Comments on David McNally’s “Marx on Colonization and Bonded Labor”

Thank you, Professor McNally, for sharing this insightful lecture with us today in memory of the late David Gordon. I am grateful for the invitation to serve as your respondent. I feel obliged to share that I initially declined the invitation, concerned that I didn’t have any particular scholarly expertise in what I understood to be the subject of McNally’s planned lecture. However, I reversed course and accepted the invitation when I learned that McNally’s lecture, while ostensibly about his current research on colonialism and slavery, would be more fundamentally concerned with demonstrating the enduring relevance of Marx’s method of immanent critique ¹ inherent in his critique of political economy. This is what I hope to draw out in my response, along with the potential implications for Marxist economics.

Marx is frequently criticized for not considering things he did in fact consider, on one extreme, and for not being a psychic wizard capable of producing an infinite body of writing that perfectly anticipates the future, on the other. Those of us who are terminally online might be familiar with a relevant meme: “Karl Marx failed to consider.” Karl Marx failed to consider “calling the ghostbusters” (@marxconsiders 2022). Karl Marx failed to consider “an invasive species of spider the size of a child’s hand that parachutes down from the sky” (@as_a_worker 2022). “Karl Marx failed to consider that White Claw [is] just Zima for zoomers” (@marxconsiders 2019). However, Marx didn’t need to consider everything under the sun because, as McNally points out, Marx provided us with a framework that allows us to do that work ourselves.

In McNally’s lecture today, he places himself within a critical Marxist tradition. He describes Capital as a text that poses many problems that it leaves unresolved. And he characterizes Marx’s critique of political economy as an “open-ended framework” that invites us to explore “problem[s] that [are] broached but not resolved” in Capital. McNally guides us through two examples of related theoretical problems that Marx didn’t solve but that contemporary scholarship can develop, in this way deepening Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy: first, the labor process involved in reproduction of the commodity labor power, and second, forms of bondage in the colonies and their relationship to the bloody and violent process of dispossession.

First, McNally discusses the recent Marxist Feminist offshoot calling itself “Social Reproduction Theory” (SRT), which merges particular insights from two otherwise theoretically contradictory strains of twentieth-century Marxist Feminism to “argue for the working-class position and revolutionary capacity of people. . . engaged in either waged or unwaged work related to the reproduction of labour-power, if not surplus value directly” (Munro 2024: 208). By doing this, SRT, like Marxist Feminism more broadly, uses the framework provided by Marx to theorize a component of the reproduction of capitalist society that Marx did not discuss in detail, and to, in McNally’s words, “go beyond the concept of labor” as generally understood by traditional Marxists. This includes both the unwaged labor of household production, but also a theorization of the contribution of certain unproductive workers such as teachers to the reproduction of the commodity labor power. And while I have offered a number of what I hope are taken as comradely critiques of SRT in other writing, ² this application of Marx’s framework has done important work to reignite the Marxist Feminist conversation in recent years, showing that there is in fact no unhappy marriage between Marxism and Feminism (Hartmann 1981), but rather a constructive partnership capable of shedding new light on questions that were outside the scope of Marx’s own work.

Second, McNally turns to chapter 33 of the first volume of Capital, “The Modern Theory of Colonialism.” In this chapter, the insights of Edward G. Wakefield on land and labor in the colonies are used by Marx to explain the emergence of capitalism in Europe. However, Marx does this without fully developing a theory of colonialism or forms of bondage in the colonized world, let alone a theory of racism. But this is not the same as saying that Marx is unconcerned with these topics, simply—not unlike the reproduction of the commodity labor power—that they are not central to his analysis in Capital (Knox and Kumar 2023).

Part 8 of Capital, volume 1, “Primitive Accumulation,” including, but not limited to, chapter 33, has served as a significant source of inspiration for a number of theorists of racialization, slavery, and colonialism. ³ In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes that Marx’s work needs to be “slightly stretched” (légèrement distendues) ⁴ to make room for a theory of colonialism (1965 [1961]: 32), but this statement suggests that the material is plastic enough to accommodate some stretching. Rob Knox and Ashok Kumar, in their introduction to a recent special issue of Historical Materialism on Race and Capitalism, argue that Fanon’s “slight stretching” is actually a deepening of the critique of political economy (Knox and Kumar 2023: 34). And so, it is the story that Marx neglected to tell in chapter 33 that provides McNally with an opening to investigate these topics historically using Marx’s own method of immanent critique.

