II
As argued in chapter 2, such fetishisms are not mere intellectual errors. They are – so far as Marx is concerned, at least – grounded in capitalism's phenomenal forms, the ways in which the social relations of bourgeois society present themselves to the consciousness of its participants. Neither the social presuppositions, nor the historicity, of natural, self-understood forms of life’ like labour’, commodities, money or capital, are immediately evident in their appearance. Such forms seem, rather, to be natural, obvious and universal, and are accordingly conceived in ordinary language and political economy in fetishistic ways: precisely as pure ahistoric abstractions.
As we have seen, Marx persistently relates the abstraction of social phenomena from their historic integument - he speaks of the abstraction of the state, abstract labour, the abstract individual, and so on, in ways that are too consistent and too frequent to be coincidental – to the particular social conditions of capitalist production and the world of fetishized appearances they sustain. Reification is for him a real social process. It is, then, the nature of bourgeois reality itself – the discrepancy between its appearance and its reality, its real and its ideal forms - which renders a scientific analysis of such forms necessary, and which simultaneously makes that science necessarily a critique. To show capitalism's phenomenal forms to be mystifying is implicitly to criticize the immediate social forms of consciousness' – and the theories and ideologies predicated on their plausibility - in which these forms are spontaneously' grasped. Marx's own theoretical concepts, in short, are grounded in a critique of appearances, of natural, self-understood forms of social life' and their corresponding categories.
Having written on this at book length elsewhere (1983), I do not intend to elaborate too far on (or defend) what I see as involved in this form of analysis. But briefly, I see Marx's critique, analogously to Kant's, as entailing an excavation of the conditions of possibility or impossibility' and therewith the ‘origins, extents and limits' (Kant, 1969: 3) of its object. Marx's object – his severally declared startingpoint² - is not production in general, but the specific social forms in which, in any given instance, productive phenomena manifest themselves to our experience. Given his materialist assumption of ‘correspondence' between phenomenal forms and categories of thought, such an analysis of the conditions of possibility or impossibility' of the forms themselves is simultaneously an exposure of the origins, extents and limits' of the theoretical categories in which they are conventionally apprehended. Not only propositions, therefore, but the very terms in which they are framed - categories and concepts – for Marx have a truth-value. Definition can accordingly never be a merely nominal operation. A difficult notion for analytic philosophy to accept, this idea would not be at all odd to a Hegelian.
The conditions of possibility at issue will for Marx be a given set of production relations – between people, and to nature - related to a given level of development of productive forces (in my sense of both terms): what he calls the material groundwork, or set of conditions of existence'(1867a: 80) of society, its ‘essential relations'. Marx's critique, he says in the General Introduction, thus moves from the imagined concrete' – the given world of phenomenal forms – to the abstract' – the concepts of the essential relations which explain these forms. Equally importantly, however the critique then moves back again, to ‘a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought' (1857:
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THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
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