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# The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism

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The Violence of Abstraction

The Analytic Foundations

of Historical Materialism

For Natasha

DEREK SAYER

Basil Blackwell

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Copyright © Derek Sayer 1987   
First published 1987   
Basil Blackwell Ltd   
108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK Basil Biackwell Inc.   
432 Park Avenue South, Suite 1503   
New York, NY 10016, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Sayer, Derek The violence of abstraction: the analytic foundations of historical materialism. 1. Historical materialism I. Title 335.4′119 D16.9

ISBN 0-631-15318-7

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data   
Sayer, Derek. The violence of abstraction. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Philosophy, Marxist. 2. Historical materialism.   
3. Communism and society. I. Title.   
B809.8.S334 1987 335.4'119 86-23208   
ISBN0-631-15318-7

Contents

Preface vii   
1 Prologue: Marx's guiding thread' 1   
2 Productive forces 15   
3 Relations of production 50   
4 Ideal superstructures 83   
5 Interlude: the giraffes among the acacias 113   
6 The historicity of concepts 126   
Notes 150   
Bibliography 157   
Index 164

Typeset in 10½ on 13pt Plantin by

The Word Factory Ltd, Tonbridge, Kent

Printed in Great Britain by T.J. Press, Padstow

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=2 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED

Preface

... as if the task were the dialectic balancing of concepts, and not the grasping of real relations! Vorl Marv Karl Marx,

General Introduction to Grundrisse, 1857

It has become fashionable in some circles to decry Marxology'. In one way this is odd. We do not speak in the same tones of Kantology', or 'Weberology', though studies of Kant and Weber abound. Interpretive commentary on the work of major thinkers is a common and legitimate scholarly enterprise, and not always a merely scholastic one. In the social sciences, at least, explicit reflection on established paradigms is a normal, and perfectly proper, way in which problems are clarified and disciplines advance, particularly in times of theoretical crisis. Because the pioneering work of a Durkheim or a Keynes does constitute a paradigm, in Kuhn's sense – a framework within which substantive researches continually go on - the form which theoretical debate takes is often that of a questioning return to, and reinterpretation of, the writings of an acknowledged past master. The context of such discussion is often a growing awareness of empirical anomalies which the relevant paradigms have difficulties encompassing. Every generation reappropriates its intellectual heritage in accord with its needs and priorities. In this sense, I see nothing wrong with 'Marxology', and this book is unashamedly a Marxological work. I focus on Marx's own texts, but I do so in the light of current preoccupations, and in order ultimately to help further knowledge of the world we live in. I do not presume that this knowledge can be directly derived from Marx's writings themselves – he after all died more than a century ago – but critical reflection upon their theoretical foundations may aid his successors in their endeavours to produce it.

But there is, none the less, a particular problem with writing about Marx. This problem is a moral as much as an intellectual one. No

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other modern social thinker has influenced social and political movements as much as he. Some one-third of the world's population now live under governments which claim Marx's imprimatur for their policies and indeed legitimate their very existence in terms of his supposed theory of history. Marxist parties, of varying size and strength, claim to speak for the people' everywhere they are permitted. This is not the case with a Kant or a Weber, and greatly raises the stakes of intellectual debate. Questions of what Marx meant by this or that have an inescapably political as well as a scholarly context, and may sometimes have very practical implications. In many cases the claim that Marx held such and such a view is itself - absurd as this may be - considered sufficient to confer authority upon that view. Nobody, so far as I know, has yet been incarcerated or killed for their heretical interpretation of Kant or Weber (or, come to that, for their orthodox one). Marxology' is therefore rarely a merely academic pursuit. However disinterested one's scholarly motives, conclusions often become part of other people's politics. The study of Marx can be a coded form of social criticism (in East and West alike), it can be snivelling apologetics, but it can hardly be politically innocent.

