The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism

There remains undivided communal land – for grazing, hunting and so on – but this does not take the separate form of state property, the ager publicus, as in antiquity. Rather, it is really the common property of the individual proprietors, not of the union of these proprietors endowed with an existence separate from themselves' (ibid.: 485). Individual property does not appear mediated by the commune; rather, the existence of the commune and of communal property appears as mediated by, i.e. as a relation of, the independent subjects to one another' (ibid.: 484). This characterizes the Germanic form more generally: the commune exists only in the interrelations between these individual landed proprietors as such' (ibid.).

Following these sketches, Marx draws some general conclusions. 'In all these forms', he writes, the relation to land and soil, to the earth, as the property of the labouring individual ... is instantly mediated by the naturally arisen, spontaneous, more or less historically developed and modified presence of the individual as member of a commune – his naturally arisen presence as member of a tribe etc. (ibid.: 485), Hence:

If the obiective conditions of his labour are presupposed as belonging to him, then he himself is subjectively presupposed as member of a commune, through which his relation to land and soil is mediated. (ibid.: 486)

Marx goes on explicitly to discuss what property' means in this context. He argues that, property . . . originally means no more than a human being's relation to his natural conditions of production as belonging to him, as his'. He then elaborates on the character of these ‘natural conditions' (making it clear, once again, that 'natural' and ‘social' were not for him by any means exclusive categories):

The forms of these natural conditions of production are double: (1) his existence as a member of a community; hence the existence of this community, which in its original form is a clan system, a more or less modified clan system; (2) the relation to land and soil mediated by the community. (ibid.: 491-2).

Hence, a natural condition of production for the living individual is his belonging to a naturally arisen, spontaneous society, clan etc. This is e.g. already a condition for his language, etc. His own productive existence is possible only on this condition' (ibid.). This of course powerfully echoes Marx's characterizations of production as always a 'double relationship' in the supposedly immature German Ideology. Marx concludes - and it is the only logical conclusion - that in these forms of society, 'Property, therefore, means belonging to a clan' (ibid., emphasis added).

Now I argued earlier that for Marx, property and production relations were substantially synonymous concepts. He says much the same here, for instance in this passage, three pages later:

The original unity between a particular form of community (clan) and the corresponding property in nature ... which appears in one respect as the particular form of property - has its living reality in a specific mode of production itself, a mode which appears both as a relation between the individuals, and as their specific active relation to inorganic nature, a specific mode of working (which is always family labour, often communal labour) . . . This relation as proprietor - not as a result but as a presupposition of labour, i.e. of production - presupposes the individual defined as a member of a clan or community (ibid.: 495)

If property means 'belonging to a clan', we must conclude that production relations, in all these forms of society, include all those relations by virtue of which individuals are clan or commune members. Not only do these include kinship relations. They embrace communality of blood, language, customs', and in the Germanic case a common historical experience or tradition. They extend to the entire polis of antiquity, membership of which made the civis into a Romanus. They encompass, in the Asiatic case, ideology. There is simply no way, for any of these pre-capitalist socio-economic formations, that we can even begin to exclude superstructural' terms from the very definition of ‘economic structures'. To do so would make nonsense of Marx's entire analysis. It would also render the societies at issue incomprehensible.

It will do no harm in passing here to move beyond Marx, to look, for a minute, at modern historical materialist anthropology. Meillassoux (1972; cf. his 1975) argues that ‘agricultural self-sustaining communities . . , rely less on the control of the means of material production than on the means of human reproduction: subsistence and women. Their end is reproduction of life as a precondition to production’. He uses this to explain why social power in the cases he examines tends to be distributed on the basis of age and gender, rather than property as traditionally conceived. Godelier goes still further, arguing of such societies that here relations of kinship serve as relations of production, and this from within’ (1978). Elsewhere he develops a similar case for the polis of ancient Athens (1984). On this basis he rejects any general distinction between basis and superstructure as "levels" of social reality, as distinctions within social reality which are in some sense substantive ... institutional divides in its substance' (1978). He maintains, as I do, that it is specifically capitalism which ‘for the first time separated economics, politics, religion, kinship, art, etc., as so many distinct institutions'. This is of course why restrictive conceptions of production relations, and the hard and fast base/superstructure distinctions they sustain, do have some phenomenal purchase in bourgeois society (and cease to as soon as we move beyond its historical boundaries). Such work is immensely valuable precisely because it is not founded in merely theoretical argument, and recognizes criteria of adequacy other than coherence alone. If Marxist anthropologists have been forced (as was Marx himself, a century earlier) to take a broad view of what comprises an economic structure', it is because the facts have resisted characterization otherwise.

