{"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":"60 / 61","pdf_page":36,"physical_index":36,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ee93009aa870f7511a97a15556e62096eb0749c7c9d64f0a9a89ef1525e610d5"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Basic to Marx's argument here is the idea that property is a social relation, not – or at least not primarily, but only consequentially – a relation of individuals to things. He says the same thing in Grundrisse, drawing a linguistic parallel we have encountered previously in his discussion of production. Language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property' (1858a: 490). Possession, Hegel's starting-point, is indeed ‘the subject's simplest juridical relation', but ‘there is no possession preceding the family or master-servant relations'; the concrete substratum [like family or master-servant relations] of which possession is a relation is always presupposed' (1857: 102, my interpolation). The appearance of property as an unmediated relation of possession between individual owners and the things they own is an illusion arising out of the phenomenal form property takes within specifically capitalist relations. It is an historical product.\n\nIn previous forms of society, neither individuals as owners, nor their property, had their modern exclusivity or simplicity. Property did not even appear as a simple relation of person and thing. Who owned what, or even what it meant to be an owner, were by no means clear-cut; the very terms at issue are anachronistic. This is well brought out in the historian Marc Bloch's discussion of the inapplicability of modern concepts of property to medieval Europe. There, he points out:\n\nthe word ownership, as applied to landed property, would have been almost meaningless . . . The tenant who – from father to son, as a rule, ploughs the land and gathers in the crop; his immediate lord, to whom he pays dues, and who, in certain circumstances, can resume possession of the land; the lord of the lord, and so on, right up the feudal scale – how many persons are there who can say, each with as much justification as the other, That is my field!’. Even this is an understatement. For the ramifications extended horizontally as well as vertically and account should be taken of the village community, which normally recovered the use of the whole of its agricultural land as soon as it was cleared of crops; of the tenant's family, without whose consent the property could not be alienated; and of the families of the successive lords. (1967:115-16)\n\nMarx himself argues that landed property receives its purely economic form' - i.e. its modern capitalist form, of a relationship of exclusive, individual possession, wrongly theorized as an eternal idea' by Hegel – only 'by discarding all its former political and social embellishments and associations'(1865a:618), to become divorced from ‘relations of dominion and servitude' (ibid.: 617). Only then can property appear as a simple relation of possession between individuals and objects. As any reader of Capital I (or anyone with any familiarity with modern history) will know, the making of this purely economic form' of property was a protracted, bitter, and often bloody struggle – one Marx first encountered, incidentally, as early as 1842, with the transformation, in the Rhineland, of erstwhile common rights to gather wood into a crime (1842; cf. 1859a). We will see later that the independent ‘natural individual' who appears to Hegel as the self-evident possessing subject is equally a modern phenomenon.\n\nOne might perhaps maintain that the complexity to which Bloch points can be analytically encompassed within some notion of degrees of control of persons over things. Cohen's argument moves in this direction, when he seeks to define the serf as a part-owner of both means of production and labour-power (1978: 65). It is questionable whether such a merely quantitative index of control is sufficiently subtle to allow us to differentiate the qualitative variety of forms which anything we might want to call property has taken historically. But this is, I would suggest, in any case to miss the main thrust of Marx's argument. For what he does is precisely to shift the focus of the concept of property away from relations between people and. things - from ostensibly simple possession - to the social relations between people which make such appearances possible in the first place. In the process - just as with the fetishized conceptions of productive forces considered in the last chapter - Marx criticizes everyday ideas of property, of the sort systematized by Hegel, as an ideological expression of specifically capitalist conditions, whose extension elsewhere is profoundly anachronistic.\n\nThese points are reinforced when we turn to Marx's (extensive) discussions of property in his early writings. Thus in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 he writes, for instance, that:\n\nPrivate property is . . . the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself . . . True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) in political economy. But analysis of this concept shows that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence ... Later this relationship becomes reciprocal .. . estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. (1844a: 279-80)\n\n60\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\n61","previous_page":35,"next_page":37}