Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
RX
LS
MA
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A R XI S M
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
The volumes of this series challenge the ‘Marxist’ intellectual traditions
to date by making use of scholarly discoveries of the Marx-Engels
Gesamtausgabe since the 1990s, taking on board interdisciplinary and
other new critical perspectives, and incorporating ‘reception studies’.
Authors and editors in the series resist oversimplification of ideas and
reinscription of traditions. Moreover, their very diversity in terms of
language, local context, political engagement and scholarly practice mark
the series out from any other in the field. Involving scholars from different
fields and cultural backgrounds, the series editors ensure tolerance for
differences within and between provocative monographs and edited
volumes. Running contrary to 20th century practices of simplification, the
books in this innovative series revitalize Marxist intellectual traditions.
Alienation and
Emancipation in the
Work of Karl Marx
George C. Comninel
Department of Politics
York University
Toronto, Canada
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
America, Inc.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
Praise for Alienation and Emancipation
in the Work of Karl Marx
“With this comprehensive book, George Comninel builds on the best of Marx’s
major writings and political initiatives, while identifying mistaken and problematic
aspects of his theoretical and political legacy. Comninel’s long-standing commit-
ment to improving and developing historical materialism has thus yielded an enor-
mous contribution to social theory, historical sociology and political economy, while
providing crucial guidelines for class formation and socialist strategy in our time.”
—Leo Panitch, Professor Emeritus, York University, Canada,
and Co-editor, Socialist Register
“This work is a penetrating analysis of the fate of Marxism in the 20th and 21st
Centuries. George Comninel both describes the distortion of Marxism in Stalinist
Russia and the post-Soviet rebirth of Marxism in the 21st Century led predomi-
nantly by the recognition of the Hegelian influence on Marx. All those interested
in the contemporary revival of Marxism are required to read this book.”
—Norman Levine, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland
Baltimore County, USA
“By locating Marx’s works in the historical context, George Comninel has pro-
vided in this book an insightful interpretation of the development of Marx’s ideas
of alienation and emancipation through the critique of political economy as well as
a persuasive articulation of the tension between the liberal ideas retained in Marx’s
works and Marx’s own historical materialist approach to history.”
—Zhang Shuangli, Professor, Fudan University, China
v
This book is dedicated to the memory of Ellen Meiksins Wood,
a great friend, inspiring mentor, and true comrade.
Series Foreword
Types of Publications
This series brings together reflections on Marx, Engels, and Marxisms from
perspectives that are varied in terms of political outlook, geographical base,
academic methodologies, and subject matter, thus challenging many pre-
conceptions as to what “Marxist” thought can be like, as opposed to what
it has been. The series will appeal internationally to intellectual communities
that are increasingly interested in rediscovering the most powerful critical
analysis of capitalism: Marxism. The series editors will ensure that authors
and editors in the series are producing overall an eclectic and stimulating yet
ix
x SERIES FOREWORD
synoptic and informative vision that will draw a very wide and diverse audi-
ence. This series will embrace a much wider range of scholarly interests and
academic approaches than any previous “family” of books in the area.
This innovative series will present monographs, edited volumes, and
critical editions, including translations, to Anglophone readers. The books
in this series will work through three main categories:
Titles Published
1. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of
Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.
2. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German
Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.
SERIES FOREWORD
xi
Titles Forthcoming
Robert Ware, Marx on Emancipation and the Socialist Transition
Jean-Numa Ducange and Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the
Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century
Vladimir Puzone and Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the
21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism
John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre
Xavier LaFrance and Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of
Capitalism
Preface
The book that follows pulls together ideas and writings about Karl Marx
that have developed over many years. My original work, with which I am
still engaged, broadly addressed class struggles and historical political
development, with a particular focus on the French Revolution. Like many
others, I was initially attracted by the epochal character of the Revolution,
and widespread acceptance that it constituted a “class revolution”. Aside
from the broadly recognized account of its leadership embodying the
interests of the French bourgeoisie as a class rising to ascendancy, there
seemed much to learn from research focussed on the radical popular
movement in the Revolution, with leading contributions by such Marxist
historians as George Rudé and Albert Soboul.1
From the start, however, I found myself compelled to address the rela-
tively recent but increasingly influential “revisionist” conception of the
Revolution. During the 1970s, a growing wave of French revisionist his-
torians followed the lead of the deeply anti-Marxist British historian Alfred
Cobban. Their challenge to the classic account of a bourgeois class revolu-
tion became more and more emphatically ideological, embracing Cobban’s
characterization of the conception as a distortion of historical evidence
driven by Marxist theory.2 Notwithstanding this ideological intent, how-
ever, there did indeed appear to be a deeply problematic disjuncture
between the terms of the classic account of “bourgeois revolution”—not
only prominent in Marx’s own writings, and a touchstone of Marxist his-
toriography, but long accepted by mainstream historians—and a growing
body of evidence that in fact no capitalist class had been involved.
xiii
xiv PREFACE
predated Marx’s birth by decades but never actually was consistent with
the idea of class struggle between oppressor and oppressed, which was at
the heart of Marx’s truly original conception of historical development.
Since there can be no doubt that Marx accepted the widespread idea of
bourgeois revolution and integrated it within his work, my approach nec-
essarily entailed coming to terms with what was essential and unique in his
own ideas; how his theoretical perspective developed; how his genuinely
original contributions were consistent and remained unchallenged by any
evidence; and how, unfortunately, liberal ideology not only was incorpo-
rated into his work but subsequently was even taken by others to define it.
This Book
For these reasons, I have frequently returned to take up the issues of
Marx’s theory, particularly his conceptions of precapitalist versus capitalist
forms of class society, and, more generally, the issues of historical class
analysis. My approach to understanding Marx’s ideas is in many ways
inspired by the work of the late social historians of political theory, Neal
Wood and Ellen Meiksins Wood, with whom I studied (for more on my
approach, see Chap. 1). Ellen Wood, of course, was also known for her
significant contributions as a Marxist theorist, but in her final two books
she set out how she conceived the social history of political theory.5 The
“social history of political theory” particularly emphasizes the ways in
which the social, political, and economic context of an author—and not
merely the contemporary context of ideas—not only powerfully shaped
the author’s thought but generally constituted the terrain of its engage-
ment. One purpose of this book is to bring that approach to bear with
respect to the ideas of Marx. The crucial starting point for this must be the
French Revolution, the opponents of which carried their opposition
almost without distinction from 1792 (the first war of the Revolutionary
era), into and through the Napoleonic Wars, ending just three years before
Marx’s birth. Indeed, as will be argued throughout much of what follows,
the French Revolution was the single greatest determinant of politics,
social change, and culture during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Its historical impact—and impact on the idea of history—can hardly be
overstated. I particularly take up these latter ideas in the Introduction,
which also attempts to provide an overview of the book’s essential argu-
ment instead of just posing the questions to be addressed.
xvi PREFACE
My engagement with the issues of history and theory has not been
limited to the confines of directly historical analysis. When I published
my book on the French Revolution, I was a member of the Sociology
Department at the University of Western Ontario, teaching social the-
ory. Since 1990, I have been a member of the Political Science
Department at York University, where I teach the history of political
theory. In both of these contexts, I have taught Marxist theory to both
undergraduate and graduate students. I have also benefited from more
than 25 years of teaching “The Theory and Practice of the State in
Historical Perspective”, the full-year graduate seminar created by Neal
and Ellen Wood. I was a student in that course when they first taught it,
and it was in and through the course that Neal and Ellen, and I—as well
as other students over time—became involved with the practice of what
has come to be called “Political Marxism”. Through this teaching, I
found myself addressing, and writing about, key questions with respect
to understanding Marx’s work, in addition to the issues of historical
analysis with which my career began. This book grows from confronting
those theoretical questions.
It is always a challenge to write about any significant aspect of Marx’s
work. Widely recognized as one of the greatest social thinkers, there are
many points of entry into his ideas—political, philosophical, historical,
economic, sociological, and so on. His ideas encompass the whole of
human history and the future of humanity, yet he also wrote in concrete
detail about the politics of Second Empire France, and the American Civil
War. No one work, or even an entire career, can hope to adequately cover
the whole of what Marx had to say in a serious and critical way (in keeping
with his own injunction, expressed to Arnold Ruge in 1843, to carry out
“ruthless criticism of all that exists”). This book is indelibly marked by its
origin in confronting issues of history, but equally by its focus on the twin
issues of alienation and emancipation, with which Marx began his serious
theoretical work in 1843, and which remained central to his efforts for the
rest of his life.
It is this thread of Marx’s thought that has always gripped me: what
makes a revolution necessary, and what must be achieved through it? As
what follows will maintain, this thread initially runs from Marx’s early
“philosophical” manuscripts (never so much philosophical in themselves
as critical of mere philosophy) [see Chaps. 2, 3, and 4], through The
Communist Manifesto [Chaps. 6 and 7], with particular attention to the
early political writings of the 1840s [Chaps. 4 and 5]. While Marx had
PREFACE
xvii
One irony is that some recent critics of this approach have asserted that,
rather than not being “economic” enough, the problem is that we are too
economically determinist. This might even seem comical to those who
have read Ellen Wood, Brenner, or me on the subject, but once again,
there is a reason for the allegation, even if it is wrong. At the root of this
claim is that we (and I am often singled out for particular criticism due to
my work challenging the idea of “bourgeois revolution”) take too extreme
a view of what constitutes capitalism. This has everything to do with the
delineation of capitalist and non-capitalist forms of society, in which I
carefully follow Marx’s terms of analysis in Capital and the Grundrisse. As
Brenner, Wood, and I have maintained, there is, in fact, a sharp distinction
between capitalist and non-capitalist social relations, despite frequent
points of similarity and continuity. Neglecting this crucial difference can
only lead to confusion, and so the importance of insisting on it.
It is not, of course, as if Political Marxists have a monopoly on the con-
ception of capitalist society, and that others are not permitted to conceive
it differently if they choose. There is, however, something very specific
about the conception with which we work, and it is directly derived from
Marx’s critique of political economy. Unfortunately for our Marxist oppo-
nents, one cannot reject this conception without rejecting the core of
Marx’s work.
One could easily write an entire book just on the differences between
capitalist and precapitalist social relations, but the key issue is fairly easily
summarized, as I have tried to do in my work, and Ellen Wood did in hers.
The capitalist extraction of social surplus occurs through the formally eco-
nomic relations of wage labour, by which the worker is paid for the time at
work, and all that is produced during that time belongs entirely to the
capitalist employer. In Marx’s value analysis, the worker is compensated
for the value of the capacity to work over that period—for her labour-
power—not for the value of what is produced through that labour. The
value of labour-power is essentially the socially normal cost of living for
the worker, which is usually not at the level of bare survival, and may well
include items of relative luxury. If the cost of living of workers, on average,
was greater than or equal to what they produced during their employ-
ment, there could be no capitalism. In fact, however, it is just as character-
istic of capitalist society as precapitalist7 societies for those engaged in
labour to produce a surplus beyond their own needs in the normal course
of production. The major difference is that in precapitalist societies what
is primarily produced are the immediate requirements for subsistence,
PREFACE
xix
whereas in capitalist society the full range of social needs is only acquired
through extensive market relations. It is immediately obvious when half of
what a sharecropper produces is taken away by the owner of the land, just
as it is obvious that the sharecropping family subsists primarily on what is
left. It is this naked exploitation of producers that necessitates extra-
economic coercion, without which landlords would be unable to compel
tenants to surrender so large a part of their annual labour.
Yet, while there is no such obvious exploitation in the capitalist wage
relation—which is why political economic analysis is required to under-
stand not only the mystery of economic equilibrium but even the source
of profit—and no manifest extra-economic coercion, it is not the case that
no coercion is involved. In the terms that Ellen Wood used in her work,
the operation of the market does not only present opportunity—as econo-
mists are fond of maintaining; the market is also a source of compulsion,
from which it is all but impossible for workers to escape. Behind this com-
pulsion is the historic separation of the labouring majority from the land
on which they once directly secured their subsistence and produced a sur-
plus. This fundamental separation of labourers from the historically con-
stituted form of the means of production is the real story of so-called
primitive accumulation, as Marx argued in Capital. As a result, there is no
practical alternative for the great majority but to seek employment for
wages.
The real secret of capitalist social relations, however, lies in a second
form of compulsion that is experienced by the capitalists themselves.
Through his account of relative surplus value, Marx described the advan-
tage an individual capitalist can realize in the market through increasing
productivity—paying the same in wages while achieving a greater output,
and so being able to sell at a lower price while still making a profit. In
consequence, other capitalists in the same type of production are com-
pelled to match or exceed that increase in productivity. Any capitalist
enterprise that cannot maintain the prevailing rate of surplus value over
time is doomed to failure as other capitalists win customers away through
a price advantage.
A great deal of Capital is devoted to the analysis of this dynamic and its
implications for the system of capitalist production as a whole. The idea of
relative surplus value is indeed at the heart of Marx’s account of capitalist
society. Yet, while those of us raised in capitalist society and wholly inured
to its normal practices may take for granted that the owners of the means
of production can make changes in production processes that will yield
xx PREFACE
productivity improvements, for most of history this was not possible at all.
In medieval guilds, for example, guild members were subject to its rules
and regulation of production, and employers—whether outsiders or, more
usually, masters within the guild—could do nothing that contravened
these norms. As the work of E. P. Thompson revealed in impressive detail,
the struggles by which British owners of capital acquired real and effective
control over the processes of production played out over centuries. Not
before the middle of the nineteenth century did what Marxists call the
“real subsumption of labour to capital” become anything like characteris-
tic of wage employment. In pre-revolutionary France, large factories
existed—some using the most sophisticated technology of the day—but
not the management of wage workers within them.8 Further, in nineteenth-
century France—directly as a result of the Revolution!—labour law had
literally come to prohibit employers from interfering in the processes of
production as immediately organized by the workers themselves [see
Chaps. 2 and 12]. At the time Marx wrote Capital, the real subsumption
of labour to capital had only begun to be normal in Britain, was legally
prohibited in France, and stood in stark contrast to the forms of artisanal
production that continued to be dominant in most of Europe. Marx had
a clear, and still unsurpassed, understanding of the nature of capitalist
social relations; but at that time the economic reality of European societies
lagged far behind England, despite awareness of its advantage.
It is for this reason that one must be “extreme” in judging whether or
not capitalism exists. There were factories and wage labour in ancient
Greece and Rome. In eighteenth-century France, commercial relations
were enormously significant, and growing technical expertise in manufac-
turing ultimately led to the Jacquard loom. Yet in neither the ancient
world nor the ancien régime did what Marx understood as capitalism actu-
ally exist. Even in England, where enclosures brought about so-called
primitive accumulation starting at the end of the fifteenth century, and
where agrarian capitalist social relations were well established by the mid-
sixteenth century, there was a long epoch of class struggles before indus-
trial capitalist production began to become dominant in the nineteenth
century.9 If the role of relative surplus value and the real subsumption of
labour to capital is not taken seriously in understanding whether capital-
ism exists, or not, the whole history of European society can be reduced
to stages of capitalist development, perhaps interrupted by a feudal hiatus.
There are, of course, some social thinkers who have preferred to conceive
history in this way, such as Max Weber. The conception of capitalism that
PREFACE
xxi
Weber put across, as also his concept of class, was intended to be a refuta-
tion of Marx. Instead of following Marx’s theoretical analysis—or even
merely respecting the evidence of history, it simply is not acceptable to
take a superficial and haphazard approach to conceiving the nature of capi-
talist society.
Notes
1. George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London: Oxford
University Press, 1967); Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes: The Popular
Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793–1794 (Garden City, N.Y:
Anchor Books).
2. Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1968). See my Rethinking the French Revolution
(London: Verso, 1987).
3. See my discussion of Régine Robin in Rethinking the French Revolution.
4. This was most readily apparent in the reaction of the great historian Albert
Soboul, as discussed in Rethinking the French Revolution.
5. See particularly the first chapters of both Ellen M. Wood, Citizens to Lords:
A Social History of Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
(London: Verso, 2008), and Wood, Liberty and Property: A Social History of
Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment (London:
Verso, 2012). Perhaps her most notable works of Marxist theory were
Democracy against Capitalism (London: Verso, 1995), and The Retreat
from Class (London: Verso, 1986), in addition to a number of works of
historical analysis of class societies.
6. Guy Bois, “Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy”, in The Brenner Debate:
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre- Industrial
Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 115.
7. Although much of my work deals with the analysis of precapitalist societies,
this book does not deal directly with that subject. It will, however, be the
subject of a forthcoming book.
8. Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013),
284–5. With work organized in “guild-like” ways, these really operated as
manufactories notwithstanding the use of advanced machinery.
9. Zmolek’s Rethinking the Industrial Revolution provides a detailed history of
these struggles.
Acknowledgments
xxiii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
6
The German Ideology versus Historical Materialism 123
xxv
xxvi Contents
Bibliography 323
Index 335
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Karl Marx was never an academic. After abandoning the career in law that
his father wanted for him, and completing a doctoral degree in philosophy
in 1841, he became a radical journalist and political activist. Throughout
his life, during which his family suffered from real poverty, he remained on
this basis an agitator for human freedom. The greatest part of his writ-
ings—both published and unpublished—were devoted to the critique of
political economy, and it was through this medium that he particularly
confronted the dominant ideas of his time, especially historical social the-
ory or the philosophy of history. On these grounds, he certainly qualifies
as a great philosopher, yet his purpose was never merely philosophical. His
main objective, from even before he encountered political economy, was
always the realization of human emancipation, which from the start he
understood to be more than simply a political goal.
Already inclined to pursue a radical project of revolutionary transfor-
mation going beyond the achievements of the French Revolution, Marx
had at university overcome his initial dislike of G. W. F. Hegel’s apparently
conservative philosophy to work with the Left Hegelians.1 Together with
Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess,
and others, Marx embraced a view that the social and intellectual develop-
ment of humanity that had been realized over the course of history—the
fundamental subject of Hegel’s philosophy—had not, in fact, reached its
pinnacle in the Prussian monarchy of his day. It was through this Left
Hegelian perspective that Marx first came to appreciate both the nature of
alienation in society and the extent to which human emancipation had at
its core overcoming alienation in its various forms. From the beginning,
but especially after his first encounter with political economy in 1844,
Marx understood the issues of alienation and emancipation to lie at the
heart of historical social development.
In 1843, having been forced from his career as newspaper editor due to
the suppression of its issues by reactionary Prussian censors, Marx under-
took to analyse seriously the forms of alienation obstructing human free-
dom. He began with a close critique of part of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.2
Where the Left Hegelians, particularly following Ludwig Feuerbach, had
already criticized religion as a form of human alienation—their central
philosophical challenge to Hegel himself—Marx went beyond this to find
alienation also in the form of the state.3 Moses Hess had recently pub-
lished a book chapter that criticized money also to be a form of alien-
ation.4 Shortly after—in the article “On The Jewish Question”, written for
the Deutsch-Franzöische Jahrbücher that Marx co-edited, and challenging
Bauer’s preoccupation with religion—Marx reproduced this insight, but
extended it to include more generally wealth in the form of property.5
Through these works of 1843, but especially as a result of encountering
the ideas of Frederick Engels—writing for the same journal—Marx was
brought to confront the ideas that political economists had advanced
about capitalist society. As a result of this, he was led to consider how the
human condition in his day should be understood in relation to social
development in history and to a future realization of humanity’s real
potential.
In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx advanced
the idea that alienation of labour constituted the essential form of exploi-
tation, and was, in fact, the source of private property, not its consequence.
Though he was still a long way from the critique of political economy
achieved in Capital, already he recognized that the antagonistic social
relations between workers and capitalists had a profound significance in
human history. Indeed, he asked, “What in the evolution of mankind is
the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract
labour?”6 He conceived “the entire movement of history” in a broad
sweep from early social forms (“ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.”)—where the
“antithesis between lack of property and property” remained as yet unde-
veloped—to labour and capital, which, in their opposition, “constitute
INTRODUCTION 3
Both the Revolution and its defeat had an especially dramatic impact on
Marx’s family and his birthplace of Trier. The oldest city north of the Alps,
Trier had been a cosmopolitan residence of Roman emperors and, during
the fourth century, the administrative capital of the Western Roman
Empire. As a major city, there would have been Jewish residents during its
Roman heyday. By 1096, there was a significant Jewish community that,
despite initial efforts by its ruling Archbishop to shield them, was sub-
jected to forced conversion during the First Crusade.12 One of seven
Electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Archbishop, held considerable
power and influence, and, no doubt, partly for this reason, Trier remained
thoroughly Catholic during and after the Reformation. Close to France,
and often under its influence, the Revolution saw Trier fully incorporated
as the capital city of a French Départment. At Marx’s birth, there were
perhaps 100 Jews in the city proper (but more in its countryside) and a
total of perhaps 300 Protestants (mostly the result of its acquisition by
Prussia), in a population of more than 11,000.13
Marx’s family not only was Jewish but, on his grandmother’s side, had
long provided Trier with chief rabbis. His paternal grandfather and uncle
then held that position, in turn; his mother also came from a (Dutch) rab-
binical family. His father, Herschel, however, had benefited from the
French Republic’s granting of citizenship to Jews (notwithstanding its
later revocation by Bonaparte) and studied law. He was on the verge of
being admitted to the bar when Trier was handed over to Prussia by the
Congress of Vienna. Though his colleagues pressed the Prussian justice
minister to make an exception for him, this was denied. As a result,
Herschel Marx—one of only three Rhineland Jews in a legal profession—
did as most of the leading Jews in Trier (and many Jews across Prussia) did
in the early nineteenth century, and converted to Christianity.14 He did
not, however, convert to the Catholic faith of more than 96% of his neigh-
bours, nor even to one of the conventional churches of Lutheranism or
Calvinism. Instead, he was baptized in the new church that King Friedrich
Wilhelm III brought into being as part of a forcible (though ultimately
unsuccessful) effort to merge the dominant Protestant sects. Clearly an
intelligent and ambitious man, Herschel Marx’s legal practice prospered.
Soon, indeed, he purchased a home on the leading residential street in
Trier, next door to the Baron von Westphalen, newly appointed to oversee
the city on behalf of Prussia. Now known as Heinrich, Herr Marx and the
Baron became close friends, as did their children.
6 G. C. COMNINEL
the idea grew that in the development of social forms over time there was
a narrative arc that gave meaning and shape to history as a whole. No
longer just instructive tales, history increasingly became a thing and
acquired substance and direction.
This view was premised on shared European experiences from the end
of Roman antiquity: Germanic successor kingdoms; the spread of feudal-
ism; its crisis and collapse; the dawn of the modern age.21 Relative to this,
the essentially philosophical approach to history retrospectively framed
advances in economy, technology, politics, and culture into a compelling
narrative of progress. The long medieval hiatus in the “middle” of this
narrative—attributed to the arbitrary imposition of aristocratic power,
privileges, and monopolies—only contributed to the ideological substance
of the narrative.
Viewed in philosophical terms, history as progress has become under-
stood in relation to the realization of human potential, constituting a telos
of human social evolution. Where for an ancient philosopher like Aristotle
the telos of humanity was essentially timeless, the idea of inherent historical
development provided instead a fundamentally temporal dimension. This
arrow of historical progress was famously captured in John Locke’s asser-
tion that “in the beginning, all the world was America”.22
This view of history as progress did not emerge immediately with
modernity, nor across all European contexts at once. In the sixteenth-
century France, Protestant constitutional theorists advocated the con-
straint of royal power and “revival of liberty” almost entirely in terms of
the restoration of (feudal) rights from bygone ages.23 Even in the eigh-
teenth century, Charles, Baron de Montesquieu, differed little from
Machiavelli in his conception of history.24 In early modern England, how-
ever, a conception of history as the ongoing and inherent progress of
humanity first emerged in close association with political and economic
liberalism.25
This “Whig” conception of history as progress infused Locke’s philoso-
phy and became ascendant in Hanoverian England and the Scottish
Enlightenment.26 Such notable members of the French-speaking
Enlightenment as Jean-Jacques Rousseau27 and Voltaire (Candide)
rejected this inherently progressivist liberal world-view, but it spread across
Continental Europe with the emergent discourses of liberalism, before
and especially during the French Revolution. Virtually all social theory
and historiography since the eighteenth century have to some extent been
INTRODUCTION 9
It is obvious that the political constitution as such is brought into being only
where the private spheres have won an independent existence. Where trade
and landed property are not free and have not yet become independent, the
political constitution too does not yet exist. The Middle Ages were the
democracy of unfreedom.
The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern times,
because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern times.39
Marx had as yet no familiarity with political economy beyond what was
in Hegel.40 This first articulation of the modern separation of state from
civil society emerged, then, from the political side. He conceived the polit-
ical form of the state to embody alienation inherently: “democracy is the
essence of all state constitutions – socialised man as a particular state
constitution”,41 which, however, is to say the state is our collective human
capacity projected into a form exercising power over us. He argued it
never could realize the universal in society as Hegel had claimed; in con-
crete terms, not least because state personnel have strong “particular”
interests in the state itself as a form of private property.42
12 G. C. COMNINEL
modern industry, its system of wage labour more and more reduces the
worker to insecurity and misery: “like a horse, he must receive enough to
enable him to work”, though only as a worker; when not working, the
worker does not exist for the capitalist economy. Regardless of the eco-
nomic cycle, whether growing, declining, or static, workers suffer.
At the end of this first section, proposing “to rise above the level of
political economy”, Marx brought his critique to bear upon historical
development, posing two monumental questions. The first, noted above,
queried the role of abstract labour in the historical development of human-
ity. The second, illuminating his previously declared objective of social
emancipation, queried the errors of “piecemeal reformers” who sought
only better wages for workers.46
These questions established a framework for conceiving working-class
social revolution to end the capitalist system of wage labour and realize
true human emancipation. Through this approach, Marx articulated a
profoundly different overview of the social evolution of humanity than
previously expressed in liberal historical social theory or philosophical his-
tory. While retaining a Hegel-like recognition of history as social develop-
ment conceived in its entirety, in these manuscripts Marx brought critical
analysis of this development beyond the idea of alienation in the form of
the state, beyond even alienation in monetary exchange, to conceive alien-
ation of labour as underpinning historical development. In admittedly dif-
ficult passages, Marx asserts that the alienation of labour is the key to “the
movement of history”: given the “reduction of the greater part of man-
kind to abstract labour”, revolutionary self-emancipation by the proletar-
iat not only ends their exploitation as a class but realizes “the goal of
human development”.47 Marx’s conception does not merely stand Hegel’s
idealism “right side up” to conform to conventional liberal materialism.
Instead, his historical materialism conceived antagonistic class relations to
be at the core of history just as much as they were at the core of the mod-
ern economy.
Marx rejected any fictitious primordial account of the origin of prop-
erty, the linchpin of political economy and starting point for explanations
of “the social problem”. He proposed “to start out from a present-day
economic fact” rather than an imaginary primordial condition: the labour
of the worker producing commodities for wages creates wealth for the
capitalist, but is realized for the worker as loss, its “appropriation as
estrangement, as alienation”.48
14 G. C. COMNINEL
If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, and if it confronts
him as an alien power, this is only possible because it belongs to a man other
than the worker.49
Thus through estranged, alienated labour, the worker creates the rela-
tionship of another man, who is alien to labour and stands outside it, to that
labour. The relation of the worker to labour creates the relation of the capi-
talist… to that labour. Private property is therefore the product, result and
necessary consequence of alienated labour, of the external relation of the
worker to nature and to himself.50
However, property does not exist only in its fully realized modern form.
The historical development of forms of property is, therefore, the develop-
ment of alienation of labour. Capital and labour, as such, are the forms of
“private property in its developed relation of contradiction”.51 It is the
alienation of labour in the various forms of its development—the appro-
priation of surplus product in a concrete relationship that gives real form
to wealth and its owner, as also to the immediate producer, and to produc-
tion itself—that constituted real property relations throughout history.
Finally, in the developed capitalist form of “abstract labour”, the antago-
nism is starkly exposed, no longer hidden as mere inequality of property.
