Marx and Philosophy

By the same author M A R X : AN INTRODUCTION

MARX AND PHILOSOPHY Three Studies

W. A. Suchting

Reader, Department of General Philosophy University of Sydney

M

MACM1LLAN

© W. A. Suchting 1986 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1986 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. Was man nicht nutzt, ist eine schwere Last; Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nutzen.

Goethe*

Printed in Hong Kong British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Suchting, W.A. Marx and philosophy: three studies. 1. Communism and philosophy I. Title 335.4'11 HX533 ISBN 0-333-39429-1

*Faust, I, 682-5 ('Earn what you have inherited from your fathers so as to make it your own. What is not used is a dead weight; the moment can make use only of what it brings forth.')

Contents Preface Acknowledgements Notes on Referencing Foreword: Marx and Philosophy Introduction: Layout of the Book 1 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 2 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism 3 Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' Notes and References Index

1X x xn

xv xix 1 53 81 104 129

vii

Preface The main lines of the following studies were worked out in drafts written during the second half of the 1970s, and the finished products still bear the intellectual marks of those times. Had I been tackling the problems in question afresh now I might have treated them somewhat differently and here and there presented the results otherwise. But since I have not significantly changed my mind on the central issues the pieces may stand as they are. Meanwhile, 'To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new'. 12 September 1984 W. A. S. 12.9.84

ix

xi Acknowledgements ally important in a building but whose provenance is forgotten. Nevertheless

Acknowledgements My chief debt is to the writings of Louis Althusser; some readers may recognise that the title of this book makes perhaps immodest allusion to one of his. If he is at present treated as a 'dead dog' by many who have buried him with as little comprehension as they once praised him, intellectual history is only repeating itself once more. To a lesser degree I have learnt a great deal from some writers whom he has deeply influenced. As regards references to 'the literature', when my views are the same as or similar to those published by others, I have not necessarily noted the fact though I hope I have acknowledged significant debts. Where my views differ from those of others I have generally not entered into polemic with them, because I want my own positions to stand out as sharply as possible, obscured as little as possible by the dust and smoke of conflict. If readers are familiar with the opposing views in question then they should be able to see roughly how the polemic would go; and if they are not they need not be worried by the differences. However, here and there I have struck an agonic note where this might assist the exposition of my own positions. I have also given some references (determined largely by the accidents of my reading) where this contains developments of, or backing for, a point of my own or where I think the reader might be helped in following a theme further. More personally, Roy Edgley commented on very early drafts of most of the material on which the studies which comprise this book are based. For this I am indebted to him, especially since he did not agree with a great deal of it. However my major personal debt is to my friend and colleague John Burnheim, from whom I have learnt an incalculable amount over a number of years of conversations and written exchange. Whatever the value of this book it would have been a much poorer thing without him. The process of working out ideas is a complex one in which many an important influence gets lost, like a stone which may be structur-

Danke, dass die Gunst der Musen Unvergängliches verheisst: Den Gehalt in deinem Busen Und die Form in deinem Geist.* Thanks are due to Jon Atkins who helped read the proofs.

*Goethe, 'Dauer im 'Wechsel' (Thanks be to the favour of the Muses which forever promises that what is said will remain in your heart and how it is said in your mind.' Freely rendered.)

Notes on Referencing 1 TO MARX (AND ENGELS) For the convenience of the reader references to the works of Marx (and Engels) are in general included in the main text. Where a passage from Marx or one of his works referred to has appeared in a volume of the Marx-Engels Collected Works now being edited from Moscow, the reference is to this. If it has not yet appeared there, but is in the Pelican Marx Library, then this is cited. Otherwise, references are to the Selected Works in Three Volumes by Marx and Engels (Moscow) or to other editions as specified at the place. References to the original texts are in general to the standard Werke, published by Dietz, the principal exception being the Grun¬ drisse, not included in the Werke, where the text used has been the Dietz 1953 edition. Other separate editions are indicated in selfevident ways. The principal abbreviations used are as follows. C CW EW G Gr PW SW TSV W

= Capital, 3 vols (Penguin/New Left Books, 1976-81). = (Marx-Engels) Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975ff). = Early Writings (Penguin/New Left Books, 1975). = Grundrisse (Penguin/New Left Books, 1973). = Grundrisse (Berlin: Dietz, 1953). = Political Writings, 3 vols (Penguin/New Left Books, 1973-74). = (Marx-Engels) Selected Works in Three Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969). = Theories of Surplus-Value, 3 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963-71). = (Marx-Engels) Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1956ff).

When the edition in question is in more than one volume the reference is to the volume number followed by a colon and a pagexii

xiii Notes on Referencing number (unless otherwise specified). For example, 'CW 2:36' refers to Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 36. English translations of Marx's writings are very frequently patchy in quality, and sometimes simply unreliable. I have therefore had to revise a considerable number of the passages cited. This has been done without notice, as flagging each change would have fairly littered the text with such indications. All other translations are mine exclusively. 2 LENIN References to Lenin are to the Collected Works, 4th edition of the English translation published in Moscow under various imprints (most recently 'Progress Publishers') and various dates, and abbreviated as 'Lenin, C W followed by volume and page number(s), as above. 3 HEGEL Werke = Werke, in zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969ff). PG = Phänomenologie des Geistes ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 6th edn, 1952). PS = Phenomenology of Spirit Translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1977). WL = Wissenschaft der Logik ed. G. Lasson (Leipzig: F. Meiner, enlarged reprint of the 2nd edn, 1951). SL = Hegel's Science of Logic Translated by A.V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, New York: Humanities Press, 1969). EL = Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830) Erster Teil: Wissenschaft der Logic. Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen, vol. 8 of the Werke. Translated by W. Wallace as The Logic of Hegel (3rd edn, Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1975). I have also altered, frequently and without notice, passages cited from translations of Hegel, in particular from those listed above.

Foreword: Marx and Philosophy

Marx and Philosophy: I shall begin by situating the book in fairly general terms, and do so by glossing each word in the title. In the Introduction which follows I shall say something more detailed about the contents. First of all then, the book is about certain aspects of the work of Marx, and not, for instance, about 'Marxism', except to the extent that certain works in the tradition thus designated are specially relevant to the discussion of Marx's own thought. This is not the place to argue the point, which will be here simply assumed, namely, that 'Marxism' does not name an even approximately unitary body of theory or practice. It has always been a construction - an historical construction - the constituent parts of which have been theoretical responses to various concrete circumstances. Each has had definite practical consequences, and each has called upon various texts from Marx for canonical legitimation, this being largely what gives them the 'family resemblances' necessary for them all to be said to be part of the history of a common doctrine. 1 'Marxism' is like an inhabited countryside which when seen from a great altitude seems homogeneous enough but when surveyed from closer up presents a rather different picture. Then you see many different towns, of different sizes and different ages, some with flourishing populations and others nearly deserted, in different states of repair, linked by roads some of which have not been used for a long time, the sites sometimes clearly chosen for defensive sometimes for offensive reasons, with signs of warfare both against others and also internecine. However, all have some sort of communications with a large city that stands out as the most important. This too looks like the pictures on the tourist posters upon the walls of the other towns, at least until you approach more nearly. Then it turns out to be a very diverse place indeed. It clearly grew up slowly, with buildings of different styles, some the result of renovating others, some built from the remains of earlier ones, a xv

xvi Foreword few finished sufficiently to live in fairly comfortably - quite a number of these are grandiose ones - others with scarcely the foundations laid, or clearly knocked up without much done in the way of infrastructure. There are many wide streets, but it is also full of narrow lanes, some leading to nowhere in particular, others to dead ends. Such, to drop the image, is the work of Marx himself, very far from the thought 'cast from a single piece of steel' of which Lenin once spoke. 2 So to talk about 'Marx's thought' is to refer to a very mixed bag indeed. If what 'Marx' refers to is highly problematic, then the same is not less true of 'philosophy'. Philosophy] What is there in common between, say, Plato, Heidegger and Carnap? I believe there are at least family resemblances, but again this is not the place to argue the point. I hope it will be sufficient here merely to acknowledge the at least initial fogginess of the term; at any rate I am going to rely on an intuitive understanding, mediated by certain paradigms, of the scope of the idea of 'philosophy'. Finally, the title brings the two together with that most discreet of all words: 'and'. Indeed it is meant here to carry the burden of openness. Marx - like any other thinker - can be related to philosophy in one or more of at least three ways. Firstly, we may look for his contributions to philosophy in the pretty straightforward sense in which this is done say in articles in The Philosophical Review. And certainly various parts of Marx's work fall under this description you need only think of his doctoral dissertation and the work immediately connected with this, the 1843 critique of the sections on the / state in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and many pages of the 1844 k Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. This is so even though I MacL-WXOte next to nothing of this sort after about 1846 or 1847. Secondly, and quité apart from tne aoovg; he might be said to'have related to philosophy, even made contributions to it by virtue of what is 'implicit' in his writings, in terms of the sorts of 'assumptions' or 'presuppositions' he may have made. This is the way in which, for example, Galileo or Freud may be said to have contributed to philosophy in writings on motion or the clinical works (however much they intended them to be purely scientific). So, for example, someone may analyse the 'philosophical significance' of the notion of 'labour' in the 1844 Manuscripts. Thirdly, there is a more radical sense in which Marx might be argued to relate to philosophy: not by virtue of contributing to it from the inside so to speak, as a going concern, but by virtue of his treatment of it as a concern, as a type of

xvii Foreword practical theoretical activity, as a distinctive type of 'discourse'- in particular, by doing_a 'metacritique' of it. In such a case 'Marx and Philosophy' would have a subject-matter of the same sort as, say, 'Marx and Religion'. This is indeed suggested by the comments on philosophy, on 'the philosophers', in the 1845-1846 period, in the 'Theses on Feuerbach' and The German Ideology. The studies in this book will be concerned to some extent with 'Marx and Philosophy' in the first of the three senses just distinguished. I shall definitely be concerned with 'Marx and Philosophy' in the third sense: my principal interest j& indeed.in..works. aL Marx written aflexJieJiad j^ven up_and indeed,, arguably^jrejecieji '.philosophy', th a t is, in the works of the period after about 1845-46 and certainly after 1848.1 shall also be concerned, very centrally, with the topic^Marx and Philosophy' in the second sense, provided of course this is interpreted in a way which is consistent with a rejection of 'philosophy' as such, at least in certain traditional senses of the word. To try to get clearer about this I shall distinguish between two senses of 'assumption' or 'presupposition' - let me call them the 'grounding' and the 'practical' senses of those words. A 'grounding presupposition' is the one familiar to traditional philosophyTlt is an allegedly necessary (perhaps even also sufficient) condition for the possible existence of some sort of situation. Kant's conditions for the possibility of experience are the most obvious examples, but various ethical postulates and methodologies of science are full of instances. Such presuppositions are in general considered to be the province of a special discipline - philosophy - which has the task of discovering and validating them (or showing that they cannot be validated). A 'practical presupposition' is a great deal less ambitious: it is (if correctly identified) just a 'leading principle' of some ongoing activity, one of the most fundamental lines of operation, without any implication that it is strictly necessary for all possible activities of that sort. So chess has 'practical presuppositions' of this kind, and so does play-writing, swimming, finding out what causes cancer and what cures it, and so on. Now I do not think that Marx's work has 'grounding presuppositions', if only because I do not think that any such things exist. But it does have some 'practical presuppositions' and it is a legitimate part of 'philosophy' - in some sense of that word, or in the stipulative sense of some different word - to look these out. Some contribution to this task is the main aim of this book. But this having been said, it must immediately be added that in the

xviii Foreword nature of the case the difference between, on the one hand, expounding, elucidating, 'interpreting' Marx in these respects, and, on the other, constructing a certain set of views on the basis of, or with the materials which Marx provides, is often a nice one. This might be argued to follow from various general theses about the 'deconstruction' of texts. I am not doing so here, but only making the claim in the particular case of Marx. His work is so complex and, in particular, the 'philosophical' passages so few and far between (in comparison certainly with the amount he wrote on political economy, history, and so on) that any presentation of 'what Marx really meant' in this area must be at least hazardous. Certainly no 'all-around', 'balanced' picture is attempted: this can be achieved, if at all, only by putting together various pictures in a sort of montage which has yet to be produced.

Introduction: Layout of the Book The preceding 'Foreword' has outlined the general orientation of the studies that follow. But it may be useful for the reader to have a slightly more detailed overview of the lay-out of the book as a whole. Though the term 'epistemology' (and equivalents in other languages) is not earlier than the mid-nineteenth century, what it designates is the typically modern branch of philosophy. (Even Hegel, whose system does not even contain a separate 'theory of knowledge', has an epistemological point of departure in the Phenomenology of Spirit.) So a consideration of traditional epistemology would seem, on this ground alone, to form a privileged access to the area marked out by 'Marx and Philosophy'. This is the general context of the first study, 'Marx and "The Problem of Knowledge" '. It is meant to have a two-fold significance. Firstly, from the side of 'philosophy', it aims to outline a fundamental critique of 'epistemology', in Marx's sense of 'critique' which includes both an 'internal' criticism of the position in question ancLan !exter= nal' one which explains, from the point of view of a_different 'problematic', the difficulties revealed by the first. Secondly, from the point of view of Marx, the outlining and use^Fthis different problematic permits us to push straight into the heartland of Marx's thinking where resides his central concept of material practice or what may be called his 'practical materialism'. In the first study the emphasis is on 'practice', the 'practical' side of this notion. The 'material' or 'materialism' aspect is the central theme of the second study, 'Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism'. In the 'Theses on Feuerbach', which Engels correctly characterised as 'the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook' (SW 3:336), Marx contrasted his own 'new materialism' with 'the old materialism', with 'all hitherto existing materialsm' (SW 1:13,15) But in what, more precisely, does the specificity of 'the new materialism' consist? The answer to this question is by no means xix

Introduction clear. Marx himself, in a characterisation in the first volume of Capital, cited a countless number of times, speaks in terms which seem hardly different from traditional conceptions. I argue that the answer must be sought in the central notion of material practice, already introduced and partly explored in the first study. But this opens up some complex issues and makes it necessary - so I argue to distinguish between a number of different senses of 'materialism'.. Amongst these different senses one will be found lacking, namely, 'dialectical materialism'. This might even be thought a notable absence in view of the fact that reference is often made to a philosophical position or world-view of this name, ascribed explicitly or by way of implication to Marx. Now even though Marx did not use this term he certainly subscribed, in some sense, to the idea of a 'dialectic'. The task of the third study, 'Marx, Hegel and "Contradiction" ' is to make some contribution to finding out just what this comes to in Marx with regard to a basic notion. XX

1 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' In the beginning was the deedl Goethe 1 1 INTRODUCTION 'Epistemological' questions arise very early in Marx's work. 2 For example, the notes for the doctoral dissertation (1841) pose the problem of the theoretical conditions for the possibility of Hegel's political accommodation (CW 1:84); the 1843 critique of Hegel's philosophy of the state provides an answer. The 1844 Manuscripts discuss the basis and development of human sense-perception. Basic questions relating to materialism and idealism are absolutely central to the brief notes (written in 1845) which Engels described, in publishing them for the first time under the title 'Theses on Feuer¬ bach', as 'the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook' (SW 3:336); the same is true of The German Ideology, written soon after, as of The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Ten years later, in the 'Introduction' to the Grundrisse (1857-58) he discusses general questions of methodology, and in Capital 'epistemological' standpoints are present both explicitly and implicitly, as they are in one of Marx's last important writings, the 'Marginalia' to Adolph Wagner's Textbook of Political Economy (1879-80). Of course there is no extended and comprehensive treatment of matters of this sort in Marx's work and consideration of them certainly retreated as he became more and more preoccupied with concrete questions of politics and political economy. Nevertheless there are ample materials on which to base an attempt to reconstruct his views in this regard, and it is to this project that I want to contribute in the present study. 3 I shall for the most part confine myself to the period of Marx's work which begins with the 'Theses o n 1

2 Marx and Philosophy Feuerbach'; indeed it is with a consideration of the first of these that I shall begin. 2 THE FIRST O F T H E "THESES ON FEUERBACH' This runs, in greater part, as follows: 'The chief defect in all materialism up till now (Feuerbach's included) is that objectivity, actuality, sensibility [der Gegenstand, die Wirklichkeit, Sinnlichkeit] is grasped only in the form of the object or the given [des Objekts oder der Anschauung]; not however as sensible human activity, practice [sinnlich menschliche Tätigkeit, Praxis], not subjectively. Hence the active side [was] worked out abstractly, in opposition to materialism, by idealism - which naturally knows nothing of real sensible activity as such. Feuerbach appeals to sensible objects [sinnliche Objekte] ones really different from thought-objects [Gedankenobjekten]: but he does not grasp human activity itself as objective [gegenständliche] activity.' (CW 5:3) 3 'OBJECTIVITY', 'ACTUALITY', 'SENSIBILITY'; 'OBJECT', 'THE GIVEN' The first problem is to achieve some preliminary understanding of these terms, about which the first of the two parts of the first sentence is organised. 3.1 'Objectivity'/'Object' It is fairly clear that the first of the terms, 'objectivity' ('der Gegen¬ stand') directly contrasts with 'object' ('das Objekt'). But the sense of the contrast thus marked out by the verbal distinction is by no means a clear one; indeed the way in which I have\rnade the distinction is to some extent arbitrary, because English do$s not have two words as different as the two German ones. But then again the import of the distinction is no more obvious in the original than in the translation. This is, I believe, because Marx is using here a distinction which has its origin (proximate anyway) in Hegel. 'The Object' ('Das Objekt') is the title (in the definitive Encyclopedia exposition anyway) of the second main sub-division of the

3 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' last of the three broadest divisions of Hegel's Logic, namely, the 'Doctrine of the Notion [Begriff]'. In the first main sub-division of the latter ('The Subjective Notion') reality is conceived as 'subject', as having the inner articulation of thought-contents, in abstraction from an object of thought. At the end - by an argument which fortunately does not need to be traced out here - subjective thinking in abstraction from an object of thinking goes over to the opposite idea, namely, that of the world conceived as purely objective, as made up of objects (Objekte), constituted as such without reference to a subject. But in the course of the argument of this section - which again we do not have to follow for present purposes - this view is also shown to be inadequate and is replaced by a synthesis of the opposing abstractions: the world is now grasped as thinking, certainly, but as thinking which necessarily has an object, so that the object is for a subject. Grasped as such, what was formerly conceived as 'das Objekt' becomes 'der Gegenstand', that is, what, etymologically speaking, 'stands against' something else (a subject). By 'object' [Objekt] is commonly understood not merely an abstract being or existing thing or some actuality or other, but what is concrete, completely independent in itself . . . That an object is also what is objective [Dass das Objekt auch Gegenstand . . . ist] and something external to something else will be seen later on, insofar as it puts itself in opposition [Gegensatz] to the subjective [zum Subjektiven]. (EL, Sec. 193) So Marx would seem to intend, by using the distinction which I am elucidating, that what is on the side of the object in knowing - 'der Gegenstand' - should not be conceived as constituted in total independence of what confronts it on the side of the subject. (This formulation is only a first approximation which will be replaced later on.) 3.2 'Actuality'4 This also has Hegelian overtones. In Hegel's Logic, 'Die Wirklich¬ keit' is the title of the third main sub-division of the 'Doctrine of Essence', in turn the second of the three broadest divisions of the system. 'Die Wirklichkeit' is the synthesis of the preceding two categories of 'Ground' and 'Appearance': it signifies the stage at

4 Marx and Philosophy which 'Ground' is fully manifest, at which the nature of things is taken to be a single whole whose 'essence' and the appearance of that essence are discriminable but not separable aspects (something like the form of a numerical series and its members). So 'actuality' chimes in with the meaning of 'Gegenstand' as that which, by virtue of the moment of 'appearance' contained in it, is completely 'for us'. Thus both 'objectivity' and 'reality' in the first trio are in a sense in apposition and together contrast with 'object' in the following pair of terms. 3.3 'Sensibility'/'the Given' 'Sensibility' harks back, proximately at least, to Kant: The capacity (receptivity) for receiving ideas [Vorstellungen] through the mode in which we are affected by objects [Gegenstände] is entitled sensibility [Sinnlichkeit]. Thus sensibility alone yields us the given [Anschauungen]; but it is through the understanding that [objects] are thought, and from the understanding arise concepts. All thinking must . . . relate ultimately to the given, and therefore, with us, to sensibility . . . (Critique of Pure Reason, A 19 = B 33, Kemp Smith's trans., revised). So it turns out that to understand 'sensibility' we must bring in precisely the remaining term of the set we are explicating, namely, 'the given' ('Anschauungen'). 5 Indeed this also involves the term 'idea' which will occur in a later context and can conveniently be introduced now. 'Idea [Vorstellung]' is Kant's most general term for any mental content which may be said to 'represent'. 6 One of its species contains those that relate to objects: this is 'knowledge [Erkenntnis]'. 'Knowledge' is either 'the given [Anschauung]' or 'concept [Begriff]'. 'The former relates immediately to the object and is single, the latter refers to it mediately by means of a feature which several things may have in common' (op. cit. , A 320 = B 377). Thus 'the given' denotes that aspect of knowledge by virtue of which it refers directly to particulars, that is, refers in each case without reference to other particulars. The sphere of intuition is that of the purely receptive, passive dimension of mind. It is the raw material of knowledge on

5 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' which the active, 'spontaneous' factor of conceptualisation works. Thus, in sum, for Kant, sensibility is the mental capacity for being affected by objects, the result of such affection being the given, which, when worked upon by the understanding, may yield concepts, and thereby knowledge proper. 7 In Hegel's philosophy of mind, immediate apprehension of an individual object is the province of 'sensible consciousness' ('Das sinnliche Bewusstsein') (EL, Sec. 418). This is the first phase of the section entitled 'Consciousness', which culminates in 'Reason', after which we proceed to 'Mind' ('Der Geist'), the first phase of which is 'Theoretical Mind', The initial phase of this is 'The Given' (EL, Sec. 446ff). The given is immediate as in Kant - or, more exactly, that in the case of which the mediation is not yet explicit. It has both outward and inward moments. As content of mind it is inward, but as having a reference to what is other than the subject it is outward. But insofar as the given is 'intentional' its outwardness is just an aspect of its inwardness. The given qua inward (though having intentionality) is just 'idea' ('Vorstellung') (EL, Sees 45Iff). This has the sense of 'picture-thinking', the picture being a particular with universal intent. When the latter achieves independence we have 'thinking' proper (EL, Sees 465ff). Thus in Hegel the broad sequence is the same as in Kant: from sensibility - or 'sensible consciousness' - through the given/ideas, to thinking. The difference is mainly that for Kant the given is a sub-class of 'ideas', whereas for Hegel 'ideas' are a development of one aspect of the given. But both view sensibility/sensible consciousness as a capacity for apprehension of objects, and for both this is immediate. 3.4 The 'Chief Defect' in Traditional Materialism If we come back now to the group of terms in the first of the 'Theses on Feuerbach' we can see that the two sub-groups have a common arrangement: in both there is one set which are object-oriented (objectivity, actuality/object) and one which is subject-oriented (sensibility/the given). So we may take it that the contrast intended is between, on the one hand, objectivity, actuality/object, and on the other sensibility/the given; and that contrast between the terms in each set relates to the 'chief defect' of traditional materalism. However Marx does not tell us, except by implication, what exactly is the

6

Marx and Philosophy 'defect' of traditional materialism. The implication, signalled in the contrast between 'objectivity' and 'object', is made a little more explicit with the reference to 'sensible human activity, practice' in the second part of the first sentence. Still, we have in effect an answer to a question that has not yet been made clear: why is grasping objectivity (etc.) as pure object a defect that is remedied by grasping the same as practice (etc.)? This is a question the answer to which is partly implied in the rest of the passage cited; but we shall have to turn to the second of the 'Theses' for more - though not fully explicit - instruction. Meanwhile let us look at the second main sentence in the passage. 4 '. . . T H E ACTIVE SIDE WAS WORKED OUT ABSTRACTLY . . . BY IDEALISM It is a story familiar to students of the history of philosophy how it was effectively Kant who introduced into epistemology the idea of object-constituting activity of the subject. According to the doctrine of the Critique of Pure Reason knowledge results from a combination of the workings of the faculties of 'receptivity' and 'spontaneity'TThe former supplies the raw materials of knowledge and the latter synthesises them into objects according to the forms of space and time on the one hand, and the categories of the understanding on the other. Hegel (we need not be concerned here with the transitional figures of classical German philosophy, especially Fichte and Schelling) picked up the idea of the centrality of the idea of activity for epistemology, and radically generalised it. It emerged as important early in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the famous section on 'the relation of domination and servitude'. In labouring for his master, in transforming the world into objects of use and enjoyment for him, the bondsman discovers and develops his capacities on the one hand, and, on the other, discovers the nature of the external world on which he is forced to act (Ch. IVA ad fin). But it is in the Logic that the theme of activity finds its most comprehensive and abstract working-out. Taking up the thread where it was dropped in explaining the distinction between 'Objekt' and 'Gegenstand' above, we find that the former goes through three main phases. In the first, 'Mechanism', the object comes forward as a

7 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' sheer multiplicity, the parts of which are related in a purely external way. In the second, 'Chemism', unity begins to reappear when it is seen that the very independence of the separate objects is an expression of a form of relatedness to one another. In the last section, 'Teleology', the preceding two are brought together into a unity; objects in their plurality retain an independence consistent with the dependence presupposed by their being in the unity of an End, a telos. In Teleology the separation between object and subject - the second represented by the End - is done away with: the latter has ceased to be merely subjective, being now embodied in an objective state of affairs, whilst this is at once independent but also the vehicle and expression of the subjective. The objective is now in fact just the Means to the End, and in this unity we have the unity of the subjective and objective which is the essential character of 'the Idea', the subject-matter of the last phase of the Logic. The first phase of 'the Idea' is 'Life'. This is just the conception of the unity of different factors, where the unity is nothing but the relation between the factors as brought together for the realisation of some End, whilst the factors only have their existence as such in being thus related. That exemplification of Life which is the organism has brought the inorganic within itself as a means to its own Ends. The external world is both what always confronts it, and also what is ever being absorbed within it. This twofold relationship is the essential nature of the second main sub-division of the Idea, what Hegel calls by the inclusive name 'Knowing'. From being considered primarily in its external aspect, in Life, the world is now considered from the point of view of the process of its internalisation. This can happen in one or other of two ways. Firstly, the subject can take up a passive attitude, and then the object as it is enters the subject by modifying consciousness. The subject appropriates it by analysing and synthesising what is thus vouchsafed it. This is Knowing as usually understood. It is still an imperfect internalisation of the object because the subject is determined from without by the nature of the modification of its consciousness: the object is just 'given', 'data' in the original meaning of the word. But, secondly, the subject may take up an active stance and make the world subjective by transforming it in line with its own character. This is Knowing as 'Willing'. But this too is imperfect because the End-as-Realised is never fully adequate to the End-as-intended. The contradiction can only be removed by a category in which the object is no longer alien

8

Marx and Philosophy to the subject that wills, but is identical with the subject in its real nature. What is projected as an 'Ought' is the inner nature of the real, and what is is just the eternal working together of Knowing proper and Willing. This is the 'Absolute Idea'. Marx says that 'the active side [was] worked out abstractly, in opposition to materialism, by idealism'. That is, the factor of activity was developed theoretically in abstraction from, neglecting, that which materialism emphasises, namely, the factor of sense-perceptible reality. This is underlined in the immediately following words where Marx says that 'idealism . . . naturally knows nothing of real sensible activity as such'. Kant's object-constituting activity is a process of some sort purely internal to the subject. Hegel is at pains to point out that the (active) relation of subject to object is for him internal to subjectivity in an appropriately broad sense. Thus he writes that to speak of 'the unity of thinking and being' might make it seem as if the subjective is 'neutralised' by the objective, Thinking by Being. But in the negative unity of the Idea thinking over-reaches [übergreift] being, subjectivity over-reaches objectivity. The unity of the Idea is subjectivity, thinking, infinity and is in consequence to be essentially distinguished from the Idea as substance, just as this over-reaching subjectivity, thinking, infinity is to be distinguished from the one-sided subjectivity, the one-sided thinking, the one-sided infinity to which it descends in judging and defining (EL, Sec. 215) 5 DRAWING SOME THREADS TOGETHER We can now begin to see the picture of traditional materialism and of idealism which underlies the remarks in the first of the 'Theses on Feuerbach'. Constitutive of both is the subject/object couple. What is characteristic of the materialist position is the priority accorded the object, conceived as constituted independently of anything else and vouchsafing its nature to the subject in a direct, unmediated way in Anschauung. And put in this way it then becomes apparent that the traditional materialism that Marx concentrates on here is only one of many species of a more general position characteristic of which is taking the basis of knowledge to be a direct inspection of a real object

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 9 of one sort or another. In this perspective traditional materialism is on all fours with, say, classical British empiricism. What is characteristic of the idealist position is the priority accorded the subject, and in particular the constituting activity of the subject. If for the first position the subject is, ideally, the perfect mirror of the object, for the second position the object becomes, with Hegel, the perfect mirror of - indeed is - the subject. Kant's is a half-hearted idealism, insofar as what it takes to be constituted by the subject are empirical objects (the 'content' of which is supplied to the subject independently of it), leaving the noumenal domain outside the scope of the subject and also unknowable. Hegel's was the project of absorbing the entire domain of the real into the ambit of the subject, into a super-subject, the Absolute Subject. Both, Marx partly says, partly implies, are abstract, that is, one-sided: the first abstracts from the cognitive activity which the second emphasises at the expense of what the first concentrates upon. Nevertheless, all this is still at the level of assurances, as Hegel would say: Marx has asserted that a certain position is defective - and by implication another too - and has suggested an alternative, but has not told us in any explicit way what the defectiveness consists in. This lack is to some extent made good in the second of the 'Theses'. 6 THE SECOND OF THE 'THESES ON FEUERBACH': THE 'PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE' The second of the 'Theses' runs, in full, as follows: 'The question whether objective [gegenständliche] truth pertains to [zukomme] human thinking - is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice must people prove the truth, i.e. actuality [Wirklichkeit] and power, this-worldliness [Diesseitigkeit] of their thinking. The dispute over the actuality or non-actuality of thinking - that is isolated from practice - is a purely scholastic question.' (CW 5:3) 'The question whether objective truth pertains to human thinking', 'the dispute over the actuality or non-actuality of thinking' - this is the classical 'problem of knowledge'. It arises as follows. The point of departure is a subject and an object of knowledge, as we came upon them in the immediately preceding discussion. The former is that wherein a cognitive process of some sort is conceived to occur; the latter is an extra-discursive somewhat which the subject's knowledge

10 Marx and Philosophy is conceived to be about. That knowledge presupposes truth, which consists in general in an accurate representation by the subject of characters of the object. The 'problem of knowledge' is that of finding a criterion (or set of criteria) of truth, such that an affirmation of the latter is 'justified', 'properly evidenced', 'guaranteed' (etc.) by a satisfaction of the former. This defines the task of classical, traditional epistemology, which is to find such quite general criteria or guarantees of truth. Qua guarantees the requisite criteria must form a specially privileged domain of knowledge. (This domain has been generally identified with that of statements which cannot but be true, but this is not crucial. 8 ) Epistemology qua general must be a priori at least in the sense of not presupposing the truth of any particular beliefs or results of inquiry. 9 But there is a fundamental difficulty in the way of solving this problem (a difficulty which was recognised at least as long ago as the Greek sceptics). 10 It may be put in many different ways; the following is one. The problem is to find a criterion which guarantees that a representation is a true representation of reality. Now a putative criterion is presumably a claim to knowledge and hence to truth. Therefore it is either to be justified by some further criterion or it is insusceptible of further guarantee. If the latter, then there are some representations that do not need to be justified by criteria, contrary to the requirements of the model. If the former, then either the chain of further criteria has a last member or it has not. If it has, then the case reduces itself to the one just considered. If it has not, then there are no ultimate criteria of knowledge. In brief, the choice is either dogmatism (there are items of knowledge not capable of being guaranteed or justified) or scepticism (no statement is susceptible of being guaranteed or justified). 11 So it would seem that the problem cannot in principle be solved, resulting as it does either in some items of assumed knowledge falling outside its own account (dogmatism) or in all such items doing so (scepticism). In general the great historical systems are more or less complex combinations of dogmatism and scepticism. In any case the course of modern (post-Cartesian) philosophy may be viewed in the light of different approaches to the 'problem of knowledge'. Such approaches may be schematically laid out as follows. (1) A criterion which neither needs a criterion nor is dogmatic is

11 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' sought in what is in some sense self-authenticating. There are two main variants here. (a) One takes the subject as primary source. The great historical exemplar here is of course the Cartesian cogito. (b) The variant that takes the object as primary source. The exemplars here are traditional materialisms and empiricisms which take certain sorts of perceptual judgements as guarantors of claims to empirical truth. (2) An attempt is made to change the terms of the problem by trying to remove the 'gap' between subject and object which gives rise to this need for a criterion. Again there are two main variants. (a) Taking the object as primary, knowledge is held to be some kind of merging of the subject with the object (Jacobi, Bergson, 'Verstehen' epistemologies of various sorts, etc.). (b) Taking the subject as primary, this approach, whose exemplar is Kant, has the object as such constituted in some way by the activity of the subject. (3) Hegel in a sense returns to the beginning: for him the subject is self-authenticating, not so much as origin or foundation, rather as end, and indeed as a subject which includes - in a special sense - the object. The Absolute subject authenticates itself by being the end-point of a development through forms that assume some sort of distinction between subject and object and show themselves to be not able to be carried through consistently. The Absolute Subject is the sole entity than can be consistently thought. 113 This is, of course, not a mere random sequence. The failure of the Cartesian project gives place to the second variant which works itself out by disintegrating its own presuppositions. Berkeley's doctrine of ideas makes it impossible to account for physical objects without re-introducing problems it was meant to avoid (e.g. the relation of ideas to their grounds, duplicated in the relation of ideas to God). Hume, at the very end of the Treatise, confesses himself unable to construct the concept of the subject (self) in his own terms. Intuitions - on option (2a) - solve the problem by the incoherent assumption of a subject of knowledge which yet is not an independent subject at all. Kant takes his problem from Hume (especially the problem of justifying the assumption of synthetic a priori statements). But, quite apart from detailed problems, his position shows the familiar

12 Marx and Philosophy face of dogmatism (assumption of the necessary character of certain results in logic, mathematics and physics) and scepticism (things-inthemselves). Hegel's is an attempt to overcome the subject-object dualism by absorbing the second into the first, or, rather, by sinking both into the idea of the Absolute Subject. It is the combination of subtlety and lack of any positive outcome in the attempts to solve the problem of knowledge according to the various classical options that undoubtedly leads Marx to call it - in the terms in which it is posed - 'a purely scholastic question', 12 and also leads him to recur to the notion of practice introduced in the first of the 'Theses'. So now, having got a better grip on the significance of the problem which is assumed there, we must return to that first passage and try to make out more clearly what Marx's alternative in fact is. 7 'SENSIBLE HUMAN ACTIVITY, PRACTICE' The first of the 'Theses' cited in Section 2 makes at least three relevant points: (1) 'objectivity, reality, sensibility' must be grasped 'as sensible human activity, practice'. (2) To grasp objectivity (etc.) thus is to grasp it 'subjectively'. (3) 'Sensible human activity, practice' is 'objective [gegenständlich]', that is, of the character of objects qua 'Gegenstände'. What does (1) mean? The problem lies in the first place in the interpretation of 'as': objectivity (etc.) is to be grasped 'as' practice. The formula is repeated, in substantially the same terms, though only with respect to sensibility, in Theses 5 and 9, so the 'as' is not a mere trick of expression. In fact this connecting of 'sensibility' and 'activity' recalls a long passage in the 1844 Manuscripts (CW 3: 299ff) written a year before the 'Theses'. The passage is a difficult one, and contains many viewpoints not obviously relevant here. But the thread of the argument which I think affords us an important clue to Marx's meaning may be put as follows. Humankind's primary relation to the world is an active one, specifically the relation involved in labour. In transforming the world through labour, two things happen simultaneously. Firstly, the object of labour is changed, in accordance with certain human aims, into a new sort of object - a 'humanised' object.

