Marx is cited that once he
said, "I am not a
Marxist."
 
And I think there is a lot of
truth to it.
The reason why I carry on and
on and on with Marx,
in this course,
because my experience is that
many of us do have very
simplistic stereotypes,
in our mind,
who Karl Marx was and what his
theory is all about.
 
Well he was a creative scholar,
a vibrant mind,
who was ready to change his
mind when confronted with new
arguments or confronted with new
evidence.
And there were many,
many facets,
many faces of Karl Marx.
 
We have seen some of those.
 
Right?
 
We have seen Marx,
starting as a Hegelian
idealist,
being obsessed with the idea of
alienation,
disappointed with Hegel's
fluffy idea of alienation,
bringing it closer to home,
bringing it more down to earth,
making probably some
reductionist mistake in the
process,
then abandoning it and turning
into a materialist somewhat
hesitantly and reluctantly.
 
When he starts his turn towards
historical materialism in
"The Theses on
Feuerbach,"
he says: "The point is to
change the world.
Truth is a practical
question."
Within six months,
in The German Ideology,
he is a positivist social
scientist.
Right?
 
The point where we start with
our real individual and our real
actual social circumstances.
 
He offers testable hypotheses,
to put it this way,
in modern social science
language.
And in some ways he remains a
positivist social scientist,
in his major works.
 
So he was changing his mind,
and indeed he was less
doctrinaire than usually
Marxists are.
And easy to be less
doctrinaire--right?--if you are
one of the persons who created
the doctrine.
Today we will be talking about
one important component of
Marx's theory,
his theory of history.
And this is also contradictory,
full with tensions and
contradictions.
 
But it is a formidable body of
propositions;
absolutely formidable.
 
There is actually not a single
theorist I can recall who,
like Karl Marx,
not only has a very specific
set of ideas in what stages
human evolution,
from the very elementary
societies to the most complex
one evolved.
 
There are many who offer
typologies like this.
We have seen in Montesquieu,
we have seen in Adam Smith;
there were many who did that.
 
But what is unique about Marx,
that he has a genuine theory of
history.
 
He has a very powerful argument
what is the exact causal
mechanism which leads the
transition from one form of
society to another one;
what drives historical
evolution.
 
Marx is genuinely the Darwin of
social scientists,
in this respect.
 
What Darwin could do with
The Evolution of Species,
Marx was capable to do in the
theory of history.
It's a genuine theory. Right?
 
A theory, when you have an idea
what are really the causal
mechanisms, what links cause to
an effect.
And Marx has such a theory.
 
We will see when we will be
discussing Weber,
whom I admire a great deal,
that Weber really does not have
such a theory.
 
And as far I can,
nobody else does.
Well the only downside of
Marx's theory of history is that
history proved him to be wrong.
 
Well theories are not
necessarily to be supported by
the facts.
 
Theories are there,
you know, to have a tight
enough proposition and to be
tested.
But what exactly the theory is
will vary in Marx's own
writings,
and there are some versions of
this theory which fit better the
empirical reality than the
original one,
and the one which became kind
of carved into stone in the
literature on Marx.
And this is why I do a little
comparison between The German
Ideology--
we touched upon The German
Ideology already--
and another manuscript that he
also left incomplete and
unfinished.
He was working on it in 1857
and '58, and was never properly
translated, the title into
English.
We always refer it to
Grundrisse,
the 'eh' at the end,
the sounds.
Right?
 
English speakers like to call
it "Grundriss".
No, it is Grundrisse.
 
And Grundrisse means a
sketch, an outline.
And that's what it is.
 
One-thousand pages,
handwritten pages,
written in a big hurry between
'57 and '58.
Like the earlier attempts to
write a big book,
The Paris Manuscript and
The German Ideology,
when Marx approaches the end of
his title he argued,
theory--he said,
"My goodness gracious,
I got it all wrong.
 
I have to start it all over
again."
And he will start all over
again, just in ten years' time,
and he will write Das
Kapital.
Did he get it wrong in the
Grundrisse?
That's what I will try to pose
today.
And I was merciful enough that
I did not ask you to read too
much from the Grundrisse.
 
