2947. Buddhism and Marxism: Points of Intersection

By Karsten J. Struhl, International Communication of Chinese Culture,  February 2017

Abstract 

I contend that Marxism and Buddhism can mutually enrich and support each other, offer constructive criticisms of each other, and intersect in a variety of ways. To demonstrate this, I follow the order of Buddha’s ‘‘four noble truths.’’ I focus first on the general concern which informs both perspectives—their respective analyses of suffering (the first noble truth). While Buddhism emphasizes the pervasive existential and ontological nature of suffering (dukkha), and Marx focuses on its historical construction, I argue that the former is always mediated by the latter. Second, I examine their respective analyses of the causes of suffering (the second noble truth). While Buddhism locates the cause of suffering in the illusion of self and its attendant desires, cravings, and attachments and while Marxism sees suffering as caused by the division of labor, class exploitation, and alienation brought about by the capitalist mode of production, I argue that capitalism both feeds on and reinforces these cravings and attachments; and that the illusion of the self provides the desperation that capitalism turns into profit accumulation, competitiveness, and consumerism which, in turn, reinforce this illusion. Third, I consider their respective ways of understanding the overcoming of suffering (the third noble truth). For Buddhism, this requires extinguishing the illusion of self and its attendant desires, cravings, and attachments. Here, I argue that Marxism’s vision of communism, the construction of a classless society which would ultimately overcome all divisions of labor and forms of domination, will require extinguishing of the illusion of self and its attendant poisons; and that the possibility of overcoming dukkha and attaining Nirvana will, for the vast majority of human beings, require the construction of such a society. Fourth, I argue that Buddhism’s analysis of the eight-fold path as the praxis necessary to attain Nirvana (the fourth noble truth) needs to be extended to a ‘‘socially engaged Buddhism,’’ to a social praxis which confronts and struggles to change the oppressive social institutions that cause suffering; and that Marx’s understanding of revolutionary social praxis can inform and, in turn, be guided by this Buddhist social praxis. Finally, in the last section of this article, I use the challenge to the ecological crisis as an example of how Marxism and Buddhism can work together as well as to critique one another, how confronting this crisis requires both challenging global capitalism and the anthropocentric assumption which separates our species identity from the whole of nature. 

I hope to demonstrate that Marxist and Buddhist modes of understanding can intersect and mutually enrich and support each other (and sometimes offer constructive criticisms of each other). I am not at all claiming that Buddhism and Marxism can be simply combined to form a synthesis. In fact, the ability of these two perspectives to mutually enrich each other depends in part on their differences on the basis of which they can offer constructive criticisms of each other. However, this is only useful if there are sufficient parallels so that they can mutually engage each other. In order to make these parallels clear, I will follow the order of Buddha’s four noble truth in the hope of demonstrating that both Buddhism and Marxism follow a similar pattern of problem-solving. They both confront the problem of human suffering (the first noble truth). They then proceed to analyze the fundamental causes of suffering and the impediments to overcoming suffering (the second noble truth). They both envision the possibility of the extinguishing and overcoming of suffering (the third noble truth). And finally, they both suggest a practice which could overcome suffering (the fourth noble truth). 

I also recognized that historically both Buddhism and Marxism have evolved and that both take a variety of forms. Therefore, when I talk about Buddhism as such, I will be referring to either early Buddhism or what I take to be a claim that all Buddhist traditions have in common unless I specify that I am referring to some other specific form of Buddhism. When I talk about Marxism, I will be referring to a version of Marxism which is sometimes referred to as humanistic Marxism or Marxist humanism. This version of Marxism assumes a continuity between the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the later Marx of Capital and the Critique of the Gotha Program. 

The problem of suffering 

The key problem which Buddha identifies as the first of the ‘‘Four Noble Truths’’ is dukkha which is most often translated as ‘‘suffering’’ but which can also be translated as a sense of unsatisfactoriness, of unease, of insubstantiality, of emptiness. However, two points need to be made immediately. The first is that Buddhism does not to claim that existence ultimately has to be dukkha. The whole point of the third Noble truth, which is the cessation of dukkha, is that it is possible to reach a level of understanding which overcomes dukkha and that it is possible to attain Nibbana (Nirvana) in one’s lifetime. The second point is that Buddhism is not claiming that we never experience pleasure or moments of happiness. Rather the claim is that even these moments of pleasure or happiness have a lack of substance, and, thus, there is always a sense of disquiet, a suspicion that there is something deeply unsatisfactory and insubstantial about them. Of course, when we do not get what we want, we are dissatisfied. But even when we get what we want, loss or the threat of loss remains an ever-present possibility. Everything that is will eventually cease to be. From the Buddhist perspective, impermanence is a fundamental fact of all existence, and, therefore, we will eventually lose everything, and, as much as we may try to avoid thinking about it, we know that it will all end in old age, illness, and death. Hence, life has at its core a deep existential anxiety, a sense of inner emptiness, and a feeling of that there is no substantial grounding for our existence. 

For Marx, suffering takes a number of forms. There is first the suffering of immiseration which is still a lot of perhaps the majority of people in the world. This includes hunger and the lack of what is materially necessary to live a comfortable life. It also includes relative immiseration in which there are glaring and growing inequalities between the capitalist elite and those who are wage workers. There is second suffering that is based on the way work is organized in capitalist society. Work is most often experienced as physical and mental exhaustion, boredom, and an inability to express one’s creative energies. This last entails a third form of suffering, as the worker is alienated from the product of her labor and from her own activity. As a result, we are alienated from our ‘‘species being,’’ from ourselves and from our sense of being human. In addition, there is an alienation from others because others are perceived as competitors, because we take ourselves as individuals independent of others, and because our relation with others is mediated by the commodity form. This last is the problem that Marx termed ‘‘commodity fetishism’’ in which our social relations take the form of relation between things. As a result, our relations to each other are reified in work, in leisure, and in our consuming activities. 

It seems to me that the Buddhist and Marxist understanding of the nature of suffering are complementary, but this is not because they designate two different and separate spheres of suffering. While Buddha emphasizes the pervasive existential and ontological nature of dukkha and Marx focuses on its historical nature, dukkha never exists independently of a specific social and historical context. The suffering of impermanence is never simply the existential difficulty of accepting impermanence but always manifests itself as the attempt to cling to that which is impermanent within a specific historical moment and takes a specific historical form. Furthermore, dukkha is never simply my individual dukkha in that our suffering always occurs within a social context, which entails that our individual suffering cannot be separated from our social relations and from the suffering of others. Conversely, the alienation, reification, and dehumanization which Marxism analyzes is the historical form of the emptiness, impermanence, and insubstantiality at the core of our being which Buddhism discovers. 

The causes of suffering

For Buddhism, the proximate cause of suffering is tanha, which is literally translated as ‘‘thirst’’ but which is often translated as craving. This includes craving for sense pleasures, for existence, and even for non-existence. As a result of these kinds of craving, we get attached to things, to objects or ideas which give us pleasure, to our physical being, and, in the case of desiring suicide, to the destruction of our physical beings. We also develop aversions to that which would cause us pain and which would threaten our physical being (and, in the case of desiring suicide, to that which would maintain our existence). These cravings also cause us to be attached to whatever seems to satisfy the cravings. However, these cravings rests on a fundamental ontological illusion—the illusion of a permanent and independent self which has executive control of our intentions and actions. This illusion is generated by our attempt to avoid confronting the impermanence, emptiness, and insubstantiality at the core of our being. The problem is not the impermanence itself but the desire that there be something permanent within us, a desire that cannot be fulfilled, since everything is impermanent. In other words, the problem is not the fact of impermanence but our inability to accept impermanence. The problem is compounded by what Buddhism calls the three poisons—ignorance, greed, and ill will. These three poisons are also grounded in the illusion of our being a separate, independent self. Ignorance is ultimately the ignorance of the fact that there is no self. Greed is motivated by the desire to do everything for me and to make everything mine, which, since there is no self, can never succeed. Ill will, which takes such forms as hatred, anger, envy, and the desire for revenge, is based on the sense that I am separate from others and that, therefore, these others are a threat to me or to that to which I am attached. 

For Marx, suffering is caused by the division of labor in all its forms, with its attendant exploitation, oppression, and alienation. In The German Ideology, the division of labor is not only class division but also the division between intellectual and material labor, the gender division of labor, and even the division of labor in terms of people being locked into different kinds of labor. Within each of these divisions of labor the surplus product is appropriated by the dominant group. As the history of human species progressed, class division became the most significant division, and Marx analyzed class exploitation and alienation as the result of class division in which the ruling class controls the forces of production and appropriates the surplus product, while the members of the subordinate class produce the whole product but get only what is necessary for their continued existence. This subordinate group, at least in capitalism, also has no control over the labor process and is, in that sense, alienated from the very activity of their labor; and since, for Marx, one’s activity is essential to one’s being human, it is also alienation from one’s ‘‘species being’’ and from oneself. In addition, with the advent of capitalism, the ruling class, now the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, appropriates the surplus in the form of surplus value which continues to grow relative to the total product, and the subordinate class, now the proletariat, or wage worker, becomes at least relatively if not absolutely immiserated. It should be added that Marx thinks that even the ruling class suffers from alienation, although they do not experience their suffering in a way that calls them to challenge the system. Finally, as capitalism turns everything into a commodity, our social relations are mediated by the commodity form, which produces the illusion that commodities and money have a reality independent of human beings. In short, the reification of the commodity conceals our social relations as workers and as consumers. 

Capitalism both feeds on and reinforces the greed and possessiveness which, for Buddhism, is rooted in the illusion of self. Conversely, it is precisely the illusion of our sense of a separate and independent self which provides the desperation that capitalism turns into profit accumulation, competitiveness, and consumerism. Money in particular becomes a way to evade dukkha and, at the deepest level, a way to evade the recognition that the self is empty and, therefore, that there is nothing within us to which we can cling. We interpret this lack of self as a feeling that there is something missing to which money may supply the answer. Money creates a false sense of solidity and reinforces the illusion of an independent self. Since money cannot really take away the sense of emptiness, a sense that there is something lacking, there is a continuous drive for more money, which is the basis for capital’s continuous need to expand. David Loy puts it this way. ‘‘In modern developed...societies such as the United States, I am likely to understand my lack as not having enough money—regardless of how much money I already have. Money is important to us not only because we can buy anything with it, but also because it has become a kind of collective reality symbol. The more money you get, the more real you become.’’1 However, since money does not provide any genuine reality, since it cannot fill the emptiness within us, it simply increases the craving and attachment which produces dukkha. We must, we think, need even more money. No amount can ever be enough. Wall Street feeds on tanha. Thus, there is a reciprocal relation between the motives of capitalism and the existential-ontological problem which Buddhism identifies. It is the illusion of a separate and independent self which provides the fuel which capitalism transforms into profit accumulation, competitiveness, and consumerism; and capitalism, in turn, reinforces this illusion. Tanha fuels a continuous drive for more money and, thus, provides the existential basis for capital’s continuous need to expand. Conversely, the capitalist imperative for continuous expansion reinforces tanha. 

