Review of "Beyond Marx" - Über Marx hinaus

This article presents a review, summary and notes on Über Marx hinaus Arbeitsgeschichte und Arbeitsbegriff in der Konfrontation mit den globalen Arbeitsverhältnissen des 21. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth, this book combines many heterodox thinkers of the left, who had a close engagement with Marx, but are convinced now that we need to go beyond Marx for a number of reasons. This carefully edited volume makes a very interesting contribution to the history and present of labour and deserves to receive enough attention so that it gets translated as a whole or some of the pieces in it.


Reference: Über Marx hinaus Arbeitsgeschichte und Arbeitsbegriff in der Konfrontation mit den globalen Arbeitsverhältnissen des 21. Jahrhunderts, Marcel van der Linden und Karl Heinz Roth, (ed.) with Max Henninger, Berlin und Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2009 1

"We urgently need a critical theory which makes it possible to analyse the development of a capitalist world system and to construct, based on this understanding, new perspectives for a comprehensive social re-ordering" (Marcel van der Linden und Karl Heinz Roth, Introduction p. 13)

The introduction by the editors starts with a short and concise analysis of recent world events, the so called financial crisis and the decline of U.S. hegemony. This concludes with a number of points which illustrate that even so the last 20 years can be understood as a phase of economic expansion, this expansion was very uneven. The poorest fifth of the world's nations achieved negative economic growth of -0,5%. In 80% of all countries the rise of life-expectancy has slowed down, while also the decline of child death has decelerated. Only in the richest countries spending on education has risen, while in almost every country the proportion of spending as part of GDP has fallen; and even in the richest countries, measured by the OECD, the wealth gap between the poorest and richest segments of societies has grown. pp. 8-9

The introduction proceeds with a short re-assessment of Marx' work. Both authors/editors belong to a thread in Marxism which has drawn on Marx' classics during their youth in the 1960s and 1970s, yet were also close to the student movement and currents in Marxism now known as autonomous Marxism coming out of the operaio movement. The authors point out that the new materials published in the new complete German edition - Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe MEGA 2 - show that Engels' interventions as editors of the second and third volume of Capital did not only occasionally smooth over Marx' gaps and inconsistencies but had a more profound impact on the meaning of the work than had previously been thought. They also point out that Marx, towards the end of his life, had resisted the publication of II and III not only because the work was unfinished but because he had started to nurture severe doubts about the analytic framework he had developed. Marx had originally planned a six part work with the themes capital, land ownership, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market of which he had within his life time only finished the first volume of the first part. It is therefore impossible, the authors conclude to analyse the complex processes and cycles of the world economy driven by competition between nation states on a genuine Marxist basis p. 12.

Roth and van der Linden identify five main weaknesses, inconsistencies and/or contradictions in Marx' work. First, they focus on the issue that Marx analysed capital but did little on living labour, which was reserved for a further book which he never came to write. The focus on developing theoretic instruments through which to understand the working of capital necessarily leads to many gaps, notably how capitalism actually works in the real work, how for instance the working class reproduces itself and what constitute its 'needs'. This, in our terms, would be the integrative process. van d. Linden and Roth are asking, what is the working class? The first part of the book provides a variety of angles, from a historic perspective, to aspects such as migration and the difficulty of applying a concept of class on subaltern groups in an emerging economy such as India.

This leads to a second point, a tendency to objectivism which is partly explained out of the context of Marx' own life: while the basic plan for a critique of the national economy was developed in the revolutionary 1840s, the emerging working class movement suffered heavy political defeat in the late 1840s and Marx thereafter became a precarious intellectual who had withdrawn into private life to make his theory more 'scientific'. This resulted in an objectivist tendency with Marx hoping to discover the "natural laws of the development of the capitalist economy" which would either lead to avantgardism or passivity (this line of critique is developed by quoting Karl Korsch (p.17)2 and Castoriadis' Crossroads in the Labyrinth (p. 16 and p. 204)3, both quoted on pages 18-19).

The third weakness is a tendency to privilege only one segment of the world working class, the male industrial proletariat which Marx and Engels treat as the only really revolutionary class while having, for instance, scant regard for the urban lumpenproletariat. This is closely linked with a fourth problem which is identified as methodological nationalism (p. 20). Marx explicitely based his theoretic model in Capital I on one nation state. While Marx made this theoretic reduction explicit, it has led to a widespread methodological nationalism among Marxists who, according to Roth and van der Linden, naturalise the nation state and exclude subnational, supranational and transnational aspects of the world system, while also identifying society with the state and a specific territorry (p. 21). This leads to the fifth accusation of Eurocentrism, which finds three main expressions, one, by ignoring events outside the axis Europe-North-America, second, by developing a prejudice about a European led development model, and third, by using empirical assumptions which treat certain things as facts, when they actually occured only under specific historic conditions (p.23).

