Open one of the gates to Marxism — “The Working Day” chapter in the first volume of Capital — and you’ll find paragraphs with equations (“As the working-day is A—–B + B—–C or A—–C, it varies with the variable quantity B—–C…”) Stones in your pass-way? Yup. Yet once you’re through the gate, you’ll see a path that leads to a life in struggle. You can’t help but wonder if you’ll be worthy. Not that you’ll feel a need to be (what Karl said he wasn’t) a Marxist, but you’ll always wish to come down on the commoners’ side of class conflicts. And the older you get, the more you’ll suspect the only regard that matters comes from militants with the brains to turn tears into controlled rage as Marx does throughout his “Day”…
In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily papers published a paragraph with the “sensational” heading, “Death from simple over-work.” It dealt with the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years of age, employed in a highly-respectable dressmaking establishment, exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise. The old, often-told story, was once more recounted. This girl worked, on an average, 16½ hours, during the season often 30 hours, without a break, whilst her failing labour-power was revived by occasional supplies of sherry, port, or coffee It was just now the height of the season. It was necessary to conjure up in the twinkling of an eye the gorgeous dresses for the noble ladies bidden to the ball in honour of the newly-imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had worked without intermission for 26½ hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of air required for them. At night, they slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the bedroom was divided by partitions of board. And this was one of the best millinery establishments in London. Mary Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having previously completed the work in hand.
If you want astonishments that last, fuck Cocteau and his kind — read Marx as he feels his carbuncles and walks with Mary Anne Walkley. Or pulls a quote from a “magistrate of the lace trade’s” report on sweated children…
of nine or ten years…dragged from their squalid bed at two, three, or four 0’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into to stonelike torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.
Bless the British factory inspectors behind the Blue Books that gave Marx the details he needed to evoke the condition of the English working class in the mid-19th C. (and give the rest of us a template for resistance to the ethos of bosses). Marx’s daughter, Laura, helped him read through those government reports, lying about her age in order to slip into the archives at the British Museum. Laura’s research comes up in the essay by Peter Linebaugh (from his collection “Stop Thief: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance”) posted below. Linebaugh is alive to how women made it possible for Marx to write a book that would set the Thames on fire. He tells a revelatory story about Marx’s encounters with a “superior woman” comrade, Gertrude Kugelmann, who made his life sweet during the month he spent correcting proofs of the German version of Capital. Gertrude’s husband was one of Marx’s patrons. Ludwig Kuglemann turned out to be a petty domestic tyrant and Marx broke off relations with him due to Ludwig’s brutish behavior toward Gertrude. Linebaugh doesn’t pass over Marx’s own patriarchal side, but his essay isn’t a work of disenchantment except when it comes to Marxist theory-mongers. Linebaugh cleans the clocks of scholastics who fail to grasp that the power of Marx’s writing stems in part from his decades of powerlessness. Linebaugh takes in the years of dearth that left Marx yearning “to fundamentally rectify my financial affairs and at last stand on my own feet again.” A line that moves Linebaugh to muse: “Surely, the hope of proletarians all over the world could not be expressed better.” Leftists who reduce all opinions to bottom lines are truly vulgar. But those locked on cultural Marxism and adventures of the dialectic in late capitalism tend to get too far from Marxism’s base truths. Linebaugh’s lede below highlights what’s personal in historical materialism.
A hundred and forty years ago, in April, 1864, having visited the pawn shop to redeem his clothes and watch, Karl Marx left London suitably accoutered for Hamburg with the manuscript of Das Kapital in hand. [1]
It was a year when David Livingston sought out the source of the Nile, and presumably the secrets of humanity’s origin but actually it was a step toward the Scramble to come. It was the year of the invention of barbed wire, a means of enclosing cheaper, speedier, and nastier than any other. It was the year of the founding in Louisiana of the Knights of the White Camelia, a terrorist organization of white supremacy. In 1867 Alfred Nobel’s “safety powder” was patented as dynamite. Das Kapital thus came forth in a year of imperialism, enclosure, racism, and bombing.
