"A New Marx" by Roberto Fineschi

A New Marx

by Roberto Fineschi

[Transcript, with minimal editing, of the opening lecture of the ‘Officina Marx 2018’ series, held at Le stanze delle memoria on 22 October 2018. For a more detailed discussion of many of the issues raised, see: R. Fineschi, A New Marx. Interpretation and Perspectives after the New Historical-Critical Edition (MEGA2), Rome, Carocci, 2008]

I

The title of my talk is ‘A New Marx’. On the one hand, it is a somewhat paradoxical title because Marx is a well-known author, widely read and much interpreted. Rivers of ink have been spilled over him, and not only that: his face was emblazoned on political banners, his name has been used by many and in many different ways as ideological political capital to legitimise historical movements, and even states.

In this sense, to the extent that he was used politically, it was inevitable that an orthodoxy would emerge, because political movements that become institutions require an official, eternal truth which, clearly, for the sake of identity and self-legitimisation, inevitably tends to solidify into formulas that gradually lose their grip on reality and become a set of stock phrases to be repeated on anniversaries and during celebrations.

This is certainly, in part, the fate that befell Marx’s work in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe, where it was the official doctrine of an institution and could only be true, unchangeable, and certain for ever and ever. Dialectical Materialism is the prime example of par excellence. Among the key elements of these various formulations was, of course, the notion that ‘real socialism’ constituted the realisation of Marx’s theories: as ‘real socialism’, by coming into being, confirmed Marx’s predictions—the existence of an intrinsic historical necessity whereby that outcome was ultimately inevitable. 

This ideology possessed great strength and, I would say, almost a sense of legitimacy in its day, because it gave courage and hope to activists. It was as if to say: if the outcome of our struggle is the direction towards which the course of history is tending, and this will inevitably happen, then we are strong because we are riding the wave of history; all this legitimises our political action. This ideology, which seemed to positively support the historical-political movement at the time of its expansion, sounded like a contradiction when socialism collapsed and came to an end (having already faced difficulties since at least the post-war period): if Marx had previously been right – because he would have argued that so-called real socialism was the verification of his predictions – its collapse, crushing everything under the rubble of the Wall, buried not only that experience but Marx himself; Marx, too, ended up in the dustbin of history alongside real socialism. Thus, the uninvited guest in these discussions about Marx is often real socialism itself.

Much of this new research – which I, too, am carrying out, as are others – aims, as a starting point, to show that real socialism, for better or for worse – because positive things did happen as well – is not one and the same as Marx.

Of course, it is not true that real socialism has nothing to do with Marx; they are simply not the same thing. If we start from this premise, his theory probably still has something to say to the present day. This is, in a way, the aim of this endeavour. Not least because, on closer inspection, Marx says very little about real socialism or, rather, about the future society. If you read Marx’s many works, the future society is merely alluded to, touched upon in a few sentences; it is not theorised in all its complexity. There are some ideas, such as rational management, but there is a world of difference between stating the need for rational management of the economy and then showing how this works and can be structured – and Marx does not do the latter. In reality, Marx essentially studies the capitalist mode of production; this is the subject of his research – he studies how capitalism works. This distinction is important because one cannot hold him responsible for everything that happened afterwards. It is an open-ended discussion that lends itself to multiple interpretations. This generally marks the beginning of the response to the first objection that is raised, namely the alleged identity between real socialism and Marx.

The second objection raised is that Marx spoke essentially of the industrial working class; he saw the working class as the historical agent in opposition to capital, the working class identified above all with the factory worker, the mass worker; and that, as this figure disappears or is scaled back, the ground would be pulled from under one of the fundamental premises and, therefore, once again, Marx would have been wrong or would have been right only within certain limits. Some people today therefore theorise about post-modern, post-industrial, post-workerist society; seeking subjects other than mass workers would be to go beyond Marx – that is, to use Marx but in order to transcend him, to see how his theory was limited and how there is a need to go beyond it. I believe, however, that the issue should instead be addressed by bearing in mind the different levels of ‘abstraction’ at which the theory is developed.

Before delving into the matter, however, I would like to make a brief digression regarding the publication of the new critical edition of the works of Marx and Engels, the *Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe*. Some of their traditional works have been profoundly affected by these editorial changes.

