Abstract
In his book, Paul Zarembka examines some of the key elements in Marx’s contribution to social theory. He focuses on three dimensions of Marx’s work: its relation to philosophy, to the class nature of the economy, and to some political factors which, in the author’s opinion, deserve critical attention. Accordingly, the book is divided into three parts, the first dealing with “The Atrophy of Philosophy” in Marx’s thought, the second—with “Key Elements of Political Economy,” and the third—with “Nationalism and State Machiavellianism.” The variety of the themes reflects both the breadth of Marx’s intellectual legacy and Zarembka’s range of interests.
By “the atrophy of philosophy,” Zarembka means the diminishing part played by philosophy in Marx’s work. When Marx first conceived of his “Critique of Political Economy,” of which Capital was the first part, he intended to structure it in accordance with Hegel’s Science of Logic. The point of doing so was to show the interconnection of the economic categories, such as value, money, wages in the same way that Hegel had deduced the categories of philosophy of his day. The result would be a progression from the most elementary economic category—the commodity—to the most all-embracing of economic categories – the world market. Marx’s intention was to show that “the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.” This was the approach Marx adopted in the Grundrisse and later drafts of Capital. However, it is much less evident in the published versions of the work, beginning from the first German edition which appeared in 1867, though the first chapter of this edition clearly shows Marx’s Hegelian influence.
As in Hegel’s Science of Logic, Marx structured his material according to the pattern of Universality, Particularity, and Individuality at various levels of his exposition. He also made use of Schelling’s concept of “subsumption” to describe the process by which in its circuits capital drew more and more of the pre-capitalist social and economic structures into its orbit, transforming every kind of product into a commodity. The eventual culmination of the process would be a point at which capitalism became the universal system. The implication was that with nowhere else to go, capitalism would become unstable and collapse, giving way to a new form of economic organization.
However, in the process of compiling the final manuscript of Capital, Marx had discovered that capital did not in fact necessarily assimilate, or “subsume,” all pre-capitalist forms of economic organization to itself, as he had believed. He could find many examples where capitalism and traditional communities co-existed, including in his own part of Germany. Accordingly, he discarded those passages in which the concept of “subsumption” appeared. Zarembka is right to point out that the Penguin edition of Capital volume one should not have included the appendix containing “Chapter Six,” where subsumption figures prominently, as doing so frustrates Marx’s intention. It was in the second German edition that Marx began the process of eliminating the Hegelian terminology from Capital. There too he states that any use of this terminology is for stylistic purposes and is not structural to his argument. In the French translation published in 1875, which Marx partly rewrote, any remaining philosophical vocabulary is removed, as is any suggestion that capitalism is a universal system.
At the end of the 1860s, Marx turned his attention to investigating how capital actually began to circulate and how it impacted on traditional village communities. He was fortunate to have the ideal case study before him. Serfdom in Russia had been abolished in 1861 and the framers of the emancipation legislation expected the country to embark on a path of capitalist development on the pattern of the nations of Western Europe. Moreover, the traditional peasant commune had been left intact, so that any inroads of the capitalist system upon it could be investigated.
By 1870 Marx had taught himself Russian, and with the help of Nikolai Danielson, collected materials on Russia’s post-reform economic development. Marx’s intention was to incorporate this material in the second and third volumes of Capital, but he never succeeded in carrying this out. He did, however, draw upon his Russian studies to write his letter to Otechestvennye zapiski in 1877 and his letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881, both on the possibilities for a non-capitalist development for Russia. After Marx’s death, rather than attempt to incorporate the Russian material into the second and third volumes of Capital, Engels dispersed it and edited these volumes from manuscripts largely written before Marx commenced his Russian studies.
Although it has been very little recognized, Nikolai Sieber is a key figure in the history of Marxism. For his doctoral dissertation at Kiev University in 1870 Sieber wrote on the subject of the way Ricardo’s theory of value and capital had been improved upon by Marx. Sieber’s dissertation was the earliest introduction to Marx’s economics to appear in Russia, two years before the publication of the Russian translation of Capital in 1872. As Zarembka points out, the striking feature of Sieber’s dissertation and the articles he published subsequently on Marx’s economics is that they quite explicitly avoid the Hegelian terminology that Marx had used in the first German edition of Capital. Sieber considered this terminology was unnecessary and that the “impenetrable armour of Hegelian contradictions” rendered the work less accessible. Sieber’s dissertation was one of the first works Marx read in Russian. He praised it highly in the afterword to the second edition of Capital, and later, in 1881, in his notes on Adolf Wagner’s textbook on economics, Marx again held up Sieber as a commentator who had understood his ideas. It is significant that Marx raised no objection to Sieber’s elimination of Hegelian terminology, and Sieber was gratified to see that in the second edition of Capital the Hegelian element had been reduced considerably.
In the second section of his book, Zarembka examines the economic content of Marx’s work. With the publication of the French edition in 1875 the Hegelian terminology had been eliminated almost entirely. It was with this edition that Marx was most satisfied, and when shortly before his death he began to prepare a third edition of Capital Marx intended to make wide use of the French edition. He did not live long enough, however, to complete the task, but he did leave a list of changes which he wanted to make in the new edition, which it fell to Engels to produce. In Zarembka’s opinion “The difference between what Marx wanted and what Engels passed down to us is considerable and not acceptable once we arrive at part VII” (p. 49). Using Marx’s list of changes Zarembka analyzes which ones Engels carried out and which he did not. It emerges from this analysis that Engels was at his most remiss when dealing with part VII, that on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” Zarembka is able to reconstruct the text of this section of Capital as Marx would have wanted it, by carrying out exactly the changes indicated in the list.
