Similarly, to equate production relations with ownership, and define capitalism's economic structure in these terms alone, is to replicate bourgeois illusions as to what property is - an unmediated relation of individuals to things – and comprehensively obscure the wide range of relations, the labyrinth of forms and foci of social power, through which so apparently simple a thing as property' is actually constituted, regulated, legitimated, and made natural and 'obvious': precisely simple'. Foucault's work on the microsociology of power' is pertinent here; so is the rich vein of modern feminist historical scholarship (MacKinnon, 1982). Such forms of power centrally include (though they are far from exhausted by) that which we summate as the state', and its orderly oppression of law' (Smith), which traditional Marxism' equally – and in defiance of the subtleties of Marx's own analysis - takes at its face value as an ostensibly independent ‘superstructure'.
Ironically, bourgeois radicals have been far more aware – for some time! - of the imbrication of the non-economic' in making capitalist economy possible (and its naturalistic appearance passable), perhaps because for them it was always a practical rather than a merely theoretical problem. I have already quoted Adam Smith (above, p.52); for Jeremy Bentham, Law alone has accomplished what all the natural feelings were not able to do; Law alone has been able to create a fixed and durable possession which deserves the name of Property' (quoted in Halévy, 1972: 503). Smith, like Durkheim, also knew that contract had a basis in trust, that capitalism was amongst other things a profoundly moral order. The Theory of Moral Sentiments preceded the Wealth of Nations (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: ch. 1; Corrigan and Sayer, 1985: 104-9). Christopher Hill (1967) and Edward Thompson (1971 and passim), amongst many others - and following Marx (1864) – have recovered for us the struggle of moral economies in capitalism's formation. But one could as well read Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, or, come to that, Disraeli's Sybil for comparable enlightenment.
In citing early sociologists of capitalism (for such they were) like Smith or Bentham, I am not trying to restore idealism. Law or morality were never, for Marx, independent of people's materialistic connection'. The point is that for him law was not a superstructure, as tradition understands the term, external to and causally determined by the economy, either. Rather, it is one of the myriad forms the social relations which premise that economy empirically take. Marx's achievement lies in comprehending law, like the state, as such a form, rather than in its ideal, abstracted independence. In this sense he indeed does find the anatomy of civil society in political economy. This is a far cry, however, from traditional ideas of what superstructures are, and how they relate to bases. It is also not without its implications for conceptions of socialism: the facile but enduring idea, for instance, that 'the state' is the sort of ‘thing' which can be ‘seized', ‘used' (and as Lenin once said (1919: 488), then 'thrown on the scrapheap' of history) - or even, in that favourite apocalyptic Marxist image, ‘smashed'. As a long and sad history from Kronstadt to Solidarity bears witness, this particular abstraction has been bloodily violent in its practical implications.
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THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
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