History on the Flip-side
Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capital
Columbia University Press, 312pp, £24.00, ISBN 9780231174800
reviewed by Marie Louise Krogh
The 7th of October 1917 marks the date of a ruptural reconfiguration not only of the social, economic and political history of Russia, but also of the intellectual landscape of Western Europe. Until this point European Marxists had – following some of Marx's own suggestions – seen the most 'advanced' capitalist economies as the inevitable site of the coming revolution. With the overthrow of the Tsar and the subsequent failure of the Bavarian Council Republic, all this changed. Western Europe became contra-defined as the place in which revolution did not occur, and West European Marxists became obsessed with understanding how this came about.
In his 1953 work Adventurers of the Dialectic, Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the phrase 'Western Marxism' to denote an intellectual tradition of which Perry Anderson would later became the chronicler (Considerations on Western Marxism, 1976) and whose morphology functions by way of a contrast to the forms of Marxist theory produced in the Soviet Union. The term here marks a separation of theoretical bodies of work mapped onto a geographical divide with one side preoccupied by post-revolutionary concerns for industrialisation (re-compositions of the labour force, and, methods of production), and the other fretting over the commodity form and its modes of structuring consciousness and culture in a society marred by an absent revolution. We've heard this story before, repeatedly, and while we know that of course it is based on a simplified model, it nonetheless continues to function, problematically (for one: where is the rest of the world, when the West means Europe and the East means the Soviet?), to such a degree that Western Marxism in some cases has become, in Harry Harootunian's words, the 'presumed (…) stand-in for Marxism itself'.
With Marx After Marx Harootunian ambitiously sets out to elaborate a Marxism that reaches beyond this divided, to globally mediate experiential and structural categories of analysis in the age of global markets. Throughout the book, Harootunian performs a double labour, at once constructing the beginnings of a theoretical framework within which we might understand the history of actually existing capitalism and of its presuppositions through the conceptual lens of formal subsumption, and simultaneously excavating an intellectual history of thinkers to be counted as allies in this constructive endeavour. I'll return to the matter of how these two strains interact and especially to how they each relate to Marx as an authoritative figure in the conclusion, but for now it is worth considering the stakes of the intervention more generally.
The title of the introduction, 'Deprovincializing Marx,’ inevitable reads as both a tip of the hat to, and a problematisation of, Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) which, along with Ranjit Guhar's History at the Limit of World-History (2002), might be considered to constitute the core theoretical works on historiography and critiques of Eurocentric (Marxist) conceptions of History to have come out of the Subaltern Study Group. Harootunian clearly shares their preoccupation with surpassing historicist and stagist models of history, that would unfold along a linear timeline as progressive development and implicitly or explicitly judge chronologically co-existing societies according to their proximity or distance from a posited terminus. Such an assumed linearity makes for a bad historiographical approach and an even worse model of political analysis.
For Harootunian, deprovinzialising Marx, in this context, essentially means addressing the question of how to employ a Marxian frame of analysis for understanding contemporary political and economic structures (and their history) without at the same time adopting Europe (or any other province for that matter) as the model through and against which all other regions are to be grasped and judged. However, the preservation of a decidedly Marxist framework ultimately places this book in closer proximity to Viviek Chibber's polemical and scathing critique of postcolonial theory in Post Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) than to any of the many instantiations of postcolonial theory itself. But where Chibber attempted to argumentatively pick apart the assumptions and theoretical models presented especially by Guhar and Charkrabarty, Harootunian proceeds by way of construction, making the case for a shift of focus in the categories organising our analyses, from 'real' to 'formal' subsumption.
Rather than assume that the formal subsumption of labour under capital in the form of wage-labor and its real subsumption in the (technological) transformation of the labouring process, is ironbound to a specific historical periodisation that would place the former before the latter, formal subsumption is understood as a form used to explain capital's continued penchant for appropriation. That is to say, the adaptability of capital to whichever cultural specificities or social forms of organisation at hand, and the relentless cruelty with which these can be subjugated to the maximisation of the generation of surplus value.