II

As for *German Ideology*, the new edition was published a few months ago and contains significant changes, particularly regarding the famous first chapter on Feuerbach, in which, according to some traditional interpretations, one might even find the foundation of the dialectic between the forces of production and the relations of production – the cornerstones of historical materialism. This first chapter does not actually exist as an independent draft; it is a collage of various preparatory materials; indeed, some headings were in the margins and have been moved to the top. Rather than a book, these were galley proofs of articles written for a quarterly journal that was never actually published. It had all been left there, and in the 1920s Ryazanov, then editor of the first MEGA (the first attempt to produce a historical-critical edition, which subsequently foundered), delighted to have found the famous book left to the ‘gnawing’ criticism of mice mentioned in the Preface to *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*, structured it in a manner that was not always philologically acceptable. The intervention of Adoratsky, the new editor of the MEGA following Ryazanov’s purge, further worsened the situation by restructuring the chapter on Feuerbach in a wholly arbitrary manner. These texts have given rise to many interpretations; after all, books have their own destiny, so even these philologically imperfect interpretations have produced theories, etc., etc., which in themselves have their own merit; the point at present, however, is that it is possible to return to Marx—that is, one can finally read the texts as he wrote them. This applies in particular to *Capital*, Marx’s mature, unfinished work, to which he devoted practically his entire life, at least from 1857 onwards, writing three colossal manuscripts in which he sketched out the entire theory three times; broad outlines, of course, before publishing the first volume in several editions with numerous variations, and subsequently attempting to publish the second and third volumes without success. It is well known that, after his death, Engels published the second and third volumes. In the introductions, he explains the nature of the editorial work he undertook, though without recounting the whole story. Now, at last, all the original manuscripts on which Engels worked have been published, and what emerges clearly is that the books were not finished; they were far from being in a publishable form. In particular, the main manuscript on which Engels worked for the third book dates from 1864–65; Marx died in 1883 and the book was published, edited by Engels, in 1894. In fact, this third volume is therefore the least developed, because Marx published the first volume in 1867 and then republished it two more times; the manuscript for the third volume is thus an old, largely unfinished manuscript, containing an entire section entitled ‘The Confusion’. Speaking of his own work, he himself considered this section to be confused; it is a list of quotations on credit and fictitious capital, clearly showing that he was still working through the issues and did not have a clear grasp of the ideas. To give an example of how Engels altered this section – not because he had any ill intentions, but simply because, in order to be published, a book must be finished and the manuscript was not, so he had to finish it himself. From this entire section, entitled ‘The Confusion’, Engels extracted 11 chapters, each with a title and a structure, generally consisting of quotations linked by a short paragraph written by Engels – an introductory remark by Engels, the quotation, followed by a connecting remark by Engels. This is not to suggest that Engels was a deceiver or a traitor – far from it; Engels sought to carry out his work as honestly as possible. The point is that the book was unfinished and that he completed it, in the sense that he published it as a finished work, when in reality it was a mass of material in which there were countless loose ends. 

To mention just a few of the classic problems of Marxian interpretation, the transformation of value into prices was far from complete; it was a composite exposition. Even the tendency for the rate of profit to fall was far from complete. Not to mention fictitious capital, where there is this whole section known as ‘confusion’. If a book of this sort is published as a finished work, it results as an aporetic book in which certain parts are at clash with other parts. For example, the whole debate on the transformation of value into prices, which is one of the classic themes of Marxian exegesis, arises from presenting as complete a development that was, in fact, moving in conflicting and evolving directions. Returning to Marx’s texts allows us to make use of these paths that were open to moving forward, to explore Marx’s argument in greater depth beyond the historical impasse in which it ended up; for without these new insights – if we stick to the traditional texts – everything has truly already been said, and probably even more than everything. The traditional Marx has been read, discussed and re-discussed; it is truly difficult to add anything.

The ‘new’ Marx is therefore not merely new in terms of interpretation but also in his textual foundation; that is to say, he is quite literally a new Marx to be read, comprising new or revised texts.