The emancipation of society from private property necessarily takes “the
political form of the emancipation of the workers”, but it constitutes the
basis for universal human emancipation.52 More than just a workers’ politi-
cal movement, communism “is the positive supersession of private property
as human self-estrangement”: “It is the solution to the riddle of history and
knows itself to be the solution”.53 It is this conclusion—at once political
and historical-theoretical, answering both questions from “Wages of
Labour”—that first expressed the basis for the rest of Marx’s work.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight…54
INTRODUCTION 15
The general theory of historical materialism requires only that there should
be a succession of modes of production, though not necessarily any particu-
lar modes, and perhaps not in any particular predetermined order.60
History was not Marx’s primary purpose, however, and after comment-
ing on the relationship between the anatomy of humans and the anatomy
of the ape, he decided it was “wrong” to follow a historical method of
exposition:
The point at issue is not the place the economic relations took relative to
each other in the succession of various forms of society in the course of his-
tory… but their position within modern bourgeois society.61
For this reason, Capital begins with the abstract form of the commod-
ity, not with history. This was neither abandonment nor repudiation of
historical materialism, however. The generalized capitalist system of com-
modity production depends on there being workers lacking rights to the
means of production and obliged to work for wages in order to survive.
Not only does this condition differ from the almost unmediated engage-
ment with nature of early human bands, before production of agrarian
surpluses made “civilization” possible; it also differs from the immediate
possession of land by peasant families in precapitalist agrarian societies,
whatever their formal property relations.
As Ellen Wood has argued, through the critique of political economy,
Marx increasingly came to conceive historical development in terms of
processes that produced the social forms—property, law, and other social
relations—that are preconditions for the specific relations of capitalist pro-
duction.62 This first appeared in the Grundrisse’s long section on precapi-
talist forms, but as Wood notes, “the remnants of the older view [based on
Smith’s stages] are still visible”.63 In Capital, however, Marx historicized
capitalism not only without relying on, but in opposition to, the progres-
sivism of liberal political economy. And so, after his lengthy analysis of
how capitalist social relations operate, Marx briefly turned to consider
how they came into existence.
Precapitalist Societies
Marx rejected yet another imaginary starting point of political economy—
that “primitive accumulation” was savings made by a “frugal elite” of
future capitalists while others squandered everything—asserting that “so-
called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical
process of divorcing the producer from the means of production”.64 It is
here that Marx most clearly addressed the transition from feudalism to
18 G. C. COMNINEL
Through lengthy analysis, Marx explored not one, but two forms of
differential rent (each distinct from normal profit, monopoly profit, and
interest), and their relationship to rent on the worst land.68 Ultimately,
this analysis of capitalist ground rent requires recognizing yet another
form of rent—absolute rent—which is not determined by capitalist rela-
tions of production and exchange but imposed upon them.69 It is specifi-
cally this capitalist phenomenon that led Marx to begin analysing the
“Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent” with precapitalist forms of rent: not
deductions from surplus value (which did not then exist) but the charac-
teristic historical form of appropriating “unpaid surplus labour”.
INTRODUCTION 19
The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out
of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it
grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a deter-
mining element… It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the
conditions of production to the direct producers… which reveals the inner-
most secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the
political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the
corresponding specific form of the state.71
Implications for Today
Little can be confidently asserted about the direction of Marx’s thought at
this late point in his life, but it certainly seems he was prepared to question
the inevitability of the Western European path of historical development.
In understanding the implications of this development, however, it is
essential to appreciate that Marx was never primarily a social theorist
abstractly interested in history. Even before his early critical engagement
with the ideas of Hegel, Marx was preoccupied with the problem of human
unfreedom—that, as Rousseau began The Social Contract, “Man is born
free, and everywhere he is in chains”.84 This preoccupation led Marx to
overcome his initial distaste for Hegel, to follow the Left Hegelians in
extending the analysis of alienation. After his profound and original
recognition that the state was in itself, necessarily, a form of alienation—
giving Marx theoretical priority among those for whom the political form
of the state is fundamentally incompatible with true freedom85—it was a
confrontation with actually existing exploitation, the capitalist alienation
of labour, that brought him to an appreciation of the historical dimension
of unfreedom.
In his first thoughts on the subject in 1844, development of the
alienation of labour was merely development of the social form of private
property, from the ancient world to the modern form that was described
by political economy. Soon, however, he integrated this concept of devel-
opment with the accepted view that history progressed through specific
stages—modes of subsistence—but instead framed these stages in terms of
exploitation: the history of class struggles. He never advanced any single
definitive sequence of such historical forms of exploitation or “modes of
production”, nor was such a sequence necessary.
Marx recognized capitalist social relations of production to constitute
the fullest possible development of private property, the ultimate manifes-
tation of the alienation of labour. Whereas all precapitalist forms of prop-
erty necessarily depend upon the extortion of surplus through overt
extra-economic coercion, the alienation of labour in capitalism uniquely
24 G. C. COMNINEL
Notes
1. These philosophers are often referred to as the “Young Hegelians”.
Whatever their failings, they were variously recognized to be radicals in the
context of the day, and the primary distinction was always political, not a
question of age.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1967).
3. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.
Introduction”, MECW, vol. 3, 29–33, 49; Karl Marx, “On The Jewish
Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 154.
4. Moses Hess, Einundzwanzig Bogen Aus Der Schweiz (Zurich: Verlag Das
Literarisches, 1843). The same volume contained the chapter by Bruno
Bauer that Marx addresses in the second part of “On The Jewish Question”.
5. Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 172–4.
6. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW,
vol. 3, 241.
7. Ibid., 293–4.
8. Ibid., 296.
9. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations
(New York: International Publishers, 1965).
10. As will be argued later in this book, until after 1848, capitalism in any
form, and its industrial revolution, were almost entirely absent from the
European continent, and only just becoming truly dominant in England.
11. Beethoven famously had originally dedicated his Third—“Heroic”—
Symphony to Napoleon, only retracting the dedication after hearing that
Bonaparte had crowned himself Emperor. Many less discerning, or more
desperate, residents of oppressive monarchies continued to look to the
Emperor in hopes of liberation.
12. Robert Chazan, God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade
Narratives (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 86–93.
13. Boris Nicolaievsky, and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and
Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), 7; Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A
Nineteenth Century Life (New York: Norton, 2013), 6. Such numbers are
more indicative than definitive.
14. Sperber, Karl Marx, 17.
15. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, 8.
16. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, 9–10; Sperber, Karl
Marx, 28–9.
17. Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and
the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), 181.
INTRODUCTION 27
18. The term bourgeoisie in old regime France referred to townspeople able to
live without performing demeaning labour, but lacking noble status. Only
Marx’s loose use of it as a synonym for the class of capitalists—informed by
pervasive liberal ideas about the causes of the French Revolution—gave to
it that particular sense. In fact, most bourgeois had been lawyers and owners
of state offices, and no more than 10% engaged in commerce or industry
of any sort. While these bourgeois generally were the wealthiest, they nor-
mally purchased ennobling offices in the state as soon as possible, leaving
behind both their bourgeois status and commercial business, which was
incompatible with nobility. François Guizot—renown liberal historian and
politician, but a politically conservative liberal—gave lectures at the
Sorbonne in the early 1820s (François Guizot, General History of
Civilization in Europe (New York: Appleton, 1896)) that, while more con-
ciliatory than the work of other, more radical liberal historians, still empha-
sized the rise of the bourgeoisie and their struggle for progress as central
to European history. See George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French
Revolution (London: Verso, 1987).
19. This is the core idea of the concept of bourgeois revolution, and it is per-
fectly captured in the first section, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, of The
Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the
Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6). While Guizot expressed largely moder-
ate views on the historical role of the bourgeoisie, the significance of their
revolutionary role was emphasized by other liberal historians. In 1817,
Augustin Thierry wrote “Vue des révolutions d’Angleterre”, a history of
the heroic liberalism of the English Civil War that really was a thinly veiled
account of the Revolution in France (in vol. 6 of Oeuvres Complètes, Paris,
1851). In 1824, François Mignet published the first liberal history of the
Revolution in terms of a class revolution of the bourgeoisie (History of the
French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 (London: David Bogue, 1846)), the
account with which The Manifesto most strongly resonates. As I noted in
Rethinking the French Revolution (72–3), the very first account cast in
terms of bourgeois class revolution actually was written by the leading
revolutionary Antoine Barnave in 1792, but it was not published until
1843.
20. Oxford English Dictionary: “ancient Greek ιστορία inquiry, knowledge
obtained by inquiry, account of such inquiries, narrative”, OED Online,
September 2012, Oxford University Press, December 4, 2012.
21. Feudalism is widely misunderstood to correspond to the manorialism of the
early Middle Ages, when in fact it emerged through a sudden social trans-
formation around the year 1000 that had profound impact on subsequent
European history. See George C. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the
Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53;
28 G. C. COMNINEL
57. Marx, Grundrisse, 515. In the MECW edition, this passage appears on
p. 438, with the cited words identically translated.
58. Marx, Grundrisse, 17–23.
59. Ibid., 399–439.
60. Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, 19.
61. Marx, Grundrisse, 28–44.
62. Ellen M. Wood, “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms Which Precede
Capitalist Production’”, Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of Political
Economy 150 Years Later, ed. Marcello Musto (London; New York:
Routledge, 2008), 70–92.
63. Ibid., 87.
64. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 705–6.
65. Ibid., 707.
66. George C. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”,
Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53; Ellen M. Wood, The
Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002).
67. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 609.
68. While actual rent on the worst land affects the whole structure of rents, it
has no effect on differential rent, which can therefore be calculated as if the
worst land has no rent.
69. Ibid., 749–51.
70. Ibid., 777.
71. Ibid., 777–8.
72. Ellen M. Wood, Capitalism against Democracy: Renewing Historical
Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 34–7.
Wood, “Historical Materialism in Forms Which Precede Capitalist
Production”, 80–2.
73. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974).
Regrettably, Anderson recognized the possibility of new modes of produc-
tion only in the histories of non-European societies.
74. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, “Guizot, Pourquoi La Révolution
d’Angleterre a-T-Elle Réussi? Discours Sur L’histoire de La Révolution
d’Angleterre, Paris, 1850”, MECW, vol. 10, 251–6.
75. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 202–3.
76. Kevin B. Anderson, “Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western
Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity”, Socialism and Democracy 24, no. 3
(2010): 7–22.
77. Karl Marx, “Excerpts from M. M. Kovalevskij (Kovalelvsky)”, in The
Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the
Writings of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975),
343–412.
INTRODUCTION 31
78. Karl Marx, Notes on Indian History: (664–1858) (New York: International
Publishers, 1960).
79. Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, ed. Lawrence Krader, 2nd ed. (Assen:
Van Gorcum, 1974).
80. Karl Marx, “Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich”, MECW, vol. 24,
n398, 640.
81. Ibid., n400, 641.
82. Ibid., n397 and n398, 640.
83. Karl Marx, “Letter to Vera Zasulich” MECW, vol. 24, 371; Anderson,
“Not Just Capital and Class”, 11–2.
84. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987), 17.
85. Setting aside early modern radicals who couched their beliefs in religious
terms.
86. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 34–6.
87. As Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation: The Political and
Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957), capitalism is
unique as a system for the social organization of production and distribu-
tion because these essential human functions are not embedded in broader
structures of normative social relationships—such as kinship, custom, and
law—but stand apart in what is construed to be an autonomous economic
sphere. It is because the “disembedded” capitalist economy is determined
as a whole by the fundamentally unplanned consequences of myriad indi-
vidual economic relationships that it must be approached by means of
abstract analysis and the deduction of “laws”. On the historical connection
between political economy and agrarian capitalism (and, subsequently,
industrial capitalism), see David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of
Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
CHAPTER 2
and historical implications, in contrast with other historical forms that are
at most superficially similar.
In the terms that Marx would later develop and articulate in Capital,
the social relations of production in capitalist society are driven by com-
petition among different owners of capital. While acknowledging, and
even analysing at length, the possibility for monopolies to exist, Marx
asserted that the uniquely dynamic character of the industrial capitalist
economy followed from the competition between producing enterprises
to gain an advantage in the market. Innovations in production machinery,
processes or output, or achieving “efficiencies” through tighter manage-
ment of employed labour, lead to gains in productivity. The innovating
enterprise gains an advantage in the market by being able to sell for less
while making the same or higher profit—until competitors find ways to
match that advantage.
This relentless ratcheting up of “relative surplus value”8 leads to com-
modities becoming cheaper, as enterprises also attempt to gain in the mar-
ket by producing new or improved goods. In a growing capitalist economy,
the reduced demand for labour in enterprises achieving productivity gains
is more than offset by the demand for labour in new lines of production
and/or new enterprises. Obviously, workers are not entirely without influ-
ence in this system, though they are largely limited to pressing for better
wages, hours or working conditions through the threat of withholding
their labour.
As Ellen Wood emphasized, in this system of production the market
does not merely provide an “opportunity”—it imposes imperatives.
Workers have no realistic alternative to selling their capacity to labour to
capitalist enterprises for their subsistence, and they are obliged to accept
(if not without setting some limits through struggle) the control of man-
agement over their work. At the same time, producing enterprises that do
not keep up with productivity gains will eventually fail, as each capital
essentially tries to beggar the others. Where this systematic structuring of
the forms and processes of production through market imperatives does
not exist, there is no capitalism—even if commodities are produced and
exchanged, and workers are paid wages. There were factories in the ancient
world with wage labour, producing large numbers of commodities such as
amphora for the transport of wine and oil. This production was not, how-
ever, subject to the regulating effects of market imperatives—there was no
drive to innovate or increase productivity—and it did not constitute
capitalism in Marx’s sense.
38 G. C. COMNINEL
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more
his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever
cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of
the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world
of things. Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the
worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces com-
modities in general.
This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces –
labour’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent
of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied
in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour.
Labour’s realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions
this realisation of labour appears as loss of realisation for the workers; objec-
tification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrange-
ment, as alienation.9
“Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary conse-
quence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature
and to himself.”10
Marx achieves two crucial objectives in this analysis. First, he establishes
that it is through the seemingly simple production of commodities under
the capitalist system of wage labour that workers are immediately exploited.
Private property in the means of production is a social relationship—not
APPROACHING MARX’S THEORY 39
Capital is thus the governing power over labour and its products. The capi-
talist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human quali-
ties, but inasmuch as he is an owner of capital. His power is the purchasing
power of his capital, which nothing can withstand.
Later we shall see first how the capitalist, by means of capital, exercises his
governing power over labour, then, however, we shall see the governing
power of capital over the capitalist himself.11
All wealth has become industrial wealth, the wealth of labour; and industry
is accomplished labour, just as the factory system is the perfected essence of
industry, that is of labour, and just as industrial capital is the accomplished
objective form of private property.
We can now see how it is only at this point that private property can
complete its dominion over man and become, in its most general form, a
world-historical power13
Even in 1844, then, Marx had conceived the “reduction of the greater
part of mankind to abstract labour” in terms of the long historical devel-
opment of the alienation of labour.
This conception of capitalist social relations is clearly not just an exten-
sion of the social relations of market exchanges as have existed for millen-
nia. While the commodity is the logical foundation of the system of
capitalist social relations, capitalism does not exist simply because com-
modities are exchanged for profit on the market. Rather, capitalism exists
because the worker has become no more than a factor of production under
the control of capital—“like a horse, he must receive enough to enable
him to work”, yet is owed nothing more from capital than that. Without
this reduction of the worker to a direct and more or less absolute subordi-
nate to the needs of capital, the social relations of capitalist production
would not exist. It is not, of course, that workers do not struggle against
this loss of power, their virtually complete loss of control in the processes
of labour in which they are engaged—but their resistance does not fully
succeed, or the inherent logic of capitalist production would be defeated.
It is on this basis that it may be said that capitalism only exists where the
direct producers have been reduced to a condition of market dependency.
It is not, however, simply a question of workers being dependent on market
relations for subsistence—what is crucial is that this market dependency is
realized in the form of subordination to the control of capital. This idea
was later expressed in Capital as the real subsumption of labour to capital14
(the merely “formal” subsumption existing where the employment of
labour by capital has not been realized in the form of active control over
production). Where capital does not maintain a real subordination of
labour to its control, the distinctive and inherently crucial capacity to
APPROACHING MARX’S THEORY 41
seeking to balance interests and achieve peace and fairness in the work-
place. It is clear, therefore, based upon a large and growing body of evi-
dence, that the basic capitalist social relationship of the subordination of
labour to capital in industry was very far from fully realizable—if perhaps
not quite actually illegal—down to the last decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Just as the French Revolution had the effect of buttressing the rights
and customs of peasants, preventing any development of capitalist produc-
tion on the land, so also it not merely reinforced but greatly increased the
rights of workers in industry. This provided a profoundly different context
for labour.
It was not, of course, as if the French state took away all rights of prop-
erty owners; but it had a predisposition towards benefiting great property
holders in relation to the state itself, as well as large-scale trade and indus-
try, while generally neglecting the position of small-scale proprietors in
relation to production. This state-centric form of class relations had been
characteristic of the old regime, and while important institutional changes
certainly followed as a result of the Revolution, the continuity is strik-
ing.24 This entrenchment of precapitalist economic patterns goes a long
way towards explaining the slow rate of industrialization in France and
sheds light on the historically distinctive development of its labour
organizations.
It has long been recognized that, after the Revolution abolished guilds
as holdovers from the feudal past, the workers continued to rely upon their
compagnonnages, journeymen’s societies that equally had roots in the mid-
dle ages.25 In addition, workers increasingly developed various forms of
mutual-aid society. Together with the legal regime of louage d’ouvrage,
these forms both expressed and reinforced a corporatist character in work-
ers’ organizations. The form of workers’ associations stood in integral, yet
ironic, connection with the recognition of the rights of workers relative to
employers: workers in a given trade developed a collective identity with
respect to social needs and political participation, in part on the basis of
their relative security and strongly held identity as individual members of
that trade. This relative strength of French workers as individuals contrasted
greatly with the characteristic form of capitalist social relations of wage
labour, above all as realized in England, and provided a powerful historical
foundation for the subsequent development of syndicalism in France.
Of course, workers’ interests were not always met through the concili-
ation of the labour tribunals, and strikes did occur. Still, in keeping with
the strong legal recognition of their rights as individuals, as well as the
44 G. C. COMNINEL
role of the state in preserving “public order”, strikes were entirely illegal
until 1864, and strikers were frequently prosecuted.26 In the absence of
collective bargaining, with most terms of employment recognized with
respect to the trade as a whole in each locality, there were no trade unions
as such. When, therefore, workers did resort to strikes, they organized ad
hoc, secret, sociétés de resistance solely for that purpose—yet another
development that contributed to French syndicalism. All of these tenden-
cies were profoundly reinforced by the small-scale and artisanal produc-
tion typical of French industry—as late as 1896, 36% of industrial workers
were employed in workshops of 5 or fewer, and 64% in workplaces of less
than 50.27
This, then, was the social context for the development of Marx’s thought
in 1843. While a detailed consideration of its key points would deserve a
major work in its own right, even a cursory examination reveals that his
1843 works are preoccupied with the politics emanating from the French
Revolution. Only with his 1844 Paris manuscripts did Marx first engage in
the critique of political economy that constituted the grounding for his-
torical materialism, and his primary contribution to social thought.55 The
central problem addressed in the earlier works remained that of the state,
consonant with precapitalist political thought from Rousseau, through the
French Revolution and Hegel, down to the Left Hegelians. It was specifi-
cally in his 1843 critique of both Hegel’s and French Revolutionary con-
ceptions of the state that Marx was able to carry the idea of human
emancipation beyond the terms established by Rousseau, making a signifi-
cant contribution to the development of political theory in its own right.
First, in his unpublished critique of The Philosophy of Right, Marx chal-
lenged 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.56 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
inherently a kind of alienation. Where the Left Hegelians were primarily
preoccupied with alienation in the form of religion—which attributed
human social and moral capacities to the Divine—Marx recognized in the
state the crucial concentration of human 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 might not always be
APPROACHING MARX’S THEORY 55
realizable, as was the problem with large national states), Marx could not
accept this resolution of the contradiction between the universal and the
particular. He instead described democracy as “the genus Constitution …
the solved riddle of all constitutions”, for what it fundamentally expressed
was human collective power and social capacity.57 But so long as the state
continued to take concrete form as a separate and alien power over against
us as individuals, it remained, itself, a barrier to human emancipation. Far
from being able to resolve the conflicting propertied interests of civil soci-
ety, the state preserved all those interests, adding to them its own subjec-
tion of the individual.
With his two articles written for the Deutsch-Französische Jarhbücher
between October 1843 and January 1844, Marx carried forward this anal-
ysis 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 simply secularizing the state—granting political
rights to all, including the Jews, by abolishing every official recognition of
religion—was wholly insufficient for the purposes of true human emanci-
pation. In his preoccupation with religion, Marx argued, Bauer could con-
ceive only of a political form of emancipation. The “political” form of state
implied by the French Revolution, however—meritocratic, rather than
founded on privilege—continues to take civil society (or, as the German
can also be read, bourgeois society) as its precondition. Therefore, its
political power necessarily ensures the separation of human social capaci-
ties from humanity as a whole. True emancipation must, therefore, depend
on ending this separation, and so necessarily the political form of the
state.58 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 precapitalist 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.59 With this,
Marx issued a fundamental emancipatory challenge to the whole frame-
work 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 emanci-
pation 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 (non-capitalist)
56 G. C. COMNINEL
It was only after reading this that Marx, in his “Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction”, argued that the
proletariat constituted the class with requisitely “radical chains”.
Immediately after completing this article and his editorial work on the
Jarhbücher, Marx turned his attention to reading each of the political
economists Engels had cited. Never before having confronted these ideas,
Marx powerfully brought his powers of critique to bear on political econ-
omy in the spring of 1844, in his Paris manuscripts.62
It was at this turning point that Marx truly undertook his life work. At
once, he raised two crucial questions, defining first the historical material-
ist project of understanding the history of class society (“What in the evo-
lution of mankind is the meaning of [the] reduction of the greater part of
APPROACHING MARX’S THEORY 57
Notes
1. The introductory chapter, “A Question of Method”, to Neal Wood’s John
Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984) offers
an illuminating discussion of the historical approach to political theory.
Ellen M. Wood addressed the issue in more detail in her volumes con-
ceived as the social history of political theory, From Citizens to Lords: A
Social History of Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
(London: Verso, 2008) and Liberty and Property: A Social History of
Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment (London:
Verso, 2012).
2. Wood, Liberty and Property, 147–69.
3. On the face of it, “precapitalist” 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, “precapitalist” is not a teleological usage, but a historical
one: it was only possible to identify what all precapitalist societies had in
common relative to capitalism after the latter actually developed as a novel
social form.
4. Max Weber, “Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe”, in Weber:
Selections in Translation, ed. W. G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), 333–4.
5. As Karl Polanyi 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 “Aristotle Discovers the Economy”, in Trade and
Market in the Early Empires, ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg and
Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, 1957), 64–94. Ellen
M. Wood considers some of the implications of the social change between
the entirely “marketless society” of Bronze Age Greece and that of classical
Attica in Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988), 81ff.
6. Weber, “Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Europe”, 336–7.
7. It may, of course, be the case that in a broad social context in which work-
ers generally are subjected to the control of capital over their labour, there
remain pockets of production in which control rests with the workers. One
might then reasonably conceive the society to be generally capitalist in
character, with the artisanal workers an exception, and one likely constrained
in various ways by the largely capitalist whole. It would not, however, be
reasonable to find that capitalism existed (in Marx’s sense) where few if any
wageworkers were subjected to the control of capital over production.
APPROACHING MARX’S THEORY 59
8. Surplus value is the difference between the value produced by a worker and
the value of the living wage required for her employment. The wage is
determined socially, historically, and through struggle, but will always be
less than the value a worker will typically produce or there would be no
basis for profitable employment. Relative surplus value refers to the poten-
tial for an innovating owner of capital to have commodities produced more
efficiently than the average in the market, and thus to have an advantage
over less productive enterprises. Typically, this advantage would translate
into being able to sell at a somewhat lower price while still making at least
average profit, and thus to gain market share at the expense of the least
productive enterprises. Innovation in production therefore produces a
market advantage that exists until all remaining owners of capital in that
market can match it. In a normal market, the price of a commodity over
time (discounting inflation) will therefore decline as capitals joust with
each other for advantage.
9. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW,
vol. 3, 272.
10. Ibid., 279.
11. Ibid., 247.
12. Ibid., 291.
13. Ibid., 293.
14. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 511. There is an enormous
body of literature on this issue, drawing particularly on a chapter in Marx’s
original manuscript analysing the formal and real “subsumption” of labour
to capital, which was not included in Capital. I take account of the pub-
lished text alone here simply because it is entirely sufficient to the point.
15. I am indebted for much of what follows on France to the analysis of Xavier
Lafrance in his as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation, Citizens and
Wage-Labourers: Capitalism and the Formation of a Working Class in
France (York University, 2013).
16. See Ellen M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002),
George C. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”,
Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000), and Michael Zmolek,
Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
17. The work of E. P. Thompson is especially enlightening on the long strug-
gle 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: The New Press, 1991) and The Making of the English
Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
60 G. C. COMNINEL
18. Alain Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail: une évolution
contrastée entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne au XIXe siècle”, Revue
d’histoire du XIXe siècle 33, no. 2 (2006): 101–20 (published in English as
“Industrial tribunals and the establishment of a kind of common law of
labour in nineteenth-century France”, Private Law and Social Inequality
in the Industrial Age, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000)).
19. Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail”, 103, 113–4.
20. Ibid., 105–9.
21. Ibid., 109 [my translation].
22. Ibid., 112.
23. Ibid., 116.
24. See my analysis in Rethinking the French Revolution, 200–3.
25. For a classic typology of the forms of working-class organization in France,
see Louis Levine, Syndicalism in France (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1914), 26–33. On the compagnonnages, and particularly their politi-
cal role after the Revolution, see William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution
in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
26. There were 14,000 prosecutions between 1825 and 1864, and 9,000 strik-
ers were imprisoned (Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in 19th
Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010), 58.
27. Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914”,
in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary
(Oxford: Berg, 1989), 49. Magraw offers an excellent overview of the role
of syndicalism in French politics.
28. Ellen M. 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. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University, 1989),
117–39.
29. Ellen M. Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in
Capitalism”, in Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 19–48.
30. In his original formulation, Brenner termed this “private property in the
political sphere” in “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, in The
Brenner Debate, ed. T. H. Aston and C. P. E. Philpin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 290.
31. See particularly William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-
Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Also, see
my discussion of the politics of class interests in the ancien régime, in
Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987).
APPROACHING MARX’S THEORY 61
32. As Wood argues, notably in Liberty and Property, the “absolute” power of
the monarchy was not so much a reality as an objective relative to the
genuine local and regional power of the formerly feudal nobility. The
centralized power of the state in England far exceeded that of France
throughout the early modern period.
33. Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 156–66.
34. There is an extensive theoretical and empirical analysis in 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. 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
“English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant
Studies XXVII (2000).
35. See Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1983), Foundations of Political Economy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994); Ellen M. Wood, The Pristine Culture
of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), Liberty and Property; Ellen M. Wood
and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition (London: Pluto Press, 1997).
36. 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 Rethinking the French Revolution,
and “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), and “Bourgeois
Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in The First Modern Society,
ed. A. L. Beier et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
and Ellen M. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical
Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and The
Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002).
37. This is to exclude the idiosyncratic “national political economy” of
Friedrich List, and the elements of Adam Smith’s work incorporated into
Hegel’s conception of “civil society”.
62 G. C. COMNINEL
52. Shirley Gruner, “Le concept de classe dans la révolution française: une mise
à jour’, Histoire Sociale/Social History” IX, no. 18 (1976): 412–5.
53. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 199.
54. Albert Soboul, Understanding the French Revolution (London: Merlin
Press, 1988), 99–101. This point is emphasized throughout the work of
Soboul and George Rudé, who both argued that the identity of sans-
culottes, comprising small proprietors, artisans, and day labourers alike,
derived primarily from their position as consumers of bread.
55. See Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 121–31.
56. Karl Marx “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”,
MECW, vol. 3, 44–54.