It is, of course, this political context of Marx scholarship – the association of Marxist theory with what is claimed to be socialist practice - which gives the charge of mere Marxology' its rhetorical force. The accusation of ‘scholasticism', academic' Marxism, is a convenient moral bludgeon with which to beat bourgeois' intellectuals into shamefaced conformity, or marginalize the political pertinence of their researches. Meghnad Desai, in a recent deplorable review of Teodor Shanin's Late Marx and the Russian Road – a book which painstakingly demonstrates Marx's deviation from Marxist orthodoxy across a wide range of politically sensitive issues, and traces the organized 'forgetting' of this within the communist movement - avails himself of this device in order not to discuss the challenge to received views which the book poses. Peter Binns does much the same in his grotesque dismissal, in Socialist Review, of Kolakowski's magisterial (if eminently disputable) three-volume history of Marxism as ‘chit-chat from the common rooms'.¹ It is very often just those - they frequently turn out to inhabit universities - who believe themselves to possess, in their own pet version of Marx, the truth incarnate, the revealed secret of history, who are the first to denounce serious Marx scholarship as 'Marxology'. In this environment I believe the study of what Marx actually said not merely to be an academically defensible but a politically virtuous enterprise. If intellectuals are to be of any service to humanity, they must first of all serve the truth. The political context of Marxist debate, in short, makes it more, rather than less important to respect the constraints of academic scholarship when trying to expound his ideas.

That is not to say I believe a definitive', or a disinterested, interpretation of Marx's thought to be either possible or desirable, and this is not my aim in this book. Marx wrote an enormous amount, over a period of many years. His legacy is very varied. Texts like Capital I, finished for the press, and revised through several editions, form the smaller part of the corpus that has come down to us. Unpublished drafts like The German Ideology, the Grundrisse, or the remaining volumes of Capital – all now treated as major works – are part of our inheritance in ways they were often not for earlier generations. Apart from his economics', Marx penned political tracts like the Manifesto, an inordinate amount of penny-a-line journalism (sometimes on subjects he knew little about), and even poetry. He left a voluminous private correspondence. There are obvious problems as to what weight to give to these different kinds of text, dating from different periods of his life. Not all that Marx wrote was clear, unambiguous or even consistent. It would be exceedingly surprising if it were.

But beyond this, why should we in any case seek to be definitive? It seems to me perfectly reasonable (as well as being unavoidable) to read Marx in different ways at different times and for different purposes. It is a testimony to his greatness that we can do so, notwithstanding all attempts to freeze his ideas into formulaic and dogmatic moulds. Marx's thought lives in so far as it is interpreted anew by others, in the light of their changing needs. It is no more eternal than the nineteenth century that produced it. Definitiveness, then, is so far as I am concerned a chimerical grail. Indeed I believe its assertion to be profoundly authoritarian and coercive, indicative of an approach to theory which is the opposite of emancipatory.

This is not, however, to argue for an interpretive free-for-all. As Max Weber once remarked, Marx is not a taxicab one can drive where one will. It is, I think, often possible to demonstrate that Marx did not adhere to positions commonly ascribed to him. Much of the argument of this book is of this sort. There is, for me, both a scholarly and a political point in engaging in such debate, scholastic and Marxological' as it might frequently appear. Precisely because Marx's name is so often invoked to authorize and legitimate contemporary doctrines and practices, to know what he did and did not say, and what can and cannot fairly be said in his name, becomes important.

viii

PREFACE

PREFACE

ix

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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.

This 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.

Misunderstandings 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.

To 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.

The 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.

x

PREFACE

PREFACE

xi

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I do not pretend originality for everything argued here. Various intellectual influences on my argument will be apparent, of which some deserve particular acknowledgement. I would single out for special mention the work of Bertell Ollman, whose Alienation remains for me the classic study of Marx's novelty; the historical writings - which are profoundly theoretical in their import - of Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and other Marxist historians; and the pathbreaking Marxist anthropology of Maurice Godelier. Many of the ideas developed here originated in collaborative work with Philip Corrigan, not only in our recent study of English state formation, The Great Arch, but in our previous books with Harvie Ramsay on socialist construction in post-revolutionary societies. Patrick Murray's helpful criticisms of Marx's Method, in his review essay in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, jolted me into rethinking the importance of Marx's Hegelian background, something I undoubtedly neglected in the earlier book.

