******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
LRB Vol. 39 No. 13 · 29 June 2017
Find the Method
by Timothy Shenk
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones
Penguin, 768 pp, £14.99, May, ISBN 978 0 14 102480 6
‘Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre
wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre
had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very
young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely
historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual
who lived in London in the middle of the last century,’ Sartre
remembered thinking. As the years passed, he came to see Marx as more
than a creature of his context. The details of Marx’s life were not what
mattered. It was ‘the reality of Marxism’ – workers discovering their
collective identity as a proletariat locked in fatal conflict with
capitalism – that brought Marx into the 20th century. He was the father
of ‘a philosophy that had become the world’.
Loyalty to Marx required confronting the world as it existed, without
the comforting delusion that answers to every problem could be found by
sifting through the sacred texts time and again. ‘Everything remains to
be done,’ Sartre insisted. ‘We must find the method and constitute the
science.’ This science would not be advanced by experimenting in
laboratories or constructing mathematical models. It would be a
historical enterprise, just as it had been for Marx. History was where
civilisation’s deepest truths revealed themselves, and identifying them
would allow history’s chosen subjects – the proletariat – to seize
control of their world. They would be history’s masters, not its victims.
Gareth Stedman Jones came across Sartre’s writings on Marxism when he
was about the same age Sartre had been when he first read Marx. A
Francophile in his adolescence, Stedman Jones had worked in Paris for
Agence France-Presse before starting at Oxford. Back in England, he fell
in with the group coalescing around the New Left Review, and by 1965 was
on its editorial board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the
left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had
planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort
had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the
Continent and the likes of Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser, for remedies
against what they saw as the tired empiricism and little Englandism of
their predecessors. The aim, Stedman Jones explained in 1971, was to
develop Marxism as both ‘a revolutionary political ideology’ and ‘an
infant science struggling for its autonomy’. The proper subject of that
science, he maintained, following Sartre, was history; his first book,
published the same year, was Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship
between Classes in Victorian Society.
Today Stedman Jones denies he was ever a true believer, describing his
younger self as more a ‘crypto-Fabian’ than a Marxist. Even at his most
radical, he was never an economic determinist; and he didn’t believe
that Marxists should be satisfied with a history from below that brought
previously excluded figures into the standard narratives. He was a
systematic thinker who wanted to reconstruct social totalities, not take
sides in forgotten battles between the oppressed and their oppressors.
He was drawn to the New Left Review crowd because they, like him,
recognised that ‘we were witnessing an extraordinary period in the
development of the human sciences’ – in anthropology, linguistics and
psychoanalysis – that demanded a response from historians. Theoretical
sophistication, analytical precision and rigorous quantification could
furnish the building blocks for a new historical science.
The predilection for systematic inquiry that attracted Stedman Jones to
Marxism ensured that his break with it, when it came, would be just as
uncompromising. Whatever revolutionary ideals he may once have harboured
were snuffed out as the 1970s dragged on and he grew distant from what
he characterised as the ‘furtive mandarin Leninism’ at the New Left
Review. He didn’t believe that theories based on the primacy of class
and capital could account for the rise of the feminist movement or deal
with its concerns, or that Marxism had much to offer environmentalists
or human rights activists. The time he spent in Frankfurt during the
Baader-Meinhof Group’s attempt to bring guerrilla warfare to Germany
convinced him that would-be revolutionaries in Europe could only damage
their cause. And scepticism about the radical potential of working-class
politics was easily felt in a period bookended by Enoch Powell and
Margaret Thatcher.
In this hostile climate, Marxist historical scholarship experienced what
Stedman Jones later called an ‘abrupt and terminal decline’.
Reconstructing social totalities increasingly seemed a chimerical
enterprise, and his earlier confidence that history could be turned into
a science now struck him as naive. Historians had begun to overturn
pillars of conventional Marxist history, from François Furet’s
revisionist studies of the French Revolution to Stedman Jones’s own work
re-examining the relationship between labour and capital in
industrialising Britain. Meanwhile, an obsessive attention to discourse
and language was sweeping through the humanities, a trend Stedman
Jones’s long familiarity with French intellectual life had readied him
to accept.
He announced his changed loyalties in a sequel to Outcast London
published in 1983 under the title Languages of Class, and prefaced with
the observation – unusually self-aware for a historian – that the story
the book told was ‘as much that of my own theoretical development as of
the history of the working class itself’. Marx had failed to produce a
materialist science of history, Stedman Jones now believed, because the
task was impossible. Where once he had located his causal analysis in
the social realm – a space dominated by class struggle and the dynamics
of capital – he now argued that nationalism, the fight for equal rights
as citizens, and even the dream of a classless society, were
fundamentally political phenomena that could not be treated simply as
reactions to capitalism’s advance.
