Abstract
In a variation on an old cliché, it might be argued that every epoch gets the Marxist dictionary – written by Marxists, about Marxism, for actual/potential Marxists – that it deserves. Those published during the 1930s and 1940s (Burns 1936, 1939; Gould 1947; Selsam 1949) emphasised claims to be a science, backed up by numerous quotations from Stalin. Trotskyism was either ignored or described (Gould 1947: 96), laughably, as ‘a counter-revolutionary organization named after Leon Trotsky, who was connected with the Russian Labour Movement for many years’.
By the 1980s, even Marxist dictionaries published in the USSR (Frolov 1984) no longer featured the authority of Stalin, and claims to scientificity gave way to critiques of social science discourse in capitalist nations. Sensing, perhaps, the ideological struggles ahead, Marxist dictionaries appearing at that conjuncture in Western capitalism seemed to embrace glasnost. Entries in Gorman (1985-6) included not just Giddens – neither a Marxist nor a neo-Marxist – but also Mihailo Marković, a prominent member of the Yugoslav Praxis group who later became an exponent of Serbian nationalism. The latter is also among the contributors to the volume by Bottomore (1983).
In many ways, this trajectory accompanied the shift of Marxism from the street into the university, a transition evident in the most recent volumes. Earlier dictionaries (Burns, Gould, Selsam) were clearly aimed at a wide audience: that by Burns was subtitled ‘a very simple exposition, that anyone can understand without previous knowledge’. Entries covered the basic theoretical issues, definitions were concise, and the texts themselves were usually around a hundred pages. Later volumes (Frolov, Bottomore, Gorman) were equally clearly aimed at a much narrower, largely academic, audience, a fact embodied in the increased length and the extended debate. The short dictionaries by Russell (1981) and Brewer (1984) are an exception in this regard.
If Marxist dictionaries of the 1930s/40s and 1980s reflected the confidence and subsequent defensiveness of their respective epochs, then the volume reviewed here bears the marks of defeat. Former versions displayed varying degrees of combativeness towards the enemies of Marxism; the current one, by contrast, exhibits at times an overly conciliatory tone towards them (under the slippery ideological rubric of ‘diversity’). Edited by Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho, The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics consists of around sixty entries and authors. The selection of contributors is parochial, many having had – or having still – an institutional base at London University, especially SOAS, creating the impression of a (friends-of-friends) network. Not only has the number of entries proliferated, but the earlier approach which treated Marxism as an overarching theory now fragments along academic lines (‘Marxism and sociology’, ‘Marxism and anthropology’, etc.).
The result is both exclusionary and inclusionary: on the one hand, important Marxist voices (for example, James Petras) are not heard, while on the other, palpably non-Marxist views are smuggled in and endorsingly cross-referenced. Unsurprisingly, therefore, problematic or discredited interpretations, some of which are not just non-Marxist but anti-Marxist, tend to be presented unchallenged. As the following examples demonstrate, an equally predictable outcome is that crucial aspects of Marxism are diluted, misrepresented or simply missing.
The ‘new’ agrarian question – broadly speaking, what happens to the peasantry in a developing economy, and why – is reduced by Terry Byres (pp. 10-15) to a debate between himself and Henry Bernstein, an agrarian populist, thereby ignoring the presence of other, more rigorously Marxist interpretations. As an exponent of the semi-feudal thesis, Byres restricts the agrarian question to capitalist development within a given national context. Unless labour-power employed there is free, capitalism is deemed to be absent or insufficiently developed, a view that discounts accumulation by international corporations using unfree workers to restructure the labour process (Brass 2007). Since bonded labour is misinterpreted by the semi-feudal thesis as a ‘pre-capitalist’ relation, its presence signals wrongly that a transition is to be to yet more efficient capitalism, not socialism (Brass 2002). Confining the agrarian question to national contexts, therefore, allows capitalism off the hook, banishes socialism from the political agenda, and permits the myth of a ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie to flourish.
Much the same difficulty faces Utsa Patnaik (pp. 47-52), another exponent of the semi-feudal thesis, in her attempt to explain class and class struggle. Perceiving class through a nationalist lens, she claims that workers in the capitalist heartland remained free at the expense of their counterparts on the periphery, where unfree production relations were imposed. This not only overlooks the presence of the latter in core areas (which continues), but also implies that free workers were somehow complicit participants in the exploitation of unfree labour in the colonies. It also reproduces the semi-feudal dichotomy between developed core = capitalism = free labour-power, and underdeveloped periphery = non-capitalist = unfreedom (Brass 1995). When considering class conflict, therefore, Patnaik’s focus is on resistance by (unfree) peasant smallholders to surplus extraction, and not on the struggle by (unfree) workers to become, remain and act as a proletariat in the full sense of the term.
