The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism

Marxists may feel that this cuts them adrift. A characterization of historical materialism in terms of an object-domain (production and reproduction of real life’) and a method of analysis (empirical history informed by critique) leaves few of the old comforting landmarks intact. The proof of the pudding is left entirely to its eating, and there is little left for the philosophers to do. But I see nothing as being lost, and much to be gained, by this strategy. We cannot after all establish any logical necessity for the primacy of production in the explanation of social life. It must remain hypothetical. Material production - including, I would suggest, production of human beings - is a reasonable starting-point for a sociology, and one which has in the past led to substantive studies which have mightily increased our knowledge of society and history, including those of Marx himself. But we can no more conclude from the undeniable fact that there can be no social life without production, the consequence that the mode of production therefore determines any other area of social life, than we could conclude from the equally true (and equally banal) proposition that there can be no social life without language, the corollary that social structures are determined by the laws of grammar.

No worthwhile piece of historical materialist sociology, or anthropology, or history would in my view resist methodological characterization in the terms offered here. Indeed, the best and most innovative Marxist work has as often as not been accomplished only by abandoning (or at best paying only lip-service to) the sacred cows of ‘tradition'. Consider Thompson's explicit rejection of the base/superstructure distinction, and ask whether The Making of the English Working Class could have been written otherwise, or think about how far Godelier would have got in his anthropological studies had he not been prepared to jettison the standard conception of an ‘economic structure'. On my interpretation of the fundamentals of historical materialism, we can without contradiction respect Thompson's observations on the pervasiveness of law in eighteenth-century English society, indeed - and the point should really not have to be argued among historical materialists - we can see this for what it actually is, an important gain in our knowledge of the material groundwork' of that phase of English capitalist development, rather than a theoretical embarrassment, an unwelcome anomaly, or (worse) a deviation from the Biblical texts of the Master. To adopt the kind of conceptual hygiene advocated by Cohen, on the other hand, would I fear land us up with no worthwhile Marxist work of any substantive kind at all. For to put it bluntly, the world is not as his theory requires it to be. Thankfully perhaps. As Marc Bloch once remarked, it is no bad thing the facts are there to remind us that society is not a geometric figure.

Theory should be abandoned if it gets in the way of knowledge. In the case of historical materialism, I believe, we are better off without the familiar landmarks, for all too often they turn out to be mere Potemkin villages: impressive façades which block the view. ‘Traditional historical materialism’ all too often theoretically pre-empts what can only be historical questions and should never have been treated as anything else. Marx himself, I believe, would have had little truck with such theoretical bubble-blowing'(1846a: 53) - though that is neither the only, nor the best, reason to leave it behind. But a last reminder of irascible Old Nick's impatience with the poverty of philosophy will not, perhaps, go amiss:

When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement – the real depiction – of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or the present. (1846a: 38–9)

148

THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS

THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS

149

Preface

Notes

1 M. Desai, review of Shanin (1984), in Fournal of Peasant Studies 13 (3), 1986; P. Binns, review of Kolakowski (1981), in Socialist Review (11), 1979.

Chapter 1 Prologue: Marx's guiding thread'

1 Though it should be remembered that Engels's Anti-Dühring had Marx's imprimatur; indeed Marx wrote a chapter for it. On the Marx/Engeis relationship see Carver (1986).

2 Marx wrote to Engels on 30 September 1882, the “Marxists" and the "anti-Marxists" at their respective conferences . . . have done everything possible to spoil my stay in France'. His letter to Jenny Longuet of 11 April 1881 relates his first, distinctly unfavourable impressions of Kautsky. His letter to Sorge of 5 November 1880, dismisses the soí-disant Marxist' Black Repartition group in Geneva (whose founder was Plekhanov) as doctrinaires', contrasting them unfavourably with the ‘populist' People's Will group. See Shanin (1984). The well-known attribution to Marx of the statement all I know is, I am not a "Marxist"' is Engels's.

3 See the works of Althusser, and Hindess and Hirst, listed in my bibliography; Cutler et al. (1978); Godelier (1973; 1984); Hilton (1985).

4 Similar problems arise in trying to use traditional Marxist categories to make sense of present-day ‘socialist' societies. Mao Zedong, that most unorthodox of twentieth-century Marxist thinkers and doers, often stretched such concepts to breaking-point (see Corrigan,. Ramsay and Sayer, 1979). Among western commentators on the historical experience of socialist construction, Charies Bettelheim (see Bibliography) has been more aware than most of the need to rethink Marxist analytic categories.

5 See my 1983: ch. 1, and below, ch. 3, section II, and chapter 4, section II, for elaboration and exemplification.

6 As will become clear I do not believe Marx was an empiricist in the standard philosophical sense. He is better characterized as a realist. But basic to Marx is the notion that empirical phenomena are the startingpoint of analysis, in the course of which scientific concepts and theories are developed a posteriori, and the capacity of theories actually to explain such phenomena remains the uitimate criterion of their validity. "Theory' is thus always empirically grounded and validated. I argue this, against Althusser, in my 1979, and in more formal terms in my 1983: ch. 5. See also Thompson (1978a).

7 I detail this in my 1983. See also Wada in Shanin (1984); Marx (1879a, b; 1882a), Krader (1975), and Dunayevskaya (1982).

Chapter 2 Productive forces

1 See for instance Balibar in Althusser (1970), and subsequent discussions in the writings of Hindess and Hirst. Construing mode of production in such abstraction has often led to the need to differentiate ‘social formation' - conceived as a concrete society - independently. One implication of my argument is that such a distinction is misplaced, or at least needs very careful handling. Modes of production exist only in and as concrete social formations. Whilst it may be legitimate to abstract the concepts of mode of production for some analytic purposes, there is a persistent danger of reification in so doing.

2 Marx makes this clear in the 1859 Preface. Marx's rude awakenings as to the import of ‘material interests’ in social life can be traced through his Rheinische Zeitung articles (in Collected Works, vol. 1), especially those on thefts of wood (1842) and the plight of wine-growers in the Mosel (1843a). Too often the evolution of Marx's ideas towards materialism and communism is traced as a purely philosophical journey; in his superb study, Draper (1977). breaks away from this, stressing the formative import of Marx's own political experience. What is most striking in the Mosel piece is the way Marx simply counterposes the phenomenal reality of the Prussian state – the one which was to close down his newspaper - against its philosophical concept, and this discrepancy is what led him to undertake his critique of Hegel. The impact on Marx's ideas shortly after this of Engels – who was at that stage of their lives very much better acquainted with industrial conditions, both in Germany and Britain (see Collected Works 2, especially the early Reports from Bremen', and the articles on England) – is also not to be underestimated.

3 Cohen himself admits this with regard to the relations of correspondence Marx posits in the Preface, but he does not extend the argument to the entities related.

NOTES TO PAGES 11-17

151

4 I have argued this at length in my work with Philip Corrigan and Harvie Ramsay.

5 I make the qualification ‘social' because I believe the internal relations perspective more defensible for the social world than the natural, on grounds elaborated as much by Wittgenstein or, seminally, by Winch (1958), as by Marx. I do not think historical materialism needs to be grounded in a philosophy of nature, though it may well be compatible with one. Marx and Engels themselves, however, fairly evidently did subscribe to a dialectical view of reality per se. Engels developed this most explicitly, in Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, but Marx explicitly endorsed the former and was well aware of Engels's work for the latter.

