{"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":"12 / 13","pdf_page":12,"physical_index":12,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"53183588184b410682890f266239ca44091a62d8bb70f3c460dda87a09e3b549"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"This empiricism', incidentally, is not, as some have alleged, merely an aberration of the 1840s, a positivist’ over-reaction to the excesses of idealism. Marx echoes the point, for instance, over 30 years later, when repudiating Mikhailovsky's metamorphosis' of the ‘historical sketch' of the rise of capitalism in Britain given at the end of Capital I into an historico-philosophical theory of the general path of development prescribed by fate to all nations'. One must, Marx says here, study forms of evolution separately', something which cannot be done ‘by using as one's master-key a general historicophilosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical' (1877: 293-4). This passage, like many another in Marx, is much cited (including by Cohen, 1978: x), but without due consideration for how it affects the interpretation of his methodological fundamentals.\n\nShanin (1984) and his collaborators have recently shown how Marx's 'late writings', particularly on Russia, in fact admirably exemplify his willingness to modify and even abandon the supposed general theory of history conventionally ascribed to him, in the light of fresh empirical evidence. If Engels (1894b: 17) is to be believed it was the continuing search for such evidence which delayed completion of volume 3 of Capital. Russian history was to play the same role there as English history had in volume 1. Given the picture of historical development normally drawn from the 1859 Preface, and outlined in Cohen's reading above, it is very much to the point that Marx – having learned Russian at the age of 42, and studied Russian social conditions from a mass of primary sources – envisaged Russia avoiding a capitalist stage' of historical development, notwithstanding its generally low level of development of productive forces. The basis for an alternative ‘form of evolution' in Russia, in his view, lay in the specific social relations (and associated forms of experience and consciousness) materialized in its surviving peasant commune, the obshchina or mir, providing the forces currently undermining these – state and capital - could be neutralized (Marx, 1877; 188la, b; Shanin, 1984). It was the writings of ‘the great Russian scholar and critic'(1873: 15) Chernyshevsky which had first alerted him to this possibility. Marx's historical and anthropological reading over the last decade of his life was wide-ranging and voracious.7 One of his last manuscripts, published in Russian translation in the 1930s but virtually unknown among western Marxists to this day, was a chronology of world history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the seventeenth century, which runs to over 1500 pages in print (1882a). I do not want to pull yet another ‘unknown Marx' out of the archivist's hat, but the painstakingly empirical tenor of such an enterprise is worth remarking, perhaps, in the context of this argument.\n\nAll this suggests that general formulations of the kind found in the 1859 Preface should be treated as exactly what Marx said they were - precisely a ‘guiding thread', an orientation to empirical and historical research, not a theoretical substitute for it. It can be questioned, in other words, whether they were ever intended to amount to a theory of history, in any rigorous sense of the word, at all. To take them as such – as do both Cohen and the Althusserians – is to misconstrue them. Obviously Marx has a certain vision of the overall trajectory of human historical development, which leads him to focus on material production as his analytic starting-point, but this is not quite the same thing as a systematic theory. It provides, rather, the guiding framework within which he works empirically. We should attend instead to Engels's repeated urgings, in his late letters, that those in search of the fundamentals of historical materialism should look not just at Marx's general resumés – like the Preface - but rather at his concrete analyses, his historiographic practice. Three times Engels refers his correspondents to the Eighteenth Brumaire as an epitome of historical materialist analysis. He also recommends that critics should look at Kapital, the section on the working day, for instance, where legislation, which is surely a political act, has such a drastic effect. Or the section on the history of the bourgeoisie' (1890c: 87). The clear message is that the meaning of Marx's general, summary pronouncements is best sought, not in texts like the 1859 Preface taken in isolation, but in the wider context of the substantive analyses such summaries can inevitably do no more than gloss. Marx's concepts are best explicated on the basis of their actual use.\n\nNow Engels has been criticized, in recent Marxist literature, for both the variety and the imprecision of the metaphors he employs in these late letters to conceptualize the ‘ultimate' primacy of the material dimension of social life. Cohen's one dismissive reference to the letter to Bloch is of this ilk. Such criticisms are undoubtedly (if obviously) valid, if these letters are read as advancing a putative theoretical model of social structure or historical process. Engels's formulations, without closer specification of his key terms (ultimate' determination, relative' autonomy) are so vague as to be vacuous (Sayer, 1975). Devotees of Sir Karl Popper's doctrine of the necessary falsifiability of scientific propositions would have a field day with so accommodating a ‘theory': what historical event could possibly count as an instance neither of ultimate economic determination’ nor of relative superstructural autonomy'? But to argue thus may be seriously to miss the point.\n\n12\n\nPROLOGUE: MARX'S'GUIDING THREAD\n\nPROLOGUE: MARX'S 'GUIDING THREAD'\n\n13","previous_page":11,"next_page":13}