57. Ibid., 29.
58. Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 168.
59. Ibid., 152ff.
60. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,
Introduction”, 186. For the liberal conception of class in history, see
Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 54–74.
61. Frederick Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, MECW,
vol. 3, 434.
62. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3
(New York: International Publishers), 229–346.
63. Ibid., 241.
64. On the nature and meaning of Marx’s critique of political economy as a
historical materialist approach to the class society of capitalism: Ellen
M. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism; E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty
of Theory”, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Monthly
Review Press, 1978); Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (New York,
London: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Harry Braverman, Labor and
Monopoly Capital (New York, London: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Hal
Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 4 vols. (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1976–87).
65. See Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 1: 147–8.
CHAPTER 3
in the city of Trier. Karl was a brilliant and philosophical young man,
sufficiently so as a youth to have taken part in long walks with the Prussian
Baron von Westphalen. The latter was relatively liberal and thus sent to
oversee this possibly fractious new territory, and it was his daughter Jenny
who was the love of Marx’s life.
It is clear that from an early age Marx was deeply committed to a radical
realization of human freedom, and to atheism proper. Frustrating his
father by turning towards philosophy and away from a career in law, then
abandoning even the pretence of legal studies after his father died,1 Marx
devoted himself as student, journalist, and activist to clarifying the mean-
ing of human emancipation and how it was to be achieved. As also was the
case for virtually every other thinker and activist of the time, the immedi-
ate and inescapable starting point for Marx’s ideas required coming to
terms with the politics, objectives, and limitations of the French Revolution.
In its opposition first to aristocratic privilege, and then to monarchy,
the politics of the Revolution revolved about issues of liberty, equality, and
sociality.2 The radical Jacobins had conceived the Revolution in terms of
fundamentally political emancipation, and the lawyers, office holders, and
professionals who constituted their majority came to understand this
almost entirely in terms of building a democratically representative repub-
lican “Nation”. They saw their mission as—and increasingly they became—
functionaries of the state serving as a revolutionary instrument devoted to
instilling democratic republican citizenship. This project of realizing a
republic in accord with Rousseau’s ideas, embodying the General Will of
the people as the nation—however much Rousseau himself may have been
doubtful of such a possibility—went far beyond the relatively mild forms
of earlier and more obviously liberal politics, from the most tentative of
original revolutionaries through the moderate Girondins.3
Yet, from the perspective of the even more radical popular movement
within the Revolution, which embraced not only direct democracy but
increasingly also ideas of social equality—political tendencies that culmi-
nated in Gracchus Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals”—even the most radi-
cal Jacobins fell far short of advocating true human emancipation. Babeuf’s
ideas, in turn, constituted a key contribution of the French Revolution to
the development of “socialism” in the first half of the nineteenth century,
notably in the emergence of babouvism as a movement among workers in
the 1840s. Indeed, it was in reference to the raising of “the social ques-
tion” that a distinctive radical politics emerged within what otherwise was
a broad “left”—comprising democratic, republican, and even merely
EMANCIPATION IN MARX’S EARLY WORK 67
middle ages, and the limited extent to which emancipation had since been
realized, that the Genevan Rousseau was prompted to confront the conun-
drum that men were born free, yet everywhere were in chains.
Subsequently, there emerged at the level of culture, in “the
Enlightenment”, a growing rejection of superstition and revealed faith as
the basis for public discourse and the regulation of public activity. The
feudalism of the Middle Ages had devolved upon the Church virtually
complete control over culture—regulation of morality, the forms of social
intercourse, artistic expression, and acceptable knowledge and legitimate
ideas, while the lords enjoyed almost untrammelled political power as
bearers of the sword. As issues of public rights and freedom re-emerged in
the modern era, so also did challenge to the power of the Church. Contrary
to much recent opinion, this cannot be reduced to a single dimension of
modern discourse, such as liberalism—neither Voltaire nor de Sade can in
any way be said to have been liberals, nor is it easy even to reconcile
Rousseau with liberal ideas. The emancipation of thought and cultural
production that constituted the “Enlightenment” in the course of the
modern era took many and varied forms, framed within a broad rejection
of authorized received knowledge, leading to the profound displacement
of religion as guardian of ideas, values, and legitimacy.
Nor can the modern era be associated with a single form of social and
economic development. As Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood
have demonstrated, capitalism did not develop across Europe, but uniquely
in England; and not in the context of town life, but in agriculture.10 In
France, by contrast, the social property relations of the modern era increas-
ingly took the form of politically constituted property within the monar-
chy, centred upon increasingly formal property rights in personally owned,
heritable, and saleable “public” offices, supplanting the immediately polit-
ical property form of territorial sovereignty characteristic of the feudal era.
This led to a society characterized by intense bureaucratism and statism—
in contrast with both feudal society and modern England—with intense
and frequent struggles over interests that were simultaneously “political”
and “economic”.
of state officials grew. Much like the absolutist monarchy of the old régime,
this burgeoning apparatus of power both played a vital role in the social
and economic life of France, and provided income and career to the
already rich and powerful, the talented and ambitious, and the merely
comfortable bourgeois.11
This development is evident in Marx’s commentary on the state at the
founding of the Second Empire by Louis Bonaparte:
It is striking to what extent, not only in this passage but throughout the
work, Marx identifies the material interests of the French dominant classes
in terms of finance, state incomes, and rents, and at the same time the
slight extent to which any industrial bourgeoisie is even noted, let alone
credited with having a significant role. Moreover, Marx clearly identified
the peasantry as bearing the burden of supporting the dominant classes
through their astounding level of mortgage indebtedness, together with
the heavy taxes that were the “life source” of the apparatuses of state.13
The French state, through its successive absolutist, Republican, constitu-
tionally monarchical, and Bonapartist forms, erected an ever more stupen-
dous edifice of administration, rule, and war—nominally for the good of
the people, or the glory and General Will of the Nation, but always on the
backs of impoverished peasant masses, and to the great benefit of its archi-
tects and overseers.
There were, then, different paths of social and political development in
the modern era, each emerging from the middle ages in accord with the
historical specificities of the societies of the era. In Italy, robust industry
EMANCIPATION IN MARX’S EARLY WORK 71
Given the difficulty of Hegel’s texts, it is actually then more likely that a
non-specialist reader will come to appreciate some of their depth through
familiarity with Marx’s ideas than to glean insights from Hegel with which
to illuminate Marx.
To facilitate understanding of the thought of each, one may begin by
emphasizing fundamental elements that their philosophical perspectives
shared. At their core, the ideas of Hegel and Marx had in common a rec-
ognition that human existence takes form in and through a systemic social
unity, or totality; that the historical development of human activity, ideas,
and institutions proceeds from early, and simpler, forms to more complex
forms through continuous interactive processes within the social totality;
and that this history of social development constitutes the realization of
our collective human potential as a meaningful and integral whole. To
shed light on these common elements, it may help to relate briefly the
ideas of both thinkers to the ideas of Aristotle.
For Aristotle, the elements of both the natural world and the social
world of humans in each case possessed a fundamental form that reflected
their essential purpose, nature, or position within the whole: what might
be said to be their telos, or “end”. In the classic example, the telos of an
acorn is realized in the form of the mature oak tree. Rarely will this telos be
realized perfectly, but even if the acorn grows into a stunted tree, or is
devoured by squirrels, its end remains that of the towering oak. In opposi-
tion to Plato’s conception of purely ideal forms, Aristotle conceived these
ends to be rooted in nature. This can be interpreted as merely a different
variety of idealism, given the presupposition of an essential telos, but the
difference from Plato is real. In Aristotle’s view:
it is evident that the polis belongs to the class of things that exist by nature,
and that man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis [zoon poli-
tikon]. He who is without a polis, by reason of his own nature and not of
some accident, is either a poor sort of being, or a being higher than man…20
We humans, then, are inherently social animals, and only gods and
monsters naturally exist outside society. Without further elaborating
Aristotle’s ideas, what is most striking is that his conception of the nature
of humans is fundamentally ahistorical. Although Barbarians and the
“slavish” peoples of the east are conceived to fall short of the telos of
humanity, there is nothing in Aristotle to suggest the superiority of the
Greeks is the result of any historical process of human development. In his
thought, the telos of a thing is fundamentally timeless.
74 G. C. COMNINEL
For the most part, as is especially evident in Bruno Bauer’s book The
Jewish Question, Left Hegelians conceived the emancipation of humanity
in terms of its release from religious alienation. The authority of the
Prussian state was said to be grounded in religion, and it directed much of
its attention towards religious issues. The philosophical freedom of
humanity from the alienation of religion, embodied in the freedom of the
state from religion, would result in the realization of freedom in the
republic, or Freistaat. It was this reduction of human emancipation to
nothing more than achieving the merely political objective of the French
Revolution—the “free state” rather than free humanity—to which Marx
directed his caustic criticism of Bauer in the first part of “On The Jewish
Question”.25 He concluded this critique by demanding a great deal more:
In his first published work of theory, then, Marx declared the need to
go beyond the “merely political” politics of the French Revolution—
human emancipation required the transformation of our “own powers”
into a truly social form.
Among the Young Hegelians, however, Moses Hess had already begun
to take the idea of alienation an important step further, in ideas best known
from The Essence of Money, published in 1845. He had first broached this
approach in a Swiss publication of 1843 that contained pieces by several
Left Hegelians, as well as Frederick Engels, and Marx’s critique was
directed towards Bauer’s piece in this collection as well as The Jewish
Question.27 Hess’s contribution clearly made a significant theoretical
advance. As Hess articulated his ideas in 1845, he conceived “the human
essence” to be “the collaboration of individuals of the human species” in
EMANCIPATION IN MARX’S EARLY WORK 77
the social whole of life activity, and he saw in money the alienation
(estrangement) of humans from that essence in terms drawn from the
critique of religion:
He tells us that originally and in theory the whole product of labour belongs
to the worker. But at the same time he tells us that in actual fact what the
worker gets is the smallest and utterly indispensable part of the product – as
much, only, as is necessary for his existence, not as a human being, but as a
worker, and for the propagation, not of humanity, but of the slave class of
workers.35
From this, Marx rises above the point of view of political economy, and
in subsequent passages known on the basis of their content as “Estranged
Labour”, he conceives of the alienation of labour. The alienation of labour
is not a product of property or monetary wealth—rather, property is itself
the concrete form of alienation of labour.36
This realization had the most profound impact upon Marx’s thought,
and posed the problem of human emancipation for him in entirely new
terms. This is evident in the two questions that are posited at the end of
his original analysis of what political economy had to say with respect to
workers, under “Wages of Labour”:
Emancipation and Revolution
In his later political writing, especially his “Critique of the Gotha
Programme”, Marx briefly sketched an approach to these problems.
Asserting both the need for revolution to make possible an end to capital-
ist social relations of production and the need not only to change the state
in its immediate form but to eliminate the state as such as a condition of
full emancipation, Marx nonetheless accepted the need for a political form
of the state to continue for some time (and one might well expect not a
short time). Here—using the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” in
one of a very few places in the whole of his writing—he explicitly (if briefly)
explored the implications of it not being possible to transform social life
completely all at once.
He recognized that a process of transformation in social life was required
to make possible a move from the principles of what he described as “bour-
geois right”. In a capitalist society, “bourgeois right” does not apply to
workers, in that their returns from production are not proportional to the
labour that they contributed.44 The first stage of revolutionary transforma-
tion must necessarily end the alienation of labour by which workers inher-
ently produce wealth for their capitalist employers, but cannot immediately
go very far beyond that. Only
On the one hand, human emancipation requires that the state itself
must truly be transcended, in time. On the other hand, the political form
of the state cannot simply be dispensed with on the morrow of the revolu-
tion. It is, therefore, essential to recognize the ways in which the alien-
ation inherent in the state has been partially constrained through the
construction of human rights during the modern era. States long ago gen-
erally ceased to be embodiments of relatively simple communities of like-
minded persons among whom a General Will might be said to exist at the
political level.
Notwithstanding the revolutionary conception of liberty, equality, and
sociality that informed the Jacobin project of building a Rousseauan
republic, such a state cannot achieve true human emancipation. Relative
to the alienation inherent in state power, however, the establishment of
individual and collective rights has been a profound political achieve-
ment. The state’s alien potency has not been replaced by benign, freely
determined, self-governance, but it is potentially held in check relative to
ourselves as individuals. There is no certainty that rights will be respected,
of course, and they can never simply be taken for granted, but instead
must be preserved and extended through struggle. It is, indeed, not least
because rights are limited and uncertain that the state as such must, in
the end, be transcended. It is, therefore, profoundly important to recog-
nize the potential for what Bakunin—in diatribes to which Marx pro-
vided criticism that on the whole was both apt and scathing—called
“dictatorship over the proletariat”, a form of alienation that is not to be
trivially dismissed.
Moving On
The struggles for human emancipation must have, at their core, class
struggle to end the alienation of labour. This is not, however, the only
form of alienation through which humanity has been, and continues to
be, oppressed. Ultimately, the realization of full human freedom requires
the elimination of our collective subordination to any form of sovereign
power—we must not be subjected to some “other” that is constituted as
more than “us”. Since this transcendence cannot be realized all at once,
however, we must recognize and preserve that partial recovery of liberty
relative to the state that has been one of the signal achievements of the
modern age. As part of an ongoing struggle for the realization of eman-
cipation—necessarily dialectical in pursuing real ends through real
EMANCIPATION IN MARX’S EARLY WORK 85
Notes
1. On this period of Marx’s life, see especially Francis Wheen, Karl Marx
(London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 21–30.
2. Fraternité might be translated as “fraternity” or “brotherhood”, but its
implications went beyond the sense generally conveyed by those terms in
the context of Anglo-American liberal ideology. Inherent in early modern
French political thought was a robust idea of the centrality of society in
86 G. C. COMNINEL
28. Moses Hess, The Essence of Money, Chap. 14, Marxists Internet Archive
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/hess/1845/essence-money.htm.
29. Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 173.
30. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”,
MECW, vol. 3, 29.
31. Ibid., 186.
32. Ibid., 187.
33. The German communist theologian Thomas Müntzer, and the English
“Digger” Gerrard Winstanley, had both produced writings that argued
human freedom required abolition of both the state and private property,
but their works are not accepted as part of the “canon” of political thought.
34. See Chap. 2, this volume.
35. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 239.
36. Ibid., 271–3.
37. Ibid., 241.
38. Ibid., 293–4.
39. Ibid., 296.
40. Ibid., 297.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 241.
43. This point is apparent in much of anthropology and sociology, and figures
centrally in the history of political thought. See, for example, Morton
Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology
(New York: Random House, 1967) or Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and
Steel (New York: Norton, 1997).
44. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme, Section I”, MECW,
vol. 24, 81–90.
45. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, MECW, vol. 24, 87.
46. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.
Introduction”, MCEW, vol. 3, 175–6. I prefer the translation “opiate” to
“opium”, recognizing that at the time opiates were readily available at phar-
macies to alleviate the pains incurred through exhausting labour. Religion
was not so much a means of exhilaration as of escape from the physical and
mental pain of overwork with inadequate compensation or rest.
47. Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 168.
CHAPTER 4
only when man has recognised and organised his “forces propres” [own pow-
ers] as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from
himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation
have been accomplished.7
labour, nothing that Marx expressed during the rest of his life supersedes
it. Any merely political emancipation that did not address this artificial
separation of the social from the political—therefore allowing substan-
tive social inequality to be maintained under conditions of formal politi-
cal equality—could never be the basis of true human emancipation. At
the same time, notwithstanding his critique of Bauer, Marx, of course,
accepted the Left Hegelian view that alienation also existed (though not
with so profoundly deleterious effect8) in religion, which venerated
human social capacities as divine.
Marx never backed away from these early insights. Once, however, he
identified the alienation of labour to be the underlying basis for the other
forms of alienation, as realized in property, money, the state, and even
religion, it was this more profound and fundamentally exploitive form of
alienation—the foundation for the history of class society—that took pre-
cedence in his thought. At the same time, he brought these ideas—con-
ceiving that alienation, the state, and property relations constituted
elements of human social totality in a very Hegelian way (though of course
not following Hegel)—into an equally Hegelian understanding that their
social manifestations developed through the course of history.
What is crucial in this regard is that Marx was not simply following
Hegel. Rather, Hegel’s far from revolutionary efforts to make sense of the
complex historical development of human society and its institutions pro-
vided Marx with an example—perhaps even a guide—for how one might
conceive processes of social development over time. It was in this way,
focussing on the actual ongoing consequences of the development of
material social relationships, rather than just the development of ideas in
which they were expressed, that Marx believed he had turned Hegel’s
upside-down history right side up.9
Thus, the “movement of property” through history—which is to say
the concrete realization of the alienation of labour, or exploitation,
through the long course of its historical development—increasingly clearly
became for Marx the basis for comprehending the history of class societ-
ies. Only through the elimination of alienation in its full range of histori-
cally developed forms could humanity achieve generalized emancipation,
which now could be discerned both as an objective towards which the
politics of the French Revolution had been (imperfectly) tending, as well
as a proper philosophical “end” for human social development. It was in
this way that Marx’s project of revolutionary freedom always was deeply
connected to his conception of the processes of history.
THE DEVELOPING CONCEPTION OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 93
points of view. Numerous others have argued in one way or another that
Marx only reached his profound insights after moving beyond previously
accepted conceptions—or that, instead, his early insights into human
alienation were undermined by later “economistic” preoccupations. There
are few indeed who have taken the position that Marx never in his life put
a foot wrong—and, outside of hagiography, one should not be surprised
that even the most brilliant of thinkers might have been misled at certain
points, particularly insofar as some of the problematic ideas maintained
alongside his own were drawn from the prevailing conceptions of the age.
Once one is open to looking at the ideas Marx expressed in his work in
relation to such potentially opposed categories, it becomes strikingly clear
that there are indeed two lines of thought to be discerned in his writings.
His truly original ideas were those driven by criticism, and above all were
immediately associated with his critique of political economy. It is essential
to recognize, however, that there were in his day a broad range of ideas
that self-identified with the concept of historical progress, and which
stood opposed to the hide-bound reactionary conceptions that rejected
every aspect of the French Revolution. Indeed, the prevailing reactionary
ideas of the day were more antithetical to liberty and progress than even
the ideas that had prevailed during the ancien régime; now, moreover, they
were consciously grounded in religion and tied to fundamental, some-
times racial, claims to inherent social privilege. Even the ideas central to
liberal political economy, though they could unblushingly justify the most
profound degrees of substantive social inequality, stood in stark opposi-
tion to such deeply reactionary ideas.
Marx did critically discern the fundamentally liberal ideological content
of political economy and turned his ideas to confront that. The ideas of
liberal history, however—dealing with the past and, being liberal, opposed
to legal recognition of arbitrary class privileges—were not on the face of it
points with which Marx needed to take issue. Indeed, to the extent that
they articulated conceptions of “class struggle” and historical progress,
they expressed ideas that it is not hard to see Marx embracing.
Historicization in the Critique
of Political Economy
Marx was only 25 years old when he first took up the critique of political
economy. He died at the tragically young age of 64—almost certainly in
part due to the hardships of his daily life, including the toll they had taken
on his family. Still, he accomplished great things in those 39 years, if only
THE DEVELOPING CONCEPTION OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 95
Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of
classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me,
bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this strug-
gle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anat-
omy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is
merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of produc-
tion; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the
proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transi-
tion to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.14
That this letter not only addresses the concept of class in both history
and political economy but does so with one of Marx’s rare references to
“the dictatorship of the proletariat” has ensured that it has received con-
siderable attention over many years. Its implications with respect to Marx’s
ideas about history, however, have received very little attention. More
than 40 years later, in the year before his death, Engels also wrote about
this in a letter to H. Starkenberg:
98 G. C. COMNINEL
There is, then, little doubt that both Marx and Engels attributed to the
liberal historians a fundamental recognition of the role of class in history
(as well as, to the political economists, recognition of the role of classes
within the capitalist economy). In this regard, they each appear to con-
ceive the role of class—both in history and within capitalism—as a “scien-
tific” fact with which even bourgeois scholars were compelled to come to
terms.
There is, however, a profound and fundamental difference between lib-
eral and Marxian conceptions of class. In liberal history, the idea of class is
simply associated with that of relative ranks within society; while in liberal
political economy it is associated with sources of revenue. Although liberal
history is capable of recognizing that oppression and exploitation existed
in past societies—as in the cases of slavery in the ancient world and serf-
dom in the Middle Ages—it is fundamental to the liberal conception of
capitalist society that it is grounded in a generalized realization of personal
freedom, and this makes class a difficult idea to incorporate. In liberal
historiography, class as a matter of fundamental inequality was acknowl-
edged to have constituted a regrettable fact of the past but understood to
have been wholly superseded by the liberal norms of capitalist social rela-
tions. Classical political economy recognized different classes to exist as
social expressions of different forms of income: capitalists, landlords, and
workers. Liberal discourse, however, has been resistant to recognizing the
existence of fundamentally unequal classes in contemporary capitalist soci-
ety. When it has deigned to recognize them, it has primarily been in rela-
tion to a structure of simple social stratification brought about by
differentials in levels of income.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposi-
tion to one another17
both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of depar-
ture as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that
they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity of
private property).24
Thus the social character is the general character of the whole movement:
just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.
Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence,
are social: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature
exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond
with man … Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true
resurrection of nature – the accomplished naturalism of man and the accom-
plished humanism of nature.25
It is such competition within the ruling class30 that, for example, con-
stitutes the main substance of conventional political history, with the
material interests of individuals, families, or factions figuring centrally.
This competition, of course, is also an essential expression of the form of
class exploitation/struggle that underwrites it. That is, in precapitalist
class societies, where class exploitation takes directly extra-economic and
political forms, politics and/or conquest are the definitive ruling class
careers, in which differential access to surplus through the state, social
domination, or plunder, can be gained, maintained, or squandered by the
individuals and families of the ruling class.
Intra-ruling class conflicts may also become directly associated with, or
emerge as a response to, the conflict between the opposed fundamental
classes over exploitation: all of the French revolutions between 1789 and
1871 can be offered as examples of ruling class struggles that became
associated with popular movements that were, at least in some sense,
rooted in exploitation and its social effects. Where struggle within the rul-
ing class reaches the point of civil war, rather than merely individual com-
petition, it might well be expected that one side—generally that which has
closer connections to the exploited, if the intra-class division takes such a
form—will be able to attract the support of a popular movement. Yet,
while the potential for intra-ruling class conflict is created in the first place
by the existence of exploitation/fundamental class struggle, it has a spe-
cific, characteristic identity of its own—witness feudal warfare. It also may
have a contradictory bearing on the struggle of exploiter and exploited—
as when capitalists facing a shortage of workers bid up wages, or when,
post-population collapse, medieval lords lured surviving peasants by offer-
ing advantageous terms that brought an end to their status of unfreedom.
The specific form of intra-ruling class competition must, therefore, be
taken into account alongside the particulars of inter-class antagonism.
These aspects of class struggle are generally neglected as a systemic
issue in formulating a Marxist theory. Marx, however, had explicitly recog-
nized this form of ruling class competition in relation to capitalism—
beyond what was implied in the 1844 manuscripts—as early as The Poverty
of Philosophy:
On the other hand, if all the members of the modern bourgeoisie have the
same interests inasmuch as they form a class as against another class, they
have opposite, antagonistic interests inasmuch as they stand face to face with
one another.31
106 G. C. COMNINEL
Notes
1. Not that this argument ever was convincing. Louis Althusser, For Marx
(New York: Vintage, 1970), 36–6, 61.
2. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx
and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014). See Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History
of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and below.
3. Also involved in the manuscripts was Joseph Weydemeyer, Carver, and
Blank, A Political History, 38. Weydemeyer was one of the earliest and tru-
est converts to Marx’s ideas until his untimely death in the United States.
THE DEVELOPING CONCEPTION OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 107
4. The issue of the youthful Marx’s ideas on revolution are explored at length
in Draper’s multivolume work, but see his analysis of Marx’s writings in
1842–3, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press:
New York, 1977), 1: 39–76, 61ff.
5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 150, 160–2, 470, 488,
509, 515.
6. See his analysis of “the exchange of objectified labour as exchange value for
living labour as use value”, explicitly articulated in terms of “the alienation
of labour”, Marx, Grundrisse, 515.
7. “On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 168.
8. Indeed, as he famously noted, it provided comfort, much like the relief
from bodily aches obtained by taking the opiate concoctions available at
pharmacies.
9. In fairness to Hegel, it might be noted that for both thinkers, concepts and
their concrete manifestations alike develop through the web of the social,
that the level of experience at which concrete forms of behaviour are
shaped by and in turn shape ideas. Hegel’s idealism lay primarily in his
acceptance of a telos for human social experience. While—much as for
Aristotle—not the denial of material reality, still, though there perhaps
might have been some teleology in Marx’s early thought, it faded over
time. He always believed in the “necessity” of communism, but generally
not in the “hard” philosophical sense of a telos. More to the point, Hegel’s
conception of human development stopped far short of the full realization
of emancipation, even going so far as to express the idea that it was the
Prussian monarchy that was the means for the realization of the universal.
10. In a letter to Eduard Bernstein of November 2–3, 1882, Engels wrote
that, in 1880, Marx had said to Paul Lafarge, with respect to what was
called “Marxism” in France, regarding the programme of the French
Workers’ Party, “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist”
(MECW, vol. 46), 356. Engels repeated this in a letter to Conrad Schmidt,
October 27, 1890.
11. The extent to which this was realized in the form of construction of a
book, “The German Ideology”, will be taken up in Chap. 5.
12. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic
Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 14.
13. See below, and Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 196ff.
14. Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, MECW, vol. 39, 62–6.
Both this and the following reference were importantly flagged by Raphael
Samuel many years ago: Raphael Samuel, “British Marxist Historians,
1880–1980: Part One”, New Left Review 120, (1980): 21–96.
108 G. C. COMNINEL
15. Frederick Engels to H. Starkenberg, January 25, 1894, in Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895, trans. Dona Torr
(London: M. Lawrence ltd, 1934), 518 [preferred translation]. (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing, 1953), 550.
16. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3,
235. Marx began these manuscripts with the section “Wages of Labour”,
not the “Preface”, which was written later.
17. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,
MECW, vol. 6, 482.
18. While the history of class relations of property, as known in Europe, is far
from the only way in which human social experience has unfolded across
the globe, over hundreds of millennia, it remains true that, particularly
through the development and spread of capitalism, European class society
has transformed the world.
19. Most notably with respect to Ancient Greece and the French Revolution.
See Ellen M. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988),
and George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London:
Verso, 1987).
20. This has particularly been stressed by Anderson, Marx at the Margins. Also
see the contextual account of these late studies in Marcello Musto, Another
Marx (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).
21. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.
Introduction”, MECW, vol. 3, 187.
22. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 297.
23. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, MECW, vol. 5, 5.
24. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 298.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 304–6.
27. While there are those who argue against the term “historical materialism”
to describe Marx’s historical social theory, there is not only long usage
behind it, but a clear theoretical foundation for it, provided its specific
grounding in the social history of exploitation is always kept in mind.
28. In 1888, Engels noted that in 1847 the pre-history of human societies,
before the written history of civilizations, was “all but unknown” [Marx
and Engels, Manifesto, 482f]. Still less had Marx begun to consider that
there were other courses of history than that of Europe. It is, however, the
history of class societies, founded on exploitation, that Marx has in mind
here.
29. The issues of development in non-Western societies will be taken up in a
later chapter.
THE DEVELOPING CONCEPTION OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 109
30. This is not to preclude the possibility of multiple dominant classes, with
further competition between them. The point is that even where there is a
single ruling class there is bound to be competition within it.
31. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by
M. Proudhon, MECW, vol. 6, 176.
32. It should go without saying that in precapitalist societies, characterized by
extra-economic class relations, intra-ruling class competition will generally
not take the form of market competition.
CHAPTER 5
Just after completing the Paris manuscripts in August 1844, Marx met
Engels for the second time.2 Together, they outlined The Holy Family, in
which, as Hal Draper noted years ago, they not only dispensed with Left
Hegelian philosophy but clearly asserted that communism will be the self-
emancipation of the proletariat through class struggle.
