Marx's Critical/Dialectical Procedure (RLE Marxism) 9781138855021, 9781315712840, 9781138886964, 9781315713830, 0415055474

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: MARXISM

Volume 19

MARX’S CRITICAL/DIALECTICAL PROCEDURE

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MARX’S CRITICAL/DIALECTICAL PROCEDURE

H.T. WILSON

First published in 1991 This edition first published in 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1991 H.T. Wilson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

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Marx’s Critical/Dialectical Procedure

H.T. Wilson

O om

*

London and New York

First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1991 H.T.Wilson Typeset by NWL Editorial Services, Langport, Somerset TA10 9DG Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wilson, H.T., 1940Marx’s Critical/Dialectical Procedure 1. Marxism. Dialectical materialism I. Title 335.4112 ISBN 0-415-05547-4 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wilson, H.T. Marx’s Critical/Dialectical Procedure / H.T. Wilson p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ISBN 0-415-05547-4 1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. I. Title B3305.M74W49 1990 90-8442 335.4—dc20 CIP

For John O’Neill on his fifty-seventh birthday

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Another matter which must not be passed over without consideration is whether the proper subject of our exposition is that with which the ancient writers concerned themselves, namely, what is the process of formation of each animal; or whether it is not rather, what are the characters of a given creature when formed. For there is no small difference between these two views. The best course appears to be that we should follow the method already mentioned, and begin with the phenomena presented by each group of animals, and, when this is done, proceed afterwards to state the causes of those phenomena, and to deal with their evolution. For the process of evolution is for the sake of the thing finally evolved, and not this for the sake of the process. Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium 639b16 - 641*29

- the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But all of this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101

Totality indeed does not signify all facts. Totality signifies reality as a structured dialectical whole, within which and from which any par­ ticular fact (or any group or set of facts) can be rationally comprehended. The accumulation of all facts would not yet amount to the cognition of reality, and neither would all accumulated facts amount to a totality. Facts are the cognition of reality only provided they are comprehended as facts and as structured parts of a dialectical whole, i.e. not as immutable, further reducible atoms which, agglom­ erated, compose reality. The concrete, that is, totality, is thus not equal to all the facts, to a sum of facts or to the accumulation of all aspects, things and relations, for this set lacks the most important feature - totality and concreteness. Without comprehending what facts signify i.e. without compre­ hending that reality is a concrete totality which for the purpose of knowing individual facts or sets of facts turns into a structure of meanings, cognition of the concrete totality itself amounts to no more than mysticism or to a thing in itself unknowable. Karel Kosik, Dialectics o f the Concrete, pp. 18-19

With regard to all sense in general we must lay it down that sense is that which is capable of receiving the sensible forms without the matter. Aristotle, D eAnim a, 424a17 - b, 3

Sense-perception ... must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense perception in the two-fold form both of sensu­ ous consciousness and of sensuous need - that is, only when science proceeds from nature - is it true science. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 143

To think is at the same time to perceive: it is a constituent part of the process of perception, which always exists as an aspect of human praxis. Since logic as the theory of thought is a constituent part of the process of perception, it is a part o f the theory o f perception; it forms the primary part of the theory of perception. Jindrich Zeleny, Logic of Marx, p. 3

Ricardo starts out from the determination of the relative values (or exchangeable values) of commodities by The quantity of labour’ ... The character of this ‘labour’ is not further examined. If two com­ modities are equivalents - or bear a definite proportion to each other or, which is the same thing, if their magnitude differs according to the ... quantity of ‘labour’ which they contain - then it is obvious that regarded as exchange-values, their substance must be the same. Their substance is labour; That is why they are ‘values’. Their magnitude varies, according to whether they contain more or less of this sub­ stance. But Ricardo does not examine the form - the peculiar characteristic of labour that creates exchange-value or manifests it­ self in exchange-values - the nature of this labour. Marx, Theories o f Surplus Value, Part II (Volume IV of Capital), p. 164

The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5

Contents

List of figures and tables

1

xi

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgements

xvii

Marx’s critique of political economy as a problem-posing framework Political economy and its critique Science and method Nature’ and labour Labour and 'value9 Surplus value and labour

1 1 5 9 13 18

2

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today Critique and las practice A procedure not a method On the logical and actual status o f facts} Common goals, but different procedures Reality and reason in science and life

24 24 28 32 37 41

3

The meaning and significance of Marx’s critique of the method of political economy Knowledge and method in the Grundrisse Perception, observation and thought Dialectics: thinking and comprehending The theorist and/in society

46 46 51 58 63

Making analytical and practical sense of Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure Concrete totality as concrete totalization Phases, levels and types of/in the procedure

69 69 74

4

ix

Contents Materialism, concretion and natural necessity Logic and contradiction in the critical/dialectical procedure Political economy, science, logic 5

6

7

x

79 85 90

Ontological underpinnings of the critical/dialectical procedure Essence and nature Wholes, forms and laws Materialist dialectics and/as essentialism Contradiction and totality in the cell form The cell form and the value form

93 93 98 102 107 113

Retroduction and empiricism in Marx’s practice and theory of understanding Anomaly and discovery in natural science Retroduction: Marx's analytic procedure? Aristotle and knowledge o f the phenomenal as real Showing why the phenomenal is not essential The practice o f concrete totality

120 120 124 130 135 139

Labour as the objective basis of materialist dialectics Abstract(ed) labour From abstract(ed) to concrete labour Reflection and/as labour Labour and!as the dynamic motion o f thought A procedure for concrete world production

147 147 152 158 165 172

Appendix: Capitalism, science and the possibility of political economy

180

Notes

201

Index

242

Figures and tables

Figures 1

Forms of mental activity available to the human being

2

A matrix for locating some ancient, modern and contemporary thinkers

64 108

Tables 1 2

Essential analytic concepts and their non-reflexive correlates in Marx

76

Beginning and process in thought, science and life

83

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Preface

Marx was, among many other things, a serious student of theoretical and analytic method in political economy, philosophy and the natural sciences. Some have even claimed that he was an ontologist as well. To a great extent this intellectual attitude was thrust upon Marx by his very need to develop and defend an alternate way of thinking about human beings as collective, cultural and historical creatures. This need arose uniquely out of his response to developments in the natural sciences, philosophy and political economy, some of which inspired admiration and some of which necessitated critique. It was in and through his experiences with these institutions, disciplines and fields of knowledge in particular that what I call Marx’s critical/dia­ lectical procedure was formed, took shape and developed into a full blown counter approach to knowledge and knowing, one charac­ terized by a dynamic, active reflection rather than one which was contemplative in a more passive sense. This critical/dialectical proce­ dure, in effect, is nothing less than an intellectual practice composed of significant empirical, as well as reflexive and analytical elements. A central feature of this procedure was Marx’s thesis about the relation between knowledge and reality. By rejecting identity and cer­ tainty as possible and desirable goals of inquiry, Marx was led to endorse an exhaustive, comprehensive approach to knowledge and knowing in the already-cited domains of his intellectual and practical interest. Instead of this recognition leading to passivity and resigna­ tion, it thus generated just the opposite reaction in Marx, and for reasons which the writer believes were thoroughly sensible. Modern and contemporary thinking views reality as a pre-given, already con­ stituted, passive whole of ‘concrete’ parts that human beings only act on in various ways rather than constitute in one moment of their being as well. For Marx, this view is thoroughly mistaken, and conse­ quential in central ways in its mistakenness. Knowledge, not being

Preface separate and independent from reality, can never presume to seek an identity with it. This obsession with certainty fails to understand pre­ cisely what such a desire for identity really constitutes. The desire for identity reflects the operation of a protocol of tem­ porary detachment carried out in pursuit of knowledge about reality, which detachment necessitates a prior presumption of independence from the reality one wishes to know about. As long as one realizes what he is doing while engaged in this quest, it is highly unlikely that this protocol will become unhinged from reality and, as a conse­ quence, be disembodied from the rest of the intellectual practice of which it is but a moment. When Marx and later critical theorists like Adorno speak of ‘being after the thing itself, they mean to address critically the idea that disembodied and unhinged detachment could ever constitute a mode of inquiry in its own right because this is pre­ cisely what such a protocol on its own fails to realize in and through its activity. This detaching moment is at one and the same time given in the act of abstraction and determination which is the basis for any human claim to know, and something which can be, and has been, extended well beyond its former confinement between thought and common-sense practice. Whether one wishes to call this procedure of thinking a social on­ tology or not, it clearly constitutes an important and novel way of addressing reality in a ‘realistic’ way, one which is designed not to lose the thing-in-itself any more than is necessitated by the very fact of its constitution as a knowable object of intellectual and practical desire. The consequences for both ‘traditional’ theory and ‘empirical’ method in political economy and, more recently, the social sciences and related disciplines of recognizing this procedure are already clear to intellectual practitioners on all sides of the matter, and can only become more obvious with the passage of time and the ever-increas­ ing inability of late capitalism to contain its contradictions, now grown to global proportions. In effect, Marx displays through his own intellectual practice the fraudulence of both a self-sufficient de­ tached empiricism and the ‘traditional’ approach to thought and thinking found most prominently in both political economy and speculative philosophy - the philosophy of Hegel. Marx’s critique and reconstruction of these disciplinary practices takes its point of departure, intellectually speaking, in the thought of Aristotle, in particular Aristotle’s essentialism as a procedure of in­ quiry standing irreconcilably against Democritean atomism. In addition, of course, there is Marx’s resistance to idealism as a self-suf­ ficient philosophical approach to problems of knowledge. When the two were combined, as was the case with the work of the political economists, particularly Ricardo, the result was even more conse­

Preface quential. While it has been argued with force, and persuasively, that Marx’s thought on these matters contains significant elements of Kantian, as well as Hegelian thought, this must always be set in the context of what would come to constitute the key components of the critical/dialectical procedure itself. Surely this should come as no greater surprise than the discovery that Marx’s procedure contained significant empirical elements which were the result of the influence upon him of the very political economists he was subjecting to critique. As a fortuitous combination of Aristotelian essentialism, Hege­ lian dialectical analysis, Kantian idealism, and a revised and reconstituted empiricism from both Kant and the political econo­ mists, it is hardly fair, or even sensible, to call the result a regression to pre-modem forms of thought as Karl Popper and Frederick Hayek have done. There is neither nostalgia nor malevolence in any part of Marx’s analysis, and any and all efforts like Popper’s to link Marx’s thought to contemporary totalitarianism, particularly of the com­ munist variety in the USSR and elsewhere, manifest a supreme ignorance or lack of interest in his analysis of the development of capitalism, among other things. What makes this directly relevant to my concerns in this text, however, is Popper’s claim of a logical rela­ tion approaching cause and effect between holistic and historicist thinking in general and totalitarian practices. Nothing will serve to dismiss such allegations more quickly than the analysis to follow, which shows how and why Marx, in contrast to liberal and positivistic thinkers, is no determinist in the sense that Popper and others under­ stand this term. Marx’s discussion of the only relevant and sensible understanding of lawfulness and necessity, based on biology rather than physics, and essentialism rather than atomism, goes beyond this Aristotelian view to comprehend as well a new dynamic and active reflection mani­ fested in/as materialist dialectics. Marx resuscitates materialism from its narrowly empirical modern source in Locke in a way which only underscores how it is that such recognition demands that we turn away from identity and certainty as possible and desirable goals of thought and thinking. Only by acknowledging thought’s inability to appropriate and become one with reality is it possible to be ‘after the thing itself in its wholeness, understood in both its structural and its developmental aspects. Failing this, thought hostages its own possi­ bilities to imitating and recapitulating what it believes to be the process of reality constituting, maintaining and transforming itself, unaware that its very membership and participation in reality dooms such an enterprise to futility, frustration and rage, while denying to thought the functions that it alone can perform in favour of a trun­ xv

Preface cated and disembodied discipline masquerading its ‘even thinner ab­ stractions’ as thought itself. A final point would ask how, if thought and reality are alleged to be different and distinct, we can know this. The preliminary answer is fourfold, (a) We can see through the aegis of thought that the knowl­ edge we have about reality shows it to be active and dynamic rather than passive and static in its being when this knowledge is the result of a full, rather than a truncated, intellectual procedure, (b) We can realize from this experience that reality can only be known in its wholeness through such a procedure, and that this procedure must be different from the reality that we can see as a function of thought’s active, dynamic, material knowledge of it. Thus (c) we can turn to our advantage the very fact of thought’s membership and participation in reality, instead of allowing this recognition, acknowledged or other­ wise, to lead to futility, frustration, resignation, despair and rage because it means that the achievement of identity and certainty is impossible, (d) This, in turn, shows up the need for the sort of com­ plete process of thinking best manifested in what I have called the critical/dialectical procedure which, in turn, is best exemplified in the work of Karl Marx.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book was the result of an initial interest in an intro­ ductory section of Marx’s Grundrisse, titled T he Method of Political Economy’. This single section completely overwhelmed me and led to a re-reading and analysis of the greater part of Marx’s written work. I believe that Marx’s response to the body of work which he calls pol­ itical economy conditioned virtually all of his subsequent research and scholarship, and that elements of what would later be acknow­ ledged to be his unique ‘anti-method’ can be seen in his earliest writings. Just as important for the concerns addressed here is the point that no matter how brilliantly Marx depicts and describes what he is doing when he observes, investigates, thinks and reflects, his actual display of this activity in and through his work is always even better. This in itself only underscores the limits of disciplined obser­ vation on its own (allegedly) independent of its true object. I am grateful to colleagues and students in Canada, The Netherlands, West Germany, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong for many discus­ sions over the past three years during which time this book was written, even though I am solely responsible for what follows. Lois Wood typed an excellent draft of the first four chapters of the text beginning only three weeks after she trained herself on the VDT, and Helen Reiss typed the rest of this draft. The second draft was typed speedily and very well by Wanda Wong with help from Susan Currie. The final draft was looked after by Toni Tetrault under ex­ tremely trying and difficult circumstances. I am very grateful to these people for their cryptographic and investigative, as well as their sec­ retarial and typing abilities, given the amount of patience that was required to decipher my handwriting. This is especially appreciated by those of us who remain members of that decreasing group of aca­ demic intellectuals incapable of carrying out either machine or electronic reproduction of their work. I also want to thank Professor

Acknowledgements Dezso Horvath for his consistent support of the study both as head of department and Dean of Faculty. Finally, I am grateful to York University for a sabbatical and a leave during the period from August 1987 to May 1988. H.T. Wilson Toronto

xviii

Chapter one

Marx’s critique of political economy as a problem-posing framework

Political economy and its critique Writing in the late 1880s, Friedrich Engels drew attention to a dis­ tinction between political economy and its critique which is no less relevant today than it was then: Political economy.... as the science of the conditions and forms under which the various human societies have produced and ex­ changed and on this basis have distributed their products political economy in this wider sense has still to be brought into being. Such economic science as we have up to the present is al­ most exclusively limited to the genesis and development of the capitalist mode of production.1 Engels would seem to be redefining ‘political economy5 in this ex­ cerpt, but perhaps it is only our present-day understanding of economics per se which makes us think so. On the one hand, his ref­ erence to the way ‘various human societies have produced and exchanged and ... distributed their products’ has a distinctly modern ring about it. On the other hand, however, Engels implies that politi­ cal economy is a generic discipline which has only been developed in one direction - ‘the genesis and development of the capitalist mode of production’. Engels would appear to be appropriating the term in a way which would be alien to the founders of political economy, in particular Smith and Ricardo. This to the extent that he makes it clear that pol­ itical economy is an enterprise whose concerns transcend the conditions in which the term itself was first coined, and thereafter applied to a defence and legitimation of capitalism or, more accur­ ately, capitalist industrialization.2 For Engels, political economy is, at the very least, necessarily concerned with the analysis and critique of the ‘conditions and forms’ by which all human societies - past, 1

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure present and (presumably) to come - produce, exchange and distrib­ ute goods and services. This emphasis on conditions and forms has always been central to Marxian analysis, to be sure. Yet Engels seems to be saying more about political economy than meets the eye here. He is suggesting that the direction that political economy as a ‘science’ took in the Nineteenth century was not necessarily faithful to its real topical and analytical concerns. Engel’s statement offers us an interesting parallel to the later work of Tawney and Robertson, where it is argued that the so-called ‘Prot­ estant Ethic’ only came to serve the interests of bourgeois negative individualism by a concerted, and ultimately successful, effort to sup­ press the collective and social concerns which were just as central to its origins as an ethic or doctrine.3 In the case of political economy, the same sequence of events and developments could be seen to hold, but only in the case of Smith. Smith’s Theory o f Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, seventeen years before The Wealth o f Nations, pro­ vides us with a social theory which does not lead solely in the direction of the defence and legitimation of capitalism and capitalist industrialization. Perhaps it was by reference to the contrasting tenor of these two works that Engels was inspired to refer to Smith as ‘the Luther of political economy’. In any event, it is important to address the distinct likelihood that political economy, like the Protestant Ethic before it, possessed collective and social concerns and refrains quite at variance with those for which it is still so well known.4 The possibility, or rather likelihood, that another side of political economy was suppressed or overwhelmed by a markedly different, albeit complementary, set of concerns should hardly be a surprise. What is even more interesting is the fact that in both of the above cases it was the individualistic rather than the collectivistic or com­ munitarian moment that triumphed. In the case of political economy, and later on economics, it is a negative bourgeois individualism which becomes the centrepiece of the emerging psychology of man as homo oeconomicus, and thereafter underwrites a view of individual and social concerns as mutually exclusive.5 France’s leading entrepre­ neurs responded to Colbert’s offers of state assistance with the infamous refrain ‘laissez nous faire’, eventually shortened to laissez faire. Everywhere individualism was viewed as something which gov­ ernment and its agents could only thwart and suppress. One example of such suppression during the formative period of political economy was to be discovered in mercantilist support for monopolies and ex­ clusive franchises, as well as direct and continuing state initiatives in commercial and financial matters. That mercantilism is nothing less than &pre-industrial form o f capi­ talism should never be forgotten by those who view capitalism as 2

Marx's critique o f political economy perverted to the extent that it permits, or depends on, public or state activity. For the longest time capitalists exchanged goods that were produced in pre-industrial ways, which is to say that capitalism preceded industrialization (initially under capitalist auspices) by cen­ turies. Individualism, and the liberalist ideology of individual liberty and freedom that undergirded it, emerged as a concept and category concerned to speak to the need for both economic and political free­ dom from older collective forms. At the same time, as Durkheim pointed out, it signified the genesis of a new collective form - Society and the fact that, when all was said and done, individualism itself was a societal, not just a collective, category.6 In his introductory remarks to the Grundrisse, itself an introduc­ tion to the later critique of political economy found in Capital, Marx treats political economy in a way not dissimilar to Engels. Beginning with a notion that had become well-established by economists, Marx considers their starting point in population, its make up and distribu­ tion, as the basis for the study of production, exchange, distribution, etc. The alleged ‘method of political economy5which he isolates ser­ ves to deceive the reader to the extent that its ‘basic5 analytical categories on their own - like population - provide an illusion of concreteness as a basis for the application of an approach which is anything but analytical. Thus Marx suggests that the emphasis on population, which is really an aggregate abstraction from the alleged­ ly concrete individual, is deceptive because it excludes class, save as an afterthought for purposes of sub-categorization. Since class pre­ supposes land, wage labour and capital, which in turn are based on exchange, division of labour and prices, population is a ‘chaotic con­ ception ... of the whole5.7 The fact that economics moves progressively toward simpler con­ cepts which constitute thinner abstractions leads it invariably toward ‘the simplest determinations5. This ‘scientifically correct method5 is problematic because it treats all concepts and categories both as ‘in­ dividuals5 and as ‘equal5 for analytic purposes. But this misconstrues the relation between the concrete and the abstract, according to Marx. This and many other sections of the Grundrisse take the form of a manifestly critical exercise in which Marx attacks the way that philosophy and other intellectual disciplines try to appropriate rather than address topically the reality that includes them. I men­ tioned his critique of the assumption that all concepts and categories are equal in order to point out the fallacy of the method implied by such conceptualization and categorization. Thus the problem lies in the belief that there are totally deflated concepts and categories which contain no concepts and categories within them, and therefore

3

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure a hierarchy of concepts and categories from the most deflated to the most conflated as well.8 Political economy of the sort that Marx addresses critically ap­ pears to possess a scientific method, then, because it allegedly moves from the simple to the complex, progressively moving toward more inclusive, abstract concepts and categories. The fallacy of this mode of thinking, however, is precisely that it is a mode of thinking which reconstructs reality so that the concrete is synonymous with the simple, ‘the movement of the categories (with) the real act of produc­ tion’. Marx cites this as an originary error in Hegel’s Phenomenology in the following statement. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself by itself, whereas the methwl of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But all o f this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being (emphasis mine).9 Political economy is a problematic discipline, analytically speak­ ing, precisely because it honours a method which does not seek simultaneously both to address and embody this difference between ‘the process by which the concrete itself comes into being’ and the way the concrete is conceptualized in thought. Marx’s argument for the analytical supremacy of dialectics is no­ where more forcefully, clearly and concisely stated than in this introductory section of the Grundrisse. What Marx had said earlier in his critique of Kant’s defence of the supremacy of practical reason that Kant fetishized the practical by treating it in too abstract a way addresses a far more intellectually responsible conception of ‘false concreteness’ than what so-called analytical philosophy has be­ queathed us in the Twentieth century.10 Simply conceptualizing the practical as that which is more concrete empties both practicality and concreteness of the sense that would permit them to function in a way which would allow thought to display the value of this difference be­ tween the process by which the concrete is produced and the process by which it is conceptualized. None of this is to argue that concepts ever really can (or should wish to) absorb their objects, just that the presumption of identity given in thinking and conceptualization it­ self presupposes not only the effort at but the success of such appropriations.11 The danger always lies in forgetting or ignoring the difference be­ tween these two processes in our haste to be intellectually, 4

Marx's critique o f political economy professionally and/or scientifically respectable. Marx and Engels both cite Smith as a watershed because of the way he sought to retain a holistic method of analysis in the development of political econ­ omy, while nevertheless being caught up in the commitment to relevance and practicality as the key to what was rapidly ceasing to be a ‘moral’ science at all. In its place were increasingly technical and strategic maxims and methods whose real role was to reconstruct, rather than topically address, reality. The result was the inversion of the concrete and abstract already cited, along with a significant change in the analytical task. No longer was the objective as faithful a rendering of reality, understood as a concrete historical pheno­ menon, as the very different process of conceptualization, reflexivity and thought would allow. Instead practice and the concrete were themselves upended by the imperialism of an appropriative project which sought to substitute conceptual for historical processes in the analysis of history and collective life.12 Science and method I have tried to suggest how significant the difference is between the task of political economy as understood by Marx and Engels, and the rather more truncated view held by generations of ‘political econo­ mists’ after Smith, particularly Ricardo and his immediate contemporaries. For it was with and in the work of this latter group that the transition to what is today called ‘economic science’ was first accomplished. The root of the difference lies in the contrasting no­ tions of the concrete and the abstract held by Marx, in particular the relation between the two and the consequences of this relation for his view of the proper task of political economy. While recognizing the impossibility of replicating in and through thought and speech the actual historical movement by which the concrete life process comes into being and is sustained, his understanding of the purpose of intel­ lectual, scholarly and theoretical work required him to make sense of this movement by producing in situ a critical/dialectical procedure based on an essentialist ontology. Thus the notion that the whole is concrete, with ‘its’ parts abstract because abstracted out o f that which must be presumed if the idea of partiality is to make any sense.13 Marx’s critique of political economy, Capital, and his introduction to this critique, the Grundrisse, serve to underscore the reason why political economy’s starting point in population and demographics provides what is at best a false sense of practical relevance based on a fundamentally mistaken notion of concreteness. Here it is the par­ ticular which is concrete, as if the sense of this (or any other) particular could be faithful to history and the life process when it 5

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure insists on treating the whole as an abstraction, an aggregate of parts possessing an independent and autonomous existence. It is the fund­ amental contradiction between this view of the whole as it is depicted and represented in and through the thought and speech of the political economist, and the way we know the whole practically, experientially and on reflection that powers the critique of this inver­ sion of the concrete and the abstract. The already falsely concrete concepts employed by political economy at the start only suffer fur­ ther truncation and dismemberment as its method moves toward ever more superficial concepts in its effort to be concrete, practical and relevant - an applied science of intervention.14 Confusion over the many and varied understandings of science played an important role in all this. Science can mean any form of disciplined, scholarly inquiry, regardless of its objects, its paradigms, its theories, its methods or its rules of assessing and evaluating evi­ dence (Wissenschaft). It has also come to mean the ‘natural’ sciences or sciences of external nature - physics, chemistry, biology, astron­ omy and the many sub-fields and concentrations arising out of merging research interests from two or more disciplines, as well as mathematics. The issue of emulation of the natural sciences, com­ bined with respect for their operative modes of inquiry - however distant this respect might be - cast the far older study of human beings in the shadow of ‘science’, so understood. Science’s apparent ‘success’ as a mode of inquiry generated imitators in the social and cultural disciplines, individuals who supported the view of the con­ crete and the abstract that laboratory, experimental and research work in the sciences of nature, as opposed to theorizing in these disci­ plines, seemed to require. Against all experience, practice and reflection, supporters of this purported ‘method of science’ proceeded to build up disciplines con­ cerned with the study of human beings in various institutional settings. Inadequate understanding of the reasons behind this appar­ ent contradiction between theory and research in the sciences of nature led them to misunderstand or ignore altogether the role of speculation in scientific thought and theorizing.1^ Instead, greater emphasis was put on what needed to be done to such thought and thinking in order to put it in the form required if testing and ex­ perimentation were to occur. Almost totally ignored was the continued autonomy of speculation, combined with its central role in these disciplines, even in the face of sustained research of an ex­ perimental or related kind. Even Marx missed this speculative aspect of science in his Early Texts when he referred to science per se as a form of industry, that is, thought in a manifestly active mode. What he said was correct only for the rest o f the work of the sciences of 6

Marx's critique o f political economy nature - precisely because of the apparent efficacy of experimental method - but not for that part which far more readily embraces the idea of the whole as concrete-speculation.16 Political economy was a leading enterprise of inquiry which early became concerned about the possibility of emulating the successes that appeared to flow from the method of inquiry being prosecuted by the sciences of nature. Here too, there is little if any interest in or concern for the reflexive aspect, and almost no recognition of the fact that ‘progress’ in any form of inquiry, such as it is, is a function of theoretical, rather than empirical, developments. The claim that Marx has (at least) two understandings of science, one in the Early Texts and one in the later work that formed his third critique - political economy, only makes sense in the light of contemporary under­ standings of science.17 Thus it is always necessary to keep in mind the fact that the term ‘science’, and the notion of what was and what was not ‘scientific’, was formerly subject to a number of understandings, and that these understandings were held by scholars as well as by lay persons. Indeed, the continuing contrast between Wissenschaft, and one particular form of it - Naturwissenschaft, continues to echo the sense of Engel’s claim that Marx had discovered a ‘scientific’ rather than a ‘utopian’ approach to the analysis and understanding of human history and collective life.18 Political economy thus endorses the experimental method of in­ quiry carried out by the sciences of nature, while ignoring what organizes and makes sense of this method, this ‘research’. Even here, however, it must improvise what it does in order to appear scientific, where by this is understood as being methodical and concrete. Politi­ cal economy constitutes itself as a science by reference to what is clearly the least scientific and the most technological aspect of science’s work, its activity, its industry - laboratory experimentation. Theoretical work in the form of hypotheses which have already been structurally decomposed as a prerequisite to testing is the only form of thought which is permitted to pass muster in the emerging equa­ tion. Theoretical thought, that organon of science which is the only real basis for measuring or assessing its progress, is not replicated in the haste to develop a science of political economy, an economic science. The result of this decapitation is a discipline (and subsequent disciplines) without a head which might challenge the inversion of the abstract and the concrete required by experimental method and ‘research’, in contrast to thoughtP The idea of political economy as a ‘moral science’ in its new guise as ‘economics’ already evidences a thoroughgoing inversion of the abstract and the concrete in its thinking, which in turn indicates the consequences of speculative and theoretical decapitation of the sort 7