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V

To return to the Grundrisse. A little later, Marx significantly extends the argument I have traced thus far, telling us that slavery and serfdom are . . . only further developments of the form of property resting on the clan system' (1858a: 493). The analysis of property developed here, then, would seem to apply to all the non-capitalist ‘epochs in the economic formation of society’ - Asiatic, ancient, feudal - delineated in the 1859 Preface: a very wide historical compass indeed. With that in mind, we may turn to the second substantive analysis of property/production relations in Marx I wish to discuss, that of feudalism. His fullest treatment of the topic is in Capital III, where he raises it in the context of an inquiry into the origins of capitalist ground-rent.

As with the section of the Grundrisse we have just been examining, Marx's underlying concern in this text is with what distinguishes capitalist forms of landed property, so he focuses on feudal forms mainly for their contrasts with capitalism rather than for their own sake. The major contrast he draws is this. Unlike in capitalism, where labourers are separated from the means of production, in feudal society the direct producer . . . is to be found . . . in possession of his own means of production, the necessary material labour conditions required for the realisation of his labour and the production of his means of subsistence' (1865a: 790). This difference has an important implication for the mechanism of exploitation - the transfer of surplus labour or its products to the ruling class – in the two societies. We should remember, in discussing this, that this mechanism is absolutely crucial to Marx in characterizing a mode of production:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneousiy its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers ... which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure. (ibid.: 791)10

In capitalism, economic' pressure11 alone suffices to ensure that the worker produces surplus for the capitalist. Given the labourer's lack of means of production, the only conditions under which he can produce his subsistence at all – selling his labour-power for a wage - are ones which entail the performance of unpaid surplus-labour. But in feudalism, things are different. From a purely economic' viewpoint the peasant can produce his subsistence, on the land, and with the animals, tools, and so on, which he possesses, without having in the very process to produce surplus for his lord. Since feudal lords none the less manifestly do extract surplus-labour, and feudal society would not be what it was if they did not, Marx is led to draw the following conclusion:

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Under such conditions the surplus-labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form may be . . . Thus, conditions of personal dependence are requisite, a lack of personal freedom, no matter to what extent, and being tied to the soil as its accessory, bondage in the true sense of the word. (ibid.: 791)

It is a conclusion which he generalizes. ‘In all forms in which the direct producer remains the “possessor" of the means of production', he argues, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relationship of lordship and servitude' (ibid.: 790, emphasis added). Herrschaft, we must conclude, is here the specific economic form’ in which surplus is pumped, and hence constitutes ‘the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure'. Other texts make this explicit. For Capital I, personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production . .. personal dependence forms the groundwork of society' (1867a: 77). We could hardly ask for a clearer statement of the internality of Herrschaftsverhältnisse to society'seconomic structure'. For the Grundrisse, likewise, the master-servant relation is an essential element of appropriation'(1858a: 500). For Theories of Surplus Value, the latter's 'basis is the forcible domination of one section of society over another'(1863c: 400). In feudal society, relations of personal dependence – relations, moreover, not founded upon ‘effective control' of the means of production, which Marx assumes the direct producer to enjoy – are essential relations of production, and hence, consistently with the stipulations of the 1859 Preface, form the groundwork of society'.

To reduce Herrschaft, as Cohen doeş, simply to part-ownership of labour-power is in my view a travesty of what Marx is getting at in these analyses: the essence of the relationship, he makes clear, is ‘appropriation of an alien will' (ibid.: 500-1, emphasis added), personal subjection, unfreedom. It also begs the (empirical) question of how – in other words, through what set of relations – such alien control over labour-power is actually established. At one point in the Grundrisse Marx goes so far as to assert that feudal landed proprietorship developed ‘out of purely military relations of subordination' (1858a: 165); given the amount of land administered by the medieval church, one might also want to give due weight to the power of the word. It is ironic, considering the labours of Cohen and others to produce a rechtsfrei definition of property, that in European feudal society by the high middle ages Herrschaft was in fact largely organised through jurisdiction. In Perry Anderson's words, justice was the ordinary name of power' (1974a: 153). This has led Rodney Hilton recently to count jurisdiction explicitly as a key social relation of feudal production (1985); unsurprisingly, perhaps, since his own earlier writings estimate that by the twelfth century, more than half of all feudal ruling class income took the form of profits of jurisdiction or taxes, rather than ground-rent as such (1976).