The “fearful weather and gales” of the voyage across the North Sea sent most passengers below. A few were not incapacitated by sea-sickness: Marx, a cattleman, a clockmaker, a Texan, a strong-stomached woman, and a man returning from fifteen years roaming in unmapped areas of Peru who regaled the others with accounts of “the sexual depravities of savages.” Marx summed up this American and an indigenous story for Engels. “He was received in a hut where a woman was giving birth. The afterbirth is roasted and–supreme expression of hospitality–he is obliged to partake of the SWEET BREAD.” Perhaps Engels remembered something Marx had written him a year earlier. Referring to a gigantic manuscript unfit for publishing Marx wrote that he “began the business of copying out and polishing the style on the dot of January first, and it all went ahead swimmingly, as I naturally enjoy licking the infant clean, after long birth pangs. But then the carbuncle intervened again… ” and he had to stop.[2]
Marx delivered his manuscript to Otto Meissner, his Hamburg publisher, who promptly put it in his safe, and then prepared to wait to correct the proof sheets sent up from the printer in Leipzig (in Hamburg “the proofreaders were insufficiently learned”). Meanwhile, Marx waited in Hanover as the guest of Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann, an eminent gynecologist, and his wife, Gertrude. “Splendid people,” “exceptionally kind” is how Marx described them to Engels. Kugelmann was a former member of the Communist League and a follower of Marx and Engels from 1847. He had been one of Marx’s correspondents who elicited from “the Moor” the most illuminating of letters.[3] Kugelmann was successful in many respects, esteemed by his colleagues and responsible for technical innovations, though I don’t know whether he actually delivered babies. He certainly was a help in delivering Das Kapital. Durring the previous year Marx had asked him twice for help in obtaining a personal loan in Germany. Dr. Kugelmann was active in trying to obtain reviews of it in Germany; and was second only to Engels in launching the “damned book.” The inflamed suppurating carbuncles, the begging letters, rheumatism, tooth ache, the dunning creditors, the adolescent daughters denied pretty treats, the winter cold with neither money nor coal in the house.
Kugelmann’s character is revealed by a gift he sent. On Christmas day 1867 as Marx lay groaning on his back from the incessant pains and as the females below stairs were preparing pudding for desert there arrived a tremendous bust of Jupiter Tonans, a grandiose gift from Dr. Kugelmann. (It was one of two gifts, the other being a tapestry which had hung in the study of Leibniz.) Zeus the sky god hurtles his thunder upon the weaker beings and when Kugelmann did this on his wife it ended the friendship with Marx. But I get ahead of myself.
Marx arrived on April 16 and he stayed a month, conscious of the “economic advantages.” He wrote Engels that it was here on his birthday, May 5, that he corrected the first sheet of Das Kapital as sent by the printer.[4] Gertrude Kugelmann took an interest in the book a well. How could she not? Its author corrected the page proofs in her house while she anticipated his every need for more than a month. It was “one of the happiest and most agreeable oases in the desert of life,” as he later wrote. Although bored by the enthusiasm of Kugelmann, he was charmed by the warmth and friendship of Frau Gertrude Kugelmann, and interested in another houseguest, Therese Tenge (nee Bolongaro-Crevenna), wife of a Westphalian landowner, who was a great musician, an atheist, and inclined to socialism. “She is a superior woman,” he wrote to Laura, his middle daughter, denying that he flirted with her.
It was here too, that the activist and theorist of the proletarian revolution expressed his hope “that I shall be able to fundamentally rectify my financial affairs and at last stand on my own feet again.”[5] Surely, the hope of proletarians all over the world could not be expressed better. To fundamentally rectify our financial affairs and at last stand on our own feet again.
Ah, where did we go wrong?
