Re: [Marxism] Peter Hudis

[Peter McLaren <mclaren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For those who are interested in Marx and his comments on various non-Western
societies, here is an excerpt from an essay, "Marx Amongst the Muslims"
published by Peter Hudis in the journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Peter McLaren



What is remarkable about such judgments is that they ignore the bulk of
Marx¹s writings on non-Western societies. The tendency to single out a
handful of Marx¹s writings on non-European countries?such as his 1853
writings on India?while ignoring the full range of his work on such subjects
persists even in the aftermath of the numerous debates in the Left over the
significance of the September 11, 2001 attacks and their aftermath. One
might think that given the contentious debates being waged today over the
nature of contemporary Islam that at least some on the Left would explore
the issue in light of Marx¹s writings on Muslim history and societies. After
all, Marx lived in Algiers for two months in 1882 (a year before he died),
where he had the chance to observe and comment directly on various aspects
of Islamic civilization. While in Algiers he also carried on extensive
discussions on Arab landed property and French colonialism with the civil
judge Albert Fermé.[i] <#_edn1> Moreover, in 1879, several years before his
trip to Algiers, Marx made a comprehensive study of the Muslim rule of
northern India, communal land formations in Algeria, and the Hanafi school
of Islamic jurisprudence in his notebooks on the work of Maxim Kovalevsky, a
Russian sociologist who wrote an important study of communal land formations
in northern India and North Africa. In the last several years of his life
Marx also studied a number of other aspects of both Indian and Indonesian
society (such as his October 1880 notes on Indian history from 664 ad to
1858 and a 1,700 page manuscript on world history, which was written in late
1881, which has yet be published).

            Some of these writings have yet to either appear or to be
translated into English, and even many that are available take the form of
excerpt notebooks on the writings of various authors. Given the unpolished
and fragmentary character of these notebooks it is hard to draw conclusions
about their overall significance. Yet we still have much to learn from the
method and approach that Marx employed in his studies on colonialism,
communal forms, and technologically underdeveloped societies during his last
decade. Whereas Marx¹s writings from the early 1850s on India (in which he
seemed to endorse a unilinear evolutionist view that social ³progress² would
come to India through Western colonialism and industrialization) continue to
receive much discussion and debate, Marx¹s writings from his last decade
(1872-83)?in which he altered many of these earlier views?continue to be met
with either silence or insufficient attention.

            We will therefore try to fill some of this gap by exploring a
few aspects of Marx¹s ³Notebooks on Kovalevsky,² which he wrote in the fall
of 1879. (The bulk of Marx¹s Notebooks was published in 1975 as an appendix
to Lawrence Krader¹s The Asiatic Mode of Production; the full text, which is
over 100 pages long, was published in German in 1977 by Hans-Peter Harstick
as Karl Marx über Formen vorkapitalistischer Produktion: Vergleichende
Studien zur Geschichte des Grundeigentums 1879-80.)[ii] <#_edn2>

            There is no question that Marx¹s ideas developed in a European
context and that a number of his comments on non-Western societies in the
1840s exhibited a European bias and lack of familiarity with and sensitivity
toward their internal development. One need only recall the Communist
Manifesto¹s phrase about the Europeans¹ ³heavy artillery with which it
batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians¹
intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.²[iii] <#_edn3> Yet
even in the 1840s Marx engaged in important studies of non-European
societies. In 1846 he made extensive notes on developments in Egypt, Turkey,
Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and South Africa in his study of
Gustav von Gulich¹s Geschichtliche Darstellung des Handels. Though virtually
ignored in the English-language literature on Marx, his 1,000-page notebooks
on von Gulich shows that even in the 1840s Marx took an active interest in
developments outside of Europe.[iv] <#_edn4>  By the 1850s this expanded
into a series of studies on China and India and in the section on
³Precapitalist Economic Formations² in his Grundrisse. From such studies
emerged his concept of ³The Asiatic mode of production,² which he cited in
his famous 1859 Preface to The Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy. In the period of the Taiping revolt in China (which he actively
studied and supported), Marx argued that unlike Western Europe, which was
characterized by a development from slave to feudal to capitalist societies,
India and China exhibited signs of an independent ³Asiatic mode of
production² characterized by ³an economical and common use of water² due to
largescale irrigation. This, he argued, ³necessitated in the Orient where
civilization was too low and the territorial extent too vast to call into
life voluntary association, the interference of the centralizing role of
government.²[v] <#_edn5>  Alongside such centralized government were
small-scale farming villages ³contaminated by distinctions of caste and
slavery.²[vi] <#_edn6> Marx did not explore this so-called ³Asiatic² mode of
production in order to denigrate non-European societies as ³backward.² On
the contrary, as he wrote in 1853, ³The question is, can mankind fulfill its
destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?²[vii]
<#_edn7> Marx probed the dualities and contradictions within China and India
to see if they could lead to a worldwide revolutionary upsurge against
existing society. As he wrote in his article of 1853 ³Revolution in China
and in England² in discussing the Taiping rebellion in China, ³England,
having brought about the revolution in China, the question is how that
revolution, will in time react on England and through England on
Europe.²[viii] <#_edn8>

