Abstract
Karl Marx’s Capital (and its various manuscripts) are mostly read as an excellent but disputed analysis of the capitalist mode of production in its ‘classical’ stage in mid-nineteenth century Great Britain, isolated from Marx’s life-long historical-philosophical and strategic-political search for a communist alternative. Brie challenges the view that Marx’s Capital and his economic manuscripts are merely an analysis of the capitalist mode of production, stressing the importance of the historical elements of Marx’s masterpiece and the permanent elaboration of a post-capitalist, that is, communist society in all of the drafts. This approach reveals the embeddedness of Marx’s economic analysis in his search for a strategy of transformation beyond capitalism, and its close link to the workers’ and socialist movements of his time. Brie demonstrates the critical importance of such a Marxian reading for current discussions around socio-ecological transformation towards a post-growth society.
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Notes
- 1.
By communism as a social order I understand, in a Marxian sense, an ‘association , in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx and Engels 1848/1976, p. 506) both in this instance and in the following.
- 2.
Here and in the following I refer to ‘Capital’ in its ‘canonical’ form (see Heinrich 2014)—i.e. in three volumes as published in the lifetime of Marx and/or Engels and (as contained) in the ‘Theories of Surplus Value’ based on Marx’s manuscripts from 1861–1863. For the objective of this chapter, the differences between this ‘canonised’ oeuvre and the one constituted by the manuscripts composed between 1857 and 1878 is of no greater relevance (on Marx’s plans for Capital, see Vollgraf 2015; Bock 2015).
- 3.
Likewise, the innovative thrust in Marx’s thought between 1842–1846 was politically inspired: it was a result of his experience as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung and his subsequent involvement in the French communist circles and the Communist League. The same applies to the period from the late 1860s, which saw the emergence of revolutionary tendencies in Russia, the Paris Commune and the rise of particularly German Social Democracy.
- 4.
Marx had come across this problem when he read ‘Labour’s wrongs and labour’s remedy’ by John Francis Bray (1809–1897) in Manchester in 1845. He compiled a remarkably extensive excerpt (Marx 2015) from which he drew time and again (for more elaboration on the reading of Bray see Marx Bohlender 2014, 2015).
- 5.
This particularly includes the works of Justus von Liebig and Carl Fraas (see Saito 2016).
- 6.
- 7.
‘The study of viable alternatives asks of proposals for transforming existing social structures and institutions whether, if implemented, they would generate – in a sustainable, robust manner – the emancipatory consequences that motivated the proposal’ (Wright 2010, p. 21). On the critique of an understanding of communism as a monosubject, or indivisible community, see Brie (1990a) und Ruben (1990, 1995).
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Brie, M. (2018). Foreshadowing of the Future in the Critical Analysis of the Present. In: Dellheim, J., Wolf, F. (eds) The Unfinished System of Karl Marx. Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70347-3_11
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