Book Review: (Re)Discovering Marx

The three volumes reviewed here have one thing in common—their focus on Marx’s Capital—but they are also quite different in origins and format. Marcello Musto in Marx’s Capital after 150 Years brings together recognized authorities on Marx (e.g., Balibar, Postone, and Olman) who were contributors at an international conference to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Capital’s publication held in 2017. Conference proceedings do not usually lead to coherent volumes, and the contributions are uneven. But the unifying thread of Capital is evident. Musto sets the tone in his introduction on “the unfinished critique of Capital” where he argues that “the critical spirit with which Marx composed his magnum opus reveals just how distant he was from the dogmatic author that many of his adversaries and self-styled disciples presented to the world” (30). However—as Musto notes—the work of Marx was not left in anything like a definitive state and that poses a problem for the researcher today, insofar as a massive job of rediscovery is called for to overcome the many years of simplifications and reduction of a living thought to a dogma.

The second volume under review, Marx’s Capital: An Unfinishable Project? edited by Marcel van der Linden and Gerald Hubmann, is also a result of a conference, in this case held in 2014, bringing together mainly those who were responsible for the definitive edition of Marx’s work, namely, Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), aimed at producing a complete historical critical edition of his work and that of Engels. Prior to this, the voluminous collection of manuscripts that went to form the Capital that Engels and others edited after Marx’s death (except for volume 1) were not known. As the editors note in their introduction, this work is being carried out “in line with modern editing methods,” meaning high fidelity to the originals and with all writings reproduced in exact conformity with the author’s original text. It is only by taking this philological approach that we can ascertain what was a developing thread in Marx’s writing and what was a later add-on or “interpretation.” Thus, we are provided with a definitive account of the genesis of the various editions of Capital volume 1, for example, that differentiates MEGA from other, “often politically-motivated editions offering a ‘solidified’ and ‘finalized’ version of the works of Marx and Engels” (25). The aim of this volume is to bring experts on, and editors of, Capital together to evaluate the new textual foundations and to provide an overview of the new material and of some current research issues regarding Marx’s critique of political economy.

The third volume under review is Theory as Critique: Essays on Capital by Paul Mattick that represents a change of gears as it were, not just because it is a single-authored text but also because its objective is not the text of Capital as such but, rather, “the main interest of this book is the attempt to bridge the gap between Marx’s ideas and their application to present day circumstances” (7). We are looking here at an attempt to forge a renewed Marxist research program and not one based on endless debates between interpretations. The aim of Theory as Critique, “despite its piecemeal nature,. . . is. . . to present the core ideas of the Marxian critique and to suggest some modes of applying them to an understanding of present-day experience” (10). The objective is the abolition of capital—that is, the capital “relation”—that “would require radical reconfiguring in a society in which the totality of individuals would be free to arrange their collective and private activities as they wished” (217). This is very much in line with the class-struggle Marxism of the 1920s, a tradition that Mattick seeks to revive.

As with others, the Marxism I learned in the early 1970s was somewhat limited: base and superstructure, forces of production and relations of production, determination in the last instance by the economic, etc. A stint with the early Conference of Socialists Economists did not help as we got lost in endless debates around the transformation problem and other arcane issues. The development of Marxology—learned but obscure debates around Marxists texts—did not help either as I got absorbed in political practice. What use was this to understanding the situation and guiding our action? While I remained within the worldview of Italian autonomism or workerism, I could find little enthusiasm for Marxist economics as such.

That all changed—strange though it might seem—with the resumed publication in 1998 of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), the new historical-critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels. It was only in 2013 that part 2 of MEGA (Capital and the preliminary studies) was finally completed. ¹ As we felt in 1973 with the publication of the Grundrisse with Martin Nicolaus’s Introduction, there was great excitement, albeit in a perhaps more subdued way (Marx 1973). This was not an “unknown Marx” coming forth, but certainly a different one. There could no longer be facile talk about the young Marx and the mature Marx with an epistemological break in between. This was a new seamless Marx, a developing Marx, and certainly a more complex Marx. For me, anyway, it was not the mythological Marx of the Marxists but a living Marx, above all a revolutionary.

