Abstract

Migration by displaced workers and anti-migrant nativism have a long history. Marx was much more actively engaged in understanding that history, which was assuming global proportions when Capital appeared in 1867, than scholars have typically realized. That becomes particularly clear when we examine Marx’s late manuscripts, which he drafted for the volumes of Capital he was unable to finish in his lifetime. What we learn from these extraordinary manuscripts is that Marx was immersing himself in the study of trends which remain central to globalized capitalism. He was keenly attuned, in particular, to the growth of trade, money, and industry amid a planetary mosaic of cultures, some of which, he stressed, resisted the entry of capital, while others were too frail to resist. Marx had always been alive to the ‘solvent effects’ of the world market on the world’s cultures, but he became increasingly absorbed by that topic as capital radiated outward from Europe. His late manuscripts—including the famous ‘ethnological notebooks’, of which I am editing an English-language edition—give fresh life and specificity to his thinking on this subject. Drafted in 1877–1882, when Marx writing about capital accumulation for Capital Vol. 2, these manuscripts explore the many ways in which—in India, Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere—peasants and artisans who were exposed to capital’s ‘dissolving,’ ‘destructive’ influence were suspended in a social vacuum, dispossessed and vulnerable, with neither land nor work. Many had no choice but to emigrate, which gave them a new kind of vulnerability—exposure to the ire of nativist workers. Marx’s manuscripts trace the early stages of this hard new reality.