Slip the Surly Bonds of History

The Marxist Mode of Understanding History

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have always had its critics. Since the very first smokestack was erected, artisans and craftsmen lamented the darkening of their countryside skies and blackening of their streams. On the one side, late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Romantics and Socialists decried the machine’s deformation of the countryside laborer and the injustice of a prosperous few dominating the impoverished many. On the other, British political economists marveled at the wonders of industry and declared capitalism to be the greatest fulfillment of human nature — the natural inclination to buy and sell, to satisfy self-interest, and eye one’s neighbor for the best deal — that there ever was.

While critical, the Utopian Socialists’ insufficient understanding of political economy led them to accept some of the central premises of political economy and produce piecemeal solutions ranging from Proudhon’s market socialist schemes and Fourier’s cooperative towns funded by rich benefactors. Their critiques therefore failed to transcend the view of the world from the standpoint of bourgeois political economy.

Marx was a radical. He was not just a radical for his century but a radical for his epoch. It’s not simply his critique of capitalism that made Marx a radical: it was his conception of history as action that marks him head-and-shoulders above his contemporaries. While political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo viewed the desire to profit as natural to human nature, Marx studied it as a social and historical phenomenon resulting from the actions of humans and specific to the capitalist mode of production. The “ruthless critique of everything” is not just a more intense critique than those of the Romantics and Utopians that came before. Marx’s ruthless critique was ruthless because it got to the root of the problem.

Marx is essential not only for understanding capitalism but how we approach the totality of human social relations and their reproduction. The implications of his critique stretch beyond economics. Marx’s analysis aids our study of how phenomena like race, wage-labor, gender, private property, and rent are historical constructions and contribute to the unfolding of capitalist social relations. My intent is to lay the broad outline of how the sociological dimension of Marxist analysis leads to a sturdier foundation for acting towards a better future through its use in studying phoenmena like the Black Radical Tradition.

The problem of profit is of our own making. Although it would be foolish to believe that profit and its consequences upon our lives and the earth can simply be unmade, they nevertheless can still be transcended.

Materialism and Out-Smithing Adam Smith

Misunderstandings abound concerning Marx’s method. The most prevalent of these is that Marx reduces everything to “material” conditions, usually entailing factors like income, industry, geography, natural resources, and other factors. Liberal critics criticize Marx for his crude reduction of society to the merely perceptible; more specifically, Marx is accused of connecting literally everything back to the most visible manifestations of class conflict.¹

If Marx did hold this approach to studying society, one would indeed wrinkle their nose and scratch their head at the idea that Marx would have anything to say about black slaves or middle-class housewives. But this characterization of Marx’s method is the exact opposite of Marx’s actual approach to understanding society. In actuality, Marx’s method begins at the level of the abstract, the imperceptible, and ends at the concrete. Marx renders his method explicit in the introductory chapter of the Grundrisse: 

“When we consider a given country… we begin with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc. It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete... However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc… Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations.”²

Marx set out to distinguish himself from the liberal economists and historians of his day by going beyond the crude materialism of his contemporaries. He sought to begin at the level of the abstract because the concrete is merely “the concentration of many [abstract] determinations…” Marx’s method is, in other words, scientific because he seeks out and isolates the simplest elements of a given totality and gradually descends to the level of the concrete, adding more abstract relations until the concrete world emerges from them. This is why Marx begins Capital Volume I by first analyzing its most basic element, the commodity, and introduces more determinations until we arrive at more concrete expressions of capital like commercial capital and banking capital in Volume III. 

This is important because Marx did not set out to merely describe the world i.e. paint a picture of the world as it appeared. The first to attempt this systematically wasn’t Marx but Adam Smith. Marx instead aimed to understand the canvas beneath the paint. 

In their respective investigations, Smith and Ricardo took for granted economic categories like profit, wages, and rents and believed them to be the perfect expressions of natural reason. This led them to project the values and laws of bourgeois society backwards into history. History only starts after the end of the “early and rude state of society” when “the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land” begins.³ Marx questioned how natural these forms really were and aimed to grasp the “inner-laws” that drove their development to prove that the capitalist mode of production is just as subject to history as those modes of production that preceded it. 

