Men make their own history, but they do not make it justas they please; they do not make it under circumstanceschosen by themselves, but under circumstances directlyfound, given and transmitted from the past. The traditionof all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on thebrain of the living. And just when they seem engaged inrevolutionising themselves and things, in creatingsomething entirely new, precisely in such epochs ofrevolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spiritsof the past to their service and borrow from them names,battle slogans and costumes in order to present the newscene of world history in this time-honoured disguise andthis borrowed language.2Leaving aside for later (as indicated above) any implications ofthese remarks for the 1990s, we should note in particular that therelationship of the Russian Revolution to the French Revolutioncould be considered so close as to be almost sym-biotic. Moreover,Karl Marx himself helped to prepare the way for this relationshipthrough an intellectual journey taking him from France to Russiaby way of Germany and England (or Great Britain). To investigatethis journey will mean a neglect of the rest of the world, but, as wehave seen in the funeral oration of Engels and will confirm in ourforthcoming scrutiny, Marx concentrated his attention on thoseparts of Europe and America, from Siberia to California, wherethe proletariat was to be found. This meant comparative neglectnot only of Africa, South America and Asia, but also of large regionsbetween Siberia and California in Europe and America. Inparticular, as is well known, Marx had a negative attitude towardsmost of Eastern Europe, and, for much of his career, Russia. His‘historical science’ therefore possessed certain weaknesses. On theother hand, beyond doubt, Marx was one of the great thinkers ofthe nineteenth century.The ‘mighty spirit’, as Engels had called him, began hisintellectual life as an idealist, cutting his teeth on Germanphilosophers, especially Hegel. Early in 1844, he published anIntroduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, includingthe following passage (his italics only):The only liberation of Germany which is practically possibleis liberation from the point of view of that theory whichdeclares man to be the supreme being for man. Germanycan emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it eman-cipates itself at the same time from the partial victories overthe Middle Ages. In Germany no form of bondage can bebroken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany,which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make arevolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation ofthe German is the emancipation of man. The head of thisemancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat.Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendenceof the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itselfwithout the realization of philosophy. When all the innerconditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will beheralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.3Before the Gallic cock crew again, Marx gave furtherconsideration to its announcement of an earlier dawn: in otherwords, before review of 1848, there was retrospect to 1789. Early in1845 Marx observed, ‘Ideas can never lead beyond an old worldorder but only beyond the ideas of the old world order.’Nevertheless, ‘the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER48beyond the ideas of the entire old world order.’ Under the heavyinfluence of classical precedent: ‘Robespierre, Saint-Just and theirparty fell because they confused the ancient, realistic-demo-craticcommonweal based on real slavery with the modern spiritual-istic-democratic representative society.’ The ‘idea of the new world order’ wasto be found not in the thought of Robespierre and his associates,but in that of a more truly revolutionary movement beginning in1789, temporarily defeated in Babeuf’s egalitarian conspiracy of1796, and then re-emerging in France after the Revolution of 1830.This was ‘the communist idea’.4From about 1845 to 1846, Marx moved from an idealist to amaterialist conception of the world and history, and began toformulate more clearly the stages through which human beingswould pass on the road to communism, a goal to be reachedthrough the agency of the proletariat and involving the abolitionof the division of labour:In communist society, however, where nobody has anexclusive area of activity and each can train himself in anybranch he wishes, society regulates the general production,making it possible for me to do one thing today and anothertomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,breed cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as Ilike without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, aherdsman, or a critic.5At the beginning of 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx andEngels made their first full statement of their new materialist viewof world history. The central idea was an ‘acceleration’ in globaldevelopment. That is The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape,opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. TheEast-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization ofAmerica, trade with the colonies, the increase in the meansof exchange and in commodities generally, gave tocommerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse neverbefore known, and thereby, to the revolutionary elementin the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.The rising bourgeois class had worked miracles, convertingmembers of all respected professions into its wage labourers,reducing the family relation to a mere money relation. Moreover: The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that thebrutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, whichreactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complementin the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to showwhat man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplishedwonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aque-ducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditionsthat put in the shade all former exoduses of nations andcrusades.In time, competitive expansion would lead towards the internalcollapse of capitalism, and a proletarian revolution would bringto an end the phase of history dominated by the bourgeoisie.At the end of that revolutionary year, in December 1848, Marxcompared events immediately preceding with others more remote:The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English andFrench revolutions; they were revolutions of a Europeanpattern. They were not the victory of a particular class ofsociety over the old political order; they were theproclamation of the political order for the new European society.In these revolutions the bourgeoisie gained the victory;but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victoryof a new social order, the victory of bourgeois propertyover feudal property, of nationality over provincialism,of competition over the guild, of the partition of estatesover primogeni-ture, of the owner’s mastery of land overthe land’s mastery of its owner, of enlightenment oversuperstition, of the family over the family name, ofindustry over heroic laziness, of civil law over privilegesof medieval origin. The revolution of 1648 was the victoryof the seventeenth century over the sixteenth century, therevolution of 1789 was the victory of the eighteenthcentury. Still more expressing the needs of the parts ofthe world in which they took place, England and France,these revolutions expressed the needs of the whole world,as it existed then.6The Communist Manifesto had suggested that the next revolutionwould be in Germany, and soon, taking place in ‘more advancedconditions of European civilization, and with a much more

 developed proletariat’ than its two great predecessors had beenable to experience. But, as we all know, the next revolution was tocome in Russia, and later, and in less advanced conditions ofEuropean civilisation, and with a proletariat under-developed inmost respects. In Russia (and indeed in Germany) for some timeto come, however, the proletariat would have to coexist with alarge peasantry: in Marx’s view an incomplete class which in Francesoon after 1848 he found to be a ‘simple addition of homologousmagnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes.“The peasants” are consequently incapable of enforcing their classinterest in their own name.’7We will examine the problems of interpretation of the RussianRevolution, including the relationship between the peasantry andproletariat, in closer focus below (pp. 59–65). For the moment, letus simply note the fact that, up to 1848 and beyond, Marx lookedupon Russia as an unregenerate absolutist state beyondredemption. Moreover, whereas in England and France, and evenin Germany, development of the state had been influenced mostlyby the development of society, in Russia it was the other way round,in the view of Marx who wrote extensively about Russia at thetime of the Crimean War.Before then, in the aftermath of February and March 1848, hehad set out his main thesis: ‘Europe, with the defeat of therevolutionary workers, had relapsed into its old double slavery,the Anglo-Russian slavery.’ In the New Year, he wrote:The table of contents for 1849 reads: Revolutionary rising ofthe French working class, world war. And in the East, arevolutionary army made up of fighters of all nationalitiesalready confronts the alliance of the old Europe representedby the Russian army, while from Paris comes the threat ofa ‘red republic’.8But then, the Hungarians and their supporters were defeated bythe Russian invasion, while Marx was compelled to leave Paris forLondon, where the end of the Chartist movement also brought anew ‘bourgeois’ stability.As well as scrutinising the arrival to power of Napoleon in inFrance, Marx now began to study in greater depth his newhomeland and its wider context. As D.B.Ryazanov, the greatRussian expert on Marx, was later to put it The political enslavement of continental Europe to Russiawas complemented by its economic enslavement to Britain.The revolution of 1848 had been wrecked on the resistanceof Russia, the despot of Europe, and equally on theresistance of Britain, the despot of the world market.9Marx himself described at some length the manner in whichthis Anglo-Russian stranglehold had developed from the time ofPeter the Great onwards, emphasising the manner in which theabsolutist government had been able to carry out its reactionarymission through rigid control of the Russian people.With the international crisis leading to the outbreak of theCrimean War in 1854, new opportunities arose for Marx to analyseand condemn the tsarist autocracy while he also examined thepolicies of the government and opposition in Britain too. After theend of the war and the ensuing reforms in Russia, he still detectedno significant change in Russian society, writing that:the emancipation of the serfs...is simply intended to perfectautocratic rule by tearing down the barriers which the bigautocrat has hitherto encountered in the shape of the manylesser autocrats of the Russian nobility, whose might isbased on serfdom, as well as in the shape of the self-administering peasant communes, whose materialfoundation, common ownership of land, is to be destroyedby the so-called emancipation.In the view of Marx, Russian absolutism would not modify itsaggressive foreign policy. On the contrary, ‘the emancipation ofthe serfs, as the Russian government sees it, would increase theaggressive power of Russia a hundredfold.’10Marx would come to modify this view, possibly under theinfluence of Engels, certainly under the influence of events. Weshall return to this revision below (p. 50). For the moment, let usfocus on the place where Marx himself concentrated his attentionin the aftermath of the Crimean War, on the rapid development ofanother belligerent, Britain, which Marx, following foreign customrather than native prejudice, normally referred to as ‘England’. Hewas now on the spot, ideally placed to study what he called the‘demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos’,11 to capture the essence of thehustle and bustle of the City of London from the nearby tranquillity of the Reading Room of the British Museum. There, he worked onwhat he saw as his most important publication, Capital.MARX ANDCAPITALThe Preface to the First Edition of Volume 1 published in 1867 endswith an adaptation of a line from Dante—‘Go on your way, and letthe people talk.’ This was to demonstrate that he was making noconcessions to the prejudices of ‘so-called public opinion’ at thesame time as he welcomed every opinion based on scientificcriticism. Unlike Montesquieu, then, who had wanted to think ofhimself primarily as an artist, like Correggio, Marx chose tocompare his fundamental approach to that of the scientist,especially, though by no means exclusively, Darwin. However, atthe same time, he was anxious to distinguish his own historicalmaterialism from the ‘positivism’ of Auguste Comte and othernineteenth-century social scientists.Earlier in the Preface, Marx compares his own point of departurewith that of the scientist. He explains his early emphasis on ‘value-form’ by deeming it the ‘economic cell-form’, and noting that justas in anatomy, ‘the complete body is easier to study than its cells’,so in economic analysis, the greater rather than the smaller subjecthad been previously more open to consideration. Marx goes onimmediately to observe: ‘The physi-cist either observes naturalprocesses where they occur in their most significant form, and areleast affected by disturbing influences, or, wherever possible, hemakes experiments under conditions which ensure that the processwill occur in its pure state.’The analogy with physical science is repeated in other Pref-acesand Postfaces, not least by Engels in the Preface to the Englishedition of 1886:Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in thetechnical terms of that science. This is best shown bychemistry, where the whole of the terminology is radicallychanged about once in twenty years, and where you willhardly find a single organic compound that has not gonethrough a whole series of different names.Similarly, continues Engels, Capital had needed to use certainterms in senses different to those customary not only in ordinary life, but also in ordinary political economy, since he and Marxlooked upon modern capitalist production, not as a form final andimperishable, but rather as ‘a mere passing stage’ in the economichistory of humankind.12Marxism in general and Capital in particular have inspired orprovoked a vast amount of commentary and analysis. There willbe little attempt in this book to add to it. However, as with TheSpirit of the Laws above, so with Capital here, a reminder of thebasic approach and contents might be appropriate. Throughemphases and proportions, some idea may be gained of the author’soverall thrust. But unlike Montesquieu, of course, Marx neverreached the final shore, and so the ultimate destination has to beimagined. Capital was never finished: indeed, only one volume ofa projected longer work was published in Marx’s lifetime.According to one calculation, the author devised as many asfourteen different versions of his plan for Capital. Perhaps the mostsettled was drawn up in 1865–6: Volume 1, Process of productionof capital; Volume 2, Process of circulation of capital; Volume 3,Forms of the process in its totality; Volume 4, History of the theory.Moreover, at least initially, Capital was projected as part of aneven larger ‘Critique of Political Economy’, for which six bookswere envisaged by 1857: (1) On capital; (2) On landed property; (3)On wage labour; (4) On the state; (5) International trade; (6) Theworld market.Volume 1 of Capital unfolds in the following manner. Part 1 isthe starting point, concentrating on the elementary form ofcapitalist wealth, the commodity, from the following points of view:(a) the commodity and the realisation of its exchange-value, or theprocess of exchange; (b) the process of exchange and the means ofexchange: money; (c) money, necessary mediator of the process ofcirculation of commodities.Part 2 discusses the transformation of money into capital, thatis value searching for an accretion of value, surplus-value. Part 3focuses on the production of surplus-value and absolute value,Part 4 on the production of surplus-value and relative surplus-value (from manufacturing to the modern factory system). Next,Part 5 examines the relations between wages, productivity of labourand surplus-value, including the rate of surplus-value. Then, Part6 looks at how the value of labour-power is transformed into wages,their different forms and variations. Finally, Parts 7 and 8 analysethe accumulation of capital, that is capitalist wealth in its totality and its consequences for labour, along with the origins ofcapitalism—the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’. In such amanner, Marx set out to determine a fundamental process ‘strippedof the historical form and diverting chance occurrences’, as Engelsput it.Yet, as Marx himself pointed out in 1867, the locus classicus ofthe development of the capitalist mode of production had been‘England’ (i.e. Great Britain): that was why ‘England is used as themain illustration of the theoretical developments I make.’ Marxdeclared:If, however, the German reader pharasaically shrugs hisshoulders at the condition of the English industrial andagricultural workers, or optimistically comforts himselfwith the thought that in Germany things are not nearly sobad, I must plainly tell him: De te fabula narratur!13‘The tale is told about you!’ Horace had said in his Satires,but how would it reach its climax in Germany or further afield?For even in ‘England’ in 1867 and for some years afterwards,agriculture was still the most important economic pursuit.Admittedly, farming had reached the capitalist stage, andworkers were being driven (or attracted) from the land to jointhe swelling ranks of the industrial proletariat. But would thisprocess become universal? It is still insufficiently known thatbeyond the reasons of illness, poverty and political activity,Marx’s hesitation in the face of that question was what delayedthe completion of Capital.Nearly twenty years on from the first publication of Capital,Engels appeared to consider that whereas a wholesale changeof terminology was necessary for chemistry, this was not thecase for political economy. Today, more than six times twentyyears after Capital’s first appearance, some critics might arguethat such a complete revision should be mandatory. We willapproach this argument towards the end of this book; here letus for a moment look upon some aspects of the immediatecontext of the first ‘mere passing stage’. To take the outliers of‘England’ rather than the locus classicus itself and its immediateWest European context, the American Civil War had been overfor two years when Marx observed in his original Preface of1867 Just as in the eighteenth century the American War ofIndependence sounded the tocsin for the European middleclass, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil Wardid the same for the European working class. In England,the process of transformation is palpably evident. When ithas reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent.The progress made in the USA after the Civil War was markedin an addition made by Engels to the fourth German edition in1890 to Marx’s original note of 1866. While Marx had written that‘the United States must still be considered a European colony’,Engels was now to point out that ‘it had developed into a countrywhose industry holds second place in the world, without on thataccount entirely losing its colonial character.’Some of the reasons for the USA’s rapid development werealready hinted at in 1867. For example:Nowhere does the fluidity of capital, the versatility oflabour and the indifference of the worker to the content ofhis work appear more vividly than in the United States ofAmerica. In Europe, even in England, capitalist productionis still affected and distorted by hangovers from feudalism.Could it be therefore that ‘value-form’ in the USA differed fromthe ‘economic cell-form’ in England and Europe? Marx himselfasserted that they were the same. Whatever the differences resultingfrom the lack of feudalism and much higher rates of immigrationand foreign investment, together with closer connections to slavery,Marx reiterated at the conclusion of Capital, Volume 1, that whatmost interested him was the secret ‘discovered in the New Worldby the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimedby it’. This was that:the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, andtherefore capitalist private property as well, have for theirfundamental condition the annihilation of that privateproperty which rests on the labour of the individualhimself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker.14No doubt, the same conclusion would apply to England andEurope’s eastern outlier, Russia, although Marx had far less to say about it in Capital. He barely mentions the arrival of the ‘peculiarinstitution’ of serfdom, and makes no reference to its abolition. Asfar as industry is concerned, he notes: ‘On this Russian soil, sofruitful of all infamies, the old horrors of the early days of Englishfactories are in full swing.’15 However, while the strong implicationin Capital is of Russian backwardness, the tsarist empire, like theUS republic, was soon to join in the development first noticed inEngland and Europe. The progress made by both outliers was notedmost succinctly in the Preface to the Russian edition of the Manifestoof the Communist Party of 1882. Marx and Engels observed that bothRussia and America were missing from their first edition of 1848.At that time, both were in their respective manners ‘pillars of theexisting European system’. But now, along with the great leapsforward made by the USA, Russia had advanced sufficiently tobecome ‘the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe’, albeitwith peculiar characteristics:The Communist Manifesto set out to announce the inevitablyapproaching dissolution of modern bourgeois property. InRussia, however, we find that the fast-blossoming capitalistswindle and newly-developing bourgeois landed propertystand face to face with peasant communal ownership ofthe greater part of the land. This poses the question: Canthe Russian obshchina, a form, albeit heavily eroded, of theprimitive communal ownership of the land, pass directlyinto the higher, communist form of communal ownership?Or must it first go through the same process of dissolutionwhich marks the West’s historical development?16This final question was to be posed with varying degrees ofintensity for the next fifty years and more; even today, perhaps, adefinitive answer remains to be given. In the shorter run, it isimportant that Marx himself devoted much attention in the lateryears of his life to the Russian question, in particular to the peasantcommune and ground rent, with up to 30,000 pages of notes. Herethen was another threat, possibly to the ‘value-form’ as ‘economiccell-form’, certainly to the completion of Capital. Marx had come along way from the Postscript to the first German edition of Volume1 in 1867: ‘If the influence of capitalist production...continues todevelop on the European continent as it has done until now...therejuvenation of Europe with the aid of the knout and obligatory infusion of Kalmyk blood... may ultimately become quiteinevitable.