What you read has been
published as a separate little
book, under the title
Pre-Capitalist Economic
Formations.
 
And this is probably the most
accessible text in the whole
one-thousand pages.
 
It was put together and
translated by the wonderful
British social historian,
Eric Hobsbawm.
Fortunately he's still with us.
 
He's ninety-one-years-old,
and thanks God he's strong;
and he's still traveling,
if you pay him business class.
But we could get him to this
class if Yale would be willing
to pay business class ticket,
but Yale would not do it.
Anyway, he's sharp,
good, and he was the major
social historian of the
twentieth century in Britain--
not a trivial matter because
the best social history was in
Britain in the twentieth
century.
Anyway, he translated it,
and you read his translation.
Was it difficult?
 
Yes.
 
But try the rest of the
Grundrisse,
and then you will see how easy
this text is.
Okay, and the point what I'm
trying to make today is to show
what a fundamental shift there
is in Marx's thinking from
The German Ideology to
the Grundrisse.
So we will start with the
initial formulation in the
Grundrisse,
how he's beginning to conceive
what historical evolution is.
 
And this is something we did
cover, so I can rush through of
it very quickly.
 
Right?
 
The idea is--what he introduces
for the first time in The
German Ideology,
1845--is the concept of the
mode of production.
 
And you already have seen this
citation.
Right?
 
"Man can distinguish from
animals by consciousness,
by religion,
or anything you like.
They, themselves begin to
distinguish themselves from
animals as soon as they begin to
produce,
as soon as they're beginning to
change the world to fit their
human needs."
 
That is the fundamental insight.
 
And you may dismiss it but,
you know, that's clearly a very
serious proposition.
 
Right?
 
That if you look at history
over time, you will become very
interested how these people
survived.
What did they eat?
 
How did they produce what they
did eat?
What kind of housing did they
live in?
How they did build their
housing?
Right?
 
How they did move around?
 
Did they invent the wheel,
or did they already know the
wheel?
 
Right?
 
These are the questions you
will be asking when you are
studying a society.
 
Did they--could they lit a fire
or they couldn't?
Right?
 
So you were interested in this
stuff.
How did they kill the deer?
 
Right?
 
What kind of weapons they had.
 
What kind of instruments they
used when they planted their
plants.
 
Right?
 
These are obvious questions to
ask, and he said,
"That's it,
that's what we want to
see."
 
And he said,
"This mode of production
must be considered not simply as
reproduction."
Right?
 
And I think this is a very
powerful argument,
what he makes it here.
 
Right?
 
This is a definite mode of
life.
Right?
 
When I'm suggesting mode of
production, I'm not narrowly
focusing on the economy.
 
I am basically talking about
differences in ways of life.
And differences in ways of
life, as he elsewhere puts it,
well first you have to drink
and eat and find shelter.
And once you are not hungry any
longer, and you are not wet when
it is raining,
then you start thinking.
Right?
 
But first you have to fill your
stomach--right?--and make sure
that you are safe from the
rainfall.
That's a reasonable argument.
 
Well there are some very
important key differences,
as we proceed from The
German Ideology to the
Grundrisse.
 
Well in The German
Ideology there's one
important difference.
 
History is driven by increasing
division of labor.
And I pointed to this in the
earlier lecture.
Here he draws directly on Adam
Smith.
He basically takes it over from
Adam Smith.
That's what Adam Smith did.
 
In the Grundrisse,
on the other hand,
he sees a movement,
a gradual movement over
history, towards private
ownership;
that's what drives the story.
 
"A gradual separation of
the laboring subject and the
objective conditions of the
worker."
That's how he describes now
human history.
And doing so--separation of
laboring subject and the
objective conditions of labor--
enables him in the
Grundrisse to bring back
the notion of alienation.
He already seemed to have
forgotten and put it on the
shelf.
 
Then he will forget it again.
 
But for this piece of work,
the idea of alienation
re-interpreted as the making of
private ownership and the
separation of worker and the
objective conditions of work is
very crucial,
very important.
There is another big difference.
 
