A través de la Práctica del Dibujo de Observación

A fundamental reason why Marx thought capitalism is “world-historical” is because it is a totalizing system that spreads like wild-fire across the globe “through the inner necessity of this mode of production and its need for an ever extended market.”⁴⁵² Indeed, he thought that the

“tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.”⁴⁵³ From his perspective the “creation of the world market” and “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market” is an integral part of “the historic task of the capitalist mode of production”

which is an unavoidable phase in our development because it contributes to the creation of the

“material foundations for the new form of production” and the subjectivity required to initiate

450 Ibid., 415.

451 Hegel 1956, 22.

452 Marx and Engels 1998, 59; Marx 1981, 344.

453 Marx 1973, 408.

it.⁴⁵⁴ He thought that the development of the world market establishes forms of globalized

“universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse.”⁴⁵⁵ In particular, he thought that the activity of “world-historical” capitalism creates conditions that facilitate the development of “real connections” which enable individuals and entire societies to overcome forms of isolation that inhibit the development of “intellectual wealth.”⁴⁵⁶

Marx analysed social conditions lacking such connections in French, German, Indian, and Russian communities, among others, and he drew a connection between the prevalence of prejudice rooted in isolated social units—“home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition”—

to the “real intellectual wealth of the individual” which “depends entirely on the wealth of [their]

real connections.”⁴⁵⁷ This was significant for Marx particularly because, on his assumptions, the growth of these connections are indispensable for the subjective development required for carrying out a successful revolutionary movement. This is one of the main reasons he considered proletarian conditions more favourable for revolutionary development than peasant conditions.

As Engels claimed, “the peasants” are “always the bearers of national and local

narrow-mindedness.”⁴⁵⁸ It is evident that Marx agreed with this assessment. “What separates the peasant from the proletarian,” he claimed, is not their “real interest” but their “delusive prejudice.”⁴⁵⁹

Marx also linked the lack of “real connections” to populations that give rise to despotic state forms. “Bonaparte,” for example, represented “a class,” i.e., “the small peasant

454 Marx 1981, 572; Marx 1976, 929. Cf. Marx 1981, 359; Marx 1973, 161; Marx and Engels 1998, 59.

455 Marx 2010b, 325.

456 Marx and Engels 1998, 59. Cf. Marx 2010, 71.

457 Marx and Engels 1998, 57, 59.

458 Marx 2010, 215.

459 Marx 2010c, 257.

proprietors.”⁴⁶⁰ Marx’s claim that it was “the material conditions which made the feudal French peasant a small proprietor and Napoleon an emperor” follows from the idea that the conditions of the peasantry were not consistent with the development of “intellectual wealth”:

“Their mode of operation isolates them instead of bringing them into mutual

intercourse. This isolation is strengthened by the wretched state of France’s means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants. Their place of operation, the smallholding, permits no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science and therefore no diversity of development, variety of talent, or wealth of social relationships.”⁴⁶¹

He had a similar opinion of the “idyllic village communities” in India which, according to him,

“had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism”⁴⁶² because “they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.”⁴⁶³ A principal reason why Marx thought English imperialism would play a partly progressive role in India was because it would establish “real connections”:

“The village isolation produced the absence of roads in India, and the absence of roads perpetuated the village isolation. On this plan a community existed with a given scale of low conveniences, almost without intercourse with other villages, without the desires and efforts indispensable for social advance. The British having

460 Marx 2010b, 238.

461 Ibid., 241, 238-239.

462 Even if there are certain geographical conditions and forms of state which Marx associated with so-called

‘Oriental’ despotism, it is evident that he nevertheless thought that despotism in the ‘Orient’ has essentially the same subjective basis as in the ‘Occident’.

463 Ibid., 306.

broken up this self-sufficient inertia of the villages, railways will provide the new want of communication and intercourse.”⁴⁶⁴

This, however, did not stop Marx from recognizing that “the history of English economic management in India” was “a history of futile and actually stupid (in practice, infamous) economic experiments.”⁴⁶⁵

In Marx’s view, capitalism has a tendency to play a progressive role by transforming rural communities and agricultural production in a way that is necessary for “the full development of the human race.”⁴⁶⁶ As he claimed,

“capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.”⁴⁶⁷

This indicates further that this process involves a transformation of human subjectivity and that the development of “the human mind” is a fundamental feature of his ‘Historical Materialism’:

“In the sphere of agriculture, large-scale industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for the reason that it annihilates the bulwark of the old society, the