Anderson himself argues similarly, and like Marx generalizes the point beyond feudalism alone:

All modes of production in class societies prior to capitalism extract surplus labour from the immediate producers by means of extra-economic coercion. Capitalism is the first mode of production in history in which the means whereby the surplus is pumped out of the direct producers is purely economic in form ... All other previous modes of exploitation operate through extra-economic sanctions - kin, customary, religious, legal or political. It is therefore impossible to read them off from economic relations as such. The superstructures' of kinship, religion, law or the state necessarily enter into the constitutive structure of the mode of production in precapitalist social formations. They intervene directly in the internal' nexus of surplus-extraction, where in capitalist social formations, the first in history to separate the economy as a formally self-contained order, they provide by contrast its external' preconditions. In consequence, pre-capitalist modes of production cannot be defined except via their political, legal, and ideological superstructures, since these are what determine the type of extra-economic coercion that specifies them. (1974b: 403-4)

I would want to express the point more forcefully, and say that what Anderson is getting at renders the very terms in which he (like Marx himself) formulates his argument – ‘economic' versus non-economic' - anachronistic. ‘Superstructures' cannot reasonably be said tointervene' in a structure of which they are constitutive'. A far better way of putting it would be to say that in these societies, a distinction between economic relations as such’ and superstructures' - at least as conventionally drawn - simply does not obtain. Indeed if we persist in using these concepts in the usual way, Anderson's observation comes very close to denying the applicability of Marx's claims for the primacy of the mode of production of material life' outside capitalism. 'Superstructures', Anderson appears to be saying, determine the core social relations of these modes, their specific modes of exploitation, upon which, for Marx, is founded the entire formation of the economic community'. Anderson's frequent recourse to quotation marks is perhaps indicative of some unease; I doubt he intends thus to curtail the scope of historical materialism. None the less he goes on to make a very important point.

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Since, he says, feudal societies are defined by their ‘non-economic mechanisms of surplus-extraction, to specify them in rechtsfrei terms abstracting from superstructures', leaves us with no basis for differentiating between them. This has a paradoxical historiographic consequence. 'If, in effect, the feudal mode of production can be defined independently of the variant juridical and political superstructures which accompany it, such that its presence can be registered throughout the globe wherever primitive and tribal social formations were superseded, the problem arises: how is the unique dynamism of the European theatre of international feudalism to be explained?' (ibid.: 402). A 'colour-blind materialism' (ibid.) eventuates in historical idealism, for the differentiating factors can then, logically, only be sought outside the sphere of ‘material life'.

Cohen does discuss Marx's analyses of feudalism; he could hardly fail to, given their evident awkwardness for traditional historical materialism'. What he says is to my mind implicitly subversive of his overall conception of production relations. He cannot but recognize that for Marx the production relations of slavery or serfdom include the authority of the superior over the producer's labour-power, and he exploits it by exercising that authority'(1978: 83). Violence and ideology are thus admitted to be internal to feudal exploitation, or constitutive of the specifically feudal property form. On the face of it, this must collapse the base/superstructure distinction as Cohen conceives it, to yield a broader conception of economic structure. Cohen tries to evade the difficulty – in so far as he recognizes it at all – by arguing that the serf is not in fact the owner, but merely the possessor, of his plot, so that the rights he enjoys over it are tied to the performance of his duties' (ibid.: 84). To the extent that we can speak of ownership' without anachronism in this context, this is undoubtedly true, but it hardly helps Cohen. He remains hoist by his own petard. For Marx's point, well taken by Anderson, is that economically’ the serf precisely is in a position to produce his own subsistence, and any rechtsfrei definition of ownership would have to acknowledge this fact. The only thing which curtails his effective control' of either means of production or his labour-power is the eminently rechtsvoll relationship of Herrschaft. It is only through the latter – Marx's non-economic' coercion – that we can in fact meaningfully characterize the lord's ‘ownership', as distinct from the peasant's material possession, at all. As with Marx's three forms of communal property, the political and legal superstructure’ turns out once more to be internal to the ‘economic structure of society', a defining element of property' in the feudal context.