In The German Ideology,
Marx has a unilinear view of
history;
a very deterministic,
uni-linear view of history.
 
And this is what will come back
in later Marx,
and that dominate Marxists of
various kinds.
Uni-linear means--right?--that
all societies start at the same
starting point:
tribal society.
They all progress through
slavery, feudalism,
capitalism, with the assumption
that they all will end up in
communism.
 
But this is a kind of
uni-linear stage.
Every society will have to go
through of these stages,
and there is necessity that one
moves from an earlier stage to a
later stage.
 
And as I said,
he will show the causal
mechanism how it is happening.
 
The Grundrisse is
different.
This is a messy description of
human history,
a multi-linear trajectory;
and I will show you what his
multi-linear trajectory is.
 
The beauty of shifting from
this uni-linear trajectory to
the multi-linear trajectory is
that,
though Marx messes completely
the logic of argument up,
but he produces a theoretical
proposition what you can see
fits already in his time,
the historical development,
very well,
and would argue by
extension--now I will extend his
argument--
it even fits better later
historical evolution.
Okay, let's return now to
The German Ideology
briefly, and the centrality of
division of labor in this work.
Well, Marx described--right?--a
mode of production between the
dialectical interaction between
what he saw,
he called forces of
production--and forces of
production means basically the
technology,
raw materials,
the labor power--and eventually
he invents a term,
the relations of production.
But he identifies this with
property relations in the later
work.
 
But he tends to use the word
'intercourse' or 'division of
labor' in The German
Ideology.
Now dialectical interaction.
 
What on earth this word means?
 
I think I also mentioned once
that Marx,
in a letter to Engels,
once wrote: "You know,
when I don't understand
something, then I say it is
dialectical."
 
So the idea of dialectics was
not much clearer to Karl Marx
than it is to you.
 
Right?
 
But dialectics basically
meant--right?--an interactive
relationship.
 
You know, in today's social
science language we would
say--right?--that there is the
causal arrow going in both ways.
Right?
 
It's not simply that relations
of production determine
relations of production.
 
Certain relations of production
can block the development of
forces of production,
and when they change,
the new relations of production
can unleash the development of
the forces of production.
 
So that is the
dialectics--right?--
that the causal arrow,
there is not simple
determination pointing from one
to the other,
but there is a feedback loop.
 
Right?
 
That would be,
I think, the modern social
science language,
to put this one.
As I said, in the initial
formulation, he really thinks
this is the division of labor,
rather than property
relationships.
 
And I think we have seen it,
he will--this comes straight
out of Adam Smith,
what you have read.
Right?
 
The relations of different
nations among themselves depends
to which each has developed
these productive forces,
the division of labor and its
internal intercourse.
So that's exactly--right?--what
Adam Smith said.
Hunting/gathering societies,
grazing societies,
agricultural societies,
commercial societies,
they all correspond to
different levels of division of
labor.
 
And that's what Marx initially
tries to do in The German
Ideology.
 
And he deals with the question
of the property relations,
but he said,
"Look, property relations
also change,
but these changing property
relations are simply the
outcomes of the increased
division of labor."
 
So it's basically determined by
the division of labor.
"If I understand the level
of division of labor,
I will understand property
relationships as well."
That sounds actually quite
reasonable.
And these sections of The
German Ideology,
by the way, were rediscovered
by Marxists in the 1950s,
especially Marxists who were
living in the Soviet Empire.
There was a formidable social
scientist in Poland;
his name is Ossowski.
 
And Ossowski,
in 1957, re-read The German
Ideology.
 
And until then,
you know, what was carved into
stone,
that, you know,
Marxist theory suggests that
this is property relations which
explain everything.
 
And that was the
project--right?--of communism.
You eliminate private ownership
and everything will be fine.
Right?
 
No private ownership,
things will be rosy.
Right?
 
There will be equality among
people--right?--and dynamic
economic growth.
 
Now the Soviets eliminated
private ownership.
Was it an egalitarian society?
 
No it wasn't.
 
Was it a dynamic society?
 
No it wasn't.
 
