The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism

Capital it remains the purposive character of human labour which stamps it as exclusively human' and ‘distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees'(1867a: 178). Under certain circumsances the productive powers of human labour may then come to appear simply as the intrinsic property of the material things in which these powers are objectified, independently of the social relations through which they alone acquire this property. But such an appearance is, for Marx, exactly that: a fetishistic illusion, and one he was much concerned to confute, as we shall see.

I shall first try to substantiate my interpretation of productive forces from Marx's texts. Having done that, I shall show that Marx himself explicitly criticized what has become the standard conception – the reduction of productive forces to the things used in production - as exactly such a fetish, an ideological confusion rooted in the alienated forms of appearance of human capacities and social relations under capitalism.

The passage already quoted from The German Ideology, which describes production as a ‘double relationship', is an appropriate place to begin. For it reads, at more length, like this:

the production of life, both of one's own in labour and of fresh life in procreation ... appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the cooperation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a productive force'. (1846a: 41, emphasis added)

Note should be taken of the words I have italicized: it is interesting to see what Marx himself considered to follow for the concept of productive forces from his understanding of production as a double relationship'. Cohen does not discuss the closing sentence to this passage: oddly, since Marx here explicitly includes social relations among productive forces, something Cohen is at pains to deny. Were this the only occasion where Marx did so, it could perhaps be dismissed as an aberration, notwithstanding its evident connection with the logic of his overall argument. But it is not.

Marx speaks, for instance, in the same text - when discussing communism – of ‘communal economy' as ‘in itself . . . a new productive force'. Though he makes clear that communism supposes an appropriately developed technology, it remains the communal economy', and not the technology in and of itself, that is the productive force at issue (1846a: 40n). He also counterposes industrial productive forces' and ‘productive forces . . . based on association and the community' (ibid.: 91). Lest such sentiments be thought a peculiarity of Marx's early works alone, the Grundrisse, also, describes the community itself ... as the first great force of production' (1858a: 495).

In the same work, Marx argues that the capability to consume' is 'the development of an individual potential, a force of production. The saving of labour-time [is] equal to an increase in free time, i.e., time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power' (1858a: 711). Discussing Robinson Crusoe, he conceives such castaways - bereft, presumably, of advanced technology - as persons ‘in whom the social forces are already dynamically present' none the less (1857: 74, 84–5). Money, as well as being ‘an intrinsic relation of production', is itself an instrument of production' and ‘a driving wheel for the development of all forces of production, material and mental' (1858a: 215, 216, 223; cf. 225). ‘Trade' is numbered as a productive force alongside industry and science (ibid.: 277). So is increase in population', because it ‘makes possible a greater combination and division of labour' (ibid.: 399). Most importantly, perhaps, it is the human being himself who is the main force of production' (ibid.: 422).12 Capital, similarly – though not explicitly using the term productive force' – describes state activity during the early development of capitalism as itself an economic power'(1867a: 751). Not all of these can plausibly be dismissed as merely metaphorical extensions of the concept.

Returning to the early works, a draft article of 1845 brings out the thoroughly contextual, historical character of Marx's concept with macabre irony:

Under the present system, if a crooked spine, twisted limbs, à one-sided development and strengthening of certain muscles, etc., makes you more capable of working (more productive), then your crooked spine, your twisted limbs, your one-sided muscular movement are a productive force. If your intellectual vacuity is more productive than your abundant intellectual activity, then your intellectual vacuity is a productive force, etc. etc. If the monotony of an occupation makes you better suited for that occupation, then monotony is a productive force. (1845a: 285)

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F.W. Taylor, the pioneer of ‘scientific management', would readily have concurred. For optimal operation of his system he sought workers of smaller calibre and attainments', of the type of the ox' (quoted in Braverman, 1974: 118, 108). Adam Smith thought the modern division of labour made the worker as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become'; a destiny he saw – in this case I presume with unintended irony - as inevitable, for the labouring poor, that is, the great mass of the people', ‘in every improved and civilizing society’ (Wealth of Nations, quoted in Marx, 1867a: 362).

