Tuesday, March 16, 2021

 

Notes on our discussion of section 11, p.459-514

Just three comments from our discussion on pages 459-514, mostly concerned with "precapitalist economic formations".

1. Not a rigid scheme

Marx's off-hand comment in the Preface to the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has sometimes been read as mandating a rigid categorisation of all societies into one or another of only a very few "modes of production".

"In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society".

In fact, in its heyday Stalinist orthodoxy made the scheme even tighter, eliminating the "Asiatic mode" from the sequence.

In the Grundrisse itself Marx discusses yet another ("Germanic") mode. He points to wide differences within the "Asiatic" mode. (Perry Anderson, in Lineages of the Absolutist State, argues in detail that there were in fact several substantially different "Asiatic" modes).

There is no indication in the Grundrisse that Marx considers the rough categorisation discussed there to be exhaustive.

Marx would have been aware of the gaps in his knowledge, as Eric Hobsbawm discussed them in his introduction to the separate translation of this section of the Grundrisse published under the title Pre-capitalist Economic Formations in 1964:

"The general state of Marx and Engels' historical knowledge [at the time]… thin on pre-history, on primitive communal societies and on pre-Colombian America, and virtually non-existent on Africa… not impressive on the ancient or medieval Middle East, but markedly better on certain part of Asia, notably India, but not on Japan… good on classical antiquity and the European middle ages… outstandingly good on the period of rising capitalism…"

2. Contradictions in feudalism

Why did capitalism emerge first in areas why feudalism had come to dominate, in Europe and Japan?

In the Grundrisse Marx attempts no discussion at all of the transition from one mode of production to another. He would give a four-sentence comment in the 1859 Preface, which to my mind confuses as much as it enlightens, but in any case was not a summary of longer or detailed investigation in the Grundrisse itself or anywhere else:

"At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure".

But on page 479 he offers the idea, in tune with his whole approach to history, that the fruitful element in feudalism was the contradictions embedded in it:

"The history of classical antiquity is the history of cities, but of cities founded on landed property and on agriculture; Asiatic history is a kind of indifferent unity of town and countryside (the really large cities must be regarded here merely as royal camps, as works of artifice erected over the economic construction proper); the Middle Ages (Germanic period) begins with the land as the seat of history, whose further development then moves forward in the contradiction between town and countryside…"

3. Alienation as progressive

In line with that comment on the social fertility of contradiction is another passage where Marx says again that the alienated relations of capitalist society also encapsulate its progress relative to pre-capitalist societies.

"The most extreme form of alienation, wherein labour appears in the relation of capital and wage labour, and labour, productive activity appears in relation to its own conditions and its own product, is a necessary point of transition – and therefore already contains in itself, in a still only inverted form, turned on its head, the dissolution of all limited presuppositions of production, and moreover creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production, and therewith the full material conditions for the total, universal development of the productive forces of the individual…" (p.515).

I've mentioned before Lucien Goldmann's idea that socialism will be "a synthesis at a higher element of the positive elements of three great preceding forms of society: 1. the classlessness of primitive society; 2. the qualitative relations of man [meaning human] to man, and of man to nature of pre-capitalist society; 3. the rationality of capitalist society and values of universality, equality and freedom".

(The passage is from Socialism and Humanism, a contribution to a book edited by Erich Fromm, Socialist Humanism. It is indeed quoted in Miriam Glucksmann's New Left Review 56 article on Goldmann: thanks to Matt for the pointer).

Marx's idea is certainly not Goldmann's. His idea is that socialism will emerge from the contradictions and conflicts within capitalist society, taking from it emancipatory elements of course, but not as a synthesis of the supposed "good sides" of previous societies. The human-to-human relations of precapitalist societies, enclosing each individual in a web of clan and tributary dependencies, were more cramping, less productive of conditions for fuller development and of fruitful struggles, than the alienated relations of capitalist society.


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