The central thesis of the editors of Beyond Marx is that those 5 issues have to be overcome if radical theory should be able to provide orientation in the way it is expressed in the initial quote. The following essays of this finely edited book focus mainly on the aspect of labour and a more inclusive approach to the question of who or what is the working class. Thereby they help to sort out the mess with regard to class issues. The demographic decline of a specific type of working class in rich Northern countries, the rise in numbers and significance of new types of "flexi-workers" both in developed and emerging economies, the swelling numbers of the new industrial proletariat in emerging economies, all those tendencies coalesce into a problematic which has so far seen little solution both theoretically and empirically.

Historical labour inquiries

The first section, on labour, starts with a short version of Linebaugh and Rediker's book on the Many Headed Hydra4 which I assume to be well known by an English reading public. The second article by Niklas Fryman, is a fascinating account of seafarers as workers on the European war ships of the late 18th century. One thing that stands out is how, firstly, hard it was for the various navies to fill warships with the necessary amount of workers, and the mostly coercive ways of achieving this; secondly, there have been, accroding to Fryman, different phases when working class resistance took on different forms: during phases when hopes for an overall political change are slim, seaferers deserted in great numbers; when things got really hopeless they switched to open mutiny.

This almost melts together in my memory with Peter Way's attempt to understand the British soldier of that same period as a 'worker'. Noteworthy, across those three texts, is the tendency for transnational revolutionary solitarity, and the much bigger attention that probably should be paid to forms of forced labour, as both seafarers and soldiers can only partially be understood as "free individuals" who had nothing else to sell but their labour time. Can workers who are forced to work and who do not engage in a free contractual relationship also be analyzed according to a Marxist framework of labour vs. capital? And, as specifically Peter Ways suggests, does the great role that forced labour played in primitive accumulation lead us to a new understanding of that process, which Marx maybe assessed to schematically within a before and after of capitalism's history? Furthermore, are there continuities with regard to coercive methods on the capital-labour relationship with legacies lasting till today?

Gambino and Sacchetto on migration, forced labour and the business cycle

This last question gains increased urgency in the fourth piece by Ferruccio Gambino and Devi Sacchetto, which is the first piece in this volume to create a bridge from those deep histories to present times. Die Formen des Mahlstroms. Von den Plantagen zu den Fließbändern which could be translated as The forms of the maelstrom: from the plantations to the assembly lines draws together those histories of labour in chains with histories of migration and industrial development, the combination of free trade with slavery and indentured labour as well as the hard fought for freedom of the wage labourer to leave her employer. This 40 page essay does not waste much time with lengthy declarations about methodologies and theories and is packed with interesting research which is impossible to retell without translation of the whole piece.

As an important aside, a short search for possible English versions of this text did yield no result. It shows how important translations is especially in this living field of theory which connects itself to real struggles, something that becomes even more visible with the next piece by Sergio Bologna (more below). My motivation for writing this review is partly to make people aware of this book to motivate them so that they either wholly or partially translate it into other languages than German.

Gambino and Sacchetto address the "re-disciplining of migration flows" in Asia, Europe and North-America as a double process of selection, between exclusion of people deemed dangerous and the combination of formal and informal recruitment channels for an industrial system based on just-in-time production which wants to access human resources as flexibly as natural ones (p. 116). The buerocratisation of 'processing' migration flows takes on various forms and so leads to segmentations between workers whose often paperless status gets exploited while fostering new practices that turn detention centres for 'illegal migrants' into informal recruitment camps for cheap and dangerous labour. The text, however, does not only focus on the ways power tries to regulate migrant labour, it also highlights the agency of workers and the influence this had and has on the business cycle.

The chief term here is that of 'fluctuation', the turnover of workers and the measures taken to address it, or taken more generally, the mobility of capital. While the movement of workers has forced capital to globalise its recruitment capabilities, migrant workers have also triggered the opposite movement, when they try to stay in places where employers want to get rid of them again. Bringing in David Harvey's retemporalisation of the crisis, the authors ask how does this complex and cruel dialectics play itself out concretely. As Marx discusses the turnover of fixed capital and its relation to circulating capital, they criticise him for taking a too contemplative view on a process which went ahead in a much stormier way thereby exposing the limits of a system relying on 'using up' or 'exhausting' labour power. The relationship between jumpy peaks and troughs of fixed capital investment rates - the business cycle - and the availability of human labour as an uncertain factor is a key theoretical problematic to which this text makes an important contribution. There is an ambiguity between the historic forms that the maelstrom took on, using coercive and free forms of labour together for their own workers, in England, for example, while showing outright violence and brutality to slaves and indigenous people on plantations p. 121.