But rather than multiply isolated quotations (which would not however be difficult in this instance) I think the argument best advanced by looking in detail at how Marx comprehends productive forces in the context of one substantial piece of historical analysis. The example I shall give is his study of the emergence of specifically capitalist productive forces. It is drawn, therefore, from the very centre of his intellectual and political concerns - the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. This example will also allow us some insight into how, in one empirical instance – but again, an absolutely central one in his work - Marx saw technological development and social change intersecting in the genesis of a new mode of production, thus clarifying the claims of the 1859 Preface on this point. The texts on which I mainly draw are the first volume of Capital, and its draft so-called ‘sixth chapter' (1866). This latter is a long manuscript entitled Results of the immediate process of production' which was written some time between 1863 and 1866, and published only in 1933 (and first translated into English in 1976). 'Results . . .' clarifies some of Capital's arguments in important ways. Marx originally intended it to follow the chapter on Wakefield with which Capital I as we know it closes.

In these writings, Marx distinguishes what he calls manufacture and machine industry as successive historical stages (though stages no more separated from each other by hard and fast lines of demarcation, than are geological epochs' (1867a: 371)) in the development of a specifically capitalist production process. These stages rest upon different historical forms of the labour/capital relation, which Marx refers to as formal and real subordination, subjection or subsumption of labour to capital respectively. To these two forms of the capital/ labour relation, and stages in the development of a capitalist production process, correspond two different modes of exploitation of labour. These are absolute and relative surplus-value. Marx details these in parts 3 and 4 of Capital I. Absolute surplus-value is obtained by extending the working-day, relative surplus-value by diminishing, through increases in productivity, the portion of it devoted to reproducing the labourer's wage-costs.

Formal subordination of labour to capital - the social basis of capitalist manufacture - involves, for Marx, simply a change in social relations. Workers previously in possession of their means of production, whether as peasants or artisan craftsmen, become wagelabourers, dependent for their livelihood upon the sale of their labour-power to capitalist employers. Real subordination, by contrast, comes into being only when ‘a technologically and otherwise specific mode of production – capitalist production – . . . transforms the nature of the labour process and its actual conditions’ (1866: 1034-5). Labour is said to be really subjected to capital when the production process itself, and above all the instruments of labour, have become transformed in such a way that they can only be operated cooperatively, by labour-power socially combined' (ibid.: 1040), or what Capital terms ‘the collective labourer'. At this stage of capitalist development - unlike in manufacture, where the power of capital remains a merely social requisite of production – the sway of capital develops into a requisite for carrying on the labour process itself, into a real requisite of production' (1867a: 330). The difference Marx is pointing to is that between, say, hand-loom weavers working under the putting-out system, where the actual mode of work is no different from that they would have pursued had they remained independent craftsmen, and power-loom weavers working in large factories.

Real subordination occurs with the development of machine industry. Thereafter, it is not merely their dispossession, but the concrete forms of the actual labour-process itself - large-scale, coordinated, mechanized productive processes - that prevent the labourers from working individually for themselves. The very technology of production is socialized. In its capitalist form, however, modern industry is a· palpable, material embodiment of the social power of capital and the expropriation of labour. This, for Marx, in contrast to merely formal subordination, represents the development of a specifically capitalist mode of production' (1866: 1021), 'a specifically capitalist form of production . . . at the technological level too' (ibid.: 1024), capitalist production proper' (ibid.: 1027).

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Crucially for my argument, Marx is adamant that the merely formal subordination of labour does not entail any immediate changes in the labour process, though it may (it also may not) lead to their adoption. Nor, equally importantly, does it in any way presuppose the prior development of a specifically capitalist technology, or indeed any technical advancements whatsoever on previous modes of production. Formal subordination of labour to capital, according to 'Results .. .’:

does not in itself imply a fundamental modification in the real nature of the labour process, the actual process of production. On the contrary, the fact is that capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes over an existing labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of production ... For example, handicraft, a mode of agriculture corresponding to a small, independent peasant economy. If changes occur in these traditional established labour processes after their takeover by capital, these are nothing but the gradual conseguences of that subsumption. The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may become more continuous or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist, but in themselves these changes do not affect the character of the actual labour process, the actual mode of working. (1866: 1021, final emphasis added)

There is no change as yet in the mode of production itself. Technologically speaking, the labour process goes on as before, with the proviso that it is now subordinated to capital. (ibid.: 1026)

In Capital, Marx extends these points. He distinguishes, within the manufacturing epoch, two successive regimes which precede the development of machine industry and capitalist production proper. These are 'simple co-operation' and 'detail division of labour'. In the first, workers are brought together, either physically under one roof or organizationally under the aegis of a single capitalist; in the second – as in Adam Smith's famous discussion of pin manufacture - existing crafts are broken down into detailed operations devolving on different individuals. In neither case, Marx makes clear, is the technological basis of the production process altered, though its social relations are already undeniably capitalist (1867a: ch. 24). Indeed eventually this ‘narrow technical basis' becomes a ‘fetter ... on the dominion of capital' (ibid.: 368).

