The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism

The consequences are serious. Not only does this mystify the productive forces of capitalism itself, at least as Marx conceived them, in ways evidently conducive to capitalist apologetics. Once capital is perceived as a thing, whose contribution to social productivity is independent of that of labour, profit can be understood as its equally independent and thoroughly deserved reward (see Sayer, 1983: ch. 3). The fetishizing of Marx's concept also denies us access to what actually were the productive forces of previous epochs, if by that we understand those things (and ideas, and relations) which actually did enhance the productivity of labour, and thereby give humanity a history which is, despite everything, meaningfully a progress. Marx numbers here such phenomena as 'the power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, Etruscan theocrats, &c.' in relation to the colossal effects of simple co-operation’ evident in such gigantic structures' as the pyramids (1867a: 333-4; see also the Iong quote there from Richard Jones).

But, as a famous passage in Capital remarks – à propos commodity fetishism, but the point applies equally to other fetishes as well:

Man's reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities ... have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning . . . The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, as soon as we come to other forms of production. (1867a: 75–6)

It seems that ‘traditional historical materialism' has yet to learn this lesson, and is no more immune than bourgeois economics to the fetishistic seduction of ‘natural, self-understood forms of social life' (1867a: 75), in which, for Marx, our social forms of consciousness are embedded. One might say of the traditional conception of productive forces, as Marx himself said of political economists' notions of value, that these formulae ... bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him' (1867a: 81). One might also take seriously, sixth and lastly perhaps, his cautionary invocation of Shakespeare's Dogberry, for whom ‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by nature' (Much Ado About Nothing, III. iii, as quoted in Marx, ibid.).

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Relations of production

If productive forces are not the things they are so often taken to be, then definitions of production relations, and hence Marx's economic structure of society', in terms of ownership of these forces are clearly in some jeopardy. But there is far more to be said about the concepts of production relations and economic structure than this. We may begin with a common criticism of historical materialism, to which I briefly alluded in chapter 1. In the 1859 Preface, as we know, Marx says that property relations are but a legal expression for' relations of production, and his writings frequently assimilate the two terms. H. B. Acton, amongst others, has argued that this renders Marxism incoherent. It amounts, he says, to defining production relations - the alleged ‘economic base' of society - by legal forms which belong in the very ‘superstructure' which that base, within historical materialist theory, is supposed to determine. The theory is thus viciously circular. Acton goes on to argue, more generally, that ‘the "material or economic basis of society" is not . . . something that can be clearly conceived, still less observed, apart from the legal, moral and political relationships of men' (quoted Cohen, 1978: 235).

This charge is obviously a serious one for any Marxism which wishes to retain a standard base/superstructure model, and it has not gone unchallenged. Cohen, in particular, has replied at length. On the face of it, he has little trouble in disposing of Acton's argument. He simply develops a general 'rechtsfrei’ definition of ‘ownership’ in terms of real powers over, as distinct from legal rights in, the objects owned - productive forces, as he conceives them. Other Marxists, like Balibar (in Althusser, 1970: 226 ff.), take a similar tack. Within such views, Marx's production relations' are ownership relations in some distinctively non-juridical sense. Legally formalized property relations can then coherently be conceived as both distinct from and expressive of production relations thus defined, exactly as the 1859 Preface seems to require. This resolves Acton's problem of the independent conceivability of economic structure and superstructure. Cohen further argues, not unreasonably, that the fact that economic variables may not be empirically observable independently of the non-economic variables they are held to determine does not of itself invalidate the claim of determination. Such situations, he maintains, are commonplace in any developed science.

Cohen's solution is a nice, and characteristically elegant, piece of philosophical reasoning. But whether it satisfactorily resolves the substantial problem which lies at the heart of Acton's comments is another issue. Consider, by way of example, the following satirical observation of E. P. Thompson's on the supposed 'relative autonomy' of law. His ire is directed at Althusser's structural Marxism' rather than Cohen's, but the point is pertinent none the less:

