History, Colonialism and Invisibility

While the species in its difference only exists, i.e. reproduces itself, in particular modes of production, there is still a difference between the generic capacity for differential (re)production and the determinate modes of (re)production. It is only with the capitalist mode of production that history becomes world history. Already in The German Ideology Marx and Engels argue that:

The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another, extend in the course of this development, the more the original isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production and intercourse and the division of labour between various nations naturally brought forth by these, the more history becomes world history. …³⁰³

Indeed the species itself, as a real universally communicating and reproductive

302 It is important to note the tense of the prose of this historical sketch. It is written in the present perfect of what has been in what is – in Marx and Engels' space of contemporaneity – hence the invisibility of matriarchal societies and divisions of labour without hierarchy. Ibid., 33-34. Engels made up for this much later on in his Origins of the Family which was based on Marx's ethnological notebooks. Friedrich Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” in MECW, vol. 27 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990).

303 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow:

Progress Publishers, 1969), 39. My emphasis.

totalisation, is only historically becoming actual, in a process still unfinished. It only becomes so by replacing 'the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency' with 'intercourse in every direction, the universal inter-dependence of nations.'³⁰⁴ The development of the species as a true potentiality arises through the integration of its reproduction and communication on a global scale: 'Influence of means of communication. World history as not always existed; history as world history a result.'³⁰⁵ Despite the fact that world history is premised on the daily sacrifice of individuals and the appropriative and exploitative processes of colonisation and the capitalist world-market, Marx does not reject this process outright. Rather, his method compels him to develop a situated critique of this actuality, and to relate it to a subjective orientation towards the potentialities created through 'universal intercourse', universal destruction and the possibility of global crises. While local communisms have always been possible, only with global expropriation does it, paradoxically, become a global possibility.³⁰⁶

Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples

“all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism.

Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour-power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. ³⁰⁷

The development of a world-historical problem makes possible a world-historical solution; communism has nothing to do with resistance, but only with the actualisation of the species made possible by the historical existence of the proletariat. It would therefore seem that the possibility of communism is hence premised on the violent proletarianisation of populations on a world scale, which in turn is premised on the dispossession and criminalisation of the commoners and the reproductive activity of

304 Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” 112.

305 Marx, Grundrisse, 109. Balibar's reformulation poses this as a general theoretical point: 'a synthetic concept of time can never be a pre-given, but only a result.' Étienne Balibar, “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” in Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970), 297 and 280.

306 Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 1969, 37.

307 Ibid.

women and children. While communism is the violent overthrow of bourgeois society, it still appears that the bourgeois brutalisation of the world will ultimately be for the better of mankind, forcibly developing its potentialities through expropriation and exploitation. Indeed, Marx's infamous article 'The British Rule in India', written for the New York Tribune in 1853, is an outright celebration of the historical role of colonisation, despite the brutality and destructiveness of its methods, and vileness and stupidity of its intentions:

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them.

But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.³⁰⁸

This role concerns not only the destruction of the caste-system and slavery of a society incapable of change itself in its 'undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life', but also of the 'brutalising worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman [sic], the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.'³⁰⁹ The world-historical role of capitalism is thus negative and destructive, advancing history by the bad side, to use the formula Marx devised against Proudhon.³¹⁰ While this formula is devised, writes Balibar, against a moralising, optimistic historical teleology which draws on Hegel, it is Marx's response that is truly Hegelian, an invocation of the cunning of reason, the capacity of the historical dialectic of 'converting war, suffering and injustice into factors of peace, prosperity and justice.'³¹¹ However, as Daniel Bensaïd notes, Marx is no Hegelian insofar as he is writing about a future yet to be, the potentiality inherent in the struggle to which the 'bad' side gives rise. Thus, Marx seeks to

extricate himself from the abstraction of universal History … without lapsing

308 Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 493.

309 Ibid.

310 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1995, 132. Edward Said here presents Marx as being seduced into 'Romantic Orientalism' by his final quote from Goethe's poem Westöstlicher Diwan; however, the difficulty is rather deeper, it lies in Marx's unilinear historical schema. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 153–55. See also Kevin B. Anderson's discussion of Said's critique, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago:

University Of Chicago Press, 2010), 17–20.

311 Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (London: Verso, 2007), 98.

into the insane chaos of absolute singularities; and without resorting to the trump card of progress. In so far as universalisation is a process, progress is not conjugated in the present indicative, only in the future anterior: conditionally.³¹² Marx is thus positioning himself squarely beyond the dilemma 'progress or chaos' which is the premise of the Kantian orientation in history.³¹³ Moreover, the issue is not a calculus of good and bad according to a moral standard, but an affirmation of potentialities produced by the crisis of the old world and the composition of the new.