It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole pro-
letariat, at this moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the prole-
tariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be
compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably fore-
shadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of
bourgeois society today.3
where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general produc-
tion and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming
hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.8
Beyond the question of the selection and ordering of the texts (and
what editorial notes might be appropriate), a second and closely related
issue has to do with how the underlying conception of human historical
development in the texts should be presented. Should this be presented as
having a structure that directly conforms to the historical developments in
material forces of production (and/or the division of labour)? Should it
instead be represented in terms of the evolving human experience of alien-
ation/exploitation and its social consequences? Might it rather be taken to
be a realization of human essence, in a manner that seems to be more
Hegelian than Marxist? These different views were very much in play dur-
ing the early decades of the twentieth century with respect to not only
determining the implications of the manuscripts but also providing a pur-
pose to their publication.
The first editor of the manuscripts as a whole was David Ryazanov, in
the USSR. While he was undoubtedly a Marxist, he made it clear that he
was not a Leninist. The conception established for the Marx-Engels
Institute that he directed was to focus exclusively on the period up to the
outbreak of the First World War (thus avoiding the Russian Revolution
entirely). He nonetheless was readily recognized to be one of the Soviet
opponents to Stalin, and he was arrested in 1931.
At the same time, however, one of Ryazanov’s main targets of criticism
was the other great advocate for publication of “The German Ideology”
in the 1920s: Gustav Mayer, a member of the German Social Democratic
Party. That party’s fundamental opposition to Soviet developments in the
wake of the Russian Revolution—and their permanent turn away from
revolutionary socialism—was by then clear. This opposition between a
Menshevik Soviet Marxist and a Social Democratic German Marxist, both
advocating for the significance of these texts, is only a small part of the
convoluted political story of the manuscripts. It is, however, undoubtedly
significant that, as respectively Menshevik and Social Democrat, both of
their points of view would have had much in common with more main-
stream—and less revolutionary—currents of social thought. Ryanazov
explicitly described Mayer as a “bourgeois writer”,9 but it is open to ques-
tion to what extent either of these antagonists really embraced the essen-
tial idea Marx had put forward that “the history of all hitherto existing
societies is the history of class struggles”.
There are, therefore, many subtle political as well as merely textual
issues to be negotiated with respect to the publication of “The German
Ideology” as a book. Indeed, to follow the intrigues and political turns of
116 G. C. COMNINEL
publication of these manuscripts through the Stalin period, the Cold War,
and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, is something of a daunting task.
Fortunately, it is not wholly necessary for present purposes. The central
conclusion to be recognized is that these texts were far more fragmented,
on the one hand, yet more nuanced in meaning, on the other, than ever has
been made evident in their published versions, especially in English. The
texts were clearly the work of Marx and Engels, even though the editing
might be suspect, so the published editions cannot simply be disregarded.
There remain, however, issues with respect to the intentions of Marx and
Engels that have important bearing on how the texts should be read.
The central issues with respect to the importance of these manuscripts
clearly revolve about their conception of history. While Marx did not
actually use the term, the significance of these texts since the 1920s has
been stressed to be in relation to what they revealed about “the materialist
conception of history”.10 Certainly, it is for its passages on history and
materialism, rather than its use of Feuerbach to critique the other Left
Hegelians, that this work has become so widely read and referenced. For
this reason, it becomes important that the real purpose behind the text
produced by Marx and Engels was not an articulation of the materialist
conception of history. It is not simply that they were not writing a specific
book, nor even that the texts were something of a pastiche, their editors
having given them whatever textual integrity and organization they might
be said to possess as a whole. Rather, it is crucial that the original purpose
of the texts was very different from the purposes that the editors had in
mind in publishing them. There are, in fact, very good reasons for recog-
nizing the perspective articulated in these texts to be different from most
of the rest of the canon of Marx and Engels, and, more to the point, to be
at odds with much of the ideas they—and particularly Marx—articulated
elsewhere.
With respect to the ideas actually expressed within “The German
Ideology”, the grounds for such claims long predate the current issues of
the political history of the texts and were in fact identified in a doctoral
dissertation as early as 1983.11 The history of these texts—both how they
were written, for which Carver and Blank have provided unique insight
into the working relationship between Marx and Engels, and how they
were published, which reveals much about what Marxists have sought to
find in their work—certainly may shed light upon the interpretation of
their meaning. Even a simple reading of their supposedly final form, how-
ever, leads one to recognize significant issues that need to be addressed
PROBLEMS OF THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY 117
The nub of the matter was not so much that these philosophers were think-
ing the wrong things because they were thinking the wrong way, but that
they were doing politics the wrong way (hence thinking the wrong way) and
were thus merely encouraging others to be just as wrongheaded and (so
Marx and Engels were arguing) ineffectual.16
PROBLEMS OF THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY 119
after all, Marx had discovered the foundation for his own critique in the
words of the political economists themselves. While he “rose above”
their perspective in order to frame those critical insights for his own pur-
poses—to advance communism and to put paid to Hegelian philoso-
phy—this did not involve arguing that the liberal political economists
were “wrong”. Only after many years of developing his increasingly orig-
inal critique of political economy did Marx have a fuller comprehension
of the nature and extent of ideological conceptions within political econ-
omy, as well as the errors and theoretical flaws of its proponents. Marx
was never merely “a political economist”, but in 1845, his critique was
still at an early stage.
Even more strikingly, Marx never brought his critical faculties to bear
against the historiography of the liberals. As previously noted, he and
Engels always attributed to the liberal historians the original recognition
of the role that class played in history. Marx certainly acknowledged the
political failings of the great historian Guizot, but did so in terms that
contrasted his political defence of the Orleanist monarchy that he had
served with the earlier insights of his historical analysis.18 In contrast to his
continued development of the critique of liberal political economy, the
major project of his life, Marx unfortunately never undertook a critical
engagement with liberal historiography, perhaps the most significant
lacuna in the whole of his work.
In 1845, as Marx and Engels engaged in their political critique of the
Left Hegelians, part of their point continued to be the lack of German
social, political, and intellectually practical development relative to France
and England. Both friends had already contrasted Germany with these
more economically and politically developed societies, identifying in
Germany a preoccupation with—and undoubted excellence in—philoso-
phy as opposed to politics or political economy. In Germany, history simi-
larly was freighted with a philosophical cast—most evident in Hegel, but
also in the Left Hegelians—with no sign of those striking social, political,
and economic dimensions tied to terms of class that historians elsewhere
had discerned. The great problem with the Left Hegelians like Bauer and
Stirner was that they had not got beyond mere philosophy; they continued
to understand such essential issues as alienation and emancipation exclu-
sively in philosophical terms. In this regard, they trailed even the mundane
liberals in France and England, to say nothing of the practical criticism
advanced by the communists.
PROBLEMS OF THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY 121
By 1845, Marx and Engels had gone far beyond this perspective in
many ways, and had now in fact trained their sights on those very same
German philosophers, as ideologists who did not advance, but indeed
even obstructed, the practical task of the communist self-emancipation of
the proletariat.
It is in this light that the manuscripts of “The German Ideology”
must be addressed.21 Never either complete or coherent, they were early
texts by Marx and Engels addressing the failings of German philosophy
in political terms. The German philosophers, they argue, did not con-
front practical reality even when they declared themselves to be materi-
alists. They produced only “ideology”, ideas about ideas, which had no
practical, emancipatory value. It was through their profoundly polemi-
cal criticism of this form of German radical and socialist thought that
Marx and Engels sought to establish their own position and practice:
that of the practical criticism of communism, which would lead to actual
revolution and real emancipation. Throughout their writing they drew
upon the concrete and practical, often inspired directly by mainstream
writers of the “more advanced” societies of Britain and France, posing
their relatively practical ideas in contrast to the mere ideology emanating
from the “sainted” Left Hegelian atheists (already taken to task in The
Holy Family).
122 G. C. COMNINEL
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 313.
2. A first meeting in 1842 had been cool, Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-
Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), 90.
3. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical
Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, MECW, vol. 4, 37.
4. As noted previously, for Althusser it marked an “epistemological break in
Marx’s work”, and it has for generations figured in undergraduate courses
on social theory.
5. Terrell Carver, and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx
and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014).
6. Carver and Blank, A Political History, 2.
7. This analysis is deeply indebted to and closely follows that of Carver and
Blank.
8. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, MECW,
vol. 5, 47.
9. Ibid., 17.
10. Ibid., 33, 37.
11. George C. Comninel, Historical Materialism and Bourgeois Revolution:
Ideology and Interpretation of the French Revolution (Toronto: York
University, 1984).
12. Terrell Carver, and Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s Marx and Engels’s
“German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 7.
13. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, MECW, vol. 5, 4, 5.
14. Carver and Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts”, 7–8.
15. Ibid., 7.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, “Guizot, Pourquoi la révolution
d’Angleterre a-telle réussi? Discours sur l’histoire de la révolution
d’Angleterre, Paris, 1850”, MECW, vol. 10.
19. Frederick Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, MECW,
vol. 3, 392–3; Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, MECW, vol. 3, 179.
20. Ibid., 187.
21. Carver and Blank’s presentation of an English text includes only parts of
the unfinished polemics against Bauer and Stirner which Marx and Engels
had laid aside but which were later assembled by Ryazanov into the “main
manuscript” of a supposed “Chap. 1. Feuerbach”. In what follows, cita-
tions will therefore be made to the MECW edition, despite the problems
of heavy-handed editorial intervention that Carver and Blank (Marx and
Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts”, 68–70) detail.
CHAPTER 6
It is important to keep in mind that this was not intended by Marx and
Engels to be the beginning of a text on the materialist conception of his-
tory. It was instead chosen to be the opening passages for a constructed
“book” by editors who believed that they could discern a fundamental
Marxist text on historical materialism in otherwise disconnected manu-
script fragments. As noted previously, the passages of this “chapter” have
resonated very widely as articulations of Marx and Engels’s materialist
thought. What is most striking, then, is how conventional these ideas were
at the time; how consistent they were with mainstream social scientific
ideas about history and social development that were broadly dissemi-
nated in the nineteenth century.
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY VERSUS HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 125
The idea that human society had progressed through a series of clearly
demarcated stages of modes of subsistence had been established in con-
ventional liberal social and historical theory more than half a century
before Marx was born. Indeed, the liberal historiography of stages of
modes of subsistence was fully developed long before the French
Revolution. In his Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, Ronald Meek
provided a profoundly insightful account of the development of this lib-
eral conception of historical progress proceeding through distinct stages
of modes subsistence.4
As previously noted, the political economists Adam Smith and Anne
Robert Jacques Turgot first conceived the idea of four fundamental and
sequential stages of modes of subsistence—hunting, pastoralism, agricul-
ture, and commerce—in the middle of the eighteenth century. Meek
noted that as early as 1758, Lord Kames had produced a history of law and
public governance based upon these progressive stages of the classic modes
of subsistence.5 Kames’s description of the modes of subsistence then
made reference to the simultaneous development of a growing “intimacy
of union” in the course of these successive stages of historical progress.
In these terms, he explicitly recognized both the growth of the social
division of labour in society (with concomitant mutual dependence) and a
necessity for the development of forms of government that could provide
an adequate legal structure to accommodate the new social relations asso-
ciated with this growth of complexity. By the time of Marx’s childhood,
this story of progressive stages of history founded upon successive modes
of subsistence not only was broadly accepted (at least within liberal per-
spectives) but had been specifically articulated in terms of the civilizing
role of a rising commercial bourgeoisie. The idea that this specifically
modern class, the inherent embodiment of historical progress, had been
compelled to contest for political ascendancy with an increasingly out-
moded aristocratic agrarian ruling class, desperately clinging to power, had
by this time become an integral element in the widely disseminated liberal
historiography of “bourgeois revolution” put forward by Augustin
Thierry, François Mignet, and François Guizot.6
Meek observed that the concept of mode of subsistence can be distin-
guished from Marx’s conception of mode of production on the grounds
that the latter “embraces not only the kind of living that men get but also
the relations they enter into with one another in order to get it”.7 Given
Kames’s account of the developing social division of labour, however, this
position demands drawing a careful distinction. In Meek’s view, it would
126 G. C. COMNINEL
in reality and for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a ques-
tion of revolutionising the existing world, of practically coming to grips with
and changing the things found in existence. When occasionally we find such
views with Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have
much too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as
anything but embryos capable of development.9
The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this
fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, especially
since they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made
the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being
the first to write of civil society, of commerce and of industry.13
seen below, and in his later work. What is clear, however, is that there is
great continuity in Marx’s thought from 1844 through the three volumes
of Capital, and into his later studies, and that the ideas incorporated in
“The German Ideology” diverge from these profoundly. “The German
Ideology” remains fundamentally flawed in its reliance upon ideas that
were drawn from non-Marxist sources; that articulated uncritical views on
the historical character of production, as such; and that gave precedence
to simple productive technique over property relations in the development
of history. Marx’s earlier, profoundly original insight that it is alienation of
labour that is the essential moment of production in the course of human
history was therefore undercut by a broad infusion of a fundamentally
liberal materialism.
It is clear that in the course of pursuing the political polemical purposes
of rejecting the ideology of the German “True Socialists”, the focus of
Marx and Engels shifted from property relations and alienation of labour to
forms of production, as such. There is nothing in this project that would
have been necessary in any country other than Germany, and even with
respect to Germany, there is little doubt that the main reason for this
polemic against the Left Hegelian philosophers is that Marx and Engels had
previously been associated with them. The ideologists had, in fact, negligi-
ble impact on the development of actual radical politics in Germany, and
even within philosophy, their impact shrank profoundly within a few years.
In these polemical writings, Marx and Engels did not explicitly aban-
don their earlier insights. Their analysis seems, however, to have lost sight
of them, perhaps as a consequence of the scope, specific polemical pur-
pose, and relative immaturity of “The German Ideology” texts. In con-
fronting the Left Hegelians, Marx and Engels were compelled to articulate
their ideas in relation to the historical scope and embrace of social totality
that was characteristic of Hegel’s own ideas. It was not, of course, Hegel
himself but the “critical” Left Hegelians whom they sought to confront.
Yet, notwithstanding their supposedly “materialist” critique of Hegel, the
Left Hegelians were entirely dependent on Hegel’s system,16 which forced
Marx and Engels to confront the latter’s far more profound reach (corre-
sponding to his greater genius) even while criticizing the former’s more
limited arguments. Marx and Engels, therefore, were drawn into an
extended polemic against German idealism, in which they sought to
counterpose to the Hegelian idealist philosophy of history (even as the
Left Hegelians claimed to be materialist) a truly materialist and social con-
ception of history that was at the same time comparably broad and deep.
130 G. C. COMNINEL
But their purposes were not—as Carver and Blank remind us—fundamen-
tally philosophical (or theoretical), so much as a critical rejection of the
idea that the advancement of philosophical insights (however valid) con-
stituted real politics.
Marx and Engels’s intent was a fundamentally political polemic against
Left Hegelian philosophers who not only claimed to have the only correct
approach but rejected the self-organized struggle of working people.
While compelled to confront the inherent Hegelianism of their oppo-
nents, their actual purpose was to reject entirely the supposition that phi-
losophy was politics. As Carver and Blank have argued, they were not
trying to counterpose one philosophy with another, were not seeking to
establish a correct philosophical or theoretical approach against one that
was incorrect. The point was fundamentally that philosophy could never
change the world in the way that was required, and that therefore the
necessary political task was instead to develop concrete communist action
among the working class: practical politics leading to practical change.
Finally, it is important to recognize that this profound engagement with
the Hegelianism and flawed materialism of the German “True Socialists”
was undertaken when Marx’s critique of political economy had not yet
been carried very far. Many issues that would have been germane to
addressing the weaknesses of the Left Hegelians had as yet to be taken up,
little more than a year after completion of the 1844 manuscripts.
In the development of his ideas, Hegel (following the example of
Aristotle) began with the individual, followed by the family, and in turn
the social form of life. Marx and Engels also began, therefore, with the
very origins of human society, their point of departure being a social con-
ception of humanity defined by human self-creation through production.
They sought to challenge the idealist framework of Hegelian thinking
insofar as it remained integral to the Left Hegelians, even where the latter
sought to style themselves as materialists.
In so doing, Marx and Engels generalized upon Marx’s earlier recogni-
tion that social institutions and modes of consciousness are founded upon
the social relations of production. Indeed, they pushed this crucial frame-
work for historical analysis back beyond the initial threshold of social
property relations, with which Marx’s original observations had begun in
1844. As a consequence, “The German Ideology” begins with the role of
social production as providing the basis for the structure of society in gen-
eral, even before the existence of exploitive forms of class society.
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY VERSUS HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 131
While not without validity, this shift from a focus upon social produc-
tion that inherently embodies the alienation of labour, to a more general
appreciation of the materialist significance of social production in all of its
forms, articulates a far less critical social insight. This perspective, indeed,
is one congenial to many liberal perspectives, not least that of the prog-
ress of stages of subsistence. This shift in attention from the alienation of
labour as the essential foundation for exploitive class-based production,
to a broad consideration of the social implications following upon any
systemic form of production, obviously may divert analysis from “the
movement of property through history”, to the no doubt real—but far
less telling—implications of material social reproduction in any form of
human society.
There no doubt remains an important relationship to consider between
the material forms of social reproduction—in general—and social institu-
tions at the legal, political, and cultural level. This is, however, little more
than what Lord Kames observed in 1758. It may perhaps be argued that
with this exposition, Marx and Engels had improved on the long-standing
liberal view that historical social forms corresponded directly to the “means
of subsistence”, narrowly conceived. Nonetheless, there remains an essen-
tial difference between this broad and general materialist conception of
the fundamental social role of production, and Marx’s prior (and subse-
quent) recognition that history—the history of class society—begins with
and is founded upon the development of specifically exploitive relations of
production. The general materialist conception of a relationship between
“social life”—broadly grounded in social production—and social institu-
tions and ideas are not at all a problem for mainstream liberal thinkers. In
Marx’s earlier insight, however, it is explicitly social relations of exploita-
tion—the alienation of labour realized as human estrangement in the form
of property—that is socially determinant, not production in any merely
material terms.
That original conception specifically addressed the world-historical
development of class society, culminating in industrial capitalism. It was in
relation to this specific context, indeed, that Marx first observed that “reli-
gion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc.” fell under the “general
law” of the “movement of property” (which was the historical realization
of the alienation of labour). In other words, the social forms of class society
correspond to the development of class exploitation and not to the devel-
opment of production as such.
132 G. C. COMNINEL
The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent
to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and
internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognized. But not only
the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of
the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its produc-
tion and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces
of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which
the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force, in so far
as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already
known … brings about a further development of the division of labour.
The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of
industrial and commercial from agricultural labour … At the same time,
through the division of labour there develop further, inside these branches,
various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of
labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the
methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism,
slavery, estates, classes)…
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY VERSUS HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 135
What is distinctive and new in the version of the stages theory here
presented by Marx and Engels is the history of the development of prop-
erty. They transform the liberal conception, by arguing that property is
simply an aspect of division of labour. Their purpose is to demystify and
“historicize” property, in contrast to the economists who regard it as “nat-
ural”. In making property an aspect of the division of labour, they make it
into a specifically social relation, derived from that division of labour by
which the reproductive life of individuals is socially organized.
Their intent is clear—to bring to the materialist conception of historical
development the critical insight that the basis of all social progress has at
the same time been the basis for the development of exploitive human
alienation. This insight is a rebuke to the simple-minded liberal ideology
of progress, and particularly to the German ideologists who believe they
have discovered the “resolution” to problems of modern misery, without
experiencing, understanding, or even acknowledging the historical devel-
opment of capitalism, of which these problems are an expression.
Yet, in theorizing the social origins of property (and hence exploita-
tion) by deriving it from the division of labour—instead of taking oppres-
sive exploitation to mark the definitive point of departure—Marx and
Engels have in fact embraced the scheme of the four stages theory, and so
incorporated its mechanical and “naturalistic” conception of social devel-
opment. They present the history of social development in terms that are
strikingly similar to the ideas of Turgot (whose work they comment on in
passing).
already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval communal soci-
ety. Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social orga-
nization evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all
ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstruc-
ture, has, however, always been designated by the same name.22
This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not
originally the effect of any human wisdom …. It is the necessary, though
very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature
which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter,
and exchange one thing for another.26
For liberal classical political economy, the division of labour took the
form of a natural force, the inevitable consequence of the supposedly
inherent tendency of humans to trade. It is the inherent tendency of
humans to trade that explains the specialized occupational structures of
the social division of labour (which strikingly do not follow from “human
wisdom”). Having postulated that it is the detailed impact of division of
labour in the workshop that underpins the social division of labour, Smith
has attributed to human nature an inherently natural process for increas-
ing productivity at the most basic level. This, in turn, provides the ideo-
logical rationale by which social complexity, structures of class, and the
“natural” organization of the workshop, all was to be explained, in a world
that led inexorably from first principles to capitalist production.
Given their political polemic against the “ideology” of German philos-
ophers, Marx and Engels appear to be prepared to travel a long way down
the road alongside the “practical” political economists. In his later critique
of political economy—in The Grundrisse and Capital—Marx would offer
scathing rebuttals of the political economists’ bourgeois essentialism. At
this point, however, he had yet to develop his critique very far, and the
contrast between Anglo-French materialism and German idealism (even
the “ideology” of the supposedly materialist Young Hegelians) was too
tempting to ignore. Regrettably, taking on board such fundamentally lib-
eral materialist conceptions as the division of labour as a primary driver of
140 G. C. COMNINEL
[N]ot only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal
structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached
by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the pro-
ductive forces of a nation developed is shown most manifestly by the degree
to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force,
insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces
already known (for instance, the bringing into cultivation of fresh land),
causes a further development of the division of labour.27
The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many
different forms of property, i.e., the existing stage in the division of labour
determines also the relations of individuals with reference to the material,
instrument, and product of labour.28
The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in pro-
creation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural,
on the other as a social relationship … It follows from this that a certain
mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain
mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself
a “productive force.”35
material reality of the book as a human artefact must include its meaning
as a product of consciousness, a reality which is entirely natural in its con-
tent, yet which cannot be comprehended in purely “natural scientific”
terms that would exclude the processes of conscious existence. Only con-
sciousness can produce a book.
In appropriating the liberal materialism of the stages theory—notwith-
standing their critical amendments and Marx’s prior recognition of the
social character of human material existence—Marx and Engels unfortu-
nately succumbed in “The German Ideology” texts to liberal “technical”
and “naturalistic” conceptions, especially with regard to the social rela-
tions of division of labour. Much as in the purely liberal conception, the
material basis of social development is said to be “increased productivity,
the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the
increase of population”:36
With these there develops the division of labour, which was originally noth-
ing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour
which develops spontaneously or “naturally” by virtue of natural disposition
(e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc., etc.
It is, perhaps, notable that Marx and Engels move away from the
Smithian emphasis on a natural proclivity to trade as the foundation for
division of labour, and instead turn towards a quite different natural foun-
dation in the form of the sexual act.
This approach maintains an emphasis on natural developmental pro-
cesses but shifts this away from the political-economic presumption of the
primordial nature of trade relations. This seems, on the one hand, to chal-
lenge political economy in terms that resonate with the 1844 manuscripts:
it is prone to push explanation into the “grey nebulous distance” of pri-
mordial conditions while failing utterly to illuminate the origin of divi-
sions between classes.37 In contrast to the emphasis upon alienation of
labour in the Paris manuscripts, however, the resort to natural explana-
tions for the development of divisions within society—beginning with
reproduction and the biological foundations for differentiation in family
life—substitutes for the original political economic natural propensity to
trade a different but comparable naturalism. Marx and Engels have
replaced naturally trading humans who learn from this to differentiate
socially, with humans who are naturally differentiated in their social rela-
tions, and who learn from this to trade. It does not require a profound
144 G. C. COMNINEL
For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is
compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest
as the common interest of all the members of society … The class making a
revolution appears from the very start, merely because it is opposed to a
class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears
as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. It can do this
because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common
interest of all other non-ruling classes … Every new class, therefore, achieves
its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously,
in return for which the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new
ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly.38
Notes
1. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, vol. 5, 38.
2. It must be kept in mind that, though the words are those of Marx and
Engels, the texts were assembled after the fact by others having their own
priorities, purposes, and interpretations. For this reason, references in the
text will be made to “The German Ideology” to avoid perpetuating the
idea that this was a book by Marx and Engels.
3. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 7.
4. Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble savage (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976).
5. Ibid., 103–4, citing L. Kames, Historical Law-Tracts (Edinburgh, 1758),
1: fn, 77–80.
6. George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso,
1987), 53–61.
7. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble savage, 229n.
8. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx
and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014), 7.
9. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 38–9.
10. Carver and Blank, A Political History, 8–12.
11. Ibid., 8.
12. Ibid., 12.
13. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 42.
14. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 63–74.
15. Ibid., 61–3.
16. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 29–30.
17. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997);
Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political
Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1967).
18. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 32.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 32–3.
150 G. C. COMNINEL
21. Thomas B. Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society (New York: Vintage,
1966), 22.
22. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 89.
23. Ellen M. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 22; Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage,
1973), 87.
24. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk 1, Chap. 1, first sentence.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., Bk 1, Chap. 2.
27. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 32.
28. Ibid.
29. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3,
271.
30. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 32, 33.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 35.
35. Ibid., 43.
36. Ibid., 44.
37. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 271.
38. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 60–61.
39. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York:
International Publishers, 1964); R. Hilton, P. Sweezy, M. Dobb, et al., The
Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1976).
40. Hilton, et al., Transition, 49–50, 107–108.
41. Draper, Hal. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. II (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1978) Chapters 7–10.
CHAPTER 7
The great, inescapable fact about The Manifesto of the Communist Party1
(hereafter, Manifesto) is that, more than a century and a half after its pub-
lication, the call to arms issued by Marx and Engels has never been taken
up by even one working-class revolution in a developed capitalist society.
The International Communist movement that grew out of the Russian
Revolution—which claimed the Manifesto for its own and shaped world
politics for most of a century—is essentially defunct, its once tangible suc-
cesses crushed, beaten back, or called into question. It is generally accepted
that the Cold War was won by the capitalists and that the game is over.
Yet, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the USSR, it had
long been hard to reconcile the Manifesto’s striking imagery—European
powers haunted by the spectre of workers bringing communist social
emancipation—with the increasingly dissolute social life, enervated poli-
tics, and marginalized labour movements of modern capitalist societies.
From a communist perspective, the dispiriting political realities of capital-
ist society were matched by all too grim social realities in the Soviet Bloc.
While Marx and Engels’s brilliant evocation of the cause of radical change
might still stir readers, they were far more likely to be idealistic university
students than the workers for whom it was originally intended. Over time,
even those who most credited and abided by its message had come increas-
ingly to view the Manifesto as a document belonging to history.
It is simply a fact that no working class in the advanced capitalist world
has managed more than ephemeral moments or minuscule movements of
revolution. This fundamental failure of class politics to meet the expecta-
tions of the Manifesto has posed an enduring challenge to Marxist thought,
from the Second International to the second New Left of the 1970s, and
beyond. Repeatedly, Marxists have found themselves hard-pressed to
rethink the Manifesto’s fundamental call for proletarian revolution. On the
one hand, reformists have always jumped at the chance to abandon the
politics of class struggle as “unrealistic” and “divisive”; on the other hand,
revolutionary socialists have been confronted by the eternal question of
“what is to be done” in the face of the working class’s failure to develop
revolutionary politics. By the twenty-first century—the all too imperfect
achievements of revolutionary socialism succumbing on every side to
seemingly triumphant capitalism, and most surviving parties of the left
rushing to embrace the agenda of capital—even those convinced by Marx’s
call for socialist class politics have found it hard not to see the Manifesto as
a historical document of the nineteenth century with sadly little to say to
the present.
It is obvious, therefore, that something is in fact fundamentally wrong
with the Manifesto. It will be argued here, however, that this does not
include either its fundamental class analysis of capitalist society or its call
for revolutionary transformation through the struggle of the working
class. There is, therefore, no reason to abandon the ideas of the Manifesto.
