{"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":"110 / 111","pdf_page":61,"physical_index":61,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a5402e2b445ee1500f51f1eaea978ce36a11573079b7c3be1d265631da6783e1"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"This argument implies, among other things, that the class relations of capitalism cannot adequately be delineated just at the economic' level, as Cohen's supposedly rechtsfrei ownership relations. State and law are intrinsic to the totality of social relations which actually make up the seemingly impersonal' power of bourgeois property, which maintain a social order in which domination can appear to take purely ‘economic' forms. They are constitutive of bourgeois class rule; it could not exist otherwise. The bourgeoisie, in Max Weber's useful phrase, is the national citizen class' (1966: 249); Marx himself observes of the notion of citizenship ‘it should read: domination of the bourgeoisie' (1846a: 215). Anderson, too, must be qualified here. I quoted him above on the novelty of ‘the economy' being a formally self-contained order' in capitalism, for which ‘superstructures' of state and law are \"\"external\" preconditions' (p. 73). This is fine, and grasps an important contrast between capitalism and previous forms of society, providing we remember that although the novelty is real enough, the externality of these ‘spheres' is merely apparent. This brings me to Marx's second point.\n\nFor he is equally clear that in capitalism, these essential relations manifest themselves in Erscheinungsformen which conceal their true substance. The appearance of the economic sphere’ as an external, objective realm is one side of that world of illusion, whose fetishes we have sufficiently explored in previous chapters. As E.P. Thompson has observed, the very category of economics – the notion that it is possible to isolate economic from non-economic social relations, that all human obligations can be dissolved except the cash-nexus – was the product of a particular phase of capitalist evolution' (1965: 82–3). The appearance of the political state, the illusory community', peopled by abstract individuals, equal citizens of the polity and subjects of the law, is the other side of the same phenomenon. The link between the two is the real subject of the commodity exchange – the bourgeois. When Marx speaks of state and law as superstructures’, it is to this bewitched world of appearances that I believe he is referring. Far from inscribing in his own theory, via a metaphor of levels', the reifications of capitalist society, the base/superstructure metaphor is intended to show them to be just that. The real state is an essential dimension of capitalism's class relations, the combination of one class over against another' (1846a: 93). Its ideal appearance is of an illusory community [which] took on an independent existence' (ibid.). It is the latter Marx calls a superstructure', in order precisely to show up its illusoriness, its ideal' character, and deny its substantial independence.\n\nRegrettably Marx never did write that 'Critique of Politics and Political Economy'. But his later writings are thoroughly consonant with the critique he developed in the 1840s, arguing both the internality of the real state to capitalism's class relations and the insubstantiality of its ideal'independence. Capital for instance asserts that the use of state power is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation'(1867a: 737), whose methods ‘all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organised force of society' (ibid.: 751). For Grundrisse, likewise, speaking of England, governments, e.g. of Henry VII, VIII, etc. appear as conditions of the historic dissolution process fof feudal relations] and as makers for the conditions of existence of capital' (1858a: 507). Part 8 of Capital I details some of what Marx has in mind.13 Both The Civil War in France, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme, texts of the 1870s, continue to anchor the political state’ - the state in so far as it forms a special organism separated from society through the division of labour' (1875: 356), a State separate of and independent from society' (1871: 151) - in the specifically capitalist division of labour.\n\nMarx also continues emphatically to deny the substantial reality of this separability. For The Civil War, the Second Empire whilst ‘at first view, apparently the usurpatory dictatorship of the governmental body over society itself, rising alike above and humbling all classes', is in fact ‘the only possible stateform in which the appropriating class can continue to sway it over the producing class' (ibid.: 196), ‘the last degraded and the only possible form of that class ruling' (ibid.: 198).14 The very separation of ‘civil society' and political state’ is an ideological superstructure on capitalism's component relations, an ideological form in which they are masked, which simultaneously idealizes individual and community. Two passages, one from 1843, the other from 1871, bring out well the underlying continuities – and the animating emancipatory vision – in Marx's thinking here:\n\n110\n\nIDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES\n\nIDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES\n\n111","previous_page":60,"next_page":62}