This modern bourgeois society is one that – as we saw in the beginning of this chapter – is like a sorcerer that has lost control of his own spells, of the dynamism of trade and industry.³¹⁴ Modern history – which Marx counts merely 'many a decade' into the past – is the history of 'the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.'³¹⁵ The production of wealth and poverty on two sides poses a radical problem not so much on its own account, but on account of the deepening of this contradiction towards crisis:

It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. … In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.

Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.³¹⁶

The problem this poses is not that of absolute lack and poverty, nor the problem of the virtual poverty of the proletariat, but the deepening contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of property. But while these crises have solutions – like Hegel noted – they are only temporary:

how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced

312 Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Time: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique (London: Verso, 2009), 61.

313 Cf. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 42.

314 Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” 113.

315 Ibid.

316 Ibid., 113–4. On the notion of crisis in nineteenthcentury Germany, see appendix 3.8.

destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. ... not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.³¹⁷

The optimism of Marx's passage is premised on the conviction that the contradictory development of bourgeois society not only leads to crises, but to successively deeper and more wide-reaching crises, in the process of which the development of productivity as well as radical needs will produce a radical revolution of the producers of history.

But what Bensaïd's reading does not appreciate is how this entails consigning the struggles of the 'people without history', to use a phrase central to the demarcation of Hegel's Philosophy of History, to the definite past, to political irrelevance, i.e. to consider not only their struggles but their modes of life as bereft of potentiality in the present. This concerns not only the 'exo-colonisation' of non-European lands, by territorial might and capitalist relations, but also Marx's analysis of the bourgeois 'endo-colonisation' of Europe.³¹⁸ Further, as Peter Osborne notes,

[c]risis ‘theory’ is ... in principle inadequate to thinking the historico-political meaning of crises – and this includes Marx’s own account (or ‘theory’) of capitalist crises, however central to such a thinking it might be.³¹⁹

The notion of crisis does not in itself hold the political key, this is rather found in the projection that the dynamic of bourgeois society tends towards a symmetrical development of capital and its gravediggers. It is on the validity of this prediction that Marx's conditional optimism is premised.

Marx does not present this as an automatic process of growth and development, but a violent process of the destruction of previous modes of production. Capital might tend towards becoming an Absolute Subject – world history or the universal mode of

317 Ibid., 114.

318 This terms were introduced in a Marxian context in Jason Read's Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003). However, one should keep in mind the earlier use by Paul Virilio, who presents both as essentially territorial military logics, in which a state colonises its own population.

319 Peter Osborne, “A Sudden Topicality - Marx, Nietzsche and the Politics of Crisis,” Radical Philosophy 160, no. Mar/Apr (2010), 21.

(re)production – but it is merely an expanding teleology, in a world that consists of as many histories as there are modes of (re)production (and infinitely more myths, legends and shared memories, of course).³²⁰ The question is whether subsuming, world-subduing history can ever become History, contemporalise and synchronise all other histories.³²¹ Marx notes that the bourgeois mode of production is built on the 'ruins and elements' of vanished social formations 'whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along with it.'³²² As Dipesh Chakrabarty insists, looking at what Marx says capital 'encounters [...] as antecedents [but] not as antecedents established by itself, not as forms of its own life-process', there continues to be a non-totalised substance of histories irreducible to this subject of History.³²³ Chakrabarty is interested in how these 'interrupt and punctuate' the life-process of the 'self-reproduction of capital' as a basis of a 'politics of human belonging and diversity',³²⁴ or how, in a beautiful definition, 'the subaltern is that which constantly, from within the narrative of capital, reminds us of other ways of being human than as bearers of the capacity to labour.'³²⁵ The issue of 'capital antecedents', is generally one of elements that might and might not be(come) part of the reproduction of capital. After the sentence cited by Chakrabarty, Marx continues: '[i]n the same way as it [capital] originally finds the commodity already in existence, but not as its own product, and likewise finds money circulation, but not as an element in its own reproduction'.³²⁶

However, the issue for Marx is of course not one of small subtractions, resistances and histories, of the persistence of difference and other forms of life within capitalism (Chakrabarty's History 2). Indeed, if such small narratives are to have any significance on the level of Marx's critique they must be related to the problem of History (History 1). Here the question becomes whether lives other than those of labour, marginal or non-reproductive of surplus-value are antagonistic to capitalist reproduction, whether such lives are reproductive, and whether both the antagonism and the self-reproduction of this non-self-reproduction of capitalist relations is at least potentially

320 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

321 As would be the claim of theories (to which we will return in chapter 7), that due to the real

subsumption of society, today any outside can only be a fantasy produced with capitalism, i.e. not an other in itself, but an other of capitalism.

322 Marx, Grundrisse, 105.Marx, Grundrisse, 105.

323 Marx’s Theories of Surplus-Value quoted by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:

Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (new ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 63.