McNally shows that Marx’s engagement with Wakefield can be extended to nineteenth-century political economic discussions of chattel slavery, expanding on Wakefield’s conclusion that waged labor requires the compulsion that arises from violent dispossession, and that, from the point of view of the nonproducing class, bondage is necessary to compel labor where there is an abundance of land. We can see from McNally’s lecture that Wakefield (and by extension McDonald and others) were not wrong. Waged labor in capitalism necessitates dispossession—this is not an illusion. Wakefield is just saying the quiet part out loud. ⁵

But at the same time, it is more than an illusion. Because Wakefield is uncritical of his presuppositions, he fails to grasp that his insights are only true in particular forms of society. Wakefield, McDonald, and others can describe, but they could not explain (Clarke 1991: 108). Political economy characterizes exchange in markets “as an expression of [the] natural propensity” to truck and barter when the reverse is true: “the ‘propensity to truck, barter, and exchange’ [is] a need imposed by exchange” (Clarke 1991: 65). Political economy presupposes private property and “attribute[s] social power to things, inverting the subject and the predicate” (Clarke 1991: 65). Political economy is unable to grasp that the propensity to exchange in markets it describes is not natural, but rather human made: a compulsion imposed on people following the bloody process of primitive accumulation.

I was recently asked by a journalist about my view of Milton Friedman’s (1970) New York Times polemic, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” I think I surprised her by responding that Milton Friedman is right. The progressives that Friedman is arguing with believe that there is some way to convince or compel capitalist firms to sacrifice some profits to be kinder to their employees or to take steps to deliberately benefit society. And while this may be true in some limited sense, the extent to which it is possible is set by the limits prescribed by the imperatives of accumulation. But it is not an illusion that capitalist firms need to increase their profits. Capitalist firms are compelled to constantly grow, reinvest, drive down costs, and increase their profits, and they will go bankrupt if they do not. At the same time, it is more than an illusion. Like Wakefield and McDonald, because Friedman is uncritical of his presuppositions, he fails to grasp that this is only true in a particular form of society. Economics can “at best describe, but it [can] not explain” (Clarke 1991: 108, emphasis original).

I would like to turn my attention now to briefly exploring what Professor McNally’s lecture and a critical interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy suggests about how contemporary Marxist economists might approach our work. This objective is complicated by the fact that there is little agreement on what exactly the object of Marx’s critique is or what the critique of political economy entails. Making matters even worse, a number of theorists, for example, Hans-Georg Backhaus (1992, 2005), Werner Bonefeld (2001, 2004), Simon Clarke (1991), Paul Mattick (2018), Moishe Postone (1993), ⁶ Alfred Schmidt (1968, 2014 [1962]: 134), Helmut Reichelt (2002), and Roman Rosdolsky (1974) have argued in various ways that “Marxist” economics is a contradiction in terms. Indeed, Marx himself describes his work on Capital as “a Critique of Economic Categories” ([1858] 2010: 270, emphasis in original).

With all of that in mind, I draw on some of the theorists I just mentioned to offer the following provocation: if, like Wakefield and McDonald’s insights on bondage and dispossession in the colonies, the capitalist economy as described by contemporary bourgeois economics ⁷ is not merely an illusion, how do we employ immanent critique to carry out the critique of political economy today?

The critique of political economy isn’t just a critique of the ideology of bourgeois economists “but of the alienated forms of social life which [economics] describes but cannot explain” (Clarke 1991: 66). Marx’s critique is not only of “vulgar political economy” or “bourgeois political economy” but rather of all political economy (Rosdolsky 1974; Backhaus 1992; Heinrich [2004] 2012: 33–36). Because economics presupposes a particular form of society, it fails to explain how “things come to acquire a social power, and so it attributes this power to the things themselves” (Clarke 1991: 65). However, this creates some confusion because “in a capitalist society, things really do manifest this social power” (Clarke 1991: 65). So, it is not the case that appearances, as described by bourgeois economics, are untrue, but that economics “fails to penetrate further, from the mere ‘apparent forms’ to the ‘inner essence,’ to the hidden ‘structural core’ of economic processes.” Thus, economics is unable to “locate the ‘principle of appearance’ and grasp this appearance as necessary” (Rosdolsky 1974: 67).

