316 2012 9 4

Many argue that Marxs political project of working class revolution to realize
socialism has proved a dead end. His critique of capitalisms inherent economic
dysfunctionality and profound inequalities, however, has been acknowledged
even by the mainstream during the current global crisis. This disconnect reflects
the belief that proletarian socialist revolution might reasonably have been
expected in 1848, when Marx and Engels called for it in The Manifesto.
Extending Marxs method of historical materialist analysis to the history of class
societyhistorical analysis that Marx did not himself pursue, relying instead on
liberal historical accounts of classesreveals that even in Western Europe
capitalism was far from sufficiently developed for proletarian revolution even at
the turn of the 20th century. Using the analysis provided in Capital, however, it
can be seen that the society Marx understood to be the foundation for a profound
revolutionary transformation does finally exist today.
MARXISM 21
Article
Capital and Historical Materialism
George C. Comninel*23)
Keywords: modes of production; history of class societies; Political
Marxism; proletarian revolution; historical materialism.
* Department of Political Science, York University, comninel@yorku.ca.
Capital and Historical Materialism 317
1. Marxs critique of capitalism vs. his revolutionary project
It is obvious that at least some significant problems must be acknowl-
edged with respect to the ideas expressed by Karl Marx. Most obviously,
more than 150 years after The Communist Manifesto there still has been no
working class revolution in any developed capitalist society, whilewhat-
ever one makes of Russias 1917 revolutionthe Soviet Union existed for
less than seventy-five years.
1)
Yet, at the same time, although the collapse of
the USSR led many to trumpet the death of Marxism in the 1990s, the global
crisis of capitalism that began in 2007 has brought even mainstream econo-
mists to declare that Marx was right.
2)
This juxtaposition raises the ques-
tion of the relationship between the ideas Marx articulated specifically about
capitalism, primarily in the three volumes of Capital and its related manu-
scripts, and his overarching conception of history as the history of class
struggles, culminating in a revolutionary transformation that finally brings to
an end the long line of societies founded on the exploitation of labouring
people for the benefit of a tiny minority.
One approach to understanding Marxs workso-called Political Marxis
m
3)
attributes many of the problems to be found in his work (and that of
most later Marxists) to the uncriticised incorporation of ideas originally ad-
vanced by earlier liberal historical thinkers(See Kaye, 1995; Wood, 1995).
4)

1)
None of the successful revolutions of the 20th century have ever been argued to have
occurred in developed capitalist societies; the few potentially- or quasi-revolutionary
episodes (as in 1919) never came close to success. For more, see Comninel(2000c).
2)
See for example these Internet videos: Roubini(2011); Magnus(2011).
3)
The term originated in a critique of the work of Robert Brenner by Guy Bois, but has
since been accepted by most working within the approach. Another term, preferred by
Charles Post (2011), is Capital-centric Marxism, resonating with the argument here.
4)
For a critical account, see Blackledge(2009).
318 2012 9 4
The influence of conceptions drawn from liberal historians of the eighteenth
century and early nineteenth century is especially manifested in the perva-
sive ideawithin mainstream social theory as well as Marxismof in-
evitable and unilinear historical progress, most often explained in terms of
an underlying economic, demographic, technological, and/or climatological
determinism. Far from being in any way original to Marx, such ideas were
common long before he was born(See Comninel,1987; Wood, 1988;
Brenner,1977, 1989). In contrast to such progressivist, deterministic and uni-
linear forms of analysis, Political Marxism stresses specific historical tra-
jectories of social development, often differing even between neighbouring
nations, based upon the particular historical forms through which social
property relations developed and the concrete balance of forces and out-
comes in particular histories of class struggle. Indeed, the approach stresses
not only that there is no general historical form of social development appli-
cable across the continents, but that even the major societies of Western
Europe diverged profoundly during their historical development. Only in the
era of spreading industrial capitalismdating back barely more than 150
yearshas there been significant convergence in national forms of economy
and society for the first time since the heyday of European feudalism(See
Comninel, 2000a, 2012).
This approach, challenging not only centuries of mainstream liberal
thought but many supposedly orthodox historical conceptions within
Marxism, has certainly been controversial. It is, however, directly grounded
upon that analysis of the capitalist mode of production articulated by Marx
through his critique of political economy, and the insistence that this con-
ception not be conflated with such earlier historical forms as the widespread
merchant capitalism of the early modern era. In this it challenges the con-
ception of capitalism as originally mere commercial profit-making, over
time taking on industrial production as if this were natural and inevitablea
Capital and Historical Materialism 319
profoundly ahistorical conception that not only pervades liberal historical so-
cial theory but ironically also underpins most Marxist accounts.
This regrettable failure to apply Marxs ideas in Marxist historical analysis
follows from Marxs own deference to the liberal historians, whose ideas he
never subjected to a searing critique comparable to that of liberal political
economy, to which he devoted so much effort. This is often compounded by
misunderstanding the possibilityindeed, necessityof analysing capitalist
society through abstract theoretical modelling of its economic structure as a
general approach to historical social analysis. It is, however, central to
Marxs analysis that the capitalist mode of production is unique in this
regard.
Indeed, it is precisely at those moments in the three volumes of Capital
and the Grundrisse when Marx was compelled to contrast the capitalist mode
of production with pre-capitalist forms of class society that he came the fur-
thest in articulating principles of historical materialist analysis, and develop-
ing original alternatives to the concepts of liberal history and the social theo-
ries informing them. By systematically differentiating Marxs analysis of
capitalist social relations from those that were precapitalist, and recognizing
both that many established historical ideas with which he was familiar were
ideologically informed, and that we have more and better historical knowl-
edge today than was available to Marx and his antecedents, we can not only
correct the historical errors and dubious judgments in his work, but clarify
the integral unity between his analysis of capitalism and historical materialist
analysis of the history of societies. The problems with Marx and much later
Marxist work largely result from not being consistently Marxist.
320 2012 9 4
2. Capital and the commodified form of class society
Marx was too kind by far to liberal thinkers such as Locke, Ferguson,
Smith, Turgot, and Guizot. Their conceptions of class had nothing to do with
the exploitation of labouring direct producers by the owners of property, but
rather the existence of ranks within society. It was through his critique of lib-
eral political economy that Marx originally and uniquely exposed the social
relations of class exploitation, beginning at the end of the story, the capitalist
mode of production. The final form of this theoretical critique (to the extent
he articulated it in at least manuscript form) was an extraordinary achieve-
ment, realized through decades of empirical study and intense critical
reflection.
The magnitude of his achievement is best captured in the recognition that,
in contrast with all prior forms of class society, capitalism alone is founded
upon a formal separation of political and economic spheres in society, the
fundamental processes of social reproduction structured through operation of
the Law of Value. Capitalism concretely realizes the social form of abstract
labour within society through its commodification of labour-power, by
which means it constitutes a general system of class exploitation despite its
ostensible basis in the enjoyment of political, civil, and economic freedoms
by social individuals. Whereas other forms of society are characterized by
inherently normative social relationships throughout production, as well as
governance and culture, the individual and autonomous economic actors on
which capitalist production is based are in principle guided only by the
invisible hand of the market. How it is even possible for a society to be or-
ganized in this way can only be understood through conceiving it in terms of
a totality (as acknowledged even by mainstream macro-economics).
There is a well-known quote by Lenin on the relation between Capital and
Hegels thought: It is impossible completely to understand Marxs Capital,
Capital and Historical Materialism 321
and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and under-
stood the whole of Hegels Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of
the Marxists understood Marx!
5)
There is certainly something important to
this point, though it is easy to exaggerate the importance of Hegel. Indeed,
one might well argue that one can better appreciate the nature of Hegels
method by reading and understanding Capital.
Without descending into a line by line analysis of the work of either, what
must be recognized is that Marx, like Hegel, conceived both history and so-
ciety in terms of totality. Totality is in fact simultaneously at the core of both
Marxs historical materialism and his critique of political economy. It is,
however, crucial that it is a diachronic totality that underlies his conception
of history, whereas his conception of the capitalist mode of production is in-
stead fundamentally synchronic. Even more to the point, it is not only his-
tory as a whole that is diachronic, but the history of class societies, none of
whichprior to the specifically capitalist mode of productioncan be char-
acterized by a synchronic structure of fundamentally abstract social relations.
As is generally recognized, Marx began Capital with the commodity, pre-
sented as the central fact and concept of the capitalist mode of production:
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its
unit being a single commodity.(Marx, 1997: 45) It is first of all striking that
this conception of the wealth of nations directly posits a transitive equiv-
alence of commodities. They exist as individual elements, but they can and
intrinsically must be accumulated into a collectivity possessing concrete
magnitude, a sum that constitutes the total wealth of any capitalist society.
Inherent in this transitive equivalence of commodities is that they can be
5)
This much cited aphorism is from Lenins Conspectus of Hegels Science of
Logic(Lenin, 1976: 180).
322 2012 9 4
compared with, and thus exchanged against, each other. This is the tangible
meaning of the commodity. It may, we hope, actually prove to have a
use-value; and certainly it may analytically be discovered to have an undis-
closed but profound significance as a bearer of human social relations. But
in its most immediate incarnation, it is something that we can take to market
to exchange for something else.
