notes to Marx and Engels on capital and 19th century imperialism
Christopher Cutrone
"Just as the period of crisis began later on the Continent than in England, so also did prosperity. The process originated in England, which is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. On the Continent the various phases of the cycle repeatedly experienced by bourgeois society assume a secondary and tertiary form. First, the Continent exports to England disproportionately more than to any other country. This export to England, however, depends on the latter's position, especially in regard to the overseas market. England exports disproportionately more to overseas countries than to the whole Continent, so that the quantity of continental exports to those countries is always dependent on England's foreign trade. Hence when crises on the Continent produce revolutions there first, the bases for them are always laid in England. Violent outbreaks naturally erupt sooner at the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, because in the latter the
possibilities of accommodation are greater than in the former. On the other hand, the degree to which continental revolutions affect England is at the same time the thermometer that indicates to what extent these revolutions really put into question bourgeois life conditions, and to what extent they touch only their political formations.
"Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois society are developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a revolution is possible only in periods when both of these factors — the modern forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production — come into opposition with each other. The various bickerings in which representatives of the individual factions of the continental party of Order presently engage and compromise each other, far from providing an occasion for revolution, are, on the contrary, possible only because the bases of relationships are momentarily so secure and — what the reactionaries do not know — so bourgeois. On this all the reactionary attempts to hold back bourgeois development will rebound just as much as will all the ethical indignation and all the enraptured proclamations of the democrats. A new
revolution is only a consequence of a new crisis. The one, however, is as sure to come as the other." (593)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch04.htm
As Marx put it, the depth of the revolutionary crisis (in France) was to be measured in its impact and effect on England.
In this week's readings, on the British Empire in the context of the development of global capital, focused in particular on the case of the British Empire in India, the question is posed somewhat differently: What is the role of (global) capitalist development in the context of the (historical) crisis of capital? After the social-political crisis of the (failed) revolutions of 1848, how should one regard the question of capitalist "progress?" For Marx and Engels, the late colonialism and imperialism, after 1848, is an index of the decadence of the bourgeois society of capital. As Marx puts it in his letter to Engels of October 8, 1858, bourgeois society is having its "16th century" again in the 19th century:
"There is no denying that bourgeois society has for the second time experienced its 16th century, a 16th century which, I hope, will sound its death knell just as the first ushered it into the world. The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_10_08.htm
(The first sentence of this passage is unfortunately excised in the selection printed in the Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader p. 676.)
What did Marx mean by the "16th century?" The constitution of capital. For just as the 16th century inaugurated the emergence of modern capitalism and the society based on capital, so the 19th century, in Marx's view, marked the historical crisis of capital and humanity's task in overcoming it. The "production based on [the world] market," that Marx identifies as the "proper task of bourgeois society" is the wage labor of proletarian production, which entered into fatal crisis with the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. What had happened in a few select countries in Europe (and in their colonies in the New World) in the 16th century was now taking place globally in the 19th century, the difference being the possibility of proletarian socialism putting a stop to the "creative destruction" of capital.
Nonetheless, the "bourgeoisification" and concomitant "proletarianization" of the world proceeded apace, especially after the first world commercial crisis of the "hungry" 1840s (including the phenomenon of Chartist working class agitation in Britain) and the failed revolutions of 1848.
So the question then becomes, for Marx, what is the effect of the accelerating violent upheavals of proletarianization of the predominantly peasant-based countries of the world, in terms of the crisis of capital? Marx generalizes from what he observed about the failed revolution and aftermath of 1848 in France, in which the peasantry had formed a reactionary, counterrevolutionary mass to be mobilized by Bonapartist nationalism against the nascent proletarian socialism in Paris. As Marx put in in his letter to Engels,
"For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant over a far greater area?" (676)
Moishe Postone expressed a similar anxiety in the face of present-day "globalized" capitalism in the interview we did with him in the Platypus Review (issue #3, March 2008), in which he said that,
"The present moment is very bleak, because . . . it is difficult to talk about the abolition of proletarian labor at a point where the meager achievements of the working class in the 20th century have been rolled back everywhere. I don't have a simple answer to that. Because it does seem to me that part of what is on the agenda is actually something quite traditional, which is an international movement that is also an international workers' movement, and I think we are very far away from that. Certainly, to the degree to which working classes are going to compete with one another, it will be their common ruin. We are facing a decline in the standard of living of working classes in the metropoles, there is no question about it, which is pretty bleak, on the one hand.
"On the other hand, a great deal of the unemployment has been caused by technological innovations, and not simply by outsourcing. It's not as if the same number of jobs were simply moved overseas. The problems that we face with the capitalist diminution of proletariat labor on a worldwide scale go hand in hand with the increase of gigantic slum cities, e.g., São Paolo, Mexico City, Lagos. Cities of twenty million people in which eighteen million are slum dwellers, that is, people who have no chance of being sucked up into a burgeoning industrial apparatus."
http://platypus1917.org/2008/03/01/marx-after-marxism-an-interview-with-moishe-postone/
This is what it means to say that capitalism has become historically "decadent" and that capitalist development can no longer be regarded as "progressive," in the sense of providing resources for potential further emancipation.
Marx concludes one of his 1853 articles on India we are reading this week, "The Future Results of British Rule in India," on precisely this note:
"The devastating effects of English industry, when contemplated with regard to India, a country as vast as Europe, and containing 150 millions of acres, are palpable and confounding. But we must not forget that they are only the organic results of the whole system of production as it is now constituted. That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world -- on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of
material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain." (663-664)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm
In other words, it would be wholly unnecessary for India in the 19th century (and 20th-21st centuries!) to undergo in accelerated fashion what Western Europe (and its New World colonies) underwent in the 16th-17th centuries. -- It was not only unnecessary but also a feature of regression that India should have to be "proletarianized."
Whereas the emergence of capital in the 16th-17th centuries was expressed through bourgeoisification (including in the rise of the wage-laboring working class), the "proletarianization" of the post-Industrial Revolution 19th century produced bourgeois subjects, but not in the best sense but only in the most authoritarian fashion. Where once capital produced cosmopolitan liberals, it now produced nationalist authoritarians (the "petit/petty bourgeois" and "lumpen proletarians"), and not only in Europe (e.g., France), but globally. This has been the history of capital ever since then.
This fundamental perspective is what was informing Marx's treatment of British colonialism in India, the estimation that its "civilizing mission" was hardly that, but for specific social-historical reasons of the crisis and regressive dynamic of capital ripe for revolution, and not because colonial expansion was in itself wrong.
Capital rendered European civilization self-contradictory and self-undermining in its global hegemony as a function of capital. As in the historical problem of capital overall, however, it mattered a great deal whether one responds in a conservative-reactionary or progressive-emancipatory way to the crisis of modern society in capital. Marx and Engels wanted no truck with the former but were concerned critically with the problems of the latter. Whether in Europe or its colonial hinterlands, the same problems were posed.
-- Chris