The way in which Marxism and Buddhism can mutually engage each other goes beyond Marx’s specific analysis of capitalism. Buddhism’s analysis of the causes of suffering as rooted in the illusion of self needs to be supplemented by a historical account of the forms of this illusion. Different historical periods will produce different forms of self constructions and, thus, produce historically specific forms of attendant suffering. ‘‘To be sure all the different forms of samsara are forms in which ego-consciousness is pervasive. But the specific degree and quality of humanness that is shaped to be what it is in specific historical conditions.’’2

The overcoming of suffering: Buddhist compassion and Marx’s vision of communism 

While abolishing the division of labor, class exploitation and oppression, and alienation are necessary conditions for the overcome suffering, it is not sufficient. As long as there is the illusion of self, suffering, however socially attenuated, will still exist. Furthermore, it is unlikely that these goals can be attained without extinguishing the illusion of self. Conversely, while extinguishing the desires, cravings, and attachments generated by the illusion of self may be necessary to overcome suffering, it is not sufficient. Overcoming individual dukkha requires that we overcome social dukkha, and this means that we must confront the economic, social, and political causes of suffering as well as its fundamental ontological cause.3 

The goal of Buddhist practice is ‘‘Nibbana’’ (the Pali word) or ‘‘Nirvana’’ (the word in Sanskrit). The word ‘‘Nibbana’’ means literally ‘‘extinguish,’’ as in extinguishing a fire, or blowing it out. It is the extinction of the cravings and the flames of the three poisons, both of which are derived from the illusion of self. It, therefore, requires extinguishing the illusion of the self, and this, in turn, requires, a society which instead of promoting individual separation and competition extols interdependence and solidarity. Furthermore, extinguishing the illusion of self removes the primary boundary to the development of compassion which, for those who have attained enlightenment, would be impartial and boundless. This is not only because the illusion of self draws a boundary between my individual ego self and all others but also because it creates boundaries between those with whom I identify and those outside my social identities. As a result, our social identities (ethnic identity, religious identity, religious identity, etc.) are reified and we become indifferent or hostile to those outside these boundaries. In short, our compassion is no longer constrained within the boundaries of our social identities. Extinguishing the illusion of self can extinguish these boundaries and allows our compassion to flow freely and universally. But this will also require political engagement and struggle to eliminate all the social conditions which are obstacles to the cultivation of compassion, and this political engagement needs to be animated by a vision of another kind of society, a society which would make universal compassion possible. It will require the creation of a ‘‘society in which loving kindness is the primary basis of social relationships...one in which the vast majority of human beings understand and act based on nonattachment and compassion. This is the ideal society according to Buddhism.’’4 It is also, as I shall argue below, the ideal society for Marxism. 

As the goal of Buddhism is Nirvana, the goal of Marxism is communism. As Buddha did not say very much about the positive features of Nirvana, Marx does not offer a blue print for a communist society. However, Marx did offer a vision of communism in broad strokes. Consider two main ideals of Marx’s vision. The first appears in The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels declared, ‘‘we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’’5 Thus, as capitalism fosters competitiveness and antagonism between individuals, so that one person’s gain is another person’s loss, a communist society would foster mutual caring through which each of us would strive to promote the capacities of others in conjunction with the development of one’s own capacities. In other words, the communist society which Marx envisioned would be organized in such a way that each individual could develop his or her potentialities and would take responsibility for the development of the potentials of all its members. Thus, communism, as Marx envisioned it, would provide the social foundation for extinguishing the illusion of self, for nonattachment, and for the development of universal compassion. 

The second main ideal appears in the Critique of the Gotha Program where Marx envisions the principle of distribution of this society to be ‘‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’’6 While the second ideal sounds utopian, Marx prefaces it with several main preconditions, among them that the forces of production have so developed that necessary work time can be drastically reduced and that work is something people do for its own sake, both because it is a way to develop their creative potentials and because it makes a contribution to the social good. The last is, for the purposes of this paper, especially important as it entails that human beings could work without material incentive for the benefit of the society as a whole. In other words, communism, as Marx envisioned it, requires that human beings develop a strong sense of solidarity with each other. Once again, the realization of this ideal would provide the social foundation for extinguishing the illusion of self, for developing nonattachment, and for cultivating universal compassion. 

In all, the possibility of attaining the goal of Buddhism will require attaining the goal of Marxism, and the possibility of attaining the goal of Marxism will require attaining the goal of Buddhism. While certain individuals may, through the recognition that there is no self, attain Nirvana and remove the internal barriers to universal compassion, the conditions of global capitalism will prevent most people from moving in this direction. On the other hand, while abolishing capitalism would provide the economic and social basis for communism, it would not be sufficient as long as most individuals retained the illusion of self. What each lacks, the other can provide. ‘‘The Buddhist prescription for personal happiness lacks one key ingredient: an understanding of the relatively durable social conditions that block our ability to limit suffering and live happy, fulfilled lives. At the same time, the Marxist vision of an ideal society elides the obdurate, existential facts of human suffering. Yet, both perspectives also provide us with valuable insights about how all human beings can attain a good life.’’7 

The eight-fold path and revolutionary social practice 

Buddhism proposes a practice to attain Nirvana, which Buddha called the eight-fold path. Marxism also proposes a practice for achieving communism. The practice is the organization of the working class into a political organization able to overthrow capitalism, to use the machinery of political power to establish collective ownership and control of the forces of production, and to begin the construction of socialism, which Marx understood as first phase communism. The practice, to be successful, would need an authentic sense of solidarity among the proletariat. Marx envisioned this solidarity as international, and in the twenty-first century, the overthrow of capitalist globalization requires a global solidarity. Whether the revolutionary agent is still the proletariat is now much debated, but it is clear that whatever form the revolutionary agent would take, it would need to be a global one. 

This global agent will include Buddhists who are socially engaged. In fact, there is now a movement which openly calls itself ‘‘socially engaged Buddhism,’’ a movement which is an evolving form of life and method of confronting our deepest existential problems as they are socially mediated, a practice which simultaneously confronts individual and social dukkha as it intersects with our global historical conditions. The Ven. Bhikku Bodhi has defined social engaged Buddhism as the ‘‘application of Buddhist principles and practices to the task of instigating systematic changes in social, political, and economic institutions and policies so as to further the well-being of the people (and other beings) affected by them.’’ Its goal is ‘‘to change the systems and structures responsible for communal suffering’’ and not merely alter the views and attitudes of individuals.8 Bhikkhu Bodhi also argues that while Mahayana Buddhism inaugurated a second stage in the development of Buddhist ethical consciousness, socially engaged Buddhism brings into being a third stage, one in which the universal compassion must be manifested in social action. Although engaged Buddhism reaches back to classical Buddhism and uses ‘‘Buddhist principles as guideposts to change society,’’9 it represents ‘‘a decisive shift...away from transcendent liberation or heavenly rebirth...to the task of transforming oppressive systemic structures that cause grave suffering for people in this present world of concrete experience.’’10 I would add that socially engaged Buddhism is as much an Asian phenomenon as it is a western one and that it presents itself as a confrontation of Buddhism with the problems of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first century.11 

In all, while certain individuals may, through the recognition that there is no self, remove the internal barriers to universal compassion, the conditions of global capitalism will prevent most people from moving in this direction. On the other hand, while changing social conditions in the direction of Marx’s vision of communism would provide the political-economic basis for social solidarity, it would be not be sufficient as long as most individuals retained the illusion of self. In other words, the possibility of extinguishing the illusion of self, for non-attachment, for universal compassion, and for a genuine social solidarity requires both a radical social and subjective transformation. Unless we radically change social conditions, we cannot expect most people to develop the understanding necessary to recognize that their idea of the self is an illusion and for cultivating universal compassion. Conversely, simply changing social conditions will be insufficient to achieve social solidarity without a practice to develop the insight to extinguish the illusion of self and to cultivate non-attachment and universal compassion. Furthermore, each of these perspectives can not only support and complement each other but can also interrogate and guide the other. I will conclude with a suggestion made by Jeff Waistell. ‘‘Communism should guide Buddhist practice. In particular, the criterion for selecting meditation practices should be to ask; which ones inspire Socialism? A corollary of this is to cast aside those types of meditation that lead to an illusory nirvana that leaves us feeling self-satisfied, imagining that we have gained individual insight, when all around us is social and environmental suffering from which we have disengaged... And the key success criterion for evaluating meditation is to ask—to what extent has it reduced social suffering?...Buddhism should guide Communist practice. For example, mindfulness meditation is needed to keep calm when non-violently fighting the class war that continues to rage around the world. Meditation can provide insight to the causes of structural violence and the solutions to it. Buddhism can help Communism to drive social change non- violently, while having zero tolerance for structural violence.’’12 

Bringing Marxism and Buddhism together: the ecological crisis as an example 

In the age of globalization, capitalism is in crises on the global level. There is an explosion of credit and debt, increasing rates of exploitation, inequality and impoverishment, and continuing financial instability, and the very real threat of a financial meltdown. There is a growing recognition that trans-national industrial and financial corporations act like global psychopaths. Perhaps the symptom of the crisis which is most immediately dangerous is global warming/climate change and the more general ecological collapse, which not only threatens the survival of our own species but within the next twenty-five to fifty years may extinguish half the species on this planet. 

The problem of global warming is now a climate emergency. In 2007, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Emergency (IPCC) issued a report which said that if carbon gas emissions were not reduced the following would happen: increase of major storms and floods, deadly heat waves, agriculture will collapse and deserts expand, hundreds of millions will suffer from water shortage and famine, there would rapid melting of the earth’s ice sheets, oceans would swallow the world’s coastlines including cities like New York, Calcutta, Shanghai, Mumbai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and London. The world’s temperature is already one degree centigrade above average. A two to three centigrade increase would mean no arctic sea ice and perhaps a seven to twelve foot rise in the sea levels. A three to four degree increase would mean a loss of perhaps seventy percent of the snow and glacial areas of the world. The 2014 IPCC report makes it clear that the situation is even worse than it was thought in 2007. The polar ice caps are already melting an alarming rate. We can expect increasing extremes in heat waves, storms, floods, etc. The rise of sea levels has already destroyed certain islands and will continue to rise. Global warming will continue even if we stop all GHG emissions now. We can expect increasing disease, malnutrition due to low crop yield, displacement due to natural disasters food and water insecurity, loss of biodiversity. Perhaps, most alarming of all, the 2014 IPCC report predicts that at the present rate of GHG emissions, we will have reached the tipping point by the year 2025. 