Das Kapital was published in September, and in this “the Bible of the working class,” as Engels would call it, is an answer.
It has thirty-three chapters and they are arranged into eight parts. Some of these chapters are very short, some are difficult. The subtitle calls it ”A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production,” but the subtitle of the second German edition changed this to ”.A Critique of Political Economy.” Political economy must be critiqued before the analysis of capitalist production can become sufficiently critical to propose communism. Otherwise, we think that concepts of political economy are eternal. There has been a lot of confusion about what kind of book it is, theory or history, critique or criticism, anti-capitalist or anti-economics. I emphasize history, as Marx did too to the gynecologist’s wife.
In November 1867 Marx wrote to Kugelmann, “Please be so kind as to tell your good wife that the chapters on the “Working Day,” “Cooperation,” “The Division of Labor,” “Machinery,” and finally on “Primitive Accumulation” are the most immediately readable. You will have to explain any incomprehensible terminology to her. If there are any other doubtful points, I shall be glad to help.”[6]
The longest ones, oddly, are the Gertrude Kugelmann chapters, those which are “immediately readable.” For something to b “immediately readable” a number of conditions need to be met: First, the diction must be familiar and this would exclude both obtuse philosophical terminology and the jargon of political economy. Second, the subject matter must be contemporary. Finally, if there is a shared experience between the reader and the author, then again the material will be immediately readable, especially if the author is putting that experience into words for the first time as far as the reader is concerned. With the addition of one chapter and the conjoining of another, these Kugelmann chapters provide us with the five gates of Marxism.
Our conference refers to one of these gates: Part VIII, “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation.” He is not talking about a piggy bank or a pile of coconuts. No, he is talking about our world. We have a problem of translation. In German, Part VIII is Die Sogenannte Urspringliche Akkumulation, and ursprungliche may be translated as “source,” “original,” or “primary.” I want us to approach the idea historically but not rigidly; the primary accumulation continues beyond the “primitive stage,” so to speak. Our understanding need not be confined to the sixteenth century; even advanced capitalism includes the primary accumulation of capital. Our own world is incomprehensible unless we understand its source; this is its base. It unifies terror and accumulation.
Four points need to be emphasized. First, primary accumulation is world wide. “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of ·the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primary accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.”
The second characteristic of primary accumulation is its violence, its “merciless Vandalism.” The violence of primary accumulation is a history of expropriation “and the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of humanity in letters of blood and fire.” “Great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence … the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis off the whole process.” The violence occurs as imperialism in its two ways, as commercial competition among the European nation-states and as conquest of the societies of Africa, Asia, and America. The organization of this “brute force” requires an army and navy, a centralized taxation system, public debt, a state bank, and international financial understandings.
It is within this classic form that the importance of the Enclosures occurs. The enclosure of England is protracted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The first phase was done by church and king, the second by Parliament. Phase one was accompanied by an ideological offensive, the Protestant Reformation. Phase two no less was accompanied by an ideological offensive, three stooges called Improvement, Progress, and Development. The agricultural population was removed from the land by the spoliation of church property, the colossal theft of state lands, the systematic robbery of communal land, the clearing of the highlands of Scotland, or the usurpation of clan property, and the defrichement of the forests. These are assisted by the criminal code, new courts, the development of cadre of attorneys, the establishment of universities, new philosophy and the destruction of other ways of thinking. Even in its classic, English, form, we need to augment his account with new chapters. These have been written: The violence against woman’s· body. The violence of the African slave trade. Racism and misogyny, racist accumulation and misogynist accumulation.[7]
Marx is sarcastic. His rhetoric throughout is powerful. Primary accumulation has a theological and philosophical aspect. He compares it to original sin.” Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race.” Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past, but primary accumulation is not a thing of the past alone. Moreover, not all suffer the same consequences from original sin. In Protestant theology–an “elect” of the intelligent and frugal become rulers, while the rest by reason of laziness must be forced to eat bread in the sweat of their brows. Here his sarcasm begins to mount, as he tears into theology with his bare teeth. This is the final feature of his discussion that stands out.
