Kevin B. Anderson » Books

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:00:12 +0000

Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed. To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America. But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis of non-Western societies, as well as race, ethnicity, and nationalism. While some of these writings show a problematically unilinear perspective and, on occasion, traces of ethnocentrism, the overall trajectory of Marx’s writings was toward a critique of national, ethnic, and colonial oppression and toward an appreciation of resistance movements in these spheres.

In 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels espoused an implicitly and problematically unilinear concept of social progress. Precapitalist societies, especially China, which they characterized in ethnocentric terms as a “most barbarian” society, were destined to be forcibly penetrated and modernized by this new and dynamic social system. In his 1853 articles for the New York Tribune, Marx extended these perspectives to India, while viewing the communal social relations and communal property of the Indian village as a solid foundation for “Oriental despotism.” Postcolonial and postmodern thinkers, most notably Edward Said, have criticized the Communist Manifesto and the 1853 India writings as a form of Orientalist knowledge fundamentally similar to the colonialist mindset.

By 1856-57, the anti-colonialist side of Marx’s thought became more pronounced, as he supported, also in the Tribune, the Chinese resistance to the British during the Second Opium War and the Sepoy Uprising in India. During this period, he began to incorporate some of his new thinking about India into one of his greatest theoretical works, the Grundrisse (1857-58). In this germinal treatise on the critique of political economy, he launched into a truly multilinear theory of history, wherein Asian societies were seen to have developed along a different pathway than that of the successive modes of production he had delineated for Western Europe.

During the 1860s, Marx concentrated on Europe and North America, writing little on Asia. It was in this period that he completed the first version of Capital, Vol. I, as well as most of the drafts of what became Vols. II and III of that work. But he also concerned himself with the dialectics of race and class during the long years of the American Civil War, 1861-65. Although the North was a capitalist society, Marx threw himself into the anti-slavery cause, critically supporting the Lincoln government against the Confederacy within the British and European labor and socialist movements. In his Civil War writings, he argued that white racism had held back labor as a whole, later writing in Capital that “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where in a black skin it is branded.”

Marx also supported the Polish uprising of 1863, which sought to restore national independence to that long-suffering country. He and his generation of leftists viewed Russia as a malevolent, reactionary power, a form of “Oriental despotism” based in the communal social forms and property relations that predominated in the Russian village. It constituted the biggest threat to Europe’s democratic and socialist movements. Since Russian-occupied Poland stood between Russia proper and Western Europe, Poland’s revolutionary movement represented a deep contradiction within the Russian Empire, one that had hampered its efforts to intervene against the European revolutions of 1830 and initially, those in 1848 as well. As with India and China, by 1858 Marx also began to shift his view of Russia, taking note of the looming emancipation of the serfs and the possibility of an agrarian revolution, as seen in several of his articles on Russia for the Tribune.

The labor and socialist networks that Marx helped to form in Western Europe in support of the U.S. and Poland were crucial to the founding of the First International in 1864. During his years of involvement with the First International Marx focused to a great extent on Ireland. His theorization of Ireland marked the culmination of his writings on ethnicity, race, and nationalism. British workers, he held, were so greatly imbued with nationalist pride and great power arrogance toward the Irish that they had developed a false consciousness, binding them to the dominant classes of Britain, and thus attenuating class conflict within British society. This impasse could be broken only by direct support for Irish national independence on the part of the revolutionary elements within British labor, something that would also serve to reunite labor within Britain, where Irish immigrant labor formed a subproletariat. On more than one occasion, Marx linked his conceptualization of class, ethnicity, and nationalism for the British and the Irish to race relations in the U.S., where he compared the situation of the Irish to the African-Americans. He also compared the attitudes of the British workers toward the Irish to those of the poor whites of the American South, who had too often united with the white planters against their fellow Black workers. In this sense, he was creating a broad dialectical concept of class, race, and ethnicity.

