Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 154

In October 1842 Karl Marx, aged 24 years, became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. Founded a few months before, the newspaper lasted barely fourteen months before the Prussian State closed it down. Under Marx’s editorship the paper become one of the most widely read German publications, and he used the newspaper to develop radical critiques of important contemporary issues.

For Marx these were transformative times. As Robert Nichols explains in his introductory essay to The Dispossessed, Marx later explained that while editor he

experienced for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests. The proceedings of the Rhineland Parliament on thefts of wood, and so on … provided the first occasion for occupying myself with the economic questions.

The ‘discussions’ that Marx took part in during 1842–1843 in the pages of the Rheinische Zeitung might seem obscure, mark a period of intellectual transition for the young radical. As Nichols says, it was a period that saw ‘Marx’s break with Hegelian philosophy’ and the start of Marx’s embracing of socialist ideas and his development of a radical critique of political economy.

The Dispossessed is in three parts. The bulk consists of an extended article by the French Marxist Daniel Bensaïd that uses Marx’s 1842 work as a jumping off point to explore issues of ownership, dispossession and the state. Bensaïd (1946–2010) was a prolific author and activist. A key French Marxist intellectual, he is less well known in Britain, so Nichols’ autobiographical introduction provides useful framing for Bensaïd’s essay.

The final part of the book is Marx’s article, ‘Debates on the Law Concerning the Theft of Wood’, published in five parts from late October to early November 1842. It is an extraordinary piece. Working from fragmentary reports of the Assembly, Marx constructs a detailed critique of the transformation of property relations in the countryside. Superficially the issue seems simple – the rights of the peasantry to use wood from forests.

The issues arises, Bensaïd says, ‘as a consequence of rural pauperism in full bloom’. Yet the complexities of the debate arise:

from the fact that the integration of timber into an exchange market rendered its use-value and exchange-value inseparable from one another. At stake in the new legislation was the need to assert property rights, rigorously distinguishing property titles from entitlements based on need and thus the exchange economy from the subsistence economy. The evolution of an apparatus of penal sanction thereby institutionalised new forms of delinquency and social criminality.

In other words, what was at stake in the Assembly discussion on wood theft was a vision of how society should be organized. Emerging capitalist interests were keen to transform economic and social relations in their interests. This meant destroying old, customary, and communal organization and connecting nature to the market economy.

Marx shows how there was a contradiction between the desired new relations and the existing laws. Having ‘become conscious of the conflict between the interest of forest protection and the principles of law’, the Assembly voted on ‘whether the principles of law should be sacrificed to the interest of forest protection or whether this interest should be sacrificed to the principles of law’. The Assembly ‘trampled the law under foot’, says Marx. He continues:

The Rhinelander ought to have been victorious over the estate, the human being ought to have been victorious over the forest owner. [The estates] are legally entrusted not only with the representation of particular interests but also with the representation of the interest of the province… The sense of right and legality is the most important provincial characteristic of the Rhinelander; but it goes without saying that a particular interest caring no more for the province than it does for the Fatherland, has also no concern for local spirit.

Instead, Marx complained of the ‘immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness that is slavishly subordinated to this object’.

Through the debates on wood, Marx begins to break with an approach that sees the law and the state as being above society. Instead, he starts acknowledging the way that the law is a tool of social forces. The process he is describing was mirrored elsewhere. It is worth noting the similarities between the situation in the Rhineland and England. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw similar changes in social and economic relations in the countryside, and the mass criminalization of poaching. There is even a parallel between the provisions in the Prussian legislation for punishment based on whether criminals had blackened their faces with the Black Act of 1732 in Britain.

Bensaïd shows how Marx’s conception of property goes through a transformation, breaking with cruder explanations such as Proudhon’s ‘all property is theft’ and evolving into a more complex understanding where ‘two conceptions of law that have come to clash, the rights of the property owners against the rights of the owned’. In this situation, Bensaïd concludes following Marx, ‘Only force can decide’.

In the final section of his essay, Bensaïd develops Marx’s insights into a contemporary critique. In an era when conservationists try to assign exchange-value to nature through a process of commodification known as ‘Natural Capital’, when institutions like the UN see market mechanisms such as carbon trading as the solution to climate crisis or when corporations try to privatize knowledge, Bensaïd uses Marx’s work to explore the ongoing destruction of the commons. He concludes that it is ‘no longer about the comparative advantage of rational economic solutions. It is rather a test of political strength’.

The Dispossessed is thus of interest on several levels. The work by Marx explore the role of the state in driving through a new set of property relations that facilitated the further development of capital. For historians of the rural economy, the parallels between nineteenth-century Prussia and Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are fascinating. Secondly, Bensaïd’s essay draws out the importance of the debates for Marx’s own development as a socialist and then applies these to contemporary capitalist society. Finally, Robert Nichols provides, for readers in Britain, an introduction to the insights and importance of Daniel Bensaïd’s life and work. All together this is an insightful and compelling work.