Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy: Recognizing Capital 3031375440, 9783031375446

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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC PURPOSE

Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy Recognizing Capital

Patrick Murray Jeanne Schuler

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

Series Editor Michael J. Thompson, William Paterson University, New York, NY, USA

This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise, but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection as well as informed praxis.

Patrick Murray · Jeanne Schuler

Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy Recognizing Capital

Patrick Murray Department of Philosophy Creighton University Omaha, NE, USA

Jeanne Schuler Department of Philosophy Creighton University Omaha, NE, USA

ISSN 2524-714X ISSN 2524-7158 (electronic) Political Philosophy and Public Purpose ISBN 978-3-031-37544-6 ISBN 978-3-031-37545-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jose A. Bernat Bacete/gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ted and Mary Louise Schuler in memory and gratitude

Acknowledgments

Several of our teachers have had a lasting influence on us. We both studied with James Collins at St. Louis University. Dr. Collins supervised Patrick’s dissertation, Marx’s Theory of “Wissenschaft,” and taught him much about working as a historian of modern philosophy; his presence is enduring. Richard Blackwell created the doctoral program in the philosophy of science at St. Louis University from which Patrick graduated. He was a beloved teacher and mentor. Albert William Levi directed Jeanne’s dissertation, Logics of Theoretical and Practical Reason in G. W. F. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” at Washington University. For years, he and his wife, Ute Levi, graciously opened their home as a Friday afternoon salon. Paul Piccone joined the Sociology Department at Washington University and brought the journal Telos to St. Louis, opening new worlds of critical thought. With Dan Dahlstrom, we studied Marx’s Grundrisse with Piccone once the full English translation appeared. Piccone encouraged Patrick to study in Frankfurt as a DAAD (Fulbright) Fellow. In Frankfurt, Patrick took the opportunity to learn from many teachers, including Jürgen Habermas and several of Theodor Adorno’s students. Rüdiger Bubner was especially supportive. Five philosophers whom we came to know in St. Louis took an interest in our work and have been a great resource and support over decades. Peter Fuss let Patrick audit his course at the University of Missouri—St. Louis on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where Patrick was first exposed to Fuss’s translation of the Phenomenology, on which

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John Dobbins would collaborate. Patrick and Jeanne kept talking with Fuss about Hegel, Dante, Kant, Rousseau, Arendt, Marx, and more. James Marsh was a reader of both our dissertations. We kept learning from Marsh’s phenomenological approach to critical theory after he left for Fordham University. Tom Jeannot, who wrote his dissertation on Marx under Marsh’s supervision, has long taken an interest in our work. We are grateful for Jeannot’s exuberant and humane intelligence. Dan Dahlstrom has been a friend and a model of intellectual passion and integrity since he and Patrick started graduate school at St. Louis University. John F. Kavanaugh, S. J., was an inspiration, an unfailing advocate for our work, and a dear friend. We want to acknowledge the members of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory (ISMT), which began when Fred Moseley organized a working conference on Marx’s method in Capital at Mount Holyoke College in 1991. There were eight participants: Chris Arthur, Martha Campbell, Guglielmo (Mino) Carchedi, Paul Mattick, Fred Moseley, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, and Patrick. What was intended as a onetime event became an annual one with weeklong working conferences every summer for the next 22 years. Over the years, some people left, and others joined the group, including Riccardo Bellofiore, Andrew Brown, Roberto Fineschi, Guido Starosta, and Nicola Taylor. Jeanne, who was reading conference papers all along, and our colleague Amy Wendling participated in the last conference, held at Creighton University in 2014. We thank all the members of the ISMT for their generosity, critical minds, and dedication to the work. Over the years, other scholars helped in developing Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy: Recognizing Capital, including Christine Achinger, Anne Pomeroy, Pete Amato, Dennis Badeen, Samuel Chambers, Ruth Groff, Joseph Fracchia, Peter Hudis, Andrew Kliman, Dan Krier, Judy Levin, Bill Martin, George McCarthy, Eric-John Russell, and Michael J. Thompson. We have benefitted from associations with several scholarly groups and publications, beginning with the St. Louis Telos group. We have been involved in the American Catholic Philosophical Association; each of us served on its Executive Committee. We served as co-coordinators of the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) and regularly attend the RPA’s biennial conferences. Sebastian Budgen and other editors of the journal Historical Materialism took an interest in Patrick’s work when the journal was in formation. We regularly attend Historical Materialism conferences.

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The British Marx & Philosophy Society has sponsored talks by Patrick. We spoke at the 40th anniversary celebration of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and Patrick spoke at the 45th anniversary celebration. Our essay “Reclaiming the Concepts of Value and Capital” was presented by Patrick in Nanjing, People’s Republic of China, at Hohai University and at Nanjing University. We thank Hohai University’s VicePresident Tang Hongwu and Professor Zhang Yibing at Nanjing University for their kind invitations. We thank Dr. Wu Jing, of Hohai University, who published a Chinese translation of “Reclaiming the Concepts of Value and Capital” in Nanjing Social Science. We are fortunate to work in a diverse and intellectually alive philosophy department. We are grateful to our Creighton colleagues and former colleagues in philosophy J. J. Abrams, Michael Brown, Jack Carlson, Elizabeth Cooke, Charles Dougherty, Randolph Feezell, Patricia Fleming, Sam Gavin, Kevin Graham, Sr. Mary Alice Haley, RSM, Jeffrey Hause, Thomas Kiefer, Thomas Krettek, S. J., Chris McCord, David McPherson, Anne Ozar, Chris Pliatska, Ross Romero, S. J., Eugene Selk, William O. Stephens, Amy Wendling, Richard White, and Jinmei Yuan. We thank other Creighton colleagues for their support: Fidel Fajardo-Acosta, Sue Calef, Bette Evans, Maorong Jiang, Richard Miller, Ron Simkins, Ryan Wishart, and participants in the Kenefick Chair Reading Group. To Creighton’s College of Arts and Sciences, we are grateful for sabbaticals, funding for research and travel, and for hosting two ISMT conferences and one RPA conference. We thank our Deans and Associate Deans who have generously supported our work. We have enjoyed the friendship and support of the St. Louis community where we once lived: Michael Bartz, Trish Curtis, Judy Gallagher, Mary Beth Gallagher, Michael Goeke, Julie Kerksick, Sharon McMullen, Mark Nielsen, and Cathy Nolan. We have benefitted from years of conversation with John Duggan, Rene Heybach, Wolfgang Richter-Girard, and Dan Semrad. In 1975, Patrick met Moishe Postone at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Patrick and Jeanne became fast friends with Moishe, and we shared decades of conversation until Moishe’s death in 2018. We gained much from Moishe’s force of mind and depth of understanding. At Palgrave Macmillan, we thank Michael J. Thompson, editor of the series Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, for his generous encouragement. For her support and guidance, we thank Madison Allums, Commissioning Editor for US Politics & Political Theory. For her expert

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guidance and her understanding in the production phase of the book, we thank Nandakini Lahiri, Project Manager—Books Production. Philosophical and Political Consequences would not be possible without our parents’ love and support, from Muriel Stehney and George Stehney and from Mary Louise Schuler and Ted Schuler, to whom we dedicate this book. We appreciate the unfailing generosity of our siblings and their spouses, Cathy, Sue, Joyce, Scott, Paul, Kevin, Kathleen, Greg, Christine, Kevin, Joe, and Martha. John Patrick, David, and Savita, our children, grew up while this book was being written; they bring joy into our family, which now includes Isabel Malone, Kara O’Malley, and grandchildren Theodore, Benjamin, and Ocean.

Contents

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Introduction: Philosophy and Social Theory Beyond the “Bourgeois Horizon” What Are Important Terms in Economics? Bait and Switch Three Questions About Wealth Two Questions About Wealth in Capitalism Marx’s Phenomenological Critique of Economics The “Bourgeois Horizon” Three Types of Concepts Subsumption, Shadow Forms, and Fetishes Subsumption Capital’s Shadow Forms The Commodity, Money, and Capital Fetishes MacIntyre, Postone, Weber, and Marx: Instrumental Action or Capital? Turning the Key of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Bibliography Recognizing Capital: Some Barriers to Public Discourse About Capital Recognizing Capital: What Makes It Hard What Is Capital? What Makes Capital Hard to Recognize? Recognizing Capital and the “Politics of Identity”

1 4 5 5 6 7 8 9 10 10 14 17 21 24 34 39 39 39 41 43 xi

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Critique of Fraser on Redistribution and Recognition On Capital and the Politics of Identity and Recognition Conceptual and Political Blockages and Openings to Recognizing Capital Getting Beyond the Conversation Stopper: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” Appendix: Letter from Patrick Murray to Judith Butler, December 16, 1995 Bibliography

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The Legend of Hegel’s Labor Theory of Reason The Work Theory of Reason A Hegelian Response to the Legend Consequences for Discourse Ethics Bibliography

63 66 69 73 75

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Marx, Subjectivism, and Modern Moral Philosophy The Modern Moral Predicament Subjectivism and Nihilism Commerce and Nihilism Countertendencies to the Nihilism of Commerce Beyond Moral Nihilism Bibliography

77 78 83 86 88 98 106

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Karl Marx and the Critique of Bourgeois Philosophy The Bourgeois Mindset The Social Basis of Bourgeois Thought Beyond the Bourgeois Horizon Conclusion: Toward Better Concepts Bibliography

109 110 118 122 125 131

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Reclaiming the Concepts of Value and Capital Introduction Fundamental Concepts and Horizons of Discourse Five Misconceptions of Value and Capital Value Is Not Utility; Utility Is a Bogus Concept Value Is Not Use-Value Value Is Not Exchange-Value or Price

133 133 134 135 137 139 140

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Capital Is Not Just Any Resource McDonaldization Represents Real Subsumption Under Capital Not the Spread of Instrumental Reason Bibliography 7

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Social Form and the “Purely Social”: On the Kind of Sociality Involved in Value Social Forms and General Traits Skepticism About Purposes and Forms Social Forms: From Commodities to Value The Commodity Spectrum: Simple Commodities, Commodities That Are Commodity Capital, Ex-commodities, Potential Commodities, Quasi-Commodities From Value to Abstract Labor and Time From Abstract Labor and Time to Money and Capital Two Meanings of Marx’s Description of Value as “Purely Social” More to the Story: Some Qualifications to the “Purely Social” Sociality of Values Bibliography The Commodity Spectrum Getting to the Form of Commodities Generalization of the Commodity Form in Capitalist Societies Refining the Concept of Capitalist Commodities From Capitalist Commodity to Commodity Capital The Consequences of Producing Commodities on a Capitalist Basis Doubling and Redoubling: Keep the Double Character of the Commodity in Mind How Value Shapes the Usefulness of the Commodity Ex-commodities: From “Simply Things” to a Store of Value Quasi-Commodities Ideal Subsumption and Shadow Commodities Bibliography

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140 141 145 147 150 152 153

155 156 158 160 164 167 169 169 172 174 178 179 182 185 187 188 193 202

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A Brilliant Failure: Hegel and Marx Assess the Enlightenment The Enlightenment in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy Enlightenment in the Phenomenology of Spirit The Enlightenment’s Victory Over Naïve Faith What Lies Beyond Reflection: The Thing-in-Itself Utility—The Truth of Enlightenment From Utility to Terror Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment: Capital, the Truth of Utility Afterword: Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason Bibliography

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From Hegel on Enlightenment Terror to Marx on Capital Contrasting Hegel and Marx on Capitalist Society Hegel’s Account of How the Enlightenment Culminates in the Notion of Utility Utility’s Double Masquerade Comparing Hegel and Marx on the Enlightenment and Utility Bibliography The Poetics of Nihilism: Representing Capital’s Indifference in Dickens’ Hard Times Introduction: Literature and Social Theory Constitutive Forms and Shadow Forms Art and Philosophy: A Hegelian Counterpoint to Dickens Hard Times and the Gradgrind Philosophy The Gradgrind Philosophy and Utilitarianism The Harthouse Philosophy as the Truth of the Gradgrind Philosophy Dickens, Hard Times, and Capitalism Conclusion: Taking on Capital’s Shadow Forms References

205 207 209 211 213 215 217 220 223 227 229 230 233 235 237 246 249 249 251 253 254 257 263 265 268 279

CONTENTS

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Rebel Without a Cause: Stanley Kubrick and the Banality of the Good Surfing the Zeitgeist The Skeptical Vision and the Banality of the Good Skepticism and Capitalism The Skeptical Tropes of Stanley Kubrick Skeptical “Solutions” Pleasure Über Alles The Artist’s Response: Create the Meaning That Is Missing from the World The Consolation of False Philosophy Bibliography Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen How the Factoring Philosophy Makes the World Disappear Woody Allen’s Existentialism David Hume as the Consummate Trick Philosopher Skepticism’s Instability Skepticism and Freethinking: Oscillating Between Incompatibles Global Skepticism’s Philosophical and Artistic Dead Ends How to Live If All Values Are Strictly Subjective Reflecting on “Life’s Shortness and Uncertainty” Counterworking “the Artifice of Nature” Problems with Projection Theory—But Not to Worry Bibliography

Index

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283 283 284 287 289 290 294 295 297 299 301 302 305 308 309 311 313 315 318 322 323 327 331

Notes on Chapters

Chapter 1: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, Introduction: Philosophy and Social Theory beyond the “Bourgeois Horizon,” previously unpublished. Chapter 2: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Recognizing Capital: Some Barriers to Public Discourse about Capital,” in Race, Class, and National Identity, edited by Andrew Light and Mecke Nagel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), pp. 101–116, with the kind permission of Humanity Books. Appendix to Chapter 2: Patrick Murray, “Letter from Patrick Murray to Judith Butler, December 16, 1995,” previously unpublished. Chapter 3: Jeanne Schuler, “The Legend of Hegel’s Labor Theory of Reason,” in Social Philosophy Today, Social Philosophy Today, Volume 14, 1998, pp. 301–316, with the kind permission of Social Philosophy Today. Chapter 4: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Marx, Subjectivism, and Modern Moral Philosophy,” in The Modern Schoolman, Volume LXXXIII (March 2006), pp. 173–196, with the kind permission of The Modern Schoolman (now Res Publica). Chapter 5: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Karl Marx and the Critique of Bourgeois Philosophy,” The Modern Schoolman, Volume LXXXV (January 2008), pp. 163–180, with the kind permission of The Modern Schoolman (now Res Publica). xvii

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Chapter 6: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Reclaiming the Concepts of Value and Capital,” Journal of East-West Thought, Volume 5, Number 2 (Summer), June 2015, pp. 19–28, with the kind permission of the Journal of East-West Thought. Chapter 7: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Social Form and the ‘Purely Social’: On the Kind of Sociality Involved in Value,” in The Social Ontology of Capital, edited by Dan Krier and Mark P. Worrell (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 121–141, with the kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Chapter 8: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “The Commodity Spectrum,” in Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom, Volume 1, Issue 4 (2017): 150 Years of Capital, pp. 112–152, with the kind permission of Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom. Chapter 9: Jeanne Schuler, “A Brilliant Failure: Hegel and Marx Assess the Enlightenment,” International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2, Issue 222 (June 2016), pp. 203–220, with the kind permission of the International Philosophical Quarterly. Chapter 10: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “From Hegel on Enlightenment Terror to Marx on Capital,” previously unpublished. Chapter 11: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “The Poetics of Nihilism: Representing Capital’s Indifference in Dickens’ Hard Times,” in Capital in the Mirror: Critical Social Theory and the Aesthetic Dimension, edited by Dan Krier and Mark P. Worrell, in the New Political Science book series, edited by Bradley MacDonald (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020), pp. 89–121, with the kind permission of the SUNY Press. Chapter 12: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Rebel without a Cause: Stanley Kubrick and the Banality of the Good,” in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, edited by Jerold J. Abrams (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), pp. 133–148, with the kind permission of the University Press of Kentucky. Chapter 13: Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen,” in The Blackwell Companion to Woody Allen, ed. by Peter Bailey and Sam Girgus (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 481–503, with the kind permission of Blackwell.

About the Authors

Patrick Murray is John C. Kenefick Faculty Chair in the Humanities and professor of philosophy at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska. He is the author of The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form (Brill, 2016) and Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Humanities, 1988) and the editor of Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present (Routledge, 1997). He is co-author with Jeanne Schuler of False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory: Losing Public Purpose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He is working on a reissue of Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge and on Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes. Patrick served on the Executive Council of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and as co-coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association. His research interests center on the relationship between capitalism and modern philosophy and include the British empiricists, Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School. Jeanne Schuler is professor of philosophy at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska. She has published in the history of philosophy and critical theory, including articles on Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Arendt, Iris Murdoch, and Habermas. She is co-author with Patrick Murray of False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory: Losing Public Purpose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). She served on the Executive Council of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and as co-coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association. She is working on a series of articles on Hegel and modern philosophy, four of which have been published. xix

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Philosophy and Social Theory Beyond the “Bourgeois Horizon”

Much of modern philosophy and social theory is caught within a horizon of discourse—Karl Marx calls it the “bourgeois horizon”—based on phenomenologically untenable bifurcations. This horizon of discourse excludes recognizing capital, which Marx identifies as the concept central to understanding the modern world: “The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, since it [is] the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself … [is] the foundation of bourgeois society”1 Paul Mattick Jr. explains the implication for Marx’s critique of political economy: “Marx’s critique – his ‘scientific revolution’ – therefore involved not merely a reworking of economic categories but the construction of another set of concepts, explicitly social and historical ones.”2 By contrast, consider the economist Paul Samuelson’s definition of capital goods: “Capital goods, then, represent produced goods that can be used as factor inputs for further production.”3 According to this definition, capital has nothing in particular to do with capitalism or any specific social form of the provisioning process. The general categories of economics, like “produced goods that can be used as factor inputs for further production,” differ from the concept of capital. Capital has specific social and historical content. The “bourgeois horizon” allows no cognitive space for a concept like capital.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_1

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The seminal idea of Marx’s historical materialism states: a mode of production [Produktionsweise] must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite way of life [Lebensweise] on their part.4

Whatever this way of life is, it is inseparable from the mode of production, and it will be fraught with moral, social, and political consequences. Recognizing the inseparability of mode of production and way of life is the phenomenological breakthrough of Marx’s historical materialism. The bifurcating “bourgeois horizon” does not recognize this inseparability; consequently, it treats a mode of production “simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals.” In splitting the provisioning process from its constitutive social form and purpose, the “bourgeois horizon” posits an economy-in-general and thereby falls into the “illusion of the economic.” Economics takes this impossible economyin-general as the object of its inquiry. This is why capital is unrecognizable within the “bourgeois horizon” and absent from economics. As Moishe Postone puts it, Marx offers a critique of political economy, not a critical political economy.5 What Postone calls traditional or Ricardian Marxism is a version of critical political economy; it operates within the “bourgeois horizon.” It treats labor in capitalism as if it were labor in general, which presupposes the phenomenological false move of splitting labor from its constitutive social form and purpose. The crux of Marx’s critique of political economy is that it fails to make constitutive social forms and purposes ingredients of its theory. The classical (Ricardian) labor theory of value, which is adopted by traditional Marxism, fails this way. “At the core of all forms of traditional Marxism is a transhistorical conception of labor,” writes Postone.6 Marx’s theory of value, by contrast, is about the social form of labor in capitalism and its consequences. I. I. Rubin was among the first interpreters of Marx’s critique of political economy to recognize it as a theory of the social form of labor and of the products of labor under the capitalist mode of production: When Marx treats value as the social form of the product of labor, conditioned by a determined social form of labor, he puts the qualitative, sociological side of value in the foreground…. The basic error of the

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majority of Marx’s critics consists of … their complete failure to grasp the qualitative, sociological side of Marx’s theory of value.7

Political economy—including the critical political economy—misses the phenomenological point that a provisioning process is inseparable from its constitutive social forms and purposes. Consequently, it fails even to recognize what needs to be explained. Why in capitalist societies is wealth generally produced in the commodity form? Why are those societies where wealth is generally produced in the commodity form also capitalist societies? Why, in capitalism, is the production and distribution of wealth mediated by money? How does that matter? How is it that commodities and money are repositories of purchasing power, a peculiarly abstract social power? What is value, understood as what money measures and stores? Why is there no stable store of value? Why are commodities produced for the purpose of making profit? What is capital?8 Marx’s critique of political economy offers a guide to replacing political economy and the “bourgeois horizon” within which it is confined. Simon Clarke points out what is needed: There was a scientific revolution in nineteenth-century social thought … It was inaugurated by Marx’s critique of the ideological foundations of classical political economy, which he located in the political economists’ neglect of the social form of capitalist production.9

Replacing political economy and moving beyond the “bourgeois horizon” involves renewing the revolution that Marx inaugurated—the investigation of the social form and purpose of capitalist production.10 As Clarke adds, the neglect of social form characteristic of the “bourgeois horizon” distorts social theory broadly, so understanding Marx’s critique of political economy has extensive implications for philosophy and social theory. “Economics” was not a term in common use in Marx’s day; he wrote of “the critique of political economy.” We take Marx to offer a critique of economics. By economics, we understand any purportedly scientific account of the provisioning process or of human choice under conditions of scarcity for which constitutive social forms and purposes are not recognized ingredients. Because every provisioning process has constitutive social forms and purposes, none can be understood apart from them. That is the lesson of historical materialism. In disregarding social forms,

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economics makes bad abstractions and phenomenological false moves. Lack of attention to social form leaves economics in the “illusion of the economic,” the misconception that there is an economy-in-general, where needs, wealth, labor, and production exist in general, without any constitutive social forms.11 Martha Campbell observes that Marx traces the “illusion of the economic” to the way that capitalist production presents itself: “What is, for Marx, the extraordinary feature of economic activity in capitalism” is “that it claims to create wealth ‘pure and simple’ and [to be] organised by this purpose.”12 This deceptive impression gives cover to capital and helps explain the persistence of economics and the phenomenological errors on which it is based.

What Are Important Terms in Economics? Which of the following are important terms in economics: property, commodity, money, prices, wages, profit, interest, or rent? None, according to economists Glenn Hubbard and Anthony Patrick O’Brien in their textbook Microeconomics. Echoing Lionel Robbins, they characterize economics as “a group of useful ideas about how individuals make choices.”13 With its empire defined so vapidly, economics claims validity across the globe and human history. No wonder, then, that all the economic terms listed by Hubbard and O’Brien are ones that are generally applicable, like goods and services (not commodities, which have prices), labor (not wage labor), natural resources (not landed property), and produced goods used to produce other goods (not capital as “self-valorizing value”). Making socially specific categories of ingredients would spoil the recipe and defeat the aspiration of economics to general applicability. In restricting itself to generally applicable categories, economics puts social reality on a Procrustean bed. General categories are scientifically inadequate; as used in economics, they suppress inescapable social, moral, and political content. Consequently, economics excludes, displaces, or renounces rational inquiry into normative questions, clearing the ground for its proud claim to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Economics gives positivism an alibi. How economics is conceptualized—within the “bourgeois horizon”—shrinks the scope of its discourse and its capacity to understand and explain.

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Bait and Switch Bait and switch is the rule in microeconomics textbooks. These texts announce a generally applicable human science but leap in with “unimportant” socially specific categories such as the commodity, money, prices, wages, profit, interest, and rents. Supply and demand curves appear, as if goods always and everywhere have prices. Paul Samuelson states that demand is tied to price, “The quantity of a good that people will buy at any one time depends on price.”14 Yet he erases price by reducing buying and selling to barter, eliminating the “obscuring layer of money”: Even in the most advanced industrial economies, if we strip exchange down to its barest essentials and peel off the obscuring layer of money, we find that trade between individuals or nations largely boils down to barter— transforming one good into another by exchange rather than by physical transmutation.15

Money, remember, is not an important concept in economics. Economics is schizophrenic about money, dismissing it where it exists yet finding it where it does not, as with Gary Becker’s ubiquitous “shadow prices” and “opportunity costs.”16 But if we dispense with money and prices, what measures demand? It is easy to miss this point and conflate demand with desire, which lends economics a false plausibility. Eliminate all references to the “unimportant” socially specific categories and what would remain of an introductory microeconomics text? Where would economics be without bait and switch?

Three Questions About Wealth Marx begins Capital by answering a question that economics does not ask: what is the social form and purpose of wealth? He writes, “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.”17 The commodity, then, is the social form of wealth in capitalism. Two questions are familiar and commonly asked. How much wealth is there? How is wealth distributed? But a third question gets overlooked.18 What is the social form and purpose of wealth? Asking it triggers perplexity.

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Economics misses, overlooks, or discounts the third question. That sets up the futile project of doing social theory without social forms, for there can be no economy-in-general. Marx’s critique of economics comes to this: economics fails to engage self-consciously with constitutive social forms and purposes. It ignores them, conflates them with generally applicable categories, and introduces them out of the blue in an unavoidable bait and switch. Marx attributes David Ricardo’s “inability to grasp the specific form of bourgeois production” to his “obsession that bourgeois production is production as such.”19 For Ricardo, a thinker whom Marx admired, capitalist production is “not a specific definite mode of production, but simply the mode of production.”20 Ricardo’s mistake is twofold: (1) capitalist production is not “production as such,” yet he conflates them, and (2) there is no “production as such.”

Two Questions About Wealth in Capitalism A commodity has a double character; it is a useful thing, and it is a value. Its value character is indecipherable if we examine the commodity; it appears as a useful thing “pure and simple.”21 A commodity’s value must appear as something other than itself, namely money. Commodities are useful things that are values and have prices.22 In Capital, Marx moves quickly from the commodity to value and then to exchange-value, demonstrating that money is value’s necessary form of appearance. He reasons from money to capital—Part II of Capital 1 is called “The Transition from Money to Capital”—to answer these questions. What keeps the fires of simple circulation burning? Why do useful things keep being produced as commodities to replenish the market? Commodities keep coming into the market because they are commodity capital: they are commodities whose sale brings profit to their owners, which is how capital can keep accumulating. In a world where the inputs to production are commodities, including the labor power sold by wage workers, production must begin with money. But there is no point in investing a sum of money to get the same amount back. Only surplus value, ΔM, in the circuit of capital: M-C-M + ΔM, makes sense of a circuit beginning with M. Since capital is a value that increases its value—capital presents itself as “self-valorizing value”—the concept of value is essential to that of capital, but we see now why value presupposes capital.23 The failure of economics to engage the questions what is value? and what is capital? reverberates through social theory and public discourse. Everyday talk about “value

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added” doesn’t stop to ask what is added. Such thoughtless talk confirms Marx’s remark “It is naturally still more convenient to understand by value nothing at all.”24 Talk of human capital, social capital, natural capital, political capital, cultural capital, reputational capital, moral capital, spiritual capital, conceptual capital, and so on reduces capital to a resource of whatever sort. Loose talk piggybacking on the shallow concepts of economics drowns out the needed critical concepts of value and capital from scientific and public discourse.

Marx’s Phenomenological Critique of Economics The fundamental insight of Marx’s historical materialism is phenomenological: there is no production-in-general; production always has a specific social form and purpose. By phenomenology we mean experience-based inquiry that determines whether what is distinguishable is separable, like my shoes from my feet, or is not separable, like my shirt from its shape. Drawing what David Hume calls a “distinction of reason” involves phenomenology in this plain sense. Hume observes of a white marble sphere that we can draw “a distinction of reason,” or analytical distinction, between the whiteness of the marble and its spherical shape, but we cannot separate the two.25 What we call factoring philosophy mistakes what is only distinguishable for what is separable; its phenomenological false moves create the “bourgeois horizon.”26 Phenomenological lessons can be broad. When he gulped down Hegel at age 19, Marx realized that form and content are distinguishable but not separable.27 The bifurcation between form and content is one of many that Hegel rejects: Form and content are a pair of determinations that are frequently employed by the reflective understanding [Verstand], and, moreover, mainly in such a way that the content is considered as what is essential and independent, while the form, on the contrary, is inessential and dependent. Against this, however, it must be remarked that in fact both of them are equally essential.28

Marx likewise adopts Hegel’s thought that essence and appearance are not separable. Tracking Hegel’s complex conception, according to which essence must appear as something other than itself, Marx argues that price is not value but is the necessary form of appearance of a commodity’s

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value. That necessity alone shows that value is not a generally applicable concept; value exists only where the provisioning process is mediated by money. Marx’s critique discloses where economics makes phenomenological mistakes by separating form from content or appearance from essence. Marx’s major phenomenological claims include: The substance, magnitude, and form of value are inseparable, so money, as the necessary expression of value, and value are inseparable. No money, no value. Simple commodity circulation is inseparable from the circulation of capital. No surplus value, no value. Consequently, the liberal idea that “the free market” has no compulsory collective goal is an illusion as is the aim of separating the right from the good: profitmaking and boundless accumulation of capital disclose the truth about what transpires in the “free market.” Forces of production and relations of production are inseparable.

Marx summarizes his methodologically demanding phenomenology of capital’s complex form: “in the completed bourgeois system, every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form.”29 Relations that presuppose one another are distinguishable but not separable. So, the metaphysics of causality between independent and dependent variables—for example, the conventional idea that value is the independent variable that determines the price, the dependent variable—is out of place here.

The “Bourgeois Horizon” Marx’s phenomenological critique of economics belongs to his broader critique of what he called the “bourgeois horizon,” the mindset of much modern philosophy as well as political economy and the “bourgeois socialism” of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Left Ricardians (John Francis Bray and John Gray), and the German socialist Gotha Programme. The “bourgeois horizon” is established by phenomenologically false bifurcations such as the purely subjective vs. the purely objective, form vs. content, essence vs. appearance, forces vs. relations of production, the labor process vs. the valorization process, and distribution vs. production. Of Proudhon’s mix of political economy, idealist philosophy, and “bourgeois socialism” Marx writes: “Proudhon does not rise above the

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bourgeois horizon.”30 Unlike a distinction of reason, a bifurcation treats as separable what is not separable. Marx’s critique of the “bourgeois horizon” was modeled on Hegel’s critique of the kind of thinking that Hegel identified with understanding (Verstand) as opposed to reason (Vernunft ). Marx quickly directed this critique of the bifurcating mindset of Verstand at Hegel’s own philosophy, locating it within the “bourgeois horizon.” As Georg Lukács puts it, “Marx reproached Hegel … with his failure to overcome the duality of thought and being, of theory and practice, of subject and object…. in the crucial point he [Hegel] failed to go beyond Kant.”31 Marx’s critique of political economy belongs to his efforts to move philosophy and social theory beyond the “bourgeois horizon.”

Three Types of Concepts We distinguish three types of concepts: (1) generally applicable concepts such as wealth, labor, and production; (2) socially specific constitutive ones such as the commodity, value, money, wage labor, and capital; and (3) pseudo-concepts spun from the “illusion of the economic.”32 Regarding the first type, Marx states, “what is customary to say … in general terms is restricted to abstractions which had a historic value in the first tentative steps of political economy … Later, they become leathery commonplaces, the more nauseating, the more they parade their scientific pretensions.”33 It is fallacious to reason from a legitimate general concept of production to the existence of production-in-general: production-ingeneral is a pseudo-concept. General concepts are reasonable abstractions that identify features found in societies throughout history, but no society exists in general; neither do needs, useful things, labor, nor production exist in general. Philosophy and social theory must distinguish these three kinds of concepts and employ the first two properly, while recognizing pseudo-concepts and avoiding them. Three fundamental concepts in modern social theories, wealth-ingeneral, utility, and instrumental action, are caught in the “illusion of the economic.” They presuppose an impossible economy-in-general. In an appendix to his book The Logic of Marx’s “Capital ,” Tony Smith writes, “I shall briefly and provisionally examine three of the most significant theoretical alternatives to Marxian value theory: neoclassical economics, Weberian social theory, and Neo-Ricardian (Sraffian) economics.”34 We take Smith to be dealing here with wealth-in-general (Neo-Ricardian

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economics), utility (neoclassical economics), and instrumental action (Weberian social theory). Smith concludes that none of these three fundamental concepts has the explanatory power of Marx’s theory of value. We agree, but we argue that these are not simply poor concepts; they are pseudo-concepts since there is nothing for them to be the concepts of . These pseudo-concepts are not to be confused with the correlative and indispensable general concepts of wealth, usefulness, and purposeful action, with which they are readily conflated. The predominance of the pseudo-concepts of wealth-in-general, utility, and instrumental action represents a breakdown of social theory that Marx’s critique of economics discloses.

Subsumption, Shadow Forms, and Fetishes In disregarding social form, economics cancels three powerful Marxian contributions to social theory: (1) subsumption under constitutive social forms; (2) capital’s shadow forms, which are shadows of capital’s constitutive social forms; and (3) the commodity, money, and capital fetishes. These are among the phenomena uncovered by the attention that Marx’s critique of economics pays to the commodity, value, money, wages, capital, profit, rent, and interest—social forms dismissed by economics as unimportant. Subsumption Having overlooked or discounted them, economics lacks the concepts for naming and investigating subsumption under constitutive social forms. The several types include formal, real, ideal, and hybrid subsumption. They bring phenomena under a specific social form, for example, under one of the value forms that constitutes capitalist production.35 Here we consider just a few types. Commodification is the subsumption of goods under the commodity form. This form of subsumption creates what Fred Hirsch calls the “commercialization effect,” a transformation of goods that is dismissed by economics because it ignores the commodity form. Michael Sandel is among those political philosophers who revives the topic of simony, that is, treating what Thomas Aquinas called “undue matter” as a commodity, thereby corrupting it.36 Much of the literature that notes the philosophical and political significance of capital’s social forms restricts itself to subsumption under the commodity form. It is

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troubled about the moral limits of the commodity form. These important critical investigations focus on the simple commodity. Marx cautions us that the commodity is not simple: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”37 A commodity is a useful thing—there is “nothing mysterious” about that, says Marx—and a commodity is a value, which is a “ghostly objectivity” [gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit ].38 Marx makes good on his claim that the commodity is “a very strange thing,” first by establishing that the commodity is a fetish. As a value, the commodity is a depository of peculiar social power, purchasing power, distinct from its natural powers. Second, Marx demonstrates both that the generalization of the commodity form of wealth is necessary for the circulation of capital, and the reverse is true. Commodity circulation presupposes the circulation of capital. So, commodities are commodity capital, bearers of surplus value through whose sale capital reaps profits. The simple commodity and commodity circulation are neither simple nor so benign as they appear; assessing them cannot be separated from assessing capital. In Chapter 8, we explore the complexities of “the commodity spectrum.” The spectrum includes basic commodities, capitalist commodities, commodity capital, ex-commodities, quasi-commodities, ideal commodities, and shadow commodities. What we call basic commodities, goods or services with prices, pre-date capitalism, as do most commercial forms. Money, wages, profit, rent, interest, and capital go by the same names whether in non-capitalist situations or in the capitalist mode of production. However, Marx makes an important point in distinguishing how they function. Tony Smith puts Marx’s point well: [T]he social forms analysed by Marx in Capital are historically specific. Commodities, money, profits, and so on, can all be found in precapitalist societies. One of Marx’s fundamental insights is that these were not the same social forms as commodities, money, and profits in capitalism, although we use the same words. In Capital, Marx examines these social forms insofar as they are moments of a social order whose organizing principle is the self-valorisation of value.39

We call the modern form of commodities capitalist commodities , that is, commodities as they function in capitalism. In showing that simple commodity circulation presupposes the circulation of capital, Marx shows

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that the commodity as it appears at the beginning of Capital is commodity capital.40 A commodity whose sale brings in a profit functions as capital. Not every capitalist commodity is commodity capital, for not every commodity in capitalism is produced on a capitalist basis. This is true of labor power, the crucial commodity for capital. If labor power were produced on a capitalist basis, it would be owned from the start by capitalist firms rather than first being the property of free wage laborers. Commodities are produced in capitalist societies by not-for-profit firms, governments, and the self-employed; they are capitalist commodities but not commodity capital. Marx notes the tendency in capitalism toward commodification, including the transformation of labor into wage labor: “In capitalist production the tendency for all products to be commodities and all labor to be wage-labour, becomes absolute.”41 What is true of commodities in capitalism is also true of wage labor, which is a special form of commodification essential to capitalism. Not all commodities are produced by capitalist firms, and not all wage-laborers work for capitalist firms: “Every productive worker [one who directly produces surplus value] is a wagelabourer, but not every wage-labourer is a productive worker.”42 Marx gives the example of soldiers who are paid a wage. Not all commodities are products. Though value is the consequence of commodity-producing labor and price is the necessary expression of value, the price-form unleashes value such that things not produced on a capitalist basis, indeed not produced at all, can have prices: The price-form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price, i.e. between the magnitude of value and its own expression in money, but it may also harbour a qualitative contradiction, with the result that price ceases altogether to express value, despite the fact that money is nothing but the value-form of commodities.43

Marx offers uncultivated land as an example of something that is not a product of labor but can have a price. Wage labor is one of the capital’s constitutive social forms. Labor power, which is recognized as the property of the worker by natural right, is subsumed under the commodity form. Labor power is for sale on the labor market. Marx observes:

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The capitalist epoch is therefore characterized by the fact that labourpower, in the eyes of the worker himself, takes on the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently takes on the form of wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the commodity-form of the products of labour becomes universal.44

Labor is the use or consumption of labor power; in capitalist production, labor is aimed at the production and accumulation of surplus value. Marx’s “value theory of labor”—as Diane Elson distinguishes it from the classical (Ricardian) labor theory—rests entirely on the subsumption of labor under the social form of commodity-producing labor.45 Because commodity circulation presupposes the circulation of capital, the labor that produces commodities turns out to be wage labor that valorizes value. The labor of workers employed by capital to play a role in its valorization process is thus formally subsumed under capital. Two familiar but historic features of this formal subsumption of labor under capital are easily taken for granted: (1) “the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs” and (2) “the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker.”46 Marx treats real subsumption of labor under capital in Part Four of Capital 1: The Production of Relative Surplus Value. Real subsumption materially transforms production processes to extract more surplus value. This momentous phenomenon cannot be articulated when value and capital fall outside the discursive horizon—when capital goes unrecognized. Consequently, phenomena resulting from real subsumption are either ignored or misconceived. A popular way of misconceiving real subsumption under capital invokes the “technocratic paradigm.” It appeals to a neo-Weberian social theory based on the concept of instrumental action. In The McDonaldization of Society, George Ritzer offers a neo-Weberian account of McDonaldization as the spread of instrumental action with its values of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. But Ritzer ultimately recognizes that fast food aims at increasing profit margins: “Profit-making enterprises pursue McDonaldization because it leads to lower costs and higher profits.”47 Phenomena such as “efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control,” popularly referred to as McDonaldization, are best conceptualized as real subsumption under capital.48 We can speak of the real subsumption under capital of the products as well as of the production process, though Marx does not introduce

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this category explicitly. “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” is a remark often heard. We take it to be an everyday observation about real subsumption, which usually involves cheapening of commodities and diminishing their quality. This diminishment is the theme of Ezra Pound’s canto “With Usura.” Pound echoes Marx’s example of adulterating bread: with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper, with no mountain wheat, no strong flour49

At McDonald’s, “Don’t dare ask for a rare burger,” Ritzer advises. What McDonaldized technologies produce are “flattened, featureless products.”50 Along its path to stretching the profit margin, McDonald’s food has undergone real subsumption under capital. In the same vein as “McChicken” and “McRibs,” USA Today is “McPaper,” for-profit schools are “McEducation,” corporate rock is “McMusic,” and so on. “Mc” is the prefix of real subsumption. Capital’s Shadow Forms Capital’s constitutive value forms generate many shadow forms.51 If we fail to distinguish constitutive forms from their shadows, we may tilt at windmills. We distinguish between shadow forms designated by pseudo-concepts—for which there is nothing to be the concept of—and shadow forms that track aspects of value forms that stretch beyond their constitutive role. Some of the most important shadow forms are pseudoconcepts: “the economic,” intended to refer to features of an impossible economy-in-general; utility, intended to refer to usefulness-in-general; and instrumental action, intended to refer to purposive action that is indifferent to its ends and is efficient-in-general. These pseudo-concepts are fundamental to much social theory. They arise from the “illusion of the economic,” which—due to capital’s ways of concealing itself—presents capitalism as if it were the provisioning process-in-general. To contrast shadow forms with value forms is not to dismiss them. Shadow forms matter in their own ways. That is true even of shadow forms that are pseudo-concepts; they have ideological force. They disguise realities that value forms disclose. Shadow forms are further manifestations of capital’s power, extensions of its reach. Shadow forms figure

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widely in social theory, but only by recognizing capital are they seen for what they are—capital’s shadows. Capital’s shadow forms include the “economic,” utility, and instrumental action among the pseudo-concepts. But the list of shadow forms is long; it includes egalitarianism, indifference, nihilism, the calculative mentality, punctuality, gigantism, industriousness (the Protestant work ethic), secularism, and more. The rubric of capital’s shadow forms lays the basis for a more complete theory of capitalist society. It opens possibilities for cooperative work between the Marxian critique of economics and other investigations of capitalist societies, which often are directed at capital’s shadows. Secularism is one case in point. Consider Marx’s remark linking an enlightened secular mindset with the emergence of world money, a constitutive form of capital: As money develops into international money, so the commodity-owner becomes a cosmopolitan. The cosmopolitan relations of men to one another originally comprise only their relations as commodity-owners. Commodities as such are indifferent to all religious, political, national and linguistic barriers. Their universal language is price and their common bond is money. But together with the development of international money as against national coins, there develops the commodity-owner’s cosmopolitanism, a cult of practical reason, in opposition to the traditional religious, national and other prejudices which impede the metabolic process of mankind.52

Compare Marx’s comment with Max Weber’s observation toward the end of his essay “The Spirit of Capitalism” that the fitting subjective complement to capital’s dominance is “the ability to free oneself from the common tradition, a sort of liberal enlightenment … The people filled with the spirit of capitalism today tend to be indifferent, if not hostile, to the Church.”53 Georg Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” offers an array of associations between “the money economy” and shadow forms: “It has been the money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms.”54 Calculability, exactness, and punctuality are capital’s shadows. Though Marx does not develop this rubric, capital’s shadow forms have a root in his texts. In criticizing the Ricardian socialist John Francis Bray, Marx identifies egalitarianism as a shadow of commercial society:

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Mr. Bray does not see that this equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world; and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow [“ombre”] of it. In proportion as this shadow [“ombre”] takes on substance again, we perceive that this substance, far from being the transfiguration dreamt of, is the actual body of existing society.55

Egalitarianism is a shadow of the circulation of commodities, one of the capital’s constitutive forms, though the market is not generally recognized as presupposing capital. Equality is a constitutive social form of capital as Marx observes, “The system of exchange values, and the money system even more so, are, in fact, a system of freedom and equality.”56 Egalitarianism stretches the form of equality beyond its constitutive role in establishing the moral equality of all persons involved in the commercial roles of buyer and seller, borrower and lender, and free wage laborer and capitalist employer. The expansiveness of egalitarianism is represented by the use of “ = ”—the equal sign—as a bumper sticker and by tying social movements to equality, as in recognizing same-sex marriage as marriage equality.57 George Ritzer’s attack on McDonaldization targets shadow forms instead of real subsumption under capital. As Ritzer comes to recognize, the four key principles of McDonaldization that he identifies: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, are shadows of the value forms. The value forms can explain McDonaldization; the shadow forms cannot. These shadow forms articulate the pseudo-concept of instrumental action; they do not set out a coherent and reproducible mode of production. Caught within the “bourgeois horizon,” Ritzer’s neo-Weberian conception of McDonaldization skips over questions concerning the social form and purpose of wealth and its production. Ritzer’s principles say nothing about why the products of McDonaldization are commodities, why McDonaldized workers work for a wage, or why profits animate their employers. There is no conceptual path from Ritzer’s principles of McDonaldization to any social forms constitutive of capitalist societies. The path goes the other way. In the absence of definite social forms and purposes, these shadow forms presuppose an illusory economy-in-general. Marx shows why capital has an immanent drive to innovate to accumulate, but Ritzer’s principles lack any coherent drive. McDonaldization is not about instrumental action—there is none—it is about capital’s reach.

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Moishe Postone comments on the shift of Frankfurt School thinkers from the critical political economy of traditional Marxism to a critique of instrumental action: Lacking a conception of the specific character of labor in capitalism, Critical Theory ascribed its consequences to labor per se. The frequently described shift of Critical Theory from the analysis of political economy to a critique of instrumental reason does not, then, signify that the theorists of the Frankfurt School simply abandoned the former in favor of the latter. Rather, that shift followed from, and was based upon, a particular analysis of political economy, more specifically, a traditional understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy.58

The neo-Weberian critique of instrumental action operates within the “bourgeois horizon,” as do economics and traditional Marxism. Each is caught in the “illusion of the economic.” The Commodity, Money, and Capital Fetishes A commodity is a fetish because it possesses a social power not due to its useful properties: car thieves want your car’s purchasing power, not its horsepower. In explaining why a commodity is a fetish, Marx singles out the “peculiar social character of the labor that produces commodities.”59 According to Marx, the commodity is a fetish because it bears a privately owned, abstract sort of social power—purchasing power.60 But neither the social form of wealth nor the social form of labor is a topic for economics. Without the concepts with which to grasp the peculiar social character of the commodity or the root of its fetish character in the social character of labor, economics is in no position to recognize the fetish character of the commodity.61 First, we set aside two sources of confusion in thinking about what Marx calls the fetish character of the commodity. Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Ridolfi Riva sort out the difference between the fetish character of the commodity and fetishism, which are often confused or conflated. In the classical (Ricardian) labor theory of value, value is conceived to be the product of labor, with no thought given to labor’s social form. That is to understand value as a transhistorical or “socio-natural” concept. Marx calls this fetishism because he shows that value is “purely social.”

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Value is a consequence of production on a capitalist basis, not a historical constant. Fetishism is an error of theory. Fetishism is a mistaken way of thinking that belongs to economics and any social theory that neglects the social form of labor and its consequences. On the other hand, the ghostly social objectivity that makes a fetish of the commodity and money, write Bellofiore and Riva, “is actually very real … What is deceptive is to attribute social properties to the things themselves as their natural attributes: this latter is Fetischismus, fetishism.”62 Thinking that value is transhistorical is fetishism, a theoretical mistake; thinking that commodities are possessed of the peculiar social power to purchase other commodities is no mistake. The commodity is a fetish in two ways that are easily confused. For Marx, it is purchasing power, the peculiarly abstract social power that the commodity packs, that makes it a fetish. Thorstein Veblen depicts how, in commercial societies, wealth functions as an honor fetish, a status symbol, leading to what he labels “conspicuous consumption.” Under the rubric of “sign-value,” Jean Baudrillard incorporates Veblen’s insight into an expanded Marxian account of the commodity.63 In addition to their use-values and exchange-values, commodities in a consumer society have sign-values. Sign-value bears some relation to use-value and roughly tracks exchange-value, as it reveals a further dimension of capitalist commodities. Economics ignores the double character of the commodity and of the labor that produces commodities. The double character of the commodity as a useful thing registers the same phenomenon as the fetish character of the commodity: the commodity is a fetish because it is a value. The double character of the commodity generates a double consciousness. In the lead essay of his book The Souls of Black Folks , W. E. B. Du Bois invokes the term “double consciousness” to describe the situation of Black Americans navigating a world dominated by hostile whites. A Black American is forced into a double consciousness, “always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in bemused contempt and pity.”64 What Du Bois does for Black Americans, Georg Simmel does for residents of commercial societies, who navigate a world saturated with prices. Like contestants on the television game show The Price is Right , we experience our world with double vision. We size up the washer/dryer combo, the sports car, the weeklong vacation to Cancun, knowing that each has its price. The double consciousness of participants in the money economy, Simmel contends, reaches into “the depths of the soul”:

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Money … hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. They all float with the same specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. They all rest on the same level and are distinguished only by their amounts.65

This “devaluing the entire objective world” ends “inevitably in dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valuelessness.”66 Valuing (pricing) is devaluing. Money, “the frightful leveler,” annuls the features that make useful things useful.67 For Marx, prices are the feature of the fetish character of the commodity whereby commodities, “far from being under their [owners’] control, in fact control them.”68 For Simmel, the hollowing effect of prices induces nihilism and the corresponding “blasé attitude.” For lack of attention to social form, economics is unable to recognize either the necessity of money in capitalism or money’s fetish character, both of which are rooted in the social character of the labor that produces commodities. Money and the commodity are inseparable since money is necessary for the polarized expression of value: the value of the commodity must be expressed in a quantity of something other than itself—money. Likewise, the commodity fetish and the money fetish are inseparable. Because labor in capitalism is undertaken independently, with products intended for sale at a profit Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action. This situation is manifested first by the fact that the products of men’s labour universally take on the form of commodities. The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes.69

Because it is the universal equivalent, money does not need to prove that it has purchasing power, as commodities do. Marx observes of commodities: “We see then that commodities are in love with money, but that ‘the course of true love never did run smooth.’”70 In its function as a store of value, or what Marx calls “money as money,” money seems to gain independence from circulation and become value incarnate. But money’s independence from circulation is a sham:

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[money’s] autonomous relating over and against circulation, its pulling out of circulation, robs it of both its use-value, for it [here money is assumed to be gold] is not supposed to serve as metal, [and] its exchange-value, for it possesses this exchange-value only just as moment of circulation, as the abstract symbol of their own value, which is reciprocally opposed to the commodities, as a moment of the movement of the commodity’s form itself. As long as it remains pulled out of circulation, it is just as devoid of value as if it lay buried in the deepest mountain shaft. However, if it goes again into circulation, then it is at the end of its imperishability, then the value contained in it perishes in the use-value of the commodities against which it is exchanged, [it] becomes again mere means of circulation.71

Money as money bursts with contradictions. Money’s independence from circulation is illusory: “In circulation it [money] is always only actual insofar as it is given away. If I want to hold on to it, then it evaporates in my hand into a mere ghost of wealth.”72 But if I return money to circulation, “it perishes in the use-value of the commodities against which it is exchanged.” To maintain itself as value, money as money must reenter circulation, but this spending must take the form of investing.73 When money reenters circulation, we begin a circuit with M. But what can be the goal of value in reentering circulation except to valorize itself, to increase in value, which requires completing an M-C-M + ΔM circuit, the circuit of capital? As the “rational miser,” the capitalist doesn’t spend but rather invests. We have followed Marx in transitioning from the commodity to value; from value to its necessary form of appearance, money, and prices; to money as a store of value, “money as money,” whose claim to be value incarnate, independent of circulation, proved to be deceptive; to money that functions as capital by initiating an M-C-M + ΔM circuit. Capital turns out to be the truth about value. As capital, value is not a thing; it is a process, a social form that comes to life as an “automatic subject” pursuing its aims of profitmaking and accumulation.74 Thinking value through, starting with the commodity, leads us to capital and the capital fetish.75 The fetish character of capital as “self-valorizing value,” as an automatic subject, appears most vividly when, as interest-bearing, capital itself becomes a commodity and perpetually lays golden eggs of interest. Like the fetish character of the commodity and money, the capital fetish lies beyond the horizon of economics. For economics conceives of capital benignly as produced means of production—nothing strange there.

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In missing the fetish character of the commodity, money, and capital, economics—and social theories under its spell—cancel Marx’s counterpoint to the Weberian legend of the “disenchantment” of the modern world. The modern world is not disenchanted. It is a capitalist world, and it is perversely enchanted by the ghostly social objectivity of value, which proves to be the automatic subject that is driven to accumulate endlessly. The irony of capitalist enlightenment is that it rebounds in the fetish character of the commodity, money, and capital. The fact that Marx’s critique of political economy nullifies Weber’s “disenchantment” thesis by revealing that capitalist modernity is haunted by value and dominated by capital’s drive to accumulate has largely gone unnoticed. There is no place for it within the “bourgeois horizon.”

MacIntyre, Postone, Weber, and Marx: Instrumental Action or Capital? Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue begins: “Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.”76 MacIntyre is setting up his claim that modern moral discourse has suffered a catastrophe, though one that has largely gone unnoticed. The catastrophe is signaled by the rise of emotivism: “emotivism has become embodied in our culture.”77 Feelings or gut responses, not rational deliberation, guide us. Emotivism decimates moral discourse: it asserts that there “can be no valid rational justification for any claims that objective and impersonal moral standards exist and hence that there are no such standards.”78 MacIntyre describes “the contemporary vision of the world” as “predominantly … Weberian.” 79 For Max Weber, modern society is unhinged from traditional moral moorings: “Weber is … an emotivist.”80 MacIntyre observes that “a moral philosophy—and emotivism is no exception—characteristically presupposes a sociology.”81 Though MacIntyre is dead set against Max Weber’s emotivism, the sociology of the modern world that informs MacIntyre’s account of the collapse of moral discourse comes from Weber; its fundamental category is instrumental action. Emotivism is the correlate of the instrumentalist assertion that there is a rationality of means, but reason cannot set ends. Emotivism involves “the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations,” writes MacIntyre.82 We argue that MacIntyre’s diagnosis that modern moral philosophy devolves into emotivism is distorted because the Weberian sociology that he adopts

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fails to identify and develop systematically the social forms constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. Weber does not cut to the quick of capitalist society; instead, he is caught in the “illusion of the economic.” Moishe Postone argues that labor in capitalism appears to be, and is, instrumental action: “it is precisely because of its socially mediating character that labor in capitalism is instrumental action. Because the mediating quality of labor in capitalism cannot appear directly, instrumentality then appears as an objective attribute of labor as such.”83 Labor appears as instrumental action because its peculiarly abstract social form “cannot appear directly.” Wealth in capitalism is produced in the commodity form, and commodities have a double character. Commodities are useful things—this they have in common with wealth in any social form—and they are values. Value is the social form of wealth in capitalism; labor in capitalism produces wealth in the commodity form: it is value-producing labor. Marx observes that value, which is congealed abstract labor that is socially necessary, is, accordingly, “supersensible”: not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value.84

Value must be expressed, then, as something other than itself, namely, money and prices.85 So, commodities appear to be wealth pure and simple, and commodity-producing labor counts as labor “pure and simple”—instrumental action, devoid of any determining social form. Labor in capitalism, however, is not labor “pure and simple”; rather, it produces value and surplus value. Labor in capitalism is a socially specific form of labor with a specific aim, namely surplus value to be accumulated as capital. Postone is mistaken, therefore, that labor in capitalism not only appears as instrumental action but is instrumental action. Postone’s point that labor in capitalism appears to be instrumental action still holds: “it is precisely because of its socially mediating character that labor in capitalism” appears to be instrumental action. But because labor in capitalism plays a socially mediating role, it cannot be labor “pure and simple”; labor in capitalism cannot be instrumental action, which repels social mediation. Labor in capitalism is not instrumental action; it is surplus value-producing labor since commodities produced on a capitalist basis

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carry surplus value. Because its peculiarly abstract social form “cannot present itself directly,” labor in capitalism appears to be instrumental action. Labor in capitalism presents itself as if it were labor per se, labor with no social form or purpose. In capitalism, “instrumentality then appears as an objective attribute of labor as such,” which it is not. Instrumental action is a fetish form. Of course, labor is always purposive, though it appears in capitalism as indifferent to its purpose. Labor’s aim encompasses the socially specific goal of producing surplus value. By contrast, instrumental action is supposedly indifferent to its goal. Instrumental action purports to be an actual kind of labor, whether that kind is thought to be socially specific or not; purposive labor does not claim to be a kind of labor. Purposive labor is an unsaturated concept, a general concept that applies to all labor but is the name of none since there is no purpose in general. Consider Marx’s treatment of the labor process in Chapter 7 of Capital 1, “The Labor Process and the Valorization Process.” The first section is devoted to the labor process-in-general: “We shall therefore, in the first place, have to consider the labour process independently of any specific social formation.”86 The fact that Marx states that he is considering the labor process “independently of any specific social formation” reminds us that no actual labor process ever exists independently of some specific social formation with its constitutive forms and purposes. There is no labor process-in-general. But only in that impossible setting could instrumental action take place. Since there is no labor process-in-general, there is no instrumental action: instrumental action is a pseudo-concept. There is nothing for instrumental action to be the concept of. It is easy to conflate the generally applicable category of purposive action with the pseudo-concept of instrumental action, which is one of capital’s long shadows. Weber’s sociology of modernity rests on the fetish of instrumental action. Weber fails to perceive instrumental action as an illusion because he does not recognize capital.87 Instrumental action purports to have no social form or aim. But there is no such thing; so instrumental action is a pseudo-concept, and the Weberian sociology based on instrumental action rests on a phenomenological false move. Like economics, it posits a labor process without any constitutive social forms or purposes, an economy-in-general. But the lesson of historical materialism is that there is no society-in-general, no wealth-in-general, no labor-in-general, no

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production-in-general, no economy-in-general. Thinking otherwise falls into the “illusion of the economic.”

Turning the Key of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Social theory in philosophy and social science has experienced a collapse— also largely unrecognized. Social theory, notably mainstream economics, collapses the socially and historically determinate categories needed to understand life in capitalist societies into generally applicable categories or conflates the two. Since those determinate categories carry the moral, social, and political weight, the collapse squeezes those meanings out of social theory. Morally, socially, and politically laden action reduces to behavior, leveling the field of social life for positivist social theories that exclude the normative matters. The fragmentation of modern moral discourse that MacIntyre bemoans is better situated in the collapse of social theory. That involves the ongoing failure to grasp capitalism in an adequate way. Instead, capitalism is misconstrued as a mythic economy-in-general. The hollowing out of social theory is exacerbated by the encroachments of “economics imperialism.”88 Social theory fails to engage the concepts needed to comprehend capitalist society. Emotivism, instrumental action, utility, wealth, and production do not identify any mode of production. But the crux of historical materialism is that there must always be a mode of production one and that each involves a “way of life.” The concepts of capital and instrumental reason both evoke nihilism but in different ways. What is more nihilistic than the claim of instrumental reason that nothing in the world is objectively good or bad, right or wrong? Lack of respect for the person as a person is a criticism lodged repeatedly against utilitarianism. The same holds for instrumental action; its presuppositions set aside the dignity of the person. Both utility theory and instrumental reason presuppose that intentions, emotions, and actions have no moral weight of their own. Their nihilism is teamed with moral nominalism. Capitalism and the social forms bound up with it are not nihilistic in these ways. Capital produces wealth in the commodity form, and commodities require buyers and sellers. Buyers and sellers are free, property-holding persons (even if one’s property is limited to, in John Locke’s phrase, “a property in one’s own person,” that is, one’s labor

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power) whose will (including their will as present in their property) must be respected. Buying and selling are mutually voluntary. Being free, possessing rights, deserving respect, these values belong to capitalism’s constitutive social forms. As Marx points out: In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects … The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property.89

But mutual respect, even respect laced with indifference or antagonism, is contrary to what MacIntyre identifies as the key to emotivism, “the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations.”90 A formal morality belongs to the social relations that make up a capitalist society; intentions, actions, and affects have moral weight. Moral nominalism is out of place here. Capitalism is not so nihilistic as utility theory or instrumental reason. Emotivism does not capture the tensions inherent in commercial relations. Buyers and sellers will pressure one another, but morality and law set limits to the manipulation of persons. Marx contrasts pre-modern laborers, such as slaves or serfs, who are subject to “personal dependence,” with wage laborers, who freely sell their labor power but are subject to the impersonal forces of the labor market. Unlike slaves or serfs, wage laborers are formally free to leave their employer, but a recession throws many out of work against their will. The social roles of buyer and seller, including that of the free wage laborer, are formally egalitarian; the power of this egalitarianism continues to be seen in social movements for equality around the world.91 Still, there is a certain nihilism to the juridical person posited by commercial relations, the pure or unencumbered self. Nevertheless, the reduction of the person to the pure self that comes with capitalist relations does not negate all values. Capitalist society is not emotivist at its root. Emotivism depends on the untenable claims of instrumental reason. Emotivism and instrumental reason, like utility, are caught in the “illusion of the economic.” This illusion, cast by capitalist social forms, posits an economy-in-general—usually by mistaking the capitalist economy for an impossible generic one—stripped of all social valuations of useful things and all specific social roles and relations, along with their moral weights. Since the commodity form of wealth, which is integral to Marx’s account

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of capitalism, is absent from both utility theory and the Weberian notion of instrumental reason, the moral implications of the social roles of buyer and seller are missing. Since there can be no society-in-general, there is no generic social space to accommodate utility theory or Weberian instrumental action. As imagined, such a space would be emotivist, with individuals left to assign values based on their own preferences. Because every mode of production is a definite and morally laden way of life, the social space of any actual society is never generic, never emotivist. Emotivism is an illusion spawned by capitalist social relations.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1973), 331. 2. Paul Mattick Jr., “Marx’s Dialectic,” in Marx’s Method in ‘Capital ’: A Reexamination, edited by Fred Moseley (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 124. 3. Paul Samuelson, Economics, 9th edition (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1973), 50. 4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, translated by Clemens Dutt, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5 (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1976), 31. 5. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 69. Time, Labor, and Social Domination is the seminal Englishlanguage contribution to the new reading of Marx, what Germans call die neue Marx Lektüre. On die neue Marx Lektüre, see Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva, “Die Neue Marx Lektüre: Putting the Critique of Political Economy Back into the Critique of Society,” Radical Philosophy, 189 (January/February 2015), 24–36. The new interpretation understands Marx to be a critic of political economy, including of the classical (Ricardian) labor theory of value. The classical theory is based on a transhistorical conception of labor and has no idea of why value must be expressed as money. Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane develop the critique of political economy as critical social theory. See Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane, eds., Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2022). Interpreting Marx as a critic of political economy enables us to see the new reading as a branch of the Frankfurt School that reaches back to Theodor Adorno and his students Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, and

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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Hans-Jürgen Krahl. The essays collected in the present volume explore the philosophical and political significance of the critique of political economy as critical theory. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Alfredo Saad-Filho observes, “According to the ‘traditional’ interpretation, Marx’s theory of value is not essentially different from Ricardo’s.” Alfredo Saad-Filho, The Value of Marx (London: Routledge, 2002), 21. I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, translated by Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman (Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 1972), 73. Samuel A. Chambers addresses this deficit in his Capitalist Economics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022). Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (London, UK: Macmillan, 1982), 240. In our judgment, Marx’s critique of political economy develops needed categories in way that makes it indispensable. But Marx is not the only resource in renewing the critique of political economy as a critical theory. Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel are among those who have much to contribute. Martha Nussbaum finds economics preposterous and threatening in equal measures. Preposterous: “We have to grapple with the sad fact that contemporary economics has not yet put itself onto the map of conceptually respectable theories of human action. (Indeed, it has repudiated the rich foundations that the philosophical anthropology of Adam Smith offered it.) Sometimes it seems like an odd exercise, finding subtle errors in economic theories of behavior, when one’s inclination is really to say, we can’t even assess a theory this crude, let’s throw it all out and begin all over again” [Martha Nussbaum, “In Defense of Universal Values,” in Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 122]. Threatening: “certain proposals in ethics and especially in economic theory that present themselves as innocuous extensions of ordinary belief and practice could actually lead, followed and lived with severity and rigor, to the end of human life as we know it” [Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990), 107]. See Samuel A. Chambers, There’s no Such Thing as “The Economy”: Essays on Capitalist Value (New York, NY: punctum books, 2018). Martha Campbell, “Value Objectivity and Habit,” in The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital,” edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 86. R. Glenn Hubbard and Anthony Patrick O’Brien, Microeconomics, 5th edition (New York. NY: Pearson, 2016), 17. Paul Samuelson, Economics. Paul Samuelson, Economics, 55.

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16. “The economic approach is clearly not restricted to material goods and wants, nor even to the market sector. Prices, be they the money prices of the market sector or the ‘shadow’ imputed prices of the nonmarket sector, measure the opportunity cost of using scarce resources, and the economic approach predicts the same kind of response to shadow prices as to market prices” [Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 6]. 17. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 125. Marx’s statement calls for a variety of qualifications, several of which we begin to explore below in Chapter 8: “The Commodity Spectrum.” 18. Below, in Chapter 2, “Recognizing Capital: Some Barriers to Public Discourse about Capital,” we criticize Nancy Fraser’s 1995 article “From Redistribution to Recognition Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” New Left Review 212 (July 1, 1995); reprinted in Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), for focusing on the redistribution of “wealth,” addressing the second question, and neglecting the third, what is the social form and purpose of wealth? Writing in 2018, Fraser calls attention to the third question: “Above and beyond the matter of how wealth is ‘distributed,’ there is the problem of what counts as wealth in the first place and how that wealth is produced” [Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, edited by Brian Milstein (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018), 3]. Moreover, Fraser states that in her 1995 New Left Review article, “far from endorsing the black box view of distribution [which ignores the third question about the social form of wealth], then, I was trying to clarify where it came from and why it was juxtaposed to recognition. I traced the provenance of both those categories (as well as their mutual opposition) precisely to capitalism” (Capitalism, 9). In the appendix to Chapter 2, “Letter from Patrick Murray to Judith Butler, December 16, 1995,” Murray criticizes Butler for treating capital as wealth, thus not addressing the third question and thereby not taking into consideration implications of the capital form for homophobia. 19. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II, edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya, translated by Renate Simpson (London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), 529. 20. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II, 504, note. 21. Marx notes that, in the polarized expression of their value in money, “as the only adequate form of existence of exchange value in the face of all the other commodities,” commodities appear to be “playing the role of use-values pure and simple [blossen Gebrauchswerten]” (Karl Marx, Capital 1, 227). See also Capital 1, 153.

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22. “Everyone knows, if nothing else, that commodities have a common value-form which contrasts in the most striking manner with the motley natural forms of their use-value. I refer to the money-form” (Karl Marx, Capital 1, 139). 23. “As the elementary form of bourgeois wealth, the commodity was our point of departure, the prerequisite for the emergence of capital. On the other hand, commodities appear now as the product of capital ” (Karl Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process, translated by Rodney Livingstone, in Capital 1, 949). 24. Karl Marx, Capital 1, note 6. 25. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd edition, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge; revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1967), 24–25. 26. We develop the idea of factoring philosophy in False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory: Losing Public Purpose (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). 27. See Karl Marx, “Letter to his Father: On a Turning-Point in Life,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, edited by Lloyd Easton and Kurt Guddat. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1967. 28. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991), §133, addition, 202. 29. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 278. “Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing point …” [Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 107]. To present this totality Marx takes a systematic dialectical approach in Capital. 30. Karl Marx, “Letter to P.V. Annenkov (December 28, 1846),” in The Poverty of Philosophy, New York: International Publishers, 1963, 190. 31. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), 16. Lukács adds, Marx “measured Hegel’s philosophy by the yardstick he had himself discovered and systematically elaborated, and he found it wanting” (17). This interpretation of Hegel is a major point on which we question Marx’s judgment. 32. We also discuss shadow forms, some of which are pseudo-concepts and some not. 33. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 852–853. 34. Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s “Capital”: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 196. 35. For more on subsumption under value forms, see Chapter 10: “The Social and Material Transformation of Production by Capital: Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital, Volume I,” in Patrick Murray, The Mismeasure of

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36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

Wealth (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2016) and Patrick Murray, “Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes,” in Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique, ed. Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2016), 113–135. See also The Problem of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx, a Ph.D. dissertation by Andrés Sáenz de Sicilia for The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, UK, April 2016, and Innovation under Capital, a Ph.D. dissertation by Shannon Walsh for the University of Auckland, New Zealand, 2022. Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. See also Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983). Karl Marx, Capital 1, 163. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 128. Tony Smith, Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2006), 336. See also Karl Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process, translated by Rodney Livingstone, in Capital 1, 950. In the “Original Text of ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’,” (Urtext ), Marx describes simple commodity circulation, the market, as “an abstract sphere of the bourgeois process of production as a whole, which through its own determinations shows itself to be a moment, a mere form of appearance of some deeper process lying behind it, even resulting from it and producing it” [Karl Marx, “Original Text” (Urtext), in “Economic Manuscripts of 1957—8,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 29 (London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart 1987), 482]. That “deeper process” is the circulation of capital. Karl Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process, 1041. Ibid. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 197. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 274, n. 4. Diane Elson, “Marx’s Value Theory of Labour,” in Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson (London, UK: CSE Books, 1979). Karl Marx, Capital 1, 291–291. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press 2000), 168. Ritzer is right that Max Weber argued that “ultimately, material or, more specifically, economic interests drive rationalization in capitalist societies” (McDonaldization, 168–169). We may

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48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

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speak of real subsumption without formal subsumption in cases where notfor-profit organizations, such as public and private hospitals or universities, “go corporate,” imitating practices of for-profit firms with which they may be competing. We might speak of McDonaldization in such cases. George Ritzer, McDonaldization, 12. Ezra Pound, Canto XLV, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfounda tion.org/poems/54319/canto-xlv. For Marx, see note 14 on 278–279 in Capital 1. Ritzer, McDonaldization, 189. For more on shadow forms, see Patrick Murray, “Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes,” in Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique, edited by Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 113–135, and Dennis Badeen and Patrick Murray, “A Marxian Critique of Neoclassical Economics’ Reliance on Shadows of Capital’s Constitutive Social Forms,” in Critique of Political Economy, a special issue of Crisis and Critique, edited by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, Volume 3, Issue 3 (November 16, 2016): 8–28. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, edited by Maurice Dobb, translated S. W. Ryazanskaya (New York, NY: International Publishers), 152. See also Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 410. Max Weber, “The Spirit of Capitalism,” in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 70. George Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 327–328. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York, NY: International Publishers), 79. This book was written in French. Karl Marx, “Original Text” (Urtext ), 475–476. Moishe Postone sees the hard-won extensions of more equal treatment to social groups previously discriminated against as going with the grain of capitalist universalism: “These preliminary determinations imply that the extension of the universalistic principles of bourgeois society to larger segments of the population—that is to say, the realization of these principles—which has in part, been effected by working class movements, as well as by those elements of women’s movements and minority movements that have struggled for equal rights, should not be understood as a development that points beyond capitalist society” (Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 369). Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 119.

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59. “As the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labour which produces them” (Karl Marx, Capital 1, 165). 60. Marx notes how the strange purchasing power of money upset ancient society: “Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. Ancient society therefore denounced it [money] as tending to destroy the economic and political order” (Karl Marx, Capital 1, 230). 61. Georg Lukács writes of the commodity form, “at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question [of the commodity form] and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure” [History and Class Consciousness , translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), 83]. The ghostly objectivity of value, the commodity’s fetish character, “stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man” (ibid., 100). 62. Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Ridolfi Riva, “The Neue MarxLektüre,” 36, n. 56. 63. See Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, translated by Charles Levin (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981) and “Consumer Society,” in Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present, edited by Patrick Murray (New York and London, UK: Routledge, 1997). 64. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009). 65. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 330. 66. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 330. 67. Marx says of usefulness: “The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter” (Karl Marx, Capital 1, 126). The devaluation that Simmel links with money, one of capital’s constitutive forms, is likewise brought about by one of capital’s shadow forms, utility—a double whammy. Martha Nussbaum is stunned by how utility hollows: “It is a startling and powerful vision. Just try to think it seriously: this body of this wonderful beloved person is exactly the same in quality as that person’s mind and inner life. Both, in turn, the same in quality as the value of Athenian democracy; of Pythagorean geometry; of Eudoxan astronomy. What would it be like to look at a body and to see in it exactly the same shade and tone of goodness and beauty as in a mathematical proof—exactly the same, differing only in amount and in location, so that the choice between making love with that person and contemplating that proof presented itself as a choice between having n measures of water and n + 100” [Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 116].

1

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

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Karl Marx, Capital 1, 167–168. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 187. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 202. As quoted in Patrick Murray, Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988) 171. As quoted in Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge, 175. “In the circulation M-C-M, however, both commodity and money function merely as disappearing modes of existence of value itself: money its universal form, the commodity as its particular form, its disguised from of existence, so to speak. Value goes constantly out of the one form over into the other without losing itself in this process, and it thus transforms itself into an automatic subject” (Karl Marx, Capital, 1, 255). Karl Marx, Capital 1, 255. Riccardo Bellofiore presents this transition from value as commodities and money to capital as the process of extracting surplus value from wageworkers as the transition from value as a ghost (commodity, money) to a vampire. See Riccardo Bellofiore, “A Ghost Turning into a Vampire, The Concept of Capital and Living Labour,” in Re-reading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 1. Ibid., 21. MacIntyre’s description of emotivism fits mainstream economics, for which preferences take the place of goods: “What I have suggested to be the case by and large about our own culture—that in moral argument the apparent assertion of principles functions as a mask for expressions of personal preference—is what emotivism takes to be universally the case” (ibid., 18). Ibid., 18. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 29. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 183. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 138–139. Value follows the logic of essence as Hegel conceives of it: essence must appear as something other than itself. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 283. It is not as simple as that, as Tony Smith points out. This same pattern of being forced to recognize capital recurs in George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society. “Economics imperialism” refers to the reach of mainstream economic thinking and game theory into the social sciences generally. See the two

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studies by S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For a proponent of extending economic analysis into nonmarket arenas such as the family, see Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976). For a critical approach to “economics imperialism,” see Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis, From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). 89. Karl Marx, Capital 1, 178. See also Capital 1, 280. 90. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 22. 91. Marx states, “the system of exchange values, and the money system even more so, are, in fact, a system of freedom and equality.” Karl Marx, “Original Text” (Urtext ), 475.

Bibliography Amadae, S. M. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———. Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Anderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Badeen, Dennis, and Patrick Murray. “A Marxian Critique of Neoclassical Economics’ Reliance on Shadows of Capital’s Constitutive Social Forms.” In Critique of Political Economy, a special issue of Crisis and Critique. Edited by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, Volume 3, Issue 3 (November 16, 2016): 8–28. Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981. ———. “Consumer Society.” In Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by Patrick Murray. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Bellofiore, Riccardo. “A Ghost Turning into a Vampire, The Concept of Capital and Living Labour.” In Re-reading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition. Edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Bellofiore, Riccardo, and Tommaso Ridolfi Riva. “The Neue Marx-Lektüre: Putting the Critique of Political Economy back into the Critique of Society.” Radical Philosophy, Vol. 189 (January/February 2015): 24–36.