In the early sections of this chapter I sought to establish, on both empirical and theoretical grounds, that we had no good reason for excluding any kind of social relation from being a possible relation of production, or for arbitrarily assigning some social relations to the 'base’ and others to the superstructure' of society, a priori. These questions could only be resolved for particular historical forms of society, on empirical criteria. I have now shown that in analysing concrete historical formations Marx himself was no respecter of neat base/superstructure models. Indeed, I have suggested that the apparent separability of the economic sphere' from Acton's legal, political and moral relationships of men’ is a phenomenon of capitalism alone, and orthodox conceptions of production relations are therefore methodologically akin, in their immediate generalization of capitalist appearances, to the fetishized views of productive forces discussed in chapter 2 – a theme I shall take further below.

The clear implication of this argument is that, for Marx, production relations are, very simply, any and all social relations which are demonstrably entailed in a given mode of production, or way in which [people] produce their means of subsistence' (1846a: 31). To put it the other way around, the production relations of a given mode are all those relations between people, in whose absence they would not be producing in that particular way. Such production relations and the ‘economic structure' they define, may include Cohen's material relations', superstructural’ relations, or relations he deems beyond the purview of historical materialism entirely, like familial forms. Examples of all of these being treated as internal to an economic structure' can be found in Marx's work. What is, or is not, a production relation in any given instance can only be determined a posteriori, on the facts of the case. We have no good theoretical grounds for defining the category more restrictively, and Marx's own practice suggests he did not intend that we should. Since property is for him merely another appellation for production relations, the same holds for what comprises ownership'.

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Greg McLennan (1981: 17 ff.), criticizing an earlier (and less elaborated) formulation of this argument, has expressed the worry that so open a definitional criterion of production relations might be satisfied by random empirical evidence. His concern is that everything will be collapsed into a vague concept of social relations', and historical materialism lose its distinctiveness. I do not see the danger. If it is claimed that social relation x is essential to, and therefore a production relation of, mode of production y, the case needs to be empirically argued, and counter-claims can be empirically evaluated. Certainly there may be disputes, but I fail to see why their resolution should be considered arbitrary'. Arbitrariness is only a risk so long as such claims are not subjected to any process of empirical adjudication. What I think worries McLennan (and other critics12) is my refusal of a determinate concept of production relations at the level of general theory, which is where Marxists habitually seek it; my point, however, is that in Marx's analytic framework conceptual determinateness can only be provided a posteriori, for specific historical formations. That is not to say, however, that it cannot be provided at all.13

Two final quotations might appropriately be cited by way of conclusion to this long argument. When, in The German Ideology, Marx describes production as a ‘double relationship', both material and social, he adds: ‘by social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner, and to what end' (1846a: 41). We might take this openness, for once, at face value. Similarly with this remark, against Proudhon, in the Grundrisse: human life has from time immemorial rested on production, and, in one way or another, on social production, whose relations we call, precisely, economic relations'(1858a: 489). What Marx is doing here is so devastatingly simple, and at the same time so genuinely revolutionary, that generations of commentators have somehow managed to overlook it.

He is not, as with ‘traditional historical materialism', reducing social relations to economic relations as conventionally conceived, or explaining the former in terms of the latter. He is precisely redefining ‘economic' relations – and thus the ‘economic sphere', or ‘economic structure', or ‘economic base' of society – as comprising the totality of social relations, whatever these may be, which make particular forms of production, and thus of property, possible. These social relations are simultaneously forms of material relation of human beings to nature. This totality is Marx's ‘groundwork of society', and its extensiveness indicates why he could plausibly treat material production as being synonymous with production of the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations' (1858a: 712), or assert that the relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society' (1847b: 212). Such propositions are grossly reductionist on any other interpretation. As he wrote in 1846, introducing the notion of a mode of production', this mode 'must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of ... individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part' (1846a: 32). What we have here is less an economic (and still less a technological’) theory of history or society, in any standard sense of the word ‘economic', than an agenda for an historical sociology of economic forms and phenomena.

