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 346.
[10] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 347.
[11] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 355.
[12] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 358.
[13] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 354.
[14] Karl Marx, “Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy,” 333-338, in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 335.
[15] Marx, “Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy,” at p. 337.
[16] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 353 (my emphasis).
[17] Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” in Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), 187-236, at p. 211.
[18] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 209, 213.
[19] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 213.
[20] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 213.
[21] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 232.
[22] Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Programme of the French Workers’ party,” 376-377, in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 376-377.
[23] Marx, “Introduction to the Programme of the French Workers’ party,” at p. 377.
[24] Marx, “Introduction to the Programme of the French Workers’ party,” at p. 377 n.2.
[25] Marx, “Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy,” at p. 334.
[26] Marx, “Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy,” at p. 334.
[27] Marx, “Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy,” at p. 336.
[28] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, translated by Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff, introduction by Peter Hudis, foreword by Peter Linebaugh (Binghamton, New York: PM Press, 2022); Kevin B. Anderson, “Lessons from Marx’s Classic Work, Critique of the Gotha Program, as Seen in Our New Translation — and in Light of What Faces Us Today,” IMHO Journal , September 2, 2022, available online at https://kevin-anderson.com/article/lessons-from-marxs-classic-work-critique-of-the-gotha-program-as-seen-in-our-new-translation-and-in-light-of-what-faces-us-today/.
[29] Anderson, “Lessons from Marx’s Classic Work.”
[30] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 355.
[31] Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, translated by Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff, at p. 51.
[32] Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, trans. by Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff, at p. 68-69; Anderson, “Lessons from Marx’s Classic Work.”
[33] Anderson, “Lessons from Marx’s Classic Work.”
[34] In Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, starting at p. 345; in Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, trans. by Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff, starting at p. 57.
[35] Anderson, “Lessons from Marx’s Classic Work.”
[36] Anderson, “Lessons from Marx’s Classic Work.”
[37] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 347.
[38] Anderson, “Lessons from Marx’s Classic Work.”
[39] Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (Routledge, 1994), Chapter 5 (online here: “In Search of the Proletariat: The Notion of Class Politics in Marx”).
[40] Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, at p. 134.
[41] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 354.
[42] Marx, “Réponse de Marx à Vera Zassoulitch,” 8 mars 1881 (my translation).
[43] Marx and Engels, 1882 Preface, available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882.
[44] Karl Marx, “Réponse de Marx à Mikhaïlovski (novembre 1877),” 53-57, in Michael Löwy, Pier Paolo Poggio, and Maximilien Rubel, Le dernier Marx, communisme en devenir (Etérotopia, 2018), at p. 54.
[45] Karl Marx, “Brouillons de la réponse de Marx à Vera Zassoulitch,” 61-76, in Michael Löwy, Pier Paolo Poggio, and Maximilien Rubel, Le dernier Marx, communisme en devenir (Etérotopia, 2018), at p. 70; also available online here https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1881/03/km18810300.htm
[46] Saito, Slow Down, at p. 117.
[47] Marx, “Brouillons de la réponse de Marx à Vera Zassoulitch,” at p. 70 n.27.
[48] Saito, Slow Down, at p. 118.
[49] Marx, “Brouillons de la réponse de Marx à Vera Zassoulitch,” at p. 69 (my translation).
[50] Marx, “Brouillons de la réponse de Marx à Vera Zassoulitch,” at p. 75-76 (my translation).
[51] Marx, “Brouillons de la réponse de Marx à Vera Zassoulitch,” at p. 75 (my translation).
[52] Marx, “Brouillons de la réponse de Marx à Vera Zassoulitch,” at p. 76 ; followed by my translation.
[53] Marx, “Réponse de Marx à Mikhaïlovski (novembre 1877),” at p. 56.
[54] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 233.
[55] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 355.
[56] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, The First International and After, at p. 357.
[57] Marx, “Introduction to the Programme of the French Workers’ party,” at p. 377.