Yet, the problems that exist in this great text are sufficiently critical—and
so much at the centre of what has been taken to constitute Marxism (even
if not truly belonging to the core of Marx’s own thought)—that there will
undoubtedly be resistance to recognizing them. The revolutionary project
of the Manifesto can and must be revindicated. To do so, however,
demands a new historical materialist understanding of the development of
capitalist society, and of socialism as a movement within it.
The most obvious error in the Manifesto lies in the historical position it
claimed for itself in its call for revolution relative to capitalist society. In
only 1848—when barely half the GDP of Britain itself was industrial in
origin2—it trumpeted not only the need for an end to the era of industrial
capitalism across Europe but that the very hour of that end had come. For
all the insight Marx (and Engels) brought to bear on the historical
THE PUZZLE OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 153
responsible for the mess that has been made of “Marxist” approaches to
history. However pervasive the idea may be that capitalism was well devel-
oped in the Europe of 1848, and despite the fact that Marx himself
undoubtedly held that to be true at the time, this idea must be repudiated
on the grounds of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This should not be terribly surprising with respect to Germany, which
was so frequently described as “backward”. Hegel was familiar enough
with political economy to give his conception of civil society a superficially
Smithian character. Yet it is striking that where Smith’s Wealth of Nations
consistently argued against the “Continental system” of corporatist regu-
lation, and in favour of self-regulation by the market, Hegel took for
granted that the persistence of corporate regulating bodies was essential to
the functioning of civil society. His political theory conceived the state to
rise above the antagonism of the particular interests within civil society,
not least through direct, non-market regulation.11
It is not, as some have supposed, that Hegel transcended the particular-
ism of capitalist society, anticipating something like the twentieth-century
conception of social democracy. Nor did he have in mind simply the nor-
mal capitalist state meeting social needs unmet by the market. Rather,
Hegel’s take on civil society is firmly grounded in a precapitalist perspec-
tive, most evident in his description of the “corporations”; it is a perspec-
tive that accords a central place to exchange, yet which still presupposes
the necessity of normative social regulation by corporate bodies and the
state.
This fundamentally normative and corporatist approach to social and
economic regulation is, in fact, characteristic of precapitalist states—and it
is precisely this sort of regulation that in principle capitalism does without,
and against which Smith argued. The strikingly anti-normative, unregu-
lated, and indeed “anarchic” character of capitalism is central to the per-
spective of political economy, and to Marx’s critique of it. As Karl Polanyi
also recognized, the principle of social regulation exclusively through
means of the market was the unique, and largely disastrous, distinguishing
feature of the profound social change of the transition to industrial capital-
ism.12 Yet it is clear in reading Hegel that he simply did not “get it” when
it came to the ideas expressed in capitalist political economy. The same is
true of Saint-Simon, whose Catechism of the Industrialists proposed to
provide a new normative framework of regulation to replace the old moral
order that appeared to have been rendered obsolete by the social order
articulated by the political economists.13 With perhaps rare exception,
THE PUZZLE OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 159
social thinkers on the Continent at the time of the French Revolution and
in the decades that followed simply did not “get” capitalism as conceived
in political economy (the works of which they certainly read) because their
social experience of market relations was very different. The social rela-
tions of capitalism had not developed there indigenously, and only began
to spread there after the Revolution—often very slowly—from the increas-
ingly industrial capitalist society developing in England.14
Marx, therefore, had no direct experience of capitalist social relations,
nor did he have any basis for identifying the specific character of the capi-
talist working class, prior to his encounter with Engels’s critique of politi-
cal economy. Notwithstanding the many popular struggles, strikes, and
even organized socialist movements that came to the fore following 1789,
neither a capitalist form of society nor a capitalist working class yet existed
in France or Germany (nor anywhere outside England). Indeed, as noted
in Chap. 2, the development of labour law in France following the
Revolution had been diametrically opposed to that in Britain, and actually
stood as a barrier to industrial capitalism.
Marx’s ideas on human emancipation and transcending alienation in
the form of the state, which down through 1843 were his primary focus,
were not initially grounded in the class politics of capitalist society. Nor
did the broad Continental “bourgeoisie” which he opposed as yet have a
capitalist character more than 50 years after they had taken to the political
stage in the French Revolution. Specifically, capitalist society did not fig-
ure in Marx’s thought until after he was introduced to it by the work of
Engels in 1843. Engels was deeply immersed in capitalist social relations
working at his father’s mill in Manchester, and he both read the works of
political economy and attended to the unprecedented misery of the work-
ers. It was through Engels’s lead that Marx came to confront the character
of specifically capitalist social relations. Though neither he nor Engels rec-
ognized the point, these English social relations of capitalist production
did not, in fact, exist on the Continent.
Perhaps understandably, this has been an especially difficult point for
some Marxists to accept, given the emphasis in the Manifesto on the
French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. Still, the crucial fact about
the French Revolution from a historical materialist perspective is that nei-
ther it nor its whole range of politics—Liberal, Jacobin, or even Socialist—
had anything to do with capitalism as such. It certainly was grounded on
issues of class struggle, but it did not involve any classes that had a capital-
ist character; above all, the French bourgeoisie was not in any way a
160 G. C. COMNINEL
c apitalist class, was not in the process of becoming one, nor was there any
development of capitalist social relations underway anywhere in France.15
Beyond the fact that there was no tendency towards the development of
capitalist social relations anywhere in France, neither did the existence of
powerful agrarian capitalism and the beginnings of industrial capitalism in
England provide some geopolitical impetus for the actual development of
capitalism in France. The French certainly were aware of England’s eco-
nomic advantage but found themselves utterly unable to emulate the
social changes (such as enclosure) that underpinned this advantage. French
society not only was not capitalist, it was inherently structured in ways that
were inimical to capitalism. Not only did the French Revolution not have
the effect of fostering capitalist development, or even clear obstacles for it,
the Revolution actually entrenched precapitalist socialist relations in
France, causing it to fall behind even “backward” Germany in its industrial
development by the later nineteenth century.
A substantial body of Marxist scholarship now argues, following Robert
Brenner and Ellen Wood, that contrary to prevailing social, economic, and
historical theories grounded in liberal ideas, capitalism did not develop
across Europe as a whole, but uniquely in the society of England.16 Most
evidently, and significantly, the specifically capitalist and socially transfor-
mative industrial revolution followed through historical processes that
were unique to England, and which played out over at least 450 years of
distinctive social and economic development.17
In England, and England alone, a peculiar historical dynamic emerged
through the development of the common law under Norman royal aus-
pices following the Conquest, in the context of a legal system of national
courts previously established under the centralized Anglo-Saxon monar-
chy.18 The existence of a separate system of effective law—providing the
crown with an important counter-balance to arbitrary lordly power in the
countryside, while at the same time securing the inheritance and other
property interests for lords otherwise subject to the vagaries of feudal
law—proved to be enormously important, allowing for the truly unique
English experience of enclosures.19 This unique historical development
was directly responsible for the emergence of agrarian capitalism in
England. Nothing like the early modern transformation of English rural
property relations through enclosure, and with it the whole structure of
agrarian society, occurred anywhere else.20
During the early modern period, trade everywhere grew to unprec-
edented levels. But simply making a profit in trade is not capitalism.21
THE PUZZLE OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 161
wrenching dislocation for much of the population; lost control over work
by those who laboured; and the plain and simple immiseration of a grow-
ing mass of people.23 In the process of this dramatic social transformation,
roughly from 1450 through the Industrial Revolution of the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, the English gentry remade them-
selves into a capitalist landlord class, transforming their manors and
adopting tenant-farmers as junior partners responsible for production. It
was these tenant-farmers who were the actual agrarian capitalists, gaining
access to the land only through the market in leases, and as and when
necessary hiring the dispossessed as labourers. This was the foundation of
the “trinity formula” of classical political economy—the three fundamen-
tal classes of landlords, capitalists, and workers, each with their distinctive
form of income. Finally, with the rapid growth of industrial forms of pro-
duction based on an extension of the same capitalist principles during the
first half of the nineteenth century, the landlord and capitalist classes, at
first recognized to be distinct, began to merge into one.24
There are three crucial claims that emerge from Brenner’s analysis.
First, that capitalism developed in, and through the transformation of,
agriculture, not in the growth of urban-based trade or workshops. Second,
that capitalism developed through a specific historical process connected
with the unique English experience of enclosures (a complex phenome-
non having more to do with the suppression of common rights and collec-
tive control over land use than with hedging fields, consolidating holdings,
or even dividing common woodland and pasture). Third, that capitalism
led to the radical transformation of non-agricultural sectors in the
Industrial Revolution only after the radical transformation of agriculture,
which included an Agricultural Revolution. As Ellen Wood pointed out,
these positions correspond precisely with Marx’s account of “so-called
primitive accumulation” in Capital.25
If the Brenner-Wood analysis is correct, indigenous developments of
trade or industry on the Continent prior to the spread of novel and dis-
tinctive forms of capitalist production following the Industrial Revolution
simply cannot be taken as a sign of actual, nascent, or even latent capitalist
development. Capitalist development cannot be taken for granted, but its
presence must instead be demonstrated and explained. The growth
of precapitalist forms of trade and industry can never explain their
transformation into capitalism. Only if the Brenner-Wood account is
proved wrong can anything to do with the bourgeoisie, trade, workshops,
THE PUZZLE OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 163
It was significant social inequality, and the inherently abusive power of the
state that preserved it, to which Rousseau objected—not anything specific
to capitalism or its development, with which he reveals no familiarity. Nor,
in attempting to justify the absolutist state as having something akin to
this “general will”, was Hegel any more concerned than Rousseau with
specifically capitalist society. In neither the context of Continental political
philosophy, nor that of the political movements which he covered as a
journalist, did Marx have occasion to confront capitalism before the end
of 1843. Like Rousseau, but enriched by the experiences of the popular
movement in the Revolution, Marx conceived of human emancipation
from the chains imposed by property and the state. No more than
Rousseau, however, had he yet conceived of a process or agency, beyond
philosophy, by which this emancipation could be achieved.
Through the critique of political economy, however, Marx did more
than just identify the agency of the proletariat in 1844. Far more impor-
tantly, the proletariat was transformed in his thought from being simply
the “propertyless”, as they had been in precapitalist social and political
thought, to take the specific form of the capitalist working class. Their
struggle was not simply the struggle of the dispossessed and disenfran-
chised everywhere, but specifically located in the structured social rela-
tionships of capital accumulation and its crises, founded on the
commodification of labour-power and the continual revolutionizing of
production.
Though social justice would demand equality and human emancipation
in any form of class society, it was Marx’s particular claim, arrived at
through the critique of political economy, that the same revolutionary
transformation of society which brought about capitalism, in turn, estab-
lished a dynamic contradiction between ever-expanding human produc-
tive capacities and the reduction of actual humans to a means for achieving
that growth. In the history of hitherto existing class societies there had
been what Marx called in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
the “movement of property”: “Only at the culmination of the develop-
ment of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely that on
the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that on the other it
is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alien-
ation.”45 As he argued in the Manifesto, “modern bourgeois property is
the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and
appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploita-
tion of the many by the few”.46 It is specifically in and through these fully
172 G. C. COMNINEL
whose time had passed. It was generally recognized that to prevail against
the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie had had to involve the people. Yet, if on
the one hand there was much to unify the Third Estate, as “the Nation”,
against the aristocracy, who were opposed to the Nation, it was clear on
the other hand that there was a crucial division between the interests of
the propertied bourgeoisie, and those of the poor. As early as 1791 a fierce
debate arose, in deciding whether there should be a property qualification
for elections, over the difference in interests between the bourgeoisie and
the people (or as the apologists for the bourgeoisie then put it, between
“the Nation” and “the brigands”).48 Through the involvement of the peo-
ple, the bourgeois political revolution of 1789 became a truly social
revolution.49
The tension between the bourgeois political project, which even in its
most radical Jacobin form always took the preservation of private property
to be a precondition of the state, and the social interests of the property-
less, for whom democracy could never be a merely “civic” right without
social implications, was an enduring feature of the Revolution’s political
dynamic. Though Robespierre was a truly incorruptible advocate for the
people as citizens, and he accepted the need to limit the negative effects of
property (at least temporarily, during the war), he would not cross the line
to advance the people’s interests by making a fundamental challenge to
property itself.50 This helps to explain why the sans-culottes did not rally to
his defence in 1794, while at the same time a movement (admittedly small)
began to distinguish itself from the merely political tasks of building and
defending the Nation, specifically advocating radical measures to redress
social inequality. As Marat had recognized from the start, the very fact of
the Revolution would eventually raise the issue of whether a loi agraire
should affect the distribution of property; and so, quite independently of
the development of capitalism in England, it was the Revolution of 1789
that put the idea of socialism on the European political agenda.
The autonomous political activism of the sans-culottes was decisively
crushed by the Thermidorean regime after their final insurrection on 1
prairial, and the Conspiracy of Equals was later dispatched with little dif-
ficulty. But babouvism survived Babeuf, and one of the legacies of the
Revolution was the small but growing socialist movement of the early
nineteenth century. Still, as their Marxist historians always recognized, the
sans-culottes never themselves constituted a capitalist working class, and
their common social interest lay in the provision of affordable bread rather
than the sale of commodified labour-power.51 By the early 1840s, French
THE PUZZLE OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 175
workers were already highly conscious of what was now called “the social
question”, and increasingly identified with one or another of the
approaches to “socialism” articulated by Cabet, Blanc, Proudhon, and
others—even as they continued to maintain their compagnonnages.52 In its
origin, then, French socialism was no more specifically an indication of the
development of capitalist society than were the liberal politics of the bour-
geoisie in 1789.
However, much as the common characteristics of liberalism in England
and France tended to blur the crucial differences in their societies, so did
the idea of socialism tend to blur the differences in their workers’ move-
ments. In both England and France, workers fought for traditional rights,
as well as against novel inequities. In England, however, one enduring
form of struggle in the first half of the century, much emphasized by E. P.
Thompson, was resistance to the capitalist demolition of precapitalist
rights of labour, and for retention of “honourable” control over the labour
process by the workers themselves. At the same time, workers fought to
maintain their rate of pay in the face of competition from “dishonourable”
trades, and argued for preservation of the Speenhamland system of poor
relief for the unemployed and underemployed, even if it had been initially
imposed by justices of the peace in the interest of maintaining public
order. From early in the modern period, indeed, the English maintained a
system of poor relief based on taxes that differed from all other European
approaches to poverty, which can be seen to be part of the long process of
adaptation by an increasingly capitalist form of state to the pressures atten-
dant on the continuing development of capitalism.53 In trying to preserve
what they came to see as their right to relief, workers were not, in fact,
fighting to hold on to a part of “the old order”, but were engaged in con-
tinuing struggle over the responsibility of the state for social welfare in a
capitalist society.
In France, during the first half of the century, struggle was character-
ized instead by essentially traditional artisans—reinforced in that status by
post-Revolutionary labour law—confronting what had become a chronic
condition of underemployment. Where English workers in the 1830s
sought to keep the state from eliminating poor relief, the last refuge from
the naked effects of “the labour market”, in France the demand instead
emerged for the state to address the chronic problem of underemploy-
ment through establishing workshops to create jobs. Only in the course of
the latter half of the century did the French workers’ movement slowly
come to include the struggles of workers in proletarianized industries; but
176 G. C. COMNINEL
these newer, more capitalist struggles often took place at the same time
that artisanal workers continued to press for traditional demands. This
tension played a pivotal role in the development of socialism in France,
particularly insofar as anarcho-syndicalism came to constitute a significant
challenge to the socialist organizational project of the French Section of
the Workers’ International (as French socialists insisted on calling them-
selves until a decade after the establishment of the Fifth Republic). The
syndicalist emphasis on direct action and organization by workers in the
workplace resonated powerfully with the traditional corporatist organiza-
tion and struggles of the artisans. The contrast with the development of
the trades unions in Britain, and eventually the emergence of Labourism
from a Liberal-Labour alliance, is telling. The greater political radicalism
and relatively lesser development of effective unions among French work-
ers, throughout the nineteenth, and well into the twentieth century, was
not, in fact, a hallmark of the advanced proletarian character often imputed
to them, but rather of the later and less intensive development of industrial
capitalism in France.
In England, a working-class had made itself through struggle over the
establishment of capitalist property rights, capitalist forms of production,
and the capitalist laissez-faire state. In France, traditionally precapitalist
artisans and labourers had been radically politicized by the protracted
struggles among the propertied over the constitution of the state.
Traditional forms of economic organization, such as the guilds, might be
abolished for immediately political purposes, as when, on the night of
August 4, 1789, most of the forms of “privilege” recognized by the old
social order were thrown on the bonfire of revolutionary civic zeal.54 Such
political manifestations of liberalism were dictated by struggle against the
aristocracy itself, and not by an underlying agenda of capitalist economic
reforms. This is clear in the case of the guilds, as also with the abolition of
legal impediments to enclosure in the countryside, since, in both cases,
during and after the Revolution the same essential structure of precapital-
ist economic organization survived.
would lead the way to human emancipation, arguing instead that the very
structure and contradictions of capitalist class society would lead the
working- class majority to end class society as such through its self-
emancipation. The politics of class interest, not disinterested philosophy,
held the key to the transcendence of class society. And so the Manifesto
was issued as a call for class struggle.
The known history of societies may indeed be the history of class strug-
gles, but the Manifesto makes it clear that these societies have had different
specific forms, with differing forms of class struggle. Capitalism, more-
over, is unique in that its class relations take an apparently purely eco-
nomic form, in contrast to the extra-economic coercion that is characteristic
in every precapitalist form. It is essential, therefore, not to confuse the
class struggle which is specific to capitalist society with the sorts of strug-
gles found in earlier times.
With this in mind, it is significant that the idea of redistributing wealth
in the interest of social justice can be traced back to the ancient world,
finding notable expression in the Agrarian Law championed by the broth-
ers Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus in the second century BC (leading to
their successive murders at the hands of the thugs of Roman Senators).
When similar ideas surfaced during the French Revolution, the links to the
past were again obvious, in the references made to a loi agraire as early as
1789, and subsequently in the name adopted by Gracchus Babeuf, as well
as the goals he espoused. The ideas of babouvism made an important con-
tribution to the politics of the nineteenth century, along with other social-
ist conceptions and schemes for the redistribution of wealth. Yet all had far
more in common with the social issues of dispossessed peasants and urban
plebeians than with solutions to the problems of capitalist society, and they
were no more indicative of the development of capitalism than the radical
republicanism of the Jacobins. The legacy of such socialist ideas and move-
ments played an important role in the later development of specifically
capitalist workers’ movements, of course, as did the ideal of a democratic
citizens’ republic. They constituted an important lineage of radical thought
and action which—whatever their defects—were often an asset in organiz-
ing struggles within and against capitalism. However, particularly because
it was Marx and Engels in the Manifesto who first distinguished the com-
munist project of the capitalist working class from all the utopian socialist
ideas of the past, it is crucial to recognize that (especially on the Continent)
this radical legacy had its origin in social struggles within fundamentally
non-capitalist societies.
180 G. C. COMNINEL
In the terms of the day, then, Marx was certainly a socialist in 1843. He
had a highly developed socialist critique of merely Jacobin radicalism and
embraced the struggles of working people and the dispossessed in his jour-
nalism. But this sort of socialism, even when pushed by Marx to conceive
of the potential for human emancipation through the transcendence of
alienation in society, was still very different from the specific conception of
socialism that he developed through the critique of political economy,
beginning in 1844. The difference lies not so much in the goal of emanci-
pation, as in the conception of a historical process of class struggle that
would lead to it. Through the critique of political economy, Marx con-
ceived of the emancipation of humanity through the self-emancipation of
the capitalist working class. Exploitation had achieved its most perfectly
realizable form in capitalism, and with no further capacity to develop
alienation, class society would come to an end with it through its own
inescapable contradictions and the class struggle generated by them. This
is the key to the project outlined in the Manifesto. The conflation of this
process with the social conflicts of precapitalist Europe was an error, as was
Marx’s acceptance of the liberal accounts of 1789 as a bourgeois class
revolution. But these errors take nothing away from the core of the ideas
put forward in the Manifesto, which Marx went on to develop with great
clarity through the more rigorous critique carried out in the Grundrisse
and Capital. However inspiring the socialism of Babeuf and the others, it
is the project of ending the commodification of labour-power and the
tyranny of market forces over social life which remains relevant to us today,
and it is this which is the legacy of the Manifesto.
The weaknesses of the Manifesto have everything to do with looking
back to 1789, while its strengths involve looking forward to the role of
class struggle within capitalist society, and its capacity to bring about an
end to the history of class society as such. The confusion of the issues of
capitalism with the issues of the aftermath of the French Revolution was
virtually universal at the time, and Marx’s failure to recognize it can be
attributed to the fact that, after turning from the issues of the Revolution
to those of capitalist society, he never had occasion to re-examine his initial
presumptions about the nature of the historical conjuncture. Marx, in fact,
proved amazingly perceptive in the Manifesto. He claimed that Europe in
1848 was on the verge of revolution, and a great wave of revolution in fact
coincided with its publication. He recognized fundamental truths about
the nature of capitalist society—truths widely acknowledged by a range of
commentators looking back from the present—at a time that it had still
barely taken form even in England.
THE PUZZLE OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 181
If the European politics of the day were not in fact yet the politics of
capitalist class society, and the politics that have developed since have been
very different from what was anticipated on the model of the French
Revolution, this takes nothing away from the essential message put for-
ward in the Manifesto. Clearing away its historical errors, we are left with
the understanding that the history of hitherto existing society has been the
history of class struggles; that, in capitalism, class society has realized its
ultimate form; that it is crisis-ridden as well as incapable of delivering
social justice; and since, if capitalism is not to last forever, the only way
forward is through socialism (the alternative being a relapse into more
manifest forms of social injustice), the pursuit of the class interests of the
majority in ending insecurity and want has the potential to liberate human-
ity from the indignity of class exploitation. In these terms, it is as true
today as it was in 1848: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win.”
Notes
1. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,
MECW, vol. 6, 477–519.
2. D.C. Coleman, The Economy of England 1450–1750 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977).
3. Vladimir Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” in V. I. Lenin: Collected Works
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), 5.
4. See George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and
the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1987); Robert Brenner,
“Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in The First Modern
Society, ed. A. L. Beier et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989) and the postscript to Merchants and Revolution (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 638–716; Ellen M. Wood, The Pristine
Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); “The History of the
Market”, Monthly Review 46 (July/August 1994): 14–40; Democracy
Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (Garden City,
NY: Anchor Books, 1955).
6. Ellen Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism.
7. See François Guizot, Historical Essays and Lectures, ed. Stanley Mellon
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
182 G. C. COMNINEL
8. On this point, the great Marxist historians of the sans-culottes are clear:
Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sansculottes and the French Revolution, 1793–
4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); George Rudé, The Crowd in
the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1959).
9. This understanding of the French Revolution is central to the arguments
of Marx’s contributions to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher—see
MECW, vol. 3, 133–87. See also Marx’s argument against the politics of
his former friend Ruge in “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of
Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’”, MECW, vol. 3, 189–206, spe-
cifically citing Michel Chevalier on the bourgeois nature of the French
Revolution, and his later polemic against Karl Heinzen, “Moralizing
Criticism and Critical Morality”, MECW, vol. 6, 312–40, which first
appeared in the Deutsche-Brüsseler Zeitung in 1847.
10. I discuss this historiography in some detail in Rethinking the French
Revolution, dealing with the works of Guizot, Mignet, Thierry, and
Barnave, among others.
11. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1967), 147, 161, 189.
12. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957); Ellen M. Wood, The Origin of
Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), 21–6.
13. Henri de Saint-Simon, “The Catechism of the Industrialists”, in The
Political Thought of Saint-Simon, ed. G. Ionescu (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 182–203.
14. Michael Zmolek. Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill,
2013).
15. This is the central argument of Rethinking the French Revolution.
16. See T. H. Ashton and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian
Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Gwyn Williams,
“Twenty Years After”, in Artisans and Sans-Culottes: Popular Movements
in France and Britain During the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (London:
Libris, 1989), xiii–xlii.
17. As detailed in Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution.
18. See Brenner’s two articles in The Brenner Debate, as well as Wood, Pristine
Culture, and Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution.
19. I have pursued in some detail the unique character of the legal social prop-
erty relations that developed in England following the Norman Conquest
in “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant
Studies 27, no. 4 (July 2000), 1–53.
THE PUZZLE OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 183
20. While important changes did take place in agriculture in the Netherlands
and Flanders, these changes did not lead to development of the classic
“trinity formula” of landlords, capitalist tenant-farmers, and workers. The
Low Countries introduced many agrarian innovations that proved impor-
tant—not least when adopted in England—but they did not produce
agrarian capitalism. There was, however, no transformation to speak of in
the agriculture of France, Germany or Spain.
21. Marx’s insistence upon the difference between the capacity for merchants
to make profits in trading commodities and the specifically capitalist pro-
duction of surplus value is central to the approach I share with Wood and
Brenner. On the failure, even of many Marxists to recognize this distinc-
tion in the development of capitalism, see Robert Brenner, “On the Origins
of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New
Left Review 104 (1977): 25–92. For a clear exposition of Marx’s concep-
tion of capitalism and of the nature of work in capitalist society, see the first
few chapters of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). These chapters stand on their own,
notwithstanding the “monopoly capital” approach that figures later in the
book.
22. Wood, Origin of Capitalism; Comninel, “English Feudalism”.
23. E. P. Thompson was chiefly responsible for documenting this transforma-
tion and the resistance to it by the people of England, notably in The
Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)
and Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1991). A powerful
overview, however, was provided by Marx himself in the section on “The
So-Called Primitive Accumulation” which closes Capital, Volume I,
MECW, vol.35, 704ff. The classic account of the impact of enclosures is
that of R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New
York: Franklin, 1912). I discuss Tawney’s account and offer a critique of
the revisionist historians that have challenged it in “English Feudalism and
the Origins of Capitalism”.
24. It was Engels who offered the first intimation of this merger, identifying
the “struggle of capital and land against labour” in “Outlines of a Critique
of Political Economy”, in MECW, vol. 3, 434. Throughout Capital, Marx
deals with the two classes of workers and capitalists. In the final, unpub-
lished chapter of Volume 3 entitled “Classes” (Capital, Volume III,
MECW, vol. 37, 870–1), he returns to consider the trinity of landlord,
capitalist, and worker that appear in classical political economy, the very
classes with which he had first begun his critique in the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
25. Wood, Origin of Capitalism, pp. 35–7.
184 G. C. COMNINEL
39. Wood, Pristine Culture, and “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. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University,
1989).
40. Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought”.
41. Sir Thomas Smith, A Discourse of the Commonwealth of This Realm of
England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1969). For further discussion, see Neal Wood, Foundations of Political
Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
42. MECW, vol. 3, n117, 606, and Marx’s notebook excerpts from the
Mémoires de R. Levasseur, to which the note refers.
43. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 198–9.
44. Wood, “Popular Sovereignty”.
45. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3,
280.
46. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 498.
47. Ibid., 490.
48. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 108–9.
49. For a discussion of the French Revolution as a social revolution, and a
vindication of Georges Lefebvre’s views, shorn of the conventional gloss of
“bourgeois revolution” that he applied to them, see George Comninel,
“Quatre-vingt-neuf Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the
French Revolution”, Historical Papers—Communications historiques
(1989): 36–52.
50. George Rudé, Robespierre: Portrait of a Revolutionary Democrat (London:
Collins, 1975).
51. Soboul, The Parisian Sansculottes; Rudé, The Crowd in the French
Revolution.
52. Sewell, Work and Revolution, 219–22.
53. For a thorough exploration of this unique historical experience, see
Larry Patriquin, Agrarian Capitalism and Poor Relief in England, 1500–
1860: Rethinking the Origins of the Welfare State (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
54. See the discussion of the night of August 4, 1789, in “Quatre-vingt-neuf
Revisited”.