Whereas, for Marx, the real subordination of labour to capital always supposes its formal subsumption – the wage relation being fundamental to all forms of capitalist enterprise1³ – the converse does not necessarily obtain' (1866: 1019). We may, in other words, find formal subordination in the absence of, or side by side with, the specifically capitalist mode of production based on real subordination. The latter arises out of the former only ‘if the historical circumstances are otherwise favourable, as they were for instance in the sixteenth century' (ibid.: 1022). There is no automaticity about the progression. But on one point the sixth chapter' is insistent:

absolute surplus-value always precedes relative. To these two forms of surplus-value there correspond two separate forms of the subsumption of labour under capital, or two distinct forms of capitalist production. And here too the one form always precedes the other. (ibid.: 1025)

Capital is equally emphatic. A greater number of labourers working together . .. under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting-point of capitalist production (1867a: 322).

Now, it is true that in this account capitalist production proper is only achieved with the real subordination of labour to capital. Only then does capitalism become a mode of production sui generis' (1866: 1035). It is true, also, that Marx at one point asserts that it is only at the latter stage that the corresponding relations of production between the various agents of production and above all between the capitalist and the wage-labourer, come into being for the first time' (ibid.: 1024). This is, on the face of it, somewhat mystifying - indeed contradictory - in the context of the overall analysis, for Marx is clear throughout that formal subordination is a capitalist relation, or 'form of capitalist production' (ibid.: 1025). The only sense I can make of this apparent inconsistency is to interpret Marx as saying that only with real subordination do capitalist relations achieve what he later calls their ‘adequate form' (ibid.: 1035) – only then, in the words of the Grundrisse, do they gain totality and extent' (1858a: 277; cf. 297), becoming obligatory and general, because materialized in the very forms of the labour process itself. This indeed does presuppose an industrial technology.

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But what is beyond any doubt, throughout the analysis, is that technological change as such is not the primum agens in the rise of capitalism, or even in the development of the production process most appropriate to it, machine industry. It may be capitalism's most productively revolutionary consequence, but that is a different issue. It is in fact competition between capitals – explained by the division of labour between them, a social relation - which compels technical innovation, and the labour/capital relation that makes its general adoption possible on the basis of co-operative labour. Social relations, not productive forces as conventionally construed, thus have explanatory primacy. ‘Capital is productive, i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces' - these being the productive powers of labour, which [it] incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth' (1858a: 325, emphasis added). The ‘sixth chapter’ is clear that formal subsumption of labour - a change in social relations alone – is not merely historically antecedent to, but forms the premiss and precondition of its real subsumption’ (1866: 1026). Capital, again, reiterates the point. It is the production of relative surplus-value – on the basis of real subordination – which revolutionizes out and out the technical processes of labour'; but this ‘presupposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of production, a mode which, along with its methods, means and conditions, arises and develops itself spontaneously on the foundation offered by the formal subjection of labour to capital' (1867a: 510).

How, then, are we to reconcile this historical analysis with the picture usually drawn from the 1859 Preface, in which the development of productive forces – understood technologically, as the things used in production (including labour-power) – is the ultimate motor force of historical change, impelling transition from one mode to another? At first sight, Marx's analysis - an analysis, it should again be recalled, of the rise of that mode of production whose laws of motion' preoccupied him above all others - flatly contradicts this picture. Here, changes in production relations bring about developments in technology, not the other way about. A perusal of part 8 of Capital I, incidentally, would complicate the issue still further, since it would additionally reveal the key part played in Marx's account by those historically 'favourable circumstances' of the sixteenth century to which he refers in the ‘sixth chapter'. It is difficult to see how for instance Henry VII's dissolution of the monasteries is readily susceptible to technological explanation, no matter how ‘ultimate'.

