Rough Theory

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Category Archives: Political Economy

The Reality of Abstraction

10 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on April 20, 2008

I’ve been glancing through some of the secondary literature on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, trying to piece together an abstract. I paused over the following comment, from Jameson’s “Marx’s Purloined Letter”, in Ghostly Demarcations (2008), p. 36:

As for materialism, it ought to be the place in which theory, deconstruction and Marxism meet: a privileged place for theory, insofar as the latter emerges from a conviction as to the ‘materiality’ of language; for deconstruction insofar as its vocation has something to do with the destruction of metaphysics; for Marxism (‘historical materialism’) insofar as the latter’s critique of Hegel turned on the hypostasis of ideal qualities and the need to replace such invisible abstractions by a concrete (that included production and economics). It is not an accident that these are all negative ways of evoking materialism.

For present purposes, I’m not concerned with whether Jameson fully endorses the position set out in this excerpt – what interests me is that this presentation captures one of the common ways of attempting to make sense of what Marx means, when he talks about “standing Hegel on his feet”. In this view, Hegel’s problem is that he engages in “invisible abstractions”: a proper critical approach, by contrast, requires that such abstractions be replaced with “concrete” entities that are purportedly more “real”.

As a placeholder, which I won’t develop adequately here: this is not how I read Marx’s critique of Hegel. Marx is not attempting to reject abstractions – still less to replace them with something concrete, as though the abstractions are mere illusions which can be wished away. Marx is, instead, trying to grasp the ways in which abstractions are generated in practice – in a situation in which those abstractions possess what Marx will often in the Grundrisse refer to as “practical truth”. Hegel’s abstractions become, for Marx, social realities – they aren’t tangible, they can’t be seen immediately through empirical experience, but nevertheless they do exist – and they “really” exist abstractly – if only as moments of a very specific, and potentially transient and transformable, form of social life. Marx wants to grasp these abstractions: their critique consists in the demonstration of how they are produced. The point of critique is not to debunk or to dismiss abstractions as “untrue”, but instead to explore the presuppositions or conditions of possibility for a particular sort of bounded truth – of truth for us – possibly of truth we want to abolish – but truth (for the moment) nevertheless.

The simple dismissal of abstractions, or the unmediated reduction of the abstract down to the concrete – what Hegel might call an “abstract negation” – is insufficient for Marx: only by seeking out the practical genesis of what is being criticised, can critique – for Marx – make a meaningful contribution to the practical project of emancipatory transformation.

Abstraction, Critique, Negations, Political Economy, Transformation

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, pt. 3

9 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on April 16, 2008

Just like as in a nest of boxes round,
Degrees of sizes in each box are found:
So, in this world, may many others be
Thinner and less, and less still by degree:
Although they are not subject to our sense, […]

~ Margaret Cavendish “Of Many Worlds in This World”

Fragments on Lukács’ essay, focussing on how I would contrast Lukács to Marx, in relation to various claims Lukács puts forward in the first section of his essay, under the subheading “The Phenomenon of Reification”.

I. Quantity to Quality vs. Relationality

In my previous post, I mentioned a key problem confronting this text – a problem that was also a central question for Marx: if capitalism is understood as something historically unique, why do the categories used to theorise capitalism – commodities, money, interest, profit, rent, etc. – appear to be less historically specific than the object those categories purport to grasp? As I discussed previously, Lukács attempts to answer this question by suggesting that a quantitative expansion of the phenomenon grasped by these categories – to the point that this quantitative expansion becomes totalising and all-encompassing – yields a qualitative shift: in Lukács’ framework, capitalism can be generated as a historically-specific object from the extension of forms of practice that are much older historically.

Lukács believes that this is how Marx would also answer this question, and cites various passages from Marx suggestive of this idea. I would suggest that Marx’s answer actually takes a completely different form: for Marx, capitalism as an historically distinct object is constituted when various older forms of practice come to be reconfigured as component parts of an historically novel and qualitatively distinctive social relation. Following Hegel, Marx grasps the meaning of the categories as something that is determined relationally. To say this more plainly: Marx thinks that “commodities”, “money”, and similar categories are only apparently non-specific to capitalism – in his account, these categories take on a very different meaning and significance under capitalism, than various phenomena that, from our present-day point of view, look similar in other societies. The “essential difference” between these categories in a capitalist, compared to a non-capitalist, context, is therefore not due, in Marx’s account, solely to a process of quantitative expansion, but instead due to the emergence and reproduction of the historically distinct sort of social relation whose constitutive moments these categories express. Since Marx also does speak of various quantitative expansions associated with the development of capitalism, this argument is complex to demonstrate on a textual level – I’ll leave that task for another post. My goal here is simply to draw attention to a possible alternative to the sort of analysis Lukács presents, when he tries to explain why the core categories of “capitalism” appear more transhistorical than the object they purport to grasp.

II. Totalities and Tipping Points

Lukács seems to regard the “tipping point” at which quantitative expansion yields a qualitative shift, to be the point at which the “commodity-structure” becomes universalised or totalised. In Lukács’ argument:

The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate them, from servitude to the ‘second nature’ so created.

Logically, even within Lukács’ quantity-yields-quality framework, this isn’t the only analytical option – in principle, quantitative expansions might yield qualitative shifts without some sort of maximal, universal extent of quantitative expansion. Theorising this sort of “tipping point” concept, however, would probably pull the analysis closer to Marx’s relational approach, due to the need to explain why a certain level of quantitative expansion should yield a specific qualitative shift – an explanation that might point toward an exploration of whether some sort of specific configuration, with distinctive qualitative properties, becomes possible at some particular level of quantitative expansion. I don’t specifically see Marx’s analysis following this line – Marx seems to focus more on the effects to an entire set of practices, of the constitution of a new form of social relation, and to understand this qualitative shift to drive a quantitative expansion. Marx does, though, appeal in other dimensions of his argument to the notion that capitalism presupposes a certain (itself expanding) scale that transcends earlier historical organisations of production.

III. Personal vs. Social Relations

At one point early in this section, Lukács makes the point in passing that, at some early point in the development of capitalism, it was easier to “see through” the commodity-structure. Lukács argues:

the personal nature of economic relations was still understood clearly at the start of capitalist development. (emphasis mine)

Lukács intends this as a gloss on Marx’s argument about the fetish, in which Marx argues “a definite social relation between men… assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” In his reformulation of Marx’s argument, Lukács tacitly assumes that the “social” equates to the “personal”. I would suggest that Marx precisely does not make this equation – that Marx is instead attempting to theorise the collective constitution of a social relation that is specifically not personal in nature. As Marx puts the point:

the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. (emphasis mine)

Marx’s formulation also calls into question Lukács’ tacit suggestion that reification involves a sort of ideology or illusion – something that, when it is less totalistic, can be pierced, to reveal the “true” relation – a personal one – that sits on the other side of the veil. Marx is not attempting to theorise an ideology (not even a “necessary” one), but instead a distinctive form of social relation, characterised precisely by its “objective”, “materialist” character. Marx is not suggesting that theory needs to help up pierce the veil of an illusion of objectivity: he is suggesting that theory needs to grasp how we are collectively constituting a genuinely impersonal form of social relation. The categories of the “social” and the “personal” precisely do not align for Marx – this disalignment is central to Marx’s attempt to thematise capitalism as historically distinct, and it also alters the strategy at play in Marx’s critique, which is not to uncover the reality that has come to be crusted over by illusion, but instead to analyse the genesis and potentials of a very distinctive form of social relation.