55. For a brilliant exploration of this theme, see Wood, Pristine Culture.
56. This is not, of course, to deny that crucial national differences continue to
exist, reflecting the specific historical experiences of capitalist development
in different precapitalist social contexts. Notwithstanding centuries of cul-
tural, religious, political, and economic interactions, the histories of Italy,
186 G. C. COMNINEL
Germany, France, and Spain have been very different. The persistence of
significant national differences is far easier to understand if capitalist devel-
opment is recognized to have been late, and external in origin, rather than
all of Western Europe presumed to have developed along a common path
for more than a millennium. Though greater homogeneity may lie in the
future of Europe, the historical legacies of national difference are unlikely
to fade any time soon.
57. The hopeful radical turns of left parties in Greece, Spain, and even Britain,
will have to be evaluated over the course of time.
CHAPTER 8
was adequate, the rest could be presumed. For this reason, the one aspect
of liberal ideology which remained largely uncriticized by Marx was his-
tory. The consequent failure of Marx’s “historical” formulations to
describe the conditions and processes of precapitalist class societies really
has no bearing on his lifework. It is the misguided efforts of Marxists to
construct a history of precapitalist modes of production from his paltry
sketches and retrospective analyses that are problematic; the errors in his
own published works do not significantly affect the purposes for which
they were intended.
If Marx’s failure to criticize liberal historical conceptions can be attrib-
uted to the fact that history lay outside his focus of study, the same cannot
fairly be said of those suggestions of economic or technological determin-
ism which can be found in his work. Correcting the impression that his-
torical materialism is economic determinism has been a major theme of
Marxist thought in recent years.1 Yet while it has been argued that eco-
nomic determinism contradicts Marx’s historical materialism, and runs
directly counter to the critique of political economy, it must be admitted
that support for such determinism can genuinely be found in a number of
the brief statements of their work that were made by Marx and Engels,
qualifications notwithstanding.
An inclination towards economic determinism—and at times the
straightforward embrace of it—has therefore persisted within Marxism.
The economic determinist argument—which may imply or even be frankly
stated in terms of a technological determinism, as in G. A. Cohen’s Karl
Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense—is rooted in the metaphor of “base
and superstructure”, as undeniably utilized by Marx and Engels, most
notably in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy.2 An exhaustive treatment of the subject of base and superstruc-
ture is not possible here, but from the foregoing discussion of the origins
and character of historical materialism, it should be clear that the point of
departure and continual focus of Marx’s central work was not “the eco-
nomic base” but class exploitation.
It was with relations of exploitive production—alienated labour—that
Marx began, not the idea of the determination of social behaviour by the
structured activities of production. Indeed, it was only in “The German
Ideology” that Marx came to state his basic historical conception of social
development in terms of determination by stages in the process of pro-
duction—terms which are strongly redolent of the liberal mode of subsis-
tence theory. All subsequent Marxist formulations of economic/technical
DEBATING MARX’S CONCEPTION OF CLASS IN HISTORY 189
determinism clearly are derived from that account. Yet, by attributing the
development of both class and property forms—and so, by his analysis,
the whole line of human social development—to the effects of the “divi-
sion of labour”, in a conception rooted in natural/technical processes,
Marx was engaging in the sort of abstract-formal and anachronistic analy-
sis which he soon came to criticize.
The social division of labour is found in all societies, “whether such divi-
sion be brought about or not by exchange of commodities”.8 The produc-
tion of commodities—which is the essential focus of Capital—is, of course,
predicated upon the social division of labour. This, however, does not
mean that the production of commodities is itself in any way a “natural”
necessity: on the contrary, the organization of social production based on
quite elaborate division of labour, without internal commodity exchange,
has existed in a number of societies, such as ancient Egypt.
Moreover, not only is there a basic difference between the production
of commodities, as such, and social division of labour in the production of
articles for use, but there is an even more profound difference between the
social production of commodities and the technical division of labour in
the workshop. The latter “is a special creation of the capitalist mode of
production alone”.9 Whereas the social division of labour is a means of
organizing social production as a whole, the division of labour in the
workshop is a specific means of maximizing the production of surplus
value for the capitalist. The “natural” drive to increase productivity, the
very association with the progress of technique, is specifically historical in
character:
“social”; but both production and society were still conceived by them in
the terms of political economy, and were not yet historicized by any criti-
cism of abstract-formal materialism.
Yet no more than a year passed before, in his next important work, The
Poverty of Philosophy, Marx explicitly criticized Proudhon precisely for his
anachronistic and technical conception of division of labour:
Here, Marx argued that it was not the natural unfolding of the division
of labour that gave rise to Adam Smith’s workshop, but rather the imposi-
tion of new social relations by the exercise of capital, which made possible
the workshop and made necessary the further increase in division of
labour.14 This analysis clearly belongs to the line of the critique of political
economy. Marx had already abandoned the problematic terminology of
“The German Ideology” and its tendency towards a natural-deterministic
conception of social development, and once again emphasized the role of
class relations instead.
Marx also had no reason to call into question the pervasively held gen-
eral historical interpretations of progress, which recast in class terms
seemed only to support his overall conception of history. He could not
have had reason to question them, unless he were to investigate precapital-
ist society seriously, on its own terms. Not only was the theory of bour-
geois revolution standard history, dramatically turned to serve Marx’s
purposes, but it recommended a historical precedent for proletarian class
revolution and evoked the memories of earlier popular action. Remembering
that Marx’s thought began with the class politics of the French Revolution,
it is not surprising that he never criticized liberal history as a whole.
In the second place, while a criticism of liberal materialism was implicit
in the developed critique of political economy, the liberal materialist pre-
sumption that social development followed from economic development
did appear to provide an adequate account for the dynamic of liberal class
history. The contradiction was not immediately apparent, and without cre-
ating an entire alternative history, it would have been difficult to specify
any different dynamic. After “The German Ideology”, of course, Marx did
not attempt actually and specifically to describe the dynamic of class history
(and he never published that work). Instead, a simple correlation of the
stages of social relations of production with stages of the forces of produc-
tion continued to offer a convenient framework for history and an apparent
explanation for the emergence of classes. The ambiguity created by endow-
ing the “forces of production” with a broadly social definition appeared to
raise the argument above the level of determination by the division of
labour, per se—without actually contradicting it. This ambiguity can only
be resolved in favour of either the economic determinism of base/super-
structure or the dynamism of class exploitation in the social relations of
production. Historical materialism clearly, if implicitly, requires the latter.
A similar approach to explaining this ambiguity in Marx’s overall con-
ception of historical development is offered by Melvin Rader in his some-
what problematic Marx’s Interpretation of History. Rader asserts that
Marx’s mature insights are most faithfully expressed in the metaphor of
organic structure—which implies that the political and the economic are
inseparable, and that “production in its organic totality is internally related
to ‘moments’ that are not usually thought of as economic”; in short, that
society as an organic whole is characterized by class.18 Yet, he argues, there
remained a need for the base/superstructure metaphor also, in order to
emphasize the priority of production within this structure, as opposed to
the role of consciousness.
196 G. C. COMNINEL
a very considerable part of that work – the major part – could be taken just
as “what the English call ‘the principles of Political Economy’”: an analytic
critique of the existing “science”, and an exposition of an alternative “sci-
ence”, of economic functions, relations, and laws. That is, if we did not (for
exterior “reasons” of value) disapprove of exploitation, waste and suffering,
then we would find ourselves presented with an alternative lawed structure
of economic relations.22
We have often been told that Marx had a “method”, that this method lies
somewhere in the region of dialectical reason, and that this constitutes the
essence of Marxism. It is therefore strange that, despite many allusions, and
several expressions of intent, Marx never wrote this essence down … If he
had found the clue to the universe, he would have set a day or two aside to
put it down. We may conclude from this that it was not written because it
could not be written, any more than Shakespeare or Stendahl could have
reduced their art to a clue. For it was not a method but a practice, and a
practice learned through practicing.24
the form of exploitation, nor its pervasive penetration of the whole fabric
of society. Yet it remains true that even Marx’s historical materialist analysis
of capitalism was never completed, or even advanced in properly historical
terms. The analysis of precapitalist societies—including the history of the
transition to capitalism—was never even attempted. The task of historical
materialism still lies ahead: to improve and extend the analysis of capitalist
society, and to make a comparable analysis for the rest of class history.
On the whole, this history will have little to do with Marx’s retrospective
glances at the antecedents to the political economic categories with which
he was primarily concerned. In general, Marx’s specific suppositions can be
expected to be proved wrong. Yet it is not hard to perceive that his overall
conception of history will be vindicated. There is much that can be recov-
ered from the histories that have already been written. And already in
Thompson’s and Brenner’s works can be found that focus on the concrete
history of class relations and the balance of class struggle which is essential
to historical materialism. Particularly in the contributions they have made
to the history of the transition to capitalism, the leading edge of historical
materialism can be seen emerging from the heavy fog of “Marxist theory”.
While a historical materialist interpretation of the French Revolution can
only truly follow from a great deal more work upon the society that lay
behind it—and not the society that lay ahead—the present work would not
be complete without some effort to anticipate how the method outlined
here might reveal a structure of exploitive class relations in the ancien régime
and relate it to the political conflict of “bourgeois” and “aristocrats”. The
conclusion which follows will, therefore, offer a preliminary historical syn-
thesis, incorporating most of the data the revisionists have used to criticize
the social interpretation. The evidence clearly suggests that the Revolution
was indeed the direct result of the conflicts and contradictions generated by
class relations of exploitation in the ancien régime, though in a fundamen-
tally different way than is usually associated with “bourgeois revolution”.
Notes
1. The work of Lucio Colletti can be cited, particularly his essays “Marxism as
Sociology” and “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International”,
both in Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (New York, London:
Monthly Review Press, 1972), 3–108; and “The Theory of the Crash”,
Telos 13 (1972): 34–46, reprinted in Bart Grahl, and Paul Piccone, Towards
a New Marxism (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973). Raymond Williams’ critical
202 G. C. COMNINEL
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic
organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the
comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the struc-
ture and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out
of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered
remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed
explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the
anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the sub-
ordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher
development is already known.1
My work has much in common with Ellen Meiksins Wood, whose con-
tribution to Musto’s book, “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms which p
recede
Capitalist Production’”,2 considers both the historical problems in Marx’s
specific formulations in the Grundrisse and the extent to which his overall
historical materialist analysis is nonetheless vindicated. My intention here is
to approach some of the same ideas from a somewhat different angle.
Marx does not begin his analysis in the Grundrisse historically and does
not start with an account of the “Forms which precede Capitalist
Production”. Instead, setting out to address “Production, Consumption,
Distribution, Exchange” as general categories of economic analysis, he
begins with “material production”. From the very start, however, he con-
trasts his critical approach with that of the political economists:
for example, peasants are not compelled to sell any surplus that they may
retain after meeting their obligations to the owners of the land and/or the
state. If market prices are high, they may indeed put effort into producing
more to take advantage of this opportunity. When prices are low, however,
they will instead be inclined to produce less, because it is not worth the
effort to produce the maximum, and by this means they may reduce sup-
ply to an extent that will restore prices to what is understood to be a nor-
mal level. They are, in any event, in control of the means of production—even
if they do not own them—and in possessing the means to produce their
own subsistence, the market remains for them only an opportunity, not a
means of compulsion.
emerge from nor was grounded in any historical narrative. It did not even
follow from recounting history as context for theoretical analysis. Instead,
it emerged immediately from the critique of political economy, and was
pursued in the systematic terms of his method of critique.
Within the articulation of his critique of political economy, his insights
into precapitalist forms of society are integral to the development of his
analysis of the capitalist mode of production.
societies of ancient and medieval Europe are known in greater detail, and with
greater certainty, than at any previous time in the modern era. It should not
be surprising, therefore, that Marx’s directly historical accounts contain sup-
positions that have since been disproved.
But what is perhaps even more significant is that Marx explicitly gave
credit to “the liberal historians” for uncovering of the role of class in his-
tory,11 without distinguishing between their liberal ideas about classes and
his own historical materialist conception of classes engaged in antagonistic
relationships of exploitation. In many cases, as Ellen Wood, Robert Brenner,
and I have argued, those liberal accounts were constructed in directly ideo-
logical terms. Marx never undertook a critique of historical ideas compa-
rable to his critique of political economy, so their liberal ideology, prejudices,
and presuppositions escaped serious scrutiny. As a result, not only much of
the detail but even basic historical concepts that Marx incorporated into
the historical accounts within his work are neither accurate nor really
Marxist. Those places in his critique of liberal political economy where
Marx found himself compelled to differentiate that which was specific to
capitalism from that which was precapitalist are strikingly different from
this broad and relatively uncritical appropriation of historical ideas grounded
upon liberal ideological formulations. His recognition of the development
through history of the social forms and relations between labour and capi-
tal already was evident in his 1844 manuscripts. At that time, he had as yet
only an inkling of the relationship between earlier forms of the alienation
of labour and fully developed capitalist society, but he conceived of the
development of relations of surplus appropriation as “the movement of
property” through history. While he did not at this point recognize that
there were qualitatively different forms of society along the way, he already
conceived historical development in these terms:
Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its
secret, appear again, namely that on the one hand it is the product of
alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alien-
ates itself, the realization of this alienation.12
This clearly intimates that capital is distinct as the most fully developed
form of property relationship, though it does not yet distinguish between
that which is capitalist and that which is precapitalist.
The methodological assertion of just such a distinction in the
Introduction to the Grundrisse marks a huge advance in historical materi-
alist analysis. In drawing attention to the difference between the anatomy
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND THE SPECIFICITY OF CAPITALISM 209
of the ape and that of the human, Marx articulated the existence of quali-
tatively different social contexts, in which apparently identical social forms
of property and economic interaction may have very different characteris-
tics and implications. Then, on this basis, recognizing that capitalist soci-
ety contains the most fully developed social property relations, he pointed
to the analytical potential for learning about earlier forms precisely in
comparison with the later ones. It goes without saying that, as a dialectical
thinker, Marx also recognized that this use of the developed form to illu-
minate the earlier also offers the potential of shedding light on the pro-
cesses of development themselves.
One particular example that Marx pursues in these terms is labour,
which “seems a quite simple category”, and which “in this general form—
labour as such—is also immeasurably old”.13 “Nevertheless,” he contin-
ues, “when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as
modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstrac-
tion.” Marx had already, in his 1844 manuscripts, come to recognize that
the most fundamental capitalist social relations had a profoundly abstract
character, which he articulated in terms of the alienation of labour. Indeed,
as noted in Chap. 3, at the end of the first section of his manuscript,
“Wages of Labour”—beginning with the stark assertion that “Wages are
determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker”14—he
posed a question that both summed up what the political economists had
themselves revealed about the antagonistic relations between labour and
capital, and his appreciation of its significance for the whole of history:
“What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction
of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?”
This abstract character is precisely a manifestation of the alienation of
labour that he analyses in detail in the subsequent section, “Estranged
Labour”. This alienation of labour is at the very heart of the capitalist
system and is the fundamental form of class exploitation, and as such, the
origin of property rather than its consequence. While, as is well known,
Marx does not use the terminology of alienation in Capital, it is telling
that he does use it in the Grundrisse, in the chapter on Capital:
Production based on exchange value, on whose surface this free and equal
exchange of equivalents proceeds, is at its base the exchange of objectified
labour as exchange value for living labour as use value, or, to express this in
another way, the relating of labour to its objective conditions – and hence to
the objectivity created by itself – as alien property: alienation [Entäusserung]
of labour.15
210 G. C. COMNINEL
It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer remains
the “possessor” of the means of production and labour conditions necessary
for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property relationship
must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude, so
that the direct producer is not free … Under such conditions the surplus-
labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by
other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be.19
then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from
this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no
stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection
to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in
the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. But, on the other
hand, no private ownership of land exists, although there is both private and
common possession and use of land.20
with liberal materialism have long endured within the body of Marxist
theory. Marx’s own work, however, was thereafter primarily focused on
specifically capitalist society, and with ever-increasing acuity he came to
criticize the quintessential liberal ideology of political economy.
This development by Marx of a consistent and thorough critique of
political economy, over the whole course of his work from 1844 to the
posthumously published volumes of Capital, coincides with the real devel-
opment of historical materialism, and particularly its increasing realization
by Marx in practice. The key to this development was Marx’s growing
appreciation of the historical specificity of the categories of political econ-
omy. For, at the same time that his critique exposed the specific class char-
acter of political economic categories in capitalism, it also laid the basis for
criticizing the ideological conceptions of previous class societies. It has
already been noted that the very concept of “the economy”, or even “the
economic”, is necessarily specific to capitalist society, with its uniquely
economic form of exploitive surplus extraction. A major point of this work
is that Marx’s study of this unique form of class exploitation, through his
critique of political economy, provides a guide for understanding the nec-
essarily quite different terms of analysis of extra-economic surplus extrac-
tion in precapitalist societies.
Perhaps the clearest discussion by Marx of the historically specific eco-
nomic categories of capitalist society—such fundamental concepts as
property, labour, and exchange—occurs in the section on the method of
political economy in the Grundrisse.
Marx’s work is full of the presentation of previous forms “as steps leading
up to” the forms of capitalism—but there is no unintentional irony in this
statement. For Marx’s extensive retrospective use of history in Capital was
conscious, informed precisely by these insights of the Grundrisse, and
intended to reveal the class character of these supposedly timeless forms. It
is only subsequent Marxists who have taken this “history” written retro-
spectively from the point of view of capitalism to represent history, per se.
214 G. C. COMNINEL
Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been his-
tory, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions
of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of
bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as
such, eternal.23
In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set
of entirely different social relations. Thus to define bourgeois property is
nothing else than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois
production.
To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a
category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion
of metaphysics or jurisprudence.24
The continuity between the critical thought in this passage and that in the
Grundrisse a decade later is striking. Whereas “property” was in 1844
treated as a simple category—though one which had history—already by
1847, before the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx conceived prop-
erty relations to be historically specific expressions of the antagonistic rela-
tions of production fundamental to each particular epoch.
Marx had, then, already substantially arrived at the conceptual founda-
tions of historical materialism. Its development followed from his percep-
tion that the central dynamic of “historical movement” lay in the evolution
of alienated social production—that history was the history of class exploi-
tation and struggle. The essential accomplishment of historical materialist
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND THE SPECIFICITY OF CAPITALISM 215
thought to this point had been to grasp the historical specificity of capital-
ist social relations as one stage in the development of exploitive social
production.
This overview of historical development did, of course, imply some
actual succession of equally specific class epochs—each social mode of pro-
duction being developmentally linked with those preceding and follow-
ing. The essential point was that capitalism, too, was such an epoch of class
society and that it too would be superseded. It has already been suggested
that the historical details which Marx attached to this overview were drawn
from ideologically liberal historical conceptions of ancient slavery, feudal
agriculture, and bourgeois progress. The extent to which his conception
of the succession of epochs, particularly in “The German Ideology”, was
influenced by the century-old theory of stages of subsistence must of
course be considered carefully. Yet with regard to the overview itself,
Marx’s central critical perception remains: in capitalism, the social devel-
opment of relations of alienated labour and class relations have reached a
logical terminus—the condition of universal commodification, encom-
passing even living human labour-power, as he came to express it.
The essential concepts of historical materialism—the historical over-
view, the fundamental role of class exploitation, the specificity of relations
of production in each epoch—were, then, developed through the critique
of political economy. The original formulation was suggested by Marx’s
critical treatment of “private property”, as an expression—not the cause—
of alienated labour. By this, he attributed to property a process of origina-
tion and a history of development. This leap beyond the merely economic
conception of property as a “natural” category was embodied in his critical
recognition of the simultaneously exploitive and historical character of
property relations. Through all of Marx’s work, the two essential strategies
of historical materialist analysis in criticizing liberal ideology were to reveal
its class content, and to identify the historical specificity of its concepts.
The only systematic application of this critical historical materialist
approach was to be in Marx’s lifelong study of capitalist class society.
Although he never completed the major project of analysing world capital-
ist society that he set for himself—which, according to the Grundrisse, was
to have included “[c]oncentration of bourgeois society in the form of the
state”25—the fundamental class analysis provided by Capital can be ade-
quately supplemented by inferences from the major works of Marx’s con-
temporary political analysis. Together, these form a consistent and integral
picture of capitalist class society as it existed in Marx’s lifetime, a genuinely
historical materialist analysis, rooted in the critique of political economy.
216 G. C. COMNINEL
The general theory of historical materialism requires only that there should
be a succession of modes of production, though not necessarily any particu-
lar modes, and perhaps not in any particular predetermined order.28
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 105.
2. Ellen M. Wood, “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms which precede Capitalist
Production’”, in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of
Political Economy 150 Years Later, ed. Marcello Musto (London: Routledge,
2008), 79–92.
3. Ibid., 83.
4. Ibid., 84.
5. Ibid.
6. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson, “The Place of
Economies in Societies” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, eds.
Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, IL:
Free Press, 1957).
7. Norman Levine, Divergent Paths: Hegel in Marxism and Engelsism
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 214.
8. Marx, Grundrisse, 102.
218 G. C. COMNINEL
Theory and History
The relationship between theory and history has long been a problem for
Marxists.1 Although the general form of Karl Marx’s critical analysis of
class societies can rightly be characterized as “historical materialism”,
there is an obvious imbalance between his extensive study of class relations
in contemporary capitalist society and limited observations on precapital-
ist class relations. Having considered the historical materialist analysis of
precapitalist societies, we must now consider how Marx’s critique of polit-
ical economy relates to history.
As mentioned in previous chapters, Marx devoted decades of study and
thousands of pages of manuscripts to the capitalist mode of production.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, he did not provide a comparably compre-
hensive and historically accurate account of any precapitalist form of class
society, let alone all of them. Indeed, he produced no canonical statement
even of what precapitalist modes of production he supposed had existed.
His various statements are mostly off-hand, and sometimes contradictory.2
Even more to the point, Marx and Engels uncritically credited the “bour-
geois historians” with having discovered the existence of classes and histori-
cal development of class struggles,3 despite the fact that liberal historical
ideas about class never included the idea of exploitation, to say nothing of
its being defined by specific, antagonistic relations between classes that—as
Capitalism and Commodities
At the heart of prevailing conceptions of capitalism is the market exchange
of things. Of course, beyond the substantial commodities of agriculture
and industry, commodified services became important during the twenti-
eth century, though they certainly existed earlier. The growing impor-
tance of information commodities, especially in digital form, is a cliché of
contemporary commentary. What truly is significant, however, is less the
CAPITAL AS A SOCIAL RELATION 221
Exploitation and Property
As noted in Chap. 2, Marx first addressed the question of property in the sec-
tion of the 1844 manuscripts known as “Estranged Labour”. The analysis is
unlike anything that had previously been argued in social or political theory,
though Marx accepted (and later greatly improved) the labour theory of
value articulated by the political economists. He pointed out that “[p]olitical
economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us”,
and against this asserted, “Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial
condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain.” He then
declared that “[w]e proceed from an actual economic fact.”
CAPITAL AS A SOCIAL RELATION 223
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more
his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever
cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of
the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world
of things. Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the
worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces com-
modities in general.
This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces –
labour’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of
the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in
an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour.
Labour’s realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions
this realisation of labour appears as loss of realisation for the workers; objec-
tification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement,
as alienation.10
“Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary conse-
quence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to
nature and to himself.”11
Marx achieves two crucial objectives in this analysis. First, he establishes
that it is through the seemingly simple production of commodities under
the capitalist system of wage labour that workers are immediately exploited.
Private property in the means of production is a social relationship—not a
thing—and the means by which the fruits of previously achieved exploita-
tion are brought to bear, through antagonistic relations of wage labour, to
increase the property of the employer without regard to the well-being of
the worker. Second, this exploitation realized in the private property of
means of production—capital—is the underlying power controlling the
processes of social reproduction, a totalizing system grounded in the
relentless logic of that property’s self-expansion.
Capital is thus the governing power over labour and its products. The capi-
talist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human quali-
ties, but inasmuch as he is an owner of capital. His power is the purchasing
power of his capital, which nothing can withstand.
Later we shall see first how the capitalist, by means of capital, exercises his
governing power over labour, then, however, we shall see the governing
power of capital over the capitalist himself.12
its previous limitation of being grounded in land, thus “dealing the death-
blow to rent – that last, individual, natural mode of private property and
source of wealth existing independently of the movement of labour, that
expression of feudal property”.13
All wealth has become industrial wealth, the wealth of labour; and industry
is accomplished labour, just as the factory system is the perfected essence of
industry, that is of labour, and just as industrial capital is the accomplished
objective form of private property.
We can now see how it is only at this point that private property can
complete its dominion over man and become, in its most general form, a
world-historical power.14
His purpose is instead “to reveal their differences and, in so doing, inescap-
ably to raise the question of how capitalism, as a specific and unprecedented
social form, came into being—not simply as a maturation of earlier forms
but as a transformation”. As Wood concludes, Marx’s method both stresses
the specificity of each economic formation and compels us to locate the
“principles of motion from one to another” not in universal historical forces,
but within the dynamics of each social form itself.18 This conception of social
transformation through internal development, reaching a point of rupture
that results in a fundamentally new social formation, with different principles
of motion—a transformation necessarily unintended from the perspective of
the prior social forms—is at the heart of the historicization of capitalism in
Marx’s critique of political economy, and the materialist approach to history
realized through it.
In addition to the 1857 “Introduction”, there are points in Capital
where Marx finds it necessary to clarify the distinctiveness of capitalist
social relations by means of contrast with precapitalist social forms.19 His
chapter on “Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent” in Volume III offers
notable insights into precapitalist class relations, and how modes of pro-
duction should be conceived; but Section VIII of Volume I, “The
So-Called Primitive Accumulation”, particularly focusses on the transition
to the capitalist mode of production. Close consideration of this transition
yields a better understanding of capital as the fundamental social relation
of our epoch, and motive force behind the fetishism of commodities. This
is particularly valuable for distinguishing between social formations in
which capitalist relations of production genuinely are present, and those in
which the circulation of commodities must be judged to occur in a pre-
capitalist context.
There has, unfortunately, been profound and widespread misunderstand-
ing among non-specialists about feudal social relations, and endless, largely
pointless debate about the meaning of feudalism.20 Marxist theorists have
for the most part failed even to recognize what Marx himself had to say on
the subject, and have focussed on entirely wrong aspects of medieval society.
In consequence, they have had enormous difficulty making sense of the
transition from feudalism to capitalism.21 A significant advance in Marxist
historical understanding, however, came with historian Robert Brenner’s
argument that the primary transformation of social relations of production
in the transition from feudalism to capitalism occurred in agriculture, not
manufactures.22 Ellen Wood, particularly, has drawn out the implications of
Brenner’s work with respect to the agrarian origin of capitalism, providing
crucial perspective with which to approach Marx’s analysis.23
CAPITAL AS A SOCIAL RELATION 227
The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be
none other than the process which takes away from the laborer the posses-
sion of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand,
the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other,
the immediate producers into wage-laborers. The so-called primitive accu-
mulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing
the producer from the means of production.27
As Marx also observed, “In England alone, which we take as our exam-
ple, has it the classic form.” The history of agrarian social relations was
indeed very different in other societies, both European and non-European,
as Wood and Brenner emphasize in their work. While, therefore, the anal-
ysis set out in Capital is both historically accurate and extraordinarily
revealing with respect to the processes of social transformation, one can-
not generalize from this to developments elsewhere. It is, however, by
recognizing in detail the historically specific form of this radical transfor-
mation that we can truly come to understand the unique character of capi-
talist society.
tenures persisted alongside freehold, and freehold might lie either within
open fields or outside their regulation, in principle, the entire structure of
customary feudal holdings and manorial regulation of production could be
eliminated, leaving a fully developed property system in place. Where free-
hold proprietors agreed—or “unity of possession” existed—the system of
customary tenures and open-field regulation could simply be extinguished.
This was the real meaning of enclosure; fencing or hedging was merely a
consequence, where it occurred at all. This explains why the process of
enclosure—the single most dramatic transformation in law and social rela-
tions of production in early modern Europe—was unique to England.