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Becker, Gary. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Bonefeld, Werner. Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014. Bonefeld, Werner, and Chris O’Kane, eds. Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2022. Campbell, Martha. “Value Objectivity and Habit.” In The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital.” Edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Chambers, Samuel 2018. There’s no Such Thing as “The Economy”: Essays on Capitalist Value. New York: punctum books, 2018. ———. Capitalist Economics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London: Macmillan, 1982. de Sicilia, Andrés Sáenz. The Problem of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx. Ph.D. diss. The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, UK, April 2016. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folks. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009. Elson, Diane. “Marx’s Value Theory of Labour.” In Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. Edited by Diane Elson. London, UK: CSE Books, 1979. Fine, Ben, and Dimitris Milonakis. From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the social and the historical in the evolution of economic theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Fraser, Nancy. “From Redistribution to Recognition” Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Review 212 (July 1, 1995); reprinted in Nancy Fraser. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Fraser, Nancy, and Rahel Jaeggi Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Edited by Brian Milstein. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. Hubbard, R. Glenn, and Anthony Patrick O’Brien. Microeconomics. Fifth edition. New York, NY: Pearson, 2016. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd edition. Edited by L. A. SelbyBigge. Revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1967. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Second edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984

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Marx, Karl. “Letter to P. V. Annenkov (December 28, 1846).” In The Poverty of Philosophy. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1963. ———. “Letter to his Father: On a Turning-Point in Life.” In Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. Edited by Lloyd Easton and Kurt Guddat. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1967. ———. Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II. Edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya. Translated by Renate Simpson. London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968. ———. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Maurice Dobb. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1970. ———. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973. ———. Capital 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1976. ———. Results of the Immediate Production Process. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. In Karl Marx, Capital 1. ———. Karl Marx, “Original Text” (Urtext ). In “Economic Manuscripts of 1957—8.” In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 29. London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1976. Mattick, Paul Jr. “Marx’s Dialectic.” In Marx’s Method in ‘Capital ’: A Reexamination. Edited by Fred Moseley. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993. Murray, Patrick. Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988. ———. “Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes. In Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique. Edited by Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell. Leiden: Brill, 2016, pp. 113–135. ———. The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2016. Murray, Patrick, and Jeanne Schuler. False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory: Losing Public Purpose. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. “In Defense of Universal Values.” In Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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Pound, Ezra. Canto XLV. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poems/54319/canto-xlv. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000. Rubin, I. I. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Translated by Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman. Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 1972. Saad-Filho, Alfredo. The Value of Marx. London, UK: Routledge, 2002. Samuelson, Paul. Economics. Ninth edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1973. Sandel, Michael. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Satz, Debra. Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald N. Levine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Smith, Tony. Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2006. ———. Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2017. Walsh, Shannon. Innovation Under Capital. Ph.D. diss. University of Auckland, New Zealand, 2022. Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983. Weber, Max. “The Spirit of Capitalism.” In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.

CHAPTER 2

Recognizing Capital: Some Barriers to Public Discourse About Capital

Though a certain Ph.D. in philosophy who never got a job in the field wrote a long, unfinished work on the subject over a century ago, the determining social form under which the globe increasingly groans remains poorly understood. We still have a long way to go in recognizing capital. We want to examine some of the reasons for that as well as some of its consequences. Our essay divides into three parts. First, we consider what capital is and why it is difficult to recognize. Second, we examine the consequences of the failure to conceptualize capital for thinking about the politics of identity. In this part we will first respond to a recent article by Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition: Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” and then do some thinking of our own on capital and the politics of identity. Third, we survey some conceptual and political barriers and openings to a better recognition of capital.

Recognizing Capital: What Makes It Hard What Is Capital? Capital is a peculiar and stunning social form of wealth and the production of wealth. It is inherently dynamic and global. Capital is not use-values, not money, not commodities, not means of production, as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_2

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many common sense or social scientific notions would have it. Capital is not “wealth,” that is, it is not merely wealth capable of being employed in the production of new wealth. Rather, capital is a specific social form of wealth and the production of wealth that is organized around a definite, if bizarre, purpose, namely, the endless accumulation of surplus value. Capital involves a class system of expropriation in which wage laborers are free to contract with those who own the wherewithal to produce (the capitalists), since workers are legally free and “free” of alternative means of support. What capitalists expropriate from wage laborers is not surplus “wealth” but surplus value, that is, wealth in a determinate social form, in the value form. Value is the basis for the equivalencies asserted when commodities are exchanged. Value is the residue of the blind, coercive, abstract, and impersonal social form of labor under capitalism. Value itself cannot appear—what would “congealed socially necessary abstract labor” look like?—value can appear only as something other than itself, namely, money. Money is not a mere “technical support” to the production of “wealth”; no, capital necessarily expresses itself and takes its own measure in money. To identify capital with commodities or with money is wrongly to reduce an internally more complex value form (capital) to value forms proper to simple commodity circulation. But to identify capital simply with means and materials of production is utterly to fail to recognize capital for what it is: not a thing, and not a historical constant, but an uncanny and astoundingly powerful (asocial) social form of wealth turned into an “automatic subject” lording it over the globe. As Marx put it, “[c]apital, as self-valorizing value; does not just comprise class relations, a definite social character that depends on the existence of labor as wagelabor. It is a movement, a circulatory process through different stages, which itself in turn includes three different forms of the ‘circulatory process. Hence it can only be grasped as a movement, and not as a static thing’.”1 The circulation of capital involves not simply a flow of materials but ongoing metamorphoses, an endless flow of forms from money capital to productive capital, to commodity capital, and back to money capital—which explains why capital cannot simply be identified with money, means of production, or commodities. To sum up, capital is not “wealth.” “Wealth” is not inherently dynamic and global; capital is. “Wealth” need not be measured in money; capital must. “Wealth” is not bound by class antagonism; capital is. “Wealth” does not force the generalization of commodity circulation, including the

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commodification of land and labor power; capital does. “Wealth” does not set a determinate collective good; capital does, endless moneymaking. “Wealth” is not bound up with liberalism’s formal recognition of the dignity of each (bargaining) person; capital is. “Wealth” lacks any determining social form and is therefore merely an abstraction, nothing actual; capital is the actuality of coercive rule by abstraction. What Makes Capital Hard to Recognize? The concept of capital involves great subtlety and complexity—and we just scratched the surface. We need only contrast it with the common, ahistorical notion of capital as “wealth-producing wealth,” that is, usevalues of undetermined social form that can be used to produce new use-values, in order to identify one high and unavoidable hurdle to recognizing capital. Thinking about capital is intellectually very demanding. Capital is a particular social form; and not only is it difficult to attend to forms, forms and formal causality have been whipping boys of modern and postmodern thought. Our intellectual climate is generally hostile to forms, social or otherwise. Modern and postmodern anti-essentialism close off the conceptual space for recognizing capital and tracking its pervasive influence throughout culture and the world. Form speaks to the peculiar necessity exerted by something. What makes something what it is cuts deeper than an interpreting framework and with more specificity than an amorphous underlying power. To speak of forms is not to deny that forms can come and go; neither is it to assert that any one form determines the way events actually occur. But form best describes the insistence at work throughout advanced capitalist society: the insistencies of the value forms (commodity, money, wages, capital) are real enough. Giving up on form makes us less able to get hold of the forces at work in the world. Ironically, just as capitalism’s grip intensifies dramatically, the conceptual resources to talk about this penetration are being cast off as out of date. That’s not accidental, for, Marx argues, this modern resurgence of anti-Aristotelian thought is itself bound up with capitalism’s rise to hegemonic status. But to show that would require another paper.2 Classical and neoclassical economics—and much of what goes under the name of socialist or even Marxist “economics”—fail miserably at conceptualizing capital. They fail to recognize it as a particular social form of wealth and the production of wealth. Martha Campbell reminds us of the chasm that separates Marx’s critique of political economy from

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classical and neoclassical economics when she writes: “There are no counterparts to Marx’s concepts in either classical or utility theory.”3 Marx’s critique of political economy—Marx was no “economist”—rests on a profoundly different conceptualization of “the economy” from those commonplace in the dismal science. The difference lies in Marx’s insistence that human wealth, needs, labor, and productive interchange with nonhuman nature always have a determining social form, and that these social forms matter all the way down. “All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society,” writes Marx in the Grundrisse.4 Capital is such a social form. In short, almost all of modern economic and social science, including socialist and Marxist contributions, conspire to make capital unrecognizable.5 This sorry situation is no simple testament to the ill will or blockheadedness of modern economic and social science. We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Smith, Ricardo, Böhm-Bawerk, Jevons, Weber, and Parsons were all on the take. For capital conceals itself; capitalism writes its social form, the value form, all over itself—in invisible ink! This takes us into the socioepistemological dimension of Marx’s theory of value as a social form. Unlike Ricardo’s naturalistic or, better, asocial approach to value, Marx’s theory of value just is his theory of the social form of labor and wealth under capitalism. Marx identified the omission of any analysis of the value form, as opposed to the magnitude of value, as a cardinal sin of classical political economy—a judgment that extends to neoclassical economics, whose forerunner, Samuel Bailey, Marx carefully evaluated. What Marx’s analysis of the value form revealed, however, is that value— that is, the social form of labor and wealth in capitalism—cannot appear itself but only as something other, as a thing, as money.6 The oddities of the value form, then, set up a situation more baffling than that presented by a ventriloquist. For while the ventriloquist appears not to be speaking, just as the capitalist production process appears not to have a social form, at least what is “thrown” by a ventriloquist is recognizable as a voice. But who would identify what is “thrown” by value, a bare thing, money, as a social form? This creates the illusion that the capitalist economy is “the economy” pure and simple, “the economy” finally “disembedded” from “noneconomic” encumbrances and thereby a proper object of study for the science of “economics.”7 But this notion of an actual economic order free of any determining social form, the idea that there can be an

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actually existing “economy-in-general,” is really only “the illusion of the economic.” It is truly the “illusion of the epoch.” Clearly, capitalists and their minions are in no hurry to see capital recognized for what it is. Given the power they wield in capitalist societies, this constitutes a pervasive obstruction to our recognizing capital. Thus, the elusiveness of capital results jointly from conceptual complexity, capital’s self-concealing character, and political reluctance to bring the subject out of hiding.

Recognizing Capital and the “Politics of Identity” What are the consequences of failing to recognize capital for the politics of identity? We begin with Nancy Fraser’s article and then turn to several observations of our own regarding capital and identity politics. Critique of Fraser on Redistribution and Recognition In an article published by the New Left Review in 1995, Nancy Fraser observes: “The ‘struggle for recognition’ is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict in the late twentieth century. Demands for ‘recognition of difference’ fuel struggles of groups mobilized under the banners of nationality, ethnicity, ‘race,’ gender, and sexuality.”8 Fraser worries about ascendent “identity politics” being disconnected from a much-needed politics of “redistribution.” “My larger aim is to connect two political problematics that are currently dissociated from one another.”9 We share Fraser’s aim of conceptualizing a nonreductive politics of redistribution and recognition, but we question her way of framing the issue.10 We reconceive Fraser’s project as one that investigates the relationship between capital (rather than redistribution) and the politics of recognition. That leads naturally to the question: What is Fraser’s concept of capital? Answering that question leads us to make three judgments: (a) Fraser’s notion of “redistribution” belongs to a “left-Ricardian” approach to capital rather than a Marxian one; (b) Fraser’s view of capital and the politics of recognition is too “demarcationist,” too external—even though her purpose is to join the forces fighting for recognition and for redistribution, and even though she repeatedly insists on how the two are “intertwined,” the framework of Fraser’s analysis remains dualistic; and (c) the shortcomings of a conception of capital which neglects

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the basic question of the social form of wealth and wealth-producing activities explain why she’s stuck with an external relation between redistribution and recognition. Fraser’s demarcationist account keeps from the view of many powerful conceptual connections between capital and identity. Capital’s power, the causality of capitalist social forms, is altogether left out of the “left-Ricardian” picture of inequitably divided “wealth.” Unlike capital, “wealth” is a dull concept; it won’t do much work. a. Fraser associates “redistribution” with redressing “material inequality” and with a socialist imaginary centered on terms such as “interest,” “exploitation,” and “redistribution.”11 But this “imaginary” may be termed a “left-Ricardian” one, for it identifies capital with the systematic expropriation by capitalists of surplus wealth created by wage laborers. Like Ricardian thought in general, what this leftist version neglects to theorize are questions such as: What is the social form of this inequitably divided wealth? and What is the specific social form of the labor that produces it? By not theorizing these and related questions, Fraser slips into the “illusion of the economic”; that is, that wealth and the creation of wealth can exist without determining social forms, and by the same token she forecloses any investigation of the powers of capitalist social forms. Here is the heart of our counterproposal: We suggest reframing the project of reconceptualizing “redistribution” and “recognition” and building it out from the Marxian theory of capital in place of the left-Ricardian horizon of redescribing “wealth.” b. Despite her efforts to the contrary, Fraser’s conceptualization of capital and recognition is demarcationist, that is, it conceives of the two as independent spheres. Fraser emphasizes that the distinction between redistribution and recognition is an analytical one, and she repeatedly notes the interconnectedness of the two. It’s the innerconnectedness that slips through these terms of engagement. When she writes “[i]n the real world, of course, culture and political economy are always imbricated with one another, and virtually every struggle against injustice, when properly understood, implies demands for both redistribution and recognition,”12 we need to inquire further: exactly how are “culture” and “economy” being conceptualized? The term “imbricated” refers to an overlapping, as with tiles or shingles. But tiles and shingles can stand alone; “culture” and “economy” cannot. Fraser’s concepts suggest a

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multilayered interaction of independently constituted, free-standing spheres. That’s the flypaper “illusion of the economic” again. No actual economic order can be adequately conceptualized in abstraction from cultural factors, notably, from ways of recognition. In particular, the form of abstract recognition involved in wage labor, like wage labor itself, belongs to what makes capital, capital. It’s not a cultural accompaniment. So, despite the talk of “a constitutive, irreducible political-economic dimension” to culture, the picture remains demarcationist. Moreover, the text confirms this: Thus, far from occupying two airtight separate spheres, economic injustice and cultural injustice are usually imbricated so as to reinforce one another dialectically. Cultural norms that are unfairly biased against some are institutionalized in the state and the economy; meanwhile, economic disadvantage impedes equal participation in the making of culture, in public spheres and in everyday life. The result is often a vicious circle of cultural and economic subordination.13

Fraser is surely right that “sexual, racial, religious, and other biases get institutionalized in the state and the economy,”14 but this institutionalization of prejudice remains a fundamentally external relationship. Fraser writes: Gender, for example, has political-economic dimensions. It is a basic structuring principle of the political economy. On the one hand, gender structures the fundamental division between paid “productive” labor and unpaid “reproductive” and domestic labor, assigning women primary responsibility. On the other hand, gender also structures the division within paid labor between higher-paid, male-dominated, manufacturing and professional occupations and lower-paid, female-dominated “pink-collar” and domestic-service occupations.15

But what counts as “a basic structuring principle of the political economy”? While affirming that male supremacy is institutionalized in the “really existing” capitalist economies, we contend that it is not a “basic structuring principle” of capitalism that domestic work be done by women; neither is it a principle of capitalism that the paid labor force be structured to advantage men at the expense of women. We

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distinguish between what are truly structural principles of a capitalist economy—what is essential to capitalism—and what are not. The distinction between paid, “productive” labor, and unpaid domestic labor is essential since wage laborers must be free persons—not capitalistically produced commodities—reared in a domestic sphere at least formally independent of capital. But the further specification that domestic labor be unequally divided, with women shouldering the greater portion of it, while deeply entrenched, is not an essential feature of capitalism. Why should the distinction between what is essential to capitalism and what is not matter? Isn’t it a squabble over words or, worse, special pleading for a Marxist hobby horse? Making the distinction is important because the conditions for reproducing the structural principles essential to a capitalist economy differ from the conditions for reentrenching patriarchy (or racism or homophobia).16 Do we have any good reason to believe that it would spell the end of capitalism if domestic labor were equally shared out between men and women or if women were not superexploited and marginalized? Institutionalized discrimination against targeted groups in the economy and politics is painfully real, but such discrimination does not belong to the conceptualization of what a capitalist economy is. What needs distinguishing is the difference between how a particular economic order essentially affects recognition, and recognition’s being affected by how a particular economic order happens to behave in a specific time and place. What indications there are suggest that Fraser has the second thought in mind, not the first. Relatedly, the way Fraser uses the term “dialectical” suggests that she understands it to mean a back and forth interplay between two entities each capable of standing alone, what might be better be termed “synergy,” not the exposition of the actual inseparability of two putatively independent entities, which we take to be the proper use of the term “dialectical.” In this connection, we note that Fraser identifies Hegel as the paradigmatic philosopher of recognition and the intellectual ancestor of two prominent philosophers of recognition, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth. By contrast, we would argue that Hegel (like Marx) is better thought of as conceptualizing the inextricability of modes of recognition from definite economic orders. Fraser worries that the pursuit of political and economic equality requires putting one’s group identity “out of business.” This dilemma appears to be based on a non sequitur: Redress of political and economic

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injustices does not require identity groups to disclaim their distinctiveness. Here Fraser seems to slip back to the position Bruno Bauer took on the Jewish question: To become true Prussian citizens the Jews would have to give up their Jewishness and Christians would have to quit being Christians. To this Marx countered: Nothing of the sort is required; on the contrary, modern liberalism explicitly protects religious and other freedoms of association. Capitalism has other ways of dissolving group identities, for example, gradually eroding thicker understandings of particularity with the watery goodwill of consumer society. Maintaining a strong identity requires too much deliberate effort once basic civil rights or economic security seem possible. c. Fraser’s demarcationist conceptualization of recognition and economy as tightly overlapping one another stems from the fundamental shortcoming of the “redistributionist” or “left-Ricardian” imaginary, namely, its failure to ask: What, exactly, is it that is being inequitably distributed? To answer, “wealth,” is to ignore the insistent follow-up question: Wealth determined by what social form? To know what wealth is requires identifying its determinate social form, for definite forms of recognition belong to rather than accompany—no matter how closely—any given form of wealth and wealth creation, and these forms matter.

On Capital and the Politics of Identity and Recognition If we replace a “left-Ricardian” concept of capital with a Marxian one, how does that influence our approach to the politics of identity? Why should it matter? One short answer: Capital is rich in conceptual determinations, while “wealth” is poor. The strategy of demarcation goes hand in hand with a static, flat notion of capital that requires all resistance to capital to come from somewhere outside the “economic” realm. Demarcation establishes external oppositions meant to generate limits or breaks on the domination of a runaway “economic” logic. By contrast, a more dialectical and dynamic notion of capital as the flow of forms which aren’t restricted to the “economic” sector refashions the meaning of resistance. Resistance now begins internal to the value form—prior to distribution—in the tensions between exchange-value and use-value. The interplay between use-value and exchange-value occurs in a force

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field with resistance occurring internal to the forms, for example, in the friction exerted by nonhuman nature, space, time, desires, needs, or household life to the spiraling requirements of the value form. It is bad capitalist ideology to conceive of nature as infinitely malleable, passively drafted by the roving capitalist imagination to serve capital’s purposes— nor does resistance occur for the most part “outside” the pressure field, for example, in the realms of culture or politics.17 The genuinely oppositional force of some kinds of identity politics goes through the value forms, rather than attempting the increasingly futile task of locating a vantage point from without. How does a more exacting concept of capital shed light on the politics of identity? To this basic question, we offer the following observations. a. Identity politics involves a reflective stance toward one’s identity; no longer tacit and submerged, the politics of recognition makes identity thematic: “Black is Beautiful,” “Sisterhood is Powerful,” and “Gay Pride.” Though reflection may be provoked in various ways, capitalism fosters a reflective society like nothing else. Why? For several reasons. To mention two, capitalism has its own table of values, one which inevitably conflicts with customary codes and parochial ways of forming identity. The intrusion of the new table of values compels reflection on the customary ones. Plato’s Republic, set in Athens’ commercial port, the Piraeus, may be read as taking stock of this sort of upheaval. Secondly, capitalism is expansive; world trade is its destiny. Such commerce brings people of very different customs, religions, and practices into face-to-face relations with one another. This, too, spurs reflection as trading partners begin to recognize their identities as identities, particular and different from those of others. b. The egalitarianism implicit in the wage labor form, with its builtin respect for the bargaining person, lays a strong foundation for liberal political ideals, including those of equal treatment, tolerance, and human rights generally. Often, identity politics functions on this liberal plane, where value forms shape its agenda and give it force. c. The egalitarianism implicit in money and the wage labor form is a double-edged sword, however. While it promotes tolerance, it can also be a powerful force for social homogenization. Søren Kierkegaard wrote of traditional cultures being consumed in the “hopeless forest fire of abstraction whipped up by the spread of

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markets and modernization.”18 Georg Simmel called money “the frightful leveler.”19 And in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote of the impact of capitalism on traditional identities: “All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned.”20 As a human habitat destroyer, capital is a huge force for assimilation. With an irony that much disturbed John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, the commercial forces that open up new horizons of tolerance are also conducive to an ominous conformism. Beware the body snatchers! The “leveling” power of capital acts both on the plane of generalized commodity circulation (money and commodities, buyers and sellers) and on the level of capital.21 In commodity circulation we are identified as freely contracting persons responding to our own needs. The scrawny identity of the individual that matters for simple commodity circulation is pretty much Michael Sandel’s “unencumbered self.”22 At the capital level, the demands that capital accumulation places on the time and mobility of wage laborers work as powerful forces to destabilize and break up strong identity-forming practices and institutions. As Marx put it in the Grundrisse, “[i]f money is not the community, it destroys the community.”23 d. “Identity politics” (domestically and internationally) can arise as a reaction to the shallow, amnesiac, “white-bread” identities ground out by commercial life. What Dorothee Soelle calls, a “rebellion against banality” can spur forms of identity politics varying in their authenticity or artificiality.24 e. Identity politics in some postmodern forms seems to mimic the apparent powers of capital freely to dissolve and recreate any content. The utopian vision of identity “quick change” acts where identities are swiftly constructed and deconstructed resembles a capitalist fantasy more than human liberation. f. Ever clever about making a buck, and no stranger to profitably coping with the mess it makes, capital gets involved in the booming “identity industries” in several ways: ● Capital instrumentalizes existing identities—or, at least, popular images of them to sell products, for example, when an “old-world” Italian grandma hypes mass-produced spaghetti

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●

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●

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sauce. More slowly emerges the pitch to marginalized groups, for example, young gay and lesbian audiences gradually being targeted by mainstream media. Capital uses identity to segment markets and fine tune product design and marketing campaign, Marlboro’s reversal from being a woman’s to a man’s cigarette being a classic case. As “identity markers” become increasingly sophisticated, so do products and ads. As consumption goods are increasingly designed not just to serve a purpose but to “make a statement” or “show attitude,” capital expands its business of constructing and deconstructing more or less complex identities up for sale. A real estate ad in our local newspaper for a swinging new “singles” complex proclaimed: “Rent a lifestyle.” Increasingly, identity functions like a computer’s “format painter,” just drag Eddie Bauer or Wrangler across a recreational vehicle; Barbie across a lunchbox or umbrella; Harley Davidson across a tavern; Michael Jordan, well, you name it: We like Mike. Identity spreads and sells. Not only does capital instrumentalize identity, it turns multiculturalism and identity politics themselves to a profit. Think of Benneton’s “United Colors” or its AIDS deathbed ad; Virginia “You’ve come a long way baby” Slims; homoerotic ads for clothing or perfume; and so on. And progressive corporations jostle for the public’s attention and goodwill by visibly putting themselves at the cutting edge of identity politics in the business world: providing childcare, sponsoring diversity workshops, providing benefits for same-sex domestic partners, and so forth. Of course, searching for, maintaining, and enhancing one’s identity opens up profitable opportunities for capital, ranging from genealogical services to all sorts of identity paraphernalia.

g. Often, imputed social identities are meshed with capitalist social forms and class divisions. Moishe Postone argues that Nazi antiSemitism was a variety of misplaced and misconceived anticapitalism in which “the Jew” was the scapegoat for the most hated capitalist roles: merchant, landlord, banker.25

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Or consider gender identities. The association of the masculine with the moneymaker and the feminine with unpaid domestic work illustrates the problems with a “demarcationist” approach to capital and recognition. Male and female roles are defined in part by the going capitalist forms of labor and recognition. Common stereotypes of targeted ethnic and racial groups collect around specifically capitalist forms: impoverished African Americans are unemployable, that is, make poor wage laborers, and African Americans generally lack the entrepreneurial skills for small business. Conversely, the stereotypes have it that Jews and “Asians” are rapacious small merchants. To conclude this section: In capitalist societies the social forms that belong to the makeup of capital enter, in multiple ways, into the determination of group identities and into identity politics. The rich Marxian category of capital provides conceptual resources to sort out those ways, while the Ricardian notion of “wealth” draws a blank.

Conceptual and Political Blockages and Openings to Recognizing Capital Getting Beyond the Conversation Stopper: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” I can recognize and fight a cold without knowing about viruses: Similarly; many of capital’s effects can be known and combatted without their being recognized as effects of capital. Nonetheless, it is the task of critical theory to articulate what capital is and to show the practical relevance of such knowledge. In recent elections, public discussion seems to break off after determining that “it’s the economy, stupid.” What more is there to say?26 The work of critical theorists involves, on the one hand, identifying and removing conceptual and political blockages to recognizing capital, and on the other, making the most of the opportunities to recognize capital that come our way. We begin by identifying a few overlapping conceptual blockers. Three common and crude views of capital that impede recognition of what it really is are: (a) the “commerce and industry” picture, (b) “wealthism,” and (c) “consumer society.” All three derive from what we earlier labeled “the illusion of the economic.”

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a. A natural way of looking at wealth in a capitalist society is to break it down into a generalized circulation of wealth whose basic forms are money and commodities, buying and selling, accompanying a process of production that, devoid of any determining social form, simply transforms material inputs to create new wealth. This pictures a capitalist economy as a commercial and industrial one. The trouble is that the picture excludes capital itself; for capital is not simply commodities, money, or the use-values needed for production. It does not belong to the nature of any of those to produce surplus value (profits, rents, interest), yet bearing surplus value is capital’s ruling passion. b. The common celebration of “industry” and “wealth” is an expression of what may be called “wealth fetishism” or “wealthism,” which takes the endless spewing of products of an undisclosed social form to be the purpose of production.27 By contrast, in book 1 of the Politics , Aristotle observed that true wealth is limited: Nothing should count as wealth but what contributes to the attainment of some identifiable human good, and any such good inescapably stands in relation to the good of the polis.28 Though the wealth fetish is a by-product of the capitalist mode of production, the notion that what drives capitalism is the restless desire to accumulate “wealth” is a falsehood stemming from the incapacity of common sense and various economic theories to recognize the actual social forms ruling capitalism. For it is the uncanny impulsion to accumulate surplus value, not “wealth,” that keeps capital’s heart pumping. “Wealthism” paints a conveniently false picture of the reality of capitalism; it gives capitalism a thin but tolerable tale to tell about itself, to speak with Lyotard and Baudrillard, it provides a “metanarrative” of material progress that is only an “alibi.”

c. Representing capitalism as “consumer society” has its good and bad points. On the negative side it tends to white out the class distinction between capitalists and wage laborers, for at least two reasons: (l) Capitalists and wage laborers are both consumers and as such enjoy

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roughly the same sorts of formal freedoms of the marketplace. Identifying people simply as consumers erases the class divisions essential to capitalism.29 (2) Relatedly, talk of “consumer society” implicitly gives the impression that the marketplace is populated only with “consumer goods,” but that overlooks the fact that “production goods” are constantly being purchased—just not by those in the class of wage laborers. But reproducing the class division between those who control “production goods” and those who must sell their labor power in order to be employed is an essential feature of capital. How does ordinary language block or open up our recognizing capital? Consider the term “capital” itself. “Capital” is widely used simply to mean a resource of whatever sort. Labor power for sale as wage labor is “human capital,” which is a deceptive half-truth: Once it is purchased by a capitalist it becomes productive capital, but wages are not profits, so for the wage laborer her labor power does not function as capital. Writing in America magazine, the Jesuit sociologist John Coleman observes how religion’s contributions to “civil society” can buck up “social capital.”30 If capital is to be recognized for what it is, either we must find a new term or these obfuscating usages need to be challenged by critical theorists. The terms “industry” and “product” are interesting examples of the power of capitalist social forms to determine linguistic usages. What allows us to speak of the entertainment “industry,” the health care “industry,” and even the insurance and banking “industries”? They are all moneymaking operations. This tells us that “industry” is tracking the social form, not the material features of the activities. Similarly, we now find “product” at every turn: Loan options at the bank are different “products,” and a chaplain friend of ours informs us that at his for-profit hospital the distribution of Holy Communion is classified as his “product.” In the notion of the Gross Domestic Product, we unthinkingly collapse “product” into goods and services in the commodity form. Slurred usages like these are not immune from critical reflection, as the women’s movement of the seventies demonstrated in the case of the word “work.” The question “Do you work?” was politicized. There’s a model for us. Ordinary language does not simply streamline itself to the requirements of capital, often enough it offers handholds for critical observations or commentary on capital. The ordinary distinction

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between “commerce” and “commercialism” is one. The emergence of the term “consumer” to supersede “customer” is another. It marks a new level of capital’s intrusiveness that can be conceptualized in Marxian theory in terms of the “real subsumption” of consumption under capital.31 Our favorite example is the growing usage of “Mc” as the “prefix of commercialization.” Thus, USA Today is “McPaper”; for-profit schools, “McEducation”; the television around which the family gathers, “McHearth”; and so on. These nonconforming usages provide openings to a more articulated recognition of capital and its powers, and they signal popular discontent with capital’s effects.

Appendix: Letter from Patrick Murray to Judith Butler, December 16, 1995 December 16, 1996 Prof. Judith Butler Department of Rhetoric 2125 Dwinelle Hall University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94,720-0001 Dear Judith Butler: I attended the plenary session of the Rethinking Marxism conference at which you, Wendy Brown, and Wahneema Lubiano spoke. Given the preoccupation with the events of the previous evening, there was too little occasion to discuss the ideas raised in your three presentations. Your talk was especially thought-provoking for me as my wife, Jeanne Schuler, and I had presented a paper at the recent Radical Philosophy Association Conference at Purdue in which we criticized Nancy Fraser’s essay on justice and recognition. So after the plenary I wrote down some thoughts that contrast the approach to criticizing Fraser that we took with the line of thought that you developed. I understood your criticism of Fraser to challenge her location of homophobia to the extreme recognition pole in her scaling of social struggles across a space ranging from pure struggles for justice to pure struggles for recognition. You argued that Fraser’s putting homophobia on the extreme recognition end of the scale misplaces it; rather it should

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be identified as a “bivalent” struggle, to use Fraser’s term, like struggles against racism and sexism. The crux of your argument, as I heard it, was that the normalization of the heterosexual nuclear family spells homophobia and that this normalization is an institutional feature of the modern capitalist economy. For the wage-labor form requires that there be a domestic sphere in which future wage-laborers, who will be “free” to sell their labor power, can be reared. Consequently, homophobia is involved with the capitalist economic order and the injustices it perpetuates: homophobia is “bivalent.” In the wider context of your talk, I took it that this was meant to demonstrate to “orthodox Marxists” that struggles against homophobia cannot be reductively dismissed as “culture” (“superstructural”). If Fraser’s “larger aim” was “to connect two political problematics (‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’) that are currently dissociated from one another,” your paper was meant to show how she failed to do this in the case of homophobia and then to do it for her. I find this to be a compelling objection to Fraser on her own terms, for the sort and site of institutionalized homophobia that you point out is real and fits Fraser’s description of “bivalence.” Our criticism was of a different sort and has different consequences. Our primary criticism was to challenge Fraser’s whole setup, which we think falsely dichotomizes “justice” and “recognition” in a way that duplicates mistaken readings of Hegel and Marx made all too commonplace by Habermas and other “demarcationalists.” We claim that the horizons of Fraser’s conceptualization of “justice” are (as has been so often the case in the history of “Marxism”) “left Ricardian” rather than Marxian. That is, Fraser attends to the injustice of the expropriation by the capitalist class of surplus “wealth” produced by the working class. This is fundamentally a classical or Ricardian framework because it neglects to ask: what is the determining social form that “wealth” takes in capitalism, a question to which Marx provides a very lengthy answer in the book whose title gives the short answer, Capital. Because the wage-labor form and the abstract, contractual forms of interpersonal recognition that Marx identifies as constitutive of the sphere of simple commodity circulation (which is a constant presupposition and result of the circulation of capital) belong to this peculiar form of wealth, Fraser’s dichotomizing of “justice and “recognition” fails, as do classical and neoclassical economics generally, to come to grips with the full actuality of the capitalist mode of production. Whether your own view is liable to this sort of criticism is not immediately evident from the particular criticism you made of Fraser.

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We further criticize Fraser for not distinguishing between the institutionalization of racism or sexism in our capitalist economy, which is all too real, and what is a necessary feature of a capitalist economy. Thus, we understand the absence of reference to race or sex in Marx’s presentation of the necessary forms of the capitalist mode of production to be neither an oversight nor a mistake. It seems to me that your claims regarding the institutionalization of the heterosexual nuclear family are similar to Fraser’s observations about institutionalized sexism and racism. I do not see where institutionalized homophobia is necessary for capitalism. That there be a domestic sphere of some sort so that the supply of wage-laborers can be constantly renewed in such a form that they are “free” to sell their labor power is necessary for capitalism. Workers cannot be produced as commodities if they are to be “free.” But I do not see the necessity for organizing that domestic sphere around the heterosexual nuclear family. Moreover, if it is necessary, those capitalist firms that are ahead of government in recognizing various rights for same-sex “domestic partners” must be stupidly pulling the rug out from under themselves. Likewise, given the grip that assorted capitalist interests have over our federal representatives, the level of opposition to the recent legislation enforcing heterosexuality in marriage would appear more remarkable than the passage of the bill. [This refers to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that President Bill Clinton signed into law on September 21, 1996. The law banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage.] A severe shortcoming of the Ricardian horizon of Fraser’s essay is that by failing to ascertain the social forms that determine wealth, production, labor, and needs under capitalism, the power of those social forms cannot be theorized and investigated. We argue that the power of the wagelabor form works against patriarchy, racism, and homophobia. Marx saw capitalism as a powerful force acting against patriarchy and against precapitalist traditions more generally—“all that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned.” He saw the epochal significance of capitalism to lie in its substitution of all-around domination by abstractions (notably by capital’s bizarre telos of unending expropriation of surplus value and its accumulation) for the sort of personal domination characteristic of precapitalist economic formations. It is in the very abstractness of the wage-labor form in particular—which presupposes only that the wage-laborer be “free” in the double sense of being juridically empowered to dispose over his or her labor power and in need of doing so due to being “free” of other means of support—that their distinctive power lies.

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Though sexism, racism, and homophobia are institutionalized in our capitalist economy, the fundamental, abstract forms of capitalism work, over time, against them. It seems to me that not only are sexism, racism, and homophobia not necessary for capitalism, the fundamental capitalist forms point toward their eventual undoing. The fact that the (liberal) self presupposed by the wage-labor form is so “unencumbered” (a term that appears in some translations of Marx’s account of wage-labor), that it is such a bare “person,” suggest that Fraser’s (and your?) hope for “a culture in which ever new constructions of identity and difference are freely elaborated and then swiftly deconstructed” is one situated at an extreme of the (liberal) capitalist imaginary rather than being a radical challenge to its defining forms. I enjoyed your presentation very much and would like to have a copy of it if that is feasible. Thank you and best wishes. Sincerely yours, Patrick Murray

Notes 1. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 2, edited by Friedrich Engels, translated by David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1978), p. 185. 2. Here is a sketch of the argument. In modern philosophy, forms, essences, natures come to be thought of as “fictions” (Bacon) because they are believed to be the products solely of “the workmanship of the understanding,” as Locke put it. For it is assumed that this “workmanship” is the pure activity of the mind—projecting cognitive “value added” onto the “materials” provided by sensation. The products of this (purely subjective) “work” of the knower, then, are not “real essences” but “purely subjective” impositions, fictions, made up, not found out. Marx explains how the capitalist mode of production summons this notion of “purely subjective” “value-added.” In capitalism, products have the peculiarly inscrutable social form of value, which, since it is congealed socially necessary abstract labor (a “ghostly objectivity”), can appear only as something other than itself, namely, money. Going into a production process, the needed means and materials have a price; consequent to the production process, the products are sold, leaving the impression that the difference in the two monetary sums measures the “value-added” by (pure) labor. In this way everyday forms of life under capitalism lend an air of plausibility to what Marx regards as a couple of bad abstractions: pure

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

thought and pure labor—and thereby some respectability for the modern attack on Aristotelian (real) essences. Martha Campbell, “Marx’s Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of Capital,” in Marx’s Method in “Capital,” edited by Fred Moseley (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1993), 152. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1973), 87. In this connection see Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1982). On this point see Patrick Murray’s “The Necessity of Money: How Hegel Helped Marx Surpass Ricardo’s Theory of Value,” in Marx’s Method in “Capital.” For a critique of Karl Polanyi along these lines, see pp. 5–7 of the “General Introduction” to Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present, edited by Patrick Murray (New York: Routledge, 1997). Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” New Left Review, 212 (July 1, 1995): 68. Reprinted in Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). Ibid., p. 69. A valuable, earlier investigation into how the politics of redistribution and recognition match up may be found in Milton Fisk, “Feminism, Socialism, and Historical Materialism,” Praxis International, 2(2) (July 1982): 117– 140. Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?,” pp. 68–69. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., pp. 72–73. An excellent recent study of just that sort of institutionalization of racism leading to a vicious circle is Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995). Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?,” p. 78. In a plenary talk she gave at the “Rethinking Marxism” conference held at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in November of 1996, Judith Butler argued that Fraser wrongly classifies homophobia as a struggle for recognition. Butler argued that homophobia is, in Fraser’s terminology, “bivalent,” like racism and patriarchy, because capitalism institutionalizes homophobia to maintain the private, “domestic sphere,” where the working class must be constantly reproduced. This makes a good point against Fraser, but it is not clear that homophobia is a necessary principle of a capitalist economy any more than is racism or patriarchy. On

2

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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the contrary, the abstractness and impersonality of capitalist social forms work—not without contradictions—against such prejudices. As Marx observed in the Grundrisse: “Use value in itself does not have the boundlessness of value as such” (p. 405). Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, edited by and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 107. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” translated by Edward A. Shils, in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by David Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 330. Appeared originally in Social Sciences III Selections and Selected Readings, Vol. 2, 14th ed. (University of Chicago, 1948). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 6: Marx and Engels: 1845–1848 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 487. These are nicely sorted out in David Harvey, “Money, Time, Space; and the City,” in The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 165–199. See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Marx, Grundrisse, p. 224. See Dorothee Soelle, “Rebellion Against Banality,” in The Strength of the Weak (Westminster: John Knox, 1964). See Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” in Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust, edited by Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986). Michael Sandel narrates a history of the watering down of the civic humanist elements of U.S. public discourse regarding political economic matters in Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). On this score it is worth noticing that, where Adam Smith called his masterwork The Wealth of Nations , Marx named his Capital. Aristotle, The Politics, edited by Stephen Everson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Marx points this out in the Grundrisse. “What precisely distinguishes capital from the master-servant relation is that the worker confronts [the capitalist] as consumer and possessor of exchange values, and that in the form of the possessor of money, in the form of money he becomes a simple center of circulation—one of its infinitely many centers, in which his specificity as worker is extinguished” (pp. 420–421). John A. Coleman, “Under the Cross and the Flag,” America (11 May 1996), 8.

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31. Here we are widening the employment of the distinction between formal and real subsumption under capital set forth in Marx’s manuscript Results of the Immediate Production Process, in Capital: Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

Bibliography Aristotle. The Politics. Edited by Stephen Everson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Campbell, Martha. “Marx’s Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of Capital.” In Marx’s Method in “Capital.” Edited by Fred Moseley. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1993. Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1982 Coleman, John A. “Under the Cross and the Flag.” America (11 May 1996). Fisk, Milton. “Feminism, Socialism, and Historical Materialism.” Praxis International, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July 1982): 117–140. Fraser, Nancy. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Review, Vol. 212 (July 1, 1995). Harvey, David. “Money, Time, Space; and the City.” In The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Kierkegaard, Søren, Two Ages. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1973. ———. Results of the Immediate Production Process. In Capital: Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. ———. Capital: Volume 2. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Translated by David Fernbach. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 6: Marx and Engels: 1845– 1848. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Murray, Patrick, ed. Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. New York: Routledge, 1997. Oliver, Melvin L., and Thomas M. Shapiro. Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge, 1995.

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Postone, Moishe. “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.” In Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust. Edited by Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986 Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Translated by Edward A. Shils. In Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by David Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Soelle, Dorothee. “Rebellion Against Banality.” In The Strength of the Weak. Westminster: John Knox, 1964.

CHAPTER 3

The Legend of Hegel’s Labor Theory of Reason

In an impressive inquiry into the origins and prospects of Critical Theory, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, Seyla Benhabib redirects Hegel’s critique of Kantian moral philosophy against discourse ethics to see whether similar weaknesses hamper the pursuit of rational and democratically established norms.1 Does Hegel’s blistering attack on the empty formulas of duty fall equally hard on the ideal communicative situation? This test of discourse ethics, however, is hampered by what Benhabib terms the pervasive flaw of the Hegelian-Marxian tradition: its captivation with work. The examiner—Hegel—at this point switches places with the examined. Hegel, it is charged, turns to labor—more than any other experience—to model reason, while Marx transposes labor from the exemplar of reason to the paradigm of human activity. Both Hegel and Marx purportedly neglect human interactions, such as politics and morality, or else jam them into the labor mold. Discourse ethics is largely directed at recovering these interactions for Critical Theory: the plurality and interpretive indeterminacy of lived experience. In short, though Hegel’s challenge to discourse ethics is often insightful, it derives from the Procrustean framework that motivated the turn of Critical Theory toward discourse ethics in the first place. This article questions this reading of Hegel’s concept of labor and thereby rejects the popular story according to which discourse ethics © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_3

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plugs a gaping hole or normative deficit in Critical Theory. While labor does pervade Hegel’s account of reason, Benhabib’s notion of labor fails to recognize how speculative and social Hegel’s meaning is. Discourse ethics presupposes a generic, non-social conception of labor akin to instrumental reason, a view which Hegel explicitly rejects. For Benhabib, labor or objectification “means that certain capacities, skills, and techniques are embodied or materialized in an object.”2 The meanings of labor, property, and work which Hegel seized upon in political economy do inspire his reformulation of philosophy as Benhabib points out. However, the content she ascribes to these categories is not Hegel’s and instead resembles the neo-Kantian account of reason as instrumental. The model of instrumental reason strongly influenced later thinkers, such as Horkheimer and Pollock, but it is anachronistic to read this notion back into Hegel’s texts. Benhabib’s attack on labor would be better directed at Lukács or Horkheimer than at Hegel or Marx.3 Ironically, there is too little real dialogue in this test of discourse ethics: Hegel’s thought is trimmed to fit the contours of the neo-Kantian mindset. An encounter between genuine differences mostly is missing. This article is both an academic squabble about getting Hegel right as well as an effort to see what implications a revised concept of labor has for the conceptual foundations of Critical Theory and for the turn to discourse ethics. Discourse is continually presented as the moral supplement to labor. Discourse ethics—we hear repeatedly—breaks the stalemate for a Critical Theory left lurching back and forth from instrumental reason to aesthetics. If the notion of labor said to provoke the crisis of Critical Theory proves false, what does it mean for the “communicative turn”? The problem that Habermas set out to solve—a lack of normative foundations—was misconceived from the start. I’d like to turn the tables one more time and use Hegel’s actual conception of labor to criticize the one put forth in discourse ethics. What is the significance of a discourse no longer defined by its opposition to labor?4 Hegel’s notion of reason differs most visibly from neo-Kantians on the issue of fundamental demarcations. In defending the unity of reason, however, Hegel does not eliminate the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, a distinction that falls short of an exclusive disjunction or demarcation. In describing the historical progression of attitudes toward objectivity at the beginning of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel traces each form of reason (traditional metaphysics, empiricism, Critical Philosophy, and the Idea that underlies later German idealism) through both

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theoretical and practical forms. Central to Hegel’s presentation of these historical forms of reason is how a common logic shapes each project and how each logic signifies a distinctive mode of formative activity. Hegel shows how the logics of theoretical reason mirror forms of practical reason. For example, efforts to get past the limits of theoretical reason by u-turns into practical activity to reenact the original dilemmas. The deepest problems faced by Kant’s moral philosophy, in other words, were variations on the troubles besetting his critique of theoretical reason: reason in the Kantian project has a certain shape that cuts across theory and practice, and the shortcomings of that shape recur. Thus, the maxim that cannot be embodied in action without loss of meaning is the moral equivalent of epistemology’s thing-in-itself. A Hegelian examination of discourse ethics, we may surmise, would observe how the formalism of discourse replicates—rather than escapes—the formalism of instrumental labor. One shrunken notion tends to foster another. When criticism reaches the status of legend, thinking winds down. Why pause over Descartes’ disembodied subject after a case made countless times enters into the common sense of an era? The assumption regarding labor and interaction within recent Critical Theory verges on this reflex response. That discourse among subjects (interaction) differs from the “monological” action of subjects on objects (labor) sets the terms for discussion. The customary contrasts are drawn between social science and natural sciences, rules and laws, culture and nature, norms and facts, and interpretation and calculation line up with this fundamental split. When pressed into these bifurcations, the Hegelian text disappears into the legend: Hegel gets read in terms of divisions he rejects. The legend has such a grip on how questions are framed that the memory of other readings fades. Anymore, Hegel—even when cited at length—is the one missing from the scene. Benhabib makes this exclusion explicit when she sizes up the central intellectual struggle of our times as pitting neo-Kantians against contextualists, adherence to universality against the play of particularity. “The program of critical social theory can offer an alternative to the impasse in contemporary philosophy between neo Kantianism and contextualism.”5 Hegel’s reading of the times, I venture, would surprisingly identify neo-Kantians and contextualists as book ends on the same shelf. Both situate reason in the pure activity of the subject (knowledge is “value added” by the knowing subject), and both contrast these “constructions” with the objects of knowledge themselves. For both, insight into the active involvement of the knower in cognition

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comes at the cost of skepticism about truth.6 Whether an otherworldly, purely subjective universality offers much of an advance on an aesthetically minded plurality is doubtful. What neither considers is how subjectivity and objectivity are inextricable, so that any effort to split one off from the other distorts the act of knowing. Hegel’s message is that the idea of chalking up knowledge entirely to the “value added” by the knower (contextualist) or even the idea of separating out the “value added” by the knower (neo-Kantian), leaving an unintelligible thing-in-itself as a residue, involves a poor phenomenology of human knowing.7

The Work Theory of Reason What is the work theory of reason that I call legend? If we turn first to Habermas, we find that discourse ethics descends from his distinction between labor and interaction. That distinction, in turn, represents Habermas’ reworking of the traditional Marxist dualism of the forces of production and the relations of production, which Habermas mistakenly attributes to Marx. According to the traditional Marxist dualism, the forces of production (the work world) were technical, while the relations of production were social. Moreover, Habermas held that Marx was prone to suppress the relations of production (the moral world) and make them the plaything of technical change (the forces of production). Hence Habermas had to rescue Critical Theory with discourse ethics.8 But this Marxist interpretation of Marx is deeply mistaken. Ironically, it represents a retreat into the asocial standpoint of classical political economy toward production, which Marx criticized so profoundly.9 This false conception of labor was read back into Hegel as well as Marx, which meant that the Habermasian stream of Critical Theory unwisely turned its back on them both. For Benhabib, work involves two phases: externalizing what lies within the subject (her talents, intentions, goals) and appropriating that object or deed as expressing the subject’s actual identity. Labor imposes form upon the given materials, from which deposit it retrieves the value or meaning of the product (e.g., knowledge). Who the subject is, is manifest in her product, and what the object is—at least in so far as it is knowable to us— traces back to the subject’s activities. This double movement—from the subject to the outside world and then back into the subject—is a blank transmission without the indeterminacy or give and take of discourse. Technical requirements direct how I open a can of beer, not questions of

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meaning. In Benhabib’s reading, these two phases of labor inspire the two pillars of classical Critical Theory: immanent critique (the active subject produces or externalizes the object) and defetishizing critique (the object is traced back to the acting subject). As a model of reason, work splits the difference between rationalism and empiricism with their respective fixations on the passively given and on the acting subject by compounding them, not by giving up on the underlying opposition, namely, that the two are separable. Benhabib’s notion of labor thus conforms to the Kantian or “Copernican” turn and so represents some epistemological progress. In its effort to hold the two moments together as separable, however, it bequeaths to philosophy a sharp and stubborn dualism between the subjective and the objective. Benhabib does not question this concept of labor; her scrutiny falls on its application in theory and its influence in practice. The ominous link between labor and domination is signaled by the “philosophy of the subject.” My thesis is that because the model of human activity to which both [Hegel and Marx] resort is, in the final analysis, work and not interaction, the discourse of transsubjectivity comes to dominate ... not an intersubjective plurality of communicating selves, but the transsubjective perspective of a collective singular subject.10

Theories modeled on non-discursive labor easily justify authoritarian practices by presupposing a subjectivity that is collective and singular rather than plural, unruly, and diverse. According to the legend, it is no surprise that Hegel, Marx, and early Critical Theorists say little about democracy; their favored subjects are Geist, species, nation, humanity, proletariat, philosopher, or state, and not contentious gatherings of persons who may see matters in very different ways. Evidence of Hegel’s tough-mindedness toward particularity isn’t hard to find, and it can easily be read as enthusiasm for an overarching subject with the heroic proportions of a demiurge creating the world from its mythical labor. Benhabib pinpoints Hegel’s slip into the “philosophy of the subject” in the Phenomenology of Spirit where the observing “we” gets the final say on the meaning of a form of consciousness; with the omniscient power of one who sees the whole course of experience, “we” recognize what transpires behind the back of poor, deluded consciousness. With this “we,” the observer is privileged over the participants, the therapist

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over the patient, and lived experience is delivered over to the system. Hegel, it is charged, never betrays the need for theorists to listen to actual persons living the events in order to figure out their meaning. Rather than involving consciousness in the Bildung process, “we” seize the relevant concepts and move on. These descriptions of experience are designed by philosophers with eyes on the system, not figured out by those immersed in the situation. This singular, observing authority, dubbed “transsubjective” by Benhabib, contrasts with the lived perspectives of consciousness. The sufferings and aspirations of consciousness are left behind while the “we” marches on to fulfill the mission of reason. For Hegel, the redemptive power rests in a philosophical system, not with the living voices fading into the sublated past. That philosophy should remain rooted in lived experience and honor diverse perspectives on meaning I take to be one goal of phenomenology. Does the philosophical “we” squash this involvement when it identifies the conceptual form of experience in moving toward its systematic account? Possibly. Linking philosophy so closely to concepts and systems may indeed trample on experience. Yet while the suspicion of philosophical arrogance is warranted and reflecting on the “we” should be continual, there remains a need to judge experience. Holding our judgments open to revision in the light of experience is different from never making any judgments to begin with. Moreover, the battery of conceptual bifurcations, such as labor vs. interaction, constitutive for this branch of Critical Theory, is as “transsubjective” as anything in Hegel. For Benhabib, a critical theory that doesn’t swallow reality whole must insist upon the irreducible difference between observer and participant, systems and lifeworld, as well as facts and values. Outside of supposedly self-regulating systems, such as the economy or state bureaucracy, observers do not always know best. Where norms and their justification are concerned, the input of participants is irreplaceable. Spaces of potential freedom exist alongside spaces of technical necessity and expert control. This expansion of genuinely democratic procedures into the air pockets of big systems, administrative bodies, and throughout the lifeworld now represents the goal of Critical Theory and its politics. How democracy infiltrates bureaucratic capitalism follows to a large degree the lines of demarcation. Since these demarcations prop each other up, questioning the opposition between labor and interaction upsets the rest of the agenda of discourse ethics.

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The conceptual demarcations underlying discourse ethics gain plausibility by mirroring the demarcations that supposedly define modernity. In this familiar account, bourgeois society separates once common life into the autonomous spheres of the household, state, and civil society.11 Kantian-like divisions of reason then appear to reflect actual social realms and justify the diverse interests that rule there. The cognitive methods and values purportedly aligned with work seem to best describe the subject’s relation to nature, whether through science, technology, or production, but fail to convey how norms arise, meanings are understood, or personal identity is expressed. The work model is unobjectionable within its proper economic domain, thinks Benhabib; it poses dangers only when it strays over borders, say, into the political realm, where interaction occurs and policies take shape. Benhabib’s adherence to the logic of demarcation is apparent throughout the text: opposing concepts like labor and interaction are commonly introduced in tandem. Figuring out her views on labor involves assessing the adequacy of these demarcations, whether in regard to society or to thinking. A basic tool of analysis, distinctions turn ideological when the object of inquiry is obscured or when the distinctions pull apart what belongs together, e.g., labor and interaction or technique and morality. And here lies the problem. The demarcations that structure the discourse ethics stream of Critical Theory make understanding— let alone criticizing—capitalism impossible. Capitalism separates into a technical sphere of production, which is not the site of norms or their justification, and a social distribution of wealth. Critique is kept at bay within these partitions. Rather than a complex and expansive social form possessing a moral character, capitalist production is a one-dimensional application of labor to nature which later—in the market—acquires social and moral qualities.12 Rethinking the meaning of labor (and capital) makes one goal of demarcation—identifying the “truly normative” to rescue Critical Theory from one-dimensional stalemates—unnecessary. What sort of theory is it, then, that isn’t demarcationalist? This now becomes a pressing matter to address.

A Hegelian Response to the Legend What kind of Hegelian response can be offered to this legend of Hegel, and more importantly, why should it matter? Despite my enthusiasm for how thinking ruptures and revives in Hegel’s hands, I don’t mean

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to suggest that all solutions facing Critical Theory are tucked away in his ponderous texts. Nor do texts speak with one voice through the ages. Interpreting by way of the problems and resources of the present is unavoidable; moreover, it yields creative advantages. It is just that Benhabib’s reading of Hegel is self-defeating. Benhabib wants Hegel’s critique of Kant to serve as a test of discourse ethics. However, by inadvertently imposing neo-Kantian demarcations on Hegel, the test is nullified and, not surprisingly, we only confirm what was presupposed from the start. To develop Hegel’s actual work theory of reason, I’ll look first at how he conceives the general features of action and then consider his account of modern labor in the “Civil Society” section of the Philosophy of Right . While Hegel is as attached to the labor model of reason as Benhabib believes, he self-consciously rejects her conception of labor as externalization and appropriation. What later comes to be called instrumental reason fails to convey the speculative possibilities which drew Hegel to the writings of political economists in the first place. All human action— including labor—is social, taking and achieving meaning in the nexus of reactions, judgments, and valuations provoked by formative activity. Even Benhabib’s simple example of opening a can of beer shows this: children are deterred from drinking beer, we don’t open cans of beer in church, we shouldn’t toss the tab away, etc. Hegel’s bondsman suffers precisely because his labor fails to be recognized as human. If labor merely involved shifting what is internal to the outside, the slave’s labor would be no different than the free person’s. To say that labor embodies a monological process (akin to the application of rules without interpretive intervention), then, ignores the central focus in Hegel on the ways in which labor (and reason) embody forms of social recognition. Labor is no more generic than reason and never follows a natural course, like trees falling in the woods. Reason has a history and so do forms of work and activity. Common to all forms of activity is worldliness that breaks down the conventional opposition between the inner and outer realms. This actual worldliness of action contrasts with the naive expectation that action externalizes or “transmits” what is inner into the outer realm. To limit labor to externalization trades a Hegelian view of action for a Kantian one. For Kant, the mind actively synthesizes the raw materials of intuition to produce the valuable product of knowledge. This process of imposing form upon matter moves in one direction—outward—and

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truly constitutes externalization. Hegel explores this attitude of externalization in discussing various forms of activity, such as pure insight or moral consciousness. What is true of these forms of activity bears on labor as well. The person initially expects action simply to translate intention into external form in an action that, as Hegel ironically puts it, “alters nothing and opposes nothing. It is the pure form of a transition from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content which is brought out into the daylight and displayed, is nothing else but what this action already is in itself.”13 The person who initially expects action simply to externalize intention is distressed by the unexpected outcomes and judgments commonly unleashed by the deed. Those who cling to their original intentions and refuse to adjust their meaning in the face of experience eventually retire from action to preserve the moral essence within the safe confines of pure thought. What this moral self wanted was externalization and appropriation, but what action cracks open is the disturbing fact of our worldliness; nothing, not even our intentions, is what we imagine as completely “ours.” That the meaning of our intentions should be conveyed by our action seems a matter of accident or “moral luck.” But the mediation of self and world in action goes all the way down. There never was a pure subject alongside the world waiting to be externalized; neither the action nor the product simply reveals or expresses some preestablished inner nature or intention of the subject. Benhabib’s judgment—that Hegel, uncomfortable with the indeterminacy of action, turns to work—is implausible. Benhabib claims that Hegel finds “human action is risky, and from the standpoint of an expressivist paradigm, less adequate to capture the essential idea behind it than that of a made object.”14 The acting consciousness described in “The Spiritual Animal Kingdom” from the Phenomenology has only this advantage over the previous moral consciousness: it manages to act and its action destroys the illusions that action is “its own affair.” In acting, the risks of being misunderstood or ineffective are unavoidable. We are open to the judgments of others, and the once fragile moral consciousness grows strong in its worldliness. They pretend that their action and efforts are something for themselves alone in which they have only themselves and their own essential nature in mind. However, in doing something, and thus bringing themselves out into the light of day, they directly contradict by their deed their pretense

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of wanting to exclude the glare of publicity and participation by all and sundry. Actualization is, on the contrary, a display of what is one’s own in the element of universality whereby it becomes, and should become, the affair of everyone.15

The ongoing interpretive process which troubled moral consciousness comes into full view with work: the meanings of our actions are transient and perishable. The work is, i.e. it exists for other individualities, and is for them an alien reality, which they must replace by their own in order to obtain through their action the consciousness of their unity with reality…thus the work is, in general, something perishable, which is obliterated by the counteraction of other forces and interests, and really exhibits the reality of the individuality as vanishing rather than as achieved.16

Hegel does not resort to work as a way to eliminate indeterminacy. On the contrary, work explicitly posits the dynamic social mediations that moral consciousness seeks to avoid with its view of action as “translating” the inner into the outer world. The ongoing mediations of subject and object are transformative ones. Our actions educate us as to the ways of the world: the meanings, perceptions, and opinions of others. In willing to be educated, we lose our initial naiveté about how things ought to occur. Hegel tilts sharply toward the social reading of actions in suggesting that we learn what we intended from these mediations; the intention here filters through general representation back to be recovered by the individual. “Our” intentions actually presuppose that we are given over to a world of meanings not of our own making, but which, happily, are not immune to our influence. We try to disassociate ourselves from these social determinations at risk to our identity. What matters for this discussion is that any action—including work—continually meshes subjectivity with its objects; action is neither a linear process nor a circular loop that ends up back inside the subject. Human knowing and acting take place in this original nexus of subjects and objects. Labor serves Hegel as a touchstone of actuality; a theory that can’t express the meaning of labor or grapple with the shifting determinations of action and their outcome remains empty. Labor—like reason—always possesses a determinate historical and social form. Further proof that Hegel held this social conception of labor may be found if we shift from

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his general treatment of action to his account of modern labor in the Philosophy of Right . The opening lines from the “Civil Society” section of the Philosophy of Right describe how thoroughly social are modern individuals even in this most fragmented sphere of life: The concrete person who, as a particular person, as a totality of needs and a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrariness, is his own end, is one principle of civil society. But this particular person stands essentially in relation to other similar particulars, and their relation is such that each asserts itself and gains satisfaction through the others, and thus at the same time through the exclusive mediation of the form of universality, which is the second principle.17

The needs and actions which appear as asocial and merely individual actually represent what is peculiarly modern and thoroughly social. Appearing “natural” is the disguise under which capitalism functions best. This social form of modern labor already suggests the rules of communicative discourse, acknowledging the consent, individuality, and freedom present in private property and in the labor contract. Getting the concept of modern labor right means getting straight about how capitalism functions. While it is debatable whether Hegel figured out the latter adequately, he certainly acknowledged that labor, needs, wealth, etc. have specific social forms with all sorts of consequences.

Consequences for Discourse Ethics Rethinking labor matters to a consideration of discourse ethics for several reasons. First, maintaining the split between labor and interaction blocks an adequate critique of capitalism. The notion of work as generic, technical problem-solving without any specific social goal disguises the actual social end of capitalism: the endless accumulation of capital. What most needs to be discussed or at least named, capital, gets screened out from the start. The notion of work as “instrumental” furnishes the alibi behind which capitalism can pursue its own brand of refashioning nature. Second, demarcations such as system and lifeworld are not immanent enough. The world of capitalism is neither one-dimensional nor immutable, but it shapes, often in subtle ways, how lifeworld, identities,

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and tradition come to be experienced. The lifeworld is not situated “outside” the economic system with border patrols responsible for battling colonialization efforts. Capitalist forms—contracts, consent, buyer, seller, investment, credit—resonate throughout the lifeworld. Recognizing the forms that span the social spheres makes for better theory and more astute politics. Third, to reject the demarcation between labor and interaction puts the purposes of discourse ethics on a more promising footing. We need not uphold strict divisions between procedural justice and notions of human nature or the good. These disabling dualisms keep discourse merely procedural, the propaedeutic to a hypothetical conversation that can’t get started. While caution against overly “thick” conceptions of the good is warranted, a prohibition against naming the good goes too far. Ridding ourselves of the legend of Hegel doesn’t erase the need for critiques of Hegel. One question concerns the social determinants of Hegel’s notions of labor and reason. Do Hegel’s categories mimic the movement of capital, as Marx charged? If Hegel’s philosophy capitulates at the end to the capitalist world order, is it closer to an all-enveloping system that coerces the living rather than foreshadowing the reciprocity or mutual recognition of true freedom? What would Hegel have to learn from Benhabib? Benhabib’s call for a utopian dimension of Critical Theory is missing from Hegel’s work. Hegel’s owl soars over the conceptual landscape of the past and present; Benhabib’s communities of solidarity look to a future that social movements may make possible. With the great power of capitalist forms to saturate our days and nights, our thinking, and our dreams, this utopian dimension may, in the end, be as vital to Critical Theory as an adequate conception of labor.18

Notes 1. I do not refer to Benhabib’s Situating the Self , since her conceptual account of Critical Theory is more fully developed in the present text: Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 2. Critique, p. 61. 3. See Time, Labor, and Social Domination, by Moishe Postone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), on the failure of the early Frankfurt School to grasp Marx’s concept of labor. Postone’s recovery of Marx from fundamental misinterpretations models my related defense of Hegel.

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4. While I focus on Benhabib’s account, the same criticism can be directed against Habermas. 5. See Critique, p. 14. 6. Both neo-Kantians and contextualists subscribe to what Donald Davidson calls the “third dogma of empiricism,” i.e., the assumption that there is an unbridgeable chasm between “conceptual schemes” and objects of knowledge. Davidson here echoes Hegel’s rejection of skepticism in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. 7. “The Thing-in-itself expresses the object when we leave out of sight all that consciousness makes of it…It is easy to see what is left—utter abstraction, total emptiness, only described still as an ‘other world’—the negative of every image, feeling, and definite thought…Nor does it require much penetration to see that this caput mortuum is still only a product of thought.” Hegel’s Logic, Section 44. 8. Habermas tracks Marx’s supposed failure to maintain the distinction between science and critique or technical production and moral relations in Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), Chs. 2–3. 9. See Martha Campbell’s “Marx’s Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of Capital,” in Marx’s Method in Capital, edited by Fred Moseley (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). 10. Critique, 68–69. 11. Critique, 7. Hegel distinguishes between these institutions of modern society without identifying them as autonomous spheres. 12. See “Beyond the ‘Commerce and Industry’ Picture of Capitalism,” by Patrick Murray, in The Circulation of Capital, edited by Chris Arthur and Geert Reuten (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1998). 13. Phenomenology, #396. 14. Critique, 89. 15. Phenomenology, #417. 16. Phenomenology, #405. 17. Philosophy of Right, #182. 18. I wish to thank Patrick Murray for his help in revising this paper.

Bibliography Benhabib, Seyla. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Campbell, Martha. “Marx’s Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of Capital.” In Marx’s Method in Capital. Edited by Fred Moseley. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993.

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Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and the Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Hegel, G. W. F. 1952, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. Hegel’s Logic. Translated by William Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ———. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Murray, Patrick. “Beyond the ‘Commerce and Industry’ Picture of Capitalism.” In The Circulation of Capital. Edited by Chris Arthur and Geert Reuten. Basingstoke: Macmillan 1998. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER 4

Marx, Subjectivism, and Modern Moral Philosophy

The last half-century has witnessed a stream of criticism directed at modern moral philosophy. A recurring theme has been the pervasiveness of the defects, leading many critics to the conclusion that modern moral philosophy is not fit for reform. It has failed, they say, and must embark on a new direction, such as that suggested by the virtue ethics of Aristotle. Some critics ignore the modern social context entirely. They focus on the shortcomings of moral theories without looking up from the texts to consider the societies in which these theories take shape and prove persuasive. Others, however, link the failures of moral philosophy to features of the modern world. Since philosophy is not practiced in a vacuum, a historical perspective is sensible. The view of the modern world glimpsed in these criticisms of modern moral philosophy usually follows lines set down by Max Weber rather than Karl Marx.1 This is not surprising. Most philosophers, like most social scientists, are cut off from his work by a narrow understanding of Marx as someone concerned with “economic” issues, and wrong about most of them.2 For a broader understanding of modern society, it is presumed that we must look elsewhere. This presumption is badly mistaken: Marx offers a thorough critique of modern society and the mindset it fosters.3 Dismissing Marx undermines both the analysis of how modern moral philosophy fails and efforts to revitalize ethics by turning to the virtues. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_4

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We do not adequately decipher the skepticism in modern philosophy when capitalism, a potent source of skepticism and the biggest game in town, is ignored or misrepresented. Moreover, Weber helps precipitate the modern crisis of morality by assuming that values fall outside reason—he is an influential moral skeptic himself—while Marx, who is not a skeptic, clarifies the predicament of modern moral life and identifies possibilities for overcoming it. Showing how Marx’s theory sheds new light on modern moral thinking and practice is our objective. We look first to Hegel’s critique in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Hegel, we identify utility theory and Kant as exemplifying defects of modern morality.4 Hegel argues that the flaws of philosophy replicate larger social patterns: philosophy is a child of its time. But it is Marx who deciphers the fundamental patterns of modernity.5 From Marx, we can learn how the social forms of wealth and labor that characterize capitalism—but which most social analysts gloss over—are germane to modern morality.6 The modern social context illuminates the modern moral predicament. Critics of moral philosophy call for change. The prospects for renewing moral thought and experience, however, depend on a surer account of the failure of modern moral philosophy and the social sources of that failure.

The Modern Moral Predicament “Modern Moral Philosophy,”7 Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal article explaining why modern moral philosophy is broken, concludes with the provocative advice to quit using “moral” in relation to duty, since the concept has lost ties to the lawgiver that made sense out of its forceful imputation of responsibility and guilt. Philosophers, like anyone, can inquire as to what ought to be done, but we should refrain from asking what is morally required. Like a motherless child, the “moral” is adrift without the guidance and content formerly supplied by Judeo-Christian teachings. Morality is “an heir that is cut off from the family of concepts from which it sprang.”8 Modern society is secular; it no longer takes its moral bearings from religion, despite any lingering influence of religious traditions.9 For Anscombe, moral law requires a lawgiver, and modern society lacks any such viable source of law. In a secular society, God is not available to legislate and enforce commandments, and Anscombe doubts that other sources of obligation, the self, social contracts, or human nature, can fill the role and supply the “mesmerizing force” of the moral.

