Marx at the Margins

Abstract

Marx at the Margins: Response to Reviewers -- by Kevin Anderson [Author's last version of my response to a symposium in Dialectical Anthropology (published online spring 2015) on Marx at the Margins: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non- Western Societies. The symposium featured these essays: Aijaz Ahmad (India), Karl Marx, Global Theorist, David Norman Smith (USA), Prometheus Unchained, Marx's Abolitionism, Michal Buchowski (Poland), Marx for Poles, and Eamonn Slater (Ireland), Marx on Ireland and Its Dialectical Moments. In keeping with University of California's open access policy, I am putting this online now. The other essays may not yet be accessible by open access, but they have appeared in the online version of the journal are available through some libraries.] It is extremely gratifying to read four reviews of Marx at the Margins by noted Marx scholars who are also specialists in several of the major geographic areas taken up in the book, from India, to Ireland, to Poland and Russia, and lastly, to the U.S. Let me begin with David Norman Smith’s response, which links in a new way Marx’s conceptualization of the struggle against slavery and racism to that for the abolition of the wage system, and therefore of capitalism. As Smith writes, Marx was “an abolitionist in a dual sense. He called equally for the abolition of slavery and capitalism -- and in nearly identical terms.” From today’s vantage point, the first form of abolition sounds almost like a given and the second one visionary in the extreme. As Smith reminds us, however, in the nineteenth century, the abolition of slavery was also a deeply radical position. Both of these forms of abolition or emancipation seemed utopian in 1861, as the Civil War in the U.S. began around narrow questions of preserving or shattering the Union, and whether slavery would be maintained as is or allowed to expand into new territories that would become states. But as Marx argued as early as 1861, and Smith notes, the total abolition of slavery would be pushed to the forefront by the logic of events. It certainly was, as was the incorporation of Black volunteers into the armies of the North, and the granting of full citizenship rights to the former slaves. To be sure, the abolition of slavery in early 1865 without compensation to the slaveowners constituted a vast expropriation of capitalist private property, here in contrast to the British emancipation, which richly compensated the slaveowning class at public expense. But an equally momentous change at the economic level was only posed rather than enacted, one that would have gone much further, the breakup of the old slave plantations and the ceding of substantial plots of land (forty acres and a mule) to the newly emancipated and enfranchised former slaves. As Smith also shows, the very language of abolition also permeated the way in which Marx formulated the ultimate goal of the workers’ movement, whether as abolition of class rule, of the wage system, or of the rule of capital itself. Similarly to the struggle against slavery, the workers’ struggle for a better life would, as Marx saw it, be forced by the logic of events not to stop at the raising of wages or the shortening of the workweek, and to move on to the abolition of class rule, of the wage system, and of capitalism itself. Thus, as Smith notes, Marx’s 1871 pamphlet about the Paris Commune, written in English, alludes to the U.S. Civil War in its very title, “The Civil War in France.” There, Marx intoned that the Paris Commune, with its decentralized form of government and with its abolition – that word again – of the standing army and the police in favor of an armed and self-organized citizenry, had approached the horizon of communism. It was nothing short of – again that word “emancipation” – “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour” ([1871] 1986, p. 334). Michal Buchowski’s response treats of another type of emancipation, national emancipation. Opposition to nationalism has come to the fore of late within progressive and critical thought, whether as opposition to U.S. or other imperialist forms of