This contrast carries over into a number of other dimensions of Lukács’ argument, some of which I’ll pick up on below.

IV. Subjects, Objects, and Things in Between

Both Lukács and Marx offer an argument about a distinctive form of subject-object dualism related to the commodity-structure. The very different conceptions of commodity-structure in play, however, point each in very different directions.

Lukács understands the commodity-structure to relate to the exchange relation. In his account, the quantitative expansion and, ultimately, totalisation and universaliation of the exchange-relation, leads, on the one hand, to a “world of objects and relations between things” – which Lukács equates with “the world of commodities and their movements on the market”. This “objective” world of market exchange confronts the individual subject as a “second nature” beyond their control – an environment whose laws the subject can attempt to anticipate and calculate, but not overcome. Proletarian subjects are further compelled to sell their labour-power onto this market – to externalise part of themselves as an object – and also confront the full effects of the fragmentation of the labour process which, in Lukács’ account, comes to be organised in such a way as to break apart the “organic unity” of use values, scattering the production of a finished product in time and space, and turning labour from a purposeful mastery of nature, into something itself mastered and inserted as a motive force into a production process to which labour must adapt. In each of these ways, Lukács argues, the subject – or, specifically, something he calls “the personality” – the aspect of subjectivity that exceeds what is required for the labour-power that is bought and sold on the market – comes to experience itself as set apart from the totality of the object world. The subject thus becomes contemplative – passively analysing and adapting itself to the laws of an object world the subject experiences as fundamentally alienated from its own practice.

Most visibly with the strange, ungrounded category of the “personality”, but also with the undertheorised category of the “object world”, Lukács’ argument here falls short of the type of theory Marx is attempting to construct. Lukács tacitly takes for granted the qualitative characteristics of both his subject and object worlds. The type of explanation Lukács uses, for example, to account for the “objectivity” of the market, could implicitly be used for any sort of social environment into which any human subject finds themselves “thrown”: single social actors do not, as single social actors, have the capacity to alter any social context – why does the “contemplative” relation of subjects to an object world not characterise all of human history? Lukács’ implicit answer hinges on his argument that capitalism uniquely breaks apart the “organic unity” of the production of use values: lurking in the background here is a notion that subjects realise themselves through their self-externalisation of themselves in material nature, coupled with a tacit romantic glance at skilled handicraft production. “Personality” – which might perhaps realise itself as an active agent in a less fragmented productive environment – lingers into an era in which it figures as nothing more than an idiosyncracy – a “source of error”. With no means available to externalise and thus realise itself as an active, creative agent, it finds itself cordoned off from the object world, which it confronts in a state of contemplation.

It is significant, I would suggest, that, in order to make this argument, Lukács directly juxtaposes – as though they were intended to make the same sort of contribution to Marx’s argument – passages from Capital that are describing commodity fetishism, and much later passages describing the transformation of the labour process that takes place under capitalism, particularly after the introduction of large-scale machinery. These juxtapositions assist Lukács in his attempt to equate Marx’s category of the “fetish”, with Lukács’ own category of “reification”. I would suggest, however, that these two categories point in quite different analytical directions. Marx’s argument about the fetish is intended to account for something that remains unproblematised in Lukács’ argument: the constitution – in the sense of the enactment or performance in collective practice – of the distinctive qualitative characteristics of the forms of “objectivity” and “subjectivity” that are enacted via the process of the reproduction of capital.

Marx’s argument here is more complex and difficult to express than Lukács’ – I won’t be able to do justice to it in this post (I have, however, erected the scaffolding within which to reconstruct this argument, in the series on the first chapter of Capital, volume one, under the Marx tab above). Here – and still very gesturally and inadequately – I can begin to sketch some of what might be at stake, by looking briefly at the contrasting ways in which Lukács and Marx approach the question of the social constitution of particular forms of equality.

V. All Else Being Equal

Just as Lukács reduces the commodity-structure down to the exchange relation, so he also attempts to explain distinctive ideals of equality with reference to the exchange relation. Once again, this pushes Lukács onto the terrain of personal relations: he speaks of the recognition of formal equality, as one of the “objective” conditions for the exchange of qualitatively incommensurable goods. This is a very common way of accounting for the modern resonance of ideals of equality – to point these ideals back to the conceptualisation of exchange as a form of contract, presupposing the formal equality of contracting parties as in principle self-determining agents who are operating free from coercion, and also presupposing the intrinsic fungibility of the goods being exchanged. Marx will make use of these sorts of arguments, as these sensibilities and their associated forms of practice are dimensions of capitalism. Significantly, however, Marx suggests a different line of argument in the immediate context of his discussion of commodity fetishism. He cites a passage in which Aristotle considers the question of whether the goods exchanged on the market – since these goods are being, in effect, “equated” with one another in social practice – might possess some underlying sort of commonality or identity – whether they might, as the chapter has just discussed, possess the homogeneous supersensible substance of “value”. Aristotle considers the possibility, and rejects it, arguing that exchange is simply a “makeshift for practical purposes”. Marx then suggests why Aristotle failed to arrive at the concept of value, and points this back to the absence of wage labour in classical antiquity. Marx argues:

The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.

The “in truth” is sardonic – Marx is miming the forms of analysis of political economy in speaking this way. Political economists might speak as though value has always existed, but Aristotle and other thinkers failed to “discover” it until the present enlightenment enabled us to uncover what has always tacitly been there (remembering here Marx’s characterisation of the political economists, that they speak as though “there used to be history, but there is no longer any”). The argument of the first chapter of Capital, however, is that value was not there to “discover” until the development of the distinctively modern social practices that performatively (if unintentionally) bring “value” into being. Aristotle didn’t overlook the presence of value: value did not yet exist.

This argument connects in complex ways with how Marx understands the social constitution of modern ideals of equality. Value figures in Marx’s analysis as an intangible social substance – as something that cannot be directly perceived, but whose existence can be deduced through observations over time of the non-random transformations of aspects of social experience that are immediately evident to the senses. Value is an implicit social category – its existence must be deduced. This deduction is possible, because non-random (lawlike) patterns of transformation of material nature and social institutions take place over time. The constitution of value is unintentional (social actors are not attempting collectively to generate the patterns Marx labels with the category “value”), and it is impersonal (taking the form of a constantly reset social norm that marginalises social actors who cannot conform).

I have mentioned before that one image or metaphor for thinking about “commodity producing labour”, involves a nested collection of sets, where the largest includes any sort of social practice involved in any way in the reproduction of our social existence, within this, is that subset of activities oriented in some way to producing goods intended to be sold on the market, and within that is the subset of activities that succeed in what Marx calls a salto mortale – activities that survive a process that Marx describes as a reduction of the labour that social actors empirically expend in production, to labour that gets to “count” as part of social labour. This reduction takes place, in Marx’s account, behind the backs of the social actors involved in the process, who have no way of predicting what percentage of their empirical activities will get to “count”: some empirical activities will “count” fully, some partially – some excessively. And this impersonal process, over time, exerts a coercive pressure back on empirical activities themselves, creating incentives and disincentives that tend (probabilistically) to drive empirical activities in non-random directions, conferring a “developmental” directionality on aspects of capitalist history.