Musto’s Marx’s Capital after 150 Years is part of an engaged and engaging oeuvre that, in combining erudition and accessibility, has brought this “new Marx” to a wider audience. In the introduction to this collection, he traces the development of Marx’s Capital as he wrote it, in its specific context. We meet Marx the researcher and writer, not a frozen holy text. His colleague Engels was a close commentator and critic of his unfolding drafts of Capital and at one point “noted that his exposition of the form of value was excessively abstract and insufficiently clear for the average reader” (24). Capital was also a book that was produced by a publisher and sold like any other commodity. We learn that “Capital was out on sale on 14 September 1867. The high price of the book—three thallers—was equivalent to a worker’s weekly wage” (24). Marx was no academic economist, and he followed closely the financial crises of his era in the belief that they would usher in a revolutionary moment. The study of the Marx manuscripts is still underway and there are still many subjects that are open to different readings, but this collection is a good introduction to the work in progress.

From the many excellent chapters on a wide range of topics—from the environment to the wages question, from Marx’s humanism to the theory of value form—I pick first as an example the contribution by Etienne Balibar. He takes a fresh look at Marx’s famous aphorism “the expropriators are expropriated,” which has been seen in quite simplistic terms till now. What is at stake here is the very notion of an alternative to capitalism, and Balibar is clear he is not writing for the “Marxologists.” The famous phrase captures Marx’s understanding of the violent process of social transformation that leads to the abolishing of private property and the socialization of the economy. Balibar, however, undermines the simplistic reading that prevails through an Althusserian “symptomatic reading” of the phrase in its full textual and historical context. Balibar concludes that “Capital is not only a book left unfinished by its author; essentially it could not be finished. . . because its principal argument was leading to several incompatible conclusions” (42). In this case, there is an equally valid messianic reading of Marx and one that is reformist/evolutionist.

Silvia Frederici engages in rethinking the relationship between Marx, reproduction, and the class struggle. Here Marx’s writings not only contain contradictions but real gaps and silences. As Frederici writes, this is “a key to understanding the reasons for Marx’s failure to acknowledge the momentous changes that were in the make in England, in the nineteenth century, with regard to family life and male-female relations is his treatment, in both Capital and the Grundrisse, of the reproduction of labor power” (127). For Marx, love, passion, and procreation were taken to be a natural given as it were. The “liberation” of women through factory work was embedded in Marx’s thought as much as in Engels’s view of the world, which has had a major impact on the relationship between Marxism and feminism. What is particularly interesting (to me) in this account is that it focused on Marx’s role as a leading member of the first Working Men’s International Association that resulted, perhaps, in his pandering to the male-centered views on the family wage held by his trade unions colleagues. Marx as an actor, as a political operator on such a vital matter, is an interesting thought indeed.

Other equally thoughtful chapters deal with various aspects of value theory, the ecological critique of political economy, Marx’s humanism, and class theory.

The second volume reviewed here nicely complements the first in offering a blow-by-blow account of the original manuscripts of Marx that went into the production process of the MEGA volumes in Marx’s Capital: An Unfinishable Project? edited by Marcel van der Linden and Gerald Hubmann, both key figures in the (re)discovery of Marx. For obvious reasons, it was clear in 1989 that the Soviet/East German project to publish the complete works of Marx and Engels would not be completed, and in 1990 the International Marx-Engels Stiftung was set up in Amsterdam to continue work. We need to recall that Marx only signed off on volume 1 of Capital himself and that the collection of manuscripts pertaining to Capital had never been published. The magnitude of the task was enormous and the results spectacular, in rendering faithfully the work Marx actually wrote with all the various versions painstakingly and authoritatively re-created. For the first time, all versions drafted are being made available for study. These volumes not only provide material for further research into Marxism but allow for access to the laboratory of Marx’s thinking unperturbed by the endless commentary that had taken on a life of its own. One small but significant lesson from these works is that Marx was not speaking metaphorically when he referred to society as a “versatile crystal” or when he used the term “fetishism.” His notebooks make clear he was immersed in the study of geology, chemistry, and physiology when he used these terms. This changes our understanding of Marx and his relation to the sciences.

