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Yes, Virginia, Predestination Marx Is Not Fake (ANNOYANCES)

TIER 4   Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:45:16 +0000

Marx wrote unvermeidlich. That matters much more than Peter Gordon dares to admit. It means one has to read Capital as not just an analysis but as a work in the Judæo-Christian prophetic tradition as well as a work in what Marx and Engels thought of as fully science if you are to read it well. Marx really did see himself as history’s and sociology’s Darwin. And to pretend that he did not is to betray one’s scholarly-intellectual obligation to him…

I must say I do find myself cranky this morning. And so I wonder: am I being unfair here to marxisant Peter Gordon, who seems to have closed off his mind to a lot of what is really going on in the thought of Karl Marx?

Am I? To cut to the chase: No. I really do not think I am.

The Reitter/North new translation of Marx’s Capital <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190075/capital> vol. I is, as best as I can tell, truly excellent—it made me read it again, cover to cover, with the old Moore-Aveling and Fowkes translations also open on the desk, for fun.

And Peter Gordon <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/peter-e.-gordon/hair-splitting> does do a nice service by drawing attention to it.

But this from Peter Gordon:

Peter Gordon: Hair-Splitting <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/peter-e.-gordon/hair-splitting>: ‘The analogy to natural science is unfortunate… mischie[vious]… implies that human freedom must yield to naturalistic necessity.…. Marx did not use the term [“laws”] in the sense we have in mind when we say that laws govern… biolog[y]… or the… planets…. Marx… knew that the economy was a human creation and therefore susceptible to historical and social change…. In his later years Marx came to appreciate the diversity of human cultures and economic practices…. Whatever commitment he had to discovering necessary or universal laws in the economic sphere yielded to a far more pluralistic acknowledgment of the many paths from past to future.

This shift is evident when we consider the differences between the [1872] French translation of Capital and the [1867] German original…. German… “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”… French… “The most industrially developed country only shows those that follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future.”… This seemingly minor amendment has dramatic consequences… leaves history open to alternative routes that do not all climb the same ladder of Western industrialisation…

It is simply gonzo wrong. And so Peter Gordon will henceforth serve as one of my poster children on how not to read big, difficult books.

Start with the second paragraph I quote. Comparing the 1867 and 1872 versions of Marx:

If anything, the 1872 French version sounds the Predestination Marx leitmotif louder in my ears than does the 1867 German version:

Marx thought that his great intellectual achievement—in Friedrich Engels’s eyes and even more so in his own—was precisely that he had uncovered the laws of how this human creation that was the economy must undergo historical and social change. As Newton had been for physics, as Darwin was becoming for biology, so Marx was for history. Indeed, from at least 1848 the following was very clear to Marx:

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61-images.html>: [While] ‘hitherto… society has been based… on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed…

Something much better was coming as:

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61-images.html>: ‘the modern laborer… sinks deeper and deeper… and pauperism develops more rapidly… the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class… and… impose its conditions of existence…. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition… by their revolutionary combination… [amd] cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable…

Inevitable.

Inevitable.

The final sentence in German: is Ihr Untergang und der Sieg des Proletariats sind gleich unvermeidlich. The German word translated as “inevitable” is unvermeidlich: un-, not; -lich, making it into an adjective; -vermeid, a verb stem meaning avoid, evade, avert.

Or, alternatively translated, Predestined.

And Predestination Marx’s recognition of that inevitably really his, in his mind and in Engels’s mind, fully scientific:

Friedrich Engels (1883): Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm>: ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained…. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production…. Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one…. Such was the man of science…

Yes, it would have been far wiser in the Manifesto, given Marx’s and Engels’s purposes, for them to have not made claims to knowledge either scientific or theological. It would have been far wiser to have anticipated Red Rosa Luxemburg and said that humanity faced a choice between “socialism or barbarism”. But that it not what they said. That is not who they were.

But what is going on here with Gordon?