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As for the virtues, pressures exerted in modern society have worn down the social conditions supporting their specificity or “thickness.” Even those repulsed by the slogan “greed is good” have trouble defending their intuition. Moreover, a revival of the virtues, according to Anscombe, awaits a firm grasp of their psychological aspects, intention, action, motivation, and goals, something neglected by Aristotle. How to philosophize in the unhinged moral culture of modern society is far from clear. Stick as closely as possible to the particular situation in naming the action, suggests Anscombe, and be wary of the fraudulent forms of consequentialism that clutter the annals of modern philosophy. In a striking passage, Alasdair MacIntyre describes modern moral discourse as an encounter with Babel.10 Efforts to communicate are beleaguered, as if each speaker recently arrived from distant shores. “Moral” becomes synonymous with unending disagreements, futility, clashes, and private opinions. A common vocabulary, according to MacIntyre, is rooted in suitable practices and traditions. Coherent moral discourse cannot be isolated from authoritative texts or teachings, such as those that define religious traditions. Modern moral discourse, to a great degree, has lost its footing in character-forming practices, texts, and traditions. This forlorn condition describes modern moral philosophy equally with the actual habits and dispositions prevalent in modern society. MacIntyre ties the failure of moral philosophy to its historical context. Every moral philosophy has some particular sociology as its counterpart…the kind of understanding of social life which the tradition of the virtues requires, is a kind of understanding very different from those dominant in the culture of bureaucratic individualism.11

Weber’s influence is felt in MacIntyre’s observation that ways of life rooted in the bureaucracy, labor, and markets of modern society will not support the virtues. In Weber’s assessment of the modern world, reason and the passions are severed; reason calculates but has nothing to say about what is suitable to serve as an end. Max Horkheimer called this condition “the eclipse of reason.”12 The choice of ends or goods remains arbitrary, echoing the treatment of preferences in neoclassical economics. This collapse of morality into emotivism and decisionism, to which Weber was a party, is embodied in these influential characters: the pleasureseeking aesthete, the efficient manager, and the non-judgmental therapist. MacIntyre criticizes emotivism as incoherent—“murder makes me feel

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bad” does not explicate “murder is wrong”—yet deeply entrenched in modern society. His project is dogged: to situate the virtues in the shadows of the institutions that have made them irrelevant, to locate the crannies in surviving traditions suitable for reviving the virtues. Bernard Williams takes moral philosophy to task for pursuing theory as its goal, a shrunken project that amplifies the already reflective disposition of the modern world. Theory has come to drive the writing and teaching of moral philosophy. Philosophy classes inspect one theory after another as if they mapped moral life. In Williams’ view, theories, notably the modern favorites, deontology and utilitarianism, impose purportedly rational structures on ethical practices. Humans act for reasons, but theory insists on ultimate justification of reasons, unitary tests for acting, and foundations for judgments. Human action faces constraints and limits; theories leap over limits in pursuit of justification. Constructing theories takes philosophy far from the ethical concerns of human beings; the scaffolding of transcendental arguments creates labyrinths that trap thoughtful persons. Williams’ skepticism about moral philosophy, especially modern moral philosophy, does not extend to ethical life. In his view, being raised human means that ethical judgments are so internalized in desires, feelings, and goals that we cannot step into midair to look at ethics from outside. Ethical life describes an inescapable species trait. Even a seemingly amoral person displays shreds of ethical dispositions. Williams dismisses the view that, without a proper theory, ethical life will vanish or lapse into prejudice. Taking philosophy off the job of theory construction still leaves it with important reflective work to do. Philosophy, as construed by Williams, attends to actual human practices; its goal is nothing less than to change the world. How a particular society functions, then, matters to Williams. In his critique of utilitarianism, Williams links the theory to capitalism. “Utilitarianism is unsurprisingly the value system for a society in which economic values are supreme; and also, at the theoretical level, because quantification in money is the only obvious form of what utilitarianism insists upon, the commensurability of values.”13 Utilitarianism appeals because it appears worldly and in touch with economic life: just as all commodities are comparable by means of money, so all actions are comparable by means of utility. Williams does not develop this crucial point further. He does observe that since modern society is reflective, we have no choice but to look upon received views or customs in critical ways. We no longer feel about traditions the way that

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our ancestors did. Reflection clarifies how terms such as “good” are used in relation to objects and to human conduct. Reflection acknowledges the central role of disagreements in ethical life and considers how disagreements are resolved. Philosophical reflection recognizes the constraints on ethical life, such as deeply ingrained dispositions to care about how others regard us, that rule out certain solutions to disagreements. Among philosophy’s main tasks is determining the shortcomings of moral theories, such as utilitarianism, and of theory-imposed dilemmas, such as the supposed contrast between moral duty and happiness. How does ordinary discourse reveal the defects of modern moral experience? Attitudes shaped by positivism tell us that values are meaningless or reveal nothing of the world: value is all about us. Projectionism tells us that we seem to discover values in the world only because we first project them onto objects and events that are inherently indifferent. Ethical egoism lobbies for the “bottom line” account of motivation or aspiration: it is all about me. Efforts to establish that human existence is absurd offer further evidence of breakdown. Indifference appears in the blasé attitude; as the popular slogan has it, “Whatever!” Irony first admits that something matters but then takes its backward step to plunge into the utter groundlessness of human concerns. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov links moral collapse to atheism: if God does not exist, then nothing is forbidden. Enjoy the green leaves of summer and other fleeting pleasures until the day arrives when you have had enough and decide to end it all. Professor Levy, the philosopher and concentration camp survivor in Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors , extols the arbitrariness of values shortly before he opts to exit by the window, rather than the door. Woody Allen’s character, Cliff Stern, comments: “Every day he woke up and said ‘Yes! Yes!’ Today he woke up and said ‘No.’” In Levy’s words we hear the modern mantra: “It is only we, with our capacity to love, who give meaning to the indifferent universe.” We face the burden of decision propounded by Sartre: the meaning of our lives arises from our choices alone. Professor Levy echoes Sartre’s stoic point: “We define ourselves by the choices that we have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices.” No teachings, traditions, virtues, or mentors serve as guides or share our responsibility. We are alone, without excuses. In Cliff Stern’s eyes, Professor Levy is a profound thinker. And Allen’s character is not alone. His view of values is likely to be regarded as liberating. The celebration of arbitrariness, what some call decisionism, makes modern moral

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life uncanny. What some treat as a crisis others consider the epitome of freedom. In the face of secular skepticism about goods comes the countercharge of religious fundamentalism and the divine command theory. Duties are stipulated by God; inquiry, justification, interpretation, and debate are not integral to moral life. This strategy for overcoming skepticism by removing its supposed breeding grounds backfires. Determining what is good involves observation, thought, and judgment. Skepticism does not disappear just because it is brushed aside. This mode of obedience makes a blunt instrument, but skepticism will not be bludgeoned this way. Rather, this about-face to obedience entrenches skepticism. This plan for shoring up crumbling moral foundations will not recognize the diverse goods and kinds of goods that exist. If we must rely on obedience to divine authority to recognize that health is good or slavery is wrong, we are mired in a theistic version of moral skepticism. Philosophers and non-philosophers alike, then, share the sense that something is wrong with modern moral theory and practice. Why do moral thinking and practice undergo strange upheavals? What is it about modern society that obstructs a coherent sense of moral life? Whatever is wrong must have something to do with the modern world; analysis generally goes no further. Philosophy addresses its social context in various ways. A self-reflective philosophy comprehends existing social relations and probes their shortcomings and potentials. It does not simply reflect them. Its categories are both abstract, as suits philosophical analysis, and in contact with the actual processes that constitute society. Self-conscious philosophy is historically attuned and critical. Modern moral philosophy reflects its social context without comprehending it; it is largely subservient to its surroundings. Social relations are sometimes addressed, but in distorted ways: categories unwittingly replicate social relations. Moral philosophy adopts the dichotomies that pervade modern philosophy, but their skeptical consequences are more disturbing here. It is one thing to be skeptical about the existence of matter or the external world; it is quite another to be skeptical about the significance of human actions. Dichotomies split the subject off from its world, leading to a situation that we describe as subjectivism. This subjectivism hinders our engagement with the world and our critique of modern life. Subjectivism could be described as loss of the world. The subjectivism

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that defines modern moral theory is not simply a peculiarity of intellectual analysis; it characterizes modern moral experience more broadly.14 We turn to Marx to show why subjectivism is such a pervasive force in capitalist society. There is a social logic beneath the Babel of moral discourse. The texts of modern moral philosophy are best read against the grammar of commercial life. But subjectivism is not the only upshot of capitalism; there are countertendencies that complicate the modern moral predicament. Marx’s analysis of capital reveals both its tendencies toward subjectivism as well as countertendencies. Our inquiry addresses five questions. (1) How does subjectivism lead to nihilism? (2) How does capitalist society promote subjectivism? (3) What countertendencies to nihilism do we find in capitalism? (4) How do mainstream ethical theories—utilitarian and Kantian—uncritically reflect capitalist relations to varying degrees? (5) What sort of theory would be able to comprehend and contest the nihilistic aspects of modern life? Subjectivism and Nihilism Nihilism could be taken as a flat negation: there are no goods. Images of violence are evoked by the term: principles are smashed and no new law takes their place. Thrasymachus’ praise of force in the opening book of the Republic comes to mind. But Plato draws Thrasymachus into one pitfall after another as this extreme claim is scrutinized. Denying goods seems to lead nowhere. It is an existential impossibility not to have some criteria by which to measure action or judge success. Even a tyrant needs a way of life. Complete arbitrariness is approached only in literature, as in Mersault’s shooting of the Arab man in Camus’ The Stranger. Distinctions inevitably shape experience. When a philosophy, such as stoicism or skepticism, erases ordinary distinctions in a sweep, substitutes must be found. In the quest to avoid suffering, the stoic views all “external” events as indifferent but concedes that some events are “preferred” over others. In the quest to avoid error, the skeptic regards all beliefs as unjustified (perhaps unjustifiable) and consequently uncertain. To be sure of avoiding error, we should refrain from belief. Finding this untenable, the skeptic acknowledges some beliefs as more “truth-like” than others— even the skeptic leaves by the door, not the window. Ersatz notions like “preferred indifferents” or “truth-like beliefs” accommodate existential necessities: humans cannot act in the void left by the initial claims of

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stoicism and skepticism. The inescapability of these concessions to ordinary experience casts doubt upon the initial sweeping claims. On what grounds are existential necessities displaced by arguments, however logically compelling they seem? These philosophies dismiss ordinary cares and beliefs on one hand, while, on the other, modified versions are drawn back in. After the initial clear-cutting of goods and beliefs, distinctions spring up. Experience is not vacant for long. But these new distinctions are little more than the old ones laced with irony. We prefer but restrain ourselves from judging what we prefer to be good; we believe but restrain ourselves from judging what we believe to be true. We convince ourselves that we are out of touch with what we originally sought to guide our preferences and beliefs—what is good and what is true. Sartre called this condition “nausea.” It might also be described as a farce that follows the opening melodrama. The clamor over the skeptical and stoic projects conceals their conservative denouement. We retreat to the present situation with a knowing, superior attitude, presumably more enlightened. But nothing really changes. Nihilism is best defined as the blanket refusal to recognize the goodness that exists in the world. To ordinary eyes, the world teems with goods of many kinds. The spectrum of beings from animals to electrons displays objects deserving varied admiration. No leap need be taken to acknowledge many features of the natural world as goods. Each species has its abilities. Those species that possess intelligence have a distinctive and rare power that sets them apart from other conscious beings. The capacity for ethical judgment is a great power. These abilities are goods. Goodness is apparent in healthy bodies; pathology, as a field of medicine, would be ridiculous if we judged otherwise. Death involves great loss. Human actions, likewise, may be good or bad. The evil of violence is evident. The solicitude of those who bring comfort and the courage of those who risk their lives for others are good. Disagreements still occur: what religious practices are allowable in the military? How are property rights limited by civic life? Should homosexuals be allowed to marry? Previous diagnoses are revised without undermining the whole project of identifying disease. Resolving disagreements may carry us further into the details of the matter at hand: specialized knowledge, at times, is required to identify goods. But even an untutored ear or eye hears the bird’s song or sees the river as goods. Their absence would signify a loss; the world would be poorer without them.

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Nihilism, then, signifies a pervasive and principled resistance to acknowledging the goods of this world.15 Popular theories about moral phenomena—egoism, emotivism, decisionism, absurdism, and projectionism—promote nihilism by undermining confidence in the goods of the world. Nihilism is already at hand when discussions focus on values rather than goods. In the present article, we speak of goods rather than values to counter the skepticism laced into the discourse of values. How does talk of values uncritically reflect a nihilistic mindset? Typically, value is contrasted to fact, as the subjective to what is objectively the case. Values are purely subjective; they are all about us, our sentiments, our preferences, not about objects or actions.16 Values need not be private, arbitrary, changeable, or indeterminate. Values, Hume claims, are largely shared by the species as persistent dispositions. Even as species traits, however, values remain subjective. Analogous to conceptual schemes, paradigms, and social constructions, values are the residue of a skepticism rooted in the practices of modern society.17 The subjectivism of mainstream modern philosophy makes the goodness of the world inaccessible. What we thought to be good about something turns out to be solely some projected feature of subjectivity— sentiments or preference or intent. With a memorable image, Hume compares abstruse philosophy to anatomy; it uncovers the processes hidden within ordinary experience. The philosopher dissects experience to reveal the underlying muscle, ligament, and bone. The post-mortem invariably labels components as either objective or subjective. Consider an action regarded as good, such as tending to the wounds of an injured person. The philosophical anatomist exhibits the human sentiments that are mistaken for the goodness of the action. Action evokes pleasure from an observer; this response, which Hume deems purely subjective, is unknowingly projected on to the action and treated as if it reports some property found in the action. What appears to be the goodness of an act results from a psychological process hidden even from the admirer of the act. What ordinary people experience as belonging to the world is disclosed to the supposedly more penetrating skeptical mind as purely subjective in origin: values come from us and us alone. This turnabout from the goods of the world back into the valuing subject takes various forms, but, inevitably, objects “in themselves” are drained of goodness. Subjectivism means loss of the world. The goodness thought by unreflective minds to be present in the world actually turns out to be “for us,” sentiments aroused in us—or so we are told.18 What draws mainstream

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modern moral theories and postures into nihilism is the sweeping rejection of the common sense, and classical philosophical, recognition of the good things that exist in the world. Utilitarianism and Kantian ethics are channels of the nihilism at work in modern moral philosophy. These two ethical theories initially seem like poor candidates for the role; they are credited with redirecting modern moral theory to concrete human concerns and moving philosophy out of the doldrums of metaethics. Why go after the good guys, instead of positivism or emotivism, to get to the root of the problem? However, the root of all these mainstream modern moral theories is the subjectivist mindset that factors out the subjective from the objective and then relegates values to the (purely) subjective side of the divide. In our view, subjectivism in ethics is nihilism since it inevitably expels goodness from the world. Subjectivism reflects—but does not comprehend—the workings of capitalist society. The factoring out of subjective and objective follows the pattern entrenched in capitalist ideology according to which “value-added,” the contribution of labor (or desire), the purely subjective, is singled out from the objective factors of the production process or the useful properties of goods.19 Commerce and Nihilism Moneymaking—the imperative shaping institutions, attitudes, and practices in capitalist societies—is the source of nihilism.20 The spread of money hollows out ethical culture and reduces what is rich and complex— though it may also be objectionable—to the simple and repetitive. Money levels the multitude of goods to one that trumps the rest and draws all things into a “more or less” relation. What appears as manifold and distinctive reduces to one bottom line. Sayings like “nothing is sacred” or “everything has a price” describe universal commensurability, where utterly dissimilar entities get compared. Money does not confront or dispute; it seeps in, saturating the season from Thanksgiving to Epiphany, until substance dims like the fading of beliefs. Observing the Sabbath is not called off; the practice dries up. Making money presses meaning into slogans. Commercial dimensions expand, leaving the funeral package with its “Our Lady of Fatima” motif in uneasy tension with the rites of mourning. A culture of money creates vacancies within persons and within things. Georg Simmel vividly described this emptiness:

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Money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of “how much” ... money hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. They all float with the same specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. They all rest on the same level and are distinguished only by their amounts.21

This flattening of things diminishes us; in T. S. Eliot’s words: “We are the hollow men.” Our attunement to things changes; we become blasé. The essence of the blasé attitude is indifference toward the distinctions between things. Not in the sense that they are not perceived, as in the case of mental dullness, but rather that the meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless.22

The dominance of commerce is a flicker away from “nothing really matters.” Money cultivates indifference. “Whatever!” (“Whatever sells at a profit” would be more accurate.) Abstraction that deletes all differences except the quantitative engenders blankness in the face of experience. Enjoyment goes slack without a vivid sense of the particular thing that is at hand. When money matters, our eye drifts to the price tag. And as the young Marx observed, commercial indifference to particularity extends to the persons engaged in commodity exchange. “The complete domination of the alienated thing over man is fully manifested in money, the complete indifference both with regard to the nature of the material and the specific nature of the private property, and to the personality of the private property owner.”23 Money also levels human activities and engenders indifference toward their particularities. Capitalists undertake productive activity for the purpose of making money; as long as that goal is achieved, what gets produced does not much matter. Concerning the workers employed by capitalists, Marx adds, Since the sole purpose of work in the eyes of the wage-laborer is his wage, money, a specific quantity of exchange-value from which every particular mark of use-value has been expunged, he is wholly indifferent towards the content of his labor and hence his own particular form of activity.24

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Everyday expressions such as “I need a job” or “I’m looking for work” register this indifference. Marx offers this summary: “moneymaking appears as the ultimate purpose of activity of every kind.”25 So money promotes indifference toward the particularities of goods; it encourages commodity exchangers to be indifferent toward activities and toward the persons with whom they exchange (though not to their personhood), and it waters down our self-esteem, “ending in dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valuelessness.”26 What atmosphere could be more stifling of the virtues? No wonder that capitalist societies foster irony and cynicism.27 Countertendencies to the Nihilism of Commerce Characterizing capitalism solely as nihilistic is one-sided; it ignores important countertendencies. Some of these spring from precapitalist practices that persist under capitalism; others are native to it. Traditions are not wholly eviscerated by commercial life. Principled moral conduct that to a degree regulates commerce is passed down through politics, religion, family, and skilled crafts. To function, capitalism depends on the existence of goods kept outside the system of monetary equivalence. A totally money-mediated world, where all relationships exist as commercial transactions, would not work. Capitalism presupposes non-capitalist institutions, notably the family and the state. Drawing on Marx, we identify seven countertendencies to nihilism that are native to capitalism. (1) Capitalism recognizes a realm of the sacred: not everything does have a price. Buyers and sellers are recognized as persons, and persons are not for sale. (2) In fact, use-values and human needs are not reducible to money and the love of it—that’s the moral of the myth of Midas. (3) Useful concrete labor must still be done and attended to, even if it is undertaken in the interest of moneymaking. (4) Though the domestic sphere is shaped by consumerism, it cannot be run on a commercial basis. Children eventually enter the labor force, but they are not turned out as products for sale. (5) Though it must take a life-or-death interest in the fate of profit making, the state does not operate as a for-profit business. (6) Capitalism involves an inherent “double movement” that resists its own nihilistic drift, for example in the demands for protections of labor (child labor laws, legal limitations on the length of the work week) and the environment. (7) Growing social resources (science, technology, infrastructure, and consumer goods) open possibilities for a society not centered on the

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endless accumulation of capital.28 In this section, we explore several of these countertendencies. First of all, not everything can have a price. There are no commodities without persons to own and exchange them. Capital presupposes persons. The slogan of the Communist Manifesto “All that is holy is profaned” exaggerates: persons, and by extension their property rights, are sacred. Moral features are embedded in the market, through which capital necessarily circulates. They include “freedom, equality, property, and Bentham” in Marx’s barbed summary.29 People must be free to enter into contracts. The sanctity of the person is fundamental to simple commodity circulation as a sphere of voluntary exchanges. Marx writes: In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent.30

A predominantly commercial economy is made possible only by the emergence of a modern capitalist society, in which slavery and servitude are replaced by free wage labor. Workers can sell their labor power only because they own it to begin with.31 Wage laborers negotiate their wage contracts, though their circumstances force them to make some deal. Persons are not commodities to be bought and sold: that is a fundamental premise of capitalism. Not everything can be put up for sale. Capitalism recognizes the dignity of human beings, but in its bare bones: all are persons.32 What is particular to a person—needs, sex, race, health, social class—goes unacknowledged, officially, though it continues, for that very reason, to matter.33 What it means to be a person undergoes leveling, as what Marx calls the cosmopolitan and secular “cult of practical reason” overtakes religion, nationality, and anything parochial.34 The egalitarianism of both Kantian ethics and utilitarianism, where every human being counts the same, echoes this abstract equality of persons under capitalism.35 The complexity of capitalism is evident in other ways. Though commodities are homogenized by prices, they necessarily retain particular features that meet human wants. My house is both a valuable asset and a shelter. Each commodity has this double character: it exists as a particular use-value that has exchange-value. As Marx sardonically observes,

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without the peculiarities of human needing, commodity exchange would fizzle: “The owner makes up for this lack in the commodity of a sense of the concrete, physical body of the other commodity, by his own five and more senses.”36 Moreover, human needs do not arise in isolation. Desires form as we are recognized by others; their opinions influence our needs all the way down. The sensuous realm never excludes the social, and it is never smothered by commercial abstractions, though desire comes under siege as markets seek to fashion the consumer’s identity and needs. What we want is never dictated by commerce alone. McDonald’s must deliver an edible meal, as it searches out messages to increase its market share. Flattening desire conflicts with capitalism’s need for eager consumers. Consequently, we are inundated with advertising hype and intensified coding of products in hierarchies of prestige. The double character of the commodity covers its production, too. While capitalists and wage earners alike may only be out for the buck, they nonetheless have to attend to the particulars of the production process they undertake. So the experiential basis for the virtues within the work world cannot be eradicated. In addition to the double character of capitalism, there is what Karl Polanyi called its double movement: capitalism’s spread goes hand in hand with resistance to it.37 Some such struggles are inescapable: consider how the capitalist drive to lengthen the workday provokes labor’s resistance.38 Exploitation of child labor led to laws setting a minimum age for wage workers. Others arise from political movements: consider how consumers battle corporations to achieve product safety. Life in capitalist societies continually provokes challenges to the austerity of the “unencumbered,” bargaining persons who assert their rights in the market. Even many of its advocates sense the coldness of the market and hedge against nihilism by thickening the minimalist conception of rights. They declare that one or more of the following provisions must be secured for all: education, food, housing, medical care, rescue, disaster relief, pensions, employment, and even joint ownership of the firm where one works.39 The root of this “positive” human rights approach is a broader, more material conception of what the dignity of the person requires.40 A Kantian outlook is promoted by countertendencies to nihilism that characterize capitalism. Utility Theory and Subjectivism In what ways do modern moral theories uncritically reflect the nihilism of capitalism? Commercial society’s reductiveness, abstractness, indifference, and thirst for the calculable provide the model for the doctrine of utility.

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Utility theory mimics everyday life under capitalism, where money represents value-in-general, and almost everything has its price. Marx depicts utility harshly: “Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relation of utility and user.”41 Beneath the disparate goods of this world supposedly lurks a unit of value that provides a metric for judgment. Goods from friendship to clean air are rigorously tabulated, based on the quantity of utility distilled from each. Moral theories aiming for a generality detached from the specificity of goods have an inherently nihilistic aim: apparent and palpable goods are discounted in their specificity and accounted for only as quantities of utility. Utility theory is a species of nominalism, for it dispenses with types of actions; only the equally formless consequences brought about by particular behaviors bear on their moral standing. Actions have no inherent moral character. The thick categories of everyday experience—betrayal, courage, homicide, generosity, self-respect, integrity, and compassion—melt into the vapid “more or less” of value-in-general. Without the recognition of kinds of actions, virtues and vices are eclipsed by nameless, formless “acts.” The bravery of an act is no recommendation of it; neither does the cruelty of an act count against it. Bravery and cruelty just do not show up; they do not register. Only the underlying abstraction matters.42 Utility mimics money, and the moral agent invests in actions that promise the best return. Actual identities and roles that shape our responsibilities—sister, teacher, mother, neighbor, citizen—do not compute. This moral reasoning rings like a cash register. A stranger to commercial society would not dream of a moral accounting system that vaporizes actual differences. Utility theory shrinks moral experience down to empty-headed considerations like pleasure, pain, and preference, which differ only quantitatively. In the name of calculative rigor, it replaces socalled irrational customs and judgments with its shiny moral accounting system. As Marx and Alasdair MacIntyre both point out, utility is a pseudoconcept; there is no value-in-general. There are no scales with which to compare a third child with a pay raise or lasting peace in the Middle East. These scales cannot be invented, since goods are disparate, qualitative, and contextual.43 Tough choices do not transmute into straightforward calculations based on assigned measures. There is no pleasure or pain in the abstract, though there may be more or less abstract pleasures and pain.

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Nonetheless, the concept of utility is easily fixed in our minds because it is the shadow of something actual that is ubiquitous under capitalism: prices. Marx traces utility theory directly to money and prices: The apparent absurdity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of utility, this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation.44

Just as every commodity lives a double life as something useful and a quantity of value, we are easily persuaded that a similar abstraction underlies each experience. However, prices are real; utility is a mirage. Utilitarianism persists, since it resonates with what is real and exudes an aura of objectivity, egalitarianism, altruism, and fairness. Utilitarianism can rightly be regarded as a “morality of capitalism.” It pushes one aspect of generalized commodity exchange to the maximum: every conceivable thing has its utility “price.” Utility theory is doubly caught up in subjectivism. (1) Utility theory discards the thick vocabulary and judgments of common life, for it is based on a subjectivist elimination of forms, essences, and kinds as mere fictions.45 By excluding kinds of actions from moral experience, utility theory has no need to ponder their possible moral weight. There are no murders, lies, sexual assaults, no acts of friendship or generosity; there are only behaviors and events with their consequences (“outcomes”), describable as pleasurable or painful, preferred or unwanted. This moral anti-essentialism harbors nihilism. (2) Today, utility is supposed to be (or to measure) something purely subjective. Utility theorists scorn Marx’s concept of use-value for missing this supposedly simple point: utility bypasses the inherent fitness of things for a purpose. Our desire, they claim, can be separated from the physical properties of the objects of our desire. As today’s neoclassical economist puts it, “Utility in the sense of desiredness is a purely subjective concept, clearly distinct from usefulness or fitness for a purpose.”46 The shift in utility theory away from Bentham’s objective hedonism, according to which utility distilled the manifold properties of a thing (in the broad sense) to its capacity to produce pleasure or pain—but still its capacity— to the contemporary concept of utility as purely subjective preference, charts the trajectory of subjectivism.

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If Marx is right, however, usefulness cannot be divvied up into subjective and objective components. “The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this use-value does not dangle in midair. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.”47 Of course Marx recognizes that usefulness does not exist in abstraction from subjective purposes and desires either. Marx does not dodge the challenge of subjectivist (neoclassical) value theory, as is commonly assumed; he anticipates and meets it. While a utility calculus plainly resembles a price system, utilitarianism falls short of being the morality of capitalism in failing to represent the pricelessness of the bargaining person: as a commodity, labor power has a price; its owner, the wage laborer, does not. Utilitarianism assigns values to all things but fails to make clear why it counts people as equals. Why respect persons equally, even if their capacities to experience pleasure or form preferences vary greatly? What is it about persons that the concept of dignity addresses? Even if utility were a cogent concept, it would lack the resources to account for the moral status of subjects. Kantian ethics plumbs deeper and deserves to be recognized as the morality of capitalism.48 Kant and Subjectivism How one assesses capitalism’s relation to nihilism will depend on how one evaluates Kant’s moral dictum that, whereas things have only a price, only persons have a (priceless) dignity. We argue that the “purist splits” of Kantian philosophy tilt it toward nihilism.49 Kant is the champion of purist splits, for he accomplishes his “Copernican Revolution” by factoring experience into two components: what intuition gives and what the subject adds. The former is purely objective (albeit unknowable), while the latter is purely subjective (though it makes objectivity in Kant’s “critical” sense possible). Like Hume, Kant assigns philosophy the task of penetrating experience to uncover the processes that structure it. Philosophy identifies the judgments and concepts hidden from ordinary view. In every case of human experience and knowledge, Kant insists that “intuitions without concepts are blind” while “concepts without intuitions are empty.” Even the simplest beliefs synthesize concepts with intuitions. All the same, the philosopher factors experience into intuitions and transcendental forms and concepts. Each is attributed to a different source: intuitions are given, while the subject imposes transcendental forms and concepts. Kant wants it both ways: the subjective and the objective are

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inseparable in experience, yet critical philosophy is all about factoring them out. The person, as factored out by Kant, slides into nihilism. Splitting subject from object, persons from things, sensing from thinking, freedom from necessity, and happiness from duty makes it impossible to judge how to act. Kant’s moral subject is so purely subjective as to burn all bridges back to the ordinary goods of the world. This purely subjective moral agent is in free fall. Subjectivity gets meaning from actual relationships. If we abstract entirely from our identity as friend, family member, teacher, citizen, neighbor, writer, or believer, the frictionless subject lacks the traction that practical judgment requires. Like an alien from another universe, only worse, the subject must make moral judgments without recourse to any human sensibilities. Davidson calls this mind purified of any possibly distorting traits the “featureless self,” This featureless self is familiar from theories in quite different parts of the philosophic landscape…. In each case, the mind is divorced from the traits that constitute it; an inescapable conclusion from certain lines of reasoning…but one that should always persuade us to reject the premises.50

In Kantian dualisms the contradictions of capitalism are secreted. The dignity of the subject is secured at the cost of the loss of its world: what is truly, concretely human is screened out. The human subject founders in abstraction, a bare presupposition of freedom, a ghostly power that underlies existence.51 The subject outside experience that makes experience possible is a spiritual Ding-an-sich.52 A featureless self is unable to care and has no reason to act in one way rather than another. Unless it is immersed in its world, the self is not recognizably human and cannot act. Kant’s pure subject strips the world of goods as thoroughly as does utilitarianism. Both are caught up in purist splits that lose the world. As we will see, the dualistic mindset underlying them is entrenched by the ways that capitalist social forms dispose us to represent our practices to ourselves. Capitalism and Subjectivism How do the dynamics of capitalism encourage the subjectivism and skepticism that result in the dilemmas of modern morality? We will distinguish three ways; each involves the splitting of subjective and objective that

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is the source of those dilemmas. First, in capitalism one’s labor power is treated as a commodity. This split between the person and her labor power resembles the stoic’s distinction between what is truly mine: my thoughts, preferences, and aversions, and what does not belong to me: the external world, bodies (including “mine”), and actions. Since my labor power is for sale but I’m not, I must be something other than my capacities to perform useful labor. The self is pushed inward, like the “featureless self” that Davidson criticizes. Second, as we have seen, capitalism promotes indifference to the particular form of useful labor, in the case of the worker, and to the particular form of investment, in the case of the capitalist. In both cases, the focus on the abstract purpose of making money distances subjects from the specific features of their work and their world. Third, answering the question “What is value?” discloses sources of the subjectivism that bubbles through modern moral thought. Under capital, wealth takes the social form of value, whose inner measure is the socially necessary abstract labor time needed to produce it. Not the actions of this particular worker, but the labor time socially required to produce commodities measures their value. As congealed socially necessary abstract labor, value itself is abstract and cannot appear. Rather, value necessarily appears as a quantity of money, which is the outer measure of value. In determining the quantity of value, what people want matters. The demand for the commodity figures into what counts as socially necessary labor; unwanted products have no value regardless of how much labor it took to produce them. The social process of abstracting from the particular useful properties of commodities leaves as its residue the “ghostly objectivity” of value.53 Commodities and money are not just things; they are fetishes, that is, they possess social powers unrelated to their physical properties—they have clout. Value is no less real for being entirely relative, a purely social substance. Not all abstractions reveal concrete reality. This abstraction, socially necessary abstract labor time, does reveal the actual workings of capitalism. But this measure cannot appear. Rather, value, which is abstract, is necessarily actualized in and expressed as money, though money is not value. Not only is money required to express value, but value also cannot exist without money: commodity exchange belongs to the formation of value because only by being sold does a commodity prove that the labor that produced it is socially necessary. The quantity of value latent in the product becomes actual only through the exchange process, where

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demand plays its constitutive role in the formation of value.54 Capitalism stands the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle on its head: far from introducing uncertainty, measuring the value of a commodity by selling it is necessary in order to fix its value. That value necessarily appears as money leads to a fundamental illusion involved with the forms of income, notably the wage form. The wage form suggests that I am paid for the value added by my labor, “On the surface of bourgeois society the worker’s wage appears as the price of labor, as a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain quantity of labor. Thus people speak of the value of labor.”55 Commutative justice is presupposed by this way of speaking.56 Wages are just, in this view, if they match the value the worker adds. Commutative justice runs into problems when applied to wages. First, the very idea of the “value of labor” is problematic. Labor, unlike labor power, is not a commodity. “In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labor must at all events exist before it is sold.”57 You cannot sell what you do not own. Labor does not occur until after the capacity to labor has been sold; labor is the use of the labor power that now belongs to the capitalist. For a wage, the worker exchanges her capacity to labor, not her labor, which she does not have to sell. Furthermore, labor is the source of value; it does not have value. “Labor is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself.”58 Marx points out that the phrase “the value of labor” is an “imaginary expression,” but one that capitalist social relations naturally generate.59 Second, the personal pronoun “I” generates a profound mistake about value, namely, the notion that the labor of an individual creates value directly. Thus, the American neoclassical economist John Bates Clark wrote that under conditions of perfect competition, “each man accordingly is paid an amount that equals the total product which he personally creates.”60 The appearance that the value added is strictly one’s doing is thoroughly false. As already noted, value-producing labor is socially necessary labor. Value is something purely social; “crystals of the social substance”61 Marx calls it, though natural conditions are presupposed.62 It is how my individual labor counts in relation to the labor of others that matters in determining how much value I produce. The subjectivism of mainstream modern philosophy is fostered by the way that labor appears to function under capitalism. Subjectivist philosophy perpetuates a distorted view analogous to both classical and neoclassical economics. In classical economics, labor is treated as the

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sole source of value. Neoclassical theory takes value to be exclusively a matter of human preferences, and it assumes that preferences are purely subjective. In either case, value or value-added is human, purely human. This notion of “value added” by labor or preference gets re-inscribed in modern epistemologies in the idea that the subject’s contributions to knowledge, the “value added” by the knower, can be rigorously separated out.63 The sifting of concept from percept, subject from object, mind from world that occurs throughout modern philosophy parallels the “value-added” standpoint that factors out the contribution of subjectivity and gauges its contribution, whether this is laboring (as in the case of classical economics) or preferring (as in the case of neoclassical economics).64 Thus, subjectivity is said to create values, while objectivity supplies facts; subjectivity devises concepts, while objectivity constrains us with bare intuitions. Kantian epistemology shares with economics a view of human activity as spontaneous, capable of being factored out from its objects, and the sole source of value. This factoring out of the purely subjective is the source of the skepticism endemic to modern philosophy. Once a chasm is posited between subject and object, remedial efforts to close it inevitably fail. The supposed source of value, pure human activity, is also the source of skepticism. Ironically, our confidence that we act is thought to depend on being able to disentangle what we add from what experience gives. What is taken to be free, the will and the spontaneity of judgment, is seemingly superior to and unaffected by the world since they inhabit no common ground. This subject—to remain subject—loses its world. This insistence on the purity of subjectivity is the Achilles heel of mainstream modern thought and the root of its nihilism. The presupposition of the purist splits that underlie modern philosophy is this: the conceptual and the empirical can be split off from one another as can, respectively, the subjective and the objective. Thus, empiricism and Kant’s critical philosophy understand concepts as human constructs: pure impositions on what is given in intuition. Concepts are subjective—purely subjective. What answers to concepts, what concepts are concepts of, is nothing in reality; concepts are strictly subjective functions. By the same token, natures, essences, or forms, which supposedly answer to concepts, are fictions—or as Francis Bacon put it: “forms are figments of the human mind.”65 Purist splits engender skepticism, since no trustworthy mediations between concepts and objects can be established.66 If concepts are purely subjective, how can they represent the world and not merely the mind-constituted appearance of things? What we called “true” we now

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nervously qualify as “true for us.” What we called “good” we no longer deem good “in itself.” Our shadow is cast in every direction, making it seem impossible to tell what things are apart from what they are for us. Purist splits inhabit the “value-added” ideology of capitalism. Beyond Moral Nihilism The intention to revitalize moral theory does not ensure success. Utilitarianism and Kantian ethics appear far removed from nihilism, but their conceptual moorings are kin to emotivism and decisionism. Only a phenomenology of human freedom and moral agency, that is, only an experience-based inquiry into human nature that does not dogmatically presuppose that the subjective and objective are separable can avoid nihilistic consequences. A historically perceptive neo-Aristotelian account, such as Marx’s, offers the best prospect of identifying the nihilistic aspects of capitalism and the possibilities for surpassing the modern moral predicament. What are the features of an embodied and critical moral theory? Good philosophy begins with the search for good concepts, especially one that answers Kant’s fourth critical question: “what is man?” Because sociality is as native to us as our skin, an adequate concept of the human requires an adequate concept of society. Individuals are not disembodied moral wills. An embodied ethics takes the social and political character of human life not as a supplement but as one of our “original properties,” in Hume’s sense. It belongs to our human makeup. Thus Aristotle’s “man is a political animal” and Marx’s “man is a social animal” are statements about what we are, our essence; they are phenomenological, not ordinary empirical claims. Thus, to treat human beings in abstraction from the forms of their social and political life, as do classical and neoclassical economics, state-of-nature theories, and utilitarian and Kantian ethics, means to lose contact with the actuality of human existence. A critical moral theory situates persons in determinate communities, from family to civil society to state, that constitute particular relationships and responsibilities. Theory tracks the tensions between the dimensions of our lives: the independence of the citizen at odds with the dependence of the vulnerable person unable to meet her own needs. Loyalty to one’s nation is at odds with membership in a global community. Belonging to a faith community at odds with secular institutions. An embodied ethics replaces the false doubts of subjectivist philosophy with the real challenges

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of actual persons. Mediation is not the impossible dream of joining what theory forever pulls apart; judgment and action already put mediation at the center of moral existence. It is philosophy’s task to help get the actual mediations right. Since social and political institutions belong to human nature, theories should incorporate the truth that human needs and labor always have a specific social form. Getting the proper measure of wealth involves getting the right social form of wealth and of labor. Today we need to inquire into the specific powers of capitalist forms in moral life.67 How does the drive of endless capital accumulation influence moral thinking and conduct? How do the pressures to produce, consume, and achieve, shape our conceptions of the good? What counter movements to the pressures exist? What resistance to nihilism is possible? The world is full of diverse goods and creatures that have a vast range of powers and purposes. This expresses in a minimal way the standpoint of ordinary perception and knowledge. Nothing is more palpable than the goods that surround us: a healthy child, a tree in bloom, the redheaded woodpecker, kind acts, just laws, and friends. The evils of slavery, kidnapping, cruelty, or fraud are likewise there to discern. Why is philosophy so hamstrung in its attempts to let in the obvious? What experience conveys directly, say, the goodness of just being alive, gets rerouted into strange paths by philosophy and ends up reversing directions: rather than disclosing the object, goodness is stripped of all reference to the world and bent back onto us, only now in the form of values.68 What originally seemed to be a feature of the object bizarrely turns out to say nothing about it.69 It turns out that nothing in the world deserves our concern; there is no goodness in the world to guide us. Only the profoundly depressed recognize the true indifference of the world and everything in it. Like Ivan Karamazov, the rest of us live a lie—or, more politely, play the game of life—drawn into life by the force of appetite, the Karamazov in us. The empty thoughts of modern moral theory do not arise in a social vacuum. What pulls apart at a conceptual level replicates how things appear under capitalism. The nihilism fostered by capitalism goes beyond faulty philosophy; it is a compelling force in our lives. The goods of this world are at risk from the enveloping spread of commerce. A turn toward virtue ethics will not undo the ungodly dynamic of commercial life. An embodied moral theory must escape subjectivism, but it cannot escape

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the showdown with capitalism. Marx’s critique of capitalism, in conjunction with a neo-Aristotelian approach to human nature, best prepares us for this confrontation.

Notes 1. Simon Clarke shows how modern sociologists such as Weber and successors like Talcott Parsons adopted the horizon of neoclassical economics. They missed the key revolution in nineteenth-century social theory— Marx’s. “There was a scientific revolution in nineteenth-century social thought, but it was one that Parsons ignored. It was inaugurated by Marx’s critique of the ideological foundations of classical political economy, which he located in the political economists’ neglect of the social form of capitalist production which was the basis of their naturalisation of capitalist social relations.” Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (London: Macmillan, 1982), 240. 2. It is a common misunderstanding that Karl Popper considers Marx not to be a scientific thinker because he didn’t make empirically refutable assertions; actually, Popper says that most of Marx’s assertions have been refuted. See The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 2002 [1957]). 3. This is one of the main themes of Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 4. We propose to use the term “utility theory” quite broadly to cover any theory, whether objectivist or subjectivist, normative, explanatory, or descriptive, that employs a concept of utility. We conceive of utility as the good in general, whether thought to be objective or subjective; utility purports to be independent of the specific properties of goods and measurable by some metric of goodness, whether transpersonal or not. This broad usage includes the variants of the moral philosophy of utilitarianism but also neoclassical economics and modern welfare economics. Neoclassical economics complements modern moral philosophy by giving greater currency to the notion of purely subjective utility. Our use of “utility theory” includes utility theory in the narrower, technical sense pioneered by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, who developed concepts and methods for measuring preference intervals. [On utility theory as a theory of the measurement of preferences, see von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, third edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), especially “The Notion of Utility,” Section 3 of Chapter I; and Games and Decisions, by R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa (New York: Wiley, 1957), especially Chapter 2; and

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also Chapter 2 of William Charron’s forthcoming The Logic of Strategic Decision.] As a theory of the measurement of preference, utility theory in this narrower, technical sense is not a moral theory per se. However, the point of measuring preferences is to provide a platform for a gametheoretic or decision-theoretic account of rational choice, which, if it is not strictly a moral theory, is as normative as the concept of rationality. Rational choice theory exemplifies the subjectivism characteristic of modern moral philosophy since preference is taken to be purely subjective and only my preferences are relevant to determining whether or not my choice is rational. Not only do these varieties of utility theory differ; some are incompatible. (1) Bentham thinks of utility as “the property of an object, whereby it tends to produce … pleasure … or to prevent the happening of … pain” [Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Press, 1948 [1789]), 2], while preference-based utility theories reject such objectivism in favor of a purely subjective theory of utility. (2) Von Neumann’s utility theory undercuts utilitarian moral philosophy because the former holds that there is no interpersonal measure of preferences, while any utilitarian moral calculus needs one. (3) Unlike utilitarian moral philosophy, which, in Kantian fashion, accords equal respect to each person’s preferences, game theory and decision theory accord the preferences of others no moral weight. The preferences of others are treated purely strategically; how will they enable or block one from achieving one’s predetermined objectives? Rational choice theory is egalitarian inasmuch as it is addressed equally to all agents with the capacity for rational choice. For Marx understanding modern society begins with the commodity and value, but the commodity “is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,” while value “transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic.” Karl Marx, Capital 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976 [1867]), 163 and 167. For example, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) has no entries for “commodity,” “money,” or “capital” in its index. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Ethics, Religion and Politics, vol. 3 of the G. E. M. Anscombe Collected Philosophical Papers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981). This article originally appeared in Philosophy, 33, 1958. Anscombe, 41. Marx explains why capitalism fosters secular society in “On the Jewish Question,” translated by Clemens Dutt in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels

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15. 16.

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Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975 [1843]), 156. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, second edition, 1984 [1981]), 2. MacIntyre, 225. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1974 [1947]). Bernard Williams, Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 89. For a telling diagnosis of the trouble with modern philosophy and its characteristic conception of subjectivity, see Frank B. Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Farrell roots modern subjectivity with its concomitant loss of the world in late medieval thought and largely ignores the power of modern institutions. Farrell’s book is a good example of what Donald Davidson calls the “new antisubjectivism.” See Davidson’s Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 47. Depression involves a pervasive difficulty in experiencing the good, but not necessarily a principled one. Carl Menger, a founder of neoclassical economics, imparts the wisdom echoed by Woody Allen’s Professor Levy, “value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.” Principles of Economics, translated and edited by J. Dingwell and B. F. Hoselitz (Glencoe, Illinois, 1950), 6–7. The case against the skepticism implicit in conceptual schemes that Hegel made in his Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit was renewed by Donald Davidson in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984 [1980]). In Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism, Frank Farrell defends moral realism. For a criticism, see Barry Stroud, “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms’,” Hume Studies, Vol. XIX, No. 2 (November 1993), 253–272. Stroud argues that projection theorists like Hume have not provided a believable account. What is it that we are supposed to be projecting onto objects? Our feelings? How odd! W. V. O. Quine opposes factoring at the level of the statement, “It is nonsense, and the root of much nonsense, to speak of a linguistic component and a factual component in the truth of any individual statement. Taken collectively, science has its double dependence upon language and experience” in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953 [1951]), 42. But Quine does factor the linguistic from the factual at the level of science and its “cues.” “Subtracting his cues from his world view, we get man’s net contribution as the difference. This difference marks the extent of man’s

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conceptual sovereignty—the domain within which he can revise theory while saving the data.” W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 5, as quoted by Donald Davidson in Subjectivity, Intersubjectivity, Objectivity, 42. Davidson rejects this factoring as an instance of the scheme-content dualism. What Davidson did for the true we seek to do for the good. The root of generalized moneymaking is the capitalist mode of production. Endless moneymaking is the aim of producing wealth in the social form of the commodity. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1903]), 330. Compare Capital 1, 229, where Marx calls money the “radical leveler.” Simmel, 329–330. Karl Marx, “On James Mill,” in Karl Marx Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 118. The theme of indifference remains important in Marx’s later work. See for example Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973 [1857–1858]), 156–157, and Capital 3, translated by David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981 [1894]), 297. In Karl Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” translated by Rodney Livingstone, in Capital 1, 1033. “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” 1041. Simmel, 330. Marx calls the commodity “a born leveler and cynic” Capital 1, 179. A favorite theme of Herbert Marcuse, these potentials are called “shearing pressures” in Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 348 and 369. Capital 1, 280. Capital 1, 178. See Capital 1, 270–271. Michael Sandel criticizes the minimal, unencumbered self of liberal theory. See his Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 13. See Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 153. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya, edited by Maurice Dobb (New York: International Publishers, 1970 [1859]), 152. As the history of legal and social discrimination against the poor, religious minorities, women, ethnic and racial groups, homosexuals, and others has shown, the abstract equality implicit in commercial life has become a reality, to the extent that it has, only through protracted struggle. Capital 1, 179.

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37. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 130ff. 38. Marx describes the struggle over the length of the workday as pitting irreconcilable “right against right” (Capital 1, 344). 39. For a discussion of “decommodification,” see Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, edited by John Keane (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). 40. For a forcefully argued statement of this approach, see Carol Gould’s Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 41. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 163. 42. Utility theory in von Neumann’s sense puts no restrictions on preferences; however, all it respects about a preference for, say, honesty is that it is someone’s preference. 43. Marx quotes Aristotle, “It is however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurable.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. V, Ch. 5 (London: Loeb edition, 1926), 287–289, as quoted in Capital 1, 151. 44. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, translated by Clemens Dutt in vol. 5 of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976 [1846]), 409, translation amended. 45. Subjectivism leads to the rejection of forms since order or meaning is factored out to the subject side. Locke calls (nominal) essences “the workmanship of the understanding.” Anti-essentialism should be added to the list begun by Quine and Davidson of dogmas of empiricism. The “new antisubjectivism” retrieves form. 46. R. D. Collison Black, “Utility,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, 4 vols (London: Macmillan, 1987), 776. 47. Capital 1, 126. 48. We suspect that preference is a rarified manifestation of the Kantian, egalitarian element that has been present in utility theory from the start. That element was expressed by Bentham, “Each is to count for one, and none for more than one.” This egalitarian assumption about persons, a whopping moral commitment, is the rationale for the utilitarian accounting procedure of taking the arithmetic sum of utilities. Because it treats the preferences of an agent’s others purely strategically, rational choice theory is not egalitarian in this way, yet it is addressed equally to all agents capable of rational choice. But why make preferences moral absolutes? (In von Neumann’s utility theory as in rational choice theory, preferences are screened by certain formal criteria, such as transitivity.) The bare “mineness” of preferences would seem to be what entitles my preferences to respect. Respecting a

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53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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person’s preferences—whatever they may be—is contemporary utilitarianism’s permissive way of respecting the persons whose preferences they are. Utilitarianism has flipped over into a skeletal Kantianism. “Purist splits” is a term we borrow from James Collins’ Interpreting Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 14. Analyses that factor out elements posit purist splits. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” 185–186. “Only what he does, without reference to enjoyment, in full freedom and independently of what nature can procure for him passively, gives an [absolute] worth to his presence [in the world] as the existence of a person; and happiness, with the whole abundance of its pleasures, is far from being an unconditioned good.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1966 [1790]), 43. The factoring of subjective from objective persists in Kant’s accounts of the beautiful and the sublime in his Critique of Judgment. “Because a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment and beauty is not a characteristic of the object” (192). “Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our minds” (104). Capital 1, 128, revised translation. Contribution, 45; Capital 1, 166, 179–181. Capital 1, 675. Capital 1, 676. Capital 1, 675. Capital 1, 677. Capital 1, 677. Essentials of Economic Theory (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), 92. Clark must mean the value of “the total product which he personally creates.” Capital 1, 128 or 165. Capital 1, 138–139. When Locke spoke of nominal essences as the “workmanship of the understanding,” he meant that they were pure “value added” to the raw data of experience by the labor of the understanding. Quine’s purist split between “cues” and “net contribution” traces back to Locke. John Locke factors out elements throughout the An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “This shows Man’s Power and its way of Operation to be much what the same in the Material and Intellectual World. For the materials in both being such as he has no power over, either to make or destroy, all that Man can do is either to unite them together, or to set them by one another, or wholly separate them” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1690]), 163–164.

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65. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Chicago: Open Court, 1994 [1620]), Aphorism 11. In a similar vein W. V. O. Quine writes in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” “Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word” (22). 66. This is why Donald Davidson objects to all “epistemic intermediaries.” See his essay “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Subjective, Objective, and Intersubjective, 144–145. 67. See Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Recognizing Capital: Some Barriers to Public Discourse about Capital,” in Race, Class, and National Identity, edited by Andrew Light and Mecke Nagel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 101–116. 68. Mired in skepticism for so long, we find its absence disconcerting. Davidson’s conclusion to his anti-skeptical classic, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” jolts modern sensibilities with its lack of irony: “In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false” (198). We are no less in touch with their goodness, against which we test our practical choices. 69. Stroud points up the “special problem” that judging objects raises for modern subjectivists. “But the special problem which arises for the problematic thoughts we are interested in is that the impressions which are said to produce them cannot in that sense be impressions of ‘anything, that does or can belong’ to external objects. They are not ‘of’ anything that can be so, or that we can perceive to be so, in the world” (265).

Bibliography Anscombe, G. E. M. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” In Ethics, Religion and Politics, G. E. M. Anscombe Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. London, UK: Loeb edition, 1926. Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1994 [1620]. Black, R. D. Collison. “Utility.” In The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. 4 vols. London, UK: Macmillan, 1987. Clark, John Bates. Essentials of Economic Theory. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1907. Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London: Macmillan, 1982. Collins, James. Interpreting Modern Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

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Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1984 [1980]. ———. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001. Farrell, Frank B. Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gould, Carol. Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Horkheimer, Max. The Eclipse of Reason. New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1974 [1947]. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York, NY: Hafner, 1966 [1790]. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1690]. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Second Edition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984 [1981]. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. Edited by Maurice Dobb. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1970 [1859]. ———. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1973 [1857–1858]. ———. “On the Jewish Question.” Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1975 [1843]. ———. Capital 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976 [1867]. ———. “On James Mill.” In Karl Marx Selected Writings. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” Translated by Rodney Livingstone. In Karl Marx, Capital 1. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 5. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1976 [1846]. ———. Capital 3. Translated by David Fernbach. London, UK: Penguin, 1981 [1894]. Menger, Carl. Principles of Economics. Translated and edited by J. Dingwell and B. F. Hoselitz. Glencoe, Illinois, 1950. Morgenstern, Oskar, and John von Neumann. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Third edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. Murray, Patrick, and Jeanne Schuler. “Recognizing Capital: Some Barriers to Public Discourse about Capital.” In Race, Class, and National Identity.

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Edited by Andrew Light and Mecke Nagel. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. Offe, Claus. Contradictions of the Welfare State. Edited by John Keane. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944. Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge, 2002 [1957]. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Quine, W. V. O. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View. New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1953 [1951]. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Sandel, Michael. Democracy’s Discontent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald N. Levine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1903]. Stroud, Barry. “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms’.” Hume Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (November 1993): 253–272. Williams, Bernard. Morality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

CHAPTER 5

Karl Marx and the Critique of Bourgeois Philosophy

Marx’s critique of capitalism has been called the “scientific revolution in nineteenth century social thought.”1 But this revolution quickly stalled since basic dimensions of Marx’s critique remain out of reach of even sympathetic readers. Marx names the array of obstacles to understanding capitalism “the bourgeois horizon.” The bourgeois horizon describes a familiar mindset inculcated by many sources. Its power lies in its apparent self-evidence. Thinking is assumed to follow set patterns. These patterns run throughout modern philosophy and trace back to Hellenistic philosophy. They underlie sociology and neoclassical economics. Most forms of philosophical analysis presuppose them. The pervasiveness of this horizon destines Marx, ironically, to be read through the lens of that thinking he endeavors to displace.2 Like a horizon, the bourgeois mindset conceals as well as reveals. It is the ideology of commercial societies, disguising its origin so that its mode of thinking appears as generic. With this mindset in place, Marx’s effort to disclose the forms of capital is systematically thwarted. Marx is not commonly credited for his command of philosophy. However, his disclosure of the bourgeois horizon involves a sophisticated critique of philosophy. Because that critique has been overlooked, the bourgeois horizon isn’t left behind but is replicated—often in the guise of radical thought. From Hegel, Marx inherits the critique of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_5

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Verstand, the predominant mode of thinking in modern philosophy. However, Marx faults Hegel for falling prey to the dualisms that he had exposed in modern philosophy. For the purpose of the present inquiry, we will not challenge how Marx characterizes Hegel’s defects. We will address three topics. First, drawing on Hegel and Marx, we develop in greater detail the basic features of bourgeois thought. Second, we consider how commercial life or capitalist society makes these patterns plausible. Finally, we sketch how Marx’s critique of capitalism presupposes an adequate phenomenology that goes beyond the bourgeois horizon. In our view, only an adequate phenomenology makes the critique of capitalism possible.

The Bourgeois Mindset Exposing the failures of bourgeois thought was a lifelong project for Marx. Writing to his father at the age of 19, Marx conveyed excitement at discovering Hegel and abandoning the bifurcations of Kant and Fichte. “The mistake lay in my believing that the one (form) could and must be developed in separation from the other (matter), and consequently I obtained no actual form, but only a desk with drawers in which I then strew sand.”3 Drawers are designed to pull out of desks, but separating form from matter serves no purpose. Marx characterized bourgeois thought as a knot of unworkable bifurcations: form vs. content, mind vs. world, a priori vs. a posteriori, passive vs. active, immediate vs. mediated, sensation vs. concept. These dualisms arise from the root conviction that what can be distinguished in thought can exist separately. For analysis to dictate the terms of existence is deeply mistaken. What Hume calls a “distinction of reason” shifts, without experiential warrant, into a “matter of fact.”4 A distinction of reason describes what can be separated for the purpose of analysis but can’t exist separately. In analysis, we focus on the color, shape, or texture of something. The mistake arises with the further assumption that clear apprehension insures separate existence. Clarity comes to mean independence: distinctions signify distinct existents. Color supposedly exists independently of shape and texture if it is conceived separately. This slide from distinguished aspect to separate element fuels the bourgeois mindset and its characteristic dilemmas. What must exist together—such as action and its consequences—are split apart and treated as separable things. Splitting apart what exists only together—or makes sense together—yields

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thinking that never makes its way back to experience. Analysis of a sort ensues, but it doesn’t get at reality—not because it is abstract, but because its abstractions are false: they posit as independent what experience shows to be inseparable. While Hume acknowledges distinctions of reason, he doesn’t leave room for these distinctions when he divides knowledge into relations of ideas and matters of fact. Relations of ideas, found in logic and math, are inseparable in thought. To deny such a relation, described as “analytic” by Kant, results in contradiction. Matters of fact, by contrast, are founded on experience. Hume construes experience as a stream of distinct perceptions. The route from experience to knowledge requires establishing necessary connections, such as causality, between perceived events. As Hume construes perception, this linkage doesn’t exist. Perception excludes necessity, since perception is stipulated as discrete. Since necessity is not directly given in perception, argues Hume, it must arise subsequently from our habits or customs of perceiving; humans respond to repeated perception and project necessity on to the world. Arrived at in this way, necessary connections are only subjective. Custom tells us about human nature, not about the external world. Once necessity is removed from experience, what remains of a distinction of reason? Hume’s skepticism pulls the ground out from under distinctions of reason, since it supposes that nothing must exist together. What is pulled apart in analysis doesn’t come back together again. Getting beyond the bourgeois horizon restores distinctions of reason to their role in achieving knowledge. The bifurcations that constitute the bourgeois horizon presuppose purist conceptions of terms.5 Purism and bifurcation go hand in hand to make up the bourgeois mindset. A purist conception pushes difference to the extreme of dualism or disjunction. For example, form and matter are different aspects of things. When these differences emerge within the bourgeois horizon, form becomes pure (contentless) form and content becomes pure (formless) content; the subjective becomes the exclusively subjective and the objective the exclusively objective. Rather than distinguishing aspects of the thing, these categories cordon off rival territories. The bourgeois mindset is stymied by mediation. Radical oppositions make mediation between the extremes unthinkable. The dilemma faced by Descartes in comprehending the unity of mind and body resounds from other corners. So long as concepts are isolated from each other, a semblance of order appears. To maintain this semblance, thinking is

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reined in. If thinking persists, then questions such as these arise: how are perceptions and concepts related? Do a priori structures of knowledge change over time? If so, are these changes provoked by experience?6 Questions that force purist concepts together undermine the fundamental stance. A semblance of order quickly dissolves into nagging doubts. The clear and distinct oppositions that characterize the bourgeois horizon are often one question away from a slide into skepticism. Marx’s dissertation and notes reveal his fascination with the Hellenistic philosophies of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. He called them the key to the whole history of Greek philosophy and judged these bifurcating philosophies to be the forerunners of modern bourgeois thought, just as he saw in much modern philosophy a revival of Hellenistic ideas. Moneylenders and traders inhabit the fringes of a traditional society. Marx considered Hellenistic thought to be occasioned by the breakdown of traditional, “substantial” societies and the rise of private property and commercial life. Bourgeois philosophy is the shape thought is likely to assume when traditional, communal societies give way as private property and commercial forms take hold. The main moves of Hellenistic philosophy are the staples of bourgeois thought. Epicureanism and Stoicism stipulate as essence a single element that is supposedly self-evident and needs no defense. This element—pleasure or detachment—signifies the sole measure of worth. Hellenistic thinkers may quarrel about what constitutes the essence, but they agree that a single abstraction underlies the diversity of experience— like a common currency that expresses all prices. A further hallmark of Hellenistic thought is the split between the inner and outer realm. This line, drawn by Stoicism, separates what is mine—perceptions and judgments—from what lies beyond my control, a matter of indifference. This division between inner and outer, what is essential and inessential or subjective and objective, is the original purist split. Further bifurcations are replicated from this. With Epicureanism, the disjunction is posited between what is pleasurable in the world and what is not. With Stoicism, bifurcation retreats inward, separating external uncertainties from what falls entirely under my control, my thoughts and choices. Skepticism appears to escape bifurcation by exposing all claims to essence as flawed. Skepticism can make the case that purist concepts are empty without much trouble. However, a split persists within skepticism between failed doctrines, on one hand, and the unmet criteria on the other. Like purist concepts, stipulated criteria that have never been tested by experience

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are hollow. Like the Epicurean and the Stoic, the Skeptic asserts criteria for the essential, though these criteria are not realized. Dogmatism and skepticism oscillate throughout philosophy, without a hint that this is a deadlock, let alone how it might be broken. What is missing from bourgeois philosophy is an understanding of human activity. Hegel’s great contribution to philosophy, in Marx’s view, was recognizing the importance of activity, even if the paradigmatic activity was wrongly taken to be thinking itself. Figuring out how to think about activity moved Hegel beyond the standoffs of modern philosophy to grasp how mediation gives concepts their content. The dynamic process that constitutes human activity inspires the core categories of Hegel’s philosophy, the concept and the idea. Philosophy arrives at an adequate grasp of its own activity slowly through its history. In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel describes three attitudes toward objectivity: traditional metaphysics, empiricism and Kant’s critical philosophy, and the idea of immediate or intuitive knowledge found in Schelling. In each case, how philosophy reckons with its own activity shapes the conception of objectivity. Traditional metaphysics, in Hegel’s view, doesn’t trouble about its own activity; it assumes that human thought is capable of grasping its object, whether God, the soul, or the universe. Instead of determining its object through a reasoning process, traditional metaphysics borrows from popular conceptions and fashions its predicates accordingly. This naïve confidence issues its predicates as disjunctions: God is either one or many, the universe is either created or uncreated, the soul is either simple or composite. These categories behave as labels, in Hegel’s view; they lack content and remain unfit for the task of metaphysics. Disjunction reflects the absence of awareness of the relation between mind and its object. Traditional metaphysics leaps into speculating about God because it is naïve and never considers how its own activity as thinking matters. Like traditional metaphysics, empiricism and critical philosophy represent a distinctive approach to human activity. Empiricism rejects metaphysics as otherworldly; it turns against thinking and claims to find truth in sensing and sensuous, earthly reality. The empiricist acknowledges that humans must act in order to determine scientific laws; the regularities of nature are grasped through research and experiment. But empiricism treats activity as neutral, as if thinking disclosed truth in a transparent, hands-off way without determining it; truth is “discovered.” Sensing and

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subsequent analysis, for empiricism, are conduits to its object. This externality defines empiricism; categories, such as cause and effect, are handled as independent entities. Categories are connected in ways that do not alter their fundamental status as separate. Distrust of thinking is the hallmark of empiricism for Hegel. Critical philosophy is painfully aware of its own thinking and the difference it makes. The naïve transparency of empiricism is gone. Since human activity makes knowledge possible, truth is qualified in relation to a particular set of knowers: the framework is constituted by the human activities of both thinking and sensing. Humans supply the categories or universal framework, while the particular content is contributed by the world outside consciousness. Nature exists apart from these activities as an unknowable residue. Human activity for critical philosophy acts like a curse: success breeds a kind of failure. Since objectivity is constituted by human synthesizing, it is subjective to some degree. We know how things appear, but not how they are in themselves. Objects not filtered by human consciousness tantalize but remain unknowable. What results from attending to human activity—whether thinking or sensing—is a subjectivism that spells skepticism. The more we acknowledge our activities, the longer grows our shadow, until it envelops reality. Under certain assumptions, self-awareness and skepticism go hand in hand. Marx’s theses on Feuerbach acknowledge idealism’s edge over traditional materialism in grasping the importance and meaning of human activity. The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism…is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly.7

This serves as a concise statement both of Marx’s identification of (traditional) materialism and idealism as opposing branches of bourgeois philosophy—which is characterized by its purism and bifurcations—and of Marx’s post-bourgeois phenomenology, which rejects the separability of the passive and the active, the objective and the subjective. Materialism takes a contemplative approach to the bodies in motion that constitute reality. Its standpoint is theoretical, not practical. It endeavors to know what exists in the passive manner of empiricism: perceptions built up

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into knowledge in mechanical ways. How to change the world is not its concern; space for human initiative is lacking from this map of reality. Humans, like all species, are just part of the furniture of the universe. “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing…forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.”8 It is the idealist Hegel, not the materialist Feuerbach, who grasps the importance of activity. For Hegel, purism and bifurcation signal a defective mindset that he labels understanding (Verstand) or abstract identity. Abstract identity separates what cannot exist independently. What replicates these defects is an inability to acknowledge the active involvement of thinking without jeopardizing truth or objectivity. The bourgeois horizon bifurcates relentlessly. Action of any sort—whether moral deeds, labor, consuming, or thinking—resists bifurcation. To grasp action takes us back to Hume’s distinctions of reason. Intention, consequences, acting, interacting, recognition, personal history, and the broader cultural context are inseparable aspects of action. Thinking about action threatens the bourgeois horizon. It is safer to ignore the topic. To grasp action, in Hegel’s view, reveals how reason functions. Rather than a thinking thing, reason is better construed as laboring through the evidence of nature to arrive at its valued property, knowledge. Like action, reason breaks through the bifurcations of the bourgeois horizon. For example, Hegel criticizes Kant’s account of moral intentions as empty because intentions are comprehensible only in relation to the purpose, ends, and context of particular kinds of action. It is not up to the individual to decide the intention expressed by an action. Intentions are not settled prior to actions in any sense. According to Hegel, I come to understand my intention—what I mean by acting in this way—through the action itself. What I insist was my intention must yield to the meaning of the action as recognized by myself and others. Splitting off consequences from actions in order to determine moral worth runs into similar objections from Hegel. The meaning of consequences can’t be understood apart from the actions from which they flow. The attempt to vector action into intention and consequence is futile. In the end, Marx regards Hegel less as a critic of the bourgeois horizon than its fullest embodiment. The activity largely missing from other philosophy surfaces in Hegel’s work as the activity of thinking. Hegel endeavors to recover the world lost to bifurcating analysis only to have it slip away. For Marx, Hegel’s focus on thinking as paradigmatic

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signifies a betrayal of sensuous human activity. Recall that Marx wrote that idealism developed the active side of human sensuous activity “only abstractly.” Hegel does not subordinate knowledge to the actually existing world but turns to pure knowing as the fulfillment and replacement of sensuous actuality. The shadowy realm of pure concepts—logic—emerges as the centerpiece of Hegel’s system. Not sensuous human activity but the concept of activity captivates Hegel. Thinking reconciles subject and object, only because the “object” turns out to be a creature of the subject. The work of thinking makes everything its property: what we took to be other actually conceals thought as its source of value. “Logic therefore coincides with Metaphysics, the science of things set and held in thoughts—thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things.”9 In Marx’s view, Hegel reinstates the divide between objectivity and subjectivity, with sensuous reality dismissed in favor of rational forms or logic that are then imposed on the world. This thinking does not transform sensuous immediacy; it abandons it for logical forms. This logic presupposes that conceptual content can be distilled out of knowledge and experience. While abstractions arising through a dynamic development differ significantly from lists of categories, these abstractions still signify opposition to concrete existence. In the end Hegel diagnoses the bourgeois mindset but doesn’t escape it. With the culmination of reality in absolute thought, the purist splits are more entrenched than ever. Hegel turns to abstractions as the ultimate embodiment of freedom. What Hegel calls freedom, suggests Marx, actually expresses the replacement of sensuous reality by abstractions: the freedom of absolute idealism turns out to be a form of domination that foreshadows the domination of modern society by capital. Hegel advances Marx’s critique of the bourgeois mindset in another way. For Hegel, all philosophy is “its time grasped in thoughts.” No philosophy is adequately understood apart from its historical context. Marx approaches Hegel on these terms when he christens Hegel the bourgeois thinker par excellence. The movement of Hegel’s abstractions evokes the action of the real abstraction that increasingly dominates modern society, capital. Identifying modernity with the power of capital was not Hegel’s intent—indeed, the concept of capital is absent in Hegel—but we are not masters of our own intentions. In spite of his objectives, Hegel’s thought offers a glimpse into how modern reality is driven and fashioned

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by the unending expansion of capital. The domination of concrete existence by abstractions unwittingly evokes the moves of capital, revealing Hegel to be not the critic of the bourgeois mindset but its most profound exponent.10 For the bourgeois mindset, activity is dismissed, disdained, diminished, or driven to subjectivism and skepticism. The purist opposition between the subjective and objective governs bourgeois thinking and makes it impossible to grasp human activity as a condition of truth without qualifying truth. Either way breeds dilemmas. A student expressed the skeptical impasse this way: “Truth cannot lie in concepts, since they are of our own making. Thus truth must lie in sensation itself.” We want to know what exists, but as soon as we think, we interfere with the object in more ways than we can account for. So a hopeless choice sums up our options. Either we know only what we construct, or we aim for the “given” in ways that won’t distort it, such as through sensation, feeling, or intuition. If we opt for construction, then the thing-in-itself lingers as a tease: “knowledge just represents your framework and not reality itself.” If we pedal steadily after the given, we end up speechless, since “saying” what is given throws us right back on concepts or constructions. Given the dilemmas associated with human activity, bourgeois philosophy is forced either to turn against thinking in order to arrive at knowledge or to settle for thoughts of its own fabrication. Kant seemingly has the last word where truth is concerned: everything we touch turns into us. A Midas curse haunts the standoff between construction of truth and the given. The curse won’t be broken until we figure out how to comprehend our own activity as an indispensable ingredient of truth that cannot be pigeonholed as merely subjective. We break free of the impasse by recognizing that there is no sorting the objective out from the subjective—when we free ourselves from what Donald Davidson calls “the myth of the subjective.”11 The very idea of the purely subjective proves false. Human existence is a condition of knowledge, but, as Heidegger observed in Being and Time, humans exist in the world. Knowing doesn’t fall on either side of the line, because the line—in its purist formulation—is our imposition. Donald Davidson captures the dilemma well. There is the idea that any language distorts reality, which implies that it is only wordlessly if at all that the mind comes to grips with things as

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they really are. This is to conceive language as an inert (though necessarily distorting) medium independent of the human agencies that employ it, a view of language that surely cannot be maintained. Yet if the mind can grapple without distortion with the real, the mind itself must be without categories and concepts. This featureless self is familiar from theories in quite different parts of the philosophical landscape. There are, for example, theories that make freedom consist in decisions taken apart from all desires, habits, and dispositions of the agent; and theories of knowledge that suggest that the mind can observe the totality of its own perceptions and ideas. In each case, the mind is divorced from the traits that constitute it; an inescapable conclusion from certain lines of reasoning, as I said, but one that should always persuade us to reject the premises.12

Bourgeois thought takes stock of a remarkable range of human activities from sensing, doubting, desiring, and conceiving to voting and laboring, but always against the backdrop of the subjective/objective divide. Economics, like epistemology, speaks of the active subject who constitutes value through labor or preferences. For the most part, the passive dimension belongs to sensing or to “untouched nature,” before the workmanship of the mind gets involved. What is valuable about knowledge or property comes from the activity that confers form on what is formless. Value must come from us, since the result of labor—scientific knowledge or the commodity—acquires worth that doesn’t exist at the onset of the process. Activity is no neutral conduit that exposes value to public view. It constitutes or adds value with each move. This bourgeois, value-added model of knowledge becomes self-evident when the only seeming alternative requires knowledge to be available like ripe fruit ready to drop. Hume demanded that necessary connections appear immediately in the collision of his billiard balls. Since this doesn’t occur, Hume concludes that custom is responsible for the value or knowledge. What we purport to find, we actually have deposited.

The Social Basis of Bourgeois Thought The abstract social forms characteristic of modern capitalism powerfully encourage the purist and bifurcated thinking not only of philosophy but also of the social science called economics. What Marx conceives of as the bourgeois mindset, then, encompasses philosophy and economics.13 Marx wrote repeatedly of the “bourgeois horizon” of classical political economy, and he did not hesitate to apply that phrase to Left-Ricardian

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socialists or Marxists. He referred not to the fact that classical political economists were apologists for the rising capitalist order; rather, he was criticizing philosophical features of their thinking such as their inattention to form14 generally and historically specific social form in particular. It is not surprising that Marx identifies John Locke, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding he once described as demonstrating “that the bourgeois way of thinking is the normal human way of thinking,” as the philosopher par excellence for classical political economy.15 Why are purism and purist splits congenial to bourgeois thinkers and what could Marxian value theory have to say about the question? The intricacies of capitalism unfold by examining the commodity, the most immediate and everyday form that capitalism takes. The subject-object divide and the asocial conception of the person familiar from bourgeois thinking capture aspects of the situation of individuals who must sell their labor in order to purchase commodities. Persons in capitalist social relations appear stranded and cut off, lending credence to the notion of a subject/object dichotomy.16 In the marketplace we alternate between the roles of buyer and seller. Here the buyer is judged sovereign, searching out the maximum satisfaction of privately determined desires. Consequently, a market society appears free of social constraints and collective purposes; “it’s up to me” to settle on choices and initiate exchanges that shape my life.17 The ways in which choices, labor, consumption, education, leisure, relationships, etc. are actually constrained by the collective purpose of expanding capital are less obvious. Domination and exploitation are hidden behind the real though limited freedom of the market. Here the appearance of bare individuals over against objects holds sway. A freewheeling subject set directly against commodities is captured in an abstract way by bourgeois philosophy. The bifurcation between subject and object is fostered by market activities. A trademark of the bourgeois horizon is its obliviousness to historically specific social forms. This ahistorical outlook is germane to capitalism. The peculiar abstractness of the purpose of production under capitalism, namely, endless profit making, encourages a conception of the production process as simply the creation of wealth to serve human needs (through the mediation of the exchanges that take place in the market, of course). This promotes a picture of the capitalist production process as a generic activity, thereby deflecting attention away from any examination of it as a particular mode of production with specific purposes and consequences.18 Needs, labor, and the production process as a whole appear

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to be without definite social form and purpose, creating “the illusion of the economic.”19 Here we see the match between the standpoint of “economics” and the enthusiasm within bourgeois social and political theory for state of nature and social contract theories, right down to the present affinity for rational choice theory.20 To see what light Marxian value theory can shed on the bourgeois mindset, we do well to begin where Marx begins, with the commodity.21 The generalization of the commodity form involved in the spread of the market promotes a purist and bifurcating mentality. How? Marx pointedly begins his treatment of the commodity form by calling attention to the double character of the commodity: it is a use-value, and it has an exchange-value. He goes on to argue that exchange-value is the necessary form of appearance of value. Regarding use-value Marx observes, “It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.”22 That seems plain enough. Nonetheless, Marx insists that the commodity “is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”23 What is so strange about the commodity—and by implication about the labor that produces commodities—is that “the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.”24 In other words, use-values in the commodity form appear not to have any social character; instead they are endowed with value, a strange, “suprasensible” property that appears to be a natural feature of the commodity. Marx is quick to observe that this oddness of the commodity is a consequence neither of its use-value character nor of the bare fact that labor is involved in the production of use-values. “So far as it is a use value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labor.”25 The fetishism of the commodity has nothing to do with the mere fact that labor is involved in the production of use-values. Yet the commodity abounds in “metaphysical subtleties”; it is a “thing which transcends sensuousness.”26 If the “mystical character of the commodity” has nothing to do with its usevalue or the simple fact that labor was involved in its production, what is its source? Marx answers that the source is the commodity form itself, and he goes onto say that use-values take the commodity form because of “the peculiar social form of the labor which produces them.”27

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It is important to see that one consequence of this oddly asocial social form of labor is that its products are socially validated only through market exchanges. For “it is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of use value.”28 The practice of commodity exchange, then, is an essential moment in the movements of a capitalist society that result in the purism and bifurcation involved in the double character of commodities.29 Exchanges of commodities and money force the problematic of value and disclose the basis for purism and bifurcation in capitalist social practices. They suggest an equation, but what is it that is being equated? The difficulty of this question is compounded by the recognition that, on the assumption of generalized commodity circulation, any amount of each commodity can be equated with some amount of every other commodity. Each commodity has multiple exchange-values, but each of those expresses some identical magnitude. What on earth could they all have in common?30 Value is the usual answer, but what is value? When the problem is not dodged by identifying value with exchange-value,31 the two chief answers that have been given to this question are labor (by classical economics and Left Ricardianism) and utility (whether absolute or marginal, whether construed hedonistically or in terms of personal preferences). Each answer involves us in purism—whether pure labor or pure preference, each expresses the idea that value comes purely from the subject—and bifurcation: labor and preference are separated out from the means and materials of labor and the objects of preference, respectively.32 Marx’s analysis of simple commodity exchange exposes the purism involved in this social practice. Marx considers what sort of thing could be the common element among commodities. This common element cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical, or other natural property of commodities. Such properties come into consideration only to the extent that they make the commodities useful, i.e., turn them into use-values. But clearly, the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values. Within the exchange relation, one use-value is worth just as much as another…33

What remains once we have abstracted from all the useful properties?

