Joshua Malbin

In the introduction to A Companion to Marx’s Capital, available for download, David Harvey suggests that Marx is synthesizing from three intellectual traditions active in his day: English political economy, German critical philosophy, and French utopian socialism.

A long excerpt below the fold.

The three grand conceptual frameworks that converge in Capital are these: first, classical political economy—seventeenth- to mid-nineteenth- century political economy. This is mainly British, though not solely so, and it runs from William Petty, Locke, Hobbes and Hume to the grand trio of Adam Smith, Malthus and Ricardo, as well as to a host of others, like James Steuart. There was also a French tradition of political economy (Physiocrats like Quesnay and Turgot and later on Sismondi and Say) as well as individual Italians and Americans (like Carey) who provide Marx with additional critical materials. Marx subjected all these people to a deep criticism in the three volumes of notes now called Theories of Surplus Value. He didn’t have a photocopying machine and he didn’t have the Web, so he laboriously copied out long passages from Smith and then wrote a commentary on them, long passages from Steuart and a commentary on them, and so on. In effect he was practicing what we now call deconstruction, and I learned from Marx how to deconstruct arguments in this way. When he takes on Adam Smith, for example, Marx accepts much of what Smith says but then searches for the gaps or contradictions which, when rectified, radically transform the argument. This kind of argumentation appears throughout Capital because, as its subtitle indicates, it is shaped around “a critique of political economy.”

The second conceptual building block in Marx’s theorizing is philosophical reflection and inquiry, which for Marx originates with the Greeks. Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, and he was familiar with Greek thought. Aristotle, as you will see, provides a frequent anchor for his arguments. Marx was also thoroughly trained in the way in which Greek thought came into the mainly German philosophical critical tradition— Spinoza, Leibniz and, of course, Hegel, as well as Kant and many others. Marx puts this mainly German critical philosophical tradition into a relationship with the British and French political-economic tradition, though, again, it would be wrong simply to see this in terms of national traditions (Hume was, after all, as much a philosopher—albeit an empiricist—as he was a political economist, and Descartes’ and Rousseau’s influence on Marx was also substantial). But the mainly German critical philosophical tradition weighed heavily on Marx because that was his initial training. And the critical climate generated by what later came to be known as the “young Hegelians” in the 1830s and 1840s influenced him greatly.

The third tradition to which Marx appeals is that of utopian socialism. In Marx’s time, this was primarily French, although it was an Englishman, Thomas More, who is generally credited with originating the modern tradition—though it, too, goes back to the Greeks—and another Englishman, Robert Owen, who not only wrote copious utopian tracts but actually sought to put many of his ideas into practice in Marx’s lifetime. But in France there was a tremendous burst of utopian thinking in the 1830s and 1840s, inspired largely by the earlier writings of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Babeuf. There were, for example, people like Etienne Cabet, who created a group called the Icarians, which settled in the United States after 1848; Proudhon and the Proudhonists; August Blanqui (who coined the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”) and many like him who adhered to a Jacobin tradition (such as that of Babeuf); the Saint-Simonian movement; Fourierists like Victor Considerant; and socialist feminists like Flora Tristan. And it was in the 1840s in France that many radicals, for the first time, cared to call themselves communists, even though they had no clear idea of what that might mean. Marx was very familiar with, if not immersed in, this tradition, particularly when in Paris before his expulsion in 1844, and I think that he draws from it more than he willingly acknowledges. Understandably, he wanted to distance himself from the utopianism of the 1830s and 1840s, which he felt accounted in many ways for the failures of the revolution of 1848 in Paris. He didn’t like it when utopians configured some ideal society without any idea of how to get from here to there, an opposition made clear in the Communist Manifesto. He therefore often proceeds in relation to their ideas by means of negation, particularly with respect to the thought of Fourier and Proudhon.

Nothing to add or note at this point — I just found this a clear and helpful bit of context to add to the “Marx said he wasn’t a Marxist” nostrum. I can’t say that I have the ambition to read Capital with or without David Harvey’s assistance, but he’s been licking at the edges of my consciousness for a while. Someone please write a long magazine profile of him. This introduction by The Stranger’s Charles Mudede is a nice start.

Also, you must watch this animated David Harvey lecture on the current financial crisis, via The Great Whatsit. Harvey’s approach is surprisingly flattering to the Planet Money boys’ take in The Giant Pool of Money, although they of course would never place the current crisis in the context of the 1980s’ labor crisis. Planet Money can helpfully explain that there were vast amounts of capital that required investment and created the pressure that resulted in high-risk home loans to anyone with a central nervous system. But they would not provide the insight that this capital accumulated because in the previous go-round, labor got so badly beaten up through strikebreaking, outsourcing, TINA etc. that it couldn’t lay claim to any of the money. Which wound up in the Giant Pool. Clearly someone should do a Marxist review of Planet Money, but it shouldn’t be me.

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