By the 1870s, Marx returned to his earlier preoccupation with Asia, while also deepening his studies of Russia. Whereas he had previously concentrated on Russian foreign policy, he now began to learn Russian in order to study that country’s internal social structure. Marx’s interest in Russia increased with the publication of Capital in Russian in 1872, especially after the book generated more debate there than it had in Germany. Some of the changes Marx introduced into the 1872-75 French edition of Capital concerned the dialectic of capitalist development out of Western feudalism that was at the heart of the book’s part eight, “The Primitive Accumulation of Capital.” In direct and clear language, Marx now stated that the transition outlined in the part on primitive accumulation applied only to Western Europe. In this sense, the future of Russia was open, was not predetermined by that of Western Europe.

During the years 1879-82, Marx embarked upon a series of excerpt notebooks on scholarly studies on a multifaceted group of non-Western and non-European societies, among them contemporary India, Indonesia (Java), Russia, Algeria, and Latin America. He also made notes on studies of indigenous peoples, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. One core theme of these excerpt notebooks was the communal social relations and property forms found in so many of these societies. In his studies of India, for example, two issues emerged. First, his notes indicated a new appreciation of historical development in India, as against his earlier view of that country as a society without history. Although he still saw the communal forms of India’s villages as relatively continuous over the centuries, he now noted a series of important changes within those communal forms. Second, these notes show his preoccupation, not with Indian passivity as in 1853, but with conflict and resistance in the face of foreign conquest, whether against the Muslim conquerors of the medieval period or the British colonialists of his own time. Some of that resistance was, he argued, based upon indigenous communal forms.

If Marx’s theorization of nationalism, ethnicity, and class culminated in his 1869-70 writings on Ireland, those on non-Western societies reached their high point in his 1877-82 reflections on Russia. In a series of letters and their drafts, as well as the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto he co-authored with Engels, Marx began to sketch a multilinear theory of social development and of revolution for Russia. Russia’s communal villages were contemporaneous with industrial capitalism in the West. If a village-based social revolution in Russia could draw upon the resources of Western modernity by linking up with a revolution on the part of the Western labor and socialist movements, Russia might be able to modernize in a manner far different from capitalist development, he wrote. Moreover, a revolution in rural Russia could be the “starting point” for such an international revolutionary outbreak, he concluded.

In sum, I argue in this study that Marx developed a dialectical theory of social change that was neither unilinear nor exclusively class-based. Just as his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear direction, so his theory of revolution began over time to concentrate more on the intersectionality of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and class. To be sure, Marx was not a philosopher of difference in the postmodernist sense, for the critique of a single overarching entity, capital, was at the center of his entire intellectual enterprise. But centrality did not mean univocality or exclusivity. Marx’s mature social theory revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference, but also on occasion made those particulars — race, ethnicity, or nationality — determinants for the totality.

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism

admin — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 19:00:02 +0000

[Winner of the Latifeh Yarshater Award for the Best Book in Iranian Women’s Studies, 2006.]

We analyze critically the extensive but little-known writings on Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution by Michel Foucault, who traveled there twice in 1978. These writings, published in 1978-79 in French and Italian newspapers and journals, celebrate the Islamic revolution as an alternative to both Western capitalist democracy and socialism. We also discuss the tragic course of the Iranian Revolution itself, especially with regard to gender. In addition, we examine in detail the heated debate over Foucault’s Iran writings in France in 1978 and 1979, a debate that included Iranian and French feminists, leftists, and Middle East scholars.

While Foucault was among the first to discern the Islamist character of the Iranian revolution and the importance of radical Islamism as a newly emergent global movement, his assessments of these developments were surprisingly uncritical, something that did not go unnoticed by his opponents.

We also examine Foucault’s post-1979 writings on sexuality, especially those on the Greco-Roman world, in light of his Iran writings. We explore the question of whether he posited the social relations of the ancient world as an alternative to Western modernity and whether these issues overlapped with his Iran writings, which idealized another form of society that he saw as fundamentally different from the modern West.

