Table Of ContentGlobal Marx
Studies in
Critical Social Sciences
Series Editor
David Fasenfest (Wayne State University)
Editorial Board
Eduardo Bonilla- Silva (Duke University)
Chris Chase- Dunn (University of California– Riverside)
William Carroll (University of Victoria)
Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney)
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (University of California, Los Angeles/
Columbia University)
Raju Das (York University)
Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University)
Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen)
Alfredo Saad- Filho (King’s College London)
Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo)
Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)
volume 229
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss
Originally published as Global Marx. Storia e critica del movimento sociale nel mercato mondiale, © 2020
Meltemi editore (Milan, Italy).
Cover illustration: “The world in marxsphere”, 2022, courtesy of Laura Montanari.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Battistini, Matteo, editor. | Cappuccilli, Eleonora, editor. |
Ricciardi, Maurizio, editor.
Title: Global Marx : history and critique of the social movement in the
world market / edited by Matteo Battistini, Eleonora Cappuccilli and
Maurizio Ricciardi.
Other titles: Global Marx. English
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2023] | Series: Studies in critical
social sciences, 1573-4234 ; volume 229 | “Originally published as
Global Marx. Storia e critica del movimento sociale nel mercato
mondiale, © 2020 Meltemi editore (Milan, Italy)”–Title page verso. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029819 (print) | LCCN 2022029820 (ebook) |
ISBN 9789004520691 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004520707 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Marxian economics–History. | Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.
Classification: LCC HB97. 5 .G55413 2023 (print) | LCC HB97. 5 (ebook) |
DDC 335.4/11–dc23/eng/20220705
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029819
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029820
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/b rill- typeface.
issn 1573- 4234
isbn 978- 90- 04- 52069- 1 (hardback)
isbn 978- 90- 04- 52070- 7 (e- book)
Copyright for English edition by Meltemi editore, 2023. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden,
The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
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This book is printed on acid- free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
