The homeland(s) of Marxism: Labor power, race, and nation after Capital

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century, Alain Badiou once wrote that “Marxism no longer has a historical homeland,” but had instead at last been “expatriated” from the burden of its apparent “origins.” There exists a long polemical history, often within the framework of postcolonial studies, which posits the Marxist tradition as something fundamentally “Western,” something that never fit “the world,” but only its supposed “homeland.” But what truly is the “homeland” of Marxism, if we can even put it this way at all? My principle thesis here is the following: If Marxism’s homeland in the nineteenth century was Western Europe, then its homeland in the twentieth centurywas above all the Tricontinental-Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This thesis is a polemic, intended to radically alter our view of the intellectual history of Marxism, which methodologically remains deeply fixed to a narrative about itself that is structured according to a model of diffusion. But what if we chose concretely to theorize it another way, to emphasize that the seed of this transfer between centuries lay already in Marx’s work in the years following Capital, and that the global impetus to understand the function of Capital as a guide to the “critical analysis of capitalist production” came principally from the situation of the “non-West”? This itself would lead us, in a circular fashion, back to the beginning, to formulate a new historical trajectory of development for Capital, as the pivotal text of a new global centrality of the categories of “race” and “nation” to the enclosure of the world by capital itself.