When enclosures began in the late fifteenth century, relatively few cus-
tomary tenants actually were evicted because population had fallen so dra-
matically over the previous hundred years, and peasants often exercised
newly won freedom to move to more advantageous land. Much less arable
land was required for a population one-third or less of that in 1300. Living
standards were high, inflation underway, and prices rose more quickly for
livestock products than for grain. Despite mistaken ideas of a “natural
economy” persisting under feudalism, the many charges levied in money
by seigneurs, pervasive re-coinage under seigneurial jurisdiction, and the
enormous growth of trade coinciding with unprecedented population
growth between 1050 and 1250, all speak to the familiarity with markets
of lords and peasants alike before enclosures. In England’s west midlands,
in villages outside zones of strict open-field production—where less inten-
sive regulation and prior enclosures readily accommodated pastoral pro-
duction—population levels were sustained, in contrast to the depopulation
and many deserted villages of open-field zones.29 Peasants voted with their
feet to engage in more remunerative types of production.
The truly significant transformation, however, occurred where open-
field regulation had been intensive, and feudal-era closed fields were rare.
When proprietors in these areas enclosed their fields—especially landlords
completely replacing open-field peasant production with sheep runs leased
to graziers—they were not taking advantage of existing flexibility. Instead,
they exercised freehold property rights against the whole framework of
established agrarian society. Even where few, if any, tenants were evicted—
perhaps a depopulated hilltop village, surrounded by less-exposed villages
with better soil—the fact that centuries-old messuages might be pulled
down, and the ancient rotation of fields replaced by large flocks and a few
shepherds, supported the view expressed in Thomas More’s Utopia: sheep
had become man-eating beasts.30
CAPITAL AS A SOCIAL RELATION 231
sustained, and land itself became just another commodity. For the first
time anywhere, production of exchange values became so divorced from
use values that peasant society itself—the norm since agriculture devel-
oped, and basis for “civilisation” itself—became expendable and began to
disappear. By the nineteenth century, though pockets of smallholding
farming survived (mostly in dairy), and people still lived in the country,
peasant society was gone.
In place of control by direct producers and the community, enclosure
put determination of what was produced and how solely in the hands of
the owners of the means of production. After centuries of strict customary
regulation, custom was debarred in law. No immediate community ratio-
nale existed (though political economy would develop a defence of
market- oriented self-interest as public policy). Production increasingly
was conceived in terms of the self-expansion of wealth in commodities,
and even before this logic was carried into manufactures, the wealth of
England’s landlords and capitalist tenant-farmers rose to world-historic
levels. This agrarian transformation “freed” most labouring people from
the land their ancestors worked, making them available to work for wages
in expanded cottage industry, and then capitalist factories.
While enclosure did not result in the immediate subsumption of labour
to capital, that essential condition for increasing relative surplus value would
not have been possible had control over the social relations of production
not been wrested from producers and their communities. As Marx observed
in 1844, capital is power over labour and its products, power by which
alienated labour is appropriated. This globally transforming social relation,
without which the capitalist mode of production could not exist, was first
forged in the so-called primitive accumulation of English enclosures.
Notes
1. Ellen M. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical
Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
2. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, Precapitalist Economic Formations (New
York: International Publishers, 1965).
3. Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, MECW, vol. 39, 62–5;
Frederick Engels to Walter Borgius, January 25, 1894, MECW, vol. 50,
264–7.
4. In addition to the above, see Ellen M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism
(London: Verso, 2002).
5. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974), 403.
CAPITAL AS A SOCIAL RELATION 233
While Locke acknowledged that it was labour that put the “difference of
value upon every thing”, and the classical political economists recognized
that behind the fact of normal or average prices there had to be some
comparability of the labour expended in production, the implications of
these assertions were never taken to the extent of a truly total social con-
ception of production. Thereafter, in the wake of the shift to marginal
utility theory and the emphasis upon arbitrary individual desire as estab-
lishing value, liberal thought has consistently denied that there can be any
intrinsic basis for the equivalence of commodities. Yet, where the capitalist
mode of production exists, commodities do not first exist as individually
constituted entities and then come into relation through the subjective
will of their possessors. Rather, from the start, they exist in relation to each
other as elements in a social totality.
Marx acknowledged that the immediate appearance of exchange was as
a form of arbitrary agreement between free individuals: “Exchange-value
appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently
an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably connected
with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.”8 But, he
went on to observe, the fact that they can be related in regular proportions
under normal conditions, within a systemic whole, means that they must
have something in common that can explain such a consistent quantitative
relationship.
His embrace of the labour theory of value was therefore not simply a
restatement of the view held by Locke and Smith. It was instead grounded
in the idea that within capitalist society there exists a social totality of com-
modities that is the true summation of the social production of wealth.
Since within this totality, any and every commodity necessarily must be
able to be related to any and every other, all that they can possibly be said
to have in common is that they are in some measure the product of human
labour: “there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are
reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract”.9
This conception is based upon the broadest possible conception of labour
as the basis of total social production. Marx again writes, “The total labour
power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all
commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous
mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable indi-
vidual units.”10 This holistic conception of the commodity, and of the
capitalist mode of production as inherently a social totality, is fundamental
to Marx’s thought.
240 G. C. COMNINEL
At the same time, as he was quick to point out, such an abstract totality
cannot be presumed to be characteristic of all societies. Indeed, also within
the first section of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, Marx
noted that production of wealth in the form of use values in feudal society
was not predicated on the production of commodities:
The medieval peasant produced quit-rent corn for his feudal lord and tithe-
corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent corn not the tithe-corn became
commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others.
To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it
will serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange.11
And so, within the first six of more than 2000 pages of Capital, we are
presented with a qualitative difference between the capitalist mode of pro-
duction and what, by reference to both his prior and subsequent analyses,
can ultimately be said to be all previous forms of human society. It is the
capitalist mode of production alone that is structured around the produc-
tion of commodities: use values embodying the most abstract possible
form of human labour as the basis for exchange, through which social
production in its totality is regulated. Other forms of society have also
involved the production of use values for enjoyment not only by the indi-
vidual producer but by exploitive others. They have not, however, in any
comparable way been predicated upon the abstraction inherent in the spe-
cifically capitalist commodity form as both an expression of and means to
realize the social totality of production.
After Marx himself, perhaps the best-known exponent of this recogni-
tion that capitalism differs qualitatively from all precapitalist societies with
respect to the role of the commodity has been Karl Polanyi. Polanyi is an
important figure, but his ideas are not without serious problems in several
ways. What is most significant in his work is precisely that he fundamen-
tally distinguishes precapitalist from capitalist societies on the basis of the
commodity (or market) becoming the very basis for social organization in
the latter.12 Polanyi acknowledged that human societies have generally
been characterized by forms of organization predicated upon basic prin-
ciples of social unity. Early human societies were fundamentally character-
ized by some combination of two basic principles of collective integration:
redistribution and reciprocity.13 These forms of organizing what might
from a capitalist perspective be described as economic interaction gener-
ally are integrated with other forms of social relationship, such as kinship.
CAPITAL AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 241
comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value. “It is,
however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensura-
ble”—ie., qualitatively equal. Such an equalization can only be something
foreign to their real nature, consequently only “a makeshift for practical
purposes”.17
While there always were wage workers in European precapitalist class soci-
eties, their labour—as Marx noted—was never systematically organized
and controlled by those who employed them, nor did markets regulate the
processes of production in which they were employed. Workers instead
were hired to do work of a well-defined sort, in labour processes that they
themselves understood and directly controlled. Even in such precapitalist
factories as occasionally existed, labour processes were controlled by guilds,
laws, tradition, and the workers themselves, not by owners of capital.
There were significant factories in pre-Revolutionary France, but the
workers in them wandered about more or less as they pleased, taking
impromptu breaks and the like.26 One can exaggerate the extent of this
autonomous control over production by direct producers, but it was
nonetheless very real, especially in contrast to the development of capital-
ist factories in England in the period after 1780. Indeed, in France, the
primary exponent of control over commodity production was the state,
which increasingly licensed and regulated producers and closely dictated
standards. In Normandy, the cottage industry of woollen weavers, through
CAPITAL AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 245
Let us now rise above the level of political economy and examine the ideas
developed above, taken almost word for word from the political economists,
for the answers to these two questions:
(1) What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction
of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?
(2) What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who
either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of
the working class or regard equality of wages (as Proudhon does) as
the goal of social revolution?36
CAPITAL AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 247
then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from
this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no
stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection
to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in
the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. But, on the other
hand, no private ownership of land exists, although there is both private and
common possession and use of land.48
The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out
of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it
grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a deter-
mining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the
economic community which grows up out of the production relations them-
selves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct
relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct pro-
ducers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the
development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity –
which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social struc-
ture and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and
dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.49
There is, as noted several times above, no single statement that should
ever be taken to encapsulate the whole of Marx’s method for analysing
modes of production, but this certainly provides a clear guide to a most
fundamental consideration.
At the same time, this statement is directly associated with Marx’s class
analysis of two different modes of production having the same foundation
in terms of the forces of production or material conditions of social repro-
duction: self-reproducing peasant households. Marx does nothing here to
freight his conception of the first, so-called Asiatic mode of production—
which may not reflect the social realities of any Asian society in the modern
era, but certainly corresponds to societies in Bronze Age Greece, the
CAPITAL AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 251
ancient Near East and Asia, and precolonial America—with any supposition
of hydraulic agriculture, nor does he in any other way distinguish its pro-
duction from the second, feudal, case. For this reason, his reference to “a
definite stage in the development of the methods of labour” cannot be
taken to mean that any deterministic relationship exists between forms of
production and social relations of class exploitation. It must, instead, be
taken simply to express a limitation on the forms that such relations can
take relative to social productive capacities.
The significance of Marx having conceived two different “modes of pro-
duction” with identical grounding in terms of both technological forces of
production and social relations of production—evident in the form of vil-
lages of peasant households—cannot be overemphasized. Perry Anderson
recognized this to the extent that he insisted on including the conception
of hydraulic society in the (so-called) Asiatic mode of production, though
there is nothing in Marx’s work to sustain this point.50 Clearly, there can be
no immediate correlation between forces and relations of production and
modes of production if two separate modes of production are based on the
same forces and relations—as Marx seems clearly to have intended here.
Notes
1. None of the successful revolutions of the twentieth century have ever been
argued to have occurred in developed capitalist societies; the few potentially-
or quasi-revolutionary episodes (as in 1919) never came close to success.
2. See, for example, these Internet videos: George Magnus, “Give Karl Marx a
Chance to Save the World Economy: George Magnus”, Bloomberg View
(August 29, 2011). Nouriel Roubini, Karl Marx Was Right (August 16, 2011).
http://www.wsj.com/video/nouriel-roubini-karl-marx-was-right/
68EE8F89-EC24-42F8-9B9D-47B510E473B0.html.
3. The term originated in a critique of the work of Robert Brenner by Guy
Bois, but has since been accepted by most working within the approach.
Another term, preferred by Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism:
Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict,
1620–1877 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), is “Capital-centric Marxism”, resonating
with the argument here.
4. See Harvey Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1984); Ellen M. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical
Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a critical
account, see Paul Blackledge, “Political Marxism”, in Critical Companion
to Contemporary Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009).
CAPITAL AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 253
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1967).
31. I briefly discuss this in both Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins
of Capitalism”, and “Feudalism”.
32. See Comninel, “Revolution in History”.
33. In addition to my works cited above, see Marcello Musto, “The Formation
of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. From the Studies of 1843 to the
Grundrisse”, Socialism and Democracy 24, no. 2 (2010): 66–100; Marcello
Musto, “Marx En París: Los Manuscritos Económico- Filosóficos de
1844”, in Tras Las Huellas de Un Fantasma. La Actualidad de Karl Marx
(Mexico: D.F.: SIGLO XXI, 2011).
34. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3,
235.
35. Ibid., 241.
36. Ibid.
37. E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory”, in The Poverty of Theory and
Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1984), 74.
38. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 35–7.
39. Karl Marx, “Introduction”, MECW, vol. 28, 42; George C. Comninel,
“Die Anatomie Des Affen Verstehen: Historischer Materialismus Und Die
Spezifik Des Kapitalismus”, Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung 84
(2010): 104–15.
40. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 293ff.
41. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW,
vol. 29, 263.
42. See Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations
(New York: International Publishers, 1965).
43. K. Marx, Capital, Volume III, MECW, vol. 37, 325.
44. Ibid., 769.
45. Ibid., 734ff.
46. Ibid., 776.
47. Ibid., 776–7.
48. Ibid., 777.
49. Ibid., 777–8.
50. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: N.L.B., 1974),
“B. ‘The Asiatic Mode of Production’”, 462–549. Anderson argues that
such a mode of production—following the terms of his definition—never
existed.
51. Ibid., 403–48.
52. Ibid.
53. See especially Chaps. 2 and 7 above.
CHAPTER 12
such as the American Civil War, the conflicts attending unification in Italy
and Germany, the Polish uprising, and the Irish struggle for indepen-
dence. Then, with the end of the decade came the Franco-Prussian War—
the last major European war before 1914—and the Paris Commune.
It was, in fact, out of efforts to forge international working-class politi-
cal solidarity that the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) came
into being on September 28, 1864.6 What is striking is the extent to which
it was the International, born entirely from a working-class initiative, that
seized and imposed itself on Marx. Not only did he have nothing to do
with the idea in the first place, but his correspondence in the years before
this historic turning point suggests that, if anything, he might have been
expected to have been sceptical, and to have kept aloof from it.
Only six months earlier, Engels had remarked with respect to the pos-
sibility of reissuing his The Condition of the Working Class in England that
“this is not a suitable moment in any case, now that the English proletar-
iat’s revolutionary energy has all but completely evaporated and the
English proletarian has declared himself in full agreement with the domi-
nancy of the bourgeoisie”.7 Writing back the following day, Marx men-
tioned that he had attended the large meeting called by the London
Trades Union Council on March 26 to support the Northern states in
their struggle to end slavery and oppose possible British intervention on
the side of the South. “The working men themselves spoke very well
indeed”, he noted, “without a trace of bourgeois rhetoric or the faintest
attempt to conceal their opposition to the capitalists.” Yet he continued,
“How soon the English workers will throw off what seems to be a bour-
geois contagion remains to be seen.”8
Beyond scepticism as to the readiness of the working class, he was now
deeply committed to completing his theoretical critique of political econ-
omy and the capitalist system. In the period of his responding to Vogt, he
had good reason to emphasize that the Communist League belonged to
history, that it was he himself who had moved to dissolve it years before,
and even that he had belonged to no organization since. Still, writing to
Ferdinand Freiligrath (another Red 48er) in connection with the Vogt
affair, Marx went significantly further:
since 1852 I had not been associated with any association and was firmly
convinced that my theoretical studies were of greater use to the working
class than my meddling with associations which had now had their day on
the Continent… Whereas you are a poet, I am a critic and for me the experi-
ences of 1849–52 were quite enough.9
MARX AND THE POLITICS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL 257
It was very difficult to frame the thing so that our view should appear in a
form that would make it acceptable to the present outlook of the workers’
movement… It will take time before the revival of the movement allows the
old boldness of language to be used.10
If the workers were not ready for bold language, they certainly did not
found their Association to undertake revolution. Yet, that this clearly was
no rebirth of the old revolutionary politics did not prevent Marx from
interpreting the fact that the meeting was “chock-full” as a sign that “there
is now evidently a revival of the working classes taking place”. Moreover,
258 G. C. COMNINEL
far from holding back from the Association, to the founding of which he
was invited as a non-speaking presence on the platform, he accepted mem-
bership not only on the provisional organizing committee but also on the
subcommittee charged with drafting a statement of rules and principles.
The difference is also not simply a matter of stated objectives. In the
Manifesto, for example, the stated goals include a “graduated income tax”
and “Free education for all children in public schools”.11 The Communist
League was nonetheless seriously and immediately committed to revolu-
tion. Within the IWA, Marx not only did not hide his ultimately revolu-
tionary goals, but included them from the start in the Inaugural Address
and Rules of the Association.
The Address began not with the spectre of revolution haunting Europe,
but with the “fact that the misery of the working masses has not dimin-
ished from 1848 to 1864”.12 After rehearsing both the facts of that misery
and the crushing political defeat after 1848, Marx pointed only to two
“compensating features”: the Ten Hours Bill and the growth of the coop-
erative movement. Still, his conclusion was that “[t]o conquer political
power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes.”13
The Rules—unanimously adopted and published by the Association
together with the Address—were even less ambiguous. They stated that
“the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the work-
ing classes themselves”, called for “the abolition of all class rule”, and
asserted that “the economical emancipation of the working classes” was
the ultimate goal.14 The concluding words of the Address even echoed
those of the Manifesto: “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!”
Yet, where the Manifesto was directly a call for revolution, the founding
documents of the International, the policies adopted at its Congresses, and
the organizational undertakings over the course of its existence all focussed
on precisely the task of building and uniting—in the open—a mass politi-
cal instrument for the working class. It is not that Marx was ever in any way
less committed to revolution, let alone converted to reform. Nor were he
and his closest associates alone among IWA members in advocating for
revolution. As profoundly different as they were in their politics, Mikhail
Bakunin and his supporters—who eventually outnumbered those who
stood with Marx—were no less committed to the idea of revolutionary
change rather than reform. The key difference between Marx and Bakunin,
indeed, lay precisely in the former’s recognition that a revolutionary trans-
formation presupposed a political process, that in the first instance a politi-
cal revolution was necessary, and that this required the real and substantial
MARX AND THE POLITICS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL 259
lagged significantly behind that in Britain. Belgium was the first continental
nation to undergo significant capitalist development; France grew relatively
slowly at least until the 1870s; and Germany came from far behind but then
rapidly surpassed France.18 Marx himself weighed in on the unique status of
Britain in 1870:
Although the revolutionary initiative will probably start from France, only
England can act as a lever in any seriously economic revolution. It is the only
country where there are no longer any peasants, and where land ownership
is concentrated in very few hands. It is the only country where almost all
production has been taken over by the capitalist form, in other words with
work combined on a vast scale under capitalist bosses. It is the only country
where the large majority of the population consists of wage-labourers. It is
the only country where the class struggle and the organization of the work-
ing class into trade unions have actually reached a considerable degree of
maturity and universality. Because of its domination of the world market, it
is the only country where any revolution in the economic system will have
immediate repercussions on the rest of the world.19
It was not, of course, as if the French state took away all rights of prop-
erty owners; but it had a predisposition towards benefiting great property
holders in relation to the state itself and large-scale trade and industry,
while generally neglecting the position of small-scale proprietors in relation
to production. This state-centric form of class relations had been character-
istic of the old regime, and while important institutional changes certainly
followed as a result of the Revolution, the continuity is striking.29 This
entrenchment of precapitalist economic patterns goes a long way towards
explaining the slow rate of industrialization in France, and sheds light on
the historically distinctive development of its labour organizations.
It has long been recognized that, after the Revolution abolished guilds
as holdovers from the feudal past, the workers continued to rely upon
their compagnonnages, journeymen’s societies that equally had roots in the
middle ages.30 In addition, workers increasingly developed various forms
of mutual-aid society. Together with the legal regime of louage d’ouvrage,
these forms both expressed and reinforced a corporatist character in work-
ers’ organizations. The form of workers’ associations stood in integral, yet
ironic, connection with the recognition of the rights of workers relative to
employers: workers in a given trade developed a collective identity with
respect to social needs and political participation, in part on the basis of
their relative security and strongly held identity as individual members of
that trade. This relative strength of French workers as individuals con-
trasted greatly with the characteristic form of capitalist social relations of
wage labour, above all as realized in England, and provided a powerful
historical foundation for the development of syndicalism in France.
Of course, workers’ interests were not always met through the concilia-
tion of the labour tribunals, and strikes did occur. In keeping with the
strong legal recognition of their rights as individuals, as well as the role of
the state in preserving “public order”, strikes were entirely illegal until
1864, and strikers were frequently prosecuted.31 In the absence of collec-
tive bargaining, with most terms of employment recognized with respect
to the trade as a whole in each locality, there were no trade unions as such.
When, therefore, workers did resort to strikes, they organized ad hoc,
secret, sociétés de resistance solely for that purpose—yet another develop-
ment that underpinned French syndicalism. All of these tendencies were
profoundly reinforced by the small-scale and artisanal production typical of
French industry—as late as 1896, 36% of industrial workers were employed
in workshops of 5 or fewer, and 64% in workplaces of less than 50.32
MARX AND THE POLITICS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL 263
political organization, but also to strikes; the great role that “mutualism”46
played in his thought: all these resonated powerfully with the largely artisanal
French workers.47 A case can be made that Proudhonism was the primary
current against which Marx had to struggle down to 1867, when the begin-
ning of a wave of strikes—in which active support by the IWA played an
important role—signalled an important shift away from Proudhon.48
Mikhail Bakunin was a very different anarchist thinker (though that
term was no more common at that time than was “Marxist”). The rela-
tionship between Marx and Bakunin changed tremendously over time. At
the time of the International’s founding, Marx wrote to Engels that he
had seen him for the first time since 1848, and liked him very much,
“more so than previously”, adding, “On the whole, he is one of the few
people whom after 16 years I find to have moved forwards and not back-
wards.”49 Yet, the history of the second half of the brief life of the
International revolved around the growing opposition between Marx and
his supporters, and Bakunin and his own.50
Another French current was represented by Louis Auguste Blanqui,
revolutionist par excellence, who had taken part in numerous conspiracies
and every uprising and revolution, from joining the Carbonari in the
1820s to being elected president of the Paris Commune in 1871 (though
already under arrest by the Versailles government). While he was undoubt-
edly a socialist in at least the broad sense of the term, his primary commit-
ment was to making political revolution, from which change would be
introduced. As Engels characterized the man and his movement:
The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of
Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the
American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes.55
If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that
I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as
before, to transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand to
another, but to break it, and that is essential for every real people’s revolu-
tion on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris
are attempting.64
In its struggle against the collective power of the propertied classes, the
working class cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political
party, distinct from, and opposed to all old parties formed by the propertied
classes.68
one must be careful not to trivialize or reduce his ideas to simplistic cari-
catures. It is instructive, however, to locate Marx’s politics concretely in
relation to those proposed by Lenin, and to contrast the two.
If the emancipation of the working class—and with it, the whole of
humanity—was to be the task of the workers themselves, then the first
requirement was development of the capacity of that class to act in their
own interests. It is precisely in this regard that Marx’s conception of class
politics comes to the fore, and can be seen to be inherently different from
the politics of reformists, insurrectionists, anarchists, and Leninists alike.
Marx was prepared to make great sacrifices to help the working class
advance in its struggle. It always remained, however, the self-organization
of the workers that was central. Workers had to make themselves collec-
tively into agents who would end the state’s role as instrument of class
rule, and remake their lifetime of labour from a means of enriching the few
into a collective realization and enjoyment of human potential. No single
institution, leader, or ideological conception was either sufficient or irre-
placeable for that to be achieved. It is this commitment to development of
the working class, as such, into a social and political force that is most
clearly revealed by Marx’s participation in the International.
Marx never became a reformist—contrary to the views of Eduard
Bernstein, most notably70—despite his efforts to ameliorate conditions of
workers, engage in politics within existing states, and resist irresponsible
calls to provocative action. By the same token, despite his abiding commit-
ment to revolution and genuine support for the Commune, he was never
an insurrectionist, and he certainly could conceive revolutionary change
being achieved without taking to barricades. Marx also was never an anar-
chist, as such, though as early as 1843 he became the first political theorist
ever to view the state—in itself, and regardless of how democratic it might
be—as inherently a form of human alienation that needed to be tran-
scended in achieving human emancipation.71 In this regard, he was so
profoundly anti-statist to the end of his life that it might be said that his
disagreement with anarchism72 was not with its end, but over the feasibil-
ity of its means. Finally, beyond all this, he was never a Leninist, and if
anything more clearly not in his maturity than in his youth.
Fifty-four years passed between the Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s
What Is to Be Done?, with the transfer of the International to New York not
quite halfway between the two. As noted above, the International was very
different from the Communist League and had a different purpose.
Moreover, the IWA clearly never had any of the characteristics that Lenin
274 G. C. COMNINEL
The extent to which the democratic practice of the IWA was real—and
anything but a form of “democratic centralism”—can be seen in the dif-
ficulty Marx continuously had in dealing with the various other political
currents. Yet, despite the growing battle with Bakunin, he made no effort
to limit membership, a basic principle of the Bolshevik model. Indeed, the
revised Rules of 1871 made the openness of membership even more
explicit than the original Rules, stating that “Everybody who acknowl-
edges and defends the principles of the International Working Men’s
Association is eligible to become a member.”75 When Marx’s participation
in the International is viewed in full, and without the filter of one or
another expression of Leninism, the vivacity, openness, and democracy of
the politics that can be discerned is not merely a revelation, but an
inspiration.
It is an inspiration that is desperately needed today. The situation of the
working class internationally has (in relative terms) worsened even more in
recent decades than it had when Marx wrote the Inaugural Address. The
gains that workers achieved following the decisive global defeat of fascism
more than two generations ago—a defeat won by working-class men and
women determined to end not only rapacious and horrific oppression, but
also economic vulnerability and immiseration—have been rolled back dra-
matically. Yet, as Marx noted then, there are compensating factors.
MARX AND THE POLITICS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL 275
Notes
1. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW,
vol. 29, 257–419.
2. Ibid., 540–2, n57.
3. Marx’s letters of 1860 are preoccupied with Vogt’s calumnies, widely
reported in Germany, including the astonishing claim that Marx had run a
racket during the 1848 Revolution, extorting money from vulnerable
communists in Germany (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1860–64,
Letters, MECW, vol. 41, 43). The whole matter is documented in Marx’s
Herr Vogt, MECW, vol. 17, 21–329.
4. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, MECW, vol. 30, 455, n1.
5. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, December 8, 1861, MECW, vol. 40, 217.
6. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, November 4, 1857, MECW, vol. 42, 15–8,
n18, n19. For a brief history of the International, and a selection of its
most important documents (including those that are cited here), see
Marcello Musto, Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
7. Frederick Engels to Karl Marx, April 8, 1863, MECW, vol. 41, 465.
8. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, April 9, 1863, MECW, vol. 41, 468.
276 G. C. COMNINEL
9. Karl Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath, February 29, 1860, MECW, vol. 41,
81–2.
10. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, November 4, 1864, MECW, vol. 42, spells
out his view of the meeting and his intentions in what followed.
11. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,
MECW, vol. 6, 505.
12. Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s
Association”, MECW, vol. 20, 5.
13. Ibid., 12.
14. Karl Marx, “Provisional Rules of the Association”, MECW, vol. 20, 14.
15. The original Rules of the Association referred specifically to Europe, which
only was changed in the revised rules written by Marx and Engels in 1871.
16. David Fernbach, “Introduction”, in The First International and After
(London: Penguin/NLR, 1974), 10–3.
17. I have discussed this in virtually all my previous work, and throughout this
book, and will cite here only George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French
Revolution (London: Verso, 1987) and “Critical Thinking and Class
Analysis: Historical Materialism and Social Theory”, Socialism and
Democracy 27, no. 1 (March 2013): 19–56. The foundation for this histori-
cal conception lies in the work of Robert Brenner, most notably two articles
collected (with rejoinders) in T. H. Aston, and C. H. E. Philpin, The
Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Ellen M. Wood has contributed importantly to these ideas in Democracy
Against Capitalism: Rethinking Historical Materialism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), The Pristine Culture of Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1991) and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
(London: Verso, 2002). Michael Zmolek’s book, Rethinking the Industrial
Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013) provides a lengthy historical analysis of the
long development and late realization of industrial capitalism in England.
18. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London: Sphere, 1977), 56; François
Crouzet, “The Historiography of French Economic Growth in the
Nineteenth Century”, Economic History Review 56, 2 (2003): 223.
19. Karl Marx, “The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance
Switzerland,” MECW, vol. 21, 86.