I have, as it happens, been interested in this myself, in my historical practice: not, of course, in any grand way – for the whole of history, nor for the capitalist mode of production everywhere, but in a very petty conjuncture: in an island on the edge of the Atlantic, very well supplied with lawyers, at a moment in the eighteenth century. So my evidence is highly marginal, as well as being seriously contaminated by empirical content. But what I discovered there would make La Structure à Dominante boggle. For I found that law did not keep politely to a ‘level' but was at every bloody level; it was imbricated within the mode of production and production relations themselves (as property-rights, definitions of agrarian practice) and it was simultaneously present in the philosophy of Locke; it intruded brusquely within alien categories, re-appearing bewigged and gowned in the guise of ideology; it danced a cotillion with religion, moralising over the theatre at Tyburn; it was an arm of politics and politics was one of its arms; it was an academic discipline, subjected to the rigours of its own autonomous logic; it contributed to the definition of the self-identity both of rulers and ruled; above all, it afforded an arena for class struggle, within which alternative notions of law were fought out. (1978a: 288).

'La Structure à Dominante’ is Althusser's structural causality' model, referred to above (p. 9). He, like Cohen - and many other Marxists – supposes the separability of the economic' from other levels of social structure. It is this separation Thompson rejects, going on to ridicule the very notion of “"levels"motoring around history at different speeds and on different schedules' as ‘an academic fiction' (ibid.: 289). I could have cited other Marxist historians like Christopher Hill on Coke's Institutes, or Rodney Hilton on jurisdiction in feudal Europe,² to similar effect.

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3

Cohen's rebuttal of Acton is, significantly, carried out entirely within theory, at the level of a general, transhistorical concept of property. It is undoubtedly successful, as a piece of philosophical argument. To develop a rechtsfrei definition of property raises no particular difficulties of a theoretical sort. But what the passage from Thompson scathingly brings out is that so soon as we try to apply such a definition, and specify, historically, what real power over objects – property, as Cohen conceives it - empirically consists in, then those things excluded from its general rechtsfrei definition tend ineluctably to creep back in.

For we rapidly discover that power over objects' (including, here, people's labouring capacities) only exists, empirically, in forms which include things which according to the standard dogma ought to belong in the supposed superstructure'. In eighteenth-century England, for instance, we may not be able to say, in any empirically meaningful way, what property' or production relations were, without talking about game laws, the bloody code', Parliamentary Acts of enclosure, strict settlement and entail, magistrates' regulation of hours of work and rates of pay, Combination Acts, the theatrical rituals of the assizes, or laws prohibiting the shearing of sheep within five miles of the coast. Historical inquiry shows what Adam Smith called 'the orderly oppression of the law'(quoted D. Winch, 1978: 88-9) to be an integral part of - internal to, constitutive of - the complex web of social relationships we summate as property' in this particular time and place, not a ‘relatively autonomous instance' at all.

In the real world, then, power' over objects turns out to be neither the abstraction, nor the simple relationship, of Cohen's impeccably rechtsfrei definition. It exists only in a multiplicity of often rechtsvoll empirical forms, to whose analysis, if Thompson is correct, a categorial framework built on prior and exclusive definitions of supposed social 'levels' is remarkably ill-suited. In certain cases, like England in the eighteenth century, law will emerge as inextricably imbricated within - indeed constitutive of - any property relations we might want to consider relations of production, part of the same nexus of relationship' (Thompson, 1965: 84). So too might other supposedly superstructural instances', like moral codes, political institutions, or ‘forms of social consciousness'(all of which are fairly evidently entailed in Smith's ‘orderly oppression’). In which case, to seek to expunge these from the concept of property or production relations a priori, for the sake of theoretical coherence or elegance, would seem to be a gross artificiality which does considerable violence to the very facts Marx's concepts are meant to help us understand: a species of what he himself castigated as ‘violent abstraction'(see Sayer, 1983: 121-2).

II

Cohen, however, tells us that he does not need to be advised that history is “always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and subtle"" than any theory will represent it as being (1978: ix, quoting Lenin). Balibar's concern is likewise with outlining only what he calls the pertinent differences' on whose basis the abstract concepts of modes of production can be theoretically developed (in Althusser, 1970: 209 ff.). Either would therefore presumably dismiss the foregoing line of argument as beside the point: a reminder, perhaps, of the real complexity of history, but not something which should be allowed to affect the basic formulation of Marx's theoretical concepts as such. To forestall this objection, a short philosophical aside is in order. For I do not cite Thompson here simply to counterpose the real complexity of history against the arrant simplicities of theory, worthwhile and necessary as that enterprise sometimes is.