Ted Benton, Philip Corrigan, Greg McLennan and Gavin Williams read the first draft of this book in full, and made extensive, sometimes highly critical, but invariably useful comments. I have tried to respond to their anxieties, even if on some issues I have remained obstinate. Their generosity has at least, I hope, made some points in my argument rather less murky than they were in their first formulation. David Frisby indulged a good deal of thinking aloud on my part, and added some ideas of his own. Sean Magee was as ever all that one could want in an editor, and Blackwell a positive pleasure to work with. Much of the book was written during a period of two terms' study leave from the University of Glasgow; it would have taken a lot longer otherwise. To all, my thanks.

Glasgow, Scotland

Derek Sayer

xii

PREFACE

PREFACE

xiii

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Prologue: Marx's ‘guiding thread'

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.

Preface, The Critique of Political Economy (1859a)

These few lines are amongst the most familiar, but also the most debated, in all Marx. Introduced by a thumbnail sketch of his intellectual development up to the mid-1840s, they summarize, in his own words, ‘the general result at which I arrived and which, once won, served as a guiding thread for my studies’.

The passage comes from the 1859 Preface to The Critique of Political Economy, the first part of Marx's economics' to be published. This project, which was to eventuate in the four volumes of Capital, the summit of his life's work, had already occupied Marx for some 15 years. Under the circumstances it is impossible to believe that he did not weigh his words carefully. He himself indicates that he wrote the 1859 Preface to replace an earlier draft introduction, that of 1857 to the Grundrisse. To be sure, the book had to pass the Prussian censor, and it has been suggested that the language of its Preface – the first, and perhaps the only thing the censor would be likely to read – is appropriately coded (Prinz, 1969). The word class', for instance, a concept normally (and rightly) thought central to Marx's view of history, is conspicuous by its absence. But whilst due allowance might be made for such linguistic caution, there remains no convincing reason not to regard the 1859 Preface as Marxists traditionally have: as providing a definitive summary, indeed the nearest Marx ever came in print to the definitive summary, of the core of the materialist conception of history.

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If so, certain conclusions as to what that conception is, would seem inexorably to follow. Their most lucid and influential recent elaboration can be found in G.A. Cohen's book Karl Marx's Theory of History: a defence (1978). Cohen describes his Marxism as ‘an oldfashioned historical materialism ... a traditional conception, in which history is, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable or impede that growth' (ibid.: x). The 1859 Preface, which Cohen reproduces at length as the frontispiece to his book, is the ‘most pregnant statement' of this version of historical materialism - one which would not have been unfamiliar to Plekhanov or Kautsky. Though occasionally unorthodox in his treatment of some aspects of Marx's concepts, Cohen undoubtedly does articulate the essentials of the traditional conception'. He does so, moreover, with a clarity and rigour not always associated with that tradition, which is why I take his formulations as exemplary here. Cohen interprets the claims of the 1859 Preface as follows.

The text presents, to begin with, a general theory of history. Fundamental to this theory, the bedrock, as it were, on which the ‘economic foundation' of society is built, are material productive forces. By these, Cohen understands the things people use in order to produce. Productive forces consist of two sorts of things: means of production - raw materials, instruments of production, auxiliary materials, premises, spaces, (some) scientific knowledge; and labour power – human beings’ physical and mental capacity to work, together with their accumulated skills. Cohen postulates, and attributes to Marx, an inherent tendency for these forces to develop throughout history (the development thesis'), and argues that in Marx's theory productive forces have explanatory primacy in that it is their level of development which explains the production relations of a society and from time to time obliges them to change (the ‘primacy thesis'). Development of productive forces is thus, for Cohen, the fundamental dynamic or motor of history, and Marx's theory of history is ultimately a technological one (ibid.: 29). Importantly, Cohen insists that productive forces are material, as distinct from social entities. He sees this material/social distinction as a systematic and fundamental one in Marx's work, whose existence must be acknowledged if the primacy thesis is to be rendered coherent.