Marx's account is in fact (logically) compatible with Cohen's functionalist reading of the primacy thesis', to which I shall return. It evidently cannot, however, be reconciled with standard causal versions of that claim. In the face of this Anderson (1974a: 204 ff.), Bettelheim (1976: 86ff.), Balibar (in Althusser, 1970: 233ff.) and others have sought to reverse the traditional paradigm, arguing instead for the dominance of relations over forces. Whilst I sympathize with what they are attempting, I believe the problem to be illusory. I also think this solution misleading, for several reasons. First, it bends the stick too far; as I shall show, there is a sense in which Marx's analysis here is compatible with the primacy thesis', though that sense is not Cohen's. But simply to reverse the line of causality between forces and relations obscures the important extent to which, for Marx, the growth of human productive power does remain the fundamental dynamic of historical progress. Second - although the authors I have cited are not in fact themselves generally guilty of this – a mere reversal of terms may have the consequence of preserving a conception of productive forces as things which was not Marx's own, and which is, as I shall argue below, specifically fetishistic. Finally, this way out of the dilemma entails dismissing the claims of the 1859 Preface as anomalous, which is to say the least implausible.

In fact, Marx's analysis of the rise of capitalist productive forces contradicts the claims of the 1859 Preface only so long as productive forces are understood in the traditional, restrictive manner. So soon as the forms of co-operation and division of labour entailed in the formal subsumption of labour to capital (or, indeed, the competitive relations between individual capitals) are themselves acknowledged to be productive forces in this historical context, the apparent inconsistency disappears. The rise of capitalism is indeed understood in terms of new productive forces conflicting with old production relations, exactly as the Preface requires. Only in this case - in the first instance, at any rate – the new forces at issue are embodied in new forms of social relationship rather than new technologies. Such an interpretation is of course consistent with the passages cited above from The German Ideology and elsewhere, which indicate that for

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Marx social relations could indeed be productive forces. But we do not need to go so far for authorization of this heresy. The texts on which I have been drawing- Capital and ‘Results of the immediate process of production' – themselves say as much. 上

Although, for Marx, formal subsumption of labour to capital entails no technological change in the labour process, it does lead to a considerable enhancement in the productive power of human labour. He repeatedly, even tediously, stresses this. For the Grundrisse, the greater the extent to which production still rests on mere manual labour . . . the more does the increase of the productive force consist in [producers'] collaboration on a mass scale' (1858a: 529). In the ‘sixth chapter', Marx lists several ways in which this happens.

Formal subsumption ‘increases the continuity and intensity of labour; it is more favourable to the development of versatility among the workers, and hence to increasing diversity in modes of working and ways of earning a living' (1866: 1026-7). In contrast to slave or servile labour, 'this labour becomes more productive ... The consciousness (or better, the idea) of free self-determination, of liberty, makes a much better worker of the one than of the other, as does the related feeling (sense) of responsibility' (ibid.: 1031, Marx's parentheses). ‘Social forms of consciousness' - ‘superstructural' phenomena par excellence for most Marxists - would seem here to be part of capitalism's productive forces, and unproblematically so for Marx. A similar case could be made for Max Weber's ‘Protestant ethic', an orientation to conduct' of whose benefits to capitalist enterprise neither Marx himself, nor Marxist historians like Hill or Thompson, have been entirely unaware.14 This position is perfectly coherent within the multi-referential and non-exclusive interpretation of Marx's general concepts argued earlier, but not otherwise. The same goes for the passage on state activity as ‘itself an economic power' quoted above. Elsewhere Marx similarly describes French state formation as ‘a powerful coefficient of social production' (1871: 75). My own previous work (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985) suggests he was not exaggerating.

Perhaps most importantly of all, for Marx, formal subsumption permits – even on the basis of the old, traditional mode of labour’ - large increases in the scale of production, and this enlargement of scale constitutes the real foundation on which the specifically capitalist mode of production can arise’ (1866: 1022). Once again Capital generalizes the point:

the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided operation ... In such cases the effect of the combined labour could not be produced at all by isolated individual labour, or it could only be produced by a great expenditure of time, or on a very dwarfed scale. Not only have we here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses. (1867a: 326)

Marx goes on to remark that ‘mere social contact begets in most industries an emulation and a stimulation of the animal spirits that heighten the efficiency of each individual workman'. His general conclusion – something of a syntactic battering-ram, but worth giving in full – is this:

Whether the combined working-day, in a given case, acquires this increased productive power, because it heightens the mechanical force of labour, or extends its sphere of action over a greater space, or contracts the field of production relatively to the scale of production, or at the critical moment sets large masses of labour to work, or excites emulation between individuals and raises their animal spirits, or impresses on the similar operations carried on by a number of men the stamp of continuity and many-sidedness, or performs simultaneously different operations, or economises the means of production by use in common, or lends to individual labour the character of average social labour – whichever of these be the cause of the increase, the special productive power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due to co-operation itself. When the labourer cooperates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species. (ibid.: 329, emphasis added)

Only the most determined casuist, I would suggest, could deny that for Capital, as much as for The German Ideology, people's mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force", - and a pretty powerful one at that. The forces/relations distinction as conventionally drawn must accordingly collapse. These are not mutually exclusive concepts, denoting substantially distinct entities.

