Title: Reconstructing Capital: The American Roots and Humanist Vision of Marx's Thought
Abstract: PERHAPS ONE OF history's great ironies is that Marxist scholarship, and scholarship on Marx, began to flourish only with the near total collapse of socialist societies and the dissolution of socialist movements. Far from dying alongside the Soviet Empire, Marxist discourse has only recently been emancipated from the blinders of Soviet ideology. Douglas Kellner argues that a certain type of Marxism has died and that more tolerant, open, skeptical, and modest reconstructions of Marx's thought are emerging. This is due to two dynamics. First, to this day there are a significant number of writings by Marx that have never been published in any language. We have not had a full rendering of Marx's works as he wrote them. There is now a project in Europe committed to the publication of the entire corpus of Marx's writings. For the first time since the 1920s major editions of Marx's work are being published under the aegis of an entity other than a Stalinist government. Second, with the loosening of Soviet ideological controls, the meaning and relevance of even the classic, published works of Marx are being reinterpreted from broader perspectives. The publication of portions of his Ethnological Notebooks in the 1970s and The Mathematical Manuscripts in the 1980s revealed that Marx was a more complex thinker than the rigid economic determinist presented in Cold War ideology and thought to be reflected in many of his published writings. What is different today about scholarship on Marx is that researchers are looking at the entire corpus, including his correspondence and newspaper articles, as a means of understanding Marx's thought and breathing new life into critical social philosophy. Much of the new scholarship on Marx utilizes a broader array of his writings to explore how he constructed the arguments that appear in the 1844 Manuscripts, the Communist Manifesto, and Capital. These combined efforts are opening new windows into Marx's thought and the relevance of his work in the postmodern world. What appears to be emerging in the new scholarship is an image of Marx as a multi-dimensional humanist who is as concerned with gender, ethnicity, and national identity as he is with the industrial proletariat. This essay contributes to the renewed dialogue on Marx by exploring the influence of the Civil War in the United States on the organization, methodology, and content of Capital and its implications for the relevance of Marx's thought in the postmodern world. My argument is that the Civil War prompted Marx to pursue a major reconstruction of Capital, eventually centering the work on the lived experiences of workers under capitalism. While Marx had a deep interest in the United States, and its Civil War in particular, Marxist thought is almost universally regarded as European in its origins, analysis, and focus. The Eurocentrism of official Marxism assumed that Marx imposed a ready-made framework on his analyses of events in the United States and elsewhere. The influence of events in the United States on Marx's thought has not been analyzed nor widely appreciated, with the exception of the early work of Raya Dunayevskaya. Marx's humanist reconstruction of Capital is the articulation of a new methodology for social theory that is opposed to methods espoused by classical social theorists and post-Marxists alike. This argument is supported by material from four sources: letters that Marx wrote to Engels in the 1860s about the events in the United States; the news articles Marx wrote for the New York Tribune and Die Vienna Presse in 1861 and 1862; a comparison of the first volume of Capital with the initial manuscripts Marx left behind; and Engels's description of these manuscripts in the Preface to the second volume of Capital. Taken together, these sources suggest that Capital has American roots and that a humanist thread runs throughout Marx's magnum opus. Dunayevskaya's analysis is an important foundation for understanding the influence of events in the United States on Marx's thought. …
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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