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure cited.20 Instead of acknowledging, and thereafter displaying the necessity of, the difference between the way the concrete whole came historically into being and sustained and developed itself in and through institutions, and the way it is constructed and built up in thought, dichotomies and distinctions properly employed to address this reality topically are superimposed upon it, with the result that they gradually come to constitute descriptions of this reality. This pro­ cess of what I have elsewhere called ‘empiricization’ supplants experience and violates its practical and reflexive understanding at every turn in its haste to be relevant and offer ‘results’. The major consequence of this undertaking, a thoroughgoing perversion of what occurs in the sciences of nature, is to undermine both practice and theory in collective living, in favour of a disembodied yet disci­ plined observation 21 To say of the discipline of economics that it is a moral science is to point to the impact of the dichotomy between ends and means on its collective (and later institutional) self-understanding.22 Thus the new political economists wished to shed any reference to ethics, poli­ tics and the political in the name of their discipline, their method, their ‘science’, because its morality must be seen to occur outside of and be extraneous to its research and the application of its method. This meant that economics could only acknowledge the economizing function that it had committed itself to - the rank ordering of ends given scarce means - if it refused to acknowledge the partiality of the values that would guide it in this endeavour. In addition, it was re­ quired to endorse the notion - become-norm of scarcity as something which was an objective fact emerging out of the stinginess of ‘nature’, rather than admit that it is human being, not nature, that is stingy. Seen in this light, scarcity begins to look more like an invention of the political economists than something which capitalism alone can dis­ lodge from the iron grip of nature in its raw and untamed form.23 The shift from science to technology already implicit in political economy’s endorsement of false concreteness (and abstractness) is carried further as a consequence of the impact of this distinction be­ tween ends and means in the developing discipline. In the event, scarcity becomes the norm which fuels the effort at rank-ordering, on the assumption that nature rather than man is stingy, and that there­ fore a particular set of values can be allowed to define and determine the way given preferences are ranked.24 Having invented the prob­ lem, it is easy to invent the solution; one follows ‘naturally’ from the other. If scarcity is the problem, then productivity, accompanied by the profits that justifiably accrue to individuals doing this noble work, must be the solution. At precisely the point in time that the earlier discovery and subsequent application of steam power was undermin­ 8

Marx's critique of political economy ing the non-capitalistic craft and guild methods of fabrication that capitalists had depended on for centuries, political economy in its new guise as the moral science of economics came forward in support of industrialization under capitalist auspices as the solution to the problem of scarcity.25 The upshot of what now was clearly a legitimizing role for the new economic science was that the rank-ordering or economizing func­ tion could gradually be dropped, or shunted into philosophy along with other concerns of an ethical or moralistic kind that posed ob­ stacles to more methodical concerns bearing more directly on the new definition of the situation. The irony of this was that by engaging in this act of separation and (further) dismemberment, economics became more indisputably a ‘moral’ undertaking than it had ever been before. This in the sense that the very act of jettisoning econo­ mizing and rank-ordering, while redoubling its efforts as a technology committed to the methodical production of useful knowledge, left it no alternative but to acquiesce in the preference orders that had been, or were in the process of being, established by capital and the bourgeoisie. When political economy gave up its economizing func­ tion, this function did not disappear, but was effectively turned over to the very economic interests who now insisted on their legitimate right to political representation and recognition, alongside their right to accumulate and invest. ‘Nature’ and labour At this point, we would appear to have sacrificed the term ‘political economy’ to those who were able, after Smith, successfully to capture its definition and understanding. Like the Protestant Ethic of John Calvin and his followers, we are acknowledging the defeat of a collectivistic or communitarian moment by a negatively individualistic one. It is necessary to stress this negative element in individualism in order to underscore the fact that individuation perse is not necessarily in­ compatible with more collectivist or communitarian concerns. I shall, therefore, continue to use the term political economy in the narrow sense employed by Engels in the excerpt which introduced this chapter, without prejudice to the possibility that a ‘new* political economy in the generic sense might arise in the future which did not sacrifice either moment to the other, but acknowledged and under­ stood their interdependence and interpenetration. The concern in the last section for different understandings of science cannot be fully appreciated in the absence of a parallel under­ standing of the sense of ‘nature’ held by science in its experimental or research, as opposed to its speculative, activity. Nature is also a cen9

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure tral concept making sense of the many and varied attempts to imitate, or at the very least employ as a distant model, the apparently success­ ful efforts of the natural sciences by economists and social and behavioural scientists over the past two centuries. Once again, it is to the distinction between natural science as speculative theories and natural science as technological endeavours aimed at the testing and verification of hypotheses in laboratory and other experimental and research settings that we must turn if we are to grasp the differing ways in which nature has been comprehended by this particular set of disciplines. The more obvious association, certainly for non-scien­ tists, has been between science and the narrower conception of nature as that which is both external to us and/or which appertains only to our bodies and not to our minds.26 Indeed, two of the most important dichotomies to suffer reduction and detopicalization to the status of descriptions of reality rather than ways of approaching it are the man-nature and mind-body dis­ tinctions found in, or presupposed by, virtually all of modern rationalist and humanist thought. Here nature is treated one-dimensionally as an empirical entity or phenomenon that manifests itself in all living organisms, as well as in those aspects of existence generally referred to under the heading of ‘inanimate nature’. Only the most evolutionary of thinkers would deny the existence in human beings of certain aspects and properties lying outside of ‘nature’, however broadly defined and understood. Without sacrificing the sense that such a view might make, then and now, Marx in his Early Texts ad­ dressed ‘nature’ reflexively as a term which both referred to something that it was said to correspond to, while at the same time constituting a concept central to the industry of the ‘natural’ sciences. Save for his failure to attend adequately to the rather different aus­ pices of and inspiration for its speculative moment, where the concept of nature was possessed of what he would have acknow­ ledged to be a more ‘concrete’ understanding, his sense of the tie between science and nature is indisputable. The following statement appears in a section titled ‘Private Property and Communism’, and addresses the relation between ‘na­ ture’, natural science or the science of nature and man’s concern with objective knowledge: Man is the direct object of natural science; for directly sensuous nature for man is sense experience (the expressions are identical) in the shape of other men presented to him in a sensuous way. For it is only through his fellow man that his sense-experience becomes human for him. But nature is the direct object of the science of man. Man’s first object - man himself - is nature, sense experi10

Marx's critique o f political economy ence; and particular human sensuous faculties are only objectively realized in natural objects and can only attain to self-knowledge in the science of nature in general. The elements of thought itself, the element of the vital manifestation of thought, language, is sensuous in character. The social reality of nature and human natural science or the natural science of man are identical expressions.27 Here Marx is addressing the dialectical character of conceptualiz­ ation, but at the same time is emphasizing the reflexive reference to membership implicit in use of the term nature rather than its refer­ ence to phenomena or objects external to human being. Thus nature is the concept without which natural science makes no sense what­ soever. More important than this, however, is the fact that by drawing attention to the collective self-reference to membership given in re­ course to ‘nature’, men are showing that their real interest in learning about externalities is to learn about themselves?* Marx’s concern that all sciences be rigorous by reference to their own concerns and objects of inquiry, rather than through slavish emulation of some other discipline functioning as a model (however distant) for them, only serves to underscore the senselessness of any method which fails to reflect in its very activity the difference between the way the concrete is built up and sustained historically, and the way it is depicted in and through the act of thinking and conceptualiza­ tion.29 Nature, as such, becomes problematic in political economy precisely because the discipline’s slavish emulation of the sciences of ‘external nature’ requires it to play down or ignore those features of human nature which are at substantial variance with the conception of nature as externality allegedly discovered in natural science. When this is not happening, nature itself - or more precisely human nature - is fetishized by being treated not as a concept claiming an external reference which also has a collective self-reference, but rather as a timeless property, a fixed entity or thing, which is transhistorical and transcultural.30 As such it is always available to explain and/or justify events or behaviour in line with the view that a proper explanation is one which has been reduced to the timeless and fixed. Marx, as Schmidt and others have pointed out, seems to offer de­ finitions, understandings and assumptions about nature which underwrite the view of it as a thing without collective self-reference. The difference between nature as it is discussed in the Early Texts, while Marx was engaged in the critique of philosophy and religion, and later on in the Grundrisse, and particularly Capital, where the concern is with the critique of political economy, is often striking. The capitalist’s systematic and continuous exploitation and expropri­ ation of external nature costs him no more than it cost the cave man, 11

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure the ancient, the miller or the craftsman.31 In all cases, we can usefully distinguish between nature and labour, but only with the capitalist does this exploitation become a continuous process, as exchange values supplant use values. Marx, in his later writings, shifts some­ what his focus from the collective self-reference of nature and our membership in it to the concept of labour. Thus, he states that ‘all those things which labour merely separates from immediate connec­ tion with their environment, are subjects of labour spontaneously provided by Nature.’32 This is not to say that the subject of labour must always be in a direct relation to external nature or natural phenomena. Often it will have been ‘filtered through previous labour’, thus bearing an indirect rather than a direct relation to ‘Nature’. ‘An instrument of labour is a thing, or complex of things which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conduc­ tor of his activity.’ Appendages and man’s mind also constitute instruments of labour, no less than rocks, trees, water, etc. ‘Thus Na­ ture becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself.... As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his original tool house.’33 In the labour process, therefore, man’s activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, affects an alteration, designed from the commencement, in the product; the latter is a use-value, Nature’s material adapted by a change of form to the wants of man. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject: the former is materialized, the latter transformed. That which in the labourer appeared as movement, now appears in the product as a fixed quality without motion.34 Creation and destruction of real value would thus seem to occur simultaneously and as a ‘natural’ upshot of any and all activities of fabrication and production. It is evident, then, even in Capital, that the concept of nature as Marx understood it in the Early Texts has not been lost, but has rather been reformulated in order to allow his critique of political economy to use the same terms and concepts that are employed by those indi­ viduals whose ideas and categories he is subjecting to critical analysis. It also addresses man as an active species being. Thus he speaks of both ‘Nature’ and ‘labour’ when addressing human transformations - either direct or indirect - of nature in and through human activity. But this only refocuses the original concern about membership; it does not annihilate it. Labour and Nature as such merge into one entity in the very act of being human, being a human animal, an 12

Marx's critique o f political economy animal that is different from other animals by dint of being human, but is still and forever an animal nevertheless. This dynamic oneness is well captured in the following statement, which is the basis of Marx’s analysis of profit taking and exchange value. It is thus strikingly clear, that means of production never transfer more value to the product than they themselves lose during the labour process by the destruction of their own use-value. If such an instrument has no value to lose, if, in other words, it is not the product of human labour, it transfers no value to the product. It helps to create use-value without contributing to the formation of exchange value.35 It is the supplanting of use by exchange value which effectively transmutes and betrays the labour theory of value allegedly so central to political economy since its modern origins in the work of John Locke.36 In effect, the labour theory of value, which follows quite di­ rectly from the concrete conception of nature as that which includes both collective self- and external reference, sees human nature as an essential property of this whole, not something outside it. This fol­ lows from recognition of the fact that man is a human animal and that Nature is his home, however much an active, transformative mode accompanies and defines his participation in it. From this it follows that value, if it is to have any meaning, must be compatible with na­ ture and labour so defined. The labour theory of value is pressed into service to this end by Marx, and the hypocrisy of the political econo­ mists demonstrated in the process. Labour and ‘value’ The heart of Marx’s critique of the political economists is, of course, the labour theory of value and the concept of surplus value. It is of more than passing interest to note that the labour theory of value is a creation o f the political economists themselves. Marx only insisted on holding them to the requirements of their own concept. To this end it was necessary to show how the economic institutions resulting from the supplanting of use by exchange value, the prerequisites to the growth of a capitalist economy, created surplus value that was not being taken account of by the capitalist. Marx’s earlier observation about nature and labour upon it, either directly or through instru­ ments, was relevant here, inasmuch as ‘means of production never transfer more value to the product than they themselves lose during the labour process by the destruction of their own use value.’ At the same time, however, the fact that ‘the process disappears in the 13

Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure product’ cannot be used to justify any concept of labour which fails to see that exchange value, such as it is, is always, and must always be, in contradiction to use value. The apparent disappearance of use values, and their alleged displacement by exchange values, does not mean that the labour expended or the use values themselves disap­ pear; on the contrary.37 Capitalism, in effect, undermines the relation between nature, la­ bour and value by subordinating use value to exchange value. Production, in turn, supplants fabrication, thereby becoming ‘con­ spicuous’.38 The resulting emphasis on the process of production rather than on the product, except as an ‘end’ or ‘final’ product, has the effect of redefining the labour theory of value so that now it com­ prehends machinery, technology and all other forms of ‘capital’ (as opposed to ‘labour’) intensity as an independent force belonging to its owner. Failure to remember the backward dimension of our mem­ bership in nature, in favour of viewing nature solely as external matter, leads invariably to a view of it as potentiality, possibility, rather than actuality. Suppression of membership serves to exter­ nalize in a one-dimensional fashion not only nature, but human labour as well. This latter, in effect, becomes no less a form of poten­ tiality available to the capitalist than the rest of nature, conceived undialectically in the same a priori way that was coming to charac­ terize man’s relation to industrial production.39 Ricardo’s subsistence theory constitutes the consummate example of this sundering of the holistic and historic relation between nature, labour and value. In contrast to Marx, who focused on labour power and socially necessary labour, Ricardo’s conception of the labour the­ ory of value led him to concentrate on labour perse and labour time. In effect, labour in the Ricardian equation became not only onedimensionalized as physical effort, but physical effort whose value, hostaged to time, could only be expressed in terms of the wage form as a derivative ofprice. As well, labour is also seen to be a function of the employer’s provision of work processes and payment sufficient to allow the labourer’s family to reproduce itself and nothing more.40 The machinery itself is not back-referenced to nature as a basis for understanding value as something that must be premised in the final analysis on human activity. Marx’s observation that Ricardo and McCulloch had failed to realize that machinery is nothing more than ‘congealed labour power’ only served to underscore the consequen­ ces of holding such an unreflexive concept of nature, one which sacrificed the backward dimension of membership totally to the for­ ward reference of transformation and domination of an entity allegedly ‘outside’ us.41 The idea that value is to be discovered in the possession of 14

Marx's critique o f political economy machinery and other productive processes, combined with the power to hire ‘labour power’ to tend these processes, indicates just how far political economy would go to support a view of labour almost totally at variance with John Locke, the founder of the modern (British) doctrine of the relation between nature, labour and value. Political economy would even argue in favour of subsistence wages for the labourers - men, women and children of both genders, and would justify doing so by pointing to machinery and other productive pro­ cesses as sources of value independent of those who originally produced or subsequently tended them , and dependent only on their owners - and the market - for their value.42 In a sense this was correct, but only if it was exchange rather than use values that were being discussed. The very idea of exchange, how­ ever, suggests that it is an intermediary rather than an end in itself, thus that the ‘value’ being captured in such a concept was itself illu­ sory and incomplete, as illusory as was the wage form that had come to constitute the symbol of ‘labour power’ distended from nature and denied its true value. Once again, the assumption of discrete, timebound transactions imposes on the holistic and continuous character of reality a fundamental discontinuity whose effect, if not its intent, is to favour the development of a new method. This method sought to emulate natural science in its technological, non-speculative as­ pect, and was seen to be central to any understanding of the meaning of social reality which was premised on the attempt to recapitulate the way it allegedly came into being and sustained itself. What gives an apparent and obvious ring of truth to the empiricization of labour as observable activity under particular conditions of ownership and control of facilities and processes is the market for goods and services itself. Thus a ‘product’ of the capitalist process of industrial (factory or mill) production is a commodity for the capital­ ist precisely because it is produced not for use but for exchange. The purpose of production is the accumulation o f‘value’ that comes from exchanging the product-become-commodity on the market, where the values discovered are alleged to be unchallengeable and irreduc­ ible. But this is not to dispute in any way the truth of the whole that both practice and reflection reveal, as is evident from the following statement from Capital. The capitalist buys labour power in order to use it; and labour power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour power con­ sumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour power in action, a labourer. In order that his labour may reappear in a commodity, he must, before all things, expend it on something 15

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure useful, on something capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the capitalist sets the labourer to produce, is a particular use value, a specified article. The fact that the produc­ tion of use values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf, does not alter the general character of production.43 This concluding observation does not mean, however, that the production of a product having a use value is to be fetishized, for its commodity character provides the basis for the contrast between the labour process in general and ‘the particular form it assumes under given social conditions’44 The political economist not only fetishizes the commodity without noticing the priority of the labour process in general and its tie to nature. He also begins, as in demography, with the false concreteness of the labourer as such, which leads to the fetishization of the wage form as a method of remuneration appropriate to the active expression of this labour power 45 ‘Given social condi­ tions’ are themselves fetishized as timeless, natural (or superior) ways of doing things, and the doctrine of progress is always available to sustain and undergird such a claim. The tie of labour power in general to ‘Nature’ as the ultimate source of all value is lost sight of in such empiricizations as the basis of both false concreteness and fetishization. In the event, labour power in the person of labourers themselves becomes a commodity no less than the products that ema­ nate from their activity.46 The consequences of political economy’s jettisoning of the econ­ omizing function which was to be the discipline’s centrepiece and raison d'etre perhaps can now be more readily appreciated. With it goes a refusal to reflect on what distinguishes the labour process in general from the form it takes under given social conditions. Subsist­ ence under the wage form shows how truncated even the understanding of production and consumption is. Their dialectical relation seen in terms of Nature disappears as demography comes forward in place of a recognition of the fact that production is (also) the consumption of human labour power as a stock of nature. Simi­ larly, consumption is production - a point only too obvious to the political economists when they advocate a subsistence wage based on the need for a docile population readily available for labour power, but unable to act independently of the social form that defines them apart from the continued (re)production of their kind. What the ana­ lysis that political economy retreats from would tell its practitioners is that the capitalist process of production, remuneration and valu­ ation, far from being logical and sensible, is riddled with contradictions.47 16

Marx's critique o f political economy To a certain extent, political economy has been able to escape the force of much of Marx’s argument by a fundamental misreading of Locke’s theory of appropriation. For it is not solely by reference to perspiration, privation and the exhaustion (consumption) of the value (or potential value) of labour power that human beings may be understood to lay title to what they have laboured on. Indeed, one might seek to transcend the very notion of property implicit in the idea that any power of individual appropriation follows ‘naturally’ from the activities by which people ‘mix and mingle’ their bodily la­ bours and its properties with (the rest of) nature.48 This may even apply to appropriation as an outcome of human collective endeav­ ours, inasmuch as capitalism’s emphasis on the process of (continuous) production, combined with the equation of need with infinite desire, creates practical, real-world environmental and eco­ logical difficulties of the sort anticipated in Marx’s reflection on what it means to know that production is the consumption not only of human labour power, but of the rest of nature to which such labour power belongs 49 It is the unending cycle of production and consumption and pro­ duction, where Nature and labour as such serve to define a more concrete form of value proceeding from, and comprehensible only by reference to, the whole that generates the most basic contradiction on which all the others described by Marx ultimately depend for their sense and significance. Empiricization provides what is at best an il­ lusion of concreteness derived from a perversion of the proper function of thinking and conceptualization. Manifested most clearly in ‘the capitalist’, ‘the labourer’, ‘profits’, ‘the wage form’, ‘productive forces’ and ‘general population’ is the political economist as disci­ plined observer allegedly outside that which is being studied, while yet being a member.50 Suppression (or ignorance) of membership fuels false concreteness and fetishization by viewing nature solely in terms of external reference - that which is ‘other’. This, in turn, makes it impossible for the political economist to see that he is ab­ stracting out of the real concrete the particulars with which he will seek systematically to deny particularity in his haste to reconstruct thinking and conceptualization so that it not only suborns, but sup­ plants, all efforts to focus on the nature of social reality. This reality is a structured yet dynamic, motional and contradictory whole pos­ sessing essential properties and necessary directions, if not processes, of development. Dialectical thinking always threatens any illusion we may have of the autonomy of thought, either on its own, or as a source capable of constructing and formulating concepts of social and historical reality allegedly ‘external’ to this reality focused exclusively or mainly on the 17

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure way the societal whole or form comes into being and sustains itself.51 The activity of disciplined observation, increasingly dependent upon a serious misunderstanding of the role of theorizing - particularly speculative thought - in the activities of the sciences of (external) nature, was centrally responsible for this consequential inversion of the abstract and the concrete. Political economy under the guise first of the labour theory of value, then as a ‘moral science’, finally as a technological discipline with scientistic pretensions known as econ­ omics, becomes the first observer-based ‘social science’ to seek to emulate what it understood to be science. In the practice of this ‘scientism’, it has helped alter fundamentally our understanding of our own collective and individual experience of life in the social form we call advanced industrial society, while providing sustained legit­ imation to capitalist industrialization and industrial capitalism long before the latter felt the need directly to harness the natural sciences and the technology issuing from their activity to its own purposes.52 Surplus value and labour A major argument that emerges from Marx’s analysis of the labour theory of value, initially in the Grundrisse and later in Capital, is that the capitalist (therefore capital perse) uses up value at least as fast as he creates it. The idea that capital creates value in turn presumes the supremacy of exchange over use value and confuses value with surplus value. Capital congeals labour power in and through money (circula­ tion) and the machine and other technological artefacts (production), but such objectification is at best the preservation of value, rather than its creation. It is only its participation in a general productive form that makes it possible for capital to appear to create value. Indeed, one could argue that it is ‘Nature’ as a whole, including ‘external’ nature, that provides through its own production and re­ production processes the material from which value is created and recreated through labour. The production of surplus value therefore proceeds in a way that is in fundamental contradiction with the pro­ duction of value per se. The fact that the worker is recompensed for his labour time with money, in itself, but particularly as the central medium of exchange value, guarantees that the surplus value taken from him will be appropriated, even (or especially) at ‘fair exchange’. Capital itself is thus accumulated labour, congealed or otherwise, wrenched (or ‘freely’ taken) from the sinews of ‘Nature’. The socalled production of wealth under capitalism is characterized by nothing so much as the contradiction between the mode of produc­ tion and the mode of appropriation.53 The labourer is paid in and through the medium of exchange value 18

Marx's critique o f political economy money, which gives him only fictive equality when facing the individ­ ual capitalist in the ‘market’. The concepts of market and money themselves already presuppose the appropriation of labour power and its transformation into an object of use value to the capitalist, which, however, is recompensed in and through the medium of ex­ change itself. In effect, ‘the worker relates to his labour as exchange value, the capitalist as use value’.54 It is only as a result of this process of reformulating labour power in terms of exchange value that labour and the labour process as a whole can be absorbed into capital. The labourer’s ‘share’ of whatever is created in and through the processes of capitalist production is determined only quantitatively, in terms of money. The ‘exchange’ that he ‘consents’ to is variously more or less fettered, but it is a euphemism at best to call it ‘free (or fair) ex­ change’, except and inasmuch as this is understood to endorse a system of valuation which uses up labour, therefore real value, in the determination to create surplus value under the established system which ‘values’ only by reference to quantitative measures of money equivalence.55 In his analysis of surplus value, Marx insists on looking first at ‘the labour process in general’, what is common to all situations where individuals seek to transform nature while being irresistibly a part of nature. ‘He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, set­ ting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants.’56 In doing so, the labourer’s own ‘nature’ changes in the process of producing use values through productive labour. This, in turn, requires him to employ existent use values in the form of already produced products. ‘The same use-value is both the product of a previous process, and a means of production in a later process. Products are therefore not only results, but also essen­ tial conditions of labour.’57 This means that labour, as such, is a means of consumption of products used for production of sub­ sequent products, as well as a means of production. Labour and the labour process in all its guises thus seek the production of use-values, either through a direct transformation of nature, or through the in­ termediation of use values in the form of already produced products having their ultimate origin in nature.58 Capitalist production differs significantly from the ‘ideal-typical’ labour process, or the production of use values in general. Not only are we concerned with a mode of production characterized by a manysided system of social relations in which it is embedded. We must also face the fact that the means of production themselves are so ‘distant’ from the initial transformations of nature needed to begin the cre­ ation of the use-values that would eventually lead to them - not 19

Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure excluding mental (as well as physical) 'labourpower’ - that a system of value compatible with the view that such processes constitute private property must, it would seem, be defended.59 It is here that one sees yet again the consequences of imposing discontinuity on the way re­ ality emerges and develops in the very effort to conceptualize and describe it from the vantage point of the (allegedly) disembodied dis­ ciplined observer. And it is here also that it becomes necessary for the capitalist to produce a use-value that has a commodity value in ex­ change which is ‘greater than the sum of the values of the commodities [including “labour”] used in its production’ which he has purchased ‘with his good money in the open market’. It is the fact that such commodities are both exchange values and use values which requires that ‘the process of producing them must be a labour- pro­ cess, and at the same time, a process of creating value’.60 But this process of production, directed to producing exchange value in a pro­ duct which is treated as a commodity, is paid for as if its purpose was solely the production of use value, albeit with and through money as the medium of capitalist exchange.61 Marx demonstrates how one assesses the value of a given com­ modity by applying the labour theory of value to the production of ten pounds of yarn. To do this, he calculates the quantity of labour ‘realized’ in it as a finished product. The raw material, cotton, is al­ ready the result of labour power which has been purchased at more than its use value by the capitalist in the market. Then there is the depreciation of the machinery (spindle) which must be reduced to its value based on the amount of labour required to produce it and the percentage lost through ‘wear and tear’. Alongside this is the labour in the yarn itself. Marx’s point is that this labour is accumulated la­ bour, embodied value, rather than being some series of phases each of which is successively ‘paid off. The whole of the labour in the yarn is past labour; and it is a matter of no importance that the operations necessary for the production of its constituent elements were carried on at times which, referred to the present, are more remote than the final operation of spin­ ning. If a definite quantity of labour, say thirty days, is requisite to build a house, the total amount of labour incorporated in it is not altered by the fact that the work of the last day is done twenty-nine days later than that of the first. Therefore, the labour contained in the raw material and the instruments of labour can be treated just as if it were labour expended in an earlier stage of the spinning process, before the labour of actual spinning commenced.62 But none of this is to say that value can be completely reduced to 20

Marx's critique of political economy calculated values. This is evident from any careful analysis of the re­ lation between exchange and use value. ‘Value is independent of the particular use-value by which it is borne, but it must be embodied in a use-value of some kind.’ In addition, however, ‘the time occupied in the labour of production must not exceed the time really necessary under the given social conditions of the case’.63 Marx makes the point that socially necessary labour is the measure, rather than an experi­ ence of production which, for whatever reason (e.g. more precious rather than basic materials in the production of spindles), is more costly than it should be. When he considers ‘what portion of the value of the yarn is added to the cotton by the labour of the spinner’, he notes that here different considerations obtain. Looked at from the point of view of an objective measure of value, the specific character of the labour expended (cotton planting, spindle making, spinning) ‘would make no difference’ whatsoever. Neither does the matter of ‘quality’ enter into the calculation of value. In short, while labour is directly associated with the production of both use-values and ex­ change values, its true value is independent of any exchange values by which it is borne and in which it is presently embedded.6* It is the way that the capitalist calculates (and pays for) the labour that is borne by or embodied in the products by which he seeks the production of surplus value that uses up and at the same time per­ verts the value that is created as a result of its participation in the general form. Marx stresses the need to focus initially and continu­ ously on labour perse, not a particular function being performed, and to do so from the standpoint of socially necessary labour time. The value embedded in products can now be seen to include the raw ma­ terial used to create them. The labour theory of value, strictly adhered to, requires us to view the product (yarn) as ‘nothing more than a measure of the labour absorbed by the cotton’. Thus: ‘Definite quantities of product, these quantities being determined by experi­ ence, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallized labour-time.’65 It is here that we can begin to grasp the consequences for political economy of its shift of loyalties away from the labour theory of value that Marx insists on holding it to, toward the embrace (and fetishization) of the capitalist mode of production and appropriation. Labour is thus objective and even quantifiable using the measure of time (labour-time), which only underscores its independence from the performance of specified functions, in whatever they consist. Re­ gardless o f task, function or person, it is the labour that is absorbed by and embedded in a given quantity of product that is the thing being measured, not the quantity or quality o f product66 Assessment of the ‘total value’ of a given product using labour as an objective basis thus 21

Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure in a certain sense reduces to labour-time, to be sure. The point, how­ ever, is that the individual labourer is not recompensed in money with an equivalent value, which means that he cannot as a conse­ quence derive the equivalent value from using this money in order to purchase the things that he and his family need. In the market, his money must always come up short in terms of what it can purchase for him, because he has been recompensed with something whose value on exchange is not equal to the value that he has created for the capitalist. The use-value that the labourer’s labour has for the capi­ talist is greater than the value on exchange of his wages.67 The difference constitutes surplus value, reflected in the conver­ sion of money into capital, and in a recompense that falls short of the value of the labour actually expended. Political economy, of course, long ago gave up trying to argue that this is not indeed the case, in favour of increasingly sophisticated justifications and ‘explanations’. Thus there is ‘risk’, differences in the quality of performance from labourer to labourer, market values for different functions and tasks even apart from performance, depreciation of ‘capital-intensive’ ma­ chinery and technology, ‘overheads’, etc. More important by far than any argument in defence of the beneficient societal effects to all of the selfish appropriation of value in the form of surplus value by the capitalist is the fact that labour, therefore real (use) value, is actually used up in a non-creative way by this system of production and appro­ priation. This means that in a certain sense we are more dependent upon the recreative powers of external nature than our ancestors ever were. Government and the public sector are often pointed to at this juncture in order to indicate how ‘human’ the system has become. The difficulty here is that it constitutes a viable basis for employment precisely because capitalism in the form of the production of surplus values continues to undergird it. Never mind that the mode of appro­ priation, unchanged in its initial and fundamental aspects, has been softened by taxation, social welfare, ‘social responsibility5 and other ‘transfer’ arrangements. The fact is that the public sector either spends or disposes of surplus value in a compensatory way whose ef­ fect (and perhaps its purpose) is to preserve the present system, or it creates, or oversees the creation of, surplus value in a manner thor­ oughly in harmony with (if not a version of) capitalism in its contemporary form. As a consequence, it uses up labour and destroys value by its de­ pendence on and/or emulation of business, industry and finance no less than the so-called ‘private sector’ does when it (also) creates sur­ plus value. The difficulty which Marx drew attention to cannot be dealt with solely, or even mainly, through the aegis of improved 22

Marx's critique o f political economy ‘distribution’ (Mill) or compensatory transfers within the present sy­ stem. Still, it remains the most important existent basis for practical improvements given the present system. Of equal importance is Marx’s point that we not confuse the way that events occur over time in a sequence of proximate, yet distinct, relations to one another with an understanding of the structured, yet dynamic, motional and con­ tradictory whole within which these events occur and acquire their meaning as epiphenomena of more essential properties and processes of development.

