Marx's later writings extend the argument to the actual forms of law themselves, and anchor these more directly in the phenomenal forms of commodity circulation. Pashukanis (1978; cf. Corrigan and Sayer, 1981) has developed this theme in Marx with considerable brilliance (if also, at times, undue abstractness). ‘Capital-logic' theorists (who can sometimes be subjected to the same criticism) have argued similarly regarding the characteristic political forms of bourgeois democracy (Holloway and Picciotto, 1978). So I shall be brief. For the Grundrisse, the juridical subject - the free, autonomous, sovereign individual - is implicit in the relation of commodity exchangers: in the very act of exchange they are stipulated for each other as, and prove themselves to be, equals, [and] there enters, in addition to the quality of equality, that of freedom':
although individual A feels a need for the commodity of individual B, he does not appropriate it by force, nor vice versa, but they recognise one another reciprocally as proprietors, as persons whose will penetrates their commodities. Accordingly, the juridical moment of the Person enters here, as well as that of freedom, in so far as it is contained in the former. No one seized hold of another's property by force. Each divests himself of his property voluntarily. (1858a: 243; cf. 1867a: 84)
Marx goes on to argue that the exchange of exchange-values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom', and ‘as pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations they are merely this basis to a higher power'(1858a: 245). Equality and freedom presuppose relations of production lacking in the medieval and ancient world, which rested on ‘direct forced labour' (ibid.; cf. 464-5). Capital argues similarly that the notion of human equality' can only ‘acquire the fixity of a popular prejudice' when ‘the dominant relation between man and man is that of owners of commodities' (1867a: 60). In this sense the market is ‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man', where ‘alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham' (ibid.: 176).
The attributes of the juridical person', then, are precisely [those] of the individual engaged in exchange' (1858a: 246). However, Marx argues – and here we return to the ideality’ of superstructures – that the sphere of exchange is merely the surface process’ of bourgeois society, 'beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear' (ibid.). He of course has in mind the eminently unequal ‘exchange' of labour-power for wages, out of which arises an unrequited surplus-value. Polemicizing against French socialists, who see this as a perversion’ of the original equality of the exchange relationship, Marx argues that capital is inherent in’ exchange-value, and wage-labour in commodity-producing labour. The possibility of the perversion' is in other words given in the original relationship itself. Failing to see this is a utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society', the latter being only the inverted projection [Lichtbild] of this reality” (ibid.: 249). Such are superstructures'.
VII
Let me now try to pull together the strands of this argument. Nothing I have said, or quoted from Marx, is in any way intended to deny the reality of organs, institutions or agencies of government or law as such. That would be absurd. It is the reality of their apparent separation from capitalism's economic structure' - its essential relations – which is at issue.
Marx's analysis of legal and political ‘superstructures', I believe, hinges upon two key points, both of which are very subversive of 'traditional historical materialism'. First, he seeks to establish that the regulative agencies of state and law are substantially internal to capitalism's 'base' itself. That is to say, they are but forms of the social relations within and between classes – division of labour and labour/capital relation - upon which the possibility of capitalist economy is predicated. Their appearances of independence notwithstanding, state and law are in reality 'the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised' (1846a: 79–80). Marx insists, moreover, that state and law are necessary forms of bourgeois rule: the individuals who rule in these conditions - leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state – have to give their will - a universal expression as the will of the state, as law' (ibid.: 329, emphasis added). State and law are thus essential relations of capitalist production, in the sense elaborated in my last chapter: it could 'not proceed in their absence. We should pay close attention to Marx's language when he says that civil society must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, and inwardly must organise itself as State', and speaks of civil society in its action as State’ (ibid.: 50, 48). This does not sound like an external relation.
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IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
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