Archaeologists inform us that the Garden of Eden is a fable arising during the transition from hunting-and-gathering to settled agriculture, that it belongs to the Neolithic revolution of eight to ten thousand years ago. We know it to have been in Mesopotamia. There have been many sins since the first taste of the apple of knowledge. Who is going to pay? At the high church ceremony in Westminster Abbey the other day celebrating the abolition of the slave trade two hundred years ago Mr. Agbetu interrupted the solemn and sacred proceedings, striding to the front to tell her majesty, “You, the Queen, should be ashamed,” and to tell the prune minister, “You should say sorry.” Mr. Agbetu tells a truth in the highest English Christian sacred place. When Engels refers to Das Kapital as the Bible of the working class he need not mean merely that it was authoritative. First of all is the implication that the Bible itself was the ideological Capital of the ruling class: a Jahwist story of an exclusive hill-tribe followed by the story of the carpenter’s son with his unique strategy against empire. There is not atonement without making amends which necessarily includes the restoration of surplus value.
When Hugo Gellert sought to illustrate Das Kapital in 1933 (“like the X-ray it discloses the depths below the surface”) he drew sixty lithographs, more than half of them from what we can call the Kugelmann chapters pointing the way to the five gates. He began the illustrated interpretation with the final gate, part VIII, which he also calls primary accumulation.[8]
Karl Korsch, the German council communist, wrote an introduction to a 1932 Berlin edition of Das Kapital.[9] Volume one “impresses us both in form and content, as a finished and rounded whole.” In this context of trying to understand Das Kapital as a “scientific work of art” that Korsch introduces Marx’s recommendations to Mrs. Kugelmann. The description is so vivid, the narrative so gripping. This is true, but there is more. “I want to recommend to the beginner an approach that diverges somewhat from Marx’s advice on a suitable start for the ladies (wherein we may sense a certain deference to the prejudices of his own time!).” We are supposed to smile in the condescending recognition that Marx was a male chauvinist. Be that as it may. We do not smile.
We must see Gertrude Kugelmann as a “lady.” We need to also understand that Marx treated her as a comrade. We can resist the temptation to think of her as a midwife.
He sent her a photogram of his daughter Laura in June, and in January of the next year of his other daughters, Jenny and Eleanor. In July he wrote promising to send Mrs. Kugelmann a membership card for the International Working Men’s Association, formed earlier. Ever since the IWMA was formed in 1864 Marx had busied himself with these cards. An individual membership in the IWMA cost 1s.1d. a year. “The cards served as a passport abroad.” He also sent a card to Therese Tenge.
“I hope that I have not fallen into disfavour with your dear wife,” he wrote in October 1868 not having heard from Kugelmann. “A propos: the International Women’s Association…has sent an epistle to the Brussels Congress, enquiring whether ladies may join. The answer, of course, was a courageous affirmative. Should you therefore persist in your silence, I shall send your wife a mandate as correspondent of the General Council.” This was not entirely a joke. In December he wrote that Madame Law was elected to be a member of the General Council. He reported as well that “great progress was evident in the last Congress of the American ‘Labour Union’ in that, among other things, it treated workingwomen with complete equality.” He wrote, ”Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment.”[10]
When Marx chose those particular chapters for Mrs. Kugelmann to read, he referred to capitalist production not to political economy. Similarly, when he asked his daughters to help his research he did not put them onto “theoretical discourses” but right into the crimes of the capitalist mode of production as revealed in the Blue Books. Laura assisted him at the Reading Room of the British Museum lying about her age in order to qualify for a reader’s ticket. Jenny acted as a part-time secretary and did research for him in the great library of Bloomsbury. The latest Blue Books arrive. What do they say? They must be read. Their own suffering is placed in perspective. The material goes into the chapter on machinery and the chapter on the general law of accumulation. “Deviling” was the slang in Victorian literary production of doing professional work for a barrister or literary man without fee. Marx himself delayed the completion of Das Kapital in order to incorporate the findings of the latest (5th) Report of the Children’s Employment Commission and the (8th) Board of Health Report, an inquiry into housing.