A problem arises when some progressive and even Marxist economists attempt to show that appearances as described by bourgeois economists are untrue—that capitalism does not actually work the way they claim it works, and that mainstream economics is merely a deranged lie. They might argue this research program represents a critique of political economy, but these progressive economists fail to grasp that bourgeois economists have largely described the world at the level of appearances in an accurate way. This causes progressive economists to make a mistake. Bourgeois economics is deranged, but it is not a lie. It is deranged because the world it describes is deranged. By tilting at the windmills of appearances, progressive economists have failed to reach the essence, “the hidden ‘structural core’ of economic processes” (Rosdolsky 1974: 67). According to the critical Marxists I referenced, it is simply untrue that Marx’s work includes both critique of political economy and a path toward formulating a better economics. Rather, “Marx’s critique of political economy does not create a space for a Marxist political economy since political economy can never do more than describe the alienated forms of social existence” (Clarke 1991: 75) instead of understanding economic categories for what they are—not an illusion but an “objective delusion” (Bonefeld 2004: 231).

A related problem arises because Marxist economists “apply directly” the abstract categories and concepts of Marx that he borrowed from political economists for an immanent critique of political economy, but do so without reference to “any mediations, to the phenomena of the world of appearances” (Rosdolsky 1974: 71). Concepts “are smuggled into the economic theory as if they ‘fall out of the sky’” (Backhaus 2005: 21). Marx tells us that political economy “has never once asked the question why this content has assumed [this] particular form” (Marx [1867] 1976: 174). Non-Marxist approaches to studying the economy “accept economic forms and categories without thought, that is, in an unreflective manner.” A Marxist approach would “‘derive’ these forms and categories as inverted forms of human social relations” (Backhaus 2005: 21). According to Keston Sutherland, Marx takes the “soberly conceived categories of political economics and. . . [translates] them into this other nightmarish idiolect” (Matthews 2022).

Rather than presenting a new and improved political economy, Marx provides a “critical theory of economic categories” (Backhaus 1992: 56), the categories of bourgeois economics that Marx describes as verrückte Formen (Marx [1867] 1951: 81), “deranged forms.” ⁸ “Economic categories are crazy, deranged, displaced forms. . .. Economic theory knows only the result of this craziness and displacement” (Bellofiore and Redolfi Riva 2015: 32). In the process of naturalizing the deranged categories of political economy into “eternal truths, political economy makes the society to which these categories correspond itself an eternal truth” (Clarke 1991: 66). Thus, the critique of political economy must involve demonstrating that these economic categories—these deranged forms—are not natural, but of human origin (Bellofiore and Redolfi Riva 2015: 32).

The trouble is that in this form of society, “it really is the case that the value of labor power and surplus value appear in the forms of wages, profit, and rent” (Clarke 1991: 101), but at the same time these categories represent the “illusions of the trinity formula” (Clarke 1991: 102)—the complete “mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material relation of production with their historical and social specificity” (Marx 1981 [1894]: 969). Thus, the key to explaining economic phenomena is understanding that the critique of political economy involves an immanent critique of the economic categories used to describe a “bewitched, distorted, and upside-down world.” Because the contradictions of economics are located within economics, “these contradictions can only be resolved by reformulating the concepts of political economy, whose contradictions can then be explained as the expression of the historically developed contradictions of the social form of capitalist production” (Clarke 1991: 70).

It is precisely this sort of critique of political economy that Professor McNally demonstrated in his remarks today. McNally showed that Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy provides a flexible framework that allows us to examine both topics Marx alluded to but did not fully analyze and topics that Marx did not consider at all. McNally shows that society at the level of appearances as described by political economists is both not an illusion and more than an illusion. By understanding these appearances as necessary, we can move beyond description and to explanation of the inner essence of capitalist society—the violent process of dispossession through which “direct coercion has been replaced by (silent) economic compulsion. . . [with] the object-less, free worker as the foundation” for the reproduction of capitalist society (Bonefeld 2011: 385, 388).

Backhaus argues that a “critique of ‘the’ economy” requires that “‘the’ economist or ‘the’ economy can become object of a critical ideological investigation” (Backhaus 2005: 23). Perhaps the abolition of capitalism requires the self-abolition of economists. In the meantime, Marxist economists can learn from Professor McNally’s example a more illuminating approach to engagement with contemporary bourgeois or “mainstream” economists—through the immanent critique that characterizes the critique of political economy.