20. Ibid., 87.
21. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 511. There is an enormous
literature on this issue, drawing particularly on a chapter in Marx’s original
manuscript analysing the formal and real “subsumption” of labour to capi-
tal, which was not included in Capital. I take account of the published text
alone here simply because it is entirely sufficient to the point.
MARX AND THE POLITICS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL 277
22. I am indebted for much of what follows on France to the analysis of Xavier
Lafrance in his as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation, Citizens and
Wage-Labourers: Capitalism and the Formation of a Working Class in
France (York University, 2013).
23. Alain Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail: une évolution
contrastée entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne au XIXe siècle”, Revue
d’histoire du XIXe siècle 33, no. 2 (2006): 101–20 (published in English as
“Industrial tribunals and the establishment of a kind of common law of
labour in nineteenth-century France”, in Private Law and Social Inequality
in the Industrial Age, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
24. Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail”, 103, 113–4.
25. Ibid., 105–9.
26. Ibid., 109 [my translation].
27. Ibid., 112.
28. Ibid., 116.
29. See my analysis in Rethinking the French Revolution, 200–3.
30. For a classic typology of the forms of working-class organization in France,
see Louis Levine, Syndicalism in France (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1914), 26–33. On the compagnonnages, and particularly their politi-
cal role after the Revolution, see William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution
in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
31. There were 14,000 prosecutions between 1825 and 1864, and 9,000 strik-
ers were imprisoned; Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in 19th
Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010), 58.
32. Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914”,
Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary
(Oxford: Berg, 1989), 49. Magraw offers an excellent overview of the role
of syndicalism in French politics.
33. Karl Marx, “Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party”,
MECW, vol. 24, 340; Karl Marx and Jules Guesde, “The Programme of the
Parti Ouvrier”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/
parti-ouvrier.htm. See also Frederick Engels to Eduard Bernstein, October
25, 1881, MECW, vol. 46, 144–51.
34. A remark to Paul Lafargue that Engels reported to Bernstein, MECW, vol.
46, 356.
35. Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914”.
36. Dick Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914”,
in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary
(Oxford: Berg, 1989), 102–3.
37. Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 199ff.
278 G. C. COMNINEL
56. Karl Marx, “Address to the National Labour Union of the United States”,
MECW, vol. 21, 53–5. The threat of war loomed in 1869 as the US pressed
claims against Britain for damages resulting from the Alabama, a ship built
in Britain and delivered to the Confederacy, and other violations of neu-
trality. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sought the
enormous sum of $2 billion, with the possible alternative of annexation of
British Columbia, the Red River Colony, and Nova Scotia. The claims ulti-
mately were resolved through arbitration.
57. Marx did not himself attend any of the Congresses until the last, at The
Hague, in 1872, but he submitted resolutions through the General
Council. There were, of course, other resolutions as well.
58. Office of General Council, International Working Men’s Association,
Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva, 1866, and the Congress of Brussels,
1868 (London: IWMA, 1868).
59. Karl Marx, Synopses of Speeches on Education (August 10 and 17, 1869),
in General Council, International Workingmen’s Association, The General
Council of the First International, Minutes, 1868–1870 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1964), 140–1, 146–7.
60. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Resolutions of the Conference of
Delegates of the International Working Men’s Association”, MECW, vol.
22, 424.
61. Karl Marx, “The London Conference of The International Working Men’s
Association September 17–23, 1871”, MECW, vol. 22, 246.
62. Karl Marx, “Value, Price and Profit” [sometimes published as Wages, Price
and Profit], MECW, vol. 20, 102–59.
63. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, August 8, 1870, MECW, vol. 44, 39.
64. Karl Marx to Louis Kugelmann, April 12, 1871, MECW, vol. 44, 131.
65. Aside from The Civil War in France, MECW, vol. 22, 307–59, see Marx’s
letters of April 12, 17, and 26, May 13, and June 12, 1871, MECW, vol. 44.
66. Karl Marx, “Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance”,
in General Council of the First International, Minutes, 1868–1870 (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1964), 322–4.
67. Jacques Freymond et al., La Première Internationale (Geneva: E. Droz,
1962), 2: 191–3.
68. International Workingmen’s Association, 5th Congress, The Hague
Congress of the First International: September 2–7, 1872, Vol. 1, Minutes and
Documents (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 282.
69. Which in any case would also have to take account of Lenin as a Marxist—
an entirely different matter—as well as the unique historical context cre-
ated by the Bolshevik Revolution.
70. Bernstein did not deny that Marx was a revolutionary, especially originally,
but saw a second, reformist current in his ideas, which he sought particularly
280 G. C. COMNINEL
It is, in fact, only the historically specific and peculiar context created by
capitalist social relationships that makes it possible even to conceive of
society in terms of separate economic and political spheres.9 Liberal social
thought emerged to give novel articulation and intellectual systematiza-
tion to these new capitalist relationships, and at the same time constructed
a new conception of history as progress to conform with them.10 In the
context of this new form of social structure, and the new forms of social
theory based upon it, the foundation of Marx’s social theory must be rec-
ognized to lie not merely in a critique of the legitimation of contemporary
capitalist social relations by liberal social theory, but in a more basic cri-
tique of the ways in which modern social thought adopts from liberalism
a conception of the economy and of social progress through processes of
economic development. Indeed, far from being historical materialist, eco-
nomic determinism is a quintessential expression of the incorporation of
liberal social thought into Marxist theory.
The failure of Marxism to develop and sustain a truly historical material-
ist methodology has had far more significant effects than those narrowly
interested in the study of capitalist society might suppose. The deeply
flawed theories of historical social development that have been accepted as
Marxism have created profound distortions not only with respect to
European history but also in conceptions of the relationship between
Europe and the rest of the world.11 They also undermine the critical foun-
dations of Marx’s account of capitalism as a class society. For in not only
building upon categories drawn from capitalist society but doing so in
terms derived directly from liberal social theory, these theoretical approaches
stand in stark contrast to the critique of liberal ideology in the form of
political economy that is the basis of Marx’s approach to capitalism.
Indeed, without a self-conscious methodological commitment to ongo-
ing critique of the liberal categories and concepts of development integral
286 G. C. COMNINEL
The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head
of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation
valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an
abstraction only as a category of the most modern society.15
This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract catego-
ries, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all
epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, them-
selves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity
only for and within these relations.
MARX AND SOCIAL THEORY 287
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic
organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the
comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the struc-
ture of and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations
out of whose ruins and elements it has built itself up…16
It is at this point that Marx observes that “Human anatomy contains a key
to the anatomy of the ape”—and likewise that the forms of capitalism can
retrospectively shed light on earlier social forms, “but not at all in the
manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences
and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society”. As stressed in Chap. 9,
the critical awareness of difference is absolutely necessary.
The danger in historical social science is that we cannot avoid knowing the
outcome of the past in the form of the present—and the present necessarily
colours our conceptions. Aspects of earlier historical social experience have
been carried over into the present, but not necessarily with anything like the
same character. Prevailing social forms and institutions of the present in
some way had their origin in the past, but not necessarily through simple
and direct development from superficially similar elements of the past. Yet
Marxists have consistently put forward precisely the sort of “historical pre-
sentation of development” that Marx warned against—conceptions of social
288 G. C. COMNINEL
Taking account of the work of Alvin Gouldner, Irving Zeitlin, and a num-
ber of other contemporary theorists, Seidman outlines the “conventional
wisdom” of a fundamental divergence between sociology and Marxism in
European theory, citing Daniel Rossides’s assertion of the key point:
In the prevailing view, then, the three main streams of modern social
thought stand in clear distinction from each other.
Seidman’s work, with obvious affinity for the views of Anthony Giddens,
challenges this conventional wisdom of opposing Marxism to “bourgeois”
sociology.32 In pursuit of a non-Marxist reconciliation of Marx and sociol-
ogy, Seidman rejects the view that Marxism and European sociological
thought diverged fundamentally in their descent from the Enlightenment.33
He thus brings together Marxism and sociology in “a common analytical
program”. But by grounding the origin of both in “the critique and recon-
struction of liberalism”, he reiterates that a confrontation of theoretical
perspectives is at the heart of the formation of modern social theory.
The development of modern social theory is thus consistently con-
ceived in terms of one or another framework of fundamental theoretical
opposition. In the first place, Marxism may be recognized to stand in criti-
cal opposition to all forms of “bourgeois ideology” (or alternatively, the
varieties of social science may be taken to oppose “Marxist ideology”). In
the second place, following the prevailing conception of the history of
sociological thought, the three traditions of liberalism, Marxism, and soci-
ology may be juxtaposed to each other. Finally, as Seidman (and Giddens)
would have it, Marxism and sociology may together be held to stand in
opposition to liberalism.
and liberalism is apparent to all. Yet it is equally clear that affinities exist
between the main currents of sociological thought and both Marxist and
liberal social theory, in turn. What is most fundamental in this regard is
precisely that liberalism, Marxism, and sociology have very similar concep-
tions of historical social development, based upon variations of the under-
lying idea of progress.
Each of these approaches incorporates elements that are specifically
derived from modern capitalist society, making them an integral part of
the historical process of development. Liberal theory projects into the
past, as a timeless “universal”, that relationship which exists between pro-
duction and markets in capitalism. Against this, as the non-Marxist eco-
nomic historian and anthropologist Karl Polanyi argued decades ago, it
must be recognized that the “market economy”—which he characterized
as “an economic system controlled, regulated, and directed by markets
alone; order in the production and distribution of goods are entrusted to
this self-regulating mechanism”—is not only not “universal”, it is an abso-
lutely novel feature of modern capitalism.34 This was also Marx’s position
in the Grundrisse.
There are a number of varieties of sociological theory, but the general
reliance upon specifically capitalist phenomena in formulating conceptions
of development is evident from the seminal work of Durkheim and Weber.
Durkheim’s concept of the effects of the division of labour in history, for
example, conflates the division of labour in the workshop with the social
division of labour, associating the two with a biological metaphor to create
a continuous, universal principle of progress.
How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How
is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have
gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the ques-
tion of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of
alienated labour to the course of humanity’s development.56
Marx had in fact raised this issue of the role of exploitation in the history
of human social development at the outset, in criticizing political economy
for reducing human beings to the condition of mere factors of production,
no different from “any horse”: “What in the evolution of mankind is the
meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract
labour?”.57
Based on his analysis that property arises from the alienation of labour
(i.e., from class exploitation), Marx went on to assert that “the entire
movement of history” is the process of human social development,
298 G. C. COMNINEL
The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not com-
prehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an indifferent
antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal relation, not yet
grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this first form even with-
out the advanced development of private property (as in ancient Rome,
Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private
property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as
exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour,
constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction – hence a
dynamic relationship driving toward resolution.60
Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its
secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand, it is the product of alien-
ated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alienates
itself, the realisation of this alienation.61
[t]he relations of private property contain latent within them the relation of
private property as labour, the relation of private property as capital, and the
mutual relation of these two to one another.
It is in one sense profoundly true that private property has latent within
it the ultimate potential of the capitalist labour relationship. Yet this poten-
tial is in no way obvious from the forms of actual property relations in
precapitalist societies. It can only be known after the fact, given the capi-
talist point of view.
300 G. C. COMNINEL
its real originator was Adam Smith, upon whom Marx was profoundly
dependent for his own formulation, and it bears all the characteristic marks
of Smith’s theory of history. The central explanatory notion at the core of
this theory is the self-developing division of labour.69
was presented in Grundrisse, Capital, and other later works of Marx, but
was never fully worked out by him. Its master principle is the mode of pro-
duction, conceived as a system of social-property relations which make pos-
sible, and thereby structure, societal reproduction – in particular, the
maintenance of society’s individual families and constituent social classes.70
MARX AND SOCIAL THEORY 303
class society to ascend, and much of what has been said by Marxist theorists
about precapitalist societies must simply be rejected. Marx’s own observa-
tions on the concept of Asiatic mode of production, however, remain sig-
nificant, though the term itself is misleading. Ellen Wood, for example, has
identified a society that fits the concept in Bronze Age Greece.74 It might
well also be said to apply to the earliest of the hierarchically organized
ancient states of both Old World and New, perhaps to “pristine” states in
general, as well as to a number of Asian and other empires or kingdoms.75
It is particularly significant, however, that the concept does not apply to
classical Greece or ancient Rome, for in Marx’s conception this term refers
to agrarian societies in which it is the state itself that appropriates the sur-
plus labour of the direct producers—in which, that is, there is no private
ownership of land as the basis of exploitation. There is exploitation
through the exaction of rent—identical in this case to “taxes”, but the
ultimate control over land as means of production that we understand as
“ownership” is vested directly in the coercive apparatus of the state.
In the difference between the Western line of societies descended from
Greece, and especially Rome, and these state-centric systems of exploita-
tion, there appears to lie the explanation for the remarkable historical
dynamism of class society. Western class societies have been characterized
by a fundamental duality in the relations of exploitation, since the appro-
priation of surplus has been based throughout Western history on the
private ownership of property in the context of a state structure of political
power. It is in this regard that the history of Western class societies can be
conceived as a whole, in contrast with other historical experiences. As
Ellen Wood has written,
it developed in England, did France (slowly) and the rest of Western Europe
(often more quickly) come to converge in the familiar capitalist social forms
of “modern society”. France entered the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury with an enormous peasantry, and a real “peasant problem”, more than
two centuries after it was reasonable even to speak of an English peasantry.
Yet this profound social difference no longer holds, however great the sec-
toral differences in their economies remain. Given this social convergence
under capitalism, it would not be surprising to find increasing similarities in
contemporary patterns of politics and culture. But what of the past?
On the one hand, England and France both belong to the line of
Western class societies descended from Rome. A central issue throughout
the history of specifically class societies has been the relationship between
class power and state power. The history of the West has been character-
ized by continuous tension between the individual interests of propertied
members of the ruling class, and their collective interest in a strong central
state. This can be seen from the rise of the senatorial aristocracy in
Republican Rome to the civil wars that ushered in the Empire; from the
withdrawal of ever greater resources from the ambit of Imperial taxation
in the Later Empire, under protection of the senatorial nobility, to the
reconsolidation of political power under Germanic kings after the “fall” of
the Western Empire. Again and again in Western history—in France the
examples can be mounted almost century by century from Charlemagne
to the Second Empire—there has been flux and reflux in the balance
between class and state power.
This tension, with its recurrent political crises, has been an important
factor in the development of Western political theory. Quentin Skinner, in
fact, has written a very influential account of political theory from the
twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, focusing primarily on the development
of claims made for and against central political power.86 A further theme,
though very much less an issue of debate among those theorists who have
accepted the social order as it is, has been that of the relationship between
the state and private property.87 Since these and other important themes of
social and political thought have related to experiences common to all of
the societies in the Western line of development, it is only to be expected
that writers on these issues have drawn upon, and responded to, each oth-
er’s ideas across not only time, but national social boundaries as well.
Yet, on the other hand, there have been crucial specificities in national
historical social development, perhaps nowhere so striking as in the diver-
gence of French and English societies from the late middle ages, through
310 G. C. COMNINEL
the whole of the early modern era. This divergence meant that even
though French and English social and political theorists continued to
exchange ideas, they did so from increasingly distinct contexts of social
reference. Seventeenth-century English thinkers read the works of
sixteenth-century French theorists debating constitutionalism and abso-
lutism, but the new formulations of political ideas put forward by both
Hobbes and Locke did not simply build upon these. Rather, they created
new conceptions—in the first case absolutist, and in the second liberal—
that drew upon the novel English social context produced by enclosures,
a context of economic individualism that was qualitatively different from
anything known in French society.88
Similarly, Rousseau’s conception of “the general will” must be under-
stood in light of the norms of corporative social organization and collec-
tive regulation that existed in France.89 It makes an enormous difference,
when judging whether or not Rousseau is “totalitarian”, if one recognizes
that French norms of social relationship had not been transformed through
any process like enclosure and that a natural, organic community of inter-
est was generally still presumed to exist, in a way that was no longer the
case in the liberal, and increasingly capitalist, England of the eighteenth
century. It is equally clear that however much the French Physiocrats
absorbed from English liberalism and the early development of political
economy, they added to it a peculiar insistence upon agriculture as the
unique source of social wealth, lumping the entrepreneurs and labourers
of industrial production together as a “stipendiary Class”.90
It is not that Adam Smith later improved on the Physiocrats, to general-
ize the source of all wealth as labour in any form—this was already present
in Locke’s conception of value in the Second Treatise of Government. From
the point of view of historical materialism, it is obvious—not only from the
works of the Physiocrats, but also from Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, and
others—that truly capitalist social relationships were not properly under-
stood on the Continent, even into the early nineteenth century. They sim-
ply had had no experience of capitalist society.
In English liberal political theory, “civil society” referred to the condi-
tion of living in a state, as agreed by mutual consent. Hegel, drawing on
Adam Smith’s political economy, gave the concept of bürgerliche gesell-
schaft—which means bourgeois society as well as civil society—the mean-
ing of a sphere of individuals engaging in egoistic social and economic
relations, in contrast to the institution of the state, in which social unity is
realized.91 Yet for Hegel—certainly one of the most profound of the
MARX AND SOCIAL THEORY 311
since the early eighteenth century had never amounted to a capitalist per-
spective. The French Revolution was fought over specifically political liberal
principles, which bore upon the question of distribution of power within a
ruling class for whom the state was a central “economic” locus. The
Revolution neither reflected, nor did very much to advance, the social basis
for specifically capitalist production. Throughout the eighteenth century,
English liberal thought had been accepted, or—as in the case of Rousseau—
criticized, entirely on the basis of what it had to say for Continental societies
that were not capitalist.
As it increasingly became apparent that some profound change was
afoot by means of capitalist industrialization, and as capitalism itself began
to spread through the networks of trade, it was no longer enough to con-
front English ideas. It was necessary to come to terms with capitalism
itself. Social theory on the Continent began to reflect more than long-
standing liberal self-satisfaction with the effects of the rise of trade. Some
more fundamental understanding of qualitative social change was required.
European social theory approached capitalism as an alien phenomenon,
impressed by its power, increasingly recognizing its potential as a force not
only for material change but for social change, dissolving Gemeinschaft
(community) and introducing Gesellschaft (association), for better or
worse. Hegel still did not even see how there might be a problem with the
bürgerliche gesellschaft of English political economy coexisting with the
“universalizing” functions of the Prussian state’s bureaucracy. Durkheim
was troubled by the alienation of labour—both as existential anomie and
as forced division of labour—yet his proposals for amelioration combined
the very corporatism that capitalism tends systematically to corrode, with
the fantastic suggestion that capitalist society might abolish inherited
wealth. With Weber, the principles and premises of capitalism proper are
fully understood and embraced—he even accepts marginal utility theory as
his basic tool of social analysis. What he is offering is not even critical of
capitalism, but, from a European point of view shaped by the absence of
liberal social traditions, he is merely pessimistic with respect to the social
and political claims made for liberalism.
None of the European social theorists ever challenged the liberal capi-
talist view of how and why capitalist society came into being. Building
upon essentially liberal theoretical premises, their hesitations, qualifica-
tions, and reformulations in approaching liberal social and political ideol-
ogy are all beside the point with respect to a critical apprehension of the
history of class societies. Torn between the European experience of the
MARX AND SOCIAL THEORY 313
past and the capitalist experience of the present, these social thinkers were
willing and able to give more consideration to Marxist criticisms of liberal
capitalist society than to liberals proper.
Yet, ultimately, they accepted capitalism and they accepted its concep-
tion of the economic processes of social life in past and present. Their
tendency to reinforce the modern “bourgeois” paradigm of history had
implications not only for liberals but regrettably for Marxists too. Forced
to choose between two points of view in Marx’s work, Marxists, on the
whole, have not even recognized those ideas that were original and
critical.
History is not only the past that humankind has experienced but also
the future that we will forge. George Santayana’s famous aphorism, so
often quoted in relation to history, was specifically directed at progress:
This, however, is not at all akin to why Marx looked to the past. When he
proposed that we can learn about the anatomy of apes from the anatomy
of humans, the goal was above all to learn what made each distinct. Only
by understanding how the past truly was different can we understand the
world of today, and only then can we hope to understand how our future
can be truly different again.
It is long past time, therefore, for the theoretical unity that has been
presumed to encompass historical “progress” to be challenged, and for
truly critical alternatives grounded in the original analysis of the long and
varied history of class societies to be heard. True human emancipation can
itself only follow from the struggle of oppressed peoples. This struggle
needs to be informed by history, and yet it must be freed from the dead
weight of the past.
From the very beginning, Karl Marx was preoccupied with the experi-
ence of alienation, and the need for human emancipation. Through his
incredibly insightful critique of political economy, starting in 1844, he
realized two great advances in social theory. These advances built upon the
basic questions first articulated in the Paris manuscripts. On the one hand,
he put forward a foundation for historical theory that emphasized the
inherently social character of our species, and the way that we came to
bind ourselves in forms of social existence based upon relations of exploi-
tation that became determinants of historical development. On the other
314 G. C. COMNINEL
hand, he was never satisfied with merely understanding the world in all its
complex history but, as he put it in his Eleventh Thesis on Fuererbach,94
he sought to change it. It is this world historic task that still remains for
humanity to achieve through the organization of the oppressed in com-
mon struggle against their oppressors.
Notes
1. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,
MECW, vol. 6, 482.
2. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, MECW, vol. 37, 776–7.
3. Marx’s own works remain unparalleled as accounts of how it is that workers
who enjoy full civil rights equal to those of their employers are nonetheless
exploited by the very employment contracts, based on the principle of
exchange of equivalents, into which they enter voluntarily. Though his
arguments are presented clearly and systematically in Capital, Volume I,
MECW, vol. 35, and in a somewhat incomplete but very short and simple
form in “Value, Price and Profit”, MECW, vol. 20, 101–49, they remain
widely misunderstood and debated even among those who consider them-
selves Marxists. Still, in comparison with the issues of the historical dimen-
sions of his thought, the nature of his critique of political economy in
respect of capitalism is well established. Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic
Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970) is one of many guides. For
particular insight into the enduring relevance of Marx’s essential analysis for
workers in all sectors of advanced capitalist society (though with a few
unorthodox elements related to monopoly capitalism), see Harry
Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1974). Ellen M. Wood has primarily been concerned with exploring
the relationship between Marx’s critique of political economy and his social-
ist class politics, on the one hand, and his conception of the history of class
society on the other, making her work of central relevance to the arguments
put forward in the present essay. At the same time, much of what she has
written is very helpful in clarifying Marx’s ideas on the nature of capitalism.
See especially the first part of Democracy Against Capitalism: Rethinking
Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
4. The meaning of the term capitalism is the subject of great debate as has
been discussed previously in Chaps. 2, 7 and 9. All forms of modern social
theory recognize some qualitative difference between modern industrial
capitalist society and earlier forms of society (as between Gesellschaft and
Gemeinschaft), but they do not all associate this difference with capitalism
MARX AND SOCIAL THEORY 315
68. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 477–519. It is Marx’s
profound error in this regard, failing to carry through a critique of liberal
historiography to match his critique of political economy, which is the sub-
ject of Rethinking the French Revolution.
69. Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, 272.
70. Ibid., 273.
71. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 482.
72. Marx, Capital, Volume IIII, 791.
73. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 34–7; Perry Anderson, Lineages of
the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974), 462–549; Ernest Mandel, The
Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1971), 124ff.
74. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 35, and Peasant-Citizen and Slave,
81–98.
75. On “pristine” states as the first enduring societies characterized by system-
atic structures of socio-economic inequality, see Morton Fried, The
Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967).
76. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 33.
77. Ibid., 36–7.
78. See Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 108–45.
79. Brenner, “Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, 213–15.
80. See Brenner’s articles in The Brenner Debate and Wood’s The Pristine
Culture of Capitalism. Also see my Rethinking the French Revolution and
“English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant
Studies, 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53.
81. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution; “Quatre-Vingt-Neuf
Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the French Revolution”,
Historical Papers – Communications Historiques (1989): 36–52; “The
Political Context of the Popular Movement in the French Revolution”, in
History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in
Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia
University Press, 1985), 143–62.
82. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave.
83. Ibid., 115–20; Democracy Against Capitalism, 264–83.
84. Wood, The Retreat From Class.
85. The “bourgeois” dual revolution—the French Revolution and the
Industrial Revolution—was a staple of classical liberal accounts of progress,
and of orthodox Marxism. Perhaps its best-known expression—and in
many ways one of the most admirable—is Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution.
86. Quentin Skinner, The foundations of modern political thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978).
MARX AND SOCIAL THEORY 321
87. An entire essay could be devoted to such issues as a comparison of the way
conservative and radical utopians have dealt with property and the state;
the positions of non-socialist critics of existing society, such as Machiavelli
and Rousseau; the peculiarly “modern” emphasis on property in Cicero;
and the necessity for John Locke to provide a conception of the origin of
property and its relationship to the state which differed fundamentally
from the ideas of both Hobbes and Filmer.
88. See Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism.
89. See Ellen M. 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. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University
Press, 1985), 117–39.
90. A. R. J. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth,
in Ronald Meek, ed., Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), 123ff, 153; Rethinking the French
Revolution, 195.
91. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (London: Oxford University Press,
1967), 124–5, 154–6, 161, 188–9.
92. Durkheim, The Division of Labor, 353ff, 374ff.
93. George Santayana, The Life of Reason (London: Constable, 1905), 1: 284.
94. Karl Marx, Theses on Feurerbach, MECW, vol. 5, 5.
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108n27, 118, 124, 126, 134, 112, 116, 118–121, 123, 124,
136, 144–148, 177, 187–188, 129, 130, 297
193–203, 212–222, 238, 246, Lenin, V.I. (Leninism), 153, 272–274,
282–285, 299–310 279n69
Historical specificity, 213–215 Liberalism/liberals, 4, 7–11, 21,
Historiography, xiii–xiv, 3, 7, 8, 27n19, 28n32, 48–53, 68–69,
98–104, 120, 125–128, 156, 104, 120, 126–127, 133,
301, 315n10, 320n68 154–156, 165–178, 196,
Holy Family, The, 102, 112, 121, 285–295, 300–302, 310–313
123, 133 Lord/lordship, 14, 19, 28n32, 68–69,
Hobsbawm, Eric, 16, 19, 24, 96, 99, 86n7, 99, 105, 147, 160, 191,
216, 217 211, 227–230, 249–250, 315n9
I M
International Workingmen’s Machiavelli, Niccolo, 7, 8, 34, 46,
Association (IWA), 21, 90, 50, 321n87
247, 256–259, 264–268, Manifesto/Manifesto of the Communist
270–275, 278n54 Party (Communist Manifesto),
xvi, 3, 14–15, 20–21, 27n19, 56,
80–81, 86n5, 90, 99, 104, 117,
J 126, 136, 151–181, 214, 220,
Jacobins/Jacobinism, 4–9, 50–55, 235, 257–258, 273, 281,
66–69, 77, 84, 154–155, 159, 301–303, 320n68
169–170, 174, 179–180 Market compulsion/dependency/
imperative/regulation, xix,
36–40, 51, 158, 169, 205–206,
L 225–232, 243, 246, 283
Labour law, xx, 42, 52, 159, 175, Market imperative, 37
260–261 Market regulation, 36, 205
Labour-power, xviii, 146, 161, Marx, Karl, ix–xi, xiii, xv–xxi, 1–6,
165, 171–174, 178, 180, 10–25, 26n3, 26n4, 26n5, 26n6,
211–216, 222, 225, 237–244, 26n13, 26n14, 26n15, 26n16,
298, 306, 315n4 27n18, 27n19, 29n34, 29n35,
Labour theory of value, 222, 239 29n36, 29n38, 29n43, 29n44,
Landlord, xix, 19–20, 68, 98, 146, 29n45, 29n54, 29n55, 29n56,
162, 167–168, 178, 183n20, 30n57, 30n58, 30n61, 30n64,
183n24, 230–232, 244, 249, 30n67, 30n74, 30n76, 30n77,
306–307 31n78, 31n79, 31n80, 31n83,
Lassalle, Ferdinand (Lassalleanism), 33–57, 65–85, 89–106, 106n3,
263–264, 267, 269 107n4, 107n5, 107n10, 107n12,
340 INDEX