23

Chapter two

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today

Critique and/as practice In what follows, I address Marx’s critique of political economy as a problem-posing framework which provides us with an alternate ap­ proach to both inquiry and collective self-understanding in late capitalist societies. A central feature of this body of work is Marx’s critique of the method of political economy, alongside that of specu­ lative philosophy, positivism and reformism, and his production of a unique and distinctive approach which I call the critical/dialectical procedure. My reasons for calling this approach a procedure rather than a method include Marx’s own resistance to the idea of method as a ‘one best way5, an idea central to the traditional theory which he found so problematic in political economy and other disciplines.1 Marx’s procedure, as I understand it, is not to be counted either a methodical basis for intervention in events, nor a ‘total systems’ ac­ count of the way the world, in both its natural and its social dimensions, ‘works’.2 It is precisely because this is the case that I be­ lieve it constitutes a most sensible, practical basis for collective self-understanding in late capitalist societies, while it underscores the urgent need for critique (rather than simply ‘criticism’) as an ongoing internal property of all sciences and scholarly pursuits. I have already suggested that it is precisely the imitative and recapitulative nature of traditional theory, and its preoccupation with achieving an identity with reality through disciplined empirical study, which makes it diffi­ cult for critical thought to be taken seriously in these disciplines. Apart from anything else, such thought and thinking threatens the presumption of ‘progress’ which is virtually given in the very activity of such disciplines, their ‘industry’. In place of shopworn attempts to defend the idea and practice of a ‘unity of method’, we need to ac­ knowledge the need to resuscitate different and distinctive

24

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today approaches and procedures in pursuit of the same general purpose, goal or objective - truth.3 Here it is necessary to invert our normal and established ways of viewing the relation between method, direction and objective. In the process of doing this, the idea of method per se comes to be com­ prehended as an ‘impossible process’. In its place is put the notion of a procedure, a notion whose sense can be seen to lie in its practice as a form of industry, an activity in its own right, which correlates far better with our objective - truth - than a so-called method whose goal is acknowledged to be something very different - success.4 Thus the difference and distinctiveness of the approach is not accidentally re­ lated to its objective, but is necessitated by it. And, contrary to Popper and Hayek and those who follow them in endorsing the prac­ tice of the same general method to a different objective where the study of human collective activity is concerned, the critical/dialectical procedure refuses to be intimidated by charges of holism (collectiv­ ism), historicism (scientism) and ‘utopianism’ as proxies for scholarly irresponsibility.5 In effect, Marx’s approach to analysis, based in critique, yields up a new way of understanding the meaning of process and change, while it produces a novel procedure, along with new categories and con­ cepts (or at the very least a reformulation of already established ones) to house this understanding. Marx’s procedure, given the parallel ex­ istence of knowledge claims which it addresses critically, is best understood as an anti-method or counter-structure. It is a counter­ structure in the sense that it provides critical insight into the way that phenomena and events occur and constitute themselves in/as a dy­ namic, changing whole by not seeking to emulate in and through thought the manner by which they would appear to have come into being in reality. At the same time, such a structure constitutes a basis for an alternate or counter collective, not so much because of the purported way that such process and change will lead ‘objectively’ to this new social form, but rather by reference to the standard of critical and analytical thinking which produces such understanding and func­ tions as an icon for its indispensability in this future form of collective life, as well as in the transition to it.° This theoretical desire to overcome certain emergent dichotomies which only later became full-fledged shorthands for thought in the domain of social analysis, as well as the formal distinction between method and substance itself, is a major epistemological reason be­ hind Marx’s commitment to a materialist dialectics. But this is not to say that dialectics does not constitute a general form through which process and change can be understood to occur and take shape. It is in part Marx’s refusal to endorse the limitations posed to thought and 25

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure thinking by the distinction between method and substance, solidified later on in what were then largely emergent disciplines of study, which would lead him to argue that it is ultimately history itself which provides his analytic claim to the supremacy of a dialectics based on a radically different procedure from that of Hegel with its authority.7 My claim that the critical/dialectical procedure offers an indis­ pensable basis for understanding reality in both its wholeness and its dynamism is thus not to be counted either as an argument in support of the possibility of an identity between thought and reality, or as an endorsement of attempts to imitate in and through thought the pro­ cesses by which reality is thought to come into being and be sustained. Indeed, it is political economy, in clear contrast to Marx's critique o f it, which makes such assumptions, and allows them to become central features of its activity, now as before. The point that needs to be made here is that the need for and value of a research programme and procedure is not to be discovered in claims to the possibility (or likelihood) of certainty that it either posits explicitly, or permits to function as an implicit standard for it. In effect, critical analysis can only perform its indispensable function in the present order when its recognition of its nature as a collective and historical act within re­ ality as a dynamic whole undergoing institutionalization and change does not lead it to emulate what is believed to be the way that reality itself comes into being and is sustained, on the presumption that such an approach can better realize the possibility or likelihood of cer­ tainty in and through an identity of thought and reality.8 This suggests that the charges often laid against Marxian materia­ list dialectics - as it is embodied in the critical/dialectical procedure by supporters of a ‘unity of method’ who attack what they call ‘holism’ and ‘historicism’ are more properly laid at the feet of positivists, libe­ rals and ‘speculative’ thinkers. This is something that Hayek himself has in part acknowledged, albeit by including these latter in an attack on ‘scientism’ (historicism) and ‘collectivism’ (holism) even more sweeping than that of Popper.9 It must be clear that these two dis­ tinct, but interrelated, assumptions are a manifestation of a view of thought and thinking which seeks to model its activity on the basis of what is believed to constitute the essence of practical reality. This is particularly evident in the way that knowledge and knowing are idealized as forms of mastery and domination over the phenomena and events in question, as if these latter constituted an external ‘na­ ture’ which must be grasped and appropriated in line with the modern project that realized its theoretical apogee in the work of Hegel. This project continues unabated in its abstracted and recap­ itulative aspect not only in economics and contemporary political

26

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today economy, but in the social, behavioural and administrative/manage­ rial disciplines in advanced industrial societies as well.10 At the same time that Marx generates an alternative or counter structure for thinking which attempts to preserve comprehension while nevertheless taking its collective and historical nature, and its distinct nature as an activity, seriously, he proceeds from what is clearly a critical starting point inasmuch as he takes the claims of an existing body of knowledge as his analytic point of departure. Even in Capital, where the writer believes that Marx had largely given up any hope that critique might inform, and be an ongoing part of, the intel­ lectual process by and within which political economy as a discipline might develop and improve itself, he still retains a view of the analytic task as one which necessarily focuses on a critique of established knowledge claims, and the common-sense and philosophical assump­ tions that undergird them. Marx’s focus on both the discipline of political economy and actual working conditions in the England (and Britain) of his day reflected his commitment to making sense of the reality under investigation, not only through disciplined empirical study, but also through a procedure of thought and thinking that sought to preserve the holistic and dynamic character of Society by not downgrading such theorizing because it was distinct from reality and could never expect to become one with it if it wanted to compre­ hend reality as a dynamic, motional, yet contradictory, whole. The question of thought’s authority therefore compels us to come to terms with what it must be relative to reality, once we have acknow­ ledged that it is not and can never be coterminous with reality. Its authority must lie in what it can achieve when it sees its task as one which includes constituting the object of disciplined empirical study in the interests of practice, but without any capacity independent of itself to intervene in events. The error that many critics of Marx’s procedure make is to believe that this is a matter of choice or discre­ tion, for either theorists or their patrons, when it is nothing less than a real limit on thought itself, one independent of what anyone may think or do as a consequence of being exposed to it, and one which is given in thought’s very participation in the reality that includes it, and with which it cannot hope (contra Hegel) to achieve identity (cer­ tainty). In effect, thought’s authority is precisely a function of its limits relative to the reality that includes it, rather than being ac­ cidentally related to such limits. The clearest manifestation of its authority would therefore be its refusal to acquiesce in the idea and practice of a ‘unity of method’, and its corollary determination to con­ stitute itself by reliance on approaches to understanding which are radically opposed to strictly empirical studies in which the thought that guides them is denied in favour of the elaboration of serial hypo­ 27

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure theses which divulge only the most superficial and least reflective fea­ tures of such thought.11 There is thus a sense in which one might argue that it is precisely in and through critique within an established discipline that one maximizes the likelihood of preserving thought’s authority. Acknow­ ledgement of the disciplinary starting point for critique constitutes a parallel acknowledgement of thought’s distinctiveness vis-a-vis the reality that includes it because it includes it, as well as its inability to absorb, master, appropriate or achieve an identity with reality. At the same time, thought’s critical function is the more legitimate and potentially consequential because it goes on within established aus­ pices, and addresses reality not only through the activity of disciplined empirical inquiry, but also through a critique of the as­ sumptions, concepts, categories and methods that guide the discipline’s very efforts at understanding reality. As it turns out, it is usually in and through critique of this sort that the claims of such activity to the status of a procedure radically different from reality as a process of institutionalization and change can be most readily ac­ knowledged and rendered sensible. While critique is only the starting point of the critical/dialectical procedure, one is nevertheless war­ ranted in arguing that it is virtually indispensable as practice to the Marxian analysis. A procedure not a method Though critique begins in a discipline, or key assumptions, concepts, categories and methods found in one or more disciplines, this is, how­ ever, insufficient on its own to produce or make possible what I have called the critical/dialectical procedure. This latter can only be real­ ized in Marxian analysis where critique is joined with a materialist dialectics that begins in reality, while nevertheless admitting its dif­ ference from reality, rather than in thought understood as the source of reality. For Marx, reality is not only independent of thought but comprehends and includes thought, in contrast to Hegel, for whom reality itself (‘nature’) is ‘a mere thought determination’, ‘the concept in its non-conceptuality’.12 This is what Marx means in the Grundrisse when he attacks speculative philosophy, and in particular Hegel, for confusing the succession of the categories with reality as a process of institutionalization and change. It is also directly relevant to his critique of the method of political economy inasmuch as this method was characterized by a mode of theoretical imperialism derived from abstraction and recapitulation and premised on a false beginning.13 This is not to deny that critique, in contrast to criticism, lacks some significant aspect of what makes Marx’s procedure distinctive and 28

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today uniquely valuable. It rather addresses what feature of the procedure dynamizes the critical concerns of critique by giving them a practical sense. Here nothing is more important to understanding the role of materialist dialectics in this dynamizing endeavour than an appreci­ ation of the way that being after the ‘thing itself affects the reflective analysis of concepts, categories, methods, approaches, etc. Concepts in particular are back-referenced through an analysis of their ‘history* to the real, practical life situations which gave rise to them and which render them sensible as part of human practice in/as reality. The hol­ istic concerns of critique require such an effort precisely because thought and its formative and forming voice - the concept - do not stand outside of and apart from reality and can only be made sense of if they are seen in terms of their own real, practical origins in reality. There is one sense in which it is therefore appropriate to speak of concepts as simultaneously embodying history and having a history of their own - a ‘burden* in/of history.14 Materialist dialectics accepts Hegel’s critique of abstraction and recapitulation as self-sufficient goals of inquiry, and his reconcep­ tualization of the abstract and concrete, the particular and the general then, but does so ‘from the other side’, as it were. Concepts and ideas have a history, to be sure, but only because they are a mo­ ment of/in history, not because they are in any sense independent of history. It is this very dependence and interdependence between con­ cepts and reality which not only allows for but demands of thought that it address reality as a part of reality which is simultaneously selfconscious of this dependence and interdependence and determined to exercise its function as practice as if it were not aware of this at all. The critical/dialectical procedure is rendered momentous when it ad­ dresses what exists ‘outside’ it conscious of its partiality for that whole - in space and time - that it knows itself to be part of. The essence of this procedure is thus what might be called a partial reflec­ tion, one which proceeds at one and the same time backward and forward into Society - the real subject and the first presupposition.15 In line with Marx’s critique of positivist conceptions of natural science in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, these back­ ward and forward properties of the critical/dialectical procedure can be understood to correspond to the distinctions he makes, following from Feuerbach, between the moment of sensuous need and the mo­ ment of sense experience.16 Backward reference points to the need that brought forth the concept as a function of collective human thought, the thought of a human animal with a thinking head in real practical situations of life and living. The essence of this reference is membership in a species that is a species being present in and to the historical realities that define it in terms of its unique ability to 29

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure understand and make sense of its concepts. The need is sensuous be­ cause it reminds us on reflection of how important it is to ‘remember’ ourselves through self-conscious acts that bespeak a concern for ful­ ler understanding like the critical/dialectical procedure. Backward reference completes the logic of thought and thinking understood as a collective, historical activity essential for human animals whose for­ ward, empirical reference to sense experience (abstraction) may otherwise delude them into believing that thought is either totally distinct from reality or is capable of becoming one with it.17 Materialist dialectics thus dynamizes critique’s concern as a form of practice within existing disciplines and bodies of knowledge, with all that this implies for knowledge claims and/in their relation to re­ ality, while topicalizing or rendering momentous static, empiricized distinctions and dichotomies like parts and wholes, the abstract and concrete, etc.18 Whenever such dynamization occurs, the reflective moment that it expresses completes the logic of critique’s negativity by seeing through such distinctions, thereby, in effect, standing them (sic) on their feet. The whole is thus seen to be prior, albeit a dynamic motional whole rather than a static whole. This pre-eminent method­ ological principle of the critical/dialectical procedure recasts the particular and the individual as abstract, because ‘abstracted’ from a whole which must be prior if the idea of parts and particularity is to make any sense, at the same time that it makes its case for this priority by showing through its efforts that the whole cannot be appropriated in and through thought and that thought can never hope to be ident­ ical with it. This in contrast to the false concreteness and Active ‘mastery and domination’ of a self-satisfied abstraction, followed by recapitulation and aggregation found in political economy and in the so-called empirical social sciences today.19 The critical/dialectical procedure endeavours to ‘maximize the utilities’ of thought by not short-circuiting its process so that sensu­ ous need is ignored in favour of an unmomentous and unreflective preoccupation with the appropriation and accumulation of the pro­ ducts of sense-experience. Here again it is precisely the recognition of thought’s distinctiveness vis-a-vis the reality that includes it, yet that it can claim to know ‘independent’ of reality (albeit in only one moment), that compels thought to seek to comprehend reality in a way that is not concerned with imitating its process. Indeed, it can really only come to discover process in reality, historically and epochally bounded and defined as it is, if it employs a procedure radically at variance with the process that it wishes to understand. Recognition of the priority of a dynamic, motional whole as a pre-eminent (and operational) methodological principle of the critical/dialectical pro­ cedure is essential if thought is to take its own tack and see the whole 30

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today in process, because phenomena and events rarely if ever present themselves to us in everyday life in their holistic and dynamic as­ pect.20 This is highly relevant to the concerns that are addressed in the next chapter, where I discuss Marx’s use of the critical/dialectical pro­ cedure, stated initially in the Grundrisse and developed to its highest point in Capital and Theories o f Surplus Value, in order to attack and reconstitute the entire thought process of political economy and al­ lied disciplines. Here foundational dichotomies like the man-nature, mind-body, subject-object, value-fact, particular-general, individualsocial and concrete-abstract distinctions are shown to be the essence of a mode of inquiry truncated with regard to the role of reflection in understanding. It is by reference to the concepts of nature, labour and value that Marx upends the serial-linear and instrumental focus of a discipline committed to an individualized transactional view of his­ tory and collective life - reality as a series of logically independent ‘facts’ - based on a one-sided emphasis on the forward reference of sense experience alone - empirical abstraction followed by recapitu­ lation, aggregation and the reconstitution of these facts as a complex reality of many determinations. Marx’s point was that this latter reality, far from constituting the conclusion of disciplined, scientific inquiry, is only the expression of one side, one aspect of the whole for which a backward reference is also required 21 Whereas method might in contemporary parlance be viewed as describing a technique made up of discrete steps and stages that anyone can emulate to a largely foreordained result, given the ‘cor­ rect’ point of origin or beginning, my preference for the term procedure may now be seen as perhaps indicative of a promise that has not itself been fulfilled, however short of a method (or different from it in/as practice) it may be thought to be. There are no steps or stages which promise ‘results’; indeed, this is precisely what the method of political economy and, nowadays, the methods of the em­ pirical social sciences come close to promising, if they do not actually do so. This has led to a situation in which problems in these disci­ plines (along with the reduction of theory to testable, verifiable/falsifiable hypotheses) are defined by reference to available methods of research and investigation, rather than one in which methods are either adapted to problems or invented anew, based on an independent assessment and definition of or response to the prob­ lem.22 This is not to say that generalized tasks cannot be isolated, and perhaps even be put in some order, as long as this order is acknow­ ledged to depend upon thought’s direction in response to the object o f inquiry.

31

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure The first task might be to reflect on some discipline or body of knowledge and focus on its claims, presuppositions, etc. as embodied in its concepts, categories, methods, etc. What would then be re­ quired would be a dynamic and collective critique both addressed to and expressive of materialist dialectics, with its concern for what a sensible, complete procedure of thought must be. Here concepts in particular would be back-referenced, as well as forward-referenced, in the ways suggested, while latent assumptions about thinking and its relation to reality would be exposed. Here the objective would be a partial reflection, one that knows that all language presupposes an identity with reality, however much thought may resist such an ac­ knowledgement, even to the point of displaying this resistance in its form as well as its content. Thought and reality can never become one, whether through a perfect correspondence, or because reality is understood to constitute a ‘mere thought determination’ and nothing more. This in turn requires that what follows on empirical inquiries take a different tack based in the whole and its dynamic. In the event, the backward reference expressing sensuous need (membership) would complement the forward reference of sense experience (indi­ vidualized perception and observation) to the end of a complete procedure which is, for this reason, a partial, rather than a total re­ flection. The point here is that the term procedure, as opposed to some­ thing less well defined like approach, may perhaps claim too much precisely because critique and materialist dialectics must be displayed rather than discussed as something ‘external’ which someone can come to know (appropriate; master). Even the attempt to describe what it is must display and exemplify the claim it makes rather than seek to assert or affirm this claim independently. In a way that is un­ mistakable, this only underscores the claims that critique and materialist dialectics make in and through this display in the work of Marx in particular. A fundamental assumption of the present seriallinear, correspondential and identitarian view of knowledge and its relation to reality has still to be uncovered and examined, however. It concerns the relationship of logic to knowledge claims in, of and about the world, and requires elaboration before we can turn to a defence of different and distinct methods, procedures or approaches toward a common goal, in contrast to the self-serving (and conse­ quential) claims of those who support a ‘unity of method’. On the logical and actual status of Tacts’ The belief in the existence of a logic of reasoning and argumentation independent of knowledge and truth claims is a corner-stone, if not 32

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today the corner-stone, of western thinking on relations between thought and reality. Even the empirical convention, with its commitment to: (a) a correspondence theory of truth; (b) the possibility of an identity between thought and reality - coupled with belief in a thoroughgoing formal and empirical distinction between them; and (c) the view of the whole as potentially masterable and appropriatable - with the corollary understanding of the parts as concrete, empirically observ­ able or knowable-by-other-means ‘facts’ - presupposes belief in the existence of an independent logic, whether syllogistic, formal or sym­ bolic in type.23 This belief has serious consequences for all forms of thought and thinking directed to the attempt to understand the na­ ture of thought and thinking, particularly as they address relations between reality and knowledge claims directed to it. This in turn forces us to attend to the concept of fact, and its status relative to this relation in all sciences and scholarly pursuits, for it is not self-evident that facts as such ‘exist’ 24 Even if they do, what does this mean? If the critical/dialectical procedure takes its point of departure in the pre-eminence and analytical priority of the dynamic, motional, contradictory whole, the foundation of its activity understood as a problem-posing research programme resides in its view of the facts as ‘real’ in one of its moments, but logically as well as empirically interdependent with rather than independent of one another. The mo­ ment of sense experience, refined to take account of a disciplined (as opposed to a common-sense) observation that always threatens to become unhinged and disembodied in the present collective form25 which Marx calls abstraction toward the production of the simplest (most atomic and individuated) determinations - needs to be com­ plemented by reflection both forward and backward if such conventions and cultural artifacts are not to be confused with objec­ tive truth. Indeed, abstraction without such reflection and analysis is, as Adorno and Knight would later say, not objective enough rather than too objective, because it attempts to exist as a pure protocol independent of its object26 Any convention which hides its true object from revelation and knowledge must be suspect, now no less than in Marx’s day. The issue, in this event, becomes the status of facts under a convention where we acknowledge that they really are interdependent, but for purposes of formal analysis can be treated as logically independent. The prob­ lem is less the existence of this bifurcation on its own than the way it is employed as a device to allow social-scientific research to proceed once it has formally acknowledged that its process is protocolbased.27 This short-circuits the dynamic and motional activity of reflection by apparently making it unnecessary, since the implication is that what it might show is already ‘really’ known, though not dis­ 33

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure played as such. One result, one of the most well-known in the annals of social theory, is the way that Max Weber’s acknowledgement of value-relevance was employed to justify not only subsequent ‘valuefree’ research, but the avoidance of critique, reflection and recognition of the analytic object itself.28 While it makes sense in this context of critique and disputation to turn to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and other work to make the point that the facts are logically interdependent, this downplays or ignores Wittgenstein’s conviction, expressed in this book and elsewhere, that the problems of life are the most important problems and ones that cannot be addressed and dealt with by logic at all.29 What the Tracta­ tus in particular does is to authenticate as a property of everyday life reality the existence of these two domains, the factual and the logical. Thus, Wittgenstein acknowledges that facts are states of affairs rather than objects, but allows the procedural formality of logic to justify a view of these states of affairs as individuated and atomic, yet reduc­ ible to their simplest constituent properties. Logic is preserved as the ‘scaffolding’ that shows its own insufficiency vis-a-vis real life, while yet continuing to function as the standard to which all ‘truth claims’ must aspire inasmuch as one endeavours to make such claims.30 It is the way that the existence of a separate and distinct logic is endorsed, even in the face of its violation of the real status of facts in life, that has always caused difficulties even (we might rather say especially) in the so-called empirical social sciences. This idea that Wittgenstein’s analysis promotes, while more sophisticated in the best sense of the term than the positivists (Carnap, Reichenbach) or em­ piricists (Russell) who read his work and interpreted it (wrongly) to their own ends,31 is that facts are states of affairs rather than objects which are really interdependent in life, but can nevertheless be con­ stituted as formally independent for all logical purposes. Since logic in its various modes, so understood, continues to stand as the real organon of thought, reasoning and argumentation and disputation in the present collective form, the resulting bifurcation has the effect of sterilizing both theoretical and empirical inquiry in the social scien­ ces and related disciplines, thereby giving a sense to the term ‘social’ in their name which is compelling, though totally unintended.32 Materialist dialectics, as it is embodied in the critical/dialectical procedure, cannot countenance this bifurcation between the empiri­ cal and the logical. In the hands of Wittgenstein, thought itself must acquiesce in limits that are false and contrived, based as they are, per­ haps ironically, on frustration with its inability ‘really’ to appropriate its object, thereby achieving an identity with it. To be sure, it is pre­ cisely this realization that leads such thinking to hide its object, by refusing to engage in the reflection and analysis that alone might 34

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today reveal and display it. Such a refusal is the essence of an incomplete procedure, no matter how methodical it may be. Since identity is known to be impossible, though treated as possible for all formallogical purposes, the task must be to equate such identity with know­ ledge of the whole, understood in terms of the mastery and appropriation of some external entity. This in turn leads to carving the world up into ‘parts-as-facts-as-events’ and mastering and appro­ priating it piecemeal. Since such a ‘carving up’ is understood in both a spatial and a temporal sense, this reconstitution of the whole as ‘the world’ has serious implications for practice as well as knowledge claims addressed to it." By turning away from any and all protocols which support or sanc­ tion this bifurcation between the empirical and the formal-logical, materialist dialectics is acknowledging that logic cannot stand apart from the reality that includes it and gives it its collective, cultural and historical sense and significance.34 It is an offence against reality, understood as a concrete totality which is knowable but not appropriatable, to allow a form of thought to promote a distinction which both common sense and reflection rebel against. This is all the more true where those who defend this form of thought themselves admit that the facts ‘reall/ are interdependent, however much they may be treated as independent for all formal, logical purposes. That this convention, and the bifurcation that results from it, has real conse­ quences in the domain of practice, as well as in knowledge claims relevant to practice, must be clear. This protocol is what makes ab­ straction to the simplest determinations not only possible, sanctionable and legitimate, but justifies the view that such abstrac­ tion actually appropriates the ‘concrete particulars’ of the world piecemeal, thereby paving the way for the view that recapitulation really does aggregate and reconstitute the world as a known and knowable whole. I want to flesh out one prominent example of this mode of think­ ing in order to show how serious are the practical consequences of accepting and acting on what may appear to be a mere formal proto­ col or convention at first glance. I have in mind the way that the fiction of the independence of facts from one another, preserved in logic though denied in reality, can be employed to undergird the idea that such states of affairs are not only empirically separate and dis­ tinct from one another, but constitute wholes in their own right. These entities are treated as concretely real and independent of one another, and are understood in both a formal and an empirical sense (legality) to be bounded (and defined) by discrete transactions which serve to legitimize their appropriation as property. Carving the world up into parts-as-facts-as-events, on the unreflective assumption that 35

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure such a protocol can be translated into the claim that these states of affairs are concrete, individuated particulars having a real status as such, sanctions possession, and with it the view that one can own not only the products of another’s labour, but the labour itself. This world-view and its guiding assumptions about relations between thought and reality is therefore essentially, rather than accidentally or contingently, tied to the idea and practice of exchange and surplus value in capitalist society.35 It is by acting out this view of the world as knowable and control­ lable in both its natural and its social dimensions that the present system is sustained and even extended. An essential feature of this view is the assumption that such knowledge can lead to control, but only if the allegedly concrete ‘parts-as-facts-as-events’ are mastered, appropriated and accumulated serially and in a piecemeal fashion. This in turn presupposes that these concrete, individuated particu­ lars constitute states of affairs which are independent of one another in a real rather than simply a logical sense, and that their definition as such takes on practical, cultural and historical significance in the present collective form through the aegis of discrete transactions hav­ ing legal sanction and legal status. These transactions effectively legitimize, as well as justify and make possible, the control through appropriation that has been realized, while they serve to define the contours and boundaries of each such entity by sealing it off from others. Annihilation of the reality of interdependence between the facts serves to annihilate the reality of interdependence among per­ sons, and between persons and the rest of ‘nature’, thereby sundering the tie between nature, labour and value that is of the essence of the concrete totality in materialist dialectics.36 It is therefore never a question of whether facts exist, but rather what it means for us to say (and know) that facts exist, while at the same time knowing that they cannot but be interdependent with one another 37 Preoccupation with the possibility of identity and cer­ tainty,38 coupled with frustration at their impossibility, has led to the development of a world-view that sanctions the real existence of a formal bifurcation between the empirical and the formal-logical that offends both common sense and thought. That this bifurcation has real consequences for practice and life in present-day societies points to the way that short-circuiting reflection allows such activity to hide its real object from us. The resulting inversions of the abstract and the concrete, the particular and the general, and the concept and its object express a stultification of thought in response to the realiz­ ation that it can never appropriate the reality that includes it and gives it its sense even as it seeks to make sense of reality. Recognition of the impossibility of identity generates a response not dissimilar to 36