VII

The final issue I wish briefly to air in this chapter - and I do not pretend to do any more – concerns what I take to be a serious lacuna in Marx's work, and the historical materialist tradition generally. This is the question of human reproduction, and its connection with material production' as Marx conceived it. The context in which I raise this (and what has made it visible as a theoretical problem) is, of course, the renaissance of feminist scholarship in recent years, which questions the paradigms of all classical sociologies, including Marxism. I have argued that Marx's conception of the material groundwork'(1867a: 80) of society was far broader than that normally ascribed to him. The question I want to raise here is: was that conception sufficiently broad – or could it be made sufficiently broad - to accommodate (without subordinating) the undoubted sociological insights of feminist analysis? I shall suggest that it was not, but could be made so; and that Marx's own writings provide some grounds for undertaking the task with his posthumous blessing. Thus to revise historical materialism, however, would leave few familiar Marxist theoretical landmarks intact.

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Conventionally, by production Marxists understand production of material goods, and modes of production are defined and differentiated according to how this is effected. Marx speaks of a mode of production as a way in which people produce their means of subsistence (1846a: 31). It is true, and important, that he recognized such production as simultaneously being the production of social relations. But the relations he had in mind were specifically those entailed in the production of goods, such as the kinship relations of the primitive commune, the ancient polis, feudal Herrschaft, or the labour/capital class relation. It is production of goods, therefore, which demarcates the field, and whose social forms constitute the specific object, of historical materialist inquiry. But in certain of Marx's writings, notably The German Ideology, the notion of production and reproduction of real life' has a significantly wider compass than this.

Near the beginning of that text Marx and Engels list a number of material' factors in human life routinely overlooked by idealist historiography, which they say are premises' of their own viewpoint. The first and second of these are the need to produce (goods) to live, and the development of new human needs and capacities in the process. They continue: the third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their own kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family' (1846a: 40). These three aspects of social activity', they go on to make clear:

are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects or, to make it clear to the Germans, three moments', which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today. (ibid.: 41)

The next sentence – the one I have severally quoted on production as a double relationship'- includes within the production of life' both production of one's own [life] in labour' and production of fresh life in procreation'. Production of goods and production of people are thus given equal status here, conjointly defining the production of life’ and equally integral to people's ‘materialistic connection' (ibid.), Marx's declared analytic starting-point. A page or two later, in a passage I have already quoted more fully (above, p. 62), Marx refers to the nucleus, the first form' of both property and division of labour as being the family, where wife and children are slaves of the husband' (ibid.: 44), while later in the same manuscript he writes of marriage, property, the family’ as the practical basis on which the bourgeoisie has erected its domination' (ibid.: 195).

It must be said, however, that Marx did not take these fragmentary observations much further in his subsequent work. Engels did, in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1891), but in ways that are problematic.14 Marx recognizes the importance of familial and clan relations to pre-capitalist property forms, as we have seen, in the Grundrisse and elsewhere – but only in so far as these are relations of production of material goods. The probable reason for this failure to return to family forms in later writings – also stated in The German Ideology - is that Marx considered the family to be ‘a subordinate relationship’ in more developed forms of society (1846a: 40). Thus The Communist Manifesto roundly declares that capitalism has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations . . . and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous "cash-payment"’(1848a: 486-7). This sweeping, and undoubtedly inaccurate, judgement reads somewhat ironically in the light of recent work on the multiple ways in which capitalist production continues to be organized through patriarchal forms of relationship both within and outwith the workplace (narrowly considered) and the labour-market.15 It explains, however, why Marx should have given his third material circumstance' so little explanatory weight in later writings by comparison with the modes of production of goods.

None the less, it is clear that in principle Marx did consider production of human beings – and thus, presumably, the relations through which such production is organized - to be as essential to production of life' as is the production of goods. It would have been surprising (and inconsistent) had he not, since he recognized human labour as common to all labour processes, and repeatedly stressed, moreover, that individuals were always social \~ and therefore specifically and differentially socialized - human beings. His exclusion of 'the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the familv', therefore, from the ways in which modes (and thus forces and relations) of production are conceptualized, can be defended if, and only if, his claim that this is a subordinate relationship' stands. He must show that such relations are wholly a corollary or a consequence of ways in which people produce their means of subsistence. Now this is a substantive judgement, open to empirical inquiry. If it turns out to be wrong, then – on Marx's own, self-declared premisses – the notion of production of life', and the concepts employed to analyse it, must perforce be extended to encompass modes, forces and relations of human reproduction as well as of ‘material production more narrowly considered.

