The Curious Case of Karl Marx's 1859 "Preface"
Engels pitched methodology; but Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy delivered very little in the way of actually, you know, critiqueing political economy, let alone using that as a springboard to transform how you should think about the economy, or what one should do to bring progress toward true human flourishing. The “Preface” endures, the book does not. Perhaps Marx thought he needed to publish it to demonstrate that he was doing something more than occasional pieces in the long drought between 1852 and 1867. But, if so, it does not look to me as though it was a successful demonstration…
Columbia’s Adam Tooze said a couple of days ago that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
He does not say why:
Adam Tooze: Top Links 976 <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>: ‘[I] keep thinking of this…. [Karl Marx] “Men… enter into definite relations… independent of their will… [with] their material forces of production…. [That] constitutes the economic structure of society… on which arises a legal and political superstructure and… forms of social consciousness…. Material productive forces… come into conflict with… [property] relations of production… [which] turn into their fetters [on development]. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure…. [Then come] the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out…. This consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life….
New superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve….
In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last… form… antagonistic… emanat[ing] from the individuals’ social conditions of existence—but… bourgeois society create[s] also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation…
A couple of days ago I said why I, at least think about this <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search>. I divided the passage into six threads:
Theology: the millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the end was at hand of the long era in which human societies were societies of domination,
Stage Theory of History: The six modes of production—tribal, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and socialist—as the successive stages of human history, social revolutions driving the transitions between them.
Theology: Refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow of progress driven by econo-political change.
Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms.
Political Economy: Relations of production constrain technological development and investment, and then constraint fails as society’s property order is broken by social revolution.
Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else has to be fitted to that
I argued strongly that to pick up one (or more) of these six claims and then to try to develop it and demonstrate its truth and draw forth its implications for human knowledge, human society, human political action, and the human future is what it is to be a “Marxist” in any sense meaningful. And I argued: