4 I have argued this at length in my work with Philip Corrigan and Harvie Ramsay.
5 I make the qualification ‘social' because I believe the internal relations perspective more defensible for the social world than the natural, on grounds elaborated as much by Wittgenstein or, seminally, by Winch (1958), as by Marx. I do not think historical materialism needs to be grounded in a philosophy of nature, though it may well be compatible with one. Marx and Engels themselves, however, fairly evidently did subscribe to a dialectical view of reality per se. Engels developed this most explicitly, in Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, but Marx explicitly endorsed the former and was well aware of Engels's work for the latter.
6 Patrick Murray (1983) has drawn attention to my neglect of the Hegelian legacy in Marx's Method. I think he is right. In that book I was more concerned with Marx's epistemology than his ontology, and was - to say the least – somewhat evasive about what the latter was. I now believe the critical epistemology I ascribed to Marx there is comprehensible only in the context of the kind of ontology proposed by Oliman. We cannot make sense either of Marx's treatment of categories as expressing' relations, or of the discrepancy between those relations and their forms of appearance', otherwise. Somewhat belatedly, I am persuaded of the truth of Lenin's maxim that it is completely impossible to understand Marx's Capital ... without having thoroughly studied ... Hegel's Logic'. One implication of this, of course, is that analytic philosophy is perhaps the worst of all philosophical frameworks in which to try and force Marx's thought. Two features of the analytic school are particularly problematic in trying to make sense of Marx: first, its hard and fast analytic/synthetic distinction (Ouine, 1953), which renders any notion of internal relations in the world as distinct from among propositions simply meaningless; and second, its persistent phenomenalism (which leads to a conception of definition which Kolakowski (1972) summates as the rule of nominalism'), which rules out appearance/essence distinctions. Cohen (1978: ch. 1) gives Hegel his due for having supplied the paradigm for Marx's image of history', but shows no awareness of how the Hegelian legacy might have influenced Marx's conceptual usage at any deeper level.
7 See chapter 4 below, where I argue that both the abstract individual' of civil society and the political state’ are in the same sense implicit in the ‘economic' relations of commodity production.
8 On grounds of the logical, as distinct from ontological, presuppositions of Marx's method; though as I have said in note 6 to this chapter, I now see the former as requiring the latter. See my 1983, ch. 5, Afterword, and passim.
9 Marx's frequent references to language, in elucidating his idea of production and society, suggest another intriguing set of possible parallels. Wittgenstein's later work - which was highly critical of the logical atomism, and correspondence theory of meaning, in his earlier Tractatus – roots concepts in forms of life'. That same work is also highly critical of reification of generic abstractions in ways which are strikingly close to Marx's criticisms of speculative construction' (below, ch. 3, section II). The best-known sociological elaboration of this Wittgensteinian position on language is to be found in the work of Peter Winch, who argues that ‘the relation between ideas and context is an internal one', and the ‘very categories of meaning, etc., are logically dependent for their sense on social interaction between men' (1958: 107, 44). Durkheim's later writings argued something very similar in their thesis of the social origin of the logical categories: a position strikingly anticipated by Marx - with due homage to Hegel – in his letter to Engels of 25 February 1868, where he wrote à propos the concepts Allgemeine and Besondre (universal and particular) that the logical categories are ... damn well arising out of "our intercourse"’. These parallels are not fanciful or over-extended. Certainiy Marx differed from Winch or Durkheim in insisting on the material rootedness in humanity's relation with nature of 'forms of life’, and with this their specific historicity, but his appreciation of the relationship between ideas and social relations as internal is as fundamental to his sociology as it is to the more familiar idealist variants of the same thesis. Again we need to take cognisance of Marx's Hegelian background. See further ch. 4, section II, below; Frisby and Sayer (1986).
10 I should clarify this. It is, I think, conceivable that say, a particular material labour-process - for instance, modern factory production - is compatible with a range of possible social relations, in at least some respects. Modern industry is materially organized in not dissimilar ways in the present-day USA and USSR. To this degree we may analytically distinguish the material labour-process from the wider social integument. But in any given empirical instance these two will be internally related, in the sense in which I am using the term here: the one will exist only in and through the other, as aspects of the same totality. The necessity at issue is substantiai (material production can only take place in definite social relations), not logical. The problem with much Marxism is its persistent reification of such analytic distinctions; a reification which must be undertaken if the entities in question are to be related causally and externally.
1l There are exceptions here. Balibar (in Althusser, 1970) is amongst the more significant, correctly arguing the relational features of Marx's concept.
12 Cohen's dismissal of this as rhetorical (1978: 44-5) is based on highly selective quotation from Marx.
13 See, inter alia, Marx (1867a: 430; 1863c: 490-1; 1865a: 879-80; 1878: 119-20). Compare Weber (1966: 207–9).
14 Weber (1966: final chapter; 1974); Hill (1961; and more generally his 1958 and 1974 collections); Thompson (1967).
15 I gave a more detailed account of Marx's critiques of the fetishism of commodities and capital in my 1983: chs 2 and 3, respectively.
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