This volume is collectively dedicated to the memory of Benedetto Vecchi
∵
Contents
P reface ix
A bbreviations xvii
N otes on Contributors xviii
part 1
Disciplines and Structures: Time, History, Mutations
1 O n Possession and Property
Marx, Gans and the Law 3
Michele Basso
2 B reaking the Chain of Time
Marx and the French Historians 16
Isabella Consolati
3 T he Social Object
Marx, the Economists, the Mercantile Society 28
Maurizio Merlo
4 T he Artificial Nature and the Genetic History of Capital
Marx and the Modern Theory of Colonization 44
Paola Rudan
5 T he Feminine Ferment
Marx and the Critique of Patriarchy 58
Eleonora Cappuccilli and Roberta Ferrari
6 T he City as a Time- Machine
Marx and Urban Transformations 74
Niccolò Cuppini
7 M arx and Darwin
Technology and Anthropology 91
Fabio Raimondi
viii Contents
part 2
Spaces and World: States, Revolutions, Social Movement
8 G ermany as an Anachronism
Marx, Social Science and the State 109
Maurizio Ricciardi
9 I n the Anarchic State of Capital
Marx and the Suspended History of Latin America 122
Michele Cento
10 T he Colonial Lever and the Social Movement in General
Marx and Ireland 136
Luca Cobbe
11 T he French Revolutions and the Meaning of Politics
Marx and France 151
Federico Tomasello
12 T he Nation within Capital’s Political Relations
Marx and Italy 168
Michele Filippini
13 F rom the Commune to Communism?
Marx and Russia 183
Luca Basso
14 ‘ A Sea of Revolution’
Marx, India and China 196
Giorgio Grappi
15 B etween Slavery and Free Labour
Marx, the American Civil War and Emancipation as a Global Issue 212
Matteo Battistini
16 E ngland as the Metropolis of Capital
Marx, the International and the Working Class 231
Mario Piccinini
W orks of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 247
R eferences 259
I ndex 273
Preface
This book is not a collection of scattered essays, but the outcome of a lengthy
collective research project aimed at investigating the way Marx reconstructed
the spatial and temporal coordinates of capital’s world domination. Although
the terms global and worldwide are now often taken as synonyms, we do not
intend to establish the possibilities and limits of Marxian discourse under
the conditions of present- day globalization; researching the possible ways of
making Marx and Marxism global today (Spivak 2018; Hoff 2017) falls outside
the scope of this volume. Our aim is rather to identify the factors that make
Marxian discourse global in its very formulation. The underlying hypothesis
is that, in spite of its many limitations and antinomies, Marx’s political epis-
temology allows us to go beyond specific spaces and the hegemonic subjects
within them, and thus is itself global.
The different chapters are arranged along a double axis. The first axis
explores some of the disciplinary languages that Marx encounters, uses and
criticizes in more or less explicit ways in order to produce his own political
epistemology. The second interrogates the political spaces on which he focuses,
in different ways and with different levels of intensity. In an apparently inter-
mediate position, and with a connecting function with respect to these two
axes, is the investigation of political processes and structures such as the city,
patriarchy, colonization, and technology, which, although widely present in
Marxian texts, have until now attracted little interest.
We are aware that a lot is missing, but the book does not claim to be ency-
clopaedic in nature. To give just a couple of examples of what is lacking, there
is no adequate analysis of the importance of the hard sciences in the building
of the Marxian discourse, just as there is no analysis of the political relevance
that Poland had for Marx and Engels. However, our global Marx is not limited
to his analyses of geographical spaces but focuses on how his global approach
affects his conceptual framework and his critique of the scholarly disciplines
that were establishing themselves as the scientific knowledge of capitalist soci-
ety. From our point of view, Marx’s epistemology is a political epistemology of
antithesis that aims to define the cleavages that characterize capitalist society
in all its spaces. Precisely for this reason, it is crucially determined by his crit-
ical confrontation with those disciplines that were preparing the forms of the
governance of capitalist society through the scientific description of the social.
This seemed even more relevant to us in light of the centrality of the con-
cept of the world market in Marx’s discourse, understood not simply as the
extension of trade to ever larger parts of the planet, but as the structure of a
x Preface
communicative, economic and institutional power that repeatedly redefines
the geography of capital, setting the changing coordinates of the forms and
figures of the exploitation of wage labour through the subordination of ever
larger masses of individuals.
The exploitation of wage labour is obviously a function of the valorization
of capital, which cannot exist without continuously reproducing its conditions
of possibility, which are not always strictly economic and are neither delimited
to the areas where exploitation is most evident or intense. It is precisely for
this reason that Marx argues the world market is not simply the progressive
outcome of so- called capitalist development, but the political presupposition
of its very existence. On the other hand, in 1858 Marx stated that the process
of the globalization of capital was complete. There were no lands that could
still be considered outside of its range of action. The geography of bourgeois
society seemed to have fulfilled its historical task, which, however, opened up
a political problem that did not concern the spaces of capital, but the time of
revolution.
The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market,
at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since
the world is round, the colonization of California and Australia and the
opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this pro-
cess. For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent revolution
is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character.
Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since
the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant over a far
greater area?.
marx to engels 10/ 8/ 1858 in mecw 40: 347
In the years that followed, Marx attempted to solve this small geometric par-
adox, this corner in a round body, through investigating the social movement
that traversed the world market and tormented the structures guaranteeing
its continuity. In this regard, it has been rightly observed that ‘the most fragile
part of Marx [is] the predictive Eurocentric scenario’ (Spivak 1993: 142). At the
same time, however, a growing literature has shown that this scenario is not
given once and for all (Shanin 1983; Nimtz 2004; Anderson 2010; Basso 2015;
Pradella 2015; Musto 2020). It changes over time and is affected by events that,
although not happening in Europe, are not recorded by Marx as secondary
facts or expressions of a still ‘immature’ history, but as symptoms of the struc-
tural instability of the world market. To fully assume the political dominance
of the latter means recognizing that the presence of the social movement is