Now Ossowski was re-reading
The German Ideology and
said, "Well you did not
read your Marx right.
Marx doesn't say it is property
relations which is crucial,
but division of labor.
 
So, of course,
the division of labor exists in
a Communist society,
just not the appropriate
division of labor,
and that creates
inequalities."
 
Anyway, that was a very
interesting debate.
Ossowski had a very great
reception in western social
science circles.
 
Okay, anyway so this is the
initial idea--right?--in The
German Ideology.
 
And then he proceeds,
as again we have seen it.
I'll rush through of it.
 
He describes various modes of
production this way.
Right?
 
There is the tribal
society--very primitive means of
production: hunting,
fishing, gathering.
Division of labor is very
elementary.
And he uses this sexist term:
"This is only a natural
division of labor between men
and women.
Women gather and men hunts,
because the men are strong and,
as you know,
the women are weak."
Right?
 
And therefore this is a
"natural division of
labor."
 
Well probably he can be
forgiven;
I mean, he wrote this in 1845.
 
And then he moves on to slavery.
 
He said, "Well now the
forces of production are
beginning to develop.
 
In a tribal society people just
had enough capacity to gather,
hunt, and fish enough food to
survive,
and therefore everybody had to
go out gathering,
hunting, and fishing.
 
But now we have new
technologies,
which are more productive,
and therefore it becomes
possible that some people say,
'Well I am not going out
hunting.
 
I will get slaves,
and slaves will do the work for
me.
 
They will be able to produce
what is necessary for their
survival.
 
I'll give them only as much
that they do not die from
hunger.
 
I eat the rest,
and drink the rest,
and then I'll just sit at home
and I am writing
philosophy.'"
So ancient philosophy is born.
Right?
 
You're Plato,
sitting at home,
and thinking,
and you are writing drama and
poetry,
and you create art,
because the slaves are working
the fields,
producing a surplus that can be
appropriated from them.
Division of labor increases as
technology increased.
Well as a result,
some change in property
relationships.
 
Right?
 
Now this is not a communal
relationship,
we are not members of the same
community, but a pretty
oppressive relationship between
slave and slave owner.
And he goes on.
 
And then comes feudalism,
and what happens with
feudalism?
 
Well what is the problem with
the slaves?
The problem with the slaves,
that they have absolutely no
interest in producing.
 
They were simply physically
coursed to produce.
Therefore they can be pretty
negligent in operating the means
of instrument.
 
You have to supervise them.
 
You beat them--right?--to make
them work.
Right?
 
You keep killing them,
you know, if they disobey.
There's struggle;
you know, you have to conduct
wars all the time--right?--to
get new slaves.
Therefore as technology
develops, you need a labor force
which is more motivated to work
harder.
So slaves are being replaced by
serfs, by peasants.
And what is the big change?
 
The big change is that now the
peasants will get a plot they
can cultivate themselves.
 
They actually have to work only
for two or three days on the
large estate of the feudal lord,
and the rest of the time they
can stay at home,
cultivate their land.
They can build a house.
 
They can have their family.
 
They can marry,
and their children will belong
to them, rather than to the
lord.
Right?
 
A big change. Right?
 
In classical states of slavery,
the children--there are no
marriage, no home.
 
Right?
 
Slaves lives in barracks. Right?
 
The institution of family does
not exist.
I mean, you know,
slavery in the south of the
United States was not quite
classical slavery,
in Greece and Rome or in Egypt,
but had some similarities.
Right?
 
Slave owners certainly had
claim on the children of slaves,
and in many instances marriage
was really--
not really an existing
institution,
even in nineteenth century U.S.
 
Now the serfs are very
different.
They have their family,
they have their home.
They do not have a title of the
land and the home,
but they have possession of the
land and the home.
And therefore they have an
interest.
If they don't work hard on
those two days,
on the land of the landlords,
they are kicked off their land.
Right?
 
So therefore they will have to
pay more attention.
That's the idea.
 
But then he looks at--you know,
compares--the Dark Middle Ages
in Europe--right?--the peaks of
feudalism with Rome and Greece
and Athens.
 
And he said,
"Did the division of labor
increase?"
 
