To top it all, Engels also got to see Manchester through the eyes of his Irish working-class companion and lover, Mary Burns. It was through her that Engels was introduced to the fetid squalor of the living quarters of the proletarian Irish immigrants of the city. The historical materialist foundation that Marx always craved in his theoretical work came from the likes of Horner, Burns, and Engels. It is this that gives such a powerful aura of accuracy and authenticity to Marx’s writings. And it is this that then partly explains how and why Marx’s theorizations from that time echo down to us so convincingly, even though we are living in such different times. Yet this also gives substance to the view that Marx’s theoretical formulations may be tainted by the particularities of the Manchester case or more broadly by Anglocentric or Eurocentric perspectives.
But capital as an economic system was itself Eurocentric in origin and continued to be so throughout his lifetime. It began in its industrial form in Britain and spread worldwide but, as it did so, it had to adapt to different conditions and take on different forms. From time to time, it had to confront proto-capitalistic social formations and hybrid forms elsewhere. Marx also had to deal with regions of arrested development, regional economies where seemingly insurmountable barriers to full-fledged capitalist development prevailed (for example, the American South until very recently or the backward region of the Italian South that Antonio Gramsci confronted).
Marx universalizes the qualities and character of the capitalist mode of production by way of the particularities of mid-nineteenth century Britain in general and Manchester industrialism in particular. How to theorize its nature was the challenge that, before Marx, troubled both Adam Smith and David Ricardo. How to distill a few universal concepts and relations from the myriad and voluminous record of social practices of, for example, market exchange and capitalist production everywhere and how to ensure that whatever conceptual apparatus is derived is “adequate to” (as Marx would put it) valid interpretations of the “laws of motion” of capital in general. To this day, it is an open question whether the laws of motion of capital that Marx laid out apply with equal force in China, Bangladesh, the European Union, and the United States.
Marx’s attempt to find an answer to that sort of question – a question that confronts all attempts to theorize capital – has first to deal with an intense hostility to all things Marxist, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition. As Walter Rodney wittily observes: within that tradition, “one knows that [Marxism] is absurd without reading it and one doesn’t have to read it because one knows it is absurd.”
Even if Marx’s presentations may have been accurate and relevant for the place and time of their origin, their validity for Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong as well as for movements as diverse as Amílcar Cabral’s revolutionary movement in Guinea-Bissau or Thomas Sankara’s revolutionary government in Burkina Faso or Rodney’s revolutionary work in Guyana needs demonstration. Rodney has, perhaps, the most succinct answer. What matters is not so much Marx’s substantive findings, which are always tainted by the circumstances of their place and time, but his method of investigation and enquiry that led him to those substantive findings.
Marxism “starts from a perspective of man’s relationship to the material world . . . and when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words.” Marxism “rooted itself in the material conditions, and the social relations in society.” This, says Rodney, is the starting point: “a methodology that begins an analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations that arise in production between men.” There are a whole variety of things that flow from that: “Man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature, nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labor, and man’s labor produces a constant stream of technology, that in turn creates other social relations.” This is the spirit of Marx’s historical materialism and the Communist Manifesto at work.
To the degree that we all now have our being within a material world dominated by capital and the geopolitics of capital’s imperialism, so the method of inquiry must be directed toward understanding “the motor within that system” in order to expose and overthrow “the types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production.” The resultant theory is thereby revolutionary. As Cabral put it: there may be revolutions that have had a revolutionary theory that failed, but “nobody has yet successfully practiced revolution without a revolutionary theory.” While the material conditions of production and social relations in Guinea-Bissau may have been the starting point, the culmination, in Cabral’s view, entails mobilizing the power of revolutionary theory everywhere.