It is crucial that, by beginning with the commodity as a part of a totality in
a specifically capitalist mode of production, Marx manages to evade the na-
ive, timeless, ahistorical, and ultimately anachronistic implications of view-
ing it as liberal social theory always hasfrom before Locke, throughout the
era of classical political economy, then again through the Marshallian revo-
lution, and all the way down to Friedman and Samuelson. While Locke ac-
knowledged that it was labour that put the difference of value upon every
thing, and the classical political economists recognized that behind the fact
of normal or average prices there had to be some comparability of the labour
expended in production, the implications of these assertions were never tak-
en to the extent of a truly total social conception of production. Thereafter, in
the wake of the shift to marginal utility theory and the emphasis upon arbi-
trary individual desire establishing value, liberal thought has consistently de-
nied that there can be any intrinsic basis for the equivalence of commodities.
Yet, where the capitalist mode of production exists, commodities do not first
exist as individual entities and then come into relation through the subjective
will of their possessors. Rather, they exist in relation to each other as ele-
ments in a social totality from the start.
Marx acknowledged that the immediate appearance of exchange was as a
form of arbitrary agreement between free individuals: Exchange-value ap-
pears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an in-
trinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with, in-
herent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.(Marx, 1997: 46)
Capital and Historical Materialism 323
But, he went on to observe, the fact that they can be related in regular pro-
portions under normal conditions, within a systemic whole, means that they
must have something in common that can explain such a consistent quantita-
tive relationship.
His embrace of the labour theory of value was therefore not simply a re-
statement of the view held by Locke and Smith. It was instead grounded in
the idea that within capitalist society there exists a social totality of com-
modities that is the true summation of the production of wealth. Since within
this totality, any and every commodity necessarily must be able to be related
to any and every other, all that they can possibly be said to have in common
is that they are in some measure the product of human labour: there is noth-
ing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same
sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.(Marx, 1997: 48) Marx again
writes: The total labour-power of society, which is embodied in the sum to-
tal of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as
one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, composed though it be of
innumerable individual units.(Marx, 1997: 49) This holistic conception of
the commodity, and of the capitalist mode of production as inherently a so-
cial totality, is fundamental to Marxs thought.
At the same time, as he was quick to point out, this abstract totality cannot
be presumed to be characteristic of all societies. Indeed also within the first
section of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, Marx noted that
production of wealth in the form of use-values in feudal society was not pre-
dicated on the production of commodities:
The medieval peasant product quit-rent corn for his feudal lord and
tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent corn not the tithe-corn be-
came commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for
others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another,
whom it will serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange(Marx, 1997: 51).
324 2012 9 4
And so, within the first six of more than 2000 pages of Capital, we are
presented with a qualitative difference between the capitalist mode of pro-
duction and what, by reference to both his prior and subsequent analyses,
can ultimately be said to be all previous forms of human society. It is the
capitalist mode of production alone that is structured around the production
of commodities: use-values embodying the most abstract possible form of
human labour as the basis for exchange, through which social production in
its totality is regulated. Other forms of society have also involved the pro-
duction of use-values not only for enjoyment by the individual producer but
by exploitive others. They have not, however, in any comparable way been
predicated upon the abstraction inherent in the specifically capitalist com-
modity form as both an expression of and means to realize the social totality
of production.
After Marx himself, perhaps the best known exponent of this recognition
that capitalism differs qualitatively from all pre-capitalist societies with re-
spect to the role of the commodity has been Karl Polanyi. Polanyi is an im-
portant figure, but his ideas are not without serious problems in numbers of
ways. What is most significant in his work is precisely that he fundamentally
distinguishes pre-capitalist from capitalist societies on the basis of the com-
modity (or market) becoming the very basis for social organization in the lat-
ter(Polanyi, 1957a: 43). Polanyi acknowledged that human societies have
generally been characterized by forms of organization predicated upon basic
principles of social unity. Early human societies were fundamentally charac-
terized by some combination of two basic principles of collective in-
tegration: redistribution and reciprocity(Polanyi, 1957a: 47). These forms of
organizing what might from a capitalist perspective be described as econom-
ic interaction generally are integrated with other forms of social relationship,
such as kinship.
Whereas the simplest forms of human society, hunting/gathering bands,
Capital and Historical Materialism 325
have primarily been characterized by a prevalence of immediately redis-
tributive social relations, among tribal societies there typically exist more
complex rules and obligations of reciprocity tied to kinship. Polanyi noted
the Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific, who famously grew more yams
than they could ever need, taking great pride in their bounty yet delivering
them to kin, receiving yams from other kin in turn. Similarly, they would
travel hundreds of kilometres across open seas by canoe to make gifts of at-
tractive shells and the like, which then were passed on in the same way.
Eventually these gifts would return to the giver, after a long circuit of annual
gifts over great distances, only to be given yet again.
In exchanging like for like, compounded by unnecessarily great effort and
a goal of giving more than is received, such forms of trade clearly do not
embody market rationality. Instead, they reveal what Polanyi characterized
as the social relations of an embedded economytransfers of non-commo-
dified social products, or use values, on other than market principles. Far
from being universal to human societies, often asserted as a point of de-
parture for the discipline of economics, market exchanges of commodities
can be seen to be atypical, appearing in the Mediterranean basin only after
several thousand years of civilization, and as many as twenty thousand years
of settled agricultural societies, following a hundred thousand or more years
of hunting and gathering(See Diamond, 1997).