Marx finds evidence how a technical advance in one area leads to degradation in another. Britain was the worldwide emporium of the rag trade importing from Japan, South America, Egypt, Russia, for the paper industry. The girls employed as rag-sorters were infected by small pox and other infectious diseases. The same report gives him evidence of “overcrowded habitations absolutely unfit for human beings.” Twenty such colonies of 10,000 persons each in London were “nothing short of infernal.”
The 5th Report is cited in chapter 15, and the Bethnal Green public market where children hire themselves out to work for the silk manufacturers for 1s.8d. a week, on mechanization of brick-making, the replacement of stitching by riveting in the Leicestershire shoemaking trade, on the worker’s name for the print shops of books and newspapers, i.e. “slaughter-houses,” on the drunkenness of the “brickie,” how ocean navigation has “swept away the technical basis on which seasonal work was supported,” on the desirability of combining “some work as well as play to give variety to schooling,” the torturous, monstrous tension of the ten-year-old boys in the Coventry ribbon looms where “the boy is a mere substitute for steam-power,” how the parents exploit their children without limit possessing “the absolute power of making children mere machine”– “a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery.”
The 6th Report of the Children’s Employment Commission was published in March, and Marx cites it in ch. 25. How the girls of an agricultural village “live like pigs” and that depression and death often follow incest. How the gang system of agricultural work prevails m eastern England forty to fifty women and children (six to thirteen years of age) led by a gang-master, over-work, enormous marches, demoralization. He is the “democratic emperor” of these Sodoms and Gomorrahs.
These two chapters, these two subjects rather, were so important to Marx that he was willing to delay submitting his manuscript to get the latest information. Doing so was a family labor, and he relied on the intelligence, eye-sight, and study habits of his daughters. In July 1867 when he was back in London. he wrote the preface to Das Kapital presupposing “a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.” Surely, Mrs. Kugelmann was among those at the back of his mind?
Years later in 1874 Kugelmann persuaded Marx to attend the spa at Carlsbad. They quarreled, the grounds being the incessant, bullying, pedantry Kugelmann displayed towards his wife. Jupiter Tonans returned. The “foreign workers” of Moscow gave this account of the quarrel, “Although a sincere believer in the ultimate triumph of socialism, he rejected the proletarian class struggle and expected the realization of his ideal in a purely reformist way.” Eleanor, who accompanied Marx to Carlsbad, wrote, “It is a hard thing when a woman has no money of her own and her husband tells her every minute that she is ungrateful for his benefactions to her and the child. You cannot imagine how brutish Kugelmann is and how shameless.”[11] Marx wrote, “he torments the poor woman, who is in all respects his superior, in the most revolting manner.”[12] The twelve-year friendship with Ludwig Kugelmann was irreparably ruptured. We don’t know how this affected his relation with Gertrude. Karl Marx and family remained at least on good terms with her brother, Max Oppenheim, who they visited in Prague in 1876.
“It is a hard thing when a woman has no money of her own.” This is the proletarian condition, not having money. Without access to land, or subsistence,i tis a hard thing. It is this experience which makes the chapters “immediately readable.”
These are the chapters which tended to be neglected in the Das Kapital debates of the last quarter of the last century.[13] The big issues of Marx’s theory were expressed as the problem of the state, or the problem of consciousness. There was value theory and state theory. Or, they were expressed as a problem of alternative economics. Rarely were they expressed as class struggle and never as communism.[14] These chapters were brushed aside as mere illus trations of the heavy theory, or scorned as English history in a world whose history had long passed little England by. These commentators are like the explorer whose stories from Peru made such an impression on Marx during the bad weather on the North Sea. They derive nourishment from the placenta–Althusser swallowing meconium, Rosdolsky sucking the amniotic fluids.
