Karl Marx, "Global Theorist"

Author(s): Aijaz Ahmad

Source: Dialectical Anthropology , June 2015, Vol. 39, No. 2 (June 2015), pp. 199-209
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43895141

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Dialect Anthropol (2015) 39:199-209
DOI 1 0. 1 007/s 1 0624-0 15-9382-5 CrossMark

Karl Marx, "Global Theorist"

Aijaz Ahmad1

Published online: 7 May 2015

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Invitation to participate in a discussion of Kevin B. Anderson's distinguished

contribution to Marx studies is a great pleasure. His prose is refreshingly lucid and
free of jargon, and his arguments rest on a rare combination of extensive research,
nuanced theoretical grasp and close textual analysis. His previous publications, his
continuing work on the yet unpublished notebooks from Marx's last years, as well
as some remarks in the book itself suggest that he has been engaged with this project
for well over a decade, perhaps closer to two. The book is thus a product of patient,
formidable scholarship. My agreements with him are so extensive that the following
comments shall be more in the nature of clarifying certain positions and adding my
own arguments to his.
A statement of Anderson's essential objective comes early:

"I argue for a move toward a twenty-first century notion of Marx as a global
theorist whose social critique included notions of capital and class that were
open and broad enough to encompass the particularities of nationalism, race,
and ethnicity, as well as the varieties of human social and historical
development, from Europe to Asia and from the Americas to Africa. Thus, I
will be presenting Marx as a much more multilinear theorist of history and
society than is generally supposed... (p. 6)"

I doubt that this characterization of Marx "as a global theorist" is a particularly

"twenty-first century notion." What follows in the rest of the sentence is, however,
salutary, essential and much closer to how Marx has been seen for a long time
among those Asian Marxists who have been organically linked to anti-colonial and
socialist movements. The charge of Marx's Eurocentricity was manufactured

Kl Aijaz Ahmad

1 New Delhi, India

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 200 A. Ahmad

mainly in Ang
precincts, afte
Atlantic.
Four virtues stand out in Anderson's book right away. First, he examines
Marx's writings from late 1840s up to the very end of his days - the Manifesto
onwards, so to speak - deftly sidestepping issues of Early and Late Marx,
Epistemological Breaks, etc., and tracing continuity as well as reorientation in
Marx's thought at various points. Second, even as one whose intellectual
affiliations are clear even from the fact of his dedicating the book to Raya
Dunayevskaya ("my intellectual mentor") and to Lawrence Krader, he avoids
equally shrewdly the theological disputes over Marx's materialism versus
humanism; the humanist concern remains grounded, dialectically, in concerns
about material life and social relations of production. Third, and in keeping with
the kind of writer Marx was, Anderson accords great importance to Marx's
journalism, correspondence, and the whole chaos and scattered brilliance of the
late notebooks, published and yet unpublished - without neglecting the central
texts of the great "Economics": the Grundrisse and Capital. Fourth, Anderson is
on firm ground in insisting on the central importance of the French edition of
Capital Volume 1, as the last version of the volume prepared under Marx's own
supervision and one in which he made numerous additions and corrections, of style
as well as substance.
At its core, Marx at the Margins is largely a work of great synthesis. Various
collections of Marx's writings on India were published in the Soviet Union as well
as India, and those writings - hence a whole range of Marx's views on Indian
history and social structure, on colonialism and anti-colonialism, nationalism, etc. -
have been discussed among Indian Marxists of various persuasions almost ad
infinitum . The latest and in my view the most definitive edition of those writings was
published in Delhi in 2006, which Anderson duly acknowledges.1 The writings of
Marx and Engels on Ireland were likewise distributed and studied very widely, in
Ireland and beyond; it has been understood quite clearly that Marx thought of the
Irish question as a colonial question, an agrarian question and a national question
simultaneously. Various other collections of that kind - on Colonialism, the Eastern
Question etc. - were issued from Moscow and were read avidly, often reprinted in
one form or another, across the Tricontinent and in socialist and/or communist
parties more generally. I have myself edited a slim volume in which selections from
their writings on India and Ireland are published together with writings on Germany
and Poland, along with more general writings and letters on these questions, with
the assertion that, as I put it in the introduction, "our understanding of these
questions would be very much richer if we do not detach their thinking on nations
and national movements in Europe from their thinking on colony and nation in the
Asian context."2 I had also argued that Marx "(a) tended to view various

Iqbal Husain (ed), Karl Marx on India, with Introduction by Irfan Habib and Appreciation by Prabhat
Patnaik, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2006.
2 Aijaz Ahmad (ed). Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels, On the National and Colonial Questions: Selected
Writings, LeftWord, Delhi, 2001.

