I would like to acknowledge the comments I have received in the many places I have given variants of this paper before its evolution into the chapter in this book. I’m especially grateful to Stephen Gelb for his thorough-going critique as a reviewer for Transformation and to Michelle Williams for encouraging me to continue despite those criticisms.
Notes
1 There have, of course, been other periodisations of Marxism, but most offer a story of collapse. Thus, George Lichteim (1961) traces the birth and rise of Marxism and then the fall after the Russian Revolution. Writing in the aftermath of the European upsurge, Perry Anderson (1976) focuses on the rise of a classical Marxism, followed by the retreat of Western Marxism into philosophy as it lost touch with its revolutionary mainspring. Leszek Kolakowski (1978) describes Marxism’s fall from grace with the rise of the Soviet Union and Western Marxism, followed by its final degeneration with the student movements of the 1960s. Note that all these classic accounts were written before the collapse of communism, whose existence was taken for granted.
2 Harvey identifies the wave of marketisation with accumulation through dispossession, a necessary accompaniment to commodification which Marx had only seen as part of the pre-history of capitalism, what he called primitive accumulation.
3 Naomi Klein (2007) offers a magnificent panorama of capitalism’s capacity to exploit the crises it generates through processes of primitive accumulation.
4 Polanyi argues that it is the extreme form of dispossession (disembedding) that leads to working-class revolt whereas later historians, most notably E.P. Thompson (1963) argue that it was the strength of tradition founded in the skilled crafts, in other words a pre-formed working class, rather than its destruction, that accounted for mounting mobilisation.
5 As regards the contradictions of the state socialist economy, see two non-Marxists: János Kornai (1992) and Alec Nove (1983).
6 I refer here to a broad genre of works that would include Louis Althusser (1969 and 1971), Ralph Miliband (1969), Nicos Poulantzas (1973) and William Appleman Williams (1961).
7 I have developed this complementary relation in Burawoy (2003).
8 In this regard Gramsci’s critique of sociology applies especially well to Polanyi’s invocation of ‘society’ as a deus ex machina. For Gramsci, society or ‘civil society’ is something that organises but is also organised by specific social and political forces.
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