{"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":"140 / 141","pdf_page":76,"physical_index":76,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"74b435ed05d5a46132b5d818d628b28ce6b505b34ade290bf7680d0a49834550"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Abstraction', ‘idealization', reification were for Marx - to say it again - intrinsic to the perverted logic of essence' of capitalism, characteristic of the estranged, alienated ways in which bourgeois social relations manifest themselves to consciousness in all spheres of life. Arguably it is just such reified forms which underpin and give phenomenal sense to the boundaries between modern social science disciplines - boundaries which, in so far as those disciplines do succeed in penetrating beyond ‘the surface of society', they themselves comprehensively protest. ‘The economy' - itself one such reification, and perhaps the most bedazzling and spectacular of all – is far from the only production in this theatre of illusion. Nor is ‘it itself explanatory of the mystification. Our social relations are.\n\nHistorical materialism needs to be as aware as Marx himself of the historicity of the analytic categories it brings to bear on the world. I mean this in two senses. First, it must recognize the origins of theoretical concepts in forms of experience, which may – if Marx is right - be misleading. Though they furnish the necessary startingpoint for analysis, such categories may systematically misrepresent the reality they seek to depict. They are first of all explananda for historical materialism – an integral part of the object of investigation - not unproblematic theoretical resources. Before they can be used they need to be critically interrogated and historically situated, just as Marx did with the categories of political economy. Second, Marxism needs equally to be aware that there are historical boundaries to the legitimate employment of concepts, and theories built upon them. We can no more universalize the concept of the state, or property, or the individual, appropriate to the phenomenal forms of capitalist life than we can the concept of value or capital. Simple abstractions', in short, are neither so simple nor so abstract as they at first sight appear. They always articulate, even as they obscure, some more concrete substratum' – dare I say it, some material basis?\n\nIV\n\nTo some readers the foregoing may appear banal and elementary sermonizing. But my central argument against much ‘orthodox' Marxism in this book – using Cohen as my exemplar – has been that it lacks precisely this sort of critical analytic foundation. It proceeds immediately from summaries like the 1859 Preface, interpreting the concepts employed there in ways that are inconsistent both with Marx's substantive practice and the critical methodology which informs it. Impatient for certainty, for tidiness, for system, orthodox Marxism' demands a theory of history, understanding by the latter something which is radically incompatible with a methodology within which substantive concept formation and explanation are ineluctably a posteriori and necessarily historically bounded. It is tempting to speculate on the reasons for this. Colletti (1972) suggests the influence of the late nineteenth-century positivistic and scientistic intellectual milieu, in which Marxists were constrained to combat ideologies like social Darwinism on their own terrain. I believe the transformation of Marxism into the official ideology of mass parties and latterly of ‘socialist' states to have had as much to do with this mutation of Marxism from method to dogma. Not, perhaps, always directly, but more in the provision of an authoritative set of parameters for discourse, paradigms in Kuhn's sense, like the orthodox - and generally unsubstantiated - taken-for-granted interpretations of Marx's basic concepts criticized here. Be that as it may, my immediate concern here is with what results.\n\nThese standard interpretations of the fundamental concepts of historical materialism, I have sought to show, are exactly like the fetishistic concepts Marx criticized in political economy in that they are built upon specifically capitalist appearances, which are then generalized. A determinate historical - and fetishistic - content is surreptitiously carried over into ostensively transhistorical abstractions, apparent pure definitions'. As with the economists' concept of 'labour', historical and transhistorical are conflated. That same double dehistoricizing is manifest: ignoring of concepts’ roots in a particular form of society goes along with universalization of properties of that society under the guise of pure conceptual abstraction. Just like political economy, traditional' Marxism endlessly moves in the charmed circle of natural, self-understood forms of social life', seeking to decipher ‘not their historical character, for in [its] eyes they are immutable, but their meaning'(1867a: 75). Theories are spun through philosophical ratiocination alone. There is simply no conception of the possible historicity of his own categories, the invisible threads' which connect the languages of philosophising with the real world, in a work like Cohen's.\n\n140\n\nTHE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS\n\nTHE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS\n\n141","previous_page":75,"next_page":77}