{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title":"The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0631153187","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","uuid":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title":"The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism","normalized_title":"theviolenceofabstractiontheanalyticfoundationsofhistoricalmaterialism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0631153187","isbns":["0631153187"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":93,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Violence%20of%20Abstraction%20The%20Analytic%20Foundations%20of%20Historical%20Materialism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"106 / 107","pdf_page":59,"physical_index":59,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6ca4d2a9d00d93c6d86c40690b7da416015013e8c3b80a3a3662e0f4545b9f25"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value ... the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. (1858a: 156-7)\n\nIt is the materialization - the alienation - of the social bond' in the thing-like forms of commodities, money and capital, which permits people to exercise power over one another indirectly and impersonally, as abstract individuals, rather than directly and personally as master and slave or lord and serf. In Capital Marx observes that it was on precisely these grounds – social power becomes the private power of private persons'- that the ancients denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things' (1867a: 132), an order seen by for instance Aristotle as one of natural and personalized hierarchy.\n\nThe German Ideology relates the existence of both state and law to this impersonal', and alienated, form of class domination through property’ alone:\n\npure private property ... has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut off the state from any influence on the development of property. To this modern private property corresponds the modern state . . . By the mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the state has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeoisie necessarily adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. (1846a: 79, emphasis added)\n\nMarx savs exactly the same of law: in the law the bourgeoisie must give themselves a general expression precisely because they rule as a class' (ibid.: 671).\n\nThe clue to the necessity of bourgeois rule taking the form of an ideally independent state enforcing the rule of law lies, for Marx, in the atomized, fissiparous character - precisely the individualized nature – of the bourgeois class itself. This in turn follows from the specific form of social division of labour between independent commodity-producers in which capitalist production is based. The individuals of the bourgeoisie, Marx considers, form a class only in so far as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors' (ibid.: 69). Their common class interest can be secured only by maintaining conditions – above all the defence of individual propertyrights – in which they can continue to act freely as individuals, each pursuing his own private interests, in apparent isolation from one another. This entails both the safeguarding of bourgeois right against the political and moral economies of other classes (whether aristocratic or proletarian) and the maintenance of equal right among bourgeois individuals themselves. The rule of law’ is the paradigm form of such regulation:\n\nthe fact that they [the bourgeois class] enforce their own will in the form of law, and at the same time make it independent of the personal arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend upon their idealistic will. Their personal rule must at the same time assume the form of average rule. Their personal power is based on conditions of life which as they develop are common to many individuals, and the continuance of which they, as ruling individuals, have to maintain against others, and, at the same time, to maintain that they hold good for everybody. The expression of this will which is determined by their common interests, is law. It is precisely because individuals who are independent of one another assert themselves and their own will, and because on this basis their attitude to one another is bound to be egotistical, that self-denial is made necessary in law and right, self-denial in the exceptional case, and self-assertion of their interests in the average case. (ibid.: 329)\n\nMarx's discussion of the English Factory Acts in Capital I (1867a: ch. 15) admirably illustrates this thesis. Certainly he stresses the degree to which parliamentary limitation of hours of labour represented a victory for the political economy of the working class' (1864a: 845– 6); law is a theatre of class struggle as much as a form of class rule. But he is equally sensitive to the cry of the capitalists for equality in the conditions of competition'(1867a: 490). The German Ideology argues, comparably, that the representative system’ of modern parliamentary democracy is a very specific product of modern bourgeois society which is as inseparable from the latter as is the isolated individual of modern times'(1846a: 217–18).\n\n106\n\nIDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES\n\nIDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES\n\n107","previous_page":58,"next_page":60}