Furthermore, the problems of global warming and the other forms of ecological destruction have a variety of feedback and multiplying effects. Ecosystems are internally related and the results are, therefore, nonlinear, chaotic, and unpredictable. For example, the burning of the tropical rainforest cause 25 per cent of all carbon gas emissions. The melting of the sea ice releases huge amounts of methane, which is more aggressive than greenhouse gas. The melting of the polar ice eliminates the albedo effect (wherein solar energy is reflected from the ice). The result is a greater absorption of solar energy and an even greater increase in global temperature. The melting of the frozen tundra also releases methane. The ocean acidification caused, in part, by oil means that the ocean has less ability to absorb carbon and, therefore, there is more global warming. Finally, the changing climate zones, as a result of global warming, results in the collapse of ecosystems, the extinction of species dependent on these ecosystem, which results in the collapse of more ecosystems and the extinction of more species. Climate scientists now warn that we may be facing the 6th largest species extinction in our earth’s history. 

However, while many of these facts are known, the world’s political leaders, while expressing concern, do not begin to confront the magnitude of the ecological crises. Why this denial? Consider the following: 

What prevents the world community from adopting measures to curb carbon emissions rapidly and on the required scale? If a fire breaks out in my house, I would quickly take any action necessary to extinguish it, even calling for the fire department if it gets out of hand. Yet, oddly, when our planetary house is aflame, we spend more time squabbling over who should extinguish the fire than we do actually pursuing ways to put it out. Those most responsible for setting the fire in the first place scheme and bargain to avoid making a full commitment to the firefighting.13 

What are the impediments to rationally dealing with the crisis, since surely no one wants species extinction or a significant debasement of human life on the planet? 

It is beyond debate that the ecology of Earth – including the life support systems on which humans and all other species depend – is under sustained and severe attack by human activities. It is also clear that if we don’t radically change our ways, the results will be devastating. The multifaceted, complex, and rapidly accelerating character of the planetary environmental crisis is traceable to a single systematic cause: the economic and social order in which we live.14 

The economic and social order which is the underlying cause of this ecological crisis is global capitalism, and there are several reasons that this crisis cannot be solved within the parameters of capitalism. 

The first reason is the imperative of profit accumulation. Capitalism changes C-M-C (Commodity-Money-Commodity) into M-C-M0 (Money-Commodity-more Money). The circuit cannot be continued unless it generates, surplus value, which requires both the exploitation of labor and the domination and exploitation of nature. It requires exponential growth without limits. As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, ‘‘Capital is the Endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary is and has to be a barrier for it. Else it would cease to be capital—money as self-reproductive.’’15 The second reason is that globalization has as its basic mission to convert the entire world to the accumulation process. It must, therefore, penetrate every life world in order to foster accumulation. The whole of nature is simply a resource for this process. Any CEO of a corporation who wants to remain a CEO must disregard that which is not profitable, and, in any case, Capital selects persons who are self-seeking and ruthless. The third reason is, to quote Michael Parenti, that ‘‘pollution pays, while ecology costs. Every dollar a company spends on environmental protections is one less dollar in earnings. It is more profitable to treat the environment like a septic tank, to externalize corporate diseconomies by dumping raw industrial effluent into the atmosphere, rivers, and bays, turning waterways into open sewers.’’16 The fourth reason is that the commodity form places exchange value over use value, which has its culmination in finance capital. Financial capital is even more abstract/pure capital—more liquid; it has more need for immediate rewards (short-term profitability), and Wall Street is the command center. Pure financial capital becomes a self-expanding machine which must constantly seek ways to overcome any limits which nature would impose. Fifth, as capital can never be satisfied, it forces a constant sense of lack, creating conditions which foster greed (for profit), attachment (to consumer objects and money), and a variety of cravings and artificial needs. Hence, capitalism creates a consumer society which needs a constant infusion of energy and resources to satisfy it.17 Thus, even those who do not have much of a stake in capital accumulation are tied psychologically to the commodity form through their needs as consumers. 

As I mentioned earlier, Wall Street feeds on tanha. Financial capital in turn reinforces and inflates tanha, which in turn, provides the existential basis for capital’s continuous need to expand. While the expansion of money can continue for a while without the growth of an underlying productive base, these financial bubbles eventually burst. Capital then needs to find other investment outlets, and this requires still more production which despoils nature. 

However, while the Marxist critique makes it clear that the ecological crisis cannot be solved within the parameter of capitalism, socialism, as it is often understood, cannot in itself overcome the ecological crisis. The problem here is not just that what has been called ‘‘really existing socialism’’ in the twentieth century, most notably the Soviet Union and China, were ecological disasters, but also the anthropocentric, Promethean, and productivist assumptions that were built into classical socialist thinking. The anthropocentric and Promethean assumptions imply that human beings have a privileged position vis-a-vis the rest of nature and have, therefore, the right to exploit and change nature fully to their advantage; in effect, that we can conquer nature. The productivist assumption is that production can be unlimited—in order that we can go from the ‘‘kingdom of necessity’’ to the ‘‘realm of freedom.’’ Nature, then, remains a resource to be controlled and dominated. Here, for example, is Trotsky in an essay in Literature and Revolution: ‘‘through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety....He will point out places for mountains and passes. He will change the course of rivers, and he will lay down rules for the ocean.’’18 Although there is some debate about whether Marx and Engels themselves made such productivist and Promethean assumptions, such assumptions have often framed the way in which many Marxists think about socialism. And it is certainly the case that Marx and Engels assumed a privileged place for human beings in relation to the rest of nature, which is the anthropocentric assumption. 

What all this means is that that the second impediment to solving the ecological crisis is the anthropocentric assumption which predates capitalism and which will not be automatically overcome with the overthrow of capitalism. Buddhism is especially well suited to addressing this assumption. 

I have already discussed the general problem of social dukkha, in which the illusion of self can take a collective as well an individual form. Once these collective self-identities are formed, they open the possibility of needing to protect oneself against members of the other group, exploiting and dominating the other group, and perhaps going to war against members of the other group. It is often thought that this problem is overcome if we can establish a ‘‘human’’ identity, an identification with all members of the species. But a species identity draws another boundary line, between the species-self and what is not the species-self—all other species and the rest of nature. If the sense of a separate self is dukkha, as Buddhism claims, then the sense of a collective species-self is the most fundamental form of social dukkha, as it creates a sense separation from the rest of the biosphere of which, in reality, we are a part. This collective sense of separation creates an alienation from the rest of nature, a sense of collective insecurity and anxiety. Our response to this collective alienation, insecurity, and anxiety is to continually rearrange nature through our technology, to turn it into mere resources for us, to subordinate it to our will, to dominate and exploit it for profit within capitalism; or, in the socialist spirit, ‘‘to change the course of rivers’’ and ‘‘lay down rules for the oceans.’’ Thus, a socialist anthropocentrism would still see nature as a resource to be dominated for the sake of the collective species self. 

The solution to the problem of individual dukkha is to free ourselves from the illusion of a separate, independent, permanent self; to accept the impermanence of existence and to embrace our interdependence with others. The solution to the problem of social dukkha requires both that we abolish the institutional structures of global capitalism and free ourselves from the illusion of a separate, independent self, including a separate species-self, and embrace our interdependence with the totality of the biosphere. ‘‘The environment is not merely the place where we live and act, for the biosphere is the ground from which and within which we arise. The earth is not only our home, it is our mother....The air in my lungs, like the water and food that pass through my mouth, is part of a great system that does not stop with me but continually circulates through me.’’19 This implies compassion for all sentient beings, respect for all living beings, and responsibility for the well-being of the ecosystems which sustain life and ultimately for the whole of the biosphere. 

Endnotes

1. David Loy, Money, Sex War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2008), 19–20 (Loy 2008). 

2. Kevin M. Brien, ‘‘Buddhism and Marxism: Ironic Affinities,’’ Dialogue and Universalism 14 (2004): 58. (Brien 2004). 

3. I am indebted to David Loy for the idea of ‘‘social dukkha.’’ Loy argues that each of the three poisons functions in a collective as well as an individual form and that extinguishing the three poisons in both their collective and individual form will require challenging the power of global corporate and financial capital. ‘‘Our present economic system institutionalizes greed, our militarism institutionalizes ill will, and our corporate media institutionalizes delusion.’’ Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma, 89 (Loy 2008). 

4. Michael Slott, ‘‘Can you be a Buddhist and a Marxist,’’ Contemporary Buddhism 12(2) (2011):353 (Slott 2011). 

5.  Marx and Engels, ‘‘The Communist Manifesto,’’ 176 (Marx 1994). 

6. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 321 (Marx 1994). 

7. Slott, ‘‘Can you be a Buddhist and a Marxist,’’ 356 (Slott 2011).

8. Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, ‘‘Socially Engaged Buddhism and the Trajectory of Buddhist Ethical Consciousness,’’ Religion East and West 9 (2009): 2 (Bodhi 2009a). 

9. Bodhi, ‘‘Socially Engaged Buddhism,’’ 14 (Bodhi 2009).

10. Bodhi, ‘‘Socially Engaged Buddhism,’’ 15 (Bodhi 2009).

11. Proponents of socially engaged Buddhism include Tich Nhat Hanh from Viet Nam, Sulak Sivaraksa from Thailand, and the Dalai Lama.

12.  Waistell, ‘‘Marx and Buddha: A Buddhist-Communist Manifesto,’’ 209–210. (Waistell 2014). 

13. Bhikkhu Bodhi, ‘‘The Voice of the Golden Goose,‘‘ 162–163. (Bodhi 2009b).

14. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011): 25. (Magdoff and Foster 2011).

15. Marx, Grundrisse, 334 (Marx 1973). 

16. Parenti, ‘‘Why the Corporate Rich Oppose Environmentalism.’’ (Parenti 2005). 

17. For these arguments, I am especially indebted to Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: the End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (New York: Zed Books, 2007). (Kovel 2007). 

18. Trotksy, ‘‘Literature and Revolution’’, 287 (Trotksy 1962). 

19. Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma, 109–110 (Loy 2008). 

References 

Bodhi, Ven. Bhikkhu. ‘‘Socially Engaged Buddhism and the Trajectory of Buddhist Ethical Consciousness.’’ Religion East and West 9(2009a):1–23. 

Bodhi, Ven. Bhikkhu. ‘‘The Voice of the Golden Goose.’’ In A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency, ed. John Stanley, David R. Loy, and Gyurme Dorje, 157–171. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2009b. 