He said, "No they,
the division of labor
decreased."
 
I mean antiquity,
that was discovered in the
Renaissance, was far superior to
the Middle Ages.
The big cities,
like Rome, were abandoned.
Many of you were in Rome.
 
Even now you see ruins. Right?
 
The glorious Rome--right?--was
left as a grazing land for the
sheep.
 
Right?
 
Those lands--you know,
they could bring water into
your homes.
 
Right?
 
The Greeks.
 
They had high levels of
technologies.
They had highly developed
industries.
This was all forgotten in the
Middle Ages.
Right?
 
So what is the Middle Ages?
 
Some people said this was a
step backward historically.
Right?
 
Inquisition,
the Dark Middle Ages,
the decay of the cities;
it's a step backward.
Well Marx doesn't know what to
do with it.
Right?
 
And as I said-- pointed out,
he abandons the manuscript
here.
 
He said, "Well the theory
doesn't work.
I cannot explain this all with
increasing division of
labor."
 
Then, of course,
would be-- the fourth mode
should be capitalism.
 
And as he's beginning to
develop the form of capitalism,
he's beginning to develop now
the notion of relations of
production.
 
Really feudalism is
superior--this idea comes up in
The German Ideology--
superior to the Middle Ages
because it had more developed
relations of production,
more developed property
relations.
It was a further step towards
private ownership.
It was a further step because
now the laborer had possessions
of the land, what they
cultivated.
Well and here it comes,
the classical Marxist view,
what he will change in the
Grundrisse,
about historical change.
 
And this is,
I think, a provocative,
important statement;
that he said,
"If I'm looking at a mode
of production,
we can characterize them by the
correspondence of the forces and
relations of production.
 
A certain level of forces of
production require a certain
type of relations of production,
a certain type of relationship
between individuals."
 
This is, in Marx,
what a hundred years later in
social sciences were called
structuralism.
This is a typical structuralist
statement.
Right?
 
That you have correspondences
of the different elements of the
system you are analyzing--
a correspondence of the forces
and the relations of production.
 
And then he goes further.
 
And now we will begin to see
how he develops the causal
mechanism of change.
 
He says, "There is the
development of forces of
production."
 
To use the term of contemporary
Marxist Eric Olin Wright,
is "sticky down."
 
Sticky down means that the
forces of production can only
become more complex.
 
You don't forget--actually it's
not true, but that's the
theory--you don't forget more
advanced technologies.
Technology is always advancing.
 
But the growing,
evolving technology eventually
gets into conflict with the
relations of production,
between the property
relationships and social
relationships in society.
 
They become outdated.
 
So outdated because,
as I pointed out,
the slaves were not
sufficiently attentive to
technology,
and the serfs were more
attentive but not sufficiently
attentive.
The serfs were not-- did not
have such high incentives to
work very hard with complex
technologies than you guys will
be when you will be in a job.
 
Right?
 
Because you will be highly paid
and highly skilled.
You will have fringe benefits,
and you don't want to be fired.
Right?
 
And you will put your skills to
use,
and therefore you will be able
to use very--
with great care,
that the computers you use are
not being damaged,
as you are using them. Right?
So therefore you have to become
a wage laborer to have these
very high incentives to work
very hard,
and to be very careful with the
instruments what you are using.
And then he says therefore what
happens that eventually these
outmoded social relationships
become in a conflict with the
forces of production,
and we want to have more.
We want to have development.
 
Right?
 
And therefore at one point
there will become a tension
between the outmoded,
outlived, old relations of
production and the need to
create new spaces for the
development of forces of
production.
And this is the revolutionary
movement, as Marx defines it.
This is the time when the
revolution will come because
this is when we will rise
against the old social
relationships and replace them
with new social relationships--
right?--which will create new
space for further growth after
development of forces of
production.
Again, you know,
just to make clear,
a way one of the misunderstood
ideas of Marx:
Marx never said that capitalism
is not effective.
On the contrary,
Marx said capitalism was the
most productive system in human
history.
He said, "In the last
hundred years of capitalism we
achieved more progress than in
the whole human history."
Or what Marx said--he wrongly
said so, he proved to be
false--that it will never-- not
will go on forever.
At one point capitalism,
like any other previous modes
of production,
will get in conflict with its
relations of production,
and that's when the revolution
will have to come.
 