Production relations, for Cohen, are relations of ownership between people and productive forces, thus defined. By ownership Cohen does not mean a legal relationship. This would create problems of circularity, since the base', comprising production relations, would then apparently presuppose its superstructure', in which legal relations are held to belong. Ownership, as Cohen uses the term, is a relationship of effective control: an ability really to command the force owned. This power may or may not be superstructurally expressed in the form of legal relations. The totality of production relations, thus construed, makes up the ‘economic structure of society', its ‘base' or infrastructure' in standard Marxist parlance. This is society's foundation', that which in Capital's words provides the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure' (1865a: 791). In accord with the primacy thesis, bases correspond' to requisite levels of development of material productive forces.

In most forms of society production relations will be class relations, and class, conversely, is for Cohen entirely defined as a property relation. A person's class is established by nothing but his objective place in the network of ownership relations . .. His consciousness, culture, and politics do not enter the definition of his class position' (1978: 73). Cohen argues that these exclusions are necessary to protect the substantive character of Marx's claim that the latter are largely determined by the former. This position receives some support from (amongst others) Perry Anderson in his critique (1980) of E.P. Thompson, the most prominent recent advocate of a cultural' rather than a structural' (the terms are inadequate) concept of class.

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Two further consequences of Cohen's definition of the economic base', where he differs somewhat from more traditional (and usually less scrupulously formulated) Marxist accounts, should be noted. First, for Cohen productive forces are not themselves part of the economic structure of society'. If they were, he argues, we could not make sense of Marx's claim that productive forces and production relations come into conflict, which would seem to suppose that they are separate entities. The primacy thesis demands their clear demarcation. Second, only relations of ownership in his sense can be bona fide production relations. This means other forms of social relationship which are evidently connected with or have a bearing on material production fall outside the category. These include both relations within the immediate production process itself, like forms of division of labour in the workshop', which Cohen calls material relations' between producers; and relations which lie apparently outwith, but nevertheless facilitate, production, like particular forms of law, state or family. Though Cohen does not deny the productive salience of such relations, he does not count them as relations of production. The economic base is made up of, and only of, property relations as he defines them.

This base is the real foundation' on which legal and political superstructures’in turn arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness' correspond. Cohen is similarly punctilious in his definition of the superstructure. He is also, on this occasion, rather less than orthodox. Marxists who adhere to a base/superstructure perspective have usually implicitly taken the superstructure to include all else in society - though there have always been some grey areas, prominent amongst them language. For Cohen, however, the superstructure specifically comprises ‘non-economic institutions', above all the institutions of law and state. This implies that phenomena may exist in social life which are neither basic nor superstructural, an important limitation on the explanatory pretentions of historical materialism. Additionally, for Cohen, the 1859 Preface's ‘forms of social consciousness' are not part of the superstructure, where for most Marxists they quintessentially belong. Not much hangs on this, however - at least in Cohen's view - since Marx says very similar things about both: namely, that they are strongly conditioned' by the economic base.

As productive forces develop, production relations are forced to change; the entire immense superstructure' sooner or later alters accordingly. Marxists have traditionally interpreted such propositions causally (although, in most cases, with a determined effort not to do so mechanistically). Cohen makes a persuasive philosophical case for the view that if Marxism is to be rendered coherent, correspondence' – of production relations to productive forces, and superstructure to base - must be interpreted in functional terms. Functional explanation is thus in his view indissociable from historical materialism. He also maintains, with some justice, that Marxists for the most part do treat these relationships functionally, loth as they might be to admit it. So for him Marxism holds that ‘economic structures are as they are because, being so, they enable human productive power to expand’, and superstructures are as they are because, being so, they consolidate economic structures' (1978: xi). There, in a nutshell, we have Karl Marx's theory of history. It is an economic, indeed in the final analysis a largely technological determinism, albeit of a functional rather than a conventionally causal sort. The Poverty of Philosophy's infamous dictum, The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist' (1847a: 109) should not be considered the embarrassment twentiethcentury Marxist intellectuals have so often found it. On the contrary, it expresses the very core of Marx's thought.