We conclude that Foucault’s Iran writings were not an aberration, but instead help to illuminate some problems in his overall perspective, particularly his fascination with liminal experiences like martyrdom, his problematic relationship with feminism, and his one-sided critique of Western modernity, the latter of which he seemed to be aware in his final writings on the Enlightenment.

In an appendix, we provide an annotated translation of the entirety of Foucault’s published writings and interviews on Iran. Our appendix includes as well a number of critical responses at the time to Foucault’s Iran writings, on the part of the noted Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson and Iranian and French feminists. (Most of these translations were carried out by Karen de Bruin and Anderson.)

The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

admin — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 19:00:13 +0000

This volume, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, provides an annotated selection from Luxemburg’s major political and economic works – Accumulation of Capital, the Mass Strike, Reform or Revolution, on nationalism, on Lenin, on the Russian Revolution, etc. — as well as her letters. Several important Luxemburg texts that have been translated into English for the first time by Ashley Passmore and me: a recently discovered 1911 critique of Lenin on democracy; a study of communal social structures in a variety of non-Western and precapitalist societies – among them India, Inca Peru, the Russian village, and Southern Africa — from her unfinished Introduction to Political Economy; an article on slavery; and all of her articles on gender. The editors have contributed an introduction that argues for Luxemburg as a Marxist for our times.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hudis and Anderson at the International Conference on Rosa Luxemburg, Wuhan University, 2006

The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx

admin — Tue, 15 Jan 2002 19:00:43 +0000

This volume contains annotated selections from Raya Dunayevskaya’s lifelong writings on Hegel, Marx, and dialectics, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson. It comprises work on dialectics that did not appear in Philosophy and Revolution (1973) and other of her books published during her lifetime. It begins with one of Dunayevskaya’s last writings on dialectics, followed by a closely linked text, her 1953 “Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes,” which first carved out her own unique concept of dialectic. The volume also includes substantial outlines of major works by Hegel such as the Phenomenology and the Logic. In addition, it features a selection of her letters on dialectics to Black, labor, and student activists, as well as to the philosophers and social theorists Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, C. L. R. James, Grace Lee Boggs, Jonathan Spence, George Armstrong Kelly, and Louis Dupré. Finally, it contains writings from Dunayevskaya’s last years on dialectics of organization and philosophy, connected to an unfinished book on that subject that sought to go beyond the dichotomy in radical thought between the vanguard party and grassroots spontaneous movements. The editors have also contributed an introduction, “Raya Dunayevskaya’s Concept of Dialectic,” that situates her writings on dialectics within a larger tradition involving earlier thinkers like Lukács, Adorno, James, and Lenin, as well as more recent ones like Derrida.

Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society

admin — Thu, 16 Dec 1999 19:00:09 +0000

[Recipient of the International Erich Fromm Prize, 2000)

Part one is a Fromm biography, while part two includes six essays on Fromm and criminology by contemporary scholars, of which mine is entitled “Erich Fromm and the Frankfurt School Critique of Criminal Justice” (pp. 83-119). Part three contains annotated translations (by Heinz D. Osterle and me) of Fromm’s discussions -- during the early years of the Frankfurt School -- of the criminal justice system in a class society: “The State as Educator: On the Psychology of Criminal Justice” (pp. 123-28) and “On the Psychology of the Criminal and the Punitive Society” (pp. 129-56). These virtually unknown early writings on crime by Fromm were first published in German in psychoanalytic journals. In these two articles published in 1930 and 1931 in pre-Hitler Germany, Fromm presents the criminal justice system as an important legitimating institution for the overall capitalist social order.

Moreover, he argues that the discourse over crime on the part of the state – and the response this receives among the masses -- serves to bind those masses to the state in a manner at variance with their own material interests. The state does so by appealing to sadistic drives among the masses and also by projecting itself as a father figure over those masses, he holds. In this sense, the discourse over crime and punishment serves a similar function to that of war and militarism. These articles represent one of the first efforts on the part of Fromm and the Frankfurt School to use a Freudian Marxist approach to analyze political authoritarianism.