6 Patrick Murray (1983) has drawn attention to my neglect of the Hegelian legacy in Marx's Method. I think he is right. In that book I was more concerned with Marx's epistemology than his ontology, and was - to say the least – somewhat evasive about what the latter was. I now believe the critical epistemology I ascribed to Marx there is comprehensible only in the context of the kind of ontology proposed by Oliman. We cannot make sense either of Marx's treatment of categories as expressing' relations, or of the discrepancy between those relations and their forms of appearance', otherwise. Somewhat belatedly, I am persuaded of the truth of Lenin's maxim that it is completely impossible to understand Marx's Capital ... without having thoroughly studied ... Hegel's Logic'. One implication of this, of course, is that analytic philosophy is perhaps the worst of all philosophical frameworks in which to try and force Marx's thought. Two features of the analytic school are particularly problematic in trying to make sense of Marx: first, its hard and fast analytic/synthetic distinction (Ouine, 1953), which renders any notion of internal relations in the world as distinct from among propositions simply meaningless; and second, its persistent phenomenalism (which leads to a conception of definition which Kolakowski (1972) summates as the rule of nominalism'), which rules out appearance/essence distinctions. Cohen (1978: ch. 1) gives Hegel his due for having supplied the paradigm for Marx's image of history', but shows no awareness of how the Hegelian legacy might have influenced Marx's conceptual usage at any deeper level.

7 See chapter 4 below, where I argue that both the abstract individual' of civil society and the political state’ are in the same sense implicit in the ‘economic' relations of commodity production.

8 On grounds of the logical, as distinct from ontological, presuppositions of Marx's method; though as I have said in note 6 to this chapter, I now see the former as requiring the latter. See my 1983, ch. 5, Afterword, and passim.

9 Marx's frequent references to language, in elucidating his idea of production and society, suggest another intriguing set of possible parallels. Wittgenstein's later work - which was highly critical of the logical atomism, and correspondence theory of meaning, in his earlier Tractatus – roots concepts in forms of life'. That same work is also highly critical of reification of generic abstractions in ways which are strikingly close to Marx's criticisms of speculative construction' (below, ch. 3, section II). The best-known sociological elaboration of this Wittgensteinian position on language is to be found in the work of Peter Winch, who argues that ‘the relation between ideas and context is an internal one', and the ‘very categories of meaning, etc., are logically dependent for their sense on social interaction between men' (1958: 107, 44). Durkheim's later writings argued something very similar in their thesis of the social origin of the logical categories: a position strikingly anticipated by Marx - with due homage to Hegel – in his letter to Engels of 25 February 1868, where he wrote à propos the concepts Allgemeine and Besondre (universal and particular) that the logical categories are ... damn well arising out of "our intercourse"’. These parallels are not fanciful or over-extended. Certainiy Marx differed from Winch or Durkheim in insisting on the material rootedness in humanity's relation with nature of 'forms of life’, and with this their specific historicity, but his appreciation of the relationship between ideas and social relations as internal is as fundamental to his sociology as it is to the more familiar idealist variants of the same thesis. Again we need to take cognisance of Marx's Hegelian background. See further ch. 4, section II, below; Frisby and Sayer (1986).

10 I should clarify this. It is, I think, conceivable that say, a particular material labour-process - for instance, modern factory production - is compatible with a range of possible social relations, in at least some respects. Modern industry is materially organized in not dissimilar ways in the present-day USA and USSR. To this degree we may analytically distinguish the material labour-process from the wider social integument. But in any given empirical instance these two will be internally related, in the sense in which I am using the term here: the one will exist only in and through the other, as aspects of the same totality. The necessity at issue is substantiai (material production can only take place in definite social relations), not logical. The problem with much Marxism is its persistent reification of such analytic distinctions; a reification which must be undertaken if the entities in question are to be related causally and externally.

1l There are exceptions here. Balibar (in Althusser, 1970) is amongst the more significant, correctly arguing the relational features of Marx's concept.

12 Cohen's dismissal of this as rhetorical (1978: 44-5) is based on highly selective quotation from Marx.

13 See, inter alia, Marx (1867a: 430; 1863c: 490-1; 1865a: 879-80; 1878: 119-20). Compare Weber (1966: 207–9).

14 Weber (1966: final chapter; 1974); Hill (1961; and more generally his 1958 and 1974 collections); Thompson (1967).

15 I gave a more detailed account of Marx's critiques of the fetishism of commodities and capital in my 1983: chs 2 and 3, respectively.