As Polanyi noted, it was Aristotle who first attempted to describe the
function of the market, only a few centuries after market relations of com-
modity exchange came to be common in the ancient world(See Polanyi,
1957b). Marx himself noted in Capital that it was Aristotle who first ana-
lysed the form of value(Marx, 1997: 69), deducing its inherently commuta-
tive character, expressed in terms of the equivalence of specific quantities of
unlike objects, such as beds and houses. Marx then observed that Aristotle
here comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value.
326 2012 9 4
It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commen-
surableie., qualitatively equal. Such an equalization can only be some-
thing foreign to their real nature, consequently only a makeshift for prac-
tical purposes(Marx, 1997: 69-70).
Marx attributes this apparent blockage in Aristotles thought to the role of
slavery in Greek society, asserting that, having as its natural basis, the in-
equality of men and of their labour-powers, it could not comprehend value
as an expression of a generalized equality of labour.
This is an instance of Marx adopting mistaken and ideologically con-
structed views, however, and there is more behind what Aristotle had to say
about human labour than what Marx notes. Ellen Wood has written ex-
tensively on the erroneous view that the society of ancient Athens was based
upon the labour of slaves, demonstrating that there is little evidence to sup-
port the idea that slaves significantly engaged in the agricultural labour cen-
tral to its social production. Instead it is abundantly clear that the great ma-
jority of Athenian citizens were peasants who worked the land with their
own hands, while a significant minority were artisans. Slaves were above all
household servants and agents, generally with positions at most in the inter-
stices of production(Wood, 1988: 82). Indeed, Aristotle himself asserted that
slaves are servants whose primary function is to assist the head of household
in living and that other subordinateswhich is how he also characterizes
free artisansare responsible for production(Aristotle, 1980: 10). All sub-
ordinates, both slaves and artisans, are mere conditions for social life, exist-
ing solely to make life possible for the true parts of the polis, freemen of
property who are by nature unsuited for menial labour(Aristotle, 1980: 13,
108). For this reason, he argued, artisans ought never to be citizens.
Wood shows that it was modern European thinkers who developed the
myth of an idle mob of Athenian citizens, supported by slavery as they en-
gaged in the increasingly self-destructive democratic politics of the
Capital and Historical Materialism 327
assembly. This ideological conception played a significant role, even before
the French Revolution, in a two-pronged assault against both democracy and
the supposed idleness of the poor. The preponderance of such ideas among
even liberal thinkers, as opposed to defenders of aristocratic privilege and
the ancien regime, contributed to Marxs acceptance of them as part of the
supposed discovery of the role of class in history. As Wood reveals, how-
ever, the real class antagonism in ancient Athens was between the majority
of citizenscomprising labouring peasants and artisansand a minority of
aristocratic landed proprietors who generally despised democracy even more
than Aristotle.
Seen in these terms, Aristotles failure to follow through and complete the
analysis of value as a form cannot be attributed to slavery. Rather, he could
not acknowledge the legitimacy of a real equivalence between commodities
because to do so would have undermined the idea that the polis naturally ex-
isted to be the locus for social life dominated by landed proprietors. The in-
herently unnatural potential to secure unlimited wealth through trade and
manufacture(Aristotle, 1980: 22ff)the absence of limits being unnatural in
itselfwas compounded for Aristotle to the extent that the material form of
a commodity might be incompatible with honour. Among the most egregious
examples of this was tanning, the disgusting trade of pickled animal skins, to
which Cleon, the legendary populist leader of the Athenian Assembly de-
spised by aristocrats, owed his wealth. It is in this context that he could not
countenance any merely arithmetic relationship between an ignoble com-
modity like shoes and something so intrinsically important as a
house(Aristotle,1980: 118-119). In Aristotles view, it was essential that the
market remain embedded in broader and more fundamental social relations,
holding in check its potential threat to the natural hierarchy in society.
Therefore, notwithstanding the importance of the commodity in Athenian
society, it was downplayed and misrepresented by its most empirically-ori-
328 2012 9 4
ented philosopher. Yet, while Aristotle recognized and was appalled by the
potential for commerce to subvert the natural forms of wealth and hierarchy,
the capitalist mode of production did not itself exist in Athens. This is not
because of a (non-existent) slave mode of production, but because even the
systematic exchange of commodities for profit does not in itself constitute
capitalism. Marx directly observed that in ancient societies the conversion
of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into pro-
ducers of commodities, holds a subordinate place.(Marx, 1997: 90) Indeed,
not even wage labourwhich existed in the ancient world and throughout
European history, including the middle agesis in itself sufficient to con-
stitute capitalism. On the basis of Marxs account in Capital, only when the
human capacity to labour has been transformed into the abstract commodity
of labour-power, and subsumed to capital not only formally, but increasingly
in real subordination of the worker through active control over the labour
process, can it be said that capitalist production truly exists. If the capitalist
mode of production is predicated upon the commodity, this specifically and
necessarily is realized in the regulation of production by the market as ef-
fected by the owners of capital. Where the direct producers enjoy ownership
of the means of production, or by direct possession or some other means
they remain able to control the labour process, there can be no basis for the
relentless self-expansion of capital through the form of relative sur-
plus-value.