Marx on Suicide

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 1999 19:00:16 +0000

This book includes a new, annotated translation by Plaut, Gabrielle Edgcomb, and Kevin B. Anderson of Marx’s 1846 essay/translation on suicide, which concentrated on young Parisian women who had committed suicide due to gender or familial oppression, edited by Eric A. Plaut and Kevin B. Anderson. At one point, for example, Marx writes that the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century were incomplete because they did not end familial oppression. The volume also includes separate introductions by Plaut and me, and additional background material in German and French. My introduction to the volume, “Marx on Suicide in the Context of His Other Writings on Alienation and Gender” (pp. 3-28), looks at Marx’s changing views on gender, before and after this treatment on his part of female suicide and social conditions in nineteenth century Paris.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Eric A. Plaut

Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study

admin — Fri, 01 Sep 1995 19:00:22 +0000

This book takes up Lenin’s extensive but little-known writings on Hegel, especially his 1914-15 notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic. I argue that in these notes, Lenin broke with the crude materialism of his generation of Marxists and of his own earlier work like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908). His confrontation with Hegel was part of a rethinking of his old categories in light of the crisis and break-up of the Second International (world socialist movement) during the First World War. He drew from Hegel concepts like subjectivity and self-movement, and he also interrogated the possibility that the diremption between idealism and materialism advocated by Engels ran the danger of falling into a crude materialism that ignored subjectivity and human consciousness. Instead, Lenin argued that human cognition not only reflects the world (in a materialist sense), but also creates the world (in the sense of revolutionary subjectivity). He concluded that it was impossible to grasp Marx’s Capital without a thorough study of Hegel’s Logic.

At the same time, certain limits were evident in Lenin’s dialectics, not only the fact that he did not make public his new thinking on Hegel, but also in his failure to grasp fully core Hegelian categories like negation of the negation, absolute negativity, or the relation of theory to practice. Nonetheless, Lenin’s wartime studies of Hegel helped to give a richer, more dialectical quality to his subsequent and better-known writings on imperialism, anti-colonial movements, and the state and revolution. In particular, I argue that Lenin’s studies of Hegel helped him to create dialectical analysis of imperialism, in a double sense: (1) Monopoly capitalism was the product of a dialectical “transformation into opposite” of the old capitalism and it engendered a new phenomenon, global imperialism. (2)

The rise of imperialism strengthened global capital, but it also led to new contradictions within the global capitalist system, to anti-colonial national liberation movements – from China and India to Ireland — as new forms of resistance that could ally with the Western working classes against capital. In this sense, Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel had more than a philosophical importance and were part of his wider break with established Marxism and his attempts to refound a revolutionary Marxism upon the ruins of the Second International.

This book takes up as well the considerable discussions of Lenin’s writings on Hegel by Western Marxists such as Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, Henri Lefebvre, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Lucio Colletti, and Louis Althusser. Here the positions vary considerably, with Lukács and Korsch having discussed Lenin’s Hegel notebooks rather briefly, using his work to validate theirs at strategic junctures in the face of the crude materialism of Lenin’s successors. A generation later, Lefebvre, James, and Dunayevskaya took Lenin’s Hegel notebooks up more fully, considering them to have been a crucial chapter in the history of Marxism, one that informed their own concepts of dialectic and which influenced their own studies of Hegel.

For Dunayevskaya especially, this was closely tied to the young Marx’s writings on humanism and dialectic in the 1844 Manuscripts as well. For their part, Althusser and Colletti, who launched counterattacks against Marxist humanism and the post-World War II focus by critical Marxist thinkers on consciousness and the human subject. In doing so, they took up not only the young Marx, but also Lenin’s 1914-15 writings on Hegel, seeking to collapse them back into a more orthodox interpretation of Lenin and his legacy.