In his single-minded concentration on Manchester industrialism, Marx presumes that the merchants, the bankers, and the landed interest took up the subservient role of serving the needs of an all-powerful industrial capital. In the first two volumes of Capital, Marx largely ignores these other factions of capital. In the first volume, for example, he explicitly presumes that all commodities trade at their value (the market functions perfectly), that “capital passes through its process of circulation in the normal way,” and that the fragmentation of surplus value into rent, interest, and profit on merchant capital in no way affects accumulation. In the Grundrisse, Marx boldly asserts that “the laws of capital are completely realized only within unlimited competition and industrial production.” This rules out any problems that might derive from state-imposed restrictions on competition, monopolization, or the excessive centralization of capital.
There is nothing wrong with abstracting in this way, but major modifications to the theory might be needed in the event of restrictions on competition and shifts in the balance of power between the different factions of capital. It is very unlikely, for example, that the laws of motion of industrial capital are the same as the laws of motion of merchant, banking, or landed capital. In recent times, for example, industrial capital has increasingly been disciplined by the monopsony power of merchant capitalists like Walmart, Ikea, and the major clothing and electronics companies (like Apple). Whole sectors of the economy (such as contract farming) exist in which the direct producers dance to the tune of the merchants or other intermediaries. Likewise, the power of banking and finance, of debt and credit, and of land and property capital has, at certain times and in certain places, been decisive in shaping capital accumulation and its crises. The revisions such transformations mandate in Marx’s theory of capital will be examined later.
Marx’s focus on Manchester industrialism entailed confronting the particularities of the labor processes in the cotton mills and the nature of the labor market it defined. The power loom weavers were essentially machine minders. The transfer of skills from the laborer into the machine (a transfer that Marx makes much of in Capital and the Grundrisse) entailed a de-skilling of much of the labor force. Unskilled Irish labor and women could easily substitute for what had traditionally been semi-skilled male artisans who worked handlooms, although through the “putting out” system in which merchants provided the raw materials and gathered back the finished product.
The depressing effect on wages and living conditions through the employment of Irish laborers posed a problem for Marx. Initially scathing in his criticism of the Irish for their role in redefining the value of labor power downward, he later came to recognize that the answer lay in raising the Irish labor force up as a necessary first step in the organization of class struggle. For the millowners, division within the working class (based on gender, ethnicity, national identity, and religion) was more than welcome. It helped them rule unopposed by pitting one faction of labor against another. Capital presumed the domination of labor by capital. Capital’s power would be consolidated to the degree that it could mobilize other structures of domination (such as race and gender) in support of its domination over labor.
It could be argued that Marx’s focus on the particularities of Manchester’s industrial capitalism biased his vision and that his preoccupation with the doctrines of the free market, competition, and free trade promoted by the industrialists of the so-called Manchester School of Richard Cobden and John Bright somewhat warped his vision. But the factory inspectors, the public health officials, and the parliamentary reports did not confine their observations to Manchester. They went all over the country. And Marx was well aware of the distinctive influence of the Manchester industrial faction in the realm of ideology and politics as well as in their enormous (for that time) centralization of economic wealth and power.
The results were, in a sense, predictable: “One fine morning, in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior . . . a man famed for his economic science and his beautiful style, was summoned from Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place the political economy he taught in the former.” What Senior learned was that the capitalist’s profit was totally encompassed by the last hour of work in a twelve-hour day and that any shortening of that day to, say, ten hours would spell ruination for the capitalist system because the hours of profit making would disappear.
This “so-called ‘analysis'” prompted a fierce rebuttal, as much directed to parliament as to Senior, by none other than Horner, who worked with the factory inspectors from 1833 to 1857 and “whose services to the English working class will never be forgotten,” as Marx noted. And, of course, the Ten Hours Act was finally passed. The shortening of the length of the working day was, Marx opined, one small but critical step toward a socialist future. It opened a pathway to the realm of freedom — understood as free time — for the working classes.