The relationship between the business cycle and migration has already been observed as early as 1926, note Gambino and Sacchetto 5. Yet while there are observable similarities in the shape of the respective curves, the exact connection between them is not quite clear. This is an intriguing bit which I suggest should be factored into the Technopolitics research scheme and given further consideration. Over the following pages the authors show how this particular connection was conditioned by certain social superstructural aspects in the U.S. namely the intention of keeping migrating African Americans in menial jobs and out of industrial assembly line jobs. But WWI and the U.S. fear of radicalised socialist workers together depleted the reservoir of available white workers, so that employers started to scrape at "the bottom of the barrel" of European labour - means recruiting Southern and South-Eastern European workers. there is a relationship between the tendency of the working class to "vote with their feet" when confronted with the three d's - dirty, dangerous, difficult - of labour and the role that regulation of migration plays with regard of coercing workers into accepting such working conditions that negatively afflict health (p. 138).

G&S present a particularly unforgiving view of the early phase of Fordism underpinned by spectacular turnover rates which stood as high as 370% at Ford's Highland Park before the doubling of the daily wage to 5$ (p. 134). The African Americans who had migrated to the North and West saw work at Ford as a chance despite the fact that many of them were first employed in the most unhealthy workshops such as the foundries. The retention rate of married African Americans at Ford who were not working in the foundries were one among the highest of all Fordist workers at the time, which was part of the motivation of Ford to take them on while other employers in Detroit continued discriminating against black workers (pp. 134 - 136)6

The continuation of those histories after WWII, the migration of African Americans to the centres of the industrial North, their increased inclusion in the Fordist labour market had a direct connection with the anti-segregation and civil rights movement in the U.S. within a global context of anti-colonial insurrections, according to G&S. The overall result of this was an international tendency towards less discrimination brought down many rassistic taboos in Europe as well (pp. 139-40). Northern Europe had to accept that many of those 'guestworkers' who had been invited to come for a few years and leave would have to be allowed to stay. The opposite tendency sets in, of exporting labour to low wage countries or so called export processing zones. The authors highlight the continuity from plantation to export processing zones, in the case of some countries such as the Fidschis. While a number of countries, especially larger ones, start a process of import substitution through building up domestic resources, others lack the necessary pre-conditions completely to do so (p. 141). The rise of free trade zones and export processing zones is making permanent the violation of many basic rights of the workers, there are nevertheless strong migration currents in poor countries towards these zones. China, in particluar, had already mobilised 100 million workers by 2005, with a further potential of 130 mio rural inhabitants to become migrant workers in export processing zones (pp. 148-49).

G&S conclusions emphasise more strongly the continuity of forms of forced labour in the assembly line work rather than the more Marxist orthodox view of factory work marking a more substantial change. Therefore they do not end without a swipe at those "prophets who predict the end of serialised labour or a postindustrial world" (p. 153). Without entering this very interesting discussion further I take note of a potential point of contestation with prevalent narratives about Fordism and Postfordism. If narratives about Golden Ages of Fordism are too sanguine, what about the sequel to that?

Sergio Bologna on the intellectual history of operaio

Which is, in a way, exactly what Sergio Bologna tackles with Der Operaismus, eine Innenansicht: von der Massenarbeit zur selbständigen Arbeit (pp. 155 - 181, Operaism, a view from within: from mass labour to self-employed labour). This is first of all, an intellectual history of Operaismo and autonomous Marxism and as such very useful, because in its relative brevity it is able to show connections between events and turning points in theory development that evaded me previously. What appears to me as most important is this drive by the first generation of operaistic researchers to understand factory labour, not in the terms that were already used by the Communist Party and the main Trade Unions, but what their own collective research yielded which directly engaged with the productive process on different layers:

"sequential organisation of the production cycle; hierarchical mechanisms, which this process spontaneously creates, disciplining and integrating techniques, the development of technologies and production processes, the reaction to the spontaneous behaviour of the labor force, and the intersubjective dynamics between workers, the communicative processes which workers have adopted among themselves, the passing on of knowledge from older to younger workers, the emergence of a culture of conflict, the fragmentations within the labor force, the use of breaks and cantine times, the differentiated account of the working of the payment system, the presence of trade unions and the forms of political propaganda, awareness of risk and means to protect one's physical safety, ... etc." (Sergio Bologna in Van der Linden and Roth 2009, p. 156)