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 Karl Marx, "Global Theorist" 201

geographical areas of the world,

common world history and (b
reappears in altered form in bet
render intelligible a shared huma
different historical contexts." I
political militants in India, mainl
only with my own, which a p
generally been understood about
Anglo-American zones.
Anderson is a scholar of integr
Habib in the case of India for ins
to all the manuscripts of the not
kept his focus in Chapter Six ("L
Societies") largely on publishe
selections from the Ethnologic
Shanin's Late Marx and the Russ
that it brings together into pro
arguments that have been availab
examined in an integrated frame
read him on the American Civ
Germany may not be aware of t
Russian Commune and analogo
together,adds more research and
The Marx Anderson presents is
Asian Marxists more generally bu
aftermath of the cultural tur
"orientalism-in-reverse." How so?
One way of grasping this oddity is that in the Asian countries, the very first
encounters with Marx's writings occurred during the earlier half of the twentieth
century in quite specific circumstances, The broadest context was that of the impact
of the Bolshevik Revolution on anti-colonial movements, whether in the fully
colonized formations such as those of India and Vietnam or in such semi-colonies as
China and Iran, so that Marxism was seen - and lived - from the beginning as much
more a practical politics, and a revolutionary desire, than as research object. These
were predominantly agrarian societies with very rudimentary development of
capitalist economy but far-reaching transformations in structures of law and state
authority under colonial pressure. Primary ("primitive") accumulation was not a
matter of the past only but an ongoing process, with the difference that the final
accumulation was taking place not within the national territory but in the colonizing
metropolis. The Marxist left in Asian countries that was involved in anti-colonial
and socialist mass politics was immersed in the agrarian question sociologically as
well as politically: social structures and property relations in the agrarian economy,
the question of transition (Mao's "New Democracy" for instance), role of the
peasantry in a "socialist" revolution, the question of the worker-peasant alliance
and the relationship of such an alliance with anti-colonial nationalist politics as a
whole. In Asia, typically, great importance was given to Marx's writings on

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 202 A. Ahmad

colonialism,
diverse as I
anti-colonia
capitalist fo
of that kin
precursor of
India, China
movements,
conditioned
This exten
presuppositi
ways even a
have vanishe
great intere
communal p
or India but
shortly befo
were everyw
to lay the fo
but also beca
responsive t
great ravage
property ha
insists, corr
outside the
kind of life
even among
social solidar
of mere theoretical inference. Those memories and what remains of those value
systems are very much at stake in very many forms of contemporary politics, from
the Left as well as the Radical Right. Latin America's movements of the indigenous
as much as Liberation Theology's particular ways of reading the Bible are two
examples of how a postcapitalist vision invokes memories and value systems of the
long precapitalist past. Conversely, the Radical Right, whether of the Christian or of
the Islamist vintage, also invokes those same values - of solidarity, collectivity,
community, family - holding out the promise of redemption to individuals and
groups reeling under alienations and insecurities of the capitalist world.
In India at least, the country I know best and one that comes up frequently in
Anderson's fine-grained book, our homegrown Marxism has until recently displayed
certain notable features. Leaving aside the question of the political orientations of
the more recent subalternist/postcolonialist tendencies, hardly any Indian Marxist
has taken seriously the idea that Marx was some sort of Eurocentric, racist admirer
of European colonialism; his outright, extensive denunciations of colonial practices
and colonial scholarship of his time have always been much too well known. As
heirs to India's own anti-colonial nationalism, many in the Indian Left are quite
aware of the fact that even within the colonial period, anti-caste reform movements

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Karl Marx, "Global Theorist" 203

of the modem type have an olde

deed, if there is a persistent kern
of Buddhism to modernday socia
opposition to the obnoxious cr
fruitfully inherit a tradition rid
Logically, therefore, no Indian M
abusive language Marx used about
propertied classes which sanction
If I have any partial reservation
in relation to India, it is that
"Eurocentricity" (he seems to fin
1853 on India, and then less and
"progressive" expectations from
described as the anachronisms an
in considering the positive poten
village, Anderson does not engage
caste not just as an ideological su
labor for the majority of the pop
within the village community. I
arguments on this score and only
issue of caste, for instance, Amb
supervised the writing of the In
correct in arguing that the Ind
determinism - was at least as cru
also believed, correctly, that Ind
prior destruction of the caste sy
society was so deeply structured
never be truly destroyed while th
He also thought that the traditio
system gets played out, and he
sentimentalization of the Indian
India Marx took into account fac
who has read Ambedkar on the m
Marx's language about tradition
agreement between the two.
As for the "progressive" role
immediately. Marx was far less s
liberals of the nineteenth cent
intelligentsia of the same period
with a historically informed c
modern Indian intellectuals, led b
father of Indian Modernism," exp
introduce far-reaching reforms
guage, "Western civilization" i
immolation, child marriage and p
English language as a window