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If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labor. But even the product of labor has already been transformed in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms that make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn, or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished…Let us now look at the residue of the products of labor. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labor, i.e. of human labor power expended without regard to its form of its expenditure…As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values.34

Value is like Descartes’ material substance—supersensible, phantomlike.35

Beyond the Bourgeois Horizon Phenomenology describes the kind of thinking that leaves behind the bourgeois horizon and makes a critique of capitalism possible. Phenomenology develops the basic distinctions that analyze the world without engendering stupefying polarities. This sense of phenomenology is close to that of the young Heidegger. Each structure of human existence in Being and Time unknots a familiar opposition from bourgeois philosophy, such as the opposition of theoretical vs. practical, feeling vs. reason, language vs. object, or individual vs. group. If humans exist as being-in-the-world and being-with, then all knowledge presupposes these conditions. We can’t raise any question, except as a being-in-theworld. Thinking thus situated doesn’t lead to skeptical standoffs, such as the Cartesian dualism of mind and world. We can question whether our understanding is correct, but we can’t question whether our faulty understanding exists in the world. There is no other setting for it. To situate ideas inside a mind is misleading. Humans never exist as mind separated from body and world. Such knowing is not an option for our species. What must be presupposed can’t be doubted. We can’t rid ourselves of the world even if we try. In short, “mind” constitutes a distinction of reason, an aspect of human existence that is not a separable element. For an adequate phenomenology, Marx draws from Aristotle and Hegel. For these thinkers, action signifies the fundamental mode of human existence, and it won’t neatly factor out into subjective and objective components the way that Hume and Kant purport to factor

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experience.36 Endeavoring to sort out the objective from the subjective is philosophy’s boondoggle, in Hegel’s view. He gets at this in a startling passage from the Encyclopedia, “Laying aside therefore as unimportant this distinction between subjective and objective, we are chiefly interested in knowing what a thing is: i.e. its content, which is no more objective than it is subjective.”37 An adequate phenomenology no longer asks what is objective or subjective; it asks what is true or false. This is the Hegelian lesson rediscovered by Donald Davidson. Activity is not a bridge linking subjects and objects; it is not transparent, neutral, or immediate. Activity brings about change or mediation in the world. Marx contrasts the objective conditions of production— raw materials and means of production—with the subjective or personal conditions of production—living labor. The same elements of capital which, from the point of view of the labor process, can be distinguished respectively as the objective and subjective factors, as means of production and labor power, can be distinguished, from the point of view of the valorization process, as constant and variable capital.38

But Marx intends not an exclusive opposition but rather a distinction of reason, since human labor, tools, and raw materials do not function independently within the production process; they are inseparable. Thinking and working are undertaken by humans in society and in the world; knowledge and wealth result from these activities, but this does not make either one purely subjective; it does not leave humans entirely responsible for their products. It does not even enable us to sort out and quantify the “value-added” by our activity, as John Locke was fond of doing and neoclassical economists revived with their theories of marginal productivity.39 While knowing depends upon human activity, it doesn’t follow that knowledge represents what is “true for us” as opposed to “what is true.” Human activity is a necessary condition for knowledge, but to say that human nature determines what is known—along the lines of Feuerbach’s supposition that “theology is anthropology”— reenacts the conceptual split between “active” and “passive” or the “given” and the “constructed” with their predictable skeptical outcome. An adequate phenomenology directs philosophy toward good concepts, not skeptical dilemmas. Breaking the hold of bourgeois philosophy and appreciating the role of phenomenology is difficult, since purist splits

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exert an often-unacknowledged pull on our thinking. But to conclude that anthropomorphism taints every cognitive effort begs the question and makes a dogma of skepticism. In light of these considerations, the list of philosophical false moves that Quine and Davidson named the “dogmas of empiricism” may be reconceived as the “dogmas of bourgeois philosophy,” for each of the three dogmas relies on the purist splits that characterize bourgeois philosophy.40 The list may be expanded to include nominalism or wholesale anti-essentialism, which agrees with bourgeois philosophers like Francis Bacon that “forms are figments of the mind” and John Locke that “nominal” essences are nothing but the “workmanship of the understanding.” Like the other three dogmas, anti-essentialism presupposes a purist split between subjective and objective: forms are purely subjective—sheer value added by the mind. Conceiving of activity as human, though not purely subjective, opens up new possibilities. Instead of snipe hunting for the purely given, we come, with Hegel, to appreciate how the “more subjective” can coincide with the “more objective.” Good thinking doesn’t diminish human engagement; active cognition opens up the actual world. Nor do skepticism’s worries vanish without a trace from this way of thinking. Fallible beings who set out to understand the world will be proven wrong. But cosmic doubts should be dropped for specific doubts that begin and end. The insistence that a knowledge claim is “constructed” is either idle—what knowledge claim is not?—or it is a skeptical jeer that truth lies hopelessly beyond reach. Good judgments must contend with multiplicity, vagueness, uncertainty, stress, and the absence of most human voices from places of power and decision. Must they labor under skepticism as well? Real doubts abound in an era of capitalism’s global reach. Philosophy’s energies could serve more fruitful ends than cycling through the worn paths of dogmatism and skepticism. What are needed are good concepts that take us back into the world to recognize the real possibilities that are present. While phenomenology calls into question the familiar dualisms of philosophy, Marx’s critique of capitalist society reveals a double-sidedness that characterizes production, circulation, and social life generally.41 The opening chapter of Capital identifies this double-sidedness as the commodity’s use-value and exchange-value. The analysis of exchangevalue leads to the more abstract concept of value or congealed socially necessary abstract labor. But the duality between the material process and

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social abstractions persists, as abstractions become more determinate and complex. This duality between the material and the abstract is pervasive and the source of instability in capitalist society—witness the tremendous loss of value that occurs with the bursting of a stock or real estate bubble. But the double-sidedness at the core of Marx’s critique differs from the familiar dualisms of bourgeois philosophy. This is not a dualism founded on a purist opposition, where one entity excludes the other. The duality of use-value and exchange-value is unstable because the elements cannot be separated. We cannot determine human needs without considering what makes money. Capital signifies a purely social and abstract relationship— socially necessary abstract labor time—that responds to numerous factors and depends upon the material conditions of human needs, usefulness, and the physical conditions of labor. The duality between use-value and exchange-value is not a general feature of human existence but a specific feature of being in the capitalist world. Phenomenology does not split apart what exists together. The duality of the material and the abstract in capitalist society exists as a real and determining opposition.42

Conclusion: Toward Better Concepts What are some marks of good concepts? Criticism starts from the negativity of the victim, says Enrique Dussel. Good concepts get at the specific forms of suffering that characterize the existing world and its possible transformation. Analysis begins with accessible features of the world, such as the commodity, and works through its determinations to arrive at abstract underlying processes, such as capital. As concepts develop, they become more determinate and draw us closer to the actual world. Thinking advances to the concrete, hence we claim that the more subjective (the more determinate), the more objective. It is not good enough to claim that phenomenology begins with experience and returns to experience. All sorts of dualistic doctrines make that claim. Just what counts as experience is decisive. Marx doesn’t focus on “getting back” to experience, as if the truth lay somewhere behind us, waiting to be snapped up. Instead, he looks ahead to the concrete understanding that arises as we advance to more encompassing knowledge. Good concepts sound out experience in ways that are never apparent at the start. Donald Davidson was wrong to identify empiricism so completely with dogmatism that the history of empiricism ends when the last dogma is unveiled. The thinking that moves beyond the bourgeois horizon can be called empiricist; it

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endeavors to understand the world as revealed through human experience. Efforts to get at experience have been riddled with bifurcations, but a dogmatic or skeptical mindset is not inevitable. Why sacrifice the noble cause of empiricism to bad ideas? Freeing our concepts from the dogmas of bourgeois philosophy and undertaking a critique of capitalism are inseparable tasks.

Notes 1. Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982), 240. Clarke argues that, regrettably, neoclassical economics, not Marx’s innovations, set the horizon of sociology. In this article, we extend Clarke’s claim to philosophy. 2. A good example is the charge made by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib that Hegel and Marx hold an asocial, “monological” conception of labor, when in reality they were profound critics of the bourgeois standpoint of classical political economy on precisely that point. See Jeanne Schuler’s “The Legend of Hegel’s Labor Theory of Reason,” Social Philosophy Today, 14 (1998): 301–316. 3. Karl Marx, “Letter to his Father: On a Turning-Point in Life” (1837), in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, edited by Easton and Guddat (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 43. 4. Hume explains “distinction of reason” in relation to color and form, which are inseparable in terms of existence. “After a little more practice of this kind, we begin to distinguish the figure from the color by a distinction of reason; that is, we consider the figure and color together, since they are in effect the same and indistinguishable; but still view them in different aspects, according to the resemblances, of which they are susceptible.” Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 25. 5. We adopt this notion of purist concepts from James Collins, who introduces the term “purist split” in his Interpreting Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 14. 6. C. I. Lewis developed the notion of the a priori as changing in opposition to Kant’s understanding of the unchanging a priori. Lewis seeks to maintain the meaning of the a priori as independent of experience by claiming that the a priori changes in the presence of new experience but not in response to it. 7. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 3. 8. Ibid. The third thesis on Feuerbach.

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9. G. W. F. Hegel, Logic, Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, translated by William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 36. 10. See Patrick Murray, Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988) and Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and ‘Capital’ (Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 2002). 11. Donald Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective,” in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 12. Donald Davidson, “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 185–186. 13. There is a great deal of evidence to support this contention that Marx was involved in a lifelong investigation of the bourgeois mindset shared by philosophy and economics. Here is a brief look at some of that evidence. Marx’s editors were on the right track in classing Marx’s Paris manuscripts of 1844, “economic and philosophic,” though it may be even more illuminating to think of them as joint critiques of (bourgeois) philosophy and economics. Particularly telling is Marx’s critical observation in the final Paris manuscript that “Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy” [Collected Works, Vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 333]. Marx regarded Hegel as the consummate bourgeois philosopher, a judgment we do not share. In the tenth thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote, “the standpoint of the old materialism is bourgeois society,” a judgment that, in his mind, surely could be extended to idealism. The thrust of the Theses, stated in the first thesis, is that both mechanistic materialism and idealism are caught in the purism and bifurcation that stamp them as bourgeois. The point of the Poverty of Philosophy is that Proudhon represents the complete expression of the bourgeois mindset, as a philosopher and as an economist (a Left-Ricardian one). Thus, writing in a letter to Annenkov, Marx says of Proudhon that he “does not rise above the bourgeois horizon” (“ne s’eleve pas au-dessus de l’horizon bourgeois ”) [Karl Marx, “Letter to P. V. Annenkov,” in Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1936), 190]. In that same letter he writes, “Really he [Proudhon] does nothing other than what all good bourgeois ‘people’ do…They all want the impossible, that is, the conditions of bourgeois life without the necessary consequences of these conditions” (Poverty, 190). In Capital I Marx speaks of the “bourgeois skin” of classical political economy (682), of the “limited (beschränktes ) brain” of the bourgeois economist (714), and of the “bourgeois field of vision” (bürgerlichen Horizonts ) [Karl Marx, Capital I, translated by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 737]. 14. The inattention to (social) form on the part of the economists reveals their attachment to the bourgeois mindset both in their nominalist empiricism

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(which bifurcates form and content) and in their failure to see how the social and social form go all the way down in human life. In pointing up the failure of the classical political economists on this score, Marx calls special attention to how the bourgeois mindset provides ideological cover to bourgeois society: “It is one of the chief failings of classical political economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and in particular of their value, in discovering the form of value which in fact turns value into exchange-value. Even its best representatives, Adam Smith and Ricardo, treat the form of value as something of indifference, something external to the nature of the commodity itself. The explanation for this is not simply that their attention is entirely absorbed by the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value-form of the product of labor is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money-form, the capital-form, etc.” (Capital I, note 34, 174). In this regard, it is very telling that Adam Smith identifies the subject of his masterwork as the “wealth” of nations whereas Marx calls his book Capital and insists from the opening sentence of the book that his subject matter concerns wealth having a specific social form. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya and edited by Maurice Dobb (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 77. “On the whole, however, the early English economists sided with Bacon and Hobbes as their philosophers, while, at a later period, Locke became ‘the philosopher’ par excellence of political economy in England, France and Italy” (Capital I, note 27, 513). “Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way” (Capital I, 187). F. A. Hayek contended that a market society was the only free society precisely because it imposed no compulsory collective goals on its members. Hayek was mistaken in this belief because the endless accumulation of capital is a compulsory collective goal imposed upon the participants in a market society. In Capital, Volume II , Marx points out how a one-sided attention to the circuit of productive capital (as opposed to the circuits of money capital and commodity capital), which begins and ends with the use-values requisite for the production process, misled the classical political economists into thinking that the capitalist production process was production-ingeneral: “The general form of the movement P…P’ is the form of

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reproduction, and does not indicate, as does M…M’, that valorization is the purpose of the process. For this reason, classical economics found it all the more easy to ignore the specifically capitalist form of the production process, and to present production as such as the purpose of the process” [Karl Marx, Capital II, translated by David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 172]. See also Patrick Murray, “Beyond the ‘Commerce and Industry’ Picture of Capital,” in The Circulation of Capital, edited by Chris Arthur and Geert Reuten (London: Macmillan, 1998), 33–66. See Patrick Murray, “The Illusion of the Economic: The Trinity Formula and the ‘Religion of Everyday Life’,” in The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume III of Marx’s “Capital”, edited by Martha Campbell and Geert Reuten (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), 246–272. This linking of state of nature/social contract theories with capitalism goes back to “On the Jewish Question,” and it was with the critique of this bourgeois thinking that Marx began the Grundrisse. There he writes, “Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social…relations” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with the New Left Review, 1973), 84. “The problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects” [Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83]. This enthusiasm for the explanatory power of the commodity, which Lukács may have inherited from his teacher Georg Simmel, should be moderated by the recognition that, in Marxian value theory, the generalization of the commodity form is a consequence of the spread of the capitalist mode of production. For a critique of Lukács’ understanding of Marxian value theory, see Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 72–75. Capital I, 126. Capital I, 163. Capital I, 164–165. Capital I, 163. Capital I, 163. Capital I, 165. Here lies the gulf separating Marxian value theory from Ricardian (including Left Ricardian) value theory: Marx’s theory of value is a theory of the peculiar social form of labor in capitalist society. Capital I, 166, translated slightly amended.

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29. In his book Intellectual and Manual Labor, translated by Martin SohnRethel, Alfred Sohn-Rethel emphasizes, somewhat one-sidedly, the role the abstraction involved in a system of commodity exchange plays in establishing the bourgeois mindset (London: Macmillan, 1978). 30. Compare this to the situation of the bit and the blob of wax in Descartes’ second meditation. That episode involves the bifurcation not only of primary and secondary qualities but also of our powers of imagination and understanding—Descartes insists that we know the wax through the understanding alone. 31. On this, see Marx’s protracted refutation of Samuel Bailey, who criticized Ricardian theory of conceiving of value as something “absolute,” different from and more fundamental than exchange-value. See Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 3, translated by Jack Cohen, edited by R. Ryazanskaya and Richard Dixon (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), 124–168. 32. Marx contradicts the Gotha Programme’s claim that labor is the source of all wealth, writing: “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as is labor.” He identifies this plank of the nominally socialist programme with “bourgeois phrases,” and he goes on to say that the bourgeois attribute “supernatural creative power to labour” [Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, edited by C. P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1938, 1966), 3]. In an overlooked passage from the beginning of Capital, Marx rules out the very idea of utility or pure preference, “the usefulness of a thing makes it a use value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter” (Capital I, 126). See also Patrick Murray, “Redoubled Empiricism: The Place of Social Form and Formal Causality in Marxian Theory,” in New Investigations of Marx’s Method, edited by Fred Moseley and Martha Campbell (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 38–65. 33. Capital I, 127. 34. Capital I, 128. 35. See Murray, Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge, 149, and Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 142. 36. Hegel’s emphasis on action comes through powerfully in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter Five, Section C, on the spiritual animal kingdom. 37. Hegel, Logic, Part 1 of the Encyclopedia, translated by William Wallace (Oxford: University Press, 1975), 71. 38. Capital I, 317. 39. Thus, Locke writes, “it is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing…the improvement of labour makes the far greater part of the value…if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and

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cast up the several expences about them, what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour, we shall find, that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labour” [John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, edited by C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980; originally published in 1690), 25]. The American neoclassical economist John Bates Clark wrote in Essentials of Economic Theory, “Each man accordingly is paid an amount that equals the total product that he personally creates” (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), 92. 40. The “dogmas of empiricism” are, briefly, the myth of the given, the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the conceptual scheme/world distinction. Since the dogmas noted by Quine and Davidson obviously encompassed doctrines held by rationalists and by Kant, the term “empiricism” was misleadingly narrow from the start. 41. Heidegger’s account of being-in-the-world and being-with falls short by not indicating how “the with-world” always takes a particular form. Human existence is thoroughly social, but the kind of society always matters. In short, Heidegger offers a dehistoricized account of historicity. Marx’s historical materialism is a needed complement to Being and Time. 42. Moishe Postone describes this inherent tension in capitalist society as “shearing pressure,” Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 348.

Bibliography Arthur, Chris. The New Dialectic and ‘Capital’. Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 2002. Clark, John Bates. Essentials of Economic Theory. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1907. Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982. Collins, James. Interpreting Modern Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. Davidson, Donald. “The Myth of the Subjective.” In Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hegel, G. W. F. Logic, Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by William Wallace. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975. Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1967. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980 [1690]. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.

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Marx, Karl. “Letter to P. V. Annenkov.” In The Poverty of Philosophy. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1936. ———. Critique of the Gotha Programme. Edited by C. P. Dutt. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1938, 1966. ———. “Letter to his Father: On a Turning-Point in Life” [1837]. In Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. Edited by Lloyd Easton and Kurt Guddat. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1967. ———. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. Edited by Maurice Dobb. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1970. ———. Theories of Surplus Value, Part 3. Translated by Jack Cohen. Edited by R. Ryazanskaya and Richard Dixon. London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972. ———. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books in association with the New Left Review, 1973. ———. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 3. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1975. ———. Capital I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London, UK: Penguin, 1976. ———. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 5. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1976. ———. Capital II. Translated by David Fernbach. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1978. Murray, Patrick. Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988. ———. “Redoubled Empiricism: The Place of Social Form and Formal Causality in Marxian Theory.” In New Investigations of Marx’s Method. Edited by Fred Moseley and Martha Campbell. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997. ———. “Beyond the ‘Commerce and Industry’ Picture of Capital.” In The Circulation of Capital. Edited by Chris Arthur and Geert Reuten. London, UK: Macmillan, 1998. ———. “The Illusion of the Economic: The Trinity Formula and the ‘Religion of Everyday Life’.” In The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume III of Marx’s “Capital.” Edited by Martha Campbell and Geert Reuten. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Schuler, Jeanne. “The Legend of Hegel’s Labor Theory of Reason.” Social Philosophy Today, Vol. 14 (1998): 301–316. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labor. Translated by Martin SohnRethel. London: Macmillan, 1978.

CHAPTER 6

Reclaiming the Concepts of Value and Capital

It is naturally still more convenient to understand by value nothing at all. Then one can without difficulty subsume everything under this category.1

Introduction The situation faced by radical philosophy today is the mismatch of trying to base radical critique and action on bourgeois concepts.2 For the most part, we are stuck trying to contest the practices of advanced capitalist societies, where wealth, income, and opportunity are increasingly unequal and stratified, with concepts unfit for the task. Among the pseudo-concepts that clog understanding are “the economic,” utility, instrumental reason, and other imposters that claim to explain the world of value and capital. Pseudo-concepts sound good on the surface but lack traction with the world. It is not paranoid to note that the predominant mindset fostered by capitalism, what Marx calls “the bourgeois horizon,” makes it hard to think about capitalism. Possibilities for overcoming capitalism begin with the conceptual possibility of identifying it. Good concepts are phenomenologically adequate: they get to the matter at hand and open up the world.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_6

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The two central concepts of Marx’s critique of political economy are value and capital. Since capital is value that increases its value, to understand capital we must begin by understanding value. Loose talk about “adding value” and misidentifying every imaginable sort of capital: human capital, social capital, natural capital, intellectual capital, etc., abounds today. Such expressions reduce social forms that are specific to capitalism to pseudo-concepts like utility or to generally applicable notions: capital is whittled down to resources, and value shrinks to use-value.

Fundamental Concepts and Horizons of Discourse Fundamental concepts disclose—or fail to disclose—the world; they establish horizons of discourse.3 Poor fundamental concepts keep important features of the world out of sight and out of our talk about the world. Thomas Pynchon writes, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”4 The right questions may never be asked because they lie outside the bounds of discourse set by poor concepts. The basic question that Marx answers in Capital , namely, what is the specific social form and purpose of wealth and labor in capitalist societies, is such a question. Questions like these go unasked. They lie outside the horizons of the dominant public and scientific discourse, which allows for questions about how much wealth there is, perhaps even how wealth is distributed. The questions of what is being distributed, what is the specific social form and purpose of this wealth, and what consequences do they have do not come up. Simon Clarke contrasts Marx’s scientific revolution with the regressive “neoclassical revolution” in economics, which, Clarke argues, established the discursive horizons of modern sociology as well as economics. He writes: There was a scientific revolution in nineteenth-century social thought … It was inaugurated by Marx’s critique of the ideological foundations of classical political economy, which he located in the political economists’ neglect of the social form of capitalist production … Capitalist society is a society based on a particular social form of production, within which the production and reproduction of material things is subordinated to the production and accumulation of surplus value.5

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Marx’s revolutionary new fundamental concepts are designed to overcome discursive horizons that put social and historical specificity in the shadows. Capitalism exudes “the illusion of the economic,” that is, the capitalist economy appears to be devoid of any specific social form or purpose; it appears to be the economy-in-general.6 Marx describes this common way of thinking about capitalist production as “the obsession that bourgeois production is production as such.”7 Thus, neoclassical economics presents itself as a generally applicable science. But there is no economyin-general; there is no “production as such.” All epochs of production may have certain common traits, so that we can pick out general features of any specific social way of organizing production, but that does not amount to a science. Use-value and the labor process are among the generally applicable categories in Capital, whereas all the “value categories,” commodity, exchange-value, value, surplus value, capital, wages, and more, are explicitly social and historical. Failure to see through the “illusion of the economic,” failure to develop concepts of the social forms and purposes specific to capitalism, such as the commodity, money, surplus value, capital, and wage labor, closes off the world.

Five Misconceptions of Value and Capital We believe that value and capital, properly conceived, remain fundamental critical concepts for grasping and changing the world today. We accept Marx’s conception that value is intrinsic to products produced on a capitalist basis, not for the false, naturalizing reason that Ricardo gave, namely, that labor is embodied in them. To say that value is intrinsic to the commodity is to say that the commodity is a fetish possessed of a peculiar purely social and supersensible objectivity and power. Value is intrinsic because it belongs to the peculiar social form of products of commodityproducing labor. Misconceptions of value and capital in public discourse, as well as in social science, repeat errors that Marx exposed a hundred and fifty years ago. Thoughtless talk about value and capital crowds out the discursive space for critical concepts of value and capital. Value is the core concept of Marx’s account of capitalist society; capital is value that is valorized, that is, increased in value. Value is a phenomenological concept; it describes a determinate way of being in the capitalist world: commodities exist as values. Unlike use-value, wealth, needs, and labor, value is not a general category that is found in every kind of

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society. It is historically specific and grasps what is peculiar to capitalism. The concept of value is complex; it takes time to develop, and it is confounding in its implications. Value is the ghostly presence that has taken real possession of our world. It is unfortunate that the most powerful reality on the planet, value, shares the name with what is considered purely subjective. Concerning value, skepticism rules; we commonly refer to value as personal, a matter of opinion, pleasure, or cultural outlook. Values are added to events like a coat of paint; they exist only relative to a subject, like perspective.8 In the bourgeois horizon, facts stand their ground and objects are already there, but values drift in the supposed space within us. Displacing values from this precarious state is the first task in thinking about capitalism. As Marx argued in his polemic with Samuel Bailey, a sharp critic of David Ricardo and a forerunner of neoclassical economics, this is a twofold task. The task is to defend the objectivity of usefulness against subjectivism and to defend the objectivity of value, the kind of value that money represents and measures, as intrinsic to wealth that takes the commodity form. In a world where profit is the purpose of production, we should tell our students that the primary way in which the book in their hands exists is as value; the book is value, value is not given to the object by how we feel about it.9 If the book were not a value, if it did not have exchangevalue, it would not be printed. Value is not in our heads. The skeptical project of driving values out of the world is an obstacle to thinking and, in particular, to thinking about capitalism. We identify and criticize five misconceptions of value and capital that circulate widely and obstruct the progress of radical philosophy. These misconceptions divert thinking from the concepts of value and capital worked out by Marx in his mature critique of political economy. (1) Value is utility. We follow Marx in identifying utility as bogus, a pseudoconcept. (2) Value is use-value. (3) Value is exchange-value. There is nothing wrong with either the concept of use-value or that of exchangevalue per se. But one of the first lessons of Capital is that understanding capitalist society requires a third category, value, which is what Marx calls the “third thing” that commodities have in common and makes them quantitatively comparable. (4) Capital is any sort of resource. Like use-value, resource is an unobjectionable concept, but to equate capital with resources is to eliminate everything proper to the capitalist mode of production. (5) Capitalist society is governed by instrumental reason, which we identify as another pseudo-concept. Neither concept, utility nor

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instrumental reason, plays a role in Marx’s Capital. We reject George Ritzer’s Weberian conception of “McDonaldization” as governing the world by instrumental action. Value Is Not Utility; Utility Is a Bogus Concept To grasp value, Marx asks the question for which value is the answer: how can a certain amount of one commodity, such as corn, be equated with a certain amount of another commodity, such as silk? What is equal about the two commodities? For one amount to be equal to the other, corn and silk must share some property that can be compared. But corn and silk do not share any physical traits. Since fair exchange occurs with no harm to commutative justice, there must be a “third thing” that both commodities possess which can be measured. This third thing Marx calls value. If value cannot be a physical trait, then what is it? Answering this question leads straight to the pseudo-concepts that pretend to explain the value of commodities. The most common response is to say what corn and silk share is utility. Utility is the accepted answer to the question: what is value? Utility can be defined in various ways, but it always signifies a common element that can be compared and quantified. The utility found in corn exchanges for the equal amount of utility in the silk. Theories of utility abound. For some, utility signifies what is purely subjective: the pleasure produced or the preference satisfied by the corn or silk. For others, utility signifies what is purely objective: the usefulness of the corn or silk: its capacity to improve a situation. Whether utility signifies what is in me or out in the world, it can be quantified. Utility is a fixture of economic and ethical theories, and acceptance of the notion is widespread. The term invites confidence for several reasons. First, we know that prices exist and prices can be fair. Prices are quantities, so what prices measure must be quantities too. Utility is the name given to the quantifiable element of commodities that prices measure.10 Another reason to trust utility is how practical it sounds. The subjectivity of values is exhausting. We want to hit the ground with something that is calculable and real. Utility is not about the best possible world. It is what makes a discernible difference here and now. The pragmatic sound of utility is reassuring in a world of hype. For those who teach ethics, utility is the theory that contrasts with Kant’s deontological ethics. Utility measures consequences of actions or rules; Kant’s moral imperative

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demands the universalizing of the maxim that underlies action. Weighing consequences appears more relevant to daily life than Kant’s categorical imperative. Writers like Peter Singer show the radical potential of utility in making the case for animal rights and justice toward the poor of the world. Why not accept utility as the answer to Marx’s question: what is value? Utility provides no answer to the question. We cannot make sense out of capitalism (or anything else) with this thoroughly defective concept. The arguments against utility are conceptual and phenomenological. The conceptual argument observes that the value of commodities could not possibly consist of utility. Utility is the wrong kind of category. Value is a historically specific feature of capitalist societies, while utility presents itself as a general category of human existence. The common criticism that Marx (inexplicably) overlooked the option that utility might be the substance of value rests on the failure to recognize that value is socially and historically specific. One of the most distinctive features of Marx’s theory of value is that value must be expressed as price: value and money are inseparable. Nothing of the sort holds for the notion of utility. Products made by slaves in ancient Egypt had utility, according to utility theory, but they were not commodities sold for a profit; they had no value measured by price. The concept of value is historically specific; utility theory has no place for that kind of category. The phenomenological argument shows that utility disregards the features of objects that actually make them useful. For corn or silk to be useful means that the physical properties of the object must meet the person’s needs. Usefulness is neither in the object nor in the subject exclusively but resides in the fit between them. In Heidegger’s terms, the useful resides in how objects are circumspectly handled by humans. Utility theory brackets the distinct features of corn and silk, but without the food value of corn or the strength of silk, they have no usefulness. The word “utility” sounds as if it honors the usefulness of things, but it actually erases their usefulness. There is no phenomenon that utility describes—no generic pleasure that all objects produce and no generic consequences that all objects produce that can be compared. Pleasures are specific to kinds of things; there is no dimension within which the pleasure of food can be weighed against the pleasure of music or conversation. Pleasure is always pleasure of. Utility disregards the phenomenological features that make things useful or pleasant; utility should have no more place in intelligent discourse or critical theory than phlogiston has in explaining combustion.

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It is not a mistaken concept; it is a mystifying one. It should be a primary task of radical philosophy to contest utility theory and refuse to equate use-value with utility, since utility is precisely that bogus concept which liquidates use-value and blocks access to the value that money measures. Value Is Not Use-Value Some of the loose talk about “adding value” identifies value with usevalue. If I carve a block of wood into a flute, I have added use-value, but have I thereby added value? If value is what money measures, then value is not use-value. To be measured by money, value must be a quantifiable dimension common to all commodities. Value, this common element, cannot be any sensible property, since commodities have none in common. But the usefulness of any useful thing “is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.”11 The supersensible objectivity of value contradicts the qualitative objectivity of use-value. Value cannot be use-value because useful things are found whenever and wherever we encounter human beings; use-value is a generally applicable category. But value is a socially and historically determinate category. Value, in Marx’s account, is something “purely social”; it belongs to capitalist sociality.12 If value were use-value, then value would exist wherever and whenever use-value does. Purchasing power is a popular way of conceiving of value. But it either reduces value to use-value or gets us nowhere. Either (a) purchasing power is defined in use-value terms—how much food I get for my money—which wrongly assumes that the value of food does not change or (b) purchasing power is defined in terms of the value of the goods one receives in exchange. In that case, purchasing power does not explain value; it presupposes that the value of things has been determined in some other way. If we take value to be purchasing power, understood in use-value terms, so that I have the same purchasing power from year to year if I can purchase the same basket of goods, then Marx’s theory of relative surplus value is rendered unintelligible. Relative surplus value is increased by increasing the productive power of labor that produces goods which enter into the value of labor power, that is, that affect the value of the goods that workers purchase. As the productive power of that labor increases, the value of those goods decreases, which means that the value

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of the wage can decrease even while workers continue to purchase the same basket of goods, and possibly even a larger one. Conceiving of value as use-value makes the purpose of production on a capitalist basis, namely, the accumulation of surplus value, unintelligible. Unlike use-value, surplus value has no natural limit: “Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist … His aim is rather the unceasing movement of profit-making.”13 Misconceiving value as use-value disguises the madness of capital’s motivation. Value Is Not Exchange-Value or Price Value is intrinsic to a commodity; exchange-value is what one gets in exchange for a commodity, namely money, a separate physical object, which is not intrinsic to the commodity. This is why Marx says that a commodity is a value but has an exchange-value. Exchange-value cannot be value because there is nothing for which a commodity can be exchanged that is not subject to a change in value. A fixed measure of value was the Holy Grail for many political economists, but Ricardo and others recognized that there could be no such thing. Something whose value is subject to change can hardly be value itself. If money simply were value, what sense would we make of inflation and deflation? In thinking through the concepts of value and exchange-value (money), Marx draws on Hegel’s logic of essence, according to which essence and appearance are not separable: essence must appear as something other than itself. Marx argues that this is how it is with value and money: money is not value, but it is the necessary form of appearance of value. Money and value are not independent variables; they are inseparable. But if value is inseparable from money, then talk about “adding value” in situations where money is not involved obscures a fundamental truth about value. Capital Is Not Just Any Resource Capital is value that is valorized, not a resource of whatever sort: human capital, social capital, natural capital, intellectual capital, political capital, the list is constantly expanding. In a report that aired on September 4, 2010, National Public Radio news cited a woman from a group in Washington, DC called Concept Capital. Another report from the same day featured a woman anxious to “bring value” to one thing or another.

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Capital has a specific social purpose, the production and accumulation of surplus value. Capital cannot be understood apart from value, which involves the features already mentioned, such as its inseparability from money. Since the source of surplus value is the surplus labor of the class of wage laborers, capital cannot be dissociated from wage labor any more than it can be dissociated from money and commodities. McDonaldization Represents Real Subsumption Under Capital Not the Spread of Instrumental Reason In The McDonaldization of Society, George Ritzer identifies the four “principles of McDonaldization” as “efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control [through nonhuman technology].”14 We take these four to be specifications of instrumental reason. Max Weber describes instrumental reason as the defining rationality of capitalist society. For the modern world, setting human goals is not the task of reason; our ends arise from our interests, feelings, or appetites. Goals are assigned by authority or embedded in institutions. Reason plays the subsidiary role of determining the best means to reach those ends. Reason is instrumental, not substantive or critical. It solves problems but cannot decide which problems are worth solving. Instrumental reason is a depleted caricature of reason. Like utility, instrumental reason is at odds with the basic features of human existence and becomes plausible under the peculiar conditions of capitalism. We argue that efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control are shadows of the value forms, which are the constitutive social forms of these societies undergoing McDonaldization. Shadow forms are derivative of constitutive forms and do not stand on their own: just try to organize society based on instrumental reason. To understand the phenomena that Ritzer calls “McDonaldization” and explains with instrumental reason calls for the concepts provided by Marxian theory. McDonaldization can then be identified with what Marx calls real subsumption under capital, that is, the material transformation of production for the express purpose of making it more profitable. The means of McDonaldization support the substantive goal of expansion of value. As we will see, Ritzer is forced to the same conclusion. Among the “principles of McDonaldization” is “an emphasis on the quantitative aspects of products sold (portion, size, and cost) and services offered (the time it takes to get the product). In McDonaldized systems,

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quantity has become equivalent to quality; a lot of something, or the quick delivery of it, means it must be good.”15 McDonaldization brings about “the assurance that products and services will be the same over time and in all locales … The workers in McDonaldized systems also behave in predictable ways.”16 “Homogeneous products dominate a McDonaldized world.”17 “Don’t dare ask for a rare burger,” Ritzer advises. “The work routines in the fast-food restaurant are highly standardized. Even what the workers say to customers is routinized.” What McDonaldized technologies produce are “flattened, featureless products,” food that, on its way to stretching the profit margin, has undergone real subsumption under capital.18 These principles of McDonaldization, efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, do not provide the conceptual power to explain a coherent, internally dynamic, and self-reproducing social order. They are shadow forms, not constitutive forms. These shadow forms have nothing to say about why the products of McDonaldization take the form of commodities, or why McDonaldized workers work for a wage, or why profits matter. Marx’s observation that “In capitalist production the tendency for all products to be commodities and all labor to be wage-labor, becomes absolute” has no traction.19 On the contrary, Ritzer’s Weberian conception of McDonaldization bypasses the basic questions concerning the social form and purpose of wealth and the production of wealth. There is no conceptual path from these “principles of McDonaldization” to any actual social forms and purposes characteristic of capitalist societies. The path goes in reverse. Without definite social forms and purposes, these shadow forms presuppose an illusory “economy-in-general” as the backdrop to McDonaldization. Marx argues that capital has the immanent drive to accumulate, but none of the four principles posit any coherent driving force. What guides and limits the pursuit of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control? Ritzer makes no bones about the Weberian inspiration for his theory of McDonaldization: Weber demonstrated in his research that the modern Western world had produced a distinctive kind of rationality … that Weber called formal rationality. This is the sort of rationality we refer to when we discuss McDonaldization or the rationalization process in general.20

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But Ritzer grants that Weber argued that “ultimately, material or, more specifically, economic interests drive rationalization in capitalist societies.” Likewise, Ritzer lists “material interests, especially economic goals and aspirations” among the “three other factors [that] are also important in understanding the drive toward increasing McDonaldization.” In the end, he concedes that “economic factors lie at the root of McDonaldization.”21 By invoking the term “economic” Ritzer veers from one pseudoconcept to another, one shadow form to another. For there is no “economy-in-general.” The adjective “economic” refers to aspects of the “economy-in-general,” but there is no such thing. Reality eventually gets the better of Ritzer; he drops the phony talk of the “economic” and invokes value forms, specifically, profit: Profit-making enterprises pursue McDonaldization because it leads to lower costs and higher profits. Clearly, greater efficiency and increased use of nonhuman technology are often implemented to increase profitability. Greater predictability provides, at the minimum, the climate needed for an organization to be profitable and for its profits to increase steadily from year to year. An emphasis on calculability, on things that can be quantified, helps lead to decisions that can produce and increase profits and makes possible measurements of profitability. In short, people and organizations profit greatly from McDonaldization, and as a result, they aggressively seek to extend its reach.22

Ritzer presents all this as though his four “principles of McDonaldization” were the driving forces and that is a happy coincidence that they boost profitability. But he has put the cart before the horse. His account is inverted, for, along with Weber, he has already granted that “economic interests” “drive rationalization in capitalist societies.” But that is to admit that his four “principles of McDonaldization” are derivative. They are not even co-constitutive principles of capitalist societies; rather, they are shadow forms. Instrumental reason is a shadow form. The four “principles of McDonaldization” are no principles; they are abstractions from the actual principle of real subsumption under capital, that is, the material transformation of production and products to increase profitability, what Marx also calls the drive to increase relative surplus value. McDonaldization, then, is all about capital’s reach; “Mc” is the prefix of real subsumption.

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Notes 1. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), 677, note 6. 2. This situation is not new. Marx criticized the Gotha Programme of the German Workers Party for its “bourgeois phrases” that ascribed “supernatural creative power to labor” [Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, edited by C. P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1966), p. 3]. 3. Martin Heidegger writes, “Fundamental concepts are determinations in which the area of knowledge underlying all the thematic objects of a science attain an understanding that precedes and guides all positive investigation” [Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 9]. 4. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1973, 255). 5. Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 240. 6. On “the illusion of the economic,” see Patrick Murray, “The Illusion of the Economic: The Trinity Formula and the ‘Religion of Everyday Life,’” in The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume III of Marx’s “Capital” (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 7. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II, edited by S.W. Ryazanskaya and translated by Renate Simpson (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1968), 529. 8. Subjectivism regarding (use) value is challenged by Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 71, where he writes that the usefulness of things “must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such ‘aspects’ were discursively forced upon ‘being’ which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world stuff were ‘subjectively colored’ in this way.” See also Barry Stroud, “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms,’” Hume Studies, Vol. XIX, No. 2 (November 1993): 253–272, and Chapter 4, “Value,” in Barry Stroud, Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 90–124. 9. This is not meant to deny that demand is a co-factor in the determination of value. As Marx notes, if something is deemed useless, it has no value. 10. Marx and Engels write of utility: “this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation” [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, translated by Clemens Dutt, in Volume 5 of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 409]. In a

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similar vein, Bernard Williams observes, “Utilitarianism is unsurprisingly the value system for a society in which economic values are supreme; and also, at the theoretical level, because quantification in money is the only obvious form of what utilitarianism insists upon, the commensurability of values” [Bernard Williams, Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 89]. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, 126. “The concept of value is entirely peculiar to the most modern economy, since it is the most abstract expression of capital itself and of the production resting on it” [Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 776]. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, 254. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 12. George Ritzer, McDonaldization, 12. George Ritzer, McDonaldization, 13. George Ritzer, McDonaldization, 183. George Ritzer, McDonaldization, 189. Karl Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process, translated by Rodney Livingstone, in Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, 1041. George Ritzer, McDonaldization, 23. George Ritzer, McDonaldization, 168–169. George Ritzer, McDonaldization, 168.

Bibliography Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Programme. Edited by C. P. Dutt. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1966. _____. Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II. Edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya. Translated by Renate Simpson. London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968. _____. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1973. ———. Capital: Volume One. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1976. _____. Results of the Immediate Production Process. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, in Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One.

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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Volume 5 of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1976. Murray, Patrick. “The Illusion of the Economic: The Trinity Formula and the ‘Religion of Everyday Life.” In The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume III of Marx’s “Capital.” Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York, NY: Penguin, 1973. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000. Stroud, Barry. “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms.’” Hume Studies, Vol. XIX, No. 2 (November 1993): 253–272. _____. Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011. Williams, Bernard. Morality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

CHAPTER 7

Social Form and the “Purely Social”: On the Kind of Sociality Involved in Value

The basic error of the majority of Marx’s critics consists of … their complete failure to grasp the qualitative sociological side of Marx’s theory of value. (Rubin 1972, p. 73) Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Gemeinwesen], since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all. But as we have seen, in money the community [Gemeinwesen] is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction as an isolated individual. (Marx 1973, pp. 225–226)

There are striking passages in social science, philosophy, and literature that depict emptiness as a pervasive condition in the modern world. From Dickens and Weber to Camus and Walker Percy come descriptions of lost or lonely persons unhinged from traditions, drifting through this world. Another pervasive theme echoes the traditional condemnation of greed in a modern form: the consumer. Consumers are portrayed as grasping and obsessed; they exit the Thanksgiving feast to wait for stores to open and bargains to flow. In the Gilded Age, tycoons built extravagant summer mansions that were shuttered most of the year. Some critics point out the links between a restless emptiness and greed. One way to fill a vacuum © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_7

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is to go shopping, chasing a phantom of fullness. Ads promise the fulfillment that life fails to deliver. The “festival” mall evokes the excitement and connections missing from the daily grind. Consuming offers solace for life’s disappointments; new phones, films, and restaurants are a quick fix for the soul. For these critics, modernity clearly engenders emptiness, anomie, greed, cynicism, and materialism. The focus is on the culture and the individuals damaged in these ways. The sources of this driven emptiness are less apparent. Marx has usually been thought of as investigating capitalism as an “economic system,” a mode of production. Less often has Marx been consulted to understand the sociological features of capitalist societies. The customary divisions into economy, social relations, and culture— forces of production, relations of production, and superstructure—lie in the background. But treating economy, society, and culture as separable— even if interacting—misconceives Marx’s basic concepts. The concept of the commodity is key to understanding the experience of the consumer: what kind of category is it? Does the commodity form bear cultural content, content with far-reaching social consequences? The barren sociality engendered by capitalism is felt in multiple ways. The emptiness intrinsic to the value character of commodities reverberates in the emptiness that characterizes forms of modern subjectivity. Greed in its modern guise emerges from a drive that goes beyond the marketplace to the processes that sustain it, namely, the production of commodities laden with surplus value. The assumptions at play in overlooking the sociological depth of Marx’s theory betray a theoretical emptiness that Marx calls “the bourgeois horizon.” Marx identifies “the bourgeois horizon” as the philosophical orientation that structures political economy, much of modern philosophy, and many forms of socialism. It trades in bifurcations, separating what belongs together: mind vs. world, subjective vs. objective, form vs. content, and concept vs. object. The sterility of “the bourgeois horizon” in separating wealth and labor from their constitutive social forms and purposes—where the qualitative sociological content lies—explains what I. I. Rubin calls “the basic error of the majority of Marx’s critics,” namely, “their complete failure to grasp the qualitative sociological side of Marx’s theory of value” (Rubin 1972, p. 73). The phenomenologically attuned concepts that Marx arrived at in order to grasp the emptiness of modern life are far from empty.

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Sociological studies of modernity may not think to probe the social content of the specific “economic” forms that constitute capitalist societies. In Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, Simon Clarke argues that Marx’s profound critique of economics was passed over, while neoclassical economics rose to dominance: There was a scientific revolution in nineteenth-century social thought … It was inaugurated by Marx’s critique of the ideological foundations of classical political economy, which he located in the political economists’ neglect of the social form of capitalist production. (Clarke 1982, p. 240)

Economists, both classical and neoclassical, attempt to construct a social science based on categories applicable to every society, such as needs (or preferences), wealth, labor, instruments of production, and land. But no such science is possible: no particular society can be understood solely through general categories. Certainly, no qualitative sociological insights can be derived from such categories. Clarke argues that consequences of the missed opportunity provided by Marx’s scientific revolution spread. Modern sociology uncritically adopted the horizon of neoclassical economics and ceded to it the “economic” realm in a disastrous disciplinary division of labor.1 Capital, by contrast, does not begin with the generality “the wealth of nations.” It begins with the sociologically potent observation that, in societies where wealth is produced on a capitalist basis, wealth takes the social form of the commodity. What sort of sociality is involved in this form of wealth? This is the question that we want to explore, with special reference to Marx’s claim that value must be expressed in exchange-value, more particularly, in the (antagonistic) polarized relationship between commodity and the universal equivalent, money. A commodity is a useful thing that has an exchange-value, by which Marx means a price, but, as Marx puts it, a commodity is a value. Wealth, throughout history, has had a specific social form: value is the specific, and peculiarly abstract, social form of wealth in the commodity form. Marx describes value as “purely social” [rein gesellschaftlich], as well as “supra-sensible” [übersinnlich], which means that the value character of a commodity cannot be detected anywhere on or in the body of the commodity. (Later, we will turn up reasons to qualify this statement.) Gender is a sort of sociality; it is expressed on, in, and by gendered bodies in countless ways. It must be quite a peculiar sort of sociality that cannot

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be represented on or in the thing that has that social form. This strange sociality involved in the commodity led Karl Polanyi (1968) to characterize capitalism as the “disembedded economy,” as if it were divested of social form. What is the sociality of value such that it cannot be manifested by the body of the commodity? To answer this question requires us to develop the basic concepts of social form, value, abstract labor, and the purely social.

Social Forms and General Traits What is social form? The concept has its roots in human sociality, which is a trait characterizing humans wherever they exist. Humans are not selfsufficient; from birth onward, our lives are bound together. We exist with others and thanks to others. Being social is a species trait. In modern life, we sometimes posit individuals over against society and its institutions, but this apartness or independence is its own mode of sociality, just as indifference is a mood, not the absence of mood. At the beginning of the Grundrisse, Marx traces the notion that sociality is a thing apart from individuals back to the peculiar sociality of bourgeois society: Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. (Marx 1973, p. 84)

The asocial sociality of commercial life may make it seem that they do, but individuals do not constitute themselves apart from society and its institutions. Every society is constituted by particular ways in which humans exist together. There is no one species-wide sociality. A society is a system of resources, tools, beliefs, actions, and needs. It is a way of living and opens a horizon onto what is real and what matters. How a society is organized involves ends or goals. Thus, each society serves specific ends that shape its practices and institutions. These ends might concern the salvation of souls, service to the gods, allegiance to rulers, military conquest, or the glory of battle. There is no reason to insist on only one such goal. Society’s ends and its social forms are linked: because society has particular

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ends, it is formed in relation to them. Social forms penetrate society to varying degrees. In history, social forms may develop from singular events, rudimentary institutions, or social movements. Social forms involve power because forms matter. These ends and social forms are what Aristotle calls final and formal causes: the power of the telos or purposive character inherent in social structures. Social forms always have moral implications; that is why a purely descriptive social science fails to grasp the reality of social life. For example, modern wage labor, a specific social form of labor, requires the mutual consent of employer and employee, which, formally at least, recognizes both parties as equally free persons. Are not some human traits universal or natural? By attending to social form we do not deny general or shared features of human existence, such as wealth, needs, kinship structure, psychological dispositions, custom, or even universal human rights. Reflection on a common human nature is often indispensable to inquiry. Being social is a general trait of humans. While humans possess universal traits, such as language, the universal features shared by all societies do not have the constituting power of a form. Heidegger’s (2010) analysis of Dasein in Being and Time is compelling, but establishing the equiprimordiality of the work world, discourse, mood, and understanding describes how humans exist in every setting. These identifiable general ways of being human fall short of being forms. Universal traits are static and unsaturated; they are not situated in history and lack the dynamism of forms. They lack qualitative sociological content. The particularity of history shapes human existence in essential ways. All social forms exist as particulars of something more universal. There is no form of a society in general. What can be called Use-value Romanticism holds that what is useful can exist without a specific social form. It claims that general traits, such as being useful, are sufficient designations. Useful things, or wealth pure and simple, presumably could be made and used by persons anywhere at any time. Every society involves tools, but every tool tells the story of its society. The general definition of a tool does not explain how instruments produce value (and surplus value) in capitalist societies: Marx calls instruments of production constant capital to disclose their specific social form and purpose. When social form is overlooked, denied, or disguised, Use-value Romanticism, with its penchant for general traits, will pop up. Throughout history, social forms are readily apparent. Harvest festivals and the ruins of pyramids, roads, and temples testify to the social forms of

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ancient peoples. What are the social forms that constitute modern capitalist societies? We could start by saying that capitalist society involves money and making even more money. A few people possess much money while most scrape along. The median household in the United States has about half the wealth it would need to own outright a median house and car—and nothing else. It is not the goal of the family to make money, but household consumption of commodities is mostly how families today meet needs. And that takes money. Money and its power in, and often over, our lives are visible. Money is found in societies widely in history, where its scope and roles vary. We have to dig deeper for the ends that capitalist society serves. Money is a visible marker of what is not easily grasped because of the kind of social form that it is, i.e., money that functions as capital. But to dig deeper requires intellectual strengths in short supply in the modern world. Living in capitalist society encourages forms of skepticism that make understanding it difficult.

Skepticism About Purposes and Forms What sets capitalist societies apart is how they engender skepticism about forms in general and purposiveness in particular. Modern science is proudly said to put an end to teleology. Ends and forms carry a sour, scholastic taste for many. Wariness about final causes and common purposes leads liberals to urge that no society should have set goals: we should fight for the liberty to pursue our own ends and resist paternalism. Adults do not need nannies. The domination of peoples throughout history may have allowed for collective purposes, but that domination has largely been eclipsed by modern democracy. Citizens freely abide by minimal social contracts to protect liberty and secure property and basic welfare. Market exchanges are further expressions of personal choice. Individually chosen ends are OK. Involuntary social ends are not. For this liberal mind-set, a society that has no goal, no common good, is one of history’s greatest achievements. This modern readiness to dismiss final causality hinders our understanding of capitalism. Skepticism about ends adds to the difficulty of recognizing the specific social purpose of capitalism and the social forms that constitute it. A related skepticism is directed at forms and essences. This skepticism arises from crude empiricism (things are collections of sensible properties) and nominalism (only particulars exist; kinds, or universals, are useful fictions invented, like filing cabinets, as tools). John Locke called nominal essences

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“the workmanship of the understanding,” that is, they are constructs of the mind. Empiricism, nominalism (anti-essentialism), and constructivism are default intellectual positions for many today. In this view, essence talk amounts to intellectual domination where a priori and fixed forms flatten actual existing differences. This skepticism is inspired less by science than by poor phenomenology and a view of freedom as unconstrained and self-defining from the bottom up. All limits on freedom must be repudiated. But we find that capitalism simultaneously establishes a self-centered sort of individual liberty and systematic coercion. Capitalist freedom and oppression must both be addressed. But that first requires recognition of capital’s end and forms. Skepticism about essences and ends blocks the recognition of social forms and purposes. Since social forms are actual, this skepticism leaves us strangers to our world. The skeptic is stymied when universal human traits are separated from specific social forms. This kind of skeptic views society as the aggregation of individuals and their actions. Capitalism becomes the label for the current—uncomprehended—stage of history. It is not constituted in any inherent ways. Without social forms in our intellectual repertoire, we turn to human nature and the usual suspects such as greed or self-interest to explain the world. The skeptic cannot answer the fundamental social question: what is capital? As a predisposition, this skepticism infects ordinary experience and is entrenched in academic life. It impedes every effort to grasp capitalism as a distinctive mode of production, helping capital to cover its tracks.

Social Forms: From Commodities to Value The social form of modern society includes the telos or the end of capitalism. What does capitalism strive for? As we have seen, we cannot get to particular social forms with universal categories that hold everywhere, such as needs, tools, natural resources, or human productive activity. In every society, products are made that require human labor. This universal trait cannot comprehend actual societies; it cannot capture the animating power of capitalist forms. Classical economists make this mistake when they identify the value of commodities with the labor embodied in them, regardless of the social form and purpose of the labor. Since value is specific to capitalist society, such a claim is a category mistake. As Moishe Postone (1993) points out, Traditional Marxism, too, commits this error

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of thinking about labor rather than the specific social form of labor in capitalist societies. Marx begins Capital by discarding the economist’s project of explaining actual social phenomenon with only general categories: Capital is not a study of “the wealth of nations.” Marx deliberately limits his inquiry to societies where wealth generally takes the form of a commodity, that is, a useful thing with a price, and he quickly raises the crucial question: what do all commodities share that allows for valid prices? Marx assumes that, generally, prices are not arbitrary; a thousand dollars per gallon of gas is a price, but thankfully not a valid one. Marx addresses a social world in which market forces work to establish prices that, for the most part, are valid, though not fixed. If prices are valid, they must measure something; otherwise, any price would be per se valid. What they measure must be shared by all commodities, since valid prices allow each commodity to be compared quantitatively with every other one. Since each different commodity has its price, so many barrels of oil must equal so many bushels of corn. The name for what all commodities share is value.2 The concept of value is often misunderstood. Value typically refers to a subjective reaction that is thought to be projected onto things; here, value is purely subjective. This skeptical—and transhistorical—view of value cannot explain the historically specific value that is the “third thing” shared by commodities that makes them commensurable. As common to all commodities, value is not an individual’s projection, and it “cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property” (Marx 1976, p. 127). What can it be? Commodities have prices and exist as values. The value embodied in commodities is expressed—necessarily so, Marx argues—in prices. A wool coat embodies more value than a cotton sock. Marx contrasts the usefulness of the coat with its value as the sensible to the supra-sensible. What makes the coat useful is tangible, such as the warmth provided by its woolen fabric. What determines the coat’s value is not perceived. But it would be a mistake to draw the line between the sensible and suprasensible sharply, as if value were not felt throughout our lives. As with gravity, we recognize its effects even when we do not understand its unseen source. The source is mysterious, but a thing’s value as compared to that of others is felt and often matters more than its usefulness. What is more valuable brings the pleasures of prestige: “Veblen effects,” if you will. Value appears in prices, name brands, and in our awareness of

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what something is worth—its value. What something is worth is usually conveyed by price. The thing’s worth overlaps but is not the same as its quality. Quality is also comparative, but this comparison reflects tangible useful properties, not mere quantities. The sensible and the supra-sensible dimensions that are separated in theory are inseparable in experience. Growing up in capitalist societies we learn ways in which value shows in—even structures—the world around us (Lotz 2012). We judge a thing’s value without needing to check its price tag. The perennial TV game show “The Price is Right” presupposes this sort of perceptiveness. We know when something is a good deal or is priced wrong. With our internalized price scanners, we size up the best buy. While value is apparent in what something is worth, still, money is the only visible measure of value. Social forms permeate our experience of the commercial world. Value appears to those who live in commercial societies. We experience a quart of Ben and Jerry’s as being of greater value than a Popsicle, much as we know that a boulder is heavier than a pebble. Value is sometimes treated as a placeholder for deeper realities, such as capital. But value belongs to our society like sacredness belongs to the Koran or to the waters of the Ganges. In each case, you can go deeper. Commodities are experienced as values, and value is experienced as more or less—of what is not so clear. If value were not manifested at all, analysis would slide back toward Use-value Romanticism, that is, toward use values imagined to be without any social form.

The Commodity Spectrum: Simple Commodities, Commodities That Are Commodity Capital, Ex-commodities, Potential Commodities, Quasi-Commodities For the most part, wealth functions as a commodity temporarily. Purchases that fill our home or surround us at work are being enjoyed or used productively. Not all participants in commodity circulation are individuals searching out consumer goods. Many are firms, some notfor-profit, most for-profit; commodities produced by not-for-profits differ from those produced by for-profits in that their sale does not yield surplus value. How much difference that makes is a subject for further thought. Marx must have chuckled to himself when he observed that commodities in the making within a capitalist firm are not handled as commodities:

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the next worker on the assembly line neither pays for nor sells what she’s working on. The firm itself can be organized in more or less authoritarian, competitive, or cooperative ways, none of which is dictated by the capital form. The ongoing circulation of capital that currently makes our lives possible is not continuously confronted: most commodities, once purchased, drop out of the market. If humans did exist like capital, caring only for value (more particularly, surplus value), capitalism would crash land (Marx 1976, p. 179). Having a life, which goes under the commercial label of consumption, is a condition for capitalism. What we purchase generally becomes an ex-commodity. We take products home to use and enjoy. Yet even wealth no longer in circulation is not separable from social form. We recognize the value of products in the private sphere of consumption or while working in a firm or factory. This recognition is made explicit when we draw up and price a list of our valuables for a homeowner’s insurance policy or when inventory is taken in the warehouse. Sometimes we buy commodities for domestic use, say a home, jewelry, or fine art, with the explicit recognition that such wealth doubles as a store of value or even with the speculative hope that its value will increase. In either case, the ex-commodity stores value as a potential commodity. Compared to other social forms of wealth, value is strange, but we do not need a theory to perceive its presence around us. Like gravity before Newton, value surrounds us, as familiar as it is mysterious. Quasi-commodities of various sorts go beyond being willing and able to pay the price. Being willing to pay tuition at Princeton is not enough; one must first be admitted. Paying college tuition gets you a seat in a class but does not guarantee any credit hours: you have to pass the course. We talk loosely about how much a college degree costs, but there is more to getting one than plunking down the money. Nonetheless, in his recent book What Money Can’t Buy, Michael Sandel (2012) ponders whether philanthropists can, in effect, buy an honorary degree.

From Value to Abstract Labor and Time As Marx’s inquiry unfolds, it moves beyond recognizable experience to underlying abstractions. Value is the rabbit hole to access the stranger forms. A church steeple does not reveal Christian theology in detail. Value, however, gives even less of a clue as to what lies beneath it. We know that value is measured by prices, so value must represent a quantity

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of some kind. But of what kind? We do not find a unit of value the way we do in adding eggs up to a dozen. What is the substance of value that allows it to be quantified? What do all commodities share? As diverse physical entities, commodities do not all share any particular useful properties; neither do they meet any common need—there is no need in general. We do not find any particular concrete trait that could be the substance of value. Social form must be particular, but it does not have to be physical any more than is the sacredness of Good Friday. When we look at the production of commodities, it involves tools, raw materials, labor power—and the money to buy all these. What products share is not any particular kind of concrete labor; likewise, what defines social form cannot be the universal trait of productive activity. Social form is particular. But the particular social form of the capitalist mode of production has its roots in the aspect of human labor that Marx calls abstract. No labor exists as abstract—all labor is concrete—but every kind of labor, whether slave, serf, tribal, or free, can be considered in its aspect of being human labor in abstraction from its concrete character. Abstract labor is a universal trait of human labor inasmuch as any concrete human labor can be viewed abstractly as the exertion of human muscles and brains: “however varied the useful kinds of labor, or productive activities, it is a physiological fact that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs” (Marx 1976, p. 164). Likewise, all human products can be viewed as embodied labor. When you ask, what do all capitalist commodities share that gives them value, the answer begins with the abstract labor congealed in them. As a universal human trait, however, it is not yet a social form. As a universal trait it can only be a partial answer to the questions: what is value? and what social sort of labor is value-producing? As abstract, this substance is not visible. To grasp it we strip away the concrete features that distinguish cooking from mining to arrive at the physiological process that is involved in all labor. Human beings, like other creatures, expend energy in working. Concrete labor, from which abstract labor—undifferentiated human endeavor—is abstracted, takes time, and is always oriented to specific purposes, such as drilling a well for water. Length of time is the only measure of the homogenous substance of congealed abstract labor. But abstract labor and the congealed abstract labor in products are tricky concepts. They express

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rudimentary features of labor and products. Duration is always a dimension of human activity. Abstract labor links the duration of human labor with products as values. Unlike actual things and activities, it is abstract. You cannot point to a quantity of abstract labor the way that you can pick up a single commodity. The term abstract labor can mislead us into thinking of abstract labor as an actual kind of labor. Concrete labors exist, but abstract labor as such does not exist. Abstract labor as the substance of value is not a kind of labor. Understood as concrete labor stripped of particular traits, the concept of abstract labor can be applied across history. Temporal duration and homogeneity are underlying features of any particular human labor taken as abstract.

From Abstract Labor and Time to Money and Capital Value is the social form of commodities that allows commodities to have valid prices. The substance of value is the homogeneous stuff of congealed abstract labor that all commodities share. But abstract labor is universal and not socially specific. To describe the social form or purpose of abstract labor in capitalist society goes beyond homogeneity and temporal duration to money. Making money is the usual purpose of producing commodities. Congealed abstract labor that cannot be converted into money has no value. Crops will be plowed under if the price sinks far enough. The abstract labor congealed in commodities must be realized in the market to validate its claim to value. Unable to be sold, a product of human labor lacks value (Marx 1976, pp. 179–180). A commodity without a buyer still contains congealed abstract labor in its general sense, but it is valueless. Such a commodity lacks the particular social form of labor that defines capitalist society: what we can call practically abstract labor. Practically abstract labor involves a process linking production, exchange, and consumption in which the commodity’s value must be realized as money by being sold. Abstract labor in the general sense is not socially determinate; it does not have the power of a social form. Practically abstract labor is value-producing labor; the value of its products must be realized as money through sale. Practically abstract labor is a specific social form of labor with the power to drive the accumulation process and shape a capitalist way of life. In this socially specific form of labor, the congealed abstract labor must undergo a process of social validation in which labor counts precisely as abstract labor.

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Value is a familiar feature of commodities. Commodities appear as values that make sense out of prices. Marx argues that the substance of value is congealed abstract labor. But unpacking this conclusion opens up further specificities of abstraction. The abstract labor constituting the substance of the value of a commodity is not measured by individual labor time but by the average time required to make that sort of thing. The socially necessary labor time sets the norm of value. Only socially necessary labor is value-producing (Marx 1976, p. 120). But the refinement of the social form continues. What makes the concept of abstract labor yet more confounding is that, fully grasped, it is not tallied as individual sums of abstract labor, much less sums of average labor time, but it is produced initially as an aggregate result of all capitalist production that is distributed to individual commodities through competition in markets. In Marx’s terminology, commodities sell at their prices of production—cost-price plus profit, as determined by the average rate of profit—not their individual values (Marx 1981, Parts One and Two). Practically abstract labor occurs when social production is undertaken privately. Value exists first as a social aggregate and not an individual or average quantity. Individual values are a heuristic fiction. The price of production of an individual commodity is arrived at through competition with other commodities to establish their respective claims to profit. What any individual commodity is priced at results from this competitive struggle over the aggregate. Sometimes abstract means distant from reality. But in science, abstractions that are true reveal what is real—as only they can. We may not experience subatomic forces in nature. But, ultimately, properly formed abstractions have implications for our experience of the world. Value is that kind of abstraction. Once it is established through inquiry into the world, other consequences follow directly and indirectly. For example, value is necessarily expressed as money. Money in capitalist societies plays a unique role. It is necessary both as means and end. The goal in capitalism is to increase the profits that result from production and to repeat that process endlessly. The accumulation of capital is not the only goal in modern society, but it drives capitalist societies like no other purpose, and when it begins to break down—in a recession or depression—the consequences are all too palpable. Capital accumulation is a commanding collective social purpose. As a specific social form, capital powerfully shapes and subsumes many aspects of our lives.

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Two Meanings of Marx’s Description of Value as “Purely Social” What are the sociological consequences of the social forms that define capitalist societies, such as commodity, value, money, wage labor, and capital? How is the social form of value unique in comparison with other ways of structuring societies? We propose that there are two meanings to the phrase “purely social” [rein gesellschaftlich] in Marx’s repeated statement that value is “purely social.” The first meaning is that value is “purely social” in that value is, as we have seen, strictly a consequence of a specific social form of labor: value is strictly social. Value is not a consequence of labor regardless of its particular social form, as in the classical (Ricardian) labor-embodied theory, as well as in what Postone calls Traditional Marxism. The second meaning does not contrast specifically social to general conceptions of value, as the first does; it has to do with the kind of sociality involved with value and value-producing labor, which might be called sheer sociality, barren sociality, or even asocial sociality. Thus, Marx writes of the exchange process, “Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way” (Marx 1976, p. 187). The sociality of value is a purist sort of sociality, and this purity—or emptiness—belongs to the nature of value as congealed abstract labor that has proven itself socially necessary. When Marx reaches the end of the rapid two-part argumentation that moves from a world of commodities with valid prices first to the underlying “third thing” that he calls “value” and then to congealed abstract labor as the substance of value, he describes value as “this social substance,” this “ghostly objectivity” [gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit ] (Marx 1976, p. 128). He comes back to that point at the beginning of his exposition of the form of value in Section Three of Chapter One. After a bawdy reference to Shakespeare’s character Dame Quickly, Marx writes, “Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp as a thing possessing value” (Marx 1976, p. 138). Since the commodity’s value nature is its specific social form, this means that its social form cannot show itself in any of the commodity’s perceptible features. As a consequence, the commodity appears to be a useful thing “pure and simple” (Marx 1976, pp. 153, 227), that is, commodities appear

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to have no specific social form. That contributes to “the illusion of the economic,” that is, the notion that there is an economy-in-general, which is usually identified with the capitalist mode of production. “This fiction arises entirely from the inability to grasp the specific form of bourgeois production and this inability in turn arises from the obsession that bourgeois production is production as such” (Marx 1968, p. 529). The “fiction” is the notion of an economy-in-general, or “production as such,” to which the capitalist mode of production is reduced by extracting all of its constitutive social forms and purposes. Martha Campbell puts the point this way: capitalism “claims to create wealth pure and simple and [to be] organized by this purpose” (Campbell 2004, p. 86). This illusion lays the basis for the pseudo-science of economics, which purports to be, as it were, the science of the economy-in-general. Since there is no such thing—rather, there are only socially specific modes of production—economics is missing its object of inquiry. Marx reminds us that value is “an identical social substance” and that the “objective character [of commodities] as values is therefore purely social” [ihre Wertgegenständlichkeit also rein gesellschaftlich ist ”] (Marx 1976, pp. 138–139).3 From this observation, he immediately draws the conclusion that is the key to his account of the expression of value: “From this it follows self-evidently that it [value] can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity” (Marx 1976, p. 139). Since value cannot appear in the body of the commodity, yet it must appear, it must appear in relation to another commodity, more particularly, to the universal equivalent, money. Our question is: does this follow simply because the objectivity of value is something social or because the sociality of value is of a particular kind, namely, the “purely social” ? Sociality, after all, comes in countless varieties and likewise is expressed in countless ways. Put another way, does Marx’s argument in Section Three: The ValueForm, or Exchange-Value depend upon the peculiar, pure sort of sociality that is involved with value? We believe so. First, more on the sociality of value. The description of value as “purely social” offers a clue as to the kind of sociality that value involves. Its sociality is of a blank, empty sort. To begin, it is the sociality of simple commodity circulation, the marketplace, which Marx describes as “atomistic.” In this sphere of simple commodity circulation reign liberty, equality, property, and Bentham (meaning narrow self-interest ) (Marx 1976, p. 280). The basic social roles in this sphere are those of buyer and seller (to which we may add

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borrower and lender). These roles presuppose private property and the mutual, but indifferent, recognition of participants in the market as free and equal persons. Bitzer, the repellant student in Thomas Gradgrind’s school in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times , explains how markets arrange human relations: It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn’t get to heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there. (Dickens 1990, p. 219)

As we will see, these hard-shell commercial sensibilities are not the whole story. Simple commodity circulation—the free market—appears to have no organizing goal, no common purpose to ground and orient its form of sociality. There seems to be nothing mediating the narrow self-interest of participants in the market. Consequently, this narrow self-interestedness appears to be natural, the default drive of human beings. In other words, the economists’ “homo economicus,” or “economic man,” is an ideological offspring of value’s sort of sociality at the level of simple commodity circulation. This appearance of the market leads liberals, especially libertarian ones like Friedrich Hayek, to endorse this form of sociality, precisely because it lacks—or appears to lack—any compulsory collective good. Instead, the market presents itself as an arena where property owners freely pursue their self-interested aims. As such, the sociality of this sphere of simple commodity exchange appears peculiarly asocial. Though participants are expected to respect one another’s dignity as persons by exchanging property on a voluntary basis, there is no expectation of anything resembling Aristotelian philia, no sense of belonging to a purposeful polis—the attitude that Hayek derides as a “tribal mentality.” One necessary, and troubling, unintended cost of this “sheer” sociality is the transfer of human social powers to human products that Marx calls the fetishism of the commodity. Marx writes: “Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material

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shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action” (Marx 1976, p. 187). The young Hegel’s formulation of this reversal surpasses Marx’s language in its vehemence: Need and labor, elevated into this universality, then form on their own account a monstrous system of community and mutual interdependence in a great people; a life of the dead body, that moves itself within itself, one which ebbs and flows in its motion blindly, like the elements, and which requires continual strict dominance and taming like a wild beast. (Hegel 1979, p. 249)

This pure, asocial form of sociality boomerangs on participants in a market and subjects them to the constant “discipline” of prices that periodically lurches out of control. We believe that Marx’s argument in Section Three, The Value-Form or Exchange-Value, of Chapter 1 of Capital I, turns on this second meaning of value’s being “purely social.” It is because the sociality of value is pure that—unlike other forms of sociality, such as gender, religious affiliation, or ethnicity—it must be expressed through the polarized value form; that is, the value of one commodity must be expressed in an exchange relationship with another commodity; more particularly, with money. Marx calls attention to the strange, driven sociality of value by contrasting it with other forms of sociality, such as military rank, when he writes: “This proves only that, within its value-relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than it does outside it, just as some men count for more when inside a gold-braided uniform than they do otherwise” (Marx 1976, p. 143). The social character of the commodity—which is what value is—cannot be expressed by any of its physical features. On the contrary, the effect of the social character of the commodity’s being expressed in a thing separate from itself, a sum of money, is that the commodity appears to be “usevalue pure and simple” (Marx 1976, p. 227), that is, the commodity has the illusory appearance of lacking specific social form altogether. Marx explains: The internal opposition between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. (Marx 1976, p. 153)

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Money is pure sociality an sich, in itself. As a fetish, money, a thing you can carry in your pocket like a rabbit’s foot, packs social power of a peculiar, purist kind, namely, purchasing power, which is indifferent to the purchaser, the seller, and the useful character of what is purchased.

More to the Story: Some Qualifications to the “Purely Social” Sociality of Values Marx’s claim that value is “purely social” must be qualified first by his own observations that there is no value where there is no use-value and that labor does not produce use-values on its own but rather only by working on, with, and through nature and within and through a specific social form: “All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society” (Marx 1973, p. 87). The fact that the expression of value in the value form is necessarily polarized brings home this inseparability of value from use-value. Value may be supra-sensible, but its necessary form of appearance, money, is material. Failure to recognize the implications of this leads to Use-value Romanticism. Any suggestion of a radical split between the social and the natural goes against the grain of Marx’s historical materialist philosophy: describing value as “purely social” and “supra-sensible” already suggests that there is something perverse about it. Marx argues that sheer sociality is far from the whole story about the type of sociality involved with value. For Marx argues that simple commodity circulation presupposes the circulation—and, ultimately, the boundless accumulation—of capital. Value presupposes surplus value— the aim of the circulation of capital. In the Urtext , Marx describes simple commodity circulation, the market, as “an abstract sphere of the bourgeois process of production as a whole, which through its own determinations shows itself to be a moment, a mere form of appearance of some deeper process lying behind it, even resulting from it and producing it” (Marx 1987, p. 482). Capital, which is the value that drives endlessly toward increase and accumulation, is the truth of value. The barren sociality of commodity circulation derives from the frightful emptiness of capital: Chris Arthur’s essay “The Spectre of Capital” is an alarming meditation on the void at the heart of capital (Arthur 2002, pp. 153–174). To account for the circulation of capital, which necessarily takes place both within and beyond commodity circulation, Marx introduces considerations that reveal a very different kind of sociality than that of the market.

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Whereas social class and the material character of the commodities being exchanged did not matter in the formally egalitarian space of the market, they do enter into the circulation of capital. At this more concrete level, we must distinguish between the class of owners of the means of production and subsistence, the capitalist class, and the class of “doubly free” wage earners, who support themselves through the constantly renewed sale of their own labor power. In the form of sociality that characterizes production on a capitalist basis, capitalists, by virtue of being owners of the means of production, are in charge of the production process. Capitalists direct production for the specific social purpose of acquiring—and accumulating—surplus value, that is, an increment of value above their original investment. Marx portrays this shift from the marketplace to the production site with reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy: with the sale of labor power the wage worker goes from the relatively benign Plain of Acheron, simple commodity circulation, the “noisy sphere” where the purchase and sale of labor power take place, into the inferno of capitalist production, where the worker can expect to be skinned (Marx 1976, pp. 279–280). Realizing that simple commodity circulation is the necessary form of appearance of the circulation of capital dispels the liberal illusion that the free market has no compulsory collective purpose. The market does have one, in which the barren sociality of commodity circulation is embedded. This compulsory collective purpose, the endless accumulation of capital, is no one’s choice for the common good. Further investigation of the capitalist mode of production reveals more features of this peculiar form of sociality, including inescapable class conflicts over the wage, the length and intensity of the workday, and the humaneness of working conditions—not to mention tendencies to throw the whole system into crisis. What Marx calls the real subsumption of labor under capital involves the technical or material transformation of labor processes for the purpose of squeezing out more surplus value. In Capital Marx treats these transformations, which include cooperation, manufacture, and large-scale industry, under the heading of relative surplus value (Marx 1976, Part Four). Phenomena such as “efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control,” popularly referred to as “McDonaldization” (Ritzer 2000, p. 12) may be better conceived of as real subsumption under capital. The concept of real subsumption may be extended to commodities when they are materially altered to extract more surplus value. The two may

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go hand in hand; for example, changes in agriculture, processing, or transportation often alter the food delivered to consumers. Perhaps the best recognized examples of the real subsumption of commodities under capital involve “planned obsolescence,” that is, speeding-up repurchases either by deliberately decreasing the durability of commodities or by styling them so as to go out of fashion quickly. “Junk food,” often engineered to be quasi-addictive, is a costly manifestation of real subsumption (Albritton 2009). Today’s gigantic entertainment industry affords countless examples. Consider popular music coined “corporate rock” and scripts rewritten to satisfy bean-counters and their test audiences. Does the emptiness of moneymaking leach into Hollywood blockbuster sequels and television sitcoms? Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show offers an answer: when a reality sitcom abruptly goes off the air after thirty years of continuous transmission, two parking attendants watching the show pause momentarily, then ask, “What else is on?” When we extend our inquiry conceptually beyond the marketplace to the production of commodities on a capitalist basis, we have to reconsider the starting point of the analysis, the assumption—which was appropriate at that level of abstraction—that the value nature of the commodity leaves no traces on the body of the commodity. With the real subsumption of commodities under capital, their value character, more particularly their surplus-value character in all its emptiness, marks them materially.

Notes 1. In From Political Economy to Economics, Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis explore “the process by which political economy became economics, through the desocialisation and dehistoricisation of the dismal science, and how this heralded the separation of economics from the other social sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century” (Fine and Milonakis 2009, p. 1). 2. In fact, not every commodity is a value. As Marx points out, due to the independence of the price-form, “a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value” (Marx 1976, p. 197). Undeveloped land is a case in point. For more on this point see Murray (2005). 3. Marx describes value as a “supra-natural property” [übernatürliche Eigenschaft ] that is “something purely social” [etwas rein gesellschaftliches ] (Marx 1976, p. 149). At the beginning of Section 4 The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret, Marx describes the commodity as “a thing which transcends sensuousness” [ein sinnlich übersinnliches Ding ] (Marx 1976, p. 163).