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 13 But, secondly, the subject of labour, the labourer, develops new sensory capacities adequate to the reception of the new objective characteristics thus brought forth - the subject becomes 'naturalised'. 13 This suggests that what is of primary significance is not the 'subject' or the 'object' but the practical relation by which the real object is transformed in labour. This practical relation thus has two aspects, namely, the 'subjective', which is the factor of the executor of the practice, whose sensory capacities are determined by the practice, and the 'objective', which is the factor determined by the real object. In other words, 'subject' and 'object' - that is, the real object as an object-for-us - are not constituted prior to the practice, but are constituted within practice as moments of it. This takes account of points (2) and (3) above. And it also brings us in fact to the point of view of the third of the 'Theses', in which Marx says that 'the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of . . . self-changing can be . . . rationally understood only as . . . practice1 (CW 5:4). This is then ready to be generalised. Marx's considerations in the 1844 Manuscripts referred in the first place to cases in which labour brought forth new sorts of objects and thus called forth new sensory capacities to deal with them, as when, for example, a new way of preparing food calls forth new gustatory, olfactory, etc. abilities, new types of music, new capacities for aural perception, and so on. But the viewpoint is equally applicable to situations where what is in question is an exploration of the world as it is and where the sensory capacities in the basic sense of the word are not necessarily extended. Consider examples of the simplest kinds of knowledge of the world. Thus it is found that kinds of objects differ with respect to the degree to which they resist penetration by other kinds of bodies; that some sorts disappear when immersed in a certain sort of liquid and are subsequently recoverable by evaporation, and indeed that they do this to different degrees; that, independently of other properties like shape or volume, bodies are similar in having a characteristic the magnitude of which can be compared in terms of the muscular strains involved in supporting them, and indeed that this correlates with the effort required to put them into motion. Thus the common-sense concepts of hardness, solubility and weight are born out of practical relations between objects (including human beings), which, in the form of what may be called 'procedures', serve to discriminate certain features of the world from others. Simply as thus discriminated, isolated from other features of the world, such ideas may be

14 Marx and Philosophy called 'abstractions', and as discriminated by practical operations they may be appropriately described as 'real' rather than in some sense merely 'mental' in provenance and nature. So altogether they may be called 'real abstractions'. 14 Thus it is not a matter of first having concepts of hardness, or solubility or weight, and then trying to find methods of applying them to the world: for such concepts are 'ever-already' applied and it is rather a matter of finding an adequate set of representations for classifying things according to the results of practical interactions. These examples are of the simplest, taken from the sphere of everyday knowledge. Properly scientific concept-formation proceeds in the same practical mode, though with characteristic differences. This is not the place to explore the differences between everyday and scientific concept-formation, but certain features are fairly clear. Thus science refines the practical procedures born in everyday life to gain knowledge of aspects of the world available to it, often by way of theories about the operation of those procedures. For example, beam-balances of various degrees of sophistication are developed, dependent in general on items of general knowledge like the principle of the lever; anomalies at the everyday level are removed by more refined conceptual discriminations (for example, differences in the weight of the same object at different places accounted for in terms of the differences in the concepts 'weight' and 'mass'); the scientific concepts thus arrived at are both generalized and further analyzed ('inertial' mass is now the general concept of that about a body which is responsible for resisting tendencies to acceleration, and 'gravitational' mass is what determines the magnitude of tendencies for acceleration between bodies at a given distance from one another); and so on. 15 But whatever the differences between the concepts formed at the levels of everyday knowledge on the one hand and scientific knowledge on the other, what they have in common is that they are ultimately anchored semantically, they are introduced, by procedures which apply them, whether directly, or, especially in the case of science, often indirectly. 16 The situation is no different in principle as we move away from the inorganic physical world. Let us, for the sake of brevity, spring straight into the domain of the economy of a society - let us say in a particular generalized commodity-producing society. Then in such a case the practical operation of exchange of products in the market generates certain 'real abstractions' from the multiplicity of characteristics of the products exchanged. Thus there are, on the one hand,

15 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' the 'use-value' of those products and, on the other, their 'exchangevalue', the last reducible, in the final analysis, according to Marx's theory of value, to ratios of amounts of 'abstract labor' (itself a 'real abstraction' from use-value-creating labour). Again, from the endless variety of concrete characteristics of people both individually and in their relations, economic practices (including struggle at the economic level over the control of the productive resources and the products of their use) generate the 'real abstraction' of 'class' and of 'class-individuals', of 'class-interest' and 'class-behaviour'. It may be noted immediately that this approach does not so much solve the traditional 'problem of knowledge' as dissolve it. For what the traditional picture basically involves is the idea of a knowing subject and a (putatively) known object, each constituted independently of the other, the content of the knowledge of the first being a set of representations of some kind, which stand in some form of correspondence to the object. The problem is then: how can we know when a correspondence between the representations and the object obtains? Different answers offer different suggestions as to the right procedures (perhaps involving practical interventions) to apply in instituting proofs of that correspondence. The key to the door out of this is a rejection of the idea of pre-constituted epistemological subjects and objects, including the idea of systems of representations set up in advance of procedures which attempt to relate them to the object, the world. This key is supplied in the first of the 'Theses' and in the passage in a later work where he writes that 'the relations of people to nature are . . . practical from the outset, that is, relations established by action . . . rather than theoretical relations' (TM 190). 17 It is precisely 'theoretical relations' that are regarded as primary in the traditional epistemological picture: people have sets of representations and then seek to find out what they represent, if anything. Marx argues, in effect, that this picture reverses the actual relation, which is in general that practical relations precede corresponding systems of representations. 'Subjects' and 'objects' in the epistemological sense required by traditional epistemology, namely as vehicles of systems respectively of representations and of what the representations refer to, are derivative from practical relations, in the sense that the systems of representations available are determined by the types of practical relation; and the 'reference' of such representations is just the world insofar as certain aspects of it are discriminated by certain types of

16 Marx and Philosophy practical interactions and their corresponding representations. But this is just to say that there are no 'subjects' or 'objects' in general, such as is required by traditional epistemology, which deals with such entities and their relations in complete generality. The only 'subject' that can be detected is just that system of representations which depends for its meaning on the types of interactions engaged in and which changes in those interactions. 18 The 'object' is that which stands as one pole of the practical relation: nothing in particular can be said about it except insofar as it is discriminated by interactions with it. 8 A SECOND SENSE OF 'PRACTICE': 'THEORETICAL PRACTICE' The sense of 'practice' upon which I have just been commenting is a primary one in that practices of this sort are at the basis of all our knowledge. But there is another sense to be distinguished also, one which is sketched in the 'Introduction' to the Grundrisse a dozen years later. We must now look at it in the context of the present argument, as it will serve as the point of departure for some further developments. I shall first cite the passage in detail and then comment upon it. Marx begins by saying that When we consider a given country from the standpoint of political economy . . . the correct thing seems to be to start with the real and concrete, and therefore . . . with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, he goes on, . . . on closer examination this proves to be false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty word if I do not know the elements on which they rest, e.g. wage-labour, capital, etc. These presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc . . . Thus if I were to begin with population this would be a chaotic idea [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of a process of further characterisation [Bestimmung], come upon ever

17 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' more simple concepts; from the concrete as grasped in ideas [von dem vorgestellten Konkreten] towards ever more tenuous abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest characteristics. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, however this time not as a chaotic idea of a whole, but as a rich totality of many characteristics and relations. In fact The first path is that historically taken by economics in its beginnings. The economists of the 17th Century, e.g., always began with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of abstract general relations, like division of labour, money, value, etc. which serve as means of characterisation. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less demarcated and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from simples like labour, division of labour, need, exchange-value to the state, exchange between nations and the world market. This second way, Marx continues, is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the focussing [Zusammenfassung] of many characteristics, therefore unity of the manifold. Hence it appears in thinking as a process of focussing, as result, not as starting point, though it is the actual starting point and hence also the starting point as regards data and ideas [der Anschauung und der Vorstellung]. Along the first path the idea in its fullness was distilled into abstract characterisations, along the second, the abstract characteristics lead to the reproduction of the concrete by way of thinking . . . the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is . . . the way in which thinking appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as a mental concrete [ein geistig Konkretes]. . . . the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, a thought-concretum [Gedankenkonkretum], in fact a product of thinking, of conceiving . . . a product . . . of the working-up [Verarbeitung] of data and ideas into concepts. The whole, as it appears in the head as a whole of thoughts, is a product of the thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only mode possible for it, a mode

18

Marx and Philosophy which is different from the artistic, religious, practico-mental [praktisch-geistig] appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its independence, outside the head, after as before; so long, of course, as the head behaves only . . . theoretically (G 100-2).'

Let us now sort out the main threads in this passage. (1) Marx distinguishes in the first place what he calls at the end 'the real subject', that which exists independently of any cognitive activity. 19 (2) A particular reality is 'concrete'. It is so by virtue of being in fact, though not (to start with) for knowledge, a unity of various properties and the term of various relations. (3) In distinction from this 'real concrete' as it may be called, there are various types of apprehension of it, namely, 'data'[Anschauung]' (I translate it thus here because 'data' seems to fit better with the context), 'ideas [Vorstellungen]', and 'concepts [Begriffe]' or 'thoughts [Gedanken]'. (It is obvious from the considerations of section 3 above that Marx is here using a Kantian-Hegelian terminology. 20 ) (4) Cognitive apprehension of the real concrete begins with 'data'. About this nothing is said, but we may assume that Marx understood it to be that primitive relation to the object in which particularity is the determining characteristic. It is not in fact mentioned except when coupled with 'ideas'. These Marx clearly takes to be rough and ready, internally minimally structured holistic representations. They might appear to be very concrete forms of knowledge but are in fact very abstract in the sense that they abstract from the articulations which make the real concrete concrete. We may reasonably take these to be produced in the course of practice in the first sense, that discussed in the previous section. (5) 'Data' and 'ideas' are subject to a 'working-up' (or 'workingover') - the 'work' here mimics the 'Arbeit'-root of the original which results in 'concepts' or 'thoughts'. These permit the conceiving of the various real characteristics (properties and relations) by virtue of which the real concrete is concrete. (What is 'worked-up' at a certain stage may of course also include concepts formed at an earlier stage.) (6) The product of combining these concepts in their abstraction from one another so as to yield a means for grasping the real in its concreteness is 'a mental concrete', 'a totality of thoughts', 'a

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 19 thought-concretum', 'a whole of thoughts'. 21 This combining will in general take the form of chains of argument. (7) The process by which this 'theoretical concrete' (as it may be called) comes to be (indicated in 5 and 6 just above) is a specific 'mode [Weise]' of 'appropriation' - 'specific' insofar as there are other modes which appropriate the world in different ways. 9 THE CONCEPT OF A 'MODE OF THEORETICAL PRODUCTION' Marx never spelled out this idea of a 'mode of theoretical production'. But it is worth the effort to try to sketch in this part of the picture. The fairly obvious strategy in attempting to do so is to take as a model the concept of a 'mode of production' in the economic sense, such as we have it in Marx's writings, partly explicitly, largely implicitly, especially in the analyses in Capital. It may be remarked here that despite his achievement in having been the first to focus attention on the '1857 Introduction' with respect to the idea of 'theoretical practice', and to use, however implicitly, the analogy of Marx's analysis of economic production to elucidate the production of knowledge, Althusser 22 has failed to press the analogy. Specifically, he has failed to extend it, decisively and consistently anyway, past what is effectively Marx's exposition of the labour-process, which explicitly prescinds from the special features of production in different forms of social organization, that is, from the question of (social) relations of production. For not doing this Althusser has been criticised from various quarters, the whole idea of theoretical production on the analogy of economic production being thereby impugned. Now despite indications here and there in his writings I think it is correct to say that he has indeed neglected (though by no means ignored) the question of the relation of the theoretical to the social and certainly has not pressed the analogy with economic production in the way indicated above. To that extent, and that extent only, the criticisms referred to are just. But the conclusion I draw is not that the analogy should be backed away from (my impression is that this is what some have done, being inclined to say that it was, to begin with, only a suggestive metaphor) but that, on the contrary, it should be pushed further. In the present context the idea of a 'mode of production' enters in a twofold way. It does so, firstly, as the overarching system within

20

Marx and Philosophy which the production of items of knowledge occurs, and secondly, as the model for understanding this production of knowledge. So for both reasons we must begin by looking at the idea of a mode of production in the economic sense. I shall begin by outlining what I take Marx's general idea of a mode of production to have been 23 ; I shall then apply this to the understanding of the production of knowledge. 9.1 Marx's Concept of an (Economic) 'Mode of Production' To start with, Marx may be said to have conceived of a 'mode of production' as a certain sort of structure. As such it consists, first, of certain terms or elements - what I shall call 'factors' - and, second, of certain relations between these. As regards the elements of the structure, the 'factors', Marx lists, in the first place, three: (1) the pre-existing raw materials that are transformed in the process; (2) the tools or instruments which are used to transform (1); and (3) the labour-power which applies (2) to (1). In addition he specifies (4) the plan according to which the process proceeds. For the sake of completeness these may be added to this list the aim of the process, which is (5), the product, the use-value for the sake of the generation of which the process is initiated. Marx calls (1) and (2) together, the 'means of production', and (l)-(3) in a specific combination, 'productive forces'. As regards the relations which help define the structure, these may be divided in turn into (1) 'social' relations, and (2) 'technical' relations. The first are relations of control over the factors of production (and hence over the product) by agents of production. (Where there is differential control we- have, in the historically most significant cases at least, class relations of production.) The second are relations between the factors generated by the social relations within the constraints of the natural objective necessities of the process of production itself. Thus relations of production combine factors of production into productive forces. Marx uses the idea of 'mode of production' in at least three senses, which may be ordered with respect to increasing concreteness. Of course, the real social system which is theorized by means of the idea of a mode of production is not made up of these like a nest of Chinese boxes. Rather, the less concrete concepts are derived from the more concrete by dropping conceptual determinations. But it is perspicu-

21 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' ous to begin with the most abstract/least concrete and work up to the least abstract/most concrete ('abstract' and 'concrete' both being understood to be within the domain of theory). (1) The 'labour process' is essentially the production of use-values considered only with respect to the factors of production (l)-(4) and the technical relations of production. (2) The 'production process' results from the addition of the conceptual determinant '(social) relations of production' to the notion of the labour-process. The process of production theorizes in particular how the process of production thus formed reproduces itself by way of specific sorts of exchange, distribution, circulation and consumption of its products. (The possible social relations of production are also determined by the character of the factors of production and hence by the technical relations insofar as the latter are determined by the former.) (3) What may be called 'mode of production' in the widest sense embeds the preceding notion within a system of political and ideological relations. With regard to the first, every process or production works, for example, within the context of a particular form of state (representative democracy, military dictatorship, etc.), which has certain effects on the process of production (the state as consumer to different extents, different degrees of state interventions in the control of the economy through management of credit, of labour conditions, etc.). Similarly, with regard to the second, every process of production works within the context of certain ideological relations understood (roughly) as the ways in which people experience their real conditions of existence and as the theorizations of those ways. 24 They have definite effects on that process, be they general ideologies of free enterprise which inculcate 'freedom' for capital and labor to regulate themselves, or racist ideologies which favour differential wages and conditions according to ethnic differences, etc. The various distinctions made must not thought of as marking off separable social realities. Thus there are not separable items which are technical versus social relations of production, but just a single item with respect to which we can conceptually distinguish these features. Again, there are no topographically separable areas of the 'economic', the 'political', the 'ideological', but only theoretically distinguishable aspects of every point of social space, so to speak.

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Marx and Philosophy

9.2 The Concept of a 'Theoretical Mode of Production' It was remarked above that Marx's concept of an (economic) mode of production is central for the understanding of theoretical production in at least two ways. Firstly, it serves as a model for constructing the concept of theoretical mode of production. And secondly, theoretical production takes place within, and is hence conditioned by, the framework of economic production. I shall say something about these two points in order. 9.21 The General Idea of a Theoretical Mode of Production Corresponding to the threefold distinction made with respect to an economic mode of production the following may be distinguished with regard to theoretical production: a labour-process, a production-process and a mode of production in the broadest sense. Firstly, following the economic model the theoretical labour-process may be identified in terms of the 'factors' of production and the 'technical' relations of production. Take as a simple exemplar the determination of the mass of an object by means of a simple beambalance. Then we have the following aspects: (1) The raw materials, which consist of the real object under a certain description. (2) The tools or instruments of production which are applied to (1), namely a) the balance itself, and b) pre-existing items of knowledge like the law of the lever, principles of buoyancy, statistical methods (for working up 'raw' data into a final result), etc. (3) The labour-power which is used for applying (2) to (1), namely the technical labourpower necessary for setting the process up, and the labour-power necessary for performing calculations and inferences. (The two are not, of course, always clearly distinguishable, as in the case of determining the level of accuracy of the balance.) In addition there is (4), the general lay-out of the process of measuring mass, which defines the technical relations of production. Finally, (5) the product, is here a statement of the mass of the body in question, a product which can in general be described as the solution or answer to a problem. Of course the theoretical labour-process need not be experimental, in which case (1) consists of a body of pre-existing representations which are transformed, wholly or partly, into others. For example, Marx's labour theory of value was generated from the 'classical'

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowlelge'

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theories of value by operating upon them with new theoretical means of production (broadly: historical materialism). Secondly, once more following the economic nodel, there is a theoretical production-process, consisting of the theoretical labourprocess in the context of the social relations of theoretical production (including relations determining the mode of circulation of the products). The theoretical production-process introduces, for example, the forms of control exercised by experimenters over their apparatus and the ways in which the products of theoretical practice circulate (e.g. through journals involving power-relations between authors, editors and referees of papers). Finally in the third and widest sense of the idea of a theoretical mode of production, a theoretical production-process is located in a set of political and ideological practices and institutions. An example of the first is the 'institutionalisation' of science in the seventeenth century (Royal Society, 1662, Académie des ScHnces, 1666). The ideological dimension of a theoretical mode of production is exemplified in the way in which an executor of practice is 'inserted into the practice. For example, the institutionalisation of science just referred to was a main factor in changing people's view of the aim of science from the Cartesian-Baconian one, involving the improvement of human life and general 'enlightenment', to one in which that aim is defined as the search for truth as such. 26 Again, Hans Blumenberg has pointed to 'curiosity' as a distinctive stance of the post-medieval theorist. 27 9.22 The Economic ('Embedding') and Theoretical ('Embedded') Modes of Production A theoretical mode of production is always 'embedded' in an economic mode of production. And it is a thesis of Marx's historical materialism that this 'embedding' mode of production has a crucially determining influence on the 'embedded' mode. This is of two broad sorts. . . Firstly the embedding mode may exercise its influence quite directly. For example, with regard to the theoretical labour-process, the possibilities with regard to the nature of scientific instrumentation will be broadly set by the prevailing type of economic 'tool' (e.g. ones characteristic of handicraft production, or machine-tools, or on more or less fully automated tools).

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Marx and Philosophy Again, with regard to the theoretical production-process, the influence of the capitalist imbedding mode is seen in the increasing concentration and centralisation of scientific research. Finally, the political characteristics of the embedding mode in the broadest sense may exercise a direct influence on the embedded mode through, for example, allocation of funds for research; and the direct influence of ideological features of the embedding mode is exemplified in the generally prevailing ancient difference in attitude to manual versus mental labour defining the difference between purely contemplative scholar and banausos.28 Secondly, the embedding mode may exercise its influence in ways mediated by the character of the embedded mode. For example, the course of development of the embedding mode may indirectly bring about the development of new branches of science with distinctive objects and methods - the rise of agricultural chemistry in the nineteenth century is an instance. 29 Another is the way in which 'nature' is conceptualised at a time - for instance as like a living organism or like a machine. 30 But at least two important additional remarks must be made. Firstly, features of a theoretical mode of production may not be determined by the embedding mode but actually be inconsistent with it. For example, the practice of one scientist's being able freely to use the results of another (conditional upon the observance of certain rules of proper acknowledgement, viz.) is inconsistent with the character of capitalism or a generalised commodity-producing society. (The increasing commoditization of information only brings the point just made into higher relief.) Secondly, the above very abbreviated presentation has concentrated upon the effects of the embedding mode upon the embedded mode. But there can be an important influence in the opposite direction. For example, Galileo's development of the idea of an axiologically neutral, immanently necessitated world as against the medieval view of an axiologically hierarchical, God-dependent one was a factor of not inconsiderable importance in the emergence of the modern bourgeois world. 31 9.23 A Further Example What has just been said about the idea of a theoretical mode of production is very schematic, and has been illustrated with largely disconnected examples. A more persuasive presentation would re-

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 25 s quire more carefully worked-out exemplification. There is no space for this in the present study. Instead I shall make some - though by no mea.ns all - of the above points a little more concrete in terms of a single example. The materials for this have been drawn from a recent book -- Gideon Freudenthal's Atom und Individuum im Zeitalter Newtoris32 - where the detailed argument can be found. (Freudenthal's book is not written in the context of the account I have been putting forward, but simply lends itself to illustrative use in connection with it.) Freudenthal's argument may be summarised, for present purposes, as follows. ( 1) Newton has a basic premise - call it 'P' - which may be put in the form of two clauses thus. P 1: The material world is composed of fundamental particles which are identical as regards volume and mass. P.2: These particles have certain identical properties (extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility and - especially - inertia) which Newton calls 'essential'. By this he means that they are unchangeable and belong to the individual particles inherently, independently of the existence of other such particles (in particular, they would belong to each even in an otherwise empty space). Such properties are distinct from what he calls 'universal' ones (most importantly, gravity) which siinply belong exceptionlessly to all particles as they in fact exist together in this world-system. (P may be regarded as part of Newton's means of theoretical production or a factor in his theoretical labour-process.) ( 2) P is a necessary premise in at least the following contexts (there are others): a) his experimental demonstration of the existence of absolute space (it is assumed that a unique rotating system is a possibility, that centrifugal forces would occur in it); b) his argument that there is a natural tendency for the quantity of motion in the world to decrease (because the original particles are not wholly elastic and hence lose a portion of their motion in collisions); c) his argument to the conclusion that the cause of gravity cannot (in principle) be physical (gravity not being an 'essential' property of particles). ( 3) N»wton explicitly uses the distinction between 'essential' and 'universal' proportions but does not attempt to justify it. It

Marx and Philosophy appears to him to be simply equivalent to the analytic-synthetic method. 4) P is empirically untestable. For, with regard to P 1, only a body as a whole can be weighed, accelerated, measured, and not its ultimate elements. And with regard to P2, it is clear that empirical knowledge is possible only of properties qua 'universal'. 5) Newton speaks of his analytic-synthetic method (taken as equivalent to P) as though it were a direct generalisation of handicraft practice, particularly that of the sort pertaining to the production of watches and clocks. Here certain properties of the parts before their composition into wholes are the basis of the knowledge of the whole. But this analytic-synthetic method (and hence P) cannot be simply a naive generalisation of such handicraft practice. For there is another interpretation of this method, based on a different view of that practice. This is one in the case of which we start with the whole (e.g. the way the hands move over the dial) and move hypothetically-deductively to the mechanism formed by the parts. (This was e.g. Leibniz's procedure.) 6) P, and the associated interpretation of the analytic-synthetic method, are in fact physical specifications of a general principle of metaphysics current at the time, namely, that the properties of a system are consequences of properties of the constituent elements which these elements possess inherently, i.e. independently of the presence of other elements. (This metaphysical principle was also specified for contemporary social philosophy.) It is the adoption of this principle which permitted handicraft practice to be used as a model in the way it was. 7) This general principle is rooted (in the thought of Newton in particular) in a certain conception of the origin of motion. Newton's view is essentially this. People know from completely evident and incorrigible personal experience that their bodies cannot move by themselves: the will has the unique capacity to initiate motion in the body. Thus the body is inherently passive, and since it is only a certain sort of matter, matter in general is inherently passive - passivity or 'inertia' is an 'essential' property of matter as such. Correspondingly, activity is an essential property of the will. Moreover the will must be essentially free, i.e. absolutely self-originating, undetermined by motives, otherwise there would exist a possible cause of motion other than the will, contrary to hypothesis. In general the characteristics of a

26 ( (

(

(

27 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' system are due to properties of the parts which those parts have independently of their occurring in that or any other system. ( 8) The basis of this conception of the individual is the way in which actual bourgeois social (exchange, market) relations are (nonveridically) experienced, 'lived'. ( 9) Whilst the bourgeois conception of the individual is ultimately based on actual bourgeois social relations, it is not simply related to everyday experience, for at the time bourgeois social relations were not the rule. Rather, those social relations, to the extent that they were established, formed the basis of a conception of the individual from the point of view of which those social relations were the ideal and unique realisation of that concept of the individual. Hence actual bourgeois relations determined a certain conception of the individual which was a basis of a program for the extension of those relations. (10) More concretely, that conception of the relation of the individual to the system, though a 'reflection' of bourgeois social relations, feeds back to support those relations in various ways. For one thing, it is inconsistent with feudal-medieval doctrines. According to these, nature is an hierarchical organism of unequal elements, the primary qualities of which depend upon the proper place of each in the world-system; and correspondingly, social" life is an hierarchically structured organism whose elements cannot exist outside that organism and whose properties accrue to them by virtue of their place within that organism. Furthermore, in this physical context P is an essential part of arguments to the existence of God. For one thing, P underpins the idea of absolute space, and God is assumed as the substantial basis thereof. Again, since it is a consequence of an argument of which P is an essential part that the world-system has a natural tendency to 'run down', its continued stability depends on continuous or periodical inputs of motion, which can come only from a supernatural will, viz. God's. Finally, since gravitation cannot in principle be explained in natural terms it needs, for the same reason, a supernatural cause, viz. God. (11) Thus Newton's theoretical labour-process in physics cannot be understood except in terms of the theoretical ideology in the matrix of which it occurred. (This could be spelled out at greater length. For example, Freudenthal shows how Newton's concept of 'quantity of matter', though circular as ordinarily interpreted - see e.g. Mach's critique - is not so once P is added to the

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Marx and Philosophy context.) And this theoretical ideology in turn cannot be understood except in terms of the social relations characteristic of the embedding mode of production, which also supplied the technological basis for Newton's model for the understanding of nature. But this social genesis of Newton's theoretical mode of production is not inconsistent with the empirical-objective character of its results, nor with the fact that that theoretical mode of production contributes to underpinning its own basis. Though for Newton certain properties of particles are treated as 'essential', all the empirical content of the theory follows from taking them as simply 'universal'. The 'excess content' of the essentialist interpretation is ideological, in the sense that it is unscientific and has significance for power-relations. Because the properties themselves are the very same in both interpretations Newton's theory can have a social genesis but also have a quite objective truth-content. That is, a socially determined model permitted (relatively) successful purely empirical concept-formation. The social basis of the theorisation is reflected in the ideological consequences of the result. 33

10 TRUTH In section 6 above I sketched the classical 'problem of knowledge', that is, the problem of finding a general criterion for the truthrelation between subject and object, which last two terms thus form the ultimate presupposition of the problem. The succeeding sections have been devoted to discussing Marx's alternative basic idea of practice (more exactly, 'practices'). In this and the following section I want to return to the idea of truth itself and of the idea of a criterion of truth (justification, evidence, guarantee, etc.). It is a reasonable conjecture that these ideas allude to something that is, from Marx's point of view, misrecognized, misidentified. 10.1 Some Criticisms of Traditional Views As is well-known, the traditional conceptions of truth are of two broad sorts. According to 'correspondence' accounts, the truth of a statement consists in some sort of matching between the content of the statement and the features of the extra-linguistic reality that the

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 29 statement is about. According to 'coherence' accounts, the truth of a statement consists in its being an indispensable part of a unique and maximally comprehensive system. In some versions the two sorts of views are taken as complementary, the first thought of as specifying the 'nature' of truth, the second its 'criterion'. 34 In fact the two traditional doctrines are in a sense complementary, but not in the way that the idea of combining them would suggest. Rather it is that each gestures towards something correct and thereby points up an inadequacy in the other. The traditional (and contemporary) discussions about both are lengthy and involved. The following is a radical but hopefully not misleading simplification of the issues. The correspondence type of theory of truth points to one circumstance which is simple but fundamental, and that is the acceptability of a statement - virtually however 'acceptability' is filled out depends upon something other than the statement itself or the subject's belief in it. However one may think about the notion of truth, there is something right about this. Now the correspondence account goes on to identify this factor on which the truth of a statement depends, which makes a statement true, as some sort of matching between the statement and nonlinguistic reality. The idea is of course easiest to understand, and the theory is at its most plausible, when a statement like 'The cat is on the mat' is taken as an example. Here we are invited to consider how a picture of the cat's being on the mat can be mapped onto the actual cat's being on the actual mat. More complicated cases are then taken to be capable of being handled in an essentially similar way. This account has many grave difficulties well rehearsed in the literature. I shall mention just two. Firstly, there is the question of what may be described as the details of the correspondence. Take the above case. To begin with, statements are not pictures in any literal sense. We shall take them to be symbols. Let us not, for the moment at least, worry about the way in which 'cat' and 'mat' can be coordinated to actual cats and mats. But there is a problem about how the other terms in the statement can be similarly matched: what in reality corresponds to 'the', 'is', 'on'? Suppose then it is said that it is the statement as a whole and not the individual terms in it which bears the correspondence relation. But what then of unrestrictedly universal statements, or the sorts of universal statements involving what are often called 'idealizations', which are the staple of any even moderately developed science? Secondly, there is another and in

30 Marx and Philosophy many ways deeper problem. The reality which the correspondence theory assumes is matched by the statement (if true) does not auto-select, from the unlimited number of things and properties and relations that it contains, the special circumstance of the cat's being on the mat. It is a statement that colligates these items into a 'fact'. But how is this fact picked out except by means of the statement which is chosen to express it? Thus the correspondence theory seems to reduce to a correspondence between a statement and a duplicate of itself. That is, there is no intelligible way of talking about an epistemic relation between a statement and a reality which is not presented under certain modes of description. But once the reality has been thus 'conceptualized', what is in question is a correspondence between two statements. This is where the 'coherence' type of theory enters and where it is on its strongest ground: in the underlying allusion to the fact that epistemic relations obtain only between modes of representation. It then goes on to identify the nature of truth with certain sorts of relations between such representations. But it is precisely here that it comes into conflict with the central insight of the rival correspondence theory, namely, that 'truth' is not internal to statements or to beliefs. Of course, for the coherence theory, truth is not internal to individual statements, but consists in the capacity of the statement to fit in with something beyond itself, namely the whole system of statements, much as the fact that a piece of cardboard belongs to a certain jig-saw puzzle is shown by its being able to be slotted into a certain pattern with the rest. But the defect of the theory emerges precisely with this analogy. For the uniqueness of the picture presented by the completed puzzle is evidenced by its resemblance to something other than the picture, namely, familiar realities or ones imagined in accordance with what is familiar. The coherence theory has no way of picking out a unique system, and, most importantly, no way of demonstrating (or even making plausible) that there is a uniquely adequate system. So it seems that we are back at the correspondence theory with its insistence that it is something entirely extra-discursive that selects out of all possible statements the acceptable 'true' ones. But we have seen some of the problems with this idea of correspondence. So we seem to be locked into a circle. In sum, the terms of the problem are these. On the one hand, what traditional views identify as the (epistemic) relation of truth must, it seems, depend on something extra-discursive. On the other hand, it

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 31 seems that it cannot so depend, for an epistemic relation does not hold between a statement and what is extra-discursive. 10.2 On 'Truth': a Materialist View The solution to this conundrum is that the relations in question are not the same in both cases. On the one hand, certainly descriptive statements are 'true' by virtue of a relation or connection with something extra-discursive; however, the relation is not an epistemic but a causal one. On the other hand, they are also 'true' by virtue of a relation which is not extra-discursive; but this is a logical relation. The correspondence theory is right to insist that the acceptability of a statement depends on something other than that statement; but it errs in thinking that that dependence is epistemic in character, for it is causal. The coherence theory is right to insist that epistemic dependences can only obtain between statements; but it errs in thinking that such dependences are all that there is to what it identifies as the problem of 'truth', for it ignores the (causal) dependency of the latter. To see more concretely how the matter stands, take the simple beam balance again. This has two aspects which are distinguishable but inseparable. Firstly, it is a part of the world, a certain structure of metal which is causally affected by certain changes in other parts of the world, and in particular its immediate material environment - for example, the addition of pieces of metal to certain parts of it. Call this, for want of a better term, the 'material' aspect. Simply qua material in this sense it is not a 'beam balance' but a mere congeries of metal bits and pieces. But, secondly, this configuration of metal is the 'vehicle' of certain systems of representations, in accordance with which a certain part of it is a 'lever', another a 'pointer', another a 'scale', and so on. It is this fact that turns the metal structure into a 'beam balance'. 35 Let us call this the 'theoretical' aspect. When the 'balance' is actually used, there is an inseparable interlocking of two structures (though they remain conceptually distinguishable). Recurring to the model of straightforwardly material production, we can find simple analogies for the instrument. Thus the commodity is, like the instrument, an inseparable unity of two distinguishable aspects. As a material object it is a use-value, subject to the causal influences of wear and tear, consumption, etc.. But it is also the vehicle of