Brien, Kevin M. ‘‘Buddhism and Marxism: Ironic Affinities.’’ Dialogue and Universalism 14(2004):35–59. 

Kovel, Joel. The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? New York: Zed Books. 

Loy, David. Money, Sex War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2008. 

Magdoff, Fred, and John Bellamy Foster. What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011. 

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Translated and edited by Martin Nicolas. London: Penguin Books, 1973. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. ‘‘The Communist Manifesto.’’ In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994.

Parenti, Michael. ‘‘Why the Corporate Rich Oppose Environmentalism,’’ ZNET, August 4, 2005, online at:http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-08/04parenti.cfm.
Slott, Michael. ‘‘Can you be a Buddhist and a Marxist.’’ Contemporary Buddhism 12, no. 2  (2011):347–363.

Trotsky, Leon. ‘‘Literature and Revolution.’’ In The Marxists, ed. C. Wright Mills. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1962.

Waistell, Jeff. ‘‘Marx and Buddha: A Buddhist-Communist Manifesto.’’ In Buddhism for Sustainable Development and Social Change, edited by Thich Nhat Tu and Thich Duc Thien (Vietnam Buddhist University Publications, 2014), 195–217. 

2908. Antonio Gramsci: Our Marx

By Antonio Gramsci, May 4, 1918

Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937

Are we Marxists? Do Marxists exist? Stupidity, thou alone art immortal. The question will probably be taken up again over the next few days, the period around Marx's centenary, and will bring forth rivers of ink and idiocy. Wild mumblings and stylistic affectation are the incorruptible heritage of man. Marx did not write a nice little doctrine, he is not a Messiah who left a string of parables laden with categorical imperatives, with absolute, unquestionable norms beyond the categories of time and space. The only categorical imperative, the only norm: 'Workers of the world, unite!' The duty of organizing, the propagation of the duty to organize and associate, should, therefore, be what distinguishes Marxists from non-Marxists. Too little and too much: who in this case would not be a Marxist? 

And yet that is how it is. Everyone is a bit of a Marxist, without being aware of it. Marx was great, his action was fecund, not because he invented from nothing, not because he extracted an original vision of history from his imagination, but because in him the fragmentary, the incomplete, the immature became maturity, system, awareness. His personal awareness can become everyone's, it has already become that of many people: because of this Marx is not just a scholar, he is a man of action; he is great and fecund in action as in thought, his books have transformed the world, just as they have transformed thought. 

Marx signifies the entry of intelligence into the history of humanity, the reign of awareness. 

His work falls in exactly the same period as the great battle between Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer on the role of man in history. 

Carlyle: the hero, the great individual, the mystical synthesis of a spiritual communion, leads the destinies of humanity towards an unknown, evanescent goal in the chimerical land of perfection and saintliness. 

Spencer: nature, evolution, mechanical and inanimate abstraction. Man: atom of a natural organism, one which obeys a law that is abstract as such, but which becomes historically concrete in individuals: immediate utility. 

Marx plants himself squarely in history with the solid bearing of a giant. He is neither a mystic nor a positivist metaphysician. He is a historian, he is an interpreter of the documents of the past, of all the documents, not just a part of them. 

This was the intrinsic defect of histories, of research into human events: to have examined and taken into account only a part of the documents. And this part was selected not by the historical will but by partisan prejudice, even if it was unconscious and in good faith. What this research aimed at was not truth, precision, the integral recreation of the life of the past, but the highlighting of a particular activity, the bearing out of a prior hypothesis. History was a domain solely of ideas. Man was considered as spirit, as pure consciousness. Two erroneous consequences derived from this conception: the ideas that were borne out were often merely arbitrary, fictitious. The facts that were given importance were anecdotes, not history. If history was written, in the real sense of the word, it was due to the brilliant intuition of single individuals, not to a systematic and conscious scientific activity. 

With Marx, history continues to be the domain of ideas, of spirit, of the conscious activity of single or associated individuals. But ideas, spirit, take on substance, lose their arbitrariness, they are no longer fictitious religious or sociological abstractions. Their substance is in the economy, in practical activity, in the systems and relations of production and exchange. History as that which happens is pure practical (economic and moral) activity. An idea becomes real not because it is logically in conformity with pure truth, pure humanity (which exists only as a plan, as a general ethical goal of mankind), but because it finds in economic reality its justification, the instrument with which it can be carried out. In order to know with precision what the historical ends of a country, a 'society, a social grouping are, one must know first of all what systems and relations of production and exchange obtain in that country, that society. Without this knowledge one will be able to write partial monographs, dissertations which are useful for the history of culture, one will pick up secondary reflections, distant consequences, but one will not be doing history, practical activity will not be disclosed in all its solid compactness. 

Idols crumble from their altar, divinities see the clouds of perfumed incense disperse. Man acquires an awareness of Objective reality, he masters the secret which lies behind the real unfolding of events. Man knows himself, he knows how much his individual will can be worth, and how it can be made more powerful in that, by obeying, by disciplining itself to necessity, it finally dominates necessity itself, identifying it with its own ends. Who knows himself? Not man in general, but he who undergoes the yoke of necessity. The search for the substance of history, the identification of that substance in the system and the relations of production and exchange, leads one to discover how human society is split into two classes. The class which owns the instruments of production already necessarily knows itself, it has a consciousness, albeit confused and fragmentary, of its power and its mission. It has individual ends and it attains them through its capacity to organize, coldly, objectively, without worrying whether its road is paved with bodies reduced by hunger or corpses on battlefields. 

The organizing of real historical causality takes on the value of a revelation for the other class, it becomes an ordering principle for the huge flock without a shepherd. The flock acquires an awareness of itself, of the task which it must now carry out in order to assert itself as a class, becomes conscious that its individual ends will remain purely arbitrary, pure words, empty and inflated wishes, until it possesses the tools until these wishes have become will. 

Voluntarism? The word is meaningless, or it is used with the meaning of arbitrary will. Will, in a Marxist sense, means awareness of ends, which in turn means exact knowledge of one's own power and the means to express it in action. It, therefore, means, in the first place, that the class becomes distinct and individuated, compactly organized and disciplined to its own specific ends, without wavering or being deflected. It means an impulse acting in a straight line towards the maximum destination, without jaunts into the green meadows on the wayside to drink a glass of cordial fraternity, softened by the greenery and by tender declarations of respect and love. 

But the phrase 'in a Marxist sense' is pointless; it can give rise to equivocations and fatuous showerings of words. Marxist, in a Marxist sense ... the terms are worn like coins that have passed through too many hands. 

Karl Marx is for us a master of spiritual and moral life, not a shepherd wielding a crook. He is the stimulator of mental laziness, the arouser of good energies which slumber and which must wake up for the good fight. He is an example of intense and tenacious work to attain the clear honesty of ideas, the solid culture necessary in order not to talk in a void, about abstractions. He is a monolithic bloc of knowing and thinking humanity, who does not look at his tongue in order to speak, who does not put his hand on his heart in order to feel, but who constructs iron syllogisms which encircle reality in its essence and dominate it, which penetrate people's minds, which bring the sedimentations of prejudice and fixed ideas crumbling down and strengthen the moral character. 

Karl Marx is not, for us, the infant whimpering in the cradle or the bearded man who frightens priests. He is none of the anecdotal episodes of his biography, no brilliant or gauche gesture of his outward human animality. He is a broad and serene thinking brain, he is an individual moment in the anxious search that humanity has been conducting for centuries to acquire consciousness of its being and its becoming, to grasp the mysterious rhythm of history and disperse the mystery, to be stronger in its thinking and to act better. He is a necessary and integral part of our spirit, which would not be what it is if he had not lived, had not thought, had not sent sparks of light flying from the collision with his passions and his ideas, his sufferings and his ideals.

In glorifying Karl Marx on the centenary of his birth, the international proletariat is glorifying itself, its conscious strength, the dynamism of its aggressiveness of conquest which undermines the rule of privilege and prepares for the final struggle which will crown all its efforts and all its sacrifices. 

Signed Antonio Gramsci, II Grido del Popolo, 4 May 1918.*  Text taken from An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, edited by David Forgacs, pp. 36-39. 

2824. Marx and the Progress

By Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marxism.org, September 2000

Paresh Chattopadhyay

Introduction

The basic theme of the paper is the passage from the “pre-history of human society” to humanity’s history through revolutionary transformation of the old society. This passage is considered as humanity’s progress in the sense of contradictory movement, as a manifestation of the dialectic of negativity. First, the paper restates and discusses Marx’s central proposition that capital through its inherent contradictions creates the conditions of its own demise as well as the elements for building a union of free individuals. Then, in the light of Marx’s correspondence with the Russians in his later years, the paper goes into the question, if the capitalist mode of production (CMP) is the necessary precondition for building the new society, or the old society in the absence of the CMP could, on its own, generate the necessary conditions for passage to the new society. Finally, the whole question of the revolutionary transformation of society is discussed within the broad Marxian purview of human progress where it is argued that Marx is a great ‘rethinker’ of progress, that his perspective has nothing in common with any unilateral view (positive or negative) of human advancement (or regression) and that progress in this view is an aspect of the dialectic of negativity pervading the critique of political economy.

Socialism, the Offspring of Capital

The whole of Marx’s ‘Critique of Political Economy’ (‘Critique’ for short) is informed, one could say, by what he wrote in two texts referring, respectively, to two great philosophers: Spinoza and Hegel. In his Parisian manuscripts (1844), referring to Hegel’s Phenomenology, Marx underlined that its “greatness” lay in the “dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle” (1966a: 67). Many years later, in the first manuscript of Capital, vol. 2, Marx completed Spinoza’s well-known phrase thus: “all determination is negation and all negation is determination” (1988: 316. This manuscript is not included in Engels’s edition of Capital, vol. 2). Marx shows how capital creates the subjective and objective conditions of its own negation and, simultaneously, the elements of the new society destined to supersede it – socialism. In the ‘Critique’ socialism (equivalently communism) signifies a “society of free and associated producers” based on the “associated mode of production (AMP).” This “union of free individuals,” the crowning point of the producers’ act of self-emancipation where individuals are subject neither to personal dependence – as in pre-capitalism – nor to material dependence – as in commodity (capitalist) society – excludes, by definition, private property in the means of production, commodity form of the product of labor, wage labor and state. Here the freely associated “social individuals” are the masters of their own social movement, subjecting their social relations to their own control (Marx 1987: 110; 1965: 614).