If an effect of the semi-feudalism of Byres and Patnaik is to banish capitalism, and thus also a transition to socialism, then the entry on modes of production by Jairus Banaji (pp. 227-32) arrives at the same end by a different route. Over the years he has endorsed – and then dropped – a dizzying number of modes: semi-feudalism, the ‘colonial’ mode, the peasant mode, and – most recently – the tributary mode. None of them is found in Marx, and neither is Banaji’s own interpretation of modes of production, based as it is largely on monetary expansion (Brass 2012). This leads to a familiar relay-in-statement: money signals the historical ubiquity not only of economic growth and wage-labour (albeit everywhere ‘disguised’), but also of capitalism itself.
For Marx (1976), the formal subsumption of labour refers specifically to what happens to apparently pre-capitalist forms (smallholdings, slavery, debt bondage, sharecropping) under capitalism, once this has become established. However, this is projected backwards into history by Banaji, who then argues that wherever/whenever such relations are encountered, they are ‘disguised’ hired workers and, consequently, there too is found capitalism. By abolishing the free/unfree distinction, and maintaining instead that all rural workers – in late antiquity no less than in present-day capitalist India – are simply hired labourers who are contractually free, Banaji’s approach is indistinguishable from neoclassical economic historiography (Brass 2003). It reproduces the claim made by cliometricians that capital and labour are ever-present, historically non-specific and thus ‘natural’ economic categories that cannot be transcended.
Similarly problematic, but for different reasons, is the entry by Barbara Harriss-White (pp. 102-110) on ecology and the environment. Her attempt to identify Marxist roots (‘ideas such as the sacredness and dignity of nature … also need to be incorporated’) in eco-feminism overlooks the reactionary discourse of the latter. Subscribing as it does to essentialist peasant/gender identities, eco-feminist theory has been associated historically with the politics of populism/nationalism, and in India such idioms are particularly supportive of communal politics (Staudenmaier and Biehl 1995; Cochrane 2007). The main issue for Harriss-White is whether or not capitalism can survive, and she appears to be less concerned with the case for socialism than in arguing for the necessity of establishing an ‘eco-friendly’ capitalism.
Notable lacunae in terms of not having their own entry include not just the free/unfree distinction, but also the ‘cultural turn’ and primitive accumulation. The latter absence is ironic, given the current attempt by Harvey and Negri to reposition primitive accumulation within contemporary capitalism, rather than where Marx located it, as the pre-history of capitalism. Equally, one might expect a more detailed consideration of how the rise and rise of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism (the ‘cultural turn’) displaced Marxist theory in general, and political economy in particular, especially with regard to development studies.
Of interest to Marxists are the following questions. Why did political economy not feature in that debate, and why did it focus principally on the issue of culture? And why did those on the left subscribe to this in the unleftist way they did? In the past, even non-Marxists linked race and class, showing how the former acted as a proxy for the latter. These days, by contrast, postmodern anti-Marxists have dispensed with class as a concept, dismissing this as Eurocentric and ‘foundational’, and instead essentialize non-class identities as innate. Among other things, therefore, postmodernism has shifted the concept of empowerment from class to ethnicity/gender/nationality, thereby making it difficult for socialists to pose questions about the industrial reserve army of labour without risking accusations of racism/sexism/xenophobia.
Grass-roots resistance as envisioned by the ‘new’ populist postmodernism is deemed to be simply about cultural empowerment, with little or no reference to the political economy. Viewed through the lens of the latter, an expanding industrial reserve army is disempowering, and as such can be blamed by workers on capital: the struggle accordingly becomes one of class. Viewed through a postmodern lens, however, the same process alters in meaning and agency. Struggle becomes about non-class identity, with workers seeing the impact on them of the industrial reserve army of labour as the fault not of capital but of migrants belonging to a different ethnicity, gender or nationality.
It might be thought overly cynical to conclude that this dictionary confirms the accuracy of suspicions harboured by many early-20th-century Marxists toward academia, an institution they regarded as too complicit with capitalism to mount a thorough critique of bourgeois political economy. Alternatively, it might not.