Incidentally, the critical edition has also uncovered previously unknown manuscripts, and thirty-two volumes of annotations by both Marx and Engels are currently being published. When they were studying a book, they would copy out key passages and then comment on them; there are thirty-two volumes of such material! So it is now truly possible to go through the text line by line, researching and re-examining – even critically – old notions in the light of this new textual evidence.

III

Here are a few examples to illustrate why it is so important to return to the text. Anyone who has ever studied Marx knows that he is associated with the theory of historical materialism. In your opinion, how many times does Marx use the term ‘historical materialism’ in his entire body of work? Never, not even once. Or take the ‘philosophy of praxis’. How many times, in his entire body of work, does Marx use the expression ‘philosophy of praxis’? Never. For those who have studied economics, Marx is the philosopher of the labour theory of value. How many times did Marx use the expression ‘labour theory of value’ in his work?

Never, not even once. The paradoxical thing is that all the chapters in philosophy or economics textbooks use terms to define Marx that he never actually used himself. It is therefore crucial to return to Marx’s own text to see what Marx actually said.

Viewed at a high level of abstraction, his theory proves to have surprising long-term predictive power, in that it theorises a whole series of phenomena that are more relevant now than they were when he wrote. This is what is truly impressive. For example, let us take globalisation; Marx does not use the term ‘globalisation’, but rather, in a more Hegelian vein, he speaks of ‘the universalisation of individual labour and vice versa’; the interlinking of the production and reproduction of humankind on a global scale, according to Marx, is one of the long-term trends of the capitalist mode of production; he mentions this in the Manifesto, but he first theorised it in 1857–58, at a time when there was still a long way to go before it reached the pervasive scale we see today. His theory predicted, a hundred years in advance, long-term trends that would develop – and have developed. According to him, the capitalist mode of production tends to bring about other changes, such as an exponential increase in labour productivity. Even it is difficult to argue that this is not the case, because labour productivity has increased dramatically. Marx is a theorist not only of the cooperative dimension of labour but also of the process by which science and the automation of labour are determined as a long-term trend of the capitalist mode of production; and here too, it seems to me, he was right, precisely by developing the theory of relative surplus value and demonstrating how the capitalist mode of production, paradoxically, on the one hand is based on the exploitation of living labour but on the other tends to expel living labour from the production process, thereby increasingly reducing the proportion of necessary labour. This fundamental contradiction means that the individual worker’s contribution becomes increasingly specialised and increasingly limited, to the point where it is so routine that it can be replaced by a machine. This is the theoretical basis for conceiving of automation on a mass scale. Paradoxically, the claims about the end of work are not so inconsistent with what Marx said, not because work actually ceases to exist, but because the intrinsic tendency of the capitalist mode of production to rely on labour whilst simultaneously displacing it is already underway, and in the long term this leads to a process of widespread displacement and, consequently, mass unemployment. A massive wave of mass unemployment which, from a certain point onwards, is no longer even elastic but rigid, and cannot be reabsorbed by further expansion of production. In short, here too, in my view, current dynamics are in line with what Marx hypothesised.

IV

The crisis. This, too, is a topic on which Marx has, in fact, been on everyone’s lips, given that orthodox theories offer no explanation for the crisis. If you study macroeconomics textbooks, you’ll read about frictional crises, readjustment crises and rigidities that can be alleviated through external interventions; however, these do not imply structural cyclicality, meaning that the crisis is a constant, recurring element of social reproduction. Therefore, when faced with crises such as those of 2007 and 2008 – which are, in part, still ongoing – our official economists are at a loss for words. They finally admit that that the crisis exists and that Marx is right, because there is overproduction, because the capitalist mode of production tends to produce regardless of solvent demand – that is, regardless of who can pay – and so ultimately floods the market with a quantity of unsaleable goods; prices collapse, and financial speculation cannot respond to this objective dynamic.

So much so that we are once again talking about Karl Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter – all those authors who ultimately cast doubt on the idea that a pre-established harmony would put everything back in its place. In Marx’s theory, the crisis is structural; the capitalist mode of production will necessarily and cyclically produce crises – nothing could be more normal: of course there is a crisis, because that is how the capitalist mode of production works.