            Likewise, when Marx turned to a more intensive study of
non-Western societies in the 1870s the question that was foremost on his
mind was how developments in the non-European world could feed into the
development of a global revolution against capital. In part, Marx¹s
increased interest in ³the East² from the early 1870s onward was stimulated
by the emergence of a revolutionary movement in Russia, which posed
important questions about its future course of historical development. Was
Russia destined to undergo capitalistic industrialization before it could be
ready for the attainment of a socialist society? Or was it possible for
Russia to bypass the stage of capitalism by utilizing such indigenous
formations as communal ownership and working of the land? Marx was fully
acquainted with the debates on this subject this by Russian Populists,
Anarchists and ³Marxists,² and he made a series of important studies on
Russian society with this question expressly in mind.[ix] <#_edn9>

            Yet while much has been written on Marx¹s writings on Russia in
the 1870s and 1880s, his studies of India, Indonesia, and the Muslim world
from this period remain much less known and discussed. Of central importance
in these studies is his 1879 Notebooks on Kovalevsky¹s The Communal
Possession of the Land.

            Though Marx had many criticisms of Kovalevsky¹s book, it is
important to first see what Marx appreciated about it. First, Kovalevksy
sharply attacked imperialism, arguing that British imperialism in north
India and French imperialism in Algeria were regressive phenomena because of
their destruction of indigenous communal landholding patterns. Marx agreed
with Kovalevsky¹s view of the regressive impact of imperialism upon these
societies, in contrast to some of his views expressed in his writings on
India in the early 1850s. For example, in reference to Kovalevsky¹s
discussion of the means used by the French to rob the Algerians of their
land, Marx added: ³The means sometimes change, the aim is ever the same:
destruction of the indigenous collective property (and its transformation)
into an object of free purchase and sale, and by this means the final
passage made easier into the hands of the French colonists.²[x] <#_edn10>
Kovalevsky¹s description of the French effort to destroy the clan-community
landholding patters in Algeria evoked from Marx the comment: ³The
Shameless!²[xi] <#_edn11>



[i] <#_ednref1>  See "Marx After Capital: a biographical note (1867-1883),"
by Derek Sayer, in Late Marx and the Russian Road: A case presented by
Teodor Shanin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 169.

[ii] <#_ednref2>  Krader did not translate the sections of Marx¹s "Notebooks
on Kovalevsky" which deal with Incan and South American society. Harstick
provides the complete text of Marx¹s Notebooks. A complete and revised
English-language translation of Marx¹s "Notebooks on Kovalevsky" is
currently in preparation.

[iii] <#_ednref3>  "The Communist Manifesto," in Marx-Engels Collected
Works, Vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 488.

[iv] <#_ednref4>  See "Exzerpte aus Gustav von Gulich," in Marx-Engels
Gesamtausgabe, Vierte Abteiling, Band 2 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980).

[v] <#_ednref5>  "The British Rule in India," by Karl Marx, in Marx-Engels
Collected Works, Vol. 12 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), p. 127.

[vi] <#_ednref6>  "The British Rule in India," p. 132.

[vii] <#_ednref7>  "The British Rule in India," p. 132. Though Marx did not
use the phrase "Asiatic mode of production" in such later writings as his
"Notebooks on Kovalevsky," there is no doubt that he never abandoned the
concept. This can be seen from the way he rephrased the concept, in very
similar terms used by him in the 1850s, in his draft letters to Vera
Zasulich in 1881: "One debilitating feature of the 'agricultural commune' in
Russia is inimical to it in every way. This is its isolation, the lack of
connection between the lives of the different communes. It is not an
immanent or universal characteristic of this type that the commune should
appear as a localized microcosm. But wherever it does so appear, it leads to
the formation of a more or less central despotism above the communes." See
"Draft Letters to Zasulich" in Shanin, p. 111.

[viii] <#_ednref8>  "Revolution in China and in England," in Marx-Engels
Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 95.

[ix] <#_ednref9>  Many of Marx¹s writings on the Russian village commune
from the 1870s and 1880s are available in Shanin¹s Marx and the Russian
Road. See his "Late Marx: Gods and Craftsman" in the same volume for a
discussion of how some of the early Russian "Marxists" such as Plekhanov and
Axelrod tried to suppress some of Marx¹s writings on this subject because
Marx's position, in their view, did not accord with a "Marxist" position.

[x] <#_ednref10>  "Notebooks on Kovalevsky," by Karl Marx, in The Asiatic
Mode of Production, by Lawrence Krader (Assen: Van Gorcum & Co, 1975), p.
405.

[xi] <#_ednref11>  "Notebooks on Kovalevsky," p. 412.


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