152

NOTES TO PAGES 18-25

NOTES TO PAGES 25–39

153

16 Against the whole Althusserian tradition - envincing again so much modern Marxism's profoundly ahistorical use of concepts. For Marx ideology arises only where social relations (or the natural world) manifest themselves to experience in misleading forms, and the critique of ideology accordingly involves showing - materially – why this should be the case. For Althusser, ‘the ideological instance' is (a priori) a social universal. Cohen (1978: Appendix) usefully demolishes this travesty of Marx.

17 Marx says this in several places, amongst them 1863c: 484; 1865a: 790f.; 1865b: 50–2; 1867a: 77, 236f., 539–40, 568f.

18 1978: ch.5.

19 There is reason to believe Marx modified his picture of Indian stasis, and optimistic assessment of the impact of English penetration, subsequent to 1853. In part this may have been occasioned by his awareness of the destructive consequences of capitalist penetration in Ireland. See Sayer and Corrigan (1983), and in more detail Watkins (1985). Shanin (1984, first essay) sees this as part of the novelty of late Marx'. The issue is of some contemporary importance, given the influence today of Warren's reading of Marx, which ignores such issues, taking the 1853 articles on India as Marx's last word on the subject.

Chapter 3 Relations of production

sociology of family forms is both underdeveloped and, in key respects, wrong.

Chapter 4 Ideal superstructures

154

NOTES TO PAGES 42-67

NOTES TO PAGES 67–95

155

8 Letter to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862. See further my 1985.

9 The metaphor is interesting - not least in the difference in its connotations from that of basis’ and ‘superstructure’.

10 Marx repeatedly attacks this atomized, individualized view of man', in early and late works alike. I give detailed references in Frisby and Sayer (1986: 91-3).

11 See Frisby and Sayer (1986, ch. 1); Corrigan and Sayer (1985, chs 5 and 6) substantiates this argument for England.

12 Maurice Godelier, in his 1984, discusses Marx's twofold usage of the term class - as a transhistorical and an historical category - in detail. He is amongst the few commentators to have picked this up or appreciated its significance, perhaps because he is an anthropologist used to dealing with societies where class is not an evidently applicable category. E. P. Thompson (1978b) muses over the same problem in the context of eighteenth-century England; so does Laslett (1973).

13 A well-known passage in Capital suggests that while regulative use of state power - to control wages, the working-day, and so on - is ‘an essential element in the so-called primitive accumulation', thereafter ‘direct force' is used only exceptionally, and ‘the dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection. of the labourer to the capitalist' (1867a: 737). Acknowledging the ways in which this is true should not obscure the massive extent to which – as Philip Corrigan and I try to show (1985) - state regulation remains essential to ordering a society in which economic relations can routinely and dully compel.

Chapter 5 Interlude: the giraffes among the acacias

1 I discuss them mainly as they arise in his 1978, and ignore the subsequent debate.

Chapter 6 The historicity of concepts

1 I develop a more detailed argument for abstract labour being a historical category in my 1983, ch. 2; see also Rubin's seminal 1972 on this concept.

3 See above, chapter 2, note 13, for references.

4 See above, chapter 5, note 2.

5See further my criticisms of Bhaskar on this issue in my 1983: Afterword.

Bibliography

With one or two exceptions, only works directly cited in text and notes are listed here. Works of Marx are cited by date of composition rather than first publication. In cases of posthumously published manuscripts (like Capital vols 2 and 3) I have, as far as possible, given the last date touched: thus Capital 2 is cited as 1878, even though most of it dates from the early 1860s. Writings of other authors are normally cited by the publication date of the edition referred to.