Another area that is clarified definitively is the relationship between Marx and Engels: they were neither an inseparable duo, nor was Engels the person who traduced Marx into “Marxism.” The task Engels confronted when he took on the task of shaping Marx’s manuscripts for publication was enormous. He wished to be faithful to what his friend was trying to say even if he was perhaps overly concerned with what he saw as his legacy. Regina Roth carries out a forensic examination of how Engels went about this task. There was no intentional distortion and Engels kept faithful to the spirit of Marx. But he had been a writing partner of Marx’s, and he did have his own views. That comes out at one point when Marx is discussing the crisis and “breakdown” of capitalism, when it becomes senile and outlives its usefulness. It turns out that these fairly crucial passages actually came from Engels, which is of considerable significance in terms of the debates on the falling rate of profit and the breakdown of capitalism from the 1920s onwards. There is also a general sense that while Marx was more prone to leave open a question, Engels was much keener to close an argument and be definitive. But then in the 1890s, he was the leading intellectual of a budding international political movement, so maybe that is not surprising.

In another chapter, Matthias Bohlender writes about Marx’s “Manchester moment” in 1845 when he completed the manuscripts that would lead him to his great achievement in 1867 with the publication of Capital. In a very grounded analysis, we get a real sense of why Marx spent time at that moment with his friend Engels in the latter’s hometown of Manchester. Marx met working-class thinkers with a socialist project similar to his own; he also met industrial capitalism raw in tooth and nail. Politics and science, theory, and practice were meeting in a particular place. Marx was a real person, not a disembodied intellect. Capital began to take shape as a concept aimed at giving this emerging revolutionary working-class movement theoretical expression, to find a language to make that possible. Wage slavery was identified and the need for an adequate theoretical language “to lay bare the laws of motion of modern society.”

Kenji Mori looks in detail at Marx’s previously unpublished Book of Crisis (Krisenhefte), also referred to by Musto in the introduction to Marx’s Capital after 150 Years. We note, first of all, that this is empirical research based on his economic journalism around the 1857 economic crisis. This crisis “with its panic and bankruptcies, began in the United States, reached England in October 1857, and spread from there to the rest of Europe” (220). Marx was keen to prove his hypothesis of a looming economic crisis, a hypothesis he had been advancing for over a decade. This was seen by him as a “double crisis,” that is, a thoroughly intermeshed collapse of the industrial market caused by overproduction and the produce market caused by underproduction. Other contemporary commentators tended to focus on financial speculation and manipulation. In our era, marked by the current Great Financial Crisis, it is clear that entering Marx’s workspace on this one is truly fascinating.

Other chapters deal effectively with Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit, the “redundant transformation to prices of production,” and the “beginning and end of capitalism.”

We might ask, finally, why the editors call Marx’s “an unfinishable project,” albeit with a question mark. Certainly, the difficulties Marx had in creating his problematic are now very clear, and we know there is no simple textbook to be derived from MEGA. But at least no longer will dogmatic Marxists be able to legislate on what the correct interpretation of Marx should be. All of us can read all of Marx’s writings in their original form and draw our own lessons. I can only assume that the editors of Marx’s Capital: An Unfinishable Project? mean simply that the project of Capital is not complete until we succeed in delivering Marx’s vision of a better society.

In the final book under review here, Theory as Critique: Essays on Capital, Paul Mattick, based on the new Marx works described above, carries out a clear exposition of Capital as a critique of economic theory. Mattick is seeking to develop Marxist economics as a research program. It thus does not deal with the endless debates and interpretations of commentators over the years. Marx always said his object of analysis was the “laws of motion” of capitalism. That allows Mattick to frame his exposition in ways that parallel the natural sciences.