32 Marx and Philosophy certain social relations, namely, relations between amounts of socially necessary labour. It is thus in Marx's word (e.g. C 1:163) a 'sensible-supersensible' thing. The case is similar with the capitalist production-process which is simultaneously a process of production of material use-values, and a vehicle of social relations between capitalist and labourer by virtue of which it produces surplus-value (C 1: Ch.7 of the English, Ch.5 of the German edition). Thus on the one hand, qua material, the balance is a part of the causal structure of the world and registers effects which that world calls forth in it. On the other hand, qua theoretical, it subjects these effects - which in themselves have no cognitive or epistemic significance at all - to a certain interpretation by virtue of which certain statements are generated ('this body is of mass 3 g'). On the one hand, the statement has an extra-discursive basis by virtue of being (in part) generated by interaction with the real world. On the other hand, the extra-discursive basis does not constitute it as knowledge, since only its own character as a part of a system of representations does this. Once the statement has been generated it enters into logical relations with other statements and it is, in part at least, this other system which determines whether that statement will be admitted into membership of it. So the insights that are misleadingly alluded to by both the correspondence and coherence theories are taken up by the present account while the quite incorrect aspects of these theories are discarded; they turn out to be gesturing in the right direction with regard to what they affirm, but not in what they deny. On the view just outlined the real existence of a world of entities and relations is not questioned, though our representations are not conceived to be related to them in the simple way envisaged by correspondence theories. This real world makes itself known by the ways in which it constrains the outcome of experiments and determines the concrete results of the application of various systems of representations. (As Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus, it is not that a system applies but how it does so that tells us what this world is like. 36 ) The real is that by virtue of which certain statements are generated and others are not, but this does not imply that statements in general 'correspond' to it in any sense of the word distinctive of a correspondence theory of truth. So theory is, in the striking metaphor of Cavaillès, 37 like a non-Euclidean space, which is closed, but has no 'outside' 38 - and, we may add, is subject to expansion through theoretically worked-over causal inputs from the extra-discursive domain. 39

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10.3 Marx on Truth In the second of the 'Theses on Feuerbach' cited above (Sec. 6) Marx says that 'the question whether objective truth pertains to human thinking is . . . a practical question. In practice must people prove the truth, i.e. the actuality and power, this-worldliness of their thinking'. I have already commented (3.2 above) on one overtone of 'actuality': its recalling of Hegel's category of 'Actuality' as the unity of 'Ground' and 'Appearance'. This ties up here with 'this-worldliness': people's thinking has truth if it relates to a 'ground' that is 'this-worldly' in the sense of what is accessible, what is manifest, not transcendent, what is not located in a 'beyond' ('Diesseitigkeit' implicitly contrasts with 'Jenseitigkeit'). But here a second overtone of 'actuality' resonates by virtue of its connection with 'power'. Etymologically 'Wirklichkeit' is related to the verb 'wirken', that is, 'to bring about, effect', as 'actuality' is to 'act': Wirklichkeit' is thus (in the spirit of Plato and Aristotle 40 ) that which has power. And Hegel picks up this connection (including that to Aristotle - EL, Sec. 142 Add.). For the sub-categories of 'Actuality' are those of necessity and its modes: Substance (as 'absolute power . . . the absolute activity of form and the power of necessity' EL, Sec. 151), Causality, Reciprocity. This returns us to the fundamental emphasis on practice. 'Truth' is a matter of practical power. Whatever else may be true of human thinking that is characterised by 'objective truth', it must vouchsafe power over its objects, or at least provide the cognitive underpinnings for such power. And this is just the reverse side of the points made just above (10.2): if on the one hand, reality picks out the true by constraining the results of our practical interventions, then on the other hand, that which is picked out as true gives us information about those constraining factors and hence, potentially at least, power over them. In thus moving the idea of power to the forefront of consideration as regards questions of truth (rather than accuracy of representation say) Marx is, of course, reviving the viewpoint of the interpreters of the early period of modern natural science such as Bacon and Hobbes. 11 THE CRITERION OF TRUTH This already furnishes a foothold on the other problem distinguished at the beginning of the preceding section, namely, the classical

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Marx and Philosophy problem of a criterion of truth, general principles of justification, evidence, guarantees that such and such representations are truthful, are vehicles of the truth. 11.1 Justification as Contextual The way in which the traditional question of a criterion of truth has generally been posed involves the idea of a standpoint outside of all specific items of knowledge, since what is being sought is a quite general criterion. But if - as has been argued - what is primary is an always quite specific sort of practical relation between 'subjects' and 'objects' which only have epistemic significance within that practical relation, then there can be no source for the judging of claims to knowledge outside specific practices and types of knowledgeproducing activity. Assessment of claims to knowledge must take place immanently, within the relevant practices and processes of production. At any time a system of representations will have quite specific strengths and weaknesses with respect to the specific problems of which it is an attempted solution. And these strengths and weaknesses relate, in the final analysis, to problems of power (control) over the relevant subject-matter. This is in essence the solution - or rather dissolution - of the problem which gives rise traditionally to relativism and scepticism: whilst on the one hand, there is no way of comparing an item of putative knowledge with the relevant reality, independently of some form of conceptualization, on the other hand, any such item may be assessed by comparing its own claims with what it can do as judged within its own terms. This applies both to particular theories and to general approaches. Thus Newtonian mechanics is inadequate to the extent that it cannot solve problems which fall within its domain as defined by itself; and radical empiricism is similarly inadequate because, for example, its allegedly founding protocols presuppose what they are meant to ground (in particular knowledge of generalities). 41 The analogy which is suggested by the production-model is that of quality-control. Quality-controls are thoroughly contextual. There are no absolutely general tests of quality which are applicable to everything from computers to milk-bottles: each process and product has its specific controls. Again, within each of these it is a matter of context as to precisely which feature of the product is tested (this is

35 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' often determined by how the product fares in being used by the consumer), and how the test is done. Quality controls themselves change and may always be subjected to further - in principle endless - controls, without there being any overarching doubts about the quality of the product. The traditional problematic sees certain sorts of knowledge as a foundation for other knowledge on the analogy of a building, the upper parts of which rest on the lower parts and so on till some ultimate parts are reached. From the present standpoint some knowledge is a condition for other knowledge, but the former is not of any one sort and does not ground the latter. The analogy is rather Neurath's well-known one in which knowledge is likened to a boat which has to be repaired at sea. Different parts of the boat can serve to keep it afloat while other parts are being repaired or rebuilt. So one part's being in place is a condition for another's being replaced, but there is no uniquely privileged part which has to stay put. 42 Or, to use another image, some knowledge is related to other knowledge like building materials to a finished building. It is necessary that there be materials to make a building, but the building may itself be demolished, in whole or in part, to provide materials for another building of a quite different sort. Or, yet again, to speak with Spinoza, 43 the development of knowledge is like the evolution of the hammer, in which the tool at one phase of its development is used to make a better one, without there being any ultimate hammer used to make all the others. From the present point of view these claims to knowledge can be and are assessed only in the context of their ability to handle specific problems which arise either in the process of pursuing a path of inquiry which gave rise to those claims in the first place or in the process of pursuing other paths. Thus change is not a merely accidental but rather an essential feature of the knowledge-situation, for it is only thus that the strengths and weaknesses of cognitive claims can be judged. 44 'Science seeks the perpetuum mobile', wrote Victor Hugo. 'It has found it; it is: itself'45 After a certain point at least a domain of inquiry generally shows a certain accumulation of assured results (judged by a given criterion anyway) even though many other results are eroded. So it is like a river which slowly but surely deposits more or less permanent sedimentary layers, no matter how much silt is washed out to sea. Dogmatism and skepticism are typical philosophical 'displacements'

36 Marx and Philosophy (to borrow Bachelard's excellent term) of the dual facts of permanence and change in the results of inquiry. 11.2 Theoretical Origins of Empiricism and Rationalism Looking at the matter of bases purely within the domain of theory,it may be speculated that the empiricist and rationalist variants come about in the following way. It has been argued in the preceding section that it is essential to distinguish two inseparable and indispensable aspects of knowledgesituations. On the one hand, there is the causal aspect, which relates to the way in which the situation known about causally generates effects in the knowing-apparatus (human or non-human instrument). This is not an epistemic or cognitive matter, though it is a necessary condition for such. On the other hand, there is the epistemic or cognitive aspect, which relates to the way in which these effects are processed into information by virtue of theoretical 'circuitry' of various sorts. Now, turning first to empiricist variants, it is true that the sensory order is, for human beings, the ultimate causal interface between them and the external world (the internal too in certain respects). But this fact has nothing whatever to do with an ultimacy in the epistemic context: while firings of neurones and their effects may be causally fundamental in a certain sense as regards the generation of statements, it is an entirely contextual matter what statements we take as our epistemic starting-points in a certain situation. 46 As regards rationalist variants, if empiricism misidentifies causal primacy with epistemic primacy, rationalisms misidentify the epistemic primacy of general principles with causal primacy, with what generates knowledge. Thus each picks out one element of the knowledgesituation and identifies it as foundational. As regards the principles by which the guaranteeing statements are related to the guaranteed, the idea of a unique sort of foundation for all particular reasonings might well be taken to be a result of inferring from the fact that each predicate has what may be called a specific, individual principle of 'projectibility' (determined by the specific productive process by which it is applied), the idea that every predicate is governed by a unique general principle of projectibility.

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12 APPEARANCE AND REALITY 12.1 'Essence'/'Appearance'/'Semblance' in Marx I have suggested that Marx poses the questions of truth and the criterion of truth differently from the main line of the tradition. But this may seem to be contradicted by a number of locutions in his writings, especially Capital. Paradigmatic are three: (a) 'essence [Wesen]'; (b) 'appearance [Erscheinung]' (or 'form of appearance [Erscheinungsform]'); (c) 'semblance' or 'illusion' ['Schein']. For example, Marx writes in a frequently cited passage: 'all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence' (C 3: 956). Or again, in a passage in which all three terms occur: . . . the practical capitalist, caught up in the competitive struggle, and not penetrating the appearances it exhibits, cannot but be completely incapable of recognizing, behind the semblance the inner essence . . . of this process. (C 3:269) Finally, to make it quite clear that 'appearance' and 'semblance' mean something different for Marx, take the following passage: Exchange-value appears [erscheint] first of all as the quantitative relation . . . in which use-values of one kind exchange for usevalues of another kind, a relation that changes constantly with time and place. Hence exchange-value seems [scheint] to be something accidental and purely relative. (C 1:126). Now, exchange-value remains in Marx's theory just that quantitative relation which is the subject of the first sentence; but he certainly rejected the view of it which is the subject of the second. So he certainly means something very different by 'erscheinen' and 'scheinen'. But what, more exactly? 12.2 Hegel Thereon This is in fact another case where it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand what Marx means without attending to the Hegelian background.

38

Marx and Philosophy The first of the three major divisions of Hegel's Logic is the 'Doctrine of Being'. This contains, in general, an exposition of the categories that are necessary and sufficient for grasping reality conceived of in 'immediate' fashion. That is, under the aspect of 'Being', the qualitatively different parts are ontoIogicaUy homogeneous and each is conceived as being determined by nothing but such parts. However, in the final sub-division ('Measure') it becomes necessary to conceive of qualities (which exhaustively characterise 'Somewhats') as having quantitative limits of variation. Thus arises the idea of an entity that can change its qualitative state and yet remain 'the same' - the ideas of Identity and Difference appear. Reality must now be conceived as being ontologically heterogeneous, as being sundered into two domains: a 'surface' which is now seen to be only epistemically immediate, and which is in fact governed or mediated as regards its features by an inner 'Essence'. The second of the three major divisions of the Logic, namely, the 'Doctrine of Essence', is dominated by the metaphor of reflection borrowed from the ordinary situation of mirror-reflections. The Essence is a product of 'reflection' in the epistemological sense that postulating it is a result of 'reflection upon' Being conceived of as immediate. But the surface - Being qua immediate - is also a product of 'reflection' in the ontological sense that the Essence determines the character of the surface. In the first main sub-division of the Doctrine of Essence it is the Essence that has ontological superiority, as it were. The surface is a 'Schein' in the two-fold sense of the word in German: it is a reflection, but also a mere seeming. Indeed it is a mere seeming just because it is a mere reflection: insofar as it is taken to be a reality itself (as it is in the Doctrine of Being), but is in fact wholly a product of the Essence, it is only a semblance, a mere illusion of reality. The course of the argument through this first sub-division of the Doctrine of Essence - which fortunately we do not have to follow here - is, in brief, an exposition of the difficulties in the way of giving any account of Essence independently of its 'Schein'. The culmination of the first sub-division is the category of 'Matter and Form'. The world is now conceived of as fully manifest 'matters' partly constituted by their inter-linked 'forms'. (For example, the various sorts of substances are distinguished by their molecular structures - 'forms' in the literal sense - and by their laws of behaviour expressed in mathematical 'forms'.) Everything is now 'above board'. 'Matters* are now 'of the essence' because 'forms' can only be forms of 'matters'. What was previously Schein now becomes the essential

39 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' moment, or, in other words, 'the Essence must appear [erscheinen]' (EL, Sec. 131). (Hegel here plays on features of German, as he loved to do and in ways that frequently - as here - cannot be brought over into English. For the prefix 'er-' in German conveys the idea - inter alia - of attainment of the end of the action indicated by the stem. So 'erscheinen' is the consummation of 'scheinen'.) Thus 'Schein' becomes 'Erscheinung' - 'Appearance' - when it is grasped in the real network of its relations. 'Appearance', the second main sub-division of the Doctrine of Essence, in turn goes through a dialectic. To start with, the moment of 'matters' was regarded as the permanent and the enduring, and hence the essential moment. But it is now argued that whilst matters come to be and pass away, what is truly permanent and enduring are the 'forms' that stamp matters as what they are. Still, the forms can only be forms of matter, so both are equally important. Thus we have a 'Relationship [Verhältnis]' of the two factors which in its final form is the relationship of 'Inner' and 'Outer' (EL, Sees 138-40). These are inseparable and identical in content, the first representing the moment of Identity (what makes an object the same), the second the moment of Difference (what makes an object the same). This is the third and final sub-division of the Doctrine of Essence, namely, that of 'Actuality [Wirklichkeit]', which synthesises the two preceding sub-divisions: the world is grasped as a unity in which 'essence' and 'appearance' are discriminable but inseparable aspects. The whole development may be illustrated by Eddington's famous 'two tables'. Eddington takes the table as represented by physical science (a fairly stable structure of molecules whose individual sizes are very small in comparison with their distances apart) as the 'real' table, and the commonsense table (a structure that densely fills a certain portion of space, etc.) as mere illusion. 47 But there is in fact nothing illusory about the commonsense table in the sense that this is just how the scientific table is 'projected' at the level of ordinary sized objects. This is the fully determined 'appearance' of the scientific table. Finally, to understand the commonsense table as being nothing but the scientific-table-in-such-and-such-relations is to conceive it under the category of 'actuality'. 12.3 Marx on 'Essence' (etc.) With this as background let us look at Marx's use of the terms from which we took our point of departure. 48 It will be easiest to do so in terms of an example.

40 Marx and Philosophy According to Marx's labour theory of value, that which in the final analysis governs the ratio in which use-values of one sort exchange for use-values of another is the amount of labour which went into the production of each of the relevant sorts of use-values. (This is a rough and ready statement but accurate enough for present purposes.) Such is the 'essence' of the matter. Now since the production of commodities is private, these amounts cannot be compared directly, but only be means of a comparison between the products of that labour. When these products are considered as 'representations [Darstellungen]' of that labour they are said to have or be 'values'. (Value is thus only a sort of quasi-property of the objects - if intrinsic or true relational properties are regarded as paradigmatic - much as a bank-note, as distinct from the printed piece of paper it is for physics, may possess the quasi-property of being worth such and such an amount of gold.) This value in turn cannot be assigned a magnitude except in terms of the exchange-ratio from which we just took our point of departure: this is the 'exchange-value' of the commodity. Such an exchangevalue, connected by the relation of 'representation', via value, to labour, is the 'appearance' (or 'form of appearance') of that labour. Considered in this way there is absolutely nothing epistemically suspect about 'exchange-value': it is simply that which gives us epistemic access to ratios of labour-inputs, much as the weight of a pile of coins may be used to compute its value. (The analogy is inexact for we could directly count the coins whereas - see below exchange-value is the only avenue to labour-inputs in a commodity-producing society. But this does not matter here.) However, if that ratio is considered in abstraction from its links with labour, and hence as 'something accidental and purely relative' (C 1:126), then it becomes only a 'semblance'. As Marx says of profit, wages and rent considered as generated by certain things (capital in its purely material aspect, labour and land), this is a form of existence of relations of capitalist production 'divorced from the hidden connections and the intermediate connecting links' (TSV 3:453). In sum, the 'essence' manifests itself by virtue of a 'representation'. If what in fact is the representation is recognised as such, as a result of a more or less complex process of mediation, then it is an 'appearance', otherwise a 'semblance' or 'illusion'. (Consider the case of a straight stick semi-submerged in water. The physical situation - laws of light-propagation, refractive indices of air and water, etc. - 'represent' the stick as bent. This is a fully determined 'appearance' of the straight stick in the circumstances, given a knowledge of the latter, but otherwise an illusion.)

41 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' With these threads in hand it is not too difficult to find the diritta via through related terminology in Marx's writings. Consider the following passage. The final form [fertige Gestalt] of economic relations, as these are visible on the surface, in their real existence, and therefore also in the ideas with which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to gain an understanding of them is very different from - indeed the very reverse and the opposite of - their inner, essential but concealed core-form [Kerngestalt] and the concept corresponding to it. (C 3:311). Here we have a number of new terms related to the distinctions already explicated. They may be tabulated in the following way: Essence 'core-form' 'inner' 'concept'

Representation of Essence 'final form' 'surface' 'real existence' 'idea' 'reverse'

Or take the following passage. In . . . [the] . . . completely estranged form of profit, and in the same measure as the form of profit hides its inner core, capital more and more acquires a tangible [sachliche] form, is transformed more and more from a relationship into a thing, but a thing which embodies, which has absorbed, the social relationship . . . in this form of capital and profit it appears as a ready-made [fertige] precondition on the surface. It is the form of its actuality or rather its actual form of existence. And it is the form in which it lives in the consciousness of . . . the capitalists, in which it is reflected in their ideas. (TSV 3: 483) This passage contains a number of the terms noted just above and introduces some new ones. 'Actuality or . . . actual form of existence' clearly ties in with the previous 'real existence'. (But 'actual' in 'actual motion' belongs to the side of essence. See e.g. C 1: 433.) Others relate unequivocally - like 'reverse' (noun-form: 'Verkehrung')

42

Marx and Philosophy in the above list - to the category of 'semblance': the representation of a social relation as something tangible (Versachlichung), as a thing (Verdinglichung), as an independent entity (Entfremdung). (All these are forms of 'fetishism'.) Other such instances of 'semblance' are the 'externalisation [Verausserlichung]' of relations (C 3: Ch. 24), the essence represented in an 'imaginary' (C 1: 677) or 'irrational' (C 3¬ V 969) form. ' 13 E R R O R The question of 'semblance' suggests the general question of error. Marx was concerned with the question of error from the start. He posed the problem (still in idealist terms of course) in the specific case of Hegel's philosophy as early as his doctoral dissertation (1841): It is quite thinkable for a philosopher to fall into one or another apparent inconsistency through some sort of accommodation: he himself may be conscious of it. But what he is not conscious of is the possibility that this apparent accommodation has its deepest roots in an inadequacy or in an inadequate formulation of his principle itself. Suppose therefore that a philosopher has really accommodated himself, then his pupils must explain from his inner essential consciousness that which for him himself has the form of an exoteric consciousness. (CW 1:84) Two years later in his Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' (1843) Marx in effect poses this question again. He distinguishes between, on the one hand, 'vulgar' criticism, and, on the other, 'true' or 'philosophical' criticism. The first simply discovers and points up contradictions and inadequacies in the positions criticised. It in a sense fights on the ground occupied by what is being criticised: it accepts the terms of the argument and simply shows up difficulties in the way it is carried through. But the second 'not only shows up contradictions as existing; it explains them, it comprehends their genesis, their necessity' (CW 3:91). Thus Marx in the Hegel-critique just referred to not only exhibits contradictions, non-sequiturs etc. in Hegel's position but traces the roots of these contradictions - in the final analysis, to Hegel's idealist method. This also, according to Marx, explains the intrinsically and not just accidentally or subjectively conservative character of Hegel's philosophy. Thus at this

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 43 point in his development Marx has struggled through to a clear formulation of the problem and its solution: from talk of a philosopher's 'inner essential consciousness' he is now concerned with the objective structure of the philosopher's basic position. By the time, a couple of years later, when he comes to write the founding works of historical materialism, 'Theses on Feuerbach' and The German Ideology, he has progressed to a further and decisive point: it is now not just a matter of explaining features of a philosopher's position from his 'inner essential consciousness', or even from the fundamental theoretical framework which explains those features of his consciousness, but of explaining that framework itself. This is to be drawn by reference to social practices. So, in the fourth of the 'Theses' he notes how Feuerbach takes his point of departure from the 'duplication of the world into a religious and a secular one', and how what he has done is to show how the former reflects the latter. But, Marx affirms, there is a further job to be done, viz., to explain how it comes about that the world is thus duplicated, what the mechanism is: . . . that the secular basis takes off from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained in terms of the inwardly riven and inwardly contradictory character of this secular basis. (CW 5:4) The point is made more generally in the eighth of the 'Theses'. 'All social life is essentially practical', that is, a complex of practices, he begins by noting, and then draws the conclusion: All mysteries that turn theory towards mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. (CW 5:5) With this the road is opened to the notion of 'critique of political economy', which is the title of the first exposition of his mature theory of the subject (1859) and the sub-title of the first volume of the definitive presentation (1867). Not only is error in political economy to be revealed in detail, and not only are those errors to be traced to their basic theoretical roots, but those roots themselves are to be explained in terms of social practices. Thus, near the beginning of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, after presenting the elements of his theory of the 'value-

44 Marx and Philosophy form', he notes that Aristotle was the first to see that the equation of commodities in exchange presupposes that the two unlike things must somehow be equal in such a way as to make them quantitatively comparable. But he cannot see how this could be, and ends up giving a merely pragmatic answer (the equation is only 'a makeshift for practical purposes'). Marx of course holds that this common somewhat is abstract human labour. So Aristotle's particular error here was due to his failing to have a fundamental theoretical concept. But why did he not have this? It was, Marx says, because Greek society rested on slave-labour, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of people and of their labour-powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and insofar as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the firmness of a common-sense assumption [Volksvorurteil]. However this is only possible in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, and hence the dominant social relation - the relation between people as possessors of commodities. . . . Aristotle . . . discovered a relation of equality in the value-expression of commodities. Only the historical limitation of the society in which he lived prevented him from finding out what 'in reality' this relation of equality consisted in. (C 1: 152) Consider also his 'critique' of 'classical' political economy - that which 'since W. Petty investigates the inner structure of bourgeois relations of production, as opposed to vulgar economics which only flounders around within that which seems to be the structure (C l:175n). The work of the period of his mature writing on political economy - particularly the Theories of Surplus-Value (and especially the first two volumes thereof) - is full of detailed discussions of its particular inadequacies. But according to Marx there is a single root defect, that which ultimately generates all the other problems. This is that, whilst those theories 'analysed value and its magnitude . . . and . . . uncovered the content concealed within these forms . . . it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product' (C l:173f). This is an explanation of the theoretical root of the particular difficulties of

45 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' classical political economy (let us assume). But now there is a further question: why that shortcoming? Marx gives the beginning of an answer in the course of a footnote to the passage just cited: . . . the value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodityform together with its further developments, the money-form, the capital form, etc.. (C 1: 174n). Thus the root of the theoretical errors of classical political economy is presented as being in the first place a failure to analyse - indeed even to see the problem of analysing - the value-/orw, that is, the relations within which a use-value is a commodity. This in turn is explained in terms of the failure to see the commodity as a special, historically specific form of production of use-values, a failure to pose the question of the specificity of capitalism and hence a failure to form the general concept of a 'mode of production'. Finally, this gives an answer to the question of the failure to analyse the value-form: because the mode of economic organisation based on that form is taken for granted. But the inquiry is not yet pushed to the end. A further question poses itself: not so much why it was taken for granted, but why it ceased to be taken for granted. Marx answers this question in his sketch of the history of political economy at another place. He writes that it is only possible to view 'the capitalist order as the absolute and ultimate form of social production, instead of as a historically transient stage of development, while the class struggle remains latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena' (C 1:96). Thus the specificity of the capitalist mode of production can only be overlooked whilst the rule of the bourgeoisie goes unchallenged, that is, whilst the question of an alternative mode of social organisation is not posed in practical terms, in terms of class-conflict. The critique of classical political economy is thus pushed back step by step till the roots of its errors are located in the fact that certain social practices - in particular economic ones - are taken for granted. Classical political economy went as far as it was possible to go without forming certain crucial

46 Marx and Philosophy concepts - in the first place that of a 'mode of production' - for the understanding of those practices. As Marx says of a particular analysis later: 'Classical political economy stumbles very near to the true state of affairs, but without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its bourgeois skin'. (Cf also C 3:969.) Now a further step in the procedure of 'critique' is a demonstration of how these practices lead to misleading representations of themselves. For it is a crucial part of Marx's treatment of errors that they have an objective foundation in the practices, as objective as the appearance of the straight stick half-submerged in water as bent. Thus in discussing the wage-representation of the value of labourpower as the value of labour - an 'imaginary' representation Marx calls it - he remarks that such 'imaginary expressions arise . . . from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the forms of appearance of essential relations' (C 1:677). He undertakes the tracing of the mechanism by which the practice generates its own misleading representation ('semblance') in the, various forms of fetishism, the wage-form, and so on. These involve detailed analyses into which I cannot follow him here. 49 Instead it may be illuminating, in conclusion, briefly to compare Marx's treatment of error with traditional philosophical treatments. These fall broadly into two sorts, which may be called the 'subjectivist' and the 'objectivist'. According to the first, error is a matter of the mind's falling away from the path of truth under the influence of various factors. There are many variants of this. Some are voluntarist (e.g. Descartes), others determinist (e.g. much Enlightenment materialism). Some are 'rationalist' (e.g. Malebranche), others 'empiricist' (Bacon's theory of 'idols'). Some emphasise 'inner' forces (vanity, greed, prejudice, etc.), others 'outer' ones (geography, much 'sociology of knowledge'). Error is to be avoided, to the extent it can be, by a sort of intellectual hygiene, by following 'rules for the direction of the mind' of various sorts. All involve, usually implicitly, an epistemological teleology or species of cognitive inertia: every mind continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a right line (towards truth) unless it is compelled to change that*state by forces impressed upon it (and so moving it into error). 50 According to 'objectivist' accounts, like those of Spinoza and Hegel, there is nothing 'positive' about error, so to speak: error is a matter of not seeing that which is the subject of error in its proper total context. (Spinoza: 'the sun is the size of a 20 cent piece' is false only to the

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 47 extent that the context is not taken into account. Hegel: every philosophical system - short of his - is, taken as it stands, false, but correct if seen as a partial view of the truth, as having a 'degree' of truth.) Marx's approach to error belongs to neither of these sorts, rooted as it is in neither subjectivism nor objectivism but in practice. It alludes to objectivism insofar as error is held to have its ultimate provenance not in individual minds, but in the structure of human practices, and to subjectivism insofar as what is in question in human practices. 14 THE PROBLEM OF A CRITIQUE OF EPISTEMOLOGY This discussion of the idea of 'critique' raises the question of a critique of epistemology itself. In fact, of the three stages of Marx's procedure of 'critique', as outlined in the preceding section, two have been traced out already. Firstly, internal difficulties have been exhibited insofar as it has been shown that it cannot in principle solve the problems it sets itself, since it debouches at some point into dogmatism or scepticism or both. Secondly, these difficulties have been traced, in the final analysis, to its taking the subject-object couple (rather than practice) as the fundamental unit of analysis. But next to nothing has been said about the third stage mentioned, namely, the explanation precisely of this basic theoretical 'choice'. Nor has anything been said about a fourth feature of Marx's procedure of critique, not mentioned in the preceding treatment (oriented as it was to the problem of error), namely, the ideological-social consequences of that option (a question inevitably illuminated by its explanation in social terms). These last two questions are obviously the subject-matter for a separate and wide-ranging study, for which I can offer only some programmatic remarks. As regards the third question, the centrality of the subject, and hence of its mirror, the object, is a consequence of the workingtogether of at least two factors. In the first place, 'Western' thought (at least) has been dominated, since its beginnings in mythical thinking, by the model of the subject and its actions as the principle of interpretation of the world. 51 In the second place, and 'overdetermining' this, the very discipline that was only much later called 'theory of knowledge' or 'epistemology' arose about the time of the

48 Marx and Philosophy origins of capitalism. But capitalism is precisely the mode of production whose self-representation is that of the primacy of ultimately self-constituted individuals related severally to their property and entering into purely 'external' relations to one another. Thus Marx says in the ninth of the 'Theses on Feuerbach' that 'the highest point attained by materialism based on the given [der anschauende Mater¬ ialismus] . . . is what is given to the view [die Anschauung] of separate [einzelnen] individuals and of civil society [biirgerlichen Gesellschaft]'. This is reaffirmed in the following thesis. 52 On the one hand, there is the idea of the epistemological subject, originally endowed with certain faculties of representation and inference, confronting an external world, in certain respects at least independent of that subject, though in fact practical interactions with that world would have already operated in the constitution of those faculties. On the other hand, there is the idea of the economic subject, originally endowed with certain needs and capacities, confronting a 'given' world of commodity-movements, though in fact marketmovements have already acted 'behind the back' of the economic subject to generate the needs and capacities. 53 The project of a general reconstruction of knowledge-claims to sort out what has the right to be regarded as knowledge from that which is merely in fact taken to be such' epitomised in Kant's posing of the question 'Quid juris' in distinction from the 'Quid facti' (Critique of Pure Reason, A 84 = B 117), is a reflection of the general capitalist project of freeing people from feudal 'natural ties' and instituting juridical relations between them as 'free subjects', and a special case of the general dominance of the juridical in bourgeois ideology. 54 As regards the fourth question, what 'positive' justifications do is to privilege a certain sort of discourse as the vehicle of truth, or at least as the guarantee that a certain sort of discourse is the vehicle of truth. Specifically, and exemplarily, the empiricist privileging of the domain of sense-impressions or, more generally of the perceptual world, has the ideological function of excluding appeals to rational, 'spiritual' sources for the truth, and this constituted the most important part of the ideological meaning of the empiricist movement in modern philosophy. Similarly, rationalist privileging of the domain of 'reason' (with its various inhabitants) has the function of protecting various alleged ultimate truths which invariably turn out to be significant for the maintenance or destruction of certain social powerrelations. 55 It is no wonder then that Althusser remarked at one place that 'a guarantee . . . is the irrefutable index of an ideological ques-

Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' 49 tion and answer', 56 for it is in the case of a guarantee that we find the purest and clearest case of an answer placed in advance of its appropriate question. If the sceptical path is taken the effect is broadly to leave open the field of rationally grounded belief in the area in question. This in turn can have many consequences. For example, it may be a way of opening a space for alternative sorts of inquiry (e.g. Bayle) or it may be a prolegomenon to faith (e.g. St Augustine and Kierkegaard). 57 As regards truth itself, its basic function has been to relate true statements - and false ones - to a system of authority: certain statements, in being pronounced true or false are put beyond the bounds of challenge: the first are within the permitted discourse, the second are outside it. And of course the stock of what are accounted truths is in general determined by ruling groups. 58 The often heard argument in favour of the notion of truth, namely, that it is necessary to exclude relativism and skepticism, is without foundation, for the very simple reason that there are no criteria for 'truth' other than those for justification in the contextual sense discussed in section 11 above. Scepticism and dogmatism can be combatted only by a critique of the very terms of the project of epistemology, of which the notion of truth is a central constituent. If we turn from the question of the ideological function of the concept of truth to that of its genesis then it is most perspicuously seen as, in Bachelard's terms, 59 a typical philosophical 'displacement' of the acceptable idea of 'objectivity', that is, of the fact that knowledge relates to real objects. And to the extent that a use of the idea of truth has just this significance it may have a positive role in an anti-epistemological program. Indeed this is essentially the point of the distinction which Leninmakes in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism between 'absolute' and 'relative' truth. Like a great many other things about this book, these ideas have been widely misunderstood. The clue to their correct comprehension is in their polemical thrust. 'Absolute' has the original sense of 'not subject to conditions or limitations', 'unqualified'. Now what for Lenin is unconditionally, unqualifiedly the case with regard to knowledge is its object-relatedness. This is the first and global point to be made about knowledge: it is true of it 'in general'. So, to describe thought as attaining 'absolute' truth is a way of affirming simply the bare fact of the object-relatedness of thought, its ability to grasp the object, without entering into any (necessary) qualifications as to the adequacy of this grasp in a particular case. For

50 Marx and Philosophy truth to be 'absolute' is just for it to be 'objective', about objects independent of knowers and their activities. He says this quite plainly: 'To acknowledge objective truth, i.e. truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is in one way or another, to recognize absolute truth' (CW 14: 133). So, placed in a slightly different perspective, the thrust of the term 'absolute truth' is anti-sceptical, anti-relativist. But, this having been said, a caveat must be entered that information about the world is vouchsafed only in an indefinitely prolonged process. Human ideas, which give expression to objective truth, do not 'express it all at one time, as a whole, unconditionally, absolutely', but 'only approximately, relatively' (CW 14: 122f and cf. 135, 136). So the point of the 'relative truth' phrase is to affirm the counterpart thesis to the anti-sceptical one, namely, the antidogmatic aspect. In sum, the point of the distinction between 'absolute' and 'relative' truth is, on the one hand, to focus on movement, development, change as being central to knowledge, but, on the other hand, to affirm that this process accumulates items of knowledge about objects and is not a merely subjective affair, a matter merely of changing views or standpoints. Lenin opposes on the one hand, dogmatism, the view that the whole truth about some subjectmatter has been or will be attained at some point; on the other hand, he opposes scepticism and relativism, which sees scientific change as only a kaleidoscope of different views one or other of which may be selected on extra-scientific grounds. Again, Lenin's thesis is one chosen to induce certain effects in the fields of the search for the knowledge and in the field of politics insofar as the latter is affected by the former or by the application of the former. This emerges very clearly in a passage like the following: 'This distinction between relative and absolute truth is . . . sufficiently "indefinite" to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but at the same time it is sufficiently "definite" to enable us to dissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism . . . (CW 14: pp. 136. £f. also 137, 142f.). 15 BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY Systematically speaking, Hegel effectively brought to a close the history of epistemology (as characterised earlier in this study). The primacy of the subject in reflection on knowledge found its apotheo-

51 Marx and 'the Problem of Knowledge' sis in Hegel's conception of the True in terms of Substance-asSubject. This is not to say of course that work in epistemology did not continue to be produced. On the contrary, it experienced a tremendous expansion, as part, inter alia, of a reaction against Hegel and against the ambitious metaphysical systems of the past. Indeed the field acquired its distinctive name round the middle of the century. 60 A plethora of systems of epistemology appeared. But in their real character these are basically decay-products of the main traditional systems, principally of empiricism - now called 'positivism' - and of Kant. Where they contain something useful or valuable it is in spite rather than because of their basic epistemological project. (I think here of, for example, the work of Imre Lakatos.) The other main stream of post-Hegelian thought about knowledge however peripheral in comparison with that just mentioned - may be compendiously called that of 'anti-epistemology'. Hegel indeed not only worked out the last basic option for traditional epistemology but, in bringing to the fore the idea of practical activity as the fundamental mode for the appropriation of the real, even if this was done through the distorting medium of his idealism, he left behind materials for a positive transcending of his viewpoint. For if what is fundamental is the mode of practical appropriation then the task is no longer to discover the cognitive powers of preconstituted subjects but to investigate the historically specific forms of these modes of appropriation. This combination of anti-epistemology and the standpoint of human activity, practice, is, in however many different and indeed opposed ways, characteristic of figures such as Nietzsche, Dewey, (the earlier) Heidegger and (the later) Wittgenstein. It is also, as I have tried to show in this study, essentially the program contained in Marx's work. One of the permanent needs of humankind, given its general situation in the world, is to solve problems about satisfying its needs, both natural and social. This means that it has a permanent interest in the development of the best ways of solving these problems. Just what these ways are is not something that can be lucubrated by epistemologists but can only be worked out within the context of attempts actually to solve problems; it is a case of ambulo ambulando. No a priori reason suggests that there is any one privileged set of procedures for solving all the relevant problems, rather than specific methods for specific sorts of problems. Indeed a reasonably unprejudiced look at the story of mankind's attempts to solve its problems indicates good factual reasons for thinking that the second is the correct answer, and also that these specific methods are, in

52 Marx and Philosophy their turn, subject to development in the historical course of inquiry. We can if we like - usage has largely settled the matter anyway - give the name 'science' to these methods (the term has been traditionally honorific), though this is systematically irrelevant. So there is no reason to think that there is an 'essence' of science that can be captured by e.g. a 'criterion of demarcation'; but the inquiry in question does not issue in mere - i.e. arbitrary - conventions either. The conduct of this inquiry into the 'nature' of 'science' is not specially a philosopher's job (though of course philosophers may undertake it, just as they may do research into cancer for example). It involves an inquiry into the modes of production of different sorts of knowledge and this is the site of an intersection of many existing disciplines (including the history and present state of the various particular sciences, social history in general, and so on) and possibly others still to be founded. The job of 'philosophy', at least as it relates to human knowledge, as conceived on the basis of the considerations so far advanced, building upon the views of Marx, is thus negative: it works to remove obstacles from the paths of inquiry, to keep open what traditional epistemologies work to close. (Locke's famous description of himself as an 'underlabourer' was thus correct in intention. It was just that he did not practice what he preached.) In the following study I want to approach the same conclusion from a somewhat different direction.