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Bibliography Albritton, R. Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity. London and New York: Pluto Press, 2009. Arthur, C. J. The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2002. Campbell, M. “The Objectivity of Value Versus the Idea of Habitual Action.” In The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s ‘Capital’. Edited by R. Bellofiore and N. Taylor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Clarke, S. N. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London: Macmillan, 1982. Dickens, C. Hard Times (2nd ed.). Edited by G. Ford and S. Monod. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990. Fine, B., and D. Milonakis, D. From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Hegel, G. W. F. System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4). Translated and edited by H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by J. Stambaugh, revised by D. J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Lotz, C. The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Marx, K. Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II . Translated by R. Simson and edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968. Marx, K. Grundrisse. Translated by M. Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1973. Marx, K. Capital: Volume One. Translated by B. Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Marx, K. Capital: Volume Three. Translated by D. Fernbach. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Marx, K. Economic Manuscripts of 1857—8. Translated by V. Schnittke and Y. Sdobnikov and edited by L. Miskievich. In K. Marx & F. Engels: Collected Works (Vol. 29. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987. Murray, P. “The New Giant’s Staircase.” Historical Materialism, 13, No. 2 (2005): 61–83. Polanyi, K. Aristotle Discovers the Economy. In Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi. Edited by G. Dalton. Garden City: Doubleday, 1968. Postone, M. Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Ritzer, G. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2000.

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Rubin, I. I. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Translated by M. Samardzija and F. Perlman. Detroit: Black & Red, 1972. Sandel, M. J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

CHAPTER 8

The Commodity Spectrum

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.1

Getting to the Form of Commodities What is a commodity? What should not be a commodity? These are both old and new questions. The sin of simony involved selling sacramental blessings, such as forgiveness. But grace is not for sale. When we hear that genomes, radio bandwidths, wedding speeches, the smell of Playdoh, or large prime numbers are for sale, we are puzzled. Should someone own a genetic sequence?2 In both old and new occurrences, commodities involve exchange for money. If corn is bartered for cloth, no commodities are involved.3 The commodity carries moral significance despite its absence from standard economic theories and ethics texts. Like money, the basic commodity form is old; it appears throughout history in marginal ways. Our focus is on capitalist societies, where commodities constitute the social form taken by wealth generally: to meet needs, we must purchase commodities. We call the modern forms capitalist commodities . In our world, the commodity is so obvious as to fade into the woodwork. We notice that the commodity form of wealth matters © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_8

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if something goes wrong. For example, in 2008 people noticed when households in the USA lost 12–14 trillion dollars in value as those curious commodities collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs) went toxic. Like gravity or the warmth of the sun, the commodity form matters all the time, even when we take it for granted. In this essay, we want to bring to light the reality and the moral significance of the commodity as found in capitalist societies, not the basic commodity of precapitalist settings. The topic opens onto a diversity of forms that constitute what we call a commodity spectrum.4 On the spectrum are basic commodities, capitalist commodities, commodity capital, ex-commodities, quasi-commodities, ideal (as if) commodities, and shadow commodities. Here is one reason for speaking of the commodity spectrum; there are profoundly different forms of commodity that come under the heading of the commodity.5 The questions of what cannot or should not be a commodity concern the width and makeup of the commodity spectrum. We will take a close look into these revealing social forms, for without clarity concerning the commodity spectrum, social theory flounders in conceptual omissions and confusions. Both mainstream economics and moral critiques of consumer society are our targets. Mainstream economics simply ignores the commodity, and moral critiques ignore how commodities arise from capitalist production. Marx is the main source of the distinctions found in this essay, but we charge Marx with largely ignoring the ex-commodity and the quasicommodity. Marx begins Capital: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’.”6 But what surrounds us for the most part are ex-commodities. Marx is aware that commodities generally pass through the market. But we call into question his observation: “If a commodity is exchanged for another commodity by means of money, its value-character [Wertbestimmung ] disappears in the moment in which it is realised, and it steps outside the relation, becomes indifferent to it and is now only a direct object of need.”7 Even after a commodity is purchased, its value character matters. A key term in our reading is form. The capitalist commodity is a social form of wealth of profound moral, social, and political significance. Aversion to forms of all sorts (nominalism) keeps social forms and their significance out of mind and discourse. However, the fact that there are recognized (and debated) moral limits to what should not be a commodity tells us that to be a commodity means something; the

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commodity form has moral weight. One of the most important lessons that Marx learned from Hegel was to investigate the content of forms, including social forms.8 So what is involved in the capitalist commodity form? The commodity presupposes a system of private property ownership and the social roles of buyer and seller, which involve the high-minded, egalitarian moral and legal category of persons: In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent. The guardians must therefore recognise each other as owners of private property.9

But the circulation of commodities also presupposes a particularly narrow sort of self-interest and a minimal sense of social solidarity. Marx memorably summarizes the moral significance of the commodity as it appears in the marketplace: The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange … is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage. The only force bringing them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each. Each pays heed to himself only, and no one worries about the others.10

Rights, freedom, equality, property, and self-interest signify the ideals of modern society. Clearly, the generalization of the commodity form of wealth brings about (on-going) revolutionary social transformations.

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Generalization of the Commodity Form in Capitalist Societies The problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects.11 Questions concerning commodities are rarely raised in standard economics books. We consider the reasons for this omission later. To answer these questions, we need good concepts. In our view, the key concepts for contemporary social theory derive from Karl Marx’s critique of economics, a revolutionary advance in social theory that has largely been overlooked, even by Marxists. Marx is still largely regarded as a radical political economist, working within the conceptual horizons of economics, when, in fact, he is a profound critic of those horizons. Simon Clarke makes the point well: “There was a scientific revolution in nineteenth-century social thought … It was inaugurated by Marx’s critique of the ideological foundations of classical political economy, which he located in the political economists’ neglect of the social form of capitalist production.”12 This includes neglect of the commodity form. Every society is constituted by some way of producing useful things and some form of wealth. The need for wealth is transhistorical. To actually exist, wealth must take on a specific social form. The recognition of the inescapability of social form sets Marx apart from economists, whether classical, neoclassical, or Marxist. Marx highlights the commodity as the social form of wealth and the production of wealth from the opening sentence of Capital: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities,’ the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.”13 For Marx, the commodity signifies the specific social form of wealth where production is directed at accumulating surplus value, i.e., the purpose of producing wealth in modern societies. By contrast, Adam Smith sets out to have a science of the “the wealth of nations” without attention to social form. But wealth never exists in general; it only exists as formed by a specific social purpose, such as the production of surplus value. Marx’s opening sentence tells the reader that his topic is a specific type of society, one where products generally take the commodity form—not “the economy.” Capital is not a book about “the economy.” “The economy” is a pseudo-concept, since there is no economy-in-general that could be its referent.

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The commodity opens up the study of capitalism as a whole. At the core of Marx’s critique of capitalist societies is the challenging concept of value, which turns out to require the concept of surplus value. Commodities do not have value; they exist as value. But Marx does not begin Capital with value; he arrives at value from the ordinary observation that, in capitalist societies, wealth is generally produced in the social form of the commodity. The commodity is accessible; it is seen in stores, on screens, and throughout our lives. To understand capitalism, begin with the most visible form—the commodity—and work from there. In reasoning from the commodity to the concept of value to money and then to capital with its antagonistic class division, Marx connects the circulation of commodities—buying and selling—with the circulation and accumulation of capital. No surplus value, no value. This feature of Marx’s conception of the commodity sets it apart from other critical approaches to the commodity.14 The commodity that exists in capitalist societies—the capitalist commodity—deserves our close attention. In its basic sense, a commodity is a good or service for sale, that is, something exchanged for money. In this basic sense, commodities and money exist long before capitalism. Value and capital are not presupposed by the basic commodity. The generalized or capitalist commodity, which is Marx’s focus—and ours—is a new and potent form of the commodity. The capitalist commodity has a double character: it is a use-value with an exchange-value determined through capitalist production. The capitalist commodity results when production generally operates on a capitalist basis: Capital is predicated on the exchange of commodities, trade in commodities, but it [trade] may be formed at various stages of production, common to all of which is the fact that capitalist production does not yet exist, or exists only sporadically. On the other hand, a highly developed commodity exchange and the form of the commodity as the universally necessary social form of the product can only emerge as the consequence of the capitalist mode of production.15

When Marx tells readers of Capital that the investigation “begins with the analysis of the commodity,” he has a specific form of the commodity in mind, namely the kind of commodity that characterises wealth in societies where “the capitalist mode of production prevails” and wealth “appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’.”16 The generalized commodity

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and capitalist commodity are equivalent terms. This equivalence assumes that Marx is correct that “all or even the majority of products take the form of commodities” only “on the basis of one particular mode of production, the capitalist one.”17

Refining the Concept of Capitalist Commodities To move from the commodity to the subsequent concept of value raises questions that need to be answered if we are to take Marx’s account of the commodity seriously. The first question concerns commodities that are not products of labor. Of the commodity, Marx says that it is something useful that has an exchange value, by which he means a price. What does the price measure? In capitalist societies, price or money expresses the value of the commodity. Value is a challenging cornerstone of Marx’s theory. It signifies congealed abstract labor that is socially necessary. Value results from labor under the specific social form of wage labor. But Marx sees a problem with the idea that the commodity’s price expresses its value: all commodities have a price but not all are products of labor. Forests, land, and water supplies have prices but, unlike corn and cotton, they contain no labor. What does the price of natural resources measure? Marx called attention to this objection to the labor theory of value in Toward the Critique of Political Economy: “The last and apparently the decisive objection … is this: if exchange-value [value] is nothing but the labour-time contained in a commodity, how does it come about that commodities which contain no labour possess exchangevalue [price]?”18 Marx states that “this problem is solved in the theory of rent” but gets to the answer only late in the third volume of Capital. The surplus value generated in society at large is divided into profits, interest, and rent. According to Marx, all surplus value arises from wage labor, but commodities that are not products of labor lay claim to a share of the total surplus. Price is the necessary expression of the value of a commodity, but the price form opens the door to pricing things whether they are products of labor or not: “The price-form … may also harbour a qualitative contradiction, with the result that price ceases altogether to express value, despite the fact that money is nothing but the value-form of commodities … Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value.”19 Thus Marx writes, “Everything becomes saleable and purchasable.”20 The forms of capitalism are potent and extend in many

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directions. In capitalism all products tend to be commodities, but not all commodities are products of labor. The capitalist commodity form is an umbrella that includes commodities that exist as value (products of wage labour) and those that do not. Marx is clear: not all commodities are products of labor, hence, not all exist as value. But many criticize his arguments at the beginning of Capital. Marx reasons from the equivalence of commodities—x amount of commodity A = y amount of commodity B—to establish value as the “third thing” that commodities have in common and that makes them commensurable. Congealed abstract labor is then deduced to be the substance of value. But not all commodities are products of labor. How can abstract labor be the “common element”? According to these critics, Marx has made a glaring mistake. This criticism is understandable but misguided. To understand where it goes wrong, we have to look at the arc of the argument in the three volumes of Capital. Prior to Marx, the classical labor theory of value stated that individual commodities sell at prices that express their individual value, i.e., the labor contained in each. Marx sets out in Capital, first, to demonstrate that the classical labor theory of value is untenable (he was not the first to do so) and, second, to defend a radically reconceived labor theory of value (and surplus value) that holds only for the total social capital and the total “heap” of commodities. Unaware that Marx had drafted Volume 3 prior to completing Volume 1, Eugen BöhmBawerk thought he was exposing a contradiction in the makeup of Capital when he pointed out the incompatibility of the theory of individual values of Volume 1 with the theory of prices of production in Volume 3. But Marx knew for at least ten years before publishing the first volume of Capital that the classical, individualistic theory of value cannot work.21 The labor theory of value does not hold at the level of the individual commodity; it is defensible only as a theory of the aggregate of commodities and, by the same token, of aliquot parts of that aggregate. To accept Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism is to believe that Marx intentionally based Capital 1 on a theory that he knew to be falsified and proceeded knowingly to make one false claim after another. From the beginning of Capital, it is not the individual commodity as a particular, but the commodity as a representative or aliquot part of the aggregate of commodities that is Marx’s subject. An individual commodity, such as a piece of land, may not contain labor or exist as value. However, an aliquot commodity would represent no expenditure of human labor only if the

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aggregate of all commodities required no expenditure of human labor— that is, if we were living in a very different world! Once we recognize that Capital is organized in this way, this common objection to Marx’s claim that congealed abstract labor is what all commodities have in common goes away. The capitalist commodity form presupposes that wealth is generally produced in the commodity form and that labor takes the form of wage labor. But that means that all the factors of production are in the commodity form. Once the commodity has become the general form of the product, then everything that is produced must assume that form … and the various conditions of production themselves appear as commodities which leave circulation and enter production only on the foundations of capitalist production.22

Under these social conditions, production must begin with the money (M ) needed to purchase labor power and any other commodities required for production.23 But producers will not see the point of selling commodities that merely return the original money expended (M − M ). Only if the M is increased through the sale of the commodities (M − M + ΔM ) does production have a point. So, when wealth generally takes the commodity form and labor takes the form of wage labor, only production on a capitalist basis makes sense. In Chapter 7 of Capital 1, Marx’s example of valorization (producing a commodity that bears surplus value) makes a general point about production on a capitalist basis. In making the point, Marx assumes that all of the inputs to the production process, i.e., labor power, means of production, and materials of production are all have prices. For Marx the generalization of the commodity form goes hand in hand with the generalized transformation of labor into wage labor: “The capitalist epoch is therefore characterised by the fact that labour-power, in the eyes of the worker himself, takes on the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently takes on the form of wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the commodity-form of the products of labour becomes universal.”24 The capitalist commodity, wage labor, and capital are a package deal. As we have seen, not every commodity in a capitalist society is a product of labor: some commodities have a price, though they are not

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values. Not all capitalist commodities that are products are produced on a formally capitalist basis: there are products of unfree labor, products of nonprofit firms, products of self-employed producers, government products, and more. We designate all commodities circulating in a capitalist society as capitalist commodities, noting that not all of them are produced on a capitalist basis: not all capitalist commodities are intended to bear surplus value, that is, to function as commodity capital. So we have four classes: capitalist commodities produced on a capitalist basis, capitalist commodities not produced on a capitalist basis, capitalist commodities that are not products of labor at all, and quasi-commodities. A commodity is something useful that is intended for sale (exchanged for money): “a use-value which has exchange-value, i.e. an article destined to be sold, a commodity.”25 In this analysis, we presuppose that commodities are sold legally. Anything being produced for sale, advertised for sale, or available for sale in any sort of retail outlet is a commodity. A commodity achieves full status by being sold. But this may fail to happen. Before being sold, a commodity may be ruined or lost or interest in buying it may evaporate. “Commodities are in love with money,” as Marx put it, but “the course of true love never did run smooth.”26 Strictly speaking, useful things intended for sale achieve full commodity status at the ephemeral moment of sale.27 After the purchase we have an ex-commodity (we will say more about ex-commodities). As we saw, the commodity form presupposes private property and the social roles of buyer and seller, both of whom are private property owners and have the moral and legal status of persons. The commodity form presupposes private ownership—you can’t sell the Brooklyn Bridge when you don’t own it. This link allows for ways in which ownership is compromised, especially by types of credit that complicate the commodity form. As we will see, these complications can have major social impacts, such as increase of debt.28 In capitalist production Marx points out that the product does not function as a commodity in the workers’ hands: “labour is systematically divided in every factory, but the workers do not bring about this division by exchanging their individual products.”29 Though workers do not handle things as commodities, those overseeing the production process keep their commodity character squarely in mind. But parts of the production process involve commodities that are purchased, such as the windshield wiper motors sold to auto makers, where they figure

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as components in the assembly of cars: “Perhaps a particular operation, although yesterday it still formed one out of the many operations conducted by one producer in creating a given commodity, may today tear itself out of this framework, establish itself as an independent branch of labour, and send its part of the product to market as an independent commodity.”30 One producer’s commodity is absorbed into another producer’s commodity. While the details of this proposition run into a hornet’s nest, we will say in a rough way that a representative capitalist commodity is sold at a market price; it is competitively priced, that is, without monopolies or subsidies or governmental price-setting.31 A representative capitalist commodity is for sale to any potential purchaser who has the money (or legitimate credit). “Money talks” we say. “What brings the seller [of labour-power] into a relationship of dependency is solely the fact that the buyer is the owner of the conditions of labour. There is no fixed political and social relationship of supremacy and subordination.”32 This impersonality of commodities and money has a powerful progressive dimension.

From Capitalist Commodity to Commodity Capital Understanding the commodity is like grabbing the tail of the tiger: it’s a lot more than you bargained for. Investigating the commodity as it exists in a capitalist society takes us into the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of value and the value form. Like an electrical outlet or an internet connection, an individual commodity is wired to a farflung network—the world of commodities and money—and is subject to its booms and busts. Hyperinflation, another phenomenon that makes the commodity form obtrusive, brings home the precarious social character of the commodity. A commodity is something social, but social in a particular way. A commodity is a value (and has a price), but values are “purely social”; neither values nor prices are determined individually.33 On the one hand, value is determined by the quantity of “socially necessary abstract labour” required to produce a commodity in demand; on the other hand, commodities belong to a capitalist system in which surplus value is distributed as profits, interest, and rent to diverse capitalists and landowners: commodities do not exchange at prices that track their “individual values” but rather at their prices of production. Reflecting on the course of conceptual development in Capital, Marx writes, “As the

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elementary form of bourgeois wealth, the commodity was our point of departure, the prerequisite for the emergence of capital. On the other hand, commodities appear now as the product of capital.”34 Commodities circulate as an aspect of the circulation of capital. Consequently, the moral, social, and political significance of the commodity is not limited to how it functions at the conceptual level of simple commodity circulation and the social relations proper to it. All commodities for sale in capitalist societies—whether products of labor or not—are capitalist commodities. As his analysis unfolds, Marx’s focus is on capitalist commodities that are commodity capital. This term is introduced in the second volume of Capital to indicate that commodities produced on a capitalist basis are not simple commodities; they bear surplus value. Since surplus value is the specific goal of production undertaken on a capitalist basis, commodity capital is a constitutive form of capitalist society. Products produced by self-employed individuals or collectives, as well as by nonprofit firms, are not commodity capital: they do not contain surplus value. We will refer to them as capitalist commodities, keeping in mind Marx’s point that capitalist production generalizes the commodity form, including to labor power: “In capitalist production the tendency for all products to be commodities and all labour to be wage-labour, becomes absolute.”35 Below, we will argue that this tendency gets extended in the phenomenon of ideal subsumption, where, for example, various forms of unpaid labor, housework, for example, are ideally subsumed under the wage labor form.36 Here is another reason for speaking of “the commodity spectrum”: capitalist commodities may be commodity capital or simple commodities; labor power may be purchased by capitalists to serve in the production of surplus value or it may be bought for use outside the formal capitalist sphere (such as government or non-profit jobs). So, not all commodities are products of labor, and not all that are products are produced on a capitalist basis, that is, not all capitalist commodities are commodity capital.

The Consequences of Producing Commodities on a Capitalist Basis By attending to the form of the commodity, Marx challenges mainstream economics and is also at odds with critics of commodification who do not grasp its inseparability from the production of surplus value. These critics focus on commodity exchange and ignore capital. Marx makes three

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major points about the capitalist commodity that are missing from most commentaries on the commodity. (1) The fetish character of commodities involves the impersonal domination of all by the price system, which is the cost of market freedoms: The owners of commodities therefore find out that the same division of labour which turns them into independent private producers also makes the social process of production and the relations of the individual producers to each other within that process independent of the producers themselves; they also find out that the independence of the individuals from each other has as its counterpart and supplement a system of all-round material dependence.37

Marx explicitly links the commodity with an impersonal form of domination: the fact that labor “is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product … [is] the unmistakable stamp belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite.”38 (2) Marx conceptually connects commodity circulation with credit in his investigation of the function of money as means of payment , a function that arises naturally in commodity circulation, where the delivery and payment often diverge. As commodity circulation advances, “conditions arise under which the alienation of the commodity becomes separated by an interval of time from the realization of its price.”39 So, commodities frequently come to be purchased on credit. Credit introduces a new and troubling social relationship between borrower and lender: “The role of creditor or of debtor results here from the simple circulation of commodities. The change in its form impresses this new stamp on seller and buyer.”40 As a keen reader of Shakespeare, Marx was well aware of his saying “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” While the social relation of borrower-lender maintains the moral equality of the buyer-seller relationship, its implications are more ominous and enduring: “At first, therefore, these new roles are just as transient as those of seller and buyer, and are played alternately by the same actors. Nevertheless, this opposition now looks less pleasant from the very outset, and it is capable of a more rigid crystallization.”41 Debt peonage is the most “rigid crystallization” of the creditor-debtor relation, but everyday stories of buyers who discover that their car has been repossessed or that the bank has foreclosed on their home expose how rigid and unpleasant

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this borrower-lender relationship can be. The New York Times reports in June 2017 the story of Yvette Harris, whose wages were still being garnished for $6,500 that she owes on a subprime loan she took to buy a used car that was repossessed by the lender in 2004.42 The autonomization of payment that calls credit into being introduces the possibility—but only the possibility—of monetary crises, where the chains of payments begin to come apart, confidence in the ability of borrowers to pay erodes, and nothing will do but money as means of payment: There is a contradiction immanent in the function of money as the means of payment … This contradiction bursts forth in that aspect of an industrial and commercial crisis which is known as a monetary crisis … The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value … In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction.43

With the inclusion of credit and the borrower-lender relation, the investigation of the commodity form takes us into deep and perilous waters. (3) We have seen why commodity circulation presupposes production on a capitalist basis to keep its markets stocked with new commodities. So the assessment of the generalized commodity form cannot be dissociated from the assessment of the capitalist mode of production. Once we recognize that capitalist production, which is based on free wage labor, underlies the generalization of the commodity form, we begin to see how truly expansive is the content of the commodity form. On the one hand, the egalitarian aspect of the buyer-seller relationship is reinforced insofar as everyone owns at least his or her own labor power and thereby merits equal respect as a self-determining person. However, upon completion of the sale of labor power, the egalitarianism of the market place gives way to the “despotism” of capitalist production. Marx couches this transition with a dramatic reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy, specifically to entering the inferno: When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the ‘free-trader vulgaris’ with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner

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now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but—a tanning.44

With his reference to the “free-trader vulgaris,” Marx harshly criticizes those who do not recognize that commercial society is “the society of capital and wage-labour” and who, consequently, limit their ideas about the ethical significance of the capitalist mode of production to roles and relationships involved in simple commodity circulation, in particular to the egalitarian buyer-seller relationship. Contemporary social theory largely fails to recognize that commodity circulation is only the relatively cheery appearance of the endless accumulation of capital.45 Reducing capitalism to commerce and industry conceals the class divide and perpetuates the liberal illusion that markets have no compulsory collective good: if individuals freely choose their own course, it must be just. But liberals are wrong; there is a compulsory collective goal that organizes our lives. In reality, commerce serves the compulsory “good” of capital accumulation.

Doubling and Redoubling: Keep the Double Character of the Commodity in Mind The capitalist commodity—like capitalist production and accumulation— has a double character: use-value and value. A commodity meets some need and has a price. This persisting double character can be lost in two ways: mainstream economics collapses value into use-value and moral critics worry about use-value collapsing into value.46 As Marx points out, without usefulness, there is no value: “nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.”47 In both production and consumption, use-value considerations never go away. As values, a hammer and a screwdriver differ only quantitatively. To be useful, qualitative differences matter: the hammer is good for driving nails not fastening screws. Two hammers represent twice the value of one but are no more helpful with screws. Without the particularity of human needs and desires—and the particular objects that answer them— commodity circulation would fail. For capital to accumulate, people are

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required. In an unsettling passage, Marx highlights how human participants, who discriminate among useful features, are needed to propel commodity circulation. It calls to mind the functional role humans play in the popular film franchise The Matrix: What chiefly distinguishes a commodity from its owner is the fact that every other commodity counts for it only as the form of appearance of its own value. A born leveller and cynic, it is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with each and every other commodity, be it more repulsive than Maritornes herself. The owner makes up for this lack in the commodity of a sense of the concrete, physical body of the other commodity, by his own five and more senses.48

Without specific human needs to fulfill, the process of exchange stalls. It’s nice to know you are needed! The double character of the commodity—it is a useful thing and a value—results in an actual doubling into the commodity and money: Commodities first enter into the process of exchange ungilded and unsweetened, retaining their original home-grown shape. Exchange, however, produces a differentiation of the commodity into two elements, commodity and money, an external opposition which expresses the opposition between use-value and value which is inherent in it. In this opposition, commodities as use-values confront money as exchange-value.49

This doubling of the commodity into a use-value and a sum of money brings to light the necessary polarity of the value form: the commodity is in the relative value form: money is in the equivalent value form. While commodities vary endlessly, the common measure remains the same: money. This polarized and antagonistic duality constitutes the commodity. As in Hegel’s logic of essence, value must appear as something other than itself , as money, the general equivalent. Properly grasped, essence and appearance are not separable. To think otherwise engenders illusions. The doubling into commodity and money creates the illusion that the commodity is a use-value “pure and simple,” that is, a use-value with no social form or purpose:

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The internal opposition between use-value and value hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value [unmittelbar nur als Gebrauchswert … gilt ], whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value.50

In discussing money, Marx reiterates the point: when gold “functions as money … as the only adequate form of existence of exchange value in the face of all the other commodities,” those other commodities play “the role of use-values pure and simple.”51 But a capitalist commodity is never a useful thing “pure and simple.” Martha Campbell comments: “What is, for Marx, the extraordinary feature of economic activity in capitalism: that it claims to create wealth ‘pure and simple’ and is organised by this purpose.”52 The necessary polarity of the expression of value promotes “the illusion of the economic” and, in particular, the notion that a commodity is nothing more than a good or service and as such has a purely accidental relationship to money. Like magic, the commodity form, with its double character, disappears.53 With the emergence of credit the double character of the commodity redoubles. When the commodity is acquired prior to its payment, the borrower-lender relationship is added to the buyer-seller one. Now the same parties are simultaneously in two relationships, e.g., the consumer borrows from the seller to purchase the commodity. With credit cards, the borrower-lender relationship splits off and a third party brought in, e.g., the financial institution. To purchase an automobile or house usually involves taking out a loan that puts a lien on the commodity purchased or another legal obligation that compromises the buyer’s property rights. The redoubling of the commodity can go through further iterations in the form of derivatives that convert debts into financial commodities. Thus, mortgages and other forms of debt get bundled into bonds and sold as commodities. Then credit default swaps may be purchased to hedge against those financial commodities. In this way a towering superstructure of financial commodities can arise on a humble basis of loans for college tuition, autos, or houses.54

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How Value Shapes the Usefulness of the Commodity Though the value character of a commodity cannot erase its useful features, it can alter or color them in several ways. (1) We are familiar with what things are worth. As denizens of capitalist society, we see the money in things. A commodity reminds us of its value character, expressed in its price: “Everyone knows, if nothing else, that commodities have a common value-form which contrasts in the most striking manner with the motley natural forms of their use-value. I refer to the money-form.”55 In capitalist society, goods and services have a numerical doppelgänger— their price tag. Like contestants on the television game show The Price is Right, we experience our world with double vision: we size up the washer/ dryer combo, the flashy red sports car, the weeklong vacation to Cancun, knowing that each has its price, whether our guess is right or not. This makes gift-giving a challenge. How do we keep our gift from dissolving into its price?56 (2) Due to the homogeneous and quantitative character of value, this double vision—useful things with prices—has a general leveling effect: “All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned” (Communist Manifesto).57 When everything has a price, one light shines through goods and services: Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it, let alone more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum (Consecrated objects, beyond human commerce). Just as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical leveler, it extinguishes all distinctions.58

As things are permeated by price tags, their qualitative differences are flattened. Indifference marks the lived experience of consumer culture. A seasoned shopper has seen it all. Effects of this leveling show up in everyday language, such as with the use of the words “customer” and “product.” There are actual differences between being a student, hotel guest, airplane passenger, legal client, or patient in a hospital. These differences fade when all are seen as “customers.”59 “Product” is increasingly used for several purposes. A milder

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term, “product” reflects disdain for commodities and money. As a stand in for “commodity,” “product” extends the concept beyond the scope of actual commodities. It can be used for almost anything; a local chaplain reports that the hospital administration refers to distributing Holy Communion as the chaplain’s “product.” When terms lose clear referents, discourse is muddied. A similar confusion occurs with the term “industry” in the phrase “financial industry,” which, like “entertainment industry,” once would have been considered an oxymoron. Borrowing money sustains the process of productive labor; loans may be a condition of industry but are not themselves production. “Financial industry” confers the dignity of work on financial operations. The benign notion of financial “products” conceals what is often a commodity; it includes various kinds of bank accounts or insurance policies. At a financial institution, all the options for having an account at the bank—or different loan options, for that matter—are called “products.” (3) The real subsumption of goods and services under the commodity capital form shows the inseparability of use-value and prices.60 To increase surplus value, cheaper materials are substituted; thus dry wall replaces plastered walls and laminate etched with wood grain replaces oak floors. Real subsumption involves a wide variety of phenomena, some fall under the familiar heading of “planned obsolescence,” others “McDonaldization.”61 Planned obsolescence seeks to speed up sales; it takes at least two forms: one makes products that wear out or break down quickly. Another designs products to go out of fashion quickly. We use “Mc” as the prefix of real subsumption. For example, the newspaper USA Today is referred to as “McPaper.” “Corporate rock” names the real subsumption of rock music: tweaking and testing songs to maximize profits—McMusic. (4) As commodities, goods and services are not just useful things; they have social weight. The commodity is a fetish in two ways that are often confused. (i) According to Marx, the commodity is a fetish because it bears a privately-owned, abstract sort of social power—purchasing power. Car thieves generally don’t want to drive your car; they want its purchasing power, not its horsepower. Money is also a fetish, but, unlike the commodity, its power is established; as the general equivalent it has nothing to prove. Money and commodities have “occult” powers; they are like social magnets, not mere metal. “Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. Ancient society therefore denounced it [money] as tending to destroy the economic and political order.”62 The

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irony of capitalist enlightenment is that it rebounds in the fetish character of the commodity, money, and capital. (ii) A second meaning of “fetish” in commercial societies is offered by Thorstein Veblen. For Veblen, commodities and money function as honor fetishes; simply possessing money or valuable commodities bestows social recognition. That recognition roughly tracks the value of commodities.63 On the other hand, status is a useful feature of commodities, so increased status value means increased value. In his account of consumer society, Jean Baudrillard draws on Veblen to enlarge the Marxian conception of the commodity by adding status or “sign” value to the makeup of the commodity.64 As consumers, we navigate a complex world of goods and services laden with prices and “sign” values. This sign value extends from the commodities to brands, stores, and shopping malls.

Ex-commodities: From “Simply Things” to a Store of Value Buying and selling are ephemeral: commodities come into the market, pass through, and go out. The ongoing circulation of capital that oversees our lives is episodic: most commodities, once purchased, drop out of the market, often, never to return. A consumer’s purchases become and generally remain ex-commodities. We take products home to use and enjoy. The dual character of commodities as useful and as value seems to end once the cashier is paid. What fills our rooms and closets are excommodities. But ex-commodities are not reducible to use-values solely. The double character that defines capitalist commodities persists even after the commodity exits the circulation process. Wealth that has dropped out of circulation is not separable from social form. The value of products continues to matter in several ways in the sphere of private consumption. The several ways that value shapes the usefulness of commodities follow them, for the most part, into the status of ex-commodities. Their value character is made explicit when we draw up and price a list of our valuables for a homeowner’s insurance policy or when a creditor swoops in to sell off our belongings to offset our debts. The ad on an Omaha bus for a pawn shop reads: “Need money? Give us a ring.” The accompanying photo is of a diamond-encrusted engagement ring. Just in case you were getting sentimental, don’t forget: that’s a store of value on your finger!

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Sometimes we buy commodities for domestic use, say a home, an automobile, jewelry, or fine art, with the recognition that such wealth doubles as a store of value or even with the hope that its value will increase— that the purchase will turn out to be an investment. In either case, the ex-commodity stores value as a potential commodity that may reenter circulation in the future. How well consumer purchases store value has a huge effect on a household’s net wealth. One privilege of being rich is that a larger share of your income goes to commodities that double as stores of value or investments. Disparities of income but especially wealth are bulwarks of racial oppression. The average black or Hispanic household earns approximately 60% of the average white household, but it possesses only 6% or 8% of its wealth. Disparities are compounded by their consequences for access to credit at prime rates. These figures starkly express the significance of the value character of ex-commodities in perpetuating racial and other social divisions. Not all purchases are made by consumers; many are made by producers. Production on a capitalist basis requires constant capital, such as machines or raw materials (all the elements of the production process except labour-power). Constant capital functions as a store of value; it passes its value through to the new commodities either all at once or over a series of production cycles. By contrast, variable capital (the labourpower purchased by the capitalist) does not function as a store of value; its use-value and value are used up in the production process. The trick of capitalist production is to insure that the new value added by wage laborers exceeds the value of their labor power. Commodities purchased for “non-productive” consumption (in the domestic sphere) do not pass their value through, as they do not figure in the production of new products; however, they may serve as a store of value or even a speculative investment.

Quasi-Commodities Under capitalism, commodities are generally produced to make money by answering (or stimulating) demand for goods and services. In the market, the commodity’s value is realized when it is sold. The commodity spectrum displays variations on this fundamental social form, as the capitalist dynamism plays out across concrete situations. We saw that a thing can “have a price without having a value,” so that “everything becomes saleable and purchasable.”65 Many things that are for sale in

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capitalist societies are quasi-commodities; in some way they fall short of full capitalist commodity status but belong on the commodity spectrum. Capitalism is determined in its search for ways to squeeze out surplus value. The forces that push for commodification frequently result in quasicommodities of one sort or another. We will identify a few sorts and concentrate on quasi-commodities associated with compromised property rights. Many things for sale are not sold at market prices. Markets can be constrained in numerous ways. As capital accumulates, it tends toward concentration and centralization; each deters competition. State regulation is pervasive. It is common for the price of one thing to enter into the price of another. Instead of market prices, commodities may sell at monopoly prices; such are a kind of quasi-commodity. In a case affecting many consumers, Microsoft was prosecuted for monopoly pricing by both the U.S. Department of Justice and by the European Commission of the European Union. Other quasi-commodities deviate from market pricing due to subsidies of some kind. Tuition at public universities in the United States is a quasi-commodity that is subsidized by state and federal funds. Governments purchase agricultural commodities to raise prices or pay farmers not to plant crops; these programs result in quasi-commodities. Some low-cost housing in the United States is subsidized by federal tax credits to financial institutions. The private housing industry is subsidized indirectly by tax relief for homeowners. Installation of solar panels or insulation may be subsidized by tax credits. Diverse price supports and outright price-setting by governmental bodies result in quasi-commodities. Minimum wage laws establish a floor to the labor market that affects other wage levels. Fiscal, monetary, and tax policies affect the prices of goods and services broadly. The underground or informal economy, sometimes called the shadow economy, trades in quasi-commodities, since the pricing of goods and services that it provides is compromised, often to avoid taxes or conceal the status of workers. Moreover, transactions in the informal economy are often illegal. The size of the informal economy is difficult to measure, but estimates put it at about ten percent of GDP in the United States.66 Many things that cost money cannot be bought simply because you have the money; there are other requirements. These are a kind of quasi-commodity. We may wonder how much a degree from Princeton University costs. Degrees from Princeton are not for sale in the first place, but graduates usually paid some tuition. Having the money, however, is

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not enough to pay tuition at Princeton. You have to be accepted to the university. Access to goods and services that cost money can be restricted on a wide range of bases. Legal restrictions on commerce create quasicommodities. Persons under a certain age may be restricted from buying alcohol or tobacco products. Child labor laws prohibit employers from purchasing the labor power of persons under a certain age. Purchases of many drugs are restricted by law: buyers must have prescriptions as well as the money. If you are a convicted felon or have a serious mental illness, you may not be able to purchase a gun legally. In exchange for so-called “free” goods and services, you must submit to advertising. Your personal data will be used to sell you commodities or may be sold to a third party. These “free” goods may be considered quasi-commodities of a different sort. Much of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s in the United States was directed against racist and sexist practices that created quasicommodities through discriminatory selling practices. Many goods and services could not be purchased by members of targeted groups, making them quasi-commodities. The battle was to turn such quasi-commodities into capitalist commodities accessible to anyone with the money. A major battle won in that round of civil rights legislation was the Fair Housing Act of 1968. For decades the U.S. federal government had pursued housing policies, including “racial covenants” that barred white homeowners from selling to non-whites, that created and enforced patterns of racial segregation in housing whose pernicious consequences persist.67 The struggle for equality has continued; in particular, with respect to persons with disabilities and persons of diverse sexual orientations and practices. Some evangelical Christians resist moves to equal treatment and demand the right, for example, not to sell wedding cakes or photography services to same-sex couples getting married. Anti-discriminatory legislation may be regarded as the imposition of the capitalist commodity form on this sort of quasi-commodity. The force of such legislation (or court rulings) is to constitute private ownership rights along the grooves of the capitalist commodity: to put goods or services up for sale commits the owner to sell in a non-discriminatory way. Let money do the talking. Quasi-commodities result from the variety of ways in which one’s private property rights are compromised, usually involving consent somewhere in the process. These include compromised property rights that result from buying on credit.68 Two of the main forms of credit, home mortgages and auto loans, generally involve liens, which require the

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compromised owner to have the lien-holder agree to any sale of the property. Commodity circulation naturally leads to buying and selling on credit of some sort, so that either the buyer-seller relation takes on a new aspect as a borrower-lender relationship or a third party enters to extend credit to the buyer. In compromising the buyer’s private property rights, credit makes the commodity purchased a quasi-commodity. The deal remains open, as the final disposition of the commodity is up in the air. So, the commodity form leads naturally to compromised ownership by the buyer, and trade often becomes commerce in quasi-commodities. Consider one of the most popular and important commodities of modern capitalism, the automobile. In 1919, Alfred P. Sloan, the head of General Motors, formed the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), which allowed GM customers to purchase a new automobile with a down payment of 35%, followed by a schedule of payments over one year. At Ford Motors, Henry Ford resisted this, offering a “layaway” plan instead, until setting up his own loan program in 1928. In the United States today about 85% of new autos and 50% of used autos are purchased on credit. The dollar amount of auto loans, of course, pales in comparison to home mortgages. For many in the U.S., ownership exists in an equivocal sense. Today, consumers may buy a cup of coffee with the swipe of a card, but buying commodities on credit is not new.69 Consider this exchange between Willy Loman and his wife, Linda, in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman: Willy: What do we owe? Linda: Well, on the first there’s sixteen dollars on the refrigerator— Willy: Why sixteen? Linda: Well, the fan belt broke, so it was a dollar eighty. Willy: But it’s brand new. Linda: Well, the man said that’s the way it is. Till they work themselves in, y’know. Willy: I hope we didn’t get stuck on that machine. Linda: They got the biggest ads of any of them! Willy: I know, it’s a fine machine. Linda: Well, there’s nine-sixty for the washing machine. And for the vacuum cleaner there’s three and a half due on the fifteenth. Then the roof, you got twenty-one dollars remaining. Willy: It don’t leak, does it”?

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Linda: No, they did a wonderful job. Then you owe Frank for the carburetor. Willy: I’m not going to pay that man! That goddam Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car! Linda: Well, you owe him three and a half. And odds and ends, comes to around a hundred and twenty dollars by the fifteenth. Willy: A hundred and twenty dollars! My God, if business don’t pick up I don’t know what I’m gonna do!

The big item for most households in the U.S., as Miller recognizes, is to own a home. At the beginning of the play, Willy foreshadows his suicide when he says to Linda, “Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.” Linda picks up that line at the very end of the play, saying, as she stands over Willy’s grave: Why did you do it? I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. A sob rises in her throat. We’re free and clear. Sobbing more fully, released: We’re free. Biff comes slowly toward her. We’re free … We’re free.70

Capitalists like to have their cake and eat it too; they like to sell their wares and still retain some hold on them, some way to squeeze more profit from them. The compromising of private ownership involved with credit is the main way to accomplish that, but there are others. Repairing commodities can be a lucrative business. “Repair prevention” is a corporate strategy that complements planned obsolescence like a one-two combination punch to the consumer. “Repair prevention” takes a variety of forms that all compromise the buyer’s property rights. As Jim Hightower puts it: “They’re out to corporatize the very idea of ‘owning’.”71 Some sellers include a claim to retain ownership of components as part of a sales agreement. For example, Deere & Company claims intellectual property rights and propriety rights to parts of tractors they have sold. Commodities with software may contain digital locks controlled by the seller. Or sellers can monopolize repair manuals and parts. Control of one’s own labor power can be compromised. Some states in the United States have passed “noncompete agreements” that bar workers from moving from one firm to a competing firm, making the worker’s own labor power a quasi-commodity.72

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Ideal Subsumption and Shadow Commodities The power of the commodity form to shape our imaginations, sensibilities, and practices, extends well beyond actual commodification, the formal subsumption of goods and services under the capitalist commodity form. The several ways of ideally subsuming things under the commodity or the “shadow commodity” form have various rebound effects. We saw that practices such as taking inventory remind us of the value character of potential commodities. The phenomena that we now want to consider concern ways of treating useful things as if they were commodities or what we can call “shadow commodities,” as the complement to Gary Becker’s term “shadow prices.”73 With ideal subsumption under the commodity form, virtually all aspects of our life show up as inventory. Ideal subsumption under the commodity form can have direct monetary consequences. If I donate clothes to charity or a for-profit dairy that donates milk products, a value (price) is assigned which is ideal in the sense that the donated goods are not for sale; they are not functioning as commodities. They are being handled as if they were commodities. Nonetheless, as a charitable gift, the assigned value directly affects the donor’s tax payments. Another practice that imputes prices to things that have none extrapolates from actual prices; doing so may have diverse motivations. Unpaid domestic labor (or the labour-power of those who do unpaid domestic labour) is a common target for ideal subsumption under the commodity form. The economist D. Ironmonger devised a way of measuring what he calls “Gross Household Product”; it treats household activities as if they were commercial ones and tallies the totals. In case anyone was disposed to be dismissive of unpaid domestic work, Ironmonger concluded in a 1996 article in Feminist Economics, “in a typically wealthy country, the household sector is approximately as large as the entire formal economy.”74 An essay in The Economist recommends, as one way to juice GDP numbers, that we adopt a new measure that it calls “GDP-Plus.” Among other changes, “GDP-Plus” would impute a monetary figure to unpaid domestic work and add it to GDP.75 The actual outsourcing of domestic work to paid workers, whether independent contractors or those hired by capitalist firms, may combine with the ideal subsumption of unpaid domestic work under the commodity form to make it seem as though paid labor is the default kind for the household, when actually it is the reverse. This may lead

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householders and homemakers to think of themselves as (unpaid) substitutes for paid domestic laborers. What is going on when parents complain that they have to “babysit” their own children on the weekend? They are viewing themselves as substitute babysitters, when the babysitters are substitutes for them in the first place! Increasingly various domestic activities are commodified—child care, cooking, cleaning, yard work, transport, and elder care. As a result, when a family member does chores, they feel like unpaid labor rather than simply participating in a household. Natural “services” (what Marx called “the free gifts of nature”) are another favorite target for ideal subsumption under the commodity form. The Natural Capital Project, a partnership among nonprofits, “works to provide decision makers with reliable ways to assess the true value of the services that ecosystems provide.”76 “True value,” it seems, has a single measure: money. The Project protests: Capital has often been thought of narrowly as physical capital -- the machines, tools, and equipment used in the production of other goods, but our wealth and wellbeing also relies on natural capital. If we forget this, we risk degrading the services that natural ecosystems provide, which support our economies and sustain our lives. These services include purifying our water, regulating our climate, reducing flood risk, and pollinating our crops.77

But, traditionally in political economy “natural capital” was not ignored; it was called “land.” Apparently, the Project believes that whatever supports our “wealth and wellbeing” counts as capital and that the only way to remember is to cater to the commercial imagination by putting big price tags on whatever it is that we do not want to forget. Discommodities are a familiar difficulty associated with the commodity form of wealth, precisely because discommodities are not commodities. Discommodities are an unwelcome span of the commodity spectrum. No one cares to own (or own up to) discommodities, since no one wants to buy them and remedying them may be costly. So, countering discommodities is a collective action problem whose solution usually falls to the state, which can impose regulations that likely cause those held responsible to incur costs. Or the state can impose a price on the discommodity, turning it into a kind of negative commodity. It may sell permits to create limited quantities of discommodities as a way to decrease them, and a market may develop in which those permits circulate as commodities.

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We noted that a capitalist firm can either outsource work such as making window washer motors for cars or integrate previously independent firms (centralization), as when General Motors bought Fisher Body Company long ago. In the former case (commodification) something that was not functioning as a commodity, now functions as one, and in the latter case (decommodification), what had functioned as a commodity no longer does. Internal outsourcing (or ideal commodification) is another possibility. Tasks such as copying, moving, transportation, and renovation may be performed by special units within a firm that bill the units of the firm that they serve. On the one hand, such bills involve real money: if I want my office painted, my college has to find the money to pay the university’s painters. But since all such bills are internal to the same firm, they amount to an organizational ploy to use an ersatz form of the commodity to shrink spending. When a governmental organization or a nonprofit outsources to a forprofit travel agency or office supply company, we have the possibility for rebound effects. The reliance on for-profit firms may alter the practices, culture, and sensibilities of paid workers in a nonprofit or governmental workplace in a shift sometimes called “going corporate.” The language of for-profit commerce—“customer,” “product,” “value-added,” “human capital,” “investment” and “return on investment”—may filter in. Is this analogous to the rebound effect of commodifying various domestic activities? Yes, but in that case, the rebound effect does not require that the activities be outsourced to a for-profit firm. It does in the case of the nonprofit or governmental setting on the assumption that workers in those settings are already wage laborers. By contrast, unpaid labor is the default situation in the domestic setting. Because they miss the commodity’s link to capital, answers to “what money cannot buy” fall short. To recognize what is not a commodity requires understanding the commodity form. Because it ignores social form, mainstream economics is flawed from its foundations. The commercial imagination slurs the difference between goods and commodities and the difference between means of production and capital in the pervasive misuse of “value” (and “value-added”) and “capital.” “Adding value” can mean either to make something more useful or to increase the profit from its sale. For its part, “capital” signifies any conceivable resource, so we hear of human capital, social capital, political capital, natural capital, intellectual capital, cultural capital, moral capital, spiritual capital, erotic capital, and more. The actual capital that defines modern society is never

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named. These vacuous notions block recognition of the double character of wealth in the capitalist commodity form and the double character of its production: empty-handed, we lack the concepts and language to grasp our world.

Notes 1. K. Marx, Capital: Volume One, translated by B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 163. 2. Contemporary authors who take up the question of the “moral limits” to the commodity form—and thereby recognise its existence and ethical significance—include Michael Walzer, in Spheres of Justice; Elizabeth Anderson, in Value in Ethics and Economics; Debra Satz, in Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). 3. Barter, which Marx calls the “direct exchange of products,” is not a form of the circulation of commodities; rather, “The circulation of commodities differs from the direct exchange of products not only in form, but in its essence” (Capital 1, 207). 4. “The commodity spectrum” is a phrase that we introduced in our article “Social Form and the ‘Purely Social’: On the Kind of Sociality Involved in Value,” in The Social Ontology of Capital, edited by D. Krier and M. P. Worrell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 129–130. 5. Marx applies the point to other commercial categories: “We see here how even economic categories appropriate to earlier modes of production acquire a new and specific historical character under the impact of capitalist production” (K. Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process, translated by Rodney Livingstone in Capital 1, 950). Tony Smith spells out the point nicely: “[T]he social forms analysed by Marx in Capital are historically specific. Commodities, money, profits, and so on, can all be found in precapitalist societies. One of Marx’s fundamental insights is that these were not the same social forms as commodities, money, and profits in capitalism, although we use the same words. In Capital, Marx examines these social forms insofar as they are moments of a social order whose organizing principle is the self-valorisation of value … This was not the organizing principle of precapitalist societies” [T. Smith, Globalisation (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 336)]. 6. K. Marx, Capital 1, 125.

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7. Marx, K. “Economic Manuscripts of 1857—58,” edited by L. Miskievich, translated by Ernst Wangermann, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 28. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), 191. 8. Before Hegel, there was Aristotle, whom Marx praises as “the great investigator who was the first to analyse the value-form, like so many other forms of thought, society and nature” (K. Marx, Capital 1, 151). 9. K. Marx, Capital 1, 178. This private property requirement will play a key role in our account of quasi-commodities. Since the commodity form is vital to the circulation and accumulation of capital, the expansion of the commons and commons-based peer production poses a threat to capital. For an assessment of the threat that it poses as an alternative to production on a capitalist basis, see T. Smith, Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Karl Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 10. K. Marx, Capital 1, 280. 11. Lukács, G. History and Class Consciousness, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), 83. 12. S. Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 240. 13. K. Marx, Capital 1, 125. 14. Neither Debra Satz’s Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale nor Michael J. Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy has an index entry for “capital.” For that matter, neither has an entry for “commodity,” though both in effect discuss the significance of the commodity form. 15. K. Marx, Results, in Capital 1, 949. 16. K. Marx, Capital 1, 125. 17. K. Marx, Capital 1, 273. In his discussion of money as a means of payment, Marx makes the further point that the practice of pricing extends beyond the sphere of commodities: “When the production of commodities has attained a certain level and extent, the function of money as means of payment begins to spread out beyond the sphere of the circulation of commodities. It becomes the universal material of contracts. Rent, taxes and so on are transformed from payments in kind to payments in money” (Capital 1, 238). 18. Marx, K. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, edited by M. Dobb, translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 62. 19. K. Marx, Capital 1, 197. 20. K. Marx, Capital 1, 229. 21. See Chapter 13 of P. Murray, The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form (Leiden: Brill, 2016) and F. Moseley, Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in “Capital” and the End of the ‘Transformation Problem’ (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

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22. K. Marx, “Results,” in Capital 1, 950. 23. “The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital … Even up to the present day, all new capital, in the first instance, steps onto the stage -- i.e. the market, whether it is the commodity-market, the labourmarket, or the money-market -- in the shape of money which has to be transformed into capital by definite processes” (K. Marx, Capital 1, 247). 24. K. Marx, Capital 1, 274, n. 4. 25. K. Marx, Capital 1, 293. 26. K. Marx, Capital 1, 202. 27. We can distinguish between potential commodities that are intended for sale and potential commodities that are not currently intended for sale, but could be. My car is a potential commodity, but I may never put it up for sale. We will discuss commodities that are paid for over time under quasi-commodities. 28. Credit (debt) creates a mass of quasi-commodities. This discussion can be seen as a continuation of the special issue of this journal on debt. 29. K. Marx, Capital 1, 132. Ronald Coase explored this idea in his famous essay “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica, New Series, 4(16) (November 1937): 386–405; within firms, the price mechanism is not used for allocation. 30. K. Marx, Capital 1, 201. So the commodification or decommodification of components of commodities is a strategic question for capitalist producers. Mergers and acquisitions are another sort of decommodification. 31. We note Ha-Joon Chang’s warning in Thing 1 of his 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010): there is no free market. 32. K. Marx, Results, in Capital 1, 1026. 33. K. Marx, Capital 1, 139. 34. K. Marx, Results, in Capital 1, 949. 35. K. Marx, “Results of the Direct Production Process,” translated by B. Fowkes, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 34 (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 141–142. Marx makes explicit the point that this tendency toward wage labor holds for workers outside the formally capitalist domain: “with the growth of capitalist production all services become transformed into wage-labour, and those who perform them into wage-labourers ” (ibid.). Workers engaged in providing private services, e.g., gardening, childcare, house cleaning (though these can also be organised and provided on a capitalist basis); government workers; and workers employed by nonprofit firms, are all wage laborers. Presently, that is a large number, about a quarter of the paid US workforce. 36. Marx points up the propensity to project features of the dominant mode of production where they do not belong: “But in line with the dominant

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43. 44. 45.

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mode of production, even those kinds of labour which have not been subjugated by capitalist in reality are so in thought. For example, the selfemploying worker is his own wage-labourer; his own means of production appear to him in his own mind as capital” (K. Marx, “Results,” in Capital 1, 1,042). K. Marx, Capital 1, 202–203. K. Marx, Capital 1, 174–175. K. Marx, Capital 1, 232. Ibid., 233. Ibid. “The Used Car Was Repossessed, But the Lender Is Still Collecting,” by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery, The New York Times, June 19, 2017, sec. A. K. Marx, Capital 1, 235–236. K. Marx, Capital 1, 280. In Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, T. Smith drives home the point that liberal egalitarians lack the concept of capital; so they are unable to judge its troubling social and political implications. Georg Simmel moves in this direction in describing how money fosters a blasé attitude that is indifferent to the specific features of things (P. Murray, Reflections on Commercial Life, 340). This persisting double character is a prima facie reason to question Herbert Marcuse’s talk of “one-dimensionality” in One-Dimensional Man. The pessimism associated with the Frankfurt School thesis of a one-dimensional society is a target of Moishe Postone’s criticism: “In seeking to formulate a more adequate critique, Critical Theory ran into serious theoretical difficulties and dilemmas. These became manifest in a theoretical turn taken in the late 1930s, wherein postliberal capitalism came to be conceived as a completely administered, integrated, one-dimensional society, one that no longer gives rise to any immanent possibility of social emancipation” [M. Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 118]. Postone counters this pessimism by appealing to the “shearing pressure” created by the contradictory double character of capital’s accumulation process: “This process of production is both a process of production of material wealth, increasingly based on socially general knowledge, and a process of the production of value, based on immediate labor time expenditure. Hence, to analyze its concrete form is to examine a mode of production that, on a deep level, embodies the contradictory structural imperatives of achieving ever-higher levels of productivity and producing a surplus of value. Historical changes in the concrete form of fully developed capitalist production can, according to such an approach, be grasped in terms of a growing ‘shearing pressure’ generated by these

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54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

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two increasingly opposed imperatives” (M. Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, 348). The use-value aspect of the double character of capital accumulation cannot be effaced by the value aspect; it keeps mattering. K. Marx, Capital 1, 131. K. Marx, Capital 1, 179. K. Marx, Capital 1, 199. K. Marx, Capital 1, 153. Marx, Capital 1, 227. M. Campbell, “Value Objectivity and Habit,” in The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital”, edited by R. Bellofiore and N. Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 86. Likewise, in classical political economy, the double character of production collapses into production per se: “[B]ourgeois or capitalist production … is consequently for him [Ricardo] not a specific definite mode of production, but simply the mode of production” (K. Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II, edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya, translated by R. Simpson. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), 504n. Michael Sandel points out that life insurance policies are purchased, bundled, and sold as death bonds. K. Marx, Capital 1, 139. In his discussion of gift-giving, Sandel points out that mainstream economists, oblivious to the commodity and money as significant social forms, insist that money is the only rational gift. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, translated by H. Macfarlane, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 161–162. Christian Lotz offers a pointed examination of the significance of this monetary mediation in The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014). See also G. Simmel. K. Marx, Capital 1, 229. At a local community college, when students register for courses on-line, they put them in a shopping cart and check out to complete registration. Marx writes of the real subsumption of labour under capital; we extend the concept to the real subsumption of goods and services under the commodity capital form. Even packaging can be a variety of real subsumption: when you buy 16 batteries at once, how many end up wasted? K. Marx, Capital 1, 230. See T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899). Marx, too, links commercial wealth and social recognition: “The … value of a commodity measures the degree of its attractiveness for all

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65. 66.

67.

68.

69.

70. 71.

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other elements of material wealth, and therefore measures the social wealth of its owner” (Capital 1, 230). See, for example, J. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, translated by C. Levin (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), and “Consumer Society,” in Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present, edited by P. Murray (New York: Routledge, 1997), 447–473. K. Marx, Capital 1, 197; K. Marx, Capital 1, 229. M. Johnston, “How Big Is the Underground Economy in America?” March 29, 2016, Investopedia website: http://www.investopedia.com/ articles/markets/032916/how-big-underground-economy-america.asp. See Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017) and the earlier study by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/ White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). To get a sense of how compromised household ownership of purchased commodities is by credit, consider that, in May 2017, the New York Federal Reserve Bank reported a high-water mark for consumer debt in the US, 12.73 trillion dollars: 71.4% in home mortgages, 10.6% in student loans, 9.2% in auto loans and 6.0% in credit card debt. See M. Corkery and S. Cowley, “Household Debt Makes a Comeback in the U.S.,” The New York Times, May 17, 2017. “The practice of Americans buying consumer goods on the installment plan dates back to the Civil War. Manufacturers realised that more people could afford to buy sewing machines and parlor organs if they bought now and paid later. By the early twentieth century, increasingly efficient American factories churned out more and cheaper products, like washing machines, refrigerators, phonographs and radios. Most of them could be bought on installment” (S. Smith, “The American Dream and Consumer Credit,” American RadioWorks, A Better Life: Creating the American Dream: http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/ americandream/b1.html). About 75% of US households use credit cards, and the median current amount owed is about $3,000. A. Miller, Death of a Salesman, edited by G. Weales (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 35–36 and 139. J. Hightower, “Corporate ‘Repair Prevention’ Schemes Steal the Right to fix our own belongings,” The Hightower Lowdown, 18(6) (June 2017): 1–4. C. Dougherty, “Battles Simmer as Workers Try to Go to Rivals,” The New York Times, July 15, 2017, sec. A.

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73. Gary Becker employs the term “shadow price” in The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 5– 6. If things that are not commodities, that do not have actual prices, are attributed “shadow prices,” it must be because they are “shadow commodities.” 74. D. Ironmonger, “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labour: Estimating Gross Household Product,” Feminist Economics, 2(3) (1996): 37–64. 75. “How to measure prosperity,” in The Economist, April 30th, 2016. 76. The Natural Capital Project’s website is at: https://www.naturalcapitalp roject.org/ and its “What Is Natural Capital?” web-page is at: https:// www.naturalcapitalproject.org/what-is-natural-capital/. 77. “What Is Natural Capital?”: https://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/whatis-natural-capital/.

Bibliography Anderson, E. Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Baudrillard, J. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by C. Levin. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981. Baudrillard, J. “Consumer Society.” In Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by P. Murray. New York, Routledge, 1997, pp. 447–473. Becker, G. S. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Campbell, M. “The Transformation of Money into Capital in Marx’s Capital.” In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the “Grundrisse”. Edited by R. Bellofiore, P. Thomas, and G. Starosta. Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 149–175. Campbell, M. “Value Objectivity and Habit.” In The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital ”. Edited by R. Bellofiore and N. Taylor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 63–87. Chang, H.-J. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. Clarke, S. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982. Coase, R. “The Nature of the Firm.” Economica, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 16. (November 1937): 386–405. Corkery, M., and S. Cowley. “Household Debt Makes a Comeback in the U.S.” The New York Times, May 17, 2017, sec. A. Dougherty, C. “Battles Simmer as Workers Try to Go to Rivals.” The New York Times, July 15, 2017, sec. A.

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Hightower, J. “Corporate ‘Repair Prevention’ Schemes Steal the Right to fix our own belongings.” The Hightower Lowdown, Vol. 18, No. 6 (June 2017): 1–4. Hubbard, R. G. and A. P. O’Brien. Microeconomics, 5th ed. New York: Pearson, 2014. Ironmonger, D. “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labour: Estimating Gross Household Product.” Feminist Economics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1996): 37–64. Johnston, M. “How Big Is the Underground Economy in America?” March 29, 2016. Investopedia website: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/ 032916/how-big-underground-economy-america.asp. Lotz, C. The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Lukács, G. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971. Marcuse, H. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Marx, K. Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II. Edited by S.W. Ryazanskaya. Translated by R. Simpson. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968. Marx, K. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Edited by M. Dobb. Translated by S.W. Ryazanskaya. New York: International Publishers, 1970. Marx, K. Capital: Volume One. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books: 1976 [1894]. Marx, K. “Results of the Immediate Production Process.” Translated by Rodney Livingstone. In Capital: Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Marx, K. “Results of the Direct Production Process.” Translated by Ben Fowkes. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 34. New York: International Publishers, 1994. Marx, K. “Economic Manuscripts of 1857—58.” Edited by L. Miskievich. Translated by Ernst Wangermann. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 28. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986. Marx, K., and F. Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by H. Macfarlane. In Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Edited by Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. Miller, A. Death of a Salesman. Edited by G. Weales. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Moseley, F. Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in “Capital” and the End of the ‘Transformation Problem’.” Leiden: Brill, 2016. Murray, P. The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form. Leiden: Brill 2016.

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Murray, P., ed. Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. New York: Routledge, 1997. Murray, P., and J. Schuler. “Social Form and the ‘Purely Social’: On the Kind of Sociality Involved in Value.” In The Social Ontology of Capital. Edited by D. Krier and M. P. Worrell. Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 121–141. Oliver, M., and T. Shapiro. Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Postone, M. Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rothstein, R. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017. Sandel, M. J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Satz, D. Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Silver-Greenberg, J., and M. Corkery. “The Used Car Was Repossessed, But the Lender Is Still Collecting.” The New York Times, June 19, 2017, sec. A. Simmel, G. “The Metropolis and Modern Mental Life.” In Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by Patrick Murray. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 335–347. Smith, S. “The American Dream and Consumer Credit.” American RadioWorks, A Better Life: Creating the American Dream: http://americanradioworks.pub licradio.org/features/americandream/b1.html Smith, T. Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Karl Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Smith, T. Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account. Leiden: Brill, 2006. The Natural Capital Project: https://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/. Torrens, R. Essay on the Production of Wealth. London, 1821. Veblen, T. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Walzer, M. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983. “What Is Natural Capital?”: https://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/what-is-nat ural-capital/.

CHAPTER 9

A Brilliant Failure: Hegel and Marx Assess the Enlightenment

For its adherents, the European Enlightenment signified the emergence of a rational society achieved by subjecting the existing world to criticism. In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant calls for broad freedom of citizens to question laws, rulers, and religious authorities while continuing to obey them. This legally protected tolerance for criticism is one way that reason advances in history. The great thinkers of the nineteenth century—from Hegel to Marx to Mill—inherit from the Enlightenment the duty to confront existing institutions and practices. Marx’s thesis that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it” is congenial to Enlightenment thinkers. Modern philosophy embarks with caution, as Descartes restricted systematic doubt to knowledge; later, the social order increasingly becomes a fit object for criticism and restructuring. The critics of enlightenment are legion. Hegel and Marx are seldom linked to this topic. Thus we do not see how Marx draws from Hegel’s exposition of Enlightenment to uncover utility as a disguise taken by capital. For both Hegel and Marx, Enlightenment leads to the pseudonotion of utility, which paves the way for terror. Marx rejects the pretensions of utility in the opening paragraphs of Capital:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_9

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The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing.1

Marx notes that utility erases the specific features that make things useful. To begin to grasp capital means we must reject utility as a bogus substitute for usefulness, which remains a general but reasonable conception. But Hegel and Marx are rarely mentioned as critics of utility. Both go beyond standard criticisms of Utilitarian theory to identify utility as a dangerous imposter that fails to grasp any aspect of the world. The neglect of Hegel’s and Marx’s work on this topic has consequences. Well-known critics of enlightenment, such as members of the Frankfurt School like Max Horkheimer, generally overlook their trenchant criticism. Consequently, their criticism replicates the terms of Enlightenment rather than moving beyond them. This essay presents Hegel’s account of enlightenment followed by Marx’s, which engages Hegel’s. By the term “enlightenment” Hegel and Marx understand a failed project at liberation.2 For Hegel, the failure lies in the form of consciousness that he calls pure insight. For Marx, the failure is rooted in socio-historical practices that perpetuate the defects of pure insight. For both, enlightenment describes conditions that are not limited to a particular historical period. They agree that bogus notions have real consequences in the world. In a closing section, I consider how the way the Frankfurt School, specifically Max Horkheimer, addresses enlightenment concedes too much and loses conceptual ground won by the early critics. Hegel addresses enlightenment in his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Lectures on the History of Philosophy His focus is on the flawed logic that reason adopts in its campaign for a rational society. This flawed logic is more visible in the crude doctrines of the French enlightenment than in great thinkers like Kant. For Hegel, enlightenment in both crude and sophisticated forms is defined by awareness of the subject’s activity in constituting knowledge and morality. But heightened self-awareness breeds the skepticism that concludes that things have no content except what we put into them. Thus Richard Rorty concludes that it is us all

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the way down, “there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.”3 Enlightenment reaches its limit in the notion of the residual thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself is unknowable. The emergence of utility breaks through this roadblock and restores momentum to enlightenment. In the Phenomenology, utility leads directly to the unfettered destruction of absolute freedom and terror. For Hegel, utility signifies a false and dangerous metaphysics. The enlightenment’s push toward a rational society issues in violence. Marx offers a historical materialist account of the enlightenment and its mindset. He criticizes Hegel’s focus on forms of consciousness, and specifically, pure insight. Instead, Marx addresses the social practices, specifically, commerce, that lay the basis for enlightenment and the currency of utility. While utility may be a bogus notion, it has staying power where the capitalist mode of production dominates.4 Marx explains how theories of utility disguise the exploitation that comes with capitalism. Aiming at the “greatest happiness” through utility optimization is the alibi for striving after ever greater profits. Marx goes beyond Hegel to show how that empty and dangerous notion becomes entrenched in modern life.

The Enlightenment in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy Enlightenment, says Kant, is the audacious mindset that questions authority and “dares to know.”5 For Hegel, enlightened thinkers are certain that they can grasp all things without turning to authority or custom. The spirit of the Enlightenment is egalitarian: “pure insight is thus the Spirit that calls to every consciousness: be for yourselves what you all are in yourselves—reasonable.”6 This confidence in the power of the human intellect is a declaration of independence, the intellectual harbinger of democracy: The point of most importance with these philosophers is that what is to be accepted as valid must have presence, and that man in all knowledge must be himself the knower; for … these philosophers made war on all external

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authority of state and church, and in particular on abstract thought which has no present meaning to us.7

What is true must be directly evident to persons. For the Enlightenment, “you have to show me” is more than a slogan. Presence to the truth, moreover, obliges us to reform society by bringing truth into existence. In the Lectures, Hegel admires the Enlightenment in France for its vibrant criticism, not its crude doctrines. In challenging corruption and error, writers such as Voltaire and Diderot fomented cultural tension.8 Calling for reform, they confronted church and state: The attack of the reasoning instinct against a condition of degeneracy … against the positive side of a religion that has become wooden and lifeless … with its might and magnificence, the corruption of its manners, its avarice, its ambition, its luxury … French philosophy also attacked the state; it assailed prejudices and superstition, especially the depravity of civic life, of court manners … We must represent to ourselves the horrible state of society, the misery and degradation in France, in order to appreciate the services that these writers rendered … the shamelessness, the dishonesty were past belief.9

Moved by contempt for the old regime, the critics added force to demands for change. As a cultural insurgency the Enlightenment marks a turning point in history, the consciousness that anticipates the formation of the modern state and civil society. For Hegel, the Enlightenment furthers the purifying work of the Protestant Reformation in the midst of “the most wretched superstition, priestly domination, stupidity, degradation of mind, and … squandering of riches … in the midst of public misery.”10 The Reformation had recognized individual consciousness as fundamental. Insisting that everyone must grasp the truth for himself, the French thinkers “completed the Reformation that Luther began.”11 They adopted Locke’s empiricism rather than Descartes’ doubt and demanded that what was true or essential must be proven to each inquirer. No ritual or belief is presumed essential unless it first shows its truth to all. Nothing is accepted on trust or from authority. The sign of the cross is replaced by the “standard of thought” under which the Enlightenment “shall conquer.”12 Hegel finds incisive protest more compelling than the positive doctrines upheld by philosophers of the French Enlightenment. In the Lectures, he states that to maintain any interest in its positive side was

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“out of the question.” The search for an all-encompassing doctrine led thinkers to materialism, determinism, atheism, and naturalism. La Mettrie teaches that “matter alone exists” and thought refers to brain modifications. For Helvétius, all virtues stem from selfish desires, thus virtues are fraudulent. For Baron d’Holbach, the universe is “an unbroken chain of causes and effects” in which human behavior, like all natural events, is lodged.13 Utility is the practical counterpart to materialism put forth by Helvétius and d’Holbach. By comparison with the materialism of Spinoza, the empiricism of Locke, or the virtues in Hume, these doctrines merit little attention, in Hegel’s view. For superior ideas, Hegel looked to Kant and other German thinkers, where thinking predominates over action. Nonetheless, the logic that defines and limits enlightenment shapes both Kant and the French writers: And in the Aufklärung, it [the absolute Notion] likewise made its way to Germany in such a manner that all existence, all action, was called upon to serve a useful purpose, i.e., the implicit was done away with and everything had to be for another; and that for which everything had to be is man, self-consciousness, taken, however, as signifying all men generally. The consciousness of this action in abstract form is the Kantian philosophy … Kantian philosophy is the Enlightenment reduced to method; it states that nothing true can be known, but only the phenomenal.14

Kant’s philosophy is more subtle than that of the French writers. What they share is a view of activity as qualifying content as for us, leaving the thing-in-itself beyond the reach of the self.15

Enlightenment in the Phenomenology of Spirit The Enlightenment is taken up in the latter half of the Phenomenology. The chapters of this division anticipate Hegel’s philosophy of objective spirit, which includes the social embodiments of freedom in family, law, state, morality, and religion. Each chapter tracks the struggles that define spirit, such as the conflict between human and divine law in Antigone. Pure insight is Hegel’s name for the form of enlightened consciousness. The Enlightenment pits pure insight against naïve faith, or what it calls superstition. Pure insight wins all of its battles against superstition. Hegel’s point is that those oblivious to the centrality of the mind’s activity will be squashed by those aware that only by our involvement

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in sensing and understanding are knowledge and morality possible. We cannot get at the truth without acting on things as prospective knowers. Our activity inescapably shapes whatever we come to know. Faith that becomes enlightened retreats from its former rituals and creeds. Having retraced every divine predicate to its anthropomorphic source, enlightened faith has nothing to say about God. It loses all its certainties and posits the infinite as supreme but unknowable. Enlightened faith is pure insight applied to God. With this outcome, the limits embedded in the Enlightenment become visible. Pure insight ultimately sinks into estrangement, since, despite its aspiration to grasp this world, it eventually renders this world into its own impositions or “constructs” and an unknowable beyond. Like its counterpart (enlightened faith), pure insight ultimately sees through even the so-called primary qualities and posits matter as the unreachable thingin-itself. As it did in the Lectures, enlightenment moves from success to failure. Pure insight succeeds in its campaign against gullible faith. In upholding its positive doctrine, however, its defects become visible. In the Phenomenology, early forms of consciousness seek truth but ignore or discount how the subject’s activity is required to reach this goal. What marks enlightenment as superior is that it fully acknowledges the subject’s activity in constituting knowledge and routing out corruption. In Hegel’s terms, enlightenment grasps the inherent conceptuality of its objective, truth. But pure insight does not deliver on its promise. Realizing the inescapable involvement of its activity perversely thwarts pure insight’s ability to reach its goal. This sort of self-awareness comes at a great cost: This insight, as the self that apprehends itself, completes [the stage of] culture; it apprehends nothing but self and everything as self, i.e. it comprehends everything, wipes out the objectivity of things and converts all intrinsic being into a being for itself.16

Awareness of objects as mine “wipes out” objectivity. On one hand, the self is extolled for grasping the essence of things. The primary activity celebrated by enlightenment is human sensing and subsequent reflection. Pure insight moves from sensing to reflectively grasp the truth of its objects. Sensing is the means to truth. In sensing, pure insight expected to erase the distance that separates subject from objects. But accounting for its own activity in sensing is the sticking point. Insight finds that its

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activity is entangled with the truth of things. Losing confidence, insight now confronts two objects: one relative to reflection and one utterly beyond reflection, the object for-us and the object in-itself. Without any assurance that they are the same, insight takes the knowable object as inherently subjective. The absolute or unqualified essence lies beyond the would-be knower and is determined as the unknowable thing-in-itself. Self-awareness routs ignorance and naïveté. However, as self-awareness grows, the objective, the in-itself, becomes elusive. Pure insight does not figure out how sensing and reflection can get at truth in-itself or how to appreciate the subjective features of knowing without sacrificing objectivity. Enlightenment is consigned by its purist logic—my activity in knowing is purely mine—to the subjectivity of its own achievements. The goal, for pure insight, is truth—defined by Hegel as that which is in and for itself. Pure insight’s sort of self-awareness, however, puts its goal out of reach. It cannot grasp the truth.

