kevin anderson - maximilien rubel memoriam

8/9/2019 Kevin Anderson - Maximilien Rubel Memoriam

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A P P R E C I A T I O N M A X I M I L I E N R U B E LO ne of ttie ce ntu r/s greatest M arx editors, R ubel placed M arx'scritique of the modern state on an equal footing with M arx's critiqueof political economy. A n erudite scholar wh o in his M arx Oeuvres1-IV (1963-1994) pointed repeatedly to differences betweenM arx and E ngels, he became a thorn in the side of Stalinist M arxeditors, especially in France. Volume IV of R ubel's M arx Oeuvres,published less than two years before his death, offers a goodvantage point from which to measure his overall contribution.

Maximilien Rubel, 1905-1996,Libertarian M arx Editorby Kevin Anderson

IN WHAT WILL BE A REAL LOSS to M arx sch olarsh ip, theinternationally known editor of Marx's work MaximilienRubel died in Paris at the age of 90 on February 28, 1996.Rubel's most recognized achievement was his edition of M arx'sOeuvres, from the first volume w hich was published in 1963, tovolume IV, which appeared three years ago.' In the words ofhis longtime colleague Louis Janover, this edition 'provokedthe most violent polemics from the Communist Party and itsintellectuals' because 'they saw that their monopoly over theeditions of M arx's works was disappear ing' (1996:143).In 1952, long after the first Marx-Engels-Cesamtausgabe(MEGA) o r Comp lete W ritings begun in Russia in the 1920s byDavid Riazanov had ceased to appear, and when the only

edition yet published of the less comprehensive CollectedWorks of Marx and Engels was in Russian, Rubel and Bracke-Desrousseaux published an attack in a French leftist jou rna l onthe Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow for its 'silence'regarding 'the fate of Riazanov and his enterp rise.' They wrotethat Stalin, who had had Riazanov executed, would not'tolerate the publication in its entirety of an oeuvre thatstigmatized his despotism via the merciless struggle waged by


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Maximilien Rubel, 1905-1996 161includes a number of leading Marx scholars with a variety ofpoints of view. Although he does not refer to it in his 1994preface to Oeuvres IV, Rubel eventually resigned from theMEGA board, pointing in a 1995 interview to his 'disagree-ment on some editing principles, especially the absence of aplan to re-edit the volumes published during the Marxist-Leninist period.' He also implied that he was opposed to theMEG A's plans to publish most of M arx's notes and excerpts ofbooks and articles, materials which have a similar structure tothe already-published Ethnological Notebooks. As he stated inresponse to a question on whether we could expect importantnew material from Marx to be published in the MEGA:'Frankly, I do not believe so. Riazanov only wanted to publishforty volumes quite simply because ne thought it useless topublish the whole of the excerpt notebooks of Marx (morethan two hundre d!). These notebooks are no m ore than simplecopies, often without personal observations, of what he wasreading. For M arx was an obsessive reader.' (Weill 1995: viii). 'Rubel's 110-page introduction to his Oeuvres IV, takentogether with his prefaces to the individual works included andhis notes, constitute in effect an intellectual biography of Marxthrough 1854. Here he uses the new MEGA, which haspublished the letters to as well as those from Marx and Engelsthro ug h 1857, alongside other sources to unea rth som einteresting material. For example, Rubel takes up a revealingincident in 1841, wh en, during th e period that M arx wasfinishing his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus andDemocritus, the somewhat older Bruno Bauer commented onthe draft. Bauer wrote warning Marx that he should drop thenow famous epigraph from Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound,which includes the lines:

Better to be a servant of this rockThan to be a faithful boy to father Zeus(cited in Marx [ 1841 ] 1975: 31)

Bauer held, no doubt correctly, that keeping the above wouldbar Marx from becoming a professor in Germany, bothbecause its conten t was too radical and because Aeschylus wasnot a recognized philosopher. Rubel also develops a richlyinformative analysis of a passage of a poem by Goethe on theTurkic conqueror Timur which was quoted by Left Hegelians


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in the 1840s, where Goethe suggests that som e good can comeeven out of terrible suffering. Here Rubel takes up M arx's deb tto Hegel as well. However, Rubel's discussion of Marx's earlyphilosophical thinking is somewhat disappointing despite itserudition, in large part because he makes Marx into a far tooeclectic thinker, going out of his way to suggest the influenceon Marx of Kant, Spinoza, Herder, and even Schelling, whileminimizing that of Hegel. For example, when Marx at onepoin t discusses a key Hegelian concep t, 'negation of the nega-tion,' Rubel fails to mention Hegel (Marx 1994: c), while inanother place he writes somewhat incongruously that the'concluding chapter of Capital ...returns to the "categoricalimperative" of the Marxian ethic' (Marx 1994: xcvi), heremaking the mature M arx into a Kantian.