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today fanaticism, it turns out. These inversions - and the resulting attempts at mastery and appropriation through abstraction, recapitulation, ag­ gregation and reconstitution which they sanction - in effect constitute nothing less than a redoubling of efforts by those who, in forgetting their purpose, have lost the sense that these actions once made. Common goals, but different procedures Much has been made of the position, held most prominently by Karl Popper, that all scholarly pursuits ought to honour a ‘unity of method’ based on a piecemeal or incremental approach. Popper had early on come to the conclusion that even though thought and theory might be directed to different concerns based on the discipline, sub­ ject or area at issue, the method employed would, at least in a general sense, be the same. The most significant distinction that Popper pro­ moted in his discussion of the nature of discipline-based concerns was that between science and technology.39 Science, by which Popper meant the natural sciences, alone was authorized to pursue truth em­ ploying this general method, in contrast to the social sciences and related disciplines, which were obliged to proceed technologically. Unlike the natural sciences, these disciplines lacked the self-policing practices of what Popper called ‘critical rationalism’ or criticism, whereby theory itself was continuously disciplined in its role vis-a-vis research. This was mainly, though not entirely, a function of thought’s subordination in these disciplines to an approach to in­ quiry characterized by the pre-eminence of a problem-solving approach.40 Because the social sciences lacked critical rationalism, which demands of scientific theories that they meet a standard based on falsification rather than verification, it was particularly essential that theory in these disciplines take the form of a response to the state­ ment of ‘concrete’ problems 41 Popper’s resistance to the idea of what he called holistic and historicist theorizing was directed in particular to Hegel and Marx during the modern period of western develop­ ment. In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper attacked what he claimed was Marx’s obsession with studying wholes rather than parts and seeking for ‘laws’ rather than proceeding on a piecemeal basis in response to a specific problem. It was Marx’s insistence on the need for a different approach or procedure - one specifically tailored to the needs of thought and thinking in the social, economic and political sphere - that was problematic for Popper in the above text and in The Poverty o f Historicism42 Holism and historidsm were illegitimate and dangerous approaches to thought for Popper because they 37

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure circumvented the requirement that theory begin in a specific problem and occurred in the absence of critical rationalism. Indeed, it is because holistic and historicist approaches to inquiry and knowledge insist upon the right to pursue truth using concepts and procedures alien to practices in the social sciences and related disciplines that they resist the view that a piecemeal method ought to determine their research activity as a response to specific problems.43 Popper’s view of critical rationalism makes too much of this process as it actually occurs in the natural sciences, while using the illusion of its ‘objective’gatekeeping function as a vehide for restricting the pursuit of truth to these disciplines alone 44 In place of this illegitimate and dangerous objective, the social sciences are counselled to adopt a focus on success rather than truth, what Popper calls a technological approach in contrast to that of science. The resulting ‘social technol­ ogy’, based as it is on ‘piecemeal social engineering’, is an incremental process modelled (allegedly) on responsible political and social prac­ tice in rule of law, representative democracies. This, of course, is precisely what is problematic about such an approach for Marxian and critical theorists, for reasons that by now should be apparent.45 Popper (and Hayek), in effect, treat what they call holistic and his­ toricist thought and theories as a form of practice-in-waiting. This, I think, is a result of seeing such thought and thinking as a ‘cause’ cap­ able of producing a disastrous ‘effect’, almost as if both cause and effect were self-contained in the structure of thinking as an entity able to generate outcomes that are virtually determined or ordained in their consequences. Such an instrumental view of the relation be­ tween theory and practice is, at best, naive in the extreme, and certainly does not comport with real relations between them in ad­ vanced industrial societies.46 For better or worse, theory-practice relations are much more complicated and involved than this overly simplistic model would have us believe. Indeed, one might point to simple technology in order to locate the model which is operative in this case, because it is only in such straightforward technological re­ lations, or so it seems, that cause and effect as it takes shape in relations between theory and practice is so predictable, or at least explainable after the event in which it is discovered 47 The critical/dialectical procedure is the way that materialist dia­ lectics attempts to address reality given the powers and limitations of thought vis-a-vis reality that have been cited. It endeavours to resist the temptation to emulate what is thought to constitute reality in the form of everyday life practice, in contrast to Popper, Hayek, political economy and the present-day social sciences and related disciplines. Partly, this is a response to the need for thought to address reality as vigorously as possible, while at the same time being cognizant of its 38

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today participation in reality, therefore its essential and unavoidable dif­ ference from reality. Partly, however, it is also a critique of a view of social and political practice which realizes that it is not only as naive as the attitude to relations between theory and practice already noted, but incorrect as well. Far from being self-evidently the case, incrementalism only makes sense as a description of social and pol­ itical practice in the advanced societies within time-frames bounded by ‘events’ and ‘occurrences’ whose status as concrete, individual par­ ticulars is the beginning rather than the end of inquiry for the critical/dialectical procedure.48 Examples from British, American and Commonwealth historical and institutional development, the countries and cultures most often cited by Popper as paragon societies in this regard, can be considered piecemeal and incremental in a processual or developmental sense only if the great political (wars, revolutions and coups) and economic (depressions, recessions, etc.) events of past and present times are acknowledged to bound such periods and be an exception to them. One might go even further with this line of thinking, and argue that the actual installation of regimes and social structures supportive of piecemeal and incremental approaches in social and historical time and space occurred in a manner which necessarily violated these ap­ proaches 49 The incremental and piecemeal, or technological, conception of historical and institutional development fails to take account of the dependence of societies on unpredictable occurrences, along with other contingent and unanticipatable situations, and therefore cannot function as an accurate description of these societies. At best one might claim the status of a prescriptive ideal for such a conception, but even in this case it is naive, simplistic and unrealistic because of its lack of reflexivity and consequent incom­ pleteness as an intellectual procedure.50 A corollary problem with such thinking is the way it implies that planning is at best an aberrant event in advanced industrial societies rather than a continuous and ongoing feature of these societies car­ ried out by private and corporate as well as political and bureaucratic elites and structures. One consequence of such thinking is the pre­ servation as doctrine or ideology of a ‘free’ or ‘private enterprise’ conception of the economy, along with the rigid (and false) distinc­ tion between public and private sectors that goes with it.51 Preservation of such a notion, even in the face of a reality that dis­ putes it at every turn, aids and abets a view of ‘social technology’ and incrementalism as a self-sufficient basis for both thought and prac­ tice. Increasing systemic interdependence as an observable, perceivable social fact is combated by reference to a mode of thought and inquiry which self-consciously eschews the sort of reflection that 39

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure is needed for recognition of this fact to occur no matter what the configuration of the collective might be. It is as if Popper, Hayek and their supporters really believe that holism and historicism cause both planning and systemic interdependence and social breakdown in the societies they revere, when just the opposite is the case. ‘Social tech­ nology’ has been instrumental in bringing the present, highly organized system, and the planning and chaos that go with it, into being! The reason for this must be clear. Once installed, a government and political system cannot but view such ‘tinkering’ as the best way to sustain itself and respond to the need for change with manageable ‘piecemeal’ change of an incremental type.52 The idea that there is a conflict between holistic change and incrementalism of this sort is mistaken when the situation is viewed as an ongoing historical pro­ cess. Beneficiaries of the holistic changes in social and/or political structures and relations of the kind being discussed here have what can only be called a vested interest in controlling the pace of change by defining permissible objects and processes.53 The ‘objective’ char­ acter of the holistic events which brought such orders into being is the more indisputable precisely because Locke’s dictum about the inherent conservatism of people resisting massive structural changes has carried the day historically against Jefferson’s recommendation at the dawn of Nineteenth-century America that the ‘tree of liberty’ be nourished by the blood of revolutionaries every twenty years.54 Popper has argued in The Open Society and its Enemies that Hera­ clitus is the founder of holism and historicism, the original source to which one must return when analysing the development and alleged consequences of this illegitimate and dangerous mode of thinking and theorizing. In that text, Popper claimed that it was Heraclitus’s very recognition of the pre-eminent role of change in defining and making sense of the world which led him to concoct an approach to thinking about it which would endeavour to control it.55 I have sug­ gested elsewhere, as well as in the foregoing, that this not only imputes too much causal power to thought, but misconstrues the na­ ture of the influence that thought has and the form that this influence has no choice but to take. Popper is saying, in effect, that thought as a central property of human being in the world must discipline itself, and, in so doing, accede to self-imposed limitations on its powers, as if it could dictate reality and, as it were, become one with it. By so insisting, Popper consigns not only reflection backward (sensuous need, membership, ‘re-membering’) but reflection forward (the mode of presentation of thought) to the truncated and inauthentic function of generating, testing and verifying (not falsifying) hypo­ theses, thereby acquiescing in the autonomy of a disciplined sense 40

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today experience (abstraction) which has become disembodied and de­ tached from one of our most human properties.56 It is difficult, if not impossible, to assess the consequences for human being as a collective and historical phenomenon of such self­ enforced forgetfulness and incompleteness, under the guise of mod­ ern discipline. It is enough to note that the disciplined production of simple determinations under whatever protocols may be cited - ab­ straction - loses its claim to a process of thought seeking after objective truth whenever such production becomes a self-justifying basis for subsequent emulation through recapitulation, aggregation and ‘ex-planation’, rather than a prolegomena to, as well as a continu­ ation of, thought.57 This point addresses the lack of objectivity in any thought process which is truncated with regard to the activities which it would need to perform in order to acknowledge, and come to know, its object. It is for this reason that a detached and disembodied disci­ plined observation has always been viewed by materialist dialectics as an attempt to reconstitute practice in the image of such a discipline following on the annihilation of reflection, rather than an effort to assist practice by not pretending to emulate it and by not believing that it can or should become one with it.58 Reality and reason in science and life Not surprisingly, it is the understanding or conception of reality held by Popper and Hayek, and their supporters in political economy and the social, behavioural and administrative ‘sciences’, that helps ex­ plain their confusion on matters pertaining to relations between thought and reality and between goals and methods. These individ­ uals, and the disciplines that follow their lead and endorse such controls on thought and thinking, have a concept of reality which is already abstracted from life, a view of reality as natural or physical in its essence. Note that I do not contrast material to social reality here, but rather argue that their conception of reality abstracts from what reality is, and ignores the fact that the natural and the social are dimensions or moments that are inherently incomplete and partial because they constitute abstractions and nothing more. Reflection is always required on the heels of such abstraction if we are to remem­ ber, and thereafter present (address) reality in its wholeness, its essence.59 To say of these individuals and disciplines that they endorse an abstracted partial view of reality as a basis for defining and determin­ ing what reality is and how its process must be understood is to point to a paragon role in their thinking for the natural sciences, and those ‘social’ sciences which hew most closely to them in their approach, 41

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure method and world-view.60 For materialist dialectics, in contrast, there are not two realities, but one, which, however, cannot be appro­ priated by thought because it is reality and, apart from other things, includes thought within it as both reflection and less reflective activity. A natural, physical conception of reality posits this particular notionbecome-model as a basis for assessing what is then treated as that which remains in the form of the residual-social’ reality. Reality is thus formulated and defined by reference to a concept of existence, and process in existence, which is absent o f human being. Human being, when it is addressed, is treated as the observer of ‘natural’ pro­ cesses whose own ways of thinking must be disciplined with regard to a paragon method. The result is the requirement of a general unity of method for all sciences and disciplines, albeit with different goals as a consequence o f this unity, and a view of such unity when addressed to success rather than truth as essentially rather than accidentally emulative following on abstraction.61 The physical, natural sciences, thus understood to be the custo­ dians of reality so defined and comprehended, become for Popper not a simple, emulatable set of disciplines and institutions with re­ spect to method, but distant models whose proxy role has the same effect precisely because reality has been falsely concretized into one of its ‘empirical’ moments, with its ‘other’ defined in terms of the way it can (and must) safely conduct itself if it wants to understand itself in its residual role and status. In effect, the only safe concept of reality for these individuals and disciplines turns out to be one which has been abstracted from reality by sciences whose concern is not manif­ estly with human being in the world at all, but rather with ‘everything else’.62 Is it any wonder in the light of this that critical theory - that form of materialist dialectics most committed to a critical/dialectical procedure in the face of the specious self-limitation and slavish emulation of ‘traditional theory’ found in political economy and the social, behavioural and administrative ‘sciences’ - addresses itself so concertedly to the alleged self-sufficiency of the observer role as a basis for understanding and making sense of reality?63 Acknowledging that human beings are members when they ana­ lyse social phenomena in ways that do not hold for the analysis of ‘nature’ can therefore be carried only so far. It holds only so long as we are engaging in the protocol of presuming that reality is empiri­ cally constituted by/as two abstracted moments of reality. Adorno’s point that being a member brings an aspect of reflection unavoidably into the reckoning for social theory in ways that simply do not hold for theory in the natural, physical sciences must be understood as a claim or assertion within such a protocol.64 A more stringent analysis like that provided by the dialectical aspect of the critical/dialectical 42

Conceptualization and critique in Mane and today procedure would remind us that the man-nature distinction pres­ umed here, as well as dichotomies derived from it, can only assist analysis as long as they are understood to be moments, topics and as­ pects. Thus, a return to the issue of the relation of thought to reality compels us to recognize that the idea of reality as comprised of real, rather than topical, natural and social dimensions is itself a nod to reality as natural and physical, with the ‘social’ residual and necessar­ ily imitative in its effort at understanding. What disappears from the reckoning, then, is not only the way that we equate reality with natural, physical reality but (and as a conse­ quence) the way that the natural, physical sciences go about unearthing and generating this reality. What escapes scrutiny is the fact that the natural and physical sciences do not, themselves, simply apprehend and reproduce a reality that is given to them, but engage in theory and reflection in order to formulate and construct their operative notions of truth. It is for this reason that I have always been concerned in the discussion of these questions with the role of thought and reflection in the natural, physical sciences, because their procedure also involves reality construction through theory, and is no less amenable to an analysis based on the distinction between thought and reality than the ‘social’ sciences and related disciplines. To say that no concept of reality is reality is therefore, in the light of the foregoing, to dispute the idea of reality as a natural, physical con­ ception of the real apprehended and passively produced by the natural sciences no less than would be the case for conceptions generated by political economy, and the social, behavioural and administrative dis­ ciplines.65 The problem with (a) rigidly bifurcating thought from reality, rather than seeing thought as a central human aspect of reality essen­ tial for knowing it as such, preparatory to (b) the effort to use this bifurcation as a basis for overcoming the distinction between them en route to achieving an identity between thought and reality may now be seen in a somewhat different light. It is not that there is a reality which coincides with natural scientific constructions of it, and other disciplines which lag behind the natural, physical sciences in their ability to grasp or apprehend this reality. Nor are there two realities, with one more ‘real’ than the other. Finally, human being, as such, cannot, for these and related reasons, be viewed as necessarily a bar­ rier to comprehending reality, understood to mean the mastery or apprehension of ‘external nature’. Claims of this sort undergird the view held by political economists and social scientists that the proper method, given a natural, physical conception of reality as reality must involve recapitulation, aggregation and ‘ex-planation’ following on abstraction to simple (or the simplest) determinations. 43

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure What is odd about this scientistic conception of science is that it is a point of view held for the most part by political economists and social scientists rather than natural scientists. Natural scientists, no matter how applications-oriented and technologically disposed they may be, appreciate the central directing role of thought, theory and reflection in their disciplines, and do not view their knowledge as constitutive of an identity with its object. To be sure, there is, in scien­ tific procedure in general, a tendency to abstract the object out of the whole in order to examine it as an external other, but this is a property of all disciplines and all scholarship. What is required, then, is on­ going recognition of the protocol nature of this abstractive activity, and consequent acknowledgement of its partiality, its incomplete­ ness, relative to the reality that includes it, even as we seek to comprehend and make sense of reality in various ways. The so-called bottom line here would be the following: reality as such cannot be appropriated by any discipline, any science, and the ‘parts’ that are appropriated through abstraction must be understood as moments of a whole that is dynamic, motional and contradictory. It is as a conse­ quence of this point that the parts as such are abstract and the whole concrete, rather than the reverse.66 The implications of these observations regarding thought, reality and the natural, physical sciences must include the realization that the problematic for materialist dialectics and its critical/dialectical procedure must be capitalism and its creation, Society, rather than science in the person of the natural, physical sciences. In this sense, the writer acknowledges the pre-eminence of Marx over the writings of most of the first generation of critical theorists most of the time 67 This is not to say that these scientific disciplines do not often possess a world-view which is characterized in practice by an incomplete re­ flection, but rather points to this essential characteristic as one which is to be discovered at the core of most modern and contemporary approaches to understanding. While natural scientists can be unreflective about their own disciplines, their difficulties do not normally include the sort of scientism that is properly (contra Hayek) associ­ ated with political economy and the social sciences. That is to say, it is practitioners in these latter disciplines who misunderstand both their own process and the process of the natural, physical sciences that they think ought to function as a distant model for ‘progress’ in their own work.68 A concluding reference to the claim that Marx held two concep­ tions of natural, physical science is once again called for here. The belief that there is an inconsistency between the excerpt from the Early Texts which follows, and Marx’s more ‘technological’ view of the natural sciences found in Capital, fails to take account of the fact that 44

Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today the latter’s ‘success’ is as much a function of reflection, theory and thought as it is of application, invention and technology as indus­ trious activity allegedly divorced from it. Man is the direct object of natural science: for directly sensuous nature for man is sense experience (the expressions are identical) in the shape of other men presented to him in a sensuous way. For it is only through his fellow man that his sense-experience becomes human for him. But nature is the direct object of the science of man. Man’s first object - man himself - is nature, sense experience; and particular human sensuous faculties are only ob­ jectively realized in natural objects and can only attain to self-knowledge in the science of nature in general. The elements of thought itself, the element of the vital manifestation of thought, language, is sensuous in character. The social reality of nature and human natural science or the natural science of man are identical expressions.69 Marx’s point in this excerpt is that ‘nature’ is the central point of ^//-reference, thus that the concoction of ‘other’ in this form con­ stitutes a pre-eminent way man goes about learning about himself. There is no conflict whatsoever between such a reflection on what natural science means for man as its creator and the effects, in terms of technology and other applications, of its use or mobilization, par­ ticularly in the modern period. Marx is addressing how thought’s power lies in its ineffable dif­ ference from reality, showing in the process that all constructions from within it are empowered by being specifically, as well as gener­ ally, human. If nature is, as Marx claims, the pre-eminent conceptual indicator of self-reference in the modern inventory, then the primor­ dial dichotomy of modernity - between man and nature - must be comprehended as topical and momentous within the whole.70 Nothing that Marx says about natural science and nature precludes the possibility of powerful effects, but it does draw our attention unavoidably to the fact that, on its own, such activity is not self­ determining with respect to these latter effects. Indeed, it compels us to attend to the social and economic developments which are ulti­ mately responsible for these effects, and the unreflexive legitimizing disciplines so closely associated with these developments, in order to discern what there is in their approaches and methods which requires critical scrutiny and a resulting understanding based on dialectical and reflexive reconstruction.

45

Chapter three

The meaning and significance of Marx’s critique of the method of political economy

Knowledge and method in the Grundrisse In the first two chapters, I addressed Marx’s critique of political econ­ omy as a problem-posing framework, and thereafter focused on the relationship between conceptualization and critique as it takes shape in the critical/dialectical procedure, in contrast to ‘traditional’ the­ ory. In what follows, I want to discuss in more detail Marx’s critique of the method of political economy - one of the most prominent examples of his critique of the discipline perse. Marx combines both aspects of the critical/dialectical procedure in the Grundrisse, and thereafter in Capital and Theories o f Surplus Value, in a way which points to materialist dialectics as an active intellectual practice com­ prising both a forward (sense perception) and a backward (sensuous need) reference, as well as critique.1 What emerges from the applica­ tion of this active intellectual practice to the texts under consideration here is the central role of political economy, sup­ plemented by idealist philosophy, as a major ideological legitimator of capitalist industrialization in the Nineteenth and Twentieth cen­ turies.2 In the Grundrisse Marx would only appear to have suppressed this matter in favour of addressing critically the actual process of thought and thinking engaged in by political economists when they reason in books, pamphlets and lectures. He refers to it as a method in the in­ troductory section of the Grundrisse because he believes that there are a series of steps that every political economist must take in se­ quence, and that the complete process yields an outcome that is largely predictable, at least with regard to its general observations and conclusions. Marx’s discussion of this method does not, however, refer to it as wrong in an ethical or moral sense, but rather criticizes it initially as false rather than correct thinking. There is an implica­ tion that all method or system is ipso facto false, perhaps in the sense that Nietzsche later had in mind when he stated that recourse to a 46

Marx's critique o f the method o f political economy system constituted evidence of a lack of integrity on the part of the systematizer.3 Thus, for example, Marx states that: ‘It seems to be correct’ to begin at a certain point but that ‘on closer examination this proves false’.4 As I hope to demonstrate, however, the fact that Marx’s no­ tion of the true and false is not hostaged to empirical understandings of what is concrete and what is abstract compels him to collapse the distinction between the good and the true, the evil and the false, en route to arguing persuasively that ‘the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins’ is not simply mistaken, but a ‘product’ of the very system whose view of reality cries out for critique and analysis.5 At the same time, to be sure, Marx continues to rely on terms which denote at the outset unclear, mistaken thinking, but this assessment on its own only makes sense if we jettison Marx’s view of historical and social process and the role of both the mode and the means of production therein. The method of reasoning which Marx addresses critically leads him to equate political economy with a systematic unwillingness to reflect on its alleged point of departure. Marx says that political econ­ omy’s point of departure is false, incorrect, even though it ‘appears’ to be true and correct. It is to the idea of beginning that Marx addresses his initial concerns. He admits that if he began the way that the pol­ itical economists do, he too would end where they end. Thus the idea that what we are looking at is a method of reasoning made up of se­ quential steps, all constitutive of a process with unavoidable points along the way and an inescapable terminus. Marx shows that he be­ lieves this to be the case when he states the following: Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception (Vorstellung) of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determinations, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts (Begriff), from the imagined concrete towards even thinner abstractions, until I had arrived at the simplest deter­ minations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as a chaotic conception of the whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations (emphasis mine).6 When Marx notes that this path is the one ‘historically followed by economics at the time of its origins’, he implies that it is both mis­ taken and untrue because of the way it is determined in its process from beginning to end. It ‘appears’ to be the correct method, to be sure, but only given the social and historical circumstances, Marx im­ plies. Begin with the whole as chaotically conceived, and discover 47

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure through the application of a specified sequence of reasonings (method) a given, generally preordained, outcome in the person of a whole which is characterized by abstract, general relations, rather than a chaotic conception. When Marx argues that this alleged ter­ minus is really the point o f departure, he implies that the so-called chaotic whole which is the ostensible beginning for political economy is in reality already a determination of abstract general relations. In recapitulating the method, this time using concepts from politi­ cal economy in his discussion, Marx suggests the distinct possibility that political economy itself might be recovered and given its proper and correct direction by showing the fallacious nature of the reason­ ing engaged in by Seventeenth-century economists. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g. always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as divi­ sion of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, then began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market.7 Calling them economists, rather than political economists, only serves to underscore the point that for Marx, political economy could be set aright and redirected by a true and correct critique of it that was not (yet) viewed as a procedure in irretrievable opposition to it, but the only proper one for political economy itself Critique, in the event, might not have to become an alternative in the guise of a new (anti-) method or procedure, but could retain its sense as part of what it was criticizing. Economics, what Marx (and Engels) off and on re­ fers to as ‘economic science’, could then be understood to be the name given to political economy when it fails to reflect on itself and analyse its auspices and origins.8 It is at this point that Marx turns to what must still remain one of his most controversial claims, one which continues to challenge criti­ cal thinking even today. Marx states that the method of political economy, while untrue and mistaken as a form of analysis, is never­ theless ‘the scientifically correct method’.9 What makes it ‘scientifically’ correct is precisely what makes it untrue and mistaken from the standpoint of analysis and reflection, namely, that this method does seek to recapitulate what actually happens when a given phenomenon comes into being socially and historically. But this is 48

Marx's critique o f the method o f political economy precisely what is problematic, while it also suggests why recent critics are mistaken when they criticize what they call ‘concrete readings’ of Marx like the critical theory of society.10 Marx’s point here is the basis for subsequent arguments of the critical theory which I have discussed and extended on the matter of the alleged claim of a unity of method.11 This argument, found in its clearest form in the work of Karl Popper, as noted, states that all scientific and scholarly pursuits have in common the piecemeal or incremental method, but must have different goals or objectives be­ cause of the absence of ‘critical rationalism’ in the social (in contrast to the natural) sciences. These latter disciplines police themselves under the aegis of a criticism based on conjecturing and refuting hy­ potheses, where the alleged objective of the exercise is to falsify, rather than to verify them. Social and political thinking, it turns out, is legitimate for Popper only if it subordinates itself to a view of the social sciences as ‘social technologies’.12 When Marx labels the method of political economy scientifically correct, he means to contrast, (a) the effort to recapitulate the stages that various phenomena take as they themselves emerge socially and historically from (b) the way one comes to comprehend the sense of this whole in and through reflection and analysis. In effect, the only way to both take account of and overcome this gap is to attend to a mode of analysis which is diametrically opposed to the way the ab­ stract whole actually comes into being and sustains itself in any of its myriad combinations of relations and determinations. Attempts to recapitulate the actual (historical and social) process by the scholar or thinker is only sensible, as noted, for the natural scientist when he is engaged in the relatively more ‘technological’ activity of working with existing hypotheses in an effort to apply them to a problem, rather than reflecting on their sense in response to an anomaly which cannot be reconciled with the present paradigm.13 In the event, Popper’s unity of method would have to fail con­ spicuously either to comprehend what is going on when we think about history, culture and collective life, or to make a case for what we ought and ought not to be doing when we address such matters. Marx’s claim that the way effectively to take account of and overcome the difference between the way the whole actually came into being and the way we comprehend it as a whole is not to seek to emulate the social and historical process in and through our processes of thinking is well captured in the following statement. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the pro­ cess of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a 49

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point o f departure in reality and hence also the point o f departure for obser­ vation (Anschauung)y and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a re­ production of the concrete by way of thought (emphasis mine).14 Marx is saying that thought and thinking on these matters, far from ending in what is present in the social and historical world in the form of abstract relations and determinations, must begin with these abstractions. It is precisely because as relations and determinations these phenomena are abstract, that is, abstracted from a whole that comprehends them in its ongoing dialectic of structure and process, that thought and thinking must begin with them. They are its point of departure because they appear concrete and the result of processes that have produced them as independent phenomena when in reality they are not. But engaging in the procedure that Marx calls the method of political economy cannot show this. The unity of method ordains that the social sciences emulate the method of the natural sciences - ‘the scientifically correct method’. This method attempts to recapitulate in its thinking the stage process by which reality actually comes into being, and thereby guarantees that we shall maintain and increase further the gap between this latter process and our understanding of it as a concrete whole. To begin with relations and determinations (facts) rather than objects is to underscore (not ironically, as we might think) Wittgenstein’s point that the world is the totality of facts in the form of states of affairs, rather than of objects per se.15 Thought can only reproduce the con­ crete by beginning with and in abstract relations and determinations, not by ‘probing its depths’ in a way designed to turn away from this goal in favour of ending by allegedly ‘discovering’ such relations and determinations. Marx cites this as Hegel’s illusion (as well as that of the political economists), then contrasts both Hegel on the one side and the ‘scientifically correct’ way on the other to the analytically correct mode of reflection by stating first that ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind’. He then notes that ‘this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.’16 Thought, it appears, would need to be authentic about where it ‘really5 begins after all. The political economists are wrong to believe that thought could ever begin in a chaotic concep­ tion of the whole, while Hegel is wrong to believe that reality is to be discovered in and through thought concentrating itself and probing 50