Cohen himself does discuss these analyses, though not at any great length. He deals with the apparent contradiction between Marx's assertion here of the historical and logical precedence of formal over real subordination, and the primacy thesis', via his interpretation of

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Forces[even as yet non-existent forces] select structures according to their capacity to promote development' (ibid.: 162; my interjection, based on Cohen's arguments in ibid.: 177). Cohen is right that if Marx is interpreted thus, the contradiction disappears. His reading is internally coherent, whatever other objections might be raised against it. In chapter 5 I shall argue against both functional explanation as Cohen conceives it, and its ascription byhim to Marx.

The second problem I have raised is that of social relations themselves being putative productive forces. I hope I have shown that the view that they may be is more than warranted by Marx's texts. Cohen, to my mind, simply evades this issue when commenting on these analyses, He draws a distinction, within the category of production relations, between social relations' and what he calls material relations between producers' or work relations'. The former alone enter into the ‘economic structure'. I shall discuss this distinction further in my next chapter. The relevant point here is that Cohen classifies the forms of co-operation and division of labour I argue were for Marx (also) productive forces, as material relations'. He then concedes that something in this conceptual area is a productive force, but not the work relations themselves' (ibid.: 113). In his view, the relevant productive force is knowledge of ways of organising labour', not that organization as such (ibid.). This seems to me a wholly artificial, if characteristically ingenious, piece of special pleading: knowledge, like machines, is a productive force only in so far as it is productively applied.

It is also, it should be said, an extremely cavalier reading of the texts I have cited. Marx makes it abundantly clear that the relevant power is that of – in his own words - co-operation itself', not the knowledge of or blueprint for co-operation, and he does so repeatedly. The only justification for denying Marx's contention is consistency within Cohen's own theory, and whatever the merits of the

Following a characteristically capacious account of what, in capitalism, the social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialized (i.e. collective) labour' actually comprise, the sixth chapter' goes on to observe that:

This entire development of the productive forces of socialized labour ... takes the form of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the productive power of labour, or even of that part of it which is identical with capital. And least of all does it appear as the productive power either of the individual worker or of the workers joined together in the process of production. The mystification implicit in the relations of capital as a whole is greatly intensified here, far beyond the point it had reached or could have reached in the merely formal subsumption of labour under capital. (1866: 1024)

This brings me to the second major argument I want to develop on Marx's understanding of productive forces. This is that to conceive them otherwise than as powers of social labour – and specifically, to identify them with the things used in production', means of production and labour-power - is, so far as Marx is concerned, to mystify’ them. It is in fact a paradigm instance of what he diagnosed as the fetishism peculiar to the capitalist mode of production', from which, in his view, most economics suffered (ibid.: 1046). Since the concept of fetishism will be a central one in the overall argument of this book, it is worth spending some time establishing what exactly Marx meant by it.15

We saw earlier that he systematically distinguished a material side’ and a formal side' to production. The material side is that which all human productive activities have in common, or that which pertains to production in general in abstraction from its particular social modalities. For instance all production involves a labour process, and all products have a use-value (understood as a capacity to meet some human need). But to conceive production simply thus, from its material side’ alone, is, Marx argues, to grasp it abstractly. For - Robinson Crusoe notwithstanding - production only takes place empirically within definite social relations, and it is these which imprint on its elements, in any given case, their particular social or economic forms. It is these forms which are Marx's prime concern, defining real historical stages' of production,

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the latter as a functional rather than straightforwardly causal argument. In brief:

the primacy thesis does not say that forces characteristic of capitalism preceded its arrival. It rather requires that nascent forces could not be used or developed within pre-capitalist relations, and that a capitalist structure was necessary for productive progress. (1978: 179)

latter, this is not a good reason for attributing to Marx a view he demonstrably did not hold, or denying to him the view he equally demonstrably did. Particularly if, as is the general argument of this book, an alternative and equally coherent account of historical materialism, which is consistent with Marx's own conceptual usage, is eminently possible.