Marx argues – and here is where “value” enters the argument – that this impersonal, unintentional process of culling empirical activities down to a smaller subset of activities that “count” as social labour in this very specific sense, can plausibly be interpreted by social actors engaged in the process, not as a collective social process of culling excess investments of empirical labour, down to what “counts”, but rather as a process of discovering how much “value” a material object inherently or intrinsically possesses. In this dimension of collective practice, social actors behave as though something like “value” exists – as though there is a single, intangible, homogeneous substance that is the total social labour, which then comes to be subdivided in greater or lesser proportions among all the products that are empirically produced. Goods are “valued” to the degree that they participate in this intangible substance – and the degree to which they participate in this substance is not discernible when either the use value or the empirical labour invested in the good is examined: it is revealed only in the social interaction among goods – only in the process of exchange.

There is much more to this argument, but I want to break off here, to reflect briefly on the implications of what I’ve written so far, for the question of how to understand the emergence of modern ideals of formal or abstract equality. To the extent that human labour-power is also a commodity under capitalism, it also participates in this culling process – in this coercive “reduction” down from the various labour powers that have been “produced”, to those that get to “count” – partially, fully, or excessively. Social actors engaging with the labour market – whether as buyers or sellers of labour power – have practical, everyday experience with this process of reduction. “Value” – this invisible, intangible, homogeneous substance – flows in greater or lesser degrees through humankind as well, in spite of the array of visible, tangible, empirical differences that materially distinguish humans from one another. Beneath these apparent differences, something common flows through us – we all partake of a similar intangible essence. Marx suggests, in other words, that the strangely counterfactual ideal of equality that develops in tandem (he believes) with capitalism, that exerts a critical force on actual social institutions and over time is used to call into question the importance of immediately sensible differences between humans – that this counterfactual ideal is a plausible articulation of the experience of partaking in the common intangible substance of value. Quite independently of the formal, contractual dimensions of the wage relation or of other sorts of exchange (which also, of course, play their part in reinforcing ideals of equality and experiences of personhood), this unintentional, impersonal reduction of human commodities down to a common, intangible, social “essence”, helps to enact the distinctive qualitative form of modern ideals of human equality.

Through this account, Marx also hopes to render plausible what he regards as pervasive forms of misrecognition, in which these intangible – but, in Marx’s account, socially enacted – qualities are perceived, not as something we have only recently created, but rather as intrinsic essences that we have recently discovered. The argument around misrecognition is, again, quite complex – I won’t be able to recount it here. The argument hinges on a complex and largely tacit set of distinctions concerning the ways in which we perform certain dimensions of our social experience as overtly social – the personal, intersubjective dimensions – while, by contrast, an impersonal social dimension goes unrecognised as social: it plausibly appears “objective” – and, by so appearing, provides us with experience of a set of qualitative characteristics that inform our concept of “objectivity” – a concept that we might plausibly look for or be receptive to in other sorts of impersonal environments – such as material nature…

Much more is required to develop and fully substantiate this argument, let alone to draw attention to the countercurrents and side eddies that curl around the phenomena I have so inadequately described (there is never, for Marx, just one plausible articulation of our collective enactments – and the reproduction of capital, in his account, entails a bewildering multitude of additional enactments, each interacting with one another in complex and dynamic ways). For the moment, just a brief word on the issue of standpoint of critique in relation to this kind of point. As I’ve sketched the argument above, it could sound as though an ideal of equality might hinge on the sort of collective sleight of hand involved in the enactment of value. This is not Marx’s position. Capitalism may have provided the means – quite accidentally – whereby we demonstrated collectively to ourselves that we could simply perform equality – that we could treat one another as equal, at least for certain purposes and in a certain dimension of collective practice – that we could disregard empirically sensible differences in order to perform this social equality, if needed. This accidental discovery opens a space of possibility – a space that becomes potentially wider, once we recognise the collective genesis of this ideal, rather than essentialising it as a “discovery” of something we perceive as having existed all along. This space of possibility might include an exploration of other forms of relation – less formal, less abstract – but attuned to the possibility to create in and around sensible difference, by performing our selves and our relations in a different way. This topic is much too complex to address adequately here – I mention it as only the most passing of references to how Marx conceptualises the potential for the conscious appropriation of potentials that have been constituted – but in alienated form – how, in other words, he understands his standpoint of critique.

This post is a bit of a monstrosity – my deepest apologies. I am trying to capture a set of notes that I hope to develop adequately in other places at other times. I am also trying to come to grips with the difficulty I have in trying to express what I object to in other theoretical approaches, in a circumstance in which the alternative that shapes my objection is just… a great deal more vast, generally, than what I’m objecting to… Working out how to write about this, short of a full thesis-length presentation, is something with which I’m currently wrestling. At the moment, as with this post, I leave out massive amounts, to the point that, while writing is still helpful for me, because I know at least a decent portion of what I would add to flesh the argument out, the posts strike me as though they must be utterly unintelligible and bizarre to anyone reading on. Thanks all for their patience as I write through this morass… Too tired tonight to edit (which, with this post, is possibly a dire mistake…) Take care all…

Previous posts in this series on Lukács:

Seeing What Was Already There

Reification, pt. 1

Reification, pt. 2

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Empiricism, Fetish, Marxes, Materialism, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Reification

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, pt. 2

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on April 13, 2008

Whatever the elements
(it’s urban/it’s pastoral,
it’s empty/it’s open), the theory says
it could always be worse.

Until it is. Then theory fails, […]

~ Mary Jo Bang @2004 “Catastrophe Theory II”

At the opening of the “Reification” essay, Lukács puts forward the bold claim that:

It is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. Of course the problem can only be discussed with this degree of generality if it achieves the depth and breadth to be found in Marx’s own analyses. That is to say, the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.

Lukács emphasises the word “structure” in “commodity-structure” – highlighting that, in Capital, the category of the commodity is intended to describe, not simply a thing, a discrete good, but instead a distinctive kind of relationship – a relationship whose peculiar qualitative characteristics are then read off into the intrinsic properties of goods. This conception of the commodity allows the category to do much more work than might be expected: the category of the commodity figures, not simply as a category of our economy, but a category of our society – in Lukács’ terms, a “model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them”.

Is Lukács’ conception of the commodity-structure, though, quite the same as Marx’s? In the paragraphs immediately following this opening, Lukács refers to “commodity exchange”, and to the subjective and objective relations corresponding to such exchange, as though these were the relationships at stake in understanding the commodity-structure. Here Lukács runs into a problem: he stipulates that “commodity fetishism is a specific problem of our age, the age of modern capitalism” – and hence is historically specific. Simple commodity production and exchange, however, is ancient: how does an ancient practice somehow transform into the dominant and distinctive problem of modern society?

Lukács’ answer is that the quantitative expansion of commodity exchange at some point reaches a scale where quantitative increase yields a qualitative transformation. This answer suggests that the commodity-structure is founded on the the same sort of social relationship – the exchange relation – in modern and ancient times. Lukács argues that modernity is distinguished by the extension of exchange relations beyond their earlier bounds, to the point that the commodity-structure becomes totalising. Lukács characterises this as a quantitative expansion that yields a qualitative shift: his argument does not attempt to explain qualitatively distinctive forms of subjectivity or (social) objectivity with reference to the emergence of a qualitatively new social structure or historically distinctive form of social relation, but rather with reference to a kind of supersaturation of the social context by a kind of social relation whose historical origins lie in the distant past. The key social structure – the central social relation – in Lukács’ account, is therefore not historically coterminous with the form of society whose characteristics Lukács wants most to explain.

One consequence of this move (and I won’t develop this point adequately in this post) is a flattening of the qualitative characteristics of the “forms of objectivity and subjectivity” for which Lukács tries to account. The focus on exchange relationships drives him to criticise various types of formalism and quantification – forms of thought that abstract from qualitative specificity in favour of quantitative comparisons. Lukács argues that what is left out of this relation – what, therefore, cannot be grasped by bourgeois forms of consciousness – is the use value dimension – qualitative specificity, characteristics not amenable to formalisation. Lukács includes in this category production – and thus the proletariat – setting up for his argument that the proletarian class can generate a unique standpoint that can capture the perspective of the totality by grasping those dimensions of capitalism that are occluded by the bourgeois focus on exchange relations.

I will try to develop this summary more adequately in later posts – completely exhausted today, so I am just tossing up placeholders for myself now. What I wanted to suggest, however, is a certain path not taken in Lukács’ approach – a path that, I have previously suggested, is central to Marx’s argument in Capital: the treatment of the category of the commodity as a fully historically specific structure, expressing a form of social relation specific to, and definitive of, capitalism – and therefore as a category that intends to express something more than simply the exchange relation. I have suggested in previous posts that Marx understands both the exchange value and use value dimensions of the commodity as historically specific terms – use value, far from being something that “bourgeois” forms of thought cannot grasp, is a category integral to capitalism, one that grasps phenomena no less central to the reproduction of capital, than the phenomena grasped by the category of exchange value. At the same time, both use value and exchange value occupy a specific place within the overarching category of the commodity: a space of phenomena that can be directly empirically observed. As the first chapter of Capital unfolds, we quickly learn that the first “presupposition” or social “condition” of these empirically-observable categories, is a third category whose existence must be deduced or intuited, because it cannot be directly perceived by the senses: the category of value. This entire tripartite structure – not simply the “exchange relation” – is the “commodity-structure” in Marx’s account, and this structure, however much it may encompass and repurpose earlier forms of social practice, is understood as historically distinct – as temporally coterminous with the process of the reproduction of capital.

Marx’s argument does involve a complex discussion of phenomena that can directly be seen through immediate empirical observation, versus abstract patterns of social practice whose existence must be deduced through an analysis of distortions or patterns that flow through empirically-observable phenomena. Within Marx’s framework, however, both use value and exchange value fall on the side of what can be perceived directly by the senses. Neither of these categories provides access to a privileged standpoint accessible only to a particular social class: both refer to “overt” aspects of social experience for social actors engaged with the process of the reproduction of capital. And the “non-overt” dimension of social practice – the realm of the mysterious social substances like “value” that Marx argues we unintentionally enact in our collective practices – is no more emancipatory, for all that it is more difficult to perceive or understand. The question of how to understand the standpoint of critique – of how to identify a possibility for emancipatory transformation – is therefore much more complex in Marx’s work, than it is for Lukács.

If I were less tired, I would develop this contrast in much greater detail. That more developed post will have to wait for another day. Apologies for these inadequate mini-posts on Lukács – I’m essentially taking notes for myself here, but will hopefully be able to pull things together more adequately before I’m done…

Previous posts in this series on Lukács:

Seeing What Was Already There

Reification, pt. 1

Fetish, Marxes, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Reification

Seeing What Was Already There

8 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on April 12, 2008

I’m in that stage in the writing process where the work of figuring things out is going on elsewhere, inaccessible to me – whatever part of me works out complex problems, has holed itself up, toiling away, and the rest of me is left waiting, a bit drained of energy, able to sense that intense work is being done, but excluded from the work process and in the dark as to what its end product might be. Keeping me company are various random associations that seem as though they have something to do with one another, and to whatever I’m trying to figure out. I figured I would toss some of those associations up here.

One of the things that troubles me with Lukács is his equation of the totality with the standpoint of critique – an equation that provides the touchstone, unifying concept throughout History and Class Consciousness. The opening to the essay “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg” makes this point particularly concisely:

It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science. The capitalist separation of the producer from the total process of production, the division of the process of labour into parts at the cost of the individual humanity of the worker, the atomisation of society into individuals who simply go on producing without rhyme or reason, must all have a profound influence on the thought, the science and the philosophy of capitalism. Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science. (p. 27)

Lukács’ emphasis on totality can be read as a sophisticated, Hegelian inflection of a common line of criticism of capitalism in the crisis-ridden period of the transition from the laissez-faire era to the development of more state-centred forms of capitalism: the critique emphasises the irrationality of capitalism, understood to be caused by the retention of an outmoded system of private property ownership and competition between capitals that prevents production and distribution from becoming fully transparent to itself, and hence rational, through centralised state planning.

The experiences of the mid-20th century led to an intense reaction against this form of critique, as state planning and the suspension of private ownership and competition, were realised in intensely repressive forms. “Rational” planning proved compatible with the rational administration of terror. In such conditions, the political ideal of a society that had become fully transparent to itself, no longer seemed to hold emancipatory promise but, instead, to imply that there would be nowhere left to hide. The pessimism of the first generation Frankfurt School issues out of its confrontation with what appeared to be the horrific oppressive realisation of socialist ideals.

So there are historical reasons for unease with Lukács’ vision of the totality as the standpoint of critique – fears that this sort of critical discourse is “normatively underdetermined” in the sense that it does not provide critical purchase on the kinds of oppression that are mediated by the state. A theory whose central critical concept is the “all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts” sounds, to contemporary ears, much more likely to facilitate and apologise for oppression, than to bring to light emancipatory possibilities.

But it’s not just 20th century history that suggests that the totality is not the best way to conceptualise the standpoint of critique. I’m writing away from my books, and so I can’t demonstrate this point textually in this post, but there is considerable material from the Grundrisse and from Capital to suggest that Marx equates the viewpoint from the totality, with a particular moment in the process of the reproduction of capital (Murray has made the point, for example, that the category of capital is introduces using Hegel’s vocabulary for the Geist – suggesting, at the very least, that Marx would not agree with Lukács’ attempt to use a similar vocabulary for the proletariat, in order to claim the totality-eye-view as the perspective of the revolution…).

If Marx does not intend the totality to be his standpoint of critique, what does he intend? How does Marx conceptualise his critical standpoint? My suggestion – and I toss this out as a placeholder for future development, rather than as an argument I intend to make in any adequate way here – is that Marx finds his standpoint, precisely not in the totality, but in various “part contexts” that are generated in and through the process of the reproduction of capital, whose distinctive potentials we tend not to “see”, because our gaze focusses instead on the ways in which these parts are currently configured into a particular whole. A great deal of Capital consists of breaking larger wholes down into their various potential parts, exploring the implications of those parts – both as they are currently configured as moments that make a contribution to the reproduction of capital, and as they might potentially be reconfigured in order to realise very different forms of collective life.

