The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism

Engels cautions, however, 'Please do not weigh each word in the above too carefully . .. I have not the time to work out what I am writing to you so exactly as I should be obliged to for publication’ (ibid.: 104). This letter is also of interest in the present context for including within the economic conditions which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society' both geographical circumstances and race, which Engels describes as itself an economic factor' (ibid.: 101). Unlike Cohen, he also includes there the entire technique of production and transport' (ibid.: 100).

Whatever the difficulties with, or the undoubted possible inconsistencies between, these various formulations, the broad outline of what Engels is wanting to say in these letters - his ‘testament', as some have described it - is crystal clear. And it seems to me, at any rate, to contradict the spirit of Cohen's 'traditional historical materialism'. Not the least interesting feature of these letters, sharply contrasting with Cohen's analytic nicety, is the capaciousness of Engels's notions of ‘economic sphere’ and ‘superstructure'. The primum agens, for instance, is variously described as economic situation, movement, circumstances, conditions, development and necessity, while the superstructure (Engels's ‘ideological spheres') extends well beyond Cohen's institutions of state and law.

It may of course be argued that notwithstanding this terminological latitude - a lapse of rigour, perhaps, understandable in private correspondence - Engels's formulations can be reconciled philosophically with Cohen's version of Marx. Cohen might argue that Engels's remarks (in so far, no doubt, as they are meaningful at all) bear at best on how the primacy of the economic is conceived as operating, without weakening either the claim of primacy or its functional interpretation one iota. Additionally, Cohen's own functional account of primacy itself entails the feedback of relations on forces and superstructures on bases, since the character of the former term is in each case explained by its functionality for the latter. 'Construing [Marx's] explanations as functional makes for compatibility between the causal power of the explained phenomena and their secondary status in the order of explanation' (Cohen, 1978: 278). Interestingly, however, apart from one passing reference to Engels's unexplained "determination in the last resort"’(ibid.: 280) Cohen entirely ignores these letters.

I think the omission unfortunate. Though Marx and Engels were not identical twins (Carver, 1986), Engels's testimony ought surely to count for something in the interpretation of the central tenets of Marx's thought. Certainly, nothing Engels says in these late letters in any way denies the centrality to historical materialism of the production and reproduction of real life'. Nor will anything said in this book. But Engels's caveats should affect how we understand that claim; and he is adamant that this should not be done in what he sees as a simplistic, reductionist manner. Claims for primacy (whether of forces or relations) have at the least to be nuanced. To do otherwise, for Engels, is to travesty his and Marx's life work. That Engels returned to the issue on so many occasions is perhaps indicative of how comprehensive, and damaging, he considered the travesty to be.

III

With some exceptions, subsequent Marxists have for the most part accepted the ultimate economic determination/relative superstructural autonomy framework established by Engels, and happily pursued empirical work within this framework without troubling over much about its theoretical credentials. It is, after all, an undogmatic, sensibly flexible basis for a materialist sociology, which is sufficiently open to allow room for the real complexity of history - a not unreasonable ‘guiding thread'. But from the 1960s onwards there have been various attempts to develop what Althusser once somewhat patronizingly called Engels's genial theoretical intuitions'(1969: 128) in conceptually more rigorous' ways. Althusser himself has advanced an elaborate model of ‘structural causality', in which society is conceived as being made up of a ‘structure in dominance’ comprising several distinct levels’ or instances’ – economy, polity, ideology and so forth - any one of which may play the dominant role' in a given ‘conjuncture', but whose overall interrelation is governed by economic factors. Poulantzas in his earlier writings offered a similar schema. Godelier, by contrast, hypothesizes a functional hierarchy in which relations of production dominate social structures under all conditions, but which social relations actually constitute production relations in a given context may vary enormously. Frequently, these will not be manifestly ‘economic' relations at all. He counts kinship relations as relations of production in many primitive societies, as does Meillassoux age and gender relations. Rodney Hilton has recently argued a similar case for juridical relations in feudal Europe. Hindess and Hirst, at one stage in their odyssey of critique and autocritique, tried to conceptualize superstructures as essential, but non-economic conditions of existence of economic bases. I could continue.³

