‘The simplest economic category', like exchange-value, presupposes [unterstellt: Ollman (1976: 12) translates this as implies] population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. lt can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole' (1857: 101). In the same text, elaborating on the proposition that every form of production creates its own legal relations, forms of government, etc.’ - a proposition most Marxists would understand as a causal claim about the relation between essentially distinct entities - Marx berates economists for treating this relation as an external, contingent one. ‘In bringing things which are organically connected into an accidental relation, into a merely reflective connection', he says, they display their crudity and lack of conceptual understanding'(ibid.: 88, emphasis added). Such examples could be multiplied.'
Within an internal relations perspective drawing boundaries to concepts – particularly to general concepts – is evidently going to be a problem. The problem is compounded when, as was also the case for Marx, the relations at issue are viewed as being in the process of constant formation and transformation. But if Ollman is right about Marx's ontology this difficulty is unavoidable. It is not resolvable by definitional fiat, because it arises out of the very nature of the reality Marx's concepts seek to define. Words must be like bats’ if they are to be able to grasp this complexity. From the standpoint of this philosophy, one which differs in fundamentals from the whole analytic tradition, to use concepts otherwise would be singularly unrigorous, since it would entail systematically distorting reality. Indeed, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 4, Marx in fact regarded concepts and categories as a facet of social reality itself, and hence saw definitions as necessarily real rather than nominal. Engels, again, argued just this. In his Preface to Capital III he pointed out that we should not expect to find:
fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx's works. It is self-evident that where things and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images, the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation, and they are not encapsuiated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of formation. (1894b: 13-14)
It is false, Engels says, to assume that Marx ‘wishes to define where he only investigates'.
An important corollary of Ollman's argument – but a thesis which can also be independently defended on other grounds8 - is that Marx's general, transhistorical categories (like those of the 1859 Preface) acquire substantive definition from, and only from, the particular historical contexts to which they are applied. They are not applicable without change across space and time, because their content changes with the reality they seek to comprehend. This means that they cannot be substantively defined transhistorically; as general categories, they are necessarily empirically open-ended. We cannot offer a universally applicable definition, of an empirical sort, of what for instance productive forces or production relations are. Conversely, in so far as Marx's concepts are substantive categories – the concepts of concrete empirical phenomena – they are necessarily historical categories: a feudal force, a capitalist relation, and so on. Their content is historically specific, and their validity historically circumscribed.
Marx himself argues this when discussing ways of defining property, a key concept in his writings, in a passage to which I shall return:
In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations. Thus to define bourgeois property is nothing else than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production. To try and give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence. (1847a: 154)
Both the relational (and therefore extended) and the historical character of what Marx saw as involved in ‘definition' are well brought out here. E.P. Thompson argues similarly, regarding that central concept Marx so conspicuously ‘failed' anywhere in his writings to define, class. He could not have done so, if a definition of the analytic philosophy sort is required - exclusive, unambiguous, closed and universal. For, quite simply, class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition' (1968: 11). To define a class - or any other social phenomenon - is, in the final analysis, to write its history.
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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