{"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":"58 / 59","pdf_page":35,"physical_index":35,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e59487532d5fc6a7661c39a64258312c6935f367fa13c3fbaafe5e9bb1575df9"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Cohen is aware of this; it is basic to his own account of fetishism. What he apparently fails to realize, however, is that this totally invalidates his attempted work relations/social relations contrast. If material’ and social’ in Marx refer to attributes of phenomena, not phenomena as such, we cannot use his distinction to differentiate two different kinds of production relation, material and social. Nor, therefore, can we on these grounds expungework relations' from the ‘economic structure of society'. These supposedly separate 'material relations’ are but social relations of production regarded – abstractly - from their ‘material side'. Marx's distinction lies between the material and social dimensions of one and the same set of activities – activities, we might recall, which he explicitly conceives from the start as 'double', simultaneously material and social - not between substantial kinds of relations as such.7\n\nIII\n\nHaving, I hope, cleared some ground, let us now turn more directly to Marx. I have already quoted The Poverty of Philosophy on the impossibility of defining property as an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea' (above, p. 21). Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality’, a text dating from the same year, agrees: private property, for instance, is not a simple relation or even an abstract concept, but consists in the totality of the bourgeois relations of production'(1847c: 337). In both cases Marx defines property in terms of production relations, rather than the other way about. The production relations in question are always historically specific – the relations of a given mode of production – and property therefore emphatically a historical category. Marx's approach here contrasts sharply with Cohen's or Balibar's, both of whom, as we have seen, seek to ground the concept of production relations on a transhistorical, albeit rechtsfrei, concept of property.\n\nIndeed property, as Marx uses the term in these texts, far from being susceptible to independent definition, is in fact synonymous with the ‘economic structure of society' as delineated in the 1859 Preface. Moralising criticism' says that property consists of 'the totality of ... relations of production', which is exactly the Preface's description of the economic structure'. We might, for a change, take quite literally the Preface's claim that property and production relations are but different expressions for the same thing'. As usual, however, Marx offers no general definition, of a substantive kind, of what these production relations, whether construed as property' or economic structure', actually are. But given the apparent synonymity of the referents of these terms, exploration of what he had to say, in various historical contexts, about particular forms of property might take us some way forward in the search for what he understood by an economic structure’.\n\nWe may begin with some critical remarks on Hegel in Capital III. Hegel, according to Marx, seeks to explain private property in land from the (transhistorical) premise that ‘man as an individual must endow his will with reality as the soul of external nature, and must therefore take possession of this nature and make it his private property'. For Marx this will to possession is comical':\n\nFree private ownership of land, a very recent product, is according to Hegel, not a definite social relation, but a relation of man as an individual to 'Nature', an absolute right of man to appropriate all things ... [Hegel] makes the blunder at the outset of regarding as absolute a very definite legal view of landed property – belonging to bourgeois society. (1865a: 615-16n)\n\n58\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\n59","previous_page":34,"next_page":36}