{"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":"72 / 73","pdf_page":42,"physical_index":42,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e88400120b9ce013c2021a562a23a4f329ad1be6a46748a92fbc4858880fe4bd"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Under such conditions the surplus-labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form may be . . . Thus, conditions of personal dependence are requisite, a lack of personal freedom, no matter to what extent, and being tied to the soil as its accessory, bondage in the true sense of the word. (ibid.: 791)\n\nIt is a conclusion which he generalizes. ‘In all forms in which the direct producer remains the “possessor\" of the means of production', he argues, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relationship of lordship and servitude' (ibid.: 790, emphasis added). Herrschaft, we must conclude, is here the specific economic form’ in which surplus is pumped, and hence constitutes ‘the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure'. Other texts make this explicit. For Capital I, personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production . .. personal dependence forms the groundwork of society' (1867a: 77). We could hardly ask for a clearer statement of the internality of Herrschaftsverhältnisse to society'seconomic structure'. For the Grundrisse, likewise, the master-servant relation is an essential element of appropriation'(1858a: 500). For Theories of Surplus Value, the latter's 'basis is the forcible domination of one section of society over another'(1863c: 400). In feudal society, relations of personal dependence – relations, moreover, not founded upon ‘effective control' of the means of production, which Marx assumes the direct producer to enjoy – are essential relations of production, and hence, consistently with the stipulations of the 1859 Preface, form the groundwork of society'.\n\nTo reduce Herrschaft, as Cohen doeş, simply to part-ownership of labour-power is in my view a travesty of what Marx is getting at in these analyses: the essence of the relationship, he makes clear, is ‘appropriation of an alien will' (ibid.: 500-1, emphasis added), personal subjection, unfreedom. It also begs the (empirical) question of how – in other words, through what set of relations – such alien control over labour-power is actually established. At one point in the Grundrisse Marx goes so far as to assert that feudal landed proprietorship developed ‘out of purely military relations of subordination' (1858a: 165); given the amount of land administered by the medieval church, one might also want to give due weight to the power of the word. It is ironic, considering the labours of Cohen and others to produce a rechtsfrei definition of property, that in European feudal society by the high middle ages Herrschaft was in fact largely organised through jurisdiction. In Perry Anderson's words, justice was the ordinary name of power' (1974a: 153). This has led Rodney Hilton recently to count jurisdiction explicitly as a key social relation of feudal production (1985); unsurprisingly, perhaps, since his own earlier writings estimate that by the twelfth century, more than half of all feudal ruling class income took the form of profits of jurisdiction or taxes, rather than ground-rent as such (1976).\n\nAnderson himself argues similarly, and like Marx generalizes the point beyond feudalism alone:\n\nAll modes of production in class societies prior to capitalism extract surplus labour from the immediate producers by means of extra-economic coercion. Capitalism is the first mode of production in history in which the means whereby the surplus is pumped out of the direct producers is purely economic in form ... All other previous modes of exploitation operate through extra-economic sanctions - kin, customary, religious, legal or political. It is therefore impossible to read them off from economic relations as such. The superstructures' of kinship, religion, law or the state necessarily enter into the constitutive structure of the mode of production in precapitalist social formations. They intervene directly in the internal' nexus of surplus-extraction, where in capitalist social formations, the first in history to separate the economy as a formally self-contained order, they provide by contrast its external' preconditions. In consequence, pre-capitalist modes of production cannot be defined except via their political, legal, and ideological superstructures, since these are what determine the type of extra-economic coercion that specifies them. (1974b: 403-4)\n\nI would want to express the point more forcefully, and say that what Anderson is getting at renders the very terms in which he (like Marx himself) formulates his argument – ‘economic' versus non-economic' - anachronistic. ‘Superstructures' cannot reasonably be said tointervene' in a structure of which they are constitutive'. A far better way of putting it would be to say that in these societies, a distinction between economic relations as such’ and superstructures' - at least as conventionally drawn - simply does not obtain. Indeed if we persist in using these concepts in the usual way, Anderson's observation comes very close to denying the applicability of Marx's claims for the primacy of the mode of production of material life' outside capitalism. 'Superstructures', Anderson appears to be saying, determine the core social relations of these modes, their specific modes of exploitation, upon which, for Marx, is founded the entire formation of the economic community'. Anderson's frequent recourse to quotation marks is perhaps indicative of some unease; I doubt he intends thus to curtail the scope of historical materialism. None the less he goes on to make a very important point.\n\n72\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\n73","previous_page":41,"next_page":43}