Works by Marx

A Collections

B Texts

156

NOTES TO PAGES 97-136

Works by other authors

158

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

159

1

160

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

161

162

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

163

Index

Abrams, P., 104

absolute surplus value, 31, 33, 136 abstraction, 54-7, 85-8, 126-30, abstraction, 54-7, 85-8, 126-30,

140–1, 142, 149, 151; abstract and concrete, 20, 53–4, 126-7, 131–7, 141; and capitalism, 92-3, 130-1; and fetishism, 141–2; of individual, 100, 102, 130, 137, 138, 140; of labour, 129, 130, 135; of law and state, 97, 102, 130, 145–6; of private life, 97–8; production in general as, 23, 39–40, 54, 128; of society, 94, 140; sociological, 138–40; violent, 53; Wittgenstein on, 153; see also reification

abstract labour, see labour action, activity, 84, 87, 94–5, 125, 132, 136–7, 140; see also individuals

Acton, H. B., 50–1, 52, 53, 55, 57, 75, 89,114

age, 10, 70, 81, 103; see also patriarchy

alienation, 28, 43-4, 92, 93, 99, 104; and private property, 61–2, 105–6; see also reification

Althusser, L., 9–10, 12, 51, 90, 154; Althusserians, 13, 63; see also Hindess, B., Hirst, P.

ancient society, 66-7, 69, 70, 78, 90, 101, 108, 127, 139

Anderson, P., 3, 35, 73–4, 110 anthropoiogy, 63, 70, 143, 148; see also Godelier, M., Meillassoux, C.

appearance/essence distinction, see critique, Erscheinungsformen

Aristotle, 101, 106, 127, 155

Asiatic society, 45, 48, 64–6, 69, 70, 139

Balibar, E., 35, 51, 53, 54, 56, 59, 153, 154

Barker, D., 80

base, see economic structure, relations of production; see also superstructure

Bauer, B., 85

Bentham, J., 108, 145

Bernstein, E., 17

Bettelheim, C., 35, 150

Bhaskar, R., 123, 124

Binns, B., viii

Blake, W., 145

Bloch, M., 60–1, 143, 149

bourgeoisie; and civil society, 98-9; class of individuals, 106-7; and family, 79; impersonal rule of, 105–6, 110; and law, 106–11; first ruling class, 105–6, 139; and state, 103, 105–11; see also bürgerliche Gesellschaft, private property

Braverman, H., 144 bureaucracy, 138 bureaucratic collectivism, 65 bürgerliche Gesellschaft, 98–9; see also civil society

capital, 19, 58, 132, 140; circuit of, 134; Cohen on, 134; concept of, 133; constant, 58, 129; fetishism of, 39, 46–7, 93, 130, 134, 135; fixed and circulating, 129; historicity of, 136; inherent in exchange-value, 109; machinery embodiment of social power of, 32; as productive force, 34, 46–7; as social relation, 46–7, 62, 133–4, 135, 136; variable, 129, 132; see also formal subordination, real subordination, wage labour

capitalism, 28, 29, 46, 71, 137–8, 145; and abstract labour, 128–30; appearance/essence distinction in, 93; and base/superstructure, 70, 73, 93–4, 109–12, 143; dynamism of, 99; economic structure in, 63, 70, 73, 75, 94, 109, 110, 137, 140, 143, 144; fetishism in, 39, 43, 48, 92–3, 94, 140; forces/relations contradiction in, 144; fundamentals of, 33, 43, 109–11, 132; historicity of, 136–7; and individualization, 99, 138; origins of, 34–5, 122–3, 135; and patriarchy, 79, 80–2; productive forces of, 30–49 passim, 147; property in, 60, 62–3, 137, 142, see also private property; and state formation, 138, see also state; and traditional Marxist categories, 141-3; Victorian, 80

capital-logic school, 108, 156

categories, see abstractions, concepts, historical categories, ideas, transhistorical categories

Chernyshevsky, N., 16

circulation, 43; and legal forms, 55, 108-9

citizenship; in ancient society, 66–7, 69, 101, 143; in bourgeois society, 102-4, 110, 138, 140

civilization, 30, 46, 147

civil society, 16, 97–9, 101–4, 111–12, 138; epitomized in state, 109–10; as historical category, 98–9

clan, 64–9 passim, 79, 99

class, 2, 3, 18, 19, 21, 110, 138, 146–7; Cohen on, 3, 146; and division of labour, 62, 82, 137; not just economic relation, 110, 146; and estate, 105–6, 137, 139, 156; one-class society, 139; and patriarchy, 81-2; and state, 103–11, 133; struggle, 107, 135–6; Thompson on, 3, 146; see also bourgeoisie, working class