2 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism Teacher: Si Fu, name the basic questions of philosophy. Si Fu: Are things external to us, self-sufficient, independent of us, or are things in us, dependent on us, non-existent without us? Teacher: Which opinion is the correct one? SiFu: There has been no decision about it. . . . Teacher: Why does the question remain unresolved? SiFu: The Congress which was to have made the decision took place two hundred years ago at Mi Sang monastery, which lies on the bank of the Yellow River. The question was: Is the Yellow River real or does it exist only in people's heads? But during the Congress the snow thawed in the mountains and swept away the Mi Sang monastery with all the participants in the Congress. So the proof that things exist externally to us, self-sufficiently, independently of us was not furnished. . . . Brecht 1 1 THE QUESTION Marx's preoccupation with materialism of some sort dates back at least to his choice of a topic for a doctoral dissertation, namely, the difference between the philosophies of nature of Democritus and of Epicurus (1841). His serious study of the contemporary materialist Feuerbach is evident in his critique of the sections on the state in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, written in 1843, and in the writings 53

54 Marx and Philosophy published much later as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. These are in the spirit of Feuerbach, using his 'transformative method', though the word 'materialism' is scarcely used. This occurs decisively for the first time in The Holy Family (written in the autumn of 1844), which contains indeed a brief history of materialism. In this still very Feuerbachian work we read of 'materialism, which has now been perfected by the work of speculation itself and coincides with humanism' (CW 4:125). But only a short time later, in the 'Theses on Feuerbach' (spring 1845), Marx contrasted 'all previous materialism (Feuerbach's included)', 'the old materialism', with 'the new (materialism)' (CW 5:3,5); and the first and theoretically main part of the path-breaking joint work with Engels, The German Ideology (written November 1845-August 1846) is subtitled: 'Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks'. From then on Marx's materialism is to be taken for granted, in particular as regards his theory of society and history, and finds expression in, amongst other places, the 'Introduction' to the Grundrisse (1857), the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), and the 'Afterword' to the second edition of the first volume of Capital (1873). But what does Marx's commitment to 'materialism' come to? How does the 'new' materialism differ from the 'old'? How do they both differ from 'idealism'? A natural place to look for an answer would seem to be Marx's last published statement, in the 'Afterword' to Capital, just referred to. 2 AN ANSWER We are told here that whilst for Hegel 'the process of thinking . . . is the creator of the real world, which is only its external appearance', for Marx 'the reverse is true, the world of^deas being nothing but the material world transposed [umgesetzte] and translated into the human head.' (C 1:102) This statement of materialism involves two theses: firstly, that the material world pre-exists ideas, thinking, and secondly, that the latter is or can be the vehicle of accurate and exhaustive knowledge of the former. I shall call these the Independence and Knowability Theses respectively (for short, henceforth, ' I T and 'KT').

Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism

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3 TWO PROBLEMS WITH THIS ANSWER There are difficulties with this answer, at least if it is taken to be an exhaustive one. I shall mention two of them. (a) What of Historical Materialism! How, if at all, does this characterization apply to historical materialism? The query arises from the fact that social-historical affairs would seem to be at least partly constituted by such things as intentions, implying some forms of awareness, and hence that such states of affairs are not causally independent of such forms. (b) The Answer is Dogmatic. How are IT and KT to be defended? As regards IT, how can anyone possibly know whether the material world existed before any form of consciousness did, and indeed if it would exist if human beings (and any other conscious inhabitants of the cosmos) were to disappear? As for KT, how could anyone know if it were true? For, if there were some nook or cranny of the world which human beings could not know about, then we could not know that we could not know. Otherwise we would know something about it, contrary to hypothesis. Now all this is likely to be dismissed by the robust-minded as typical philosophers' paradoxes, which fortunately, in this case at least, can be easily rejected. For, someone will surely say, we need only appeal to the best science, which tells us that the earth existed long before humans - reference to the fossil records suffices. And, as for the captious subtlety about knowledge, surely the triumphant progress of science over the last few centuries is sufficient warrant for its further successes. 2 However, that 'inductive', scientific arguments of this sort are in no way decisive - indeed in some cases not even relevant - should be evident to anyone who is at all familiar with the ways in which traditional philosophers have tried to take account precisely of facts like those just mentioned (Berkeley for instance), or, for example, the ways in which Christians tried to cope with the evidence of the fossil record in the early days of Darwinian evolutionary theory. 3 There is no scientific result which idealism cannot cope with by some further elaboration of the doctrine. Such devices may appear to the materialist to be the merest fabrications, patently designed only to save a position and having no other theoretical justification. But this is so only from a materialist standpoint, which involves a commitment

56

Marx and Philosophy to the best results of the sciences, unglossed by idealism. That is, after this standpoint has been adopted, then science can afford (massive) evidence in favour of materialism. So we seem to be on the merrygo-round of a circular argument if we seek to defend materialism (as so far formulated anyway) by appeals to science. 4 ANOTHER START: THE 'PRACTICAL MATERIALISM' OF THE 'THESES ON FEUERBACH' The preceding may at least suffice to arouse some degree of uneasiness about the initial characterisation of materialism (and idealism), and prompt an attempt to find a fresh place to start. A likely one would seem to be the 'Theses on Feuerbach' from which the previous study took its point of departure. It will be remembered that in the first of the 'Theses' Marx writes that 'the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism . . . is that objectivity, actuality, sensibility' is not conceived as 'sensible human activity, practice, . . . as objective activity and in the second that 'the question whether objective truth pertains to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice must people prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power . . . of their thinking' (CW 5:4). (See above pp. 2, 9.) Here the distinctiveness of the new materialism with respect to 'all hitherto existing materialism' is located in the centrality for it of material practice. So it may accordingly be dubbed 'practical materialism' in distinction from 'traditional materialism'. Now a 'practice' is a regular way of transforming a certain sort of pre-existing situation by means of instruments used by labour-power (ultimately at least human labour-power). The practice might be ordinary economic practice, in which case the situation could be one of transforming an ingot of^steel into a sheet of the same by using rollers; or political practice and the situation one of transforming a certain set of desires, interests, and so on into a set sufficiently consensual to permit the reproduction of the particular society, by means of certain procedures of delegation or representation; or the practice could be scientific-experimental working on an object with a beam balance (and associated procedures of calculation) so as to yield an answer to the question: 'What is the mass of this object?'; and so on. But what is true of all of them is that the fundamental aspect of the situation is the mode of transformation and hence the

57 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism instrumentation. It is this which defines what aspects of the objective situation are open to inquiry, and what the scope of the inquiry thus defined. On the one hand, it is the mode of transformation or instrumentation that marks off, within a certain context, what counts as the 'object', what the 'object-for-us' is. (E.g. the electric charge on a body is an aspect of it which is at best irrelevant for inquiry, and at worst an ineliminable intrusive factor, if we do not have some way of dealing with it.) On the other hand, it also marks off what counts as the 'subject' of the inquiry, for whatever is going on in the depths of the subjectivity counts for nothing until it is associated with some mode of manipulating the world, directly or indirectly. Thus 'subject' and 'object' are not two items pre-constituted with respect to the practice that unites them; rather, it is the practice that is primary, 'subject' and 'object' (in the particular context) being constituted within that practice (cf. above, pp. 15f). Now it is possible of course to abstract the two terms or poles of the practical relation and consider them in isolation, and for one of them to be regarded as primary and constitutive with respect to the other. The standpoint of the primacy of the subject - in any of the various forms in which the subject may be exemplified - is the (theoretical) root of idealism (the way of ideas, what is special about the subject). The idealism may be of a directly ontological sort (the worldgenerating Subject of Christianity being the most obvious and influential exemplar), or it may be - in origin at least - of an epistemological sort, where the limits of all knowledge are defined by the characteristics of the subject. (Thus the 'primacy' of mind with respect to nature in the original formulation of idealism can be either a temporal-causal one or one relating to the real or logical construction of knowledge.) The standpoint of the primacy of the object is the root of what may be called 'traditional' materialism, 'all hitherto existing materialism', as Marx says in the first of the 'Theses on Feuerbach'. According to this position the object imprints itself in some way on the subject (another sort of object) which thus reflects the object like a mirror. '. . . objectivity, actuality, sensibility is grasped only in the form of the object or the given . . .' - 'the given': 'Anschauung', passive registration, intuition. So idealism and traditional materialism belong to the same problematic, the one simply inverting the order of primacy defined by the other. 4 It is no wonder then that materialisms of this sort tend to lapse into idealisms when the problems of the relations of the subject to the object are looked at more closely (problems of representationalism etc.).

58 Marx and Philosophy For 'practical materialism' the 'objective truth' of a conjecture about the world consists in the power over the relevant state of affairs which that conjecture helps to make possible - e.g. power to use an object to produce desired effects. 5 It might be said that this defines a 'criterion' of truth - say, a 'pragmatic' criterion. But this would be to reintroduce the problematic of 'criteria' which is part and parcel of the traditional 'problem of knowledge', discussed in the preceding study. Practice is not, in this alternative problematic, a criterion for something else, namely 'truth', but what replaces it. 5 ENGELS ON MATERIALISM Marx's notes on Feuerbach (more accurately, slightly revised versions of them) were published for the first time, about forty years after they-had been written, as an appendix to Engels's Ludwig Feuerbach and the Close of Classical German Philosophy. In this work Engels discusses at one point the views of philosophers, such as Hume and Kant, 'who question the possibility of any knowledge, or at least of an exhaustive knowledge, of the world' There occurs here the following passage which seems clearly to be along the same lines as the second of Marx's 'Theses on Feuerbach': The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice, namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable 'thing-in-itself. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such 'things-in-themselves' until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the 'thing-in-itself became a 'thing-for-us', as, for instance, alizarin, the colouring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. (SW 3:347) It has often been objected to this that it quite misunderstands Kant - in particular his doctrine of the 'thing-in-itself - and so misses its mark. 6 More specifically, it has been held that Engels confuses two things, namely, (1) the denial of the possibility of exhaustive empirical knowledge, and (2) the Kantian idea of the 'thing-in-itself. These

59 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism are logically independent. Engels's argument may tell against (1), which Kant rejected anyway, but is irrelevant to (2). Now if this passage is taken just as it stands then, the reading in question is a plausible one. At the same time it must arouse some astonishment that Engels should have committed such a crass exegetical error, given his otherwise demonstrably excellent knowledge of 'classical' German philosophy. So it is not implausible to suggest that the passage should not be taken just as it stands. In fact I think it must be read in conjunction with another passage quite a few pages on in the same work. He writes there how the post-Hegelian tendency in the 1840s, 'essentially connected with the name of Marx', involved a return to 'the materialist standpoint': 'That means it was resolved to comprehend the real world . . . just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from pre-conceived idealist crotchets. It was resolved to sacrifice mercilessly every idealist crotchet which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived in their own and not in an imaginary interconnection. And materialism means nothing more than this (SW 3:361, Emphases added.) Note that Engels does not say that materialism is committed to a view of the world as it immediately presents itself - which would be crass empiricism/ positivism, rejected by him elsewhere 7 - but as it presents itself to someone free of idealist preconceptions, 'crotchets'. Now if we read the earlier passage in the light of this it looks rather different. The full train of thought there may now be restated as follows. Practice shows the degree of adequacy of certain putative knowledge about the world. For example, we can truly be said to understand the constitution of madder to the extent to which we can use certain chemicals to produce it or certain constituents of it. There is no empirical question that 'remains over'. (The argument here in detail would be similar to Wittgenstein's arguments about what it is to 'understand' a series on a geometrical proof.) But we can also go further to say that thereby no other question 'remains over' either, provided all the relevant empirical questions have been satisfactorily answered. What grounds - other than philosophical 'crotchets' could there be for denying that our knowledge of the situation is exhaustive - not just 'empirically' exhaustive but exhaustive tout court? Why affirm that every knowable empirical, 'phenomenal' situation has an unknowable noumenal double? The second passage quoted says that rejection of these alleged further questions is precisely what constitutes materialism.

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Marx and Philosophy Now it cannot be denied that the structure of Engels's texts here is difficult and hence very easily misleads. The passage first cited immediately follows a characterization of materialism (SW 3:345-7) in essentially the same traditional terms as that outlined in section 2 above. The second passage occurs over a dozen pages later, and no attempt is made to tie the two accounts of materialism together. There are in fact two quite different doctrines of materialism in the book in question, though they are not flagged as such. That the second is operative in the first passage is shown by its effects on this 'manifest' argument, but it is kept in a state of 'latency' by the explicit occurrence of traditional materialism. 6 RESTATEMENT OF 'PRACTICAL MATERIALISM': 'PHILOSOPHICAL' AND 'SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM. The main systematic result of the immediately preceding discussion is an indication of the direction in which 'practical materialism' may be reformulated. For Engels's second, non-traditional characterization of materialism in terms of what may be called a certain policy, or program, or regulative principle ('it was resolved to . . .'). This policy (at a first approximation) is that of seeking the solutions of problems via appropriate material practices unglossed by idealism. In this sense materialism is not a set of assertions about the world but a 'thesis' in the etymological sense of a 'position': a place where one stands. 8 To be a materialist in this sense is to 'take a stand', from the vantage-point of which certain perspectives are vouchsafed and not others. Put otherwise, materialism conceived thus is literally a 'Weltanschauung' - a 'view' or 'outlook' on the whole world. 9 I propose to call this policy 'philosophical materialism'. It is to be distinguished from what I shall call 'scientific materialism', which consists of particular results of inquiry carried on (not necessarily consciously of course) in accordance with the policy designated by 'philosophical materialism'. The various factual assertions about the world included in the fund of 'scientific materialism' includes the information that inorganic matter temporally preceded and was the causal condition for organic matter, and that 'neural' phenomena have such and such causal relations to physical ones. The above is justified systematically not primarily on exegetical grounds but because it is a better formulation of materialism - in the

Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism 61 first place because it avoids negative features of the traditional characterization. Before beginning to try to show this, I want to exhibit how the distinction in question is present in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. 7 LENIN ON MATERIALISM At one point in this book (CW 14:101ff) Lenin cites the passage from Engels quoted at the beginning of Section 5 above and comments upon it. He begins by asking what the 'kernel' of Engels's objection to Hume and Kant is. He replies that it is this: Yesterday we did not know that coal tar contains alizarin. Today we have learned that it does. The question is, did coal tar contain alizarin yesterday? Of course it did. To doubt it would be to make a mockery of modern science. He continues: And if that is so, three important epistemological conclusions follow: (1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our sensations, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it. (2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. . . . The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known . . . (3) In the theory of knowledge . . . we must . . . not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact. Now if we take what Lenin says at face value, he does seem to think of himself as presenting an argument. If this is so, then what are the premises, what are the conclusions, and how are they related? The main premise would seem to be that there exist (indefinitely many) cases of the coming to be of knowledge (as a result of practical

62 Marx and Philosophy interventions) - at a certain time people know things they did not know before. That is, the preliminary assumption is that some knowledge about the world exists. Lenin's example, taken from Engels, is the knowledge that coal tar contains alizarin. Now he says that three epistemological 'conclusions follow' from this. These are listed (l)-(3) in the passage cited above. Conclusion (1) is essentially the 'ontological' formulation of materialism embodied in the IT. What is the relation between this 'conclusion' and the basic premise? In particular, what, if any, is the argument? It seems to be the following, (a) Today we know that coal tar contains alizarin, (b) Yesterday the alizarin which comes from coal tar was not an object of knowledge for us. (c) Coal tar contained alizarin yesterday. Therefore, (d) alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday, independently of our knowing it did. Now (a) and (b) may be taken to be just versions of the initial main premise. Of (c) Lenin says that it is 'beyond doubt': 'to doubt it would be to make a mockery of modern science'. In other words, someone cannot consistently both deny (d) and also take the results of modern science seriously. (An alternative to (c) is to assume, for example, that knowing about alizarin in coal today actually brings it into existence, so that it is matter of creation rather than discovery, or that God brought it into existence at that moment, or that it simply came into existence uncaused, and so on.) Indeed this seems to be also the general character of the justification of the primary assumption that knowledge exists. So, overall, the argument is that if you take the results of scientific practice seriously then you are committed to IT. Now if conclusion (1) bears upon the first component of the materialist position - the 'ontological' one, IT - conclusions (2) and (3) bear on the second component, the 'epistemological' one, embodied in KT. The train of thought t o (2) is as follows. If we have examples of what was not known yesterday becoming known today, then, in the absence of reasons to the contrary, we are justified in thinking that this process of acquisition of fresh items of knowledge has no limit, that there is no point where what is unknown today cannot become known tomorrow. Conclusion (2) is thus anti-sceptical in import. Conclusion (3) is, in effect, the converse of the preceding, and the train of thought similar. If cases like that of the discovery of alizarin in coal tar give us grounds for affirming the open-endedness of the process of acquisition of knowledge, and are thus anti-sceptical in significance, then the very same cases and the very same conclusion,

63 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism when considered from this very aspect of open-endedness, reveal as their other face the idea that any given stage in the development of knowledge is only a tentative, alterable, révisable, corrigible one, subject to transformation into more exact knowledge, but still knowledge no less subject to correction. Thus conclusion (3) is anti-dog¬ matic in import. The combination of conclusions (2) and (3) is the full thesis of the openness of knowledge from a materialist standpoint, that is, the thesis that the development of knowledge is not limited in principle by any horizon, either of unsolvable or of definitively solved problems - in other words KT. Thus (l)-(3) conjointly add up to the 'official' characterization of materialism in terms of IT and KT. Lenin's argumentation thus involves a distinction between (1) prima facie results of scientific inquiry (involving practical intervention in this world - this is part of the core of the passage from Engels on which Lenin is commenting), and (2) a certain way of regarding those results. This in fact amounts to the distinction made in the preceding section between 'scientific' and 'philosophical' materialism. This distinction is not made with complete explicitness in the passages from Lenin just cited, but it emerges much more clearly in at least two other places. (a) One is in his characterization of materialism and idealism as 'lines' (e.g. CW 14:26). In the sense of that multifaceted description which is relevant here, 'line' is a directly political metaphor: they are lines in a way in which political groupings have lines. These are programmes, stances, attitudes, orientations, strategies. Such are based upon factual assertions, but they are not themselves primarily reports of fact; they are the laying down of guide-lines for informed action to bring about certain changes. 'Philosophical materialism' is a 'line' in this sense. (b) The distinction between 'philosophical' and 'scientific' materialism jibes with Lenin's distinction between two senses of the term 'matter'. On the one hand, there is 'matter' functioning in a philosophical context: 'matter' is here what he calls a 'category'. In this sense 'matter' refers simply to that which (whatever in its specific nature it is) exists independently of consciousness. ('Matter' does not change its reference - CW 14:130, 262.) But on the other hand there is 'matter' functioning in the scientific context: 'matter' is here what Lenin calls a 'concept'. In this sense 'matter'

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Marx and Philosophy refers to the specific nature of what exists independently of consciousness (what is referred to topic-neutrally by 'matter' considered as a 'category'), and we know about it by reference to particular scientific theories (CW 14:129,269). Since theories change so does what we take matter in this sense to be. This distinction between two senses of 'matter' is one which would be induced precisely by the distinction between what I have called 'philosophical' and 'scientific' materialism.

8 THIS FORMULATION OF MATERIALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF THE EARLIER ONE This approach to the problem of a characterization of materialism has at a minimum the advantage of not being subject to the second of the two problems outlined in Section 3, that is, the problem of the defensibility of IT and KT. (I shall look at the other problem in Section 12 below.) For, given a commitment to philosophical materialism, scientific materialism vouchsafes solid evidence for the existence of the world independently of consciousness. And since philosophical materialism is a program or policy and not a set of straightforward assertions, the commitment is not to the assertion of the knowability of the world in general and in detail, but to a mode of inquiry which is not limited by assumptions to the contrary. It could be that the method of practical exploration of the world should eventually run inti) insuperable difficulties; but there is no reason at the moment to think that this is likely; so, as far as this goes at least, commitment to philosophical materialism is in order. (Cf. the Principle of Determinism interpreted as a maxim of inquiry rather than as a substantive assertion about the world.) Apart from the reasons already given for introducing a distinction between 'philosophical' and 'scientific' materialism, there is a further one, namely, that it permits a decisive rejection of any tendency to identify materialism with some particular scientific theory or theories. Such an identification has one or both of two results: either for 'materialism' to form an obstacle to the advance of inquiry or for such advances to be interpreted as refutations of 'materialism'. Though he does not in fact make the above distinction between materialism, Raymond Williams has put this danger so well that I cannot do better than quote him on the point:

65 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism . . . materialism . . . in its earliest phases . . . defines its own categories in terms of demonstrable physical investigations. Yet . . . in the continuing process of investigation, the initial and all successive categories are inherently subject to radical revision, and in this are unlike the relatively protected categories of presumed or revealed truths; . . . (further) in the very course of opposing systematic universal explanations of many of the common-ground processes, provisional and secular procedures and findings tend to be grouped into what appear but never can be systematic, universal and categorical explanations of the same general kind. Thus material investigation . . . finds itself pulled . . . toward closed generalizing systems: finds itself materialism or a materialism. There is thus a tendency for any materialism, at any point in its history, to find itself stuck with its own recent generalizations, and in defence of these to mistake its own character: to suppose that it is a system like others, of a presumptive explanatory kind, or that it is reasonable to set up contrasts with other (categorical) systems, at the level not of procedures but of its own past 'findings' or 'laws'. What then happens is obvious. The results of new material investigations are interpreted as having outdated 'materialism'. Or, conversely, defence of 'the materialist world-view', specified in certain positions now frozen in time, involves contempt for or rejection of apparently incompatible evidence and procedures, and their categorical assignment to systems taken to alternative and of the same kind: in the ordinary rhetoric, 'idealism'. Intellectural confusion is then severe enough but it is made worse by the fact, on the one hand, that much of the new 'evidence' and 'procedures' especially in its interpreted and theoretically presumed forms, is indeed incompatible, not only (which is not important) with the frozen 'world-view' but with the significant criteria of the materialist enterprise; and by the fact, on the other hand, that within the world-view, however frozen, there is still hard, often very hard evidence of a kind that is indeed likely to be smothered in the difficult process of the search for genuine compatibilities and necessary reformulations. 10 It was precisely this identification of a transitory (if long and crucial) phase in the history of natural science with materialism as such which brought it about, round the turn of the century, that advances beyond this phase tended to drive some into a reactionary defence of the 'old'

66 Marx and Philosophy against the 'new' science (the former becoming an 'obstacle' - on which see later) but some into idealism, the claim being that 'matter' had 'disappeared'. 9 MATERIALISM OR IDEALISM? It is now necessary to ask a further question (for the moment in the language of a teleology of choice): Why adopt the position of 'philosophical' materialism? The strategy for finding an answer is given by considering the character of philosophical materialism as a 'line' analogous to a political line. The latter is rationally assessed (in general terms) by considering the effects on the political situation induced by following that line. The justification of philosophical materialism as a 'line' is of a similar general character. Put most schematically my argument is as follows. (1) The alternatives are materialism and idealism. (2) Idealism (A) generates certain cognitive consequences for theory and practice which (B) are inconsistent with what may be called 'emancipatory' interests. (3) Materialism generates consequences which tend to forward such interests. A. Idealism Ha^ Certain Cognitive Consequences Very broadly speaking we can distinguish three sorts of such consequences. (1) Idealisms invariably "involve complications and mysteries which materialism does not. (2) In particular, every consistent idealism is ultimately either a theism of some sort or a solipsism. (3) These may be regarded as special cases of another consequence, namely, that every idealism generates closures in theory, puts 'obstacles' of certain sorts on the path of the development of knowledge. (1) Idealisms typically invite entanglement in one or other of the constructions which have their classic exemplifications in the history of philosophy - the elaborate philosophical stories of a Berkeley, a Kant, a Hegel. This is what Engels was driving at in speaking of 'philosophical crotchets' and Lenin in writing that idealism 'is nothing but a disguised and embellished ghost story' (CW 14:182). Now it is not impossible that ghosts exist. The point is that normally we take it that they do not, and special reasons would have to be provided to make us believe in their

Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism 67 existence, given the acceptance of certain broad features of ordinary practice and scientific theory. From this point of view the argument for materialism has rather the character of an onus-argument: in the circumstances it is rather that idealism has to show cause why it, rather than materialism, should be taken seriously. (2) The logical conclusions or presupposition of every consistent idealism is a theism of some kind or another, or a solipsism. That is, if nature is not independent of a subject or subjects, as materialism claims, then it must be the product of some creative subject - and to this, as Aquinas says succinctly, 'everyone gives the name of God'. (S. T., Pt I, Q. 2, Art 3). 11 If not then what is at least prima facie nature must be an illusion of some kind, and this - since the external world includes other people, or what passes for such - is solipsism. (3) More generally, idealism tends to have a 'blocking' effect, that is, the effect of placing obstacles on the path of inquiry. Lenin affords an example. He refers to Mach's objection to materialism that it leaves unanswered the question which it prompts, namely, whence sensation arises in organic matter. But, Lenin continues, 'does any other philosophical standpoint "solve" a question before enough data for its solution has been collected?' Mach puts forward the concept of 'element' as the basic constituent of the world. As in Russell's later 'neutral monism', 'elements' are items which are allegedly neither 'material' nor 'mental', but that from which things thus distinguished are constituted, each in its specific way. However The word 'element' . . . only obscures the question, for it is a meaningless term which creates the false impression that a solution or a step forward has been achieved. This impression is a false one, because there still remains to be investigated and reinvestigated how matter, apparently entirely devoid of sensation, is related to matter which, though composed of the same atoms (or electrons), is yet endowed with a well-defined faculty of sensation. Materialism clearly formulates the as yet unsolved problem and thereby stimulates the attempt to solve it, to undertake further experimental investigation. Machism, which is a species of muddled idealism, befogs the issue and side-tracks it by means of the futile verbal trick, 'element'. 12 It is unnecessary to list here detailed examples of the various barricades which idealist philosophy has placed from time to time

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Marx and Philosophy on the progress of inquiry: the 'foundations' of all possible knowledge (e.g. 'impressions' and 'ideas'), or type of explanation (e.g. teleological), or the nature of space and time (e.g. Kant), or the nature of consciousness (the mind as necessarily conscious of its own nature), and so on. 13 This is not to say that knowledge has never developed within the context of an idealism, or that materialism has never functioned in blockages. But insofar as the first has occurred it has always exacted its price eventually by holding up the development even of the knowledge which may have originally developed within it. The history of Platonism furnishes examples. On the second possibility see the end of Section 8 above. 14

Indeed one of the most general things that may be said about traditional philosophy is that it has endeavoured to subject science to itself in one or another way, either by subsuming science as a mere stage on the path to more perfect knowledge (e.g. the Platonic eidos or the Hegelian 'Idea'), or by circumscribing it by some allegedly unalterable forms of 'understanding' or 'reason' (e.g. Locke, Kant, Husserl, each in his own way). 15 And this attempted subjection of science has its root in idealism's point of departure in the subject, the alleged nature and limits of knowledge being set by the cognitive powers ascribed to this subject. For materialism on the contrary the limits of knowledge are contingent, variable, shifting, set by the contingent, variable, shifting limits of forms of practical intervention. The limits are typically set in the twin modes of dogmatism and scepticism. In some cases this dogmatism simply prescribes what is knowable tout court. In other cases these limits are seen as having a 'beyond' with respect to rational scientific procedures, a beyond which is then the province either of scepticism or of some allegedly higher form of knowledge, either metaphysical or of a sort perhaps better identified as faith or the like. 16 B. The Cognitive Consequences of Idealism for Theory and Practice are Inconsistent with What May Be Called 'Emancipatory Interests' Now, assuming the cogency of the above line of argument, the following question arises: What exactly is unacceptable about these consequences from a materialist standpoint?

69 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism As to (Al) I shall not dwell upon the complications of idealism, simply taking it for granted that, other things being equal, a straightforward account is to be preferred to a complicated one. As to (A2), history shows that theisms and religions in general have, overall, worked to maintain old forms of human oppression or to initiate new ones. The only thoroughgoing, consistent enemy of theism is a standpoint from which nature exists independently of all forms of mind, namely, materialism. (As to solipsism, we have yet to hear of a politics on this basis.) As to (A3), blocks to the advancement of learning are not in the interests of emancipation from exploitation: it is always in the interests of the exploited to know as much as possible about the nature of their situation. 17 In these respects it should be noted that I am not saying either of two things. Firstly, I am not saying that knowledge by or in itself is emancipatory. 18 This would be an idealism. Knowledge can be emancipatory only when it is embodied in appropriate social practices. 19 Secondly, I am not saying that the advance of knowledge cannot, in certain circumstances, be counter-emancipatory: such advances may open up the possibility of creating new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression as well as new ways of fighting them. The point is just that lack of knowledge is in general something which works in the interests of exploitation whereas new knowledge may work in the interests of the exploited. Thus, in sum, the argument has been that idealism typically generates certain consequences in theory which in turn have effects as regards the distribution of social power. So, in the final analysis, the answer to the question 'materialism or idealism' is an ethico-political answer, though one mediated by the theoretical consequences of idealism. And in this general way of connecting the theoretical and the ethical it follows in the tradition of e.g. Spinoza. 20 10 'SPONTANEOUS' MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM: THE CONTRADICTORY UNITY OF MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM On the above view then, materialism and idealism, as philosophies, should be looked at in Marxist perspective as 'lines' in the sense of regulative principles or procedure, like political lines. 21 They induce opposed effects, cognitively and socially. Since these effects relate to

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Marx and Philosophy specific objective social forces, materialism and idealism are also 'lines' in the yet further sense of military lines: they divide groups into warring camps. Hence the thesis that the history of philosophy is the history of the struggle between the two. But we can trace further the root of the struggle between materialism and idealism. The point of departure here is the reflection that what I have called 'philosophical' materialism (in contrast with 'scientific' materialism) did not always exist: both phylo- and ontogenetically, philosophical materialism as an explicit line is rooted in or based upon what may be called 'spontaneous' materialism, which is a certain quotidian, unreflective attitude towards the world. In a different context Lukacs has put the relevant point here so well that I cannot do better than to quote him: . . . people in their everyday life typically react in a spontaneously materialist fashion to the objects of their environment, whether or not these reactions by the subject of the practice are afterwards interpreted. This is an immediate consequence of the nature of labour. Every process of labour presupposes a complex of objects, of laws, which determine it with regard to its type, its motions, its modes of performance, and so on, and these are treated spontaneously as existing and functioning independently of human consciousness. The nature of labour consists precisely in the observing, the exploring and utilising of this independently existing being and change. Even at the stage where the primitive does not yet produce tools, but only seizes on stones of specific shapes and throws them away after use, he must already have made definite observations about which stones are suitable for specific uses, by virtue of their hardness, form, and so on. The very fact that from among many stones he chooses one as apparently suitable, the very type of choice, shows that man is more or less conscious of the fact that he is obliged to act in an external world that is independent of him, that he therefore must attempt, as well as he is able, to explore this environment which exists independently of him, to dominate it in thought through observation, in order to be able to exist, in order to avoid the dangers that threaten him. Even danger as a category of the inner life of human beings shows that the subject is more or less conscious of confronting an external world which exists independently of his consciousness. 22 This phylogenetic situation has its ontogenetic complement in the formation of the life of every individual human being.

Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism 71 But as Lukacs also points out, 23 this spontaneous materialism, though inextinguishable, can and does peacefully coexist with all manner of non-materialist ideas of a magical, animistic and religious nature, in short a far-reaching anthropomorphic and ultimately idealist view of the world. This has roots which demand a separate inquiry. It must suffice to mention two factors. The first is the importance of the early divisjon of social labour which separates out a group largely or totally free from the exigencies of material productive labour and so from the sources par excellence of spontaneous materialism. Such a group tends to ascribe to the ideas with which they are largely concerned a primary, demiurgic significance. 24 The second is the pervasive tendency of pre-scientific thought to explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar (as it is characteristic of scientific thought to explain the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar). Now there is nothing more familiar than our experience of intentional action, of agency, and hence the universal occurrence, at least in early stages of thought about the world, of explanations of the mysterious in terms of the actions of beings more or less like ourselves in important respects. 25 This 'spontaneous' idealism, corresponding to 'spontaneous' materialism, is the fount and origin of idealism as an explicit, more or less systematised philosophical trend. The latter, in struggle with a primitive materialism, articulating the spontaneously materialist attitude to the world, and already in struggle with spontaneous idealism, calls into being both idealism and materialism, each representative and an agent of social forces. This is a process that can be followed paradigmatically in early Greek philosophy, which can be seen as a first attempt to de-anthropomorphize earlier thought by an essentially materialist viewpoint (dialectical too, but that is another story), and then as an attempt, culiminating in Plato, to combat precisely this materialist assault. (Plato, in his famous passage on the battle of the Gods and the Giants 26 said long ago just what Engels said more recently about the fundamental place of the struggle between materialism and idealism in the history of philosophy.) Idealism is constantly reborn, both in its spontaneous form and as reflected and systematized in philosophical doctrines. As pointed out above it finds a natural 'culture' in the division between mental and manual labour; and the tendencies generated here are fostered by the role which idealism plays in ideologies appropriate to the maintenance of exploitative societies (cf. the preceding section). Again, as indicated above, idealisms take root at points where it is a question of

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Marx and Philosophy coping with the unfamiliar by means of inadequate theoretical tools, either those restricted to concepts taken from everyday thinking, or ones stemming from scientific theories which have already reached the limits of their applicability. Hence the familiar presence of idealism in thought about human beings and society, any sort of adequate theorization of which does not precede roughly the midnineteenth century (Marx and Freud), and at turning points in the history of scientific theory (relativity and quantum theory). 27 Thus the idea of struggle is constitutive of the materialism/idealism couple. They are, both systematically and historically, Siamese twins. But this, the very ground of their unity, their inseparability - that they continuously generate each other - is also the ground of the conflict between them, since the whole raison d'être of the one is to oppose the other. Thus they are 'internally' related by struggle: it is not that each is constituted independently of the other and only afterwards engage in struggle with the other, but rather that they are born in struggle. 28 (They form a 'unity of opposites'.) Finally, what has been said about the various forms of materialism and idealism so far may be summed up, and the systematic-historical analysis slightly extended, in the form of the following diagram. (Unbroken lines indicate direct affiliation, broken ones conditioning influence.) Social practice Spontaneous materialism

Spontaneous idealism

Traditional materialism —

->• Traditional idealism

Scientific materialism f

f

Philosophical materialism

-Dialectical idealism ^.

Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism 11 THE IDEALISM OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL ENTERPRISE

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I began the main part of the discussion of the nature of materialism and idealism in a mode which smacked strongly of the teleology of choice, of the framework of justification. The course of the argument led to the view that materialism and idealism are, in the final analysis, expressions of certain practical orientations 29 which are themselves both bases and consequences of specific social groupings. Though it was inevitable that the discussion would have to begin in the justificatory mode which is familiar and customary, it is necessary at this point (borrowing Wittgenstein's metaphor) to kick away the ladder by which it has been reached. Questions of justification give way to questions of explanation. The question has so far been put in terms of constructing justificatory arguments for the adoption of materialism or idealism, arguments which might be taken to be ones apt to produce conviction as regards one or other of these. This mode must now be replaced with another, so that the real question (which cannot be pursued any further here) is: What determines the distribution of bearers/agents of ideology to materialist/idealist positions? The programmatic, schematic answer is: the class-struggle and those factors which determine its course. One consequence of this change of perspective is an exclusion of voluntarism in the matter of ideological class-struggle. For if the standpoints of materialism and idealism are rooted in the sphere of the practical, then ideological class-struggle in these directions has an only 'relative autonomy', and change of distribution of ideological agents is basically not a matter of recommending different interpretations of the world, but of changing it in such a way as to effect different distributions. This is of course only to reiterate the theme of the last of Marx's 'Theses on Feuerbach' about the necessity to change rather than simply 'interpret' the world. 30 Now it is characteristic of the traditional philosophical enterprise that for the most part it conceives of philosophy as a special, genuinely theoretical branch of knowledge issuing in distinctive sorts of propositions, the choice between which is decided within the subject itself by means of theoretical arguments. Thus philosophy is thought of as having an essentially autonomous history determined by the internal logic of its arguments. But all this is, from the standpoint summarized in the opening paragraph of this section, thoroughly idealist. Thus the traditional philosophical enterprise is inherently

74 Marx and Philosophy idealist. In particular, idealism itself is, quite apart from its specific content: and, paradoxically enough - from the ordinary standpoint so is traditional materialism. (This is a result which might have been expected, considering the thesis, earlier set out, that idealism and traditional materialism are mirror images of one another theoretically.) There are no valid arguments from true premises, rationally believed, which issue in the materialist position - even if deduction is used in the commonsense, Sherlock Holmes sense. Indeed, there are no purely discursive considerations of any sort which have materialism as a conclusion. 31 12 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM I have distinguished the following kinds of materialism: philosophical, scientific, traditional and spontaneous. Where does 'historical materialism' fit in? With a consideration of this question I take up a thread explicitly dropped at the beginning of Section 8. The claim of what was later called 'historical materialism' or 'the materialist conception of history' was, in its founding document, The German Ideology, to be a science of history rather than simply an ideology which had history as its subject-matter, specifically the particular ideological formation called philosophy. But if it was this that was in question, why call it historical materialism? As Althusser has remarked 32 we do not talk about chemical materialism, for example, rather than simply chemistry. The answer, he goes on to indicate, is to be sought in the historical context in which it arose the predominance not just of philosophies of history but of specifically idealist philosophies of history. So the name 'historical materialism' has a polemical import. But, more specifically, in what does the 'materialism' of 'historical materialism' consist? This may well seem a very easy question to answer, whatever may be the adequacy of the answer to the problems of society and history. For surely Marx said quite clearly what he meant by historical materialism in the famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: The mode of production of material life conditions [bedingt] the general process of social, political and mental [geistigen] life. It is not the consciousness of people that determines [bestimmt] their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (SW 1:503)

75 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism There are doubtless tricky problems about what this thesis amounts to - problems for the solution of which concepts like 'determination (in the last instance)', 'dominance', 'relative autonomy', etc. have been minted - and then problems about the empirical adequacy of one or another version. But surely this is what the materialism of historical materialism comes to? Let us call it, just to be able to refer to it briefly, 'economic materialism'. Marx give us many paradigmatic examples of it. See, for instance, the derivation of the bourgeois ideology of equality and freedom from the material conditions of the exchange-relation in the Grundrisse (240ff) or, to cite a more compendious example, his treatment of the relation of exchangepractices and certain legal structures and practices in the 'Marginalia to Adolf Wagner's Textbook'33 There can be no doubt at all that 'economic materialism' is at least a central thesis of Marx's historical materialism. But is this consistent with 'philosophical' materialism as characterized earlier? In other words, has the introduction of this concept of materialism solved the problems first raised in Section 3 as to the nature of the 'materialism' of historical materialism? For, after all, economic practices like others are certainly partly constituted by such items as intentions. To solve this problem it is necessary to look more carefully at Marx's own practice of 'materialist' social analysis. Look, for example, at the initial couple of chapters of the first volume of Capital. Thus in the first chapter he writes: People do not . . . bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material embodiments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true. By equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do not know it, but they do it. Value, therefore, does not have what it is written on its forehead. Rather, it transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, people try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product, for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men's social product as is their language. ( C I : 66f) Thus, to start with at least, the economic practice is carried on in accordance with principles of which the executors of the practice are unaware - it is not that they have false ideas about the principles, but

76 Marx and Philosophy rather that they do not have any ideas at all. It just happens that way - like a child's speaking a language. (Marx's analogy with language at the end of the passage is not a mere accidental flourish.) 'They do not know it, but they do it.' 34 At a later stage the executors of the practice may form theories about the functioning of the practice but it is the objective character of the practice that will be decisive here, not least in determining misapprehensions about the practice (e.g. 'the fetishism of commodies'). Or consider Marx's derivation of money in the following chapter on 'The Process of Exchange'. At the beginning of this chapter he traces, in a passage of the utmost inspissation and subtlety, the way in which money arises as a necessary condition for the operation of a ramified commodity-producing economy. The actual argument cannot even be summarized here, but is in any case unnecessary for the purposes of the present theme. 'In their difficulties', he writes - that is, in their difficulties of being in the situation of a ramifying commodity-producing economy without the invention of money our commodity-owners think like Faust: 'In the beginning was the deed.' They have already acted before thinking. The natural laws of the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodites. (C 1:180) Here again, as in the previous case, a certain practice - that of commodity-exchange - extends itself in accordance with the objective tendencies of its functioning, the executors of the practice conforming themselves to these tendencies. Again, it is not a matter of a relation between a mode of production on the one hand, and a 'superstructura!' feature on the other, but between the objective structure of a practice and the way in which it is carried on, this including ideas about what is going on. The thesis of the primacy of material practices in regard to the explanation of social life and its changes may be dubbed 'social materialism'. It is different from what I have earlier called 'economic materialism' which asserts that one of these practices, namely the economic, is primary with regard to the determination (even if 'in the last instance') of the other practices which go to constitute a society. The two sorts of 'historical materialism' are logically independent (neither entails the other). The distinction in question does not come out very clearly in his writings though both versions of historical materialism are present

Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism 77 there. Nevertheless, there are indications. Thus, whilst the 'Theses on Feuerbach' stress the fundamental role of practice in the new materialism ('All social life is essentially practical.') (CW 5:5), it is not specifically economic practice that is in question at all, at least not explicitly; in The German Ideology the materialist conception of history is demarcated from the idealist conception in respect simply of the fact that the former 'does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice' (CW 5:54); in the same seminal work the materialist conception is sometimes put as generally as: 'It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness' (CW 5:37); and the second of the two formulations quoted at the beginning of this section from the famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is very similar to the last-cited from The German Ideology 'being' or even 'social being' is a great deal less specific than 'mode of production of material life'. But if Marx actually works with this sense of materialism without making it explicit or even being specially aware of it - as I have suggested may be the case - then this is itself an example of the situation to which 'social materialism' points. 'Social materialism' makes necessary an extension of 'philosophical' materialism as characterised earlier. This should now be understood to be also a policy (etc.) of inquiry into socio-historical subject-matters conceived as practices and results of practices, the executants' forms of representation of which are necessary conditions for the occurrence of such practices but where it is the structure of the practices themselves which are basically responsible for the effects and development of the practice and for those forms of representation. So, in the case alluded to above, the executants of the practice of commodity-exchange must have some conception of what they are doing for it to be sustained as a practice, but it is not necessary that this conception be a veridical one for this to occur and for it to develop, the explanation of both its occurrence and development lying in the objective structure of the practice itself.35 13 THE MANY FACES OF LENIN'S 'MATERIALISM A N D EMPIRO-CRITICISM' In this study I have used Lenin's Materialism and Empiro-Criticism quite extensively. But the results arrived at indicate that Lenin's text has a much more complex structure than may appear at first sight.

78 Marx and Philosophy Specifically, what emerges is that 'materialism' is not a univocal concept in Lenin's book. Rather, all of the senses of the term that I have distinguished are at work in it though not explicitly. Thus, I have already at various places pointed to the occurrence in his book of what I have called 'scientific', 'philosophical' and 'spontaneous' materialism. To conclude I shall focus on just one point, namely the significance of the notion of 'reflection', the point where most critical attention has been concentrated. (All page-references are to Lenin, CW 14.) Lenin says that thoughts are 'reflections' ('images', 'copies' e.g. pp. 31, 122, 232, 235, 265) of reality. 36 Now to start with, it is clear enough that 'reflection' is a metaphor, being used to make a point through some implicit comparison with something else. What this point is cannot simply be read off the face of the term. After all, 'reflection', and similar terms, have been widely used in the philosophical literature, and in different ways. For example, Hegel uses 'reflection' in his system of logic in a distinctive way, and when Heinrich Hertz says in the opening paragraph of the Introduction to his Principles of Mechanics that 'we form for ourselves images or symbols of external objects' he is not automatically accused of being a representationist. What then are the relevant features of the real situation which is the basis of the reflection metaphor (of an object in a mirror, of something on a photographic plate, etc.)? Three such features come to mind. (1) A reflection is normally like (similar to) what it is a reflection of; (2) a reflection is of something which exists independently of it; (3) a reflection is produced, within a field of objective material causal conditions, by what it is a reflection of, in accordance with some definite principles of 'projection' (e.g. in the perhaps simplest case the laws of rectilinear optics). Now (1) is the uncontroversially representationist dimension of this reflection-metaphor and the one which is the vehicle of 'traditional' materialism. It is undeniable that this is a central sense of materialism in Lenin's book, signalled e.g. by his saying that our ideas 'correspond' to reality (pp. 105,114,137,187, etc.), and also by the empiricism regarding knowledge which comes out in statements like 'All knowledge comes from experience, from sensation, from perception' (p. 12). But in fact feature (1) is inessential to the idea of reflection : for something to be a reflection of something else it is not necessary that there be any significant degree of resemblance be-

79 Marx, Lenin and the Concept of Materialism tween the two items. (Radically distorting mirrors in fun-parlours prove this, not to speak of the use of the term in mathematics.) Feature (2) may be summed up in the idea of a reflection's being 'objective' in the sense that it necessarily relates to an object which exists independently of it. This is really none other than a metaphorical version of the thesis of the independence of the world from consciousness. For example, Lenin writes: Our sensation, our consciousness is only an image of the external world, and it is obvious that an image cannot exist without the thing imaged, and that the latter exists independently of that which images it. (p. 69) Then, somewhat later, in criticising Helmholtz's theory, according to which sensations and ideas stand to the world as symbols or hieroglyphs to what they signify, Lenin writes that such a view cannot be reconciled with the materialist one that ' "we apprehend the objective properties of things with the help of our senses" ', because such a symbol-theory implies a certain distrust of perception, a distrust of the evidence of our sense-organs. It is beyond doubt that an image can never wholly compare with the model, but an image is one thing, a symbol, a conventional sign, another. The image inevitably and of necessity implies the objective reality of that which it 'images'. [Emphasis added] 'Conventional sign', symbol, hieroglyph are concepts which introduce an entirely unnecessary element of agnosticism, (p. 235) Finally, according to feature (3) of the reflection-metaphor, a reflection is a reflection of something just by virtue of being partly brought about by that of which it is the reflection according to certain objective principles, and as a consequence of which it reveals something of the nature of the object. Thus if I operate upon some sugar with water, making it disappear in it, and then by another operation of evaporation recover the sugar, the effects I induce may very aptly be said to 'reflect' or be a 'reflection' of the nature of the sugar as soluble in water, and this has nothing to do with any representationist theory of perception. It is this feature that ties up with Lenin's emphasis of the primacy of practice for the understanding of knowledge. For example:

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Marx and Philosophy The standpoint of . . . practice . . . should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And it inevitably leads to materialism . . . (p. 142)

Thus the image of reflection is 'over-determined', and in bearing various meanings is itself an image of Lenin's complex text. 37

3 Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' Ist es Ein lebendig Wesen Das sich in sich selbst getrennt? Sind es Zwei die sich erlesen Dass man sie als Eines kennt? Goethe 1 1 INTRODUCTION Among the various senses of 'materialism' distinguished in the preceding study as relevant to Marx's understanding of it, a 'dialectical' variety does not figure. This may surprise the reader who has heard of Marx as a representative, or even as the effective originator of a doctrine called 'dialectical materialism'. Now it is certainly the case that the term does not occur in Marx's writings (nor in those of Engels for that matter). 2 But it is no less true that he considered himself as using a 'dialectical method' and that he held a 'dialectic' to be at work in the real world both of nature and society. 3 Unfortunately it is not at all clear what Marx meant by this. On a couple of occasions he expressed his intention of writing a short work on the subject, 4 but this is one of the many projects that he did not carry through. What writing there is on the subject in the Marxist tradition gives even less help than usual. 5 So there is nothing for it but to start from scratch and to try to produce an account of Marx's thinking on this theme based on what he himself wrote. The sources for such an attempt are twofold: firstly, the explicit remarks which he himself made on the subject here and there, and secondly, what would seem to be exemplifications in his work of the dialectic and the dialectical method. 6 The following study will concentrate on materials to be found in Marx's major writings on political economy, but certainly makes no pretense of exhausting 81

82 Marx and Philosophy even these. Quite unexamined are, for example, his more specifically political and historical writings which thus remain for further enquiries. 7 Finally, I shall restrict myself to only one aspect of the subject, namely, dialectical 'contradiction', keeping in mind Marx's comment that 'the Hegelian "contradiction [Widerspruch]" is the source of all dialectics' (C l:744n.). To start with I shall not pause to inquire into the impact of the qualification 'Hegelian' here but rather begin straightaway with a look at some of Marx's uses of the term 'contradiction'. 2 CONTRADICTION AS 'ANOMALY' If we run our eyes down the table of contents of the first volume of Capital we see that Chapter 5 (of the English translation anyway Chapter 4, Section 2 of the original) is entitled 'Contradictions in the General Formula' (sc. for the concept of capital). Here Marx seeks to show how 'capital cannot . . . arise from circulation', and how it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation' (C 1:268). This is because, on the one hand, the increment of value that makes a sum of value a capital cannot arise in circulation consistently with the assumption, present at this stage of the exposition, that all exchanges are of equivalent values, and because, on the other hand, value cannot be realised elsewhere than in circulation. The solution of this problem lies in the introduction of a new (more concrete) concept, namely, labour-power (as distinct from labour). This explains how the increment of value which makes a value in circulation into a capital is indeed not generated in circulation (originating as it does in the use of labour-power, purchased at value - according to the assumptions at this point in the presentation - in production) but also how it cannot arise apart from circulation (where labour-power is exchanged for wages and where values in general are realised). This is an example of 'contradiction' in the sense of what I shall call 'anomaly'. Here the anomaly consists in a conflict between two parts of a theory. It is resolved by changing the theory in a certain way here by bringing in a new concept. But a contradiction in the sense of anomaly may also consist in a conflict between a theory and the facts. (In thus contrasting 'theory' and 'fact' I do not mean to commit any positivist sin but only to distinguish in a rough and ready way between, on the one hand, a relation between two parts of an already constituted theoretical

83 Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' formation, and, on the other, a feature - certainly discriminated in terms which involve theory - of what the theory is supposed to be about.) An example of the second sort of situation is the contradiction between, on the one hand, the assumption that commodities tend to exchange at their values in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour-time represented by them, and, on the other, the existence of a tendency towards an average rate of profit between branches of production, assuming (what is a fact) that the organic compositions of the various capitals (ratios of variable to constant capital) vary (C 3: Ch. 8 ad fin). As in the case of the anomaly discussed above, this contradiction is resolved through a modification of the theory by the introduction of a new (again a more concrete) concept, that of 'price of production' (the sum of the amounts of capital expended on labour-power and means of production plus the average rate of profit). Exchange of commodities is now assumed to be at price of production rather than value. 8 Such anomalies may actually occur in the course of inquiry (For¬ schung); whether or not, they can be used in the mode of presentation (Darstellung) as a device for expounding the theory. 9 The problem of the origin of surplus-value, used above as an example, is an instance of the actual historical stage in the development of thought on the subject being represented in the theoretical exposition of its solution. But, whatever else may be said of it, contradiction in the sense of anomaly is basically an epistemic matter. 3 CONTRADICTION AS 'REAL CONFLICT' But Marx also uses 'contradiction' in connection with non-epistemic situations. For example, he writes of supply and demand that 'the inequalities between them are of an opposed [entgegengesetzter] nature, and since they continually succeed one another, they balance one another out through their opposed directions, through their contradiction [Widerspruch] with one another. . . . supply and demand always coincide when the whole is viewed over a certain period, but only as the continuous movement of their contradiction' (C 3:291). This sort of 'contradiction' may be called, borrowing a term from Kant who discusses it, 'real conflict [Widerstreit]': this occurs 'where two realities combined in one subject cancel one another's effects'. 10 This looks like the situation of what Marx called

84 Marx and Philosophy 'real extremes' in his 1843 critique of Hegel on the state: 'Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation, for they are opposed in essence. They have nothing in common, they do not need each other, they do not supplement each other' (CW 3:88). 4 CONTRADICTION AS R E A L UNITY OF OPPOSITES In another part of Capital Marx writes about 'the tendency of capital to reduce as much as possible the number of workers employed, i.e. the amount of its variable component, the part which is changed into labour-power . . . which stands in contradiction with its other tendency to produce the greatest possible mass of surplus-value' (C 1:420 - cf. also 772ff). Here two real forces are identified: (1) that which tends to minimise the variable component of capital, and (2) that which tends to maximise the production of surplus-value. Furthermore, given Marx's framework assumptions regarding the nature of value and in particular surplus-value (value represents expended labour), (1) and (2) obviously work in opposition to one another. In that sense they may be said to be in 'contradiction' with one another or be 'opposites'. 11 So far the case is similar to the preceding one of 'real conflict'. But Marx also says - and this is what distinguishes the present case from 'real conflict' - that both are tendencies that stem from one and the same source, namely, capital. The full spelling out of what is implied here would amount to a treatise on Marx's political economy. But it may suffice here to say that, according to this, capital gives rise to tendency (1) by virtue of the fact (inter alia) that one of the weapons in the battle of competition between capitals is the cheapening of the unit cost of commodities, and this occurs fundamentally through lowering the labour-component of cost. Capital gives rise to tendency (2) by virtue of the fact (inter alia) that increasing productivity (which, other things being equal, results in a cheapening of unit costs of commodities) results basically from the introduction of improved technology and increased scale of production (the two tend to go hand in hand), both of which in general require command over an ever-increasing surplus. So, by virtue of the fact that the two 'contradictory' or 'opposite' tendencies 12 have the same root, we may speak of them as having a 'unity', and hence together forming a 'unity of opposites'. 13

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5 H E G E L AND DIALECTICAL CONTRADICTION 5.1 Marx on Hegelian 'Contradiction' Again This idea of contradiction as 'unity of opposites' immediately recalls Hegel, and taking into account what Marx says in the brief passage cited at the end of the first section of this study, it may be concluded that this is the specifically dialectical sense of 'contradiction' in Marx. To understand it better let us look again for a moment at the passage just referred to. With these words Marx does two things. Firstly, he turns us in the direction of Hegel - specifically in the direction of his system of logic obviously, and, more specifically still, of the idea of contradiction that is part and parcel of that system. But, secondly, he signals caution. The scare-quotes establish a distance from what they enclose; and Hegel's 'contradiction' is said to be the 'source' of dialectics, that from which it arises, from which it flows, not all that is to be said about it. The overall suggestion is that of both a continuity and a discontinuity between Hegel's and Marx's thinking on the subject. But we have a thread put in our hands here. Let us follow it by looking first at Hegel's conception of dialectics, with special attention to the idea of 'contradiction'. 5.2 Hegel on His Dialectic As a way into Hegel's dialectic there is no better path than that afforded by Chapter VI of the first part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the chapter that introduces the definitive presentation of his logical system proper. 14 Hegel says here that logic has three aspects, namely, 'a) the Abstract, or that of Understanding (die . . . verständige), b) the Dialectical, or that of Negative Reason (die . . . negativ-vernünftige), c) the Speculative, or that of Positive Reason (die. . . positivvernünftige)' (EL, Sec. 79). Thus Dialectic as 'Reason' contrasts with the 'Understanding', and as 'Negative' with the 'Speculative'. In the first place, 'thinking as Understanding sticks to fixity of characters [festen Bestimmtheit] and their distinction from one another; every such limited abstraction it treats as having a subsistence and being of its own . . . . the principle of Understanding is

86 Marx and Philosophy identity, simple self-relation' (EL, Sec. 79 and Add.). However, 'Understanding is not an ultimate, but rather . . . when carried to extremes it veers round to its opposite [auf die Spitze getrieben in sein Entgegengesetztes umschlägt]' (EL, Sec. 80, Add.). This process is in fact the sphere of the second side of logic, that of Dialectic or 'Negative Reason', by which is meant 'an immanent tendency outwards [immanente Hinausgehen] in which the one-sidedness and limitedness of the predicates of the Understanding are seen to be what they are, namely, as their negation' (EL, Sec. 81. Add.). Finally, the 'Speculative' stage, or stage of 'Positive Reason', 'apprehends the unity of determinations in their opposition [Entgegensetzung], the affirmation which is contained in their dissolution and transition . . . . the abstract thinking of the Understanding . . . shows itself as a constant suspension of itself and as a veering round into its opposite, whilst on the contrary reason as such consists precisely in the embracing of these opposites within itself as subordinated [ideelle] moments' (EL, Sec. 82 and Add.). To restate, Hegel presents thought as developing in a three-step. To start with, at the stage of the Understanding the ruling principle is simple, unmediated self-identity: each term is what it is and not another thing, perfectly distinct and isolated from any other. At the stage of the Dialectic the ruling principle is difference, negation: when the apparently self-identical determinations of the Understanding are explored, are allowed to reveal their real character, each shows itself to involve its own distinctive negation. Thus from the point of view of the Dialectic the determinations of the Understanding are shown to be 'abstract(ion)s', since they are conceived there as being isolated from one another when in fact they are related. The stage of the Dialectic is thus the sphere of transition from one determination to another, of oscillation between opposed determinations. Finally, at the stage of the Speculative the ruling principle is identity-in-difference or 'unity of opposites': here the oscillation between opposed determinations established at the stage of Dialectic is, as it were, 'contained' in a new determination, in which each of the earlier ones is conceived as existing, as having an identity, through its relation to its opposite. In Hegel's famous terminology the two earlier determinations are 'aufgehoben' - 'suspended' - in the sense that they are at once preserved as constitutive moments of the later determination but also rendered inoperative in their former mode. 15 A sketch of an example may serve to illuminate the above very general remarks. For such illustration the first stadium of the logic (EL, Sees 84-96) will serve.

87 Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' Hegel's beginning is familiar: the concept of 'pure', that is, totally unqualified Being as one which is indispensable for characterizing reality and one with pretensions to universal application by itself. He then argues that Being conceived thus is identical with Nothing: the conditions for applying one are the conditions for applying the other. Thought oscillates between the two. So Pure Being and Nothing, conceived by the Understanding as self-identical and opposed ideas, are shown to be subject to a Dialectic that relates them. Now this transition back and forth between Being and Not-Being, or Nothing, is just Becoming. But insofar as Becoming as a category grasps only the oscillation to which Being is subject, it is not itself an adequate concept with which to grasp Being. The more adequate one which is required is that of 'Determinate Being [Dasein]'. In this the earlier Being re-emerges as 'Quality', that is, as what distinguishes one 'Somewhat [Etwas]' from another Somewhat. But the quality that distinguishes one Somewhat from another can only be characterised by what marks it off and in this sense 'negates' it (in the sense of Spinoza's dictum 'determinatio negatio est'). Thus the earlier Nothing also re-emerges, now as the determinate negation of a given determination (quality) that constitutes the latter. And the oscillation between the two earlier categories which was identified as Becoming re-emerges as the way in which a Determinate Being can only be characterized by swinging back and forth between a consideration of what it is in itself and what other qualities contrast with it. Thus Determinate Being is a unity of 'Being-in-Itself [An-sich-Sein]' and 'Being-for-Another [Sein-für-Anderes]', that is, a unity of opposing determinations. Finally, the Dialectic of categories is also a Dialectic of reality: 'Dialectic is, quite generally, the principle of all movement, of all life, of all operativeness [Betätigung] in reality . . . . Everything that surrounds us can be considered äs an example of Dialectic . . . . Dialectic . . . [is] . . . the universal, irresistible power before which nothing can stand, however secure and stable it may fancy itself (EL, Sec. 81 and Add. 1). 5.3 Hegel's Dialectic on Teleological and Idealism So much for Hegel's self-characterization of the essentials of his dialectic. The drift is that the process of dissolution of successive categories (and of forms of reality for that matter) is an immanent one. 16 What happens in general - so it would seem - is that the

88 Marx and Philosophy supposition that a certain category is self-sufficient shows itself to be wrong, because the applicability of that category entails the presupposition of a the applicability of another, the two being then 'suspended' within a 'higher' category which is (at any stage short of the Absolute Idea) subject to a similar process. Now, that this schema is the correct one for understanding Hegel's dialectic is most plausible in relation to the earlier phases of his system of logic, but becomes less and less so as the presentation progresses. For example, consider the transition from 'Force and Its Expression' to 'Inner and Outer', a centrally important category which stands at the end of the section on 'Appearance' in the Doctrine of Essence, and at the threshold of the section on 'Actuality' which closes Essence. 'Force and Its Expression' is Hegel's name for the category which consists of the idea of two correlated moments, of which one ('Force') is conceived as the unifying ground of the other (its 'Expression'). ('Force' here does not have a dynamic, productive overtone. It is more like a disposition term on a purely conditional analysis. But the details of the argument here in Hegel's text is not to the point in the present context.) Hegel's argument for the inadequacy of this category as a way of seizing the nature of what is and hence the justification for going beyond is that it is a 'finite' category, that is, one which designates a state of affairs which is partly determined by factors external to it and is therefore not apt for grasping free action: The finitude of the mediated relation of Force and its Expression shows itself first of all in the fact that any force is conditional and requires something other than itself for its subsistence. For instance, as is well known, magnetic force has as its special vehicle, iron, whose other properties (colour, specific weight, relation to acids, etc.) are independent of this connexion with magnetism. The same is true of all other forces, which one and all are found to be conditioned and mediated by something other than themselves. The finitude of force shows itself further in the fact that it requires solicitation in order to express itself. That by virtue of which the force is solicited is itself another expression of a force, which in order to express itself must be similarly solicited. We have in this way either once more an infinite progress or a reciprocity of soliciting or being solicited, whereby however an absolute beginning of motion is always absent.

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Hegel concludes: Force is not yet, like purpose [Zweck], inherently selfdetermining; the content is given to it as determined, and force, when it expresses itself is, as one says, blind in its working, by which is to be understood precisely the distinction between the abstract expression of force and purposive [zweckmässigen] activity. (EL, Sec. 136, Add. 1) Thus Hegel does not demonstrate, and does not seek to demonstrate, that there is anything wrong with the category of Force and Its Expression taken by itself (as, for example, he would seem to seek to demonstrate that the concept of Pure Being is inherently inadequate). Rather, it has to be surpassed because it is inadequate when judged by a norm or standard brought to bear from elsewhere, namely, its capacity to grasp in a satisfactory way the nature of free, self-conscious activity. And this is generally true of the argument of his Logic: it is just that it becomes more obvious as the exposition of the system proceeds. 17 Thus the Logic is teleological in a twofold sense. It is so to start with, and, so to speak formally, insofar as the motive force of the argument is determined by a certain end, namely, the end of developing a set of concepts adequate for grasping a certain subject-matter which is pre-given. In this way Hegel's 'contradiction' reveals itself to be the inconsistency between, on the one hand, a category at a certain stage in the development of the logical system, and, on the other, the requirements of a categorical vehicle for the grasping of the content which forms the telos of the system. The Logic is also teleological, and substantively so, insofar as that end itself is of a teleological character, namely, the activity of rational self-consciousness. What is true in this way of the Logic is also true of the more concrete analyses of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is governed throughout by the teleology of rational freedom, without which the argument would grind to a halt at any given point. (For example, there is no reason why the argument should proceed beyond the Master-Slave relation except that at this stage rational freedom has not been realised.) And indeed Phenomenology, in some wellknown words in the Preface, reveals with the utmost clarity the principle of Hegel's system: 'In my view . . . everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally

90 Marx and Philosophy as Subject' (PS 9f= PG 19). The Logic sets out to limn the structure of ('absolute') Subjecthood in the most abstract possible way, just as the Phenomenology attempts to trace its history, the philosophy of which, Hegel says in the Encyclopedia, has 'the meaning of theodicy' (El, Sec. 147, Add.). 1 8 The end is presupposed from the start of the Logic, and the driving force is the exigency of the ever-alreadycompleted system. 19 Moreover, to say that 'the True', What Is, is Substance-as-Subject is just to say that the very foundation of the system is idealism, the thesis of the absolute primacy of subjectivity. And this is what Hegel says, of course, time after time. For example, in the Encyclopedia version of the Logic. The Notion is . . . what is truly primary [das wahrhaft Erste], and things are what they are through the activity of the Notion, immanent in them, and revealing itself in them. (Sec. 163, Add. 2) The Notion, which is at first only subjective, proceeds, without requiring an external material or stuff in accordance with its own activity, to objectify itself . . . (Sec. 194, Add.) 5.4 Consequences of the Idealism Of course it is hardly a secret that Hegel's system is an idealism. What is not quite so obvious is how this is at the root of the leading features of his system. To start with, it is clear how Hegel's idealism permits him to affirm a dialectic of reality, and indeed a dialectic of reality with the same general structure as the dialectic of the categories traced in the Logic - after all, reality is just the self-objectification of the fundamental Subject. But we can also see now the sense in which Hegel's view of the dialectical development as immanent to the categories is a correct view - from the standpoint of the teleology of the system. For, as always, a teleology and an essentialism hang together, correspond, are images of one another: the Essence is that about the category which realizes itself as the End, and the End is just what the Essence aims to realize. So development, in particular of the categories, consists not in an accretion of content, but in an unfolding, a positing (Setzen), a making explicit of what is hidden, implicit. The movement of the Notion is . . . development, through which only that is posited [gesetzt wird] which is already implictly

91 Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' present. . . . the Notion in its process does not go beyond itself [bei sich selbst bleibt] . . . that process does not posit anything new with regard to content, giving rise only to an alteration of form. (EL, Sec. 161, Add.)