Marx transcended the classical political economists once he criticized the forms on which their investigations into bourgeois society rested. Marx insisted that political economists like David Ricardo

“ultimately made the antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits… the starting point of his investigations, naively taking the antagonism for a social law of nature.”⁴

The political economists, reaching the limits of eighteenth-century materialism, took the forms of bourgeois society for granted, projecting them backwards into history as eternal laws upon which society moved.

Restoring Human Nature

In the German Ideology, Marx writes that the first premise of all human history is the existence of living human individuals. “Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”⁵ The activity which mediates between man and nature is labor. Through their labor, people confront nature, appropriates its material, and changes it “to a form appropriate to his own needs.”⁶

The corollary of production being the basis of human beings is their reproduction through time. The aim of any people is to survive not only this moment but the next and the one thereafter. Survival is a continuous process where human beings appropriate the wealth of nature in service of this end. 

Presupposing reproduction is not only a change in nature but a change in man. When one appropriates something of nature, i.e. an acre of woodland for timber, the wood is no longer there. The basis of wealth is therefore subject to a constant state of change which people must respond to and build on if they wish to perpetuate themselves. Therefore, people change simultaneously as they change nature, the mediator between the two being labor. As Marx points out, “After the city of Rome had been built and the surrounding countryside cultivated by its citizens, the conditions of the community were different from what they had been before.”⁷

Let’s descend one level of abstraction. Up to this point we have generally discussed abstract Man’s relationship with abstract nature. There is no Robinson Crusoe, the solitary individual who is able to build society from the bottom-up. The human being above all is a social being. People do not exist alone but exist within a community. For humans to exercise their peculiarly rational faculties, they must have a language through which they may render themselves communicable not only to others but to themselves as individuals. This language through which the individual develops their sense of self exists before them and will exist after them. There also must be social norms and customs and relations in which they are embedded that allow them to exercise their rationality through praxis. Praxis allows people not only to cultivate their rationality but also to form bonds with and care for one another. Out of these bonds forms a social division of labor.

Though it appears to us that there is a fundamental opposition between the individual and general interest, i.e. the private and public spheres, by no means is this opposition “natural.” This opposition only appears fixed in human nature because the opposition between man and man rests on a set of historical social relations that promote competition, opposition, and exclusivity, i.e. private property. It is a social order organized by the relations of private property that divorces the individual from society and forces him or her to confront society as something alien to them instead of recognizing that he or she is constituted by society just as they constitute society.

For now we will leave the problem of private property aside for another day. All that’s important to keep in mind is that, for Marx, the natural opposition between individual and society is a false one. It is a one-sided and mechanical approach that obliterates history. All previous societies are no longer understood on their own terms but on the terms of bourgeois thought. It is a blunt negation of history that understands Qing China and the Roman Republic as unfortunate but necessary steps to the most rational society in human history. Marx insisted against his peers that societies must be understood by their own laws and movements, not our’s. Human beings produce history in very different ways and those ways must be understood as qualitatively different from those of the present day.

The reproduction of a given society is expressed through the bonds that bind people of a particular community together, i.e. their social relations. Humans are the producers and products of social relations. These social relations allow people to express their natural sociality and perpetuate themselves. But, people do not merely reproduce themselves physiologically. They also reproduce their social relations and therefore themselves socially. Hence why Marx critiques the political economists’ uncritical assumptions of wage-labor and capital being inherent to human nature, i.e. Smith’s claim that the “propensity to truck and barter” is simply human nature. For Marx, “The worker produces capital, capital produces him – hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle.”⁸ Just as the serf is produced by medieval society and medieval society produced the serf, so too does the wage-laborer produce capitalist society and in turn is produced by it.

Black History and White Particularlity

Here we can infer that different means of (re)production produce different societies. While the same elements may exist across different societies, nothing would be more erroneous than to assume a given element fulfills the same role between different modes of production. Money, for example, is not used across societies merely because it avoids the problem of barter as some economists claim. While in a developed capitalist society money is a store of value and plays the role of universal equivalent between commodities, it also plays a far more modest role in those societies in which exchange-relations do not dominate. 

