Sohn-Rethel’s approach is politically important because it stresses that mechanistic thinking and the division of labour are problematic dimensions of classbased societies that need to be thought of in socialist strategies. But he situates communication and knowledge outside of the economy, which becomes evident in his distinction between the economy’s real abstraction and knowledge and communication’s conceptual abstraction. Sohn-Rethel makes a strict separation between the economy and culture. The phenomenon of cultural and communication labour makes it dificult to separate these two spheres. A software engineer creates a highly abstract and mechanistic form of conceptual knowledge: software code. This code is an intellectual product. It is part of the Sohn-Rethelian real economy in a double sense: a) Abstract and concrete labour produce software that b) is sold as a commodity. The abstract logic of the commodity and of exchange and the abstract logic of thought cannot be separated in this case. The one can also not be reduced to the other. Abstract thought and labour rather collapse into one: the software commodity is objectified abstract thought and the result of abstract labour.
6.2.3. Knowledge and the Economy
Sohn-Rethel does, however, not separate the economy and knowledge in a dualist manner. He rather reduces knowledge to the economy by arguing that the economic world determines the thought world. He speaks in this context of a conversion, replication and correlation: ‘the real abstraction [is] being converted to its ideal reflection into intellectual form’ (61, see also 31). The ‘basic categories of intellectual labour […] are replicas of the elements of real abstraction’ (76). ‘Capital and mathematics correlate: the one wields its influence in the fields of economy, the other rules the intellectual powers of social production’ (112). Formulations such as the ones in which the real abstraction is converted into the ideal reflection, or where the intellectual is a replica of the real, or in which there is a correlation, imply that the economy’s real abstraction determines culture’s intellectual abstraction. Sohn-Rethel’s approach in the last instance is a form of economic reductionism and determinism.
6.2.4. Money as the Language of Commodities
Sohn-Rethel’s dual separation of the real and knowledge also results in the fact that he considers economic exchange as being separate from communication. He argues that commodity exchange is a practical solipsism that does not need communication. This separation is not just questioned by informational exchange-values such as commercial software, but also by the communicative logic of exchange-value itself. Money is a particular form of communication that is instrumental, non-verbal, mediated, anonymous, impersonal, abstract, fetishised (abstracted from direct social relations), reified, and void of meaning. Money communicates commodity prices on the market. Money is the form of communication that facilitates the abstract equalisation of commodities on the market in the exchange process. Marx therefore speaks of value as the ‘language of commodities’:
180
Critical Theory of Communication