{"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":"78 / 79","pdf_page":45,"physical_index":45,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"cc5c4f859a1a91df2247dd23942cc5f42ef8575b37cc1f08ab3cc30afd9fc78a"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Conventionally, by production Marxists understand production of material goods, and modes of production are defined and differentiated according to how this is effected. Marx speaks of a mode of production as a way in which people produce their means of subsistence (1846a: 31). It is true, and important, that he recognized such production as simultaneously being the production of social relations. But the relations he had in mind were specifically those entailed in the production of goods, such as the kinship relations of the primitive commune, the ancient polis, feudal Herrschaft, or the labour/capital class relation. It is production of goods, therefore, which demarcates the field, and whose social forms constitute the specific object, of historical materialist inquiry. But in certain of Marx's writings, notably The German Ideology, the notion of production and reproduction of real life' has a significantly wider compass than this.\n\nNear the beginning of that text Marx and Engels list a number of material' factors in human life routinely overlooked by idealist historiography, which they say are premises' of their own viewpoint. The first and second of these are the need to produce (goods) to live, and the development of new human needs and capacities in the process. They continue: the third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their own kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family' (1846a: 40). These three aspects of social activity', they go on to make clear:\n\nare not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects or, to make it clear to the Germans, three moments', which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today. (ibid.: 41)\n\nThe next sentence – the one I have severally quoted on production as a double relationship'- includes within the production of life' both production of one's own [life] in labour' and production of fresh life in procreation'. Production of goods and production of people are thus given equal status here, conjointly defining the production of life’ and equally integral to people's ‘materialistic connection' (ibid.), Marx's declared analytic starting-point. A page or two later, in a passage I have already quoted more fully (above, p. 62), Marx refers to the nucleus, the first form' of both property and division of labour as being the family, where wife and children are slaves of the husband' (ibid.: 44), while later in the same manuscript he writes of marriage, property, the family’ as the practical basis on which the bourgeoisie has erected its domination' (ibid.: 195).\n\nIt must be said, however, that Marx did not take these fragmentary observations much further in his subsequent work. Engels did, in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1891), but in ways that are problematic.14 Marx recognizes the importance of familial and clan relations to pre-capitalist property forms, as we have seen, in the Grundrisse and elsewhere – but only in so far as these are relations of production of material goods. The probable reason for this failure to return to family forms in later writings – also stated in The German Ideology - is that Marx considered the family to be ‘a subordinate relationship’ in more developed forms of society (1846a: 40). Thus The Communist Manifesto roundly declares that capitalism has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations . . . and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous \"cash-payment\"’(1848a: 486-7). This sweeping, and undoubtedly inaccurate, judgement reads somewhat ironically in the light of recent work on the multiple ways in which capitalist production continues to be organized through patriarchal forms of relationship both within and outwith the workplace (narrowly considered) and the labour-market.15 It explains, however, why Marx should have given his third material circumstance' so little explanatory weight in later writings by comparison with the modes of production of goods.\n\nNone the less, it is clear that in principle Marx did consider production of human beings – and thus, presumably, the relations through which such production is organized - to be as essential to production of life' as is the production of goods. It would have been surprising (and inconsistent) had he not, since he recognized human labour as common to all labour processes, and repeatedly stressed, moreover, that individuals were always social \\~ and therefore specifically and differentially socialized - human beings. His exclusion of 'the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the familv', therefore, from the ways in which modes (and thus forces and relations) of production are conceptualized, can be defended if, and only if, his claim that this is a subordinate relationship' stands. He must show that such relations are wholly a corollary or a consequence of ways in which people produce their means of subsistence. Now this is a substantive judgement, open to empirical inquiry. If it turns out to be wrong, then – on Marx's own, self-declared premisses – the notion of production of life', and the concepts employed to analyse it, must perforce be extended to encompass modes, forces and relations of human reproduction as well as of ‘material production more narrowly considered.\n\n78\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\n79","previous_page":44,"next_page":46}