Marx metaphorises capitalism as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster – as a reanimated creature – stitched together from disparate parts, each with their own distinctive tendencies, ensorcelled to contribute to ends that are not intrinsic or essentially bound to those parts. Social actors indigenous to this monstrous context find themselves adopting practical orientations toward these parts, reproducing the parts necessarily in the process of (unintentionally) generating the whole – the subjective and objective consequence of this process, is that the reproduction of capital necessarily drags along in its wake the reproduction of these diverse habits, forms of being in the world, material potentials, and other “resources” that can be repurposed to different social ends. Critique within this framework does not speak from the point of view of the totality (although it may need to recognise that a certain kind of whole is currently being reproduced), but rather from the point of view of the parts – of their disparate potentials, which are currently being abridged in order that this particular whole might persist. To seize these potentials, however, we need to shake off the enchantment that this particular whole, is the only possible whole – we need to learn to search beneath the totality, to begin to recognise the potentials of a diverse array of constituent parts.

I will hopefully write on all this much more adequately in the coming months. For the moment, I’ll just point to a fortuitous image – a poem that happened to be linked for other reasons entirely over at Concurring Opinions today – Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another”:

In a poem, one line may hide another line,

As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.

That is, if you are waiting to cross

The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at

Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read

Wait until you have read the next line —

Then it is safe to go on reading.

[….]

One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs

Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the foot of a tree

With one and when you get up to leave there is another

Whom you’d have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,

One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man

May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.

You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be important

To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Critique, Marxes, Metatheory, Political Economy, Reification, Writing

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, pt. 1

6 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on April 9, 2008

I’ve been wanting for some time to toss up some notes on Lukács’ essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” from History and Class Consciousness (note that the version of this text online at marxists.org suffers from a number of OCR issues, most of them just nuisances, but some more significant, including omitted phrases and sentences – the text version is preferable).

Each time I sit down to post something on this text, I find myself hesitating over how to approach this work, without quite understanding the basis for my hesitation. I think part of my difficulty is that the text strikes me as often tantalisingly sophisticated in its details, while frustratingly superficial in its overarching perspective. I’m not sure how to capture its contradictions, without myself becoming mired in minutiae. We’ll see how I go… As with the other posts in the “Marxes” category, this one will consist mainly of notes and sketches – written internalistically to myself. I’ll revisit a slice of this material more formally soon, as Lukács is the focus of one of the papers I will be presenting in Europe. For the moment, though, I want to speak in a more tentative voice, and wander through the text in a nonsystematic way… I’m low on laptop battery at the moment, so just the barest of preliminary thoughts here, without even getting into the text at all – just opening the curtain, with more to follow.

One of the problems that confronts Marxist theory is how to understand the relationship of its own categories – which appear to be “economic” categories – to social phenomena that are not generally taken to be “economic” in nature. The stereotypical “vulgar” solution to this problem is reductionism: those dimensions of social life that are taken to be “economic” are posited as ontologically or causally primary in some sense, and other dimensions of social life are taken to be epiphenomena – caused by, or expressive of, an “underlying” economic reality. This reductionist impulse can extend into fairly sophisticated forms of theory, which grant various kinds of relative autonomy and/or reciprocal causal power to “non-economic” dimensions of social experience. Regardless of the epicycles permitted around the reductionist core, critique tends to be understood as a voice that speaks from the standpoint of an “underlying”, more “essential” reality, in order to target more epiphenomenal or artificial dimensions of social experience.

Lukács is, among other things, an attempt to think this problem in a different way – to do away with the dualistic question of how to relate the “economic” categories of Marxist theory to other social dimensions, by rendering apparently “economic” categories into descriptors of a distinctive form of social life. Within this framework, the theory of capitalism becomes, not an economic theory, but a theory of modernity, and apparently economic categories are reinterpreted as categories of the distinctive forms of subjectivity and objectivity characteristic of modern society. Modern society itself is conceptualised as a totality – and critique is understood as a voice that speaks from the standpoint of the totality, in order to realise the potentials of that totality.

My own work shares the sense that Marx’s own categories should not be understood as “economic” categories in the conventional meaning of that term – that these are categories of distinctive forms of social practice, intended to describe the practical rituals through which indigenous members of capitalist society collectively (and largely unintentionally) enact distinctive forms of subjectivity and objectivity. My analysis, however, does not rely on a notion of “totality” (and tends to view the perception of capitalism as a “totality” as a false, albeit plausible, extrapolation from hypostatising a small subset of the potentials generated by the process of the reproduction of capital), and regards the process of the reproduction of capital as only one dimension of modern social experience, albeit a dimension whose global reach and peculiarly abstract properties render it plausible to experience this slice of social experience as a “background” within which other dimensions of social life unfold. This form of theory attempts to grasp a specific kind of critique – a critique of the process of the reproduction of capital – and attempts to give voice to the conflictual practical orientations that social actors routinely adopt in the process of enacting the reproduction of capital, in order to show that the process of the reproduction of capital is precisely not a totality, but a conflictual assemblage that can potentially be reassembled in different ways, unleashing different potentials for personal and social experience. The standpoint of this form of critique is that diverse constellation of potentials that are being partially enacted, and yet also abridged, by the current configuration of the reproduction of capital. The goal, following Benjamin, is to make our own history citable in more of its moments…

More very soon…

Critique, Fetish, Marxes, Political Economy, Reification, Self-Reflexivity

Fragment on the Concept of a “Standpoint of Critique”

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on April 2, 2008

The recent discussion of Derrida’s Specters of Marx has reminded me (albeit in a somewhat indirect way) that I should probably toss up some notes on the concept of a “standpoint of critique” – a term I often use to cast light on how I understand other bits of technical vocabulary I use, but which I don’t believe I’ve ever written on in its own right. I’m never sure, I think, how common or self-evident the concept of a “standpoint of critique” might be – the concept isn’t a difficult one and, unlike other technical terms I use (“immanence”, “reflexivity”, “theoretical pessimism” – even “critical theory”) that have tended to be controversial in some overt way, I don’t believe anyone has ever asked me to explain what I mean by “critical standpoint”. Still, I can’t help but be struck by some key differences between how I think the question of “critical standpoint” is posed by Marx, compared to how the question seems to be posed in many other theoretical traditions. If nothing else, I thought that tugging on some of these differences might help me articulate some of what I am trying to say about Marx’s work.

At the most general level, a “standpoint of critique” is something that accounts for the critical ideals or sensibilities that are expressed in a critical theory. Here’s the first rub: theories differ over why such an account is needed – and therefore what needs to be accounted for. Generally, an account of a “standpoint of critique” attempts to explain the genesis of critical sensibilities – to explain where critical sensibilities “come from”, how critical sensibilities are generated. Very often, the possibility for the emergence of critical sensibilities is pointed back to the something that prevents social actors from becoming fully “identical” to their socialisation – pointed back to some aspect of material or social nature that cannot be fully subsumed into any particular form of socialisation. In this case, critical sensibilities are understood to express something that conditions the possibilities for practice that are available to social actors, but that represents a sort of breakdown in the process of socialisation or a “remainder” that exceeds socialisation. Depending on the theory, this breakdown or remainder might result from some intrinsic and ineradicable imperfection in socialisation itself, in some property of our physical embodiment, in some characteristic of language, in some aspect of material nature, or in other properties or processes that are interpreted to secure or guarantee that social actors can never succeed in becoming fully “at home” in their social context. These sorts of explanation for “critical standpoint” can vary substantially from one another. In spite of these differences, they share a conception that critical sensibilities are generated in a failure in socialisation (albeit that this failure may be conceptualised as intrinsic to, and even constitutive of, socialisation itself) that creates an ever-present possibility for social actors to achieve a level of distance from any particular form of socialisation – not simply distance from whatever forms of socialisation might be present at the moment the theory is articulated.