Marx's critique o f the method o f political economy its depths. The political economists are also wrong to believe that the whole that thought ends in must be an abstract rather than a concrete whole, while Hegel is also wrong to believe that reality is thought comprehending totality from outside it rather than as a member and subject in a direct and immediate dialectical relation to it. Let me conclude this section by returning to two concerns that to some extent stand apart from the main line of analysis, yet may well be more than merely tangential to it. The first is the fact that in the Grundrisse Marx still retains some small hope that political economy can be saved, in contrast to Volume I of Capital, where it is quite clear to this reader that he has given up on this hope.17 In effect, political economy itself is in the process of being superseded by ‘economic science’, that one-sided development out of political economy which adheres to the scientifically correct method, albeit with more and more emphasis on ‘ever more simple concepts’, ‘even thinner abstrac­ tions’, and ‘the simplest determinations’.18 Being thus eclipsed, political economy, by dint of this very occurrence, loses its signific­ ance in any but the most antiquarian sense, and the ‘economic science’ that allegedly supersedes it can no longer be realistically seen to include critique (as opposed to criticism) of its main body of think­ ing within its conceptual and theoretical parameters. Directly related to this concern is the parallel issue of the attitude and motives of those who practise the method of political economy which Marx addresses critically. It would appear from Marx’s discus­ sion that they cannot comprehend why the procedure they are engaging in is both scientifically correct and analytically false. Marx admits that they are really carrying out this procedure, and believe that it is sensible and valuable, even stating that were he to begin by believing that his thoughts originated in a chaotic whole, he could not avoid a similar process and outcome to his own thinking.19 Whether political economists, and later practitioners of ‘economic science’, choose not to accept Marx’s claim as to what is properly entailed in thinking, or simply do not believe it, is largely moot. What remains of the greatest interest in this matter is Marx’s realization or accept­ ance of the likelihood that the method the political economists engaged in, however fraudulent the apparent return to the same whole in new guise might be for us and others who understand and accept his analysis and critique, was one they truly accepted and be­ lieved. Perception, observation and thought At this point it will be necessary to probe Marx’s critique of the method of political economy in greater detail, taking account in the 51

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure process of the way that this critique presupposes the correctness, or rather ‘sense’, of an alternate procedure. Whether we shall want to call this procedure a method, a counter method, an anti-method or something else once we have concluded the analysis remains to be seen. To some extent, of course, the question itself is moot. My con­ cern here is to examine the alternative he poses both in and through his critique and independently of it. Nicolaus and Sekine cite several serious inconsistencies in Marx’s own understanding of what is going on when thinking and conceptualization occur, and suggest several places where he changes his mind and/or contradicts himself. Bologh, on the other hand, treats Marx’s mode of theorizing - what she calls ‘dialectical phenomenology’ - as a form of life fundamentally mis­ understood by those who have provided subsequent ‘concrete’ readings.20 These concerns and interpretations are discussed later on in this chapter. From the standpoint of a naturalistic conception of beginning, the problem is how perception, conceptualization and thought relate to one another. A temporal focus would require us to see that the common-sense mode is always, in a certain sense, prior, and that it is from this point of perception and observation that individuals proceed to conceptualization and intellection. At the same time, however, neither activity is ‘natural’ in the sense of being totally independent of the collective form in which it occurs. Indeed, we would say that they are embedded in it in quite specific ways, without in the process ignoring the biogenetic basis of the function itself. Of central import­ ance is the point that perceptions and observations in the common-sense mode need not lead to conceptualization of a scien­ tific or analytic kind; indeed, this only occurs in rare instances 21 What always needs to be kept in mind is the distinction for Marx between: (a) the way people in a conscious but unreflective mode of daily life act and behave; (b) the way that individuals acting in a ‘scientifically correct’ manner conceptualize from perceptions and observations, based on an attempt both to recapitulate and emulate the way events, phenomena, etc., actually came into being; and (c) the way that critical, as opposed to traditional, thinking occurs, and the question whether such thinking can ever expect to be more than mar­ ginal relative to (a) and (b). I would add another mode of activity (d), which I call disembodied disciplined observation, and largely subsume under (b), while at the same time admitting that in a certain sense it partakes of aspects of (a) precisely because of its increasing, and, I shall argue, unavoidable pre-eminence in advanced industrial soc­ ieties. Here it is the particular nature of the ‘abstractness’ of the findings, combined with the commitment to recapitulation and emu­ lation and the abstract(ed)ly disciplined nature of its tasks and 52

Marx's critique o f the method o f political economy ‘methods’, which mark it out as an activity that began to emerge in earnest only in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries after Marx’s death.22 I also placed disembodied disciplined observation between reflec­ tion and practice, albeit in a conceptual rather than in a temporal sense. Here it was the peculiar socially and culturally ordained and supported nature of the interposition and its consequences for both reflection (annihilation) and practice (reconstitution) which was at stake. However interesting this may have been as an exercise in re­ conceptualization, it did not reach the issue which is of paramount concern here, namely, whether one can delineate procedures or methods of thinking, comprised of steps and/or stages, and whether it makes sense to think of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ procedures or methods as a consequence.23 This attempt to think of limit is itself problematic, if only because what is involved here is an effort to use the very faculties (perception, language, memory) being studied in order to investigate and understand them in both processual and structural terms 24 The idea of a temporal, as opposed to a conceptual, beginning is in a certain sense an arbitrary notion. This must be clear from the fact that perception, observation, and thought and reflection are them­ selves grounded both socially, culturally and historically, as well as in a more immediate sense. Thus, there are social interactions, as well as interactions between various modes of activity, which together underscore the point that social life is in dynamic motion, and often not a set of anticipatable processes, but ones that are at best discern­ ible post hoc (explanation), but only because of membership and participation in the social formation.25 This, however, is by no means to disagree with Marx’s justifiably critical position toward the ques­ tion of where political economy says that it begins - in the chaotic whole. The difficulty with this is that such a construction is itself (ap­ parently) pre-perceptual, and ignores the foundational nature of common-sense rationality as grounded activity which perceives and observes within the social formation or life form, not naturalistically outside of or prior to it. Indeed, such a beginning would make the subsequent stages that characterize all types of thinking impossible, because it confuses the presence of functions having a biogenetic basis in our nature with the observations and perceptions themselves, these being conditioned by society and culture as well as functional possibility. Common-sense rationality, and everyday life in virtually all circumstances, is rarely chaotic, and even when it is such chaos would be ordered and or­ ganized as such through the function of perception and observation. Thus, this conception of a chaotic whole must either constitute an 53

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure intellectual assumption about what precedes the beginning, or refers to the state of affairs of a given collective in retrospect. This means that in a certain sense the idea of the chaotic whole is also organized and ordered, or that there is at least the perception of a potential for it. It is precisely because ‘individuals’ are grounded that the beginning of this activity of thought and thinking must be in what Marx calls ‘abstract determinations’.26 These are perceived and observed objects, events and phenomena which are ordered and organized in and through the social reference of human life, but do not as a consequence constitute a concrete whole or totality. Only in the sense of being an intellectual notion is it even sensible to speak of what is ordered and organized as an ab­ stract whole of concrete particulars, because these latter notions, as I suggested earlier, refer more appropriately to disembodied disci­ plined observation than they do to common-sense rationality as a mode of activity in its own right.27 When Marx uses the term ‘abstract determinations’, he refers to the nature of this reality as one which is unreflective, however ordered and organized. They are ‘abstract’ be­ cause abstracted from a whole which, though it must be presumed (and is ‘available’ to reflection) if they are to have any sense as parts, has not been reflected upon by the perceiver/observer. They are determinations because they are the result of perception which, though a biogenetic function, is at the same time a socially and cultu­ rally ordered activity with regard to meaning and sense. It is this aspect or quality which explains why concreteness is attributed to them as objects, events, phenomena, etc.28 Marx, let it be noted, makes a clear reference in his critique of ‘the scientifically correct method’ of political economy to what I have termed ‘disembodied disciplined observation’ when he speaks of the movement from these abstract determinations in the direction of still simpler concepts which constitute ‘even thinner abstractions’. Ac­ cording to Marx, the end point of this search after ‘the imagined concrete’ is ‘the simplest determinations’, the atomic ‘facts’ that are all that can be the case in Wittgenstein’s ‘world’.29 It is only through reversing this enterprise, once completed, that the perceiver/ observer fully combines traditional theory with empirical method, however, because only by such a process of ‘retracing’ is it possible for the political economist (or, in more recent times, the sociological theorist) to return ‘again’ to the whole, but this time to a whole which is a ‘rich totality of many determinations and relations’ rather than a ‘chaotic conception’. In this combined set of activities characterized by both perception/observation and a disembodied and disciplined version of it, reflection (glimpse) has been sacrificed to the illusion of mastery (grasp).30 54

Marx's critique o f the method of political economy This enterprise yields what is at best an abstract whole of such determinations and relations, and the question is whether the people Marx criticizes really engage in it. As noted, Marx states that if he began where they (economists of the late Seventeenth to midNineteenth centuries) begin, he too would end where they end. At the same time, there is an implication that this absence of reflection re­ ally constitutes the suppression of a concern for grounds, which knowledge - as distinct from the grounds themselves - yields a con­ crete whole or totality that is different in nature (as well as in the procedure for its realization) from the abstract whole produced out of disembodied disciplined observation. The conclusion which I have reached is that the political economists probably do believe they are engaging in this enterprise, and that knowledge of grounds, though suppressed, is suppressed not by the individual perceiver/observer in any conscious way, but constitutes evidence of the impact upon him of a given social formation and culture at a given point in time. This would accord with Marx’s oft-stated criticism of conspiracy thinking, and at the same time take account of the social and cultural basis of knowledge claims made by ‘individuals’.31 Thus there really is no conspiratorial method consciously engaged in in order to suppress reflection about grounds. Indeed, about the only complaint along these lines that Marx makes pertains to the apparent collapse of political economy as a theoretical and reflective discipline which could perhaps have taken a different path, thereby allowing critique to survive as an ongoing, lively feature of it, but did not. Only later, in Capital and Theories o f Surplus Value, does it seem that he is willing to acknowledge that its particular path is virtually dictated for political economy as a result of its decision to turn its back on the labour theory of value in favour of providing legitimation for capital­ ist industrialization in Nineteenth-century Europe and America. It is at this point that critique must be seen formally and officially to become the critical theory of Society, because only at this point does he fully give up the hope that critique might constitute an element of the discipline rather than part of a new, oppositional procedure sep­ arate and distinct from the traditional theory so central (along with empirical method) to the defence of capitalism, and thereafter Society.32 A further point is of particular importance to the notion of a ‘scientifically correct method’. I have argued that the issue here is the claim to be recapitulating and emulating in and through this method the way that events and phenomena actually come into being, subsist and are changed and transformed. Marx traces this tendency to a fund­ amental confusion virtually unavoidable for all those who practise the method of political economy, which is the most significant ver­ 55

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure sion of the ‘scientifically correct method’ relevant to his concerns. It happens during the retracing process which follows on the perceiver/observer’s having attained ‘the simplest determinations’. Moving back over the path allegedly taken from the ‘chaotic whole’ toward an abstract whole peopled with all those abstract determina­ tions which were ‘reall/ there to begin with, the political economist falls into an illusion, and comes to believe that ‘conceptual thinking is the real human being’ and the conceptual world as such the only reality. For political economy, in effect, ‘the movement of the cat­ egories appears as the real act of production’.33 The way that Marx resolves this confusion develops further his critique of Hegel, particularly in The German Ideology but elsewhere as well.34 He returns to the notion of the concrete whole or totality, which I have argued is only a possibility for the perceiver/observer, one that is characterized by reflection on grounds. It is a conceptual beginning because its essence is conceptualization, but it is no more a temporal beginning than the so-called chaotic whole is, and for many of the same reasons. Only by naturalistically denuding the per­ ceiver/observer of his humanity is it possible to endorse the notion of either point as a real beginning. Add to this the dynamic and motive nature of social life, characterized as it is by interaction within the socially, culturally and historically defined formation, and the idea of beginning itself becomes even less secure as a sensible concern 35 Nevertheless, Marx does feel it necessary to distinguish between thought and thinking on the one hand and the concept on the other, and does so in a manner which generates many more questions for us than it does answers. This is evident from the following excerpt from the Grundrisse: [The] concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working up of observation and conception into con­ cepts. The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates [s/c] the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely specula­ tive, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposi­ tion.36

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Marx's critique o f the method o f political economy The initial reference to where the concrete is concrete - in thought and the claim that it is ‘a product of thinking and comprehending’ certainly accords with his earlier discussion and my analysis of (and agreement with) it. It is rather his distinction between the concept and this whole which may appear to pose a problem or involve a con­ fusion. Marx ‘connects’ the concrete whole to ‘thinking and comprehending’ by referring to it as the product of such activity, and thereafter defines this activity as being synonymous with ‘the working up of observation and conception into concepts’.37 The concept, in contrast, ‘thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception’. Here Marx is distinguishing con­ ceptualization or concept formation from both ‘observation and conception’, and the ‘thinking and comprehending’ that constitutes the process of ‘the working up of observation and conception into concepts’. Here I believe it would be more accurate to translate any and all textual references to ‘conception’ accompanying references to ‘observation’ as perception. This accords better with Marx’s argu­ ment, while it also draws our attention to the nature of the activity which he refers to as ‘working up’ in the text.38 Thus revised, we can then distinguish observations and perceptions (sic) from the activity of working them up, as it were, into concepts. The concept, as a con­ sequence, must be understood by this reckoning to be a product of sorts of observation and perception, while yet thinking and genera­ ting itself ‘outside’ them. Though a product of observation and perception in the sense suggested, however, the concept is not a pro­ duct of ‘the working up’ of observation and perception that Marx uses interchageably with the activity of ‘thinking and comprehending’ which produces concrete wholes or totalities. How do we avoid mystical or reified interpretations in accounting for Marx’s claim that the concept, once produced or formed, ‘thinks and generates itself outside and above’ observation and percep­ tion?39 It would appear that for Marx ‘thinking and comprehending’ constitutes the ‘working up’ of observation and perception, in con­ trast to the activity of observing and perceiving per se. If concepts ‘think and generate’ themselves ‘outside and above’ what makes them possible, then this is a reference to the social nature, and the ‘availa­ bility’, relatively speaking, of this activity (e.g. conceptualization) at the same time that it establishes their stature as part of the world, albeit a world defined socially rather than naturalistically.40 Concepts would thus constitute what Schutz called ‘typifications’ in the natural attitude of everyday life, while more disciplined and formal (there­ fore more abstract) versions of them would accord with what Weber called ‘ideal types’.41 These latter would be the kind of constructs cen­

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Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure tral to the ‘scientifically correct’ approach found in the method of political economy. Dialectics: thinking and comprehending Concretion - the act of reflection or deep sense-making which Marx equates with ‘thinking and comprehending’ and the activity of ‘work­ ing up’ observation(s) and perception(s) - is the only way that he sees to address the concepts that result directly or variously from observa­ tion and perception on their own. Otherwise, these concepts threaten to move in only one direction from the common-sense mode - toward the abstract rather than the concrete. In contrast to the activity of ‘working up’ concepts which already exist in a certain sense ‘outside and above’ the individual thinker who engages in this ‘thinking and comprehending’, the method of political economy engages in the two stage procedure already cited. Here the direction is ‘down and up’, to stay with Marx’s metaphor in characterizing these mental activities, first toward ‘abstract determinations’ (abstractions) that are ‘even thinner’ than the concepts which emerge from observation and per­ ception in the natural attitude, until the point at which ‘the simplest determinations’ are reached. Moving back over this same path, as noted, does not constitute a ‘working up’ of the concepts so much as a process of (allegedly) discovering that the chaotic whole that one purported to begin with (and in) is a world of great complexity made up of an infinitude of abstract determinations (e.g. ‘facts’) after all.42 What all of this suggests is that there is something highly disci­ plined and formalized, yet essentially unreflective, about the activity of moving first from common-sense concepts derived from observa­ tion and perception on their own toward concepts that are progressively more abstract, then reversing direction in order to ‘people’ this world with all those abstract determinations, especially the simplest ones, that can now allegedly be seen to inhabit it. When Marx states that this is really where we all begin rather than end he does not, as noted, mean to imply a conspiracy, but is taking account of the socially and culturally determined nature of knowledge relative to where it is found and in what circumstances. The suppression, or purposeful neglect, of thoughts and theories inimical to existing (or emergent) economic and political arrangements43 is what accounts in the main for the success of a political economy whose concepts and methods had sundered their connection with the labour theory of value in favour of a hierarchy of ‘factors of production’, with capital on top and labour - that factor most eminently ‘substitutable’ - on the bottom.

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Marx's critique of the method o f political economy Marx’s notion of beginning would thus appear to be the beginning for thought and thinking, a beginning which the ‘scientifically cor­ rect’ method of political economy incorrectly construes as the end of the journey when it is in truth its point of origin. Beginning in those ‘abstract determinations’ which constitute the concepts that emerge from observation and perception, Marx confronts the procedure that claims to begin in a chaotic whole with the only alternative that can lead to the concrete totality as an embodied glimpse. Marx is not, of course, providing the reader with a method here, certainly not a method in the sense in which it is defined as a ‘one best way\ Indeed, his alternative as such is only limitedly ‘available’ to everyone in the natural attitude, not so much because of a lack of capacity on their part but rather because of a lack of interest and inclination given the influence of the social formation on ‘values’, interests, etc. Neverthe­ less, it would have to be possible for any human being in this formation (and perhaps in others as well) to move from the less formal and disciplined typifications that collectively constitute the commonsense rationality of life in the ‘natural attitude’ to the more formally abstract determinations that mark the beginning of both the journey of thought, and the very different route for disciplined observation.44 If the latter proliferates, narrows and further abstracts already existing abstractions in order to reach ‘the simplest determinations’, before retraversing the route in the opposite direction in order to (allegedly) ‘discover’ connections, ending with nation-states as ‘sys­ tems’, the former takes the concepts that are the result of observation and perception and ‘works them up’ into a whole that takes account of the embeddedness of thought and conceptualization in collective life and historical process. The first procedure is synonymous with the progressive disembodiment of the observer/perceiver in search of the myriad of facts which he will thereafter use to show the need to put all this complexity together in what will amount to an abstract totality of relations and determinations linked by claims of causality, function, system, correlation and coincidence. The second procedure moves in the direction of embodiment in its concern to realize both reason and reflexivity rather than the former (or latter) on its own. Here the concern for membership, in particular those concepts found in this life process (or specific areas of it) ‘outside and above’ obser­ vation and perception, generates the activity o f‘working up’ concepts into the concrete totality of the thinker who is in a dialectical relation to Society - the real subject and the first presupposition - even while his head ‘appropriates the world in the only way it can’ (sense percep­ tion).45 There is a sense in which it is fair to say of the person who accu­ mulates concepts from observations and perceptions without 59

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure working them up that this observer/perceiver lives in a world of illu­ sion precisely because he confuses ‘the movement of the categories’ with ‘the real act of production’. More to the point, this human being believes that he is realizing an ever greater grasp of the life process by moving in the direction of ever simpler determinations until all the most salient facts are allegedly known, and thereafter putting all this false concreteness together into systems, nation-states, etc., when such appropriation and accumulation only leads to the production of an externalized ‘world’ - an abstract totality of ‘parts-as-facts-asevents’ in various modes of relation and determination - which excludes the observer/perceiver.46 Marx is saying in the Grundrisse that because we begin, or can begin (or eventually will begin when objective conditions of societal contradiction make it possible or necessitate it) in abstract determinations rather than end with them, the proper procedure for a human being would be to work up the concepts that are the product of observations and perceptions into concrete totalities in the way indicated, thereby embedding and em­ bodying them in response to their various and sundried states of disembeddedness and disembodiment (abstraction, externalization). I believe that Marx’s discussion and critique also addresses the way one goes about ‘working up’ the concepts that result from observa­ tion and perception, and that he modified his views significantly on this matter. Here one must take account of an already existing stock of both common-sense knowledge and capacity in the form of originary concepts or typifications, and ‘ideal types’ which have resulted from the activity of disciplined observation carried out in ‘the scien­ tifically correct’ way, including political economy and its method. This is why it is correct to note that even though Marx is in no sense what we would today call an ‘empiricist’, his procedure of ‘thinking and comprehending’ the products of observation and perception must be distinguished not only from liberalist thought (Ricardian political economy) and idealist philosophy (Hegel’s Phenomenology o f Mind and Philosophy of Right), but from positivism (Comte) as well47 No­ where is this more evident than in the way Marx treats both types of concept (including those produced by these three movements or dis­ ciplines) relative to the task of ‘working them up’ into concrete wholes which embed, embody and ‘member’ the thinker. It is therefore of the utmost importance to an adequate under­ standing of Marx’s argument that this procedure of ‘thinking and comprehending’ as he describes it not be treated as an alienated act­ ivity involving a solitary thinker who inhabits a world where no concepts existing ‘outside or above’ observation and perception are to be found.48 It is precisely the social nature and reference of the thinker (as well as the observer/perceiver or disciplined observer in 60

Marx's critique o f the method o f political economy the case of daily life or the ‘scientific' approach) and the real, actual presence in the life process of common-sense and more abstract con­ cepts ‘outside or above’ thinkers (and observer/perceivers and disciplined observers) that guarantees that the dialectic of thought will mediate rather than mirror the dialectic of a ‘reality (Society as the real subject and the first presupposition) that includes the think­ er even as he seeks in one moment of his thinking to stand outside it.49 It is this aspect which best helps us understand what Marx meant when he simultaneously refused to turn away from reflection and a commitment to the procedure of ‘working up’ the products of obser­ vation and perception - concepts - through the activity of ‘thinking and comprehending’, while endorsing an empirical method in explicit opposition to the speculative method of Hegel.50 Nevertheless, something of fundamental importance happens to Marx’s thinking on the matter of the correct method (or anti­ method) in his response to the mistaken notions and errors of thinking found in political economy in the period of transition from the Grundrisse to Capital and thereafter. This is not to say that the role of dialectics is in any way diminished by the increased emphasis which Marx places on empirical method in his discussion in Capital.51 On the contrary, the empirical method is totally dependent on some form of dialectical analysis if it is to ‘work up’ the materials brought to light in the way Marx demands. Here it is the distinction between the method of inquiry and the method of presentation which is cru­ cial. The method of inquiry, given what Marx had said earlier about ‘working up’ the products of observation and perception, appears to have turned unequivocally in the direction of the production of those more formal ‘abstract determinations’ of which he was so critical. In­ deed, the distinction in the Grundrisse between ‘working up’ abstract concepts of various kinds (typifications, ideal types, even thought and theories) from observation and perception en route to concrete to­ talities, and elaborating on and accumulating them through a process of realizing ‘even thinner’ abstractions until the ‘simplest determina­ tions’ have been reached, would appear to have largely disappeared. Marx makes this clear in a passage from Capital, where he states that the method of inquiry ‘has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented’ (emphasis mine).52 Making my earlier point about the central role of dialectical analysis, albeit in the second phase of this procedure, he states further that: ‘If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction’.53 That this is clearly an illusion is evident from the 61

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure priority Marx gives not only to abstract determinations as the point of departure for ‘thinking and comprehending’ (as before), but to the process of increasing abstraction toward even simpler determina­ tions of which he had been critical earlier. It is the way that the method of inquiry - empirical rather than speculative in nature - combines with the method of presentation that makes the dialectical analysis which follows it so different from that of Hegel. It is only after the specifics of the social formation have been further abstracted, accumulated and studied in detail that ‘inner connections’ can be discerned, and the material reorganized and presented in such a way that the internal dynamic through which so­ cial phenomena develop and change can be laid bare. From the standpoint of an analysis like Hegel’s, based as it is in an a priori dia­ lectical logic of categories whose process is independent of, rather than only different from the movement of reality it is imposed upon,54 Marx’s procedure in Capital for generating the concrete wholes that emerge from ‘reflecting’ the life of the subject-matter ‘back in the ideas’ can only be called dialectical if the term is carefully qualified. It is an a posteriori procedure for analysing materials that have been brought to light as a result (and in the form) of detailed empirical investigations of real phenomena abstracted to the point of the ‘ simplest determinations’.5* Only at this point does Marx revert to his position in the Grundrisse, refusing to sanction the return journey by which the political economists seek to explain systematic interconnections between the determinations already evinced. Though the method of inquiry now seems to resemble the process of disembodiment criticized by Marx in the Grundrisse as a central feature of the first part of the method of the political economists, the method of presentation as Marx de­ scribes it in Capital is still concerned with generating concrete, rather than abstract, wholes through the kind of reflection prescribed. How­ ever much Marx insists that the investigator ‘appropriate the material in detail’ before any attempt is made to understand social processes, this admittedly empirical method of abstraction can only be justified by subsequent reliance on a method of presentation whose dialectical credentials continue to constitute an activity of ‘working up’, albeit of the simplest abstract determinations produced by disciplined observation from less formally precise abstractions, as well as those which are the more immediate product of observation and perception in the natural attitude.56 Marx is concerned throughout these works with method and pro­ cedure because he realizes that there are at least two ways whereby observer/perceivers, disciplined observers, even thinkers can err in their efforts to understand the process and nature of reality. On the 62

Marx’s critique o f the method o f political economy one hand, they can seek to formulate a method like that which he accuses political economy of employing, one which seeks in its second phase only to emulate through recapitulation what are believed to be the actual processes through which a phenomenon, event, etc., emer­ ges and is sustained socially, culturally and historically. Marx suspends his critique of the first phase - the elaboration and further refinement of those abstract determinations which he had always be­ lieved thought and thinking to begin in - but insists unequivocally that the activity of ‘working up’ the materials thus discerned and evinced have at its core a dialectical method of presentation. Indeed, it is only in and through this second method that the potentially dis­ embodying effects of the first on its own can be justified at all. This is the best response to those who see Marx’s revised position as auth­ orization for the subsequent development of the social and behavioural sciences (as well as economics).57 On the other hand, they can err not so much by seeking to emulate through recapitulation the process and nature of reality as by mis­ understanding what is involved in ‘working up’ the materials at hand. Here a bias toward speculation and the a priori of logical analysis, whether in dialectical (Hegel) or non-dialectical (Kant) form, leads one to ignore the importance of an empirical method of investigation in the study of Society - the real subject and the first presupposition - in favour of an attempt to carry out an analysis of social life in the near-total absence of a prior disciplined (as opposed to commonsense) inquiry into its properties and processes. Here we can see, from the other side, the consequences of employing an approach which is no less guilty of confusing the movement of the categories with the movement of reality, albeit for totally different reasons. In both instances, however, it is important to note that the concerns I have cited, following Marx in the Grundrisse regarding the conse­ quences of an unhinged empiricism, should not be allowed to overshadow the capacity of the dialectical method of presentation to produce concrete rather than abstract wholes, even given the some­ what truncated form of ‘working up’ that the two-phase procedure in Capital might appear to imply.5** The theorist and/in society Two issues in particular arise for me out of what has just been said, regardless of the procedure either employed or recommended by Marx. The first is the extent to which one of the purposes of discuss­ ing (and criticizing) method and approach is to generate a theoretical community of thinkers and speakers, and the allied issue of how ‘available’ membership in this community will be.59 The second is 63

More 'rational' side

Embodied disciplined observation, Concretion, (Absteigen)

Disembodied disciplined observation, Abstraction, (Aufsteigen)

More reflexive and analytical side

Biogenetic Constitution Intersubjective Experience Sociohistorical Constitution Institutional Orientation Orientation to Social Formation

THE HUMAN BEING

Less reflexive and analytical side

Figure 1 Forms of mental activity available to the human being

Dialectical comprehension Concrete totality as substantive and processual whole. 'Glimpse'; understanding

Perception of 'Reality' as 'Facts' Concatenated 'parts' and abstract whole. 'Grasp'; 'mastery'.

Reflexive, but 'non rational' processes (Phantasy, Revery, M editation).

Undisciplined observation, yet Oriented and Purposive.

Recovery, Remembrance. Internal totality as wholeness and sense of origin. 'Anamnesis'.

'N atural Attitude' Unreflective mem bership and mem bering. 'Commonsense rationality'.