It merits to quote this at length as it represents a possible research matrix to conduct conricerca ourselves in this day and age. In this view of theory or research as being in constant and direct connection with reality lies one of the lasting achievements of operaismo. The currently very fertile strand of conricerca appearantly owes something to the influence of Danilo Montaldi on Romano Alquati (p. 161) something further to be explored. The well known but hard to get by German edition of Opereio e Capitale, Tronti 1966 (dtsch.7), was a cornerstone of theory development. From there on, a theoretic shift phased in which should last a few years, which led to the reading of Grundrisse8 and the culmination of viewpoints based on that, lasting into the 1970s. While the first volume of Capital gives you the instruments to understand concrete labour, Grundrisse allows you to understand the principles of abstract labour, writes Bologna. With Vol I you 'get' Fordism, with Grundrisse you 'get' Postfordism (p. 166). Never before heard that so neatly juxtaposed. The next interaction between strike wave and theory creation brought together Primo maggio with the movement of 1977. Sergio Bologna published La tribu delle talpe, Mailand 19789 (German version10). While many of Bologna's colleagues had adopted ideas by Foucault, together with a reception of Deleuze via Negri, his analysis was different, based on the research of Primo maggio which had had shown the new drift of the economy towards fragmentation, specialisation, house work, just-in-time, in all these disintegrating forms, so that Bologna thought to observe first signs of a transition from Fordism to Postfordism (p. 173). The participation of new social groups in workerist struggles, where sometimes the focus was to leave the factory altogether was new and remains something to come to terms with. Bologna then turns to a narration that becomes more explicitely autobiographical.

Bologna identifies himself as a freelancer from the moment on he loses his job in the course of Italian state-action against radical intellectuals, starting in 1979, affecting him in 1982. What Bologna calls "die neue selbständige Arbeit" - Il lavoro autonomo di seconda generazione11 the phenomenon of new self-employed and self-directed gives rise to the dieci tesi, the 10 theses first presented to the public in altre ragioni in 1991, printed in 199712

Bologna comes out with the strong claim that in writing the 10 theses Marxism provided him with no historic or theoretic point of reference. There is no chapter in Capital, the Theory of Surplus Value or Grundrisse which provided any orientation for him. p. 177-78 Bologna sees great scope for fields of action opened by the crisis produced by neoliberalism and finance, because of the paradigm change brought by networked computing, "the greatest industrial revolution since the combustion engine". Bologna urges us to use those spaces of action, but also warns about the myths of the knowledge worker in light of exploitation of university staff and the general decline of the middle classes. Bologna insists we do not only have to go beyond Marx but also beyond the notion of The Left if we are to tackle issues such as the defence of postfordist labour and its autonomy, which he sees the remaining socialist or even radical leftist movements uncapable of. Now politically homeless, he is happy with that, and still draws on some of the operaismo research methodologies pp. 180-181

Those strong words come a bit as a surprise and my translation may make them even more undercomplex or clumsy. But once more lets make a holding mark, about this question if Postfordism really made any form of Marxist theory formulation obsolete. That could be read in a wider context where the development of media unhinges the leverage of Marx based thought. Which is what some Postmodern media theorists think. Turning this upside down, it could be valuable to study more concretely the relationship between the rise of new media and postmodernist theory strands within the postfordist economic paradigm.

• 1. van der Linden M, Roth KH. 
  2009.  Über Marx hinaus .
• 2. Korsch K. 
  1996.  Krise des Marxismus : Schriften 1928-1935. Gesamtausgabe / Karl Korsch / herausgegeben von Michael Buckmiller, 5 . 5
• 3. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 
  1984.  Crossroads in the labyrinth.
• 4. Linebaugh, Peter, Rediker MB. 
  2000.  The many-headed hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic.
• 5. p. 133, Footnote 43: Harry Jerome, Migration and Business Cycless 1926Jerome H. 
  1926.  Migration and business cycles,.
• 6. very interesting series of footnotes: Meier, August and Rudwick Elliott, Black Detroit and the rise of the UAW, New York 1979. Maloney, Thomas, N., and Whatley, Warren, C. Making the Effort: The Contours of Racial Discrimination in Detroit's Labour Market 1920 - 1940 in The Journal of Economic History, Y 53 (1995) and Foot, Whatley and Wright: Arbitraging a discriminatory labour market: black workers at the Ford motor company, 1918 - 1947, Journal of Labor Economics, Year 21 (2003)
• 7. Tronti M. 
  1974.  Arbeiter und Kapital.
• 8. Marx, Nicolaus, Martin. 
  1993.  Grundrisse : foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft).
• 9. Bologna S. 
  1978.  La tribu delle talpe. Centralità operaia.
• 10. Der Stamm der Maulwürfe, Mai-Gruppe und Theoriefraktion, Hg., Wissenschaft kaputt, Münster 1980
• 11. Bologna S, Fumigalli A. 
  1997.  Il lavoro autonomo di seconda generazione.
• 12. Sergio Bologna, 1997. Dieci thesi per un statuto del lavoro autonomo. in: Bologna 1997, op.cit.