Marx, I want to suggest, approaches the question of “critical standpoint” in a slightly different way. He subordinates the question of how critical sensibilities are generated, to the question of how the practices that reproduce the social context, simultaneously involve the practical constitution of resources, institutions, habits, and ideals that sit in tension with the process of reproduction that generates them. In this approach, the rise of critical sensibilities does not relate to the breakdown of socialisation or to a remainder that exceeds socialisation, but instead to the success of socialisation – in the specific context where the social form being reproduced, generates conflictual possibilities. Here, the argument about critical sensibilities is less an argument about the characteristics of social actors (although this must be theorised as well), than it is an argument about the characteristics of the social context itself. The core of the argument is an explanation of why it is not utopian to judge the existing process of social reproduction as wanting – critical ideals are accounted for, by demonstrating that these ideals can be “cashed out” by relating them to practical potentials whose genesis is the direct concern of the theory. In this approach, it is socialisation – rather than its breakdown or excession – that gives rise to the critical standpoint to which the theory appeals. As a consequence, the theory has nothing to say about how critical ideals might arise in other social contexts, and its account of critical standpoint must be understood to be limited to the society it criticises: this theory is the theory of its object, and lives and dies with the target of its critique.

These two approaches to understanding critical standpoint are not intrinsically contradictory: they simply theorise different objects. Where this is not understood, discussions or comparisons between the two sorts of approaches can speak to cross purposes. To some degree, I see this happening in Derrida’s analysis of Marx in Specters: the “dry messianic” spirit Derrida hopes to resurrect from Marx’s work, seems to invoke a concept of critical standpoint as an ineradicable possibility – a critical standpoint related to the necessary imperfection in the iteration required for the reproduction of our social inheritance. From this standpoint, Marx’s various suggestions that the transformation of capitalism would overcome the tensions and conflicts in socialisation, look violently utopian – they appear as assertions that the overcoming of capitalism would also overcome the non-identity of the individual and society. To most theorists of the latter half of the 20th century, this sort of formulation carries totalitarian overtones – it is not surprising this would be a spirit Derrida would wish to “exorcise” from Marx’s work. If Marx is understood, however, as taking his critical standpoint from within capitalism itself, his claims read a bit differently: not as assertions that the overcoming of capitalism would overcome any potential for critique or any source of non-identity between the individual and society, but simply as assertions that – definitionally – overcoming capitalism means an overcoming of those specific tensions that characterise its distinctive process of reproduction.

Marx of course is writing too early to know to fend off this particular line of misinterpretation – some formulations are ambiguous or inconsistent with the main line of his analysis. My concern is less to protect Marx against critiques of his own ambiguities, than it is to draw attention to a way of exploring the question of critical standpoint, in a way that relates this question directly to an analysis of specific practical potentials that are immanent to the process of social reproduction being criticised, where the concern is less to explain why sensibilities arise, than to demonstrate that sensibilities can be pointed back to practical, non-utopian potentials for change. Whether Marx succeeds in this task is separable from the question of whether this might be a useful line of exploration for contemporary critical theory.

Still a bit tired from my trip – will post without reading back over this, with apologies for editing issues and for the fragmentary nature of these observations.

Contradiction, Critique, Metatheory, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Transformation

Speculation

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on March 24, 2008

I’ve just finished reading Specters of Marx, and am fighting to get a particularly stupid grin off my face. I had read this work a long time ago, in another life entirely, and what struck me then – and therefore remained in memory – bears little relation to what strikes me now. I have been promising a number of people that I would at some point re-read and comment on the work here – tonight’s post will at best be a very partial gesture at this promise. At the moment, I am simply too gleeful to write anything sensible on the text: I am finding myself – quite literally – laughing in enjoyment of the parallel – beautiful and perplexing – that Derrida sketches between himself, criticising Fukuyama, and Marx, criticising Stirner. What a delightful, ironic self-critique and, of course, critique of Marx. I’ll need to leave this – and, with it, the overwhelming bulk of the text – completely aside, until some point when I am feeling a bit less captivated by it…

I do want to archive a couple of issues here for later, more adequate development. First, as will probably be clear from the discussion I’ve already written here on “supersensible” categories like “value”, I like the use of metaphors related to the spectral, in trying to capture what’s unfolding in Capital – the issue of what I’ve been calling “supersensible” categories, what Derrida tends to refer to as the sensuous non-sensuous, is, I think, perhaps the most central dimension to the argument in Capital. And the metaphor of spectrality, as Derrida deploys it here – to capture the dual sense of something invisible/intangible/supersensible and something embodied or incarnated – is a particularly comprehensive metaphor for grasping the strange social characteristics of the sorts of entities Marx is trying to pick out, through categories like “value”, “abstract labour”, and “capital”. Whether Derrida quite grasps the practice theoretic dimension of the argument, I’m uncertain, but the metaphorisation is difficult to surpass.

Second, Derrida makes a very nice distinction that expresses something that has been nagging me in my own writing – a distinction that I will likely steal, although I don’t believe Derrida wields it in quite the way I likely will. Derrida spends quite a lot of time making a case that Marx distinguishes between spirit and spectre, or good and bad instantiations of spectrality. For Derrida, this argument is bound together with a claim that Marx shares with the people Marx criticises, a common desire to banish spectres – a fear of the spectral. Again, I would need to spend much more time with Derrida’s text to decide whether I agree with this critique. In a short-term and selfish sense, what I take from the distinction Derrida draws, is the realisation that I need to express much more clearly two dimensions of Marx’s “spectral” that emerge in the course of my own argument. Capital involves a complex critique of the empirically sensible – capitalism figures as a haunted context, in which empirically sensible entities are incarnations of supersensible relations. The supersensible dimension of capitalism figures in Capital both as the object of critique (the social practices that constitute supersensible social entities like “value” need to be overcome, in order to transcend capitalism), and as part of the standpoint of critique (the potential to “carve up” existing social practices, ideals, and institutions in different ways – the latent structure of alternative organisations of social life, necessarily reproduced with the reproduction of capitalism – provides an immanent standpoint from which the reproduction of capital can be recognised as a form of domination). Derrida’s argument about Marx’s attempt to distinguish spectres and spirits intersects in complex ways with this sort of claim – for present purposes, I am simply flagging for myself that Derrida’s argument reminds me that I need to be clearer in my own writing, about the complex ways in which Marx’s critique of empirical “givens” runs through his conception of both the target and the standpoint of his critique.