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For Cohen, these are in the end little more than obfuscations and evasions. On one level, I am inclined to agree, at least so far as the theoretical contortions of Althusser and his followers are concerned. Such conceptual acrobatics recall the equants and epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy in the face of the Copernican challenge, attempts frantically to buttress an outmoded theory in the face of anomalous phenomena. But though I wish to argue against going down this road of ever more elaborate theoretical schemata, I think that the problems to which it is a response - in many cases, those of applying traditional Marxist categories like Cohen's to the analysis of non-capitalist societies4 - are real enough, and much that is illuminating has been unearthed in the attempt. In particular, Marxist historians' and anthropologists' realization of the need to extend the category of relations of production beyond its traditional ‘economic' boundaries is a big step forward. I shall return to this in later chapters. But for the moment, I want to draw a rather different set of emphases from Engels's testament'. These points tell equally against traditional historical materialism' and Althusserian-style revisionism.

What is overlooked in most recent commentary, and entirely ignored in modern attempts theoretically to systematize Engels's intuitions', is the way his letters repeatedly, and emphatically, underline the limitations of any general theory or model when it comes to analysing particular historical events, processes or societies. In the letter to Bloch, for instance, Engels concedes that he and Marx must take the blame for having laid more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We have to emphasize the main principle over and against our adversaries, who denied it'. Such polemical one-sidedness was pardonable, given a historiographic context dominated by philosophical idealism. Engels then goes on to argue: but when it came to presenting an era of history, i.e., to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error could be permitted' (1890b: 78). This echoes his complaint to Conrad Schmidt of 5 August of the same year: our conception of history is above all a guide to study’ – recall here Marx's description of his 1859 summary as a ‘guiding thread' - not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelians. All history must be studied afresh . . . But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge ... constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible.' He adds, sourly: It often seems as if these gentlemen think anything is good enough for the workers' (1890a: 73-4). The phrase' accusation (also used in the letter to Bloch, above, p.6) has a long pedigree in Marxist invective. The same jibe figured frequently in Marx's attacks on the Young Hegelians''theoretical bubble-blowing'(1846a: 53), their penchant for speculative construction'(1844a: 57 ff.), in the 1840s.⁵ The echo of those early critiques is instructive.

These quotations amount to a general warning against a certain pre-emptive use of theory, and a plea for empirical, and in particular for historical, study. This is a more general theme in Marx's work, and not just an afterthought on the part of the ageing Engels. Unfashionable as such ‘empiricism’ may be in some philosophical quarters, Marxism's founders' protestations of it are too numerous, and too consistent, to be credibly dismissed as mere ‘rhetoric (Callinicos, 1985).6 In The German Ideology – their first, joint ‘manifesto' of the materialist conception of history - Marx and Engels argue, in pretty uncompromising terms, the primacy of people's ‘materialistic connection' in historical development, just as the 1859 Preface does. Nevertheless they go on to warn that:

definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into . . . definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. (1846a: 36)

Had Marxists taken this seriously, they could never have consistently advanced the kind of universal theory of this 'connection' of the sort developed either by Cohen from the 1859 Preface or by Althusser and others from Engels's testament’.

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This empiricism', incidentally, is not, as some have alleged, merely an aberration of the 1840s, a positivist’ over-reaction to the excesses of idealism. Marx echoes the point, for instance, over 30 years later, when repudiating Mikhailovsky's metamorphosis' of the ‘historical sketch' of the rise of capitalism in Britain given at the end of Capital I into an historico-philosophical theory of the general path of development prescribed by fate to all nations'. One must, Marx says here, study forms of evolution separately', something which cannot be done ‘by using as one's master-key a general historicophilosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical' (1877: 293-4). This passage, like many another in Marx, is much cited (including by Cohen, 1978: x), but without due consideration for how it affects the interpretation of his methodological fundamentals.