I want rather to make a theoretical point concerning the character of general concepts like property and their relation to empirical particulars of the sort invoked by Thompson. This follows on the argument I developed in section II of the last chapter, and relates to the difference between Marx's transhistorical and historical categories. Only if this difference is ignored, I shall argue, can Thompson's - or indeed Acton's - arguments be dismissed as a merely empiricist' quibble which is irrelevant to considerations of high theory, and the relation between abstract theory and concrete fact be construed in the way it is by Cohen or Balibar. The empiricism, in fact, is if anything theirs, and resides in the tacit assumption - one shared by positivist philosophies of science generally - that fact and theory are wholly separate domains of discourse.³

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In The Holy Family there is a celebrated discussion of some of the more absurd practices of idealist philosophy. One of these is the fallacy of reification, or misplaced concreteness: mistaking abstract concepts for real entities. Marx⁴ dubs this the mystery of speculative construction'. By way of illustration, he satirizes philosophers – his specific target here being the Young Hegelians – as taking the general concept ‘fruit' to refer to some real essence of fruitiness which is distinct from the empirical forms in which fruit alone exists – apples, pears, and so on (1844b: 57 ff.). Wittgenstein was later similarly to chide those who imagined that beauty was a real essence inhering in and defining all beautiful objects. Nobody, we might think, would be so silly.

But like fruit, or beauty, property’ too – at least as Marx conceived it - does not exist except in particular, empirical forms. As with production, it has no existence as a generality. We might indeed be able to abstract from these particulars conceptually, in order to construct a general notion of property. But such an abstraction - rechtsfrei or otherwise – does not refer to some real essence of property independent of its empirical forms, any more than the generic 'fruit' refers to anything other than real apples and pears. In more technical terms, generic concepts refer to what defines classes of phenomena, not, or at any rate not directly, to any empirical particulars - real objects - as such at all. And as Wittgenstein, again, argues, what makes phenomena members of the same class may be something as loose as ‘family resemblances' rather than an unvarying list of empirical characteristics which they all necessarily have in common.

Now such class concepts, precisely because they are generic categories, are not, in themselves, complete descriptions of any of the individual phenomena which can be subsumed under them. Indeed – and crucially – they do not even adequately comprehend the essential features of those phenomena, if by that we mean those features which make such phenomena what they individually are, and are thus essential to their definition. They only designate those aspects of a given set of phenomena which make them members of the relevant class, the resemblances by virtue of which they can be conceived as members of the same family. What defines phenomena in their individual particularity - in other words, in their real existence - is precisely those features they do not share with other members of the class to which they belong, and are therefore not contained in their class concept. We have not, for instance, adequately defined a lemon, in any empirical sense, when we say it is a fruit. Part of any adequate empirical description of a lemon would include, for example, its colour. But yellowness is not a characteristic of fruits as such or in general, and cannot be derived from the general concept of fruitiness. Yellowness is, however, essential to what makes a lemon a lemon, and is thus part of its concept.

Similar arguments apply to property. Certainly we may choose to define the class property', in general and abstractly, in ways which exclude ‘superstructural’ terms. There may even be a point in doing so, in so far as such a definition enables us to classify certain legal and non-legal forms of relationship as kindred phenomena, which we certainly could not do if we included legal criteria in property's general concept. Thus far we may go along with Cohen against Acton. To do so is also consistent with Marx, who undoubtedly did take pains to insist that relations which were substantially property relations could exist without being legally expressed as such, as in passages like this:

With [Wagner] there is, first, the law, and then commerce; in reality it's the other way round: at first there is commerce, and then a legal order develops out of it. In the analysis of the circulation of commodities [in Capital] I have demonstrated that in a developed trade the exchangers tacitly recognise each other as equal persons and owners of the goods to be exchanged respectively by them; they do this while they offer the goods to one another and agree to trade with one another. This practical relation, arising through and in exchange itself, only later attains a legal form in contracts etc.; but this form produces neither its content, the exchange, nor the relationship, existing in it, of persons to one another, but vice versa. (1880a: 210)

If our generic concept of property includes legal terms, the practical relation’ Marx recognizes here as a property relation could not be acknowledged as such, which would be plainly contrary to his intent.