The final part of *Capital* is devoted to credit and fictitious capital – in short, to finance – and this, again, at a time when finance certainly existed but was not developed to the extent that it is today; Marx clearly sees what the trends are. The capitalist mode of production, in its process of accumulation, at a certain point tends to split and present, as two apparently real accumulation on the one hand and fictitious accumulation on the other. The entire final part of the theory in *Capital* centres on the analysis of the relationship between these two types of accumulation, and how fictitious accumulation affects real accumulation and vice versa; he therefore clearly has in mind the problem that the two do not coincide immediately – that is, that there are levels of separation which also entail a multiplication of the fictitious elements in circulation; it is not just money, but also shares, credit notes and currencies. In short, Marx does not analyse the complexity of this whole subject to its full extent, partly because, when he theorised it, it had not yet developed to the level it has reached today. However, it is not true, as many claim, that Marx did not considered finance; on the contrary, he places the subject of finance precisely as the culminating point of his theory of *Capital*; it is there that the entire complexity of the system becomes even more intricate. This is a whole area in which one can explore further. Yet in Marx there is a foundation from which to begin.

V

I would now like to return, as I was saying at the beginning, to the question of the factory worker, because some argue that Marx was wrong on the issue of the worker – that the factory worker was supposed to be the subject, and so on and so forth. He was wrong about the revolution because it was supposed to take place in England, in the advanced countries, and so on and so forth; so we need to address these aspects.

In my view, an explanation can be found here, and the starting point is essentially this: what is Marx actually talking about? Is he talking about capitalism during the Industrial Revolution? Is he talking about capitalism in general? In other words, is it a sort of theorisation of what was happening in England in the 1800s, or is it a more general theory of capitalism that identifies underlying mechanisms which are not necessarily confined to that historical phase? In my view, the answer is the latter, and here too philology helps. Firstly, how many times does Marx use the word ‘capitalism’ throughout his theory? Once. Just once. What Marx is always talking about is the capitalist mode of production, and he himself states that he will use England as an example, as it is a most developed and therefore the country in which the capitalist mode of production is most apparent, manifesting itself in its fullness. But in reality, what he is discussing are the fundamental laws of this system, and if we, bearing this in mind, examine his theory on the subject, this allows us to think about it in a different way.

The mass factory worker – this traditional interpretation emerges from the section in the first volume of *Capital* entitled ‘The Production of Relative Surplus Value’, in which Marx demonstrates the material and organisational transformations that the mode of labour undergoes once it is subsumed under capital, that is, once it is integrated into the process of capital valorisation. He mentions three figures, all of which are extremely well-known: 1) co-operation, the co-operative nature of labour which increases its productivity; 2) manufacture, in which the individual worker becomes a ‘partial’ worker—that is, no longer capable of carrying out the entire process alone but able to do so by collaborating with others; and finally 3) large-scale industry, in which the individual worker even becomes an appendage of an objective process, performing only ancillary tasks; indeed, they may well disappear altogether with automation. Along these lines, the factory worker has traditionally been identified as the culmination of this process and therefore as the principal antagonist to capital, precisely because labour was organising itself in this manner. This interpretation is clearly legitimate, and historically true in certain phases, in that when Marx was writing, this seemed to be the actual course of history. Subsequently, the expansion of large-scale industry even after the Second World War, seemed to confirm this process of the factory worker becoming the predominant form of labour; then, as you know, at least in the more advanced countries, there was a period of stagnation, a decline in the industrial sector, the shift towards the service sector – in short, offshoring – and, through mechanisation, a process of apparent reduction in the presence of the factory worker, thus providing factual evidence that this theory was incorrect.

Here, we can see how Marx approaches the subject on two levels: one more theoretical and formal, and the other more historical and descriptive. The historical–descriptive approach is the one most frequently cited – a sort of phenomenology of the transformations of labour in industrial society. However, if we look at the formal aspects, we actually identify changes in the way people work that do not necessarily apply only to manufacturing or large-scale industry. Let me try to explain this more clearly.