Rubel has some interesting comments on the developmentfrom Marx's early concept of alienated labour to that ofpolitical alienation. He argues provocatively that the writingsrepro duced in this volume on politics and on the state from theyears 1848-54 predate those on political economy for whichMarx is best know n: 'M arx, the critic of politics, comes prior toMarx, the critic of political economy. The analyst of thealienated bifurcation of modern man into public and privateman precedes the analyst of econom ic alienation. In his theory,the negation of the state is prior to the negation of capital, an-archism prior to communism' (Marx 1994: cxxvii-viii). Icannot agree fully with Rubel on this point, since Marx hadalready done much work on economic theory by the mid-1840s, and since M arx 's differences with anarch ism are explicitthroughout his work. Nonetheless, Rubel has captured here(and elsewhere in his work) some of the libertarian spirit ofMarx, an aspect of his thou ght which was often lost du ring thelong years of the burea ucratic Second International a nd then ofstatist communism.Rubel's most im portant contribution in this volume m ay lie

less in his long introduction than in his over 500 pages ofprefaces and explanatory notes accompanying the individualworks by Marx he has selected. Since he had already included,from am ong what m any consider M arx's political writings, the1843 critiques of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 'On the JewishQuestion,' and the Com munist Manifesto in earlier volumes ofthe Marx Oeuvres, the 1994 Oeuvres IV begins with selectionsfrom Marx's revolutionary journalism of 1848-49, and then


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Maximilien Rubel, 1905-1996 163includes The Class Struggles in France, The EighteenthBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a selection from his New YorkDaily Tribune articles on England, China, and India, as well asfrom his lesser-known writings such as those on the break-upof the Communist League, the Cologne communist trial, onPalmerston, on Spain, and on the 1853-56 Crimean W ar.

Rubel's 28-page edito r's preface to the Eighteenth Brumairetakes up the history of the work's publication and his notesindicate the textual differences between the two editions of itpublished during Marx's lifetime. Rubel offers a movingaccount of Marx's early years in London, showing in graphicdetail his isolation even from other revolutionary dmigrds.Poverty, ridicule by the Germ an establishment press, and evencharges of being a police agentJenny Marx's half-brotherwas by then Prussian Minister of the Interior and leading therepression of the democrats and revolutionariesdoggedMarx durin g this period. Rubel also points astutely to some keydifferences in 1851 between Marx and Engels with regard toPoland, with Engels at this point coming close to opposingPoland's struggle for independence, and he takes up alsoEngels' well-known predilection for the m ilitary side of things.However, although Rubel has a well-earned reputation forexaggerating the differences between Marx and Engels, and forhostility toward Engels, he also in this same preface creditsEngels with helping Marx to formulate the well-knownopening lines of the Brumaire. He notes that in a letter ofDecem ber 3, 1851, Engels had w ritten to M arx on theBonapartist coup in France, using the phrase 'the first time asgreat tragedy an d the second as small farce' (M arx 1994: 1363).

Rubel's shorter preface to his selection from Marx's NewYork Daily Tribune material is less interesting than are hislonger explanatory notes to this material, especially those onthe controversial writings on India. Here Rubel once againbrings in Goethe's poem on Tim ur, which Marx cites at the endof one of his 1853 India articles in which he argues thatsomething positive could emerge out of British colonialism.Rubel brings Marx's relation to Hegel into his discussion ofthis passage, which he links to the notion of capitalism as aprogressive development in history which Marx had carriedover from the Communist Manifesto. On Marx's writings onthe duplicitous and reactionary British Lord Palmerston,especially his charge that the latter was actually a tsarist agent.


