Marx and World History

Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post Marxism, 2021

Did Marx develop a critique of capitalism as a global system? And does he provide us with tools for opposing imperialism, racism and gender oppression today? It has become commonplace to portray Marx as a Eurocentric thinker whose critique of political economy never transcended the boundaries of production on a national scale. In reality, Marx’s focus on production relations does not mean that he underestimated processes located outside the immediate process of production but rather attempted to grasp the links between different spheres within the process of total reproduction of capital. Marx’s analysis of capital reproduction in Capital further developed his initial insights on the materialistic conception of history by examining the process of capital accumulation as an inherently international process, deeply gendered and racialized. Marx’s critical analysis of exploitation shows the contradictions inherent in the development of productive forces within capitalism, thus disclosing the new spaces of resistance emerging within the system. Expropriation and state violence not only continue after the initial process of “primitive accumulation” alongside exploitation, they are also deeply shaped by it. The antagonism between wage labor and capital is a global, gendered antagonism in which struggles over wages, working conditions and the duration of the working day are organically linked to struggles over dispossession, social reproduction, ecology, imperialism and racism. Marx increasingly recognized the centrality of anti-racism and anti-imperialism for building the First International, and came to appreciate the importance of women and demands for gender equality and for the socialization of reproductive activities in the program of the communist movement. He sought to show to the global working class created by capital accumulation, torn apart by competition and divisions, that there is a deeper dynamic that brings them together, allowing them to re-appropriate their own collective power. Marx’s Capital thus provides us not only the most lucid analysis of the workings of the capitalist mode of production, but discloses the potential for a free society growing amid the misery of the present.

2018

The debate on the structure of Marx’s Capital, and on the probable explanations for the changes he made to the initial ‘six books plan’, has always been a relevant topic in Marxist studies. This article provides a more exhaustive account of the genesis of Capital, on the basis of a revisitation of Marx’s intellectual biography during the 1860s, and of the publication of all preparatory manuscripts of Marx’s magnum opus, recently appeared in the MEGA2, the historical-critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels.

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A Bibliography Reflecting Karl Marx's Study of History, 2021

It is a partial and partially Cyberdiscursive Bibliography reflecting Karl Marx’s Encyclopedic Approach to the Study of History.

Penguin books, 1976

KARL MARX was born at Trier in 1818 of a German-Jewish family converted to Christianity. As a student in Bonn and Berlin he was influenced by Hegel's dialectic, but he later reacted against idealist philosophy and began to develop his theory of historical materialism. He related the state of society to its economic foundations and mode of production, and recommended armed revolution on the part of the proletariat. In Paris in 1844 Marx met Friedrich Engels, with whom he formed a lifelong partnership. Together they prepared the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) as a statement of the Communist League's policy. In 1848 Marx returned to Germany and took an active part in the unsuccessful democratic revolution. The following year he arrived in England as a refugee and lived in London until his death in 1883. Helped financially by Engels, Marx and his family nevertheless lived in great poverty. After years of research (mostly carried out in the British Museum), he published in 1867 the first volume of his great work, Capital. From 1864 to 1872 Marx played a leading role in the International Working Men's Association, and his last years saw the development of the first mass workers' parties founded on avowedly Marxist principles. Besides the two posthumous volumes of Capital compiled by Engels, Karl Marx's other writings

2014

The nature of the contemporary global political economy and the significance of the current crisis are a matter of wide-ranging intellectual and political debate, which has contributed to a revival of interest in Marx’s critique of political economy. This book interrogates such a critique within the broader framework of the history of political economy, and offers a new appreciation of its contemporary relevance. A distinctive feature of this study is its use of the new historical critical edition of the writings of Marx and Engels (MEGA²), their partially unpublished notebooks in particular. The sheer volume of this material forces a renewed encounter with Marx. It demonstrates that the international sphere and non-European societies had an increasing importance in his research, which developed the scientific elements elaborated by Marx’s predecessors. This book questions widespread assumptions that the nation-state was the starting point for the analysis of development. It explores the international foundations of political economy, from mercantilism to Adam Smith and David Ricardo and to Hegel, and investigates how the understanding of the international political economy informs the interpretations of history to which it gave rise. The book then traces the developments of Marx’s critique of political economy from the early 1840s to Capital Volume 1 and shows that his deepening understanding of the laws of capitalist uneven and combined development allowed him to recognise the growth of a world working class. Marx’s work thus offers the necessary categories to develop an alternative to methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism grounded in a critique of political economy. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of Marx’s thought and in the foundations of International Political Economy.

Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2022

In the preface to the first edition of Capital Volume I, Karl Marx wrote ‘Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences. The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty’ (Marx 1990: 89). It is no wonder then that in the face of this difficult beginning, Louis Althusser famously encouraged the first-time reader to put Part I on ‘Commodities and Money’ aside and only return to it after the end of reading the rest of the book. And even then, to do so ‘with infinite caution, knowing that it will always be extremely difficult to understand, even after several readings of the other Parts, without the help of a certain number of deeper explanations’ (Althusser 1977: 85). In the anglophone world, many readers reached for David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital for such help. But this companion, its importance notwithstanding, exhibits what Nicola Taylor and Riccardo Bellofiore (2004: 4n4) call the ‘immaturity’ of English-language scholarship on Marx which to this day continues to remain in the dark about primary and secondary literature emerging from the historical-critical edition, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2).

Socialism and Democracy, 2017

On its 150th anniversary, as contemporary capitalism shows some signs, albeit fitful, of mutating beyond neoliberalism toward a new form of authoritarianism rooted in economic nationalism and protectionism, Marx's Capital helps to illuminate the system's underlying structure and the way out, especially if we allow that he has something to tell us not only on capital and class, but also on race and gender. Among the most salient concepts in Capital I are the dehumanization of the worker via commodity fetishism, a problem rooted in the production processes of capitalism, and the concomitant quest for free and associated labor by the working people. Equally salient today is the absolute general law of capital accumulation, which shows that mass unemployment is a permanent feature of highly developed capitalism, as machines replace human labor in a process that also leads to stagnation and the tendency toward a decline in the rate of profit. Finally, Marx's mature theory of revolution shows not only labor rising up against capital, but also how in particular capitalist societies, this process can be either retarded or hastened by ethnic and national divisions within the working classes. What does it mean to celebrate and concretize for today Marx's greatest work, Capital, Vol. I? Such a discussion is terribly important at this juncture, when we are in a new situation where even some sectors of the right have started to attack neoliberalism. The Brexit vote in the UK, the large vote for Le Pen in France despite her eventual defeat by a neoliberal candidate, and above all, the Trump campaign have placed on the agenda a new form of rightwing populism with neofascist overtones that breaks with some key features of neoliberalism, such as free trade pacts, somewhat more open borders, and "humanitarian" intervention. At the same time, Trump as president has put forth an incoherent agenda that contains major continuities with neoliberal austerity and old-style militarism, above all in the attempt to gut Obamacare. The open racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and nativism that marked the Trump campaign have if anything intensified, while his administration has made only fitful gestures toward the economic nationalism and protectionism that helped to win him a decisive swath of white working class voters. Whether we are on the cusp of a new era of capitalism, or whether this is more of a rhetorical turn, remains to be seen, especially in the case of Trump. But at the very least, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism seem to be undergoing an alteration. This makes it more urgent than ever that we on the left target capitalism as such, root and branch, not merely one form or another of it like neoliberalism. 1

Thirty-Three Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically, 2019

This manuscript was the basis of the Pluto Press book by the same title. Other than pagination, the main differences between this manuscript and the published book are 1) one is digital, one is hard copy, 2) the digital version can be searched, 3) the hard copy version has a detailed index. Both manuscript and published book were revised versions of my online, illustrated "study guide" to Volume I of CAPITAL, accessible at http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg.html

2024

Marx's thoughts on world history (WH) is an essential element of historical materialism, which focuses on the time's characteristics, unifies theory and practice, and grasps correctly of the situation of human existence and historical development. The deepening of globalization has made the world development environment more complex and led to the intensification of social contradictions. In order to deeply grasp the law of world-historical development and better cope with the problems and challenges brought by globalization, this paper effectively studied the methodology of Marx's world history thoughts (WHT). After conducting an in-depth analysis of the fundamental content, main issues and ideological features of WHT, this paper explored the methodological principles and significance. It gave full consideration to the practical revelation of the methodology of Marx's WHT from the perspectives of foreign development and cooperation, scientific and technological level, and the choice of one's development path. In the natural development process of responding to globalization, firmly following its development path has an important role and value in strengthening foreign development and cooperation, advancing technological capabilities and adopting a dialectical approach towards the development of globalization.