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 204 A. Ahmad

sciences as w
Rationalism
anti-caste lea
later expect
nationalist le
Ambedkar, t
caste nation
Independence
destruction o
quite refused
system that
Hinduism alt
Anderson is
view, howev
between M
colonialism,
mode of pro
he is said to
large. Howev
The largest
production."
systems of p
were quite un
in the Grund
with the ca
preeminent p
Over roughl
Commune, M
event, most
Anderson cal
scale of the
purposes disa
"Asiatic mod
Like many o
varying degr
data, but nev
altogether.
which is uns
the 1840s, in
writings, m
correspondi
production,
succession of
is it to Asia
what comes
"vegetative,

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 Karl Marx, "Global Theorist" 205

Persia, but also Russia, Algeria,

Others" in the postcolonialist fa
system" is sometimes off-hande
even though he was perfectly awa
magisterial levels of state forma
nature of the caste system that
places as the "despotic" characte
what Marx calls "the Asiatic m
device which t helped him think
the materials proved to be too c
mode of production, distinct in
thinking about the problems at h
issue of "the communal."
Debates on these issues have been immense and I claim no special authority in
the matter. I do find very intriguing Samir Amin's schema which postulates a
multiplicity of tributary forms in precapitalist societies in which the exploitative
collection of tribute from the direct producers was universal but the form it took -
property and production relations, nature of political authority etc. - was always
distinctive, corresponding to time, place and the type of production involved
(agrarianate zones and the arid ones, temperate zones and the tropical ones,
variations in fertility of soil, demographic density, etc., even inside the so-called
Asiatic). Amin then goes on to argue that feudalism was one of these tributary
forms, specific to large parts of Europe and possibly Japan but by no means a
historical phase of precapitalist economy universally. I don't entirely subscribe to
all that Amin says on the matter but I do think that one of the merits of this
approach, among others, is that it has no interest in the bipolarity of Europe and
non-Europe. We too can then abandon the heuristic device of "the Asiatic mode of
production" and get down to the serious business of a historical sociology that can
in deed start documenting "multilinearity" in that very much larger part of the
world that is not Europe.
What is very much more important in Marx's own writing, more important than
the matter of the "Asiatic" is his immersion in the issue of "the communal" -
communal property, communal labor and the sort of society that arose on that basis.
And the question for him: now that the modern form of the "communal" - the Paris
Commune - has been beaten back in the short run, is it possible to think of those
communal forms in pre- and non-capitalist countries, in "non-Europe," serving as a
basis of revolutionary transformations there? That question is explosive. It
repudiates the idea that socialism can come only after capitalism has realized all
its potentialities, and for societies that are not already yoked to capitalism, it affirms
the possibility of bypassing the capitalist phase altogether. I concur with Anderson's
four submissions on this question. One that after all the hesitations and the drafting
and re-drafting of his answer to the question, he did affirm that such a transition was
not only possible but also desirable. Second, however, Marx did emphasize that the
communal form was only one form of property in societies where it had persisted
and the appropriate transformations would have to occur in other forms of property
and social organization to sustain that basis on the national level (all-Russia level,

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 206 A. Ahmad

for instance)
was itself no
the transitio
bypassing of
combined, ei
capitalist cou
interpretatio
that Marx di
bypassing th
revolution in
view in 191
combine wit
in the more
Russia to ma
For our own
in Latin Ame
challenging c
eventually
spawned - an
multiplicity
As for enthu
Marx makes
as, at once ,
have to conc
column and t
bad side of it
That is the f
good side of
gradually. F
intertwined
leap beyond
Does the sam
colonial conq
Marx speaks
goes so far i
tool of histo
the transitio
the barbarit
work there:
I should hav
1844 (hencef
text in which
as the centra
dialectic wa
dialectic as it
Anderson fo

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 Karl Marx, "Global Theorist" 207

issue in Marxist theory, a pos

surprising that he takes the Man
largely ignores the philosophical
before the Manifesto, Marx's sw
very humanity of human beings
intrinsically, a text of high p
conceptualized in one way, polem
be construed as boundless enthusi
passages from the much more
polemical but philosophically prof
the young Marx well before that
The idea that Marx was some ad
not hold that view but, in my
Roughly the same is true, I belie
on the matter does gain in nua
however, that even in his writing
colonialism far outweigh any hop
is subjected to an unconditiona
colonialism.