And indeed the End is ever-already realised. The consummation of the infinite End . . . consists simply in the removing of the illusion that it is not yet consummated. The Good, the absolutely Good is eternally accomplishing itself in the world, and the result is that it is already fully [an und für sich] accomplished. (EL, Sec. 212, Add. Cf. also Sec. 373.) Furthermore, keeping in mind this Essence-End couple, Hegel's 'expressivism' 20 falls into place - that is, his view that all aspects of any historical period are simply expressions or emanations of one single principle, which he sometimes calls the 'spirit of the time'. 21 For the single principle is just the Essence unfolding towards the End: Expressivism is what links together the Essentialism and the Teleology, the Origin with the End. Finally we can understand why Hegel's philosophy is conservative, and this not just as regards its details, or because of the 'use' to which it may be or may have been put at some time, but by virtue of the very principles of construction of the system. 22 It is conservative, firstly, because, through the idealist transmogrification of real features of the world into ideal ones (the former then being presented as emanations of the latter), features of the real that are in principle changeable are invested with the necessity and permanence of the ideal (cf. CW 3: 39, 83). It is conservative, secondly, because conflict and change have a pre-determined end (in both senses of the word) in the ultimate larger harmony of the Absolute Idea. This is the idea of 'reconciliation [Versöhnung]' fundamental to Hegel's conception of the function of philosophy. In his first major publication ('Difference between the Philosophical Systems of Fichte and Schelling') Hegel says in an oft-quoted passage that 'where the power of unification [Vereinigung] vanishes from the life of men and oppositions have lost their vital connexion and interrelation, and won independence, there arises the need for philosophy' (Werke 2: 22). And in the preface to the second edition of the definitive exposition of his system nearly three decades later, he recurs to this original idea: 'in philosophy Spirit has celebrated its reconciliation with itself (Werke 8: 15). 23

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6 MARX AND H E G E L The discussion in the preceding sections has at least two results. Firstly, it marks out certain basic features of Hegel's sense of contradiction, namely, the factors of 1) idealism, 2) teleology, 3) expressivism/essentialism, 4) conservatism. This brings out more sharply than before the differences between the Hegelian sense of contradiction (unity of opposites) and Marx's, as exemplified in the passage cited in Section 4 above. Specifically, what we have to with here are not pure thought-contents but representations of real operative forces working in a world of material social practices. The opposing tendencies are ones toward the production of effects as objective and material as the stresses and strains in the structure of a bridge. Their unity is not one of an essence but of a certain form of economic practice and so is as conditional as the continued coherence of that practice. (There are, of course, 'necessary' connections between the elements of certain thought-objects constructed for the purpose of understanding real phases of actual capitalist systems.) The tendencies work themselves out in the field of a number of dispersed centres of causal efficacy, many of which are not themselves determined by the contradiction in question ('overdetermination' 24 ), and there is no simple 'centre' to the process which could 'express' itself in its effects. So there is no pre-given telos to the process and the latter is as 'open' as Hegel's is 'closed'. The interaction between all the elements of the situation does not have any foregone conclusion, any outcome determined outside the process of working-together of these forces and factors. The materialist dialectic 'grasps every historically developed form in fluid movement and therefore in its transient aspect as well . . . being in its very essence critical and revolutionary' (C 1:103). The second main result of the discussion of the preceding section is the thesis that of the characteristics of the Hegelian dialectic, 1) grounds 2)^1). 1) is what Marx describes in Capital as the 'mystification' in Hegel's system, which consists in the fact that 'for Hegel, the process of thinking . . . is the creator of the real world, which constitutes its external appearance' (C 1:102. Cf. G 101). With Hegel, Marx goes on, the dialectic 'is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell' (C 1: 103). Despite the wit that has been expended on these lines - accusations of mixed metaphors for example - what Marx says here is completely in accord with the thrust of the above thesis. For if

93 Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' features 2)-4) of Hegel's form of the dialectic spring from 1), and if it is desired to avoid these, then the first thing to do is indeed to 'invert' the dialectic, that is, to reject the idealist in favour of a materialist standpoint. Marx does not say that this is all that needs to be done in order to construct a materialist dialectic: it is what has to be done first 'in order to' do this. Certainly the other metaphor, that of the kernel and the shell is at least potentially misleading: Hegel's system certainly does not contain a dialectic that is prefabricated for incorporation within materialism. But this is of secondary importance compared with the basic point, namely, that the primary step in using Hegel's dialectic to produce a materialist dialectic is to reject his idealist starting-point. 7 THE DIALECTICS OF PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION The preceding discussion has sought to demarcate the specificity of Marx's specifically materialist dialectic, in particular in contrast with Hegel's. This is not to say that there are not Hegelian and quasiHegelian strains in Marx, even in the later work. My claim is only that the materialist tendency is the dominant one and that which is innovative and valuable, the Hegelian being a recessive and sterile survival. Of the later writings it is the Grundrisse which contains Hegeloid conceptual constructions in most abundance. 25 (Marx himself notes at one point in parenthesis - perhaps a little uneasily - that 'it will be necessary later . . . to correct the idealist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these concepts'[G 151].) There is no point in going over these Hegelian remainders. But the consideration of one case, namely, the discussion of production and consumption in the 'Introduction', will be rewarding for the light it casts on Marx's materialist dialectic, especially because it is sometimes taken to be precisely an example of an Hegelian, idealist dialectic. 26 Marx's account is clad in Hegelian-dialectical garb, and I shall try to bring out the formal similarities of his exposition to the structures of the Hegelian dialectic in the following summary that leaves out much of the detail of Marx's both repetitive and highly elliptical presentation (never, after all, prepared for publication). 27 (A) Production and consumption are conceived in the first place as

Marx and Philosophy 94 pure opposites, reciprocally exclusive: an instance of one is a process the end or result of which involves the annulling of the end or result of the other. So the result of a process of production of bread is simply done away with in the eating of it, and that consumption of bread ends with a production of energy which is done away with in further production. In Hegelian language this is the sphere of the Understanding, in which concepts are kept rigidly distinct, the one abstractly excluding the other. Each is what it is independently of the other. (B) But production and consumption also form unities or 'identities' of certain sorts. (1) They are in 'immediate' unity with one another insofar as one and the same particular process (or appropriate class of such) can be correctly described either as a production or as a consumption. Thus a certain process can be regarded indifferently (according as we look at it from the point of view of the terminus ad quern or the terminus a quo, from the standpoint of result or of origin) as either a production of a table (say) or a consumption of wood, nails, and so on. Similarly, with regard to the labour rather than the means of production, the process is at once a production of skills and a consumption of energy. If (A) was the sphere of unmediated difference then this is a sphere of equally unmediated identity. One notion simply gives place to the other. In Hegelian terms this is an identity in the sphere of Being. (2) But now, holding fast to one instance of production assumed to be constituted and identifiable independently of any other instance of production or consumption (except that with which it is immediately identical according to the preceding paragraph), it can be seen to be a necessary condition for, or means to, an instance of consumption, and conversely for consumption. Thus, on the side of production, the latter supplies objects of consumption (eating of bread presupposes production of bread), and, insofar, makes the latter possible. (In this way production helps produce the consumer.) And on the side of consumption, this furnishes the needs for results of production (eating bread generates the need for more bread to replace that used up). So production supplies a real object for consumption and consumption an 'intentional' object for production. In Hegelian terms we are in the second of the main divisions of

Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' 95 the Logic, namely, that of Essence. This is the domain of essentially relational concepts, ones which consist in a relation between terms which are considered as constituted independently of one another, the relation thus 'mediating' the terms in an 'external' way. (3) In the third form of unity production and consumption are seen to be no longer independent of the other - and only after that related (as in the previous stage) - rather, each is seen to be constituted through the other. 'Each . . . creates the other in completing itself, and creates itself as the other' (G 93). Thus, on the one hand, from the side of production, a process is not strictly such, and the result not strictly a product, merely by virtue of involving human activity. Production is an activity which is carried on in order to satisfy needs, which it does by creating objects to be used (consumed). And something is shown to satisfy a need, and hence proves itself to be a 'product' (the terminus of a given 'production') by actually satisfying the need, by being consumed. So production 'creates the other in completing itself: consumption is necessary to production not simply as a stimulus but as means of actually constituting the process as a process of production. Production also 'creates itself as the other'. For there is no such thing as consumption in general (any more than there is production in general) - consumption is always definite, concrete, particular, and the manner of production helps determine the specificity of the manner of consumption. Thus raw meat will in general be consumed differently from cooked meat, and the different ways of cooking meat will help determine a similar diversity of modes of consumption. Now on the side of consumption, since we have seen that a process of production is only such when its result is confirmed as satisfying a need in consumption, the latter creates production in consummating itself. Moreover it 'creates itself as the other' because the result of consumption is nothing other than the results of production (consumption of means of production) or the agents of production (consumption of means of subsistence) who have determinate needs and modes of consumption. In Hegelian terms we are here in the sphere of the Notion in which unity and difference are reconciled and co-exist 'suspended'. Each of the opposites acquires its identity only through its part in determining the character of the other and is thus self-mediated. Unity is now restored but unity as including difference, opposition within itself.

Marx and Philosophy Now do these similarities of Marx's analysis to Hegel's dialectic mean that his treatment of production and consumption is in fact a display - at best a parody - of Hegel? That this is not so can be seen as follows. To begin with, note how Marx ends the section immediately before the paragraphs the main lines of which I have just traced. In this place he rejects those opponents of conventional political economists who behave 'as if the task were a dialectical balancing-act [Ausgleich¬ ung] with concepts, and not the grasping of real relations (G 90). Further, he writes at the conclusion of the analysis of production and consumption: 'In society, however, the producer's relation to the product, once the latter is finished, is an external one, and its return to the subject depends on his relations to other individuals. He does not come into possession of it directly. Nor is its immediate appropriation his purpose when he produces in society. Distribution steps between the producers and the products, hence between production and consumption, to determine in accordance with social laws what the producer's share will be in the world of products' (G 94). He then goes on to discuss the relation of distribution to production (and after that exchange and circulation). He concludes that it is (the mode of) production, i.e. the system of control over the means of production, which is the primary determinant of production in the narrower sense (i.e. production of particular use-values), as well as of distribution, exchange, circulation and consumption of those products. Thus the unity of (the opposites) production and consumption is not an unconditional one, as in Hegel, founded in their being moments of an essence, but a thoroughly conditional one by virtue of their being aspects of a material-social process. 28 This material, conjuncturally determined conditionality of the unity of production and consumption is emphasised a good deal later on in the Grundrisse. For example, he writes: 'We have now seen how, in the realisation process, capital has (1) maintained its value by means of exchange itself (exchange, that is, with living labour); (2) increased, created a surplus value. There now appears, as a result of this unity of the process of production and the process of realisation, the product of the process, i.e. capital itself . . . a product which is a value' (G 401f). However, this value has to realise itself as money in the process of exchange. Therefore, while capital is produced and reproduced as value and new value in the production process, it is at the same time something which has to be realised as value by means of exchange. He goes on: 'The three processes of which capital forms 96

Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' 97 the unity are external; they are separate in time and space. As such, the transition from one into the other, i.e. their unity as regards the individual capitalists, is accidental. Despite their inner unity, they exist independently alongside one another, each as the presupposition of the other. . . . The main point here . . . is that it [sc. capital] is this unity of production and realisation, not immediately but only as a process, which is linked to certain . . . external conditions' (G 403, 407). 8 THE DIALECTICS OF THE COMMODITY 8.1 Marx's Flirtation with Hegel Another, and indeed probably the major place where a dialectics of concepts has been identified in Marx is the presentation of commodities and money in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital. Marx himself is certainly partly responsible for this because of the form and language of the exposition which makes great play with Hegelian turns (though this is much less true of the second edition compared with the first29). In familiar words he writes how he had 'here and there in the chapter on the theory of value' namely, the first chapter, 'flirted with the mode of expression peculiar to Hegel' (C 1:103). Now I think that we should take Marx here quite literally: the Hegelianisms of the first chapter (to some extent of the first part as a whole) are in general superficial in a twofold sense - they are only flirtations, not the real thing, and the flirtation itself is not so much with Hegel's thought as with his terminology, even if it could be that such flirtation led Marx, as flirtations sometimes do, into occasional real indiscretions. But before entering upon the main discussion of this section it may well be asked why Marx chose to act thus and expose himself to the various misinterpretations which flirtations often generate. The answer is fairly clear from Marx's own words. He writes a little earlier in the passage which tells of his flirtation that at the time he was working on the first volume of Capital 'the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel . . . as a "dead dog". I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker (C l:102f). What was in effect a first draft of large parts of Capital,

98 Marx and Philosophy especially the first and third volumes, was part of the manuscript on political economy that Marx wrote during 1861-63, and he worked at the first volume off and on between then and the publication of the first edition in 1867. This was the time of two anti-Hegelian currents. One was natural scientific materialism represented by, for example, Ludwig Biichner's Force and Matter (1855), the seventh edition of which came out in 1862. The other was the tendency to identify philosophy with 'theory of knowledge', which effectively found its name in Eduard Zeller's inaugural address 'On the Significance and Task of Theory of Knowledge [Erkenntnistheorie]' (1862), a trend intimately connected with the revival of a Kant purified of 'metaphysics' marked by Otto Liebmann's Kant and the Epigones (1865). So Marx's flirtation took place as an intervention in a quite specific politicalideological situation: it was an attempt to draw appreciative attention to Hegel during a period in which his work was in a shadow. 29 " 8.2 Elements of Marx's Theory of Value Wherein then might the dialectic of the concept of the commodity be supposed to consist? Consider the following train of thought. (I omit qualifications inessential to the present topic.) 1) A commodity is, in the first place, an item which has a 'usevalue', that is, the power to satisfy some human want. 2) A commodity is, in the second place, a use-value that is produced 'privately' (that is, with privately owned means of production and privately purchased labour-power) for exchange with other usevalues that are similarly commodities. By virtue of this a commodity has an 'exchange-value' as well as a use-value. In its most elementary form the exchange-value of a certain sort of commodity A, with respect to a certain sort of commodity B, is the ratio of the numbers of instances of B which exchange with a given number of instances of A. 3) A condition for the possibility of qualitatively diverse objects of the sort A and B being quantitatively equated in the way just indicated is that they share some characteristic which can be measured. 4) This Marx calls 'value', the measure of which is 'exchange-value'. 5) Value is 'that which' makes 'exchange-value' possible. The 'that which' is in fact labour: the common characteristic of commodi-

Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' 99 ties by virtue of which they are quantitatively comparable is their being all products of labour. If the actual labours by which use-values are brought about are considered from the point of view of what makes them different, specific labours, then we have the idea of 'concrete' labour; if those labours are considered from the point of view of what makes them all labour (roughly: purposive expenditures of human energy) then we have the idea of 'abstract' labour, something qualitatively homogenous. 'Value' is a way of representing abstract labour, and the magnitude of value a way of representing the duration of abstract labour. A commodity-producing society (the fully generalised form of which is capitalism) has to have a mode of representation of abstract labour because, by virtue of the private form of its production, the labour-inputs into use-values can be compared only indirectly in terms of exchange-ratios of the results of those labours. This Marx also puts by saying that 'private' labour only takes the form of 'social' labour (the total expenditure of labour) via exchange and the notion of value. Thus we have the following pairs of determinations, the members of each column being associated or equivalent: use-value (exchange-) value concrete labour abstract labour private labour social labour If we consider the exchange-relation in its simplest possible form, namely, x of commodity A = (exchanges for, equals, is worth) Y of B then we see that the value of A is expressed in (and can only be expressed in) B qua physical object, what makes it a use-value. Therefore too - putting essentially the same point in different terms - abstract labour is expressed (and can only be expressed) as concrete labour and social labour as private labour. But the corresponding items in the two columns are reciprocally exclusive, are 'opposites'. 'Nevertheless the terms of each of the corresponding pairs only have an application in relation to the other, and in this sense form a 'unity'. Thus the commodity is a 'unity of opposites'.

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8.3 The Commodity on 'Unity of Opposites' With one qualification the above is, I believe, a correct account of Marx's theory of value (shorn of details irrelevant in the circumstances). The qualification concerns the description of the commodity as being a 'unity of opposites'. This could suggest that the one and the same thing is at one and the same time truly characterized by two reciprocally exclusive predicates. But Marx's theory of the commodity (fortunately) does not have this consequence. This can be seen as follows. It may be observed to start with that, strictly speaking, there can no more be just one commodity than there can be just one sibling. A use-value acquires a 'value' (expressed in its 'exchange-value'), and thus becomes a commodity, first of all and only in the exchangerelation (e.g. C 1:166, 181). This is what gives it the 'form of value' (Wertform); in fact this relation just is the 'value-form'. 30 So the concept of the commodity is an intrinsically relational one (in this respect like 'sibling' or 'husband'). So long as this is kept firmly in mind no harm is done and some effort spared by talking about the characteristics of 'the' or 'a' commodity. (Marx typically does.) But otherwise the idea of 'the' commodity as the seat of a special sort of conceptual-dialectical 'contradiction' may arise. However if we focus on the exchange-relation, then we see that the reciprocally exclusive determinations (concrete vs abstract labour, etc.) are not applied in the same context at the same time to both terms of the relation. In the exchange-relation 'x of A = y of B', A appears only as a value and B only as the physical basis of a use-value. (Of course the terms could be reversed, but this would not change the point at issue.) That is, opposing determinations are simultaneously applicable in linked fashion, but not to the same object - the value-form distributes each of them to different terms of the relation. Put otherwise, a unity of opposites is not the same as a conjunction of opposites. Furthermore, just as in the case of production and consumption, the unity, the mediation of the use-values by exchange which turns them into commodities, is in the final analysis a material-practical one. This emerges most clearly with the development of a universal means for equating commodities as values, namely, money.31 Money then becomes the visible mediator of commodities - or, in its absence, that which prevents the transformation of use-values (more strictly: potential use-values 32 ) into commodities. Thus there is no real question of some sort of inherent dialectic of the value-form, some

101 Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' conceptual vis insita constituted by the contradictory character of the commodity, some immanent unfolding of the concept of value as it exists implicitly in the simple value-form. 33 In the third section of the first chapter Marx sets up the conceptual-theoretical apparatus for the analysis of the commodity and of money, displaying the various possible value-forms, from the simplest to that of money, without any attempt to show how one is connected with the next, except in the most formal way. In the following chapter, 'The Process of Exchange', he explains, against the background of the preceding exposition, the mechanisms of the development of the sequence of valueforms, the way in which the actual practice of exchange makes necessary (if it is to develop, that is) the genesis of the various value-forms and ultimately money. What he shows in particular, in the crucial and inspissated first pages of Chapter 2, is how an extension of the practice of exchange, a gradual generalisation of the practice of producing use-values as commodities, itself throws up certain limits to its own development, limits which can only be removed by the development of a general equivalent, namely, money. Certainly the practice of commodity-exchange has a certain fundamental structure defined in its broadest terms by the nature of the commodity itself. But how the practice actually develops within such constraints is in no way deducible from the nature of the value-form. It can be known about only from a study of the practice itself as this proceeds under specific material conditions. Marx is absolutely unambiguous about this. He explains how commodityowners eventually find themselves with a basic difficulty: on the one hand, they wish to treat all use-values as commodities whilst, on the other hand, there is no item in terms of which these use-values may uniformly express themselves as values, and hence be commodities. He goes on: In their difficulties our commodity-owners think like Faust: 'In the beginning was the deed.' They have therefore already acted before having thought about it. The natural laws of the commodity manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodites. They can only bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as commodities, by bringing them into an opposing relation with some other commodity, which serves as the universal equivalent. We have already reached that result by analysis of the commodity. But only the action of society can turn a particular commodity into the universal equivalent. (C 1:180)

102 Marx and Philosophy Thus the practice itself is dialectical insofar as it develops through the generation in and by itself of contradictions. And it is a materialist dialectic not just because the practice is a matter of the transformation of material things with material means, but because it is the nature of the ongoing practice as a mode of material transformation that is the key to understanding this development and not the nature of the awareness of the executors of the practice. (Cf. above p. 77.) 9 CONCLUSION In closing it may be worth remarking on a throwaway line which occurs in the course of Marx's discussion of money as the resolution of the contradiction between private and social labour. He says that money 'does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provides the form within which they can move.' He goes on: 'This is, in general, the way in which real contradictions are resolved'. And concludes: 'For instance, it is a contradiction that a body should constantly fall towards another, and at the same time constantly fly away from it. The ellipse is one of the forms of motion in which this contradiction is both realised and resolved' (C 1:198). Taken literally this passage would seem to say that there exists in reality a situation which must be described in the form 'A and not-A (simultaneously)' ('Body X is constantly falling towards body Y and body X is not constantly falling towards body Y'). (This recalls Engels's account of motion in general as involving the contradiction between a body's being at a certain place and not being there, at the same time [Anti-Dùhring, Pt I Ch. XII].) Now, pace the many people who have analysed such motions in this way — including J. S. Mill (System of Logic, lll/vi/1, a perhaps unexpected ally for Marx - this is surely not the correct account of the situation. The body moving in an elliptical orbit is not naturally moving in two opposite directions at once but in only one, namely, along the elliptical path it in fact pursues. We may say, if you like, that it has two opposite tendencies to motion but this is a purely countertactual description. The alleged motions in opposite directions are purely theoretical 'objects' which are useful for calculations. 34 In general Marx's understanding of the notion of dialectical contradiction does not require any special form of logic, such as one suspending the law of excluded middle. Neither is it to be expected than there is even any general, if non-formal, theory of

103 Marx, Hegel and 'Contradiction' dialectics, i.e. some general principles which can be 'applied' to different particular domains. 35 Dialectics may be expected to be, like all methods of inquiry into genuine (rather than imaginary) subjectmatters, dependent upon the specificities of those subject matters. This is not to say that it may not be possible to make some general observations about the dialectic in a particular field, or even maybe some highly general remarks about similarities between dialectical methods in different fields which may well be of heuristic value. (See, for example, Mao's On Contradiction.) This is one reason why it is necessary to study the dialectics in, for example, Marx's political writings, as well as his economic writings: not just for the sake of completeness in some purely extensive sense, but in order to understand his conception of dialectics more comprehensively. Finally, in close relation to what has just been said, it is worse than a waste of time to try to elaborate an 'ontological' 'foundation' for dialectics, 36 and thereby introduce the parasite of old-style metaphysics into Marx's heritage.

Notes and References to pp. 5-10

Notes and References FOREWORD 1. I have said something more on this in my Marx: an Introduction (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983) pp. xviiff. 2. Lenin, CW 14: 326. C H A P T E R 1: M A R X A N D 'THE P R O B L E M OF KNOWLEDGE' 1. Faust, 1,1237. (A line Marx and Engels liked to quote - e.g. C 1:180, and Engels's introduction to the 1892 English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, SW 3: 101.) 2. See, e.g., G. Markus, 'Ueber die erkenntnistheoretischen Ansichten des jungen Marx' in A. Schmidt (ed.) Beiträge zur marxistischen Erkenntnistheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969). 3. My paper 'Knowledge and Practice: Towards a Marxist Critique of Traditional Epistemology' Science and Society, 47 (1983) no. 1, pp. 2-36, is a much earlier version of this first study. I have borrowed some pages of this here and there for use in the present work, which in general supersedes the earlier. Cf. also my 'Marx's Theses on Feuerbach: A New Translation and Notes Towards a Commentary' in J. Mepham and D-H. Ruben (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. II (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), and J. Curthoys and W. Suchting, 'Feyerabend's Discourse Against Method: A Marxist Critique' Inquiry, 20 (1977) pp. 243-397. 4. 'Wirklichkeit' would be more idiomatically translated by 'reality'. But it is necessary to proceed as I have done in order to capture certain overtones, some of which I immediately go on to spell out in the text. 5. 'Anschauung' is a nightmare for English translators. It is the German translation of the Latin 'intuitus' and so the English equivalent would, other things being equal, obviously be 'intuition', this being in fact how it is normally rendered. But other things are not equal, as 'intuition' now has quite misleading overtones. I have therefore decided to give it a more 'contemporary' rendering, on the ground that the reason for being of a translation is adequate communication. No translation is for all times and all places. 6. 'Vorstellung' translates, as Kant indicates in the passage part of which I go on to quote in the main text, the Latin 'repraesentatio'. (And this is

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sound since the two are etymologically parallel.) It seems obvious then to translate 'Vorstellung' into English as 'representation' (as e.g. Kemp Smith does in his standard version of the Critique of Pure Reason). But against this is the fact that the German word is a very ordinary one, whereas the suggested English equivalent smells of the lamp. I have therefore chosen 'idea', which, as occurring in the works of the classic English empiricists, was translated into German as 'Vorstellung', and which has the requisite ordinariness of tone. (It was also that chosen by the first English translator of Schopenhauer's main work.) Certainly Kant pleads, in the passage referred to, for 'Idee' to be reserved for a technical use of his own; but in contexts in which this does not matter, 'idea' does not suffer from the danger of being misunderstood. (For what it is worth Lalande in his Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (10th edn, Paris, 1968] p. 445, equates 'Vorstellung' with the English 'idea'.) 7. Kant's exposition in the passage referred to and partially cited is misleading insofar as it suggests that Anschauung and Begriff are two different sorts of knowledge, whereas he really means, as is perfectly clear from the Critical Philosophy as a whole, that they are two constituents - inseparable but distinguishable - of any particular item of knowledge. In the text I have silently glossed the passage in question in accordance with this distinction. (Thus Kant's Anschauung is not to be identified with what has been more recently called 'non-inferential' knowledge - e.g. D. M. Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge [Cambridge: University Press, 1973] chs 12, 13. An item of this sort already includes - according to Kant - the elements both of Anschauung and of Begriff.) 8. The paradigm of the statement which (allegedly) cannot but be true is of course the cogito. This is of course at best incorrigible and not necessary. (I am using the standard conceptual apparatus here since I am talking about a philosophical project 'from the inside'.) But a central part of the tradition demands that the ultimately privileged statements must be such as cannot but be true: only the necessary represents knowledge proper, or 'science'. See e.g. Locke, Essay, iv, xvi, 3. Hume distinguishes between 'science' or knowledge' on the one hand, which is necessary, and the rest (comprising 'proofs' and 'probabilities') - Treatise, e.g. in, Secs ii & xi. Kant says that 'Science proper [Eigentliche Wissenschaft] can be the name only of that whose certainty is apodictic; knowledge [Erkenntnis] which can contain merely empirical certainty, is only improperly called scientific knowledge (Wissen)'. (Metaphys. Anfangsgründe d. Naturwissenschaft, Vorrede). And so on. This is of course a hang-over from the ancient and mediaeval ideal of epistemelscientia. 9. British empiricist epistemology is a priori in this sense, and so is Kant indeed any so-called 'transcendental deduction' which promises to establish the 'conditions for the possibility' of something or other assumed as given: for, obviously, the conditions for the possibility of X cannot depend on the existence of X. 10. See e.g. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, Sees 178ff. Also Hegel, P546f, 52f, 54. For a modern statement, Armstrong, op.cit. (n. 7

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Notes and References to pp. 10-15

above) pp. 191f. Cf. also A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (Penguin, 1956) esp. pp. 75ff. 11. On the dogmatism/scepticism couple there are interesting remarks in Max Horkheimer, 'On the Problem of Truth' (1935) in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978) pp. 408 ff. Cf. also I. Lakatos, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1978) esp. pp. 193ff. 11a. Hegel represents a turn in the direction of the ancient/medieval standpoint according to which there is, in Gadamer's words, a 'transcendental relation between Being and Truth' so that knowledge is thought of 'as a moment of Being itself and not primarily as a way of relating of a subject'. See H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode3 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972) p. 434 and ff. The 'problem of knowledge' indicated in the text arises - in all centrality anyway - with the general rejection (in the first place by natural science) of this view. 12. I cannot help wondering if this turn of phrase is not yet another allusion (conscious or otherwise) to Hegel. In outlining and discussing the Kantian project of an a priori 'critique of knowledge', Hegel says (EL, Sec. 10) that this implies a desire 'to know before we know' and adds that this 'is just as absurd as the wise resolution of that Scholastic to learn to swim before he ventured into the water'. 13. A very similar sort of argument occurs in the 'Introduction' to the Grundrisse, pp. 92f, on which see Study 3 below. Cf. also Engels, 'The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man', SW 3: 66ff. 14. I take the term 'real abstraction' from A. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1978). In this work it is anchored in an economic context; I use the term to designate a much more general situation. (For the rest I disagree with a great deal of this stimulating book.) 15. There is no good history of the concept of mass to which anyone who might want to pursue this example can be referred. But see M. Jammer, Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harper, 1961) and also G. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No (New York: Orion Press, 1968) ch. I. 16. Valuable materials for developing such a view in detail are contained in the works of P. G. Bridgman - e.g. The Logic of Modern Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1927), and The Nature of Some of Our Physical Concepts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952). But as it stands this work is vitiated both by a primitive view of 'definition' and, most important, by its positivism. On the role of experiments in the specification of the concepts which theorize them in the work of Galileo in particular see S. Gaukroger, Explanatory Structures (Brighton: Harvester, 1978) pp. 204ff. 17. On the action-matrix of knowledge I have found the following instructive: P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977); V. G- Childe, Society and Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1956); J. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: a Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (1929, New York: Capricorn Books, 1960), and Logic: the Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,

Notes and References to pp. 16-18

107

1938); L. Doyal and R. Harris, 'The Practical Foundations of Human Understanding' New Left Review no. 139, May-June 1983; A. Gehlen, Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (9th edn, Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1972); M. Heidegger, Being and Time (1927, London: SCM Press, 1962) (esp. See. 15 on the primacy of 'being-at-hand' - 'Zuhandenheit' - over 'being-tohand' - 'Vorhandenheit' - in the everyday world); A. Leroi-Gouhan, Le Geste et la parole 2 vols (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964-65); G. Lukäcs, Labour (London: Merlin Press, 1979); C. S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings (ed. J. Buchler, New York: Dover, 1955). See also P. Damerow & W. Lefevre (eds), Rechenstein, Experiment, Sprache (Stuttgart: Klett¬ Cotta, 1981). 18. Thus the development of the capacity to know goes hand in hand with a displacement of the subject from the centre of the knowledge-situation, and indeed with a decentering of that situation in general. Günter Dux has shown in his book Die Logik der Weltbilder (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982) how 'the logic of the subject' underlies all 'primitive' thought (myth, religion, magic, etc.). A subject is a substance that behaves ideologically, and the 'logic of the subject' is a matter of the primacy of a) substantialistic thinking, and b) a type of thinking that explains events on the model of intentional behaviour. What may be called 'everyday thinking' is also substantialistic (primacy of 'natural kinds'), and has its focus in the subject inasmuch as i) it connects with the world mainly via the more or less unassisted human sense-organs and ii) organises the world in terms of human means and ends. (Heidegger's concept and discussion of 'being-at-hand' - 'Zuhandenheit' - is still the best account of it) so far. The structure of 'everyday thinking' has not yet been much investigated, at least in a way which is relevant to present concerns. But for important beginnings see G. Lukäcs, Aesthetik, Teil I. 1 Hbbd [Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand, 1963] pp. 33ff, and the work based on it by A. Heller, Das Alltagsleben [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978].) Scientific thinking breaks with this by replacing substance-thinking with thinking in terms of properties and relations - specifically functional relations between properties (cf. E. Cassirer, Substance and Function [1910, New York: Dover, 1953], by replacing 'final' causation with 'efficient' causation by independently identifiable forces, and, underpinning the above, by replacing the subject as a means of knowledge with objective (in the first place instrumental) procedures, which at the same time permit the specification of an 'object' of inquiry which is not 'given' in perception. (Heidegger, in 'The Age of the World Picture', published originally in Holzwege, and translated in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], has a number of penetrating things to say on what is essentially this last point.) 19. Marx comments at one place which I have not quoted that 'Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the result of the self-focussing of thinking [in sich . . . zusammenfassenden Denkens], sinking into its own depths [in sich vertiefenden], unfolding itself out of itself . . . ', that is in short, of taking the production of the theoretical concrete as identical with the production of the real concrete. (Cf. the section on 'The

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Notes and References to pp. 18-19