With manufacturing, we see the division of labour: the worker is no longer able to carry out the entire process but only a small part of it; with large-scale industry, we see ‘appendixisation’. However, these stages can be interpreted as ‘phases’ in which historically new ways of working emerged. Did these ways of working – which emerged thanks to the capitalist mode of production in the form of manufacturing and large-scale industry, and thus the division of labour, subordination to an objective set by the capitalist, and so on – cease to exist with the decline of large-scale industry or manufacturing? I do not think so. Because even in the most computerised of production chains, even the freelancer sitting at home filling in a short article using pre-formatted software that may well have been supplied from India, works in exactly the same formal ways: this is a process of fragmentation and subordination that corresponds exactly to these modes of work. The worker is fragmented, subordinate and reduced to an appendage. These are therefore modes that can be categorised within that theory; they are nothing other than that theory.

Even the form of employment contract that is not necessarily wage-based – the freelancer, for example – is not a subordinate worker in contractual terms but, in practice, is one; indeed, it is even worse because they bear the burden of downtime. Let’s take the example of someone who actually works five hours out of every eight in an office each day, for which they are paid; if their employer cannot keep them working for eight hours, their idle time is a cost, because the employer pays for eight hours but the worker only works five. If, on the other hand, this person is a freelancer, we have a sort of piecework arrangement: the five hours during which they are not productive are borne by the worker; therefore, all of this fits perfectly within the system of cost reduction that is the dynamic of relative surplus-value production. If we consider the formal transformations in the way we work, then, those categories originally devised to describe manufacturing and large-scale industry still apply. These are comprehensive processes with externally determined aims that subordinate and fragment the activity of individuals working for the valorisation of capital, exactly as they did before.

In this context, it is interesting to see how the term ‘operaio’ has traditionally been translated. In traditional editions—not only in Italian but across the Neo-Latin languages—if you read the text, you will find that sometimes the term ‘operaio’ is used and sometimes ‘lavoratore’. In reality, if you look at the German text, the same word is always used: ‘Arbeiter’. This choice to translate in one way or another has always been a decision made by the translator, who, for their good reasons believed that in certain circumstances it was better to use ‘operaio’ rather than ‘lavoratore’, but the German text always uses ‘Arbeiter’. And ‘Arbeiter’ derives from ‘arbeiten’ and means ‘to work’; the final ‘-er’ is like our ‘-tore’ in Italian – it is the suffix used to form a noun from a verb. Marx speaks of the worker as the counterpart to capital: the Lohn-Arbeiter, that is, wage labour; the concept of wage labour is broad, much broader not only than that of the ‘operaio’ but also broader than that of the ‘productive worker’, who is merely employed in the production process. The ‘Lohn-Arbeiter’ is the individual who participates in a subordinate, fragmented or even semi-automatic manner in the process of capital valorisation.

The process of capital valorisation is not, in fact, merely the process of capital production—that is, the first volume of *Capital*—but also the process of capital circulation; it encompasses the overall configurations of the system, which are the three volumes of *Capital*. The chapter that Marx entitles ‘Classes’ is the last in the third volume; it is not in the first volume. Therefore, the problem for anyone seeking, on the basis of these premises, to develop a theory of political subjects and political action is, on the one hand, a problem of fundamental definitions: that is, what is ‘the other of capital’, what is the subject antagonistic to capital? Marx speaks of wage labour. Wage labour – placing great emphasis on the factory worker because this worked well in those specific historical circumstances, though more generally speaking, wage labour. This conception of wage labour as fragmented, subordinate, a link in the great chain of capitalist reproduction does not in itself identify just a particular subject; it is the fundamental premise for conceiving more concrete configurations. It is one thing to speak of Italian capitalism within the European Community in 2018, and quite another to discuss the capitalist mode of production in general: in between there are many intermediate levels; there is, for example, a theory of the state, of international trade, of the world market, and of how this takes shape and creates more complex subjectivities.

Even mass unemployment is perfectly functional to wage labour; it is simply the other side of the coin – it is that section of the workforce which the capitalist mode of production renders unusable. It is not that they are unusable in the abstract, but that they are unusable because they do not add value to capital. In other words: even this mass unemployment is part of the game. Clearly, if I have political projects, I cannot speak to these people as if they were wage labourers; I must explain and structure my argument so that they understand that their not being wage labourers is part of the wage system, that they are functionally non-wage labourers because they do not add value to capital and therefore exist within the same system as wage labourers. This is not possible without underpinning theories – not just theories of the capitalist mode of production, but also of specific forms of capitalism – and factual analyses, specifically of Italian capitalism in 2018 within the context of the European Union, and so on.