I ask because Predestination Marx is quite probably the strongest of the many aspects of Marx. That aspect then powered itself down through the many ages of Marxism echoed down the years. It did so much so that Edmund Wilson, when he came to write about Leon Trotsky, could only marvel at Trotsky’s perception of the process by which History-with-a-capital-H wreaked its will:

Edmund Wilson: To the Finland Station <https://archive.org/details/tofinlandstation0000wils>: ‘History, then, with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky to disillusion the middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled Father Gapon to bless, and will cruelly discredit and destroy certain Pharisees and Sadducees of Marxism before it summons the boiling lava of the Judgment. These statements make no sense whatever unless one substitutes for the words history and dialectic of history the words Providence and God.... Of late, in [Trotsky’s] solitude and exile, this History, an austere spirit, has seemed actually to stand behind [Trotsky’s] chair as he writes, encouraging, admonishing, approving, giving him the courage to confound his [Stalinist] accusers, who have never seen History’s face…

So what is the root of Peter Gordon’s strange assertions that this Predestination Marx does not really exist?

I think it comes here:

Peter Gordon: Hair-Splitting <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/peter-e.-gordon/hair-splitting>: ‘Among scholars of Capital the question of what Marx meant is burdened with added importance: a proper translation of Capital can tell us how capital works…. When Marxists wrestle over a term or phrase in Capital they… [are] treating the original as the privileged source of instruction…

This is the serpent in Gordon’s mental walled and irrigated garden: his apparent belief that “a proper translation of Capital can tell us how capital works…” Not that a proper translation tells us how Karl Marx back in the mid-1800s thought and guessed and inferred how some human social-network pattern labelled “capital” would work in this year 2025 of the Common Era. Rather, that it tells us how some human social-network pattern labelled “capital” works today.

Now Gordon manages to leave thoroughly ambiguous the question of in what sense we are take his claim that “…a proper translation of Capital can tell us how capital works…”:

And to which of these overlapping communities does Gordon himself belong?

Gordon does eventually—at the very end of his piece—shift gears, and then he says that “not all Marxist theorists feel they must remain devoted to Marx the author”’ and thus “thinking with Marx can often mean thinking against him, or even past him…”?

And yet I cannot see why else he is compelled go so far against the plain reading of the sources to deny Predestination Marx. Whatever its status, a belief that the properly handled text of Capital is indeed a “privileged source of instruction”—that is the only thing I can see that can create a head of mental steam powerful enough to lead someone to attempt to suppress and erase Predestination Marx from the actual works themselves.

And this is, I think, a shame.

One important reason to wrestle with difficult books by brilliant past authors is precisely because they are so often and so profoundly wrong, in ways that we can clearly see given our more privileged standpoint later in history than they. And one of the ways in which Marx’s analysis of capitalism went wrong is that it was driven by one of what I see as the four principal aspects of Marx’s intellectual identity:

At some level, Marx really did see humanity’s future as one in which the New Jerusalem would arrive, descending from heaven.

prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away…’

Or, as Marx put it in Capital: “the integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated...”

Here is another sample of Marx as prophet: Marx on India:

Karl Marx: The Future Results of British Rule in India <>: ‘The [Brirtish] The aristocracy wanted to conquer [India], the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it… have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance.... They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India... [But] you cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to… [other] industr[ies]….

The English bourgeoisie… will not fail… [by] dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation… to create the material basis of the new world... universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind... the development of the productive powers of man....

When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain...

And yet large-scale prophecy of a glorious utopian future is bound to be false when applied to this world. The New Jerusalem does not descend from the clouds. No Great Voice declares. But at some deep level Marx clearly thought that it would descend, and would and did say so—even though he never got to the island of Patmos, with its magic mushrooms, on which Ioannes the Divine perhaps subsisted during the reign of Caesar Domitianus Augustus.

And because Peter Gordon is psychologically incapable of admitting that aspect of Marx into his mind, he cannot really read Capital—and really should not pretend that he has any competence to tell other people how to do so.

MOAR on reading difficult books:

And, as I just quoted Lisa Cook saying, actually listening to the world rather than telling it how we already know it must be is something we are rather good at, here at the University of California at Berkeley:

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