One crucial passage in the French edition which Marx wanted introduced into the third edition was that on the question of the applicability of Capital’s description of capitalist accumulation. This was: . . .So far, it has been carried out in a radical manner only in England; this country will therefore necessarily play the leading role in our sketch. But all the countries in Western Europe are going through the same process, although in accordance with the particular environment it changes its local colour, or confines itself to a narrower sphere, or shows a less pronounced character, or follows a different order of succession.
The version of this passage in the second German and retained in Engels’s third and fourth editions was: . . .The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form.
Here Zarembka draws attention to the revision that Marx makes: he delimits discussion to Western Europe and also circumscribes it with ‘local character’, ‘narrower sphere’ and ‘less pronounced character’. Russia, India, China and the rest of the world are not included. Zarembka’s analysis of the text that Engels produced in the light of the changes Marx wanted to make is carried out with meticulous scholarship. It gives an indication of what a genuinely authentic version of Capital would look like. Zarembka’s reconstructed text of “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” should be incorporated into any future edition of Marx’s work.
Zarembka considers the concept of “labour power” to be a key one in Marx’s economic system. It is one that only appears from 1863 onwards when Marx discovered that labour itself was not produced or sold; what was produced and becomes an expense for capitalists was the cost of the worker’s subsistence needs, “labour-power.” In return for paying for the worker’s subsistence the capitalist received a very specific and unique use value: the worker’s ability to produce value. The difference between what it cost to maintain the worker and the value created by his labour constituted surplus value for the capitalist. The distinction between labour and labour power was an original discovery by Marx and is an essential one for understanding the workings of the capitalist system.
A “troubling issue” Zarembka raises concerns the racial prejudices of Marx and Engels, which have been documented by several commentators. In particular he poses the question: To what extent are the Marxist categories informed by the nineteenth-century cultural prejudices of Marx and Engels? Could, for example, the concepts of value and labour power be undermined by being associated with racial prejudice? Zarembka thinks not. As proof he refers to the fact that Marx’s daughter Eleanor declared herself to be Jewish and would never have accepted that the theoretical concepts of her father were contaminated by prejudices. Besides that, the prejudices in question were related to whether or not a people had shown historically a capacity for revolution. However, Zarembka believes that the prejudices in Marx and Engels have to be acknowledged and not excused away. Doing so avoids the pitfall noted by Diane Paul, whom Zarembka quotes, of transforming Marx and Engels into progressives on every issue of concern to the contemporary world. Marx and Engels were people of their times and could not but reflect the attitudes and assumptions of their day.
Two chapters are devoted to Rosa Luxemburg, one on her The Accumulation of Capital written by Zarembka himself, and the other, by Narihiko Ito on “The National Question and Autonomy.” The earlier chapters in Zarembka’s book provide the context for that on Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital, by highlighting the incomplete state in which Marx left his “Critique of Political Economy” and the inadequacy of Engels’s editing of Marx’s manuscripts. It fell to Luxemburg to explain how the capitalist system reproduced itself on an increased scale, since, as she remarked “in the second volume of Capital. . .no solution to the problem is given.” The solution she proposed was a reaching beyond the existing space of capitalism, whether through the creation of a home market or imperialist expansion. Zarembka’s chapter takes the reader through the steps of Luxemburg’s argument and analyses the objections raised to it by critics such as Bauer, Bukharin, Lenin, Sweezy, and Rosdolsky. During her lifetime Luxemburg was able to rebut her critics, and, in Zarembka’s view, none of them was able to refute the case that Luxemburg had made in The Accumulation of Capital.
Zarembka includes in his volume the essay on Luxemburg by Narihito Ito because he regards it highly as the most detailed examination of Luxemburg’s ideas on the national question. Ito explains that Luxemburg was promoting “national autonomy” rather than “the right of a nation to self-determination,” because national cultures deserved every respect (as she respected Polish culture) while the state was, after all, a repressive apparatus. Yet Luxemburg was writing in a context mostly concerned with Poland, and not making an overall statement. According to Ito, conflict with Lenin arose when Luxemburg’s party, the SDKPiL, joined the all-Russian RSDLP in 1906 and Luxemburg requested that the RSDLP drop its demand for “the self-determination of nations” from its programme. Lenin, however, remained unconvinced, and continued to put forward the slogan of the right of nations to self-determination.
In the chapter “Marxism, Machiavellianism, and Conspiracy Theory” Zarembka argues that insufficient attention has been paid in Marxist thought to the distinction between actions that are open, transparent, verifiable, and those that are concealed, secret and conspiratorial. An example of the latter kind of action was exposed by Abraham Lincoln when he demanded that President James Polk indicate the exact spot where the alleged military incident had occurred which initiated the Mexican-American war. By doing so Lincoln exposed the ‘false flag’ that Polk had resorted to in order to provoke a war with Mexico.
Zarembka shows that the use of “false flags” has been employed repeatedly by governments throughout the world to justify military, or other kinds of action that would not have public support. He cites a number of these mainly from American history. He focuses in particular on the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, which supplied the military-industrial complex with a new “enemy” after the fall of communism. Zarembka highlights the inconsistencies in the official version of this event in the light of the available evidence.
The virtue of Zarembka’s book is that it examines the different ways in which Marx made a contribution to the social sciences. It offers to the reader much that is original and significant. Zarembka puts into context the Hegelian element in Marx’s thought, reconstructs the authentic text of the third edition of Capital, and in doing so highlights the limitations of Engels as an editor of Marx’s work. He explains in clear and accessible language key concepts of Marx’s economics, and how these have been interpreted by writers such as Rosa Luxemburg. This is a book which can be highly recommended both to specialists in Marx’s ideas and to the wider reading public.