The sociological dimension of Marx’s project was to understand the development of different societies on their own terms. The means by which capitalist society reproduces itself are different from those of feudal society. Whereas even the analytically rigorous Ricardo projects onto the primitive fisherman the mindset of a commodity owner comparing his fish with annuity tables, Marx insists on understanding societies by the laws and limits of their respective sets of social relations.⁹

Beginning our investigation upon Marxist premises — that the categories of capitalist society (wages, rent, and profit) are socially constructed, men reproduce not only themselves but the social relations in which they’re embedded, and that different societies reproduce themselves in different ways — allows for a richer understanding of the elements on which capitalist society rest. 

The Marxist approach is especially productive when taking social relations like race as its object. Liberal analysis begins at the level of racial antagonism, taking it as a given. It assumes a society constituted of individuals competing with other individuals whose interests must be mediated by an alienated political or social structure e.g. the state or civil society. The end of racial oppression is almost incomprehensible, tantamount to the Coming of the Lord or the four-sided triangle. Blackness is objectified and racialized for the simple reason that it is different from whiteness, a product of individual pathology and bigotry. 

Certain whites disliking blacks because of the color of their skin is a real enough phenomenon. This is certainly a materialist approach insofar as it takes the appearance of reality as is. But if we begin our investigation jumping off the springboard of alienated social forms like race, then we’re going to crack our head on the concrete of reified conclusions. We simply cannot assume race is a transhistorical category synonymous with the “us vs them” abstract understanding of human conflict. To do so merely smudges the differences between different historical epochs and our account becomes both stagist in seeing past societies as merely lesser-developed versions of contemporary society and static in its attributing to race an atemporal quality akin to hunger or thirst, something simply part of human nature.

Simply stating that European whites oppressed Africans because of the color of their skin is fetishistic. It projects social qualities onto a thing i.e. black skin. It would be as fantastic as claiming that social characteristics like selflessness and kindness are inherent in the physical quality of blue eyes. A physical quality only means something when placed within a set of given social relations. This is a product of the generally inverted disposition of bourgeois thought that either attributes social relations to things, i.e. the ability of industrial machinery to produce commodities being inherent in the machine rather than the worker operating it, or derives technical relations from social phenomena, i.e. rent being an inherent aspect of the physical land and soil.

Marxists working within the Black Radical and Feminist traditions have done more than anyone to emphasize the sociological character of Marx’s critique. Cedric Robinson studies the notion of “blackness” as a historical novelty only emerging out of the long sixteenth-century ascendance of capital. Unlike the term African, Moor, or Ethiope, the Negro

“suggested no situatedness in time, that is history, or space, that is ethno- or politico-geography. The Negro had no civilization, no cultures, no religions, no history, no place, and finally no humanity that might command consideration… the Negro constituted a marginally human group, a collection of things of convenience for use and/or eradication.”¹⁰

These culturally-differentiated Africans — whether Yoruba, Asante, or Ghanan — were crammed into slave ships, heading for the sugar plantations of the British West Indies, and reduced to their physical quality of being black. Their cultural differences were subordinated to their common bondage and submerged into homogenous exchange-value. Marcus Rediker in his studies of the slave ship furnishes accounts of how whites appeared to enslaved blacks “as evil spirits and horrible-looking ‘white people.’”¹¹ Just as “black” africans were lumped together because of their status as slaves, so too did “whiteness” emerge from the motley crew of sailors — Englishmen, Dutchmen, and Frenchmen — whose commonality was that they were not enslaved “blacks.”

But, crucial in these accounts of blackness are 1) their inherently social character and 2) the continually changing terms on which blackness is defined. Both Robinson and Rediker emphasize the importance of the sugar plantation and slave ship in calling forth a trans-atlantic proletariat whose cultural and ethnic differences were submerged to produce a certain identity associated with a certain form of labor: blackness and slavery. But even so, the fierce, centuries-long slave resistance preserved certain continuities from the African past while forging new bonds of solidarity in the foreign lands of the Carolinas and Caribbean, out of which emerged an African-American identity.

Dialectically, this slave resistance further solidified white solidarity across classes. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century white planters reported how entire provinces in the West Indies were in danger of being massacred by their large African enslaved proletarians.¹² Marx’s method demonstrates that, far from an eternal category, race is a rickety social construction that must be continually reproduced on ever-changing conditions if it is to have any power whatsoever.

