A major casualty of traditional’ definitions of production relations, worthy of particular comment, is the concept of class - the centrepiece of Marx's sociology. For Cohen class can be defined as a purely economic' relation, which then obliges us to seek causal connections between this economic essence' of the relationship and the real empirical forms which class identity, consciousness and action actually take in history. Other Marxists, like Eric Olin Wright, give us ever more labyrinthine schemata of the same ilk. In some justly famous remarks E.P. Thompson has derided such ‘hypostasising [of] class identities':
When, in discussing class, one finds oneself too frequently commençing sentences with ‘it', it is time to place oneself under some historical control, or one is in danger of becoming the slave of one's own categories. Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine-room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, statushierarchies and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time – that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same categories of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening. (1965: 85; cf. his 1968: Introduction; 1978b)
On the conception of social relations of production which I have argued was Marx's, it could not be otherwise. Economic' classes are made – and can only then be conceptualized in their pristine ‘economic' purity, ‘almost mathematically - so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production' (Thompson, 1968: 9) – over time, and through a multiplicity of social media. A national parliament, the county bench, Magna Carta, Hakluyt's voyages and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, suppression of disorderly alehouses and regulated ‘encouragement' of rational amusements', all of these and much else were amongst the forms through which the economic' power of the English ruling classes came to be made, not its superstructural' epiphenomena (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985).
When Marx wrote that ‘every social form of property has morals of its own' (1871: 169), or conversely, the opposition between political economy and ethics is only an apparent opposition ... political economy expresses moral laws in its own way' (1844a: 311), it was, I think, this sort of ‘nexus of relationship' he was getting at. He was not remotely speaking of an external relationship between economy here and morality (or legality, or polity, or civility) there, as traditional historical materialism' would have us, ludicrously, believe.
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It remains to say that none of this is to deny the centrality, within historical materialism, of the production and reproduction of real life'. The issue is rather of what that production and reproduction entails, and how it may most appropriately be analysed. My approach, I believe, opens up the possibility of giving what is empirically essential to people's materialistic connection’ - and recognized as such in Marx's own concepts and texts - greater centrality than any schema like Cohen's ever can. ‘Traditional historical materialism' shuffles reified categories, between which it posits more or less implausible connections at the level of a general theory. I argue rather for a minimum of a priori theory, and the use of empirically-open general categories which are analytically capable of letting the real world in. Thus there are no theoretical obstacles (of the sort which have occasioned entertaining contortions in recent years amongst Marxists) to recognizing co-operation as a productive force for nascent capitalism, or jurisdiction as a production relation in feudalism, which on any reasonable view of the evidence they surely were. The corollary is a commitment to an empirical method of inquiry – albeit, importantly, not an empiricist one – in which purportedly explanatory statements have in the end to be concretized, historically, as descriptions of the actions of real, living individuals', and validated accordingly. Such a perspective is perfectly capable of producing rigorous and determinate concepts and theories. But it does so not at the level of some general theory of history nor by virtue of philosophical virtuosity, but for substantive societies, and on the basis of empirical investigation. I would argue that historical materialism can be determinate a posteriori to the precise extent that it eschews the temptation spuriously to foreclose empirical and historical questions by a priori speculative construction.
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THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
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