II

Cohen's reading is cogent, and his book undeniably persuasive. In many ways he cuts through a century of evasion and double-think, and forces us to think seriously, clearly and honestly about what are the central and distinctive claims of historical materialism. In so doing, he powerfully restores and lends new philosophical credibility to a certain traditional Marxist 'orthodoxy'. The Marxists of the Second International, for long the whipping boys of western Marxism', stand posthumously vindicated. But there is still room, perhaps, for doubt.

Let us begin, not with Marx himself, but with a famous series of letters written by another stalwart of the Second International, Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, in the 1890s. By then Marx was dead (he died in 1883), but his ideas, often in bastardized forms, were beginning to animate Social Democratic parties throughout Europe. In these letters Engels – who was habitually, it might be remembered, more of a popularizer than Marx1- showed himself appalled at the crudity with which some of the younger ‘Marxists' of the time were treating Marx's work, and sought to soften the hard economic determinism drawn by them from such texts as the 1859 Preface. Marx's references to contemporary Marxists' in the early 1880s had been no more flattering, as Engels elsewhere recalls.2 Cohen's own formulation of the primacy thesis’ and ‘correspondence' of superstructure to base is, as I have noted, functional rather than straightforwardly causally determinist, and these letters of Engels's in no way in and of themselves simply refute’ him. They do, however, suggest an altogether different attitude or approach to Marx's ‘guiding thread', and it is for that reason that I rehearse them here.

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Engels's best known revisionist' formulations are contained in his letter to Joseph Bloch of 21 September 1890. Here he qualifies the apparent determinism of Marx's 1859 Preface thus:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Therefore if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he is transforming that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various components of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, such as: constitutions drawn up by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflections of all these actual struggles in the minds of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases determine their form in particular. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless number of accidents ... the economic movement is finally bound to assert itself. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history one chose would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. (1890b: 75-6)

Engels goes on to say that we make our own history, but under definite conditions, amongst which the economic ones are ultimately decisive'. He also offers an image of history as the product of innumerable cross-cutting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces', the unplanned resultant of the play of myriad individual wills and actions. If these latter are impelled by external, in the final analysis, economic circumstances' they cannot on that account be disregarded; for each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it' (ibid.: 77).

Other letters say similar things. The letter to Schmidt of 5 August 1890, describes people's material mode of existence’ as ‘the primum agens', but immediately adds that this does not preclude the ideological spheres from reacting upon it in their turn, though with secondary effect' (1890a: 71-2). Writing again to Schmidt, two months later, Engels speaks of the inherent relative independence’ of the state, and conceives its relation with the economy as the interaction of two unequal forces' (in which ‘the retroaction of the state power on economic development can do great damage to the economic development’). Law, likewise, must not only correspond to the general economic condition and be its expression, but must also be an internally coherent expression’ (1890c: 84). Hence ‘it rarely happens that a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the dominance of a class – this in itself would offend the "conception of right"’. In sum, ‘ideological outlook influences in its turn the economic basis and may, within certain limits, modify it' (ibid.: 85).

Speaking of literature and philosophy, Engels - in yet another avatar of the relative autonomy' argument – describes the ultimate supremacy of economic development' as in this case operating only 'within the terms laid down by the particular sphere itself' (ibid.: 86). His letter to Mehring of 14 July 1893, offers still another formulation, which is in some ways at odds with the ‘inherent relative independence' model: it is ridiculous, he says here, to assume that ‘because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres we also deny them any effect on history' (1893: 92). Similar arguments are advanced in the letter to Borgius (previously published as to Starkenburg) of 25 January 1894. In this case it is economic necessity’ which is finally seen as having to assert itself. And Engels introduces one more analogy from the mathematical realm:

The further the particular sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more will its curve run zigzag. But if you plot the average axis of the curve, you will find that this axis will run more and more parallel to the axis of economic development the longer the period considered and the wider the field dealt with.(1894a:103)

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