“Last Years of Karl Marx – an Intellectual Biography” by Marcello Musto, 2016 (First review)
The book pictures Marx in his last years, 1880-1883, as a kindly grandfather, a curmudgeon making fun of his political opponents, a dedicated researcher, a theorist discovering new angles and a man and family suffering from health problems. Surrounded by books, newspapers, government folios, documents and letters in his study on Maitland Park Road in London, Marx touched on every subject he could as an omnivore of knowledge. He studied current mathematics, anthropology, current politics, colonialism, chemistry, languages, economics, physics and so on at a tiny 2’x3’ desk. He read classics of literature and poetry, knowing passages by heart. It was estimated that his study contained 2,000 books.
Musto covers some of his last investigations, which do not
show a ‘dotard’ but a man working as he always did – methodically, thoughtfully
and flexibly. Much of Musto’s own work
here is drawn from the voluminous Marx-Engels
Gesamtaustaube (MEGA) which in 2016 reached 67 volumes, including many of
Marx’s notes and unpublished manuscripts. Much of this was unavailable to earlier
Marxists. Musto points out some of this
work contradicts the dogmatic ‘truths’ of Soviet Marxism in its various forms,
from Stalin to Gorbachev. Musto highlights
the simplistic idea that socialism was ‘the
superior development of the productive forces’ and other shibboleths.
So what does Musto look at?
His investigation into the ending years of Marx’s life refutate
Eurocentrism, economism and socialist inevitability. But first, personal life. Jenny Marx had cancer while Marx himself
suffered from a ‘nervous disorder’ and both had been banished to Ramsgate on
the English Channel for rest. He was described by a U.S. journalist in 1880 visiting
him there as a kindly, courtly and merry man with a sweeping ability to knowledgeably
converse about almost anything. At the time he was surrounded by 10 family
members on a sea-side walk with the journalist, including his sons-in-law
Longuet and Lafargue.
Marx’s house on 41 Maitland Park in north London was not
far from where Engels finally settled at 122 Regents Park Road. Engels house is where the ‘party archive’ was
kept – correspondence and internal documents of the First International. (This
house is still in existence.) Marx took
walks in Maitland Park and Hampstead Heath, enjoyed his 3 dogs and was a member
of the ‘Dogberry Club’ that read
Shakespeare aloud at Engel’s house. When
a job took three grandchildren to Paris, he was very lonely. In a way, it’s all a picture of a semi-genteel
English gentleman created by a Dickens, but behind the image, he was no Mr.
Pickwick. Leftist visitors from all over
the world visited Marx for advice, like Bernstein and Kautsky. Whether they took it is unknown, but
evidently not. Marx later said Kautsky
was a ‘hard-working mediocrity.’
THEORY
Theoretically, Marx studied communal land ownership in
India, Russia, Latin America and Algeria. In the process he did not conflate
Indian society with European feudalism, as serfdom did not exist in India. This points out that he had no
supra-historical template to lay over every society, but based his conclusions
on investigation. He wrote 4 parts of
notes on Indian history, condemning British colonialism to the utmost focused on the East India Company. He observed
that colonialism immediately made common ownership of land a target, as the
French did in Algeria by distributing clan holdings to private owners. Once that was accomplished, the French could
then buy the land themselves. The
privatization of land also broke the power of overall clan resistance to French
colonial rule. Marx believed this
process was not inevitable, unlike others. But privatization was key.
During this period Marx closely studied the Russian ‘obshchina’
– peasant communes that still heavily dominated the rural areas of Russia
outside of the landed nobility. Instead
of aligning himself with his ‘scientific’ supporters in Russia, he blocked with
the populists in seeing obshchina common property as a boon to socialism in
Russia. The ‘scientific’ supporters believed that Russia would have to go
through capitalism, so the muzhik commune would have to be privatized. Writing to Vera Zasulich after reading
Chernyshevsky and doing much independent research, Marx asserted that “the commune is the fulcrum of social
regeneration in Russia.” This marked
an increased sophistication as to whether the European model of ‘going through
capitalism’ was to be applied dogmatically and schematically everywhere in the
world. Marx said no and hinted that that
would be reformism.
 |
| Gathering on the obshchina commune |
Mariategui in Peru later made the same observations about the
Quechua indigenous ‘ayllu’ – based on common ownership of land in post-Inca rural
society. Marx had noted this earlier about Aztec and Incan property forms. Marx himself could find no real common land
ownership equivalents in Europe, as all communal ownership had been destroyed
by capital when it ‘enclosed the commons.’