Cohen, G. A., xi-xii, 2–5, 6, 8–9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15–17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 26, 28, 35, 37–9, 44, 46–7, 50–8 passim, 59, 61, 64, 72, 74–5, 76, 83-4, 89, 91, 97, 110, 112, 113–25 passim, 134, 136, 137, 141, 142, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154

Colletti, L., 17–18, 24, 134, 141

Combination Acts, 136

commodity, 20, 128-9, 138; fetishism of, 40–1, 47, 48, 93, 106, 112, 130, 134; and forms of law, 108–9; labour power as, 132; production, 41–2, 45, see also capitalism, division of labour

commune, 20, 99; ancient, 66–7, 69, 98, see also polis; Asiatic, 45, 64–6, 69; in Grundrisse, 63–9; communal labour, 41, 129; medieval, 60, 98; primitive, 63–6, 67, 69, 78; a productive force, 29; Russian, 12; see also Marx, late writings

communism, 29, 137; see also socialism community, see commune; ideal or illusory, 101–2, 104, 105, 111–12, 138

competition, 34, 107 concepts: facet of reality, 20, see also consciousness, ideas; in internal relations view, 20–1, 36; not Marx's starting-point, 40; truth-value of, 131; see also definition, historical categories, transhistorical categories

INDEX

165

consciousness: being/consciousness relation, 95–6; and history, 96; materialist theory of, 84–8, 92, 131; phenomenal basis of, 42, 48, 92-3, 95–6, 130–1; as productive force, 36; reified subject in idealist historiography, 85–7, 89; social forms of, 4, 16, 36, 48, 53, 83–4, 91, 96, 131-2; see also Erscheinungsformen, ideas, superstructure

consumption, 29

contract, 55, 99, 138, 145; women and, 103

co-operation, 24, 57, 91; in ancient mode of production, 67; in Asiatic mode of production, 65; in capitalism, 31–2, 34; Cohen on, 38, 57–8; as productive force, 26, 28–9, 38–9, 44, 147; simple, 32

correspondence, 4–5, 6, 84, 91, 94, 114, 131, 151; see also determinism, functional explanation, internal relations, relative autonomy
crises, 19–20

critique, xi, 82, 131-7, 148; appearance/essence distinction in, 93, 131; of economic categories, 82, 138, see also political economy; and Marx's emancipatory commitment, 136–7; and history, 132, 135–6; of idealism, 84–8, 90; see also Erscheinungsformen

Darwin, C., 117–22 passim, 123; Marx on, 120; social Darwinism, 141

definition: and fetishism, 141; in Marx, 14, 18-23, 58–9, 131; real and nominal, 20, 131, 152

Desai, M., viii

determinism, 5, 6, 17, 22, 83, 88, 89, 91, 95, 114, 123, 143, 145, 155 development thesis, 3, 44-5

dialectic, 19–20, 85, 86, 152; see also Hegel, G.

disciplines, 129-30, 140

Disraeli, B., 145

division of labour, 4, 154; in Asiatic mode of production, 45; and bourgeois state-form, 105–8, 109, 111–12; Cohen on, 38; in commodity production, 41-2, 43, 45, 92, 107, 132, 137; detail, 32; in family, 62, 79; and individualization, 99, 107; mental and manual, 144; and private property, 62, 99, 137; as production relation, 22, 38, 57; as productive force, 22, 26, 38, 57; sexual, 80, 82, 144; Smith on, 30, 32; social, 34, 99, 107, 109, 132, 137; theoretical basis for reconciling Marxism and feminism, 82; of town and country, 144

dualism, 88

Durkheim, E., vii, 99, 102, 104, 138, 145,153

economics, see political economy

economic structure, 3, 4, 5, 10, 50, 59, 63, 64, 69, 70–7 passim, 84, 89, 91, 94, 97, 110, 143, 148; and feminist theory, 77–82; and functional explanation, 5, 113-114, 116, 122–3; see also capitalism, production relations