Shanin (1984) and his collaborators have recently shown how Marx's 'late writings', particularly on Russia, in fact admirably exemplify his willingness to modify and even abandon the supposed general theory of history conventionally ascribed to him, in the light of fresh empirical evidence. If Engels (1894b: 17) is to be believed it was the continuing search for such evidence which delayed completion of volume 3 of Capital. Russian history was to play the same role there as English history had in volume 1. Given the picture of historical development normally drawn from the 1859 Preface, and outlined in Cohen's reading above, it is very much to the point that Marx – having learned Russian at the age of 42, and studied Russian social conditions from a mass of primary sources – envisaged Russia avoiding a capitalist stage' of historical development, notwithstanding its generally low level of development of productive forces. The basis for an alternative ‘form of evolution' in Russia, in his view, lay in the specific social relations (and associated forms of experience and consciousness) materialized in its surviving peasant commune, the obshchina or mir, providing the forces currently undermining these – state and capital - could be neutralized (Marx, 1877; 188la, b; Shanin, 1984). It was the writings of ‘the great Russian scholar and critic'(1873: 15) Chernyshevsky which had first alerted him to this possibility. Marx's historical and anthropological reading over the last decade of his life was wide-ranging and voracious.7 One of his last manuscripts, published in Russian translation in the 1930s but virtually unknown among western Marxists to this day, was a chronology of world history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the seventeenth century, which runs to over 1500 pages in print (1882a). I do not want to pull yet another ‘unknown Marx' out of the archivist's hat, but the painstakingly empirical tenor of such an enterprise is worth remarking, perhaps, in the context of this argument.

All this suggests that general formulations of the kind found in the 1859 Preface should be treated as exactly what Marx said they were - precisely a ‘guiding thread', an orientation to empirical and historical research, not a theoretical substitute for it. It can be questioned, in other words, whether they were ever intended to amount to a theory of history, in any rigorous sense of the word, at all. To take them as such – as do both Cohen and the Althusserians – is to misconstrue them. Obviously Marx has a certain vision of the overall trajectory of human historical development, which leads him to focus on material production as his analytic starting-point, but this is not quite the same thing as a systematic theory. It provides, rather, the guiding framework within which he works empirically. We should attend instead to Engels's repeated urgings, in his late letters, that those in search of the fundamentals of historical materialism should look not just at Marx's general resumés – like the Preface - but rather at his concrete analyses, his historiographic practice. Three times Engels refers his correspondents to the Eighteenth Brumaire as an epitome of historical materialist analysis. He also recommends that critics should look at Kapital, the section on the working day, for instance, where legislation, which is surely a political act, has such a drastic effect. Or the section on the history of the bourgeoisie' (1890c: 87). The clear message is that the meaning of Marx's general, summary pronouncements is best sought, not in texts like the 1859 Preface taken in isolation, but in the wider context of the substantive analyses such summaries can inevitably do no more than gloss. Marx's concepts are best explicated on the basis of their actual use.

Now Engels has been criticized, in recent Marxist literature, for both the variety and the imprecision of the metaphors he employs in these late letters to conceptualize the ‘ultimate' primacy of the material dimension of social life. Cohen's one dismissive reference to the letter to Bloch is of this ilk. Such criticisms are undoubtedly (if obviously) valid, if these letters are read as advancing a putative theoretical model of social structure or historical process. Engels's formulations, without closer specification of his key terms (ultimate' determination, relative' autonomy) are so vague as to be vacuous (Sayer, 1975). Devotees of Sir Karl Popper's doctrine of the necessary falsifiability of scientific propositions would have a field day with so accommodating a ‘theory': what historical event could possibly count as an instance neither of ultimate economic determination’ nor of relative superstructural autonomy'? But to argue thus may be seriously to miss the point.

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For if Engels's intention was not to provide such a model at all, but rather to argue precisely against the translation of Marx's guiding thread' into one, the objection evaporates. His apparent lack of conceptual ‘rigour', far from being a weakness, is of a piece with the character of the message he is trying to convey. So is Marx's own use of a base/superstructure metaphor – an analogy, rather than a precise concept – in the 1859 Preface and elsewhere, a use which, as we shall see, is also far from consistent between texts. Such shifting, and theoretically treacherous, recourse to metaphor and analogy may be a linguistic signal of exactly the inappropriateness of attempting a closed and rigorous' formulation of theory at this level of generality in the first place. Marx after all himself remarks at the start of the 1859 Preface that ‘the reader who really wishes to follow me will have to decide to advance from the particular to the general', and in that spirit offers no more in that text, in his own estimate, than ‘a few brief remarks regarding the course of my study of political economy' (1859a).

But as Edward Thompson has observed, the graveyard of philosophy is cluttered with grand systems which mistook analogies for concepts'(1978a: 296). ‘Traditional historical materialism', I shall argue, is just such a grand system, built on just such mistakes.