Right?
 
And so far we know that Marx
proved to be wrong.
He underestimated the
extraordinary capacity of
capitalism to adapt to major
challenges.
Right?
 
We just have seen it in the
last eighteen months.
Right?
 
Well, you know,
capitalists was grumbling,
"All right."
 
You know, just think about the
Lehman Brothers.
Right?
 
Think back in March.
 
Well, you know,
this was very shaky.
Did it work?
 
It looks like it probably does.
 
Right?
 
It learned how to recover.
 
Anyway, Marx's point was
capitalism was really a big
revolution, and unleashed the
development of forces of
production.
 
Now move onto the
Grundrisse,
and what are the major
contributions,
ten years later.
 
Well first of all now the
evolution of modes of production
is described to be changes in
property relations.
This is basically where The
German Ideology ends.
He started at the wrong point,
division of labor,
and now property relations is a
central idea.
And private ownership is now
defined in a new way.
He said, "What is private
ownership?
When the subjective-- laboring
subject--is completely separated
from the objective conditions of
labor." Right?
You can see this is a big step
forward from The Paris
Manuscript--right?--where
the essence of alienation was
commodity relationships.
 
Now it is not commodity
relationships.
He captures the
essence--right?--of alienation
in the nature of private
ownership.
And we will talk about what
that exactly means.
The transition,
therefore, to capitalism,
is a separation of workers and
the conditions of labor.
And Marx puts it very
powerfully.
This is an idea which then
comes back and haunts us all the
time.
 
This is an idea we will be able
to read in Max Weber as well.
The big progress,
what is happening,
that the worker becomes free,
in a double sense of the term.
That is what capitalism is
producing, in contrast to
traditional or feudal society.
 
He became free.
 
I was slave and now there is a
civil war and it is declared 'no
more slavery'.
 
I am legally free.
 
But, Marx said,
yes, capitalism produced legal
freedom and legal equality,
but it also kicks you off the
land,
forces you go to the city,
and forces you to sell your
labor.
So you are also freed from your
possessions.
Right?
 
So you don't have the means of
what a farmer had.
To some extent even a slave had
some.
But certainly the peasants did
have that means of subsistence.
Now capitalism requires that
people do not have the means of
subsistence--that you have to go
to the supermarket to buy your
egg.
 
Right?
 
The system would not work very
well if in your backyard you
could grow everything what you
need.
Right?
 
The incentive for you to work
will be substantially reduced.
Fortunately we cannot grow our
vegetables what we need.
And we have to drive to get to
work when--we have to drive to
get anywhere,
and we have to buy gasoline.
And we are also therefore
forced to sell our labor force.
This means--right?--free in the
dual sense of the term.
Right?
 
Legally free,
and freed from the means of
subsistence.
 
Right?
 
The notion of freedom,
of course, said with some
irony.
 
Okay, and then the fourth
proposition, multi-linearity.
Right?
 
There are various ways
societies can take from a tribal
society.
 
And he writes about antiquity.
 
He invents the notion of the
Asiatic mode,
what he never used before,
or labor.
He's talking about the
Slavic form,
and the Germanic form.
 
And rather than talking about
modes of production,
Marx, in the Grundrisse,
is writing about social
formations, or economic
formations.
A very interesting change.
 
It's not just a change of
terms, it's a very important
change in the theory.
 
Okay, just very briefly about
the evolution of the modes of
production and changing property
relations.
Well he said,
"In old pre-capitalist
formations,
well there is an appropriation
of natural conditions of labor,
of the earth as an original
instrument of labor,
and the individual simply
regards the objective conditions
as his own.
There is no separation really
of the objective conditions and
the laborer."
 
Slavery is the clearest
example.
Right?
 
The Greeks said,
"The slave is a working
animal."
 
Right?
 
The slave was treated as an
object--was not really seen as a
subject.
 