VI

In capitalism, for instance, the labour process is also a process of production of surplus-value, and the product, in addition to having use-value, assumes the specific value-form'of the commodity. The latter term in each pair is a distinctively social characteristic, and the specific object of Marx's analysis. Thus, clarifying the methodological starting-point of Capital in his 1880 Notes on Adolf Wagner, he makes it clear that, 'I do not start from"concepts" .. . What I start from is the simplest social form in which the labour product is represented in contemporary society, and this is "the commodity" (1880a: 50; cf. 1858a: 881).

Fetishism confuses, or indeed inverts, these two sets of attributes, material and formal or natural and social. Properties which things acquire entirely as a consequence of their standing in a specific set of social relations are mistakenly seen as inhering in, and explained by, the material qualities of those objects themselves. In Marx's own words, fetishism consists in regarding economic categories, such as being a commodity or productive labour, as qualities inherent in the material incarnations of these formal determinations or categories' (1866: 1046). To fetishize economic phenomena is to metamorphose the social, economic character impressed on things in the process of production into a natural character stemming from the material nature of those things' (1878: 229).

So commodity fetishism, to take Marx's best-known example, consists in seeing the value of commodities as something intrinsic to them as things, and therefore explicable by their material features, their scarcity, durability, utility or whatever. But these material features, for Marx, pertain only to the use-values of commodities, something the goods in question would continue to have even if they did not assume the commodity-form, and - as for instance when immediately consumed by their producers – accordingly had no value as such. The commodity as an exchange-value differs from itself as a natural, material thing' (1858a: 188). Exchange-value is ‘a cipher for a relation of production' (ibid.: 141). It is a material mode of expression of a social relation, the respective amounts of labour necessary under given conditions to the production of different commodities, and it is the social relations specific to commodity production which wholly explain why the labour-product should assume this specific (and somewhat mystifying) value-form: 'No scientist has yet discovered what natural properties make definite proportions of snuff tobacco and paintings “equivalents" for one another'(1863c: 130). Rather:

Where labour is communal, the relations of men in their social production do not manifest themselves as values' of things'. Exchange of products as commodities is a method of exchanging labour, [it demonstrates] the dependence of the labour of each upon the labour of the others [and corresponds to] a certain mode of social labour or social production. (ibid.: 129, interpolations from editorial collation of Marx's ms.)

In money, the universal symbol of value, the fetish reaches its apotheosis: a social relation, a definite relation between individuals, appears as a metal, a stone, as a purely physical, external thing' (ibid.: 239). This kind of transubstantiation is, for Marx, wholly analogous with what goes on in the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world', and explains his use of the term fetishism (which he took originally from Feuerbach's critique of religion): 'In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands' (1867a: 72).

This first fetishistic confusion, of material and social, entails a second. To comprehend social properties of objects as deriving from their material attributes is at the same time implicitly to universalize them, to deny their specific historical character. Thus value, in this example, becomes a property products possess transhistorically, irrespective of their particular modes of production. It is no longer, as for Marx, ‘a historic relation' (1858a: 252), a property things acquire only within a definite historical mode of production - commodity production, which rests on particular relations between people, a specific form of social division of labour, not found in all forms of human society. Capitalist conditions are thereby covertly taken as premisses of any and all human sociation. The connection between this critique of fetishism, and the argument developed earlier in this chapter concerning the necessarily historical character of Marx's substantive categories will, I hope, be evident. For him, ‘it is precisely these forms that are alone of importance when the question is the specific character of a mode of social production' (1863a: 296, emphasis added).

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Importantly, for Marx fetishism is not simply an intellectual faux pas, a category error. Consistently with his general denial of the independence of ideas from people's materialistic connection', of consciousness from experience - which I shall discuss further in chapter 4 - he seeks to root fetishism in the forms in which, under capitalism, individuals actually experience their social relations (Sayer, 1983, ch. 1; Godelier, 1964; Mepham, 1972). To use the hackneyed but none the less useful analogy, the mechanism of fetishism is akin to that of a mirage rather than an hallucination. It is not that people mistake what they see, what they see misleads them, for thoroughly objective reasons to do with how it presents itself to their consciousness. Marx makes this point against the Ricardian socialist, Thomas Hodgskin:

Hodgskin says that the effects of a certain social form of labour are ascribed to objects, to the products of labour; the relationship itself is imagined to exist in material form . . . Hodgskin regards this as a pure subjective illusion which conceals the deceit and the interests of the exploiting classes. He does not see that the way of looking at things arises out of the relationship itself; the latter is not an expression of the former, but vice versa. (1863c: 295–6)

A corollary of this is that fetishism is not equally characteristic of all social formations (any more than, for Marx, ideology was an invariant feature of social life¹6), and its explanation must accordingly be empirically specific. He argues, for instance, that exploitation was much more transparent in feudal societies, because it was not concealed by the material forms of the labour process itself as in capitalism. Work for oneself and work for one's lord were palpably separate in a way they are not within the wage-relation, where all of one's labour-time appears to be paid for.17 Empirically this is perhaps debatable, since feudal relations involved norms of reciprocity; crudely, protection, both earthly and divine, in exchange for services. But Marx's intent is clear.