Productive forces

One feature of Marx's 1859 Preface has been remarked upon rather less often than it perhaps ought to be. The key concepts he employs there – forces and relations of production, economic structure and superstructure – are, for the most part, either left altogether undefined in the text itself, or else defined circularly, in terms of one another. No definition whatsoever is offered of material productive forces, that concept which for Cohen has explanatory primacy in Marx's theory of history. Nor are we told what relations of production are, beyond Marx's remark that property relations are but a legal expression for the same thing'; itself a highly confusing formulation (and one that has spawned its own extensive literature) because of the many possible interpretations of 'expression'. We glean only that ‘in the social production of their existence', people inevitably enter into such relations, which are independent of their will'.

The economic structure of society' - the 'base', the real foundation' – is defined circularly, as the sum total of production relations, which takes us no further. The Preface also invokes the mode of production of material life', which Marx tells us conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life'. But the text neither defines a mode of production, nor clarifies the relation of this concept to those of forces, relations or economic structure. Conventionally a mode of production is taken to comprise a particular - in modern Marxist jargon, an ‘articulated' - combination of forces and relations,¹ but Marx does not say so here. Cohen, among others, construes it otherwise, correctly noting a variety of uses of the term in Marx's work (1978: 79–84).

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2

Marx qualifies the superstructure' in the Preface as legal and political'. He also refers, independently, to definite forms of social consciousness'. He fails to make clear whether the latter are part of the superstructure, though his language in this instance suggests otherwise, This is what has led Cohen to argue they are not. Elsewhere, however, Marx – like Engels in the letters discussed above – frequently describes the entire superstructure as ideal' or ‘ideological', and explicitly includes forms of consciousness within it. Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 4, in some passages where the term superstructure is used we would be justified in concluding that its primary, if not exclusive, reference is to consciousness. The sentence later in the Preface itself, which distinguishes the material transtormation of the economic conditions of production’ from the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out' might be taken to support this latter interpretation. On the other hand, the reference in the preceding paragraph to legal relations as well as forms of state' having their roots in the material conditions of life' might incline us to the more restrictive institutional definition favoured by Cohen.

But again, Marx's apparent curtailment of the scope of the category at this point in the Preface may have a simple explanation. He is here recapitulating a stage in his own intellectual biography, the critique of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie which he undertook in 1843. Hegel's central concerns in that work were with law and state, and Marx embarked upon his critique to clarify his own views on the state following his personal encounters with Prussian officialdom as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.2 The Hegelian background, however, muddies the waters still further with Marx's introduction of the term ‘civil society' as a synonym for the totality of the material conditions of life', whose ‘anatomy . . . has to be sought in political economy'. Is civil society' as used here merely another expression for economic structure', or an intermediary level between base and superstructure? At all events, there is considerable room for uncertainty over what exactly, for the 1859 Preface, the superstructure' comprises - or excludes.

This problem of the meaning of the key terms in this most pregnant' summary of historical materialism is not, I believe, generally raised in commentary for a very simple reason. We all think we know what Marx means when he uses these concepts. But it should be clear by now that it is not the text itself which gives us warrant for this presumption.³ Nor is our interpretive confidence as a rule founded on any sort of scholarly examination of how Marx uses such concepts elsewhere, the study of the theory' in its concrete applications of the sort recommended by Engels. It is in fact simply the authority of the long tradition of 'orthodox Marxism' which has accustomed us to understand these concepts, without demur, in particular ways. With minor caveats, these are the ways advocated by Cohen and outlined above.

But much hangs on this apparently semantic question. Lucio Colletti, for instance, in his justly famous essay on the Marxism of the Second International - a Marxism not unlike Cohen's - has argued that the orthodoxy of Kautsky and Plekhanov and the revisionism of Bernstein equally vulgarized Marx's understanding of production itself. Engels's ‘testament', in his view, unwittingly succoured this vulgarization. For although Engels argued against outright economic determinism, the way in which he did so - conceding the ‘inherent relative independence', and therewith the separability, of superstructures from their economic bases - inadvertently reinforced an economistic, technologistic conception of the latter. Hiving off superstructures drained production itself of its social and cultural dimensions, for Colletti Marx's crucial insight. In Colletti's own words:

what Bernstein shared with Plekhanov, and what Engels's self-criticism' could not correct but only confirm, was the profound adulteration of the concept of the economy', or, better still, of ‘social relations of production', precisely the core and foundation of Marx's entire work. The so-called economic sphere' - which in Marx had embraced both the production of things and the production (objectification) of ideas; production and intersubjective communication; material production and the production of social relations (for Marx, the relation between man and nature was also a relationship between man and man and vice versa) - was now seen as one isolated factor, separated from the other moments' and thereby emptied of any effective socio-historical content, representing, on the contrary, an antecedent sphere, prior to any human mediation. Social production is thus transformed into production techniques'; the object of political economy becomes the object of technology. Since this technique', which is material production' in the strict sense of the term, is separated from that other simultaneous production achieved by men, the production of their relations (without which, for Marx, the former would not exist), the materialist conception of history tends to become a technological conception of history. (1972: 65)

