Abstract
Matthieu de Nanteuil examines Marx’s relationship with Ireland. He shows that the Irish case enabled Marx to develop his dual critique of capitalism and colonialism. While Marx’s analysis of Irish class relations is not entirely convincing, his description of a society emptied of its own forces under the impact of colonialism – literally “depopulated” – is visionary. In this respect, Marx develops a narrative that links economic critique to the symbolic sphere. There is, however, a flaw in this approach. By attempting to show that colonialism was simply the extension of capitalism beyond national borders, and by equating colonial practices with the domination of one mode of production over another, Marx overlooks a dimension that is essential to understanding colonial brutality in Ireland: the religious dimension, which consisted of subjecting a Catholic population (the Irish) to Protestant tutelage (the English). This flaw is the reason why Marx underestimated the cultural component of colonialism, as well as the diversity of cultural traditions as a means of resistance to colonization. This limitation should not, however, lead us to believe that Marx ignored non-European societies. His attention to detail, visible in many places in his analysis of the Irish case, testifies to a rare sensitivity to geographical and cultural differences. Marx was looking for a “general principle” that would enable him to analyse colonialism in the age of the Industrial Revolution, without seeing that this concern for the “general” was at the same time an obstacle to the full recognition of non-European singularities.
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Notes
- 1.
This way of haranguing the crowds by mentioning Ireland echoes Marx’s harangue in Capital: “Mutato nomine de ta fabula narratur! [“Change your name, it will be your story”, quote from Horace, Liv. I, satire I, v. 69] Instead of slave trade, read labour market; instead of Virginia and Kentucky, read Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland and Wales; instead of Africa, read Germany” (Marx 1969, 202).
- 2.
From 1845 onwards, mildew ravaged almost all potato crops in a country that depended entirely on potatoes. But the Great Famine was not just a “natural event”. Initially contained by the English Conservatives, who tried to help the Irish population by importing grain, it was amplified by the liberal policy that took over in London from June 1846, “a policy blinded by the dogma of ‘laissez-faire’, [which] was characterised by the most obtuse good conscience, the most total improvidence, the most deplorable narrow-mindedness combined with the most stubborn national egoism” (Joannon 2006, 258).
- 3.
The other instance of “Ireland” at this time is found in a footnote: in a text published 2 years later, Marx criticised the analyses of William Petty, “the father of English political economy” (Marx 1963b, p. 306). A seventeenth-century author largely ignored by the general public, Petty had been interested long before Smith in the division of labour and the saving of time required for production (“His genial audacity is revealed, for example, in his proposal to transfer all the inhabitants and movable property of Ireland and Upper Scotland to the rest of Great Britain. This would save labour time, increase the productive force of labour, and make the king and his subjects richer and stronger” (ibid.). By referring to this, Marx shows that nothing can stop liberal economic thinkers, who are entirely focused on progress in the division of labour, even when this might require the massive displacement of populations. A little further on, unmasking the identity of the descendants of Petty who dominate the Whig wing of English political life, he reminds us that Petty was inclined to “pillage” in Ireland, under the “aegis of Cromwell”, then under cover of the achievements of the “glorious revolution”. In Marx, the link between Ireland, plunder and the “law of population” is constant (see below).
- 4.
The International Working Men’s Association was founded in London in 1864. From 1869 onwards, it was divided between a “centralised” approach, close to Marx, and an “anti-authoritarian” approach, close to Bakunin. The repression of the Paris Commune proved fatal to the movement, although it continued until 1876. In a recent article, Martin Deleixhe shows that Marx “made a clear theoretical about-turn on the subject of Ireland’s political and economic situation and its importance in the international class struggle after 1867” (Deleixhe 2020, 309).
- 5.
In a passage already quoted, Marx writes that “England is the world capital of landlordism and capitalism” (Marx 1984a, 312).
- 6.
Pierre Joannon wrote: “The social climate was at the heart of the problem. Excellent in England, where a fruitful collaboration between farmers and landlords was developing, it was degraded in Ireland, where the exactions of some were matched by the apathy of others. No one invested in agriculture, the peasant because he couldn’t afford it or for fear of being sacked or having his rent increased, the landlord because he might tomorrow be expropriated by another rebellion. The main concern of landowners […] was to get rich as quickly as possible, by committing as little capital as possible” (Joannon 2006, 167).
- 7.
Contrary to Marx’s vision, Joannon insists on the heterogeneity of the Irish rural world under colonialism: “We can see that the Protestant landed aristocracy was hardly more homogeneous than the Catholic peasantry. Alongside the absentee landlord, the non-resident owner of several thousand acres, there were many small hobereaux, middlemen who held the tenants to ransom, and squires obliged to stay on the land from which they derived the bare necessities of life […]. The most hated by the peasants were these little country gentlemen, who leased the land to the large landowners for a lump sum and sublet it to them at exorbitant prices” (Joannon 2006, 136–137).
- 8.
On the use of the concept of “population law“in the European context, see Etienne Balibar’s contribution below.
- 9.
Once again, Marx mentions a quotation from Horace, as if to place his work in the great cycle of Greek tragedy: “Acerba fata Romanos agunt/Scelusque fraternae necis” [“A bitter fate pursues the Romans, and the unholy crime of killing one’s brother”, from Horace, Epodes 7, “Is not this blood enough?”]. Marx seems to be emphasising here how Capital destroys the foundations of human brotherhood and, in the Irish case, how the English kill their own brothers…
- 10.
On the way in which, in the nineteenth century, the social question triggered nationalist passions, see (Hobsbawm 2012).
- 11.
An exhaustive analysis would have to include the linguistic dimension, given that the domination of Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland resulted in an all-out attack on the language of the colonised, Gaelic.
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de Nanteuil, M. (2024). The Irish Mistake: Marx, Ireland, and Non-European Societies. In: de Nanteuil, M., Fjeld, A. (eds) Marx and Europe. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53736-3_10
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