The Enlightenment’s Victory Over Na¨ive Faith In the Phenomenology, naïve faith, by contrast with pure insight, is replete with beliefs about God and the supernatural. For faith, the infinite is just as real as the world around it. In its naïve state, it combines beliefs that are grounded in sense perception with beliefs about God, the finite with the transcendent. Faith moves easily between these two conceptual households until pure insight challenges it to a showdown: The believing consciousness weighs and measures by a twofold standard; it has two sorts of eyes, two sorts of ears, speaks with two voices, has duplicated all ideas without comparing the twofold meanings. In other words, faith lives in two sorts of non-notional perceptions, the one the perception of the slumbering consciousness which lives purely in non-notional thoughts, the other the waking consciousness which lives solely in the world of sense; and in each of them it has its own separate housekeeping.17

The struggle between faith and pure insight is actually one-sided. For faith, God is the sole being whose existence is absolute, i.e., not relative to the finite. In treating God as immediately present, faith is vulnerable. With only sense perception as its guide, it cannot defend against pure insight’s skeptical attacks directed at its creed and liturgy: why bow down and pray to a wooden cross? Why venerate bread and wine? The transcendent,

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once full of meaning for faith, loses content. As the object of worship is revealed as one of its own making, the believing life empties out. Enlightenment is self-reflective: whatever is objective is taken as actually resulting from the self’s activity. Awareness of this activity sets pure insight apart from naïve believers, who ignore their role in finding their self in the infinite: At first, Enlightenment affirms this moment of the Notion, that it is an act of consciousness; opposing faith, it maintains that the absolute Being of faith is a Being of the believer’s own consciousness qua a self, or that this absolute Being is a product of consciousness.18

The victory of pure insight over faith is inescapable. Faith lacks the conceptual resources to comprehend how the finite believer can be present to the infinite. Faith does not grasp its own activity as immanent in the truth that it serves, whereas pure insight owns its own activity as essential. Pure insight inevitably displaces the object of traditional faith, just as the constitutional state inevitably replaces absolute monarchy. An advance in consciousness has occurred in history. But the attending loss kicks in with the emptied-out God left after naïve faith is defeated by pure insight. The faith that emerges from these attacks is enlightened. It adopts the standpoint of pure insight, acknowledging its own activity in prayer, service, and belief as essential. Once ideas and sentiments are given human origin, none can be assigned to God. That is the conclusion drawn by Demea in Hume’s Dialogues in rejecting theism: All our ideas derived from the senses are confessedly false and illusive, and cannot therefore be … in a Divine Intelligence … if we retain these terms when we mention the Supreme Being, we ought to acknowledge that their meaning … is totally incomprehensible; and that the infirmities of our nature do not permit us to reach any ideas which in the least correspond to the ineffable sublimity of the Divine Attributes.19

Becoming enlightened means becoming conscious of the self’s presence in all aspects of life and acknowledging that all content comes from the self. But God is absolute and does not depend on humans. Enlightened faith preserves the being of God by putting it out of reach. What lies beyond the self’s activity is unknowable. The infinite cannot be

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grasped. The upshot is a collapse of content in doctrines and of trust in rituals: As a result, faith has lost the content which filled its element, and collapses into a state in which it moves listlessly to and fro within itself. It has been expelled from its kingdom; or, this kingdom has been ransacked, since the waking consciousness has monopolized every distinction and expansion of it and has vindicated earth’s ownership of every portion of it and given them back to earth.20

Throughout the Phenomenology, a divided consciousness signifies unhappiness. Like “The Unhappy Consciousness” of an earlier chapter, enlightened faith is divided and discontent. Pure insight will eventually share this outcome.

What Lies Beyond Reflection: The Thing-in-Itself Each section of the Phenomenology advances the education of consciousness in the pursuit of truth. Enlightenment makes great strides by acknowledging the activity of reason in achieving knowledge. In positing the thing-in-itself, however, enlightenment runs into its limits. For enlightenment, thinking both is a condition of objectivity and an obstacle to attaining it. Enlightenment’s dilemma is this: it is unable both to acknowledge its activity and grasp objectivity: truth eludes it. The failure to overcome this opposition between subject and object runs throughout the Phenomenology. In the Introduction Hegel identifies the root error of the modern era as viewing cognition as a tool or medium interposed between a knowing subject and its object: To be specific, it [this way conceiving of cognition] takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; or in other words, it presupposes that cognition that, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth.21

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Tools affect their objects. If cognition is a tool, then the object is changed by cognition. As an instrument, cognition gets in the way, leaving knowers without a way to correct for the presumed distortion. If cognition involves a medium that filters the object, the unfiltered object lies out of reach. But we seek to know the object itself. Noticing the activity of mind undermines confidence that truth or the absolute is attainable. An enlightened mind can find no assurance that truth relative to cognition corresponds to its object in an unqualified way. Such see-sawing concerning the self’s activity can be illustrated with the story of King Midas and his curse. The king was granted his wish: whatever he touched would turn to gold. His touch created endless wealth. But he did not foresee the deadly consequences of a world that fulfills his wish. Food turned into gold does not nourish; golden water poisons; the king’s embrace kills. Human activity, like Midas’s touch, appears at first to be a liberating power: we are not outsiders to our world. Enlightenment conquers all opposition. But its victory brings unforeseen consequences: whatever pure insight touches loses its pristine character and is rendered subjective. To retain its inherent content and be known, the object cannot be touched by the self. But this is impossible. Like Midas, whose touch leaves gold everywhere, enlightened thought leaves the self everywhere. What pure insight sought as object is absorbed into the self; in the same movement, the world empties out. For Hegel, this is the trajectory of the enlightenment: pure insight sets out to know the world, but its way of thinking about thinking interferes with its objective. What is known exists only relative to the subject, while inherent truth lies beyond its reach. In the Phenomenology, knowledge seeks to unify what is in and for itself: reason seeks to grasp the essence of its objects. With its Midas curse, human reflection as enlightenment conceives of it cannot achieve the unity of being and thought, the in-itself and for-us. Oddly, thinking keeps us from truth. At their limit, both the secular and religious enlightenments ultimately posit matter and God as pure things that lie beyond reflection. Pure things remain after all contact with reflection is peeled away. Ultimately, enlightened thinkers reach a stalemate: either matter or God. Each is an unknowable essence devoid of predicates, on the far side of reflection. For the secular enlightenment, matter is the alternative to an unknowable God: “consequently, insight is left with an essence divided

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between sensible existence and the predicateless absolute of matter.”22 For Hegel, enlightenment empties the world of inherent being and leaves “empty husks” of matter. An unknowable essence stymies the work of enlightenment.

Utility---The Truth of Enlightenment Throughout the Phenomenology, when consciousness reaches a stalemate, experience grinds to a halt. The logic of the situation becomes visible only as an undertaking stalls. Momentum resumes after the flawed logic is revised and new concepts emerge from failure. In the Phenomenology, “we”—the observers—see what eludes consciousness: how the stalemate ends after consciousness draws together what it had held apart. The outcome signifies the “truth” of a form of consciousness. An unknowable essence—whether God or matter—blocks the advance of enlightenment. In the section “The Truth of Enlightenment,” pure insight recovers from estrangement by breaking through to the thing-initself and positing utility as the inherent content of all things. Utility is the truth or outcome of enlightenment that draws inherent being into the subject’s reach. The notion of utility solves a problem inherent in determining reflection: it puts the absolute essence of things within the grasp of persons. No longer is the enlightenment estranged. Utility breaks through this dualism in two stages: as usefulness that dissolves into utility. The notion of utility has a history that precedes the work of Bentham and the Mills in nineteenth-century England. Helvétius and d’Holbach were among the French thinkers of the eighteenth century who turned to utility in their materialistic rendering of reality. Utility, in both England and France, became a central tool of those calling for reform in the name of reason. Hegel’s brief account is one of the earliest criticisms of utility.23 Many features of later debates about utility are missing from these pages of the Phenomenology. For example, Hegel does not consider whether utility represents pleasure or preference; he does not address the drive to calculate that runs through utility theories. He does not worry about the moral shortcomings of utility, for example, the criticism that utility runs roughshod over the integrity of the person. Hegel proposes no theory of utility. How enlightenment culminates in utility is his focus. What is most significant in this quick exposition of utility is how Hegel recognizes the difference between the useful and utility, a distinction often overlooked and sometimes denied.

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For Hegel, enlightenment empties the world of inherent being and leaves “empty husks” of matter. At this point, matter is pushed aside by a new metaphysics that leaves no breaches separating humans from objects: the Enlightenment ultimately posits all entities as useful. Being useful restores movement and replaces matter as essence. As useful, the essence is visible and available: the thing itself is useful. Cotton has strength, comfort, and versatility. These traits inherent in cotton are evident to us. They constitute the object itself. The usefulness of cotton includes being in itself, being for others, and being for itself. Usefulness is dynamic; it changes. When compared to other fibers, cotton is less strong, and less versatile. Usefulness blankets the universe and recovers the satisfaction that initially defined enlightenment. It encompasses not only things but persons: Just as everything is useful to man, so man is useful too, and his vocation is to make himself a member of the group, of use for the common good and serviceable to all … so far as he serves others, so far is he taking care of himself: one hand washes the other … Different things are useful to one another in different ways; but all things are mutually serviceable through their own nature.24

The essence of persons, like that of things, lies in their mutual usefulness. “One hand washes the other.” “All things exist to be used by others.” As useful, all things are known and restored to the possession of pure insight. In Hegel’s exposition of enlightenment, the satisfactions of usefulness are short-lived. Being useful claims to constitute objects, but the designation is unstable. The goal of pure insight is to know its objects. But to find all things useful does not determine a stable essence. Useful properties are in flux. Things break down and wear out. What is once useful, like the engine crank, no longer meets needs. Being useful is ephemeral and “immediately without support … not an intrinsic being, but is essentially for an other which is the power that absorbs it.”25 Usefulness is relative to others in all ways. What is posited as inherent lacks enduring being. Matter is a fixed designation but empty and unknowable. Usefulness is knowable but ever-changing; it leaves nothing stable to grasp as essence: Since the Useful still has the form of an object for pure insight, it does have a world, one which, it is true, is no longer in and for itself, but yet a world which it distinguishes from itself.26

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Usefulness spirals back into the self continually. A progression occurs from positing objects as useful to surrendering all content to the emptiness of utility. We find objects to be useful for certain reasons. Usefulness has recognizable content, but it lacks lasting qualities. This vestige of objectivity is lost when usefulness decays into the emptiness and arbitrariness of utility. Utility is not found in the world; it is conferred on the world as its blank slate. With utility, the self absorbs the object in its entirety.

From Utility to Terror With utility, the exposition of pure insight ends and the sections on morality begin. A pattern runs through the Phenomenology: when consciousness reaches a stalemate in seeking to know, it reverses to a practical mode to regain momentum. The unfolding of the theoretical and practical sounds out the limits of a particular logic. Earlier in the text, understanding the realm of forces stalls and consciousness shifts to the self’s struggle for recognition; later, observing reason grinds to a halt, and acting reason emerges from the failure. This reversal from the theoretical to the practical transpires here. Pure insight and faith offered competing theoretical accounts of reality. This quest after truth runs aground due to the inability to acknowledge their own activity and achieve truth; to regain momentum, forms of morality arise. The sections on morality depict the practical enlightenment. Utility is the hinge that moves from knowing the world to acting upon it. Pure insight arrives at utility when it “sees right into the object”27 and finds only the flux of its own determinations, i.e., its self. Being useful is the enlightenment’s grasp after an essence that fails. Utility recaptures the emptiness of matter filled now by the self according to its preferences. Since the object has no fixed essence, the self is free to determine content at will. Usefulness is a determination of the understanding; objects are found useful in this or that respect. Usefulness is tethered to objectivity; objects are useful because of their properties. Utility is cut loose from the properties of the object and is strictly a determination of the will. Utility does not uncover the content of the object; it dictates the content. Utility, in Hegel’s account, has no measure. From the standpoint of utility, whether something is just or unjust, right or wrong, brings happiness or pain, is stipulated by the will. With utility, the fleeting character of the useful turns into arbitrary subjective preferences. Bogus notions can have real consequences: utility is false and dangerous.

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Out of utility arises absolute freedom. The will born from utility is a loose cannon, i.e., not constrained by any existing determinations in the world. Its task is not to find reason in the world. Its mission is to impose a “rational” society—its “end”—through the destruction of existing reality, if necessary: Consciousness has found its Notion in Utility. But it is partly still an object, and partly, for that very reason, still an End to be attained, which consciousness does not find itself to possess immediately. Utility is still a predicate of the object, not itself a subject or the immediate and sole actuality of the object … This withdrawal from the form of objectivity of the Useful has, however, already taken place in principle and from this inner revolution there emerges the actual revolution of the actual world, the new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom … In fact what we have here is no more than an empty show of objectivity separating self-consciousness from possession.28

The emptiness implicit in utility makes its appearance in the general will. Hegel describes this transition from utility to absolute freedom as “revolutionary”: “from this inner revolution there emerges the actual revolution of the actual world, the new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom.”29 The bursting of the bubble of utility into absolute freedom is a “virtual fait accompli” because: In fact, what we have here is no more than an empty show of objectivity separating self-consciousness from possession … partly, however, this simple determination no longer possesses anything of its own, it is rather pure metaphysic, pure Notion, or a pure knowing by self-consciousness.30

Because all the properties that make things useful are for us, pure insight sees through them, positing the utility that is inherent to the useful thing as something residual that Hegel names “pure metaphysics.” Due to its emptiness, utility gives way to the vacant form of subjectivity of absolute freedom. Without any direction from the world, absolute freedom topples into tyranny and terror. The lofty aspirations of enlightenment lead to unfettered destruction. Hegel links the general will of Rousseau’s The Social Contract to the terror of the French Revolution. In both cases, abstractions conceived apart from understanding the world are imposed on existing institutions. Like utility, such abstractions spell trouble. The particular differences that

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have no place in the notion of absolute freedom actually exist within society and must be confronted. Existing institutions, social classes, and laws reflect and create particular real differences. Since the general will does not recognize existing differences as essential, it finds itself at war with existence: In this absolute freedom, therefore, all social groups or classes which are the spiritual spheres into which the whole is articulated are abolished; the individual consciousness that belonged to any such sphere, and willed and fulfilled itself in it, has put aside its limitation; its purpose is the general purpose, its language universal law, its work the universal work.31

A notion that lacks determination becomes an indiscriminate weapon. Force is directed against all the particular interests that violate the general will. Since all particularity is excluded from empty universality, any and every particular is a target. Hegel shows how abstractions conjured apart from the world are fit only for the work of destruction: “In this its characteristic work, absolute freedom becomes explicitly objective to itself, and self-consciousness learns what absolute freedom in effect is.”32 “To make abstractions hold good in actuality means to destroy actuality,” warns Hegel.33 The “characteristic work” of absolute freedom is terror. Hegel sympathized with the French Enlightenment’s criticisms of existing institutions. But absolute freedom is disengaged from the world and has no direction for reform to offer: Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a deed, there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction … Now that it has completed the destruction of the actual organization of the world, and exists just for itself, this is its sole object, an object that no longer has any content, possession, existence, or outer extension, but is merely this knowledge of itself as an absolutely pure and free individual self.34

It is not enough to be disaffected with existing society. Abstractions disengaged from comprehending actual institutions can only be used to negate: The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest

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of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.35

When nothing has essential content, its loss does not matter. Terror assumes a banal character, like slicing bread or swallowing water. The course of enlightenment in Hegel’s Phenomenology moves from matter to usefulness, to utility, and finally to absolute freedom and terror. Spirit’s recovery from absolute freedom directed out at the world is absolute freedom directed inward. The sections that follow turn away from acting in the world to inner life as the locus of enlightenment: morality.

Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment: Capital, the Truth of Utility The category of utility is not found in Hegel’s works on logic; it is not a category of limited scope, such as thing or force or usefulness; utility is a pseudo-notion that must vanish as history advances. At least, such is a reasonable expectation. But utility does not vanish. Instead, notions of utility have become cornerstones of economic, political, and moral theories. Hegel is committed to the overall advance of reason in history. So the persistence of utility would surprise him. What accounts for its ongoing presence? Utility serves as an alibi and we might wonder what it conceals.36 Forty years after the publication of the Phenomenology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels address this question in the German Ideology. Like Hegel, they find the enlightenment idea of utility preposterous, and they follow Hegel in regarding it as a “metaphysical abstraction.” Unlike Hegel, Marx and Engels see utility primarily not as the outcome of a form of consciousness, pure insight, run amuck but rather as the result of the social practices involved in the generalized circulation of money and commodities, which occurs when production is undertaken on a capitalist basis.37 For Marx, utility theories emerge in modern thought in step with the bourgeois relations that transform traditional societies into commercial ones. In his view, the enlightenment battles of pure insight with faith express the birth pains of capitalism: they are a rarified form of class struggle. This transformation moves across Europe at different rates. Utility did not emerge in France as an economic notion. France was not

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in the front ranks of emergent commercial societies. The French materialists were less tuned into the nascent commercial transformation. For Marx, the theory of utility espoused by the French materialists Helvétius and d’Holbach is primarily metaphysical and political, not economic. For French materialists, utility expressed sweeping opposition to the old regime: all things are now to be used for the benefit of all persons. Here utility severs things from the fixed content of traditional use in order to serve the welfare of all. Marx observes: Holbach depicts the entire activity of individuals in their mutual intercourse, e.g., speech, love, etc., as a relation of utility … Now these relations are supposed not to have the meaning peculiar to them but to be the expression and manifestation of some third relation attributed to them, the relation of utility.38

Utility claims that all things and activities share in a “third thing” that allows them to be compared.39 Pure insight serves as the vanguard of the emergent bourgeoisie class: leveling all activities and things to a common denominator serves capitalism’s leveling transformation of the world. Hegel characterizes this meltdown of all differences into lumps of sameness as “metaphysics.” The reduction of all things to undifferentiated sameness occurs first with the emptying of the notion of matter and then takes a practical turn with utility. The commercial spirit takes hold in England and Holland earlier than France; for Locke and Hobbes, according to Marx, the universal exploitation of nature was “directly connected with the economic content.”40 Nature is subject to the labor of humans in order to meet needs and turn a profit. By the nineteenth century, “the complete union of the theory of utility with political economy is to be found, finally, in [James] Mill.”41 The concept of utility for English political economists was “simply the registration of facts.”42 For modern commercial society, “being useful,” a basic dimension of human existence anywhere, disguises the actual goal of capitalism: to produce goods, cultivate land, and colonize as a means of making ever more money. The wilderness was intended by God to be plowed under and put to good use—“improved”—says John Locke, by “the industrious and rational.” “Useful” is an ordinary term that masks exploitation. That the destiny of all things is to be useful is the green light that commissions us to conquer the planet. Utility is the alibi that disguises the actual drive of capitalist society toward expansion.

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Such a concept persists if it addresses a real question or provides cover so that troubling questions are not raised. The turn from matter to utility paves the way for what is most striking in capitalism: that goods and services are set into strict quantitative relation through prices that allow comparisons of all commodities. For example, this ton of coal is equal to that truckload of bananas. What allows society to set prices is a real question. Coal and bananas do not share any observable trait except that they are products of the labor of miners and of growers. What diverse commodities share that allows for their being commensurated by prices is not directly observable. Some underlying third thing must provide the dimension that enables all commodities to be measured. For Marx, that third thing is congealed abstract human labor. For reformers challenging the old regime to make way for the commercial society emerging in the eighteenth century, utility is their sharp-edged tool. Like doubt in Descartes’ hands, utility cuts down old structures to liberate all things in the service of general human welfare: “All that is sacred is profaned; all that is solid melts into air.” The notion of utility persists because it seems to answer the question: what do all commodities share that makes universal exchange possible? It persists because it provides cover for a troubling reality. In a traditional society, persons exchange goods primarily to meet needs. In a capitalist society, that goal still pertains, but meeting needs cannot explain the chase after profit that drives the production of new wealth in the commodity form. For Marx, the animating goal of exchange in capitalist society is the accumulation of capital; meeting human needs is of secondary importance, a means to an end. Meeting any need will do as long as sufficient money is made. This expansion of value, as measured by money, occurs because workers create more value through their labor than what they are paid to work—a mismatch necessary to capitalism that Marx identifies as “exploitation.” For Marx, utility is the illusory revolution; capital is the “genuinely revolutionary” driving force of the Enlightenment. If capital sets the goal for which commodity exchange is the means, then capital is the truth of utility. Utility masks market exchanges, which in turn mask the growth of capital, the hidden purpose of production.

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Afterword: Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason For Hegel, the defining defect of enlightenment is its failure to reconcile the subject’s activity with the truth of the object. Enlightenment finds no release from the epistemic Midas touch. Reason cannot be active in the world without altering it. As subjectivity is recognized, objectivity slips away. Marx situates the critique of consciousness within the critique of capitalism. Bogus notions have staying power if they provide cover for troubling but persistent realities. The expropriation of surplus labor that drives production is masked by the cheery-sounding utility that exudes general happiness. Both Hegel and Marx focus on the concepts that drive skeptical outcomes and distort reality. How does their legacy influence more recent critics of enlightenment? Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s essays on enlightenment were written during and after World War II. For these theorists, domination of nature and of the masses are the result of an enlightenment that turns against myth, but, in leveling reality to formless stuff, itself becomes mythic and falsely totalizing in the end. On the surface, their account of faulty consciousness and institutions that unleash violence suggests continuity with the earlier critics. But the leaders of the Frankfurt School often work within the terms of enlightenment and do not grapple with fundamental concepts. I will focus on Horkheimer’s essay “Subjective Reason” as an example of a critique of enlightenment that accepts enlightenment premises. Horkheimer follows Max Weber and identifies subjective reason with instrumental reason, which can serve any goal. The substantive reason of traditional religion, art, morality, or metaphysics loses ground to technical rationality, where ends or goals are stipulated by the subject’s interests, drives, or desires. This shrunken reason lacks any way to judge ends; its purview does not extend beyond means: The present crisis of reason consists fundamentally in the fact that at a certain point thinking either became incapable of conceiving such objectivity at all or began to negate it as a delusion. This process was gradually extended to include the objective content of every rational concept. In the end, no particular reality can seem reasonable per se; all the basic concepts, emptied of their content, have come to be only formal shells. As reason is subjectivized, it also becomes formalized.43

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Subjective reason is a tool to reach objectives set by preferences; Horkheimer says, “the engineer is the best symbol of this age … not interested in understanding things for their own sake or for the sake of insight, but … their being fitted into a scheme.”44 In short, subjective reason will serve any master and usher in the realm of manipulation. Domination of nature and of persons is the outcome of instrumental reason writ large. As substantive reason wanes, the idea of truth sounds wishful and out of touch. Horkheimer insists that a future enlightenment awaits the reemergence of substantive or objective reason, though not by returning to traditional forms. But in this critique Horkheimer preserves a set of dualisms that needs to be challenged. He deplores the separation of means and ends, facts and values, science and metaphysics, useful and intrinsic, understanding and reason, objective and subjective that defines enlightenment. But he does not uproot these dualisms. Recouping the neglected side only shores up a problematic dichotomy. Recovery of new forms of substantive reason, rational ends, or truth sidesteps the fact that instrumental reason is a fraud that describes nothing real, including actual practices in science and mathematics. Unlike earlier critics of enlightenment, Horkheimer relies on the terms of enlightenment to recover autonomy, truth, and substantive reason. The thing-in-itself occupies a central role as the force of repressed nature and instincts. But the terms that generate skepticism will not release us from it. The diminishment of reason’s resources in public and private life that expedite systematic violence calls for a different kind of critique. A Hegelian analysis goes straight to the concepts in play. An instrument, such as a hammer, has specific traits designed to serve specific ends. A tool is not free-floating or fungible; means and ends are aspects of practices and institutions: in order to graduate, a student completes set requirements. A goal or objective exists only because means are conceivable. The notion that ends are indifferent to means can arise in a capitalist world only because the power of money indiscriminately serves any master. Money seems to be a pure means. But money’s fungibility presupposes a society organized around a specific aim—accumulating capital. Even, then, money discriminates, since there still are things that money cannot buy. The notion that means are indifferent to ends is false; instrumentality is a pseudo-concept, like utility. Supplementing instrumental reason with another kind of reason, whether grounded in art, justice, or religion, insures a skeptical outcome. The terms of enlightenment are

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entrenched in the separation of fact from value and nature from morality. These splits go to the core of enlightenment. A more rigorous analysis is needed to replace Horkheimer’s story of instrumental reason driving out substantive reason. From the early critics Hegel and Marx we learn the importance of getting better concepts with which to decipher the consciousness and political economy of enlightenment in order to determine its inherent flaws. Philosophy may not change the world, as Marx points out in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach. But better concepts do more than merely throw an “interpretation” on the world; they open up real possibilities for critique and action. The skeptical legacy of enlightenment is entrenched in modern society and continues to block our thinking about the world. Some notions like instrumentality, domination in general, or utility have appeal but do not lend themselves to thinking further. Flat concepts that lack internal determination do not open up questions or disclose tensions. Such concepts bypass actual structures. Better, more adequate concepts disclose the obstacles to and the possibilities for historical progress, which is what enlightenment sought from the start.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 126. 2. I will use the term “the Enlightenment” to refer to the period in European history centered around the second half of the eighteenth century. The movements of thought during this period took specific national forms such as the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the German Enlightenment. I will use the term “enlightenment” (lower-case) to refer to the kind of thinking typical of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but enlightenment thinking is not limited to particular historical periods. 3. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlii. 4. Bernard Williams anticipates a time when utility theory is left behind, “The day cannot be too far off in which we hear no more of it” [J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism for and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 150]. 5. Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” begins with the declaration “Sapere Aude” [Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, translated by Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983), 29].

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6. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 328. 7. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. III, translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York: The Humanities Press, 1974), 397. 8. The French thinkers that get more than a mention in Hegel’s Lectures include d’Holbach, Robinet, Montesquieu, Helvétius, and Rousseau. 9. Hegel, Lectures, pp. 388–389. 10. Ibid., p. 389. 11. Ibid., p. 398. 12. Ibid., p. 397. 13. Ibid., p. 393. 14. Ibid., p. 425. 15. For a contemporary version of pure insight that is always rendering the in-itself as the for-us, see Steven Vogel, Against Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1996). 16. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 296. 17. Ibid., p. 348. 18. Ibid., p. 345. 19. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980), 27. 20. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 349. 21. Ibid., p. 47. 22. Ibid., p. 208. 23. Hegel, Lectures, p. 403. 24. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 342–343. 25. Ibid., p. 353. 26. Ibid., p. 354. 27. Ibid., p. 355. 28. Ibid., pp. 355–356. 29. Ibid., 356. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 357. 32. Ibid., p. 360. 33. Hegel, Lectures, p. 425. 34. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 359–360. 35. Ibid., p. 360. 36. For Alasdair MacIntyre, utility always signifies subterfuge: “The greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content … a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses … when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use” [After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 64].

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37. A contemporary critic of utilitarianism, Bernard Williams, echoes Marx’s view: “Utilitarianism is unsurprisingly the value system for a society in which economic values are supreme; and also, at the theoretical level, because quantification in money is the only obvious form of what utilitarianism insists upon, the commensurability of values” [Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 89]. 38. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, translated by Clemens Dutt, W. Lough et al., in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 5: Marx and Engels: 1845—47 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 409. 39. In Capital, Marx argues that there actually is a “third thing” but that it is value, the substance of which, he goes on to argue, is abstract labor (Capital I, pp. 127–128). 40. Ibid., 411. 41. Ibid., 412. 42. Ibid. 43. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Company, 1974), 7. 44. Ibid., p. 151.

Bibliography Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. III. Translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson. New York, NY: The Humanities Press, 1974. ———. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1977. Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Company, 1974. Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1980. Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Translated by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Second edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Marx, Karl Capital, Vol. I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1976. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by Clemens Dutt, W. Lough et al. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 5: Marx and Engels: 1845—47 . New York, NY: International Publishers, 1976.

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Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Smart, J. J. C., and Bernard Williams. Utilitarianism for and Against. Toronto, Canada: Macmillan, 1973. Vogel, Steven. Against Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1996. Williams, Bernard. Morality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

CHAPTER 10

From Hegel on Enlightenment Terror to Marx on Capital

G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx were remarkable nineteenth-century analysts and interpreters of the rapidly developing phenomenon of capitalism.1 Marx’s views on capitalist society were greatly indebted to Hegel and to his critical engagements with Hegel’s thought. Marx’s early, unfinished Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right ” was a formative work. Marx wrote of Hegel’s last book: “The critique of the German philosophy of right and of the state, which received its most consistent, its richest, and its final comprehension through Hegel, is…the critical analysis of the modern state and of the actuality connected with it.”2 Marx’s Capital can be understood to be the mature formulation of his joint critique of the bourgeois theory of right and capitalist actuality. Here we show how Marx builds on, yet departs from, Hegel in a further way by contrasting Marx’s historical materialist conception of the Enlightenment and utility with Hegel’s account in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the culmination of the Enlightenment in utility, absolute freedom, and terror. Hegel focuses on the form of consciousness characteristic of the Enlightenment, “pure insight,” which sees through everything. Marx focuses on commercial practices, where capitalists see through commodities to their (monetary) value. This leads Marx to concentrate on the categories of value and capital, while discarding utility as a disguise.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_10

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Marx shares Hegel’s interest in forms of consciousness. His critique of the “bourgeois horizon,” which he sees underlying much of modern philosophy and political economy, adopts Hegel’s critique of the factoring form of consciousness (Verstand) characteristic of the Enlightenment, which trades in bifurcations, especially splits between the for us and the in itself, the subjective and objective.3 Marx’s theory in Capital is his mature theory of that form of consciousness as well as his mature critique of Hegel’s account of the Enlightenment and Hegel’s defense of the bourgeois theory of right.

Contrasting Hegel and Marx on Capitalist Society Hegel’s treatment of capitalism in the Philosophy of Right , under the heading of civil society, is a hybrid of brilliant insights and antiquated categories.4 Richard Winfield argues in The Just Economy that Hegel’s appreciation of the historical and ethical specificity of the institutions and practices of civil society makes him the first thinker with the conceptual resources to conceive of the just economy.5 All the same, Winfield grants that “Hegel’s analysis of capital is pitifully scanty.”6 Winfield elaborates: On various occasions he points to the M-C-M’ circuit of exchange and to production for profit. Certainly, Hegel’s intermittent treatment is far too scanty to provide the required conception of capital’s involvement in the spheres of exchange and production, and of the competitive dynamic of accumulation that results.7

This absence of an adequately developed concept of capital reveals a major deficit in Hegel’s account of capitalist society in the Philosophy of Right . Relatedly, Hegel relies on a soon-to-be outmoded conception of “estates” rather than social classes; he groups capitalists and wage workers together under the reflective “estate of trade and industry [Stand des Gewerbes ].”8 Marx’s theory of surplus value and the exploitation of the class of wage workers by the class of capitalists cannot even be formulated within the horizons of Hegel’s account of civil society. The circuit of capital is M-C-M + ΔM, buying to sell for more. Hegel’s disinterest in capital’s circuit sets him off from Marx (and Aristotle). Marx organizes Capital 1 around the puzzling questions: Where does this ΔM, which he terms surplus value, come from? Can surplus value (ΔM) be justified within the horizons of the bourgeois philosophy of right, which

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demands equality in exchange? In pursuit of answers, Marx first examines the sphere of simple commodity circulation, before moving on to the circulation of capital. The puzzles about surplus value couple the two trains of thought. Aristotle defines commercial (commutative) justice as the exchange of equal values. His conclusion in the Politics was that the circuit of capital is unjust. For, if the two exchanges, M-C and C-M + ΔM, buying and then selling, were just—if equal value were exchanged for equal value—there could be no ΔM. Initially, Marx agrees: “The form of circulation within which money is transformed into capital contradicts all the previously developed laws bearing on the nature of commodities, value, money and even circulation itself.”9 But Marx takes up the challenge to explain the origin of surplus value and reconcile it with bourgeois right’s demand of equality. He accomplishes that by drawing the distinction between labor power and labor. Labor power is the commodity that wage laborers sell to their employers. Labor is the use to which that commodity is put by its capitalist purchaser. Surplus value, Marx explains, arises when workers add more value to their products through their living labor than the value of their wages. Marx assumes that wages match the value of the commodity that workers sell, labor power. Wage workers are exploited in that they are compelled to perform surplus labor; however, “the laws governing the exchange of commodities have not been violated in any way. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent.”10 Marx argues that the sphere of simple commodity circulation presupposes the circulation of capital to keep its fires burning, ironically, since value presupposes surplus value, the conditions of applicability for the principles of bourgeois right, presuppose the wrong of exploitation. Bourgeois right provides the normative framework by which the capitalist class extracts surplus labor from the class of wage workers. The laws of bourgeois rights provide a framework for the exploitation of wage workers by capitalists. Another bourgeois principle holds that one acquires property through one’s own labor. It was enunciated by Locke and affirmed by Hegel: “To give form to something is the mode of taking possession most in keeping with the Idea, inasmuch as it combines the subjective and objective.”11 Marx argues in Capital that this principle inverts itself because of the generalization of wage labor in capitalism. In the sale of one’s labor power, one transfers the rights to property in the products of one’s labor. Marx concludes, “however much the capitalist mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the original laws of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not

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from a violation of these laws but, on the contrary, from their application.”12 Property in the form of capital “turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product.”13 In exposing the consequences of these two key principles of just appropriation—equality in exchange and appropriation through one’s own labor—Capital presents Marx’s mature critique of the bourgeois theory of right that he initiated in his mid-twenties. If we focus on value rather than surplus value and capital, we find that Hegel and Marx have much in common. Though Hegel never ironed the wrinkles out of his theory of value, he anticipated some of the most distinctive features of Marx’s theory of value. Like Marx, but in opposition to classical political economy, Hegel conceives of value as a historically and ethically specific phenomenon. Hegel also anticipates Marx’s value form theory of value, that is, Hegel conceives of money as the necessary form of expression of value, hence inseparable from it. Hegel describes money as “the universal means of exchange … in which the abstract value of all goods is actualized.”14 Hegel conceives of value as the shared “third thing” that makes commodities quantitatively comparable through the price system: A thing [Sache] in use is an individual thing, determined in quantity and quality and related to a specific need. But its specific utility, as quantitatively determined, is at the same time comparable with other things of the same utility, just as the specific need which it serves is at the same time need in general and thus likewise comparable in its particularity with other needs. Consequently, the thing is also comparable with things which serve other needs. This universality, whose simple determinacy arises out of the thing’s particularity [Partikularität ] in such a way that it is at the same time abstracted from this specific quality, is the thing’s value, in which its true substantiality is determined and becomes an object [Gegenstand] of consciousness.15

But what is this “simple determinacy” which is “abstracted from” the specific quality of the thing? “Value” at first is just a name. What is this “simple determinacy” that “value” is the name of? Marx answers this question in Capital; he identifies abstract labor as the substance of value and then goes on to discuss the magnitude and (necessary) form of value, which is money. Hegel’s phrase “the same utility” suggests that he adopts a utility theory of value: utility is the substance of value.16 But

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that reading is difficult to reconcile with the lambasting he gives utility in the Phenomenology and with passages that suggest sympathy for the classical labor theory of value. In an editor’s note to #63 (quoted above) Allen Wood comments: “Hegel was, however, a student of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; in his lectures of 1819–1820 he endorses Smith’s labor theory of value: ‘Manual labor in general, a day’s wages, these are the final elements of the price of things in relation to each other’ (VPR19, 162).”17 And Winfield notes that Hegel “does claim that labor impresses its product with value,” citing the Philosophy of Right #196, where Hegel writes: The mediation whereby appropriate and particularized means are acquired and prepared for similarly particularized needs is work. By the most diverse processes, work specifically applies to these numerous ends the material which is immediately provided by nature. This process of formation gives the means their value and appropriateness.18

Finally, since utility is independent of money, a value form theory of value, according to which money is the necessary expression of value, is not consistent with utility being the substance of value.

Hegel’s Account of How the Enlightenment Culminates in the Notion of Utility We look, now, at Marx’s engagement with Hegel’s account in the Phenomenology of Spirit of how the Enlightenment struggle between “pure insight” and what it regards as superstition results in utility. Utility emerges as the object of the form of consciousness Hegel calls “pure insight.”19 “Pure insight” sees through everything, finds itself in everything, and leaves only an empty shell, a caput mortuum, as a residue. This holds for God, material things, and useful things. The two camps of the Enlightenment, “pure insight” and “faith,” prove to be variants of one underlying form of consciousness and pure consciousness. Their differences dissipate in the truth of the Enlightenment, utility. Against faith, “pure insight” takes matter to be absolute. Pure insight “sees through” the predicates of material things as mere ways in which matter appears to us. Once these predicates are sheared off, matter in itself (“pure matter”) turns out to be what is left:

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If we start from this sensuous being into which that negative beyond necessarily passes, but abstract from these specific ways in which consciousness is related to it, then what remains is pure matter … pure matter is merely what is left over when we abstract from seeing, feeling, tasting, etc., i.e. it is not matter that is seen, tasted, felt, etc.; what is seen felt, tasted, is not matter, but color, a stone, a salt, etc. Matter is rather a pure abstraction; and so what we are presented with here is the pure essence of thought, or pure thought itself as the Absolute, which contains no differences, is indeterminate and devoid of predicates.20

Once the party of faith has “seen through” the divine predicates and recognized them all as ways God appears to us rather than how God is in himself , its Supreme Being turns out to look just like the “predicateless” matter of “pure insight.” The two “are absolutely the same Notion.”21 Pure consciousness is the form of consciousness in play in the Enlightenment. It lacks the conceptual resources to do anything but separate out the for us from the in itself : its conceptuality is pure conceptuality. Utility, likewise, is the residue of abstracting away all features of useful things: “The Useful is the object in so far as self-consciousness penetrates it and has in it the certainty of its individual self , its enjoyment (its beingfor-self ); self-consciousness sees right into the object.”22 But nothing but utility remains to be seen. The utility presents pure insight with its own essence, pure conceptuality, in the form of an object: Consciousness has found its Notion in Utility. But it is partly still an object, and partly, for that very reason, still an End to be attained, which consciousness does not find itself to possess immediately. Utility is still a predicate of the object, not itself a subject or the immediate and sole actuality of the object.23

But this empty objectivity of utility is implicitly (an sich) ready to burst into absolute freedom. Pure insight has abstracted away all the properties of material and useful things; with that recognition, the objectivity of utility dissolves into the subject. Hegel describes this transition from utility to absolute freedom as “revolutionary”: This withdrawal from the form of objectivity of the Useful has, however, already taken place in principle and from this inner revolution there

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emerges the actual revolution of the actual world, the new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom.24

The revolution has “already taken place in principle” because: What we have here is no more than an empty show of objectivity separating self-consciousness from possession…. this simple determination no longer possesses anything of its own, it is rather pure metaphysic, pure Notion, or a pure knowing by self-consciousness.25

Because all the properties that make things useful are for us, pure insight sees through them, positing the utility that is inherent to the useful thing as something Hegel calls “pure metaphysic.”26 Due to its emptiness (purity), absolute freedom topples into tyranny and terror [Schrecken]. Priding itself as being the antidote to religious superstition and fanaticism, pure insight, the vanguard consciousness of the Enlightenment, flip-flops into arbitrary freedom ending in terror.

Utility’s Double Masquerade While attacking Max Stirner in the German Ideology, Marx and Engels take up utility theory and the sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology that we have just reviewed. They cite Hegel approvingly but make a historical materialist rejoinder. Rather than put the spotlight on the form of consciousness (“pure consciousness”) that issues with utility, as Hegel does, Marx and Engels put it on the modern form of social life: The apparent absurdity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstraction, arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation.27

Marx and Engels find the Enlightenment notion of utility preposterous on the face of it—usefulness is not a homogeneous dimension across which everything useful can be arrayed. They follow Hegel in regarding it as a “metaphysical abstraction.” Well, not quite. They attribute the notion of utility not so much to the abstractive proclivities of a form of consciousness, namely pure consciousness, but rather to the practical abstraction

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involved in commerce, in the circulation of money and commodities, which is misapprehended.28 In the opening section of Chapter 1 of Capital, Marx argues, first, that commodities must have some abstract “third thing” in common, which he terms “value,” and then, that the substance of this “third thing” is congealed abstract labor.29 The idea of the “third thing,” turns up already in the German Ideology. For Marx and Engels, the “paraphrasing” of various human relations in terms of utility is as phony as a three-dollar bill. They contrast it with an actual “third thing,” value, that necessarily appears as money: This paraphrasing [Umschreibung ] ceases to be meaningless and arbitrary only when these relations have validity for the individual not on their own account, not as spontaneous activity, but rather as disguises, though by no means disguises of the category of utilisation, but of an actual third aim and relation which is called the relation of utility.30

Marx and Engels continue in this vein, calling the theory of utility a “verbal masquerade” that “only has meaning when it is the unconscious or deliberate expression of an actual masquerade”; in this case, it is masking the “exploitation de l’homme par l’homme” (Saint-Simon).31 For the bourgeois, they charge, “only one relation is valid on its own account—the relation of exploitation; all other relations have validity for him only insofar as he can include them under this one relation.”32 Utility puts on a “verbal masquerade” by disguising the reality of value—as opposed to the vacuity of utility—along with the specific social practices that give rise to value, notably the circulation of commodities in the market. The “actual masquerade” is the way that simple commodity circulation (the market) serves as an Enlightened means by which a historically new form of domination and exploitation takes place. As Marx will put the point some twenty years later, simple commodity circulation—the market—is what Marx called “domination by abstractions.” This mindset presents the bourgeoisie’s exploitative domination of the class of wageworkers and the domination of all by capital’s ceaseless spiral of accumulation as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man,” as “the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”33 But this Enlightened mode of domination is impersonal and historically novel. It is possible only through the mediation of money. “Use” (utility), which masks value and surplus value, is expressed as money: “The material

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expression of this use is money, which represents the value of all things, people and social relations.”34 We see here the rudiments of Marx’s mature theory of the value form: value must appear as money. Utility theory is the “verbal masquerade.” Marx and Engels identify social practices that give rise to the “verbal masquerade” with the “monetary-commercial relation” and the “actual masquerade” with “the relation of exploitation.”35 But do the two go together? Isn’t commerce free of exploitation? Isn’t the basic rule of thumb in commercial exchanges that equal persons voluntarily exchange-value for equal value? Where is the “exploitation” in that? Here is where the “actual masquerade” goes on. Exploitation is necessarily involved in the circulation and accumulation of capital. Commerce masks the exploitation, for, as Marx will show, simple commodity circulation and the circulation of capital are mutually presupposing.36 In the discourse of utility, the emergence of bourgeois society involves liberating aspects. These aspects provide cover for a society that not only frees individuals from the motley array of feudal fetters but also frees capital to keep up its endless accumulation. Capital is the truth of utility. Yet, utility theory is ascendant over Marx’s theory of capital. This tells us that social theory took a wrong turn; we are now lost in a masquerade. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels are convinced that commercial exchanges mask exploitation. They identify exploitation as “the one relation [that is] valid” for the bourgeois.37 But they have not worked out how it is that the “monetary-commercial” relation, which appears to be based on the free exchange of equivalents, presupposes the circulation of capital and the exploitation that comes with it. How are simple commodity circulation and the circulation and accumulation of capital related? This question germinates in German Ideology and is answered in Marx’s mature critique of political economy, running from the Grundrisse through Capital.

Comparing Hegel and Marx on the Enlightenment and Utility Hegel’s accounts of utility and of absolute freedom and terror and of the transition from one to the other provide several conceptual clues to understanding simple commodity circulation, the circulation of capital, and the relation between the two. In what follows we spell out the

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homologies between Hegel and Marx. We show the structural similarities between utility and the sphere of simple commodity circulation, between absolute freedom and terror and the circulation of capital, and between the transition from utility to absolute freedom and from simple commodity circulation to the circulation of capital. We also introduce an important letter from Marx to Engels supporting our contention that, as he worked out his mature critique of political economy, Marx kept rethinking Hegel’s account of the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology. Let us look at Hegel’s contrast between utility and absolute freedom to see how it matches up with Marx’s distinction between value as conceived of at the level of simple commodity circulation and value at the level of capital. We saw that Marx considered commerce to be the basis of social practices for the conceptual fiction of utility. At the level of simple commodity circulation, then, value is the truth of utility; utility is a mere shadow of value. As we saw, Marx argues that to explain the prices of commodities, there must be a common “third thing” that makes commodities commensurable. He goes on to argue that the substance of this “third thing” is human labor in the abstract. Notice how the practical abstraction involved in market exchanges works like the abstractive power of “pure consciousness” and reaches like results: If we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labor. But even the product of labor has already been transformed in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing.38

Notice the Aristotelian metaphysics just expressed; a use-value has both material and formal constituents. Like “pure consciousness,” the practical abstraction of market exchanges strips useful things of their forms and their sensuous qualities. Continuing the passage: All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished. Nor is it any longer the product of the labor of the joiner, the mason or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labor. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labor, the useful character of the kinds of labor embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labor. They can no longer be distinguished,

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but are all together reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract. Let us now look at the residue of the products of labor. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labor, i.e. of human labor power expended to produce them, human labor is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values—commodity values [Warenwert ].39

Compare this to what Hegel concludes about utility. Marx’s terms “residue,” “phantom-like objectivity,” and “crystal” pick up on Hegel’s point that utility is pure subjectivity posited as something objective, the residue of the abstractive action of pure consciousness. Where Hegel identifies utility as the estranged objectification of the abstractive power of pure consciousness, Marx identifies value with the estranged objectification of pure labor. This practical abstraction involved in market exchanges, which results in value as a residue, belongs to the historical basis for the “bourgeois way of thinking” that Hegel calls “pure consciousness.” Hegel characterizes the conceptual level of utility this way: Consciousness has found its Notion in Utility. But it is partly still an object, and partly, for that very reason, still an End to be attained, which consciousness does not find itself to possess immediately. Utility is still a predicate of the object, not itself a subject or the immediate and sole actuality of the object.40

Likewise, for Marx, value at the level of simple commodity circulation “is as yet a predicate applicable to an object, not something constitutive of a subject.” That is about to change. Once pure consciousness recognizes itself in the objectivity of utility, once it recognizes that there is nothing to utility other than its own abstractive action, the crystal of utility dissolves into pure consciousness. The resulting emboldened form of consciousness Hegel calls absolute freedom: The certainty of itself is the universal Subject, and its conscious Notion is the essence of all actuality. If, then, the Useful was merely the alternation of the moments, an alternation which did not return into its own unity, and hence was still an object for knowing, it now ceases to be this. For knowing is itself the movement of those abstract moments, it is the universal self, the

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self of itself as well as of the object and, as universal, is the self-returning unity of this movement.41

In Chapter 4 of Marx’s Capital 1, The General Formula for Capital, we find many stunning correspondences. The conceptual moves that Hegel ascribes to pure insight as a form of consciousness, Marx locates in the social practice of generalized commodity circulation, but he reveals it to be the happy, Enlightened aspect of something deeper and disturbing: the circulation of capital. Compare Marx’s description of capital to Hegel’s account of absolute freedom. Just as absolute freedom breaks through the apparent objectivity, the apparent otherness of utility, value as capital breaks through the otherness of the commodity: There is here [at the level of capital] no antagonism, as in the case of hoarding, between the money and commodities. The capitalist knows that all commodities, however tattered they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, are by nature circumcised Jews, and, what is more, a wonderful means for making still more money out of money.42

Like absolute freedom, capital is valued no longer as an object but as an all-encompassing subject: in the circulation M-C-M both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject….value is here the subject of a process.43

Compare Marx’s contrast between the formula C-M-C, selling to buy, and the formula M-C-M, buying to sell, to the contrast that Hegel draws between the “turnovers” of utility vs. those of absolute freedom. Whereas utility passes through a turnover of moments that do not circle back, absolute freedom encompasses itself and the object and “returns into its own unity.” Marx calls attention to a corresponding difference between the formula for simple commodity circulation, C-M-C, and that for capital, M-C-M:

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Whilst in the simple circulation of commodities the twofold displacement of the same piece of money effects its definitive transfer from one hand into another [money does not return to its point of departure], here [MC-M] the twofold displacement of the same commodity causes the money to flow back to its initial point of departure.44

Marx argues that this self-movement of value out of the money form, into the commodity form and back to money again makes sense only if it leads to offspring in the form of surplus value (ΔM).45 What is the point of something as abstract and qualitatively homogeneous as a value preserving itself during its circulation unless that process results in a quantitative increase—surplus value (ΔM)? But Marx argues that the only explanation of where ΔM comes from is the exploitation of wage workers. Labor power, which workers sell piecemeal to capitalists, is the only commodity whose consumption can create new value. Because it presupposes the emergence of “free” wage labor, Marx concludes, “Capital announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production.”46 For Marx, capital is the “genuinely revolutionary” driving force of the Enlightenment. The relationship between Hegel’s account of the Enlightenment and Marx’s account of capitalism goes a step further, for this revolution does not end well. Hegel argues that the vacancy at the heart of absolute freedom makes it dangerously unpinned, resulting in terror [Schrecken]. For Marx, wage workers are subjected to the “despotism” of capitalists, and all are subjected to capital’s terrible indifference to use-value. Drawing on Dante’s Divine Comedy, Marx compares simple commodity circulation, Adam Smith’s “great scramble,” with the tumult occurring on the innocuous if spiritless plain of Acheron. He contrasts it with the entry into capital’s “hidden abode of production,” which he likens to passing into the inferno.47 Marx’s last word on the transition is “Gerberei”: passing out of the sphere of circulation, workers await skinning. In his April 2, 1858, letter to Engels, Marx notes that the seeming innocence of simple commodity circulation, because it rests on capitalist production, ends in “Schrecken” (“terror”). This phrase indicates that Marx has in mind Hegel’s account of the Enlightenment’s transition from absolute freedom to terror: Appropriation through labor and exchange of equivalents appears as the law of appropriation in this sphere [simple commodity circulation], so that

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exchange simply gives back the same value in other material. In short, here all is “sheene,” [“lovely”] but, just like that, it will end in terror [Schrecken], and that as a consequence of the law of equivalence. We come, namely, to … Capital.”48

Here we see the more mature version of the claim in The German Ideology that utility represents a double masquerade, giving cover to value and capital. In closing, let us consider Hegel’s transition from utility to pure freedom with Marx’s transition in Capital from simple commodity circulation to the circuit of capital. Regarding the latter, Jacques Bidet and others charge that Marx’s move in Chapter 4 of Capital 1 from generalized commodity circulation (C-M-C) to the circulation of capital (M-C-M’), which Marx says we find “alongside” C-M-C, is flippant and in no way to be regarded as a dialectical transition. But dialectical transitions are not of a piece. Consider what Hegel says about the dialectical transition from utility to absolute freedom: “This withdrawal from the form of objectivity of the Useful has, however, already taken place in principle.”49 What if the transition from generalized commodity circulation to the circulation of capital had “already taken place in principle”? Utility abstracts away all the formal and sensuous properties of useful things, leaving nothing “more than an empty show of objectivity separating self-consciousness” from its object. So, too, simple commodity circulation’s practical abstraction from all the formal and sensuous properties of commodities (and of the concrete labor that produces them), leaves only value as its object(ive). But value makes sense as the objective of commodity circulation only if it undergoes a quantitative increase through circulation.50 Just as utility is not about what makes things useful but rather about purist abstraction, simple circulation, the site of purist practical abstraction, is not about use-value; it is about value, but that means it is about surplus value. If capital is the truth of simple commodity circulation, and simple commodity circulation is the truth of utility, then capital is the truth of utility.

Notes 1. Thematically, this presentation belongs with Jeanne Schuler’s “A Brilliant Failure: Hegel and Marx Assess the Enlightenment,” Chapter 9 above; Patrick Murray’s “Value, Money and Capital in Hegel and Marx,”

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

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Chapter 1 in The Mismeasure of Wealth (Leiden: Brill, 2016); and, “Why Wealth Is a Poor Concept,” Chapter 10 in Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”, edited by Joseph O’Malley, translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 136–137. Marx writes in a letter to P. V. Annenkov, December 28, 1846, that Proudhon, whom Marx criticized jointly for his philosophy and his political economy, “does not rise above the bourgeois horizon” [in The Poverty of Philosophy (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1963), 190]. Jerry Muller follows Joachim Ritter in stressing the centrality of commerce in Hegel’s conception of the modern world, “for Hegel, the market was the central and most distinctive feature of the modern world, a world he affirmed and sought to explain to his contemporaries” [Jerry Muller, The Mind and the Market : Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 139]. Richard Winfield, The Just Economy (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 87. Winfield, Just Economy, 120. Winfield cites Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, paragraph 189, but we cannot see where Hegel refers to the M-C-M’ circuit or production for profit. Winfield, Just Economy, 131. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Philosophy of Right ), edited by Allen W. Wood, translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), #204, 236. Winfield criticizes as anachronistic Hegel’s reliance on the category of estates (The Just Economy, 142–156). Marx, Capital 1, 258. Marx, Capital 1, 258. Hegel affirms the bourgeois principle of equal value for equal value in his account of contracts in #77 of the Philosophy of Right . Hegel, Philosophy of Right, #56R, 178. On the inversion, see Marx, Capital 1, 292. Marx, Capital 1, 730. See also Capital 1, 300–302. Marx, Capital 1, 730. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, #204, 236. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, #63, 92. Marx dismisses the notion of utility right at the beginning of Capital, “The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter” (126). Allen Wood, in Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 411.

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18. Winfield, Just Economy, 112. In speaking of “value” here, Hegel may be referring here to the usefulness (use-value) of the product rather than its value in the sense of the value that money represents, measures, and stores. 19. Hegel’s word for utility here is Nützlichkeit, which may be translated as “usefulness.” In ordinary English usage, “usefulness” and “utility” can be used interchangeably, but there is an important conceptual distinction to be drawn. The concept of utility posits that all useful things are commensurable; the concept of usefulness makes no such claim. Utility theory comes in various forms, but the Enlightenment conception of utility that Hegel is concerned with takes utility to be the common, objective property of all useful things. In a footnote on Bentham, Marx recalls the French Enlightenment roots of the notion of utility, “The principle of utility [das Nützlichkeitsprinzip] was no discovery made by Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way [geistlos ] what Helvetius and other Frenchmen had said with wit and ingenuity in the eighteenth century” (Marx, Capital 1, n. 51 to 758–759). 20. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 351. 21. Hegel, Phenomenology, 352. 22. Hegel, Phenomenology, 355. 23. Hegel, Phenomenology, 355. 24. Hegel, Phenomenology, 355–356. 25. Hegel, Phenomenology, 356. 26. Thus, Bentham thinks of utility as “the property of an object, whereby it tends to produce … pleasure … or to prevent the happening of … pain” [Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Press, 1948)]. But this inherent “property” has no content; all the content has been stripped away with the properties that make useful things useful. 27. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, translated by Clemens Dutt, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 409. 28. With hindsight and access to manuscripts of Hegel unavailable to Marx, we may wonder how close Hegel’s thinking about utility was to Marx’s when we read a passage such as this from his Jena System of Ethical Life: “This is exchange… Property enters reality through the plurality of persons involved in exchange and mutually recognizing one another. Value enters in the reality of things and applies to each of them as surplus [that is, as a commodity, rather than a product to be used by the producer]; the concept enters as self-moving, annihilating itself in its opposite, taking on the opposite character in place of the one it possessed before” [G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life (1802/3), edited and translated by H.

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29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

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S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), 121]. At the end of this passage Hegel seems to be moving in the direction of a concept of capital, as value that maintains itself as value even as it “annihilates” itself in the form of the commodity, in the case of sale, or money, in the case of purchase. Marx goes on to consider the magnitude of value and the form of value; the three are inseparable. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 409. Alasdair MacIntyre also associates utility with a masquerade, “the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use” [Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 62]. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 410. Marx, Capital 1, 280. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 410. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 410. “The system of exchange values, and the money system even more so, are, in fact, a system of freedom and equality. But the contradictions which appear in a deeper analysis are immanent contradictions, complications of that very property, freedom and equality which occasionally pass into their opposites. The hope, for instance, that exchange value should not develop from a form of commodity and money into a form of capital, or that labour producing exchange value should not develop into wage labour is as pious as it is stupid” [Karl Marx, Original Text of ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (Original Text ), edited by Larisa Miskievich, translated by Victor Schnittke and Yuri Sdobnikov, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 29: Karl Marx: 1857–61 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987), 475–476]. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 410. Marx, Capital 1, 128. Marx, Capital 1, 128. Hegel, Phenomenology, 355. Hegel, Phenomenology, 356. Marx, Capital 1, 255. Marx, Capital 1, 255. Marx, Capital 1, 249. Marx, Capital 1, 250–251, 255–256. Marx, Capital 1, 274.

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47. Marx, Capital 1, 279–280. 48. Marx, Briefe über ‘Das Kapital’ (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1954), 90–91; our translation. Note that Marx refers here to capital, not his book Capital, which appeared nine years later. In a note in the Original Text, written about the same time as this letter, Marx writes of the concentration of capital, “ein Ende mit Schrecken macht,” which gets translated as “puts a terrible end to” (Original Text, p. 477, n*). 49. Hegel, Phenomenology, 356. 50. Hegel, Phenomenology, 356.

Bibliography Bentham, Jeremy. The Principles of Morals and Legislation. New York, NY: Hafner Press, 1948. Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Edited by Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 1952. ———. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1977. ———. System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4). Edited and translated by H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1979. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Second edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Marx, Karl. Briefe über “Das Kapital.” Berlin, Germany: Dietz Verlag, 1954. ———. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1963. ———. Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” Translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley and edited by Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970. ———. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya and edited by Maurice Dobb. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1970. ———. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York, NY: Vintage, 1977. ———. Original Text of “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (Urtext ). Edited by Larisa Miskievich and translated by Victor Schnittke and Yuri Sdobnikov. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 29: Karl Marx: 1857–61. London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987.

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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1976. Murray, Patrick. The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Murray, Patrick, and Jeanne Schuler. False Moves: Basic Problems with Factoring Philosophy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Muller, Jerry. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Schuler, Jeanne. “A Brilliant Failure: Hegel and Marx Assess the Enlightenment.” In International Philosophical Quarterly (April 15, 2016): 203–220. Winfield, Richard. The Just Economy. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.

CHAPTER 11

The Poetics of Nihilism: Representing Capital’s Indifference in Dickens’ Hard Times

The void at the heart of bourgeois life results in the most accomplished irony: accumulation as an infinite increase in emptiness is mistaken for a plenitude of wealth. (Arthur 2002, p. 172)

Introduction: Literature and Social Theory Literature and film offer powerful means of disclosing aspects of commercial life. A novel makes visible social realities that are less discernible or striking in abstract analysis. Of course, as a mode of reflection, art—like philosophy—remains subject to distortion and error. Appealing to novels and other literary forms in the exposition of socio-economic topics is not new. S. S. Prawer (1976), author of Karl Marx and World Literature, observes that Marx “uses incidents from specific literary works to show, as in a model, the actual or perverted logic of events in the real social world … Economic processes which are ‘opaque’ in real life may be made ‘transparent’ in literature” (pp. 416–417). Dante and Shakespeare are among Marx’s favorite literary sources. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty draws extensively on creative writers, especially the nineteenth-century novelists Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac (another favorite of Marx), to call attention to nineteenth-century socioeconomic realities: the makeup of wealth (chiefly rent-bearing lands and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_11

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interest-bearing government bonds), the negligible inflation, and the fact that work and learning could not compete with inheritance and “marrying well” as ways to become rich.1 Of most direct relevance for present purposes is Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, not only because Hard Times is her focus and some points she makes anticipate some of ours but also because she considers why literature—the novel in particular—plays an essential role in judging socio-economic realities. We focus on how Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times critically represents mid-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism while uncritically adopting much of its mindset.2 We will establish that Hard Times is primarily about capital’s shadow forms and only secondarily about its constitutive forms and that Dickens accepts key bifurcations involved in modern conceptions of reason and society and seeks only to harmonize them or ameliorate their ill effects. Dickens is troubled by the aggressive expansion of the utilitarian mentality into the whole social order; he wants to cordon off the political and (especially) the domestic spheres.3 At the root of this mentality’s nihilistic indifference to particularity is the reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative.4 Hard Times depicts how family and schooling are mutilated through this reduction. Politics is likewise pared down to calculations: “the most complicated social questions were cast up, got into exact totals, and finally settled” (Dickens 1990, p. 75).5 The forces of reduction are embodied in the doctrine of two characters: Thomas Gradgrind and Mr. James Harthouse. Gradgrind leads a crusading effort to refashion society in terms of the leading ideology of the day. “Facts and figures” will triumph on the grave of traditional moral, religious, and political ideals. What appears as progress to the adherents of the Gradgrind philosophy is unmasked as nihilism by Harthouse. The Gradgrind conquest is pyrrhic, and Harthouse revels in the ruins. The void that actually drives capitalist accumulation is treated by Dickens as an ideological abyss. His preoccupation is with capital’s spreading shadows.6 Dickens responds to social questions by upholding divisions. To maintain an intact humanity, he appeals to demarcations and separates industry from the rest of society. Imagination, love, and virtue are to be nurtured outside the factory walls not routed by Gradgrind’s drumbeat: Fact, fact, fact—never wonder. To set up our reading of Hard Times , we will briefly distinguish constitutive forms and shadow forms.

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Constitutive Forms and Shadow Forms Capitalism can be understood in terms of constitutive and shadow forms. Constitutive forms emerge from systematic analysis; they do not just pop into view. Capitalism is constituted as a self-reproducing social totality organized by the forms of commodity, value, money, wage labor, and capital. From these forms arise the cross-currents of a dynamic, crisisprone social order directed at profitmaking and the expansion of capital.7 Money and the price system actually perform the reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative—“everything has its price”—and “money is incapable of any other movement but the quantitative one: to expand itself” (Marx 1987, p. 495). Capital is constituted by this movement of quantitative expansion of value. At the beginning of the circuit of capital (M − C − M + ΔM), “capital exists here as yet only as a given quantum of value = M (money), in which all use-value is extinguished” (Marx 1976b, pp. 975–977).8 A successful (investment) circuit of capital begins with money (M)—“in which all use-value is extinguished”—and closes with more money (M + ΔM), where all particularity is likewise extinguished. The measure of success where the circulation and accumulation of capital is concerned is purely quantitative. Whether profit is gained by mining diamonds or making ice cream does not matter. In its downward spiral of disregard for particularity even as material wealth spirals upward, capital is nihilistic at its core.9 Powerful social forms have consequences. Marx observes that capitalism casts shadows that pervade society and shape experience. Oddly, shadow forms are often more visible than value and surplus value, the prime determinations of systematic analysis. Shadows are not restricted by the dimensions of what they track. The shadow forms crop up in social sciences, arts, and mainstream ideologies. Some shadow forms are illusory and derail efforts to understand society. Notions of utility and instrumental reason are shadows that block access to constitutive forms. They close off questions and disguise the workings of capital. Challenging these pseudo-concepts is a prerequisite to understanding capitalism. Other shadow forms illumine the workings of capital as they extend the propulsive reach of constitutive forms beyond commerce and industry into the whole of society. For example, by putting prices on almost everything, capitalism encourages a calculating mentality that can be (mis)applied to every mode of existence: what cannot be quantified cannot be trusted. Both illusory and illuminating shadow forms define capitalist society and

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culture; they are often easier to grasp than constitutive forms, and they lend themselves better to literary representation. Hard Times centers on capital’s shadows, above all, indifference and the compulsion to calculate. The early sociologist Georg Simmel called attention to the link between the money economy and the calculative, matter-of-fact mentality: But money economy and the domination of the intellect stand in the closest relationship to one another. They have in common a purely matterof-fact attitude in the treatment of persons and things in which a formal justice is often combined with an unrelenting hardness. The purely intellectualistic person is indifferent to all things personal because, out of them relationships and reactions develop which are not to be completely understood by purely rational methods—just as the unique element in events never enters into the principle of money. Money is concerned only with what is common to all, i.e., with the exchange value which reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level. All emotional relationships between persons rest on their individuality, whereas intellectual relationships deal with persons as with numbers, that is, as with elements which, in themselves, are indifferent, but which are of interest only insofar as they offer something objectively perceivable. (Simmel 1997, p. 337)

Since “all things personal … are not to be completely understood by purely rational methods,” indifference results. Dickens portrays this indifference in the scene where Mr. Gradgrind extends Bounderby’s proposal of marriage to his daughter Louisa. When Louisa has the temerity to wonder aloud, “does Mr. Bounderby ask me to love him?” her father counters that “the expression itself … may be a little misplaced” (p. 76). When Louisa presses her father for an alternative to the “misplaced expression,” he instructs her to confine herself “rigidly to Fact.” The contrast of constitutive forms with their shadows recalls Hegel’s distinction between essence and appearance: the essence of capitalism constitutes myriad appearances. Shadow forms disclose the world of capital but not the contradictory dynamism at its core. At that core lies the emptiness of value, whose supersensible substance, congealed abstract labor, shows itself in the universal equivalent, money. Marx calls the capitalist a “rational miser,” dedicated to the endless accumulation of surplus value (Marx 1976a, p. 254). In this unending process, material qualities matter only as means to moneymaking. In the accumulation of capital, more is never enough. This Sisyphean labor creates an emptiness that displaces concrete goals.

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Not surprisingly, capital’s shadow forms conceal life’s specificities and spread a nihilistic mindset. Some shadow forms dismiss the reality of self and world without comprehending them. Constitutive forms track the course of accumulation cycles; they reveal how a social order renews itself. Constitutive forms are grounded in history. If shadow forms are not connected with constitutive forms, they lack historical grounding. Without recognizing their historical grounding, shadow forms appear timeless, and they lack the power to make sense of a particular social order. That saps the critical force of an analysis focused on shadow forms. Instead, the current social order appears irreversible or metaphysical; as Marx mocked the political economists: “Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any” (Marx 1963, p. 121). Tracing shadow forms with the constitutive social forms that they are shadows of stops time from standing still.

Art and Philosophy: A Hegelian Counterpoint to Dickens In the Enlightenment, basic distinctions often harden into logical dualities. With his sharp separations of concepts from perceptions and mind from the world, Kant is the exemplar of bifurcation. Dualisms drawn from the Enlightenment shape the intellectual horizon of the nineteenth century and into the present. Dickens adopts this modern mindset. A rigid contrast between reason and imagination centers the plot of Hard Times . Gradgrind says to Bounderby, “the reason is (as you know) the only faculty to which education should be addressed” (p. 19). Dickens adopts the reason/imagination bifurcation and, likewise, splits facts from values. Another familiar divide sets knowledge apart from art and other human endeavors as what alone is objective or true.10 As a counterpoint to Dickens’ bifurcations, consider how Hegel distinguishes art from philosophy. Hegel rejects purist splits, such as inner or outer, objective or subjective. In his philosophy, ordinary distinctions do not morph into logical disjunctions. Philosophy does not contrast with art as explication to expression or head to heart. Like science and philosophy, literature engages history, culture, and institutions. All operate within the discourse of truth, each revealing the world in its own way. Narrative reveals the matter at hand at the level of appearances. How does life unfold in commercial society? Critical social theory engages the matter at hand on the level of concepts. What forms constitute commercial society?

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Splitting the universal from the particular, concepts from percepts, or philosophy from art, encourages nominalism and positivism; it is always a false move. Concepts are more abstract than experience, but disclosure of the universal occurs throughout the discourse of truth. For Hegel, art and philosophy constitute spirit in its most absolute and self-determining forms. Along with religion, each dimension of the absolute takes the totality as its object. Philosophy identifies and develops basic concepts. Art formulates sensuous ideals and paradigmatic experiences. The Grapes of Wrath portrays the reserve army of the dispossessed through the travails of the Joad family. The nature and vicissitudes of wage labor are analyzed by Marx. Fiction makes visible the effects of life under capitalism. At its best, philosophy investigates the social forms that produce these effects. The narrative opens up space for thinking and gives it urgency. In Hegel, what is concrete, the actual, sets the goal of inquiry. The concrete is not immediately in our grasp, as Locke imagines simple ideas to be. To distinguish philosophy from art, it is helpful to acknowledge two meanings of concrete: conceptual determination and ideal embodiment. What is concrete in the order of thought is directed at the whole and results from the analysis. Philosophy arrives at the concrete through analysis and phenomenological inquiry that makes systematic conceptual development possible. The fullest expressions of freedom and truth are most concrete. The characters and actions in a novel imaginatively embody a world—Dickens’ Coketown, for example. Art, properly integrated with social theory, is no intermission or seventh-inning stretch. It generates a different friction; it expands and enlivens our understanding.

Hard Times and the Gradgrind Philosophy Hard Times is set in a factory town blackened by the soot of smokestacks and reddened by the furnaces’ glare. Encircled by abandoned coal pits and dead trees, Coketown is hellish and dull: Coketown…was a triumph of fact…a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage…out of which…serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever…a black canal in it and a river that ran purple with illsmelling dye…where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small

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streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. (p. 22)

Coketown enforces leveling and sameness from its streets to its souls.11 Four households carry the novel’s action: the Gradgrind family in their Stone Lodge, the “castle” of the self-made capitalist Josiah Bounderby, Sleary’s nomadic circus performers, and the rooms of the factory worker Stephen Blackpool. The demonic force consuming Dickens’ Coketown is not money or machines but the Gradgrind philosophy, an overblown amalgam of calculating self-interest and a fetish for facts. This crusading mindset dictates how households, schools, churches, factories, banks, and states are to run. Society in all its particulars is subsumed under Gradgrind imperatives. In subsuming the domestic sphere—in particular, the upbringing and education of children—the Gradgrind philosophy exceeds the reach of capital’s constitutive forms. The households of free-wage laborers cannot be formally subsumed under capital; otherwise, children would be owned by capital. What troubles Dickens is not so much capital’s reach but its overreach. Only the circus resists the power of capital’s constitutive and its shadow forms; no wonder it is shunned by Gradgrind and Bounderby. What revolts Gradgrind about circus members like Sissy Jupe is their embrace of imagination, fantasy, feeling, and laughter. The community of performers is not yoked to the Gradgrind regime. Generosity and friendship—anathema to the Gradgrind philosophy—are found among the scruffy performers: Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving often of as much respect and always of as much generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any class of people in the world. (pp. 31–32)

The Gradgrind children never hear fairy tales or play make-believe. Forbidden to express feelings, they are spiritually starved. Their father orders them:

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You are never to fancy … We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. (p. 11)12

Like a thought experiment, Hard Times follows the barren outcomes for children reared under this regimen, especially Louisa and Tom, the elder Gradgrind children. Bitzer, the “colorless” young man who excels at this training, scorns loyalty to the Gradgrinds or to anyone. He epitomizes dedication to “me, first and last.”13 Sissy Jupe, adopted by the Gradgrinds after her father, an aging clown, disappears and fails at this training. An intact human, she emerges as the family’s savior. Dickens satirizes Gradgrind’s ideological use of political economy, but Dickens was less familiar with the workings of commerce and industry. In preparing for Hard Times he traveled north to observe the strike of textile workers in Preston, which ended in defeat after eight months.14 Hard Times follows workers trudging home at dusk but never goes inside the factory. We never learn what commodity is being produced. Hard Times presses no unwelcome questions about profits.15 For Dickens, the inner workings of capitalism remain shrouded—no wonder that its constitutive forms are not in the limelight. The novel does enter the classroom, a tightly controlled production line with students called by number, not by name. Here Sissy—Girl Number 20—confounds the facts and figures curriculum with the New Testament: “To the question what is the first principle of the science of Political Economy, Sissy offered the absurd answer, ‘To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me’” (p. 46). Indoctrination is carried out by teachers like Mr. M’Choakumchild, who are dedicated to eradicating the pestilence of imagination: but “dost thou think that thou wilt always kill the robber fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him?” (p. 12). Mr. M’Choakumchild was the product of a teacher factory: “some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs” (p. 12). M’Choakumchild’s school, like a factory, encases the “infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular statements” (p. 46). Here Dickens sets his sights on the calculative mentality, a shadow form whose fascination with the quantitative befits a society where prices daily reduce qualitative

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differences to quantitative ones. Yet Dickens looks to human nature, not political change, to offer resistance.

