{"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":"14 / 2","pdf_page":13,"physical_index":13,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"03f8211d1c914c7420e724172a1a03d9f0167a514336a9df7ba3a5b2e25c9193"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"For if Engels's intention was not to provide such a model at all, but rather to argue precisely against the translation of Marx's guiding thread' into one, the objection evaporates. His apparent lack of conceptual ‘rigour', far from being a weakness, is of a piece with the character of the message he is trying to convey. So is Marx's own use of a base/superstructure metaphor – an analogy, rather than a precise concept – in the 1859 Preface and elsewhere, a use which, as we shall see, is also far from consistent between texts. Such shifting, and theoretically treacherous, recourse to metaphor and analogy may be a linguistic signal of exactly the inappropriateness of attempting a closed and rigorous' formulation of theory at this level of generality in the first place. Marx after all himself remarks at the start of the 1859 Preface that ‘the reader who really wishes to follow me will have to decide to advance from the particular to the general', and in that spirit offers no more in that text, in his own estimate, than ‘a few brief remarks regarding the course of my study of political economy' (1859a).\n\nBut as Edward Thompson has observed, the graveyard of philosophy is cluttered with grand systems which mistook analogies for concepts'(1978a: 296). ‘Traditional historical materialism', I shall argue, is just such a grand system, built on just such mistakes.\n\nProductive forces\n\nOne feature of Marx's 1859 Preface has been remarked upon rather less often than it perhaps ought to be. The key concepts he employs there – forces and relations of production, economic structure and superstructure – are, for the most part, either left altogether undefined in the text itself, or else defined circularly, in terms of one another. No definition whatsoever is offered of material productive forces, that concept which for Cohen has explanatory primacy in Marx's theory of history. Nor are we told what relations of production are, beyond Marx's remark that property relations are but a legal expression for the same thing'; itself a highly confusing formulation (and one that has spawned its own extensive literature) because of the many possible interpretations of 'expression'. We glean only that ‘in the social production of their existence', people inevitably enter into such relations, which are independent of their will'.\n\nThe economic structure of society' - the 'base', the real foundation' – is defined circularly, as the sum total of production relations, which takes us no further. The Preface also invokes the mode of production of material life', which Marx tells us conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life'. But the text neither defines a mode of production, nor clarifies the relation of this concept to those of forces, relations or economic structure. Conventionally a mode of production is taken to comprise a particular - in modern Marxist jargon, an ‘articulated' - combination of forces and relations,¹ but Marx does not say so here. Cohen, among others, construes it otherwise, correctly noting a variety of uses of the term in Marx's work (1978: 79–84).\n\n14\n\nPROLOGUE: MARX'S 'GUIDING THREAD'\n\n2","previous_page":12,"next_page":14}