{"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":"80 / 81","pdf_page":46,"physical_index":46,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ff6696f86a4fbe6b443bc8d94354f7a15531cb847c9541aa8ccd46b14c4113a5"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"The historical record, I suggest, powerfully argues for just such a revision. The relations, generally of a patriarchal sort, within which social individuals are produced cannot wholly be reduced to aspects or epiphenomena of modes of production as historical materialism has traditionally conceived them. Indeed if anything patriarchal relations have independently informed and influenced the ways the production of goods has been socially organised, to a massive (and still largely unrecognized) extent. Relations between capital and labour, for instance, were frequently structured through patriarchal, masterservant norms, well into the nineteenth century (and understanding this might make the transition' to capitalism that much easier to grasp: not as a total rupture, but as a subtler gradation of forms). Outside capitalism's metropolitan heartlands, they often still are. Developed capitalism rests on a separation of household and enterprise, Max Weber tells us (1978: 375ff.); how can we begin to comprehend that separation empirically without reference to divisions of labour of an eminently patriarchal kind? English law and polity in the nineteenth century - that heyday of supposedly individualist Victorian capitalism – were permeated through and through with the social power of the household head', the paterfamilias, who alone, as Diana Barker (1978) reminds us, could actually be a ‘freely contracting individual'. That patriarchal household had been an organizing matrix of productive activities, political authority, taxation and administration, law and franchise, and religious worship, as well as ‘domestic ideology', in England, since time out of mind.16Indeed its unspoken assumption underpins even Marx's own determination of the value of labour-power in Capital I (1867a: 172). Here, a man of his own very patriarchal times, Marx did not seek to unravel natural, self-understood forms of social life'. He took their naturalness17 very much for granted. Such is the enduring power of patriarchy.\n\nIn fact, these forms of patriarchy would emerge as essential relations of the relevant stages of capitalist production on the criterion advocated above, since they are clearly social relations in whose absence production of goods would not have taken the empirical forms it did. This is undoubtedly an advance on ‘traditional historical materialism'. But that is not the point, or at least not the whole point. To acknowledge the patriarchal dimension of a given set of production relations, conceived as those relations necessary to a mode of production of material goods, is not to explain patriarchy itself. I reject the view – advocated by some Marxist-feminists - that patriarchal relations can be explained with reference to their economic functionality, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. The burden of modern feminist argument is rather to suggest an independent (if very material) basis for age and gender relations which is the particular concern of feminist theory. Now the specific terrain of that theory is precisely the relation of man and woman, parents and children, the family', or in other words the mode of production (conception, birth, nurturing, socialization) of human beings - exactly the dimension missing, because considered a subordinate relationship', from Marx's analysis of production of life’ after 1846. Explicitly to revise Marx's concept of production to include – as he first intended – production of human individuals within familial and other relations, and what might follow from that for human society as a whole, might allow the possibility of reconciling Marxist and feminist perspectives without subordinating the specific concerns of the latter. Retention of Marx's own conception of ‘mode of production' as the starting-point for sociological analysis, notwithstanding its capacity to recognize the economic import of relations of human reproduction, does not.\n\nHad Marx developed his broader German Ideology view of ‘the production of life', the conceptual apparatus of historical materialism might have looked very different. Mode, forces and relations of production would be very much wider notions even than those I have advocated here - if indeed those concepts, or only those concepts, remained the fundamental categories of historical materialism at all. Class relations would remain a central dimension, but would not necessarily be seen as the central – let alone the exclusive – dimension of social structure. Age and gender relations would be as integral an analytic concern. One way forward, again mooted in The German Ideology, might be to approach all these social relationships as forms of division of social labour – labour, however, extending well beyond just those activities which produce material goods. And to think the unthinkable, we might not even be differentiating social formations, or periodizing history, in the traditional Marxist ways at all. What feudalism and capitalism have in common, for instance - a certain patriarchal infrastructure - might become as significant as what distinguishes them, forms of the sexual division of labour (both within and outwith production'narrowly considered) being a common presupposition of either set of class relations. These are my views, not Marx's. To attempt to develop historical materialism along these lines, however, seems to me not inconsistent with the intellectual and emancipatory spirit of Marx's own enterprise. He was, after all, engaged in a critique of the economic categories' (1858b), and there is no good reason to see that critique as terminating in the nineteenth century, or bound forever in its natural, self-understood forms of social life'.\n\n80\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\nRELATIONS OF PRODUCTION\n\n81","previous_page":45,"next_page":47}