Neither a philosophical defence of an ontology of internal relations, nor a systematic textual justification of its ascription to Marx, will be attempted here. I cannot, in any case, better Ollman on this. I rest my case rather on the degree to which interpreting Marx in this way allows us to make better sense of how he actually used his fundamental concepts - the central concern of this book - than the standard alternatives. But the major point I want particularly to emphasize at this stage in the argument is this. If Marx indeed did adhere to an internal relations perspective, we must approach the general concepts of the 1859 Preface very differently from traditional historical materialism'.
In particular, we can no longer assume that terms like forces and relations of production, or base and superstructure, refer unambiguously or consistently to different, and mutually exclusive, bits of empirical reality as they would in an atomistic ontology. They unproblematically do so for Cohen (as they do equally for many 'relative autonomy' models). Thus he avers that productive forces strongly determine the character of the economic structure, while forming no part of it', and in turn the economic structure is separate from (and explanatory of) the superstructure' (1978: 31, 218), all these entities being defined in empirical terms. Such separations are of course logically required if the Preface's claims of determination' are to be coherently rendered either in straightforwardly causal or in functional terms. Determining and determined phenomena must be logically independent of one another, contingently rather than essentially related.
But on the view argued here, the empirical referents of Marx's concepts may neither be mutually exclusive, nor consistent across space and time. An empirical particular - a form of division of labour, for example - might figure as a production relation under one description and a productive force under another. The same division of labour might be a productive force in one historical context and a relational fetter on such forces in another. The 'detail' division of labour discussed by Marx in chapter 14 of Capital I is exactly like this; the foundation of the productivity of early capitalist manufacture, it fetters the subsequent development of machine industry. In the same way notions of personal liberty would normally, for
Marxists, belong without question in the ‘ideological superstructure' of society; but we shall encounter an instance later on in which Marx treated them none the less as a productive force. For him even theory may under certain circumstances become a material force’ (1843d: 142). This conceptual fluidity reflects both the relational and the historical character of social reality itself. The point is an important one. For if the key general concepts of historical materialism are necessarily empirically open-ended and multi-referential, they cannot then officiate as the building-blocks of an overarching theory of history' in the traditional way.
III
If, for Marx, substantive categories are necessarily historically delimited, it should not surprise us to find that the few observations he allows himself to make on production in general’ are relatively trivial. He considered, indeed, that all that could reasonably be asserted at this level of ahistorical generality were flat tautologies (1857: 86). Production in general' is a rational abstraction, since there are generic features common to all productive activities and epochs. But it is an abstraction none the less. In Marx's own words the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing more than ... abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped' (ibid.: 99).
Thus he admits, for example, the obvious truth that all production involves some sort of labour process in which people transform raw materials into products, using their labour-power, with the aid of instruments of production of one sort or another. This is an everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence'(1867a: 184), which must go on ‘in all social formations and under every possible mode of production' (1865a: 820). Even here, however, Marx is careful to say that to conceptualize the labour process thus is to view it abstractly and ahistorically, independently of the particular form it assumes under given social conditions'(1867a: 177), and thus unempirically. And he only deals with it, in Capital, in such abstraction at all in order to bring out, by means of contrast, the differentia specifica of its distinctively capitalist form, in which he is interested.
In the same way, in a well-known letter to Kugelmann of 1l July
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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