Reconstructing Capital: The American Roots and Humanist Vision of Marx’s Thought
Author(s)
Welsh, John F.
Abstract
This essay contributes to the renewed dialogue on Marx by exploring the influence of the Civil War in the United States on the organization, methodology, and content of Capital and its implications for the relevance of Marx’s thought in the postmodern world. My argument is that the Civil War prompted Marx to pursue a major reconstruction of Capital, eventually centering the work on the lived experiences of workers under capitalism. While Marx had a deep interest in the United States, and its Civil War in particular, Marxist thought is almost universally regarded as European in its origins, analysis, and focus. The Eurocentrism of official Marxism assumed that Marx imposed a ready-made framework on his analyses of events in the United States and elsewhere. The influence of events in the United States on Marx’s thought has not been analyzed nor widely appreciated, with the exception of the early work of Raya Dunayevskaya. Marx’s humanist reconstruction of Capital is the articulation of a new methodology for social theory that is opposed to methods espoused by classical social theorists and post-Marxists alike.