One brief critical comment, which I will hopefully have time to develop more adequately in the future: Derrida seems to take Marx as offering a critique from the standpoint of use value, and therefore takes exchange value as the target of the critique – certainly not an uncommon reading, and Derrida’s version is vastly more sophisticated than most. My argument has been to take more seriously that the “elementary form” is actually the commodity – not some part of the commodity – and then to tug on this thread, to uncover within Marx’s argument an analysis of a tripartite social structure in which an unintended side effect of our collective practice is the generation of a dynamic of historical transformation that is effected via the transformation of material nature and overtly social institutions, in such a way as to enact or confer on specific aspects of our practical experience, those qualitative attributes that we intuitively experience as “material” or “social”. This is a difficult point to express – for present purposes, suffice to say the argument does not use the concept of a “material world” or “use value” as an “unexplained explainer” for other phenomena, but rather attempts to account for the category of “materiality” and “sociality” (and, for that matter, “historicity” and a number of other pivotal categories) in their distinctive capitalist forms.

I suspect that a great deal of Derrida’s critique here hinges on Derrida’s conviction that Marx is too “spooked” to allow both “content” and “form” to float free, untethered to some ontological ground – too foundationalist to maintain that critique has no “standpoint” outside what is criticised. I read Marx somewhat differently, of course – as an immanent critical theorist, and so as someone not seeking an external ground, but still as someone who tries to answer the question of why we find it so intuitive, to think that the “material” world should be able to provide such a ground, to perceive the determinate qualitative characteristics we most readily ascribe to materiality, as simple negations – as what is left behind, once everything anthropologically specific has been stripped away. Marx also, of course, uses the categories he analyses – an immanent critique must – and so those dimensions of our practical experience that we enact as “material” realities carry a critical force in his argument. So do those dimensions of our practical experience that we enact as (overtly) social. And so do those dimensions that we enact as “spectral” – that are not subject to immediate empirical verification, but whose existence can be deduced through watching how empirically-observable realities unfold over time. But I’m being very abbreviated, and possibly quite unfair to Derrida’s concerns – I’ll have to take this up again, at an earlier hour, when I can do better justice to the text…

Conversations, Fetish, Marxes, Materialism, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

The Matter with Form

1 Comment Posted by N Pepperell on March 12, 2008

Apologies for the recent silence on the blog – I’ve been preoccupied with offline things, and blogging will unfortunately remain slow for a bit. I did want to point to a very nice recent post over at Larval Subjects, on “Social Multiplicities and Agency”. This post continues Sinthome’s recent reflections on the problem of how to thematise agency, asking whether the starting assumptions of much social and political theory – assumptions manifest, in particular, in a form/matter dichotomy – drive theory to oscillate between antinomic poles of abstract structure and agency:

At the heart of what I will call the “Althusserian model”, is the old Aristotlean conception of individuation based on the distinction between form and matter. While Althusser’s social structures are historical in the sense that they come to be and pass away and are thus unlike Aristotle’s forms which are eternal and unchanging, social structure is nonetheless conceived as forms imposed on passive matters, giving these passive matters their particular form or structure. The passive matters in question, of course, are human individuals. I am formed by social structures tout court and without remainder. In response to this conception– and I realize that I am unfairly simplifying matters –we should ask if this is an accurate conception of either agency or the social. Does not Althusser and other structuralist inspired Marxists severely simplify both social dynamics and the social itself? When Badiou speaks of the “state of the situation” “counting-multiplicities as one”, has he not severely simplified how the social is in fact organized, creating the illusion that there’s a monolithic structure at work in social formations? Do not Lacanians and Zizekians severely simplify the social by reading all social phenomena through the lens of the symbolic and formations of sovereignity (Lacan’s masculine sexuation)? Perhaps, in these simplifications, we create the very problems we’re trying to solve and end up tilting against monsters of our own creation.

Sinthome reaches for new metaphors for thinking the social, and finds productive resonance with certain themes in evolutionary theory, which provide tools for thinking, not the reduction of the social to the natural, but rather a more complex and multilayered conception of the social:

To draw the parallel to Althusser and similarly minded theorists– emphasizing once again that I am not seeking to apply natural selection to social formations, but to think the organization and levels of social formations –where the Althusserian form/matter social model postulates two thing (social structure and individuals), where one thing, the social formation, hierarchically imposes form on another (individuals), Gould’s model envisions a number of different levels in which distinct processes take place. As Gould goes on to say, “…[A]djacent levels my interact in the full range of conceivable ways– in synergy, orthogonally, or in opposition” (73). That is, among the different levels processes taking place can reinforce one another, they can be independent of one another, or they can be in conflict or opposition with one another. Were such a nuanced and multi-leveled conception of the biological carried over into social theory, we would no longer engage in endless hand-wringing as to whether or not agency is possible, nor would we need to postulate theoretical monsters like the Lacanian subject or subjects of truth-procedures. If such moves would no longer be necessary, then this is because we would no longer postulate hierarchical and hegemonic relations among the various strata or levels of social formations. Instead, we would engage in an analysis of these various levels and strata, examining the relations of feedback (positive and negative) that function within them, their relations of synergy, orthogonality, and antagonism, and the various potentials that inhabit these relations. Here we would need to look at the variety of different social formations from individuals, to small associations like groups (the blog collective for instance), to larger groupings and institutions, to global interrelations, treating none of these as hegemonizing all the others, but instead discerning their varying temporalities, organizations, inter-relations, points of antagonism, and so on. This, I think, is far closer to Marx’s own vision– or at least the spirit of his analyses in texts like Grundrisse and Capital.

I agree with this characterisation of Marx’s work – my discussion in the recent HSS paper of how Marx uses the concept of “inversion”, gestures at how I would begin to develop this position. I hope to be able to spend much more time on how this kind of analysis plays out concretely in Capital, in the coming months.

Sinthome’s post also resonates with the recent discussion of Diane Elson’s work (here and here), in which I was exploring Elson’s take on the concept of “determination” in Marx’s work. Much as Sinthome mines concepts used to think evolution, Elson deploys metaphors from chemistry to try to move beyond thinking of structure as something that subsists separately to, and exists in an external causal relationship with, what is structured.

All of these discussions remind me again of one of my favourite characterisations of Marx’s work, from Paul Lafargue’s Reminiscences of Marx:

He saw not only the surface, but what lay beneath it. He examined all the constituent parts in their mutual action and reaction; he isolated each of those parts and traced the history of its development. Then he went on from the thing to its surroundings and observed the reaction of one upon the other. He traced the origin of the object, the changes, evolutions and revolutions it went through, and proceeded finally to its remotest effects. He did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings: he saw a highly complicated world in continual motion.

His intention was to disclose the whole of that world in its manifold and continually varying action and reaction.

Compare with Sinthome’s lovely description of:

capitalism as a heterogeneous multiplicity with a variety of different levels, often at odds with itself, spinning off in a variety of different directions, calling for nuanced and local analyses and strategies

Apologies for the associative character of this post – systematicity eludes me at the moment… 😉 Much more on these themes in Sinthome’s original post.