But we should not then confuse such a general definition of property with its substantial reality, or take our generic concept adequately or immediately to designate real empirical objects. Nor, in particular, can we infer that what our concept excludes as a general characteristic of the class property' can a fortiori be excluded from the concepts of the individual members of that class, property's particular forms - the only forms in which it empirically exists. To do so would be exactly like denying that yellowness is an essential characteristic of lemons, because it is not a feature of the generality fruit' – an evident non sequitur.

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What my quote from Edward Thompson suggested, on empirical grounds, was that precisely as we move from the general concept of the class property’ to the concepts of its members – as soon as, in other words, we try to specify empirically those historical forms of property which are Marx's particular concern – we cannot any longer always exclude superstructural' terms. Like the yellowness of the lemon, they might be essential, and hence defining features of the property relations empirically at issue. At first sight, this appeared simply as an ill-bred empiricist' counter to Cohen's or Balibar's attempts rigorously to demarcate economic and legal at the level of a general theory. But it is in fact testimony to a lapse in their own logic. Even had Thompson not been burying his head in the archives, we would have had no licence to exclude law – or anything else – a priori from counting, should the evidence warrant it, as internal to a given property form.

For recognition of the internality of 'superstructural' relations to a given empirical form of property in no way conflicts with adherence to a rechtsfrei definition of the concept of property in general. No general concept of property can or ever could be exhaustive of the empirical characteristics which define property's particular forms. It is impossible, in logic, to infer the concepts of members of a class, their differentia specifica, from the concept of the class itself. But for exactly the same reason, rechtsvoll specifications of these forms cannot be ruled out by virtue of the general rechtsfrei definition alone either. Cohen can only evade this conclusion by implicitly reifying his general concept of property - taking it as immediately specifying an empirical particular. He treats rechtsfrei property as if it were an entity in itself, a substance really distinct from the legal and other forms in which property empirically exists, rather than – like fruit' - a mere class concept, specifying some characteristics (or family resemblances) real empirical forms of property have. A predicate, to use Marx's own vocabulary, is thus surreptitiously transformed into an independent subject.

If we refuse the reification, however, and properly distinguish the general concept of property – however defined – from the concepts of its particular forms, Acton's contention may still make eminent sense, when applied to the latter. Cohen's refutation of Acton rests on his tacit, and wholly illicit, conflation of these distinct levels of conceptualization: transhistorical and historical, to employ my earlier terminology. But one cannot argue thus from the general to the particular. Certainly we may, if we choose, define property in general in rechtsfrei terms. There are some obvious advantages to doing so. But in any given empirical instance the economic structure of society' may still turn out to be neither conceivable, nor observable, ‘apart from the legal, moral and political relationships of men'. The burden of this chapter is to show that Marx never for a moment thought otherwise, and his concepts of production relations and economic structure must be comprehended accordingly.

Similar arguments, we might note, apply to another of Cohen's attempted restrictions on the category of production relations, his exclusion from Marx's economic structure' of so-called work relations' - relations of production which Cohen terms material’ as distinct from social’ relations between producers. 'Work relations' include the forms of co-operation in the labour process, and division of labour in the workshop',6 discussed (also) as productive forces in the last chapter. By a specifically social relation between producers, Cohen means one which entails an ascription to persons - specified or unspecified – of rights or powers vis-à-vis other men' (1978: 94). This is another way of delineating his ownership relations. Not all relations between people in production are of this kind, and only those which are, in his view, enter Marx's economic structure’.

The foundation of this distinction between social and material relations of production is Cohen's perfectly correct observation that Marx himself systematically distinguishes between material and social properties of the phenomena he analyses. We saw this, and its relevance to Marx's theory of fetishism, in the last chapter. But Cohen commits a similar reification here as he does with property. For the point is that in Marx, the relevant distinction lies between material and social attributes - properties, qualities, characteristics, features - of productive phenomena, not between different kinds of phenomena in production as such. These too are in other words class concepts. Use as raw materials or instruments in the labour process, for instance, is a material characteristic which defines the class means of production, while embodying value and commanding surplusvalue are social characteristics which define the class capital. But the empirical form, constant capital, exists only as a phenomenon which conjoins both these sets of attributes. Accordingly, as argued above for class or attribute concepts generally, no purely material’ description (or, come to that, no purely social description) can be a complete empirical account of any real entity in this realm of analysis. We have not sufficiently described constant capital when we enumerate its material characteristics qua means of production. This is to refer only ‘to the simple matter of capital, without regard to the formal character without which it is not capital' (1858a: 267). Remember the lemon again. Conversely, means of production only ever exist in some social form or another, just as there is no fruit that is not an apple, a pear, and so on.