VI

Why was Marx wrong in his political predictions? Because he, too, failed to develop these intermediate levels; he was unable to complete all this intermediate theorising before his death – indeed, he died before finishing his theory of the capitalist mode of production in general, which remains unfinished; yet, on the other hand, he wrote *Capital* to give the working class the greatest weapon to hurl against the bourgeoisie, to quote one of his famous passages. So what does he do? He becomes the first Marxist in history, attempting to apply his abstract theory to concrete political ends, whilst facing the problem of this vast gap between general and particular levels. And indeed, he gets it all wrong: there is no revolution in England, nor does the English working class act as the vanguard; indeed, the revolution takes place in a corner of the world where capitalism was present only sporadically. However, in my view, this attempt at reconstruction that I am proposing also allows us to account for these very failures of Marx himself; thus, when Marx speaks of the inevitable revolution, he is engaging in politics, seeking to tell the workers he is addressing that they are justified in their struggle, even if he could not yet tell them so scientifically, because scientifically he had not yet completed his work.

Marx’s original plan comprised six volumes: *Capital*, *Wage Labour*, *Rent*, *The State*, *International Trade* and *The World Market* – six volumes of which he barely managed to write the first, squeezing in a small section of the second and a small section of the third; it is, therefore, a largely unfinished project. Despite its incompleteness, his is nonetheless one of the few theories that explains so much about the present, and that is why we are making this effort to go back to the sources – to reclaim, as far as possible, an authentic formulation on which to work. Because the foundations are sound; in its basic outlines, it has been able to explain long-term trends. In my view, the challenge for us today—who in some way draw on this theory—is to move forward and try to continue the work Marx began, whilst, of course, recognising all its limitations, including those I have outlined. In reality, the limitations do exist: the failure to theorise the intermediate levels, and consequently the search for shortcuts to intervene immediately – that is, for answers to day-to-day political issues based on abstract theory – is not immediately possible. In that formulation, there can be no answer to this.

I have not gone into the details of more specialist theoretical issues concerning aporetic points in the theory, for example the theory of transformation. I do not know how familiar you are with this topic, but it is one of the most significant issues in the traditional debate amongst economists: in the third volume of *Capital*, Marx is said to have failed to transform values into prices, that is, to demonstrate how a theory of production prices develops from the theory of value. You might ask, why is this such an important issue? It is so important because it is not merely a theoretical assumption, but a purely political one: even those who raised this criticism did not particularly care about the transformation, because if you look at the orthodox theories taught in macroeconomics, some are based on premises that are truly laughable, with utterly arbitrary assumptions.

Even a great many ‘orthodox’ theorists recognise this, but they turn a blind eye to it in order to the theory forward and develop it. They aren’t that strict. So why are they so strict with poor Karl? Because the contradiction between the first and third volumes would destroy the coherence of the theory, and if the theory doesn’t hold water, what else doesn’t hold water either? Exploitation doesn’t hold water, class antagonism doesn’t hold water; all the political consequences of the theory collapse together. That is why they have attacked this aspect as much as they possibly could. It is, in fact, aporetic; it is truly a difficult point in the text; some of the traditional criticisms do indeed raise legitimate questions. In my view, the philological reconstruction must provide answers to these legitimate doubts and, at the same time, be capable of responding positively, preserving exploitation and everything else alongside the transformation. So, whilst these matters may seem like philological quibbles, the real point is to resolve concrete theoretical issues, the resolution of which also lends legitimacy to possible theories and political movements based on this theory. This is the practical perspective of this type of research.

The key point is this: Marx is a truly ‘new’ author, with a renewed textual basis that allows us to attempt to break free from the shallows of traditional debate. It is not a question of proposing, in the abstract, new interpretations that are more or less fanciful, more or less legitimate, more or less debated and re-debated – because everything has truly already been said on this subject; the point is that Marx is different in his texts, and given that this is a theory which, over the long term, has already demonstrated great predictive power, it is well worth seeing if we can glean something from it, because it is truly the only theory that explains crisis, globalisation, conflict and financialisation – it encompasses it all – so… thank you, Marx, and let’s get to work!

Thank you all for your attention.