For Marx, fetishism reaches its zenith in capitalism, and this is explained by the singularity of the social relations on which that mode of production rests. Fundamental to capitalism is a spontaneous social division of labour between private producers, which is not subject to any conscious overall social regulation. This ‘same division of labour that turns [people] into private producers', he argues, also frees the social process of production . . . from all dependence on the wills of those producers.’ Hence, their relations to each other . .. assume a material character independent of their control and conscious individual action.’ What ensues is ‘a whole network of social relations spontaneous in their growth and entirely beyond the control of the actors' (1867a: 108, 92-3, 112). This is epitomized in Adam Smith's hidden hand' of the market, governing the movements and prices of commodities apparently by laws entirely of its own. Indeed under capitalist conditions this appearance of autonomy on the part of market forces' is real, for it is only in the form of relative prices of goods that the social relations between independent producers are actually expressed, and only through the price-mechanism that equilibriation of inputs and outputs of labour between different branches of production is regulated.

The Grundrisse summarizes this key dimension of the sociology of capitalism:

As much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. Circulation, because a totality of the social process, is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself. The social relation of individuals to one another as a power over the individuals which has become autonomous, whether conceived as a natural force, as chance or in whatever other form, is a necessary result of the fact that the point of departure is not the free social individual. (1858a: 196-7)

The Hegelian language of this passage prompts one final observation. In this respect, at least, Marx's analysis of the 'bewitching phenomenology of capitalism was remarkably consistent over time. In the early writings he was more inclined to use the concept of alienation than that of fetishism, though the former figures in his later works to a far greater extent than some commentators have acknowledged (and the latter, which comes from Feuerbach, is by no means entirely absent from the young Marx'). But the heart of the analysis – that, within capitalism, people's social relations take on the ‘alien' form of objects, and are accordingly fetishized in their consciousness - remains the same. So does the explanation of this fetishism as being consequent upon a particular social form of division of labour. This was, in short, an enduring and central theme of Marx's historical sociology.

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VII

Many commentators have recognized the importance of the concept of fetishism in Marx's writings. Indeed Cohen himself offers an account of fetishism which is in many ways outstanding.18 The relevance of Marx's critique of fetishism to what we understand by productive forces, however, has received much less attention. Fortunately, Marx himself provides explicit criticism of fetishized views of productive forces - their identification with the material objects in which they are embodied - and he does so throughout his work. In The German Ideology, for instance, he argues that under capitalist conditions:

The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals .. . not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they cannot thus control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of their will, nay even being the prime governor of these. (1846a: 46)

It is not without irony that although Cohen quotes this passage, it could have been written as an exact critique of his own formulation of Marx's so-called 'development thesis'. Both the independence of material’ productive forces from social relations, their character as things', and their supposedly inherent tendency to develop, such development being the prime governor’ of history, emerge as precisely forms of appearance, arising out of specifically capitalist production relations.

We might note in passing the (important) converse that for Marx neither such development, nor its apparent spontaneity, were in fact universal. Closely following Hegel, he characterized the Asiatic' mode of production, for instance, in terms of its 'millenial stagnation'. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history' (1853b: 217); life there is undignified, stagnant and vegetative' (1853a: 132). 'English interference' alone produced 'the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia' (ibid.: 131). This stasis is explained by the peculiar social relations of the self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form' (1867a: 358), which provide the economic foundation of 'Oriental despotism'.19 Again, the empirical validity of this picture of Asiatic society – a picture whose roots in European (and Eurocentric) thought have been admirably traced by Krader (1975) – is more than dubious. But the illustration none the less suffices to clarify Marx's position.