For the Manchester industrialists of that time, a different kind of freedom — “His Holiness Free Trade,” as Marx called it — was the only kind of freedom that mattered. The economics of free trade were lauded to the skies by the Manchester School and incorporated into state policies across the country and with respect to the industries that at that time dominated in world capitalism. Free trade, it turns out, is always the mantra of the leading capitalist industries and powers. The elaboration and instantiation of the doctrine in the form of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements of the late 1990s at the behest of the major global corporations and the United States as the hegemonic power of the moment is the obvious case in point.
In June 1849, Marx moved to London, where he stayed for the rest of his life. While not a participant in British politics, he followed British political life closely by way of press reports and parliamentary debates. For a while, he earned some much-needed income as London correspondent of the New-York Daily Tribune. During the 1850s, he tried to make sense of British imperial politics for New York readers covering, among other things, the barbarity of the repression of the Indian Sepoy Rebellion of 1857-8, the equal barbarity of the second Chinese opium war of 1858, and the dissolution of the East India Company in favor of
British direct imperial rule over India. These were, incidentally, the years when Marx was intensely engaged in writing the Grundrisse. The connection back to Manchester free-trade politics was obvious.
As he noted in 1853:
The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, but an accidental, transitory and exceptional interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the tables are turned. The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them.
The Indian market had, for some time, been a major outlet for the huge increase in output of the Lancashire cotton industry. Imperial power had assured the destruction of a long-standing indigenous handloom cotton industry in favor of becoming “inundated with English twists and cotton stuffs.” “The necessity for opening new markets or extending the old ones” was as pressing in India as it was in China and failure to do either signaled “an approaching industrial crisis” due to “diminished demand for the produce of Manchester and Glasgow.”
The millowners’ answer was to rationalize the space-economy of India by building railroads. Prior to this, the Indians could not use machinery “to work up their cotton, which is sent by ox-carts, sometimes over eight hundred miles over wet lands, to be shipped to the Ganges, thence round the Cape of Good Hope to England, to be fabricated and then returned to the natives at whatever percent above ninety such an operation costs.” The millocracy wanted, needed, and eventually got a railroad system that gave access to cheap raw materials and spatially integrated markets across the Indian subcontinent. Marx records the astonishing increase in British trade in cotton goods to India from £2.5 million to £6.1 million between 1856 and 1859.
It is important to recognize how global this system already was. The Manchester system rested on the slave labor of the cotton plantations in the United States and the markets for the commodities produced were to be found primarily in India, where caste distinctions prevailed. The whole system was managed by British imperial administration in which the Colonial Office in London was prepared to deploy violence and outright repression of whole populations to keep much of the world open for trade.
While the British bourgeoisie in general, and the millocracy in particular, were motivated by the vilest of interests, and promoted their endeavors with the most blatant hypocrisies, the building of the railroads would, Marx hopefully supposed, ultimately mean the building of an industrial system in India which would “dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.” The account of globalization in the Communist Manifesto has a contemporaneous ring:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old- established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requir- ing for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impos- sible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The stirring up of revolutionary sentiments by these processes might, Marx hypothesized, create opportunities for socialist revolution, though this would depend on how the now ruling classes “shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat.” The relations between Manchester industrialism, imperialism, and class struggle were evident, though partly masked by doctrines of free trade that, in Marx’s time, were supported by Manchester School economics and the works of the Ricardian socialist John Stuart Mill.
The Manchester materialist anchor in Marx’s thought produced a critical theory of the role of imperialism, although as experienced and understood from the center rather than from the periphery. But this imperialism was not only about the colonization of markets. It also rested on access to raw materials from the rest of the world and, in the case of raw cotton, Marx was acutely aware that, before the US Civil War, Manchester industrialism rested on the slave economies of the southern states in the United States.
The intersection of the slave mode of production with a booming capitalist mode of production produced unfathomable brutality at the same time as “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.” The location of Manchester in the emergent global economy of nineteenth-century capitalism, intermediating, between slave labor in the cotton fields of the southern United States and the teeming populations of South Asia as the main market, was of remarkable interest. It pioneered the global production-consumption networks that dominate global capital today.