With his break from Marxism complete, Stedman Jones embarked on the
second phase of his career. He intended to exhume the origins of
socialism in the hope of unveiling, as he later put it, ‘the submerged
foundations of so many of the theoretical positions I naively tried to
engage in the 1960s and 1970s’. His interpretation would be focused not
on the protests of workers or the actions of political parties but on
ideas. Intellectual history had always been a part of his work; Outcast
London began with a survey of British economic thought from David
Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to
the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that
eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to
Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost critical tradition that
reached back beyond Marx to Adam Smith. Some of the most enthusiastic
early readers of The Wealth of Nations, he noted, were radicals who saw
the work as a powerful indictment of aristocratic privilege. It was only
after the French Revolution that the division between laissez-faire and
socialism came to define the contours of political debate. Before then,
social democracy’s 18th-century precursors had sought to unite
commitments to freedom and equality, markets and the general welfare.
They pointed the way towards a 21st-century politics that restrained the
excesses of capitalism – ‘greed, exploitation and misery’ – while
reaping its benefits, uncovering a road that led from Thomas Paine to
Tony Blair.
Settling his account with Marxism required a reckoning with Marx
himself. As early as 1979, when Stedman Jones still identified as a
socialist, he was exhorting his comrades to ‘de-theologise Marx’.
Marxists had produced brilliant readings of the major texts, but they
were more eager to claim Marx’s justification for their own position
than to understand his work. They used Marx as Marx had used his
precursors: as a tool for elaborating their analysis, not as a true
subject of historical research. The disintegration of the Soviet bloc
that began ten years later gave Stedman Jones the historical prompt he
needed. Amid the ‘unsorted debris left by the death of Marxism’, he
believed it was now possible to look at Marx without the distortions of
the Cold War. ‘We continue to learn from Aristotle or Machiavelli
without having to become Aristotelians or Machiavellians,’ he wrote.
‘One day, I hope we shall be able to learn again from Marx in the same
fashion.’
But Marx could never be a subject of merely academic concern for Stedman
Jones. Even if he wished to preside over Marxism’s funeral, the zeal
with which he delivered the eulogy demonstrated its continued hold over
his emotions. The question of how the ‘strange assemblage of conceptual
insight and surreal expectation, of reiteration of radical commonplace
and genuine theoretical innovation’ that constituted Marxism became the
world’s most powerful ‘organised post-Christian religion’ would not let
him go. Marx himself, by supplying a genealogy of socialism that was as
powerful as it was deceptive, had done more than anyone to derail this
inquiry. A more satisfying answer would have to start at the source of
the problem. If Marxism had become a successor to Christianity, Stedman
Jones would write a heretic’s life of Christ. Karl Marx: Greatness and
Illusion is the latest result of this project, and its richest
expression. Restoring Marx to his historical context in the 19th century
is only the most obvious of Stedman Jones’s ambitions. He has come to
bury Marx and ‘Marxism’ under the weight of the past.
*
Marx was born into a world divided by the French Revolution. Faith in
the power of reason had been the birthright of his parents’ generation.
In the aftermath of the Revolution’s collapse, such faith seemed a much
shakier proposition. In search of an alternative way of understanding
history, Marx found Hegel. By the start of the 1840s, still in his
twenties, he had become part of a group – the Young Hegelians – that
sought to restore the radicalism they believed was embedded in the
philosopher’s work. Their discussions of religion were especially
controversial. One member of the group, David Strauss, portrayed the
Gospels as a collection of myths. Another, Ludwig Feuerbach, depicted
God as an invention of men, who projected onto the spiritual realm
qualities they already possessed – or yearned to possess. People came to
be ruled by their projections, duped into believing God created man, not
the reverse. They were, in a word, alienated.
Marx extended Feuerbach’s conception of alienation from the religious
sphere to the economic. Factory workers made commodities, but the
profits went to capital. Under these conditions, goods seemed to exist
outside the control of their makers. This deceptive independence was the
foundation of private property, a concept Marx insisted was just as much
a product of alienation as faith in an omniscient deity. He joined this
account to a vision of history that drew on Hegel. Mankind had the
capacity to remake its world: labour was the essence of human existence,
the engine that propelled historical development. The challenge was to
replace a society that held up homo economicus as its implicit ideal
with one that acknowledged Marx’s broader conception of human nature,
redeeming work from the degraded status into which it had fallen during
the Industrial Revolution.