Another passage from The German Ideology is equally clear on the fetishism entailed in identifying productive forces with their material embodiments, and says more about the specific sociàl relations - the form of division of labour characteristic of generalized commodity production, one very different from that which prevails in Marx's portrayal of Indian communities (see 1867a: 257-9) - which grounds this reification. In capitalism, Marx writes:

the productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals; the reason for this is that the individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are only real forces in the intercourse and association of these individuals. Thus .. . we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property. (1846a: 83-4, emphasis added)

Marx goes on to argue that ‘the history of the evolving forces' is in reality therefore, the history of the development of the forces of the individuals themselves' (ibid.: 90). The Grundrisse similarly describes forces of production and social relations' as but two different sides of the development of the social individual' (1858a: 706).

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I do not believe we can plausibly interpret ‘forces of individuals' in such passages as these to refer simply to the things individuals own – means of production and labour-power - as Cohen's reading would oblige us to. Marx is not speaking here of an external relation of ownership, by people of things (or their own and other people's labouring capacities). On the contrary, when he says a force of production is a force of individuals he clearly intends that force' be understood as a power, an attribute, a characteristic, of those individuals in association - of social individuals - albeit a power which may frequently be materialized in things. The relation is internal.

Marx argues similarly in his later writings. The Grundrisse is insistent that labour is the productive force which maintains and multiplies capital, and which thereby becomes the productive force ... of capital, a force belonging to capital itself (1858a: 274). Importantly, Marx makes clear that by 'labour' here he does not mean labour-power, the commodity which the worker sells the capitalist; the productive force is labour as value-positing activity, as productive labour'(ibid., emphasis added). This distinction between labour-power and labour is not a casual one; it is fundamental to Marx's analysis of capitalism as a whole, and basic, amongst other things, to his mature theory of surplus-value. Cohen, acknowledging the distinction, perversely insists (1978: 43-4) that it is labour-power and not labouring activity which is the productive force. One can see whv, Labour-power can be conceived as athing used in production', as Cohen's theory requires, in a way that labour-as-activity on his own admission cannot. Marx's insistence on the contrary, on the other hand, serves only to underline the gulf between his concept and Cohen's.

Later in the same work Marx argues that all the progress of civilization, or in other words every increase in the powers of social production [gesellschaftliche Produktivkräfte], if you like, in the productive powers of labour itself . . . increases only the productive power of capital ... The productivity of labour becomes the productive force of capital' (ibid.: 308; cf. 715). In an interesting and subtle elaboration of the argument, Marx goes on to say that those who see here a simple ‘displacement' of the productive power of labour to capital, or argue that only labour - as distinct from capital - is productive, only partially escape from the fetish. For they forget that capital' precisely is a social relation, the essence of which is that it subsumes labour and entails the necessary positing of its own powers as alien to the worker'. Such theorists – Marx has in mind Ricardo – do not conceive capital in its specific character as form, as a relation of production reflected into itself, but think only about its material substance, raw material, etc. But these material elements do not make capital into capital’ (ibid.: 308–9). Capital is indeed a productive force, in fine, but it is so by virtue not simply of its ‘material substance', but equally through its particular subsumption or inclusion within itself of labouring activity. It is a productive force, in other words, precisely in its character as a production relation.

One final quotation will suffice to round off the argument. It is taken from Theories of Surplus Value, a text intended by Marx as the fourth volume of Capital, which'dates from the early 1860s. The parallels between fetishism of productive forces and commodity fetishism are here made absolutely explicit:

Since living labour – through the exchange between capital and labourer – is incorporated in capital, and appears as an activity belonging to capital from the moment that the labour-process begins, all the productive powers of social labour appear as the productive powers of capital, just as the general social form of labour appears in money as the property of a thing. Thus the productive power of social labour and its special forms now appear as productive powers and forms of capital, of materialized labour, of the material conditions of labour - which, having assumed this independent form, are personified by the capitalist in relation to living labour. Here we have once more the perversion of the relationship, which we have already, in dealing with money, called fetishism. (1863a: 389)

Marx could scarcely be plainer. The traditional' conception of productive forces defended by Cohen, I submit, splendidly exemplifies this perversion of the relationship'. It illustrates both features of fetishism discussed above: materialization of the social, and consequent universalization of the historical. This conception certainly takes productive forces to be not the productive powers of social labour', but productive powers ... of the material conditions of labour'. Cohen defines productive forcs in terms of the latter, as labouring capacity and means of production, and moreover takes pains to insist that these are material as distinct, quite specifically, from social forces. He then generalizes this concept of productive forces to all modes of production. A misleading and specifically capitalist appearance - for Marx - thereby gets transmuted into a general theoretical postulate, in ways exactly parallel to those Marx himself criticized in his economic predecessors.

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