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This may not be entirely fair to Engels, for other readings of his late letters can be defended. One may, for instance, argue that they are as conducive to an interpretation of superstructures as ideological forms of expression of class and other basic' relations, as they are to a view of superstructures as substantially separate spheres'. But Colletti's charge certainly holds for much subsequent Marxism. His argument, moreover, applies to Marxist practice as well as theory, for such analytic paradigms have been a far from negligible ingredient in the shaping of ruling communist party policies for economic development and social transformation in the USSR and elsewhere, with momentous consequences for socialist politics.⁴

It is this line of criticism I shall pursue here, though I shall take it further, perhaps, than Colletti himself might wish. I shall try to show, from Marx's substantive analyses as distinct from his general summaries, that conventional Marxist wisdom on the interpretation of his fundamental concepts is, quite simply, wrong. Marx had a very different understanding of what (and how much) was entailed in the production and reproduction of real life’ than most of his disciples, and used all of these concepts – forces, relations, and so on – very differently from the ways ascribed to him by tradition and systematized and defended by Cohen. Additionally, and perhaps more radically, I shall suggest that ‘traditional historical materialism' actually fetishizes Marx's concepts, in his own sense of that term. I shall begin, in this chapter, by looking at Marx's concept of productive forces - or, to be more accurate, and not altogether pedantic, the social forces of production.

II

Before examining this and other key concepts of the Preface individually, however, a further preliminary observation is called for. This concerns what we may expect in Marx by way of conceptual definition as such. The Preface is not alone among Marx's writings in its failure to provide clear definition of its terms. Marx was not a devotee of that tradition of twentieth-century analytic philosophy whose standards of clarity and rigour' Cohen seeks to bring to bear on historical materialism (1978: ix), and it is idle to ransack his work in search of neat and unambiguous definitions of his general concepts. Notoriously, for example, he never defined class, that central concept of. his sociology. Such apparent laxity infuriates those of a philosophical cast of mind, and Cohen's entire book can be seen as an attempt to remedy this supposed deficiency. But Marx's way of using language in this instance - as with Engels's penchant for elusive metaphor – may be indicative of something more substantial in his thought. Modern analytic philosophy, by the same token, might not turn out to be the most fortunate choice of framework in which to try and express his ideas.

Bertell Ollman (1976) has persuasively argued that Marx's conceptual slipperiness - words like bats', as Pareto complained, appearing now like birds, now like mice – is evidence not of any lack of rigour on his part, but of his commitment to a specifically, and distinctively, dialectical ontology, Marx did not conceive social reality⁵ atomistically, as made up of clearly bounded, separate, interacting entities:"the kind of analytic particulars which can be grasped in clear, consistent and exclusive definitions. He saw the world, rather, as a complex network of internal relations, within which any single element is what it is only by virtue of its relationship to others. In this Marx stood squarely in the philosophical tradition of Spinoza, Leibniz and of course Hegel, of which mighty thinker' he explicitly avowed himself ‘a pupil' (after having written Capital) (1873: 19-20).6 To take the most obvious example, neither wage-labour nor capital, for instance, can for Marx be defined ‘in themselves', as autonomous particulars, conceivable independently of one another. Nor can they properly be understood as externally interacting' on one another. Each is what it is only by virtue of its relation to the other, and must be conceptualized accordingly. The concept of capital implicitly contains that of wage-labour, and vice versa.

What Marx held to be thus implicit in a single concept may be very extensive indeed. In the Grundrisse, for example, he remarks that the simple concept of capital has to contain its civilizing tendencies etc. in themselves; they must not, as in the economics books until now, appear merely as external consequences. Likewise the contradictions which are later released, demonstrated as already latent within it' (1858a: 414). Hence - amongst other things -the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself (ibid.: 408). In the same way he observes that the germs of crises, or at least their possibility' are already implicit in the concept of money as medium of exchange (1858a: 198), and indeed in the elementary concept of the commodity itself (ibid.: 147 ff.; cf. 1867a: 114).