Elias, N., 102, 138

Elster, J., xi

empirical analysis, 70, 75-6, 80, 81, 135-6, 141, 143, 147–9, 151; empiricism, 87, 147, 151; in Marx, 11-13, 42, 53-4, 70, 120, 136

Enclosure Acts, 135–6

Engels, F., 16, 86, 151; Anti-Dühring, 150, 152; Dialectics of Nature, 152; late letters, xi, 5–14, 17–18, 83, 90,

92, 96; Origins of the Family, 79; Preface to Capital III, 12, 20–1

England, 51-3, 80, 96, 100–1, 102–3, 111, 139, 146–7, 148–9, 159; in Capital I, 12, 107, 111, 136

equality, 102–3, 105, 107, 108–9, 110, 138

Erscheinungsformen, 91-7, 104, 130-1, 139–40; see also consciousness, critique

essential relations, 34, 81, 93, 95, 109–10, 131–7 passim; see also critique, production relations, society

estate, 97, 100, 101, 105–6, 137

estrangement, see alienation

exchange value, 20, 41, 106, 108–9, 129, 130, 133, 134; see also commodity, value

experience, 42, 93, 95, 131, 132, 140; historical, 69

Factory Acts, 107, 136

family, 4, 20, 60, 62–3, 64, 67, 75, 78–82, 84, 93, 99, 100, 154–5; see also clan, kinship, patriarchy, reproduction

feminism, 63, 77–82, 144; Marxist, 81, 113

fetishism, 39–44, 57, 130, 136; in Asiatic mode of production, 65; of capital, 39, 46–7, 93, 106, 134, 135; Cohen on, 44, 58, 112; of commodity, 40–1, 47, 48, 93, 106, 112, 130, 134; of economy, 110; and labour theory of value, 134–5; of Marx's concepts, 18, 112, 141-3; in Marx's early and late writings, 43–4; of money, 41, 47, 106, 130; phenomenal basis of, 42–3, 61, 75, 92, 130–1; in political economy, 24, 48, 110, 140; of productive forces,

103–4; of social relations, 99–100; in social science, 140; of

superstructures, 92, 112; not universal, 42; see also alienation, reification

feudalism, 5, 70–5, 100–1, 105, 108, 139; Cohen on, 61, 72, 74–5; dynamism of European feudalism, 74; jurisdiction in, 10, 52, 100, 147; master/servant relations in, 60-1, 72–3, 78; military relations in, 72; patriarchy in, 82, 139; privilege in, 97, 101; production relations of, 71–5; property in, 60–1, 70–5, 100; religion in, 72-3, 90; state in, 100–1 transparency of social relations, 42, 92; see also estate, master/servant relations, serfdom

Feuerbach, L., 41, 44, 87, 100

forces of production, sée productive forces

formal subordination, 31-9

form and content, 16, 18, 47, 55, 58, 109, 129, 138, 145, 155; Engels on, 6, 92; see also sociał forms

Foucault, M., 102, 138, 144

freedom, 108–9, 138; of labour, 132 functional explanation, 5, 6, 8–9, 22, 35, 38, 81, 83, 91, 96, 113–125 passim, 142.143

Gaskell, E., 145

gender, 10, 70, 81, 103; see also patriarchy

Germanic form of property, 67–8

Godelier, M., xii, 8–9, 64, 70, 143, 148,156

Hegel, G. F. W., xii, 16, 19, 43, 44, 59–60, 61, 85, 86, 91, 98, 99, 126, 131, 151, 152, 153; logic of essence, 93,140

Hempel, C., 115, 123, 124, 125

Herrschaft, see master/servant relations

Hill, C., xii, 36, 52, 122, 143, 145

Hilton, R., 10, 52, 73, 143

Hindess, B., 10, 114

Hirst, P., 10, 114

166

INDEX

INDEX

167