Less 'rational' side

Marx's critique of the method o f political economy why Marx is so confident in Capital that he can now employ the first phase of a procedure - his method of inquiry - of which he was so critical in the Grundrisse, and what this tells us about the relation between Society and the duplex nature of knowledge claims which are simultaneously addressed to it and a part of its ongoing structure and process. One might argue that Marx sees the possible emergence of a the­ oretical community composed of persons able to generate concrete rather than abstract wholes at some point in the future. Perhaps this emergence will be correlated with the movement to centre stage of those contradictions that always define a collective form on the verge of completion because o f their very unmanageability for Marx.60 This emerging community would not depend on membership alone, how­ ever, but would probably receive substantial support and sympathy from members of various publics, perhaps even the so-called ‘general’ public. This would likely be essential, not only for the ob­ vious reasons bearing on capacity, interest, etc. as factors limiting membership, but because of the more disciplined character of Marx’s alternate procedure, even (or especially) in Capital. Here I have in mind what potentially a more ‘methodical’ element in the empirical investigation so central to the method of inquiry than would appear to be the case for the activity of ‘thinking and comprehending’, the work-up that involves what he calls, but does not elaborate on as, a ‘dialectical’ method. It would seem from Capital, not to speak of the Grundrisse, that concretion - the production of concrete wholes out of the products of observation and perception - is to be an activity limited to a few not because the ‘method’ is too difficult for all but a small minority to practise, but because it is not a method at all in the sense in which empirical abstraction toward the simplest determinations is a method of sorts. At the same time, one could argue that this latter is no more methodical than the so-called method of presentation, but is rather easier both to practise and be productive at. This obser­ vation would accord with present-day criticism of certain features of empirical research in the social sciences, which stress the point that they are easier to engage in, but easier not because they are not work, but because they seem more in line with Society’s interests, and more people find such work interesting and attractive, given the formative and sustaining role of bureaucratic organizations, and disciplined forms of observation in the system as a (abstract) whole.61 It would be particularly ironic if Marx, who in The German Ideo­ logy and elsewhere laid such stress on the social character of knowledge, should downplay or ignore altogether the collective or

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Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure social reference when discussing the nature of thought and concept­ ualization. In the critique of the method of the political economists found in the Grundrisse, Marx often seems to be discussing these act­ ivities as if they were being engaged in by a solitary human being who only needed to be aware of Society as the real subject and the first presupposition. This fails to take account of those crucial intermedi­ ate communities of like-minded people and their supporters and sympathizers who are absolutely central not only to intellectual (and common-sense) sense-making, but to the physical survival of groups of persons exhibiting various levels of involvement in the theoretical work. This would hold with even greater accuracy in situations where the collective form was stable and predictable, and where no one could count on the disabling effect of unmanageable contradictions to increase membership, support and sympathy.62 Without going into detail about the importance of such com­ munities to ongoing study, thinking, research, scholarship, etc. in all disciplines, sciences and professions, we can notice the central role that it played in the development, reception and recognition of Marx’s thought in England, Continental Europe and, later on, in North America. This obvious social reference of knowledge within Society and its reference groups is a more important factor than we might like to think in explaining or making sense of the daring and innovative in the above areas, whereas we normally tend to associate these individuals and their efforts with rebellion, estrangement or alienation from relevant bodies of knowledge and interest. While it is doubtless true that these efforts and commitments generally entail movement out of or away from some such group or community, there is usually some other group there to receive the individual. Marx probably comes closest - certainly much closer than Freud - to dis­ puting this observation, but even in his case there was the closeness of wife, family, friends and, in particular, Engels, not to speak of others who were supporters and sympathizers in a more general sense.63 These observations are highly relevant to the second issue I raised why Marx is so confident in Capital that he can endorse the first part of a two-part method that he had been so critical of in the Grundrisse, without feeling that he had essentially obliterated his differences with the political economists in the process. A corollary matter also re­ lates to this confidence, and addresses the distinct possibility that in such an endorsement Marx would be giving free rein to those who would carry out only the method of inquiry (for reasons already al­ luded to) but not the method of presentation that alone makes concretion possible. After all, his criticisms in the Grundrisse would seem no less valid a decade later, and perhaps more valid in the 66

Marx's critique o f the method o f political economy circumstances. Here it would seem inconceivable that Marx would expect the dialectical mode that follows to provide enough ballast to overcome the empirical method that preceded it .precisely because o f the direction Society was taking at the time. The answer, to the extent that there is one, must lie in Marx’s in­ creased participation in the lay scientific societies found in London at the time, coupled with the impact upon him of the need to found not just a new ‘scientific socialism’, but a new approach to inquiry and analysis as well.64 If the real beginning of thought lay in abstraction abstract determinations in either the common-sense or disciplined observer mode - then an empirical procedure which sought to pro­ duce, narrow, refine, formalize and elaborate on them in and through further abstraction until the simplest determinations had been reached would be a sensible continuation of this line of activity. What had always bothered Marx more about the method of political econ­ omy was its attempt at emulation through recapitulation anyway, that part of the procedure which entailed moving back over the path taken earlier in reaching the simplest abstractions and determinations. If natural science could achieve the successes through its practice that it was realizing at the time, then why should not political econ­ omy - or rather the critique of political economy - be able to do the same thing? Nicolaus points out that not long after completing the Grundrisse, Marx wrote to the economist Carey to say that he no longer believed that his rendition of the scientific method (meaning recapitulation) discussed there was correct.65 What really appears to have happened is that Marx found that his desire for a scientific so­ cialism, when coupled with the need for a critical theory alongside yet independent of a critique of political economy without a hope of in­ fluencing the discipline, led him to reassess earlier notions of empiricism and empirical method, with the result that his commit­ ment to a science that was also a theory forced him to study anew the importance of abstraction, even in the natural attitude, but certainly in disciplined observation, as an important element in understanding Society in a responsible, non-speculative way. Marx’s commitment to what has been called ‘an empirically rele­ vant dialectical method’66 had always been strong, and must be considered central in any assessment of the reasons behind the break with the thought of Hegel and the young-Hegelians, not to speak of his more specific concerns as he moved toward the third critique. There was also his confidence in the dialectical method of presenta­ tion, which he offered to the reader in Capital, as well as the view after 1857 that the movement from concepts to concrete wholes discussed in the Grundrisse was not correlated closely enough with research and study of real social processes in the environing society. Much 67

Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure depended on the method of presentation which, of course, turned out to be little more ‘methodical’ than the procedure of ‘working up’ the products of observation and perception into concrete wholes endorsed in the Grundrisse. Perhaps it was the unpredictable and un­ fathomable in thought and thinking that made Marx incapable in the final analysis of understanding and describing its (his) most creative, as opposed to its (his) more repetitive properties and characteristics. Capital, not the Grundrisse, constitutes the first full-fledged text in what is nowadays called the critical theory of Society, for reasons that I suggested earlier and that have been made with great force by prominent critical thinkers of recent times. It is Marx’s refusal to con­ tinue entertaining the hope that critique might improve political economy from within that necessitated a critical theory in opposition to the traditional thinking of both the political economists and the speculative philosophers, each in their own way. An extended assess­ ment of method and procedure following on the Grundrisse seemed essential for these and many other reasons, and the result was a reevaluation of the procedure recommended in that work, one which sought, in line with many societal developments of the time, to reaf­ firm the beginning of thought that had always been central to Marx’s thinking, and to direct it to a more manifestly empirical method which would help achieve his practical and intellectual objectives, without in the process sacrificing the reflexive aspects of the proce­ dure found in materialist dialectics.

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Chapter four

Making analytical and practical sense of Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure

Concrete totality as concrete totalization I have argued that Marx’s critique and reconstruction of the method of political economy, and to a lesser extent that of speculative philo­ sophy, cannot itself be counted a method even in the sense that it may be appropriate to say that political economy has a method. This, I would argue, can be explained by the very nature of thought, analysis and reflection itself, and its tie to the individual theorist. Method, per se, must, in the event, appertain to those properties of intellection and industry which are more ‘available’ for emulation and more sur­ face in character, thus making it possible for imitation itself to occur.1 To the extent that thought is thought, one might say, it is not reduc­ ible to a method or technique which others may emulate to achieve similar insights, or insights as deep and profound as those realized by the one we desire to imitate, grasp, master, appropriate and, as it were, possess through recapitulation. Even in Marx’s revised esti­ mate of what he was doing (or had already done) as it appears in Capital, there is only the so-called method of inquiry (or process of first composition) that is conditionally ‘available’ to others as a guide to knowledge.2 This part of what I believe to constitute his critical/dialectical procedure is actually nothing less than an exhaustive enterprise of search, research, abstraction, comparison, thought, collection, fur­ ther collection and abstraction, thought, etc. that both stands on its own and can be expected to inform, both immediately and over time, the method of presentation and/or the process of reflection. Here it may be more appropriate to speak of what is potentially available to any person so motivated who is willing to go to the stupendous effort that is required. To be sure, the effort involved nowadays, in the era of full-blown ‘social technology’ and ‘administered empiricism’, is much different. Indeed, one might characterize the skills and abilities involved in engaging in this kind of study as one requiring as much of 69

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure an administrative/managerial and technological capacity as an intel­ lectual and ‘scholarly/scientific’ one. Today, one might say, with Adorno and others, that the real danger lies in the academic division of labour itself, one which has split empirical and theoretical practi­ tioners in politics, economics and the social sciences into two camps, the first largely devoid of reflective insight into what they have before them, and the second incapable of the effort involved in empirical work, in contrast to what is required to carry out formal speculative analysis.3 It may well have been the threat posed by this latter possibility to his own work that convinced Marx that there must be more to critical inquiry than the ‘working up’ of concepts from one’s own experience and practice. It is certainly no accident that Marx included, alongside his critique of the method of political economy after Smith and Ri­ cardo, a critique of Hegel’s speculative philosophy. I suggested in the last chapter that both the original anti-method, but especially the re­ vised one, constituted an effort on Marx’s part to avoid the joint, as well as the individual, effects of both kinds of ‘error’. Thus one might claim with some justification that the result, as Marx described it in the preface to the second edition of Capital, Volume 1, sought to steer a middle course between the extremes of: (a) excessive specula­ tion in the absence of empirical materials beyond those available in one’s own practice and experience; and (b) a process of abstraction followed by an effort which simply retraverses the route already taken to the ‘simplest determinations’ in order (allegedly) to discover the ‘complex whole’ that it really began with. Marx, now of the view that he must create a full-fledged critical theory for reasons already indi­ cated, effectively brings together the empirical and the speculative in a dynamic new form of active, practical reflection.4 What is unique and of lasting value about this new form of reflec­ tion is almost irrelevant to the narrow question of method addressed here. Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure is reflective precisely be­ cause it realizes the mode of appropriation carried out by a thinking head, but does so in a way which shows the concrete in both structural and processual form. Indeed, what is available for emulation by anyone able and willing to follow the critical/dialectical procedure, while certainly not a method, is a process of sorts. This process or procedure seeks to recover the sense of man’s duplex character as simultaneously within and outside nature by reflecting, in its very act­ ivity of concretion and re-concretion (totalization), the structure of the dynamic, motional collective and historical whole. To be sure, this procedure is radically at variance in both its phases with the way phenomena, events, etc. actually come into being and are sustained, since thought and reality are not identical and cannot be made so. But 70

Making sense o f Marx's critical/dialectical procedure this is what necessitates the development of the dialectical method of analysis, reflection and presentation both following on and informing through critique the search, research, abstraction, comparison, thought, etc. so central to the method of inquiry or process of first composition. When Marx attacked political economy for the way it ‘unfolded’ or reflected the materials in front of it, he clearly gave the formative and informative character of concretion and reconcretion too little credit. But he was pointing to the second part of his procedure not only for being radically at variance with what political economy does when it seeks to consider its materials - recapitulation aimed at emu­ lating the way reality is alleged to come into being. He was also drawing attention to the many-sided nature of ‘presentation’ as itself made up of composition (in its second phase), organization and structurization, all activities expressing the need for an ordered sense in exposing or unfolding the materials. Thus the word presentation is itself too facile and superficial in its meaning for us, denoting an al­ most automatic process which would appear to follow from the first phase of the critical/dialectical procedure, combined with ‘reflection’ backward through the key analytic categories. That this is not the case is all too evident from the care that Marx took with the organization and topical ordering of Capital, Volume 1, in particular his decision to begin with the commodity rather than with either labour or ‘primi­ tive accumulation’, and the way this led him to revise the process of ascension described in the Grundrisse away from the abstract to the concrete and toward the individual to the general in A Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy ? The most active and reflective aspects of the way the materials are presented by Marx remind us of his analysis of the critical elements of man’s productive life: an active, labouring human being, materials (‘natural’ or ‘man-made’) to be worked on and the instruments (‘natural’ or ‘man-made’) to do it. What only underscores once again man’s unique duplex character or ‘nature’ is that people do not nor­ mally bring to work or labour the reflective mode that characterizes the effort to appropriate the world concretely with a thinking head. This is not to say that these activities do not partake of a common base in observation and perception. It rather addresses the special nature of concrete totalization as a process of thinking constitutive of a labour in its own right. This is what Marx meant, in the passage from the Grundrisse cited in Chapter Three, when he contrasted the appropriation that the thinking head realizes through this activity to that achieved by ‘the artistic’, religious, practical and mental appro­ priation of the world’.6 Note further the distinction here between

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Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure concretion and reconcretion on the one hand, and the rather differ­ ent reference to ‘mental’ appropriation on the other. The first refers to both the method of presentation and the process of reflection backward, while the second refers to the method of inquiry - disci­ plined observation or abstraction - what Marx later came to call the (prior) process by which we ‘appropriate the materials in detail’.7 Concrete totalization nevertheless must be present if this particu­ lar labour is to be engaged in. Otherwise the mental appropriations will never get beyond the materials themselves. Their meaning and sense, not being transparent, cannot simply be ‘reflected’ through concepts and categories. These ideas and notions must be in a process of continuous interaction with the materials themselves. In this case there is little sense in being overly concerned with the idea of ‘begin­ ning’.8 Only when it comes to presentation, along with inquiry, over the period of the process of concrete totalization, does the matter of beginning acquire the status of a pre-eminent concern. For it is where one chooses to begin in reflecting on what has already been ‘com­ posed’ by the method of inquiry that determines the sense of the unfolding or exposition - the written composition or presentation. There is nothing automatic about this latter choice of where to begin, as Marx demonstrated in his consequential decision to begin Capital with a discussion of the commodity rather than with labour or ‘primi­ tive accumulation’. The effect of this choice certainly need not have dictated the rest of the volume, and subsequent ones, yet it did set the tone for a particular unfolding for Marx, an exposition simultaneous­ ly from the individual to the general and, within the concretion, from the concrete to the abstract to the concrete etc.9 While it is, of course, possible to emulate the method of presenta­ tion employed by Marx in its general outlines, the challenge is to adapt this method, based as it must be on different data and revised institutions and situations, to the contemporary nature of capitalism and Society. Still, it remains true to say of the method of inquiry that it was guided by concretions and totalizations which are to a great extent Marx’s own, and therefore amenable to no method beyond the procedures cited. These notional constellations, however, continue to inform capitalism and Society today. One might even say that they reflect the nature or essence of the system, today no less than when Marx wrote, precisely because they appertain to what Sekine (among others) has called a dialectic of capital, the analytic basis for unfold­ ing (or exposing) a purely capitalist society. The analysis of capitalism must begin in the commodity as the originary notion of presenta­ tional composition even today, because this is the empirical/notional concretion that motivates, inspires and guides. It and the organiza­ tion of what is presented is different from the process of concrete 72

Making sense o f Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure totalization that creates and recreates the totality, yet it remains the empirical/notional essence of capitalist society.10 Beginning in the commodity would appear to be essential to a ma­ terialist dialectics which is after the whole of capitalism and Society, the dynamic of structure and process over time that has converted the primitive accumulation from an accident of history into the perma­ nent unfolding of (and toward) a purely capitalist society (not just economy). This unfolding, however, is no longer a matter of accident or chance. Its essence is its ‘thingness’ for and in itself, its dialectical nature in reality in the form of a natural necessity which is com­ prehended by reference to the interplay of Aristotle’s four ‘causes’ (material, formal, final, efficient). Capitalist society, in this reckon­ ing, is not inevitable in its unfolding and completion, but it is determined with regard to the interaction of its categories.11 Such beginning attempts to avoid both self-satisfied speculation (Hegel) and empty abstraction and recapitulation (political economy) and, as such, speaks to the difference between the first and second phases of the critical/dialectical procedure. After all, it is clear that Marx treats primitive accumulation as the predecessor in history of capitalist ac­ cumulation, yet discussion of it is only to be found in the final, concluding section of Volume 1 of Capital, not at the beginning of the text.12 One might argue with justice that Marx’s procedure could be emu­ lated using his originary categories for pre-, post- and in-process concrete totalizations, while conforming as closely as possible to the method of inquiry, undertaken assiduously and exhaustively, with the caveat regarding its more ‘capital-intensive’ nature noted at the out­ set taken into account. Yet it must be clear from the very non-identity of thought and reality, which Marx used to build his own conception of science and the scientific in opposition to both Hegel and the pol­ itical economists, that the beginning which is conditionally available for emulation by others in the method of presentation is different and distinct from the beginning whose circumstances uniquely make possible and sustain the method of inquiry. While there is a sense in which it is valid to speak of a method of inquiry which is publicly available, this too has to be understood to pertain to general aspects and processes only. To some extent the concretions and totalizations that Marx so well described and displayed can never recapture the starting points so central to his thought in circumstances in which his own analysis must remain supremely relevant but nevertheless unique.13

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Marx's critical/dialectical procedure Phases, levels and types of/in the procedure This issue of when it makes sense to be concerned about where one begins and when it does not cannot ignore the interplay between con­ cretion, inquiry, composition and formal presentation. Both parts of the critical/dialectical procedure are influenced and variously af­ fected by concretion, and one is required to ask just what there is about Marx’s thought that sets it apart from that of others. Many as­ pects of his thinking bearing on beginning in life, thought and abstract inquiry are properties he shares with any wide-awake, sensi­ tive, highly intelligent person, to be sure. But others are virtually unique to Marx himself, and one is warranted in asking how much of this uniqueness is to be attributed to his background, upbringing, later relationships and life circumstances. Of that which would re­ main after these factors had been discounted, how much is to be discovered in the method of presentation and how much in the method of inquiry? While it is tempting to want to find the remainder (and more) in the method of presentation, this ignores or downplays the role of concretion as Marx described (and experienced) it, and its influence over time on what he decided to inquire into and how he decided to go about it. Part of the reason we may be so tempted lies in the way Marx him­ self depicts the so-called method of presentation. One might readily get the impression that there is limited (if any) carry-on between in­ quiry and exposition, and indeed that they constitute discrete, temporally segmented phases that do not overlap and reciprocally influence one another. Consider further Marx’s description of his method of presentation in Capital as a ‘coquetting’ with the Hegelian dialectic, and recall his criticism of the more able political econo­ mists, who, he says, have the information etc. before them but ‘unfold’ (expose, exposit) it in the ‘typical’ English way, thereby (pres­ umably) missing the essential truth which lies concealed in the facts, events, relations and phenomena they have abstracted.14 What I am suggesting is not only that the method of presentation is a compli­ cated and involved procedure relative to the method of inquiry or investigation, but that, even when those unique aspects of a person’s biography (e.g. Marx) have been discounted, the nature of the pro­ cess of concretion must still include reference to these factors in order fully to understand how perception, conception and abstrac­ tion relate to it and to the two ‘parts’ of the critical/dialectical procedure.15 Indeed, I want to argue that distinctions like this, in common with any attempt to describe (especially descriptions of thought and thinking), are themselves based on the selfsame erroneous

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Making sense o f Marx's critical/dialectical procedure dichotomization. By this I mean that the distinction between the two methods in Marx is an instance in its own right o f the method o f pres­ entation'. This difficulty is endemic to all descriptions, for example, and can be seen in the fact that Marx’s studies are always superior to his description of what he is doing.16 Thus his attempt to describe the correct procedure as a response to one ‘moment’ of his critique of the method of political economy in the Grundrisse is notably behind what he is actually doing in that text. Similarly with the revised estimate of what he is doing and its actual relation to Capital in the preface to the second edition of Volume 1. In neither case, let it be noted, are we assuming that each introduction or preface actually precedes its re­ spective text in a temporal sense. Marx has already made it plain that presentation differs from the process by which the text is assembled, and now we need to look at this more carefully.17 The relationship between the two methods as Marx depicts them in the preface to the second edition of Capital, Volume 1, and his point about the difference between the way things come into being and are sustained on the one hand and should be depicted (e.g. con­ cretely) on the other in the introductory section of the Grundrisse require further discussion in light of what has just been said. Far from ‘corresponding’ to one another, these two discussions are related by descent, as it were. The method of inquiry is a forced procedure of surrogating experience and practice, whereas the method of presen­ tation is interrelated with it through concretion. Depicted formally, both methods combine to provide only the skeletology of the criti­ cal/dialectical procedure - that part publicly knowable in and through description - rather than a complete rendition, as noted. Meantime, all this human activity and industry occurs within life as a whole, regardless of its properties, composition and interrelations. History therefore comprehends everything that people do, whether it expresses their inclusion in nature or their apparent ‘freedom’ from it given in their capacity to conceptualize it as being ‘external’ to them as such.18 The way that reality is depicted or represented as a whole there­ fore comprehends in its ambit, and requires for its realization, not only both ‘methods’, but the capacity for (and the expression of) con­ cretion. Concretion’s job is to try to render sensible through concerted intellectual industry the reality which is the product of many of the factors already cited that are not publicly available. Thus concretion and the two methods whose unique properties in Marx’s hands can only be explained or rendered sensible by reference to fac­ tors etc. outside and extant from them are the basis of the attempt to capture the essence of a reality whose historical process must always be at variance with such efforts. As Zeleny makes clear, Marx’s pre­ 75

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure occupation with undoing Hegel’s claim to the identity of thought and reality, in the form of a theoretical practice available to Hegel alone, took its point of departure in the realization that, were they the same, thought and thinking would be unnecessary. Since they are not, the purpose of thought must be to use its specific capacities to make sense of reality in its way rather than attempting to emulate it through recapitulation.19 Thus far I have discussed Marx’s two methods in a way which might imply that I am concerned about what the method of presentation can do for the method of inquiry, but not the reverse. To be sure, in both cases we have had to bring the specifically human capacity for concretion into the reckoning, and at the same time cite such a capac­ ity as one devoted to sense-making in the midst of a vast number of thoroughly unexplainable, because publicly unavailable, aspects and properties of the individual’s own ‘history’ as a member of the species (e.g. general properties of human perception, conception, composi­ tion and concretion), as well as more specific aspects of membership Table 1 Essential analytic concepts and their non-reflexive correlates in Marx Common-sense perception

Scientific conception

Analytic reflective essence

cars, toasters, cable t.v.

‘goods and services’

commodities

cost, price, wage

exchange value (value)

use-value (Value)

landowners, ditchdiggers, steamshovels

Labour; Nature (labour theory of value)

work, job, career

‘factors of production’(land, labour, capital) division of labour

mine, yours, theirs

‘possession’; property

expropriation; surplus value (absolute and relative)

stores, banks, businesses

‘the economy’

capitalism

‘politics’ (work, career)

government; ‘public sec­ tor’

the state (executive com­ mittee)

people

population; census; demography work; leisure; consump­ tion individuals; persons; ‘subjects’

class; family

abstraction; abstract to­ tality

concretion; concrete to­ tality

life John; Jane things, events, relations

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class structure; class struggle

Society human beings; human animals

Making sense o f Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure (in a class, family, gender, culture, nation-state, occupation, etc.). But none of this is to deny the importance of a careful understanding of the nature of inquiry or investigation as a species-specific form of industry and activity in its own right. Instead of assuming that we can take the method of inquiry as (and where) we find it relative to a method of presentation which must be comprehended as more than a post-investigative ‘layout’ - a sterile organization of materials to be automatically reflected through key concepts and categories - it is necessary to consider carefully first what inquiry is and what it means, that is, the sense of such investigative activity.20 So much energy has been expended discussing the difference be­ tween common-sense and social-scientific (political and economic) knowledge that one would think that no other activity of thought and conceptualization was available to (or required by) human beings. I have discussed this elsewhere as one of the corner-stones of the ‘American Ideology’. What is usually ignored, or relegated to the status of a footnote, goes far beyond even the phenomenological ‘thirdorder construct’ in defence of the everyday and common-sensical.21 It is the fact that concerted, disciplined inquiry of a ‘scientific’ kind is, among other things, an intellectual device for overcoming the limits to knowledge and knowing posed by our dependence on our own practice and experience as a basis for moving from observation and perception to conceptualization and abstraction. In a sense, one could treat the entire enterprise as a co-operative and collaborative act of knowledge and knowing in potentia if not in actuality, except for one thing. Here I have in mind the fiction of objectivity and value freedom, but not because the ‘subject’ is not honoured. Political economy and the social sciences are not objective enough.72 It is in the light of this problem bearing on the attractiveness of these ‘sciences’, these ‘disciplines’, that the question arises: What can be done to salvage the sensible and necessary empirical/conceptual properties that they exhibit in action as both social knowledge and collective industry? It is in part as an answer to this question that Marx formulated materialist dialectics, the activity of concretion linking and interrelating both the method of inquiry or investigation and the method of presentation in all its aspects. Its formal properties as a procedure of the sort already suggested constituted a response to the very fact that thought and reality are not identical, that observa­ tion and perception, and even ‘scientific’ studies like political economy and the social sciences, do not apprehend reality directly or even through disciplined and industrious research on its own.23 The issue was not simply the claim of non-identity for Marx, but rather what human beings are to do given that this is the case. Marx’s point, of course, was that thought’s non-identity with reality is part o f this 77

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure reality, an aspect of human history, and also that the effort to recover reality through knowledge, far from being turned aside, must take a path radically opposed to (not just different from) the processes by which reality came into being and sustained itself if it was to be com­ prehended and rendered sensible.24 The resulting ‘logic’ is not put forward by Marx in defence of an exclusively ‘structural’ and/or genetic analysis of a phenomenon as often claimed, however. Indeed, the critical/dialectical procedure fre­ quently can be seen to combine an ‘historical’ analysis of the development of a phenomenon (wages; the working day) with a struc­ tural analysis. The important point is that, whenever in the procedure these two types of study of an object, phenomenon, etc. are found, the latter must be present for it even to begin to meet the requirements of dialectical understanding. To be sure, it is concretion (and recon­ cretion) that makes it possible for historical and/or structural analysis to be unfolded in a way which will expose the essense of the object - the ‘object-matter’. If, however, historical and structural ‘ex­ planations’ are seen by students of materialist dialectics to constitute the raison d'etre of the two methods that Marx cites in Capital as con­ stitutive of his science, then this error is indicative not only of a misunderstanding of what is at stake in concretion, but of ignorance of the role of reflexivity in informing both methods as they interact on one another.25 Thus it clearly is not enough to tell anyone interested in carrying out the critical/dialectical procedure to begin with the commodity, not because this is an incorrect starting point for the method of pres­ entation but rather because it presupposes that this part of the skeletology as described by Marx constitutes the point of origin of a new transaction discrete and distinct from the method of inquiry or investigation, one which can be counted on to reveal the essence of capitalism and Society directly, as long as the basic categorical organ­ ization of Capital is adhered to. This sort of automaticity theme is very popular, but problematic inasmuch as concretion and totaliza­ tion were not intended to be subsumed into a static method of presentation. Beyond Kosik’s observation that: ‘The dialectics of the concrete totality is not a method that would naively aspire to know all aspects of reality exhaustively and to present a ‘total’ image of reality.... Rather, it is a theory of reality as a concrete totality’ is the impact that this point must have on our understanding of the role observation, perception, conception and abstraction, carried out in a disciplined and formally organized way, must play in materialist dia­ lectics.26 Such scientific research, because of what it allows us to accomplish over and above the limits of our own practice and experience (Marx’s 78

Making sense o f Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure exhaustive analysis of government reports on the English industrial system is a case in point), cannot help but have an influence on the way we concretize the whole, where we decide to go in the scientific work we are doing (if we go anywhere further), the status we give to different reports, ‘facts’, data, testimony, opinions, disciplines, practitioners, etc., and even the structural organization of the pres­ entation. As it happens, in the preface to the second edition of Capital, cited for its statement of the two methods, there is also a long excerpt which Marx has taken from a review of the book. Marx cites the review as highly accurate on the matter of what the author of Capital is doing, and shows in the process that he is at least as pleased that the reviewer appreciates the exhaustive investigative labours he has undertaken as the competence of the concretions on their own and in concert with both these labours and the structural analysis that necessarily goes with them in any effort to unearth the laws of a social and historical phenomenon like capitalism.27 Materialism, concretion and natural necessity Since concrete totality - concretion - is not an attempt to grasp, mas­ ter and take control of the whole as a ‘domination of (external) nature’, but is the theory (not just idea) of reality as a concrete totality, it becomes important to ask what it can accomplish that cannot be realized in and through abstraction and division. Here Marx was al­ ways very clear, though more so in a technical sense in some texts than in others. A key consideration was the status of political econ­ omy and its critique as not just a social science, but a science of social relations in capitalist society. While political economy on its own had failed this test of its real object matter - Society as the point of refer­ ence and the first presupposition - the purpose of any proper science of social relations in a given historical setting (e.g. capitalism) was to lay bare (e.g. expose) the moments of the whole through an unfolding of the key concepts which appropriate these moments concretely. From thought’s non-identity with reality, Marx did not conclude the impossibility of rendering it sensible. He formulated a new practice based on a process of truth-seeking radically at variance with either historical process or its recapitulation following on abstraction to the simplest determinations.28 The reason that Marx referred to this process as materialist dialec­ tics was not because he sought a science of reduction which would concern itself with the simplest atomic elements of human life as physical matter. Indeed, if any scientific practice obtained which had metaphysical or revelatory value for Marx, it was clearly biology. Bio­ logy, following on his respect for Darwin’s work, and his active 79