Mystery of Speculative Construction' in The Holy Family (1845), CW 4: 57ff.) This is a key to the understanding of the Hegelian philosophy as a whole, which is, in the first place, a theory of the logico-epistemological structure of inquiry given a simultaneously ontological meaning by virtue of the identification of the real with a super-subject. The process of inquiry is analysed as going through the phases, first, of apprehending some item as an undifferentiated unity, then of discriminating the elements and relations which in fact constitute that item (the phase of 'negation' - for to distinguish is to negate, to say 'is not'), and finally the reassembling of that unity but now as one with internal complexity. It is essentially Galileo's 'resolutive-compositive method' conceived not just as a method of finding the nature of the real but as revealing the nature of the real itself. It is the ultimate example of the traditional ontological hypostasisation of methodological procedures. On the latter point see also n. 35 below. 20. Marx's text is full of reminiscences of Hegel. For example: 'The Speculative or Positively Rational . . . is . . . although a content of thought [ein Gedachtes], and something abstract, at the same time something concrete [ein Konkretes], because it is not a simple, formal unity, but a unity of different determinations [unterschiedener Bestimmungen]'. (EL, Sec. 82, Add. 2. Cf also Werke 18:43f = History of Philosophy. English trans., 1:25.) And on the superior concreteness of the theoretical: 'What makes the beginning is that which is implicit [an sich], the immediate, abstract, general, what has not yet advanced. The more concrete, the richer is the later; what comes first is poorest in determinations. This may seem contrary to one's first impressions. . . . It may be thought that what comes first is the concrete. . . . Feeling and sense-perception [Ans¬ chauung] come first, thought last; thus feeling appears to us to be more concrete than thought, or the activity of abstraction and of the universal. In fact it is just the opposite. The sensuous consciousness [Das sinnliche Bewusstsein] is certainly in general the more concrete, and if poorer in thought, at least richer in content. We must thus distinguish the naturally concrete from the concrete of thought [Konkreten des Gedankens], which, on its side again, is wanting in sensuous matter [Sinnlichkeit]. . . It is in this way that science is more concrete than sense-perception [Anschauung].' (Werke 18:59, 60 = History of Philosophy, English trans. 1:40) 21. Marx's later distinction (C 1:102) between the 'mode of inquiry [For¬ schungsweise]' and mode of presentation [Darstellungsweise]' may be taken to coincide with this distinction between the phase of working-up of concepts from pre-existing cognitive raw materials and the phase of construction of the real concrete in thought, perhaps with the minor qualification that the 'mode of inquiry' embraces (presumably) both the process of construction of concepts (the 'first path' distinguished in the passage being commented upon) and the process by which the inquirer gets to the point at which the final presentation can begin (at which the 'second path' can be trodden). Thus the exposition as we have it in e.g. the first volume of Capital - the final 'presentation' of the part of Marx's political economy that it contains - was preceded by (a) the stage of

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constructing certain fundamental concepts like that between labour and labour-power from, inter al., the raw materials afforded by classical political economy (see the magisterial outline-history of this by Engels in C 2: 91ff) and (b) the stage of finding the correct 'order of demonstration', using the concepts so won. Both stages can be followed in the Grundrisse. 22. For Marx (1965) (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1969) pp. 182ff, (with E. Balibar), Reading Capital (1965) (London: New Left Books, 1960) pp. 41ff, 58ff, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976) pp. 187ff. The idea of 'theoretical practice' was itself produced from raw materials which included not only Marx but also Spinoza and Bachelard. On Spinoza in this regard cf. P.-F. Moreau, Spinoza (Paris: Seuil 1975) esp. pp. 81ff and P. Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: Maspero,1979) esp. pp. 43ff. See also Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, op.cit. . On Bachelard's contribution see the exposition in D. Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology (London: New Left Books, 1975) p. 83, and the convenient Bachelard-anthology edited by Lecourt, Epistémologie. Textes choisies (Paris, P.U.F., 1971). In developing the idea of theoretical production/practice I have also been assisted by the fine presentation in Part II of J. R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (Oxford: University Press, 1971), an account which seems to have been developed independently of the above-mentioned work. See also in different relevant connections: A. Baracca and A. Russo, Marxismo e scienze (Bari: De Donato, 1976); D. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); P. Bourdieu, 'Intellectual Field and Creative Project' in M. F. D. Young (ed.) Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1972); J. T. Desanti, 'Sur la "production" des concepts en mathématiques' in La Philosophie silencieuse (Paris: Seuil, 1975) ; T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976) ch. II; K. Gôssler, 'Erkennen als sozialer Prozess' Deutsche Zs. f.Philosophie, 20 (1972) pp. 517-46, reprinted in H. J. Sandkuhler (ed.) Marxistische Erkenntnistheorie (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: FromannHolzboog, 1973); K. D. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (Oxford: Pergaman Press, 1981); I. Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge: University Press, 1976); P. Macherey, 'A Propos du processus d'exposition du "Capital" (Le Travail des concepts)' (1965) in R. Establet and P. Macherey, Lire le Capital, IV (Paris: Maspero, 1973), and Theory of Literary Production (1966) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); E. Mendelsohn, P. Weingart, R. Whitley, (eds) The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge (Dorderecht/Boston: D. Reidel, 1977). On Bachelard see now the excellent book by Mary Tiles, Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge University Press, 1984), and for a superb 'practice'-based account of mathematics P. Kitcher, The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1984). 23. Marx nowhere gives a general account of his conception of a mode of production, at least in any detail. The closest he came to it was in the Introduction to the Grundrisse ('1857 Introduction') Sect. 2. A detailed study of a particular case, even if still incomplete, is of course Capital as a

110

Notes and References to pp. 23-4 Notes and References to pp. 24-31 111 whole. For a more detailed presentation see my paper '"Productive Gesellschaft im Denken des Hoch - und Spätmittelalters, Bde 2 and 7 of Forces" and "Relations of Production" in Marx' Analyse und Kritik, the Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Geschichte und Politik (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett 1982, Heft 2. A very convenient collection of the writings of Marx (and Verlag, 1967,1975). The relation between capitalism and the mechanisEngels) bearing on this theme (and a useful editorial introduction) is tic view of nature is explored in F. Borkenau, Der Uebergang vom now: Produktivkräfte und Produktionverhältnisse, ed. H. Reichelt and feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (1934) (Darmstadt: WissenschaftliR. Zech (Frankfurt-Berlin-Wien: Ullstein, 1983). che Buchgesellschaft, 1971), criticised in H. Grossmann, 'Die gesell24. For a good survey of the topic of ideology from a Marxist standpoint see schaftlichen Grundlagen der mechanistischen Philosophie und die G. Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (LonManufaktur' Zs. f. Sozialforschung, 4 (1935) pp. 161-231. See also other don: New Left Books, 1980). For very recent discussions see Rethinking relevant literature cited below. Ideology!A Marxist Debate, Das Argument, Sonderband 84 (West Ber31. See W. Lefèvre, Naturtheorie und Produktionsweise. Probleme einer lin: Argument-Verlag, 1983). materialistischen Wissenschaftgeschichtsschreibung - Eine Studie zur 25. On the general question of the ideology of scientists see L. Althusser, Genese der neuzeitlichen Naturwissenschaft (Marburger Beiträge zur Philosophie et philosophic spontanée des savants (1967) (Paris: Maspero, Philosophie und Gesellschaftstheorie, Hrsg, H. H. Holz, Bd 4) 1974). Ludwik Fleck's notion of a 'style of thought' is significantly (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1978). constituted by discipline-specific ideological components (amongst 32. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. In connection with Freudenthal's book it is others - which makes it a very slippery idea). See his book The Genesis worthwhile mentioning Michael Wolff's Geschichte der Impetustheorie. and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935, University of Chicago Press, Untersuchungen zum Ursprung der klassischen Mechanik (Frankfurt: 1978) , and the collection of his papers entitled Erfahrung und Tatsache Suhrkamp, 1978), a brilliant study of the social genesis & maintenance of (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983) (which contains, in the section entitled a conception of nature which, beginning in the sixth century of our era, 'Das Problem einer Theorie des Erkennens', a very useful summary of came effectively to an end only with Newton. The book thus forms a the main general theses of the book). superb background to Freudenthal's. 26. See G. Boehme, W. van den Daele, W. Krohn, Experimentelle Philoso33. Further on the ideological significance of Newtonionism, see M. D. phie: Ursprünge autonomer Wissenschaftsentwicklung (Frankfurt: SuhrJacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689-1720 (Brighton: kamp, 1977) pp. 129ff. (The whole book is of the greatest relevance Harvester Press, 1978). Cf. also in this regard the paper in G. Canguilhere.) hem, Idéologie et rationalité dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie (Paris: 27. See H. Blumenberg, Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde (FrankVrin, 1977), translated in Radical Philosophy, no. 29, Autumn 1981, as furt: Suhrkamp, 1980). 'What is Scientific Ideology?' 28. See e.g., Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, Machinisme et philosophic (2nd edn, 34. Those who may be regarded as the most consistent representatives of this Paris: P.U.F., 1947) chs I and II and E. Zilsel, 'The Sociological Roots theory do not make such compromises however. For example, Hegel of Science' Amer. J. Sociology, 47 (1942) pp. 245-79. (Zilsel's papers are makes a distinction between truth and mere 'correctness (Richtigkeit)' conveniently assembled in Die sozialen Ursprünge der neuzeitlichen (e.g. EL, Sees 172, 213). The latter is merely the agreement of an object Wissenschaft [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976].) with our conception of it. The former is the agreement of an object with its 29. For details on the example of agricultural chemistry and highly informaown concept (Begriff) (loc.cit. and Sec. 24 Add. 2), the lack of agreement tive discussions of relevant questions, see G. Boehme, W. van den or correspondence of the essence of something with the way that someDaele, R. Hohlfeld, W. Krohn, W. Schaefer, T. Spengler, Die gesellthing actually is. So a sick boy is an 'untrue' body. But the Begriff of schaftliche Orientierung des wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts (Starnberger something is what determines, and hence what can be inferred from, the Studien 1) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978). See also A. Baracca, S. Ruffo, place of that thing in a total system geared to realising a telos (in the final A. Russo, Scienze e industria 1848-1915 (Roma-Bari: Editori Laterza, analysis the telos of free, rational spiritual activity). A sick body is not 1979) , H. and S. Rose (eds) The Political Economy of Science (London: 'true' because 'body' and 'sickness' do not cohere in the total system. Macmillan, 1976). Spinoza has a similar doctrine of course, which cannot be gone into here. 30. The best general work on this is S. Moscovici, Essai sur l'histoire It is, by the way, somewhat amusing to see how so many true-blue humaine de la nature (1968, revised edn, Paris; Flammarion 1977) empiricists use coherence (the theory that best combines comprehensiveespecially the second part. Craft-activity and Greek democracy as sourness, simplicity, etc.) as ultimately the sole criterion of truth (especially ces of ways of interpreting nature are spelled out in Jack Lindsay's very under the pressure of 'the Duhemian argument'). The correspondence interesting book, Blast-Power and Ballistics. Concepts of Force and idea concerning the 'nature of truth simply 'idles" '. Energy in the Ancient World (London: Frederick Muller, 1974) espe35. We might say with Bachelard that the instrument is a 'realization' (in the cially ch. VI. Studies containing relevant materials concerning the sense of making real or objective) of theoretical concepts and principles. middle ages include the related books by A. Nitschke, Naturerkenntnis But this way of putting the matter runs the risk of opening a point of und politisches Handeln im Mittelalter, and W. Stürner, Natur und entry for idealism. As I have suggested in previous sections, it is the

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36. 37. 38.

39.

Notes and References to pp. 32-5 material practice which is basic: the theoretical representations are attempts to make sense of the results of such practices, and in no sense 'justify' them, however much such theories may contribute to improving or even suggesting quite new instrumentation. We might say that the instrument qua physical relates to real objects (space-time located things with causal efficacy to which e.g. a 'mass' is ascribed), whilst, on the other hand, the instrument qua theoretical relates to 'theoretical objects' (e.g. 'mass'), according to an Althusserian distinction (e.g. L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital [London: New Left Books, 1970] p. 43). This would be in order so long as it would not thereby be thought that theoretical objects are special sorts of objects - like real ones but perhaps somehow more ethereal. To speak of a theoretical object is to speak compendiously of a representation which is specified in terms of certain procedures. For example, the theoretical object 'limit' in mathematical analysis is not a thing (of any sort) but a way of operating upon a function: a 'ümit' is a number produced in a certain way. To think otherwise is to hypostasize the result of a process. Such hypostasizations of procedures abound in philosophy. Consider the Principle of Determinism as a procedural principle turned into a substantive assertion about the world. (On this point see also n. 19 above.) Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.341 and 6.342. Cf. W. H. Watson, Understanding Physics (Cambridge University Press, 1938) p. 52. J. Cavaillès, Sur la Logique et la théorie de la science (Paris: P.U.F., 1942) pp. 22f, 24. A misunderstanding of the duality of instrumentation as inseparably causally related to the world but epistemically self-enclosed is, I suspect, the root of the sophism in the otherwise sound attack on epistemology by B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst in their Mode of Production and Social Formation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) according to which discourse does not relate to anything outside it. This is true in one sense, false in another, as we have seen. Not to see both sides leads inevitably to idealism. I have illustrated the general thesis about 'truth' from experimentation because this is absolutely central to the acquisition of knowledge (a point aptly emphasised by Andrew Collier in his paper 'In Defence of Epistemology' in J. Mepham and D.-H. Ruben (eds) Issues in Marxist Philosophy vol. m [Sussex: Harvester 1979]). But it could be applied also to the ordinary sense-organs, though not so paradigmatically. Medical diagnosis based on visual, factual, etc. examination is a nice intermediary between ordinary sensing and developed experimentation. Cf. here Marx's reference in 1844 Manuscripts to the senses as 'theoreticians' (CW 3: 300). - The account in the text has certain similarities to the 'pragmatic theory of observation' of the earlier Carnap, revived by Feyerabend see e.g. the latter's 'Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism' in Feigl et al. (eds) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. Ill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962) pp. 35ff and 'Problems of Empiricism' in R. G. Colodny (ed.) Pittsburgh Series in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2 (Beyond the Edge of Certainty) (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965) pp. 212ff.

Notes and References to pp. 35-48

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40. Sophist, 247 d-e; Metaphysics, Bk IX. 41. This is the general drift of Hegel's approach to the traditional problem of knowledge - see PS, pp. 53f - though of course within an idealist framework. 42. A number of recent philosophers have used the Neurath analogy but few seriously enough. Quine is a case in point - he attacks 'foundationalism' but in fact simply installs a new set of foundations (psychological ones). See R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979) pp. 221ff. 43. Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding (Dover edn, vol. II, pp. llf). 44. That knowledge is inherently in process was insisted on by Cavailles, op. cit. (n. 37 above) and by Bachelard (see Lecourt, op.cit., n. 22 above, pp. 36f). It is also an aspect of Lakatos's methodology of research programs - see his Philosophical Papers esp. vol. 1. (Cambridge University Press, 1978), and a basic theme in Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks. See CW 38: 187, 188, 194f, 200, 201, 205, 207. 45. Cited by Blumenberg, op.cit. (n. 28 above) pp. 9, 274 from Hugo's 'William Shakespeare' (1864). 46. See Rorty, op.cit. (n. 42 above) esp. ch. Ill for some relevant considerations on the confusion between explanation and justification. 47. A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge University Press, 1928) p. 323. The 'two tables' example occurs at the beginning of the Introduction. 48. Still by far the best discussion of these topics in Marx is in Jacques Ranciere's contribution to the original (French) edition of Reading Capital, now most easily available as a separate reprint, Lire le Capital, in (Paris: Maspero, 1973). It is translated as 'The Concept of "Critique" and the "Critique of Political Economy" (From the Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital)' in Theoretical Practice, nos 1, 2, 6, and Economy and Society, vol. 5, no. 3, Aug. 1976. (This is despite Ranciere's selfcriticism, 'How to Use Lire le Capital', a translation of which is in the just-cited issue of Economy and Society.) 49. But cf. my Marx: an Introduction (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983) ch. 13. 50. Cf. Aquinas: 'The true denotes that toward which the intellect tends.' (S T., Pt. I, Q.16, Art. 1). 51. Cf. Dux, op. cit. (n. 18 above). 52. I cannot see how to render adequately the play on 'Anschauung' (roughly: on the one hand, what I have already translated as 'the given' and, on the other, 'outlook'). On the substance of the matter cf. G. 83f and N. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973) pp. 124ff. 53. Work on the relation between the traditional epistemological subject and the commodity-form, along somewhat different lines, is contained in the work of B. von Greiff, Gesellschaftsform und Erkenntnisform (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1976), and R. W. Müller, Geld und Geist (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1977) stimulated by A. Sohn-Rethel, op.cit. (n. 14 above). Very roughly, the basic idea in this

114

54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

Notes and References to pp. 48-55 work is to draw a parallel between, on the one hand, the relation between epistemological subject and object and, on the other, the subject-oriented use-value of a commodity and the 'objectivity' of its (exchange-) value. See also R. Rotermundt, Day Denken John Lockes. Zur Logik bürgerlichen Bewusstseins (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1976) esp. pp. 141ff. Cf. Poulantzas, op.cit. (n. 52 above) pp. 21 Iff, L. Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976) p. 117 n.12. On empiricism cf. E. Mendelsohn, op.cit. (n. 22 above) pp. 12ff, and on rationalism (specifically the a priori) see the excellent remarks by J. S. Mill towards the beginning of ch. VI of his Autobiography (remarks which make obvious how completely contemporary empiricists have lost a sense of the 'political' significance of their standpoint). Althusser and Balibar op.cit. (n. 35 above) p. 57. The immense complexity of any central ideological formation like scepticism makes it impossible to sum its effects up in any neat formula: it can have not only different but even opposing effects according to the historical context. For evidence of this within a quite limited time-span see the rich material in R. A. Popkin's The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (rev. edn, New York: Harper & Row, 1968), and more generally M. Horkheimer, 'Montaigne und die Funktion der Skepsis' Zs. f. Socialforschung, 7 (1983) pp. 1-52. On the relation between knowledge and power, truth and authority see D. Bloor, op.cit. (n. 22 above) pp. 35ff. and the citations from Dürkheim there. Also, of course, Michel Foucault, especially his 'Discourse on Language' in The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), Appendix, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977), The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon 1978). Ian Hacking, in his interesting book The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge University Press, 1975) points out that the original distinction was between knowledge and opinion ('scientia' and 'opinio'); that this was the distinction between, on the one hand, what is necessary and demonstrable and, on the other, what is only probable; and finally, that 'probable' meant, basically, what meets with the assent of respected people (people who were 'probus'). Thus knowledge proper is held to be what is raised above any possibility of questioning by anyone, though it is in fact those who are, objectively, representatives of the ruling class who determine what statements constitute knowledge; what is of any worth in what remains is also determined by the authority of the 'respectable'. See the exposition in Lecourt, op.cit. (n. 22 above) The first example of the use of 'epistemology in the OED dates from 1856 (in a work by J. F. Ferrier). The equivalent German word occurs (rarely) before this, but is only took off after E. Zeller's inaugural address, 'Ueber die Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie' (1862).

Notes and References to pp. 55-67

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CHAPTER 2 MARX, LENIN AND THE CONCEPT OF MATERIALISM 1. Turandot, Scene 4A, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967) 5: 221 If. 2. The use of such 'inductive' arguments for materialism is very common. See e.g. Lenin, CW 14: 75ff, and, more recently, Andrew Collier in his (generally excellent) article in J. Mepham and D.-H. Ruben (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979) vol. n, p. 35. 3. See esp. the third of Berkeley's Three Dialogues, Everyman ed. (1950), pp. 289ff, and on Christian responses to early Darwinism, Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (2nd edn, New York: Dover, 1957) ch. 11. 4. Hegel makes a related point, within the framework of idealism, in his first major publication, that on the difference between the philosophical systems of Fichte and Schelling: 'Dogmatic idealism presupposes the subjective as the real ground of the objective, dogmatic realism ['in its purity materialism' as he says a few lines earlier] the objective as the real ground of the subjective.' (Werke 2: 62) 5. Cf. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge University Press, 1983) esp. ch. 16. 6. E.g. G. Lukâcs, History and Class Consciousness (1923, London: Merlin Press, 1971) p. 132. Cf. also the 1967 preface, p. xix. 7. E.g. Dialectics of Nature (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941) p. 113. 8. I think that this is Althusser's meaning in his account of philosophy in his 1967 lectures, Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants (Paris: Maspero, 1974), & 'Lenin and Philosophy' (1968), reprinted in his collection of essays of the same name (London: New Left Books, 1976) pp. 37ff, 57ff, 142ff, 165ff. See also D. Lecourt, Une crise et son enjeu (Essai sur la position de Lénine en philosophie) (Paris: Maspero, 1973) (whose revised conception of philosophy, in particular of materialist philosophy, is presented in L'Ordre et les jeux. Le positivisme logique en question [Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1981]) and P. Macherey, 'In a Materialist Way' in A. Montefiore (ed.) Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 9. I do not know whether this is exactly what Engels meant when he wrote in Anti-Duhring that ' . . . modern materialism . . . is . . . no longer a philosophy, but a simple world outlook [Weltanschauung]' [Pt. I, ch. XIII). Cf. also Engels in SW 3: 349. 10. Williams, 'Problems of Materialism' in Problems of Materialism and Culture (London: New Left Books, 1980) pp. 103f. (This paper is reprinted from New Left Review, no. 109, May-June 1978.) - Ernst Bloch has argued that, historically, the aspects of matter not taken account of by the materialist concept of matter prevalent at a certain time tend to be taken up by idealism. See his book Die Lehren von der Materie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978). (This is the 'Zweiter Kursus' of his more comprehensive work Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972].)

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Notes and References to pp. 67-8

Notes and References to pp. 68-9

117

rapport traditionnel des sciences et la philosophie' in La Philosophie 11. Cf. Lenin CW14: 229: 'If nature is a product, it is obvious that it can be a silencieuse (Paris: Seuil, 1975); P. Guenancia, Du Vide a Dieu. Essai sur product only of something that is greater, richer, broader, mightier than la physique de Pascal (Paris: Maspero, 1976); B. Hindess and P. Hirst, nature, of something that exists; for in order to 'produce' nature, it must Mode of Production and Social Formation (London: Macmillan, 1977); exist independently of nature. That means that something exists outside C. Houzel, J.-L. Ovaert, P. Raymond, J.-J. Sans, Philosophie et calcul nature, something which moreover produces nature. In plain language de l'infini (Paris: Maspero, 1976); M. Pion, La Théorie des jeux: une this is called God.' Cf. P. Raymond, Le Passage au matérialisme (Paris: politique imaginaire (Paris: Maspero, 1976); P. Raymond, op.cit. (n. 11 Maspero, 1973) pp. 36ff, on the role of God in idealist philosophies. Cf. above) pp. 77ff; P. Raymond L'Histoire et les sciences (Paris: Maspero, also H. Blumenberg on materialism as a 'postulate' of the 'self-assertion' 1975) esp. pp. 66ff; P. Raymond, De la Combinatoire aux probabilités of man qua man which marks the modern age - Säkularisierung und (Paris: Maspero, 1975); A. F. Schmid, Une Philosophie desavant. Henri Selbstbehauptang (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974) esp. pp. 246, 252. Poincaré et la logique mathématique (Paris: Maspero, 1978). 12. CW 14: 46. (Emphasis added.) Cf. also 52, 55, 59, 113. On Mach's concept of element see further the remarks in H. Bruehmann, 'Der 16. Lenin, CW 14:125f: 'Contemporary fideism does not at all reject science, Begriff des hundes bellt nicht' Das Objekt der Geschichte de Wissenall it rejects is the 'exaggerated claims' of science, to wit its claims to schaften bei Bachelard und Althusser (Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1980) objective truth. If objective truth exists (as the materialists think), if pp. 41f. natural science . . . is alone capable of giving us objective truth, then all fideism is absolutely refuted.' Cf. also CW 14:30, 280, 344. 13. Cf. Peirce: ' . . . to set up a philosophy which barricades the road of further advance towards the truth is the . . . unpardonable offence in 17. Benton, in Mepham and Ruben (eds), op.cit. (n. 3 above) p. 106, notes reasoning . . . to which metaphysicians have in all ages shown themthat scientific advances are always potentially subversive of prevailing selves the most addicted.' (Philosophical Writings, ed. J. Buchler, Dover ideologies. ed., 1955, p. 54) See also the following couple of pages in which he gives 18. It should be noted that my use of the term 'emancipation' and cognates is examples. On the notion of what he calls 'blockierende Festlegung', or not an allusion to Habermas's idea of 'emancipatory interest'. See e.g. simply 'Blockades', see the concrete historical analyses in H. BlumenJ. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann, berg, Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972) esp. ch. 9, and Appendix (especially pp. 31 Iff). 1975) esp. pp. 158, 165, 279f, 413, 461, 511, 529. 539, 544, and on 19. 'The weapons of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weaphilosophers' 'barriers' to 'causal deterministic modes of mind and pons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory notion of the kind developed by psychologists and physiologists' D. also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.' Bloor, Wittgenstein: a Social Theory of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, Marx, 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: 1983) pp. 74ff. Cf. further the literature cited in n. 15 below. Introduction', CW 3: 182. 14. For examples of knowledge developing within an idealist framework see 20. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, Part IV, Appendix II-IV: 'Desires which follow Houzel et al., op.cit. (n. 13 above) and X. Renou, L'Infini aux limites du from our nature in such a manner that they can be understood through it calcul (Anaximandre-Platon-Galilée) (Paris: Maspero, 1978). The alone, are those which are referred to the mind, insofar as the latter is eventual obstructing effects of Platonism (the original role of which is conceived to consist of adequate ideas; the remaining desires are only sympathetically portrayed by Renou in the work just cited) - by contrast referred to the mind, insofar as it conceives things inadequately, and with the fruitful method of studying and developing new practical procetheir force and increase are generally defined not by the power of man, dures - is displayed in E. W. Strong, Procedures and Metaphysics but by the power of things external to us; wherefore the former are (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936). This ambiguity of rightly called actions, the latter passions; for the former always indicate influence has perhaps more than merely coincidental similarities to some our power, the latter, on the contrary, show our infirmity and fragmenreligious ideas. E. g. Methodism was both a centre of working-class unity tary knowledge. Our actions, that is, those desires which are defined by and also a force tending to exact adherance to the prevailing social order. man's power or reason, are always good. . . . Thus in life it is before all Cf. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (rev. ed. things useful to perfect the understanding or reason, as far as we Pelican, 1968), and E. Hobsbawm, 'Methodism and the Threat of can. . . . Wherefore of a man who is led by reason, the ultimate aim . . . Revolution in Britain' in Labouring Men (London: Weidenfeld and is that whereby he is brought to the adequate conception of himself and Nicolson, 1964) ch. 3. of all things within the scope of his intelligence.' (Trans. R. H. M. Elwes. Punctuation changed.) 15. Further on the historical relations of philosophy and science from points of view similar to that rehearsed in the text: Althusser, Lenin and 21. Note that Lenin says that materialism and idealism are 'fundamental' Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971) esp. pp. 21ff; Bachelard, (or 'principal') lines. This brings out yet another aspect of the metaphor whose views on the subject are most conveniently assembled in D. of 'lines': they may intersect or be woven together. Thus a particuLecourt, Marxism and Epistemology (London: New Left Books, 1975), lar philosophical position may not - in general does not - fall neatly (see index, s.v. "philosophers" and "philosophy"); J.-T. Desanti, 'Sur le under the rubrics of either materialism or idealism in the 'pure' forms

118

22. 23. 24. 25.

Notes and References to pp. 70-1 characterized above. But such a position is, according to Lenin, a combination, in different ways, of elements which are materialist or idealist, and the nature and effects of a philosophical position are principally determined by the character of its lines, yis-a-vis materialism and idealism, and in particular by the dominance oT one or the other. (The analogy for straight-forward political 'lines is clear.) As examples one may cite Lenin's indication in several places of the eclectic character of Mach's philosophy (CW 14: 44f, 50, 63ff), bringing in as it does materialist elements when his basic idealism leads him into difficulties; Lenin argues, indeed, that the same is true of empirio-criticism in general (CW 14: 83ff). But the clearest case brought forward in the book is that of Kant: The principal feature of Kant's philosophy is the reconciliation of materialism with idealism, a compromise between the two, the combination within one system of heterogeneous and contrary philosophical trends. When Kant assumes that something outside us, a thing-in-itself, corresponds to our ideas, he is a materialist. When he declares this thing-in-itself to be unknowable, transcendental, other-sided, he is an idealist. Recognizing experience, sensations, as the only source of our knowledge, Kant is directing his philosophy towards sensationalism, and via sensationalism, under certain conditions, towards materialism. Recognizing the apriority of space, time causality, etc., Kant is directing his philosophy towards idealism.' (CW 14: 198) For a subtle analysis of the opening sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason on the basis of the materialism/idealism couple see P. Macherey, 'L'Histoire de la philosophie considérée comme une lutte de tendances' La Pensée, no. 185, Feb. 1976. On materialist and idealist 'lines' in Spinoza, see Jean-T. Desanti, Introduction à l'Histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de la Nouvelle Critique, 1956) Part II, ch. I, and in the history of Marxism, E. Balibar, 'Matérialisme et idéalisme dans l'histoire de la théorie marxiste' in Cinq Etudes du matérialisme historique (Paris:. Maspero, 1974). On the whole question further P. Raymond, op. cit. (n. 11 above) Bk I Cf. also the references in n.8 above. Georg Lukâcs, Die Eigenart des Aesthetischen, 1 Hbbd (Werke, Bd 11) (Neuwied-Berlin: Luchterhand, 1963) pp. 45f. Cf. also p. 112. Lukâcs, op.cit., p. 50. Cf. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology CW 5: 92f. Engels to C. Schmidt, October 27, 1890, SW 3 : 492ff. On idealism as the 'Stades¬ ideologie' of the theoretician and related matters see also E. Conze, Der Satz vom Widerspruch: Zur Théorie des dialektischen Materialismus (1932, Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1976) Sees 437ff. Collier, in Mepham and Ruben (eds), op.cit. (n. 3 above) pp. 47f, points - correctly - to the primacy of agency in idealism. But I do not agree with his further remark that ' . . . idealism . . . is initially a resistance (in the Freudian sense) to scientific explanation of the world' (p. 59f). Why such resistance? Freud has a great deal to teach us about the explanation of the centrality of subject-centred agency in the prescientific view of the world (mythical, religious and 'every-day thinking' as well as most of Western philosophy), but it is not in the direction of some sort of alleged 'resistance' to scientific explanation. Rather it

Notes and References to pp. 71-2

119

consists in the suggestion that it is rooted in human infants' experience of the world during their comparatively long period of maturation as a world of human agents: the mythical, religious etc. view of the word is just a generalisation of infantile experience of the world as a world of agents. See Freud, Totem and Taboo, esp. ch. Ill, and The Future of an Illusion, esp. chs III and IV. These insights of Freud (and related ones by Piaget and others) have been used and built on in a superb book by' Günter Dux, Die Logik der Weltbilder. Sinnstrukturen im Wandel der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982) which sets out in detail the 'logic' of views of the world modelled on the active subject. 26. Sophist, 246 a-c. For the Greek developments cf. Lukäcs, op.cit. 49 and also 46f. Further G. Thomson, The First Philosophers (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955). On relevant developments in Indian philosophy cf. W. Ruben, Geschichte der indischen Philosophie (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1954) chs 8, 9. 27. Lenin remarks that scientists in their everyday practice doubt no more than ordinary people do in their quotidian life that they are dealing with a world which is independent of them, something shown in its constant resistance to successful understanding and control; they in general believe nevertheless in the possibility of the latter, something shown in the very fact of their continuing to work in the frequent absence of success in the short run. They are, Lenin says, 'instinctively' materialist. (This may or may not be the same as their conscious, explicit philosophies of course. Cf. Bachelard's distinction between the 'diurnal' and 'nocturnal' philosophies of science. On which see D. Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, op. cit. n. 15 above, p. 134, and Bachelard ou le jour et la nuit [Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1974].) But crises of growth generate idealism and hence need a materialist defence. The situation has many similarities to the straightforwardly political situation which Lenin discusses in connection with 'spontaneity' in What Is To Be Done? (See especially ch. II, 8, CW 5: 378ff.) Lenin argued here that workers, just by virtue of their places in the material practice of the capitalist production-process, have a 'spontaneous' recognition of their exploitation, understand in a practical way the processes by which their bosses attempt to extract more working-time from them for the same or less pay by trying to increase the length of the working-day or by intensifying their labour during the time that they do work, and see the advantages and indeed necessity of co-operation, of collective effort. But this spontaneous recogrution and practical understanding has its limits. In particular, Lenin pointed to the common 'economistic' barriers of workers' understanding of their situation, the focussing on distributive aspects of the economic system in the narrower sense, rather than on the key matter of control of production itself. And these limitations become particularly apparent in 'abnormal' situations: ones of unusual prosperity or of crisis (reformism, national chauvinism, etc.). As a result of this, workers' spontaneous attitudes to capitalism and to socialism have to be articulated and developed theoretically in order for them to be able to withstand the pressures of situations which go outside the ordinary limits and open up greater than usual opportunities for the penetration of bourgeois ideology (including

120

Notes and References to pp. 72-6

'consensus' politics, racism, producing divisions in the ranks, etc.). 'Abnormal' situations in science subject spontaneous materialism to great strains, and afford a foothold to idealism, within a general situation primarily favourable to it. In such situations materialism of an instinctive sort has to be defended from idealist incursions with an appropriately more developed and sophisticated set of weapons. Lenin himself gave an example of such a defence in his chapter (Five) on 'The Recent Revolution in Natural Science, and Philosophical Idealism', a propos 'the crisis of modern physics'. 28. It is not accidental that a similar point is to be made about the formation of classes from a Marxist point of view. Cf. Althusser, Essays in SelfCriticism, op.cit. (n. 8 above) pp. 49f. - On the social roots and functions of materialism and idealism see the excellent paper by Max Horkheimer, 'Materialism and Metaphysics' (1933) in his Critical Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1972). 29. This insight is, to start with, due to Hegel, though of course in an idealist form. See e.g. his early criticism of subjective idealism of his treatments of Stoicism, Scepticism, and religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit. (This standpoint of the idealist Hegel makes his treatment of religion paradoxically deeper than that of the materialist Feuerbach.) Cf. on all this G. Lukacs, The Young Hegel (London: Merlin Press, 1975) pp. 261ff; R. Norman, Hegel's Phenomenology (Sussex University Press, 1976) pp. 94ff. 30. See the commentary in my paper in Mepham and Ruben (eds), op.cit. (n. 3 above) pp. 24ff. For exemplifications of Marx's standpoint n this Thesis see e.g. the 1844 Manuscripts, CW3: 302, 312. 31. R. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Brighton: Harvester Press, 2nd edn, 1978) e.g. p. 31, attempts a 'transcendental deduction' of materialism, arguing that, given the contingent fact of the existence of experimental science, materialism must be correct. I agree with the criticisms of this in D.-H. Ruben, Marxism and Materialism, 2nd ed. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979) pp. 100-2. (Bhaskar has a rejoinder in the postscript to the second edition of his book p. 258, replied to in turn by Ruben in the second edition of his, 201-3 and cf. 206f.) In his second book, The Possibility of Naturalism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979) pp. 7f, he gives a more nuanced (it may be said: weakened) account of the idea of a transcendental deduction, now saying not so much that Y is 'transcendentally' deduced from the fact of X if Y is logically (necessary and?) sufficient for X, but just if 'absurd, incoherent, counter-intuitive or counter-factual results' follow from not admitting Y, and that transcendental arguments are always situated in a definite philosophical conjuncture. These are useful points. But they do not abate the fundamentally idealist-theoreticist character of the whole procedure. For one thing, results are not absurd, incoherent, etc. somehow in themselves, but only in the context of some theoretical position which is itself rooted in practical situations. For further criticism of Bhaskar's 'transcendental' procedure here see the review of The Possibility of Naturalism by R. Albury, G. Payne and W. Suchting in Economy and Society, vol. 10, no. 3, August 1981.