Recognizing this to be the standard for determining whether or not capi-
talist social relations of production existed, it becomes clear from a close
reading of history that nowhere did the capitalist mode of production serve
as the general basis for social reproduction until after the industrial revolu-
tion had largely transformed English society in the course of the first half of
the nineteenth century. The prevalence of commodity exchange prior to that
time can no more be taken to be a sign of incipient capitalist development in
Capital and Historical Materialism 329
modern Europe than in ancient Greece in the absence of historical processes
that clearly conduced to the transformation of labour into the commodity of
labour-power, and the subordination of labour processes to owners of the
means of production rather than direct producers.
It was the unique transformation of agrarian production in England by
means of the social property relations of enclosurerealized through a pro-
found defeat of peasant producers in class strugglethat led to a specifically
agrarian form of capitalist development there(See Wood, 2002; Brenner,
1987). This transformation of the basic form of social production from
self-reproducing peasant households to market-dependent tenant-farmers,
employing labourers deprived of access to the means of production, on large
farms owned by a landlord classwhich began in the late 15th century and
culminated in the society described by Adam Smithoccurred nowhere but
in England. This process is precisely what Marx described in Capital as the
secret of primitive accumulation.(Marx, 1997: 704ff)
3. An inherently exploitative system of social reproduction
While there always were wage workers in European pre-capitalist class
societies, their labouras Marx notedwas never systematically organized
and controlled by those who employed them, nor did markets regulate the
processes of production in which they were employed. Workers instead were
hired to do work of a well-defined sort, in labour processes that they them-
selves understood and directly controlled. Even in such pre-capitalist facto-
ries as occasionally existed, labour processes were controlled by guilds,
laws, tradition and the workers themselves, not by owners of capital.
There were significant factories in pre-Revolutionary France, but the
workers in them wandered about more or less as they pleased, taking im-
330 2012 9 4
promptu breaks and the like(See Zmolek, 2008). One can exaggerate the ex-
tent of this autonomous control over production by direct producers, but it
was nonetheless very real, especially in contrast to the development of capi-
talist factories in England in the period after 1780. Indeed, in France the pri-
mary exponent of control over commodity production was the state, which
increasingly licensed and regulated producers and closely dictated standards.
In Normandy, the cottage industry of woolen weavers through which mer-
chants had sought to escape the guild environment of towns, continued to be
subject to royal inspectors down to the Revolution: stamps of approval were
required before sale, and inferior bolts of cloth were destroyed(See Goubert,
1960). If there was no sign of the capitalist mode of production in the manu-
facturing of Francewhose commercial and manufacturing economy was
pre-eminent on the Continentstill less was there any transformation of
agrarian production from the open-field peasant systems that had survived
the feudal era (and continued to persist long after the Revolution).
In short, while in first agriculture, and then increasingly in industry,
England witnessed the indigenous development of capitalism from the late
fifteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century, in the societies of
Continental Europe there was instead only a growth in trade and manu-
factures constituted within the parameters of non-capitalist production.
There was no introduction of even the most rudimentary elements of specifi-
cally capitalist production in France or Germany until after the Napoleonic
Wars, following which English industrial technologyoften spurred by
geo-political priorities of the state, especially in the form of railroadscame
increasingly to the fore. Prior to the introduction of capitalist industrial pro-
duction from Britain the primary class relations of Europe, though for the
most part no longer strictly feudal, remained based on appropriating peasant
surpluses through private ownership of land and politically constituted
property (primarily in the form of state offices)(Brenner, 1993: 652ff). The
Capital and Historical Materialism 331
bourgeoisie who pursued the Revolution in France were not in any way capi-
talist, nor anticipating the development of capitalism.
6)
Rather, they were
primarily lawyers, professionals and non-noble officers of the state (with a
significant minority of rentiers), who came increasingly to identify with op-
portunities in the ever-expanding civil service of the Republic, Empire, and
restored monarchy after the proprietary state offices of the ancien regime
were abolished. Returning to Hegel, who wrote in the wake of the French
Revolution in a Prussia that profited hugely from its defeat, it is striking to
what extentnotwithstanding his familiarity with Adam Smithhis ideas
were grounded in the similar pre-capitalist social realities of early nine-
teenth-century Prussia.