The individual’s freedom from material dependence, necessarily associated with the collective (social) domination of the conditions of production by the “union of free individuals,” depends first of all on the existence of an abundance of material wealth based on a high degree of development of the productive forces at the universal level including the quantitative and qualitative development of the “greatest productive force,” the proletariat – the revolutionary class – in its “world-historical existence” (Marx 1965: 135; in Marx and Engels 1973: 34). First, the development of productive forces, which is basically the “development of the wealth of human nature as an end in itself,” is an absolutely necessary “practical (pre)condition of human emancipation because without it only the penury and the necessity will be generalized and, with the need, shall also start the struggle for necessity” (1973: 34-35; Marx 1959: 107). Not only this. With the growth in the productive powers of labor, also increases the disposable time beyond the necessary labor time – that is, the increase in society’s free time as the basis of all creative activities of the individuals. On the other hand, “only with this universal development of the productive powers can universal intercourse (Verkehr) of human beings be posited” (in Marx and Engels 1973: 33). 

Society’s (collective) domination over the conditions of production in its turn implies the mastery of the social individuals of their own social relations. However, the existence of universally developed individuals subordinating their social relations to their own control is not something naturally given, it is a “product of history” presupposing a whole series of material conditions, themselves the product of a “long and painful history of development” (1953: 77; 1987: 110). And if the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of circulation for a classless society do not exist in a latent form in the society as it is, (then) “all attempts at exploding the society would be Don Quixotism” (1953: 77). Precisely it is capital which creates the requisite material conditions of the proletarian (and thereby human) emancipation.

First, the contradictory character of the necessary labor – surplus labor relation, true for all class societies, takes on a special meaning with labor’s subsumption under capital. In the pre-capitalist modes of production where use values and not exchange values dominate, surplus labor is circumscribed by a definite circle of needs. In the earlier class societies labor time is extended to produce, beyond the subsistence of the immediate producers, a certain amount of use values for the masters. The importance of surplus labor beyond the labor necessary for the natural needs of subsistence assumes a far greater importance when exchange value becomes the determining element of production. Under capital, which is basically generalized commodity production, the constraint on labor to extend labor time beyond necessary labor time is maximum (1976: 174). Compared with earlier class societies based on the extraction of surplus labor from the immediate producers, capital extracts surplus labor in a way and in the conditions which are more advantageous for the development of productive forces and of social relations as well as for the creation of the elements of “a new and higher type of society” – which constitutes “one of the civilising sides of capital” (1992: 837; 1964: 827). “Production for production’s sake as an end in itself (als Selbstzweck),” writes Marx, “already appears with the formal subsumption of labor under capital as soon as the immediate goal of production becomes the production of as big a surplus value as possible (and) exchange value of products becomes the decisive aim ... This is a production which is not bound either by limited needs nor by needs which limit it. This is one side, positive side if you like, as distinguished from the earlier modes of production” (1988: 107; the expression “if you like” appears in English in the text). Along with the ceaseless striving to drive society’s majority to labor beyond what is required to satisfy the immediate needs, capital pushes labor to a greater diversity of production toward an enlargement of the circle of needs and the means to satisfy them and thereby the exercise of the human faculties in all directions. To the extent that it is capital’s coercion which compels society’s masses to labor beyond their immediate needs, “capital creates culture, it performs a historical-social function” (1976: 173, 175). Thus the degree and the universality of the development of the faculties (Vermögen) necessary to create “universally developed individuals” precisely (pre)suppose production based on exchange values which contradictorily creates, for the first time, along with the general alienation of the individual in relation to oneself and to others, the universality and totality of the individual’s relations and faculties (1953: 79-80). This is the “historical justification” of labor’s separation from property.

Wealth in its autonomous being exists only for either directly forced labor – slavery – or indirectly forced labor – wage labour. The directly forced labour does not confront wealth as capital, but only as a relation of (personal) domination. Therefore on the basis of directly forced labor there will only be the reproduction of the relation of (personal) domination for which wealth itself has value only as enjoyment, not as wealth as such, “a relation, therefore, which can never create universal industry” (1953:232). “The original unity between the laborer and the conditions of production,” writes Marx, “has two main forms (leaving aside slavery where the laborer himself is a part of the objective conditions of production): the Asiatic community (natural communism) and the small family agriculture (bound with household industry) in one or the other forms. Both are infantile forms and equally little suited to develop labor as social labor and productive power of social labor, whence the necessity of separation, of rupture, of the opposition between labor and ownership (in the conditions of production). The extreme form of this rupture within which at the same time the productive forces of social labour are most powerfully developed is the form of capital. On the material basis which it creates and by the means of the revolutions which the working class and the whole society undergoes in the process of creating it can the original unity be restored” (1962: 419; emphasis in the text. The expressions “the productive forces ... developed,” and “the whole society undergoes “are in English in the text).

Needless to add, production for production’s sake takes place under capitalism “at the cost of the human individual” along with the general alienation of the individual in relation to oneself and to others, as mentioned earlier. The economy of the social means of production, the economy of cost becomes, in the hands of capital, simultaneously “a system of robbery, during work, of the conditions of life of the worker, of space, air, light and the personal conditions of safety against the dangers and the unhealthy environment of the productive process,” merciless dissipation of labor power, and the most “shameless robbery” of the normal conditions of labor’s functioning (1987: 413, 443; 1965: 959-60, 983; 1988: 107). “The capitalist production is most economical of realized labor, labor realized in commodities. It is a greater spendthrift than any other mode of production of man, of living labor, spendthrift not only of flesh and blood and muscles, but also of brains and nerves” (1976: 324. Both the sentences are in English in the text). While the capitalist mode of production (CMP) never considers and never holds – contrary to the earlier modes of production – the existing form of a productive process as definitive, rendering its technical basis revolutionary, it, at the same time, generates the monstrosity of the reserve army of labor, creates “incessant hecatombs (Opferfest) of the laboring class, reckless dilapidation of powers of labor, and gives full vent to the ravages of social anarchy,” making “each economic progress a public calamity” (1987: 466; 1965: 991). Thus under capital the “productive forces know only a unilateral development and becomes the destructive forces for the majority” (in Marx and Engels 1973: 60).

Now, the development of antagonisms of a social form of production is the “only historical (real) way toward its dissolution and metamorphosis” (1987: 467; 1965: 993). It is capital itself which creates the conditions of its own negation. In an early text, addressed to the workers, Marx clearly underlines what he calls the “positive side of capital,” that is, without the big industry, free competition, the world market and the corresponding means of production there would be no material resources for the emancipation of the proletariat and the creation of the new society. He adds that without these conditions the proletariat would not have taken the road of union nor known the development which makes it capable of revolutionizing the old society as well as itself” (1973: 555). At the same time capital transforms the dispersed, isolated, small-scale labor into large scale socially organized combined labor under its direct domination and thereby also generalizes workers’ direct struggle against this domination. With the material conditions and social combinations of production” capital develops, simultaneously, the contradictions and antagonisms, “the forces of destruction of the old society and the elements of formation of a new society.” Along with the increasing misery oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation, there also grows the “resistance of the working class more and more disciplined, united and organized by the mechanism of the capitalist production itself” (1987: 475, 682; 1965: 995-96, 1239). While the capitalist mode of production, in contrast with the earlier modes of production, generates immense progress as regards the development of the productive powers of social labor, “it also includes within its antagonistic form, ... the necessity of its downfall” (1962: 426).

On the other hand, capital itself comes to constitute a material barrier to the capitalist production. The limits within which alone can the conservation and valorization of capital values move enter continually into contradiction with the methods of production which capital must employ toward its aim and which drive it toward unlimited increase in production, production as an end in itself, unconditional development of social productive powers of labor. The means – the unconditional development of the social productive powers – runs into continual conflict with the limited end - the valorization of existing capital. “If, therefore, the capitalist mode of production is a historical means to develop the material productive power and to create world market corresponding to it, it is at the same time a perpetual contradiction between this historical task and the corresponding social relations of production” (1964: 260; 1992: 324). Thus it is clear that “the material and intellectual (geistigen) conditions of the negation of wage labor and capital, which themselves are the negation of the earlier forms of unfree social production, are themselves the results of its (capital’s) process of production.” The increasing inadequacy of the productive development of society in relation to its hitherto existing production relations is expressed in sharp contradictions, crises, convulsions. “The violent destruction of capital, not through the relations external to it, but as the condition of its self preservation (is) the most striking form in which advice is given to it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production” (1953: 635-16; the word “advice” and the whole expression starting with “to be gone” is in English in the text). In this profound sense the capitalist mode of production constitutes the transition to the socialist or the “associated mode of production” (1962: 426; 1992: 504, 662; 1964: 456, 621). In the well-known words of the Gothakritik, the socialist (communist) society “comes out of the womb” of the capitalist society (Marx 1966b: 178).

The ‘Late Marx’ and the Road to Socialism

It has been widely held that Marx in his last years particularly and notably in his writings on Russia – did fundamentally change, if not contradict, his earlier central position that the elements of the new society are generated within capital through a process of creating the conditions of its own negation. This was specially emphasized not so long ago by Teodor Shanin and Haruki Wada in a book which has exercised a certain influence on scholars – Marxist or otherwise (Shanin 1983). Later a Latin American Marx scholar basically held, with some qualifications, the same idea (Dussel 1990). Let us examine this argument.

Now, in these writings, Marx was reacting to a question posed to him by his Russian correspondents: could the already existing Russian rural communes be the basis for building socialism (communism) in Russia without going through the capitalist mode of production, or must Russia pass through a capitalist stage in order to arrive at the new society?

In his reply Marx first observed that in Capital he had underlined that his analysis of CMP – its genesis and development generating, in the process, the elements of its own negation – was confined strictly to “Western Europe,” He derisively rejected any claim to possess a “master key of a general historical-philosophical theory fatally imposable” on all peoples irrespective of the specific historical circumstances in which they found themselves (to Mikhailovsky 1968: 1555). Thus the analysis in Capital could not offer either a positive or a negative answer to the question posed by the Russian correspondents. But, added Marx, from his independent studies on Russia he had concluded that the Russian rural commune could serve as the point of departure of “social regeneration” in Russia. However, this transition will not be automatic. The communal ownership in land, the point of departure of this “regeneration,” has already been affected by adverse forces – working inside and outside the commune – tending to undermine the system. On the one hand, parcellary cultivation of land and private appropriation of its fruits by its members, and, on the other hand, States’ fiscal exactions, fraudulent exploitation by usury and merchant capital happening since 1861 when the Tsarist State adopted measures for the “so-called emancipation of the peasants.” Hence, “social regeneration” is possible provided the negative factors are eliminated, most importantly by a “Russian Revolution” by the peasant masses. In the process the commune could benefit from the scientific and technological acquisitions of the existing capitalism of the west.