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32. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, op.cit. (n. 8 above) p. 47. 33. Marx, Texts on Method (tr. T. Carver) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974) p. 210. 34. Marx clearly thought this sentence a very important one. In the French translation of J. Roy, which he supervised, he inverts the order of the original sentence, and, more importantly, emphasizes it: Tl le font, sans le savoir' (p. 70 of the 1969 Paris edition published by Garnier¬ Flammarion). See also the important passage of supplementary explanation in the first edition (only) of Capital, vol. 1 - on p. 38 of the reprint by Gerstenberg Verlag (Hildesheim, 1980), or in translation in Value: Studies by Karl Marx (translated by A. Dragstedt, London: New Park Publications, 1976) p. 36. 35. A detailed concrete historical study from a methodological viewpoint which at least approximates to 'social materialism' is Bernard Groethuysen's Die Entstehung der bürgerlichen Welt - und Lebensanschauung in Frankreich, 2 vols (1927, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978). See esp. the methodological introduction to vol. 1. (There is a very much shorter version of this book in English, The Bourgeois. Catholicism vs Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France [1927, London: Barrie & Rockliff The Cresset Press, 1968]. This does not contain anything corresponding to the introduction referred to above. But there are many striking particular formulations - e.g. pp. 48f, 171, 180f.) 36. Lenin's terms are mostly taken from Engels's (Ludwig Feuerbach, Anti-Dühring, etc.). Marx himself seems to use the term 'reflection' or cognates in only one significant place, viz. the 'Afterword' to the second edition of vol. I of Capital. He says here that if the scientific worker has been successful in appropriating his subject-matter, then his work 'reflects the life of the subject-rnatter in the domain of ideas': 'spiegelt sich . . . das Leben des Stoffes ideel wider'. A few Unes later he says, in the original: 'Bei mir ist . . . das Ideele nichts andres als das im Menschenkopf umgesetzte und übersetzte Materielle.' The translation in the Everyman edition of Capital (by Eden and Cedar Paul) renders this: 'In my view . . . the ideal is nothing other than the material when it has been transposed and translated inside the human head' (p. 873). This is essentially correct (though I would prefer 'the domain of ideas' or something like it instead of 'the ideal'); in particular the last clause is perfectly accurate. But the Moscow translation (Moore/Aveling version edited by Engels) has: 'With me . . . the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. ' It is obvious how far this is away from the original; in particular the word 'reflected' is a gratuitous addition. The Penguin translation of vol. I of Capital, p. 102, follows the Moscow edition here with a couple of quite significant changes. It should, however, be added that the French translation by J. Roy, which was gone over by Marx, does introduce the 'reflection' idea: 'Pour moi . . . le mouvement de la pensée n'est que la refléxion du mouvement réel, transporté et transposé dans le cerveau de l'homme' (ed.cit., n. 34, p. 583). 37. Further on the idea of 'reflection' in Lenin see his articles on 'Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution' (CW 15), on which see

122

Notes and References to pp. 81-2 P. Macherey, Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), and the same author's 'Problems of Reflection' in F. Barker et al. (eds) Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature (University of Sussex, 1977) esp. pp. 49f.

CHAPTER 3 MARX, H E G E L AND 'CONTRADICTION'

1. West-östlicher Divan, Buch Suleika, 'Gingo biloba'. (Ts it One living being/That has divided itself?/Are there Two that select one another/So that we know them as One?') 2. The term seems to have been used first by Plekhanov in 1891 in his article 'For the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel's Death'. See his Selected Philosophical Works, vol. I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 2nd edn, 1974) p. 422. 3. For just a few examples, see C 1: 102f, and letters to Engels, 31 July 1865, 27 June 1867, 7 Nov. 1867, 1 Feb. 1868, as well as Gespräche mit Marx und Engels ed. Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1973) vol. 2, p. 545. That Marx believed in a dialectics of nature is perfectly clear from e.g. C 1:198, 423n, contrary to the opinion of many 'authorities' - e.g. Z. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism (London: Macmillan, 1967) p. 93. 4. Marx to Engels, 16 Jan. 1858, and to Dietzgen, 9 May 1868. See also Engels to Lavrov, 2 Apr. 1883. 5. As to later writers who have considered themselves to be, in some sense, followers of Marx's ideas, what Max Adler wrote round the beginning of the century is about as true today as when it first appeared: 'Of the intellectual elements which underlie Marxism, the dialectic has really attracted much attention only among its opponents.' He goes on: 'It almost seems as if many adherants of the doctrines of Marx and Engels also share the opinion of their opponents that the dialectic is basically an inessential ingredient of the Marxian system, originating only from the historical connection that its founders had with the Hegelian philosophy, by virtue of having been pupils of Hegel, so that the attacks on dialectics do not pose any serious threat to the integrity of the system.' (Marxistische Probleme. Beiträge zur Theorie der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung und Dialektik [1913], Stuttgart: Pietz, 1922, p. 18). For evidence of the lack of consensus in contemporary controversies see, e.g., the contributions to discussions in Marxism Today, from 1973 onwards, in Radical Philosophy, from no. 14, Summer 1976 onwards, in J. Mepham and D.-H. Ruben (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol. I (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), in R. Norman and S. Sayers, Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). 6. For this method of studying exemplifications see the oft-cited passage from Lenin on 'the logic of Capital', CIV 38: 319, and also a remarkably similar sentiment from Engels reported by one Charles Rappoport in an interview in 1893, for which see Enzensberger, Gespräche, op. cit. (n. 3 above) pp. 662f. 7. The literature relevant to the theme of dialectics in its relation to Marx's

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political economy includes (but is by no means at all exhausted by) the following: H-G. Backhaus, 'Zur Dialektik der Wertform' in A. Schmidt (ed.), Beiträge zur marxistischen Erkenntnistheorie (Frankfurt: Suhr- / kamp, 1969) (translated in Thesis 11 [Melbourne] No. 1, 1980): J. Bischoff, Gesellschaftliche Arbeit als Systembegriff, lieber wissenschaftliche Dialektik (Westberlin: VSA, 1973); R. W. Bologh, Dialectical Phenomenology. Marx's Method (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); G. Duménil, Le Concept de loi économique dans 'Le Capital' (Paris: Maspero, 1978); D. Elson (ed.), Value: the Representation of Labour in Capitalism (London: CSE Books, 1979) (especially the papers by Banaji and Arthur); M. Godelier, 'System and Contradiction in Capital' in R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds), The Socialist Register 1967 (London: Merlin Press, 1967); E. Grassi L' 'esposizione dialettica' nel Capitale di Marx (Roma: Basilicata éditrice, 1976); O. Morf, Geschichte und Dialektik in der politischen Oekonomie (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsantstalt, 1970); Projektgruppe Entwicklung des Marxschen Systems (ed.), Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Rohentwurf). Kommentar (Hamburg: VSA, 1978), M. M. Rosenthal, Die dialektische Methode der politischen Oekonomie von Karl Marx (Berlin: Verlag das Europäische Buch, 1973); J. Zeleny, The Logic of Marx (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). - As regards the political and historical writings see e.g. Marx's summary of the main thesis of The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850, CW 10:47, and his study of the dissolution of the early Roman society of independent household farms in the Grundrisse, pp. 487, 493-5, 506. But not all anomalies of this second sort are thus resolved. Consider, for example, the contradiction between, on the one hand, the consequences of Marx's theory of circulation and money according to which the arrow of causation points in the opposite direction. But the very existence of this apparent contradiction is accounted for by the theory and thus becomes a confirmation of it: thus the resolution consists in reinterpreting the 'facts' - in the following way. Marx has explained the circulation of commodities as having the structure C-M-C (one commodity's being exchanged for money which is then used to buy another). He goes on: The circulation of money is the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process. The commodity is always in the hands of the seller, the money, as a means of purchase, always in the hands of the buyer. Money serves as a means of purchase by realizing the price of the commodity. By doing this, it transfers the commodity from the seller to the buyer, and removes the money from the hands of the buyer into those of the seller, where it again goes through the same process with another commodity. That this one-sided form of motion of the money arises out of the two-sided form of motion of the commodity is a circumstance which is hidden from view. The very nature of the circulation of commodities produces a semblance of the opposite. The first metamorphosis of a commodity is visible not only as the money's movement, but also as that of the commodity itself, but its second metamorphosis is visible only as the movement of the money. Thereupon the commodity, in its shape as an object of utility falls out of

Notes and References to pp. 83-4 circulation into consumption. Its value-shape or monetary larva takes its place. It then passes through the second phase of its circulation no longer in its own natural skin, but in its golden one. In this way the continuity of the movement depends entirely on the money, and the same movement which, for the commodity, includes two opposed processes, is, when considered as the movement of the money, always one and the same process, a constant change of places with commodities which are always different. Hence the result of the circulation of commodities, namely the replacement of one commodity by another, appears to have been mediated not by its own change ofform, but rather by the function of money as means of circulation. As means of circulation, money circulates commodities, which in and for themselves lack the power of movement, and transfers them from hands in which they are non-use-values into hands in which they are use-values; and this process always takes the opposite direction to the path of the commodities themselves. Money constantly removes commodities from the sphere of circulation, by constantly stepping into their place in circulation, and in this way continually moving away from its own starting-point. Hence although the movement of money is merely an expression of the circulation of commodities, it appears as if, conversely, the circulation of commodities were only a result of the movement of money. (C 1: 210-12. Emphasis added.) 9. On the distinction between context of inquiry and context of presentation see C1:102. For comments relevant to the place of contradiction in inquiry and presentation see TSV 2: 150 and 3: 84. On this point see also P. Macherey, 'A propos du processus d'exposition du "Capital" (Le travail des concepts)' reprinted in Lire le Capital, iv (Paris: Maspero, 1973). 10. Critique of Pure Reason, A273=B329. Cf. also Lucio Colletti's 'Marxism and the Dialectic' New Left Review, no. 93, Sept.-Oct. 1975, pp. 6ff, for further discussion of Kant's views here. (Colletti regards 'real conflict' as the only possible sort of material contradiction.) Bucharin's interpretation of dialectics also seems to have rested on the idea of contradiction as 'conflict'. See his Historical Materialism (1921) (University of Michigan Press, 1969), and the material in N. Bucharin et al., Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanistischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969). 11. Marx does not make any systematic distinction between 'Widerspruch' (usually translated 'contradiction') and 'Gegensatz' (usually translated 'opposite' or 'opposition') and their cognates, though it is sometimes claimed - e.g. Dümenil, op. cit. (n. 7 above) pp. 368f - that he does. In this regard he is similar to Hegel whose terminology is likewise very loose here. A look at EL, Sec. 119 shows that he uses the nouns 'Gegensatz', 'Entgegensetzung', 'Widerspruch' in cheerful interchangeability and similarly the adjectives 'entgegengesetzte', 'widersprechend', 'kontradiktorisch', though in fact the categories of 'Gegensatz' 'Entgegensetzung' on the one hand, and 'Widerspruch' on the other are different, a difference to which homage is paid terminologically at the very end of the

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Notes and References to p. 84

125

last addition to Sec. 119 (though in a more or less throwaway parenthesis!). Cf. further n. 13 below. 12. This in fact a specification of what Marx regards as the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. He describes this in various ways, but it is generically the manner in which the relations of production characteristic of capitalism (private ownership of the means of production, and hence the existence of labour-power as a commodity) leads both to the development of the forces of production (for reasons already partly specified) and to the opposite of this (obstructions to the maximisation of surplus, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, under-consumption, etc.). See e.g. C 3: 366, 372f, etc. . - In this regard yet another sense of 'contradiction' in Marx's economic writings may be identified - contradiction in the sense of what may be called 'absurdity' - cf. Dumenil, op. cit. (n.7 above) pp. 364f. For example, in writing about one feature of capitalist crisis, namely, the attempt to convert all real wealth into gold and silver 'a crazy [verriickte] demand, which, however, grows necessarily out of the system itself (C 3: 708), Marx writes: 'A drain of gold . . . shows strikingly by its effects that production is not really subject to social control, as social production, and that the social form of wealth exists alongside wealth itself as a thing. The capitalist system does have this in common with earlier systems of production insofar as these are based on commodity trade and private exchange. But it is only with this system that the most striking and grotesque form of this absurd contradiction and paradox [des absurden Widerspruchs und Widersinns] arises . . .' (lbc. cit.) Such a 'crazy demand' of course paralyses production (for a time at least) and brings about the situation where there is a co-existence between, on the one hand, underutilised means of production and, on the other, underemployed labour-power - on the one hand, unsaleable use-values and on the other, unsatisfied need for them. This situation is 'absurd' in an at least twofold way. Firstly, it has the absurdity of an 'anomaly': insofar as capitalism is wrongly considered as essentially a type of social organisation aiming at the production of use-values (to satisfy) needs, rather than surplus-value. Seen from this second point of view there is nothing absurd about it: on the contrary, crises are highly functional for the system in devaluing already produced values and hence in helping to launch the economy into a new phase of production. But secondly, it is 'absurd' insofar as the situation is evaluated from the point of view of the norm or standard of a form of economy which does work to satisfy needs. 13. Colletti, op. cit. (n.10 above), denies that the idea of a unity of opposites is compatible with materialism. The gist of his argument is 1) that 'A & not-A' is the basic form of the unity of opposites, and 2) that a material situation cannot have a nature such that it can be exhaustively characterised simply by describing it as the negation of something else. 2) is true, but 1) is not, as is shown in the text to which this is a note. - It might be noted here, by the way, that Hegel, who is accused by Colletti of denying the point that has just been conceded, and indeed of building his

126

Notes and References to pp. 85-93 conception of dialectics upon it, expressly takes the point and indeed makes it the basis of the transition from 'Gegensatz' or 'Entgegensetzung' to 'Widerspruch' (cf. n.ll above), the latter being distinguished from the former by virtue of the fact that each of the opposing terms has a nature of its own not reducible simply to the exclusion of the other. See EL, Sec.119, Add.. 14. With this treatment cf. WL, vol. I, pp. 6,11, 38, vol. II, pp. 58ff, 491ff = SL pp. 28, 32, 56, 439ff, 831ff. 15. See WL, vol. I, pp. 93ff = SL pp. 106ff. 16. Cf. also the Philosophy of Right, Sec. 31: 'The method whereby . . . the concept develops itself out of itself is expounded in logic . . . Its development is a purely immanent progress, the engendering of its determinations. . . . The concept's moving principle . . . I call "dialectic"'. (Trans. T. M. Knox) 17. It is one of the many merits of Charles Taylor's Hegel (Cambridge: University Press, 1975), that it attends to this teleological structure of the dialectic. See op. cit., pp. 110,129,130ff, 216f, 230,286,326,390f. Also J. N. Findlay, 'Hegel's Use of Teleology' (Monist, 1964), reprinted in Ascent to the Absolute (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), N. Hartmann, Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1974) pp. 407f, 420, 422, 459, 471f, etc. 18. Insofar as pre-scientific (mythical, religious, most philosophical) thinking has been dominated by the basic idea of substance-as-subject, as Günter Dux argues in his Die Logik der Weltbilder (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), Hegel's system may be seen as the culmination of it - of the 'Western' version anyway. Cf. Dux, op. cit., p. 126. - Of course it is possible to use Hegel's Logic as material for a theory of production in general (of which labour in the more ordinary sense would be a special case). But this is not the same as seeing the Logic as such a theory. Cf. Peter Ruben's very interesting paper, 'Von der "Wissenschaft der Logik" und dem u Verhältnis der Dialektik zur Logik' in Rolf-Peter Horstmann (ed.) ?r Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978). 19. An idealist petitio also lies at the base of the Phenomenology. In the initial chapter on 'Sense-Certainty' Hegel infers from the fact that the language used to describe particulars involves the conclusion that universal are the objects that the language describes. 20. Althusser's term: For Marx (Allex Lane, The Penguin Press, 1969) p. 102. 21. '. . . political history, forms of government, art, religion . . . philosophy each and all have one and the same common root - the spirit of the time. It is one determinate essence, character, that permeates all sides and is represented in the domain of politics and in different elements; it is one condition which hangs together in all its parts and whose different sides, however manifold an accidental they may appear, however much also they may appear to be inconsistent, contain nothing that is different in nature from the foundation. . . . the spirit of a time stamps its whole reality in accordance with its principle.' (Werke 18:74 = History of Philosophy, English tr., 1:54).

Notes and References to pp. 93-100

111

22. Cf. CW1:84. 23. Cf. also Encyclopedia, Part III, Sec. 555; Werke, 17: 269ff (=Philosophy of Religion, English tr., Ill: 67ff); Werke, 18: 71f (=History of Philosophy, English tr., i: 52). 24. See Althusser, op. cit. (n. 20 above) index. 25. We know from a letter to Engels (14 Jan. 1858) that Marx was looking again at Hegel's Science of Logic at the time of the composition of the Grundrisse. (For a collation of Marx's various contacts with Hegel's Logic see T. Carver, 'Marx - and Hegel's Logic' Political Studies, 24 [1976] 57-68.) On the question of the Hegelian influence in the Grundrisse see e.g. J. Mepham, 'From the Grundrisse to Capital: the Making / of Marx's Method', in J. Mepham and D-H. Ruben (eds), op.cit. (n.5 above), and F. E. Schräder, Restauration und Revolution. Die Vorarbieten zum 'Kapital' von Karl Marx in seinen Studienheften 1850-1858 (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1980) pp. 113ff, esp. 117f, 123ff, 134ff, and also 166f, 205, 208. 26. As Martin Nicolaus claims in his generally very instructive introduction to his translation of the Grundrisse, p. 36. 27. For a more detailed exposition see W. Suchting, 'Marx on the Dialectics of Production and Consumption in the Introduction to the Grundrisse' Social Praxis, 3 (1975) 291-314. 28. This conditionality of unity is emphasised by Nicolaus, op.cit. (n.26 above) pp. 40f. On the general point see also Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, CW 38: 360: 'The Unity . . . of opposites is conditional temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.' Further Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong), Selected Works, vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967) pp. 342f, and vol. v (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977) p. 395. - What amounts to a statement of the conditionality of the relation of production and consumption is present in Marx as early as The German Ideology. See CW 5: 515ff, esp. 516. 29. For discussions of the differences between the editions see e.g. Projektgruppe Entwicklung des Marxschen Systems, Das Kapitel vom Geld. Interpretation der verschiedenen Entwürfe (Westberlin: VSA, 1973) pp. 139ff, and the introduction by Cristina Pennavaja to her edition of Marx, L'Analisi della Forma di Valore (Roma-Bari: Editori Laterza, 1976). As already noted (n.25 above) Marx had dipped into Hegel's Science of Logic in 1858, at the time he was writing the Grundrisse. He continued the study of Hegel sometime during 1860-63 when he was writing the manuscript of which a part was in effect a first draft of major sections of the first volume of Capital. See J. O'Malley and F. E. Schräder, 'Marx's ^ Precis of Hegel's Doctrine of Being in the Lesser Logic' Internat. Rev. of Soc. Hist. (1976) pp. 423-31. See also the article by Carver referred to in n.25 above. 29a. See e.g. Burckhardt's words in a letter to von Preen, New Year's Eve 1870: '. . . Hegel, after this year's jubilee publications, may very possibly make his definitive jubilee retirement. 'The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955) p. 145. 30. Marx uses the term 'value-form' in a number of different though

128

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

Notes and References to pp.

101-3

interrelated ways: 1) as that by virtue of which social labour is expressed as value (e.g. C 1: 138,164); 2) as that by virtue of which is expressed as exchange-value (e.g. C 1: 131, 152); 3) as the actual physical nature or shape of the commodity that serves as the value-equivalent (e.g. C 1: 144, 153). Cf. G 147f. It will be remembered from the discussion of production and consumption that products are only confirmed as products in consumption, and therefore use-values as use-values in the same way. So, strictly speaking, on Marx's view, not only does a thing only have an exchange-value in exchange but only thus does it have a use-value. (A nest of problems is sited here.) Cf. Engels, who speaks of 'how in the concept of the commodity money is . . . represented as already existing implicitly [an sich]' . . . (CW 15: 208). I thus agree here with Nancy Cartwright's discussion of vector addition in her How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) pp. 59ff. For other remarks pertinent to this passage in Marx, see M.M. Mussachia, 'On Contradiction in Dialectical Materialism' Science and Society, 41 (1977) pp. 257-80, and 'On Materialist Contradictions: A Reply' Science and Society, 42 (1978) pp. 191-8. Cf. E. Balibar, 'A Nouveau sur la contradiction. Dialectique des lutte de classes et lutte de classes dans la dialectique' in Sur la dialectique (Paris: Editions sociales, 1977), and Karl Korsch's paper 'Ueber materialistische Dialektik' (1924), reprinted in Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung und andere Schriften (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971) esp. pp. 135ff. I have in mind the sort of approach represented by Milton Fisk's contribution, 'Dialectic and Ontology', to J. Mepham and D.-H. Ruben (eds), op. cit., (n.5 above).

Index Absolute Subject, 9, 11-12 Social Theory of Knowledge, 'actuality', 3-4 116n Adler, Max, 122n Blumenberg, Hans, 23, 115n; Die Albury, R., et al., 120n Genesis der kopernikanischen Althusser, Louis, x, 19, 48, 74, Welt, 116n; Der Prozess der 115n, 126n; Essays in Selftheoretischen Neugierde, 110n, Criticism, 109n; For Marx, 109n; 113n Philosophie et philosophie Boehme, G., et al., Die spontanée des savants, HOn; andgesellschaftliche Orientierung des E. Balibar, Reading Capital, wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts, 109n, llln-112n 110n 'Anschauung', 104n-105n, 113n Borkenau, F., Der Uebergang vom 'appearance', 37 feudalen zum bürgerlichen Aquinas, St. Thomas, 113n Weltbild, HOn Aristotle, 33, 44 Brecht, Bertolt, 53 Armstrong, D. M., Belief, Truth Bridgman, P. G., The Logic of and Knowledge, 105n Modern Physics, 106n; The Nature of Some of Our Physical Concepts, 106n Bachelard, Gaston, 36, 49, 109n, llln, 113n, 119n; Epistémologie. Bruehmann, H., 'Der Begriff des Hundes Bellt nicht' Das Objekt Textes choisies, 109n der Geschichte der Wissenschaften Bacon, Francis, 33, 46 bei Bachelard und Althusser, Balibar, E., 109n; 'Matérialisme et 116n idéalisme dans l'histoire de la théorie marxiste', 118n; see also Bucharin, N., Historical Materialism, 124n; Kontroversen Althusser, Louis über dialectischen und Baracca, A., et al., Scienze e mechanistichen Materialismus, industria 1848-1915, HOn 124n Bayle, Pierre, 49 'Begriff, 105n, l l l n Büchner, Ludwig, Force and Benton, T., 117n Matter, 98 Bergson, Henri, 11 Burnheim, John, x Berkeley, George, 11, 55, 66, 115n Bhaskar, R., The Possibility of Carnap, Rudolf, xvi, 112n Naturalism, 120n; A Realist Cartwright, Nancy, How the Laws Theory of Science, 120n of Physics Lie, 128n Bloch, Ernst, 115n Carver, T., 'Marx - and Hegel's Bloor, D., 114n; Wittgenstein: a Logic', 127n

129

130

Index

Cassirer, Ernst, Substance and Function, 107n Cavaillès, J., 32, 113n coherence, 31 Colletti, Lucio, 'Marxism and the Dialectic', 124n-125n Collier, Andrew, 'In Defence of Epistemology', 112n, 114n, 118n commodities: and production, 24; Marx on, 32, 97-102 consumption, 96-7 'contradiction', 81-103, 122n correspondence, 31 Conze, E., Der Satz vom Widerspruch: Zur Theorie des dialektischen Materialismus, 118n Democritus, 53 Descartes, René, 46 Dewey, John, 51 dialectical materialism, 81, 102-3; see also 'contradiction' distribution, 96-7 Dürkheim, Emil, 114n Dux, Günter, Die Logik der Weltbilder, 107n, 119n, 126n Edgley, Roy, x empiricism, 114n Engels, Friedrich, xix, 1, 54, 61-3, 71, 81, 102, 121n, 122n, 126n, 128n; Anti-Diihring, 115n; Ludwig Feuerbach and the Close of Classical German Philosophy, 58-60; see also Marx, Karl Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, Gespräche, 122n Epicurus, 53 epistemology, xix, 1-52, 114n error, 42-7

Ferrier, J. F., 114n Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, 2, 43, 58-60; see also Marx, Karl, 'Theses on Feuerbach' Feyerabend, P. K., 'Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism', 112n Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 6, 115n Findlay, J. N., 'Hegel's Use of

Teleology', 126n Fisk, Milton, 'Dialectic and Ontology', 128n Fleck, Ludwik, Erfahrung und Tatsache, 110n; The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 110n Foucault, Michel, 114n Freud, Sigmund, xvi, 72; The Future of an Illusion, 118n; Totem and Taboo, 118n Freudenthal, Gideon, Hin; Atom und Individuum im Zeitalter Newtons, 25-8

Galileo Galilei, xvi, 24, 106n Gardner, Martin, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, 115n Gaukroger, S., Explanatory Structures, 106n Goethe, J. W. von, 1 Greiff, B. von, Gesellschaftform und Erkenntnisform und Geist, 113n Groethuysen, Bernard, Die Entstehung der bürgerlichen Welt - und Lebenschauung in Frankreich, 121n Grossmann, H , 'Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der mechanistischen Philosophie und die Manufaktur', HOn Habermas, Jürgen, Knowledge and Human Interests, 117n Hacking, Ian, The Emergence of Probability, 114n Hegel, Friedrich: and epistemology, xix, 50-1; Marx apd, 1, 42-3, 108n, 126n-127n; and 'Das Objekt', 2-3; and 'sensible consciousness', 5; and the 'Absolute Subject', 9, 11-12; and 'Actuality', 33; and 'appearance', 37-9; and error, 46; and materialism, 54, 125n; and idealism, 66, 68, 115n; and concept of 'reflection', 78; and

Index

'contradiction', 81-103; on knowledge, 106n, 112n; on truth, 11 In; Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 85-90; Logic, 3, 6-7, 38, 89-90, 95; Phenomenology of Spirit, xix, 6, 89-90, 120n; Philosophy of Right, xvi, 53 Heidegger, Martin, xvi, 51, 107n Heller, A., Das Alltagsleben, 107n Helmholtz, Herman L. F. von, 79 Hertz, Heinrich, 78 Hindess, B., and P. Q. Hirst, Mode of Production and Social Formation, 112n historical materialism, 23 Hobbes, Thomas, 33 Hobsbawm, 'Methodism and the Threat of Revolution in Britain', 116n Horkheimer, M., 'Materialism and Metaphysics', 120n; 'Montaigne und die Funktion der Skepsis', 114n Houzel, C , 116n Hugo, Victor, 35; 'William Shakespeare', 113n Hume, David, 58, 61; Treatise of Human Nature, 11 Husserl, Edmund Gustav Albert, 68 idealism, 57, 66-74, 90-1 Independence Thesis, 54, 62—4 Jacobi, F. H. 11 Kant, Immanuel, 4-5, 8-9, 51, 58¬ 9, 61, 66, 68, 83, 104n-105n; Critique of Pure Reason, 4, 6, 48, 105n, 118n, 124n Kierkegaard, S0ren, 49 Korsch, Karl, 'Ueber materialistische Dialektik', 128n Knowability Thesis, 54, 62-4 labour, 12-13, 15, 22; see also labour theory of value labour theory of value, 40

131

Lakatos, Imre, 51; Philosophical Papers, 113n Lalande, A., Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 105n Lecourt, D., Bachelard ou le jour et la unit, U9n; Marxism and Epistemology, 109n, 119n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 26 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, xvi, 49-50, 67, 77-80, 114n, 115n, 117n120n, 121n, 122n; Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 49, 61-4; Philosophical Notebooks, 113n; What Is To Be Done?, 119n Liebmann, Otto, Kant and the Epigones, 98 Lindsay, Jack, Blast-Power and Ballistics. Concepts of Force and Energy in the Ancient World, HOn

Locke, John, 52, 68; Essay on Man, 105n Lukâcs, Georg, 70-1; Aesthetik, 107n; The Young Hegel, 120n Mach, Ernst, 27, 67, 116n, 117118n Macherey, P., 124n; 'L'Histoire de la philosophie considérée comme une lutte de tendances', 118n Malebranche, Nicolas, 46 Mao Ze Dong, 127n; On Contradiction, 103 Marx, Karl: contribution to philosophy, xvi; 'philosophical significance' of, xvi-xvii; 'practical materialism' of, xix; and epistemology, 1-52; use of language, 2-5, 121n; and activity, 6-8; and Hegel's 'Absolute Subject', 9-12; and 'practice', 12¬ 19, 28; and modes of production, 20-8; and 'truth', 28, 33; on commodities, 32; and 'appearance', 37; and 'essence', 39-42; and error, 42-7; and materialism, 53-80; and 'contradiction', 81-103, 122n, 125n; commentaries on, 109n; on

132

Index

Index

'objectivity', 2-3 theory, 117n; and 'value-form', Peirce, C. S., 116n 127n-128n; Analyse und Kritik, Pennavaja, Cristina, 127n 109n; Capital, xx, 1, 19, 37, 43, Petty, W., Theories of Surplus 59, 75-6, 82-4, 92, 97, 108n109n; Contribution to the Critique Value, 44 of Political Economy, 59,1'4, 77; Philosophical Review, The Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of (magazine), xvi Right', 42; 1844 Economic and Piaget, J., 118n Philosophical Manuscripts xvi, 1, Plato, xvi, 33, 71 12-13, 54, 112n, 120n; Platonism, 68 'Introduction' to the Grundrisse, Plekhanov, G., 'For the Sixtieth 1, 16-18, 54, 75, 93, 96-7, 106n, Anniversary of Hegel's Death', 108n, 109n; 'Marginalia' to Adolf 122n Wagner's Textbook, 1, 75; The Popkin, R. A., The History of Poverty of Philosophy, 1; 'Theses Scepticism from Erasmus to on Feuerbach', xvii, xix, 1-16, Descartes, 114n 48, 54, 56-8, 73, 77; and Engels, 'practice', 12-19 The German Ideology, xvii, 1, production: mode of, 20-8; process 43, 54, 74, 77, 118n; The Holy of, 95-7 Family, 54, 107n-108n; production, theoretical, 19-20 Produktivkräfte und profit, 40 Produktionsverhältnisse, 109n Quine, W. V. O., l l l n , 112n materialism, 53-80; see also dialectical materialism Mill, John Stuart, 102; Rancière, Jacques, 113n Autobiography, 114n Rappoport, Charles, 122n Moscovici, S., Essai sur I'histoire rationalism, 114n humaine de la nature, HOn Ravetz, J. R., Scientific Knowledge Müller, R. W., Geld und Geist, and Its Social Problems, 109n 113n Raymond, P., Le Passage au Mussachia, M. M., 'On matérialisme, 115n, 118n Contradiction in Dialectical Renou, X., L'Infini aux limites du Materialism', 128n calcul, 116n Rorty, R., Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Î12n Neurath, Otto, 35, 112n Rose, H. and S., The Political Newton, Isaac, 25-8, l l l n Economy of Science, 110n Nicolaus, Martin, 127n Rotermundt, R., Das Denken John Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51 Nitschke, A., Naturerkenntnis und Lockes. Zur Logik bürgerlichen Bewusstseins, 113n politisches Handeln im Mittelalter, Roy, J., 120-121n llOn Ruben, D.-H., Marxism and Norman, R., Hegel's Materialism, 120n; Ruben, P. Phenomenology, 120n ('Von der "Wissenschaft der Logik" und dem Verhälthnis der O'Malley, J., and F. E. Schräder, Dialektik zur Logik', 126n) 'Marx's Precis of Hegel's Ruben, W., Geschichte der Doctrine of Being in the Lesser indischen Philosophie, 119n Logic', 127n

Russell, Bertrand, 67 St. Augustine, 49 Schilling, F. W. J. von, 6, 115n Schopenhauer, A., 105n Schräder, F. E. see O'Malley, J. 'sensibility', 4 Smith, Kemp, 105n Sohn-Rethel, A., Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of Epistemology, 106n, 113n Sonderband 84, Rethinking Ideology!A Marxist Debate, Das Argument, 109n-110n Spinoza, Benedictus, 46, 69, 109n, llln, 118n; Ethics, 117n Strong, E. W., Procedures and Metaphysics, 116n Stürner, W., Natur und Gesellschaft im Denken des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters, llOn Suchting, W., 'Marx on the Dialectics of Production and Consumption in the Introduction to the Grundrisse', 127n surplus-value, 32 Taylor, Charles, Hegel, 126n 'telos', llln

133

Therborn, G., The Ideology of Power and thé Power of Ideology, 109n Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, 116n Thomson, G., The First Philosophers, 119n truth, 28-36

use-value, 31-2, 100 value, theory of, 22-3, 44-5 'Vorstellung', 104n-105n Wagner, Adolph, Textbook of , Political Economy, 1 'Wirklichkeit', 104n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 51, 59, 73, l l l n ; Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus; 32 Wolff, Michael, Geschichte der Impetustheorie. Unterschungen zum Ursprung der klassischen Mechanik, l l l n Zeller, Eduard, 98, 114n