Cohen's rebuttal of Acton is, significantly, carried out entirely within theory, at the level of a general, transhistorical concept of property. It is undoubtedly successful, as a piece of philosophical argument. To develop a rechtsfrei definition of property raises no particular difficulties of a theoretical sort. But what the passage from Thompson scathingly brings out is that so soon as we try to apply such a definition, and specify, historically, what real power over objects – property, as Cohen conceives it - empirically consists in, then those things excluded from its general rechtsfrei definition tend ineluctably to creep back in.
For we rapidly discover that power over objects' (including, here, people's labouring capacities) only exists, empirically, in forms which include things which according to the standard dogma ought to belong in the supposed superstructure'. In eighteenth-century England, for instance, we may not be able to say, in any empirically meaningful way, what property' or production relations were, without talking about game laws, the bloody code', Parliamentary Acts of enclosure, strict settlement and entail, magistrates' regulation of hours of work and rates of pay, Combination Acts, the theatrical rituals of the assizes, or laws prohibiting the shearing of sheep within five miles of the coast. Historical inquiry shows what Adam Smith called 'the orderly oppression of the law'(quoted D. Winch, 1978: 88-9) to be an integral part of - internal to, constitutive of - the complex web of social relationships we summate as property' in this particular time and place, not a ‘relatively autonomous instance' at all.
In the real world, then, power' over objects turns out to be neither the abstraction, nor the simple relationship, of Cohen's impeccably rechtsfrei definition. It exists only in a multiplicity of often rechtsvoll empirical forms, to whose analysis, if Thompson is correct, a categorial framework built on prior and exclusive definitions of supposed social 'levels' is remarkably ill-suited. In certain cases, like England in the eighteenth century, law will emerge as inextricably imbricated within - indeed constitutive of - any property relations we might want to consider relations of production, part of the same nexus of relationship' (Thompson, 1965: 84). So too might other supposedly superstructural instances', like moral codes, political institutions, or ‘forms of social consciousness'(all of which are fairly evidently entailed in Smith's ‘orderly oppression’). In which case, to seek to expunge these from the concept of property or production relations a priori, for the sake of theoretical coherence or elegance, would seem to be a gross artificiality which does considerable violence to the very facts Marx's concepts are meant to help us understand: a species of what he himself castigated as ‘violent abstraction'(see Sayer, 1983: 121-2).
II
Cohen, however, tells us that he does not need to be advised that history is “always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and subtle"" than any theory will represent it as being (1978: ix, quoting Lenin). Balibar's concern is likewise with outlining only what he calls the pertinent differences' on whose basis the abstract concepts of modes of production can be theoretically developed (in Althusser, 1970: 209 ff.). Either would therefore presumably dismiss the foregoing line of argument as beside the point: a reminder, perhaps, of the real complexity of history, but not something which should be allowed to affect the basic formulation of Marx's theoretical concepts as such. To forestall this objection, a short philosophical aside is in order. For I do not cite Thompson here simply to counterpose the real complexity of history against the arrant simplicities of theory, worthwhile and necessary as that enterprise sometimes is.
I want rather to make a theoretical point concerning the character of general concepts like property and their relation to empirical particulars of the sort invoked by Thompson. This follows on the argument I developed in section II of the last chapter, and relates to the difference between Marx's transhistorical and historical categories. Only if this difference is ignored, I shall argue, can Thompson's - or indeed Acton's - arguments be dismissed as a merely empiricist' quibble which is irrelevant to considerations of high theory, and the relation between abstract theory and concrete fact be construed in the way it is by Cohen or Balibar. The empiricism, in fact, is if anything theirs, and resides in the tacit assumption - one shared by positivist philosophies of science generally - that fact and theory are wholly separate domains of discourse.³
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RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
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