The Gradgrind Philosophy and Utilitarianism Utilitarianism promotes shadow forms of the illusory kind. Dickens roughly patterns the Gradgrind system after utilitarian thinking, which comes in several varieties. Thomas Gradgrind retires from his successful hardware business to become a Member of Parliament; he shares the aspirations of Jeremy Bentham and the Mills to reform existing laws and institutions according to rules calculated to produce prosperity and happiness. Because facts, axioms, and mathematical reasoning are involved, these projects are deemed rational. Broadly following utilitarian theory, Gradgrind subscribes to a shriveled rationality whose imperial reach Dickens ridicules without first questioning its claim to count as a reason. “With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket,” Gradgrind was always “ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to” (p. 8). Since Dickens allows this pinched ideology to stand as reason, his quest in the novel is to limit its scope but not to reconsider its nature. Dickens accepts the bifurcations that Hegel rejects. When reason inherently fails to fit the make up of human beings, as it does in Dickens’ reckoning, salvation can come only from outside, e.g., fantasy, satire, or a circus. Gradgrind and the utilitarian reformers promote educational as well as political reform.16 Though references are made in Hard Times to the efforts of the Gradgrind party in Parliament, they are left rather vague, for Dickens’ primary concern is with the outcomes of the Gradgrind educational philosophy. As John Stuart Mill came to blame his mental collapse on the defects of his utilitarian upbringing, Louisa blames her breakdown on her father’s twisted, inhuman ideology.17 Like Mill, Louisa is damaged and finds only a hole where a self should be. All her thwarted passion is spent on her brother Tom, the whelp not worthy of her devotion. Mill finds healing in poetry and love for Harriet Taylor. Louisa’s wounds never heal. Those groomed to showcase utilitarian ideals bear its scars. The Gradgrind philosophy mimics utilitarian thought but with important omissions. Utility theory addresses a basic question posed by capitalist society: what do all commodities share that underlies their prices? Utility is put forward as the common substance attributed to all commodities: x amount of diamonds = y amount of ice cream because

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their utilities (or marginal utilities) coincide. Among the shadow forms, utility takes the prize for emptiness. Like value, it strips away the actual features of diamonds and ice cream, but unlike value it posits a pseudotrait, utility, as what they have in common. Utility, a cornerstone of modern value theory, moral philosophy, and mainstream economics, is a sinkhole into which real things vanish to be replaced by phantoms. From 1845 at the latest, Marx considered utility to be a sham concept best explained as a shadow cast by commodity circulation.18 Marx and Engels ridicule utility while explaining its plausibility: “this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation” (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 409).19 In Love’s Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum jars us with an attempt to imagine “that elusive item, utility”: It is a startling and powerful vision. Just try to think about it seriously: the body of this wonderful beloved person is exactly the same in quality as that person’s mind and inner life. Both, in turn, the same in quality as the value of Athenian democracy; of Pythagorean geometry; of Eudoxan astronomy. What would it be like to look at a body and to see in it exactly the same shade and tone of goodness and beauty as in a mathematical proof—exactly the same, differing only in amount and in location, so that the choice between making love with that person and contemplating that proof presented itself as a choice between having n measures of water and n + 100. (Nussbaum 1990, p. 116)20

Can we take even the first steps in this proposed thought experiment? Is there a property common to all that we desire or enjoy? We think not. The “elusive item” presupposed here does not exist. Utility is an imposter. It mimics the actual commensurability of prices, which it disguises. Commodities do share a common property: quantities of congealed abstract human labor.21 Value is the mysterious “elusive item” that does exist. It is not much of a leap from “everything has its price” to “everything has its utility.”22 Consider what Georg Simmel writes of money’s power to level and hollow things out: To the extent that money, with its colorlessness and its indifferent quality, can become a common denominator of all values it becomes the frightful leveler—it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific

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values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. They all float with the same specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. They all rest on the same level and are distinguished only by their amounts. (Simmel 1997, p. 340)23

Scott Meikle writes in a similar vein that, as a consequence of capital’s “subordinating use-value to exchange,” “Real natures are neglected, abolished, or replaced. It is the world of Jeremy Bentham. Utilitarianism is its fitting morality, and empiricism is its fitting philosophy. The form in which we conduct our life invades and diminishes that life” (Meikle 1991, p. 317).24 Hard Times exposes the diminishment that comes with the invasion of commercial forms into their real natures. Utility theory assumes that there are no definite, morally significant natures and no abiding collective good that establish the horizon for making moral judgments.25 Liberalism insists that, for its people to be free, a society must renounce any compulsory collective good.26 C. Welch notes the kinship between utility theory and liberalism: utilitarianism apparently has a special status in the evolution of modern social inquiry, not just because well-being is the modern obsession, or because the model of the “science” of economics is seductive in an age of science, but because utilitarians claim to offer a criterion of neutrality among competing conceptions of the good life in a pluralistic and antagonistic world. (Welch 1987, p. 775)

Goals such as achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number do not require any “thick,” controversial conception of the good. There is an affinity with liberalism that adds to the attraction of utility theory. What do all commodities share? This raises a real question for the examination of capitalist societies. By offering a phony answer to this real question, utility has staying power.27 Capital’s reach is vastly extended and amplified by forms that are shadows of its constitutive forms, the value forms.28 Shadow forms piggyback on constitutive aspects of the world or they would not persist. Utility is a pseudo-concept while usefulness is a legitimate general concept. The proper understanding of the useful rules out the pseudo-concept of utility; it is a common mistake to equate them. Utility gains plausibility in a world where everything has its price; it conceals its falseness and emptiness behind the mask of the unobjectionable notion of usefulness, for which it purports to provide a metric.29

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But not all shadow forms are imposters like utility. Indifference, the experience that nothing really matters, is the subjective counterpart to money, the erasure of actual differences. An economic system directed at making money is indifferent to actual commodities. Whatever makes money will do. Indifference and boredom expose the underbelly of consumer society. The “whatever” mood matches the “whatever makes money” motto. Thus, US Steel gets rechristened USX to encompass “whatever” moneymaking enterprise. In commercial societies, the emptiness of value is as real as gravity.30 Unfortunately, the actual emptiness of value’s supersensible social objectivity is trumped by the emptiness of the pseudo-concept of utility in the common understanding. Value arises from socially determinate conditions. What arises in history can disappear into history, but utility presents itself as without history: it purportedly applies across history. Utility, the imposter, makes emptiness a horizon from which there is no hope for salvation—nihilism is inescapable. The Gradgrind philosophy delights in measurement but lacks a common substance such as utility. A hodgepodge, it includes statistics, calculation, leveling, emptiness, indifference, boredom, and—always— facts and figures. Forbidden to doubt, wonder, or understand, students rattle off facts obediently. Gradgrind’s “hard facts” party in Parliament works to replace deliberation by accounting. Debate is needless, numbers alone resolve any dispute. Utility theory is propelled by an impartial mindset that calculates the greatest satisfaction for the greatest number, even if my own interests are sacrificed. But this sublime indifference to one’s own interests readily flip-flops into extreme self-centeredness. Of Thomas Gradgrind’s son it is said, “As to Tom, he was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is usually at work on the number one” (p. 51). Sacrifice and generosity lack standing in the Gradgrind philosophy, where only the self counts. Every action is a transaction calculated to maximize one’s own interests. The Gradgrind philosophy is presented as the philosophical expression of the new science of political economy: It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain

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across a counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there. (p. 212)31

All reality is modeled on exchange, and the only acknowledged motivation is seeking one’s own benefit.32 The banker Bounderby combines the myth of egoism with the myth of the self-made man, who crawled out of the ditch into which his own mother allegedly dumped him. A wet ditch, sopping wet. A “self-made man” owes nothing to anyone and least of all to his parents.33 Obligations that are not based on contracts would split the firmament of the Gradgrind philosophy. While the Gradgrind philosophy caricatures imagination, Dickens embraces J. S. Mill’s criticism of Bentham’s chief character flaw. Mill observes of Bentham that The Imagination which he had not, was…that which enables us…to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings…This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another. This power constitutes the poet…the historian…Without it nobody knows even his own nature. (Mill 1990, p. 317)

Imagination, in this context, is not the creative genius to design buildings or compose symphonies. This imagination involves what David Hume and Adam Smith call sympathy: our native ability to be affected by the situation of others. Sympathy is the rudder that guides our emotional understanding. Without the cultivation of emotions, practical reason cannot exist.34 If reason actually excluded empathy, it would never establish moral rules or dispositions. We simply would not care whether refugees die at sea or children go hungry. Even so-called artificial virtues, such as promise-keeping, depend on sympathy. We could not understand any action without being affected by how others feel, for example, the unpleasant sensation of dishonest treatment. Imagination allows for a self to exist, relationships to form, and reasonable judgments to be made. In attacking imagination, the Gradgrind philosophy mounts an assault on human nature. What emerges are persons damaged in profound ways. The products of Gradgrind education are unfit for relationships or judgments. They are immobilized and isolated from the world. Faced with the marriage proposal from a man she despises, Louisa searches in vain among the “facts” to find grounds for a decision, while her father struggles to

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calculate her way to an answer. But facts do not make decisions for us. To make a judgment, something must matter to someone. Never allowed the luxury of self, Louisa cannot arrive at what matters to her. In large part, her instincts and desires have no names, no handles; they move her blindly. Dehumanization in this generation of Gradgrinds begins in the cradle.35 Dickens employs imagination to depict imagination-starved humans. With his pale hair, skin, and eyes, Bitzer, the star student, “looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white” (p. 9). Ice, not blood, fills his veins, and he betrays all who get in his way. Bitzer fully assimilated the Gradgrind code: in a political-economic world there is no place for gratitude. A bargain is a bargain and nothing more. Dickens presents young Tom Gradgrind as a grotesque who, for his advancement, presses his sister Louisa into marrying the wealthy Bounderby, whom she abhors. Later, Tom betrays her confidence, enabling Harthouse to seduce Louisa. The long-suffering worker Stephen Blackpool, ostracized by the union and fired by Bounderby, is the fall guy for Tom’s bank heist. Like sociopaths, Tom and Bitzer are dead to the call of conscience or human suffering. When her world is heading for collapse, Louisa flees to her father and confronts him, bitterly, with his bankrupt system. Mr. Gradgrind’s moral compass is sufficiently intact. Against Bounderby’s counsel, he had allowed the tumbler’s child, Sissy, into his home. Faced with his daughter’s accusations, he recognizes his failures and is crushed by the outcomes of his bogus ideals: he has destroyed those he most loves. Mr. Gradgrind was not reared under his system; his humanity is capable of recovery. Louisa is not as lucky as her father. Gradgrind training has effectively hollowed out her soul. The only person who elicits her affection spontaneously is her wanton brother Tom, the comrade of her lonely youth who uses her and ultimately rejects her. Neither walks away from the wreck that is their childhood: There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in the girl [Louisa]; yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression. (p. 15)

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When asked by her father what she (at age 15 or 16) is tired of, Louisa responds, “I don’t know of what—of everything, I think” (p. 16). A disconsolate figure, Louisa is aware of her damaged psyche and its causes but is helpless to recover what she never possessed. She feels her loss strangely, as if observing a species and suddenly recognizing it as her own. Educated and wealthy, she is miffed by the pity of Sissy. But she is pitiable, and she knows it.

The Harthouse Philosophy as the Truth of the Gradgrind Philosophy A close look at the Gradgrind ideals discloses an abyss where nothing matters. In Book II of Hard Times , Dickens introduces the dark angel of indifference Mr. James Harthouse, a “fine gentleman” whose boredom with everything else left him “going in” for the “hard Fact fellows” of the Gradgrind party. “He was a thorough gentleman, made to the model of the time: weary of everything, and putting no more faith in anything than Lucifer” (pp. 91–92). Arriving in Coketown, he drifts into seducing Louisa Gradgrind, now Mrs. Josiah Bounderby. Like the Tin Man—but without his desire—Harthouse, as his name says, is a mere housing for a heart: “He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been” (p. 172). Mr. Bounderby’s scathing housekeeper, Mrs. Sparsit, imagines Louisa’s seduction by Harthouse as her twisting down “the new Giants’ staircase” into the abyss (p. 153, n. 5).36 Louisa’s education in the Gradgrind philosophy had already thrust her into a tailspin: Upon a nature long accustomed to self-suppression, thus torn and divided, the Harthouse philosophy came as a relief and justification. Everything being hollow and worthless, she had missed nothing and sacrificed nothing. What did it matter, she had said to her father, when he proposed her husband. What did it matter, she said still. With a scornful self-reliance, she asked herself, What did anything matter—and went on. (p. 125)

Dickens exposes the truth about the Gradgrind philosophy to be the affirmation of nihilism by the Harthouse philosophy. In The Sickness unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard (1980) describes spiritual sicknesses as forms of despair. Those content with their misshapen or desiccated selves suffer the least, like Bounderby and Bitzer. Those

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conscious of the cavern where a self belongs feel anxiety intensely. Unconscious despair is most dangerous because those unaware of their sickness do not seek help. Conscious despair is most painful because awareness without recourse brings endless torment. Conscious despair that is defiantly embraced is demonic. Louisa is aware of her missing desires but lacks recourse. She is stuck without hope of recovery, a spiritual jam that Kierkegaard calls introverted despair. Harthouse, who drops into Coketown on a lark and decides to seduce Louisa on a whim, embodies a deeper, more sinister despair. Unlike Gradgrind’s utilitarian prescriptions for the nation, the Harthouse philosophy has no messianic fervor; there are no reforms to be undertaken in earnest. Louisa, the product of Gradgrind upbringing, finds a soulless mate in Harthouse, with his explicitly nihilistic outlook. What is demonic about Harthouse is the indifference that creates the funnel in the cavity where his heart belonged: And yet he had not, even now, any earnest wickedness of purpose in him. Publicly and privately, it were much better for the age in which he lived, that he and the legion of whom he was one were designedly bad, than indifferent and purposeless. It is the drifting icebergs setting with any current anywhere, that wreck the ships (p. 135)37

Indifference, what Simmel calls the “blasé” or “matter-of-fact” attitude, accompanies capital’s draining our world of its reality. Capital is the new, spectral giant, and the descending “new Giant’s staircase” threatens our humanity. As Chris Arthur puts it in his alarming essay “The Spectre of Capital,” “the void at the heart of bourgeois life results in the most accomplished irony: accumulation as an infinite increase in emptiness is mistaken for a plenitude of wealth” (Arthur 2002, p. 172). Dickens’ James Harthouse is a model of “emptiness … mistaken for a plenitude of wealth.” Both Harthouse and Louisa recognize the emptiness in the Gradgrind movement. That is their shared understanding: they alone realize that the emperor has no clothes. But what smothers Louisa, Harthouse cheerfully accepts as the way things are. He is ready to “go in” for any game. His arrogant indifference is limitless. Whatever promises to fill the cavity for the moment will do: I have seen a little, here and there, up and down; I have found it all to be very worthless, as everybody has, and as some confess they have, and

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some do not; and I am going in for your respected father’s opinions— really because I have no choice of opinions, and may as well back them as anything else. (p. 98) The result of the varieties of boredom I have undergone, is a conviction (unless conviction is too industrious a word for the lazy sentiment I entertain on the subject), that any set of ideas will do just as much good as any other set, and just as much harm as any other set. (p. 99)

This seeming honesty—nothing really matters, including nihilism— at first disarms Louisa. Harthouse gives voice to Louisa’s disdain for her father’s great cause. But, like everything about Harthouse, this proud indifference is a ploy meant to trap her.38 Harthouse’s despair Kierkegaard calls demonic. Harthouse arrives in Coketown, like Satan in hell, bent—for no particular reason—on destruction. Louisa sees through inky calculations to the nothing they add up to. Why not have an affair with Harthouse? From the Gradgrind to the Harthouse philosophy is the slide down the spiral staircase to the abyss at the bottom. If nothing really matters, neither does adultery.

Dickens, Hard Times, and Capitalism Dickens does not share Kierkegaard’s view that true faith in God heals spiritual sickness; he does not share Marx’s view that chronic economic and spiritual aberrations are endemic to capitalism. Dickens separates ideology from the material conditions of production. In Hard Times , overweening extremist ideologies pose the danger to humanity. Ridding the world of the Gradgrind philosophy would bring decency to Coketown without tearing down any factory walls: the factory school concerns Dickens more than the factory. If the Gradgrind philosophy signifies the spirit of capitalism, it is the subsumption of life as a whole under the calculating eye of capital that Dickens fears, not the honestly conducted search for profits: My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else— the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time— the men who, through long years to come, will do more to damage the useful truths of political economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life.39

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Dickens’s attitude to capitalism is ambivalent. On one hand, the union leader Slackbridge is vilified for ordering Stephen Blackpool to be ostracized for not supporting the union. But faced with Bounderby’s demand that he spy on the union, Stephen refuses and defends the workers’ right to act in common—just as the owners do. For that bit of truth, he loses his job. The life of a worker is endless toil without hope for a better future, sighs Stephen: Look how we live, an’ where we live, an’ in what numbers, an’ by what chances, and wi’ what sameness; and look how the mills is awlus a goin, and how they never works us no nigher to onny dis’ant object—cepten awlus, Death. Look how you considers of us, and writes of us, and talks of us, and goes up wi’ yor deputations to Secretaries o’ State ‘bout us, and how yo are awlus right, and how we are awlus wrong, and never had’n no reason in us sin ever we were born…. (p. 113)

For Stephen, there is no way out but death. It’s a muddle. Dickens satirizes an extreme, unbending capitalist mentality throughout the novel. The pompous Bounderby excoriates labor— the Hands—at every turn. Dickens calls Bounderby’s “hard facts” the “fictions of Coketown.” Bounderby propounds them to the newcomer Harthouse—who assents to each in turn—just in case he is tempted to be moved by the plight of the workers: First of all, you see our smoke. That’s meat and drink to us. It’s the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs. If you are one of those who want us to consume it, I differ from you. We are not going to wear the bottoms of our boilers out any faster than we wear ‘em out now, for all the humbugging sentiment in Great Britain and Ireland. Now you have heard a lot of talk about the work in our mills, no doubt. You have? Very good. I’ll state the fact of it to you. It’s the pleasantest work there is, and it’s the lightest work there is, and it’s the best-paid work there is. More than that, we couldn’t improve the mills themselves, unless we laid down Turkey carpets on the floors. Which we’re not a-going to do. … as to our Hands. There’s not a Hand in this town, Sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now, they’re not a-going— none of ‘em—ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. And now you know the place. (p. 96)

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While he ridicules this capitalist humbug, Dickens repudiates class conflict. In his view, class differences are to be sensibly reconciled, not abolished. In a speech given in Birmingham in 1853, Dickens proclaims that industrial peace lies in the fusion of different classes, without confusion; in the bringing together of employers and employed; in the creating of a better common understanding among those whose interests are identical, who depend upon each other, and who can never be in unnatural antagonism without deplorable results. (p. 270)

At bottom, the interests of capital and labor harmonize. If Dickens were asked how this harmony is to be achieved, however, he might have had to echo Stephen’s words: it’s a muddle. Dickens’ dire warning returns us to the “key-note” of Hard Times , namely, Gradgrind’s utilitarian stifling of imagination: Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will always have with you. Cultivate in them [the common people], while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you! (p. 123)

As the circus master Sleary says in his parting, slurred words to Thomas Gradgrind, “People muth be amuthed. They can’t be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they an’t made for it. You muth hav uth, Thquire” (p. 215). Thus, Alexander Welsh writes of Hard Times , “Although for industrial conflict Dickens and his spokesman Stephen Blackpool do not have a solution other than kindness and forbearance, the novel is rather more assertive about entertainment—and entertainment, variety, imagination may at least alleviate factory work and the conditions it brings with it” (2000, p. 186). Dickens may not dig into capital’s constitutive forms, but his narrative of the Gradgrind philosophy imaginatively takes on capital’s shadow forms, which exert power in their own ways.

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Conclusion: Taking on Capital’s Shadow Forms In Hard Times , the malaise of capitalism is chiefly encountered as the Gradgrind philosophy; it does not concern commodities, money, or profits but rather a soul-deforming subsumption of life under forms that we call capital’s shadows. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx identifies egalitarianism as a shadow stretching the equality constitutive of the actual world of commodity exchange well beyond it: Mr. Bray does not see that this equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world; and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow [ombre in the French original] of it. In proportion as this shadow takes on substance again, we perceive that this substance, far from being the transfiguration dreamt of, is the actual body of existing society. (Marx 1963, pp. 78–79)

Shadow forms are cast by the underlying constitutive social forms, such as value, money, wage labor, and capital. Capital’s shadow forms open a window onto Marx’s account of bourgeois ideologies. Capital (including Theories of Surplus-Value) is the closest that Marx comes to a treatise on bourgeois ideology. With its focus on capital’s constitutive forms, however, Capital leaves plenty of room for elucidation. We can think about the shadow forms as extending capital’s reach. Shadows may go where the value forms may not; for example, utility theory may be applied to the family, as Gary Becker does, whereas the value forms must be excluded if there are to be free-wage laborers. The subsumption of Coketown under the hard facts and calculations of the Gradgrind philosophy, which results in the nihilism of the Harthouse philosophy, illustrates capital’s shadows spreading over human affairs beyond the commercial sphere.40 For Dickens, this transgressing of demarcations—capital’s overreach—is what is so disturbing. Shadow forms reflect capital’s constitutive forms in one way or another. We distinguish reflection that illumines from reflection that conceals. Some of capital’s shadow forms extend a constitutive feature beyond the commercial sphere. Equality constitutes commodity exchange; egalitarianism extends it.41 The U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmation of “marriage equality” may be seen as an egalitarian expansion of equality to the domestic sphere. Other shadow forms involve pseudo-concepts, that is, concepts whose purported referent does not exist. They pretend to

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describe reality, but instead, they distort and block our view of the world. Like a maze of mirrors, these reflections lead nowhere. They produce confusion, if not always the nihilism depicted in Hard Times . Encased in these categories, thought cannot advance. Utility is a pseudo-concept identified by Marx and one of the most pervasive notions in contemporary social theory. Other shadow forms that are pseudo-concepts include instrumental reason and efficiency, the purely subjective and purely objective, facts as opposed to values, economics (understood as a generally applicable human science), and egoism (understood not as selfishness but as an anthropological claim). A telling feature of pseudo-concepts is their ahistorical character. They eliminate negation, critique, and emancipation. Unmasking these categories is the task of critical theory. Dickens’ satire of the quantitative, calculative mentality that comes with utility and instrumental reason brings out the emptiness of Coketown ideology but does not ground it historically in the constitutive social form capital. Because of the strange, abstract character of its constitutive social forms, the value forms, capitalism presents itself as the economy-ingeneral, where “wealth” (of no determinate social form) is created by “labor” (of no determinate social form) in a production process that is likewise deemed generic. As Martha Campbell puts it, capitalism “claims to create wealth pure and simple and [to be] organized by this purpose” (Campbell 2004, p. 86). But there is no “wealth pure and simple”; there is no economy-in-general. Economics as ordinarily understood is a pseudo-science because it takes this illusion of the economy-ingeneral as its object of inquiry. What is more, “wealth” and “production” each shadow capital’s telos of endless accumulation, and each appears as a fetishistic end in itself: “material wealth for its own sake” and “production for production’s sake” (Marx 1976b, p. 1,037). We call “production for production’s sake” productivism. By the same token, we call productivism’s counterpart, “wealth for wealth’s sake,” wealthism. These ideologies of productivism and wealthism arise naturally as participants in a capitalist society represent their society to themselves (Marx 1976a, p. 742). As ways to represent the capitalist mode of production, both notions reveal and conceal truth. Productivism and wealthism mimic the abstractness, quantitative focus, and indifference characteristic of the value forms, but they fail to identify the peculiar social form and purpose of the wealth being produced. The all-important concept of capital is missing.

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Instrumental reason separates means from ends; it posits the task of reason to determine the best (most efficient) means to any designated end. Founded on a false separation, instrumental reason and efficiency are pseudo-concepts, shadows of capital’s preoccupation with profitmaking. The Weberian fear of the complete domination of instrumental reason is capitalism getting unnerved by its own shadow. The Kafkaesque idea of the “totally administered society” smacks of science fiction. It supposes either that no collective good organizes the society or that the collective good is something formal and empty like self-preservation (Max Horkheimer), control (Niklas Luhmann), or self-maintenance (Talcott Parsons). But those phrases dodge these questions: preservation of what form of life? Control over what? Self-maintenance of what sort of society? No society is generic—that idea is a fiction of the capitalist imagination. In truth, human labor is always concretely purposive and animated by definite, and morally weighty, social forms and purposes. As Marx succinctly puts it: “All production is appropriation on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society” (Marx 1973, p. 87). So the worry about “the totally administered society” is a worry that we will wriggle ourselves out of our own predicament.42 It will never happen! Better to worry about our actual quandary. The disconnection of shadow from constitutive forms gives rise to the neo-Weberian notion of McDonaldization.43 Like every business, McDonalds seeks to make money. But McDonaldization ignores this goal and puts the emphasis on how production of fast food is standardized. Efficiency, not making money, is said to be the goal. McDonaldization includes shadow forms that appear in Hard Times . Calculability “is an emphasis on the quantitative aspects of products sold (portion size, cost) and services offered (the time it takes to get the product)” (Ritzer 2000, p. 12). In McDonaldized systems, quantity and velocity have become surrogates for quality: a lot of something, or the quick delivery of it, means it must be good. American culture accepts that, in general, bigger is better. Sooner is also better.44 Quantitative bigness—gigantism—and the preoccupation with calculability that Max Weber calls “the romanticism of numbers” (Weber 1997, p. 71) belong to the list of capital’s shadow forms.45 Picture McDonald’s tallies of the billions of hamburgers that they have sold or Apple’s Timothy Cook standing on stage before a fifty-foot iPhone 7 as totems of capital’s accumulation. Constitutive forms can be reduced to shadows of themselves, which offers another way of keeping them out of sight and mind. Capital is the

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constitutive social form of capitalist societies, but the way that the term “capital” is now tossed around turns it into a shadow of itself. Stripped of all its determinate social content, the concept of capital is reduced to that of “whatever” resource. Capital is then ready to play its part as a shadow form. At the same time that so little thought is given to capital as the key constitutive social form of capitalist societies, talk about human capital, conceptual capital, social capital, natural capital, and even spiritual capital clogs our discourse. Capital’s shadow forms abound in our towns as they did in Dickens’ Coketown. When we focus on shadows rather than constitutive social forms, what results is predictably a muddle.

Notes 1. Piketty (2014) appeals to contemporary literature to bring home the fact that, in the twentieth century, inflation became a part of life, a precarious development that he refers to as “the loss of monetary bearings” (p. 106). In contrast to Austen’s determining the social position of her characters by their yearly income in pounds, “the novels of Orhan Pamuk, set in Istanbul in the 1970s, that is, in a period during which inflation had long since rendered the meaning of money ambiguous, omit mention of any specific sums” (p. 109). When they watch a custody court hearing in the film Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), our students don’t know what to make of the information that Joanna Kramer is employed as a sportswear designer in New York City for $31,000 a year. 2. In Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times, Alexander Welsh (2000) goes so far as to say, “Dickens’s fast and loose satire of the preaching of fact should not be allowed to obscure how close his thinking is to mainline Victorian philosophy, even that of utilitarianism” (p. 199). In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum (1995) sees Dickens’ contrast between reason and imagination as succumbing to the Gradgrind philosophy. 3. Georg Simmel (1997) observes: “It has been the money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms” (p. 338). 4. Martha Nussbaum identifies the foremost element of the broadly utilitarian Gradgrind philosophy to be commensurability, and “by commensurability, I mean … regarding all the valuable things under consideration as measurable on a single scale that itself exhibits differences only of quantity, not quality” (p. 14). 5. Note that future references to Hard Times will give just the page number.

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6. In the Preface to their unfinished book The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1976) described their purpose as “to ridicule and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation” (pp. 23–24). 7. Here is a passage where Dickens does bring the constitutive form capital to light in commenting on Bitzer, that “excellent young economist”: “the only reasonable transaction in that commodity [referring to the tea that he, out of weakness, gave annually to his mother, after he sent her to the workhouse] would have been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give, and sell it for as much as he could possibly get; it having been clearly ascertained by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of man—not a part of man’s duty, but the whole” (Dickens 1990, p. 89). Here we have the spirit of capital, as Max Weber called it, as well as its basic concept. 8. Marx was struck by this indifference toward particularity already in his first studies of political economy, his comments on James Mill: “Within the presupposition of division of labor, the product, the material of private property, acquires for the individual more and more the significance of an equivalent, and as he no longer exchanges only his surplus, and the object of his production can be simply a matter of indifference to him, so too he no longer exchanges his product for something directly needed by him. The equivalent comes into existence as an equivalent in money, which is now the immediate result of labor to gain a living and the medium of exchange” (Marx 1975b, p. 221). The indifference toward the product extends both to the capitalist and the wage laborer. 9. Capital’s disregard for particularity, then, is only one aspect of the story, since, as Marx reminds us of the double-character of the commodity, “nothing can be a value without out being an object of utility [that is, a useful thing]” (Marx 1976a, p. 131). The particular features that make commodities useful must always be important to capitalists, workers, and consumers at the same time that their being produced for the purpose of making money bleaches out their distinctiveness. 10. John Stuart Mill, in A System of Logic, splits “Science” and “Art” as follows: “though the reasonings which connect the end or purpose of every art with its means, belong to the domain of Science, the definition of the end itself belongs exclusively to Art, and forms its peculiar province” (as quoted in Welsh 2000, p. 201). See J. S. Mill (1974, pp. 943 and 949). 11. The Monkee’s hit song “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, satirized a suburban Coketown, where the smoke rises from backyard grills: “Another pleasant valley Sunday; Charcoal burning everywhere; Rows of houses that are all the same; And no one seems to care.”

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12. In Harrison Bergeron (1961), Kurt Vonnegut’s farcical send-up of capital’s shadow form egalitarianism, Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, who enforces equality at all costs, echoes Dickens’ “commissioners of fact.” 13. When Bitzer’s father dies, he grabs the inheritance and sends his mother to the workhouse. 14. See Dickens’ report on the Preston strike, in Dickens (1990, pp. 285– 297). 15. Alexander Welsh notes, “Dickens’ principal thoughts about industrial differences [are] aired in front of Bounderby. If these thoughts are less than incisive, that is because Dickens carefully avoids taking a taking a position on any of the economic issues, such as what portion of profits in textiles should accrue to the owners and what portion to the workers, or how much surplus ought to be reinvested” (Welsh 2000, p. 161). Where profits come from in the first place is no topic for Dickens. 16. The three Books that compose Hard Times –Sowing, Reaping, Garnering—liken the cultivation of children in this brave new world to growing crops. You reap what you sow. 17. Alexander Welsh connects Hard Times with Mill’s Autobiography and points out that the mere appeal to “the exercise of feeling” is not a sufficient answer to its suppression: “The recovery of feeling is construed as corrective in both texts; in neither the autobiography nor the novel is it certain why the exercise of feeling tends to the good” (Welsh 2000, p. 200). In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum addresses Welsh’s concern, arguing that feelings must be properly cultivated in order to result in a capacity for right judgment. 18. That Marx rejects the very idea of utility—in abstracting from all particularity, utility amounts to a false conception of usefulness—is evident from his barbed observation: “The usefulness of a thing makes it a use value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter” (Marx 1976a, p. 126). Utility dangles in mid-air. 19. They precede this statement with the observation: “The extent to which this theory of mutual exploitation, which Bentham expounded ad nauseam, could already at the beginning of the present century be regarded as a phase of the previous one is shown by Hegel in his Phänomenologie. See there the chapter “The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition,” where the theory of utility is depicted as the final result of enlightenment” (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 409). Utility, the false concept of the useful, claims that all useful things are commensurable and quantifiable—every useful thing can be assigned a quantity of utility—the legitimate, generally applicable concept of usefulness makes no such assumptions.

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20. Of course utility, “that elusive item” (Nussbaum 1995, p. 14), is nothing actual, as water is. Perhaps this is a joking reference by the classicist Nussbaum to the reductionist natural philosopher Thales, who imagined that everything is water. Marx’s neo-Aristotelian stance, rejecting the numerical comparability of diverse goods, is clear in the following passage from The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels argue that the bogus notion of utility is a disguise for commercial (capitalist) society: “Hence the actual relations that are presupposed here are speech, love, definite manifestations of definite qualities of individuals. Now these relations are supposed not to have the meaning peculiar to them but to be the expression and manifestation of some third relation attributed to them, the relation of utility or utilisation. This paraphrasing [Umschreibung ] ceases to be meaningless and arbitrary only when these relations have validity for the individual not on their own account, not as spontaneous activity, but rather as disguises, though by no mean disguises of the category of utilisation, but of an actual third aim and relation which is called the relation of utility” (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 409). Utility is the fiction. The “actual third aim” is surplus value, a constitutive capitalist form. Later in the text, Marx and Engels write of the absurdity of the sort of comparison that goes on under the mask of utility: “even though this absurd comparison has a real basis in the absurdity of present-day relations” (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 440). Bernard Williams makes the connection between commerce and utility: “Utilitarianism is unsurprisingly the value system for a society in which economic values are supreme; and also, at the theoretical level, because quantification in money is the only obvious form of what utilitarianism insists upon, the commensurability of values” (Williams 1972, p. 89). 21. This assertion needs to be qualified, since, in a monetary society, useful things that are not products of labor can and do have prices. Marx addresses this issue in his theory of rent. 22. Actually, in capitalism, not everything has a price, nor can it. Unlike portions of their labour power that are for sale, free wage laborers do not have a price. And without free wage laborers there is no capitalism. Since capitalist society is organized around the collective “good” of capital accumulation, and this goal is achievable only on the basis of free labour, a capitalist society is in no position to treat the (abstract) integrity of persons as a sum of utility that could be traded off for some greater utility. This makes it hard to imagine utilitarian ethics getting the upper hand over Kantian ethics in a capitalist society. There is more respect for the human person in capitalist social forms than in utilitarian ethics. 23. Marx calls money “a born leveller and cynic” (Marx 1976a, p. 179). 24. Compare Marx’s observation in 1843 that money “has, therefore robbed the whole world—both the world of men and nature—of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence,

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and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it” (Marx 1975a, p. 172). On Marx’s phenomenology of the human condition, utility theory engages in false abstraction. There are no such free-floating utilities or preferences (independent of all specific social forms of wealth and production) because an authoritative collective good already exists. It is one thing to challenge that good, as Marx does in the case of capital; it is quite another to pretend it does not exist. Friedrich A. Hayek insists that only a society free of every compulsory collective good can be just (Hayek 1997, pp. 399–416). The question that Marx poses, and answers, in Capital concerns societies where wealth generally takes the commodity form. It is a question about what makes commodities —not all useful things—commensurable. It is a question specific to capitalist societies, as is the answer: value. Utility, by contrast, is not socially specific: it purports to answer the question what makes all useful things commensurable. Marx’s neo-Aristotelian answer to that question is: nothing! Scott Meikle writes, “to extend by conscious design the rule of exchange value into regions of human personality and intimacy that it has not hitherto succeeded in entering by less conscious means … is grotesque in itself” (1991, p. 317). For the most part, only the shadows of exchange-value, utility, for example, can be extended into those intimate regions. This disguise is all the more effective because the word “utility” is often used to mean usefulness. Marx ominously compares value to gravity: “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labourtime socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (Marx 1976a, p. 168). This may be Dickens’ send-up of a famous passage from Adam Smith’s observations on the human propensity to “truck, barter, and exchange”: “Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, baker, brewer, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never

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talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages” (Smith 1997, p. 183). In that passage on bargaining, Smith repeatedly contrasts humans and dogs: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog” (Smith 1997, p. 183). Because dogs don’t bargain, they are of no use to one another, whereas “Among men … the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another”; they build up a common stock “where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men’s talents he has occasion for” (Smith 1997, p. 185). The irony that Dickens sets up at the end of Hard Times is that Thomas Gradgrind, Sr., cannot get Bitzer, whom he bred on bargaining, to save his son Tom; instead, “the learned dog” (p. 213) from Sleary’s circus saves young Tom. Sleary names the alternative to the calculating, self-interested Gradgrind philosophy, “the wayth of the dogth” (p. 215). 32. Nobel laureate in economics Gary Becker takes the Gradgrind modeling of all reality on commodity exchange in earnest. He recognizes the limits to the sphere of the market but suspends them by introducing the concept of “shadow” (imputed) prices: “The economic approach is clearly not restricted to material goods and wants, nor even to the market sector. Prices, be they the money prices of the market sector or the ‘shadow’ imputed prices of the nonmarket sector, measure the opportunity cost of using scarce resources, and the economic approach predicts the same kind of response to shadow prices as to market prices” (Becker 1976, p. 6). Encompassing all human affairs under the price-form—whether actual or imputed (“shadow”) prices—enables Becker to adopt the Gradgrind philosophy in full: “I have come to the position that the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior, be it behavior involving money prices or imputed shadow prices, repeated or infrequent decisions, large or minor decisions, emotional or mechanical ends, rich or poor persons, patients or therapists, businessmen or politicians, teachers or students. The applications of the economic approach so conceived are as extensive as the scope of economics in the definition given earlier [Lionel Robbins’s seminal definition] that emphasizes scarce means and competing ends” (Becker 1976, p. 8). Ironically, Becker notes that Robbins drew back from the implication of his sweeping definition: “Even Robbins, after an excellent discussion of what an economic problem is in the first chapter of his classic work on the nature and scope of economics (1962), basically restricts his analysis in later chapters to the market sector” (Becker 1976, p. 4, n. 5). Martha Nussbaum quotes Becker’s teacher George Stigler as saying, “all of man’s deliberative, forward-looking behavior follows the principles of economics” (Nussbaum 1995, p. 47).

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33. It turns out that Bounderby has been spouting lies about his origins, presenting an ironic contrast with the prized virtues of commerce: honesty and fairness. The explosive Mr. Bounderby is the sort that would provoke Georges Bataille to remark: “the bourgeois are incapable of concealing a sordid face, a face so rapacious and lacking in nobility, so frighteningly small, that all human life, upon seeing it, seems degraded” (Bataille 1997, p. 373). 34. See Chapter 3 “Rational Emotions,” in Nussbaum (1995), which concludes: “Sympathetic emotion that is tethered to the evidence, institutionally constrained in appropriate ways, and free from reference to one’s own situation appears to be not only acceptable but actually essential to public judgment. But it is this sort of emotion, the emotion of the judicious spectator, that literary works construct in their reader, who learn what it is to have emotion, not for a ‘faceless undifferentiated mass,’ but for the ‘uniquely individual human being.’ This means, I believe, that literary works are what [Adam] Smith thought they were: artificial constructions of some crucial elements in a norm of public rationality, and valuable guides to correct response” (p. 78). Note the crucial difference here between Dickens and Nussbaum: where Dickens insists that “reason” must be complemented by “fancy,” Nussbaum shows why “sympathetic emotion” is “essential to public judgment.” 35. Dickens’ narrator points out that this painful interview between father and daughter concerning Bounderby’s proposal was a missed opportunity for Mr. Gradgrind, one that he will redeem only at the end of the novel, when Louisa has skipped out on her adulterous rendezvous with Harthouse and is at the end of her wits. In this earlier scene, Louisa turns to her father, who “leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pentup confidences of her heart. But to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there” (pp.77–78). 36. In his essay “The Spectre of Capital,” Chris Arthur cites Cynthia Willett’s essay “The Shadow of Hegel’s Science of Logic” (1990), in which she pictures the dialectical development of Hegel’s logic as an upward spiral of Being and a downward spiral of Nothing. Arthur appropriates this

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image to capture the twofold development of the upward spiral of capital accumulation and the downward spiral (the “New Giant’s Staircase”) into nihilism, as value hollows out everything it touches (Arthur 2002, pp. 164–165). At the bottom of the ninth circle of Dante’s inferno, ringed with giants, is ice created by the flapping of Satan’s wings. We take it that Marx had this in mind in describing commodities, in so far as they are values, as “merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour” and “crystals of this social substance” (Marx 1976a, p. 128). Marx explicitly associates the sphere of commerce, simple commodity circulation, with Dante’s plain of Acheron and the realm of capitalist production as the inferno (Marx 1976a, pp. 279–280). With his handsome face, charm, and “assumed honesty in dishonesty, most effective and most patronized of all the deadly sins” (p. 125), Harthouse calls to mind Geryon, Dante’s monster of fraud. Charles Dickens in a letter to Charles Knight, January 30, 1855, in Dickens 1990, p. 275. Martha Nussbaum calls attention to this “spill over”: “As the novel suggests, seeing people in the way recommended by economics does tend to spill over into the conduct of life and the choice of policies: Gradgrind’s vision of the world is in that sense not an innocent ‘as if’ operation, but a way of restructuring the human world that has, if thoroughly and habitually carried out, profound significance for the shape of human societies” (1995, p. 47). A bumper sticker now popular in the United States is simply an equal’s sign: “=.” That fact that this worry looms so large in Jürgen Habermas’s work, as evidenced by his antagonism toward the social engineering approach of Niklas Luhmann and, conversely, by his passion for communicative action as a counterweight to instrumental action, attests to his failure to recognize instrumental action as a shadow form of value-producing (“practically abstract”) labor, which turns out to be surplus-value-producing labor. Frankfurt School discourse around the notion of instrumental reason turns on a miscomprehension of Marx’s labor theory of value, which, as a theory not of “labor” but of the specific social form of labor in capitalist societies, represents a profound critique of the traditional (Ricardian) labor theory of value. The “traditional Marxism” (Postone 1993) of most members of the Frankfurt School has more in common with the neo-Kantian concepts of Weber than the neo-Aristotelian ones of Marx. See George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer 2000). Ritzer’s book has in common with Hard Times a preoccupation with capital’s shadow forms, though constitutive forms turn up toward the end of the book.

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44. In Volume 2 of Capital, Marx (1978) shows how shortening turnover time raises the rate of profit. 45. On gigantism, see also Simone Weil (1997).

References Arthur, C. The New Dialectic and Marx’s “Capital”. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Bataille, G. “The Accursed Share (excerpts).” In Reflections on Commercial Life: Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by P. Murray. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997, pp. 375–381. Becker, G. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Campbell, M. “Value Objectivity and Habit.” In The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital”. Edited by R. Bellofiore and N. Taylor. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Dickens, C. Hard Times. Edited by G. Ford and S. Monod. Second edition. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, [1854] 1990. Hayek, F. A. “The Discipline of Abstract Rules and the Emotions of the Tribal Society (excerpts from Law, Legislation and Liberty).” In Reflections on Commercial Life: Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by P. Murray. New York, NY: Routledge, [1973] 1997, pp. 399–416. Kierkegaard, S. The Sickness unto Death. Edited and translated by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1849] 1980. Marx, K. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York, NY: International Publishers, [1847] 1963. ———. Grundrisse. Translated by M. Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, [1857–1858] 1973. ———. “On the Jewish Question.” Translated by C. Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 3: Marx and Engels: 1843–44. New York, NY: International Publishers, [1843] 1975a, pp.146–174. ———. “Comments on James Mill’s Élémens d’économie politique.” Translated by C. Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 3: Marx and Engels: 1843–44. New York, NY: International Publishers, [1844] 1975b, pp. 211–228. ———. Capital: Volume 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, [1894] 1976a. ———. “Results of the Immediate Production Process.” Translated by R. Livingstone. In Capital: Volume 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, [1863–1864] 1976b. ———. Capital: Volume 2. Translated by D. Fernbach. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, [1885] 1978.

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———. “Original Text” (Urtext). In “Economic Manuscripts of 1957–8.” In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 29: Marx: 1857–1861. London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, [1858] 1987. Marx, K., and F. Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by C. Dutt, W. Lough, et al. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5: Marx and Engels: 1845–47 . New York, NY: International Publishers, [1845–1846] 1976. Meikle, S. “History of Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Substance in Marx.” In Cambridge Companion to Marx. Edited by T. Carver. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 296–319. Mill, J. S. “A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive.” In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vols. 7 and 8. Edited by J. M. Robson et al. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, [1843] 1974. ———. “The Mind and Character of Jeremy Bentham.” In Hard Times. Second edition. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, [1838] 1990. Nussbaum, M. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. Poetic Justice. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995. Piketty, T. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Postone, M. Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Prawer, S. S. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1976. Ritzer, G. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000. Simmel, G. “The Metropolis and Mental Life (excerpts).” In Reflections on Commercial Life: Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by P. Murray. New York, NY: Routledge, [1903] 1997, pp. 335–347. Smith, A. “The Wealth of Nations (excerpts).” In Reflections on Commercial Life: Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by P. Murray. New York, NY: Routledge, [1776] 1997, pp. 176–203. Vonnegut, K. “Harrison Bergeron.” In The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. J. W. Ferman, 1961. Weber, M. “The Spirit of Capitalism.” In Reflections on Commercial Life: Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by P. Murray. New York, NY: Routledge, [1905] 1997, pp. 350–364. Weil, S. Sketch of Contemporary Life (from Oppression and Liberty). In Reflections on Commercial Life: Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. Edited by P. Murray. New York, NY: Routledge, [1958] 1997, pp. 385–395. Welch, C. Utilitarianism. In The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, in 4 Vols. Edited by J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, and P. Newman. London, UK: Macmillan, 1987.

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Welsh, A. Dickens Redressed: The art of Bleak House and Hard Times. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Willett, C. “The Shadow of Hegel’s Science of Logic.” In Essays on Hegel’s Logic. Edited by G. di Giovanni. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990. Williams, B. Morality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

CHAPTER 12

Rebel Without a Cause: Stanley Kubrick and the Banality of the Good

There’s nothing so very great about living—all your slaves and all the animals do it. …Think how long now you’ve been doing the same as them—food, sleep, sex, the never-ending cycle.1 Human life is to be regarded … as a dull pastime.2

Surfing the Zeitgeist Stanley Kubrick enters the annals of filmmaking as the McCarthy crackdown on communists in Hollywood ends and the movie production code loses its powers over the studios. No director was quicker to seize upon unshackled topics than Kubrick. In Fear and Desire (1953), soldiers behind the lines ambush a general and shoot him point blank as he cries “surrender.” In the heist film The Killing (1956), Kubrick uses smalltimers in a story reminiscent of John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle (1950) but lacking its humanity. In Paths of Glory (1957), French military officers order a suicide mission, fire on their own men, and execute three scapegoats to cover-up their crimes. In Lolita (1962), an English professor marries a woman for whom he has only contempt in order to seduce her adolescent daughter. In Dr. Strangelove (1964), a Cold War farce ends in a nuclear holocaust. Kubrick can ignore organized crime when

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_12

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the so-called guardians of society—family, scholars, government, and military—harbor such corruption. Kubrick also took the lead with sex, nudity, and violence; there is the matchless eroticism of the toenail polishing sequence that opens Lolita, and decades later it is still harrowing to watch scenes from A Clockwork Orange (1971). In a sea of films that shatter cultural norms, Kubrick’s stand out: the graphic or outrageous is filmed exquisitely. The audience is torn between looking away and gazing with uneasy delight. This artistic freedom was unthinkable a few years earlier; however, Kubrick did not flee to England to escape surveillance but to cut production costs. There he exercised his freedom, but it is an ironic, non-conformist brand of freedom that his films expose. Kubrick confessed that his most challenging goal as an artist was to represent his age on the screen. “I know I would like to make … a contemporary story that really gave a feeling of the times, psychologically, sexually, politically, personally … it would be the hardest film to make.”3 Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a film Kubrick had in mind by the early 70s and whose release coincided with his death, came closest to realizing that dream with its tale of jealousy, sexual adventurism, and revenge within marriage. But Kubrick surfs the zeitgeist throughout his films, exploring anti-war sentiments, the sexual revolution, space travel, behavior modification, artificial intelligence, cryogenics, the arms race, youth culture, homosexuality, and women’s liberation before they surface as mainstream. He anticipates emerging trends, staying ahead of the beat.

The Skeptical Vision and the Banality of the Good But the deeper idea that informs his films is skepticism: what seems so new sinks back into old stalemates. Behind the counter-cultural image of trendy filmmaker is a sensibility closer to Beat generation existentialism and Mad magazine—Kubrick was in his twenties from 1948 to 1958— that links Kubrick to ancient and modern skeptics. If knowledge exceeds our reach, reason’s sole task is to debunk any claim to truth. History is not moving toward perpetual peace or a rational society. Advancement or progress is exposed as illusion. With his use of the state of nature, Hobbes grasped the ugly lesson: this species lives on the brink of destruction— to plunder, pillage, and rape is our natural right —unless some external force intervenes. Humans are natural-born killers; their best behavior is a few steps away from the natural state of war. The ultimate scheme for imposing an external force on ourselves, the Soviet’s Doomsday Machine

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in Strangelove, ends up destroying the world due to a combination of party pride on the part of the Soviets and anti-Communist fanaticism on the part of General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden). In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a murder marks the “dawn of man” and the murder weapon, tossed into the air, morphs memorably into a spacecraft. Kubrick’s adoption of skeptical tropes conjoins the absurdity of human existence to the brutish nastiness of human nature. The eons of time and the immense expanse of the universe—filling the screen in 2001— reduce our lives to insignificance. Even if plans succeed—which rarely happens—with death as our destiny, what good can be achieved? At birth, we are all DOA. Each creature briefly interrupts the cosmic emptiness. Seneca observes, “We, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquility.”4 Victor Zeigler (Sydney Pollack), in Eyes Wide Shut, consoles Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) with our shared fate, “Life goes on, it always does, until it doesn’t.” If an external force could keep us from destroying each other, could it also remove the looming threat of personal extinction? Even then, if what we presently do as mortals lacks significance, wouldn’t doing it ad infinitum magnify our absurdity? For Camus, the rebel defies absurdity with a spiteful “yes” echoing through an indifferent universe. With Kubrick’s take on the absurd, moral heroes represent wishful thinking. Wedged between human treachery and cosmic futility, the genuinely good emerges—when at all—helpless, like Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) in Paths of Glory, or doomed, as with Spartacus (Kirk Douglas). The absurd takes a toll, blurring or reversing the distinction between good and bad. For example, the presumably decent, Alex’s parents in Clockwork Orange, are painful caricatures, more disturbing than their unfettered son. Humbert Humbert (James Mason), the middle-aged poetry professor who seduces Lolita (Sue Lyon), seems benign in comparison to her scheming middlebrow mother, Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). In the bathroom getting ready for a fancy Christmas party, Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) fishes for a compliment as she pees. She gets it—only it’s false—Bill eyes himself in the mirror, the back of his head to her. The good lack grace; they are banal and unbecoming. The wicked, by contrast, have sass, like Barry Lyndon (Ryan O’Neal) plotting his next con job or conquest. Yet both good and bad characters are exaggerated and cartoonish. Characters are flat, since conversation or intimacy is rare; there is little “inner” to reveal

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or develop. Even Bill and Alice’s bedroom scenes in Eyes Wide Shut are more monologue than dialogue. What brightens the screen—and Kubrick’s screen is brilliant—is irony: the snicker of the narrator or the dissonance of the soundtrack. In Full Metal Jacket , Joker (Matthew Modine) sports a peace button on his lapel while “Born to Kill” is scrawled on his helmet. In Clockwork Orange, Alex (Malcolm McDowell) exults to “Singing in the Rain” while he rapes the wife and bashes the husband by turn. A foo-foo dog gets loose and the airline luggage cart veers abruptly, spilling the old suitcase and sending a blizzard of racetrack loot blowing down the runway in The Killing. Camus’s writings wrestle with the absurd: in his spite Sisyphus triumphs; in Kubrick’s films, the absurd rules uncontested. Kubrick’s rebels lack passion; they just swerve, headed nowhere in particular. Kubrick is dogmatic in his skepticism. The skepticism that recurs throughout his films and shapes his vision is potted. Its pervasiveness reveals Kubrick’s art to be a reflection of a world that it does not comprehend. Skepticism belongs to what Marx calls the “bourgeois horizon,” the defective philosophical stance characteristic of modern times. In embracing skepticism Kubrick unwittingly accommodates himself to his world. While his relatively few films span many genres, skeptical distancing and irony shine throughout. Like Schopenhauer’s formless will, Kubrick’s skepticism shapes countless characters and presides over their disintegration. It may be wrong to say that an artist has a particular philosophy; nonetheless, the ideas circulating throughout Kubrick’s work follow familiar philosophic patterns. Skeptical moves structure and check his options yet, as with chess, allow for countless variations without altering the rules or objectives. But deep-seated flaws are endemic to skepticism, which is one of the most persistent strains of false philosophy.5 Kubrick might be called the great film artist of false philosophy. His themes are hallmarks of skeptical thought: our proximity to a state of nature, the corruptness of authority and human institutions, disillusionment with ideals such as progress, the banality of the good, the pull of immediate pleasures, the divergence of appearances from reality, the seepage of the nightmare world into daily existence, and grasping for salvation from beyond the human condition through technology or alien life.

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Skepticism and Capitalism Hegel wrote that philosophy expresses its time in thought; the Owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk—after history has achieved a new form. Like philosophy, art captures its world, but concretely in image, marble, sound, plot, music, and symbol. There’s ambiguity in Hegel’s idea, for there is a difference between a philosophy that mirrors its age and one that points beyond it by comprehending it. Karl Marx, who at 19 converted to Hegel’s way of thinking, probed this ambiguity in Hegel’s own philosophy. Marx focused on Hegel’s chief contribution to social and political philosophy, The Philosophy of Right (1821). Marx reached the conclusion that Hegel’s philosophy was more an expression of his times than a comprehension of civil society, that is, modern, commercial society. Marx gradually realized that to grasp the modern world, we need a critical, searching concept of capital. But Hegel lacked the concept of capital. Without it, social reality is systematically distorted, appearances pose as a fundamental reality, and hopes are mislaid. Civil society appears as a realm of wheeling and dealing, class conflict, waning customs, and fragmented community. Poverty and wealth spiral to extremes; ideals such as liberty and equality ignite a “great scramble” for commercial power and empire. For Hegel, this appearance is both disturbing and integral to the freedom achievable only in these societies. Once history reaches the stage of civil society, social unraveling is part of the social fabric to be managed somehow. Hegel’s philosophy reflects the hurly-burly of modern commerce; it doesn’t reach its source. In judging that Hegel’s philosophy reflects modern commercial society without adequately comprehending it, Marx further concluded that Hegel’s philosophy represents an unwarranted accommodation to it. As Hegel’s student, Marx undertook to disclose the source of that accommodation and get past it: “if a philosopher has actually accommodated himself, his students have to clarify this out of his inner, essential consciousness.”6 In relating the films of Stanley Kubrick to skepticism and like moves made by existentialists, we try to reveal the “essential form of consciousness” that makes Kubrick a rebel without a cause. In his dissertation Marx explores how philosophy accommodates capitalism. The dissertation investigated the difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, but Marx regarded this study as a point of entry for understanding the whole cycle of ancient Greek

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philosophy. Marx calls the Hellenistic cycle of Epicurean, Stoic, and Skeptical philosophy “the key to the true history of Greek philosophy.”7 It appears that Marx adopted Hegel’s view that the world of classical Greek philosophy, culminating in Plato and Aristotle, could not cope with the demand of the human spirit for individual liberty. “Antiquity was rooted in nature, in the substantial. Nature’s degradation, its profaning, marks basically the rupture of the substantial, honorable life; the modern world is rooted in spirit, and spirit can be free, other, nature set free of itself’.”8 The Hellenistic philosophies, and Epicurus’s in particular, expressed that demand and thereby exposed the limits of classical Greek philosophy, but they did so in an abstract, inadequate way. The creative kernel of Marx’s dissertation was to see in Epicurus’s doctrine of the declination or swerving of the atom the template for his entire philosophy.9 Epicurus’s swerving atoms are the original non-conformists: they assert their liberty—the prototype of bourgeois liberty’s “freedom from”—by veering away from the norm, but their freedom achieves no content beyond this gesture. What Marx goes on to say about Epicurus applies to Kubrick, “The radical subjectivism of Epicurus is double-edged. Like Prometheus, Epicurus cuts down from their heaven all gods elevated over and against human consciousness, but with the same stroke he enthrones a dangerously abstract form of self-consciousness as the new idol.”10 The skeptic’s only certainties are the stream of present sensations that Sextus Empiricus calls “appearances.” These sensations are given; everything subsequent arises from our efforts to name, order, analyze, and respond to appearances. This split between what is given—appearances— and what we construct anchors skepticism in futility. Reality splinters between the formless and the formed; as soon as appearances are spoken, they relocate to the other side of the divide: no longer given but subjective, fashioned by us. Language descends on the flood of experience in an impossible mission to say what it is. Just as quickly as we say what is true, good, or beautiful, the skeptic dismisses the claim as a subjective construction. Hence doubt is more defensible than any claim. The skeptic is hard-pressed to acknowledge better knowledge or higher morality, since distinctions lose all force when leveled to equally subjective posits. Every distinction necessarily is external to formless reality, a precarious imposition on the flood. Goodness sinks into banality, while evil, closer to the maelstrom, seems authentic and real. Capitalism encourages the skeptical mind-set: ordinary reality is often not what it seems to be. Behind the ordinary lurks the compulsion for

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money to continually expand. What is good leads a double life: home is an asset, education is an investment, children are both deductions and expense. The liberty of the market is narrowly self-centered. The indifference of money bleeds into ordinary concerns, sapping informed moral sensibilities. Irony results from the double character of capitalism: we have to pretend that our specific labors and products matter when we know that making money is all that’s important. Irony thrives too in capitalist culture as we rehearse convictions passed down to us lest they slip away. What the skeptic posits as a timeless truth actually exists as a historical reality—ours is an ironic age. Alice Harford reluctantly rebuffs the masher at the party with a coy, “I’m married,” as they both realize how little weight her wedding ring carries.

The Skeptical Tropes of Stanley Kubrick In a revealing 1968 interview that Kubrick did with Eric Nordern for Playboy, we find him invoking several modes of argument commonly employed by Hellenistic philosophers. Tropes involving either size or distance or ones involving duration and death figure prominently in his thinking: If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?11

Compare Kubrick’s observations on the futility of human existence with what Hume wrote in the voice of an ancient Skeptic: It is certain, were a superior being thrust into a human body, that the whole of life would to him appear so mean, contemptible, and puerile, that he never could be induced to take part in any thing, and would scarcely give attention to what passes around him.12

These weighty remarks should not stun us with their wisdom. If worth is measured by size and duration, then dwarfs and toddlers beware. What

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matters is not quantity, but the form of existence: the important difference between people and microbes isn’t one of size. Besides, why doesn’t our being alone in the cosmos—assuming we are—make us more significant? It is not only life’s brevity that supposedly makes it insignificant; death—whenever it comes—cancels all hope for meaning. For Kubrick, our unique capacity to project into the future is our undoing: Man is the only creature aware of his own mortality and is at the same time generally incapable of coming to grips with this awareness and all its implications. …in each man’s chest a tiny ferret of fear at this ultimate knowledge gnaws away at his ego and his sense of purpose.13

Here Kubrick finds a source of the banality—or worse—of human life. That life matters is an appearance that the skeptic sees through. Hume reminds us at the end of “The Sceptic,” “death, though perhaps they receive him differently, yet treats alike the fool and the philosopher.”14 Seneca writes, “In the ashes all men are leveled. We’re born unequal, we die equal.”15 Barry Lyndon’s narrator (Michael Hordern), looking back in time, ends with a similar sentiment about the main characters of the story: “They are all equal now.” Skeptics use such tropes to convince us that our judgments of value are wholly subjective, while Stoics appeal to them to convince us of the triviality of our temporal concerns.

Skeptical “Solutions” The skeptic can’t get past Descartes’ doubt: how do we know that all we hold certain isn’t a dream? Reason’s demand for truth tumbles into the nightmare. Value is purely subjective; the world and everything in it are utterly indifferent. In the face of such paralyzing realizations, certain skeptical options remain. These skeptical moves surface throughout Kubrick’s films. The classic skeptical solution to the nightmare of reason can be found in Hume’s essay “The Sceptic.” He follows up the passage cited above in which he claims that a superior creature forced into a human body would find the whole business insufferably “mean, contemptible, and puerile” by pointing out that the philosopher arrives at the same result:

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Now all the same topics of disdain towards human affairs, which could operate on this supposed being, occur also to a philosopher … While others play, he wonders at their keenness and ardour; but he no sooner puts in his own stake, than he is commonly transported with the same passions, that he had so much condemned, while he remained a simple spectator.16

Hume’s advice to Descartes: when you fall into a whirlpool of doubts, leave your study for the society to be found at the billiard table. Nature and custom rescue us from reason’s incapacitating insight; soon we find ourselves caring about this or that and so we carry on. The foremost solution to skeptical reason then lies with our natural instincts and sentiments. Parental love displays nature’s power to rescue our species from the abyss of indifference. Even a rake such as Barry Lyndon came under its spell. In “The Skeptic” Hume observes: Nature has given all animals a like prejudice in favour of their offspring. As soon as the helpless infant sees the light, though in every other eye it appears a despicable and a miserable creature, it is regarded by its fond parent with the utmost affection, and is preferred to every other object, however perfect and accomplished. The passion alone, arising from the original structure and formation of human nature, bestows a value on the most insignificant object.17

In his 1968 Playboy interview, Kubrick echoes Hume, adding a dash of genetics: You may stand outside your wife’s hospital room during childbirth muttering, ‘My God, what a responsibility! Is it right to take on this terrible obligation: What am I really doing here?’; and then you go in and look down at the face of your child and—zap!—that ancient programming takes over and your response is one of wonder and joy and pride. It’s a classic case of genetically imprinted social patterns.18

For the skeptic, nature, with its bio-chemical zaps, keeps the species going, while reason, fixed on its nightmare vision, generally lacks a commensurate power. In going along with nature’s urgings, however, we fool ourselves in order to make life endurable. As Lieutenant Corby (Kenneth Harp) says to end Fear and Desire, “It’s all a trick we perform, because we’d rather not die immediately.” Hume likens the trick to playing a game; we follow

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rules in pursuit of goals—say, checkmating an opponent—that is all of our own artifices. He writes: Human life … is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and carelessness.19

With this solution we who reflect on our situation live a lie: in order to live at all, we act as though what we care about matters, when the truth is that it doesn’t. The rituals of ordinary life can’t mask the futility; the nightmare licking beneath the ordinary is felt. In Eyes Wide Shut, Bill can’t be sure what happens to his friend who is whisked from the hotel. Did the woman save his life? Was she murdered? Who is following him? At the end of The Killers, after the loot blows away and the police close in, Johnny Clay refuses to run, muttering, “What’s the difference?” Our proximity to the uncanny explains why Kubrick turns to the surreal to portray our present feel for reality: “I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I’ve always liked fairy tales and myths … ghost stories … I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today.”20 Here Kubrick is at his most prescient, capturing the sense in which our lives increasingly lie outside our awareness and control. The nightmare can arise at any time. Beneath the veneer of civilization lurks the ape. Kubrick doubts that history, for all its apparent sophistication, can leave the state of nature behind. There is fighting in the War Room, the bedroom, at the dawn of history, and in the technologically advanced future where Astronaut Dave (Keir Dullea) finally checkmates HAL (voice by Douglas Rain) after the all-too-human computer has killed the rest of the crew. Death clings to Kubrick’s vision. Any social order remains external to our unruly nature. With mutual hostility as our original state, civilization, says Freud, “is perpetually threatened with disintegration.”21 In Eyes Wide Shut, Bill’s lost mask gave him away to Alice. What’s unsettling in Kubrick’s films is that, like the ax-wielding Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) in The Shining , we are always in danger of losing the masks of our civilized selves. The civilized man who sacrifices instinctual urges for security comes off as the loser. Alex in Clockwork Orange appeals because of the rawness of his appetites; he devours on

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impulse. The aggressive instinct that “opposes this program of civilization” can’t be deferred for long. The civilized Alex resembles a zombie: all the juice is drained out of him. The “cured” Alex fantasizes riotous coupling beneath Victorian on-lookers. Marine recruits in Full Metal Jacket drill to the chant, “This is my rifle; this is my gun. This is for fighting; this is for fun.” The hooded patriarchs in Eyes Wide Shut create rituals of degradation, while the proprietor of the costume store rents out his adolescent “daughter” after hours. Nothing really changes; progress is a sham. Encountering the nightmare may put us going back to “normal” life and playing our part in the “dull pastime” beyond our reach. At the close of Fear and Desire, Mac’s (Frank Silvera) comrade Fletcher (Steve Coit) ponders the gulf that now separates him from his former routines: “I’m all mixed up … I wish I wanted what I wanted before.” When, at the end of Eyes Wide Shut, Bill and Alice Harford resolve to return from their respective adulterous nightmares to the worn confines of their marriage, we wonder how successful they will be. What options remain if the clutch slips on the “skeptical solution” and I can’t find my way home? Mac, in Fear and Desire, can’t bear the thought of returning from war to his humdrum existence. Instead, he jumps at the chance to go out with a bang by killing a general: I’m thirty-four years old, and I’ve never done anything important. When this is over I’m going to fix radios and refrigerators … This is something for me. They dangle a general in front of you, you know it’s only for this once … It’s better to make your life all in one night—one night, one man, one gun!

The banality of humdrum work overlays intractable existentialist banality. Mac echoes the words of Seneca: “As it is with a play, so it is with life—what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will— only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.”22 A bold suicide puts an exclamation point on an otherwise shabby existence—and Mac’s role in the assassination of the general makes it a suicide mission.

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¨ Pleasure Uber Alles If we aren’t going anywhere, the present becomes all-important. For a skeptic, what could count as a good reason to defer the pleasures of the moment? “Present pleasure is always of importance; and whatever diminishes the importance of all other objects must bestow on it an additional influence and value.”23 Does that mean that the more “philosophical” we become, the more prone to seek out dissolute pleasures? Hume worries about the lure of such reasoning. Reflection on how everything is “hurried away by time” mortifies our passions, But does it not thereby counterwork the artifice of nature, who has happily deceived us into an opinion, that human life is of some importance? And may not such a reflection be employed with success by voluptuous reasoners, in order to lead us, from the paths of action and virtue, into the flowery fields of indolence and pleasure?24

The “skeptical solution” of sliding back into ordinary life may fail, leaving only present pleasure. The list of Kubrick characters living the “Snatch and Grab It” conclusion of the “voluptuous reasoners” includes Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), Alex and his droogs, Barry Lyndon, Victor Zeigler, and the other masked men at the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut. Marx took the quality of the sexual bond between man and woman as the barometer of an age’s progress toward or away from humanizing the species: This direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. …From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence.25

For Kubrick, the sexual bond uniquely exposes the human capacity for cruelty. With films like Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick heralds a deeply skeptical age in which the clutch on the skeptical solution is worn out and the day of the “voluptuous reasoners” is at hand. In the closing scene of Eyes, Alice is stumped when she tries to say why the marriage should continue; neither love nor forgiveness is within reach.

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Instead, it is “Fuck” that opens up their future. “Fuck” is Kubrick’s last word on sexual relations—even inside marriage. Present pleasure über alles.

The Artist’s Response: Create the Meaning That Is Missing from the World The artist sees through the hypocrisy of ordinary life, where the indifferent is treated as significant. Nature’s trick lures us along. Surrendering to this artifice of nature amounts to bad faith. The artist removes the masks for a more genuine response. Dissatisfaction with the skeptical solution may lead to a direction popularized by Sartre’s existentialism. In answer to the question: “If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?” Kubrick responds: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. …Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.26

This option discloses Kubrick’s self-understanding as a creative artist: what is missing from the universe is supplied by the movie projector’s dancing light. Meaning arises from the value added by the imagination. Kubrick’s add-your-own-value formula is familiar from Sartre: If man, as the existentialist conceives him is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. …Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.27

Art—including art that depicts life’s absurdity—offers consolation that carries us along when nature’s “zaps” fizzle or strike us as unseemly. Since the world in itself is vacant, we must rely on ourselves to fill it.

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This popular way out of the conundrums of skepticism—so important to Kubrick’s self-understanding as an artist—faces an irresolvable dilemma. It turns out to be a false door. Kubrick and like-minded existentialists exploit a fallacy in skeptical thinking about value. On the one hand, the skeptic asserts that the universe is utterly valueless or indifferent, in itself . In truth, value is something purely subjective that we foist or “project” on the world. But how are we to understand this “projection” of values? Here’s where the sophism shows up. Is the world actually being changed through this projection from utter meaninglessness into significance? Where there was darkness, does our light now shine? If so, then the world is no longer dark. What’s more, my world never has been dark because humans have been lighting it for untold generations. If projection adds meaning and value into a previously indifferent world, then we actually transform it into a meaningful and valuable one. But if we can do that, surely the generations who preceded us already did so; in which case, if it ever was, the world has long since ceased to be meaningless. If I once thought it was indifferent, I was simply mistaken. No skeptical solution was called for; this option pulls the rug out from under skepticism. But the truth about skepticism and its existentialist progeny lies, we believe, with the other horn of the dilemma. Skepticism is not serious about projection, that is, it does not believe that we actually make the world (or any part of it) significant. Projection leaves the universe as it was, meaningless and indifferent. So, the heady talk of our supplying “genuine” meaning, of our taking it upon ourselves to “light” the dark world is a self-deluding fantasy. Skepticism cannot escape this dilemma: either projection actually creates meaning and value; in which case, Skepticism’s claim that the universe is indifferent is not true. Or projection doesn’t really project anything, and the idea that we can add meaning all on our own, so to speak, turns out to be a mirage.28 There is an additional problem with the “make your own meaning” solution: the arbitrariness of any result. According to skeptical principles, nothing in the world provides any guidance to our meaning- and valuemaking ventures. “It’s not from the value or worth of the object, which any person pursues, that we can determine his enjoyment.”29 The truth becomes the plausible, the good becomes the preferred. Whether one prefers Beethoven, a bit of the old “in and out,” bum-bashing, or a fastforwarded three-way orgy set to the William Tell Overture is a matter of indifference. As Hume puts it, “The catching of flies, like DOMITIAN,

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if it give more pleasure, is preferable to the hunting of wild beasts, like WILLIAM RUFUS, or conquering of kingdoms, like ALEXANDER.”30 The meaningful falls back into “what gives me pleasure,” the outcome it was meant to escape. This skeptical solution—creating meaning—fails.

The Consolation of False Philosophy The existentialism born of skepticism was not the only alternative in the mid-1950s when Kubrick’s artistic vision took shape. Another approach, influenced by Heidegger’s Being and Time, emerges from the writings of Herbert Marcuse (a student of Heidegger) and Eric Fromm, where history makes a difference to the kind of beings we become.31 Humans develop through time; their prospects are not inherently fixed.32 Marcuse speaks of a new reality principle that transforms work into play and reconciles pleasure and freedom. Fromm observes that Freud’s tragic vision arises from taking aspects of his particular social world as basic human traits: For Freud, social life and civilization are essentially in contrast to the needs of human nature as he sees it, and is confronted with the tragic alternative between happiness based on the unrestricted satisfaction of his instincts, and security and cultural achievements based on instinctual frustration … Freud’s concept of human nature as being essentially competitive (and asocial) is the same as we find it in most authors who believe that the characteristics of man in modern Capitalism are his natural characteristics.33

Kubrick’s existentialism does not draw from this alternative. Obviously, Kubrick reflects upon his world: his films take advantage of an increasingly tolerant social climate to take up the topics of the day as well as those of the past and future. He keenly senses those aspects of our lives that are ripe for doubt: mutually assured destruction, bored spouses, bureaucrats, sexual obsession, and youth culture. But his art doesn’t comprehend this world. These timely topics are pretexts to rehearse what does not change. This popularized existentialism, oddly, remains a stranger to existence. It moves from one dogmatic claim to the next without bothering to look upon the human creature and consider just what kind of being it is. When we are convinced that nothing can change, there is nothing to learn. Hope must come from outside, such as the aliens who spawn

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a new form of life at the end of 2001. Skeptical criteria are rigged to remain one step ahead, dancing out of reach. How do we know that these criteria indeed measure truth or goodness? That question is not asked. The skeptic defends his conclusions against the evidence that human existence could offer. Dedicated to fixed claims, this skepticism makes for a false philosophy. Under the weight of foregone conclusions, even skeptical irony goes slack. It turns banal. Kubrick leaves us with stunning pictures, a filmmaker’s consolation of false philosophy.

Notes 1. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, translated by Robin Campbell (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 126. 2. David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in David Hume: The Philosophical Works in 4 Volumes, Vol. 3, edited by Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964; reprint of the new edition London 1882), 231. 3. Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 4. 4. Seneca, 104. 5. Donald Livingston addresses “the dialectic of true and false philosophy” in Chapter Two of Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 6. As cited in Patrick Murray, Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988), 20. 7. Ibid., 18. 8. Ibid., 15. 9. “The declination of the atom from the straight line is in fact not a particular determination occurring accidentally in the Epicurean physics. Rather, the law which it expresses runs through the whole Epicurean philosophy.” Ibid., 14–15. 10. Ibid., 12. 11. Nelson, Kubrick: Inside A Film Artist’s Maze, 17. 12. Hume, “The Skeptic,” 227. 13. Gene D. Phillips, ed., Stanley Kubrick Interviews (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 69, 72. 14. Hume, “The Skeptic,” 231. 15. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic,” 182. 16. Hume, “The Skeptic,” 227–228. 17. Ibid., 216. 18. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick Interviews, 67. 19. Hume, “The Skeptic,” 231.

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20. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick Interviews, 114. 21. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 59. 22. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, 130. 23. Hume, “The Skeptic,” 228. 24. Ibid., 228. 25. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 134. 26. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick Interviews, 73. 27. John Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, Inc. 1957), 15. 28. See Barry Stroud, “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms,’” Hume Studies, XIX(2) (November 1993): 253–272. 29. Hume, “The Skeptic,” 219. 30. Ibid., 224. 31. The mid-1950s saw the publication of Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse (New York: Vintage Books, 1955) and The Sane Society by Erich Fromm (Greenwood, CT: Fawcett Premier Books, 1955). 32. Kubrick’s existentialism is a far cry from that of Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. Heidegger rejects the subjectivism of value, and he sees our being-toward-death as freeing us for greater authenticity. 33. Fromm, The Sane Society, 74.

Bibliography Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. Greenwich, CT:. Fawcett Premier Books, 1955. Huston, John, dir. The Asphalt Jungle. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1950, feature film. Hume, David. “The Sceptic.” In David Hume: The Philosophical Works in 4 Volumes, Vol. 3. Edited by Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose. Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964; reprint of the new edition London 1882. Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1968, feature film. ———. Barry Lyndon. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1975, feature film. ———. A Clockwork Orange. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1971, feature film. ———. Dr. Strangelove. Los Angeles, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1964, feature film. ———. Eyes Wide Shut. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, distributor for Stanley Kubrick Productions, 1999, feature film. ———. Fear and Desire. Joseph Burstyn, distributer, 1953, feature film.

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———. Full Metal Jacket. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1987, feature film. ———. The Killing. Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists, distributor for HarrisKubrick Pictures Corporation, 1957, feature film. ———. Lolita. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, distributor for AA Productions, Anya Pictures, Transworld Pictures, 1962, feature film. ———. Paths of Glory. Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists, distributor for Bryna Productions and Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation, 1957, feature film. ———. The Shining. Beverly Hills, CA: Warner Brothers, distributor for The Producer Circle Company, Peregrine Productions, and Hawk Films, 1980, feature film. Livingston, Donald. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan. New York: International Publishers, 1964. Murray, Patrick. Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988. Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Phillips, Gene D., ed. Stanley Kubrick Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Sartre, John Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press, Inc., 1957. Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. Translated by Robin Campbell. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Stroud, Barry. “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms.’” Hume Studies, Vol. XIX, No. 2 (November 1993): 253–272.

CHAPTER 13

Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen

In Zelig , Woody Allen pulls off a marvel of trick cinematography—at one point, we see him as Leonard Zelig in the on-deck circle while Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig take spring batting practice—but it is his trick philosophy on which we will focus. A magician and lover of “the magic lantern” (cinema) as a youth, it is no wonder that Allen would be drawn to trick philosophy. In Radio Days , Joe (Seth Green), the ten-year-old Woody Allen surrogate, experiences the magic of the movies as an epiphany when he accompanies Aunt Bea (Diane Wiest) and her suitor to Radio City Music Hall. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the “spirit ball” that inventor Andrew Hobbs (Allen) rigs up works like a movie projector. At the end of Shadows and Fog , Allen’s character, Max Kleinman, apprentices himself to Irmstedt the Magician (Kenneth Mars), symbolizing, perhaps, Allen’s choice of “a life in film.”1 One of the magician’s favorite tricks is the disappearing act (usually followed by the reappearing act), and Irmstedt saves Max and himself from the lumbering town murderer by disappearing into his magic mirror. To Irmstedt’s amazement, the murderer performs his own disappearing act by escaping from his chains. Shadows and Fog ends as the screen goes black a moment after Irmstedt and Max vanish before our eyes. In Oedipus Wrecks, the disappearing and reappearing acts take unexpected turns as Sheldon’s (Allen) mother

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_13

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(Mae Questel) actually disappears during a magician’s act only to reappear projected over Manhattan, hounding her son. The trick of making oneself invisible is an ancient trope (the Ring of Gyges) used by Plato in the second book of the Republic. Allen explores this power in Alice, when Dr. Yang (Keke Luke) provides herbs to make Alice (Mia Farrow) invisible.