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The historical record, I suggest, powerfully argues for just such a revision. The relations, generally of a patriarchal sort, within which social individuals are produced cannot wholly be reduced to aspects or epiphenomena of modes of production as historical materialism has traditionally conceived them. Indeed if anything patriarchal relations have independently informed and influenced the ways the production of goods has been socially organised, to a massive (and still largely unrecognized) extent. Relations between capital and labour, for instance, were frequently structured through patriarchal, masterservant norms, well into the nineteenth century (and understanding this might make the transition' to capitalism that much easier to grasp: not as a total rupture, but as a subtler gradation of forms). Outside capitalism's metropolitan heartlands, they often still are. Developed capitalism rests on a separation of household and enterprise, Max Weber tells us (1978: 375ff.); how can we begin to comprehend that separation empirically without reference to divisions of labour of an eminently patriarchal kind? English law and polity in the nineteenth century - that heyday of supposedly individualist Victorian capitalism – were permeated through and through with the social power of the household head', the paterfamilias, who alone, as Diana Barker (1978) reminds us, could actually be a ‘freely contracting individual'. That patriarchal household had been an organizing matrix of productive activities, political authority, taxation and administration, law and franchise, and religious worship, as well as ‘domestic ideology', in England, since time out of mind.16Indeed its unspoken assumption underpins even Marx's own determination of the value of labour-power in Capital I (1867a: 172). Here, a man of his own very patriarchal times, Marx did not seek to unravel natural, self-understood forms of social life'. He took their naturalness17 very much for granted. Such is the enduring power of patriarchy.

In fact, these forms of patriarchy would emerge as essential relations of the relevant stages of capitalist production on the criterion advocated above, since they are clearly social relations in whose absence production of goods would not have taken the empirical forms it did. This is undoubtedly an advance on ‘traditional historical materialism'. But that is not the point, or at least not the whole point. To acknowledge the patriarchal dimension of a given set of production relations, conceived as those relations necessary to a mode of production of material goods, is not to explain patriarchy itself. I reject the view – advocated by some Marxist-feminists - that patriarchal relations can be explained with reference to their economic functionality, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. The burden of modern feminist argument is rather to suggest an independent (if very material) basis for age and gender relations which is the particular concern of feminist theory. Now the specific terrain of that theory is precisely the relation of man and woman, parents and children, the family', or in other words the mode of production (conception, birth, nurturing, socialization) of human beings - exactly the dimension missing, because considered a subordinate relationship', from Marx's analysis of production of life’ after 1846. Explicitly to revise Marx's concept of production to include – as he first intended – production of human individuals within familial and other relations, and what might follow from that for human society as a whole, might allow the possibility of reconciling Marxist and feminist perspectives without subordinating the specific concerns of the latter. Retention of Marx's own conception of ‘mode of production' as the starting-point for sociological analysis, notwithstanding its capacity to recognize the economic import of relations of human reproduction, does not.

Had Marx developed his broader German Ideology view of ‘the production of life', the conceptual apparatus of historical materialism might have looked very different. Mode, forces and relations of production would be very much wider notions even than those I have advocated here - if indeed those concepts, or only those concepts, remained the fundamental categories of historical materialism at all. Class relations would remain a central dimension, but would not necessarily be seen as the central – let alone the exclusive – dimension of social structure. Age and gender relations would be as integral an analytic concern. One way forward, again mooted in The German Ideology, might be to approach all these social relationships as forms of division of social labour – labour, however, extending well beyond just those activities which produce material goods. And to think the unthinkable, we might not even be differentiating social formations, or periodizing history, in the traditional Marxist ways at all. What feudalism and capitalism have in common, for instance - a certain patriarchal infrastructure - might become as significant as what distinguishes them, forms of the sexual division of labour (both within and outwith production'narrowly considered) being a common presupposition of either set of class relations. These are my views, not Marx's. To attempt to develop historical materialism along these lines, however, seems to me not inconsistent with the intellectual and emancipatory spirit of Marx's own enterprise. He was, after all, engaged in a critique of the economic categories' (1858b), and there is no good reason to see that critique as terminating in the nineteenth century, or bound forever in its natural, self-understood forms of social life'.