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Cohen is aware of this; it is basic to his own account of fetishism. What he apparently fails to realize, however, is that this totally invalidates his attempted work relations/social relations contrast. If material’ and social’ in Marx refer to attributes of phenomena, not phenomena as such, we cannot use his distinction to differentiate two different kinds of production relation, material and social. Nor, therefore, can we on these grounds expungework relations' from the ‘economic structure of society'. These supposedly separate 'material relations’ are but social relations of production regarded – abstractly - from their ‘material side'. Marx's distinction lies between the material and social dimensions of one and the same set of activities – activities, we might recall, which he explicitly conceives from the start as 'double', simultaneously material and social - not between substantial kinds of relations as such.7

III

Having, I hope, cleared some ground, let us now turn more directly to Marx. I have already quoted The Poverty of Philosophy on the impossibility of defining property as an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea' (above, p. 21). Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality’, a text dating from the same year, agrees: private property, for instance, is not a simple relation or even an abstract concept, but consists in the totality of the bourgeois relations of production'(1847c: 337). In both cases Marx defines property in terms of production relations, rather than the other way about. The production relations in question are always historically specific – the relations of a given mode of production – and property therefore emphatically a historical category. Marx's approach here contrasts sharply with Cohen's or Balibar's, both of whom, as we have seen, seek to ground the concept of production relations on a transhistorical, albeit rechtsfrei, concept of property.

Indeed property, as Marx uses the term in these texts, far from being susceptible to independent definition, is in fact synonymous with the ‘economic structure of society' as delineated in the 1859 Preface. Moralising criticism' says that property consists of 'the totality of ... relations of production', which is exactly the Preface's description of the economic structure'. We might, for a change, take quite literally the Preface's claim that property and production relations are but different expressions for the same thing'. As usual, however, Marx offers no general definition, of a substantive kind, of what these production relations, whether construed as property' or economic structure', actually are. But given the apparent synonymity of the referents of these terms, exploration of what he had to say, in various historical contexts, about particular forms of property might take us some way forward in the search for what he understood by an economic structure’.

We may begin with some critical remarks on Hegel in Capital III. Hegel, according to Marx, seeks to explain private property in land from the (transhistorical) premise that ‘man as an individual must endow his will with reality as the soul of external nature, and must therefore take possession of this nature and make it his private property'. For Marx this will to possession is comical':

Free private ownership of land, a very recent product, is according to Hegel, not a definite social relation, but a relation of man as an individual to 'Nature', an absolute right of man to appropriate all things ... [Hegel] makes the blunder at the outset of regarding as absolute a very definite legal view of landed property – belonging to bourgeois society. (1865a: 615-16n)

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Basic to Marx's argument here is the idea that property is a social relation, not – or at least not primarily, but only consequentially – a relation of individuals to things. He says the same thing in Grundrisse, drawing a linguistic parallel we have encountered previously in his discussion of production. Language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property' (1858a: 490). Possession, Hegel's starting-point, is indeed ‘the subject's simplest juridical relation', but ‘there is no possession preceding the family or master-servant relations'; the concrete substratum [like family or master-servant relations] of which possession is a relation is always presupposed' (1857: 102, my interpolation). The appearance of property as an unmediated relation of possession between individual owners and the things they own is an illusion arising out of the phenomenal form property takes within specifically capitalist relations. It is an historical product.

In previous forms of society, neither individuals as owners, nor their property, had their modern exclusivity or simplicity. Property did not even appear as a simple relation of person and thing. Who owned what, or even what it meant to be an owner, were by no means clear-cut; the very terms at issue are anachronistic. This is well brought out in the historian Marc Bloch's discussion of the inapplicability of modern concepts of property to medieval Europe. There, he points out:

the word ownership, as applied to landed property, would have been almost meaningless . . . The tenant who – from father to son, as a rule, ploughs the land and gathers in the crop; his immediate lord, to whom he pays dues, and who, in certain circumstances, can resume possession of the land; the lord of the lord, and so on, right up the feudal scale – how many persons are there who can say, each with as much justification as the other, That is my field!’. Even this is an understatement. For the ramifications extended horizontally as well as vertically and account should be taken of the village community, which normally recovered the use of the whole of its agricultural land as soon as it was cleared of crops; of the tenant's family, without whose consent the property could not be alienated; and of the families of the successive lords. (1967:115-16)

