In The Holy Family there is a celebrated discussion of some of the more absurd practices of idealist philosophy. One of these is the fallacy of reification, or misplaced concreteness: mistaking abstract concepts for real entities. Marx⁴ dubs this the mystery of speculative construction'. By way of illustration, he satirizes philosophers – his specific target here being the Young Hegelians – as taking the general concept ‘fruit' to refer to some real essence of fruitiness which is distinct from the empirical forms in which fruit alone exists – apples, pears, and so on (1844b: 57 ff.). Wittgenstein was later similarly to chide those who imagined that beauty was a real essence inhering in and defining all beautiful objects. Nobody, we might think, would be so silly.
But like fruit, or beauty, property’ too – at least as Marx conceived it - does not exist except in particular, empirical forms. As with production, it has no existence as a generality. We might indeed be able to abstract from these particulars conceptually, in order to construct a general notion of property. But such an abstraction - rechtsfrei or otherwise – does not refer to some real essence of property independent of its empirical forms, any more than the generic 'fruit' refers to anything other than real apples and pears. In more technical terms, generic concepts refer to what defines classes of phenomena, not, or at any rate not directly, to any empirical particulars - real objects - as such at all. And as Wittgenstein, again, argues, what makes phenomena members of the same class may be something as loose as ‘family resemblances' rather than an unvarying list of empirical characteristics which they all necessarily have in common.
Now such class concepts, precisely because they are generic categories, are not, in themselves, complete descriptions of any of the individual phenomena which can be subsumed under them. Indeed – and crucially – they do not even adequately comprehend the essential features of those phenomena, if by that we mean those features which make such phenomena what they individually are, and are thus essential to their definition. They only designate those aspects of a given set of phenomena which make them members of the relevant class, the resemblances by virtue of which they can be conceived as members of the same family. What defines phenomena in their individual particularity - in other words, in their real existence - is precisely those features they do not share with other members of the class to which they belong, and are therefore not contained in their class concept. We have not, for instance, adequately defined a lemon, in any empirical sense, when we say it is a fruit. Part of any adequate empirical description of a lemon would include, for example, its colour. But yellowness is not a characteristic of fruits as such or in general, and cannot be derived from the general concept of fruitiness. Yellowness is, however, essential to what makes a lemon a lemon, and is thus part of its concept.
Similar arguments apply to property. Certainly we may choose to define the class property', in general and abstractly, in ways which exclude ‘superstructural’ terms. There may even be a point in doing so, in so far as such a definition enables us to classify certain legal and non-legal forms of relationship as kindred phenomena, which we certainly could not do if we included legal criteria in property's general concept. Thus far we may go along with Cohen against Acton. To do so is also consistent with Marx, who undoubtedly did take pains to insist that relations which were substantially property relations could exist without being legally expressed as such, as in passages like this:
With [Wagner] there is, first, the law, and then commerce; in reality it's the other way round: at first there is commerce, and then a legal order develops out of it. In the analysis of the circulation of commodities [in Capital] I have demonstrated that in a developed trade the exchangers tacitly recognise each other as equal persons and owners of the goods to be exchanged respectively by them; they do this while they offer the goods to one another and agree to trade with one another. This practical relation, arising through and in exchange itself, only later attains a legal form in contracts etc.; but this form produces neither its content, the exchange, nor the relationship, existing in it, of persons to one another, but vice versa. (1880a: 210)
If our generic concept of property includes legal terms, the practical relation’ Marx recognizes here as a property relation could not be acknowledged as such, which would be plainly contrary to his intent.
But we should not then confuse such a general definition of property with its substantial reality, or take our generic concept adequately or immediately to designate real empirical objects. Nor, in particular, can we infer that what our concept excludes as a general characteristic of the class property' can a fortiori be excluded from the concepts of the individual members of that class, property's particular forms - the only forms in which it empirically exists. To do so would be exactly like denying that yellowness is an essential characteristic of lemons, because it is not a feature of the generality fruit' – an evident non sequitur.
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RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
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