{"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":"18 / 19","pdf_page":15,"physical_index":15,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3894601300befcd58a8d97c347cd23d59edc4fad158a5d129892a5cf6cd42a5d"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"This may not be entirely fair to Engels, for other readings of his late letters can be defended. One may, for instance, argue that they are as conducive to an interpretation of superstructures as ideological forms of expression of class and other basic' relations, as they are to a view of superstructures as substantially separate spheres'. But Colletti's charge certainly holds for much subsequent Marxism. His argument, moreover, applies to Marxist practice as well as theory, for such analytic paradigms have been a far from negligible ingredient in the shaping of ruling communist party policies for economic development and social transformation in the USSR and elsewhere, with momentous consequences for socialist politics.⁴\n\nIt is this line of criticism I shall pursue here, though I shall take it further, perhaps, than Colletti himself might wish. I shall try to show, from Marx's substantive analyses as distinct from his general summaries, that conventional Marxist wisdom on the interpretation of his fundamental concepts is, quite simply, wrong. Marx had a very different understanding of what (and how much) was entailed in the production and reproduction of real life’ than most of his disciples, and used all of these concepts – forces, relations, and so on – very differently from the ways ascribed to him by tradition and systematized and defended by Cohen. Additionally, and perhaps more radically, I shall suggest that ‘traditional historical materialism' actually fetishizes Marx's concepts, in his own sense of that term. I shall begin, in this chapter, by looking at Marx's concept of productive forces - or, to be more accurate, and not altogether pedantic, the social forces of production.\n\nII\n\nBefore examining this and other key concepts of the Preface individually, however, a further preliminary observation is called for. This concerns what we may expect in Marx by way of conceptual definition as such. The Preface is not alone among Marx's writings in its failure to provide clear definition of its terms. Marx was not a devotee of that tradition of twentieth-century analytic philosophy whose standards of clarity and rigour' Cohen seeks to bring to bear on historical materialism (1978: ix), and it is idle to ransack his work in search of neat and unambiguous definitions of his general concepts. Notoriously, for example, he never defined class, that central concept of. his sociology. Such apparent laxity infuriates those of a philosophical cast of mind, and Cohen's entire book can be seen as an attempt to remedy this supposed deficiency. But Marx's way of using language in this instance - as with Engels's penchant for elusive metaphor – may be indicative of something more substantial in his thought. Modern analytic philosophy, by the same token, might not turn out to be the most fortunate choice of framework in which to try and express his ideas.\n\nBertell Ollman (1976) has persuasively argued that Marx's conceptual slipperiness - words like bats', as Pareto complained, appearing now like birds, now like mice – is evidence not of any lack of rigour on his part, but of his commitment to a specifically, and distinctively, dialectical ontology, Marx did not conceive social reality⁵ atomistically, as made up of clearly bounded, separate, interacting entities:\"the kind of analytic particulars which can be grasped in clear, consistent and exclusive definitions. He saw the world, rather, as a complex network of internal relations, within which any single element is what it is only by virtue of its relationship to others. In this Marx stood squarely in the philosophical tradition of Spinoza, Leibniz and of course Hegel, of which mighty thinker' he explicitly avowed himself ‘a pupil' (after having written Capital) (1873: 19-20).6 To take the most obvious example, neither wage-labour nor capital, for instance, can for Marx be defined ‘in themselves', as autonomous particulars, conceivable independently of one another. Nor can they properly be understood as externally interacting' on one another. Each is what it is only by virtue of its relation to the other, and must be conceptualized accordingly. The concept of capital implicitly contains that of wage-labour, and vice versa.\n\nWhat Marx held to be thus implicit in a single concept may be very extensive indeed. In the Grundrisse, for example, he remarks that the simple concept of capital has to contain its civilizing tendencies etc. in themselves; they must not, as in the economics books until now, appear merely as external consequences. Likewise the contradictions which are later released, demonstrated as already latent within it' (1858a: 414). Hence - amongst other things -the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself (ibid.: 408). In the same way he observes that the germs of crises, or at least their possibility' are already implicit in the concept of money as medium of exchange (1858a: 198), and indeed in the elementary concept of the commodity itself (ibid.: 147 ff.; cf. 1867a: 114).\n\n18\n\nPRODUCTIVÉ FORCES\n\nPRODUCTIVE FORCES\n\n19","previous_page":14,"next_page":16}