Marx himself argues that landed property receives its purely economic form' - i.e. its modern capitalist form, of a relationship of exclusive, individual possession, wrongly theorized as an eternal idea' by Hegel – only 'by discarding all its former political and social embellishments and associations'(1865a:618), to become divorced from ‘relations of dominion and servitude' (ibid.: 617). Only then can property appear as a simple relation of possession between individuals and objects. As any reader of Capital I (or anyone with any familiarity with modern history) will know, the making of this purely economic form' of property was a protracted, bitter, and often bloody struggle – one Marx first encountered, incidentally, as early as 1842, with the transformation, in the Rhineland, of erstwhile common rights to gather wood into a crime (1842; cf. 1859a). We will see later that the independent ‘natural individual' who appears to Hegel as the self-evident possessing subject is equally a modern phenomenon.

One might perhaps maintain that the complexity to which Bloch points can be analytically encompassed within some notion of degrees of control of persons over things. Cohen's argument moves in this direction, when he seeks to define the serf as a part-owner of both means of production and labour-power (1978: 65). It is questionable whether such a merely quantitative index of control is sufficiently subtle to allow us to differentiate the qualitative variety of forms which anything we might want to call property has taken historically. But this is, I would suggest, in any case to miss the main thrust of Marx's argument. For what he does is precisely to shift the focus of the concept of property away from relations between people and. things - from ostensibly simple possession - to the social relations between people which make such appearances possible in the first place. In the process - just as with the fetishized conceptions of productive forces considered in the last chapter - Marx criticizes everyday ideas of property, of the sort systematized by Hegel, as an ideological expression of specifically capitalist conditions, whose extension elsewhere is profoundly anachronistic.

These points are reinforced when we turn to Marx's (extensive) discussions of property in his early writings. Thus in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 he writes, for instance, that:

Private property is . . . the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself . . . True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) in political economy. But analysis of this concept shows that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence ... Later this relationship becomes reciprocal .. . estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. (1844a: 279-80)

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Marx goes on to say that the character of private property is expressed by labour, capital, and the relations between these two' (ibid.: 289; cf. 1845a: 278). This strikingly anticipates later and more famous formulations, like Capital's observation that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons established by the instrumentality of things'(1867a: 776). The overall argument of the 1844 Manuscripts on private property is succinctly captured in two sentences: 'material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life’ (1844a: 297). Conversely, ‘only when labour is grasped as the essence of private property, can the economic process as such be analysed in its real concreteness' (ibid.: 317).

In The German Ideology Marx concretizes this analysis somewhat but without losing its essentials. He argues there that different forms [of society] are just so many forms of the organisation of labour, and hence of property' (1846a: 78). Specifically, 'division of labour and private property are ... identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity' (ibid.: 44). For,

the various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e., the existing stage of the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument and product of labour. (ibid.: 33)

Marx elaborates:

with the division of labour . . . is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property; the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wives and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent siavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. (ibid.)

The equation of property with 'power of disposing of the labourpower of others' is one Marx employs repeatedly in texts of this period. That power, in more developed modes of production like capitalism, is certainly materialized in (and effected in part through)

ownership of physical means of production. But it is worth underlining the fact that this is not the case with the family, whose relations Marx none the less claims here to be property relations. Power over people's labour-power derives in this instance from direct, personal, patriarchal relations between individuals themselves. Modern Marxist anthropologists, not to mention feminist writers, concur with this insight.8

IV

I want now to consider exactly what relations between people would, for Marx, qualify as property or production relations. I shall show, from his own texts, that he indeed did (where historically relevant) include within this category relations which are, for traditional historical materialism, eminently superstructural'. The economic structure of society' was therefore for him a very different – and a very much broader - totality of social relations than is normally recognized. The examples I shall consider are drawn from Grundrisse and Capital, both undeniably mature' works. They are therefore not open to the sort of objections Althusserians might raise to my use of the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology immediately above. They are, however, perfectly consistent with these early texts. Since both my examples concern the economic structure’ in non-capitalist societies, they also have the additional merit of suggesting, if only by way of contrast, the rootedness of conventional, narrow definitions of the economic sphere' in specifically capitalist forms of appearance.