Doubters charged that Marx’s supposedly hard-headed philosophy was just
another variety of soft-hearted humanism, with a utopian notion of human
nature taking the place once held by a Christian God. Stedman Jones
believes that Marx never found a satisfying response to this accusation.
Instead, he embraced a determinism that denied ideas any independent
role in historical change. Communism was no longer just an ideal; it was
the destiny mankind was drawn irresistibly towards. As Marx put it in
1845, using a vocabulary of class struggle he had only recently added to
his repertoire, ‘the proletariat executes the sentence that private
property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat.’ But that
resolution could arrive only because of the extraordinary feats the
bourgeoisie had already accomplished – in Stedman Jones’s words, ‘the
staggering transformation produced in less than a century by the
emergence of a world market and the unleashing of the unparalleled
productive powers of modern industry’. This was the worldview – a
hodgepodge of British economics, French politics and German philosophy
held together less by its internal coherence than by the force of Marx’s
will – that would receive its most forceful expression in The Communist
Manifesto of 1848.
Stedman Jones admits that Marx gives a groundbreaking assessment of the
power of capitalism, but considers him a much less insightful guide to
life outside the marketplace. The determinism that allowed Marx to
defend himself against charges of covert humanism distorted his
analysis, especially when he turned his focus to politics, and the error
was compounded by a ‘static and anachronistic’ interpretation of class
conflict that didn’t fit the realities of European radicalism. Well into
the 1840s, Stedman Jones writes, Marx was ‘simply unfamiliar both with
popular politics and with the world outside Germany’.
Time and again, Stedman Jones chides him for misunderstanding the major
events of his day and substituting fantasies of impending revolution for
serious inquiry. These misjudgments were, he believes, a logical product
of Marx’s worldview. According to Stedman Jones, the birth of movements
that claimed to represent the working class – such as the Chartists –
was at its core a political phenomenon, not an economic one. ‘It was not
the activities or strategy of a fictive “bourgeoisie”,’ he writes, scare
quotes at the ready, ‘but the attempt around 1830 to construct a
political system based upon the political exclusion of wage-earners that
created the “struggle” of the “working class” and the “middle class”.’
He chastises Marx for succumbing to the tendency – widely shared among
the era’s elite – to portray workers as a seething mass on the brink of
insurrection. ‘The ideals and aspirations of the working classes in 1848
were not mysterious,’ he insists. ‘But their speech was discounted. It
was ignored or replaced by quite different forms of discourse conjured
up by the fervid imagination of writers from the propertied classes.’
Deceived by his conviction that economic structures drove political
outcomes, Marx had produced a theory that pretended to explain all of
history but had difficulty accounting for any particular event.
Stedman Jones uses one of Marx’s most celebrated works, The 18th
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, to illustrate the limits of this approach.
He concedes that it is a ‘sociologically ingenious account’, but argues
that Marx’s fixation on class obscured what was most significant about
the younger Bonaparte’s rise. Unlike Marx, Bonaparte had recognised the
importance of the democratic spirit coursing through European politics.
He embraced universal male suffrage, previously anathema to
conservatives, and linked it to a nationalistic agenda that safeguarded
institutions threatened by revolutionary tumult – above all the church
and the family – while promising to address the concerns of workers.
This was a new kind of politics that fused right and left, offering both
stability and reform. The term ‘populism’ wasn’t coined until decades
later, but Bonaparte had, in effect, invented its conservative variant.
The ultimate beneficiaries of 1848 weren’t liberals or socialists, but
the novel breed of reactionaries who followed Bonaparte’s example. They
were looking to the future, while Marx had his gaze locked on a stylised
version of the past.
Marx’s personal qualities hold just as little appeal for Stedman Jones.
In 1905, Marx’s first biographer, Franz Mehring, opposed publishing his
subject’s full correspondence because he thought it would damage Marx’s
reputation. Stedman Jones doesn’t share Mehring’s concern. His index has
entries under Marx’s name for ‘racism’, ‘testiness’, ‘shrill voice’ and
‘use of opium’. Even as a child, Stedman Jones writes, Marx possessed ‘a
high degree of self-absorption, a belief in his special destiny and a
larger than normal sense of entitlement’, and these feelings remained
with him throughout his life. His despairing father asked in 1837
whether he would ‘ever be capable of imparting happiness to those
immediately around you?’