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‘The simplest economic category', like exchange-value, presupposes [unterstellt: Ollman (1976: 12) translates this as implies] population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. lt can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole' (1857: 101). In the same text, elaborating on the proposition that every form of production creates its own legal relations, forms of government, etc.’ - a proposition most Marxists would understand as a causal claim about the relation between essentially distinct entities - Marx berates economists for treating this relation as an external, contingent one. ‘In bringing things which are organically connected into an accidental relation, into a merely reflective connection', he says, they display their crudity and lack of conceptual understanding'(ibid.: 88, emphasis added). Such examples could be multiplied.'

Within an internal relations perspective drawing boundaries to concepts – particularly to general concepts – is evidently going to be a problem. The problem is compounded when, as was also the case for Marx, the relations at issue are viewed as being in the process of constant formation and transformation. But if Ollman is right about Marx's ontology this difficulty is unavoidable. It is not resolvable by definitional fiat, because it arises out of the very nature of the reality Marx's concepts seek to define. Words must be like bats’ if they are to be able to grasp this complexity. From the standpoint of this philosophy, one which differs in fundamentals from the whole analytic tradition, to use concepts otherwise would be singularly unrigorous, since it would entail systematically distorting reality. Indeed, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 4, Marx in fact regarded concepts and categories as a facet of social reality itself, and hence saw definitions as necessarily real rather than nominal. Engels, again, argued just this. In his Preface to Capital III he pointed out that we should not expect to find:

fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx's works. It is self-evident that where things and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images, the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation, and they are not encapsuiated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of formation. (1894b: 13-14)

It is false, Engels says, to assume that Marx ‘wishes to define where he only investigates'.

An important corollary of Ollman's argument – but a thesis which can also be independently defended on other grounds8 - is that Marx's general, transhistorical categories (like those of the 1859 Preface) acquire substantive definition from, and only from, the particular historical contexts to which they are applied. They are not applicable without change across space and time, because their content changes with the reality they seek to comprehend. This means that they cannot be substantively defined transhistorically; as general categories, they are necessarily empirically open-ended. We cannot offer a universally applicable definition, of an empirical sort, of what for instance productive forces or production relations are. Conversely, in so far as Marx's concepts are substantive categories – the concepts of concrete empirical phenomena – they are necessarily historical categories: a feudal force, a capitalist relation, and so on. Their content is historically specific, and their validity historically circumscribed.

Marx himself argues this when discussing ways of defining property, a key concept in his writings, in a passage to which I shall return:

In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations. Thus to define bourgeois property is nothing else than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production. To try and give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence. (1847a: 154)

Both the relational (and therefore extended) and the historical character of what Marx saw as involved in ‘definition' are well brought out here. E.P. Thompson argues similarly, regarding that central concept Marx so conspicuously ‘failed' anywhere in his writings to define, class. He could not have done so, if a definition of the analytic philosophy sort is required - exclusive, unambiguous, closed and universal. For, quite simply, class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition' (1968: 11). To define a class - or any other social phenomenon - is, in the final analysis, to write its history.

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Neither a philosophical defence of an ontology of internal relations, nor a systematic textual justification of its ascription to Marx, will be attempted here. I cannot, in any case, better Ollman on this. I rest my case rather on the degree to which interpreting Marx in this way allows us to make better sense of how he actually used his fundamental concepts - the central concern of this book - than the standard alternatives. But the major point I want particularly to emphasize at this stage in the argument is this. If Marx indeed did adhere to an internal relations perspective, we must approach the general concepts of the 1859 Preface very differently from traditional historical materialism'.

In particular, we can no longer assume that terms like forces and relations of production, or base and superstructure, refer unambiguously or consistently to different, and mutually exclusive, bits of empirical reality as they would in an atomistic ontology. They unproblematically do so for Cohen (as they do equally for many 'relative autonomy' models). Thus he avers that productive forces strongly determine the character of the economic structure, while forming no part of it', and in turn the economic structure is separate from (and explanatory of) the superstructure' (1978: 31, 218), all these entities being defined in empirical terms. Such separations are of course logically required if the Preface's claims of determination' are to be coherently rendered either in straightforwardly causal or in functional terms. Determining and determined phenomena must be logically independent of one another, contingently rather than essentially related.