The section of the Grundrisse entitled Forms which precede capitalist production' is a long, and largely self-contained disquisition on various historical forms of communal property and production, their gradual disintegration, and the eventual freeing' of the elements of capitalist production. Such communal forms were to remain an abiding interest for Marx, increasingly so in his later years. A large part of his copious, and still largely unpublished, notes and manuscripts of the 1870s and 1880s are given over to this theme (1879a, b; Shanin, 1984). In Grundrisse, he distinguishes three main communal types: primitive, ancient and Germanic. All have variants. I am not concerned here with the historical or anthropological accuracy of Marx's characterization of these forms of society, which by modern standards undoubtedly leaves a lot to be desired (Godelier, 1973: part II, discusses this), nor with how his views on the character and development of communal property might have altered in later writings. I invoke these analyses simply to illustrate how he used his concepts.

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Marx's first form of landed property' (1858a: 472-4), the primitive commune, is characteristic of initially pastoral, nomadic societies. Here individuals relate to land as property of the community, of the community producing and reproducing itself in living labour'. They are proprietors of the land in so far as, and only in so far as, they are members of the community. Indeed, Marx says, strictly speaking individuals as such are here merely possessors of the soil, for land is the property of the community as a whole (ibid.: 476). Marx is clear that the initial, naturally arisen spontaneous community'- which is the 'family, and the family extended as a clan' - ‘appears as first presupposition' for this form of property:

the clan community, the natural community, appears not as a result of, but as a presupposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the land. When they finally do settle down, the extent to which this original community is modified will depend upon various external, climactic, geographic, physical etc. conditions as well as on their particular natural predisposition – their clan character. This naturally arisen clan community, or, if one will, pastoral society, is the first presupposition – the communality of blood, language, customs – for the appropriation of the objective conditions of their life, and of their life's reproducing and objectifying activity (activity as herdsmen, hunters, tillers, etc.) ... The real appropriation through the labour process happens under these presuppositions, which are not themselves the product of labour, but appear as its natural or divine presuppositions. (ibid.:472)

Here, then, particular social relations - specifically, familial relations, extended into the clan community' – are presupposed to appropriation through the labour process, and integral to these relations are communality of blood, language, customs'. These latter are of course 'superstructural' phenomena par excellence for most adherents to base/superstructure models, and things which belong neither in the economic structure' nor the superstructure (and thus lie outside the scope of historical materialist theory altogether) for Cohen.

The so-called Asiatic form' of property (ibid.: 472-4) is a variant of this primitive form, though, Marx says, it at first sight appears not to be because of the individual's apparent propertylessness. Here:

the comprehensive unity standing above all these little communities appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor; the real communities hence {exist] only as hereditary possessors. Because the unity is the real proprietor and the real presupposition of communal property, it follows that this unity can appear as a particular entity above the many real particular communities. (ibid.: 473)

Marx's language here is dense. But he appears to be saying that in the Asiatic form, the unity' formed in the co-operation of several communities becomes a presupposition of communal property', in exactly the same way as within any single community the existence of the commune itself is such a presupposition. He instances water control as an important form of inter-commune co-operation. Clearly where artificial irrigation is a condition of production, and it requires intercommunal co-operation, such co-operation also becomes a condition of production, and hence of property. Karl Wittfogel (1957) was to develop this line of argument (and apply it to the modern USSR), though in ways uncongenial to most Marxists; modern bureaucratic collectivist’ theorists reason similarly, drawing on Marx's analyses of the Asiatic mode of production, vis-à-vis the ‘socialist' state in modern planned economies (Melotti, 1977).

In such cases, this trans-communal ‘unity' may be personified in the form of a despot'; property appears mediated for [the individual] through a cession [sic] by the total unity – a unity realized in the form of the despot, the father of many communities - to the individual, through the mediation of the particular commune' (1858a: 473). Such a personification of social relationships is analogous to fetishism in the capitalist mode of production (though Marx himself does not draw the explicit parallel here). Surplus then goes to the personification of this ‘unity' - oriental potentate, clan patriarch, state, or whatever. Marx sees varieties of this Asiatic’form of society as being very widespread, embracing Mexico, Peru and early Celts, as well as India. He also suggests that among Slavs this may have been the origin of villeinage. What is of interest for the present argument, however, is that once again relations internal to a given mode of production and property form embrace evidently superstructural’ phenomena: quasi-political relations (of a tributary sort) and, in so far as a specific mystification of the ‘unity' is involved, ideology too. Marx writes, for instance, of common labour for the exaltation of the unity, partly of the real despot, partly of the imagined clan-being, the god' (ibid.).

