{"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":"128 / 129","pdf_page":70,"physical_index":70,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7a03742225bc7076548d92e22eaf24aecb3d2ce42c7a2f36a283c45442e42549"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Though Marx briefly goes on to entertain the idea that ‘the bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc.', by virtue of its provision of such abstractions, he severely qualifies this. It is not to be taken, he says, in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society. One can understand tribute, tithe, etc. if one is acquainted with ground rent. But one must not identify them .. Although it is true, therefore, that the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society, this is to be taken only with a grain of salt.' There is ‘always . . . an essential difference' (ibid.: 105-6). Ignoring such essential differences leads to implicitly teleological approaches to history, in which the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and ... always conceives them one-sidedly' (ibid.: 106).\n\nElsewhere I have argued that subsequently Marx considerably hardened up these latter reservations (Sayer, 1983: 96–103, 146–8). In the 1859 Critique, Theories of Surplus Value, and Capital, he does not use historically ambiguous categories like labour pure and simple', but develops a new conceptual apparatus founded upon the scrupulous distinction of the historical and transhistorical referents of such notions. This is a systematic feature of the methodology of Capital. Thus those senses in which the abstraction ‘labour' does genuinely apprehend ‘an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society’ are grasped in the transhistorical concept of useful or concrete labour: labour which yields use-values, products which satisfy human needs of one sort or another. This concept, incidentally, is no more void of social content than any other, but its content is what is genuinely a social universal: the ‘material side' which all human labour possesses irrespective of its social form. Marx makes clear, however, as we saw in chapter 2 with respect to his concept of the labour process, that such transhistorical categories are abstractions: they do not in themselves immediately or adequately describe any empirical realities. This is the corollary of their very generality. All human labour is useful, but it is never only this, and no empirical form of human labour can therefore be sufficiently described by its useful features alone.\n\nMeanwhile, those senses in which labour is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction' (1857: 103) are grasped in the historical category of abstract labour:1 labour which produces exchange-values. Abstract labour is labour conceived merely as the quantitative expenditure of human labour-power, irrespective of the particular useful or concrete form in which this expenditure takes place. It is such quantitatively equatable labour, as distinct from the different and qualitatively incommensurable labours which produce different use-values, which is expressed in the relative exchange-values of different commodities. The concept of abstract labour, unlike that of useful labour - which is merely the concept of what all human labour has in common, a class concept in my earlier terminology - designates what for Marx is a definite historical reality, a particular social form in which ‘labour' actually exists empirically. Labour which creates exchange-value', he says, is social ‘not in the general sense but in the particular sense, denoting a specific type of society' (1859b: 31-2). The ‘abstraction' of labour pure and simple' from its multiple concrete forms is, for Marx, a process that really takes place when, and only when, commodities are exchanged and it is this feature of modern bourgeois society which alone makes an abstract concept of labour possible.\n\nAnd more generally, labour' is henceforth always specified in Marx's writings in one or another such form - wage labour, slave labour, communal labour, and so forth - save where (rarely) he is genuinely speaking of what pertains to human labour transhistorically. Political economy is correspondingly, and repeatedly, criticized for ignoring these distinctions of form in its conceptualizations. Indeed Marx says of the concrete/abstract labour distinction that it is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns’ (1867a: 41), the whole secret of the critical conception'(1868a; cf. 1867c). Use-value and exchange-value, or technical and valuecomposition of capital, are similar distinctions of transhistorical and historical; the same analytic strategy is at work in Marx's clarifications of Smith's ideas on productive and unproductive labour (1863a: ch. 4, sections 3 and 4) and Ricardo's confusions between fixed and circulating, and constant and variable capital (1878: ch. 9).\n\nI have mooted this distinction of transhistorical and historical categories in earlier chapters. But I stress it particularly here, because it indeed does seem to me to lie at the heart of Marx's ‘critical conception', and says much about what is most distinctive in his perspective on theoretical concepts. The categories of political economy (and of bourgeois disciplines more generally: it is not hard to see how similar arguments could be developed regarding the legal subject of jurisprudential theory, or the state in political theory) systematically conflate the historical and transhistorical dimensions of their objects, in ways that are doubly ahistorical. On the one hand, the specifically historical anchorage of these ‘simple abstractions’(and indeed of economics as a discipline) in bourgeois society is obscured. 'Labour as such', something which for Marx has tangible reality only as a relation of capitalist society - the abstract labour which produces exchange-values - is falsely identified with what is universal, the useful labour which produces use-values. The essential difference' of abstract labour is thereby lost in its identification with its antecedent social forms. And on the other hand, a quality specific to labour in capitalism - its abstract, merely quantitative comparability - is equally falsely predicated of human labour per se. Through this double slippage, the historicity of the phenomenon is totally obliterated in the unitary bland abstraction 'labour'. This is the same kind of conceptual slide, of course, found in the various fetishisms criticized throughout this book. It is hardly surprising that theories built on such abstracted conceptual foundations lack all historical purchase.\n\n128\n\nTHE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS\n\nTHE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS\n\n129","previous_page":69,"next_page":71}