The degree to which the group of thinkers gathered under the term 'Western Marxism' would, as Harootunian claims, unanimously buy into the idea of a generalised completion of capitalism in the actualisation of real subsumption and the total commodification of all social relations might be questionable (Antonio Negri seems to be the most obvious theorist to pin this on), but the counter-model we are presented with remains both pertinent and interesting nonetheless. The risk of an excessive focus on 'real subsumption' is that we might end up with a mirror image of capitalism: self-representation as a natural and necessary system, unfazed and unhinged from historical conditions . The strength of an analysis that instead sets off from formal subsumption (and its intertwinement with 'so called originary accumulation') as 'capital's general form of development' is its capacity for
This is the claim which the most theoretically dense first chapter 'Marx, Time, History,’ argues for in the aspiration to move past the economic and political dualisms of core/periphery and developed/underdeveloped, as well as the grafted moralising judgment of civilised/uncivilised. Here, we are brought back to Marx (philosophically reflected through Daniel Bensaïd's Benjaminian reading in 2010’s Marx for our Times) in order to work a double-sided concept of History. Lodged in the unsteady ground that is the present, History is at once inherently bound up with and external to the logic of capital.
The ensuing four chapters develop this initial outline of the means by which we might think uneven and combined development as the intertwinement and contemporaneity of diverse historical temporalisations. This is done by way of an alternative Marxist canon of thinkers who explicitly or thematically strove to think through capital's reproduction on a global level, and in some cases the relations between world markets and world history. In this manner we get a linage of thinkers attentive to the forces of colonial domination and exploitation and to capitalism's clash of temporalities, running from Lenin, Luxembourg and Trotsky (in 'Marxism's Eastward Migration') to Antonia Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui (in 'Opening to the Global South'), Wang Yanan, Yamada Moritarō, and Uno Kōzō (in 'Theorizing Late Development and the “Persistence of Feudal Remnants”), and finally Claude Meillassoux and Jairus Banaji (in 'Colonial/Postcolonial').
Some of these are rarely, if ever, called upon when the afterlife of Marx's work is discussed elsewhere, and the strict focus on explicit or implicit engagements with the historico-temporal meaning of formal substitution and so-called primitive accumulation generally works well as an introduction. The only objection I would have here concerns the manner in which these presentations at times refer back to Marx’s work by implying that they are direct continuations of 'what he meant all along.’ Of course this also serves to support Harootunian's own reading of Marx in the first chapter, but at some points the authority of Marx almost overshadows the explanatory capacities of the analytic framework which would be reason enough to engage with these thinkers.
This is not a major criticism though, and at worst it left me wanting to engage more thoroughly with the finer points of each thinker’s works. The same is the case for this book as a whole: it made me eager to consider the advantages for contemporary and historical analysis by focusing on formal subsumption as a form producing historical unevenness. Here, we find the polyphonic rhythm of History.
In his 1953 work Adventurers of the Dialectic, Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the phrase 'Western Marxism' to denote an intellectual tradition of which Perry Anderson would later became the chronicler (Considerations on Western Marxism, 1976) and whose morphology functions by way of a contrast to the forms of Marxist theory produced in the Soviet Union. The term here marks a separation of theoretical bodies of work mapped onto a geographical divide with one side preoccupied by post-revolutionary concerns for industrialisation (re-compositions of the labour force, and, methods of production), and the other fretting over the commodity form and its modes of structuring consciousness and culture in a society marred by an absent revolution. We've heard this story before, repeatedly, and while we know that of course it is based on a simplified model, it nonetheless continues to function, problematically (for one: where is the rest of the world, when the West means Europe and the East means the Soviet?), to such a degree that Western Marxism in some cases has become, in Harry Harootunian's words, the 'presumed (…) stand-in for Marxism itself'.
With Marx After Marx Harootunian ambitiously sets out to elaborate a Marxism that reaches beyond this divided, to globally mediate experiential and structural categories of analysis in the age of global markets. Throughout the book, Harootunian performs a double labour, at once constructing the beginnings of a theoretical framework within which we might understand the history of actually existing capitalism and of its presuppositions through the conceptual lens of formal subsumption, and simultaneously excavating an intellectual history of thinkers to be counted as allies in this constructive endeavour. I'll return to the matter of how these two strains interact and especially to how they each relate to Marx as an authoritative figure in the conclusion, but for now it is worth considering the stakes of the intervention more generally.
The title of the introduction, 'Deprovincializing Marx,’ inevitable reads as both a tip of the hat to, and a problematisation of, Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) which, along with Ranjit Guhar's History at the Limit of World-History (2002), might be considered to constitute the core theoretical works on historiography and critiques of Eurocentric (Marxist) conceptions of History to have come out of the Subaltern Study Group. Harootunian clearly shares their preoccupation with surpassing historicist and stagist models of history, that would unfold along a linear timeline as progressive development and implicitly or explicitly judge chronologically co-existing societies according to their proximity or distance from a posited terminus. Such an assumed linearity makes for a bad historiographical approach and an even worse model of political analysis.