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Marx's second form of landed property, the ancient (ibid.: 474–6) ‘also assumes the community as its first presupposition’(ibid.: 474). The ancient Greek or Roman community, however, differs from the primitive or Asiatic archetype in several respects. Its basis is urban rather than rural: the cultivated field here appears as a territorium belonging to the town'. We also see here the beginnings of private property: communal property - as state property, ager publicus - [is] here separate from private property. The property of the individual is here not, unlike in the first case, itself directly communal property'. The great problem, in ancient society, is no longer the conquest of nature, but maintenance of the territorium against other communes:

War is therefore the great comprehensive task, the great communal labour which is required either to occupy the objective conditions of being there alive, or to protect and perpetuate the occupation. Hence the commune consisting of families initially organised in a warlike way – as a system of war and army, and this is one of the conditions of its being there as proprietor. (ibid.: 474)

The ancient commune, then, unlike the primitive, consists of individual private peasant proprietors. But at the same time, the condition of their property remains their communal organisation, particularly for war. In this connection Marx offers some interesting parentheses on antiquity's view of agriculture as the sole proper occupation of a free man, the soldier's school', and the consequent exclusion of craftsmen from citizenship (ibid.: 477).

Importantly, however, the emergence here of private property does not obviate the communal character of the ancient form as a whole. Rather, membership in the commune remains the presupposition for the appropriation of land and soil, but, as a member of the commune, the individual is a private proprietor'; 'the commune ... is the presupposition of property in land and soil' still, ‘belonging [is] mediated by [the individual's] being a member of the state, by the being of the state' (ibid.). The individual is in other words only a private proprietor in so far as he remains a member of the commune.

The German Ideology similarly observes that in antiquity, the citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone ... are bound to the form of communal ownership' (1846a: 33). Certainly, the survival of the commune is the reproduction of all its members as self-sustaining peasants'. But equally, their ‘surplus time belongs precisely to the commune, the work of war etc.’. For:

The property in one's own labour is mediated by property in the condition of labour - the hide of land, guaranteed in its turn by the existence of the commune, and that in turn by surplus labour in the form of military service etc. by the commune members. It is not co-operation in wealth-producing labour [unlike in the primitive form] by means of which the commune member reproduces himself, but rather co-operation in labour for the communal interests (imaginary and real), for the upholding of the association outwardly and inwardly. Property is quiritorium [i.e. the property of the Romans or quirites], of the Roman variety; the private proprietor of land as such only as a Roman, but as a Roman he is a private proprietor of land. (1858a: 476, my interpolations)

Property here is therefore integrally bound up with citizenship; it is only as a civis that an individual can be a proprietor. In this instance, then, it is membership specifically of a polis - and participation in its military and other obligations – which Marx sees as presupposed to property and the material labour-processes in which it is realized. That polis is understood, moreover, as a variant of the clan system which also underpinned Marx's first communal form, the primitive. The ancient polis remains, in essence, an association of families grounded in the needs of war, even if the later Roman gens are not strict blood-kin.º Marx approvingly quotes Niebuhr to the effect that there was in the world of antiquity no more general institution than that of kin groups' (ibid.: 478).

Finally to Marx's third form of communal property, the ‘Germanic'. He sees this form as typical of the medieval period in Europe. It is in many ways a transitional form, representing a further development towards modern private property. Settlement here is sparse, and society predominantly rural rather than urban. The commune now exists only as a periodic gathering together of its members to pledge each other's allegiance in war, religion, adjudication etc.'(ibid.: 484). It thus ‘appears as a coming-together, not as a being-together; as a unification of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity. The commune does not therefore in fact exist as a state or political body, as in classical antiquity' (ibid.: 483). Marx still, however, considers that the unity-in-itself of commune members is none the less posited in their ancestry, language, common past and history, etc.' (ibid.); and he continues to insist that the commune ‘is presupposed in-itself prior to the individual proprietors as a communality of language, blood, etc.', even if it only becomes ‘a real assembly for communal purposes' (ibid.: 484-5).

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