This text is particularly clear on the different levels of abstraction present in Capital that have, when not understood, caused much confusion for commentators. Basically, whereas the analysis in volumes 1 and 2 are conducted at a high level of abstraction, in volume 3 Marx is more grounded and closer to reality to put it that way. In the first volumes, Marx abstracts from capitalist competition and the constant quest for the highest possible rate of profit. It is only in the third volume of Capital that Marx introduces inter-capitalist competition and the relations of supply and demand. Understanding this allows us to do away with the transformation problem that puzzled endlessly on how to transform a system of equations based on labor time values to one based on monetary prices. The levels of abstraction are simply different and thus there is no transformation problem. For me, this is an example of how Mattick deploys the notion of “theory as critique” of the existing order through the “power of abstraction” as Marx put it.

Mattick portrays a Marx who breaks definitively with Hegel from whom he just takes the rhetoric of the dialectic. The science Marx developed was akin to the natural sciences. The dominant view is that “Capital presents a critique of political economy in the same sense as that in which general relativity may be taken as a critique of classical mechanics” (75). The notion of “critique” used by Marx is thus related to the modern notion of “scientific revolution,” and Mattick refers to the work of philosopher Lakatos (1978) on scientific research programs. That might explain why Mattick finds it “alarming” that Lenin once said that understanding Hegel’s Logic was a sine qua non for the comprehension of Capital. Here there is a debate to be had on the dialectic, but that is for another day.

Mattick’s choice for Lakatos and his “methodology of proofs and refutations” does have advantages. Marx is presented in a modern idiom and in a language that any scientist would understand. It also avoids the usual problem of having to answer why Marx did not “predict” the increase in middle layers, the growing prosperity of some sections of the global working class, the nonemergence of revolution, etc. Mattick is clear that not all science is judged by the power of its predictions: thus, evolutionary biology cannot tell us what new species will emerge in the future. Mattick goes further and, in the process, undermines much of what Marxist economists see as their business. Mattick clearly argues that “Marx’s model of the capitalist economy. . . does not yield quantitative results that could be compared with economic data” (33). Thus, to use national accounts to prove or disprove Marx makes no sense. Again, we see the need to distinguish clearly between abstract models and concrete reality.

This text is far from complete and somewhat drifts at the end, but it does offer a one-stop read for those not ready to delve into the new complete unexpurgated Capital in its original format. However, it is most effective in showing how any scientific explanation of capitalism needs to be based on an understanding of how the circulation of commodities (and money) reproduces a social relationship between capital and labor characterized by coercion and exploitation. As Mattick puts it: “value is not the magic that ties the self-interest of each to the social interest of all; it is the form in which the exploitation of one part of society by another is carried out” (137). Labor is at the forefront of Mattick’s Marx and illuminates clearly how the resolution of periodic economic crises requires the abolition of capital as a social relation, and thus the monetary representation of human labor. Class and exploitation are shaped by the historically specific capital-wage labor relation that is at the core of capitalism.

The three volumes under review here give the student of Marx today a huge advantage over those of the 1970s where only the rare text, such as Mattick’s (1969) classic Marx and Keynes, was written in a way that was based on Marx’s actual writings. ² All three volumes move in an ambit that is nondogmatic and nontheological; this is a rediscovery of Marx thanks to the work of the MEGA curators. They all enter into Marx’s workshop in a sense where Capital was forged but never completed. Whether the task is unfinished or unfinishable is a moot point, and we find evidence for both interpretations in these texts. Taken separately, but especially together, they add immensely to our understanding of Marxism as methodology rather than dogma. The thematic approach of Marx’s Capital after 150 Years, the philological work covered in Marx’s Capital: An Unfinishable Project?, and the attempt at an overview by Mattick create a great basis for a renewed effort to understand Marx’s Capital.

Ronaldo MunckDublin City University Dublin, IrelandEmail: [e-mail]