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure participation in the lay scientific societies popular among intellect­ uals in London at the time, not physics, was his ‘paragon’ science for reflection on human society and development. Human beings were human animals whose duplex character as a part of ‘nature’, and a species able to conceptualize itself as distinct from and ‘outside’ it, did not alter this fact. Consciousness is determined by existence, not the reverse, as Marx and Engels argued against Hegel in The German Ideology. This even held for intellectuals and those involved in con­ cretion, if only because: (a) thought and thinkingare acts; and (b) the conscious mind has its roots in animate nature. It is therefore noteworthy that for Marx materialist dialectics is the science of man’s nature as a duplex creature for whom both collectiv­ ity and historicalness are originary features of his being. Concrete totalization, in and of itself, and in relation to the two ‘methods’ in their separateness and interaction, is a way of returning through this unique human capacity to our status as a human animal. That this had to be achieved through a procedure diametrically opposed to the way human history and institutions are perceived to come into being and be sustained is something Marx sought to demonstrate through the very operation of this procedure. ‘Nature’, far from being a mere ‘thought-determination’, ‘the concept in its non-conceptuality’, as it was for Hegel,30 was a core concept of critique and analysis which revealed man’s essence to be duplex in character, but first, last and always that of a human animal. Marx’s materialist dialectics is a the­ oretical naturalism, seeing ‘nature’ in Aristotle’s sense as generative of a different order of ‘necessity’ from that which was and still is the subject of ‘logic’.31 In effect, Marx is addressing the capacity that human beings have, as collective and historical creatures capable of life, intellection and practice on the one axis and observation, abstraction and concretion on the other, to create or generate, without really knowing precisely how or why, natural necessity through their institutions and activities over time, space and circumstance. Indeed, Marx was particularly concerned to show how political economy and allied forms of disci­ plined inquiry had inverted the natural and ‘unnatural’, with the conspicuous assistance of logic and related studies.32 Thus, (a) things were treated as ‘natural’ and the essence of a ‘human nature’ which was not a property of a particular socio-economic system based on given production relations (the wage form), while political economy in the same breath prided itself on being (b) the science of man’s choice of activity under conditions of scarcity. The first treatment (a) was fetishism, or the reification of an historically and culturally spe­ cific social relation into a ‘thing’ (e.g. commodity), while the second

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Making sense o f Marx*s criticalIdialectical procedure (b) viewed the real unfolding of the system as a whole as blind chance, combined with scarcity and animal (human) nature.33 It is Marx’s attempt to capture, or at least to illuminate, this un­ folding in and through his own exposition that has led many to say that materialist dialectics is ‘after the thing itself. Since the thing itself is its wholeness, including those moments that constitute its contradictory properties, saying this is the same as saying that dialec­ tics is after the whole. Again, however, this is not to say that concretion in particular seeks to grasp, capture or master the whole by dominating and abstracting (e.g. externalizing) all its ‘parts’ or as­ pects. On the contrary, its object is its topic, and to this end it ‘reflects’ it in its activity, but not as an empty, mystificatory or reified whole. To be after the whole means to ‘expose’ it using concepts that are essential to it, ones which provide the basis for an unfolding which seeks to lay bare the natural necessity (‘nature’) of the system through a procedure which is ‘in’ nature only in the sense that nature is both man’s place and his self-understanding of the place ‘outside’ him­ self.34 Thus it is a serious error, when trying to make sense of materialist dialectics, to address the unfolding of man’s nature as a social and historical animal as something which is captured by, in and through the analysis, as if somehow it was now, after all, possible to realize the unity of thought and reality. It is the concern in Marx with essence and the essential which shows that he knows that this cannot be the case. Because he refuses to acquiesce in either the Hegelian specula­ tive mode at the one extreme, or political economy’s attempted emulation of historical process through recapitulation following on abstraction and division at the other, does not mean that what his procedure achieves is an identity. It is Marx’s refusal to accept the view of the precursors of present-day thinkers like Popper and Hayek that all sciences are unified by a single method but divided by differ­ ent objectives that led him to formulate materialist dialectics. Here it becomes evident that it is the objective - objective truth - that is the same for all sciences, and the ‘methods’ that must be different.35 Political economy, that false and incomplete science of social re­ lations that fetishizes the historically and socially conditioned (Society, wages, classes) and at the same time denatures what people do, think, discuss and produce through its confusion about the rela­ tion between method and objectives, becomes an uncritical defender of both capital and Society as a consequence.36 It tells us to stop short of what we can know by posing for us a set of norms in the form of ‘logic’, theory of knowledge etc. which are to function as ‘objective’ guides to and controls upon what knowledge is and how we can say we know and understand something 37 Knowledge of a thing is different 81

Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure from the history and development of that thing, even if its history and development are an important part of or prelude to such knowledge - the pre-reflective and pre-analytical part grasped ‘partially’ through abstraction and division. Marx says from the first that all this does is clarify what we perceive and observe, but the collective aspects of it, as noted, must be seen to do more than this. Still, the main point of his critique of the method of all forms of such non-reflexive, albeit disciplined, inquiry addressed to man as a social and historical being is that they delude themselves and shortchange the people by the fic­ tional appropriation of the object allegedly realized through recapitulation.38 The reviewer of Marx’s method to whom I referred earlier was cited by Marx in his preface to the second edition of Capital, Volume 1, not because the review was flattering, but rather because the reviewer fully understood and appreciated the procedure and logic, and the conception of ‘law5, that Marx was employing in both >4 Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy and Capital39 What is interesting is the reviewer’s preference for the ‘severely realistic’ method o f in­ quiry over the ‘German-dialectical’ method o f presentation, and the likelihood that Marx’s later reference to these two methods as the essence of the critical/dialectical procedure as a whole is an acknow­ ledgement by Marx that the reviewer’s formulations are both sensible and correct. I have already suggested why I believe that Marx’s ac­ knowledgement here that this is indeed his procedure and logic fails even to begin to capture what is at stake in such thought and thinking on his part, and have offered some substantial amendments to this rendition, while yet admitting that one’s description of what he is doing when he thinks can probably never be adequate to what is going on when one is thinking and expressing oneself. To be sure, this prob­ lem of description is only a real problem (e.g. of analysis, thought, practice) if we fail to compare a given description to the actual work and study that has been carried out.40 In responding to the reviewer’s criticism of the method of presen­ tation, Marx is able, paradoxically, to mobilize the more complimentary parts of the review against this very assessment. The citations which he has excerpted and which I have reproduced below will bear this out, while at the same time underscoring what is at stake in concretion in its relation to the two methods cited by the reviewer and acknowledged by Marx. The one thing that is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenome­ na, in so far as they have definite form and mutual connection 82

Making sense o f Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e. of their tran­ sition from one form into another, from one series of connections into a different one. This law once discovered he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life.41 The reviewer goes on to clarify precisely what is required if this purpose is to be realized, and in the process suggests that ‘the method of presentation’ must take a different form from both perceived his­ torical developments and ‘the method of inquiry* into these developments. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing; to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive Table 2 Beginning and process in thought, science and life Orientation

Life

Intellectual Life

Practical Concerns

Function, activity Observation; Perception

Common-sense ‘recipe’ knowledge confirmed and discontinued

Formation of Care, concern, ‘ideal types’ ‘determination’ from typifications

Conception; Abstraction

Embodied disciplined observation; effort; ‘work*

Potentially disembodied Method of Inquiry /Investigation ‘to appropriate the material in detail1

Concretion; Totalization

Reflexivity as a beginning; the beginning of reflexivity in thought

Analytic practice; ‘Natural necessity*; ‘unfolding’ relation of (exposing) ‘objective conditions’to change through understanding

Abstract Whole of ‘simplest determin­ ations’ as basis for change through ‘intervention*, ‘variable manipulation’

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Marx's critical/dialectical procedure determinant orders of social conditions, and to establish as impar­ tially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting points. For this it is quite enough if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it.42 From this the reviewer concludes (correctly) that Marx views the historical process, and the discrete periods of which it is composed, as part of the natural history o f the species. Here it is evident that the method and logic employed by Marx demonstrate his support for an evolutionary conception of human development, as Heyer, among others, has argued, one that embodies a biological/organic rather than a physical-mechanical conception of ‘law’.43 Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, conscious­ ness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence.... A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among them­ selves as fundamentally as plants and animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, etc. Marx e.g. denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population.44 The only possible way that these laws can be grasped by the human mind is by dint of a procedure which is counter and contradictory to both the perceived historical development and the recapitulative ef­ fort that follows on abstraction to the simplest determinations for political economy. It is because history is human history (sense experience) at the same time that it is a part (species) of natural history (sensuous need) that it is possible to isolate these laws, but necessary to employ a radi­ cally different procedure to do so, one whose very power speaks to the inapplicability ‘in the abstract’ of the laws it discovers beyond the given historical period. This follows not only from the structuring and organizing activity of the method of presentation, but from the more reflexive act of concretion linking and co-ordinating the two

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Making sense o f Marx's critical/dialectical procedure methods and providing a materialist analysis in its own right, one that begins in the actual phenomenon.45 For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that... facts be inves­ tigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different moments of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of succes­ sions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves 46 Far from Marx being a rigid ‘abstract’ determinist on the matter of laws, it is the political economists who believe in ‘general laws’ that hold for all periods of human development, with Marx the restraining influence on such flights of fancy in and through a procedure which demonstrates the inapplicability of the notion of law from mechanics and physics 47 Logic and contradiction in the critical/dialectical procedure The essence of man’s natural history can thus be grasped only through a materialist dialectics which is after the ‘thing in itself in its wholeness. This procedure requires, among other things, that con­ cepts be reflected back into their own history, which is part of the natural history of man.48 The laws which hold in a biological/organic sense only within discrete historical periods of collective life are re­ vealed through concretion - concrete totalization - and must be understood to embody a natural necessity which stands apart from the demands of formal, symbolic or modal logic. These latter de­ mands are ‘abstract’ and ‘artificial’ in the sense that they serve to detach logic from the specifically human powers and abilities that alone can endow it with meaning. ‘To think is at the same time to perceive: it is a constituent part of the process of perception, which always exists as an aspect of human praxis. Since logic as the theory of thought is a constituent part of the process of perception, it is a part o f the theory o f perception.49 Everything that has been said to this point argues against any con­ ception of logic which would constitute itself as an organon of thought and thinking distinct from perception. Concretion is the act of returning to the object in its wholeness, recovering the object from the one-dimensionality and linearity of a form of human reasoning which seeks to detach itself from its nature through abstraction and artifice. Moments and momentousness are of the essence of concrete totalization - the theory and practice of reality as a concrete totality which thereby reflects its real, material nature.50 It is the presence of 85

Marx's critical!dialectical procedure man as mediator which requires that the procedure employed in seeking to return and recover stand counter and contrary to both ab­ straction and recapitulation. Abstraction is a real and necessary feature of human thinking and reasoning, but on its own constitutes an incomplete reflection, one whose possibilities as praxis are nulli­ fied by the act of recapitulation which Marx demonstrated to be of the essence of political economy as a form of traditional theory. Logic, far from standing apart from human being and human activity, must be a reflection of real human thinking and reasoning as part of man’s natural history, man’s ‘nature’.51 The key point about contradictory properties etc. is precisely that they are the essence of reality which concrete totalization must show, address, topicalize, etc. The idea of contradiction as something from which logic as the theory of human reasoning must retreat denies the nature of that which makes it possible. It denies the roots of human reasoning in observation and perception. It denies thought and thinking as a natural human activity which reflects and embodies the contradictory character of reality. It one-dimensionalizes reality by turning away from its wholeness, momentousness, contradictory character, in favour of the false (empirical) concreteness of parts-asfacts-as-events. Such logics establish bounds to thought and thinking which are bounds rather than limits precisely because they are artifi­ cial, untrue. They do not comport with human experience and are therefore no more capable on their own of making sense of human experience than abstraction under the rule of a falsely concrete ‘empirical’ convention. Such logics undergird and are essential to both empirical method (abstraction on its own) and traditional the­ ory (recapitulation as a proxy for thought and reflection through concretion).52 It is to the concept in its relation to its object that we must turn if we are to understand more fully the logic at work in materialist dia­ lectics. Here it is the realization that concepts are not reducible to nominal (or any other) definitions, but are universals whose sense is not synonymous with their functionalist or operationalist ‘meaning’ that is important. At the same time, concepts do not, of course, ab­ sorb their objects - the objects to which they are addressed. These objects never go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, which is to say that they come to contradict the now-traditional norm of adequacy in non-dialectical logic 53 This is not, however, to say of contradiction that it is of the essence in Hegel’s sense, but rather to underscore the material untruth of identity, or even its possibility. The tie I noted earlier between correspondential (as well as copy) theories of knowledge premised on the empirical convention, and logics based on the assumption of the possibility of identity between thinking and 86

Making sense o f Marx's critical/dialectical procedure reality, can now be seen in somewhat bolder relief through an under­ standing of concepts in their relation both to their objects and to the view of them as definitions-in-waiting.54 Marx caught this essential aspect of the concept in his ‘Introduc­ tion’ to the Grundrisse, discussing the method of political economy, which I took up in Chapter Three. Recall his distinction between con­ crete totality as a ‘totality of thoughts, concrete in thought’ and the concept ‘which thinks and generates itself outside or above observa­ tion and conception’. Whereas concrete totality is a product of ‘the working up of observation and conception into concepts’, which for Marx is synonymous with ‘thinking and comprehending’, the concept both exists independently of concrete totality while at the same time being of the essence of what I have called the process of concrete totalization.55 This latter process is, of course, not the only use of the concept; indeed conceptualization has many other uses and objects which occur far more regularly in life than concretion does. It is the tie to observation and what I preferred to translate as perception rather than conception that tells us why the concept not only has many different uses and objects but an independent existence in the real world apart from (though nevertheless essential to) all forms of appropriation of the world (e.g. not only concretion, but ‘artistic, re­ ligious, practical and [other] mental’ appropriations)56 Thus the concept for Marx is the attempt to reproduce through human intellectual activity the inner structure of an object both with regard to its internal relations as a spatial whole and its dynamic, de­ velopmental properties as a whole in process. Knowing that thought can never achieve an identity with reality and/as the object(s) therein to which it is addressed leads Marx to greater efforts at understanding, not lesser ones. It is the logical form or pattern in both of the above senses that gives meaning to the correct view that materialist dialec­ tics is after ‘the thing itself, through efforts at rational understanding which have their roots in the everyday human ability as a conscious, reasoning animal to observe and perceive reality while participating in it, both on our own ‘outside’ nature (consciousness, history, sense experience) and within it (species-being, natural history, sensuous need). The very fact that an identity between thought and reality is impossible requires a different logic of appropriation, one that be­ gins in the object, the material itself. Thus the mediated ‘mirroring’ that occurs in this process of intellectual reproduction, whether through concretion, abstraction or in some other way, takes on a combined formal-structural and genetic ‘essence’ which stands in stark contrast to narrowly causilinear explanatory modes uniting correspondential thinking with non-dialectical logics.57

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Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure Relations and properties in motion - the whole thing in itself that includes all moments, both contradictory and otherwise - is therefore the essence of the picture that Marx attempts to convey when writing about capitalism and its economic activities while focusing on for­ mal-structural and genetic concerns. Today we treat such concerns as non-causal, reflecting the fact that ‘cause’ is now restricted to what Aristotle meant by efficient cause. Marx’s view with regard to under­ standing a phenomenon fixes instead on what Aristotle calls the final cause (the oak within the acorn) and the material and formal causes (the motive for action in the whole as a formal structure of moments). Marx realizes that what Aristotle calls the efficient cause is the least penetrating and most superficial of all those he isolates (formal, final, material, efficient). On its own, it serves to underwrite a correspondential logic which demands the identity of ‘empirical facts’ and reality, while it assists the self-satisfied process - not to say industryof abstraction/recapitulation in annihilating thought and reflection enroute to reconstituting practice in the image of the disembodied disciplined observer.58 Concretion is a process of appropriating the world by the working up of concepts - the products of observation and perception - into an exhaustively researched (abstraction, thinking, comparison, etc.) and essentially organized (formal-structural and genetic relations and properties) whole which is unfolded in and through a mode of exposition which is much more than a mere ‘method of presentation’ for reasons already noted. It is Marx’s emphasis on the formal, essen­ tial arrangement of these relations and properties, coupled with an evolutionary notion of their development as an unfolding, which mo­ tivates the structural and genetic focus in his written (and spoken) reasoning. Thus the ‘arrangement’ of relations and properties that Marx isolates by carrying the process of conceptualization through to its completion in the object as a whole exists only in motion, process, development, change, but this of course cannot be directly embodied in the exposition. Even the contradictory nature of these real, materi­ al relations and properties, apart from this dynamic aspect, can only be depicted by reference to the concept of/as a structurally and developmentally full (pure, concrete) form - its essentiality as a motional (motive) whole of contradictory (and other) moments.59 While there are different ways to appropriate or take possession of reality for Marx, this does not mean, or even imply, identity - the logical form of certainty.60 Conceptual knowledge is always of an ob­ ject whose real sense is its participation in the whole reality that includes it. Marx’s materialist dialectics takes an investigative and ex­ pository form which I have chosen to call the critical/dialectical procedure because it starts with some abstracted, recapitulated ren­ 88

Making sense o f Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure dition combining one or another kind of empirical method with traditional theory (e.g. political economy), and seeks to show the structure and dynamic motion (process) of its (misunderstood) ob­ ject in and through an unfolding of its developed form. This cannot be done in a way which Marx’s logic could call ‘scientific’ without taking account of historical origins, alongside a ‘theoretical proce­ dure which allows for the interpretation of structural connections in that developed form, and at the same time allows for the historicalgenetic component before the form under consideration becomes the developed form’.61 The way I have sought to address the logic that undergirds the critical/dialectical procedure only requires concentration because we have fallen so far away from what knowledge of an object is as a con­ sequence of the joint workings in Society of (a) a correspondential conception of knowledge based on the theory and practice of identitarian thinking, (b) an empirical convention that reduces concepts to nominal definitions en route to reformulating them as atomic ‘things’ in causal or proto-causal relation (parts-as-facts-as-events) in the ‘real world’, and (c) an anti-materialist logic that supports such empiricization, false concreteness and causilinear and identitarian thinking. Marx’s procedure is one which parallels the abstract, reca­ pitulative thinking of empirical method and traditional theory, but does so by moving in a diametrically opposed direction in its process, because this procedure wants to appropriate its object as a momen­ tous, contradictory, material whole, rather than in the linear, causal (or proto-causal), empiricist, correspondential and identitarian man­ ner of political economy and, more recently, the social sciences.62 Theoretical analysis can only realize its object if it takes a path which diverges radically from both the course of history and the attempt to capture it through recapitulation following on abstraction. Concretion is, as a result of this apparent contradiction between it, the process of its object and the attempt to capture it through re­ capitulation, an attempt to return to the whole in thought by appropriating it conceptually in the purest, most total way possible. It is in this specific sense that one can compare it to abstraction on its own, which, however, Marx always realized (but only later admitted) was an essential part of the complete procedure of understanding. Abstraction seeks, like causality in its narrow (e.g. efficient) epistemological form - ‘explanation’, to generate, produce and refine the whole into parts, events, relations, and properties which are dis­ crete and, apparently, concrete as well. This examination and gathering activity is absolutely necessary for any understanding of historical and collective/social objects, even though it takes us away from the essential features o f these objects. The reproduction of the 89

Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure whole as structured, developing, material, momentous and contra­ dictory is a return to it in the only way we can if we are to appropriate it with, in and through concepts, and thereby retrieve understanding of it as an object (i.e. objectively), that is, materially (structurally and genetically).63 I would argue that in this return lies the sense of investing the familiar with theoretical content so that it can be seen in ways that are available to the human capacity to conceptualize, but do not make themselves immediately apparent to observation and percep­ tion, or even to concepts that are (or remain) unreflected on with respect to their objects. It is in and through this form of activity, as well as all other forms of appropriation (including labour in all its aspects) that we simultaneously address (sense experience ‘worked up’) and embody (the sensuous need at the core of our natural his­ tory) our essence, our ‘nature’.64 Abstraction on its own is a reproduction of the familiar as strange, and therefore must be under­ stood to be potentially disembodying when it is followed by recapitulation (abstract totalization) rather than by concretion. As peculiar as it may seem, this process of distancing oneself from the object through the particularization of its wholeness - the produc­ tion of the strange - is, at least in the present social formation and historical period, easier for us to accomplish than the return to the familiar through concrete totalization which is both the goal and the origin of the critical/dialectical procedure 65 Political economy, science, logic These three terms are indicative of the problematic relationship be­ tween conventional logics, traditional theory and empirical method in capitalist society and the critical/dialectical procedure of Marx’s materialist dialectics. In each case, as I have already suggested, there is a process of exclusion at work with regard to Marxian thought in these disciplines, activities and institutions. To be sure, this occurs in tandem with the refusal of Marx, Engels and others either to allow this to happen, or to acquiesce in its objective character when it does. Thus Marx and Engels always believed that the critique of political economy as such was part of political economy. Marx, though recog­ nizing that political economy minus the (his) critical/dialectical component was explainable (historically sensible) by reference to the social formation at a given period of development, would under­ standably persist with/in the view that political economy ‘really’ could not help but include his critique. As I already noted, and shall allude to again in subsequent chapters, this was directly related to Engels’ claim that political economy had taken an unfortunate, if unavoid­ 90

Making sense of Marx's critical/dialectical procedure able, turn, suppressing its collective and critical dimension to become the legitimator of capitalist industrialization.66 It was partly as a consequence of this that economic ‘science’ came to be synonymous with the abstractive/recapitulative approach taken by political economy - a special case of traditional theory and empiri­ cal method, and came thereby to exclude materialist dialectics from the status of an economic or social discipline. It is well known that Marx in particular always resisted this exclusion, and for reasons which, I hope, may now be better understood and appreciated. Far from being ‘led astray* by the conviction that materialist dialectics was the basis for a scientific, rather than a utopian, socialism, Marx was saved from the rhetoric and apologetics of the later Utopians, as well as his unworthy inheritors (Marxists who were not Marxians), by precisely this conviction 67 It meant openness to ‘facts’ without grant­ ing them more than temporary autonomy from the whole that gives them whatever sense they may have as an element in/of their consti­ tuent object. It meant acknowledgement of abstracted empiricism without acquiescence in the false concreteness and identitarian thinking that correspondentialism allegedly realizes in and through a recapitulation of the history of the object.68 Thus Marx wanted his contribution to the ‘critique of political economy’ to be acknowledged as such, even though he understood why it would never be accepted as a contribution to a scientific under­ standing which was based on exhaustive research and investigation (inquiry), as well as comparison, thought, etc. These labours, after all, were clearly subsidiary to concretion for him, both in its own right (‘working up’ concepts as the products of observation and percep­ tion) and as a more comprehensive formal-structural and genetic reformulation than might be realized through ‘normal’ concept­ ualization (however possible it might be given its basis in observation and perception rather than in place of it like explanation). In effect, Marx was saying that, given its object, political economy really could not be a science as long as it simply recapitulated the alleged lifehistory of its now abstracted object, instead of concretely reflecting (on) it as an appropriated object through the mind. This latter object was therefore concrete in thought, displaying through its arrange­ ment of the exhaustively researched and assembled facts (presentation) the momentous, contradictory, motional whole that alone can provide us with theoretical understanding. Marx’s science realized its analytical power precisely because of the absence of a be­ lief in or hope for identity between history and the appropriating capacity of the mind 69 From this it might seem to follow that the logic of materialist dia­ lectics, embodied in and represented by the critical/dialectical 91

Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure procedure, could be explained solely or mainly by reference to Marx’s critique of political economy. But this would be to acquiesce in the very absorption of the object that is given in the idea of the concept as sufficiently reducible to a nominal definition to permit such an outcome. Contradiction is of the essence, to be sure, but because the thing itself in its wholeness and momentousness possesses relations and properties that are not straining in the same direction or exhibit­ ing compatible social etc. properties. It is certainly not because it is the purpose of materialist dialectics to violate ‘nature’! Formal, sym­ bolic and modal logic, alongside identity, correspondence and ‘empiricization’ have accomplished this all too well on their own. As a matter of thought and practice - if not of ‘fact’ - in the present formation, it is the critical/dialectical procedure which alone can preserve ‘nature’ in both its exclusive and inclusive understandings, while making it possible in the process for thought to be fully inte­ grated into the natural history of the species as labour having true (use) value.70 We can now see how these three terms are being (or have been) appropriated by capitalism, Society and acquiescent interest groups within the formation in a way which provides an important contrast between Marx’s open, constantly studying and learning, nonidentitarian mode of ‘appropriation’, described in the introduction to the Grundrisse and elsewhere, and the zero-sum conception of appropriation discovered in academic and professional disciplines which construe ‘appropriation’ to mean private property, whether of ‘nature’ or of the mind (e.g. ‘intellectual property’) / 1 This latter has been happening with a steadily increasing velocity since Marx, not only in terms of the number of concepts being appropriated in this way, but by reference to their organizational and structural import­ ance (e.g. reason, function) for critical analysis and materialist dialectics as well. We are long past the time when we might expect simply to ‘take back’ our concepts in these disciplines, precisely be­ cause what is at stake is the procedure of conceptualization and its relation to thought itself (e.g. abstraction; concretion), not just this concept rather than that one.72 It is ultimately to some form of objec­ tive conditions that such thinking must appeal for a hearing against the illusion of the concrete fact and the abstract whole, with all that this has come to mean for knowledge and practice.