Abstraction, Contradiction, Conversations, Critical Theory, Political Economy, Transformation

The Production of Labour

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on March 6, 2008

I keep meaning to put up a pointer to Praxis, which is always discussing interesting topics at the intersection of economics and deconstruction. 🙂 The posts over there are consistently worth the read, but I wanted to post a specific pointer today to a nice post up on Keynes, written partially in dialogue to some of the things I’ve put up over here on Marx’s “labour theory of value”. A brief selection:

The innovation of Keynesianism was to reverse the terms in which neo-classical economics had understood the labour-production relation. Neoclassical economics sees labour as the means to the end of production. Keynes’s general theory sees production as a means to the end of labour. Faced with the great depression, and massive unemployment, Keynes proposed deficit-financed government expenditure as a means to ‘produce’ employment. The actual commodities labour produced were incidental – as Keynes vividly illustrates with his great example of burying bank-notes down coal mines, and then digging them up again. Keynesianism – ‘rescuing’ capitalism from itself, and from the looming threat of socialism – can be seen as bringing into the open something that was implicit in earlier mainstream economic theorising: the extent to which economic activity works to produce not commodities, but wage-labour. And – as the social unrest that the great depression brought to the surface suggests – the production of employment is essential if capitalist society is to survive. This is, of course, because people need food to eat. But it’s also because the social system of wage labour serves as an incredibly potent mechanism of discipline and control. When the Keynesian revolution brought ‘full’ employment explicitly to the forefront of policy-making, capitalism, one might say, showed its hand.

I unfortunately have no time today to comment adequately, but at least wanted to put up a pointer to the post, which is worth a read in full.

Conversations, Political Economy

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: A Way of Visualising Abstract Labour and Value

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on February 25, 2008

For anyone who doesn’t have the stamina to trawl all the way through the 11,000 words I somehow wrote on Diane Elson’s “Value Theory of Labour” (here and here), there is one bit of my argument that I wanted to reproduce in its own post, partially because it seems to me to belong in the series on Capital, volume 1, chapter 1, and partially because I’m still trying to decide whether I like this way of expressing what Marx is trying to do. I’ve removed everything specific to Elson, and just reproduced the metaphors I’ve been trying to develop recently – particularly as I’ve been trying to express in a more unequivocal way, why the argument about the fetish is not an argument simply about “market relations”. Apologies for the duplication with the Elson posts – I’m just assuming that more people will see this here, than will read all the way to the very end of the argument about Elson… ;-P

***

I find it useful to think about abstract labour in terms of sets and subsets, each enacted in collective practice.

The main set includes all sorts of activities that are productive or creative of social life in any sense of the term. This set might include working on an assembly line, falling in love, building a house to live in yourself, selling legal services, going on a vacation in New Zealand, etc. In spite of its apparent inclusiveness and genericness, it isn’t an accident that a set with such members should be thinkable to us. There is some practical sense in which our collective practice is – in at least one dimension – so indifferent to the specific activities that we carry out, that we have experiential access to a category that is so large that it can encompass all of these diverse things into an overarching concept of “human practice”. I’ll leave aside for present purposes how I think such a category is suggested by our practices.

Within this set, there is a subset of activities that are grouped together as attempts to assert themselves as commodity-producing activities. The people or groups who engage in this subset of activities can know how much effort they are empirically expending, to undertake whatever activity they are undertaking – manufacturing a car, providing medical services, building houses, etc. They cannot know, however, how successful they will be in getting the empirical effort they are expending to “count” as commodity-producing labour: they will only know this, once they send the products of their labour into the market. At that point, they will find out whether, and how much, of their empirical activity succeeds in making it into the final subset.

The final subset is activities that have successfully asserted themselves as commodity-producing labour – a status that may partially, fully or even excessively recognise the actual efforts empirically expended in production in the previous subset. This final, smallest subset of human activities, comprises those activities that get to “count” as part of “social labour” from the standpoint of the reproduction of capital.

There are other practically-enacted subsets – these three are the ones relevant to the understanding of the first chapter.

Marx’s argument about abstract labour and value relates to our experience of the salto mortale between the second and third subset. In his account, the process that culls from the activities undertaken in the second subset, to generate the activities recognised as “social labour” from the standpoint of the reproduction of capital, is a process that takes place “behind the backs” of social actors: they can experience it taking place, but they are not setting out to create such a process, and they experience this process as (what it is) an impersonal form of coercion on their intentional practices. Moreover, this process communicates its results to social actors through the process of the exchange of their products – through the proportions in which their goods exchange with one another. Productive activities that “succeed” in asserting themselves as part of “social labour”, demonstrate their success by exchanging for greater amounts of other products, which have not succeeded so well. Those activities that get to “count” as “social labour” are therefore rendered manifest to social actors, through a process that establishes relationships among goods. When Marx says that, in capitalism,

the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, objective relations between persons and social relations between objects.

he means this in a very literal sense. He is not describing some strange illusion under which social actors are operating, but something more like a very exotic ritual among the indigenous members of capitalist society, for establishing which activities count as social labour. This ritual is socially specific, but it is nevertheless perfectly real – it possesses a social validity for members of capitalist society that is not automatically undermined by the realisation that its reality is only social in origin.

Marx is worried that his readers won’t grasp how bizarre this familiar ritual actually is – that just pointing out the subsets, and indicating that we are regularly engaged in sorts of productive activity without any idea whether those activities will succeed in counting as social labour, will not provide sufficient analytical distance. He needs to jolt his readers out of their familiarity with their own context. He uses the concepts of abstract labour and value to provide this jolt.

Our collective behaviour, Marx argues, is tantamount to acting as though the labouring activities undertaken as part of the second subset, are haunted by a supersensible world that lies behind what we can empirically perceive – a supersensible world of abstract labour. To the extent that our labouring activities partake of this supersensible world, they succeed in being incorporated into the third subset. Our collective behaviour is also tantamount to acting as though the commodities we produce possess an intangible, supersensible dimension – a dimension in which abstract labour is objectified into the property of value. Another way of saying this is to state that abstract labour and value are “real abstractions” – practical truths specific to capitalist society – social entities that are enacted in collective practice.

Fetishised forms of thought, for Marx, express the existence of these social entities – but do not grasp them as social. Value is thus treated as an intangible substance that inheres in physical objects, and becomes manifest in the process of exchange. Abstract labour is treated as an intangible world of social labour that becomes manifest in the culling process of the market. In his argument, we enact entities like value and abstract labour as real abstractions, but the way that we enact such social entities (unintentionally, as side effects of practices oriented to other goals) and the way we manifest these entities (through proportional relationships established between goods) creates an intrinsic risk that social actors will become confused about the ontological status of these real abstractions – the risk that, as Marx jokes in relation to Dame Quickly, they won’t know “where to have it”.

Marx shows off a bit in the first chapter, using this argument very quickly to suggest that major themes in the development of western philosophy are actually expressive of this confusion over “where to have” these real abstractions. His analysis from that point is more careful, less sweeping – but equally oriented to linking conceptual categories as real abstractions back to the moments of the reproduction of capital in which such categories are enacted.
***

List of posts on Marx below the fold: Read more of this post

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Metatheory, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

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The Reality of Abstraction

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, pt. 3

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, pt. 2

Seeing What Was Already There

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, pt. 1

Fragment on the Concept of a “Standpoint of Critique”

Speculation

The Matter with Form

The Production of Labour

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: A Way of Visualising Abstract Labour and Value

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