According to Shanin, Marx’s new familiarity with the Russian situation would as if make Marx uphold the position that a peasant revolution in Russia towards its immediate socialist transformation would serve as the prototype of revolution towards immediate transition to socialism from the peasant societies in the backward countries like the way England served as the prototype for the capitalist world (1983: 18). Following Shanin, the Russian case added a fourth dimension to “Marx’s analytical thought” where to the “triple origin suggested by Engels – German philosophy, French socialism and English political economy” should be added “a fourth one, that of Russian revolutionary populism” (1983: 20). If this is the reading of Marx’s correspondence (on Russia) by a non-Marxist, a Marx scholar from Mexico asserted that Marx, confronted with the Russian communes, underwent a “change of direction” (viraje). Though it does not mean a “fundamental change in Marx’s theoretical position,” it signifies the “opening up of a broad road for the development of Marx’s discourse on the different ways” (to socialism) – one for the central, more developed capitalism, the other for the less developed countries of the periphery (Dussel 1990: 260-261). An eminent Marxist, in her turn, read this correspondence as if it signified that the Russian case lent itself to a “concept of revolution which changed everything, including economic laws” as if it was on a par with the Western European case, “choosing a different path” (Dunayevskaya 2002: 259. Emphasis in text).

Let us now put Marx’s discussion on Russia in the proper perspective to see on the basis of his relevant texts, what exactly Marx was saying in 1877 and 1881. At the outset it is necessary to refer to the emphasis Marx put on what he called the “uniqueness” of the Russian case, which of course automatically excludes its generalization into some kind of a ‘law’ applicable to the backward peasant societies, as, for example, the “law of motion of capital” would apply to the capitalist societies in general. To Marx the Russian “agricultural communes” offered a “unique situation, without any precedent in history” (Marx 1968: 1566, our emphasis). First, contrary to India, the victim of a foreign conqueror who had violently destroyed its rural communes with “common land ownership,” Russia had no foreign conqueror, and it was the “only European country” where “till today” its communes “have maintained themselves on a national scale.” Secondly, along with communal property of the soil, its historical environment, the contemporaneity of the capitalist production in Western Europe offer it “ready made the material conditions of cooperative labour on a vast scale” which allows it to incorporate all the “positive acquisitions of the capitalist system,” the “fruits with which capitalist production has enriched humanity” avoiding it to go through the capitalist regime” (Marx 1968: 1561, 1565, 1566).

However, while considering the positive side, Marx emphasizes, one has to reckon with the negative side contained in the “dualism inherent in the Russian communal constitution” namely, along with the communal ownership of land there is also “parcellary labour, the source of private appropriation,” enabling the communes’ members to “accumulate moveable property, money and sometimes even slaves and serfs, uncontrolled by the commune” – which constituted the “dissolvent of the original social and economic equality” (1564). Thus the “dualism” of the communes offers an alternative: “either its (private) ownership element will prevail (l’emportera) over its collective element or its collective element will prevail over the (private) ownership element” (1565). One should not forget that the “agricultural commune” constituting the “last phase of the primitive formation of society” is “at the same time the phase of transition to the society based on private property including the series of societies founded on slavery and serfdom” (1564-1565). “Theoretically speaking,” the Russian commune could conserve its soil by developing its base, the communal ownership of the land, and by eliminating the “principle of private ownership which it also implies,” and thereby “become a direct point of departure of the economic system to which the modern society tends” (1565). However, “coming down from the theory to reality,” nobody can hide the fact that the “Russian commune today is facing a conspiracy of powerful forces and interests.” Besides exercising “incessant exploitation on the peasants, the State has facilitated the domination (within the commune) of a certain part of the capitalist system, stock market, bank, railway, commerce.” Similarly, the commune is “exploited fraudulously by the intruding capitalists, merchants, landed ‘proprietors’ as well as undermined by usury.” These different factors have “unleashed inside the commune itself the conflict of interest already present and rapidly developed its germs of decomposition.” This “concourse of destructive influences, unless smashed by a powerful reaction will naturally end in the death of the rural commune” (1570, 1571, 1572). Hence Marx’s emphasis on the need of a “Russian Revolution” (1573). However, even if this “Revolution” is victorious and defeats the commune’s transformation into capitalism, the building of communism in the peasant (and technologically backward) Russia would absolutely require the help of the advanced productive forces, the “positive acquisition elaborated by the capitalist system” (1566). This material aid Russia could obtain almost certainly not from the capitalist regimes but only from the victorious proletariat in Western Europe which naturally would also serve as a bulwark against any attempted capitalist armed intervention in Russia from outside. This seems to be the clear message that we get from the ‘Preface’ to the Russian edition of the Manifesto, the last to appear under the joint signatures of its authors. There, observing that though the Russian commune had already been “seriously undermined” (stark untergrebene), it could still directly go over to the “communist form of collective ownership” provided that there is a “revolution” in Russia which gives signal to a “proletarian revolution” in the West and that the one complements the other (Marx, Engels 1972b: 576).

Shanin imputes uniquely to Engels the position that the Russian revolution needed a proletarian revolution as a complement and asserts that “Marx was moving away from such views” (22). Wada, in his turn, in an otherwise well researched paper, adds that the ‘Preface’ of 1882 “expresses the opinion of Engels, more directly that of Marx.” Marx being “in low spirits (due to his wife’s death) asked Engels to make the draft and simply put his signature to it” (Wada in Shanin 1983: 70). As if Marx resigned himself to putting his name to whatever Engels wanted to draft. Unbelievable! Dussel, in his turn, though not going to Wada’s extreme extent, wrote: “(the 1882 Preface) is a text of compromise between Marx and Engels on the question of the Russian commune (that is, writing Marx’s Russian Revolution’ and Engels’s proletarian revolution’) and the ‘compromise’ contained a contradiction indicative of the future” (Dussel 1990: 262). Let us be more serious. True, in his different drafts and the final version of his letter to Zassulitch as well as in his letter to Mikhailovsky, Marx does not explicitly refer to ‘proletarian revolution’ (by name) in the West as a complement to the Russian (peasant) revolution, so that ‘proletarian revolution’ in the 1882 ‘Preface’ seems to come uniquely from Engels who had, in a polemic in 1875 “at Marx’s demand and developing their common point of view” (Rubel in Marx 1968: 1552) – had explicitly spoken of the necessity of this complement for successfully transforming the existing commune system into a higher form. However, a careful reading of Marx’s drafts shows that the question of a ‘proletarian revolution’ in the West as an aid to the peasant revolution in Russia is very much present there, though the specific term is not there. In the very first draft (Engels was not aware of these drafts, later discovered by Riazanov) Marx considers as a “very favourable circumstance” for the agricultural commune to go over to a higher form of society without passing through capitalism the fact that, after having survived a period when the capitalist system still appeared intact, bearing its technological fruits, the commune is now witness to this (capitalist) system “struggling, on the one hand with its labouring masses and, on the other, with science and the productive forces which it has itself engendered, in a word, in a fatal crisis which will end in the system’s elimination by a return of the present society to a higher form of the most ‘archaïque’ type of collective ownership and production” (1568, 1570; our emphasis). What else is he saying here but indicating – as if paraphrasing his famous, much misunderstood, ‘Preface’ of 1859 – a situation of acute contradiction between the relations of production and the material forces of production within western capitalism ending in a “fatal crisis” of the whole system and leading to its elimination and its substitution by a society of a higher type – obviously only possible through a revolution by its “labouring masses,” that is, the proletariat. If our textual reading of Marx is correct, Marx’s position here is basically the same as that of the ‘Preface’ (1882) - only expressed in a different way – and certainly not very different from Engels’s which is easily verified when one reads Engels’s two texts closely, those of 1875 and of 1894, the first published at Marx’s demand and with his full accord (Rubel asserts this and even Wada concedes this [in Shanin 1983:53-54]) and the second without its author being aware of Marx’s drafts (Engels in Marx and Engels 1964 and 1972).

A couple of points should be stressed here concerning Marx’s depicting the future society (after capital) as a return, in a higher form, of the most ‘archaïque’ type. This is in fact a paraphrase of a sentence from Morgan – whom Marx mentions as an “American author” - where this author speaks of a ‘new system’ as ‘a revival in a superior form of an archaïque type’ towards which the modern society tends. Now, Shanin cites Marx’s expression (1983:17) and argues (without mentioning Marx’s source) that this represents a kind of (new) enlightenment for Marx confronted with the Russian commune. We would, however, submit that the idea underlying Marx’s expression here does not really represent a new position for Marx. Rather he found in Morgan’s statement a re-affirmation of his and Engels’s (Yes, Engels’s pace Shanin, Wada e tutti quanti) earlier position, held, it is true, in a more condensed theoretical manner without much of an empirical reference. Thus in his 1865 lectures to the workers Marx speaks of three “historical processes” of the relation between what he calls the “Man of Labour and the Means of Labour” – first, their “Original Union,” then their “Separation” through the “Decomposition of the Original Union,” third, the “restoration of the original union in a new historical form” through a “fundamental revolution in the mode of production” (1988: 412; emphasis in original). Earlier we referred to a passage from Marx’s 1861-63 manuscript where Marx in the same way, speaks of the “Original unity between the labourer and the conditions of production,” as in family agriculture and ‘natural communism,’ separation between them under capital and the “restoration of the original unity by means of a working class revolution” (along with the rest of society). Engels in his turn, in his preparatory notes towards Anti-Dühring, writes: “All Indo-Germanic peoples started with common ownership. In course of social development, in almost all of these, this common ownership was eliminated, negated, thrust aside by these forms ... It is the task of the social revolution to negate this negation and to restore (wieder herzustellen) the common ownership to a higher stage of development” (Marx, Engels 1962: 583).

Another point in the draft has to be noted in this connection. In the draft we find an interesting representation of the most archaïque type of community. This representation in a ‘right form’ broadly corresponds to Marx’s configuration of the society envisaged as succeeding capitalism long before Marx had read Kovalevsky and Morgan. We mean the portrait of communism drawn in a few bold strokes particularly in Capital (1867) and later in somewhat greater detail in the Gotha-Critique (1875). Here is the laconic sentence in the draft characterizing the most archaïque type (as opposed to its derivative, the ‘agricultural commune’): “in the more primitive communities (besides the common ownership of land) labour is done in common and the product, which is also common, is distributed (to the members) according to the needs of consumption after having put aside the part reserved for reproduction” (1563). Now, with this text in front of us when we read in Capital (volume 1) about the “union of free individuals” labouring with the common means of production where the product of labour is a “social product” of which one part is reserved in order to serve again as means of production while the rest is distributed among the members for consumption (1987: 109) – when we read this, does not this look like the primitive archaïque society appearing at a higher level in a new form which Marx reaffirms in his 1881 draft citing Morgan?