For Harootunian, deprovinzialising Marx, in this context, essentially means addressing the question of how to employ a Marxian frame of analysis for understanding contemporary political and economic structures (and their history) without at the same time adopting Europe (or any other province for that matter) as the model through and against which all other regions are to be grasped and judged. However, the preservation of a decidedly Marxist framework ultimately places this book in closer proximity to Viviek Chibber's polemical and scathing critique of postcolonial theory in Post Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) than to any of the many instantiations of postcolonial theory itself. But where Chibber attempted to argumentatively pick apart the assumptions and theoretical models presented especially by Guhar and Charkrabarty, Harootunian proceeds by way of construction, making the case for a shift of focus in the categories organising our analyses, from 'real' to 'formal' subsumption.
Rather than assume that the formal subsumption of labour under capital in the form of wage-labor and its real subsumption in the (technological) transformation of the labouring process, is ironbound to a specific historical periodisation that would place the former before the latter, formal subsumption is understood as a form used to explain capital's continued penchant for appropriation. That is to say, the adaptability of capital to whichever cultural specificities or social forms of organisation at hand, and the relentless cruelty with which these can be subjugated to the maximisation of the generation of surplus value.
The degree to which the group of thinkers gathered under the term 'Western Marxism' would, as Harootunian claims, unanimously buy into the idea of a generalised completion of capitalism in the actualisation of real subsumption and the total commodification of all social relations might be questionable (Antonio Negri seems to be the most obvious theorist to pin this on), but the counter-model we are presented with remains both pertinent and interesting nonetheless. The risk of an excessive focus on 'real subsumption' is that we might end up with a mirror image of capitalism: self-representation as a natural and necessary system, unfazed and unhinged from historical conditions . The strength of an analysis that instead sets off from formal subsumption (and its intertwinement with 'so called originary accumulation') as 'capital's general form of development' is its capacity for
supplying capital with its true but forgotten history, which dramatized the constant interaction of co-existing times and practices in a ceaseless process that might lead to the final realization of capital but probably not everywhere.
This is the claim which the most theoretically dense first chapter 'Marx, Time, History,’ argues for in the aspiration to move past the economic and political dualisms of core/periphery and developed/underdeveloped, as well as the grafted moralising judgment of civilised/uncivilised. Here, we are brought back to Marx (philosophically reflected through Daniel Bensaïd's Benjaminian reading in 2010’s Marx for our Times) in order to work a double-sided concept of History. Lodged in the unsteady ground that is the present, History is at once inherently bound up with and external to the logic of capital.
The ensuing four chapters develop this initial outline of the means by which we might think uneven and combined development as the intertwinement and contemporaneity of diverse historical temporalisations. This is done by way of an alternative Marxist canon of thinkers who explicitly or thematically strove to think through capital's reproduction on a global level, and in some cases the relations between world markets and world history. In this manner we get a linage of thinkers attentive to the forces of colonial domination and exploitation and to capitalism's clash of temporalities, running from Lenin, Luxembourg and Trotsky (in 'Marxism's Eastward Migration') to Antonia Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui (in 'Opening to the Global South'), Wang Yanan, Yamada Moritarō, and Uno Kōzō (in 'Theorizing Late Development and the “Persistence of Feudal Remnants”), and finally Claude Meillassoux and Jairus Banaji (in 'Colonial/Postcolonial').
Some of these are rarely, if ever, called upon when the afterlife of Marx's work is discussed elsewhere, and the strict focus on explicit or implicit engagements with the historico-temporal meaning of formal substitution and so-called primitive accumulation generally works well as an introduction. The only objection I would have here concerns the manner in which these presentations at times refer back to Marx’s work by implying that they are direct continuations of 'what he meant all along.’ Of course this also serves to support Harootunian's own reading of Marx in the first chapter, but at some points the authority of Marx almost overshadows the explanatory capacities of the analytic framework which would be reason enough to engage with these thinkers.
This is not a major criticism though, and at worst it left me wanting to engage more thoroughly with the finer points of each thinker’s works. The same is the case for this book as a whole: it made me eager to consider the advantages for contemporary and historical analysis by focusing on formal subsumption as a form producing historical unevenness. Here, we find the polyphonic rhythm of History.