A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  The Interpreters

  The first interpreter of Capital was of course Friedrich Engels, and his significance for the reception of the work was that much greater, as he brought two of the volumes to some kind of conclusion. The extent to which he accomplished his friend’s intentions is one of the most controversial questions in the substantial literature on Marx. In the next chapter, the relationship between the two men will be examined more systematically. Until then, only a few short points will be adduced.

  Engels never expressed himself as subtly as Marx; he always wrote more simply and in a more straightforward manner. That simplicity, as Hobsbawm points out in his 2011 book How to Change the World, also implied a vulgarization.38 Others have spoken about pure misinterpretation.

  What Marx called dialectics was always inseparable from his method of presentation. The very beginning of Volume I – on the commodity and money – is a prime example. Engels sighed over the degree of difficulty in the account. He himself always wrote about the dialectic, and did not employ it in his own presentation.

  There is also a difference of nuance between their views on capitalism. Marx treated developed capitalism chiefly as a system that functioned when all the essential bits – capitalists, free wage labourers, and so on – were in place. Historical changes such as the development of productive forces and the concentration of capital were consequences of the system itself. In his analyses of capitalism, Engels gave more place to broad historical overviews.

  Let us be satisfied with these points for the time being. The essential thing is that Engels not only completed Capital but also, through his own works – Anti-Dühring (1877) and The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) – would leave an imprint on the general notion, especially among social democrats and socialists of the time, of Marx’s theory of capitalism. People read and were influenced by Engels first of all, whereas Capital stood out as an entirely too demanding work, suited more for academics than workers hungry for reading. Engels’s presentations were not only simpler. Analyses of value and capital were added into a huge framework of historical development in which all signs pointed to socialism and communism. The sympathetic reader could feel a sense of secure hopefulness at the prospect of the future.

  Engels would long dominate the interpretation of Capital. His line was continued by Karl Kautsky, who developed a kind of orthodoxy that could be condensed into catechism-like works. But further development also took place after 1900, and that directly on the basis of Capital. Also to the point is that what generally came to be called Marxism became popular especially among young academics, at the same time as the German Social Democratic Party was enjoying great electoral success. Success breeds resistance, and Marx’s economic theories – officially embraced as the very centre of social democratic theory – became the subject of heavy-handed scrutiny. Chief among the critics was the Austrian economist Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, who belonged to the ‘neoclassical’ tendency that maintained – as against Ricardo and the other classicists – that prices are not related to the value created by labour but exclusively obey the law of supply and demand (an idea that is still completely dominant among economists today). Böhm-Bawerk addressed himself directly to Marx, who had created an alternative to the classical theory.39

  Another Austrian, Rudolf Hilferding, appeared in Marx’s defence. Hilferding, who began his career as a paediatrician but soon went over to economics and politics, played an important role in both the Austrian and the German workers’ movements. But above all, he was the author of the 1910 book Finance Capital, which was an audacious attempt at simultaneously updating and modernizing Marx’s theory in Capital. According to Hilferding, development had left the stage Marx had depicted in which individual capitalists found themselves in life-or-death competition with each other. Instead, large monopolies had developed – companies that in turn had become increasingly dependent on the banks, which had taken a dominant role in the economy. In brief, finance capital and industrial capital had grown together.

  In this economy, the capitalists had become dependent on the state, which with its forces could promote the export of capital that had become necessary once the large monopolies had saturated the domestic market. It could be said that Hilferding depicted very well the period of enormous concentration of wealth that characterized the period before the First World War, which had no equal until the dawn of the twenty-first century.40

  Hilferding’s analysis also became influential in the workers’ movement of the time. Weightiest was the contribution Rosa Luxemburg made through her 1913 book Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (The Accumulation of Capital). Luxemburg, who was from Poland but would make her most important contributions in Germany, was especially interested in what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’. Something like this had also gone on outside of capitalism, but as a result of colonialism these pre-capitalist societies were integrated into the new world economy, which was becoming increasingly dependent on the exploitation of people and natural resources in other parts of the world.

  Luxemburg criticized Marx for treating capitalism as a closed system. Against that, she maintained that capitalism could only survive as long as it had non-capitalist surroundings to expand into.41

  The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin went further along Hilferding’s and Luxemburg’s line while at the same time disputing their conclusions; in his 1916 book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he declared that contemporary developments would inevitably result in a revolution and a new type of society.

  Through the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 in Russia, he seemed to have confirmed his thesis. Now socialism would be built; no sacrifice was too big for this task. Luxemburg was among the sharpest critics of the dictatorship of opinion that Lenin and his closest collaborators exercised. ‘Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently,’ she declared.42

  Luxemburg can be said to have been correct on another point in relation to Lenin and his followers: in the future society Marx sketched out, there is a market of goods and not a completely regulated planned economy. But the market is equal, in contrast to the kind that characterized capitalist society.