Now the crucial question: does Marx’s position on the Russian commune constitute a fundamental departure as regards his basic point of view on the question of the transition to a society of free and associated labour? We have already referred to the singularity and “uniqueness” of the Russian case (underlined by Marx more than once) sufficient to exclude any generalization of this case (as a prototype) to the pre-capitalist peasant society anywhere else in the world. In this sense this unique example naturally does not affect Marx’s general position. It is quite clear from Marx’s correspondence that in its effort to go over to a higher type of society, assuming a successful “Russian Revolution,” the commune cannot, after all, avoid capitalism, developed elsewhere, which, through the proletarian revolution produced by capitalism itself by its own contradictions, and the advanced forces of production which it had created and which would be made available precisely by the victorious proletariat in the West, would be indispensable for the commune’s survival as well as its extended reproduction. Thus the commune’s transformation into a higher type of society would be impossible in the absence of capitalism elsewhere. All this of course assumes a successful “Russian Revolution.” However, even before arriving at this point the Russian commune already faces a sombre future which Marx discerns in his dissection of the elements of its decomposition, contained integrally in its “dualism,” on the basis of the “Russian reality,” as we saw earlier. Even before he had composed his drafts of letter to Zassulitch, Marx’s letter to Mikhailovsky (1877) already indicates the possibility of decomposition of the commune and clearly emphasized that the path of 1861 which the commune was already traversing, if continued, would exactly fall within the general case of Capital, which in fact turned out to be the case.

The Russian case also, far from invalidating, rather confirms Marx’s 1860s assertion – referred to above – that the two basic pre-conditions of building the new, “free association” namely, the development of labour as social labour and a high development of the productive powers of labour, could not be generated by the “original unity” between the labour and the conditions of production as manifested in the different forms of natural “communism” (and small family mode of production).

In Russia not only the productive powers of labor were very backward but also the rural commune was “struck by a weakness, hostile in every sense” – besides the paracellary mode of labour - namely, its existence as a “localised microcosm,” the isolation and the “lack of contact of its life with the life of the other communes” (far from developing labor as social labor) (1968: 1567).

Now this “weakness” of the commune system – even with common ownership of land – constituting an obstacle to its transformation into a society of a new type Marx had earlier put theoretically in the first edition of Capital (1867) (reiterating his 1860s position) that is, before his exposure to Chernishevsky in 1870 which, according to Wada, was a “turning point for Marx (in Shanin 1983: 45). Very interestingly, in the second edition of Capital (1872) as well as in its French version (1875) Marx retained the same passage word for word. Here is the passage: “The ancient social organisms, of production (in the “modes of production of ancient Asia, of antiquity” etc.) are extraordinarily much simpler and more transparent than the bourgeois (mode). But they are based either on the immaturity of the individual human who has not yet severed his umbilical chord connecting him with others in a natural community (of a primitive tribe), or the direct relations of lordship and bondage. They are conditioned by a low level of development of the productive powers of labour and correspondingly the narrowness of the relations of human beings as between themselves and with nature in the process of production of material life” (1983: 48; 1987: 109-110; 1965: 614). As we see much of this central idea about the old communal system is carried over and gets confirmed in the concrete case of Russia, as seen in Marx’s 1881 correspondence (after he has read Kovalevaky and Morgan).

It would of course be wrong to affirm that there was nothing new in Marx’s thought in his reflections on the Russian communes. Marx and Engels were undoubtedly impressed by the vitality of these communes still having about half the land under communal ownership which existed nowhere else at that period. This is seen in their continued interest in the question for at least two decades beginning with the early 1870s. Common ownership of the means of production by the producers themselves, being the very basis of the new society, its existence in the Russian communal system – absent elsewhere - would indeed be, so thought Marx (and Engels), a very favourable factor enabling, to that extent, the Russian peasant to skip the stage of capitalist private ownership and start right away with this great asset, provided of course they eliminate beforehand the Tsarist régime, the system’s principal enemy, and are helped by capitalism’s positive achievements, necessarily mediated by the victorious proletariat in the West. However, the reason why we hold that this does not change fundamentally, Marx’s thought in general, is simply because it does not affect Marx’s general position on the transition to a “reunion of free individuals” at a higher level whose indispensable (pre) conditions are first, the existence of social labour (with socialization of production) not at a local level but at the level of the whole society and, secondly, a high level of the productive powers of social labour contributing not only to an abundance of material wealth in order to free the “social individuals” from the struggle for necessity, as mentioned earlier, but also contributing to the increasing availability of “free time” beyond labour time, thus enabling the individuals to enjoy the wealth produced, as well as showing them time for “free activity” undetermined by the “compulsion of an external necessity” (Marx 1962: 255. The expressions “free time,” “free activity” are in English in the text in the original MS). Ideally, capitalism need not be the system where these conditions are created, and it would certainly be better if it were not. Historically, however, as Marx never tires of repeating, it is only capital which, through its contradictions, generates these conditions. The Russian communal system – abstracting from its factors of decomposition already operating – even as an exceptional case due solely to its communal land ownership, had to depend on capitalism’s positive achievements, particularly the “ready made material conditions of cooperative labour” (Marx 1968: 1566), that is, the conditions of socialising labour and production at the level of society. Finally, it is only the western proletariat, itself a product of capital, which could, through its own revolution, stand as a bulwark against all intervention from outside in order to ensure, a successful Russian Revolution against the Tsarist regime, the traditional reserve and “head of European reaction,” as the 1882 ‘Preface’ observes (Marx, Engels 1972: 576). In short, what was new in Marx’s thinking, confronted with the Russian commune, was his theoretical non-exclusion of the possibility for a society to go over directly to socialism without passing through capitalism, though not without the help of capitalism prevailing elsewhere which would both generate a proletarian revolution and make available to the society in question, precisely mediated by the victorious proletariat, the fruits of its advanced technology. At the same time Marx severely qualified this idea by emphasizing the uniqueness of the Russian case and underlining the negative factors inherent in the communal’s “dualism” working steadily towards its decomposition with the possibility of transforming the situation into the general case as depicted in Capital. In the event history, the ‘greatest of all Marxists,’ as Hilferding used to say, vindicated Marx’s dire prognostic.

At this point let us dispose of a serious confusion resulting from an ideological reading of Marx’s writings on Russia in 1881-1882. A number of distinguished people have read Marx’s idea of a “Russian Revolution” in his correspondence and in the ‘Preface’ (1882) to the Manifesto as the prefiguration of the twentieth century revolutions, particularly those led by the Marxists, beginning with the Bolshevik seizure of power. Thus, according to Shanin, Marx’s new position was vindicated by “victorious revolution led by the Marxists “in the backward countries, some of which starting with Russia and led by “Lenin, Mao and Ho, proved socialist in leadership and results, whereas “no socialist revolution came in the West” (1983: 25, 254). Similarly Dussel has written: “Russia has certainly followed the road foreseen by Marx (siguio el camino previsto por Marx). Without passing through capitalism it has realized its revolution allowing the rural Russian commune to pass, in great measure, directly from the communal ownership to the social ownership ... since the revolution of 1917” (1990: 261; emphasis in text). Michael Löwy, in his turn, writes: it is often forgotten that, in their preface to the Russian translation of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels envisaged a hypothetical situation in which socialist revolution could begin in Russia and then spread to western Europe” (Löwy, 1998: 18-19). Similarly Raya Dunayevskaya interpreted the 1882 ‘Preface’ as “projecting the idea that Russia could be the first to have a proletarian revolution ahead of the West” (Dunayevskaya 1991: 187)

Now, if one reads Marx’s writings under consideration non-ideologically it is easy to see that the mentioned texts contain no reference to a ‘proletarian’ or ‘socialist’ revolution in Russia. In the relevant texts it is always a question of “Russian Revolution” tout court. It is a question of a revolution by Russian communal peasants against the principal enemy of the communal system – the Tsarist régime. Naturally, in the thinking of Marx (and Engels), following the materialist conception of history, there could be no question of a proletarian revolution in the quasi absence of a proletariat (unless Marx’s Russian experience had made him abandon his materialism for which there is no textual evidence). The idea of the possibility of a proletarian revolution occurring in a technologically backward society where the proletariat constitutes at most a very small part of society gained its droit de cité through a theory propagated around the time of the first world war advancing the specious idea of the possibility of a proletarian revolution breaking out in the ‘weakest link’ in the world capitalist chain, supposed to be not foreseen by Marx and Engels, according to the principal proponent of this theory.

Apart from the absence of any idea of such a revolution existing in Marx’s texts, there is a more important point that should be stressed in this connection. There is in fact an unbridgeable gulf between the Marx envisaged socialist revolution led by the producers themselves towards a society of free and associated labour as what Marx calls producers’ “self activity” (Selbstbetätigung) and the revolutions in the twentieth century taking place under the leadership, not of the producers themselves, but of a small compact group in their name beginning with the Bolshevik seizure of power which from the start excluded the immediate producers from all real powers excepting in name. Even taking Marx’s correspondence in question one is struck by the emphasis Marx puts in the text on the creative power of the immediate producers in the transformation of their society. Absolutely nowhere Marx mentions the need of a special apparatus to substitute for the spontaneous self activity of the masses toward their own emancipation. Thus Marx stresses the need of “substituting the governmental institution volost' by an assembly of peasants elected by the communes themselves and serving as the economic and administrative organ of their interests” (1968: 1567). This is clearly in stark contrast with the systematic elimination of the producers’ organs of self rule almost from the start of the Bolshevik régime and culminating in the bloody liquidation of Kronstadt’s soviet democracy, “bustling, self-governing, egalitarian and highly politicized, the like of which had not been seen in Europe since the Paris commune (of 1871),” in the words of perhaps the most authoritative academic historian of the question (Getzler, 1983: 246). What would, a contrario, have broadly corresponded to Marx’s idea of a “Russian Revolution” was Russia’s popular uprising of February, 1917, initiated by the producers themselves without any party guidance, as an immense revolutionary mass movement in an open-ended, plural revolutionary process. The Bolshevik seizure of power, putting a brake on the process, destroyed this revolutionary democracy (see in particular, on the whole question, Anweiler 1958, Daniels 1967, Ferro 1967, 1980).

Marx, ‘Rethinker’ of Progress

Marx, it is well known, places the “bourgeois mode of production” – that is, CMP – as the last of the “progressive epochs of the economic-social formation” before its replacement by the AMP. In which sense does Marx view (human) ‘progress’? More precisely put, could Marx be placed among the partisans of the idea of ‘progress,’ conceived basically as a cumulative and continuing improvement in the situation of the human beings thanks notably to the continuing advances in science and technology – a conception associated with Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, the Encyclopedists and the positivists of the nineteenth century – the very idea that is coming under increasing scrutiny today?