We must not simply strike at the mask but through it. Race is a social relation historically determined and socially contested throughout time and space. The shifting social relations and the class struggle on which they are based account for how difficult it is to retain a static and transhistorical category of race. Even as blackness first emerged out of a social dynamic as a means of identifying those black-skinned Africans whose only commonality was their shared bondage in the fields, that same mark of oppression was baptized through centuries of struggle as a badge of pride and solidarity. The decolonizing twentieth-century witnessed the greatest global upheaval in human history. Calls for Black Power were not only heard in Greenwood, Mississippi and Harlem, New York but also in Ghana, Algeria, and Guyuana. Black radicals like Kwame Ture, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Franz Fanon, and Eric Williams consciously identified with a centuries-old international movement. During the sixteenth century, blackness was a mark of shame to be imposed upon the slave that destined them for the sugar plantations. White was universal and black was particular. The white Englishman defined their freedoms and rights against the bonded condition of the black slave. But by the twentieth century, blackness achieved a new meaning during the global war against imperialism, something more universal. As James Baldwin writes: 

“The white man's unadmitted — and apparently, to him, unspeakable — private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller's checks, visits surreptitiously after dark. How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?”¹³

Now, whiteness was particular and black the universal. The prosperity of whiteness hinged on the poverty of blackness.

It wasn’t simply radical black activists who grasped the universal character of their struggle. American whites in power, such as Los Angeles’s police chief William Parker, viewed rioting blacks in the Watts ghetto as “fighting like the Viet Cong” thousands of miles across the Pacific.¹⁴ The powerful few understood that the insurgents of the American ghettos had an unsettling amount in common with those of Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria. Lyndon B. Johnson not only passed the infamous 1968 Crime Bill that laid the first cornerstone of the modern American carceral state, but also strengthened policing resources sent to counterinsurgents and police forces in Europe, South America, and Asia.¹⁵ The globalization of the police matched the globalization of the struggle.

The Marxist mode of history helps us understand these developments, from the sixteenth-century to the twentieth, as possessing an organizing logic neither determinative nor wishful. New opportunities of emancipation emerge as others close. It is only during the twentieth century — its two world wars, the reconstitution of global empires, decolonization movements, and global economic crises — that this mode of struggle could be so fully-articulated, even in spite of its contradictions. Marx allows us to understand race not merely as a form of bigotry but as a social relation of production: it is a relation of production not simply producing material commodities, like sugar or cotton, but reproducing society. Race has power precisely because of the alienation between man and man produced by the universalization of a particular identity — private property — across all human society. 

Baldwin wrote in 1963 that whites must become black in order to free themselves of the hold race has on them. In other words, whites must identify themselves with the universal class. So too does Marx claim that private property can only be abolished when the proletariat abolishes itself, i.e. transcends that social relation whose existence hinges on their landlessness, alienation, and separation. Emancipation can only be universal. “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”¹⁶

History is made by men, and these men in turn are constituted by the societies that produce them. Marx’s critique of political economy cleanly evades the Scylla and Charybdis of Great Men and Material Conditions by affirming that both men and their societies are both different moments of the same process: history. This process can — must — be put to liberatory ends. Marx’s critique of political economy, in whose place he posits a radical understanding of history and all its institutions as action, allows us to understand the alienated forms of individual and society and act towards a society in which there is neither abstract man nor abstract society — only socialized man and humanized society.

1. From here on my use of the term “liberal” refers to both conservatives and politically-left liberals i.e. those who are generally in favor of capitalism.

2. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics. 93

3. Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations Books 1-3. Penguin Classics. 150.

4. Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. 97. Penguin Classics.

5. Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederich. Marx-Engels Reader: German Ideology. W. W. Norton & Company. 149.

6. Marx. Capital: Volume I. 283.

7. Marx. Grundrisse. 493.

8. Marx, Karl. Economic Manuscripts of 1844.

9. Marx, Capital Volume I. 169.

10. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. The University of North Carolina Press. 81.

11. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. Penguin Books. 128-129.

12. Horne, Gerald. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York University Press. 72.

13. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Library of America: James Baldwin Collected Essays. 341.

14. Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Harvard University Press. 69

15. Schrader, Stuart. Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press.

16. Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. 414.