464 Ibid., 322.

465 Marx 1981, 451.

466 Marx 1976, 638.

467 Marx 1973, 410.

peasant, and substitutes for him the wage-labourer…. A conscious, technological application of science replaces the previous highly irrational and slothfully traditional way of working.”⁴⁶⁸

As things have come to pass it appears that Marx was not entirely correct about

capitalism’s ability to establish “real connections” through the proliferation of markets and other networks of social intercourse worldwide. Of course, he could not have imagined the

development of the internet and social media, but as things stand there is evidence which suggests that these technological advances do not necessarily provide people with “real connections.” Rather than hurling us into a new age of Enlightenment, the expansion of the internet has served to demonstrate how even with the opportunity to learn about any topic and connect to different people and cultures almost anywhere in the world, a significant amount of people tend to search for confirmation of their beliefs and narrowly focus their learning on strengthening those existing beliefs while restricting their social intercourse to others like

themselves. Indeed, it has never been easier for ignorant individuals to find confirmation of their attitudes and beliefs by connecting with more people that are like themselves. The resulting creation of digital, mass echo-chambers which operate parallel to each other is also observable.

Nevertheless, it is true that “real connections” have developed in the sense that we have created the technological means to connect to each other with far reaching, immediate, mass

communication and transportation. The innovations in the internet and social media (and all related technologies) in the last decades of the 20^th century have greatly expanded our horizon and it has already been demonstrated that these technologies have the potential to profoundly

468 Marx 1976, 637.

influence social movements—but it must be emphasized that their efficacy depends on the way we use them, i.e., on our ability to command not only the technology but ourselves as well.

Marx’s emphasis on “real connections” should therefore be re-evaluated because while it is evident that capitalism establishes networks of communication,—e.g., by laying the material foundation for mass communication and developing social media (advancing and proliferating technologies and infrastructure for it, spreading it around the globe, etc.)—Marx’s idea of what qualifies these connections as “real” presupposes the development of a subject that is sufficiently able to derive “intellectual wealth” from them.⁴⁶⁹ In Kant’s elaboration of his idea of the “sensus communis” he articulated a kind of mental capacity which is comparable to the one presupposed by Marx’s idea of “real connections.”⁴⁷⁰ Kant associated it with three maxims: “(1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else; (3) always to think consistently. The first is the maxim of unprejudiced thought, the second that of broadened thought, the third that of consistent thought.”⁴⁷¹ Kant claimed that the “reason” of subjects such as those that Marx understood as deeply superstitious is “passive,” and that to “be given to such passivity, consequently to heteronomy of reason, is called prejudice;” and for him, the greatest of all prejudices is that of fancying nature not to be subject to rules which the understanding by virtue of its own essential law lays at its basis, i.e., superstition.” Kant’s claims about this matter are

469 Consider, for instance, the article “How WhatsApp Destroyed A Village” (Dixit and Mac 2018) which covers a spate of murders in India that are linked to the prevalence of WhatsApp, smartphones, and the spread of ‘fake news’ among village residents in rural India.

470 “[By] the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i.e. a faculty of judging which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh is judgement with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgement. This is accomplished by weighing the judgement, not so much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgements of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own judging” (Kant 2007, 123).

471 Ibid., 124.

also consistent with Marx’s view of the subjectivity of individuals who provide a foundation in the population for—and who live under the yoke of—the despotic regimes which arise in

conditions lacking “real connections.” According to Kant “the condition of blindness into which superstition places us, and which it even demands from us as an obligation, makes the need of being led by others, and consequently the passive state of the reason, all too evident.”⁴⁷²

Marx ultimately thought that only a “communist” revolution “will liberate separate

individuals from the various national and local barriers, bring them into practical connection with the production (including intellectual production) of the whole world and make it possible for them to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man).”⁴⁷³ With the continued growth of the world market he believed this revolution was steadily approaching. He thought that with the growth of the world market “all contradictions come into play” and that these “contradictions” lead to crises which he described as “the urge which drives toward the adoption of a new historic form.”⁴⁷⁴ However, Marx also emphasized the

development of the subjectivity required to carry out a revolution when the crises of the world market surface. The intensification of the “contradiction” between the forces and relations of production, for example, will only lead to a revolution if the subjectivity required for it has already matured or matures simultaneously. To put it another way, global economic crises have a marked tendency to spark mass movements, but Marx’s work suggests that they alone are not enough to bring about the kind of revolution that he imagined.

472 Ibid.

473 Marx and Engels 1998, 59.

474 Marx 1973, 227-28.