The most obvious and significant expression of this lies in Hegels casting
of the state as agent of the universal, bringing order and the realization of
Spirit to the diverse egoistic manifestations of civil society(Hegel, 1952). It
is not, as is sometimes supposed, that he proposed something akin to a social
democratic corrective to the inherent irrationality of capitalist society.
Hegel never comprehended Smiths principle that it was the market that
brought order to seeming chaos. He may have read Smith, and married
British ideas to French ideas in developing the concept of Brgerliche gesell-
schaftbut he never actually encountered capitalist society and never grasp-
ed the crucial point that it inherently, and necessarily, lacked any principle of
planning and regulation superior to the market. Indeed, even below his uni-
versalizing state, Hegels conception of civil society continued to be struc-
tured by guilds and corporate bodies. In short, Hegels philosophy depicted a
complex society, with a large and important commercial sector, but one that
remained fundamentally pre-capitalist.
7)

6)
This is a central point of Comninel(1987); see also Brenner(1989).
7)
I briefly discuss this in both Comninel(2000c and 2012).
332 2012 9 4
It is, of course, precisely with a critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right
that Marx began his development as a social and political theorist in 1843.
Although a detailed analysis is beyond the scope of the present contribution,
even a cursory examination of his 1843 works reveals that they are pre-
occupied with the politics emanating from the French Revolution(See
Comninel, 2000b). Only with his 1844 Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts did Marx first engage in the critique of political economy that
constituted the grounding for historical materialism, and his primary con-
tribution to social thought. While there is enormous development in his anal-
ysis between these manuscripts and Capital, it is continuous development
without fundamental rupture.
8)
After publishing Engelss Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy in
the Deutsch Franzsische Jarhbcher, Marx turned his attention to reading
the political economists Engels cited. Never before having confronted these
ideas, Marx brought his powers of critique to bear on political economy for
the first time in his Paris manuscripts. He began by considering Wages of
Labour and with his first lines distinguished his critical analysis from any-
thing that had hitherto appeared in the literature of political economy:
Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist
and worker. Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist.(Marx, 1975: 235)
His immediate yet incisive critical analysis, occupying only the first col-
umn of the first six pages of the manuscripts, indicts political economy:
Let us put ourselves now wholly at the standpoint of the political econo-
mist, and follow him in comparing the theoretical and practical claims of the
workers.
He tells us that originally and in theory the whole product of labour be-
longs to the worker. But at the same time he tells us that in actual fact what
8)
In addition to my works cited above, see Musto(2010, 2011).
Capital and Historical Materialism 333
the worker gets is the smallest and utterly indispensable part of the product
as much, only, as is necessary for his existence, not as a human being, but
as a worker, and for the propagation, not of humanity, but of the slave class
of workers.
The political economist tells us that everything is bought with labour and
that capital is nothing but accumulated labour; but at the same time he tells
us that the worker, far from being able to buy everything, must sell himself
and his humanity.
Whilst the rent of the idle landowner usually amounts to a third of the
product of the soil, and the profit of the busy capitalist to as much as twice
the interest on money, the something more which the worker himself earns
at the best of times amounts to so little that of four children of his, two must
starve and die(Marx, 1975: 239-240).
At this point, turning to the seventh page of the manuscript, Marx ignores
the vertical columns he has drawn and writes across the whole page. After
this page he breaks off his original contributions under Wages of Labour,
filling that column in the rest of the manuscript with quotations from the po-
litical economists, with a few notations. His analyses under Profit of
Capital and Rent of Land skip over page seven, confirming the order of
composition, while his original critique of the relationship between worker
and capitalist continues in the subsequent section Estranged Labour.
Just before breaking off, in the middle of page seven Marx, tellingly re-
veals the inherent unity of the historical materialist analysis he would con-
tinue to develop primarily through the critique of political:
Let us now rise above the level of political economy and examine the
ideas developed above, taken almost word for word from the political econo-
mists, for the answers to these two questions:
(1) What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of
334 2012 9 4
the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?
(2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to
raise wages and thereby improve the situation of the working class, orlike
Proudhonsee equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?(Marx, 1975:
241)
What is astounding is the immediacy of Marxs achievement, literally in
the first several pages of his confrontation with political economy. He in-
stantly saw capitalism for what it was, an inherently exploitative system of
social reproduction based on class relations of property embodying the alien-
ation of labour. His reaction was two-fold: to conceive of this alienation of
labour in relation to the development of humanity as a whole, and to recog-
nize the necessityand possibilityfor social revolution to put an end to
it.
9)
The historical materialist critique of political economy eventually realized
in Capital remains a uniquely powerful instrument for understanding the na-
ture of capitalist society as it has come to transform the world. Beyond this,
however, from his first moment of insight into the system, Marx recognized
in the specifically capitalist relationship of wage labour the ultimate ex-
pression of human alienation, and he understood it to be central to the histor-
ical evolution of human societies in a way that took Hegelian idealism and
turned it right-side up. It is clear, therefore, not only that there is inherent
unity between his early writings and Capital, but between his analysis of the
capitalist economy, his conception of the history of class societies, and his
political project of revolution to bring about human emancipation.
