THE SUBLIME PERVERSION OF CAPITAL

Every individual interpretation must include an interpretation of its own existence, must show its own credentials and justify itself: every commentary must be at the same time a metacommentary as well. Thus genuine interpretation directs the attention back to history itself, and to the historical situation of the commentator as well as of the work.

— FREDRIC JAMESON, The Ideologies of Theory

Capital's Historicity

Throughout the twentieth century on a global scale, Marxist theoretical research confronted again and again a certain resistance — an internal or immanent resistance — to its guiding principles, and to its capacity, as a mode of knowledge and method of inquiry, to be utilized in the concrete analysis of a wide variety of historical situations. This resistance came largely from the situation of the "non-West," understood as the diverse unity of circumstances other than those central to the historical development of western Europe. Needless to say, the division of "the West and the Rest" has long since been exposed for its direct links, at the level of knowledge, to the worldview of the nineteenth-century imperialisms as well as for its reductionist understanding of historical specificity. The very concept of "the West" has never ceased, however, to remain a remarkably resilient figure of discourse, one that continues to exert an influence on our world, its thought, and our concepts. Marxism, in this sense, has never been external to this problem.

Quite to the contrary, from the time of the First International onward, the status of Marxist theoretical and historical knowledge, when dislocated into situations far from its famous "three sources and three component parts" (as Lenin put it, "German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism"), has been widely contested. Was this mode of knowledge something delimited to its own local process of development, despite its pretension to universality, to a universal history? This broad question confronted Marxist theory long before its canonization and global development.

For example, in Marx's late work of the 1870s, after the completion of the writing of Capital, he was consistently confronted with the complexity of the nature of the Russian village commune (obshchina), its general milieu (mir), and the forms of craft labor cooperatives (artel') that still existed, social phenomena that had no precedent in western European settings. However, Marx, in a series of well-known documents (among others, the multiple drafts of the "Letter to Vera Zasulich," the "Letter to Otechestvenniye zapiski," and his "Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party" with Engels), did not take the line of many early Russian Marxists (in particular Plekhanov), who essentially argued that these phenomena co