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164 Capital & Class #62Rubel cites a little-known early evaluation by R iazanov: 'Th is istherefore an error . . .to make Palmerston into a principledfriend of Russia.... His highest "principle" was the interests ofthe English oligarchy' (M arx 1994, 1532).''For many years, as Raya Dunayevskaya once put it ,'incredible time and energy and vigilance' was expended by theRussian Stalinist regime to 'imprison Marx within the bounds'of its ideology (1988: 63). As part of this process, M arx was toooften edited in a tendentious manner, defacing his liberatoryand humanist writ ings with dogmatic and authoritarianprefaces and notes, and even delaying or suppressingpublication of some of his most important writings. In thiscontext, Rubel's editions of Marx stood out as an alternative.Along with Riazanov, he was one of the century's greatest M arxeditors. In addition, Rubel produced a body of theoreticalwork on M arx.^ Today , when m any are trying to foster a returnto Marx which would be at the same time a break with thelegacy of totalitarian communism, his work will continue tohelp us to view Marx as a fundamentally democratic andhumanist revolutionary thinker. In his last interview, Rubelstated confidently that Marx 'is a thinker of the twentieth andnot the nineteenth century.' He added that the twin dangers tohuman emancipation that Marx pointed to throughout hiswritings, 'the state and a capitalist system in the process ofglobalization,' still 'weigh down on the fate of humanity,through weapons of mass destruction' (Weill 1995: viii), todaym ore than ever.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, Oeuvres IV. Politique I.Edition dtablie, prdsentde etannotde par Maximilien Rubel. (Editions Gallimard, Paris,1994: cxxxv, 1829. ISBN 2-07-011296-9. 540 francs). Referredto hereafter asMarx 1994.2. See also the review of this volume by Bertell Oilman (1995).3. For a highly illuminating report on the structure presentlyprojected for the MEGA, including an account of some of thedebates over scaling it back forfinancialreasons and a completelist of the volumes already published and currently projected,see Grandjonc and Rojahn (1995). This article appeared in thenew journal MEGA-Studien, founded in 1994 and published bythe International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.This multi-lingual journal serves as an international forum fordiscussions on the history and present status of the MEGA.


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Ma ximilien Rubel, 1905-19 96 165

4. Rubel cites this statement from the lengthy editor 's notes toRiazanov (1920), a two-volume 1000-page collection, appar-ently the first translation into German of a large selection ofMarx's New York Daily Tribune articles. Curiously, Riazanovdid not include any of Marx's articles from the 1850s on Indiaor China, concentrating on those on Western Europe, Russia,and Turkey.

5. See the fairly representative collection of his writings whichappeared in English over a decade ago (Rubel 1981), and thetribute to Rubel by Bongiovanni (1981), as well as the morecri t ical assessments of Dunayevskaya (1982) and my ownearlier article in this jou rna l (A nd erso n 1992).

Anderson, K. (1992) 'Rubel 's Marxology: A Critique, ' Capital & ReferencesClass 47: 67-91.Bongiovanni, B. (1981) 'Maximilien Rubel, ' Telos 47:159-74.Dunayevskaya, R . (1982) 'Hobsbawm and Rubel on the MarxCentenary , But Where I s Marx? ' , News & Letters 27 No.7(August-September) : 4 ,10.(1988) Marxism and Freedom. From 177 6 until Today.Co lumb ia University Press, New York.Grandjonc, J. and J. Rojahn (1995) 'Aus der MEGA-Arbeit . Derrevidier te Plan der Marx-Engels-Cesamtausgabe,' MEGA-Studien 2: 62-89.Janover, L. (1996) 'Maximilien Rubel: une oeuvre & ddcouvr i r , 'L'Hom me et la sociit6119 (January-March): 143-46.Marx, K. ([1841] 1975) 'Difference Between the Democritean andEpicurean Philosophy of N ature , ' in M arx and Engels, CollectedWorks, Vo l. 1, Intern ation al Pu blishers, New York: 25-105 .(1994) Oeuvres IV. Politique L Edition established,presented, an d ann otated by Maximilien Rubel. Gallimard, Paris.Oilman, B. (1995), 'Review of Rubel's Marx, Oeuvres IV, ' MEGA-Studien 2: 126-27.Riazanov, D., ed. (1920) Gesam melte Schriften von KarlM arx undFriedrich Engels. 1852 bis 1862. Translated by Luise Kautsky.Tw o vols. Dietz Verlag, Stuttgart.Rubel , M. (1981) Rubel on Karl Marx: Five Essays. Edi ted andtranslated by Joseph O'Malley and Keith Algozin. CambridgeUniversity Press, Cam bridge an d New Y ork.

Rubel , M. and Bracke-Desrousseaux (1952) 'L 'Occident doi t kMarx et k Engels une Edition monumentale de leurs oeuvres, 'La Revue socialiste 59 (July): 113-14.Rubel , M. and M. Manale (1975) Marx without Myth: AChron ological Study of His Life and Worfc. Basil Blackwell,Oxford and H arper & Row, New York.Weill, N. (1995) '"Un penseur du XXe sifecle et non du XlXe." Unentretien avec Maximilien Rubel,' Le Monde (September 29): viii.

kevin anderson - maximilien rubel memoriam

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