Was it really all that reactionary in 1853 to imagine that colonialism may, for all
its depredations, have some positive potentialities to it? This question has been
partially addressed earlier, in comments on how modern intellectuals in 19th
century India and how anti-caste leaders who came somewhat later viewed this
question. I shall soon come to the specifics of what Marx actually wrote. Let me
preface that with two remarks. One, it is chastening to recall that Hegel actually
welcomed the arrival of Napoleon in Jena (History on Horseback, as it were) which
is of course not how Fichte viewed the matter. In other words, there is at least the
possibility that what is foreign may actually be more progressive than the
indigenous at a particular historical juncture, so that, in our own context, opposition
to colonialism and imperialism ought not become a mere anti-Westernism, in the
manner of, say, the Islamist Right. Second, the unity of opposites is not all that there
is to the dialectic but it is an important moment of it, and to speak of unity is not to
speak of equivalence; one side of the opposites may be dominant, the other
emergent, or whatever. A discrepant unity is still a unity of sorts. With these
provisos in hand, let us turn to the letter of Marx's writings:
In the very first of his oft-quoted essay of June 1853, "The British Rule in India"
we read: "...the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially
different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before"
and "England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any
symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing." Then: "This loss of his old world, with
no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery
of the Hindu, and separates Hindustan, ruled by Britain, from all his traditions, and
from the whole of its past history." Later in this short essay, Marx speaks of "the
deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the
British principle of free competition" and then, after lyrical descriptions of India's
massive cotton exports to Europe and consequently the great prosperity of the

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 208 A. Ahmad

Indian artisa
who eventu
backing up h
despatch of
hybrid of la
which the Br
"not capable
Marx goes to
establishing.
One could go on but the point is that if the earliest of the 1853 despatches take
this view, it is hard to see just how Marx could be seen as an enthusiast of
colonialism even at that stage. Eventually, that characterization rests on famous
formulations of the following kind:

England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other
regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the
material foundations of Western society in Asia.

That is actually somewhat similar to what Hegel thought a Napoleonic

occupation of Germany - the injection of French revolutionary milieu into his
own moribund homeland - might accomplish. Unlike Marx, however, Hegel's
sanguine hopes were not tempered with awareness of Napoleonic imperialism's
"vile interests" in Germany: the reactionary side of the agents of progress.
The other formulation of Marx that has come in for much ridicule runs as
follows:

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 bring about that revolution.

Marx follows the latter formulation with a quotation from Goethe. As is well
known, that passage, followed by that particular quotation from Goethe, brought
forth much ire from Edward Said, and Anderson's commentary on that misplaced
ire (pp. 17-21) is erudite, delicious and irrefutable. Let me add just a couple of
points.
Once Marx has clarified that England "was actuated only by the vilest interests,"
it becomes very difficult to argue that he was in any meaningful sense an enthusiast
of colonialism even in 1853. Moreover, Anderson quite rightly commends Marx for
holding a universalist idea of human liberation: social revolution in Asia has to be
intrinsically a part of humanity's overall quest for freedom. Could colonialism bring
about this "social revolution?" Marx spelled out his basic position in a despatch
published in August that year:

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor
materially mend the social conditions of the masses of the people, depending

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Karl Marx, "Global Theorist" 209

not only on the development

appropriation by the people.... Th
elements of society scattered am
Great Britain itself the new ruli
industrial proletariat, or till the
enough to throw off the English

Whatever good British colonialism

neither "emancipate" the Indian
revolution consists, in India as mu
the productive powers" but, cen
Quoting this same passage in a boo

Three things about this judgem

influential Indian reformer of the
Ahmed Khan to the founders of
clear-cut a position on the issu
himself was to spend the years du
British Army. Second, every
developed after 1919, from the G
only the most obscurantist, would
the idea that colonial capitalism d
India, some of which need very m
some interest to us here that Ma
context but of "the Hindus" (by w
country) in the context of India.
European revolution had been das
three things in the short run: a
revolution in India, and the brea

I see no reason to change my mind

"the English yoke" did become s
particular sense: in addition to affir
he immediately called "a nation
position was more advanced than th
kind. Gandhi never condemned the
caste system, often justified caste
issue of Untouchability as a particu
by contrast, the caste system was at
ferocious hierarchy in the social r
moreover, that was given religious
A number of unfortunate rhetor
mental positions on some of the k
held by luminaries of India's own
the 20th century. Expecting more
pauperized life in nineteenth ce
Postcolonialist pressure on this iss

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