Acknowledgements
The title of this book – Marxism Missing, Missing Marxism – encompasses a number of distinct meanings. First, the palpable fact that nowadays Marxist theory is faced with the difficulty that many of those who espouse it tend either to discard components that are themselves crucial to Marxism or else to combine it with epistemologies that are incompatible with – or indeed antagonistic to – Marxist politics. This is the missing-as-absence aspect of the title. Second, and ironically, this void occurs just at the moment when the presence of Marxism – both as an explanatory approach and as a guide to future action – is most necessary. And third, the same term – missing Marxism – refers also to the fact that those who object to Marxism on economic or political grounds nevertheless fail to hit their target. Here the meaning invokes a failure-to-land-a-blow on Marxism. All these different meanings inform the content of this book.
This is not to say that what follows is the construction of Marxism as monolithic theoretical edifice; rather that, when stripped of any or all of its core epistemological components – such as class formation/consciousness/struggle, socialist transition as a desirable/feasible objective, and revolutionary agency – Marxist theory in effect ceases to be what historically Marxists have claimed it is. Such is the case especially when, having discarded both revolutionary agency and socialism, Marxism is said instead to be about recuperating a ‘nicer’ capitalism by means of multi-class alliances. The latter path is the outcome of a politics that, having substituted organic evolution for revolution, advocates empowerment not of class but of non-class identities, including zealous forms of nationalism hidden behind a thinly-clad disguise of anti-imperialism, and marginally less potent – but similarly problematic – versions merely orientalising the origins of capitalism.
Marxism – or more properly ‘Marxism’ – becomes as a result indistinguishable ontologically not just from non-Marxist theory but also from its anti-Marxist variants. It might be objected that all this is now of little or no consequence, as every form of Marxism has long since ceased to exercise any kind of theoretical – let alone political – influence it may once have had. The intellectual context, however, is not wholly unfavourable. These days public acknowledgements surface periodically to the effect that in some sense capitalism ‘isn’t working for everyone’, and thus ought to be reformed. Into this political space ideas emanating from Marxist theory would in the past have been inserted and could do so still. Hence the importance of being clear, both about what Marxism is, and equally about what it isn’t.
Special thanks are due to the following people. To Professor David Fasenfest, the Series Editor, for encouragement; to Debbie de Wit, Jennifer Obdam and Judy Pereira of Brill publishers, who guided the book through production; and to my daughter Anna Luisa Brass, who designed and drew the cover illustration. She not only drew the cover for five previous books – New Farmers’ Movements in India (1995), Labour Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century (2011), Class, Culture and the Agrarian Myth (2014), Labour Markets, Identities, Controversies (2017), and Revolution and Its Alternatives (2019) – but also did the drawings which appear at the start of each section in the present volume. The cover and subsequent illustrations refer to the theoretical maze in which Marxism currently finds itself, and from which it is trying to exit whilst at the same time remaining epistemologically intact. Symbolized thereby is the endeavour by Marxist political economy to extricate itself from mistaken attempts to conflate it with the cultural turn, identity politics, bourgeois economics, or varieties of populism and nationalism, together with the danger of not doing so.
This volume draws on materials which appeared previously in Critical Sociology, Science and Society, Critique of Anthropology, Capital and Class, The Journal of Peasant Studies, and The Journal of Contemporary Asia. Others have not been published before and appear here in print for the first time. Like all my previous monographs, this one is dedicated to two sets of kin. To my family: Amanda, and Anna, Ned and Miles. Also, to the memory of my parents: my father, Denis Brass (1913–2006), and my mother, Gloria Brass (1916–2012).