How the Factoring Philosophy Makes the World Disappear What we call Woody Allen’s trick philosophy puts even a great magician like Irmstedt to shame. Allen’s trick philosophy relies on the power of unconstrained reflection to make God, the external world, enduring physical objects, other people, knowledge, morality, responsibility, character, meaning, beauty, power, action, and even one’s self disappear. We call this trick philosophy factoring philosophy because its characteristic pattern of reasoning is to factor out the purely subjective, what is for us, from the purely objective, what is in itself . Factoring philosophy is trick philosophy because it makes phenomenologically unjustifiable purist splits, notably, between subjectivity and the world. By contrast, the standpoint of the present authors, which reaches back to George Berkeley’s criticism of “abstract ideas,” calls factoring philosophy into question. Berkeley argues that certain assumptions about language play tricks on us (Berkeley 1950). Because we have one word for a general idea, say “triangle,” we assume that it must represent a single, necessarily abstract idea of a triangle. And where we have two separate words, say “color” and “shape” or “subjective” and “objective,” we jump to the conclusion that we have two separable phenomena. The consequence of applying unconstrained reflection again and again is a progressive emptying of content from the world—and us—leaving an unknowable residue. The result is a profound skepticism: we know nothing of the world as it is in itself; all specific content is deemed subjective. Even Descartes’ certainty that his mind exists as an enduring, thinking thing comes under attack in the skeptical, factoring philosophies of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume can find no evidence of an enduring self, only a parade of perceptions, and Kant distinguishes between the self that appears, which is caught up in the determinism of the phenomenal world, and the free, noumenal self, about which we know nothing. Allen sides with the skeptics:

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Sure, you know, you can never resolve the epistemological conundrum. I once did a joke a long time ago about having to take God’s existence on faith, and then I realized that I had to take my own existence on faith. And that really is the truth—that you can’t be certain of anything. (Schickel 2005, p. 157)

As Hegel describes skepticism’s disappearing act: “In Skepticism…thought…annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold determinateness” (Hegel 1977, p. 123). Of such thinking, Hegel writes, “The sickness of our time, which has arrived at the point of despair, is the assumption that our cognition is only subjective and that this is the last word about it” (Hegel 1991, p. 54). Consumed by the power of the factoring philosopher’s unconstrained reflection, the world vanishes behind the veil of subjective appearances. We might compare this peculiar disappearing trick to Truman’s (Jim Carrey) realization in the film The Truman Show that his entire life has been spent on an elaborately constructed set for a television show chronicling his life: the set doesn’t disappear with Truman’s recognition, but its identification with the world does. It abruptly becomes a staged reality, a shell of its former self. Allen creates similar effects by having a film or story within a film: both Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry start that way. Awakening from a dream is a common experience of abrupt transformation. Of Play it Again, Sam, which opens with the final scene of Casablanca, Sam B. Girgus comments, “the film also makes the important connection between the structure and nature of films and the way dreams are formed and function” (Girgus 1993, p. 16). This is how the trick philosophy operates; everything appears to be the same yet everything is different. Lemons still look yellow and taste sour, but we relegate those qualities to our own mental states: lemons aren’t yellow or sour. Imagine the trick philosopher holding a lemon: “Ladies and Gentleman, is there a yellow, sour fruit in my hand?” “Yes, of course,” they answer. “Permit me a brief lecture on the subjectivity of secondary qualities (such as color and taste)….Thank you. Ladies and Gentlemen, once again, is there a yellow, sour fruit in my hand?” “No,” they admit, “there’s something in your hand that looks yellow and tastes sour, but it is neither yellow nor sour.”

The more we reflect in this factoring way, the more things recede behind the way they appear, the less remains to say about them. In the

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end, the factoring philosophy leaves nothing to say about the world as it is in itself. The trick has worked: the world disappears while remaining in full view. Imagine the Truman Show ending with Truman returning to “job,” “friends,” and “wife,” convinced either that there is no reality beyond the set or that, if there is, it is no less a human concoction than the reality TV show he stars in. Woody Allen is captivated by the ideas of global skepticism that question the order and goodness of the world. The vicissitudes of the global skeptic play themselves out in Allen’s films. This kind of skeptic is dogged by the thought that every meaning and purpose is illusory. Even when the illusion doesn’t vanish, what remains is never quite real. Allen’s skepticism sparks lively intellectual exchanges among his characters and feeds a comic genius, but corrosive ideas have consequences for art. For the global skeptic, matters of substance are liable to dissipate at any time. Augustine describes a young skeptic caught in adultery who, in court, doubts that the woman is married, that adultery is wrong, and that they are not dreaming. Moral seriousness disappears into the lather of “what ifs.” Allen is ensnared by dubious ideas that make it hard to love life. The joy and promise of good art are possibilities, but possibilities piggyback on necessities. To be convinced that, at bottom, nothing really matters throws up obstacles for developing characters and plot. What remains is to flip-flop between repeating the global skeptic’s moves and engaging topics of ordinary artistic concern, such as marriage. The trouble is that global skepticism threatens to bleed through to the ordinary concerns. Even infidelity, a recurring theme in Allen’s films, loses weight. In Crimes and Misdemeanors , one of Judah’s (Martin Landau) motivations for having Dolores (Angelica Houston) killed is that his wife, Miriam (Claire Bloom), would never forgive his adultery. That motivation erodes by Midnight in Paris , when Inez (Rachel McAdams) admits to her fiancée, Gil (Owen Wilson), who is wooing two other women, that she’s spent a few nights with her pedantic married friend Paul (Michael Sheen) but that Gil should just “get over it.” When the need to confess or forgive dissolves in the plotline, the ground of art slips away.

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Woody Allen’s Existentialism Woody Allen’s philosophy is plausibly identified with existentialism. But existentialism is not of a piece; in fact, existentialists hold differing and even contradictory views on such fundamental questions as the existence of God, meaning, and morality. L. Nathan Oaklander offers three existentialist themes that fit popular conceptions well: One common theme is the emphasis on human freedom and the related Sartrean slogan that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that we have no prepackaged essence or nature, but that what we are is what we choose to be. Another theme stressed by existentialists is the contingency of the world, the fact that the universe has no meaning and is absurd. A third is that there are no objective values. (Oaklander 1986, p. 7)

As Peter J. Bailey notices, the philosophy professor Louis Levy (Martin Bergmann) in Crimes and Misdemeanors embraces all three: Levy’s existentialist philosophy emphasizes the coldness of the universe, its utter obliviousness to human happiness, and the necessity of human beings to project value into its moral vacancy, a central value being love. “It is only we with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe,” Levy argues. “We define ourselves by the choices we have made—we are in fact the sum total of our choices.” (Bailey 2001, p. 133)

Allen affirms Levy’s philosophy, but with an important proviso: “The professor [Levy] was intellectual, and so all his insights and all his philosophy about life, while valid and deep and profound, was…the product of intellectualism” (Schickel 2005, p. 152). Allen’s reservation, which Halley Reed (Mia Farrow) voices in Crimes, commenting on Levy’s suicide, leads us to an additional feature of existentialism, distrust of philosophical systems. In the decades following World War II, the mainstream of philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, entered the doldrums of a professionalized positivistic philosophy hostile to metaphysics and moral philosophy and indifferent toward the significance of philosophy for an individual’s life. It wasn’t that God was dead; the question of God’s existence was not meaningful in the first place. Emotivism assured us that there was no cognitive content to moral utterances, no moral knowledge to be gained. “Murder is wrong” was really a disguised way of

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saying, “Murder rubs me the wrong way, so don’t do it.” Into this stifling situation, existentialism arrived as a wake-up call—an alternative. Walter Kaufmann, an academic champion of existentialism, offered this account of what makes one an existentialist: The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life—that is the heart of existentialism. (Kaufmann 1975, p. 51)

This comes close to identifying existentialism with non-conformism and suggests an irrationalism that privileges feelings over philosophical systems. Reflecting on his interview with Allen, Richard Schickel observes, “We are all conditioned by the values of our formative years. And, as our interview makes clear, Woody is no exception” (Schickel 2005, p. 174). Born in 1935, Woody Allen’s formative years were the two decades following the Second World War. This was the period of civil rights activism, but whatever sympathies Allen may have had for that movement, it was not his center of gravity. At the end of Manhattan, when Isaac Davis (Allen) is ruminating over reasons to live, he turns up Willie Mays and Louis Armstrong, but not Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr. Allen was shaped more by the non-conformist sensibilities of the Beat generation.2 Like the young Russians that Ivan Karamozov describes, Allen was drawn to the eternal questions “of the existence of God, and immortality” (Dostoevsky 1993, p. 4). Allen says of “discussion about life and death and the meaning of both,” “Well, that’s I guess at the center of my thinking so much. I mean, it’s on my mind so much” (Schickel 2005, p. 156). For like-minded dissidents, contempt for the conformist culture and politics of the fifties often took the form of a sniping withdrawal from politics. When the counterculture and radical politics of the sixties arrived, Allen was hitting his early and mid-thirties. Though Play it Again, Sam opened as a play in 1969 and as a film in 1972, it is bleak Beat sensibilities that surface in a scene where Allan (Allen), desperate for a date, approaches a young woman at an art gallery. She is studying a Jackson Pollock painting. When Allan asks what she sees in it, she unleashes this torrent:

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It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation forming a useless straightjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.3

This is scripted to be over-the-top and played for laughs, but the substance of what she has to say turns up over and again in Allen’s films and interviews, resulting in an intellectual cul de sac that boxes in Allen’s art. Misdirection is the idea that Schickel highlights in the afterword to his interview with Allen. Allen responds to Schickel’s observation that the reversal in Small Time Crooks , where a cookie shop meant to cover-up a bank robbery becomes an overnight sensation, is vintage Woody Allen, “Right. That’s my magical background. That’s misdirection” (Schickel 2005, p. 169).4 A magician’s technique, misdirection, when taken more broadly, evokes a kind of freedom that suits Allen’s nonconformist soul. This conception of freedom goes back to the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus, who deviated from the determinism of Democritus’s atomism: Epicurus’s atoms swerved! This Epicurean conception of freedom insists that nothing binds the subjective individual. We hear it in Sartre’s insistence that no preset essence harnesses us. So many of Allen’s loves—comedy, jazz, and magic—are like that, marked by misdirection, deviation, non-conformism. “When you see a magic trick, it defies reality” (Schickel 2005, p. 145). In an interview with John Lahr, Allen says, “in the end we are earthbound,” but comedy can defy all that pulls you down, that eventually pulls you all the way down. The comedian is always involved in that attempt somehow, through some artifice or trick, to get you airborne. Being able to suggest that something magical is possible, that something other than what you see with your eyes and senses is possible, opens up a crack in the negative. (qtd. in Bailey 2001, p. 200)

“A crack in the negative” is like the swerve of an Epicurean atom, namely, an abstract affirmation of freedom against the order of things— non-conformism. In Midnight in Paris, writer Gil Pender’s midnight time travel is the “crack in the negative” that gets him “airborne.” But when he ends his nostalgic nighttime adventures, he lands not far from where

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he started—with another bright-eyed blond. At least this one loves Paris and Cole Porter instead of Malibu and whatever money will buy. Luck, with which Allen is much impressed, likewise involves deviation. Like jokes, magic tricks, and jazz improvizations, luck is recognizable only against the background of an already ordered world. Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Myers) begins Match Point : “The man who said that it is better to be lucky than to be good saw deeply into human life.” Allen, in reply to Sander Lee’s question, says that authentic romantic commitment is “a question of pure luck” (Lee 2002, p. 223). Allen takes this idea to absurd lengths in Whatever Works when Boris (Larry David) meets his future wife accidentally, by falling on her in a suicide attempt. But, given what we know about Boris and his outlook, is there any reason to suppose that his luck will hold and make this new relationship thrive and endure? Looking back, wouldn’t Chris Wilton have been better off being good than lucky?

David Hume as the Consummate Trick Philosopher Who counts as an existentialist is controversial, just as existentialism’s defining features are. Though existentialism is widely accepted to be a mid-twentieth-century movement, nineteenth-century writers, notably Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, are numbered among the existentialists. James Collins reaches further: “Its remote historical roots lie in Kant and Hegel” (Collins 1962, p. 46). We want to stretch back to David Hume, who woke Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers.” Most, if not all, of the ideas associated with Allen’s existentialism are found in Hume.5 We do not claim that Allen is a reader of Hume. It is not necessary to read Hume to be shaped by his ideas: the default philosophy of the modern, skeptical person owes much to Hume. In Hume, we find trick philosophy par excellence. Hume’s philosophy holds keys to understanding intellectual preoccupations and moves dramatized in Allen’s films. Hume factors out the purely subjective from the objective in one phenomenon after another to conclude that what we ordinarily take to be true of the world is actually purely subjective. One of his best known analyses concerns causality. By factoring experience, Hume argues that it provides no evidence of causal necessity; instead, causal necessity “is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects” (Hume 1967, p. 165). We will focus on Hume’s argument that all values, moral and esthetic, are

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“in the mind.” You thought that life was in earnest; now you recognize that life is just a game to be enjoyed—or quit. For Hume, nature and custom are the master magicians whose artifices make the world reappear, full of meaning and value and equipped with enduring physical substances having causal powers. Hume’s first trick is to factor experience so as to make that familiar world disappear. Thanks to nature and custom, the world reappears, only in a new modality, as projection. Hume’s magic is to make everything disappear while leaving it all but unchanged. This skeptical double movement, to undercut all our beliefs but then return to them, with irony, yielding to the pull of nature and custom, plays out in Allen’s films. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, for example, meaning and moral law are subjected to global doubt at the very same time that we anguish over cold-blooded murder to cover-up adultery and embezzlement. Hume’s trick philosophy is cinematic; it is a philosophy of projection. The external world, enduring physical objects, power, substance, esthetic and moral values, and more are all projected. Hume’s cinematic philosophy pictures a mind (light source) projecting feelings (celluloid frames) onto the world in itself (screen). Hume posits a mental world of thoughts, feelings, and expectations apart from the physical world; by contrast, everything about cinema belongs to the world. Real projection, such as occurs in a movie theater, involves physical objects and processes in the world. Hume’s projection involves a mysterious injection of mental stuff into a world stripped bare. Cinema is an understandable, if imagination-stirring worldly process. Hume’s projection philosophy, by contrast, stymies efforts to make sense of how it could work (Stroud 1993, pp. 253–272).

Skepticism’s Instability The trick philosophy, which makes the world disappear only to reappear as projection, is a skeptical philosophy. Skepticism is a deeply unstable pattern of thinking, predisposed to flip-flopping, which is responsible for ambiguities in how we talk of it. The opening move of skepticism is to put human cognitive faculties in doubt, leading to the conclusion that, in order to avoid error, one should suspend belief. But without beliefs one is unable to get around in the world. Hence the famous question in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: shall I leave by the door or the window? (Hume 1980, p. 5). Ordinarily, we exit by the door because we

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believe that it is safer than going out the window. How would we act if we suspended such beliefs? Though he expresses skeptical ideas, when Professor Levy “goes out the window,” it is because he believes in gravity and that his life is no longer worth living. A skeptic may concede that we cannot do without beliefs but (1) continue to suspend belief by insisting that the beliefs one lives by are not true but only plausible or truthlike and (2) limit beliefs to what Hume called “common life,” while suspending belief on speculative questions such as the origins of the universe. Difficulties arise, however, on both scores. If I am excluded from the truth, what justifies claims that my beliefs are truthlike or plausible? If my beliefs are not even truthlike, what is there to say for them? What distinguishes the truthlike from the arbitrary? You can wrestle with the truth, but you can’t wrestle with the truthlike. As for limiting the scope of one’s suspension of belief, that requires drawing a bright line between common life and speculation, but it is difficult, if possible, to draw such a line. Drawing that line became a key topic in philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant drew the line between claims that bear on some possible experience and claims such that no possible experience could count for or against them. This way of thinking was hardened by positivists, as by A. J. Ayer in his Language, Truth, and Logic. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, philosophy professor Leopold Sturgis (José Ferrer) hectors students with his positivist rejection of anything beyond the sensible. He gets his comeuppance at the end of the film, when he expires at the moment of sexual climax with Dulcy (Julie Hagerty) and his spirit is lifted to flit through the woods with kindred spirits. With these trouble spots in mind, it is perhaps not surprising to find that the meaning of skepticism swings from the suspension of belief to belief in a particular set of ideas, often about highly speculative matters. The profile of a skeptic’s beliefs resembles George Berkeley’s description of a Freethinker: There is no God or providence: that man is as the beasts that perish: that his happiness as theirs consists in obeying animal instincts, appetites, and passions: that all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education: that religion is a State trick: that vice is beneficial to the public: that the soul of man is corporeal, and dissolveth like a flame or vapour: that man is a machine actuated according to the laws of motion:

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that consequently he is no agent, or subject of guilt: that a wise man will make his own particular individual interest in this present life the rule and measure of all his actions: these, and such opinions, are, it seems, the tenets of a minute philosopher, who is himself, according to his own principles, an organ played on by sensible objects, a ball bandied about by appetites and passions….To complete his character, this curious piece of clock-work, having no principle of action within itself, and denying that it hath or can have any one free thought or motion, sets up for the patron of liberty, and earnestly contends for free-thinking. (Berkeley 1950, p. 107)

The Freethinking skeptic does not suspend belief in God, providence, morality, conscience, guilt, religion, freedom, and moral responsibility. Rather, the Freethinking skeptic denies them all.6 Such beliefs show up in many of Allen’s characters; Harry (Allen), in Deconstructing Harry, and Boris, in Whatever Works, are particularly vivid examples.

Skepticism and Freethinking: Oscillating Between Incompatibles The oscillation between suspension of belief and doctrinaire Freethinking ensnares Woody Allen and several of his characters in multiple inconsistencies. These inconsistencies show up in Crimes and Misdemeanors, as Aunt May (Anna Berger) holds forth at a Seder with her nephews Judah and Jack listening. Her Freethinking ideas echo Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamozov. 1. On the one hand, Ivan plays the skeptic regarding questions as speculative as those concerning the nature and existence of God: “I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions” (Dostoevsky 1993, p. 5). All the same, Ivan collects stories about the mistreatment and murder of innocent children in order to clinch Epicurus’s ancient argument: since the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of God, God must not exist. But can you claim to be unable to know anything of God and then cite evil in the world to prove that this unknowable God does not exist? And can you then turn around and reason from the nonexistence of God to the conclusion that everything is permissible when you first rely on the impermissibility of torturing innocent children to prove that God does not exist?

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2. Aunt May rejects any suggestion of a moral structure to the universe, but she is appalled by the fact that “Hitler got away with it.” Hers is an impossible mixed marriage of moral outrage and nihilism. If the world lacks a moral structure, then there is no way to formulate Epicurus’s pincer argument against God’s existence. 3. Aunt May becomes livid when her brother Sol (David S. Howard) says that he will always put God before the truth. But in a world without moral structure, what obligation could we have to the truth? 4. Aunt May thinks that if people like Hitler are not punished for their crimes, then God must not exist, and if God does not exist, there is no moral structure to the world. That delivers us over to the Freethinker’s creed: “all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education.” At one point in their conversation at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors, Cliff Stern (Allen) relies on this reasoning to point out to Judah Rosenthal that his murderer’s worst nightmare has come true. That is, if the murderer goes unpunished, and his feelings of guilt dissipate, then there is no justice, no God, and no moral order. But if a murderer avoids discovery and prosecution, how does that prove that no wrong was done? If a murderer’s feelings of guilt recede and fade, how does that prove conscience to be a “prejudice”?7 Are the judgments of conscience matters only of feeling? Strangers starve without my feeling upset, but I still judge that their starving is bad. Must Judah feel guilty to know that having Dolores murdered was wrong? Imagine a world where suitable punishments were meted out like clockwork for every crime and misdemeanor. Could an existentialist accept the chilling effect that would have on human freedom? 5. Cliff suggests that the murderer should turn himself in because, in the absence of God, we have to take responsibility for the moral law ourselves. But if we are obliged to take on that responsibility, then there must be some prior source of obligation. If we are not so obliged, then why would a murderer turn himself in? Supposing we could give ourselves a moral law, what would keep us from giving ourselves a different or even contradictory one tomorrow? 6. Aunt May says that morality is fine for those who want to have it, and Allen concurs. One of the two lessons of Crimes and Misdemeanors, says Allen, is: “your morality is strictly up to you” (Schickel 2005, p. 149). But this misconceives morality, dodging its binding

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character. Not every option for living is recognizable as a morality. In Plato’s Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus has to give up calling the tyrant the just person and argue instead that the unjust person is better off.

Global Skepticism’s Philosophical and Artistic Dead Ends The global skepticism of Allen’s existentialism, his trick philosophy, sets up dead-ends for him philosophically and as a filmmaking artist. Global skepticism about the true, the good, and the beautiful is a philosophy that leaves no room for development. Once factoring philosophy severs thought from the world and what goes on in it, there is nothing to do but to make that point over and over. Such repetition grows tiresome, though Allen’s brilliant wisecracks offer comic relief. By the time we get to the window exits of the nihilistic physicist Boris in Whatever Works, we have something approaching self-parody. Global skepticism and nihilism undercut the local skepticism in which we all participate. P. J. Strawson distinguishes between global and local moral skepticism, and he flatly rejects the global kind. Morality belongs to the human makeup: “our natural human commitment to ordinary inter-personal attitudes…is part of the general framework of human life, not something that can come up for review as particular cases can come up for review within this general framework” (Strawson 1974, p. 13). We all have moral questions—say, what are my responsibilities to an aging parent? But to question morality wholesale is to imagine one could unravel the fabric of human existence. If integrity were optional, would Cliff’s face turn ashen when Halley appears on Lester’s arm, now his fiancée, at the wedding that ends Crimes and Misdemeanors ? Global skepticism makes art as well as life unintelligible. An artist can no more work in a world without meanings and values than a person can walk on a frictionless surface (Girgus 1993, p. 18). In such a world— if we can call it that—there is nowhere to begin, nowhere to go, and no way to get there. Even to argue for global skepticism is impossible without beginning from a world fraught with meanings and values: skepticism and nihilism are parasitic on truth and goodness. Barry Stroud states the general problem for trick philosophy. It cannot make sense of the world that it wants to make disappear: “What is problematic is therefore

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to explain how we can have intelligible thoughts or perceptions which do not represent…the way things ‘really stand in nature’” (Stroud 1993, p. 268). Global skepticism is literally a non-starter. So, in Allen’s films, global skepticism arises as a counterpoint to local action. Many of Allen’s films work in both registers, global and local, but the two are discordant. Film counts on local issues to engage us in concerns that global skepticism would have us regard with utter indifference. If it doesn’t matter whether singer Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte) leaves his wife for Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow) and dumps his loyal agent Danny Rose (Allen) when a nostalgia fad gives his career a boost, Broadway Danny Rose will be hard to enjoy. How does one get worked up about adultery, lying, embezzlement, self-deception, murder, or betrayal with global skepticism all the time nagging that these activities, like every other, are morally indifferent and that “all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education”? Try writing a screenplay on those assumptions. Localized doubt is the friend of art; globalized doubt would put an end to it. Crimes and Misdemeanors works in both the global and local registers, just as it is comic and tragic. We might view Crimes as the first of a trilogy of films dealing with family, adultery, embezzlement, and murder. In the other two, Match Point and Cassandra’s Way, both shot in England, the comic dimension drops out. In Crimes, with its overarching image of “the eyes of God,” the global register dominates. The film’s upshot appears to be that, since Judah’s crime goes unpunished— even his feelings of guilt pass—there is no justice, no God, no conscience, no moral law. Allen says, “We wish we lived in a world where there was a God and where these acts would be adjudicated in some way. But we don’t” (Schickel 2005, p. 151). The plot involves many local concerns: how far will Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston) go to bring Judah down? How serious are Judah’s financial misdeeds? How would his wife, Miriam, take the news that he is a liar, an embezzler, and an adulterer? But how important are these questions, if we grant that lying, embezzling, and adultery have no moral significance? If a pillar of the community such as Judah is capable not only of lying, embezzlement, and adultery, but also ordering murder in cold blood, we wonder, on the local register, how pervasive is human iniquity? But, if no morality binds, what, really, is there to wonder about? When we move to Match Point and Cassandra’s Way, the weight shifts to local concerns. As we study Chris’s face at the window in the closing

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shot of Match Point, we wonder less about the eyes of God and more about what lies ahead in this life for him. Where has his strategic marriage, adultery, and cold-blooded double murder gotten him? In Cassandra’s Way, brothers Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell) are not bent on excusing their murder of the accountant of their rich Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson) by calling the moral structure of the universe into question. The combination of Terry’s gambling debts, Ian’s business and romantic aspirations, and a sense of obligation to their cornered uncle pressure them to do something they know is wrong. The remission of Judah’s guilt feelings at the end of Crimes seems designed to cast doubt on the reality of conscience. But are we supposed to feel the same way about Terry’s irrepressible guilt as we do about his gambling, drinking, and pill popping—it’s just one more addiction? Or does the vulnerable Terry bring Ian around to face the truth that they committed a terrible crime?

How to Live If All Values Are Strictly Subjective Now we want to spotlight the skeptical doctrine that values are strictly subjective and the correlative doctrine of Freethinkers that “all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education.” In his essay “The Sceptic,” David Hume insists that values are purely subjective: “We have already observed, that no objects are, in themselves, desirable or odious, valuable or despicable; but that objects acquire these qualities from the particular character and constitution of the mind, which surveys them” (Hume 1985, p. 171). “The Sceptic” is not of one mind regarding the consequences of this conclusion that nothing is intrinsically of any value. Hume’s opening position is that everything is left as it was. What might seem to be an earthquake is barely a tremor. Just because we discover that everything is intrinsically valueless does not mean that we stop caring. Hume points out that if the modern “discovery” regarding secondary qualities, namely, “that tastes and colors, and all the other sensible qualities, lie not in the bodies, but merely in the senses,” does not keep anyone from calling lemons yellow or adding sugar to make lemonade; neither should subjectivism about values alter our speech or behavior:

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There is a sufficient uniformity in the senses and feelings of mankind, to make all these [secondary] qualities the objects of art and reasoning, and to have the greatest influence on life and manners. And as it is certain, that the discovery above-mentioned in natural philosophy, makes no alteration on action and conduct; why should a like discovery in moral philosophy make any alteration? (Hume 1985, note 3, 166)

Hume trusts in the uniformity of human feelings to preserve our ordinary practices even when we recognize that they have no objective basis. Murder is judged wrong and prosecuted whether values are disclosed as subjective or not.8 Rejecting the objectivity of values can ease into an ironic assertion of customary values. Skepticism and conservatism can be two sides of the same coin. In Hume’s Dialogues, Demea argues that skepticism is a bulwark of traditional religious beliefs. If you doubt the power of human reason, you will never discover a reason to abandon the religious practices and beliefs in which you were raised. If you are skeptical about values, that is, you think that they are all purely subjective, but you also realize that you can’t do without them, then why not avow customary ones?9 Allen is too much the Freethinker for that. Among other things, religion, perhaps Judaism, in particular, offends his cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, he explores this path in his films. In Hannah and her Sisters, Mickey Sachs (Allen) tries Catholicism on for size, but it doesn’t fit. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, at the Seder that Judah observes in his mind’s eye, the young Judah and his brother, Jack, are buffeted by conflicting attitudes toward Jewish beliefs and practices. Aunt May, called a “Leninist” by her brother Sol, scorns them. Judah’s uncle demeans the rituals as “mumbo jumbo,” yet he goes along. Sol, Judah’s father, champions his faith and its rituals. In Deconstructing Harry, the dialogue between Harry Bloch (Allen) and his sister, Doris (Caroline Aaron), who keeps a practicing Jewish household (though she and Harry did not grow up in one), provides another perspective. Harry parodies Doris’s choice in a story where a psychiatrist (Demi Moore) abruptly adopts Jewish practices at home to the chagrin of her husband (and former patient). Doris complains that Harry “has no spiritual center,” whereas Judaism supplies her household with a set of values. Superstitious and parochial ones, Harry counters.10 Affirming a set of traditional values faces hurdles other than Harry’s Freethinking disdain. The skeptical realization that our values are without

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any objective warrant makes us feel funny about them and ourselves. Accordingly, “The Sceptic” concludes by regarding life as a game. We entertain ourselves only as long as we cling to the fiction that something matters: In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and carelessness. (Hume 1985, p. 180)11

In the interview with Schickel, Allen professes just this approach to life; in his case, making films keeps him entertained: To me that’s the impetus for the work. For me—I’ve said this before—it’s like a patient in an institution who they give basket weaving to, or finger painting, because it makes him feel better. The actual work of making the film is great for me, because I get to create a fake situation and live in that situation and act the character, or if I’m not in the film live with those characters and bring them to life, and dress them, and put music around them, and put them in a setting that we create, and manipulate them. I control the reality for that period of time, and live amongst beautiful women and guys who are brilliant and guys who make witty remarks or who are extra brave. And it’s great. (Schickel 2005, pp. 145–146)

That’s entertainment. So all’s well, in a way, as long as the game holds its charm. But consider the ominous conclusion to Professor Levy’s affirmation of the subjectivity of values, “under certain conditions we feel that the thing isn’t worth it anymore.” In an indifferent universe, nothing really matters; mattering is up to me—though nature and custom do much to give life its savor. If we lose the taste of living, why not go out the window? In telling Halley what he knows of Levy’s death, Cliff cracks a joke, but it is more revealing than he (or Allen) seems to recognize: “He always was affirmative. He always said ‘Yes’ to life, ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes.’ Now today he said ‘No.’” Cliff and Halley are shocked and dismayed by Levy’s suicide, but why should they be either? At the heart of Levy’s philosophy, which Halley deemed “large and life affirming,” is arbitrariness. Levy’s laconic suicide

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note underlines that philosophy: “I have gone out the window.” The note repels the question “Why?” To what had Levy been saying “Yes”? Why affirm a remorseless universe? Why isn’t “No” every bit as reasonable an answer?

Reflecting on “Life’s Shortness and Uncertainty” Hume considers how, if they are strictly subjective, one might change another person’s values. Where beliefs are concerned, we count on the traction that factual claims have with the world to provide footholds. To the astronomer who believed that all heavenly bodies were perfect spheres, Galileo could offer a look at the moon through his telescope, revealing a surface with mountains and craters. But what does one say to a person who finds the moon dull? Hume contrasts reasoning with valuing: In the operation of reasoning, the mind does nothing but run over its objects, as they are supposed to stand in reality, without adding any thing to them, or diminishing any thing from them….To this operation of the mind, therefore, there seems to be always a real, though often unknown standard, in the nature of things; nor is truth or falsehood variable by the various apprehensions of mankind. (Hume 1985, p. 164)

By contrast, values are what we add, based on our feelings; if there is any standard here, it lies not in the world but in our human makeup. But this is an untenably passive view of scientific reasoning. The categories of the objects over which the mind runs are not simply given in experience; thinking is required. Allen recognizes this in his factoring way, “We’re all given this spectacular denial system, and also a mind that puts all this chaos in order” (Schickel 2005, pp. 157–158). This human element may account for Allen’s ambivalence toward science. On the one hand, we find characters who hold science up against superstition (usually in the form of religion)—for example, Judah in Crimes or Harry in Deconstructing Harry, who says, “I’m all quarks and particles and black holes—all that other stuff is junk to me.” In Midnight in Paris, Gil cannot fathom how Adriana (Marion Cotillard) could choose to live in a nineteenth-century world without Novocain and antibiotics. In September, we are encouraged to admire Lloyd (Jack Warden), the nuclear physicist husband of Diane (Elaine Stritch). Asked by the aspiring writer

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Peter (Sam Waterson) what he sees when he looks out into the universe, Lloyd replies: I think it’s as beautiful as you do. And vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away. But then my professional perspective overcomes me. A less wishful, more penetrating view of it. And I understand it for what it truly is: haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.

On the other hand, Miles Monroe (Allen), in Sleeper, puts no faith in science. Medicine is often the butt of Allen’s jokes. One of the doctors treating Leonard Zelig, Dr. Birsky (Paul Nevens), assures his press conference listeners that Zelig’s odd behavior results from a brain tumor, only to die of a brain tumor himself two weeks later. The narrator punctuates the episode: “Leonard Zelig is fine.” Ordinarily, when we believe that someone is blowing things out of proportion or else dismissing the importance of something—of driving drunk, for example—we appeal to the true value of the thing. In Zelig we see this everyday process go haywire when several doctors come to visit Zelig at Dr. Eudora Fletcher’s (Mia Farrow) country home and Zelig gets into a scuffle over whether it is a nice day. Dr. Henry Mayerson points out that the sun is shining and it is mild. Zelig won’t hear of it and attacks the physicians with a rake. But what if, as Hume insists, the true value of everything is nil? Then values, being purely subjective, have no traction in the world. Hume draws the conclusion: “To diminish therefore, or augment any person’s value for an object, to excite or moderate his passions, there are no direct arguments or reasons, which can be employed with any force or influence” (Hume 1985, p. 171). The title of Whatever Works advertises the arbitrariness underlying Allen’s philosophy. However, “works” appeals to an objective measure by which we can distinguish working from failing to work. In a world without meaning or value, there is no non-arbitrary way to determine what works. Hume does not leave it at that: But though the value of every object can be determined only by the sentiment or passion of every individual, we may observe, that the passion, in pronouncing its verdict, considers not the object simply, as it is in itself, but surveys it with all the circumstances, which attend it….Here therefore a philosopher may step in, and suggest particular views, and considerations, and circumstances, which otherwise would have escaped us; and, by that

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means, he may either moderate or excite any particular passion. (Hume 1985, p. 172)

The trouble here, as Hume sees it, is that so often these suggestions amount to “artificial arguments,” such as he finds in Stoic philosophers. Hume dismisses their extreme arguments: “The reflections of philosophy are too subtile and distant to take place in common life, or eradicate any affection” (Hume 1985, p. 172). We shrug them off. Such “artificial arguments” crop up in Allen’s films. In Stardust Memories, Sandy Bates (Allen) worries about entropy bringing the universe to a standstill. The young Alvy Singer in Annie Hall fears that if the universe keeps expanding, it will eventually break apart, a prospect that keeps him from his homework. These concerns are too distant to alter our feelings: I learn about entropy, but I go to shop for groceries all the same. Hume points up two considerations that are not artificial; they have the power to alter our feelings, but they introduce new difficulties. The first is an Allen standby: “When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness?”12 Discussing Stardust Memories with Schickel, Allen remarks, “Every single person— it’s a total washout after a hundred years” (Schickel 2005, p. 143). But Hume takes the point further, as Allen does: And even, if we would extend our concern beyond our own life, how frivolous appear our most enlarged and most generous projects; when we consider the incessant changes and revolutions of human affairs, by which laws and learning, books and governments are hurried away by time, as by a rapid stream, and are lost in the immense ocean of matter? (Hume 1985, p. 176)

In the exchange with Schickel, Allen explains that Sandy “suffers from…what I called Ozymandias Melancholia, a depression over the fact that years from now they will come across your statue in the desert—the rotting statue in the desert—and it will mean nothing” (Schickel 2005, p. 118). It’s not just that I am whisked away; my accomplishments, like those of others, are “hurried away by time.” Even the possibility that one’s work might endure brings no consolation. In Interiors , Renata (Diane Keaton) questions her poetry writing:

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I mean, just what am I striving to create, anyway: I mean, to what end? For what purpose? What goal? … I mean, do I really care if a handful of my poems are read after I’m gone forever? Is that supposed to be some sort of compensation? Uh, I used to think it was, but now for some reason, I-I can’t.

When, after Sandy’s death, the film festival director assures her audience, “Sandy Bates’s work will live on after him,” Bates retorts from the grave, “Yeah, but what good is it if I can’t pinch women or hear any music.” Speaking in his own voice, Allen says: Some artists think that they will be saved by their art, that they will be immortalized through their art, that they will live on through their art. But the truth of the matter is, art doesn’t save you. Art for me has always been entertainment for intellectuals. I mean, it doesn’t profit Shakespeare one iota that his plays have lived on after him. He would have been better off if he were alive and the plays were forgotten.13

Nothing can compensate for the loss of my life. Sandy Bates, speaking from the grave, exclaims that he would give back his Oscar for one second of life. That leaves us wondering: what wouldn’t he trade for more life? Would he trade the lives of others for another year of his own life? If what happens to the rest of the world matters while I am alive, why would it stop mattering once I’m dead? Don’t we learn from the deaths of others that life goes on without them? If everything in the world were to stop mattering once I’m dead, why would it have mattered while I’m alive? And why wouldn’t the world have stopped mattering a long time ago, after the first person died? In Allen’s imagination, “It doesn’t matter to me” slides, perilously, into “It doesn’t matter.” Later in Hume’s essay, it seems that the problem with human affairs runs even deeper than the fact that they are “hurried away by time.” Even if they were enduring, they would be insignificant. Hume appeals to a god’s-eye view of human affairs to make his point: “It is certain, were a superior being thrust into a human body, that he never could be induced to take part in any thing, and would scarcely give attention to what passes around him.” A reflective human being can recognize the vanity of human pursuits but soon takes them up again: Now all the same topics of disdain towards human affairs, which could operate on this supposed being, occur also to a philosopher; but being, in

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some measure, disproportioned to human capacity, and not being fortified by the experience of any thing better, they make not a full impression on him. He sees, but he feels not sufficiently their truth; and is always a sublime philosopher, when he needs not; that is, as long as nothing disturbs him, or rouzes his affections. While others play, he wonders at their keenness and ardour; but he no sooner puts in his own stake, than he is commonly transported with the same passions, that he had so much condemned, while he remained a simple spectator. (Hume 1985, pp. 175– 176)

Hume counts on our feelings once again to pull us into life and divert us from the terrible truth of its triviality. In Manhattan Murder Mystery, Carol (Diane Keaton) feels cramped in her Manhattan routines. When what looks like a murder mystery unfolding down the hall falls into her lap, Carol seizes upon it, especially since it doubles as an opportunity to flirt and share the intrigue with an attractive, recently divorced friend, Ted (Alan Alda).14 When her husband, Larry (Allen), eventually gets involved in the mystery and displays some daring at the same time that Ted’s attentions are shifting toward Marcia (Angelica Huston), Carol is content to resume her marriage and Manhattan condo life. Allen finds no salvation in routine: “But as long as you’re mired, as we all are, in everyday routine and reality, we’re all going to come to the same nasty end, and have the same grim lives” (Schickel 2005, p. 141). The affirmation of life’s routines is a denial mechanism that is always in jeopardy; the truth that all our efforts are pointless and for naught threatens to break through at any moment.

Counterworking “the Artifice of Nature” Reflection on the “shortness and uncertainty of life” can chasten us—so your team lost the championship game…you might be dead tomorrow, just get over it—but what will keep such reflection from draining away our desire to live, Hume wonders: Such a reflection certainly tends to mortify all our passions: But does it not thereby counterwork the artifice of nature, who has happily deceived us into an opinion, that human life is of some importance? And may not such a reflection be employed with success by voluptuous reasoners, in order to lead us, from the paths of action and virtue, into the flowery fields of indolence and pleasure? (Hume 1985, p. 176)

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Hume counts on nature and custom to keep us going, to give us the desire to live virtuously even when we know that there are no reasons to live.15 Like too many questions to an older sibling about Santa’s travels on Christmas Eve, reflection on the “shortness and uncertainty of life” saps our groundless belief that life matters. Into the vacuum created, slide the “voluptuous reasoners” with their siren song: “Present pleasure is always of importance” (Hume 1985, pp. 176–177). In the same vein, Hume quotes Fontenelle’s observation: “the bright eyes of the ladies are the only objects, which lose nothing of their lustre or value from the most extensive views of astronomy” (Hume 1985, p. 175). The roster of “bright-eyed ladies” lending their “lustre” to Allen’s films keeps growing. The cynical logic of the “voluptuous reasoners” shows up time and again in Allen’s films. Consider the characters that Tony Roberts plays in Annie Hall , Stardust Memories, and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Return to the scene in Play it Again, Sam where Allan asks the young woman what she sees in the Jackson Pollock painting. He answers her outburst with the question “What are you doing Saturday night?” When she replies that she is committing suicide Saturday night, Allan pauses and asks, “What are you doing Friday night?” When asked by Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) at the end of Sleeper what he believes in if he doesn’t believe in science or God, Miles answers, “sex and death.” Harry, the dissolute protagonist of Deconstructing Harry, gives us an idea of where “voluptuous reasoning” can lead, as does Lee Simon (Kenneth Branaugh) in Celebrity. Faced with the supermodel played by Charlize Theron, who reveals that her entire body surface is acutely erogenous, Lee blurts out, “If the universe has any meaning, I’m looking at it.” As Harry Bloch’s sister, Doris, puts it to him: “You have no values. Your whole life is nihilism—it’s cynicism, it’s sarcasm and orgasm.” If values lack traction in the world, a disturbing question for Hume—and Allen—is what can stave off dissolution if the spell cast by human sentiments and customs wears off?

Problems with Projection Theory---But Not to Worry Professor Levy claims, “It’s we who invest it [the universe] with our feelings.” This sort of existentialism is a rerun of David Hume’s projectionist theory of value—and is every bit as problematic. Recall Hume’s

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statement that, while esthetic and moral value are purely subjective feelings, “objects acquire these qualities” from the mind that “surveys them.” Somehow, inherently indifferent objects are supposed to be invested with or acquire feelings from us. How seriously should we take Levy’s notion that we “give meaning to the indifferent universe” or “invest the world with feelings”? Not too seriously, we believe. Hume notes that “nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation, which they occasion” (Hume 1975a, 78n). But what can we make of such an assertion? How do we apply feelings to the universe? If I find a harvest moon beautiful, am I playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” on a cosmic scale, pinning my agreeable feelings on the moon? How strange! Hume contrasts reason with taste and writes that taste “has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation” (Hume 1975b, p. 294). Imagination is that “productive faculty,” and in Hume’s estimation, it puts the most extraordinary magician to shame: imagination makes a “new creation” appear. If we actually could give meaning to the universe, then it would no longer be indifferent, but of course it would have stopped being indifferent ages ago, since our forebears would have given the world meaning. No one since time immemorial would have experienced an indifferent world. No, neither Hume nor Professor Levy can be serious about the idea that we actually give meaning to the universe: if it is cold and indifferent to begin with, then cold and indifferent it remains. The very idea of our injecting meaning into a meaningless world is bogus. Professor Levy’s affirmation of life is hocus-pocus; it counts on nature to cast its spell over us. Fortunately, we don’t miss the reappearing magic of projection theory when we recognize that the disappearing magic of Allen’s trick philosophy gets thinking off on the wrong foot. His factoring approach falsifies experience; the very idea of the purely subjective is a myth. We need not be like Cecilia (Mia Farrow) in The Purple Rose of Cairo, whose life would grind to a halt if the projectors stopped running. Art’s task is not the impossible but unnecessary one that the Gertrude Stein character (Cathy Bates) in Midnight in Paris assigns it: “the job of the artist is to find an antidote to the meaninglessness of existence.” For better or worse, and for all the illusions and unanswered questions we have about it, the world we inhabit is already full of meaning, of beauty and ugliness, good and

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evil. And it is that world, the world, that makes possible magic and the movies and all that we love about them. Acknowledgements We want to thank Peter J. Bailey for his many helpful suggestions.

Notes 1. On Allen’s association of film with magic, see “Interview with Schickel,” in Schickel (2005, pp. 144–145). 2. Much the same might be said of Stanley Kubrick. See Murray and Schuler (2007). 3. Contrast this with Mario Savio’s speech on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, December 2, 1964: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” 4. Allen also mentions The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, where the insurance investigator, C. W. Briggs (Allen), turns out to be the jewelry thief, acting on the post-hypnotic suggestions of Voltan Polgar (David Ogden Stiers). Misdirection is key plot device in Bullets over Broadway, where a mobster (Chazz Palminteri) turns playwright. 5. Allen’s introduction, in Midnight in Paris, of the fallacy of “Golden Age Thinking,” which esteems past ages to the detriment of the present, takes a page from Hume’s Treatise: “Hence we imagine our ancestors to be, in a manner, mounted above us, and our posterity to lie below us” (Hume 1967, p. 437). Given the gorgeous, Sidney Bechet accompanied visual homage to Paris that opens the film, one wonders if Allen replaces golden age with golden place thinking. Gil drops his romance with the 1920s, but he moves to Paris all the same. When Gil waxes poetic about how the light of Paris shines against a “cold, violent, meaningless universe,” we recall Isaac’s (Allen) statement in the Central Park carriage in Manhattan that Tracy (Mariel Hemmingway) is God’s answer to Job: a city has taken a person’s place. 6. As we have seen, existentialists believe in freedom; Berkeley charges that Freethinkers equivocate on freedom. 7. In Dostoevsky’s stories, guilt works variously. In Father Zossima’s recounting of his youth in The Brothers Karamazov, the mysterious stranger Mihail, on whom Judah may in part be modeled, experiences

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

no guilt for years after his cold-blooded murder of the woman he loved. Later, though he is in the clear with the law, Mihail is bursting with guilt. Guilt strikes Fr. Zossima (then a young military officer) like a lightning bolt the morning he is about to fight a duel that he provoked out of jealousy and pride. His interrogation of the “vile and shameful” sensation that awakes him provides a model discernment of the workings of conscience (Dostoevsky 1993, p. 51). Hume is adamant on the point that, though any presumed objective basis for morality disappears, morality never does: “if ever there was any thing, which cou’d be call’d natural in this sense, the sentiments of morality certainly may…These sentiments are so rooted in our constitution and temper, that without entirely confounding the human mind by disease or madness, ‘tis impossible to extirpate and destroy them” (Hume 1967, p. 474). Sander Lee poses the “existential dilemma” that he sees as central to Allen’s work: “perhaps the greatest tension is between the desire of many of your characters to ground their lives in a set of traditional ethical values while, simultaneously, they sadly acknowledge that no ontological foundation can currently be found to justify such a belief” (Lee 2002, p. 222). Customs can be secular. Lane (Mia Farrow), at the end of September, is kept from attempting suicide by Stephanie (Diane Wiest), the friend who had just betrayed her. Stephanie counsels Lane to return to New York, look for work and an apartment, and tranquilize herself with life’s routines. Jerold Abrams finds in Allen’s “life in film” an ethic of aesthetic selffashioning inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault. Perhaps entertaining oneself through filmmaking is the deflated remainder of such an ethic after its urgency has dissipated. Abrams cites Nietzsche: “For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself” (Abrams 2004, p. 115). Perhaps keeping himself entertained is what satisfaction comes to for Allen. The second is to compare our situation with that of others. The trouble here is that we are prone to compare ourselves with those who are better off, only making ourselves more miserable. As quoted from a 1994 interview with Stig Bjorkman (Bailey 2001, p. 242). Allen expressed the same view back in the 1970s in an interview with Lee Guthrie, “To me, all [art]—opera, painting, anything—is a diversion, an entertainment” (as quoted in Bailey 2001, p. 16). By contrast, in Bullets over Broadway, Sheldon Flender (Rob Reiner) would carry the last copy of Shakespeare out of a burning building rather than save a stranger’s life.

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14. Peter J. Bailey observes, “What the pursuit of the mystery is for Carol (Diane Keaton) is too much what the film is for Allen: a contrived antidote for an oppressive reality, distraction impersonating remedy” (Bailey 2001, p. 208). 15. Ivan Karamozov explains to his younger brother Alyosha why he would go on living even in a “devil-ridden chaos”: “I have a longing for life and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves, you know, sometimes without knowing why” (Dostoevsky 1993, p. 2). This passage is echoed at the end of Manhattan, when Isaac brainstorms reasons to live, culminating with Tracy’s face.

Bibliography Abrams, Jerold. “Art and Voyeurism in the Films of Woody Allen.” In Woody Allen and Philosophy. Edited by Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2004, pp. 101–117. Allen, Woody. Alice. Orion Pictures, 1990. ———. Annie Hall. United Artists, 1977. ———. Broadway Danny Rose. Orion Pictures, 1984. ———. Bullets over Broadway, Miramax, 1995. ———. Cassandra’s Way. Wolverine Productions Limited, 2007. ———. Celebrity. Miramax, 1998. ———. Crimes and Misdemeanors. Orion Pictures, 1989. ———. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. DreamWorks SKG, 2001. ———. Deconstructing Harry. Fine Line Features, 1997. ———. Hannah and Her Sisters. Orion Pictures, 1986. ———. Interiors. MGM Home Video, 1978. ———. Manhattan. United Artists Corporation, 1979. ———. Manhattan Murder Mystery. TriStar Pictures, Inc., 1993. ———. Match Point. Jada Productions, 2005. ———. Midnight in Paris. MediaPro, 2011. ———. Midsummer’s Night Sex Comedy, A. Orion Pictures Corporation, 1982. ———. Oedipus Wrecks, in New York Stories. Touchstone Pictures, 1989. ———. Play It Again, Sam. Paramount Home Video, 1980. ———. The Purple Rose of Cairo. Orion Pictures, 1985. ———. Radio Days. Orion Pictures, 1987. ———. September. Orion Pictures, 1987. ———. Shadows and Fog. Orion Pictures, 1992. ———. Small Time Crooks. DreamWorks Pictures, 2000.

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———. Whatever Works. Sony Picture Classics, 2009. ———. Zelig. Orion Pictures, 1983. Bailey, Peter J. The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. Berkeley, George. Alciphron. In The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, Vol. 3. Edited by T. E. Jessop. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1950. Collins, James. Crossroads in Philosophy: Existentialism, Naturalism, and Theistic Realism. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Grand Inquisitor. Edited by Charles Guignon. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. Girgus, Sam B. The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991. ———. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Edited by Richard H. Popkin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980. ———. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Enquiries ). Third edition. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975a. ———. Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. In Enquiries, 1975b. ———. “The Sceptic.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985, pp. 159–180. ———. A Treatise of Human Nature. Second edition. Edited by L. A. SelbyBigge. Revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Revised and expanded edition. New York: Meridian, 1975. Lee, Sander H. Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2002. Murray, Patrick, and Jeanne Schuler. “Rebel Without a Cause: Stanley Kubrick and the Banality of the Good.” In The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick. Edited by Jerold J. Abrams. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007, pp. 133– 148. Oaklander, L. Nathan. Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction. Second edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986. Schickel, Richard. Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005.

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Strawson, P. J. “Freedom and Resentment.” In Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1974, pp. 1–25. Stroud, Barry. “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms.’” Hume Studies, Vol. XIX, No. 2 (November 1993): 253–272. Weir, Peter. The Truman Show. Paramount Pictures, 1998.

Index

A Abrams, Jerold J., 326 Absolute, 213 Absolute freedom, 207 Abstract ideas, 302 Abstract labor, 150, 157 Absurd, absurdism, 85 Accumulation of capital, 8, 73, 89, 159, 165, 173, 182, 222, 237, 251, 252 Acheron, 241 Action, 9, 10, 13–17, 19, 21–24, 26, 65, 70–73, 79, 80, 83, 85, 99, 110, 115, 116, 133, 137, 138, 163, 209, 219, 225, 239, 254, 255, 260, 261, 294, 302, 311, 314, 316, 322 Adding value, 134 Adorno, Theodor, 223 Aesthetics, 64 After Virtue, 21 Alibi (for value or capital), 73, 207, 221

Alice, 302 Aliquot part (representative part), 175 Allen, Woody, 81 Amadae, S.M., 34 Anderson, Elizabeth, 196 Annenkov, P.V., 127 Annie Hall , 323 Anomie, 148 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 78 Anti-Aristotelian, 41 Anti-essentialism, 124 Anti-Semitism, 50 Appropriation, 70 A priori, 112 Aquinas, Thomas, 10 Aristotle, 122, 151 Art, 253 Arthur, Chris, 264 Artificial virtues, 261 Asocial sociality (sheer sociality), 150, 160, 164 The Asphalt Jungle, 283 Atomistic sociality, 160

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3

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INDEX

A Treatise of Human Nature, 29 Augustine, 304 Austen, Jane, 249 Automatic subject, 20 Average rate of profit, 159 Ayer, A.J., 310

B Backhaus, Hans-Georg, 26 Bacon, Francis, 124 Badeen, Dennis, 31 Bad/false abstractions, 111 Bailey, Peter J., 305 Bailey, Samuel, 130 Bait and switch, 5 de Balzac, Honoré, 249 Barry Lyndon, 290 Barter, 5, 196 Basic commodity, 169 Bataille, Georges, 277 Baudrillard, Jean, 187 Bauer, Bruno, 47 Beat generation, 306 Bechet, Sidney, 325 Becker, Gary, 5, 28, 34, 193, 202, 268, 276 Being and Time, 151 Being-in-the-world, 122 Being-with, 122 Bellofiore, Riccardo, 26 Benhabib, Seyla, 63 Bentham, Jeremy, 89 Berkeley, George, 302 Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, 197 Bidet, Jacques, 242 Bifurcations, 148 purist split, 65 Bjorkman, Stig, 326 Black, R.D. Collison, 104 Blasé attitude, 81 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 42, 175

Bonds, 184 Bonefeld, Werner, 26 Borrower (debtor), 162, 180 Bourgeois horizon (bourgeois mindset), 109, 133, 148 Bray, John Francis, 8 Broadway Danny Rose, 314 The Brothers Karamazov, 325 Bullets over Broadway, 325 Bureaucratic individualism, 79 Butler, Judith, 58 Buyer, 161

C Calculability, 13 Calculating mentality, 251 Campbell, Martha, 75 Camus, Albert, 83, 147 Capital, 10–12, 14–16, 20–23, 39–41, 44, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 116, 134, 141, 164, 176, 187, 188, 194, 195, 224, 229–231, 236, 238, 242, 250, 252, 255, 265, 267, 269, 271 human, 134, 140, 195 intellectual, 134, 140, 195 political, 195 social, 134, 140, 195 Capital fetish, 10 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 249 Capitalist commodities, 11, 169 Capitalist Economics , 27 Casablanca, 303 Cassandra’s Way, 314 Category mistake, 153 Celebrity, 323 Centralization, 195 Chambers, Samuel A., 27 Charron, William, 101 Chris Arthur, 75, 127

INDEX

Circulation of capital, 156, 179 Civil society, 69, 98 Clarke, Simon, 126, 134 Clark, John Bates, 131 Class, 40 Classical political economy. See Smith, Adam; Ricardo, David; Mill, James; Mill, John Stuart A Clockwork Orange, 284 Coase, Ronald, 198 Cognition, 213 Coleman, John, 53 Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 170 Collective action problem, 194 Collins, James, 126 Colonization (of the lifeworld), 74 The Color of Law, 201 Commensurability of values, 80 “Commerce and industry” picture, 51 Commercialism, 54 Commercialization effect, 10 Commercial life, 112 Commodification, 10, 195 Commodity, 120, 149 Commodity capital, 6, 11, 12, 40, 128, 170, 177, 179, 186, 200 Commodity exchange, 121 Commodity spectrum, 155 Common good (common purpose), 152, 165, 216 Commons-based peer production, 197 Communist Manifesto, 49, 89 Commutative justice, 96, 231 Competition, 159 Concrete labor, 157 Conformism, 49 Congealed abstract labor, 157 Consequentialism, 79 “Conspicuous consumption”, 18 Constant capital, 151 Constitutive forms, 250

333

Constructivism, 153 Consumer (consumer society), 32, 47, 51–54, 147, 170, 187, 260 Contextualism, contextualists, 65 Control, 13 Cooperation, 165 Copernican Revolution, 93 Copernican turn. See Kant, Immanuel Cost of production, 284 Cost price, 159 Credit, 178 Credit card, 184 Credit default swaps, 170 Crimes and Misdemeanors , 81, 304 Crisis, 165 Critical Philosophy. See Kant, Immanuel Critical political economy, 2 Critical Theory, 63 Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 63 Critique of bourgeois philosophy, 109 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , 229 Critique of political economy, 2 Critique of Pure Reason, 310 Critique of the Gotha Programme, 130, 144 Critique of Verstand, 110 Cult of practical reason, 15 Culture, 148 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, 325 Custom, 111, 151 Customer, 185 Cynicism, 88, 148

D Dame Quickly, 160 Dante, 165 Davidson, Donald, 117 Death, 84 Death of a Salesman, 191

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INDEX

Debt, 177 Debt peonage, 180 Decisionism, 79 Declination or swerving of the atom, 288 Decommodification, 104, 195 Deconstructing Harry, 303, 316 Defetishizing critique, 67 Demand, 95 Demarcationism, 69, 70, 74, 268 Democracy, 67, 152 Democritus, 307 Deontology, 80 Descartes, René, 65 de Sicilia, Andrés Sáenz, 30 Despair, 263 Despotism, 181 Dialogues Concerning natural Religion, 212 Dickens, Charles, 147 Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times, 271 Discommodity, 194 Discourse ethics, 63 Discourse of truth, 253 Disembedded economy, 42, 150 “Disenchantment” of the modern world, 21 Distinction of reason, 7, 110 The Divine Comedy, 165 Divine command theory, 82 Dogmas of factoring or bourgeois philosophy, 124 Dogmatism, 124 Domestic labor, 45 Domestic sphere/labor, 46, 55, 56, 58, 88, 188, 250, 255, 268 Domination, 67, 119, 152 Domination by abstractions, 236 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 81 Double character, 173

Double character of the commodity, 90 “Double consciousness”, 18 Double movement of capitalism, 90 Double vision, 18, 185 Dr. Strangelove, 283 Dualism, 253 Du Bois, W.E.B., 18 Dussel, Enrique, 125

E Eclipse of reason, 79 The economic, 133 Economics, 149 The Economist , 193 “Economics imperialism”, 24 Economy-in-general (economy in general), 2, 4, 6, 9, 14, 16, 23–25, 43, 135, 142, 143, 161, 172, 269 Efficiency, 13, 16, 141–143, 165, 269, 270 Egalitarian (Egalitarianism), 15, 16, 25, 48, 89, 92, 101, 104, 165, 171, 181, 182, 207, 268, 273 Eliot, T.S., 87 Elson, Diane, 13, 30 Embodied labor, 157 Emotivism, 79, 98 Empiricism, 64 Encyclopedia Logic, 64, 113 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences , 123 Engels, Friedrich, 258 Enlightenment, 21, 187 Epicurus, Epicureanism, 112, 288 Epistemic intermediaries, 106 Equality, 89 Essay Concerning Human Understanding , 119 Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, 27

INDEX

Essence, 7, 8, 33, 57, 58, 71, 87, 92, 97, 98, 104–106, 112, 140, 152, 153, 183, 196, 210, 211, 214–217, 234, 239, 252, 274, 275, 277, 294, 305, 307 Estates, 230 Ethical egoism, 81 Ethical life, 80 Exactness, 15 Exchange-value, 149 Ex-commodity, 156, 170, 177, 188 Existentialism, 284, 305 Exploitation, 119 Externalization, 70 Eyes Wide Shut , 284 F Factoring philosophy, 302 Fair Housing Act of 1968, 190 Faith, 98, 209–213, 217, 220, 233, 234, 240, 263, 265, 295, 303, 316, 319 False doubts, 98 False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory: Losing Public Purpose, 29 False philosophy, 286 Family, domestic sphere, 88 Fear and Desire, 283 Featureless self, 118 Fetish, 95 Fetish character of the commodity, 17–21, 187 Fetishism, 17, 18, 32, 120 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 123 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 110 Final cause, 152 Financial commodities, 184 Fine, Ben, 166 Fisk, Milton, 58 Fixed measure of value, 140 de Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouyer, 323

335

Forces of production, 66, 148 Formal cause, 151 Formal subsumption, 13, 31, 193 Form and content, 7 Form and matter or content, 110 Form of consciousness, 67, 207 Form(s), 152 For profit firm, 155, 195 For us, 209 Foucault, Michel, 326 Frankfurt School, 199 Fraser, Nancy, 39 Freethinker, 310 Freud, Sigmund, 292 Fromm, Erich, 297 Full Metal Jacket , 286 Fundamentalism, 55

G GDP-Plus, 193 Gender, 163 General idea, 302 General Motors, 191 General will, 219 The German Ideology, 220 Geryon, 278 Ghostly objectivity (phantom-like objectivity), 160 ghostly or phantom-like objectivity, 57 Gift (gift-giving), 185 Gigantism, 279 Girgus, Sam B., 303 Global skepticism, 304, 313, 314 God, 210 Goffin, Gerry, 272 Going corporate, 195 Gotha Programme, 8 Gould, Carol, 104 Gradgrind, Thomas, 162 The Grapes of Wrath, 254 Gratitude, 162

336

INDEX

Gray, John, 8 Greed, 147 Gross Household Product, 193 Grundrisse, 29, 129

294, 296, 298, 299, 302, 308–310, 315–326 Hybrid subsumption, 10 Hyperinflation, 178

H Habermas, Jürgen, 66 Hard Times , 162, 250, 252–254, 256, 257, 259, 263, 265, 267–271, 273, 276, 278 Harrison Bergeron, 273 Hayek, F.A., 128 Hedonism, 92 Hegel, G.W.F., 63 Hegel’s logic of essence, 140 Heidegger, Martin, 122 Hellenistic philosophy, 109 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 215 Herbert Marcuse, 103 Hightower, Jim, 192 The Hightower Lowdown, 201 Hirsch, Fred, 10 Historical materialism, 131 History and Class Consciousness , 32 Hobbes, Thomas, 128 d’Holbach, Baron (Paul-Henri Thiry), 215 Homo economicus, 162 Homophobia, 46 Honneth, Axel, 46 Honor fetish, 18, 187 Horizons of discourse, 134 Horkheimer, Max, 64, 79 Household, 69 Housework (domestic work), 179 Hubbard, Glenn, 4 Human capital, 53 Human rights, 48, 151 Hume, David, 7, 29, 85, 93, 98, 102, 110, 111, 115, 118, 122, 126, 209, 212, 226, 261, 289–291,

I Ideal commodities, 11, 170 Ideal subsumption (ideal commodification), 179, 195 Identity politics, 39 Illusion of the economic, 2, 4, 9, 14, 17, 22, 24, 25, 43–45, 51, 120, 129, 135, 144, 161, 184 Illusion of the epoch, 43 Imagination, 250 Immanent critique, 67 Impersonality, 178 Indifference, 81, 150 Industry, 186 Informal economy, 189 In itself, 216 Instrument, 213 Instrumental reason and action, 64, 133 Interaction, 65 Interest, 174 Interiors , 320 Investment, 188 Ironmonger, D., 193 Irony, 81

J Jevons, William Stanley, 42 Jürgen Habermas, 278 The Just Economy, 230

K Kant, Immanuel, 63 Karamazov, Ivan, 81, 99 Karl Marx and World Literature, 249

INDEX

Karl Polanyi, 58 Kierkegaard, Søren, 48, 59, 263–265, 308 The Killing , 283 Kind of sociality, 160 King, Carole, 272 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 306 Knight, Charles, 278 Krahl, Hans-Jürgen, 27 Kramer vs. Kramer, 271 Kubrick, Stanley, 283

L Labor model of reason, 70 Labor power, 96 Labor theory of value, 174 Lahr, John, 307 Land, 194 Language, Truth, and Logic, 310 Large-scale industry, 165 Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 206 Lee, Sander, 308 Left Ricardians, 8 Lender (creditor), 162, 180 Leveler, 19, 185, 258 Leveling, 255 Leveller, 183 Lewis, C.I., 126 Liberalism, 47 Liberty, 152, 153, 287–289, 311 Lifeworld, 68 Local skepticism, 313 Locke, John, 152 The Logic of Marx’s “Capital” , 9 Lolita, 283, 284 Loss of the world, 82 Lotz, Christian, 155 Love’s Knowledge, 258 Luhmann, Niklas, 270 Lukács, Georg, 9, 64

337

M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 79 Mad, 284 Magic, magician, 184, 301 Magnet (magnetism), 186 Magnitude of value, 42 Manhattan, 306 Manhattan Murder Mystery, 322 Manufacture, 165 Marcuse, Herbert, 297 Market price, 178 Martin Heidegger, 144 Marx, Karl, 1–34, 40–42, 46, 47, 49, 55–57, 59, 63, 64, 66, 67, 74, 77, 78, 83, 87–89, 91–93, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 109, 110, 112–116, 118–125, 133–143, 147–151, 154–165, 170–184, 186, 194, 205–207, 220–223, 225, 229–233, 235–242, 249, 251–254, 258, 265, 268–270, 286–288, 294 Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, 149 Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge, 127 Masquerade, 235 Match Point , 308 Materialism, 114, 148 The Matrix, 183 Matter, 210 Matter-of-fact mentality, 252 Matters of fact, 111 Mattick Jr, Paul., 1 McDonaldization, 137 The McDonaldization of Society, 141 Means of payment, 180 Means of production, 39 Medium, 213 Meikle, Scott, 259 Menger, Carl, 102 Metaethics, 86

338

INDEX

Metaphysics, 64 “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, 15 Midas touch, 117 Midas touch or curse, 117 Midnight in Paris , 304 Miller, Arthur, 201 A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, 301 Mill, James, 221 Mill, John Stuart, 49 Milonakis, Dimitris, 166 The Mind and the Market , 243 Mode of production, 153 Modernity. See Enlightenment Modern moral philosophy, 77 Modern philosophy, 109 Money, 40, 149 “Money as money”, 19, 20 Money fetish, 19 “Monological” action, 65 Morality, 206 Moral luck, 71 Moral skepticism, 82 Morgenstern, Oskar, 100 Moseley, Fred, 75 Muller, Jerry, 243 Murray, Patrick, 75, 127

N Natural capital, 194 Natural Capital Project, 194 Negative commodity, 194 Neo-Aristotelian, 98 Neoclassical economics, 109 Neo-Kantian thought, 64 Neue Marx Lektüre, 26 New antisubjectivism, 102 The New York Times , 181 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 326 Nihilism, 83 Nominal essences, 124

Nominalism, 152 Noncompete agreement, 192 Non-conformist, 288 Nordern, Eric, 289 Not-for-profit firm, 155 Nussbaum, Martha, 250 O Oaklander, L. Nathan, 305 O’Brien, Anthony Patrick, 4 Oedipus Wrecks , 301 Offe, Claus, 104 O’Kane, Chris, 26 Oliver, Melvin L., 58 One-Dimensional Man, 199 “On the Jewish Question”, 101, 103, 129 Opportunity cost, 276 Oppression, 153 “Original Text of ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ ” (Urtext ), 30 P Parks, Rosa, 306 Parsons, Talcott, 42 Paths of Glory, 283 Patriarchy, 46 Percy, Walker, 147 Phenomenology, 66 Phenomenology of Spirit . See Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophical analysis, 109 The Philosophy of Right , 70, 73, 230, 233, 243, 287 “Philosophy of the subject”, 67 Physiological, 157 Piketty, Thomas, 249 Planned obsolescence, 166 Playboy, 289 Play it Again, Sam, 303

INDEX

“Pleasant Valley Sunday”, 272 Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, 250 Polanyi, Karl, 150 Polarity of the value-form, 183 Politics , 52 Pollock, Friedrich, 64 Popper, Karl, 100 Positivism, 81 Postone, Moishe, 50 Potential commodity, 156, 188, 198 Pound, Ezra, 14 The Poverty of Philosophy, 268 Practical abstraction, 235 Practically abstract labor, 158 Prawer, S.S., 249 Predictability, 13 Preference, 79 Preferred indifferent, 83 The Price is Right , 18 Price of production, 159 Price (price-form), 149, 174 Primary qualities, 210 Prisoners of Reason, 34 Private property (property rights), 112, 189 Product, 185 Production in general, 24, 128 Profit, 159 Projection, projectionism, 81, 154, 296, 309, 324 Proletariat, 67 Property (property rights), 89, 189 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 127 Pseudo-concept (pseudo-notion), 133 Pseudo-science, 161, 269 Punctuality, 15 Purchasing power, 139 Pure insight, 206 Purely social, 149 Pure metaphysics, 218 Purism and purist splits, 111

339

The Purple Rose of Cairo, 324 Purpose (purposiveness), 2–5, 7, 16, 23, 40, 43, 152, 153, 158, 159, 162, 165, 172, 209, 219, 222, 250, 269, 270, 290, 295, 304 Pynchon, Thomas, 134 Q Quasi-commodity, 155 R Racism (racial oppression), 46, 188 Radio Days , 301 Rational choice theory, 120 rational choice theory, 101 Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 34 Rawls, John, 101 Real abstraction, 116 Real doubts, 124 Real subsumption, 54, 165 Recognition, 43 Redistribution, 43 Reichelt, Helmut, 26 Relations of ideas, 111 Relations of production, 148 Religious fundamentalism, 82 Rent, 174 Repair prevention, 192 Republic, 48 Return on investment, 195 Reuten, Geert, 75 Ricardian socialism, 119 Ricardo, David, 6, 42, 136, 140 Richard Rothstein, 201 Rights, 171 Ring of Gyges, 302 Ritter, Joachim, 243 Ritzer, George, 137 Riva, Tommaso Redolfi, 26 Robbins, Lionel, 4, 276

340

INDEX

Robert Albritton, 166 Rorty, Richard, 206 Rubin, Izaak Ilych, 147

S Saad-Filho, Alfredo, 27 Samuelson, Paul, 1 Sandel, Michael, 49, 156 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 81 Satz, Debra, 30, 196, 197 Savio, Mario, 325 “The Sceptic”, 290 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef, 113 Scheme-content dualism, 103 Schickel, Richard, 303 Schmidt, Alfred, 26 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 286 Schuler, Jeanne, 126 Scientific revolution, 109 Secondary qualities, 315 Secular society (secularism), 15, 78 Self-interest, 153, 162, 171, 255 Selfishness, 171, 269 Seller, 161 Seneca, 290 Sensing, 210 September, 326 Shadow commodity/shadow commodities, 11, 170, 193, 202 Shadow price, 5, 193, 202, 276 Shadows and Fog , 301 Shadows of value forms, 16, 141 Shakespeare, William, 160, 180, 249, 321, 326 Shapiro, Thomas M., 58 Shearing pressure, 103, 131 The Shining , 292 Sickness Unto Death, 263 Sign value (status value), 187 Simmel, Georg, 129

Simony, 169 Simple commodity (simple commodity circulation), 11, 121, 161 Singer, Peter, 138 Skepticism, 66, 284 Slavery, slave labor, 82, 89, 99 Sleeper, 323 Small Time Crooks , 307 Smith, Adam, 128 Smith, Tony, 9 The Social Contract , 218 Social contract theory, 120 social form, 134 Socially necessary labor, 159 Social validation, 158 Sociology, 109, 149 Soelle, Dorothee, 49 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 130 The Souls of Black Folks , 18 “The Spectre of Capital”, 164 “The Spirit of Capitalism”, 15, 272 Stardust Memories , 303 State, 69, 88 State of nature, 284 State of nature theory, 120 Stigler, George, 276 Stirner, Max, 235 Stoicism, 112 Store of value, 156, 187 The Stranger, 83 Strawson, P.J., 313 Stroud, Barry, 102, 144 Subjectivism, 77 Substance of value, 158 Subsumption, 10, 13, 14, 16, 141–143, 165, 166, 186, 193, 194 Supersensible (supra-sensible), 22, 122, 135, 139, 149, 154, 252 Superstition, 233 Superstructure, 148 Surplus value, 148

INDEX

Sympathy, 261 A System of Logic, 272

T Talcott Parsons, 100 Taylor, Charles, 46 Taylor, Nicola, 27 Telos (teleology), 152, 153 Terror, 205, 207, 218–220, 229, 235, 237, 238, 241, 242 Thales, 274 Theoretical reason, 65 Theories of Surplus-Value, 28, 144, 200, 268 A Theory of Justice, 101 There’s no Such Thing as “The Economy”: Essays on Capitalist Value, 27 “Theses on Feuerbach”, 114, 225 Thing-in-itself. See Kant, Immanuel “Third thing”, 154 Thomas Pynchon, 144 Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 26, 27, 31, 33, 74, 100, 103, 129–131 Toward the Critique of Political Economy, 174 Traditional Marxism, 66 Transhistorical, 172 Trick philosophy, 301 The Truman Show, 166, 303 Truth-like belief, 83 2001: A Space Odyssey, 285

U Unconstrained reflection, 302 Urtext , 164 USA Today, 186 Usefulness, 93 Use-value Romanticism, 151, 155 Utilitarianism, 80 Utility, utility theory, 14, 15, 24–26, 42, 78, 91, 92, 133, 138, 139,

341

232, 235, 237, 257, 259, 260, 268

V Valid price, 154 Valorization, 176 Value, 133, 149 “Value added”, 65 Value-form, 12, 128, 161, 163, 174, 178, 181, 183, 185, 232, 233, 237 Value-producing labor, 158 Veblen effects, 154 Veblen, Thorstein, 18, 27, 187, 200 Virtue ethics, 77 Vogel, Steven, 226 Vonnegut, Kurt, 273 von Neumann, John, 100

W Wage labor, 119, 151 Walsh, Shannon, 30 Walzer, Michael, 30, 196 Wealthism, 51 Wealth of Nations , 59 Weber, Max, 42, 147 Weir, Peter, 166 Welch, C., 259 Welsh, Alexander, 271 Whatever Works , 308 “What is Enlightenment?”, 205 What Money Can’t Buy, 156 Willett, Cynthia, 277 Williams, Bernard, 80 Winfield, Richard, 230 “With Usura”, 14 World money, 15

Z Zelig , 301