{"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":"76 / 77","pdf_page":44,"physical_index":44,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"742d1ad3354b8deaf8a15f538fb4a7076b04a8676e114af199e3ae69c843b95a"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Greg McLennan (1981: 17 ff.), criticizing an earlier (and less elaborated) formulation of this argument, has expressed the worry that so open a definitional criterion of production relations might be satisfied by random empirical evidence. His concern is that everything will be collapsed into a vague concept of social relations', and historical materialism lose its distinctiveness. I do not see the danger. If it is claimed that social relation x is essential to, and therefore a production relation of, mode of production y, the case needs to be empirically argued, and counter-claims can be empirically evaluated. Certainly there may be disputes, but I fail to see why their resolution should be considered arbitrary'. Arbitrariness is only a risk so long as such claims are not subjected to any process of empirical adjudication. What I think worries McLennan (and other critics12) is my refusal of a determinate concept of production relations at the level of general theory, which is where Marxists habitually seek it; my point, however, is that in Marx's analytic framework conceptual determinateness can only be provided a posteriori, for specific historical formations. That is not to say, however, that it cannot be provided at all.13\n\nTwo final quotations might appropriately be cited by way of conclusion to this long argument. When, in The German Ideology, Marx describes production as a ‘double relationship', both material and social, he adds: ‘by social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner, and to what end' (1846a: 41). We might take this openness, for once, at face value. Similarly with this remark, against Proudhon, in the Grundrisse: human life has from time immemorial rested on production, and, in one way or another, on social production, whose relations we call, precisely, economic relations'(1858a: 489). What Marx is doing here is so devastatingly simple, and at the same time so genuinely revolutionary, that generations of commentators have somehow managed to overlook it.\n\nHe is not, as with ‘traditional historical materialism', reducing social relations to economic relations as conventionally conceived, or explaining the former in terms of the latter. He is precisely redefining ‘economic' relations – and thus the ‘economic sphere', or ‘economic structure', or ‘economic base' of society – as comprising the totality of social relations, whatever these may be, which make particular forms of production, and thus of property, possible. These social relations are simultaneously forms of material relation of human beings to nature. This totality is Marx's ‘groundwork of society', and its extensiveness indicates why he could plausibly treat material production as being synonymous with production of the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations' (1858a: 712), or assert that the relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society' (1847b: 212). Such propositions are grossly reductionist on any other interpretation. As he wrote in 1846, introducing the notion of a mode of production', this mode 'must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of ... individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part' (1846a: 32). What we have here is less an economic (and still less a technological’) theory of history or society, in any standard sense of the word ‘economic', than an agenda for an historical sociology of economic forms and phenomena.\n\nVII\n\nThe final issue I wish briefly to air in this chapter - and I do not pretend to do any more – concerns what I take to be a serious lacuna in Marx's work, and the historical materialist tradition generally. This is the question of human reproduction, and its connection with material production' as Marx conceived it. The context in which I raise this (and what has made it visible as a theoretical problem) is, of course, the renaissance of feminist scholarship in recent years, which questions the paradigms of all classical sociologies, including Marxism. I have argued that Marx's conception of the material groundwork'(1867a: 80) of society was far broader than that normally ascribed to him. The question I want to raise here is: was that conception sufficiently broad – or could it be made sufficiently broad - to accommodate (without subordinating) the undoubted sociological insights of feminist analysis? I shall suggest that it was not, but could be made so; and that Marx's own writings provide some grounds for undertaking the task with his posthumous blessing. Thus to revise historical materialism, however, would leave few familiar Marxist theoretical landmarks intact.\n\n76\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\n77","previous_page":43,"next_page":45}