{"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":"x / xi","pdf_page":4,"physical_index":4,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5e1e8282c4d052792a898c8f523adc2d3c5bdbd14ecb480cf302e3a9a965bbba"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"This is, then, why I have written this book: not in order to establish some new, impeccably accredited orthodoxy, but rather to challenge the authority claims of the old. I hope thereby to suggest the possibility of reading Marx differently, of seeing him as pioneering an approach to the understanding of society and history which offers more empirical purchase than that normally identified with his name. I would like to make it clear, finally, that I do not consider such modes of argument to be in any way capable, in and of themselves, of establishing the validity of historical materialism, whether in my heretical variant, or any other. Capital is not the Holy Bible, and provenance no criterion of truth. That Marx said something does not make it right, and he was frequently, and demonstrably, wrong. Textual commentary is the necessary currency of a study such as this. But the test of an adequate analytic framework is its capacity to make sense of the world, not its conformity with Marx's or anybody else's texts. The point is a banal one, but in this context probably needs to be made.\n\nThis book, then, is mainly a study of Marx's ideas, a work of Marxology'. It presents an argument about the analytic foundations of historical materialism, as exemplified in Marx's own analytic practice. Its specific concern is with the major general concepts of his sociology, and the way he uses them in substantive inquiry. The argument is organized around the key categories in which he frames what for many is the classic summary of the historical materialist perspective, the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: the concepts of forces of production, relations of production, economic structure and superstructure. I argue that these fundamental concepts of Marx's have been comprehensively misunderstood – indeed fetishized, in his own sense of that key motif in his thought - within mainstream Marxism, and that the ‘theory of history' which historical materialism is normally taken as offering rests on these fetishized foundations.\n\nMisunderstandings among Marxists of what these concepts denote, and how they may legitimately be used, testify to a failure to comprehend their anchorage in Marx's distinctive methodology: the analytic practice I characterized in my earlier book Marx's Method as critique. These misunderstandings, I believe, have done enormous violence to what is most innovative and emancipatory in Marx's social thought. Rather more importantly, they eventuate in a form of historical materialism which does equal violence to real history – both that history people have made in the past, and that they might seek to make in the present. Marx's own practice offers an alternative, and an analytically superior, version of historical materialism, which I try to outline and defend.\n\nTo develop this argument I need economically to exemplify the readings of Marx I reject. Throughout this book I take G. A. Cohen's influential work Karl Marx's Theory of History: a defence (1978) as the best modern exposition of the standard interpretation of Marx's fundamental concepts, which has not been superseded in the decade since it appeared. Cohen's book is immensely valuable for its philosophical clarity of definition and coherence of argument. He outlines traditional historical materialism’ more clearly, and defends it more ably, than anyone else known to me. This book is not, however, primarily concerned with Cohen, despite his frequent appearance in its pages. There is much in his work, and the debates it has inspired, which I do not address. I nowhere, for instance, discuss his debates with Elster, or Elster's own ambitious reconstruction of Marxism by wav of game theory'. Nor do I consider Cohen's own shifts of position since 1978. I discuss his original book only as an exemplar. Cohen's understanding of Marx's fundamental concepts - my sole concern in this book - is shared wholly or in part by many Marxists, across a variety of perspectives, who do not otherwise subscribe to his ‘technological' variant of historical materialism. This book, then, is both much less, and at the same time somewhat more, than a critique of Cohen's Marxism as such.\n\nThe argument is organized as follows. Chapter 1 is a kind of prologue, in which I briefly outline the conventional interpretation of Marx's concepts and claims in the 1859 Preface, and, by way of a preliminary skirmish, discuss Engels's qualifications of these claims in a well-known series of late letters. The next three chapters form the heart of the book. In these, I respectively discuss Marx's own usage of the concepts of productive forces, relations of production/ economic structure, and superstructure, in his substantive work. I argue in each case that Marx's use of these concepts differed radically from that normally ascribed to him. I also suggest that his analysis of capitalism provides more than adequate grounds for seeing orthodox conceptions of productive forces, economic structure and superstructure as fetishized. These are, to use Marx's own vocabulary, ‘idealizations' or ‘abstractions' which falsely generalize from the misleading phenomenal forms our social relations take under capitalism. Chapter 5 is a brief interlude, devoted wholly to Cohen's characterization of Marxism as a species of functionalism, which I dispute. The most technical chapter in the book, it can safely be omitted by those whose interest lies in Marx rather than Cohen. Chapter 6 ties the overall argument of the book together, by way of a consideration of the relation between history and theory in Marx's work, and its implications for the formation and use of analytic categories in substantive inquiry.\n\nx\n\nPREFACE\n\nPREFACE\n\nxi","previous_page":3,"next_page":5}