Here in the U.S. there are still remnants of common land ownership on
Native American reservations, called ‘in trust,’ which are owned by the tribe,
not individuals. However, the BIA ‘manages’
this land, and could overrule a tribe.
Most reservation land is ‘in trust’ according to one source. Our national parks, forests and lands, now
under privatization assault by private logging, mining and entertainment
capital, are another common land. Some
land is held by private ‘land trusts’ as well.
Forms
of Communism
Marx did a study of Australian aborigine society,
countering the colonial idea that it had no law or ‘culture.’ All of this was not to romanticize or urge a
return to primitive communism as idealized by some anarchists and libertarians,
but to build a new, technologically advanced communism on the communal structures
of the old. Musto clearly notes that
Marx understood capital as providing tools to ease labor, if it was only
appropriated by the working classes.
Marx made examples of 1800’s European technology that appeared in rural
colonies. This would be similar to the
present: solar panels now provide
electricity in Africa without a system of electrical transmission lines or power plants;
phones no longer need telephone poles and switching centers. A ‘leap’ has been made, though, like the car
replacing the train, some ‘leaps’ need to be reversed. Marxism it is not a form
of tech utopianism, as Marx himself rejected certain ‘advances.’
In an isolated comment, Musto quotes Marx: “…where
the state is itself a capitalist producer, as in the exploitation of mines,
forests, etc., its product is a ‘commodity’ and hence possesses the specific character
of every other commodity.” Remember,
Marx saw the commodity as the modest key to capitalist production. That is how
Capital starts, by describing it. Was he only talking about a capitalist
state? In 1880 that is all there was. Does this apply to a workers’ state after
attaining power? A workers’ state far
down the road, like the USSR and China?
Marx never predicted any stage such as ‘state capitalism’ but here he
again hints that capital still can haunt society even after a social revolution.
During this period Marx read Morgan’s “Ancient Society” (1877) and fiercely took notes on Morgan’s
treatment of production and tech progress as playing a role in social
developments, creating his own Ethnological
Notebooks. Morgan showed that human
progress quickened under conditions of increasing wealth, not scarcity. However Marx never made this a determinant. One aspect he confirmed with Morgan was that
the patriarchal ‘nuclear’ family was a new development under capitalism,
whereas prior families included the whole extended family of kin, plus servants
– the Roman ‘gens,’ almost like a caste - practicing a “communism in living.” In
some of the gens in other countries, women had greater power than men. Morgan was quite clear on the deformations
introduced by the division of labor, property and the origin of classes.
Marx also studied algebra, numbers, calculus and geometry,
looking at Newton and Leibniz work and taking 100 pages of notes on math. Marx kept in close touch with developments
throughout Europe, Ireland, Russia and the U.S., reading the bourgeois press,
the working-class press and letters from comrades. He considered the Russian Tsar to be the ‘chief of European reaction’ and so paid
careful attention to matters in Russia. Marx
was initially involved in the early development of the 2nd
International, though he remained skeptical.
He helped a merger of French working-class socialist currents. He developed a ‘Workers’ Questionnaire’ about
proletarian conditions for them, along with a transitional program. He polemicized against a U.S. economist who
thought the solution to capitalist exploitation was to tax rents, ignoring
surplus value in the process. This is
similar to present leftists like Varoufakis who think we live under ‘feudal capitalism’
or like Hudson who believe we are dominated by pure ‘financial capital.’
Due to sickness, this review has been delayed and
truncated. Part 2 is next.
Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search
box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Marx,”
‘obshchina,” “Engels,” “Mariategui,” “Chernyshevsky.”
May Day has many books on Marx. This I got at the Library!
Red Frog / April 17, 2025
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