But on the view argued here, the empirical referents of Marx's concepts may neither be mutually exclusive, nor consistent across space and time. An empirical particular - a form of division of labour, for example - might figure as a production relation under one description and a productive force under another. The same division of labour might be a productive force in one historical context and a relational fetter on such forces in another. The 'detail' division of labour discussed by Marx in chapter 14 of Capital I is exactly like this; the foundation of the productivity of early capitalist manufacture, it fetters the subsequent development of machine industry. In the same way notions of personal liberty would normally, for

Marxists, belong without question in the ‘ideological superstructure' of society; but we shall encounter an instance later on in which Marx treated them none the less as a productive force. For him even theory may under certain circumstances become a material force’ (1843d: 142). This conceptual fluidity reflects both the relational and the historical character of social reality itself. The point is an important one. For if the key general concepts of historical materialism are necessarily empirically open-ended and multi-referential, they cannot then officiate as the building-blocks of an overarching theory of history' in the traditional way.

III

If, for Marx, substantive categories are necessarily historically delimited, it should not surprise us to find that the few observations he allows himself to make on production in general’ are relatively trivial. He considered, indeed, that all that could reasonably be asserted at this level of ahistorical generality were flat tautologies (1857: 86). Production in general' is a rational abstraction, since there are generic features common to all productive activities and epochs. But it is an abstraction none the less. In Marx's own words the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing more than ... abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped' (ibid.: 99).

Thus he admits, for example, the obvious truth that all production involves some sort of labour process in which people transform raw materials into products, using their labour-power, with the aid of instruments of production of one sort or another. This is an everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence'(1867a: 184), which must go on ‘in all social formations and under every possible mode of production' (1865a: 820). Even here, however, Marx is careful to say that to conceptualize the labour process thus is to view it abstractly and ahistorically, independently of the particular form it assumes under given social conditions'(1867a: 177), and thus unempirically. And he only deals with it, in Capital, in such abstraction at all in order to bring out, by means of contrast, the differentia specifica of its distinctively capitalist form, in which he is interested.

In the same way, in a well-known letter to Kugelmann of 1l July

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1868, Marx dismissively observes that ‘every child knows'that social labour must be distributed in definite proportions between different branches of production whatever the society. Obviously some proportionality of inputs and outputs must be secured if production is to go on, irrespective of its mode. Such natural laws' cannot be done away with. But what can change is ‘the form in which these laws operate' (1868). Such social forms, for Marx, are the proper subjectmatter of economic science. The ‘material side, which the most diverse epochs of production may have in common' is something ‘whose examination . . . lies beyond political economy' (1858a: 881). He frequently criticizes political economists for their crude materialism' (1858a: 687; cf. 1865a: 323) in failing to differentiate these levels of analysis, leading to the conflation of historical and transhistorical As we shall see below, this is fundamental to his critique of fetishism.

Analysis of what pertains to production in general, then, is for Marx economically antediluvian, an enterprise yielding commonplaces' which at best had a historical value in the first beginnings of the science, when the social forms of bourgeois production had still laboriously to be peeled out of the material, and, at great effort, to be established as independent objects of study'(1858a: 881). One consistent theme in Marx's comments on production in general nevertheless does deserve emphasis here. Though similarly tautological and self-evident to Marx himself, it above all else distinguishes his approach from that of most mainstream economics. This is his insistence on the irreducibly social nature of production – the point brought out by Colletti above.

In The German Ideology Marx stresses that the production of life . . . appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship' (1846a: 41, emphasis added). Wage Labour and Capital elaborates on this:

In production, men enter into relation not only with nature. They produce only by cooperating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their relation with nature, does production, take place. (1847b: 211)

The same point is basic to Marx's polemic in the General Introduction to the Grundrisse against the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades', the isolated hunters and fishermen who provide the analytic starting-point for the classical economists' systems. Production by an isolated individual outside society ... is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other' (1857: 84). Other texts, early and late, concur (including in the linguistic analogy).9 This sociological emphasis is encapsulated in the nearest Marx comes to a general definition of production as such, again from the General Introduction: ‘All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a definite form of society' (ibid.: 87, emphasis added). Conversely, as argued in the Grundrisse, when we consider .. . society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations' (1858a: 712). To produce material goods in a particular way is ipso facto to participate in the (equally particular) social relations involved in doing so.