  The decades after 1917 are not marked by any audacious interpretations or further developments of Capital. When Stalin, after Lenin’s death, created what he called Marxism–Leninism, Marx (or, rather, Marx via Engels) was overshadowed by Lenin, and gradually also by Stalin himself. There were new issues on the agenda, especially how a socialist economy could be constructed, and the capitalist system stood out chiefly as the foreign Other that could be dismissed with a few stereotypical phrases.

  There were individual thinkers outside the Soviet Union who wanted to work in the spirit of Marx instead of following the directives from Moscow. For Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, who wrote the important 1923 work Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (translated in 1967 as History and Class Consciousness), there was a particular concept in Capital that stood at the centre: reification. This was concerned with commodity fetishism, according to which it is people who appear as things in capitalism.43 (Lukács met violent criticism from Moscow for his unorthodox book, and soon fell back in line.)

  The influential Frankfurt School, with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno as prominent figures, were implacable critics of both the Soviet Union and capitalism. They further developed a central concept in the tradition from Marx, namely critique in the sense it occurs in the subtitle of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. In general, Capital played an important role as a source of inspiration and a model. But Horkheimer, Adorno, and their colleagues were less interested in political economy in the narrow sense than they were in a broader critique of society and culture, according to which people in capitalism had become easy victims of totalitarian ideologies. In countries where dictatorship had not been victorious, the inhabitants had on the other hand become passive consumers of a soulless culture. The foundation of these defect
s could be found in capitalism itself.44

  Marx’s critique of economics also had a number of direct followers, particularly from the 1930s onwards. One prominent example of this tendency is the American economist Paul Sweezy, who played a crucial role for decades in the Marxist-oriented journal Monthly Review. Together with Paul A. Baran, an American of Russian extraction, he wrote the influential 1966 book Monopoly Capital, in which the authors could be said to have brought forward arguments not only from Marx but from Hilferding and Luxemburg as well. Thanks to capital accumulation, it becomes more and more difficult for the capitalists to make profitable investments. The economy threatens to stagnate when companies in monopoly positions draw down production in order to avoid overproduction.45

  The book on monopoly capital came out at a time when Marx and Marxism were again attracting many readers and interpreters. Whereas Capital had been overshadowed by later interpretations for decades, the work was now being put into focus. Competing readings fought for attention. French philosopher Louis Althusser and a group around him published a collection of analyses in 1966 under the title Lire le Capital (Reading Capital).46

  Althusser and his collaborators had an extremely firm idea about Marx’s development. The author of the Manuscripts was a young philosopher who wrote texts in the style of the times in which he tried to lay bare the essence of humanity. But a short time later, he was awakened to new, crucial insights that he expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology. There, as Althusser says, he discovered ‘the continent of history’. Only there does the Marx who would later write Capital emerge. The basis of his theories was the conviction that material circumstances govern history: the class struggle – that is, the struggle for power over production and the results of production – is the motor of history. Under capitalism, the class struggle assumes its particular character with wage labourers and capitalists as the major antagonists.

  Thus the materialist conception of history stands at the centre, and it is based on this that Capital should also be interpreted; namely, as a book about an epoch with its unique features.47

  Althusser’s interpretations were subjected to harsh criticism by a number of young readers of Marx on the Continent. West German philosophers Hans Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt were some of the most important, and the Danish historian of ideas Hans-Jørgen Schanz was part of the tendency, at least at the beginning.48 A common designation of their interpretation is ‘capital-logic’ or the ‘capital-logic school’, but in Germany they prefer to speak of die neue Marx-Lektüre, ‘the new Marx reading’ (or Marx interpretation); this is certainly a more suitable name. Capital-logic is only the designation for what Marx himself called the expansive nature of capital. The essentially new thing with this loosely put together tendency is the method of reading both Capital and the Grundrisse in detail without being guided by the traditions of interpretation based on Engels, which continued with additional simplifications and later additions in ‘Soviet Marxism’. What was crucial was both the almost ascetic strictness in the reading of Marx’s texts and the firm idea that Marx’s theory of capital had no substantial connection with his materialist view of history in general.

  There is already a rapidly growing body of literature on this new reading. Ingo Elbe has produced a summary, as comprehensive as it is energetic, in his 2010 book Marx im Westen. The 2011 omnibus Kapital & Kritik provides a series of longer articles that are examples of the approach.49 One of its pioneers, Hans Georg Backhaus, provided his version of the path to a new understanding of Marx in his 1997 book Dialektik der Wertform. In an introductory text, he talks about his own development as well as that of his closest collaborators. Important impulses came from the Frankfurt School, but the specialization in certain texts of Marx awakened during the encounter with the first edition of Capital from 1867. The second edition, as we have seen, is partially a popularization of the first, and by going back to a succession of texts and letters Backhaus can show how after the Grundrisse Marx strove to make his theory more accessible to more readers.

  In the Grundrisse, therefore, the outlines of the real, original theory that Marx – supported by Engels – gradually watered down can be detected. It got worse when Engels later misinterpreted the theory by placing an equals sign between ‘simple circulation’ and ‘simple commodity production’. With that, he erased the boundary between distribution and production that was so important for Marx.