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Ideal superstructures

If the argument of the last chapter stands, standard readings of Marx's base/superstructure metaphor must evidently fall. Base' and ‘superstructure' cannot be consistently delineated across modes of production as exclusive, substantively defined levels’ of the social formation. This in turn undermines the possibility of erecting any general theory of the base/superstructure relation, of a causal or functional sort, since to do so presupposes the substantial character of the distinction. This, we should note, applies as much to relative autonomy' models as straightforward economic determinisms. The question then arises: what did Marx intend to convey by his use of base/superstructure imagery? For it is undeniably common in his work, if not the leitmotif it is so often taken to be.

Cohen's account may again serve as a convenient, if indirect starting-point. Unlike most Marxists, Cohen seeks to exclude Marx's forms of social consciousness’ from the superstructure, and reserve the concept for non-economic institutions'. Leaving aside the obvious question of how we might begin sensibly to describe human institutions without reference to the ideas they embody, it is difficult to reconcile this exclusion with Marx's own use of the term ‘superstructure'. At a pinch it fits the 1859 Preface, but it demonstrably conflicts with many other texts. We have already seen Engels, in his late letters, referring to the whole superstructure as ‘ideal’ or ‘idealistic' – adjectives which make little sense except as applied to forms of consciousness. This was also Marx's usage, on at least as many occasions as not.

I

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The German Ideology, for instance, speaks of the state and the rest of the idealistic superstructure' (1846a: 49), and ‘family and political relations, together with their entire ideological superstructure' (ibid.: 417) – an interesting formulation, since here it seems to be family and political relations, the latter eminently superstructural (and the former ignored) in standard accounts, which serve as base to a superstructure which is entirely ideological. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx writes similarly that upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life, The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations'(1852: 128). With this last quote – incidentally, but a point I shall return to in my final chapter – we are in a different language game to that in which the base/superstructure issue is generally posed. Instead of the silent dance of structural correspondences', we glimpse the creative, and conscious, activity of real individuals.

At the very least then, social forms of consciousness' were certainly part of what Marx understood by the superstructure'. Cohen thinks it a relatively trivial matter whether or not we classify them as such. I do not. For I believe that Marx's references to the superstructure as ideal' or idealistic' hold the key to his entire base/ superstructure metaphor. The superstructure', in brief, is simply the ‘ideal' form in which the totality of material' relations which make up the base' itself are manifested to consciousness, not a substantially separable order of reality at all. Arguing this will take some time. Let me begin with an apparent digression.

II

Marx, of course, held a materialist view of consciousness. For him, ‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life' (1846a: 38). In the words of the 1859 Preface, ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness' (1859a).' The problem, however, is what exactly Marx meant by such claims. A common interpretation, epitomized in the works of Plekhanov or the younger Lenin, is to read Marx as inverting the primacy of the ideal’ - consciousness, thought, ideas – over the material' world (allegedly)

asserted in German idealist, and particularly Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy. Where Hegel held that the ideal determined the material, Marx argued the contrary. In a famous formulation, he found the Hegelian dialectic ‘standing on its head', and turned it 'right side up again' (1873: 20). Marx was thus like his materialist philosophical precursors in that, in Lenin's words, he takes matter as primary and regards consciousness, thought, sensations, as secondary' (1908: 46). His specific novelty, and debt to Hegel, consists in conceiving of matter itself 'dialectically'

In my view,² Marx's critique of idealism involves something quite different from, and very much more radical than, this straightforward inversion of-idealism's supposed order of priorities, and the inversion metaphor is in important ways misleading. What Marx does, in criticizing Hegel and his left' followers – Stirner, Bauer, and the rest – is first and foremost to deny the very existence of the ideal as a separable entity. The cunning of reason', the ‘spirit of the age' Hegel's Weltgeist, the Young Hegelians'‘self-consciousness', and so on, cannot for Marx be the subjects of history for the simple reason that they do not exist. They are reifications: philosophers' fictions, abstractions made flesh, speculative constructions, just like in the 'fruit' example we considered in the last chapter. Marx's central criticism of idealist history is that it is ‘an imagined activity of imagined subjects'(1846a: 38).

He ridicules what is involved in thus being German, profound and speculative' (ibid.: 542) on numerous occasions. The most famous of these is probably The Holy Family's discussion of the mystery of speculative construction', on which I drew in the last chapter, Here is another such recipe:

The whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history . . . is . . .
confined to the following three efforts.

No. 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empirical reasons, under empirical conditions and as empirical individuals, from these actual rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas and illusions in history.

No. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove a mystical connection among the successive ruling ideas, which is managed by regarding them as acts of self-determination on the part of the concept' . . .

No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this ‘self-determining concept', it is changed into a person - ‘Self-consciousness’ - or, to appear thoroughly materialistic ... into the thinkers', the philosophers', the ideologists, who are once again understood as the manufacturers of history. (1846a: 64)

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With such ‘conjuring tricks' (ibid.: 131), consciousness ceases to be an attribute of real individuals, and is instead transformed into an independently-acting historical subject in its own right, the ‘spirit of the age', or whatever. The concept of an attribute is mistakenly concretized as an entity. In Marx's words, first of all, an abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact is based upon the abstraction' (ibid.: 542).

Marx's denial of the determining role of the ideal in history, then, is based on a prior denial of the very existence of the ideal as a separable entity. Consciousness is precisely not a thing in itself, and the fundamental error of the idealists is to treat it as such, to attribute to conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness . . . an independent existence' (ibid.: 30, emphasis added). Where for idealism ‘the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual', Marx's starting-point is ‘the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness (ibid.: 38). Consciousness is my relationship to my surroundings' (ibid.: 42), it ‘can never be anything else than conscious existence (ibid.: 37). These passages all come from The German Ideology. But nearly 30 vears later, in that same text in which Marx speaks of setting the Hegelian dialectic right side up again', his criticism is exactly the same - that the ideal subject of Hegel's historiography is a purely fictitious one:

To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (1873: 19)

Idealism's historical subjects are constituted by first abstracting, then reifying what is in fact merely a predicate – consciousness - of real subjects. But Marx's critique is less an inversion of the subject/ predicate relation than an insistence that such predicates cannot, in the nature of things, be subjects at all. The only subjects of history, he insists, are real, living individuals' themselves.

The quotations I have given so far argue the fictitious status of the ideal, which is my main concern in this chapter given that Marx and Engels repeatedly qualified ‘superstructures' thus. But it is equally important to realize that the other term in the equation - the ‘material’ – is also and ipso facto transformed. If consciousness ceases to be regarded as ‘a living individual’, but instead is recognized as an attribute or predicate of real living individuals' themselves, then the material existence of these individuals can no longer be conceptualized in ways which exclude their consciousness. The material premiss from which historical materialism starts is not, abstractly, matter', as opposed to ‘spirit' (or Lenin's ‘consciousness, thought, sensations’). It is real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live' (1846a: 31) – real individuals who are amongst other things conscious, and act on the basis of their conceptions. We have seen that such purposeful action is what for Marx defines labour as a distinctively human activity, and differentiates it from superficially analogous phenomena, like the 'labours’ of bees and beavers, elsewhere in the natural world (above, p. 28).

This is, of course, the burden of Marx's famous Theses on Feuerbach. The fault in Feuerbach's materialism (which among other things renders it ahistorical) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object . . . but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively'. This active side was developed abstractly by idealism' (1845b). Stirner's understanding of matter' is similarly dismissed as an ‘abstraction, an idea' (1846a: 109), empiricism branded as ‘still abstract' because it treats history as a collection of 'dead facts' (ibid.: 38), and ‘so-called objective historiography' denounced as reactionary' because it apprehends 'the historical conditions independent of activity' (ibid.: 52). A quarter of a century later, Marx was to reiterate this dismissive characterization of objective historiography' in connection with a reissue of his Eighteenth Brumaire, a text concerned centrally with the puzzle of how an individual, Louis Bonaparte, could come to play the central historical role he did (1869: 144).

Marx is precisely unlike his materialist precursors in his inclusion, within what he understood as the realm of material life, of those attributes of human beings – the ‘active side’ – which were previously separated off under the illusory guise of the ideal. Indeed, what he retained from the idealist tradition, whilst resituating it in terms of the natural history of humanity rather than the biography of spirit, was a conception of the internality of the relation between what Spinoza called thought and extension. The reason inversion is so inadequate a metaphor for this critique should by now be evident. The metaphor suggests a simple reversal of terms – material' and ideal' - which leaves their referents intact. But what Marx actually does is to challenge these terms themselves. He denies the validity of the distinction of material and ideal, as previously drawn – including by materialists - in the first place, and it is the presumed separability of the two which forms the specific target of his atfack. Material and ideal can be separated, for the social world, only at the cost of the abstraction' or reification of both.

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