The strain of maintaining bourgeois appearances on a revolutionary’s
budget placed an agonising burden on Marx’s household. Freelance writing
and the occasional windfall from an inheritance wasn’t enough. ‘Every
day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their
graves,’ he wrote in 1862, ‘and I really cannot blame her.’ The family
fortunes would have collapsed without Engels, whose day job in
Manchester at his father’s textile firm made it possible for him to
support his friend and intellectual partner. Marx the family man and
Engels the businessman: the revolutionaries each had one half of a
bourgeois life.
At one point, Marx even contemplated becoming a railway clerk. His
application was rejected (poor handwriting), removing one excuse for his
postponing work on Capital. But Marx was an expert procrastinator, and
through one missed deadline after another he rarely lacked a rationale
for diverting his attention from his magnum opus. Sometimes it was a
feud with an enemy on the left, sometimes health troubles. Boils were a
particular torment. ‘I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles
until their dying day,’ he said to Engels; Stedman Jones notes that
their arrival tended to coincide with stressful periods of writing.
Marx’s mental wellbeing was just as unreliable. There were stretches in
which his judgments were ‘disordered, perhaps even touched by delusion,
with mood changes ranging from unreal euphoria through uncontrolled
paranoia to fantasies of revenge’.
Capital finally appeared in 1867. Stedman Jones’s judgment is severe. As
he sees it, Marx’s economic theory was undercut by his failure to
provide a satisfactory explanation for the way prices – including wages
– are determined. He couldn’t deliver a convincing explanation as to why
profits must decline, or why the bourgeoisie’s rule was doomed to end.
Marx believed the age of capital had been made possible by the
expropriation of the peasantry but, on his own telling, this wasn’t the
result of inviolate economic logics, but the outcome of decisions made
by royal officials. Politics, not economics, had given the decisive
push. Capital supplied neither a totalising theory of political economy
nor an irrefutable demonstration that the chasm separating rich and poor
was fated to widen.
What redeems Capital, for Stedman Jones, is its success as a work of
history. Most of the book, he notes, is devoted to a careful examination
of class relations: ‘A graphic, yet sober-minded analysis of the
conflict within the factory, and a horrific picture of the conditions of
workers in different industries’. The wealth of the bourgeoisie might
not require an impoverished working class, but Marx had shown that the
two were thoroughly compatible. Though he could not integrate his
narrative of capitalist economic development stretching back centuries
with his economic theories, Capital made him, in Stedman Jones’s
estimation, ‘one of the principal – if unwitting – founders of a new and
important area of historical inquiry, the systematic study of social and
economic history’.
*
Marx had failed at the task he set out for himself, yet within a few
years he had become, on his own gleeful self-assessment, ‘the best
calumniated and the most menaced man of London’. He owed this turn of
events to the failure of his prophecies. Revolution had not arrived, but
the reactionary tide that surged after 1848 had ebbed, and trade unions
were exerting a new influence on politics. The founding of the
International Working Men’s Association in 1864 showed the changing
political mood. This was the organisation later remembered as the First
International. Marx was its secretary, and one of its most effective
representatives. But the International was never as powerful as its
supporters hoped or its enemies feared. The Times estimated that it had
two and a half million members and millions of pounds in its coffers.
Both were wild exaggerations. Near its zenith in 1870, there were 254
members in Britain; a year later, there were 385 in Germany. But
publicity gave the International a reputation as a voice for the
emboldened labour movement, and helped it spread terms like ‘solidarity’
and ‘strike’ throughout Europe.
From his position in the International, Marx had a privileged view of a
critical moment in working-class politics. He entered what Stedman Jones
regards as ‘the most fruitful and successful’ period in his life.
Frightened elite members saw him as the force behind a wave of unrest
sweeping across Europe – a shadowy figure connected with everything from
the Paris Commune to the emergence of German socialism. Both Capital and
The Communist Manifesto acquired a notoriety they hadn’t enjoyed when
first published.
Yet Marx, now in his fities, was no longer the young incendiary of The
Communist Manifesto. Rather than hoping for immediate emancipation from
the rule of capital, he now believed the transition to socialism could
occur gradually. ‘What excited him was not the expectation of an
apocalyptic event,’ Stedman Jones writes, but the belief ‘that the
process of a transition from the capitalist mode of production towards
the society of associated producers had already begun.’ From this
perspective, the historical sections of Capital offered a better guide
to the future than its theoretical ruminations did. Just as capitalism
had emerged over centuries, socialism too might advance in piecemeal
fashion. Stedman Jones once argued that he had uncovered a lost
social-democratic moment at the close of the 18th century; now he
presents a forgotten social-democratic Marx. (This would have come as a
surprise to his younger self. ‘It would be absurd to argue that Marx was
not a passionate revolutionary to the end of his days,’ he wrote in New
Left Review in 1973, ‘and no one has ever done so.’)
