Subalternità e filosofia della storia. Appunti sul carteggio Marx-Zasulič

Abstract

this article proposes, through the Gramscian political-pedagogical category of subalternity, a reading of the brief exchange of letters at the beginning of 1881 between Karl Marx and Vera Zasulič, a russian revolutionary militant at that time member of the populist group Čërnyj peredel (black repartition), on an issue of great importance for the russian socialist movement: the obščina, or that specific form of common ownership of land by russian peasants. to this end, it is necessary to analyze the chapter XXiV of the first book of Capital, in which Marx outlines the historical genesis of capitalism in Western europe and, in particular, in england, through the phenomenon of «the so-called original accumulation», the initial event in the history of capital in which commodities and money have not yet been transformed into it,and cannot yet produce capitalist accumulation in the proper sense unless there is first an accumulation that «is not the result, but the starting point of the capitalist mode of production». it will be important to observe the Marxian account in an anti-deterministic and non-stage framework of the historical development of social formations through a comparison with Popper’s criticism of Marx’s alleged philosophy of history.