324 Ibid., 64, 67. See also Althusser, “The Object of Capital,” 99-100.

325 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 94.

326 Addendum 2. “Interest-Bearing Capital and Commercial Capital in Relation to Industrial Capital” in Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts: Theories of Surplus-Value (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1863).

generalisable. I will ask the question of such histories from the point of view of Marx's practical energy, his orientation towards a dissolution of the problem of capitalism, based neither on a state of affairs nor an ideal, but on the potentiality of a 'real [wirkliche] movement which abolishes [aufhebt] the present state of things', starting with the conditions now in existence.³²⁷ The logic of this movement in this quote from The German Ideology is presented as an Aufhebung, but what is the precise logical structure of this movement? From Marx's noted unilinear progressivism of the 1840s, the next chapter will engage with the writings of the period where he was beginning to question this conception of history, and open to a multi-linear conception of history.³²⁸ The first event that truly challenged the unilinear conception was the failure of the revolutions of 1848. If Marx adopts his early philosophy of history from enlightenment thought, it is significant that his sensitivity to crisis and contingency immediately allows his own texts to question it, while his orientation towards revolution maintains it, as a form of speculative and partisan thought of the possible on the level of the total historical process. Speculative thought is not cancelled when its promise does not materialise, rather, it raises the question of a catechon holding back the revolution: thus Marx did not challenge his schema as much as introduce the notion of a proletarian obstacle to proletarian revolution (the lumpenproletariat) and the insistence of the need for a historical leap, anticipated through 'a poetry of the future'.³²⁹

8. Conclusion

We have seen how Marx's faith in the coming revolution is based on a belief in the growth of both aspects of the proletariat at once. However, our discussion has also shown that Marx's texts reveal the existence of at least three countervailing tendencies, whose impact he implicitly shows are negligible: First, there is the activity of the state, charities and the estates, which ameliorate social tensions in Hegel's theory of the rabble. Second, there is the logic of the division and competition between the negative, unemployed and disorganised lumpenproletariat on the one hand, and the productive, positive and organised proletariat on the other hand (with its passive and only indirectly organised basis in domestic labour). Third, there is the globalising extension of the problem of capital through trade and colonisation.³³⁰ Focusing on the dynamism of the

327 Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 1969, 38.

328 Anderson, Marx at the Margins, 2010, 3.

329 See appendix 3.5 for the former, and 3.7. for the latter.

330 In the broadest of terms, the problem of capitalism is also the problem of colonialism, both in its

contradiction within civil society, and its contradiction with the ancient regime, Marx underestimated the mediating role of the state in organising and controlling the disorganised through measures of violence and welfare, as well as the problematic of the globalising divisions between proletarians. In order to bypass the problem of the heterogeneity and difference of the proletariat, the idea of the proletariat had to be homogenised into the figure of the (male) wage worker. The system-immanent analysis of capital and its drive to organise a still greater portion of the globe orientates revolutionary practice toward the already organised proletariat and its systemic contradiction with capital. As long as another orientation toward organisation is not found, this analysis will be bound up with a belief that colonialism and capitalist expansion in general – however regrettable and violent – is historically progressive, as the condition sine qua non of the possibility of communism. The problem – and thus the solution – of the proletariat are both overdetermined within this real-teleological horizon.

The very same logic that makes the proletariat the revolutionary agent of world history, also makes these colonisations world-historically progressive. What we have seen above is a certain blindness to the potentialities of those who form the 'reproductive' basis of capitalist history (women and children), and to those which are in the process of being subsumed (the commoners). All these will only possess historical potentiality once their powers in the present have been expropriated, and once they become exploited. Once the actuality of such activities is naturalised or made invisible, its potentialities disappear from the concepts of not just history and revolution, but from any concrete description of the development of the species itself. As long as it focuses its hopes for communism on the dialectic of its object, even the most radical theory is, to steal words uttered in a very different context, 'compelled to reproduce, to reduplicate in itself the law of its object or its object as law; it must submit to the norm it purports to analyze.'³³¹

The very same logic that makes the proletariat the revolutionary agent of world history, also makes these colonisations world-historically progressive. What we have seen above is a certain blindness to the potentialities of those who form the 'reproductive' basis of capitalist history (women and children), and to those which are in the process of being subsumed (the commoners). All these will only possess historical potentiality once their powers in the present have been expropriated, and once they become exploited. Once the actuality of such activities is naturalised or made invisible, its potentialities disappear from the concepts of not just history and revolution, but from any concrete description of the development of the species itself. As long as it focuses its hopes for communism on the dialectic of its object, even the most radical theory is, to steal words uttered in a very different context, 'compelled to reproduce, to reduplicate in itself the law of its object or its object as law; it must submit to the norm it purports to analyze.'³³¹