The slave did not have the
rights of an individual subject.
There were no individual
liberties for the subject.
I mean, it varied from slavery
to slavery--right?--in
antiquity.
 
Right?
 
That was the idea.
 
Well the serfs,
a little step further away.
Right?
 
They actually do not have
ownership, but have possession
of the means of production.
 
They are not treated as legally
free individuals and subjects.
Think about the right to the
first night.
Right?
 
The feudal lord had the right
to spend the first night with
the bride in the case of a
wedding.
You have seen the opera,
Mozart, The Marriage of
Figaro.
 
Right?
 
You remember what the story is.
 
Figaro is deeply in love with
Susanna, and wants to marry her,
and he is scared that the
landlord wants to live with the
right of the first night.
 
He does not want the lord to
spend the first night with his
bride.
 
Okay?
 
That's the story. Right?
 
An important eighteenth-century
story.
Anyway, so he's not quite a
subject.
The worker, free worker,
is a subject.
All right, let me just move on
to private ownership.
He said under capitalism the
work, the object,
are completely separated from
the worker.
And here is--right?--the idea
that we have this double
separation.
 
Right?
 
We are separated from the means
of our existence,
but we are also legally free.
 
And more citations of this kind.
 
It's also very
important--right?--that the
transition to market economy
happens by pushing people off
the land and forcing them into
the cities to become laborers
who will depend only on the wage
what they earn on the labor
market.
 
And now comes--a few more
minutes--an intriguing idea,
these multiple trajectories he
described.
Right?
 
So the initial idea was a
uni-linear trajectory.
And let me just do it this way.
 
That this was the idea.
 
*>
Tribal society leads to slave
society.
That leads to feudal society,
and that leads to capitalism.
Right?
 
And dialectics. Right?
 
Relations, forces of production.
 
This drives the process. Right?
 
It happens through breaks.
 
Right?
 
These are revolutions,
which lead from one to the
next, when these dialectal
interactions leads for people to
throw up the old system.
 
Now we have a very different
view presented here.
He describes--right?--the
various forms,
with different individual forms
of ownership,
and points out that in fact the
uniqueness of what he called the
Germanic form,
Germanic tribal form,
that it became individual
possession.
This is indeed,
as far as even now we know from
historiography,
a unique feature of Germanic
tribes that they allocated the
land by lottery,
before each season,
to individual families,
and then families cultivated
the land.
They did not have individual
property rights in the land,
but they had individual
possession allocated.
That was--the common land was
divided up by individuals or
individual families.
 
And that is the unique feature
of this.
And here it is,
and I hope you see it quite
well: the multi-trajectory
development, what he describes
in the Grundrisse.
 
Well, he said,
"It's not true that
tribalism all led to antiquity
of slave societies."
He spent, you know,
from eight in the morning until
ten in the evening,
was sitting in the British
library and reading like crazy.
 
And he said,
"Well something wrong.
When I am looking at Asia,
there is no universalized
slavery.
 
Well there are slaves in China
but, you know,
they are kind of family slaves.
 
There are no great plantations
which are cultivated by slaves,
like in Egypt or Ancient
Rome."
He excessively generalized
about Rome, Greece,
and Egypt the whole notion of
slave mode of production.
This is unique antiquity.
 
"But when I'm looking at
Asia--
and in fact I'm looking at
Pre-Columbian America--
right?--there is no
universalized slavery."
So he uses the term Asiatic
form.
He did not know much about
Pre-Columbian Americas.
He knew a little more about
India and China--did not know
much.
 
He knew as much as usually
people could in the 1850s--was
reading heavily.
 
But he understood that this was
a different form.
Right?
 
And the uniqueness of the
Asiatic form,
as he puts it,
was these were hydraulic
societies.
 
They were big empires,
all organized around irrigation
and flood protection works.
 
And in order to have these
irrigation and flood protection
works, you needed big empires.
 
And what the big emperors in
China did,
that they left the village
communes alone,
as long as they did deliver
those taxes from which the
imperial power was able to build
flood protection and irrigation
networks.
 
Right?
 
