{"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":"68 / 69","pdf_page":40,"physical_index":40,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"74a331479e5bff6af0e313edccb48eae1abb8b4bb8013a96b328beb975497cc4"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"There remains undivided communal land – for grazing, hunting and so on – but this does not take the separate form of state property, the ager publicus, as in antiquity. Rather, it is really the common property of the individual proprietors, not of the union of these proprietors endowed with an existence separate from themselves' (ibid.: 485). Individual property does not appear mediated by the commune; rather, the existence of the commune and of communal property appears as mediated by, i.e. as a relation of, the independent subjects to one another' (ibid.: 484). This characterizes the Germanic form more generally: the commune exists only in the interrelations between these individual landed proprietors as such' (ibid.).\n\nFollowing these sketches, Marx draws some general conclusions. 'In all these forms', he writes, the relation to land and soil, to the earth, as the property of the labouring individual ... is instantly mediated by the naturally arisen, spontaneous, more or less historically developed and modified presence of the individual as member of a commune – his naturally arisen presence as member of a tribe etc. (ibid.: 485), Hence:\n\nIf the obiective conditions of his labour are presupposed as belonging to him, then he himself is subjectively presupposed as member of a commune, through which his relation to land and soil is mediated. (ibid.: 486)\n\nMarx goes on explicitly to discuss what property' means in this context. He argues that, property . . . originally means no more than a human being's relation to his natural conditions of production as belonging to him, as his'. He then elaborates on the character of these ‘natural conditions' (making it clear, once again, that 'natural' and ‘social' were not for him by any means exclusive categories):\n\nThe forms of these natural conditions of production are double: (1) his existence as a member of a community; hence the existence of this community, which in its original form is a clan system, a more or less modified clan system; (2) the relation to land and soil mediated by the community. (ibid.: 491-2).\n\nHence, a natural condition of production for the living individual is his belonging to a naturally arisen, spontaneous society, clan etc. This is e.g. already a condition for his language, etc. His own productive existence is possible only on this condition' (ibid.). This of course powerfully echoes Marx's characterizations of production as always a 'double relationship' in the supposedly immature German Ideology. Marx concludes - and it is the only logical conclusion - that in these forms of society, 'Property, therefore, means belonging to a clan' (ibid., emphasis added).\n\nNow I argued earlier that for Marx, property and production relations were substantially synonymous concepts. He says much the same here, for instance in this passage, three pages later:\n\nThe original unity between a particular form of community (clan) and the corresponding property in nature ... which appears in one respect as the particular form of property - has its living reality in a specific mode of production itself, a mode which appears both as a relation between the individuals, and as their specific active relation to inorganic nature, a specific mode of working (which is always family labour, often communal labour) . . . This relation as proprietor - not as a result but as a presupposition of labour, i.e. of production - presupposes the individual defined as a member of a clan or community (ibid.: 495)\n\nIf property means 'belonging to a clan', we must conclude that production relations, in all these forms of society, include all those relations by virtue of which individuals are clan or commune members. Not only do these include kinship relations. They embrace communality of blood, language, customs', and in the Germanic case a common historical experience or tradition. They extend to the entire polis of antiquity, membership of which made the civis into a Romanus. They encompass, in the Asiatic case, ideology. There is simply no way, for any of these pre-capitalist socio-economic formations, that we can even begin to exclude superstructural' terms from the very definition of ‘economic structures'. To do so would make nonsense of Marx's entire analysis. It would also render the societies at issue incomprehensible.\n\nIt will do no harm in passing here to move beyond Marx, to look, for a minute, at modern historical materialist anthropology. Meillassoux (1972; cf. his 1975) argues that ‘agricultural self-sustaining communities . . , rely less on the control of the means of material production than on the means of human reproduction: subsistence and women. Their end is reproduction of life as a precondition to production’. He uses this to explain why social power in the cases he examines tends to be distributed on the basis of age and gender, rather than property as traditionally conceived. Godelier goes still further, arguing of such societies that here relations of kinship serve as relations of production, and this from within’ (1978). Elsewhere he develops a similar case for the polis of ancient Athens (1984). On this basis he rejects any general distinction between basis and superstructure as \"levels\" of social reality, as distinctions within social reality which are in some sense substantive ... institutional divides in its substance' (1978). He maintains, as I do, that it is specifically capitalism which ‘for the first time separated economics, politics, religion, kinship, art, etc., as so many distinct institutions'. This is of course why restrictive conceptions of production relations, and the hard and fast base/superstructure distinctions they sustain, do have some phenomenal purchase in bourgeois society (and cease to as soon as we move beyond its historical boundaries). Such work is immensely valuable precisely because it is not founded in merely theoretical argument, and recognizes criteria of adequacy other than coherence alone. If Marxist anthropologists have been forced (as was Marx himself, a century earlier) to take a broad view of what comprises an economic structure', it is because the facts have resisted characterization otherwise.\n\n68\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\n69","previous_page":39,"next_page":41}