For E.P. Thompson Capital remained “a study of the logic of capital, not capitalism, and the social and political dimensions of the history, the wrath, and the understanding of the class struggle arise from a region independent of the closed system of economic logic.” Thus he can agree with Louis Althusser that “history” is introduced to provide exemplification and “illustration” for a structure of theory which is not derived from this discipline.”[15] Theory–structure–discipline: these are not the terms of Marx the proletarian revolutionist.
This is what the Frau Kugelmann chapters require us to question: the book is not a closed field of mental mechanics.It is not a logic machine. In trying to say that it was, Thompson gets weird. “Capital was–and probably had tobe–a product of theoretical misceganation [sic].” Did he imagine that history is white and theory is black, or did he imagine it the other way around? “But misceganation of this order is no more possible in theory than in the animal kingdom, for we cannot leap across the fixity of categories of species.” Are the Kugelmann chapters white or Negro? Are the five gates African or European? “Miscegenation” was a neologism invented by two New York journalists in 1864, in order to bring together into a single abstraction a host of biological and aesthetic objections to interracial sexual union. The term was a brilliant piece of racist disinformation; it was the keystone in a pamphlet designed to destroy Abraham Lincoln’s reelection, and the term quickly caught on. The Emancipation Proclamation was called the “Miscegenation Proclamation.” Lincoln was reelected but the racist term and the assumptions behind it have remained current from Louis Agassiz to Jared Diamond.[16] Could Thompson have thought of any metaphor that might weaken his argument more?
This is an odd way of conceptualizing the work in the years of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) and Fourteenth Amendment (1868). Over the gate to the shorter working day Marx wrote, “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where in the black it is branded.” “Miscegenation” was invented as the International Workingmen’s Association was formed.
If expropriation is primary, what is secondary? This takes us to the other four gates which are: the extension of the working day; the division of the laborers, the mechanization of work, and the composition of reproduction. Extension, fractionation, mechanization, and composition: these are the four gates. Each describes means of exploitation. The fifth gate is expropriation. Expropriation is prior to exploitation, yet the two are interdependent. Expropriation not only prepares the ground so to speak, it intensifies exploitation, so together I call them X2.
The five gates refer to the longest chapters of Das Kapital. Extension refers to chapter X on “The Working Day.” This is the most well-known chapter. It was often published separately as a pamphlet. It was first translated into England by the German railway workers in St. Louis. Indeed, Marx was totally aware of the eight-hour agitation in the U.S. and the impact this chapter might have. It is an epitome of the whole book: it begins with the development of the length of working time from the transformation of the commons, and it ends with the transformation of the abolition of slavery into the eight-hour day movement “that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Fractionation refers to chapter XIV “The Division of Labour and Manufacture.” Here is where we find brilliant dialectical history of the labor process itself and how the class struggle is inherent to capitalist change. Mechanization refers to chapter XV called “Machinery and Modern Industry.” This gives an account of the Luddites, Factory Acts. The north German peasant magic of the seven league boots found their proletarian power in the most recorded song of American history. Here from the Ohio penitentiary:[17]
John Henry said to the Captain,
A man ain’t nothin but a man,.
And before I’ll let your steam drill beat me down,
Die with a hammer in my hand,
Die with a hammer in my hand.
Chapter 25 is called “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” and it describes the two parts of the working class, the paid and the unpaid. Capitalism is about the appropriation of surplus value, that is, the unpaid labors of the working class. John Henry was a convict who helped to build the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad after 1868 driving through the Appalachian mountains with his hammer. He was unpaid. In 1867 a civil engineer noted that the hand-drilling of holes in the rock was the bottleneck in the construction of railway tunnels. Rocking and rolling were the terms expressing the relation between the hammerman and the shaker holding the drill.