Marx, however, was neither a historian nor an academic philosopher, and
he never devoted his efforts to an original, critical examination of the history
9)
For a more detailed analysis, see Comninel(2000b).
Capital and Historical Materialism 335
of class societies and their processes of social change. During his life he de-
voted much energy to building the International Workingmens Association,
to analysing major historical turning points such as the revolutions of 1848
and the Paris Commune, to commenting upon political strategies and move-
ments, to wide-ranging journalism, and (particularly later in life) to studying
histories and social forms outside the Western European experience. Yet the
greatest part of his work, occupying much of his attention through the whole
of his life, remained the critique of political economy.
Although this commitment to what the historian E. P. Thompson called his
Grundrisse-face(Thompson, 1978: 74) has been a disappointment to those
(like Thompson) who have wished for more historical analysis, Marx had
good reason for his priorities. It is not only that capitalism had already be-
come the prevailing form of class society in his time, and ever since increas-
ingly the context for class struggle. More than this, from 1844 on Marx saw
that the capitalist mode of production necessarily would be the final form of
class society, sincein its formal separation of the political from the eco-
nomic, its apparently free economic relations, and its inherent drive towards
greater productivity and technological progressit constituted the most
complete possible realization of the alienation of labour through property re-
lations(Wood, 1995: 35-37).
At the same time, however, Marxs systematic development of the critique
of political economy periodically brought him to confront, as has been seen
above, essential differences between capitalist and pre-capitalist social
relations. This was, moreover, something of which he was conscious.
Indeed, as he wrote in one of the most important of his passages on the
method of his analysis, precisely in the Introduction to the Grundrisse:
Bourgeois society is the most developed and many-faceted historical or-
ganisation of production. The categories which express its relations, an un-
derstanding of its structure, therefore, provide, at the same time, an insight
336 2012 9 4
into the structure and the relations of production of all previous forms of so-
ciety the ruins and components of which were used in the creation of bour-
geois society. Some of these remains are still dragged along within bourgeois
society unassimilated, while elements which previously were barely in-
dicated have developed and attained their full significance, etc. The anatomy
of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of
higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when
the higher forms themselves are already known. Bourgeois economy thus
provides a key to that of antiquity, etc(Marx,1986: 42; see Comninel, 2010:
104-115).
In contrast with how in 1844 he initially conceived the development of the
alienation of labour merely in terms of the development of property(Marx,
1986: 293ff), Marx came to appreciate that pre-capitalist class societies had
existed with different specific forms of class relations. Although this idea is
certainly best known from the bare sketch offered in the Preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyIn broad outline, the
Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be
designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of so-
ciety(Marx, 1987: 263)it has long been recognized that there is no single
authoritative account of the historical modes of production in Marxs work,
nor one that can be said to be without problems(See Hobsbawm, 1965).
There is, however, one more important place in Capital where Marx was
compelled to confront the differences between capitalist and pre-capitalist
social relations. In Volume IIIdealing with the concrete movements of cap-
ital as a whole after the analysis of the process of production in Volume I and
the process of circulation in Volume IIMarx was brought to address mer-
cantile profits, interest, credit, and rent as each existed both in pre-capitalist
forms and in a form specific to capitalism. At several points his analysis not
only underscores the difference between the earlier and later forms, but that
Capital and Historical Materialism 337
the one cannot be taken simply to develop into the other. With respect to
merchant capital, for example, he asserted that despite its historical im-
portance it is incapable by itself of promoting and explaining the transition
from one mode of production to another.(Marx, 1998: 325) It is particularly
in Chapter 47, The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent, when addressing the
difference between the role of rent as the fundamental form of class ex-
ploitation in pre-capitalist societies and its role in capitalism, that Marxs
analysis amounts directly to a statement of historical materialist method.
As Marx remarked, the challenge in analysing capitalist rent lay in ex-
plaining the general excess of surplus-value characteristic of this sphere of
production.(Marx, 1998: 769) The question of rent in capitalist society is
exceedingly complex, with two forms of inherently capitalist differential
rent, a form of genuinely monopoly rent (fortunately a minor consideration)
and absolute rent(Marx, 1998: 734ff). Without going into the complexities,
the point is that absolute rent, the main anomalous expression of excess sur-
plus-value realized in agriculture, cannot be explained on the basis of purely
capitalist social relations. It is, instead, a form that specifically derives from
the existence of a landlord class, which is in no way required by the logic of
capitalist social relations but is instead a legacy of pre-capitalist class
society.