Marx's claim here, it should be stressed, is not that social relations are caused by material production but that it irreducibly involves them. They are part and parcel of it. It accordingly cannot be conceptualized, in any empirically adequate manner, independently of them. In particular, production cannot be conceived as a purely material' sphere, if material is taken to exclude social. I shall argue in chapter 3 that this vitiates Cohen's attempted distinction between material’ and ‘social' relations of production as substantially distinct kinds of relation. In Ollman's terminology, the connection between people's productive relations with nature, or labour process, and their productive relations between themselves, or social relations of production, is internal and necessary, not external and contingent. In any given empirical context (a particular, historical form of) the one entails (a particular, historical form of) the other.10 These are but different ‘sides' of one and the same set of relations, not substantially separable relations at all.

IV

I shall now try to show, with reference to productive forces, that this holds equally for any individual components of production. They cannot be conceived as exclusively material either. As production is in general for Marx a double relationship, so productive forces - consistently enough - are also in his usage double', simultaneously natural (material) and social. By this I mean two things. First, both material and social phenomena - in so far as we may coherently distinguish them thus at all when dealing with human productive activities - may become productive forces. Marx talks routinely of ‘every . , , natural or social power of labour' (1858a: 358). Whether or not they do, as in general with Marx and argued above, depends on historical context. Second, and rather more subtly, the material/social distinction is highly problematic here, and real forces of production for Marx habitually partake of both sets of attributes.

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Material things (land, tools, raw materials, fuel, machines and so forth) only become productive forces in so far as they take on social characteristics. A production line, for instance, is indeed (among other things) a set of material objects, and the natural properties of those objects obviously make up an important part of the explanation of its contribution to the productivity of human labour. But a production line is equally a manifestation or embodiment of both ideas and social relations, and it is only through these that it becomes a production line as distinct from a heap of useless metal. The ideas and social relations, therefore, are quite as intrinsic to the possibility of a production line being a productive force as its more evidently material features. A machine would not be a productive force in a society which lacked the technical knowledge or social organization to utilize its material capacities; at best it might be a potential productive force.

Conversely, social phenomena – forms of co-operation and division of labour, scientific knowledge, the Protestant work ethic', and much else – are not productive forces either, except in so far as they are materialized in actual production processes. In this sense ‘all productive force resolves itself into ‘a given relation to nature' (1858a: 540). They, too, will only be potential productive forces outwith this context, and accordingly fettered' if the requisite conditions for their productive utilization are absent. One frequent argument for socialism, for instance, is that it would unlock the knowledge and enthusiasm of direct producers in a way capitalism, by virtue of its social relations, does not. In short, neither material objects, nor social phenomena, are inherently or universally productive forces by virtue of their innate' properties alone; they become so only by dint of the relations - both between people themselves, and between people and nature - in which they stand. Things, then – contrary to Cohen, and much mainstream Marxism - are not, in or of themselves, productive forces. The concept is inherently a relational, and therefore an historical and contextual, one.

Indeed, an alternative translation of Marx's Produktivkräfte - that of productive powers – is rather more revealing of the sense he gave the term. 'Productive powers’ was in fact the original concept in classical political economy which Marx rendered in German as Produktivkräfte. Whereas a force' can be conceived as a thing, an independent entity, standing alone, a power is always an attribute of something. For Marx, the power in question is specifically that of social labour. The' productive forces – a reifying formulation – are precisely the powers to transform nature (and with it human nature) of social labour. Productive forces are thus an attribute of human beings in association, their collective capacities, not a set of things as such at all. Cohen himself notes that neither an instrument of production nor a quantity of raw material in strict speech is a productive force' (1978: 37); I believe there is more than a slippage of language involved here. As a well-known passage in the Grundrisse hyperbolically puts it:

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand. (1858a: 706)

The productive power of social labour may indeed, in the course of human development, increasingly become embodied in things – like machines – and undeniably it is through such embodiment that it is most enhanced. This is what is so revolutionary about modern industry; for Marx it represented a qualitative break, a veritable quantum leap in the unfolding of human productive potential comparable only perhaps with the neolithic revolution. Human beings are, distinctively, creatures who purposefully objectify their collective capacities in the material world they create through transforming nature, and this is fundamental to Marx's sociology. In his earlier writings it is this which defines human ‘species-being', while in

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