This flirtation with social democracy stayed hidden for so long because
Marx never fully acknowledged, even to himself, that it had taken place.
There was no reformist sequel to the Communist Manifesto, and his
political judgments remained shaky. Composing a declaration of
principles for the International, he complained about having to avoid
his former ‘boldness of language’ in order 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’. According to Stedman Jones,
that restraint was precisely what made Marx’s later activism so
effective. Against his will, he had been forced to address his audience
in a language they could understand.
The International dissolved in the 1870s, taking with it Marx’s best
incentive for moderation, but giving him yet another opportunity to
complete his great project. Marx had once intended Capital to be the
first of several volumes anatomising the origins, metastasis and
ultimate demise of capitalism. But despite his frequent assurances that
he was preparing a sequel, he launched his last serious effort in 1878:
‘After seven pages he gave up,’ Stedman Jones writes, ‘and never seems
to have returned to the task.’ Instead, Marx withdrew into a world
before the rise of the bourgeoisie, studying the history of early
communes with the hope of illustrating how societies that had not yet
undergone the transition to capitalism – Russia was his favourite
example – could leap directly to socialism. He died in 1883.
Sifting through Marx’s papers after his death, a stunned Engels realised
how much Marx had left undone. The task of forging a coherent Marxism
had fallen to him, though in truth he had already been engaged in that
project for some time. In 1878, the year Marx gave up on the second
volume of Capital, Engels published Anti-Dühring, a polemic against a
rival socialist that became the most popular introduction to Marxism for
subsequent generations. ‘Capital is the more powerful work,’ the German
Marxist Karl Kautsky later explained. ‘But it was only through
Anti-Dühring that we learned to understand Capital and read it properly.’
Engels didn’t know it, but he had developed a programme that diverged
from Marx’s own. Stedman Jones speculates that Marx’s continued
financial dependence on Engels might have led him to conceal the
distance between himself and his friend. Engels’s Marx retained his
confidence in the revolution until the end; he was socialism’s Darwin, a
scientist who had discovered the laws propelling capitalism towards its
destruction. Engels stitched together a second and third volume of
Capital from the piles of scattered notes Marx had left behind. He was
‘generally a scrupulous or even timid editor’, Stedman Jones writes, but
he made one crucial revision to Marx’s texts, replacing a claim that
falling profits would leave capital ‘shaken’ with the more decisive
‘collapsed’. It was Engels’s version of Marxism that provided the
intellectual basis for the next generation of Marxist theorists; it was
Engels’s version too that cast its shadow over the 20th century.
The Marx who remains alive for Stedman Jones in the 21st century is the
one who outlined the contours of a globalised capitalism that our wiser
era knows can be restrained but never escaped. ‘The left ought to give
up,’ he has said, ‘the idea that there’s some other system waiting in
the wings instead of capitalism.’ For him, political maturity starts
with a rejection of the notion that ‘there’s going to be some end of
history where there’s some magical transformative solution and a
completely different system takes over.’ Only after shedding this
utopian legacy, with its religious origins, can socialists hope to
understand the world, or change it.
There has always been something curious about Stedman Jones’s insistence
on the religious dimension of socialism. Every political movement has
its rituals and hierarchies, and every ideology has its vision of a
better tomorrow. Utopianism isn’t restricted to Marxism; it is an
essential feature of modern politics. Stedman Jones’s confidence in the
triumph of capitalism has a theological tinge of its own. ‘The Marx
celebrated from the 1890s and beyond was the theorist of the
universality of capitalism and its inevitable global downfall,’ Stedman
Jones writes. Decades after his own break with Marxism, he still adheres
to the first half of this formula, like a Christian who believes in
purgatory but not in heaven. Meanwhile, today’s young leftists are more
concerned with the manifest failures of the status quo than with secular
salvation.
They are not alone. The title of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
comes from the date in the French Republican calendar on which Napoleon
Bonaparte staged the coup that brought him to power. After his own coup
more than fifty years later, Louis Napoleon would devise the
conservative populism that dominated European politics in the 1850s. In
the Gregorian calendar, 18 Brumaire falls on 9 November – the day that,
in 2016, most of the world discovered that Americans had voted Donald
Trump into the White House. Stedman Jones notes that Engels gave Marx
the reference to Hegel that supplied the essay’s famous opening about
history occurring first as tragedy then as farce. Like Marx, he doesn’t
ask what happens the third time.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com