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Chapter five

Ontological underpinnings of the critical/dialectical procedure

Essence and nature I would now like to explore in greater detail what grounds the analysis found in materialist dialectics and embodied in the critical/dialectical procedure. While, in a certain sense, one might consider such an undertaking more appropriate at or near the beginning of a study like this, I have thought it best to present this material following its use and display, in order to allow the sense-making process to build upon a prior exposure to the procedure as such. At the same time, this discussion precedes that of the labour theory of value, beyond the introductory remarks in the first chapter, because here, in contrast, I believe it necessary to show the interdependence between process and theory as it is embodied in a procedure which has been discussed to some extent prior to (and coincident with) being displayed. In ad­ dition, I felt that it was necessary to address the problem of the analytic 'beginning’ before looking at the very different real begin­ ning, objective in the sense that labour really is the essence of human collective life and the historical reality of humanity as a speciesbeing.1 Essentialism, far from constituting the kind of arcane and mysteri­ ous approach to knowledge in its relation to reality that recent critics have alleged or implied, has been the established way of seeking knowledge in virtually all sciences since it was discovered and first developed by Aristotle.2 Essentialism is concerned with the dif­ ference between the necessary and the accidental, and is therefore directly related to the idea that phenomena have natures, or essences, not only in a structural, but in a developmental, perhaps even evol­ utionary and emergent, sense. Indeed, it may be more appropriate to say that development and change is often the essence of any phe­ nomenon and is therefore a fundamental aspect or property inherent in its very nature. The goal of knowledge must be to disentangle the

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Marx’s criticalIdialectical procedure accidental from the necessary, where the latter is understood to be synonymous with the essential and natural, and seek through careful analysis to isolate the developmental logic of the phenomenon in question, always mindful of the point that the difference between such analysis and the reality to which it is addressed is precisely the inability of thought to take account of the accidental and contingent as unpredictable features of reality.3 To equate thus the essence or nature of a thing with its pattern of development is to focus on those necessary features and properties of its being as a thing which will occur and/or emerge in the absence of accidental or contingent events. These latter events or occurrences cannot be accurately predicted and anticipated, save by accident, be­ cause if they could they would not, perforce, be accidental. Change and development being essential to a phenomenon’s thingness, if not its essence or nature per sey investigation of this will require an ap­ preciation of its beginning, its genesis.4 This in turn requires historical inquiry since in no other way can this be known. The issue here has already been addressed, and relates to the sufficiency of such inquiry, and the difference between (a) the phenomenon’s beginning and (b) the starting point of analysis as (c) it is embodied in written presentational form. If labour is the real essence/nature of the human species as a species-being, it is not its starting point, its beginning. Indeed the issue of a general beginning is moot for Marxian analysis inasmuch as it is focused analytically on its starting point in the com­ modity, that entity that contains in all its forms the originary and basic contradiction of capitalism, the contradiction between use and exchange value, real value and surplus value.5 But there is another point that needs to be made here. Just as the process probed through observation and abstraction/recapitula­ tion/aggregation is deeper in its essence and nature than these activities can reveal, so also do we find that the real starting point I just alluded to is to be discovered far below the surface. Indeed, it makes much more sense to speak of genesis than point when address­ ing beginning, because the process that follows on such beginning must be understood and presented in a way radically different from the cause and event linearity presupposed in the idea of reality as a series of sequential and connected points.6 Here the resulting determinism is thoroughly fraudulent and indefensible, precisely because it lacks in virtually every case a careful investigation of the genesis, nature and teleology of the phenomenon in question. In its place we get thoroughgoing atomism and the reduction of wholes and structures in process to allegedly discrete ‘individuated’ events, construed as causes and effects in serial and sequential connection (development, process). To be sure, the conception of causality which prevails here 94

Ontological underpinnings is only one of four types isolated by Aristotle, and the narrowest type (efficient causality) at that.7 The essence of a thing is the structure of processual relations which account internally for its persistence and change. Atomism takes the reality of accidental occurrences and elevates it to an orga­ non of knowledge, as if this could reasonably negate the necessary aspects and properties of a phenomenon. Since investigation and analysis of the genesis, nature and teleology (essence) of a thing can­ not realize certainty because all that can be known is what is necessary, with the accidental necessarily outside this activity, atomists give up on careful analysis of relevant wholes and forms altogether, in favour of focusing on externalized parts-as-facts-asevents in (alleged) accidental collision with other parts-as-factsas-events (points) whose internal properties account for nothing unless they are construed to be basic irreducible units. This means that the notion of narrow (efficient) causality goes hand in hand with a refusal to accord to larger structural and processual wholes the status of a single entity, unless it can be shown (a) that this entity can account residually or variously for individual or part-specific ‘beha­ viour’ and (b) that it possesses residual or vaguely understood ‘emergent’ properties. Even here, however, it is clear that such claims always occupy second-class status relative to those of the empirical and reductionist convention so central to false concreteness.8 Aristotle’s more concrete conception of cause - which those who support the false concreteness of reduction call a ‘broader’ concep­ tion - comprehends as causal concerns about genesis, teleology, function, form and finality, in clear contrast to present-day concerns in the social, behavioural and administrative/managerial ‘sciences’ and, in particular, the theoretical work that emanates from these dis­ ciplines. Thus for Aristotle there were (a) material causes, (b) efficient causes, (c) formal causes and (d) final causes, constituting his analytic concern for (a) genesis (b) proximate cause and event (c) function and form and (d) teleology respectively. All four were necessary, Aristotle argued, for a scientific explanation of a phenome­ non or thing.9 Efficient cause (cause and effect) was the most superficial of the four because it did not attempt to penetrate the internal nature of the phenomenon, but relied instead on an exter­ nalized focus which concentrated on the serial-linear and sequential relation of each of the parts in collision as constitutive of an event. This was seen to be sufficient, because it based its explanation on serial events, understood as individuated ‘facts’, addressing the falsely concrete ‘parts’ solely as things brought to notice by the collisions themselves.10

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Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure Two points emerge from this. First, Popper’s claim that Heraclitus was the first historicist because he reacted to the central reality of change by seeking a theory that could account for and thereby over­ come it can now be turned back on him.11 It is the atomists, not the essentialists, whose obsession with certainty leads them to deify the accidental and ignore the necessary and essential in genesis, nature and teleology. Because such knowledge cannot lead to certainty, it is they who give up on the quest, not the essentialists. This distinction between essentialists and atomists is at least as important for under­ standing the history of philosophy and theory as that between idealists and materialists, the more so because the latter distinction is relatively more confined to modem philosophy than the former.12 A second point relates to wholes and parts, and will be taken up in more detail in the next section. The human being is an organic bio­ logical whole, not a social whole. Social wholes are more than and (in consequence) different from the individuals who comprise them. While the social, behavioural and administrative/managerial disci­ plines concede this in discussions of structure and emergent process/structure, they do not allow such an understanding to reach farther so that it comprehends the social whole as a collective and historical reality which has contradictory properties essential to its understanding as structure and process.1^ Instead, atomists allege, as Marx noted earlier, that they are begin­ ning with a chaotic whole in which they thereafter discern things, phenomena, relations and events not available to normal conscious­ ness. These latter are then either pursued through disembodied disciplined observations to the ‘simplest determinations’, after which a recapitulation process fits them all together in a ‘complex’ whole of many abstractions and determinations, or aggregated directly through a less disciplined, less formal type of recapitulation.14 These parts-as-facts-as-events which they allegedly discover are then stated to be concrete, individuated particulars irreducible to subsidiary con­ stituent parts. Here I think, is the issue. Essentialism believes that the scientific investigation of phenomena must begin in a whole which already possesses the things, phenomena, relations, events etc. that atomists allegedly discover through subsequent abstractions. Fur­ ther, essentialism believes that just because some of the constituent features or properties of a whole are themselves either organic/bio­ logical wholes or social/collective wholes, this does not mean that they need to be both broken down into constituent parts and reassem­ bled in order to be understood. Indeed, as I have already argued, essentialism believes that this is precisely what mitigates against a true understanding of social phenomena.

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Ontological underpinnings As it turns out, atomists as well as idealists have effectively jetti­ soned the notion of ‘nature’ altogether, projecting it outward on to that which is supposed to be ‘other’ to human beings, but which is really the familiar, the ground, the real that most terrifies them and accounts for both their worship of the accidental, under the spell of causality, probability and significance, and their near-obsessive pref­ erence for producing (or inventing) the strange and avoiding the familiar.15 Thus Nature becomes the strange ‘other’ that must be dominated and mastered, allegedly from ‘outside’ it, an orientation to, if not organon for, knowledge that will henceforth be projected back on to human beings in the form of the social sciences and kin­ dred disciplines. The idea that things have essences comprised of their genesis, nature and teleology, and that the capacity for genesis and development is all-too-often an essential feature of a phenome­ non or thing - in the sense of being elemental to its nature - is avoided altogether. It is argued that such thought and thinking in the social realm constitutes wild speculation, which o f course it does if it is not based upon and/or followed up by careful investigation o f the properties and relations o f the abstracted phenomena in question that give it its status and sense as a contradictory but nevertheless dynamic and structured whole both in place and in motion.16 One is hard pressed to ignore the consequences for the critical/dia­ lectical procedure so central to materialist dialectics of this attack by the so-called ‘critical rationalists’. For these latter, this procedure is alleged to be a throwback to the pre- (modern) scientific era, precise­ ly because it is too demanding, in the sense of being too substantial, too much after the thing itself, while it yet acknowledges that thought and reality can never become one, either through certainty or ident­ ity. For atomists, essentialism must seem a thankless task, because it is the atomists who have subjugated their reason to a logical concep­ tion of rightness based on facts and predictions in the social field.17 It is the analytic task itself, and the way in which it accentuates the need to pursue a different procedure to what occurs in daily life - or its more disciplined version - if one is to secure understanding of the whole in its many, varied and contradictory dimensions, that per­ plexes and frustrates the atomists. They rather wish to confine themselves to living off daily life while reviling and belittling its common-sense knowledge (e.g. what the ‘subject’ knows, thinks, etc.) because they have legislated their submission to a whole which they have none the less given up trying to know in its essentials. Political economy began this ‘tradition’ of submission and the social, behav­ ioural and administrative/managerial disciplines continue it today.18

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Marx's criticalIdialectical procedure Wholes, forms and laws Perhaps the best way to underscore the consequences of this atomis­ tic submission to the real whole, exhibited in its preference for a false, abstract version of it as a terminus rather than the real beginning of observation and conception, is the so-called paradox of Zeno’s arrow.19 How can it be both in position and in motion is the big ques­ tion, and it is logic, unhinged and unreal, which offers the non­ solution. It cannot. This is supposed to constitute a proof of the limits of thinking, when it is in truth nothing more than a contrivance, a false limit in the form of a boundary. The point here is that the arrow really is both in position and in motion, but logic once again steps in to tell us that what we know cannot be so even if it is real. Similarly with the Muller-Lyer ‘optical illusion’ of the two lines of equal length, one with arrow lines at each end facing diagonally backward and the other with these lines facing diagonally forward.20 Clever disciplined observers like to ‘correct’ the untutored person when he states that the latter arrow line is longer than the former, as if this showed the limits of perception. But perception is correct because the latter line looks longer and this is the issue.21 If only the atomists could get beyond logic and paradox play to investigate the whole that really already exists for them in abstracted form, and try to make sense of it through analysis and reflection, rather than engaging yet again in the tired melodrama of further ab­ straction to the simplest determinations (atomic constituent particulars), followed by recapitulation and apparent ‘discovery of a great and hitherto unknown or unappreciated complexity. As I noted in Chapter Three, Marx did indeed acknowledge abstraction as a dis­ ciplined ‘empirical’ activity to be a real and viable moment of the critical/dialectical procedure, as long as we did not delude ourselves into believing that we were ‘discovering’ such abstraction from some chaotic whole, and as long as we did not follow this activity by recap­ itulation of the allegedly discovered parts into a new and complex phenomenon allegedly unknown or unappreciated prior to the pro­ cess. It is not just that the whole that observation and perception and its disciplined version - begin in must already ‘be’ if the allegedly concrete parts are to have any meaning (part(s) of what?), but that this whole is already an abstract, rather than a chaotic, whole which can only be made more abstract by solitary reliance on disciplined observation to the simplest determinations.22 The only way for the mind to appropriate a concrete whole is for it to reflect on the more detailed abstract whole created by this disci­ plined ‘empirical’ undertaking’, employing a sense of the whole as a structure in dynamic, contradictory process, rather than engaging in

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Ontological underpinnings the activity of recapitulation, which does nothing more than treat re­ ality as a process which is synonymous with the succession of the abstractions thus aggregated.23 As noted, much in this activity of ana­ lysis and reflection involves presentation in written/printed etc. form as a mode in its own right. Concepts that are being employed are simultaneously treated as corresponding to aspects of reality, while being back-referenced to the time and circumstances of their origin in reality.24 At the same time, contradictory aspects and properties of the whole under investigation, whether a socio-economic formation, a nation-state or a less inclusive social organism, are studied as real, essential properties central to the nature of the whole, while at the same time generative of potential new wholes in the form of new contra­ dictions. Positivist abstracted empiricism, with the conspicuous assist­ ance of logic, will labour mightily to smooth over such contradictions, either by ignoring them, recasting them in the form of further reduced atomic units, or showing that they are either temporary or illusory.25 The real form of a social phenomenon contains all the properties essential to its nature, including an understanding of its genesis and development from earlier forms, and the possibility (under norms of necessity) of new forms, new wholes, emanating from the contradic­ tions in its properties in process.26 Laws and lawfulness thus are neither valid nor appropriate beyond given wholes, given formations. Once again the atomist endeavours to disparage the notion of law and lawfulness addressed to development and change by making the conditions of its acceptance subject to logical requirements, require­ ments which are allegedly a- (or trans-) cultural and historical. The result is the view that in order for one to speak of a phenomenon being subject to law it must (a) take the form of a rule that applies to all times, places, cultures and circumstances and (b) never be ‘falsi­ fied’. In the first case, all one needs to note is Marx’s observation that social laws can only have a scientific status if they are confined to a single whole or formation in dynamic, contradictory motion. In the second, we can recall once more the emphasis in essentialism on what is necessary, and note that the accidental - those events which may falsify a law - cannot by their very nature be included in the scientific analysis of the genesis, nature, form, function and goal of a social organism or phenomenon.27 All of this leads to a peculiar outcome, namely, the realization that it is precisely essentialism’s commitment to the thing itself which, in concert with materialism, leads it to stay truthful to thought, on grounds that its very limits vis-i-vis reality are its powers, embodied in the critical/dialectical procedure. Also, the possibility that predic­ tions emanating from its analysis may be falsified by real events in the future has no bearing whatsoever on its propriety as the only scien99

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure tific way to study social phenomena, since it is precisely the accidental that accounts for the falsification. This is important for essentialism in its materialist variant in particular, inasmuch as it shows that ma­ terialist dialectics can sensibly understand a phenomenon, a whole, in its deeper significance through a method or procedure whose find­ ings or predictions may in due course be falsified by subsequent events. Nothing that can be said of the findings rendered or the pre­ dictions anticipated by the analysis but falsified by accidental, as opposed to necessary, developments should include criticism of the structural/processual, or even the teleological analysis central to the critical/dialectical procedure for this reason, since this procedure never claimed to be capable of including the unexpected and acciden­ tal in its own structure and process.28 Further to this last point is the question of the appropriateness of the term ‘falsification' (or ‘verification’, for that matter) itself. For it is far from clear that we should say that a law or theory has been ‘falsified’ if accidental circumstances which it could not possibly have considered render the law or theory a poor or inaccurate predictor.29 It is appropriate in such a case, the writer would think, to concentrate on precisely what occurred so that we might (a) be clear that it was indeed an accident and (b) consider whether if so, this circumstance might not occur again, and therefore perhaps become an element of the whole that must partake of necessary structural forms and inter­ nal processual developments. Whether it is because new aspects and properties come to constitute necessary rather than accidental char­ acteristics of the whole, or because they were already there but were not properly understood and accounted for in terms of their func­ tions in the whole, the investigation that ‘falsification’ really calls for is once again shown to be substantive and critically/dialectically material rather than formal/logical in nature. The investigation that I am suggesting is needed here is nothing less than a version of the critical/dialectical procedure itself, and it offers no escape through the back door of logic or formalism to the careful student.30 Given in this idea of the whole which accounts for its change, its growth, its development over time, as well as the relations within it between structure and process is the idea that laws and lawfulness, the predictive arm of thought, can hold (as noted) only within a given social formation. This notion of lawfulness is based on the essential features of its wholeness, in particular those contradictory properties which account for so much in its unique development.31 These latter are elemental to its essence, since they draw attention to both (a) genesis of the whole as a form, a totality and (b) the basic nature of the whole revealed in its structure and process. It would not be too much to say that the wholes under investigation possess as a conse­

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Ontological underpinnings quence of these essential features (genesis, nature and teleology) powers, and that it is important in making sense of the idea of law and lawfulness in such a holistic frame of reference to realize that these powers must be understood to be the result of processes internal rather than external to the whole under investigation. They account for change and development, and here it is important to realize that the atomist view of contradictions as logical and formal rather than substantive in nature leads them into serious error.32 This becomes readily apparent when one realizes that the atomist’s understanding of contradictions and contradictoriness presumes that development can only take place through their ab­ sence, thus as a result of the presence of consistencies and regularities and in no other way. Contradiction, in true formalist fashion, is treated as an intervening condition, following the dictates of logic, rather than as a structural property of the whole which is at least as important, if not more important, in powering the process by which it fulfils its essence (genesis, nature and teleology) by completing it.33 Reductionism in the social field, the guiding principle of atomism in thought, requires us to treat all relations as ‘external’ to two or more empirical (or logical) points in space, even if and when they are acknowledged to be occurring inside social wholes. What is clear from this, of course, is that such a conception of wholeness is, as Marx pointed out in his critique of the method of political economy, plainly abstract (i.e. the alleged result of aggregating ‘concrete’ particulars discovered through the process of abstraction and thereafter con­ catenating them into hitherto unknown relations, structures and processes).34 This draws our attention once again to why Marx’s real complaint with the political economists was not abstraction on its own, but rather the recapitulation that succeeded it.35 Contradictions are, as it were, of the essence of any social phe­ nomenon. Commitment to the priority of the whole, its analytic firstness or primacy, further necessitates recognition of the import­ ant function of contradictions as real properties accounting for genesis, nature and teleology, rather than intervening conditions which are either incidental (structure) or interruptive and distortive (process). Essentialists thus draw the contours and boundaries of their investigation of social phenomena much closer to the real limits of thought than atomists as a consequence of being ‘after the thing itself. Whereas atomists consider contradictions to be at best accidental, following from their preference for static ‘variable ana­ lysis’, essentialists consider them to be of the very essence of any and all social phenomena, in the sense of being absolutely essential to a proper understanding of them. In contrast to this, as I noted in the

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Marx's critical/dialectical procedure first section, is the way in which atomists and idealists have gone so much farther in a formalist direction by effectively deifying the ac­ cidental and circumstantial. In the process of doing this, they have necessarily lowered their theoretical sights, acknowledging thereby their abject frustration-approaching-rage with the realization that knowledge cannot be certain and/or cannot become one with reality, the very thing that their chief living exponent in the idealist camp (Popper) blamed Heraclitus for doing as the alleged founder of essentialism.36 Law thus must be understood to constitute the powers that a social whole’s essential aspects (genesis, nature and teleology) can be seen to give rise to in an investigation whose focus on necessities not only includes, but gives special consideration to, contradictions and the contradictory. By factoring such considerations out on the grounds of their being the kind of accident that inconveniences the logical and the formalistic in ‘theory’ and ‘model-building’, atomists guarantee precisely what their defeatism has already ordained, namely, that the accident will rule the day in thought. Such thinking, it turns out, will not allow itself to acknowledge that necessary properties and features of a social phenomenon (essences) can be discovered to exist and that this is the only correct way to study these phenomena scientifically. Lawfulness in the analysis of social phenomena is not a function of studying the regularities to be discovered in the apparent collision of individuated concrete particulars allegedly ‘external’ to each other. Such a false limit constitutes the failure of nerve that Marx detected in political economy’s method, one which economics and the social, behavioural and administrative/managerial disciplines continue today under the guise of a rigid distinction between theory and method in their respective activities.37

Materialist dialectics and/as essentialism If the idea of lawfulness and a law is confined o f necessity to a given whole or formation, this does not, as noted, justify a greater con­ fidence in the resulting laws, so understood. The dilemma here is derived from equating the necessary with the inevitable, rather than treating it as that which is available for knowledge and knowing re­ gardless o f the subsequent presence (or absence) of accidental circumstances in the form of unanticipated conditions that may ren­ der the knowledge gained no less substantially valuable because apparent expectations have not been confirmed.38 Instead of the pro­ cess being arbitrarily concluded at this point - perfectly acceptable from the standpoint of formalism and logic but clearly at variance

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Ontological underpinnings with reality - I stated what would thereafter be required in order to pursue the relation between knowledge and reality. To say that the necessary is not synonymous with the inevitable for essentialists is not to say that necessity either makes no sense or is irrelevant regard­ less of the sense it makes. It rather forces us to attend to the labour that scientific knowledge of social phenomena demands, while dis­ missing as artifice the idea that such knowledge can be contained inside protocols which ordain beginnings and endings to inquiry as real rather than conventional (and false).39 Another point of considerable importance arises out of the ana­ lysis I have been carrying out here as well as in earlier chapters, however. The commitment of the critical/dialectical procedure to essentialism, though perhaps the lesser known body of theory and analysis engaged in by Marx, can only be fully understood in its sense and application if its relation to the somewhat better known commit­ ment to a materialist dialectics - as opposed to both dialectical materialism and idealism - is appreciated. The impact on essentialism of a materialist and dialectical approach to analysis provides a radical contrast to idealism, particularly in its most developed (dialectical) form - Hegel.40 The essence, if you will, of materialist dialectics is a concern for the delineation of wholes whose structural and develop­ mental properties - including contradictions in particular - seek to contain all four forms of 'causal’ explanation delineated by Aristotle. The idea that an efficient causal explanation is sufficient, where necessity is contrasted to sufficiency and found wanting, is atomist hubris, and only serves to underscore the difference between arbi­ trary and formalistic acts of carving up and putting out ‘the world’, and being after the thing itself, inasmuch as the necessary and un­ avoidable difference between thought and reality will permit i t 41 Atomists step in and out of ‘the world’ seeking efficient causal ex­ planations under the guise of ‘cause’, and generally have to be satisfied with formalistic verifications or falsifications, or ‘non-causal’ explanations.42 The difficulty here is implicit in atomism’s arbitrary division of thought from (rather than in) the world. If they would admit (a) that they begin in a whole and (b) that it is not chaotic but already the result of a preliminary process of abstraction endemic to observation and perception in the ‘natural attitude’, they would be able (c) to address this whole as their object of investiga­ tion, either immediately (that procedure suggested by Marx in the Grundrisse) or, following on more detailed ‘empirical’ study involving a more disciplined mode of observation and perception (the proce­ dure recommended by Marx in Capital).** Idealists, even of the essentialist variety (Hegel), generate difficulties for themselves from the other side, as it were. Here the problem is the confusion of 103

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure thought and reality, with the result that the succession of the categories is identified, in both instances, with the process of reality. This holds for political economy (idealist and atomist) no less than for Hegel (idealist and essentialist), save for the former’s devotion to correspondence through recapitulation, in contrast to the latter’s preoccupation with identity.44 One of the most succinct passages reminding us of what materia­ list dialectics does with (and for) essentialism is still to be found in The German Ideology: In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, but from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process ... Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life 45 The critique of Hegel and his predecessors found here comple­ ments Marx’s critique of the political economists discussed earlier, and underscores how important it is for the analysis provided by the critical/dialectical procedure that one be both materialist and essen­ tialist. Essentialism without materialism (Hegel) treats thought as the basis of reality rather than the effort at its comprehension, and leads to the kind of identitarian thinking which treats the process of reality as synonymous with the succession of the categories. Though there is more attention to method and procedure (as opposed to logic) in the more empirical and correspondential concerns of atom­ ists of all types (e.g. political economy and the social sciences), the result is very similar, however different the path of investigation (ab­ straction, recapitulation) in the latter case.46 In contrast to both Hegelian idealism (essentialist and idealist) and political economy and the social sciences (atomist and idealist), there is the phenomenon of historical and/or dialectical materialism as formulated and elaborated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Cominterm and Cominform, responding to the dic­ tates and pronouncements of Soviet leaders. ‘Hist Mat’ and/or ‘Dia Mat’ combine atomism with materialism of a sort that offers a physicalist reductionism (Engels) or a narrowly empirical one (Lenin).47 In this case, it is the absence of an essentialist logic and procedure that renders such propagandists and ideological productions as flat and one-dimensional as any thinking found in western capitalist so­ cieties.48 Essentialism and materialism, in the form of a materialist 104

Ontological underpinnings dialectics (not dialectical materialism), need each other and cannot realize the analytic object if combined with idealism and atomism respectively. To be sure, the combination of idealism and atomism would seem to constitute a more serious alternative still, and indeed produces work which lacks central aspects of both essentialism (logic, procedure) and materialism (investigation, reflection). Materialist dialectics is essentialist because it begins in the whole, is after it, and subordinates its conception of law to it without, how­ ever, denying the significance of law and lawfulness. At the same time, it does not fetishize or reify either the whole it can appropriate concretely or the concept of law which is subordinated to it as does atomism, particularly of the idealist variety. It knows what its whole is, understands that the procedure it engages in is the only way to scientific knowledge of social phenomena, and utilizes the laws it dis­ covers to the end of comprehending the whole, while realizing that law and lawfulness must not be understood naturalistically. This means that laws hold only for a given social formation, because it is this very formation that gives rise to the laws, laws discovered through the careful investigation of and reflection on the social formation it­ self. This is in every case the relevant whole to be analysed. The idea of law as some ‘given’ statement of regularities etc. in the ‘nature of things’ adopted from laws in the natural sciences - or, worse, from theories formulated by philosophers of science - is the analytical basis (and essence) of fetishism - the claim that historically and/or culturally specific realities are ‘natural’ and hold for all epochs and all peoples.49 Forming all its laws out of the relevant whole as a social formation, materialist dialectics shows its preoccupation with the real material whose structure and process it must endeavour to appropriate as a whole. It does not react to the ‘size and complexity’ of the real whole by refusing to attempt its appropriation, but argues instead that no matter what effort is involved it is necessary if understanding is to be gained. Atomists seek to imitate the real whole through further ab­ straction from the observation and perception given in the natural attitude, followed by recapitulation, aggregation and concatenation of the ‘concrete’ parts into what is alleged to be a new complex whole of many determinations and relations. In doing this, they demon­ strate that they know that thought can never ‘really’ hope to achieve an identity with reality, but do not follow through on this realization by attempting to gain knowledge given this limit. Instead, they pretend to the possibility of identity, while carving up and putting out reality into small, concrete ‘parts’ which are alleged to be more certain, on the assumption they are autonomous from a whole which only in­ cludes them in an abstract, concatenated way. No reference, of 105

Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure course, is made to the point that all such knowledge is a moment in the reality that includes it, even as it claims to address or display this reality from a position allegedly ‘outside’ it.50 To thus call essentialist materialism a ‘theoretical’ posture, in con­ trast to the alleged ‘realism’ of atomism and idealism in all its guises, is to invert any meaningful understanding of the relations between thought addressed to reality and the reality that is being addressed. The dialectical component of materialism is manifested not only in the oscillation back and forth between addressing reality as a formed, formative and forming contradictory whole, while being self-con­ scious about the genesis, history and reference of the concepts being employed in this effort. Dialectics is also the recognition of the priority of the whole, its character as reality, and the inability of thought to achieve an identity with it, embodied in reflection.51 As noted earlier, this reflection follows on abstraction, according to Marx in Capital, and is to be contrasted to recapitulation and reas­ sembly of the ‘concrete’ parts allegedly discovered through (further) abstraction. Here reflection, in the form of materialist dialectics, car­ ries the critical/dialectical procedure forward, contrasting its ‘method of presentation’ not only to that of atomists and idealists (political economy and the social sciences; Hegel and speculative philosophy) but to the latter’s (as well as its own) ‘method of investigation’.5* It is precisely because materialist dialectics knows its limits relative to the reality it wishes to comprehend that it can pursue its goal - the thing itself - with such rigour and enthusiasm. When I stated that atomism proxies its obsession with identity and certainty by carving up and putting out the whole as an abstraction whose re­ ality is to be discovered in its concrete, individual ‘parts’, I was addressing the phenomenon of explanation as a way of making knowl­ edge claims. Materialist dialectics treats explanation, and its derived surrogate prediction from laws and theories conceived naturalistically, as theoretical and practical cowardice. The idea that by making the area of investigation sufficiently small significant knowledge claims can be made takes no account of the whole, its form, its reality in contradictory as well as regularized motion, that gives such ‘local’ zones their sense within this whole. It is nothing less than an illusion of certainty, embodied in the myth of ‘efficient’ causality as the ideal form of knowledge claim, the epitome of explanation. Materialist dialectics, as a consequence of its insistence on the whole in all its properties and relations as the relevant object of investigation and reflection, disputes the priority of (a) logic as the formal gatekeeper of knowledge, and (b) explanation based on establishing local causal relations between ‘concrete’ particulars.53

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Ontological underpinnings The results of the critical/dialectical procedure confirm material­ ist dialectics as the philosophy and practice of concrete totality.54 Its procedure may look somewhat similar in its investigative phase to the forms of ‘empirical’ inquiry carried out by atomists, but this over­ looks both continuity in essentialist and materialist forms of inquiry after the thing itself, and the unique ‘method of presentation’ which completes the substantive dialectical logic, while underscoring that it is the method or procedure which is distinct rather than the goal which is in every case truthl Atomists deify natural science and its knowledge by exaggerating the role of method and underrating the role of thought and speculation in its accomplishments 55 Materialist dialectics insists that its own method of presentation not only occur in a way which fundamentally disputes the sense of recapitulation following on abstraction, but reveal in its very form this basic dif­ ference. In order for social reality to be understood in all its complexity, it must be reflected through categories and concepts which are diametrically opposed in their sequence and presentation to the way that this reality, this whole, came into being and sustains itself in/as reality, if only because this reality must include all knowl­ edge claims - essentialist and materialist as well as atomist and idealist - addressed to it. Contradiction and totality in the cell form It is well known among students of Marx that his decision in Capital to begin in and with ‘the commodity5 exhibits his determination to provide an analytic starting point radically at variance with where and when recapitulation would say that things ‘really5 begin. Indeed, the commodity constitutes the (analytic) cell form for an inquiry into capitalism as a whole, but this is by no means to say that its genesis and development dates only from the beginnings of modern capitalist society. Marx begins his written ‘method of presentation’ with the commodity for reasons that were already evident in his reflections on the analytic starting point chosen for Grundrisse. After Grundrisse he had spoken of bringing a penultimate section concluding his work on ‘Value’ forward as the ‘correct’ beginning point for this study. ‘Value’ as discussed by Marx in the conclusion of Grundrisse, and ‘The Com­ modity5as it appears in the first section of Capital, Volume 1 are two ways of focusing on the same understanding of reality, and will there­ fore be taken up together in this and the concluding section of this chapter.56 For Marx, the key factor justifying an initial focus on the com­ modity in both the penultimate section of Grundrisse (‘Value’) and in Chapter One, Part I of Capital, Volume 1 (‘Commodities’) is its 107

Marx's critical/dialectical procedure

idealism

materialism

Economics Political Economy Positivism

'Dia-Mat' 'Hist-Mat'