In order to trace the concrete development of rent, therefore, Marx de-
votes a section to Labour Rent, noting of the pre-capitalist peasant-based
class societies of which it is characteristic that Rent, not profit, is the form
here through which unpaid surplus labour expresses itself.(Marx, 1998:
776) He observes immediately that in feudal society, the labour rent owed by
peasants to lords is not only directly unpaid surplus labour, but also appears
as such. He continues with a famous observation about the necessarily ex-
tra-economic character of the pre-capitalist appropriation of surplus:
It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer re-
338 2012 9 4
mains the possessor of the means of production and labour conditions nec-
essary for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property rela-
tionship must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and ser-
vitude, so that the direct producer is not free; a lack of freedom which may
be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a mere tributary
relationship.... Under such conditions the surplus-labour for the nominal
owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic
pressure, whatever the form assumed may be(Marx, 1998: 776-777).
This extra-economic character of pre-capitalist class relations of ex-
ploitation is, of course, one of the most crucial and fundamental ways in
which they differ from those of the capitalist mode of production.
Marx then addresses forms of society where no private landowners exist
to appropriate rent, but only the state:
then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from
this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no stron-
ger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that
state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the own-
ership of land concentrated on a national scale. But, on the other hand, no pri-
vate ownership of land exists, although there is both private and common pos-
session and use of land(Marx, 1998: 777).
He continues:
The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out
of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows
directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining
element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic
community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby
Capital and Historical Materialism 339
simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of
the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producersa relation
always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the
methods of labour and thereby its social productivitywhich reveals the inner-
most secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the politi-
cal form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corre-
sponding specific form of the state(Marx, 1998: 777-778).
No single statement should ever be taken to encapsulate the whole of
Marxs method for analysing modes of production, but this certainly pro-
vides a clear guide to a most fundamental consideration.
At the same time, this statement is directly associated with Marxs class
analysis of two different modes of production having the same foundation in
terms of the forces of production or material conditions of social re-
production: self-reproducing peasant households. Marx does nothing here to
freight his conception of the first, so-called Asiatic, mode of production
which may not reflect the social realities of any Asian society in the modern
era, but certainly corresponds to societies in Bronze Age Greece, the ancient
Near East and Asia, and pre-colonial Americawith any supposition of hy-
draulic agriculture, nor does he in any other way distinguish its production
from the second, feudal, case. For this reason, his reference to a definite
stage in the development of the methods of labour cannot be taken to mean
that any deterministic relationship exists between forms of production and
social relations of class exploitation. It must, instead, be taken simply to ex-
press a limitation on the forms that such relations can take relative to social
productive capacities.
340 2012 9 4
4. We still have our chains to lose
Virtually the whole of the history of class societieseven in Western
Europe, but especially elsewhere across the globeremains to be written in
historical materialist terms(Anderson, 1974: 403-448). Although Marx de-
voted his life primarily to confronting the abstract system of social property
relations that constitute the capitalist mode of production, and among the
greatest mistakes a Marxist can make is to think that such an abstract form of
analysis should be applied to any pre-capitalist form of class society, his cri-
tique of political economy does offer certain instructive guideposts for a
broader historical materialist method. What is required is in the first place to
abandon reliance upon what Marx said about any given non-capitalist soci-
ety, and to beginas he didwith the actual ways in which direct producers
of social surplus were exploited. This cannot be conceived primarily in terms
of the material basis of production, but must focus on the specific, funda-
mentally extra-economic social relations through which the product of un-
paid labour was systematically appropriated. It is historythe history for
which Marx himself did not and could not have had the timethat is
required.
Yet it also can be seen that there are, indeed, grounds for confirming the
overarching frame of Marxs conception of the history of class societies, cul-
minating in the capitalist mode of production. Simply because capitalism
embodies the most logically complete form of the alienation of labour can-
not mean in itself there is no alternative but to move on to communism, any
more than Marxs analysis of the inherently crisis-ridden nature of the capi-
talist system means it will simply come crashing down someday. Both his
prescient critique of political economyanticipating developments in capi-
talism on the basis of its structure and internal dynamicsand his conception
of historical social change conditioned by social relations of exploitation and
Capital and Historical Materialism 341
concrete forms of struggle against them, do however provide reason to be-
lieve a future of human freedom and humane rationality are possible.
10)

It is not only because of global economic crisis that we have much to learn
from a return to Marx. When he wrote in 1848 that A spectre is haunting
Europe, he was mistaken in the belief that this then was the spectre of
communism. It was, instead, still the spectre of the French Revolution and its
unresolved political issues, in a Europe that still was profoundly pre-capital-
ist(See Comninel, 2000b, 2000c). Yet while the timing of his prediction was
certainly wrong, there is no reason to believe its substance was not correct.
The link between his critique of capitalist exploitation and irrationality, and
the possibility of realizing a better world for all through transcending it, is
strong. And we still have our chains to lose.
(Received 2012-09-24, Revised 2012-10-22, Accepted 2012-10-29)
10)
See the argument and conclusion in Wood(1995).
342 2012 9 4
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