This historicity, as with the concepts of bourgeois thought more generally, may indeed not be immediately apparent, because of the level of generality – precisely the apparently abstract, timeless quality - of the categories at issue. But Marxists with an inkling of concern for their mentor's method should have been alert to it. I have argued the case in detail in chapters 2–4 for each of the three key concepts, conventionally understood as separate levels’ of social reality, invoked in Marx's 1859 Preface: forces of production, relations of production/economic structure, and superstructure. 'Traditional' definitions - epitomized by Cohen, but far from confined to his work, or his functional determinist school of Marxism - are, I hope I have sufficiently shown, founded in the universalization of what Marx at least analysed as the apparent characteristics these phenomena exhibit within the specific historical parameters of capitalism, at the same time as these categories are wholly abstracted from the historic conditions which gave them birth.
Thus where for Marx productive forces were capacities of people in association, ‘tradition' defines them in their capitalist, alienated appearance as things: those facilities and devices which are used in the process of production: means of production on the one hand, and labour power on the other' (Cohen, 1983b: 112). Where for Marx production relations are the social relations within which individuals produce', which ‘in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society'(1847b: 212) - an extremely broad conception - ‘tradition' founds the category on the notion of property as it appears in capitalism, as a relation of ownership between individuals and things: relations of ... economic power people enjoy or lack over labour power and means of production'(Cohen, 1983b: 113). And where for Marx the superstructure' is the set of phenomenal forms the base’ itself assumes in social consciousness, whose ideality’ in capitalism lies precisely in its appearance of separation from people's materialistic connection', tradition’ takes this separation at its face value and enshrines it as a theoretical axiom. The subsequent construal of Marx's guiding thread' as a theory of history, in which the entities thus defined are seen as externally and causally related - whether deterministically, functionally, structurally, or within relative autonomy' models – rests on this initial reifying abstraction of these terms themselves. Having once sundered Marx's organic unity', and constructed these fictitious subjects, the correspondences’ he posits cannot be restored – however implausible, however historically absurd, the attempt - in any other way.
The consequence of this fetishism of Marx's concepts is twofold. First, and most evidently, because this universalization of capitalist phenomenal forms is profoundly ahistorical, historical materialism loses all empirical purchase once we move outside of capitalism's parameters. This is well brought out in the anthropological work of Godelier or Meillassoux, or the historical studies of Thompson, Hill, Hilton or Bloch. The conventional concept of productive forces sheds little light on how pyramids were built or China irrigated, that of ‘economic structure' (or property’) is of scant use for comprehending societies where surplus extraction is organized through personalized relations of kinship, Herrschaft, or civitas, and it is pretty meaningless to attempt to demarcate superstructures as non-economic institutions in historical contexts where a clearly isolatable economy’ itself does not exist. In short, for societies other than capitalism, traditional historical materialism' excludes by conceptual fiat from people's materialistic connection' much that is demonstrably essential to it, and was, as I have repeatedly shown, freely acknowledged as such by Marx himself. This seriously jeopardizes Marxism's claims to be either historical or materialist in any empirically pertinent sense. It also thoroughly effaces Marx's own keen understanding of what is so distinctive about capitalist society.
Second, and equally importantly, because of their phenomenal basis ‘traditional' Marxist categories are of limited use (but, like the concepts of political economy, have immense, and immensely dangerous, superficial plausibility) in comprehending the anatomy of bourgeois society itself. I would argue, for instance, that to construe productive forces as things - in this context, industrial technology – is to travesty Marx's own appreciation of the nature of the forces/ relations conflict in capitalism, and its pertinence to socialism. For him the contradiction was between the capacities - ultimately of individuals – capitalism had developed in so far as it had socialized labour, and the restrictive forms this socialization took under the aegis of private property. Industrial technology is problematic for socialism in this view, precisely because it is simultaneously an embodiment of social productive forces and a materialization of oppressive social relationships: both a force and a relation of production. It cannot therefore simply be 'developed', in the framework of a new set of property relations (like the nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange), to deliver socialism. Its very forms – the divisions of mental and manual labour, the hierarchy of authority and subordination, embodied in the social logic of production lines - are part and parcel of the capitalist relations socialism seeks to transform. Braverman's work needs to be recalled here. The same is true more broadly of capitalism's household/ enterprise separation, and the definitions of work' (waged labour) materialized in this social geography, its town/country separation, and the many other differential divisions of labour on which it rests. As I have argued, with others, elsewhere (Corrigan, Ramsay and Sayer, 1978; 1979; 1981), 'traditional' conceptions of what development of the productive forces’ entails have placed enormous restrictions on human emancipation in this century, when embodied in the planning strategies (and very material apparatuses) of ruling parties in post-revolutionary societies. Marx spoke of the violence of things; the violence of abstractions can be equally devastating.
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THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
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