Primary accumulation must be seen in relation t6 the organization (the organs) and exploitation of the body of the working class in every frown and limb, its brains and skin, its guts and womb. Put this way, we see why Marx’s study of the working class in these Kugelmann chapters put such supreme importance on public health and children’s employment.
Returning to the fifth gate, the gate of expropriation or of primary accumulation, the author’s clauses follow like claps of thunder in the heavens. “This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” “Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation.” The noise from above are F-16s, the Garden of Eden is the desiccated marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates.
Expropriation intensifies exploitation: X2 has been our experience. The working day is increased, the working year is reduced as holidays are removed, as weekends are shot, the working life-time is increased as retirement is postponed and social security devalued. The mechanization of material and immaterial labor (as it is called) intensifies all other forms of labor. The composition of the “working class” is strained by the worldwide feminization of poverty and a Niagara of refugees–from Palestine, Mexico, Nigeria, India–talking to each other by cell-phone and laptop.
Primitive accumulation, like primitive communism, seems unrealistic or at least non-contemporary. The word “primitive” supplies us with some anthropological distance. Primitive accumulation happened long ago; primitive communism happened far away. This distance however is illusory. In our era of so-called “globalization” and incessant war accumulation is worldwide and violent.
The essence of Marxism is the class struggle. The resolution of that struggle is communism. One is in our face, and the other is not far away. Each of the gates I have described may be opened to that “fair field full of folk,” to use the phrase of English utopian dream. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” begins the Manifesto of 1848. In later editions Engels added the footnote that at the time they knew little about “primitive communism.”[18] This too must be called primary communism.
Ithaca
2007
Notes
1 This paper was delivered oµ March 30, 2007, at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, at a conference called Between Primitive Accumulation and the New Enclosures Conference. I thank Barry Maxwell, the organizer, and my colleagues Iain Boal and George Caffentzis.
2 Marx to Engels, February 13, 1866, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 227.
3 Karl Kautsky published Marx’s letters to Kugelmann in 1902. Five years later they were published in a Russian translation with a preface by Lenin. In r934 they were published in an. English translation by the Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, as Karl Marx, Letters to Dr. Kugelmann. Marxist Library, vol. I7 (New York: International Publishers, 1934).
4 Marx to Engels, May 7, 1867, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42.
5 He wrote Engels in January. “the baker alone is owed £20, and there is the very devil with butcher, grocer, taxes, etc.” Ibid., 371, 343.
6 Letter of Karl Marx to Dr. Kugelmann, November 30, 1867, in ibid., 489. So many commentators since have dealt with this problem of “incomprehensible terminology” by suggesting some other sequence of reading than chapter by chapter.
7 Walter Rodney; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981); and Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
8 Hugo Gellert, Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’ in Lithographs (New York: Long & Smith, 1934).
9 The introduction has been translated by T.M. Holmes, and is published in Karl Korsch, Three Essays on Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1971).
10 Marx to Kugelmann, October 12 and December I2, 1868, in Letters, 78, 83.
11 Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 167.
12 David Mclellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, 428.
13 Rosdolsky believes that Marx intended to write a “Book on Wage Labor,” which he abandoned because he had already conducted in volume one “the extensive empirical and historical analyses, which underpin the sections on absolute and relative surplus-value and on the process of accumulation.” Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital,’ translated by Pete Burgess (London: Pluto Press, 1977), 61. The Marxist exegetes of the late 1970s had nothing to do with the Kugelmann chapters, G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), or Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, or The Origin of Capitalism.
14 This is what is so remarkable about Harry Cleaver’s Reading Capital Politically.
15 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (Merlin Press: London, 1978), 257.
16 David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton & Co., 1864); Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia, University
of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2002), 116-18, 140.
17 Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
18 G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850, vol. 1 of A History of Socialist Thought (Macmillan: London, 1953), 248. See also Eric Hobsbawm’s introduction to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso, 20 1998).