So the village commune was left
alone as a commune itself,
and was not transformed into
serfs or slaves.
China never really had a
classical case of feudalism;
feudalism the way how we know
it from England or
France--right?--or Spain,
it never existed in China.
Therefore it was the Asiatic
form.
Right?
 
A centralized imperial
bureaucracy, and the hydraulic
economy, driven by water
problems.
And then he said,
"Well there was the
Germanic form."
 
And I briefly talked about the
Germanic form--right?--where you
had family possession.
 
And he said,
"Well, where does
feudalism come from?"
 
The original theories said,
you know, transition from one
mode of production to the next
happens because of internal
class struggle.
 
Right?
 
The theories should predict
that feudalism fell because the
serfs had enough.
 
They went uprising,
hanged the slave owners,
and created a new society.
 
Well Marx said,
"I was a jerk.
This is not how it worked.
 
Look at how Rome fell.
 
It was invaded by the Germanic
tribes."
And what is interesting,
these Germanic tribe actually
had much less advanced military
technology and technology
generally.
 
But they had a superior social
relationship system.
They had a more developed idea
of private ownership than Rome
had.
 
So, in fact,
the Roman Empire fell because
it was invaded by the Germanic
tribes, and they transformed the
Roman Empire into a feudal
society;
they transformed slaves into
serfs.
And there is also the Slavic
form.
Well there is the Russian
obshchina.
Well it's a kind of feudalism,
but the feudal lord actually
treats the obshchina,
the village commune,
as a unit.
 
Again, it is not the central
authority in Russia who collects
the rents, but the feudal lord;
but leaves to a large extent
the village commune to operate
in a communal way.
And therefore he said,
"Therefore I was wrong.
It was not the internal class
struggle which led to the
evolution.
 
Very often this is an external
force which leads to a change
into another mode of
production"--
right?--"into another
social formation."
And therefore he said,
"Well,
shall I say that the Asiatic
form necessarily will have to go
through feudalism before it can
be capitalism?
No way.
 
China is in a way already have
some signs to move towards
capitalism, without creating
feudalism."
But he did not know that a
gentleman called Mao Zedong come
a little later,
and he said,
"And do we have to become
capitalists first?"
And Mao Zedong said,
"But we hate capitalism.
Why don't we create communism
straight out of the Asiatic
form?"
 
And that's what he was trying
to do.
And therefore,
you know, he had the--this is
sort of my addition,
this arrow;
of course, it did not exist in
Marx--right?--from the Asiatic
form to communism.
 
But that's what Mao Zedong did.
 
Did it work?
 
No.
 
Well one say probably it did.
 
The only point is that
Communism is not at the end,
Communism is before capitalism.
 
Right?
 
I think Mao Zedong successfully
converted Asiatic form into
Communism, in order then to move
Communism into capitalism.
That's what Marx did not quite
consider, but will be completely
consistent with the type of
analysis he offers--right?--in
the Grundrisse.
 
And finally about the Slavic
form, and I am out of time.
The same argument.
 
He gets a letter from a Russian
anarchist, Vera Zasulich.
And Vera Zasulich was a great
admirer of Marx,
but she was a kind of populist
anarchist left-winger.
And she said,
"But Mr. Marx,
do you really want us to
destroy this wonderful Russian
obshchina village
commune,
where we live so intimately
together as brothers and
sisters,
to create this hated capitalism?
Why can't we move straight into
Communism?
This is a Communistic
form."
And Marx kind of nodded.
 
"Well",
he said- he responded,
"it's an interesting
idea."
And this is exactly what
Vladimir Illyich Lenin and
Stalin did.
 
They converted the Russian
obshchina into what they
called kolkhoz;
collective enterprise.
All what happened,
similar to the Mao story,
it turned out not to be the
road to the most advanced form
of society,
but a kind of side-road towards
capitalism.
 
And the question,
what remains to be discussed,
whether this side road was
necessary,
and whether this was the most
effective way to move to
capitalism,
and what came out as capitalism
from it is really the best
possible capitalism at all?
But that's for another course.
 
If you take Varieties of
Capitalism, we'll talk more
about that.
 
Thank you.
 
 
 
