{"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":137,"pdf_page":74,"physical_index":74,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"72609b0a4aa2644d10666152577cbc47acfe0282cdcc645c333619fec074320d"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Thus, in Capital, in pages vivid with empirical detail, Marx brings primitive accumulation' to life as the story of enclosures, clearances, theft of church property, vagrancy legislation, and Combination Acts (1867a: part 8). He traces the career of absolute surplus-value in struggles over the length of the working day (ibid.: ch. 10) and relative surplus-value in the strife between workmen and machine' (ibid.: ch. 15), a narrative of Luddites and Factory Acts: the history of class struggles. Such, I believe, is the ultimate explanatory level of Marx's work, and what alone justifies its claim to be historical and materialist. Contrary to Cohen, Marx's concepts of forces and relations of production - of essential relations – do not then denote items' which are ‘more basic than actions'(1983b: 123). The structure/ action opposition is a false one.5 These items' are actions – forms of human relationship - and the whole point of Marx's critique is to unmask them as such. Behind the authorless theatre of fetishism lie real living individuals'; for Marx the true and the only subjects of history.\n\nI offer no apologies for this humanist lapse. It is time, rather, to stress the intimate connection between this critical analytic method and Marx's emancipatory commitment. He himself had no doubts on the matter. Speaking once again of capital, he wrote:\n\nThe economists do not conceive capital as a relation. They cannot do so without at the same time conceiving it as a historically transitory, i.e., a relative – not an absolute – form of production. (1863c: 274)\n\nBut:\n\nFrom the moment that the bourgeois mode of production and the conditions of production and distribution which correspond to it are recognised as historical, the delusion of regarding these as natural laws of production vanishes and the prospect opens up of a new society, [a new] economic social formation, to which capitalism is only the transition. (ibid.: 429)\n\nI would argue that the same applies to state, law and all the other social forms historical materialism analyses. All that is apparently solid melts, if not into air. And only in that melting – that deconstruction of sedimented social forms into historical process, the actions of real living individuals - does the possibility of people getting ‘exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation under their control again' (1846a: 48), human emancipation as Marx conceived it, begin to look graspable.\n\nIII\n\nMarx's understanding, and use, of theoretical categories, is, then, intimately and necessarily bound up with his substantive historical sociology – his appreciation of the historical specificity of bourgeois society itself. Given his views on the material basis of ‘ideas, categories', it could hardly be otherwise. Marx is of course not alone in his concern with the essential differences' of bourgeois society. A preoccupation with the nature, origins and consequences of what is modern in ‘modernity' (see Frisby, 1986) has been a constitutive problematic of social theory from Adam Smith to Georg Simmel and beyond. Marx himself, as I have indicated at various points in this book, comprehensively contrasts bourgeois society with all that preceded it. His major contrast, at the level of social relations, is between social orders founded upon personalized dependency - taking a multiplicity of forms in history - and the ostensibly impersonal ‘objective dependency-relations' of capitalism. The latter are historically unprecedented – at least as the basis for an entire society – and for Marx are what explain most that is characteristically modern in modernity.\n\nIn bourgeois society, ‘abstract' individuals dominate one another, as ‘economic' classes, not social-political-legal estates, through the impersonal medium of property'. Dominion over people is established through and expressed in command over things; above all means of production and labour-power. Cohen is right, at the phenomenal level, about what property is in capitalism. The essential relation behind this is a particular form of social division of labour, of which Marx analyses class formation as an aspect. This relation constitutes the market as an apparently sui generis realm, governed by quasi-natural laws of its own and standing over and against individuals: the economy' as ordinarily conceived. But a range of other social forms are implicit in - or internally related to – this. Though\n\n136\n\nTHE HISTORICITY OFCONCEPTS\n\nTHE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS\n\n137","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}