Instructively – to return to Cohen for a moment - Cohen denies that capital is literally a relation. He says it is a thing which has relational properties. This entails identifying capital with the things in which it is materialized, albeit things which acquire the properties of capital only within particular social relationships. Cohen reasons that to say capital is a relation is akin to saying that a husband is the relation of marriage by virtue of which he acquires the relational status of husband (1978: 90). Here, as elsewhere, he purports to express Marx's thought in a less ‘untidy' form than Marx himself does. But if Marx's formulation is thought confusing (I myself find it transparently clear) it would palpably be more in accord with his intent to reserve the term capital' for the essential relation at issue, and use another word for money, means of production, the wagefund, commodities, and so on, within the relation. For Marx, the latter are merely aspects of the capital-relation, forms it takes in the course of its ‘circuit' (see 1878: chs 1-4). Marx's concept of capital includes wage-labour. As so often Cohen spectacularly, if elegantly, misses Marx's point. What Cohen sees as a rather irritating category error – the apparent confusion of a relation with one of its terms – is precisely the fetish Marx is analysing.
In this context, we might pause to note the significance of another issue on which, notwithstanding his avowed traditionalism' and respect' for what Marx wrote' (1978: ix), Cohen chooses en passant to depart from Marx. He attempts, he says, to state Marx's theory of history' in a way which involves no commitment to the labour theory of value (ibid.: 353). The labour theory may indeed have difficulties. But whether it can be so easily dispensed with in characterizing Marx's thought is questionable. For it is on the basis of that theory that the fetishes of commodity and capital are identified. Seeing value as a property of things is fetishistic only if, as the labour theory maintains, exchange-value is in fact a manifestation of relations between people's labours. Colletti (1972: 91) argues an organic unity' between Marx's theory of value and his theory of fetishism. Rubin (1972: 5) goes still further, claiming that ‘the theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx’s entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of value'. Whether either can be coherently stated independently of the other is exceedingly dubious. Alternatively we might say that Cohen's ability to write a book on Marx's theory of history in which the theses of the labour theory of value are not presupposed or entailed’ (1978: 353) is as good an indication as any of how far his peroration does respect' what Marx actually wrote. The labour theory, of course, may well be wrong. But that does not justify simply ignoring it in a purported commentary on Karl Marx.
To come back to Marx's critique. Having deconstructed’ immediate phenomenal forms into their constitutive relations, Marx now has a basis from which he is then able to go on to develop an historical account of what these relations in fact comprise. In the case of capital for instance, an historical analysis not informed by this prior critique would remain blind to the historical significance of, say, the Enclosure Acts. So long as we remain at the level of appearances, and continue to see capital, fetishistically, as a thing, the search for the origins of capitalism will be limited to such factors as the influx of precious metals - the material substance of money – from the Americas into early modern Europe, the abstemious puritanism' of early entrepreneurs who saved and invested the supposed thing capital', or the development of industrial technology, capital's palpable embodiment. I am not asserting that any of these do not have their place in a causal account. Manifestly they do. But if Marx is right about what capital is - a social relation – the central historiographic problem must be the origins of that relation itself, the processes which led to the Decomposition of the Original Union existing between the Labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour' (1865b: 45). We need to focus on how those abstractions labour’ and property’ were historically brought into being.
Marx's critique in other words accomplishes a radical shift of historiographic terrain. Once capital’ is reconceptualized as a relation, not the thing it originally appears to be, we are directed to a buried history, that of class formation and struggle. The possibility is thereby opened up of moving back again, to the ‘imagined concrete' of the surface of society, but this time grasped as ‘a rich totality of many determinations and relations' (1857: 100). Instead of operating with analytic categories which replicate the misplaced concreteness of reified forms like value and capital as conventionally conceived, we can begin empirically to recover the material ways in which, through time, these forms were constructed in the intercourse of ‘real, living individuals'. Marx is clear, we should note, that such historical inquiry is ‘a work in its own right' (1858a: 461) - we cannot deduce the empirical specifics of social formation from its bare concept. This is important; reification of the concepts of essential relations is as pernicious as fetishism of phenomenal forms, and by no means unknown to Marxism.4 Recovering the real history of the relations of production' (ibid.) is an ineluctably empirical enterprise.
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THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
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