Far from answering this question in the positive we submit that Marx, on the contrary, ‘rethought’ progress more profoundly than almost any of those who reflected on progress. Marx firmly placed (human) progress in its historical context, never as an absolute, abstract category, never unilaterally. He warns against taking the “concept of progress in the commonplace (customary) abstract” sense (1953: 29). Progress was always considered by him as a contradictory movement, simultaneously positive and negative. Indeed, most of the criticisms of progress made today could be shown to apply to the pre-Marxian unilateral idea of progress. As a matter of fact, the all-round misdeeds of the capitalist progress were already emphasized by Marx, and in a more penetrating way compared to most of the modern critics of progress. But unlike these critics whose ideas on progress are also equally unilateral as the ideas of their opponents, Marx clearly saw the profoundly contradictory character of progress under capital.

Given the extraction of unpaid surplus labor as the common basis of all hitherto existing social formations (at least beginning with a certain period), Marx considers the capitalist social formation superior to the earlier social formations precisely because with its specific mode of extracting surplus labor from the immediate producers, capital – unlike any earlier mode of production - contributes to the universal development of the productive powers of labor, a basic condition for building the new society. This is achieved of course at a tremendous cost to society undergoing “a long and painful history of development” (1987: 110). This tendency of capital toward universal development of the productive powers of labor, unconstrained by any particular limit, Marx calls the “positive side” of capital only in comparison with the pre-capitalist modes of production or as opposed to the earlier modes of production the “human development in which had only a limited and local character” (1953: 313; 1988: 107). However, Marx underlines, more than any other critic of capital, the antagonistic character of this “positive side” of the capitalist progress.

Marx’s position on progress follows from his rejection of the “dogmatic distinction between the good and the bad” in favor of the “dialectical movement” which consists of the necessary “coexistence of two contradictory sides and their fusion into a new category”(1965: 81). We mentioned already in the opening section of this paper how Marx highlights the devastating misdeeds of capital necessarily co-existing with its “positive side” (as compared with the pre-capitalist modes of production). Thus, approvingly citing a passage from Richard Jones where the latter, speaking precisely of “progress” under modern society as certainly “not the most desirable state of things” (as regards the relation between the laborers and the “accumulated stock”) but which nevertheless has to be viewed as “constituting a stage in the march of industry which has hitherto marked the progress of advancing nations,” Marx interprets Jones as asserting, on the one hand, that CMP constitutes an “immense progress as opposed to all the earlier forms when one considers the productive powers of social labor,” while underlining, on the other hand, the “antagonistic form” of this progress which contains also the “necessity of its downfall” (1962: 425).

The very principle of production for production’s sake, the recognition of wealth for its own sake as supreme virtue, leading to the universal development of the productive powers of social labor which marks the “positive side” of the “modern world,” also shows, at the same time, the other side of progress, its backward and inferior character in the “modern world” as compared with the “ancient world,” whatever the different types of narrowness which otherwise mark the latter. Thus the idea of the ancients that the human being is the aim of production, not production the aim of the human being appears “very lofty against the modern world.” Compared with the form of “complete emptiness” which the “full elaboration of the human essence (des menschlichen Innern)” assumes in the modern world (the “bourgeois economy”), the “childlike ancient world appears superior” (1953: 387). In his comments on Morgan, referring to the early period of human evolution, Marx contrasts the absence of passion for possession in the early humans with possession being “such a commanding force in the human mind now” (in Krader 1974: 128; emphasis in the text. This expression appears in English.) Again, in the first draft of his letter to Zassulitch Marx asserts that “one should not be afraid of the word ‘archaic’,” that the “vitality of the primitive communities was incomparably greater” not only compared to the Semitic, Greek, Roman, but “even more so compared to the modern capitalist societies,” and adds that some bourgeois writers “infatuated (épris) with the capitalist system and aiming to praise this system and show its superiority are incapable of understanding (this)” (Marx 1968: 1568).

Years earlier Marx had written sarcastically the following: “Antipatros, a Greek poet of Cicero’s time, greeted the discovery of the watermill as the liberator (Befreierin) of the female slaves and the builder of the golden age. Oh those pagans! They, as the learned Bastiat and, before him, still more gifted MacCulloch have discovered, understood nothing of political economy and Christianity. Among other, things. they did not grasp that the machine is the most tested means for prolonging the working day. These pagans excused the slavery of one as the means towards the full human development of another. But they lacked the specific Christian charity of preaching the slavery of the masses for turning the crude or half educated upstarts into ‘eminent spinners,’ ‘extensive sausage makers’ and ‘influential shoe black dealers’” (1987: 396-97; words under single quotation marks appear in English in the text).

Marx’s view of progress under capital as eminently contradictory (antagonistic) also clearly comes out in his observations on the two great classical economists – Ricardo and Sismondi – regarding their respective point of view on the development of productive powers of labor under the CMP. Ricardo, who considered the capitalist production as the absolute form of production and who insisted on the creation of wealth for the sake of wealth, production for the sake of production which has no barriers and which encounters no contradiction, showed a “profound understanding of the positive nature of capital.” Sismondi, in his turn, “profoundly grasped” capital’s “limitedness” (Borniertheit), its “negative unilaterality” with his “profound sentiment that capitalist production is contradictory” and that the contradictions grow with the growth of the productive powers of labor. Ricardo understood more the universal tendency of capital, Sismondi more its limitedness. Whereas Ricardo’s viewpoint was “revolutionary” in relation to the old society, Sismondi’s was “reactionary” in relation to the capitalist society (1953: 314; 1962: 48, 50; emphasis ours).

It would be completely wrong to depict Marx – as some ecologists often do – as a productionist par excellence, a high priest of production for production’s sake. Everybody knows theCommunist Manifesto’s ‘compliments’ to the bourgeoisie for their material achievements, the immense development of the productive powers of labor. We also earlier referred to the great importance Marx attaches to the growth of these powers as a condition of human emancipation. Indeed, Marx considers Ricardo’s insistence on the need for unlimited production without any regard for individuals as “just” and considers Ricardo’s critics in this regard as “reactionaries.” However, we should be careful to note that when, in this connection, Marx refers to Ricardo’s position of “equating the proletariat with machines or beasts of burden or a commodity,” and goes so far as to say that this point of view is “not mean of Ricardo” and that this is “stoic, scientific, objective,” Marx is doing this, as he makes clear, because “from his (Ricardo’s) point of view ‘production’ is enhanced this way,” because the proletarians are “merely machines or beasts of burden or they are really simple commodities in bourgeois production.” In other words, “Ricardo’s ruthlessness (Rücksichtslosigkeit) was not only scientifically honest, but also scientifically necessary for his point of view,” inasmuch as Ricardo, “rightly for his time,” considering the “capitalist production as the most advantageous for creating wealth” gave a scientifically honest representation of the bourgeois reality (1959: 106, 107, 108; emphasis in Marx’s statement is ours). Of course this praise for Ricardo goes hand in hand with Marx’s severe critique of Ricardo for the latter’s “unilaterality,” his denial of the contradictory character of the CMP, taken by him as the “absolute form of production.”

Thus, far from advancing the productionist principle as his own, Marx is highlighting the principle as reflecting the reality of capital’s ceaseless striving for producing and appropriating riches, mediated by the unlimited development of the productive powers of labor. Of course, Marx emphasizes that the development of the productive powers of labor ultimately signifies the “development of wealth of human nature as an end in itself” (1959:107; emphasis in the text). CMP shows its “civilising side” only to the extent that, compared with the preceding modes of production it is this mode which contributes most to this process. At the same time, as Marx never fails to emphasize this process, following from the very nature of capital, cannot but be inherently antagonistic, cannot but have profoundly destructive dimensions. For Marx, the “negative or the contradictory character of capitalist production (is that) this production is indifferent and in opposition to the producers. The producer (is) a simple means of production, the material wealth is the end in itself. Therefore the development of this material wealth (is) in opposition to and at the cost of the human individual” (1988: 107; emphasis ours). However, as long as capital continues, we cannot have one without the other. In general, given a society divided in classes, “if there is no antagonism, there is no progress.” This is the “law that civilisation has followed till our times. Till now the productive forces have developed thanks to the antagonistic regime of classes” (Marx 1965: 35-36; our emphasis).

While Marx praises Sismondi for his profound analysis of capital’s contradiction (which Ricardo could not understand), Marx also reproaches Sismondi for trying to eliminate these contradictions by setting “moral and legal limits” to capital “from outside,” which, as “external and artificial barriers” capital necessarily throws overboard (1953: 314) (How astonishingly modern this sounds!). Indeed, the critics of capital’s tendency toward unlimited development of the human productive powers fail to realise that though this development is effected “at first at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even of the entire classes,” it “ends up by breaking through this antagonism and coincides with the development of the singular individuals,” that the “higher development of the individuality is brought only through a historical process in which the individuals are sacrificed” (1959: 107: emphasis ours). This catastrophic situation – the destruction of the majority as a cost of ‘progress’ – Marx certainly does not posit as a universal law valid for all times. This is valid only during what Marx famously calls the “pre-history of human society.” Marx puts this very clearly in almost identical terms in two texts: “It is in fact only at the greatest waste of individual development that the development of general men is secured in the epochs of history which preludes to a socialist constitution of mankind” (1976: 327; 1992: 124-25; the whole sentence appears in English almost identically in the two manuscripts; emphasis ours).

Conclusion

Let us conclude. It is the old society itself which contradictorily creates the conditions of its own negation together with the conditions of building a society of free and associated producers. Two basic material conditions in this regard are an immense development of productive powers of labor and the development of labor as social labor. The CMP alone, among all the hitherto existing modes of production, creates these conditions. Even though socialism could arise in an essentially non-capitalist society, given some form of communal ownership in the means of production not already undermined from within, the process would prove unviable unless helped by the material acquisitions of the CMP from outside. Such help is difficult to conceive in the absence of a victorious proletarian revolution in capitalist countries.

However, the creation of the material conditions in question – commonly called material progress – under capital is necessarily bought at a tremendous cost to human beings including their surroundings, given the specific nature of capital. Capital cannot create the conditions of its own negation and those for building the new society except by devouring, à la Timur, myriads of human souls. Many have stressed unilaterally the regressive or negative progress under capital just as many have stressed equally unilaterally its positive side. Marx ‘rethought’ progress more profoundly and more clearly than perhaps anyone else by underlining the non-separability of these contradictory aspects belonging to the same process of capitalist development. You cannot simply have only the ‘good’ side and not the ‘bad’ side of progress under this tremendously antagonistic social formation. In fact the negative side itself proves to be positive by generating as necessarily as it generates the bad side – massive resistance and struggle by capital’s victims to uproot the basic cause itself. As Marx emphasizes in the French version of Capital, “in history, as in nature, putrefaction is the laboratory of life” (1965: 995; not reproduced in the German version).

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