  The essential part of the original theory that remains even in later editions of Capital, according to Backhaus, is commodity fetishism. On the one hand, the commodity is something real and concrete; on the other, an abstraction that is ascribed an exchange value. The fundamental economic categories are twofold all along. This duplication continues in the distinction between value and exchange value. Exchange value is the visible, expressed in price. Value, like surplus value, is something fundamental that only thought can show the necessity of.

  Backhaus thus makes Marx more of a philosopher than an economist in the narrow sense. Readers can themselves draw the conclusion that Marx, in and through his simplifications, is merely placed before certain insoluble dilemmas. Backhaus does not even mention the transformation problem. On the other hand, he admits in his survey of the new Marx reading that as an older man, he can see difficulties with his and Reichelt’s interpretation of Marx.50

  Michael Heinrich, who we have encountered several times, also sees himself as a representative of the ‘new Marx reading’. But his background is different, as are his interpretations to a considerable extent. Whereas Backhaus and Reichelt had their main schooling in Frankfurt am Main, Heinrich was from Berlin and was associated early on with the journal Prokla (a contraction of Probleme des Klassenkampfs, Problems of the Class Struggle) where he still has a dominant position. Otherwise, the central figure of Prokla has long been Elmar Altvater, a political scientist and critic of capitalism who, moreover, was one of the founders of Die Grünen, the German Green Party. Heinrich himself is a mathematician and political scientist.51

  Unlike Backhaus, Heinrich does not regard the second edition of Volume I of Capital as a superficial version of a scientific project whose real outlines can be seen in earlier versions of the text. In a direct polemic with Backhaus and Reichelt, he points out that what Marx wrote after the Grundrisse consisted not only of popularizations but clarifications as well. On the other hand, he sees the many different versions of the text as a link in a great, unfinished project that in his opinion had its start in 1850, after the revolutions, when Marx set about his new project on the critique of economics once more. It is this project that, according to Heinrich, constitutes the most important turning point in Marx’s development and not, as Althusser states, the introduction of the materialist conception of history. The critique of economics that Marx developed before the revolutions was coloured by speculations about the essence of humanity.

  In Heinrich’s opinion, Marx remained fundamentally ambivalent towards his new project. It is not only the concept of alienation that turns up here and there in his later writings. His relationship to his predecessors in economic theory is also ambiguous. On the one hand, he continued in their line, presenting yet another variation of their theory; on the other, his project constituted a critique of the social conditions for the type of theory that Smith and Ricardo developed, as did later economists following them. According to Heinrich, it is the latter that constitutes the important and valuable thing in the project, while Marx’s own variation of the theory is interspersed throughout the entire effort. The subtitle to Heinrich’s most important work, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert (The Science of Value), indicates the ambivalence in Marx’s attempt: ‘The Marxist critique of political economy between scientific revolution and classical tradition.’ In other words, Marx was an innovator in the theory who did not fully realize the consequences of what he had done.

  According to Heinrich, Marx had developed a theory that was not empirical in the sense that it generalized what
was sensuously evident. In that case, Marx asserted, we should be satisfied with the merely apparent, as for example John Stuart Mill, Nassau W. Senior, and others were. Instead, Marx created a particular theoretical level at which the inner coherence in capitalist society would be laid bare. Its historical character would also become evident here. Heinrich does not mention the term ‘hypothetical deductive theory’ – that is, a theory that generates certain general hypotheses that can directly or indirectly be tested on empirical material. Theories like this are commonly accepted in the modern natural sciences, but this is surely not the type of theoretical construction Heinrich has in mind. Rather, he refers to the strict conceptual construction that characterizes Capital, in which the view is opened at times to a fluent empiricism, for example in the chapters on the working day and on the development of machinery. Only through theory do we know why there must inevitably be a struggle on the length of the working day and why capitalism, equally inevitably, must strive for increasing productive force. Only through theory can we thus interpret empiricism.52

  Heinrich is otherwise best known for having developed a monetary interpretation of Marx’s theory. On that point he comes close to Backhaus, who asserts that ‘as regards simple circulation, the Marxist theory of value is essentially a theory of money’.53 Heinrich goes further, however, and draws support from the most astute of the GDR’s Marx specialists, Peter Ruben (typically enough a persona non grata in his homeland), who in 1977 pointed out that Backhaus seemed to ignore that value cannot exist outside the ‘form of appearance’ of the commodities – that is, ‘their actual sensuous existence’.54 Heinrich is of the opinion that Marx himself put obstacles in the way of the development of his theory through immediately perceiving money as an actual commodity, thereby linking it to its historical genesis. The essential thing, however, is the conventionally determined symbol of value that can take any form whatsoever. Something has value attached to it, regardless of what that something is (today we often encounter it as a few digits on a bank statement). Products of labour are neither commodities nor objects of value if they are regarded in isolation. Only through commodities being related to money can the connection between different individual labours be established, Heinrich says.55